This paper examines archetypal, initiatory symbolism in interconnected Biblical narratives, the Old Testament story of Jonah and the Fish (or Whale) and the apocryphal story known as the Harrowing of Hell, a metaphorical relationship alluded to in Jesus Christ’s cryptic reference to the “sign of Jonah.” An amplification of the imagery indicates the symbolic identity of these two mythico-ritual, structural motifs and relates the imagery in both stories to widely distributed primordial rebirth symbolism common to aboriginal people across the world. The interpretive framework for this literary analysis is grounded in a cross-cultural, trans-medial, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary perspective derived from the psychological criticism of Carl G. Jung and scholars influenced by Jung’s archetypal theories, including Joseph Campbell (comparative mythology/literary mythology), Mircea Eliade (history of religions), Northrop Frye (archetypal literary criticism), and others. The study contributes to an interdisciplinary hermeneutic of archetypal, mythico-ritual imagery found in dreams, fairy tales, and religious myths and rituals, as well as literary and film narratives.

Keywords: literary analysis, hermeneutics, myth-criticism, mythopoeic, mythopoetic, archetypes, amplification, theology, mythology, initiation, rebirth, monomyth, night-sea journey, individuation

Following publication of James Muilenberg’s influential 1969 paper, “Form Criticism and Beyond,” a proliferation of critical methods for literary analysis have been fruitfully applied to the field of Bible studies, including formal or objectivist methods of analysis, rhetorical studies, reader-response criticism, and a wide range of ideological criticisms.  Each of these literary approaches to the exegeses of Biblical narratives yields markedly different meanings, some through systematic methods of analysis and others through non-systematic critical styles or perspectives.

One of the under-utilized interpretive approaches to Biblical texts, at least within the mainstream Academy, is a Biblical hermeneutics approached through the lens of archetypal literary criticism, or myth-criticism, a critical perspective associated with the literary theories of Northrop Frye and the depth psychological criticism of Carl G. Jung, whose analytical interpretations of archetypes (i.e., widely recurring symbolic imagery depicted as myth-motifs) were introduced to literary studies by Frye (1963), in his early work, Fables of Identity. Frye’s method—which viewed literature as “displaced myth” (pp. 23-38)—emphasized the conventional mythopoeic (mythopoetic or “myth-making”) structural features of literature inherited from age-old, symbolic mythico-ritual imagery based on natural metaphors the world over. These primordial images, or archetypes, are the subject of Jung’s analytical method of amplification, which Jung applied to the interpretation of dreams, fantasies, art, and other picture-languages, including religious myths and rites, viewed by Jung as loci of psychological meaning, as creatively represented symbolic expressions of deep processes of psychological transformation.

Traditionally, the Holy Bible—both Old Testament and the Gospels—has been interpreted literally by the Christian reading community, that is, as theology or the living history of God’s revelation to humanity. In contrast, the archetypal approach favored by Jung, Frye and others, including mythologist Joseph Campbell and religious historian Mircea Eliade (both, like Frye, influenced by Jung), emphasized a symbolic approach to the reading of Biblical narrative. “Theology,” Campbell (1990) suggested, “is mythology interpreted literally.” He continued: “Mythology is psychology, misread as cosmology, history, and biography” (p. 33). While many Biblical texts refer to actual historical settings and practices, some backed by archaeological findings, other passages suggest derivation from a more remote and universal past. These mythopoetic or myth-making features—recurring motifs, tropes, themes, images, symbols, metaphors—are evident, for example, in the Genesis creation myth and myths of the Deluge, which contain narrative analogues found in many mythical traditions the world over (Campbell, 1988, pp. 50-54). Jung’s (1958/1973) interpretations of Biblical passages, including Answer to Job and his writings on Christ as a personification of the Self (Boyer, 2014b; Edinger, 1992), suggest the contemporary relevance of certain archetypal Biblical images to psychological development that he called the individuation process, a process—according to historian of religions Mircea Eliade (1958)—that proceeds by a developmental process analogous to ritual initiation.

