The Myth of the "Night Sea Journey" (Jolande Jacobi)

Vernet Joseph - Jonas et la baleine (1753)

Jolande Jacobi

The Way of Individuation

"Jung has on various occasions referred to the myth of the "night sea journey" cited by Frobenius, which he named the "whale dragon myth". The schematic representation of this journey, which occurs in numerous variations, is valid for the individuation process as a whole as well as for each of its stages:

(Symbols of Transformation, p. 210, reproduced from Frobenius)

The accompanying text runs:

"A hero is devoured by a water-monster in the West (devouring). The animal travels with him to the East (sea journey). Meanwhile, the hero lights a fire in the belly of the monster

(fire-lighting), and feeling hungry, cuts himself a piece of the heart (cutting off of heart). Soon afterwards, he notices that the fish has glided on to dry land (landing); he immediately begins to cut open the animal from within (opening); then he slips out (slipping out). It was so hot in the fish's belly that all his hair has fallen out (heat, loss of hair). The hero may at the same time free all those who were previously devoured by the monster, and who now slip out too."

The hero stands for the sun (i.e., for ego-consciousness), the fish's belly for the underworld (realm of the unconscious), for the night through which the sun makes its journey. It sinks in the West, rises again in the East. The lighting of a fire in the darkness can be interpreted as a sudden flickering up of the light of consciousness, which enables the hero to find the "essence" (heart), the supreme value hidden in the darkness. By eating it he discovers the "meaning" of the night sea journey and has thereby prepared the way for his deliverance. For as soon as consciousness pierces the darkness, it begins to approach full luminosity: the fish glides slowly on to dry land, into a conscious world.

As a result of the "heat", i.e., the emotions that shook the hero in his prison, he is "initiated" into the mysteries of the darkness, and becomes humble and wise. He loses his original power of thought (loss of hair) and, on cutting his way out ("rebirth"), emerges bald as a newborn babe. Through the "slipping out" of the sun many other contents that were hidden in the darkness come to light and can be perceived.

This schema is valid for every phase of conscious realization, e.g., for that daily journey of our consciousness through the night, during sleep. As in the story of Jonah, it remains an

open question whether the water-monster dies or goes on living after the hero slips out. Presumably both variants occur. In the first case it would mean the permanent survival of the victorious hero, after the model of a "methodical" individuation; in the second it would be a cyclic occurrence, as the sun, i.e., the hero, could always be devoured again so long as the monster lives.

Entry into the belly of the monster, i.e., the submersion of consciousness in the darkness of the unconscious, can be regarded as a return to the mother's womb, as a regression. This should not be looked upon as an incestuous wish-fulfilment, as Freud thought, but as the possibility of rebirth. It is not something negative only, but in Jung's prospective interpretation also a necessary and positive event. The realm of the unconscious is not merely a deadly maw and certainly not a refuse bin; it is a treasure-house of the nourishing and creative forces which dwell in all living things. When brought into contact with consciousness, they become activated and place themselves at its disposal: they are "reborn".

The fact that Jung often used the "night sea journey" as a model for the individuation process even in the first half of life has repeatedly given rise to misunderstandings. Because individuation extends through the whole of life, many people overlooked the fact that its first half stands under a different sign from the second and therefore expresses itself in different symbols. They assumed that only a person in the second half of life can individuate, and they regarded the process always as an analogy of the "descent into the underworld". But on closer examination this model is to some extent applicable to all stages of the process of individuation. It can be said with some justification that every act of conscious realization is a plunging into the darkness of the unerworld and a re-emergence from it, such as we experience every day in our sleep and dreams, and that the "night sea journey" therefore retains its validity for every kind of "rebirth", i.e., conscious realization, whether it belong to the first or to the second phase of individuation. Even so we must, if we wish to reduce the archetypal material to some kind of order, try to distinguish in principle between its two specific forms.

If we examine the material in which the two main phases of the individuation process are symbolized, we find them most clearly represented in most of the classical mythologems.

Let us take a look at the Egyptian myth of Osiris. There the dividing line between the first and the second phase occurs when the sun-god Osiris stands at the height of his earthly power and has accomplished all the tasks demanded by the first half of life by winning his place in the world and begetting his son Horus as his successor. At that point he falls a victim to his evil counterpart, his brother Set, is dismembered, and begins his journey to the underworld in a coffer. He enters into the womb of the mother, symbolized by the coffer, the sea, and the tree-coffin, and, after his sister-wife Isis has sought the fourteen parts of his body and put them together again, he is reborn and appears anew in his son Harpocrates, the "weak in the legs".

This son was begotten in the underworld, the realm of the dead, and has no fixed abode in the real world but, instead, is initiated into the mysteries. This may be taken as an indication that the biological power of procreation, which pertains to the first half of life and whose fruit is the "fleshly" child Horus, is superseded in the second by a symbolic, spiritual one which brings the "spiritual" child to birth. This spiritual procreative power is symbolized by the substitute phallus which was made by Isis and put in the place of the phallus that was lost during the dismemberment and could not be found again.

Although in the individuation process, aiming as it does at psychic totality, the "missing" element must always be sought and integrated, and spirit and nature, the heavenly and the chthonic realm, be considered in equal measure, it is nevertheless the normal pattern of life that the biological should occupy the foreground in youth and the spiritual in maturer years. Consequently most of the myths paralleling the individuation process culminate in an anchoring in inner reality, in the spiritual realm. Even in the "hero-myths", such as that of Theseus, which may likewise be cited as analogies, the overcoming of mortal dangers leads in the end to a victory over the agents of darkness and to a rebirth in regenerated form.

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