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(An English translation of this paper appears in this issue of the Journal under the title ‘Big self and little self: some reflections’).
(Paris). ‘Divin Corbeau. Approche d'un mythe siberien’ (The Sacred Raven. An attempted interpretation of a Siberian myth). Cahiers de Psychologie Jungienne. No. 40 (1984).
Let us hope I shall give a fair summary of this first instalment of the author's brilliant, well-researched account of her attempt at an interpretation of some North-East Siberian creation and adventure myths about Raven, mythical ancestor, demiurge, divinity and trickster.
I hugely enjoyed the author's copious mythological illustrations, particularly the creation myths in which Raven's creativity is challenged first by a mere wagtail (female), then, more seriously, by his own wife, who was taking the lead in mental ‘pre-creation’ preceding the birth of humans. Thenceforth and for all time, Raven's creativity has to be anal.
Raven, duplex and polyvalent, creator and self-created, with or without his large family in its dynastic ramifications and defence alliances, belongs both to habitable space and to ‘Wilderness’—the yet unknown and potentially unknowable.
As creator he is patriarchal, entrepreneurial, promotional; as trickster he is greedy, promiscuous, mean, perverse, ambivalent, omnipotent, full of part-object gratifications. Those qualities make for much fun and laughter among his Eskimo and north-west Indian ‘descendants’, offering necessary relief in an otherwise very hard life in which acted out impulsiveness constitutes a danger to the whole community, let alone to an individual. Myth permits what society cannot afford to tolerate, thereby facilitating separation into an external and internal world. Yet to risk infringing taboos in imagination earns one the right to inner freedom. This is resonant with Jung's views on adaptation, external and internal.
Raven himself never changes: the notion of uroboric or ‘round’ time does not admit of it, even