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The Jungian student will find a special interest in this scholarly work, which corrects the mistakes and continues the joint study of Kerényi and Jung in their Essays on a science of mythology (N.Y. 1950, London ). Kerényi regards Jung's commentary on ‘The divine child’ as a successful blending of Greek scholarship with analytical psychology, but their work on ‘The primordial maiden’ was unsuccessful, as Jung also admitted.
The trouble consisted in a joint failure to define the true image of what lay behind the events of the mystery night at Eleusis. This was an initiation rite. Being equally composed of men and women, the initiates must have experienced the same mystery; it was not an experience of the feminine self for women and a totally different experience of the anima for men, as Jung had implied. The archetype of the mother and daughter had therefore to be shown to represent a universal experience of death and rebirth appropriate for all the mystai. To differentiate it from a widespread agricultural fertility ritual, it had also to be specific for the Eleusinian Mysteries as they were celebrated at Eleusis only.
Kerényi combines the Jungian term ‘archetype’, with the specific realities with which existentialist philosophy is concerned. He says, ‘I speak of archetypal facts of human existence, of realities which cannot be mere realities of the psyche and which, of course, are also not concrete in the manner of tangible objects. They are concrete in the same sense as bios, the historical existence of the individual man.’ He believes that the true mystery came from ‘a natural capacity to see visions’ in response to the peculiar numen of the place, possibly aided by an hallucinogen in the preliminary barley drink. He is especially helpful in demonstrating that there were no actual dramas, nor cult objects shown, nor miraculous epiphanies.
Accordingly we still do not know what beatific vision was seen on the mystery night, because it must have been envisioned subject