In this paper, the Old Testament tale of Jonah and the Whale (or Fish) is interpreted as an example of recurring initiatory symbolism in myth-making Biblical narrative. For the purposes of this paper, the term initiatory refers to transformational imagery, specifically represented in the ubiquitous widely distributed symbolism associated with natural cycles of death and rebirth (or decay and renewal) common to religious mythologies and rituals the world over, a topic of great interest to Jung and post-Jungian scholarship. Jung referred to the motif as the rebirth archetype (1950/1973, pp. 45-81), the subject of a series of recent interdisciplinary studies by this author discussing the archetype’s representation in myths and rituals the world over (Boyer, 2015, 2016), in folk and fairy tales (Boyer, 2017), as well as in derivative, trans-medial storytelling forms including literature and film (Boyer, 2014c, 2015, 2016, 2017).

This study looks at the rebirth archetype as it is represented specifically in the Judeo-Christian narrative tradition. In the New Testament Gospels of Mark and Luke, Jesus—according to the anonymous author-narrators of the Gospels—indicated a direct symbolic correspondence between a prophetic vision of his own destiny and a miraculous event in the life of the Old Testament hero and prophet, Jonah:

Then some of the scribes and Pharisees said to him, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.”  But he answered them, “An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.  For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth [emphasis added]. (Matthew 12: 39-41, n.d./1989, p. 13)

What is Jesus referring to in this passage as the “sign of the prophet Jonah”? What is the relationship between Jonah and the Whale and Jesus’ own imminent death and resurrection? The text suggests that Jesus himself interpreted his destiny as a metaphorical analogue to the symbolic passage in which the prophet Jonah undertook a sea journey, was swallowed by a whale or great fish and, after three days in the fish’s belly, was miraculously spit out in order to fulfill his prophetic mission to the people of Ninevah. This suggests that the Jonah myth represented, for Jesus himself, a symbolic mirror of his own mythic destiny. A millennia-long tradition of Christian interpretation supported the view that Jesus allegorically equated his prophetic vision of post-crucifixion descent into Hell and subsequent resurrection with Jonah’s mythic and miraculous fate. Jesus’ metaphorical reference implicitly identified Jonah’s descent into the belly of the whale with the apocryphal story told in the non-canonical Gospel of Nicodemus of Jesus’ post-crucifixion journey of descent into Hades or Hell (Descensus Christi ad inferos), the Land of the Dead. This descent journey is referred to in Christian literature and iconography as the “Harrowing of Hell,” a story widely referenced in the canon Gospels, as well as the Apostle’s Creed and Athanasian Creed.

In the following literary study, the author attempts to illuminate the nature of this symbolic affinity between Jesus “Harrowing Hell” and the Jonah myth from a perspective grounded in the complementary views of Jung and scholars influenced by his views, in particular, historian of religions Mircea Eliade. Such a multidisciplinary interpretive lens yields a wealth of symbolic meanings evident in both Biblical stories that are inaccessible through other critical approaches, including theological criticism. It does so by suggesting how the complementary and intertwined narratives of Jonah and the Whale and Jesus “Harrowing Hell” open out into greater intertextual and contextual networks of cross-cultural, non-Biblical imagery foundational to myth-making the world over and which share mythopoeic-archetypal symbolic structural analogues with these Biblical narratives. Since this author has written at some length on mythopoeic structural imagery in a variety of archetypal narratives from the perspectives of Jung and Campbell, the current paper will focus on the interpretive views of Eliade, whose extensive scholarship on mythico-ritual symbolism deserves wider recognition as fundamental mythopoeic-archetypal interpretive tools of archetypal literary analysis.

According to the anonymous author/s of the Old Testament Book of Jonah (The Holy Bible (n.d./1989), Chaps. 1-2, pp. 959-961), God called to Jonah, telling him to go at once to Ninevah to cry out against the wickedness of the great city’s inhabitants. Jonah resisted this divine calling, fleeing to Tarshish in a ship.  At sea, God sent a great tempest that threatened the ship and its passengers and crew. The superstitious sailors tossed the cargo overboard as Jonah slept in the ship’s hold. The sailors cast lots to determine the cause of the calamity, and discovering that Jonah was a Hebrew, questioned what deeds of his threatened them and how to allay the tempest. Jonah acknowledged his actions as the cause of the threat and offered to sacrifice himself to the sea to save them. They reluctantly tossed him overboard and the sea stopped raging.  Instead of drowning, God sent a great fish or whale to swallow Jonah, who spent three days and nights in the whale’s belly. Jonah prayed to God for salvation from the depths of the ocean and fish’s belly, which the prophet referred to as the “belly of Sheol,” the “land whose bars close upon me forever,” but from which he praised God for bringing his life up “from the Pit.” On the verge of death, Jonah repented and praised God as the Deliverer. God relented and compelled the fish-whale to spew Jonah out on dry land. There, Jonah embraced his prophetic mission for God, and prophesied to the Ninevites, who turned from their evil ways and were redeemed.

