What is a Mythologem?

Carl Kerenyi used the term to designate the common elements in myths belonging to different traditions, like the tales of the Sacred Child, the descent of the hero to the underworld, the marriage of the King-God to the Earth Goddess, and so on. The first question which spontaneously rises is: how can this be? The easiest answer is, well, someone copied it, or it was forced upon on a conquest. Then objections rise: how do we explain that cultures like the Maya and the Egyptian, for instance, have a similar mythologem for the creation of the world through the word of a divine figure, with apparently no cultural contact? At this point, different kinds of transcendentalisms come to the answer. Putting aside extravagant modern speculations of the New Age, like the so-called theory of the ancient astronauts, we are faced with the traditional ontotheologies. They quickly answer that the common element is the existence of a transcendental realm in which human history has its frame. This would imply the existence of a metareligión in which particular religions would play a kind of cosmic role. Schelling was the first one to propose such a system. Religions would not be allegories of something else but rather tautegories of the unfolding of the divine according to the conditions of the different stages in the development of humankind. The common elements of the mythologems would then be simply concordances on the different spatio-temporal actualizations of the plan. A similar point of view was also sustained by the writers of the Eranos Group of last century, Eliade, Kerenyi, Jung, Campbell, Schrödinger, Corbin and others, with the apparent corroboration of the worldwide common patterns of mythology that the first map of human myth brought about. But these theses did not prove anything that was not already assumed in the ontoepistemology of departure: the idea of a divine element at work in the universe.

Life is a mystery in the full noon sun. The concept of "the divine" has been so clumsy manipulated that we must be careful in its use. Immanence and transcendence go hand in hand in our life experiences. We can try explanations that give a little more credit to the actions of life, to what transpires behind what appears, using an expression from Ibn Arabi. We share mythologems in many cases by mere contact and cultural communication, and we are ready to incorporate them because we understand them and make sense to us, for they are based on a common psycho-physiological constitution of human beings. When there was no apparent contact, like in the example of Mesoamerica and the Middle East, the mythologems are similar because we solve the same problems of survival with similar tools, psychological and material, and if we say that Hurakan or Ptah created the world with the word, like the ancestors of the Australian aboriginal people did in their primordial Walkabout, we are stating the importance that language had for all humans, and how language fixes and objectifies experience, valuating and interpreting life. The fundamental semantics for communication is given by the emotional protocols, in fact, we basically communicate emotions in different degrees of n-aryzation: they are the content of the ancient myths, which we elaborate in ever more complex ways of symbolization. However, the mystery remains, the Noumen. The very fact of human emotions developed from these vital movements, the perspectives that open to something other than the material environment in which they take their form, is something as fascinating as it is mysterious. On the basis of the vital, something else stands out, opening up a form of Reality that cannot be explained merely in material or vital terms.