The Biblical story of Jonah and the Whale (or Fish) is not unique to the Bible, but rather a unique historical variation of an extremely common myth-motif found in tribal shamanism and symbolic mythico-ritual forms around the world.  For example, in the Greek myths, heroes like Heracles, Perseus, and Jason (of the Argonauts) are devoured by monsters of various kinds from whose bellies they later escape. Heracles, like Jonah, was swallowed by a sea monster, from whose belly he was eventually liberated. In the folk and fairytales recorded and interpreted by the Brothers Grimm and other folklorists, heroines (typically young females) frequently meet with a similar fate. In the Grimms’ variant of “Little Red Riding Hood” known as “Little Red Cap,” (pp. 13-16, as cited in Tatar, 1999), the heroine and her grandmother were devoured by a wolf (or werewolf), but rescued by a woodcutter who sliced open the sleeping monster’s belly with a pair of scissors, freeing them (via C-section) from their presumed fate, miraculously restoring them to life (Boyer, 2017).

Death-rebirth imagery, including swallowing by monsters, is ubiquitous in folk tales and fairy tales. In a lesser known fairy tale, Giambattista Basile’s “Ninnillo and Nennella” (pp. 700-704 in Zipes, 2001) the orphaned child heroine, Nennella, is swallowed—just like Jonah—by a giant fish from whose jaws she is later released. And of course, who can forget Walt Disney’s (1940) animated cinematic adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s (1883/2001) children’s novel, in which the hero, Pinocchio, is swallowed by the giant sperm whale Monstro, from whose belly the animated human-like puppet, along with his maker, Geppetto, eventually escaped.

Eliade’s extensive study of the myth-motif of hero-initiates devoured by monsters and ultimately freed indicated origins of the recurrent archetypal imagery far more ancient and widespread than these few examples suggest. In his classic study of shamanism, Eliade (1951/1964) described a composite ritual structure associated with tribal initiation, including initiation in secret societies. This symbolic structure is based on the “initiatory essence of the candidate’s ‘death’ followed by his ‘resurrection’” (p. 64), an interpretation Eliade applied to locally distinct but structurally equivalent rituals around the world. As a point of departure, Eliade developed the ideas of anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (1908/1975), described in the latter’s pioneering studies on rites of passage in indigenous tribal societies. Eliade (1951/1964) indicated a series of rites that can be summarized with the “convenient formula: death and resurrection of the candidate” (p. 64). In his composite ritual, a candidate to the secret tribal society undertakes a period of solitude or isolation in the bush (“a symbol of the beyond”) in which he is assimilated to the dead. His face is daubed with ashes or covered by funerary masks. He undergoes a symbolic burial in a ritual structure, followed by a symbolic descent to the Underworld, and undergoes difficult ordeals that sometimes actually cost the candidate’s life. Significantly, for our study, during the stay in the bush, the aspirant’s community considers the candidate either symbolically dead or “devoured by a monster or a god, and upon their return to the village regards them as ghosts” (p. 65).

In his later work on initiation, Eliade (1958) described this motif of symbolic entrance into a monster’s belly as an initiatory pattern that has “attained the widest distribution and has been constantly reinterpreted in various cultural contexts” (p. 36). He examined in depth the idea of initiates swallowed by monsters, including marine or aquatic monsters. The motif of being swallowed by a whale or great fish, or a supernatural being—as well as a host of other symbolic monsters with analogous roles in myths and rites—is, according to Eliade, an “extremely important initiatory motif” (p. 14). Excellent examples of “being swallowed by a Divine Being or a monster” can be found in a wide variety of ritual contexts throughout the world. Referring to the symbolism of initiatory death, Eliade referenced ceremonial rituals of the Aboriginal Wiradjuri tribe of Australia in which Daramulun, the servant of the Supreme Being (and in some variants, the Supreme Being itself), related his initiatory acts in a myth told to his father, Baime, the Highest Deity. During the rite of passage, Darumulun told Baime, he slew the boys, then restored them to life. In some variants of the myth, Darumulun swallowed the novices, then disgorged them alive (Eliade, 1958, p. 13).

In a similar rite of passage ceremony in southeastern Africa, Eliade suggested (1958), initiatory tortures are administered to the initiates, “equivalents to ritual death” (p. 35). If actual physical death occurred from excessive torture, the mother is told that her son was killed by a spirit or “swallowed by a monster” from whose belly he was unable to escape. The forms such tortures take suggest that the initiates are killed by a “mythical Animal,” the master of initiation, “torn to pieces and crushed in its maw, ‘digested’ in its belly.” Eliade indicated the symbolism of the ritual structures in which the boys are isolated as evidence of the assimilation of initiatory tortures to the idea of novices being swallowed by a monster. “Often the cabin represents the body or the open maw of a water monster, a crocodile or a snake.” Eliade indicated similar symbolism in many tribal cultures. On Rooke Island, for example, women are told that their sons have been devoured by the monster Marsaba. In Ceram, initiates enter a symbolic ritual enclosure through an opening called “Snake’s Mouth.” In New Guinea, a special house is constructed for circumcision ceremonies; the structure is created in the form of the Monster Barhun, who is believed to swallow the novitiates. Similar symbolism exists in an equivalent ritual among the Papuans of New Guinea, where the boys enter a monstrous “dummy” called Kaiemunu, where they reside in its belly for a prolonged period of time. According to Eliade (1958), this motif appears in analogous rituals in a variety of monstrous forms, including “crocodiles, whales and large fish” (p. 36).

Eliade interpreted this symbolism along lines already suggested by his contemporary and colleague, the mythologist Joseph Campbell, in the latter’s paradoxical metaphor, borrowed from ethnologist Leo Frobenius, of tomb-as-womb. In his classic study, Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell (1949/1973, pp. 90-95) described the motif of “The Belly of the Whale” as a central, structural element of his paradigm of the hero quest, the “leitmotif of the monomyth,” to which we will soon return. Eliade (1958), in the spirit of Campbell (and their mutual predecessors, Jung and Frobenius), interpreted the symbolism of the initiatory structure as representing “not only the belly of the devouring monster but also its womb” (p. 36; also see Boyer, 2017). Eliade asserted that:

The novice’s death signifies a return to the embryonic state … in cosmological terms … a  temporary return to the … precosmic mode (symbolized by night and darkness), followed by a rebirth [emphasis added]  … homologized with a ‘creation of the world.’ (1958, p. 36)

Eliade developed this idea throughout his prolific works on mythico-ritual symbolism, viewing this periodic, symbolic re-creation of the cosmos as characteristic of aboriginal religious thought.  He interpreted the secluded initiatory hut in which this rebirth process occurs as the symbolic “maw of the devouring monster … but … also a nourishing womb in which he is engendered anew.”  The alternating symbols of death and rebirth, said Eliade (1958, pp. 26-27), are interdependent and complementary.

Eliade observed analogous symbolism in types of initiatory rituals other than rites of passage in which boys are symbolically transformed into men. For example, he noticed analogous death-rebirth structures and symbolism in the initiations of medicine men of the Americas in which they are tested and receive their spiritual authority. This ritual symbolism is a common feature of initiation in tribal societies throughout the world. Eliade described initiatory symbolism of the Kunapipi, a secret cult of the Australian Aborigines, in which the initiatory pattern is organized around the “idea of a new birth” with its chief dramatic ritual moment being swallowed by a monster, the familiar structural pattern. The ceremony of advanced initiation described “dual mothers”—a related motif explored in depth by Jung (1916/1991, pp. 294-368) and Jungian analyst Edward Edinger (1994)—devoured by the Great Snake, Julunggul, and subsequently disgorged and restored to life, imagery suggesting the “regeneration of the initiate through his gestation by the Great Mother” (Eliade, 1958, p. 51). Jung discussed the archetypal motif of the dual mothers as part of his analysis of the story of Longfellow’s mythic Native American savior-hero, Hiawatha, who was swallowed—like Jonah—by a great fish and eventually escaped, which Jung interpreted as a symbolic return to the womb, that is, as death-rebirth imagery. This archetype appears symbolically related to the common motif of the hero as mythic orphan (Boyer, Summer 2012), symbolic of the idea of initiation as a process of human development characterized by initiatory transformation of the self (as ego) into Self (as integrated conscious and unconscious), suggested by Jung’s theory of individuation.

Eliade connected ritual symbolism to its narrative counterpart in myth.  As the author has discussed elsewhere (Boyer, 2017), Eliade, Campbell, and others view myths and rituals as integral counterparts. Mythic narratives, later recorded as texts from ancient oral traditions, are the textual or narrative equivalent to rituals; rituals are the performance aspect of myths, that is, mythic narratives ritually enacted in tribal societies. Eliade (1958, p. 51) found myriad examples of this symbolic, initiatory pattern in a wide range of both myths and rites. “The idea of gestation and childbirth,” he asserted, “is expressed by a series of homologisable images – entrance to the womb of the Great Mother (Mother Earth), or the body of the sea monster….” The “initiatory pattern of the perilous return to the womb” (p. 52) is found, Eliade observed, in a considerable number of mythological variants. For one example, the initiatory pattern appears in myths in which the “Hero is swallowed by a sea monster and then emerges victorious.” This clearly represents a type-category of myths in which the patriarchal, Biblical myth of Jonah and the Fish (Whale) might be located, the story of a hero swallowed by a sea monster who escapes and returns to life.  

In a second example, Eliade (1958) described the motif as it appears in “myths and miraculous narratives of shamans, who during their trances … enter the belly of a giant fish or whale” (p. 52). Importantly, this second example suggests the remote prehistoric origins of devouring fish-monster imagery in the shamanic traditions of archaic tribal societies, tales of shamans who enter the belly of a fish or whale during trance journeys. The origins of shamanic initiatory symbols are ultimately untraceable, disappearing in the prehistoric mists going back approximately 30,000 years or more, perhaps much further, and predating the ancient recording of the Jonah myth—in the historical time following the emergence of great city-states like Ninevah—by tens of thousands of years. Based on archaeological evidence, scholars estimate that shamanism emerged approximately 30,000 years ago, but possibly much earlier, as the capacity for symbolic thought is attributed to the historical emergence of the current humanoid species, homo sapiens sapiens, about 200-250,000 B. C. The remote origins of rebirth imagery can be traced back to the Upper Paleolithic, some 35,000 years ago, according to archeomythologist Marija Gimbutas (1991; also see Boyer, 2017), to the prehistoric matristic Goddess religions of Old Europe, a point beyond which little archeological evidence exists.

In a third example, Eliade (1958) discussed myths describing a “perilous descent into a cave …assimilated to the mouth or uterus of Mother Earth—a descent that brings the hero to the other world” (p. 52). This example of myths that describe a perilous descent into the cave-womb of Mother Earth, connects the Jonah myth directly—on a symbolic and metaphorical level—to the imagery of Christ’s “Harrowing Hell,” a story in the apocryphal tradition that appears in the Gospel of Nicodemus, and fulfills the early prophecy of Jesus’ miraculous death, apotheosis, and resurrection with an allegorical reference to death-rebirth imagery depicted in Jonah and the Whale.  

The Harrowing of Hell is the story of Jesus’ descent into the subterranean underworld (the earth) for three days, before returning to life, where he briefly met with witnesses preceding his divine apotheosis and resurrection. The metaphorical identity between the shaman-hero-initiate’s descent into the whale’s belly and the underworld realm of Hades is suggested by Jonah himself when, dying in the belly of the sea monster, he cried out to God from the “belly of Sheol,” the “land whose bars close upon me forever.” In the King James Version, Jonah says: “Out of the belly of hell [emphasis added] cried I, and thou heardest my voice” (Jonah, 2:1). Jonah continued:

For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all thy billows and thy waves passed over me….The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: thy depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped around my head.  I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me forever.” (Jonah 2:1 – 2:6)

Eliade (1958) distinguished two types of initiation. In the first type, already discussed at length, the initiate returns to the womb, implying a symbolic transformation into an embryo preceding a second birth, that is, rebirth. In the second type of initiation, Eliade wrote, a mythical Hero “enters the Great Mother’s womb without returning to the embryonic state” (p. 61). The latter enterprise, said Eliade, is perilous. “In initiatory myths and sagas, the Hero’s passage through a giantess’ belly and his emergence through her mouth are equivalent to a new birth. But the passage is infinitely dangerous” (p. 63). In both ritual forms, the “return to the mother signifies return to the chthonian Great Mother,” he concluded. “The initiand is born again from the womb of the Mother Earth (Terra Mater).” If Jonah can be said to return to the womb in the form of the whale’s belly (from which he eventually emerged, freed and reborn by the hand of God), the analogous image of Christ “harrowing Hell” can be interpreted as a Hero descending alive into the abysmal subterranean womb of Mother Earth, a well-worn path taken by countless divine beings and semi-divine mythic heroes represented in the world’s mythologies and rites.

Eliade (1958), borrowing an example from Campbell, described the Polynesian myth of the Maori hero, Maui, to illustrate this second type of initiatory return to the womb. According to the myth, Maui entered the home of Hine-mi-te-po, his ancestress. Finding the giantess asleep, the hero entered her gigantic body. But when he tried to re-emerge, his return journey was aborted when the laughter of birds awakened her.  She clenched her teeth, cutting Maui in half and killing him. According to a Maori myth, the hero’s inability to escape, that is, to be reborn, is the mythic cause of human mortality. Maui’s ancestress, Hine-mi-te-po, said Eliade, is Mother Earth: “To enter her body is equivalent to descending alive into the depths of the earth, that is, into Hell.” To a reader familiar with Dante’s Inferno (n.d./2001), the character Dante’s transformative hero journey into Hell (Boyer, 2014c) followed this well-worn, descending archetypal path described by Eliade:

Here … we have a descent into the Underworld [emphasis added] such as we find documented … in the myths and sagas of the ancient Near East and … the Mediterranean world.  From one point of view, we may say that all these myths and sagas have an initiatory structure [emphasis added] to descend into Hell alive, confront its monsters and demons, is to undergo an initiatory ordeal.  I may add that similar flesh-and-blood descents into Hell are characteristic of heroic initiations, whose goal is the conquest of bodily immortality. (Eliade, 1958, pp. 61-62)

Although Eliade’s conclusion that all hero-descents into Hell have the goal of conquest of bodily immortality is debatable, the traditional theological interpretation of Christ’s “Harrowing Hell” is consistent with this view. After three days and nights in Hell, while his corpse presumably lay in the tomb (earth) between Good Friday and Easter, Christ journeyed into the subterranean depths of the Underworld, where he liberated certain inhabitants of the nether realm before ascending and ultimately resurrecting from the dead and continuing his ascension to immortal life in Heaven. Jung viewed the numerical symbolism of three days and nights as psychologically significant. In his interpretation of the Hiawatha mythos, a Native American Jonah equivalent, Hiawatha’s father, Mudjekeewis, was embattled for three days. Jung (1916/2001) interpreted this motif as the typical form of staying “in the prison of night. (Twenty-first until twenty-fourth of December). Christ, too, remained three days in the underworld.”  

Similar structural arcs and topographical symbols are evident, for example, in the ancient Sumerian myth of Inanna’s Descent (Inanna: Queen of Heaven, n.d./1983, pp. 51-73), the fertility Goddess killed in the Underworld by her sister, Erishkegal (the Goddess of Death). Following the sacrifice of her lover, Dumuzi (Tammuz), who substituted for her in Hades, the Goddess revived and returned to the upper world to regenerate the crops. Similarly, in the Underworld quest of the Mesopotamian hero, Gilgamesh (Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative, n.d./1972) the semi-divine hero night-sea journeyed through the nether realms in search of the Plant of Immortality needed to bring his dead friend, the wild man Enkidu, back to life.

In the rituals already described, novice initiates are isolated in ritual structures, e.g., cabins, huts, etc., designed in the shape of marine or chthonic monsters. They are “swallowed by the monster and … in its belly, hence they are ‘dead,’ … and in process of being reborn,” wrote Eliade (1958). “The monster will disgorge them—that is, they will be born again” (p. 63). But in these myths of heroic descent, of heroes who are semi-divine beings, the “Hero makes his way alive … into a monster or into the belly of a Goddess (which is at once Mother Earth and Goddess of Death); and very often he succeeds in emerging unharmed.” Mythical heroes, like their ritual initiate counterparts, can fail the return quest, as Campbell suggested. The Sibyl of Cumae warned the Trojan hero Aeneas as they gazed down into the underworld: “Easy—the way that leads into Avernus: day/and night the door of darkest Dis is open./But to recall your steps, to rise again/into the upper air: that is the labor; that is the task” (The Aeneid of Virgil, n.d./1981, p. 137).  In short, the Judeo-Christian mythic heroes Jonah and Jesus Christ, like their mythic hero counterparts in other narrative traditions, do not die but almost die, journeying into the symbolic land of the dead, where they confront and ultimately personify the triumph over death.  This brings to mind a wonderful comic scene in the popular family film, The Princess Bride, in which the mythic hero, Wesley (aka Farm Boy, The Man in Black, The Dread Pirate Roberts), is tortured to the point of death and is taken by his companions to an old Jewish healer, Miracle Max (played by Billy Crystal). Diagnosing the problem, Max asked Wesley’s companions whether the hero is dead, or “mostly dead.” Mythic heroes, like shamans and ritual initiates, are “mostly dead.”  And as Max said, there is a difference. Wesley, like Jonah and Jesus Christ, symbolically slew the monster of Death rather than being devoured by it.    

Similarly, according to some variants of the Finnish Kalevala myth, the mythic sage Vainamoinen, after being swallowed by a giantess, built a boat and rowed from one end of the monster’s bowels to the other. The giantess was finally forced to vomit up the hero from the sea.  Other Finnish myths relate the adventures of the mythical blacksmith Illmarinen who undertook a quest demanded by the girl he was wooing. The hero approached an Old Hag, a sorceress, who gobbled him up. With his magic tools, the hero opened the Hag’s stomach and emerged. A variant of the Illmarinen story has the hero swallowed, like Jonah, by a big fish. In that variant, the hero escaped by jumping about in the fish’s belly until it burst open, an obvious image of birth. One recalls the dramatic scene in Walt Disney’s (1940) movie Pinocchio, as the heroic puppet, on a makeshift raft with Geppetto, struggles against the current inside Monstro’s belly, trying to escape through the whale’s snapping jaws into the open air. According to Jung (1916/2001, p. 300), “The heroes in the sun-devouring myths often stomp at … the jaws of the monster.”

Eliade (1958) indicated that these recurrent mythical themes, like their analogous ritual counterparts, are “enormously widespread.” He summarized another Polynesian variant (for a more detailed account of this Polynesian Rata myth, see Frobenius, as cited in Jung, 1916/2001, p. 327):

The Hero Nganoa’s boat had been swallowed by a kind of whale, but the hero seized the mast and thrust it into the monster’s mouth to keep it open. He then went down into the monster’s belly, where he found his two parents, still alive. Nganoa … killed the whale, and emerged from its mouth. The sea monster’s belly, like the body of the chthonian Goddess, represents the bowels of the earth, the realm of the dead, Hell. In the visionary literature of the Middle Ages, Hell is frequently imagined in the form of a huge monster, whose prototype is probably the Biblical Leviathan. There is … a series of images: the belly of a giantess, of a Goddess, of a sea monster, symbolizing the chthonian womb, cosmic night and the realm of the dead. To enter this gigantic body alive is equivalent to descending into Hell [emphasis added]. The initiatory meaning of this type of descent to the Underworld is clear—he who has been successful in such an exploit no longer fears death; he has conquered a kind of … immortality, the goal of all heroic initiations from the time of Gilgamesh. (Eliade, 1958, p. 64)

Eliade’s interpretation of the interconnected myth-motifs of the Belly of the Whale (Jonah) and Journey of Underworld Descent (Jesus Christ) brim with original insight; at the same time, he stood on the shoulders of earlier interpreters, whose identification of archetypal, initiatory, death-rebirth imagery in these common mythopoeic motifs informed Eliade’s prolific work. On a general level, he owes a large debt to van Gennep, who interpreted rites of passage as transformative, symbolic death-rebirth initiations within the framework of a tripartite structural model of initiation that was later developed into analogous paradigms in the theories of Eliade and Joseph Campbell (Boyer, 2014a). On the more specific level of the analogous, archetypal myth-motifs of the belly of the whale and hero journey of descent, Eliade is indebted to both Jung and his contemporary Campbell.

Campbell, drawing from many of the same textual and theoretical sources as Eliade, including both van Gennep and Jung, embedded the devouring monster myth-motif as a central archetypal symbol within his composite model of the mythical hero quest, a structural paradigm in which he wed the tripartite ritual initiatory structure of van Gennep, dressed up in new terms, with the symbolism of the solar-hero in Jung’s early work (Boyer, 2014a). In his model of the hero adventure, which he called the monomyth, Campbell applied van Gennep’s three-part initiatory, structural framework to mythopoeic literary narratives, suggesting the ritual initiatory structure of literary quest myths the world over. Within this broader initiatory structural frame of “departure-initiation-return,” Campbell located the archetypal motif “In the Belly of the Whale,” sandwiched between the initial threshold passage through which the hero enters the other world and the beginning of the heroic adventure. Being swallowed by the fish, within this context, suggests its importance as a symbolic entryway into the land of peril and wonder, imagined as a symbolic journey of descent. Like Eliade’s ritual initiates, the mythic hero metaphorically enters the other world through the ritual door, so to speak, of the Great Snake’s (or Fish’s) Mouth.

Before offering a brief summary of Campbell’s view of the meaning of the belly of the fish here is perhaps the place to note that the swallowing of Jonah by the great fish is not the only mythopoeic imagery in the narrative, although admittedly the most important for this study.  Archetypal structure in myths and rites is typically amplified by a variety of other familiar, recurring archetypal features supportive of the general myth-making function of the imagery. An example is Jonah’s resistance to the Divine call.  This idea of resistance to the “divine election” is discussed by Eliade in his discourse on shamanic initiation. Campbell echoed Eliade in his discussion of the call to the adventure of mythic heroes. Some heroes, he wrote, voluntarily set off on their quests. Others start their adventures involuntarily, like Eliade’s shamans “abducted by spirits.” The cost of resisting the divine election or “call to adventure” is severe, typically manifested in extraordinary suffering or even death.  It is apparently the same for reluctant prophets as for shamans and mythic heroes; Jonah’s refusal to follow God’s call summons a furious supernaturally caused tempest 1 The Celtic myth of Tristan and Isolde contains imagery remarkably similar to many motifs in the Jonah tale. Like Jonah, Tristan is not a voluntary hero. Like Jonah, his ship and crew are threatened by a supernatural tempest, calmed by sacrificing the hero. In Tristan’s case, the sea was becalmed as soon as they left the captive alone on a wild shoreline in Cornwall, just like Jonah abandoned on the shores near Ninevah. See Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan: with the ‘Tristan’ of Thomas (Arthur Thomas Hatto, Trans.). New York: Penquin, 1967, pp. 72-74.  that threatened to sink the ship carrying Jonah. The subsequent act of being swallowed by a whale, apart from the penultimate miracle of his liberation, surely ends in the failed prophet’s death.

Following the initiation of the quest, whether voluntarily or involuntarily begun, the hero passes through one or more symbolic thresholds or portals into an otherworld—Campbell’s “zone of magnified power”—an idea examined in detail in this author’s paper on The Wizard of Oz (Boyer, 2014a). Between this threshold passage entering the otherworld and the adventure to come, Campbell situated the archetype of the hero’s descent into the fish’s belly. Campbell opened his discourse on the myth-motif with an interpretation expanded by Eliade more than a decade later:

The idea that the passage of the magical threshold is a transit into a sphere of rebirth is symbolized in the worldwide womb image of the belly of the whale.  The hero … is  swallowed into the unknown, and would appear to have died. (Campbell, 1949/1973, p. 90)

Campbell offered several examples of devouring-monster myths to support his views, like the story of Maui being swallowed by his great-great-grandmother, later interpreted by Eliade as a descent into Mother Earth. He also briefly mentioned the motif as it appeared in the fairy tale of Red Riding Hood, which this author discussed in detail (Boyer, 2017), in which the heroine is swallowed by a monstrous wolf.  Campbell (1949/1973, pp. 90-91) cited other examples, including the Celtic Irish hero, Finn MacCool, and two Native American heroes, the Eskimo trickster Raven and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Hiawatha, based on the Algonquin hero Manabozho. In The Song of Hiawatha, the hero is swallowed by a great fish, the sturgeon Mishe-Nahma, King of Fishes, who “opened his jaws and swallowed/Both canoe and Hiawatha” (Longfellow, 1855/2006, Ch. VIII), an example Campbell apparently borrowed from Jung. In the Eskimo legend of Raven, an archetypal trickster-figure darted through the open jaws of a whale-cow while carrying fire-sticks. Raven used these fire-sticks later to escape from the whale’s belly by starting a fire in the monster’s stomach, a motif recreated in Pinocchio’s escape from the whale, Monstro. Campbell also mentioned the swallowing of the entire Greek pantheon of gods and goddesses, excepting Zeus, by the Father-God Kronos. Elsewhere in Greek mythology, the mighty hero Heracles rescued the Trojan princess, Hesione, bound to sea rocks as a sacrificial offering to a sea monster.  When the monster emerged from the Deep and opened its jaws, Heracles dove into its throat and slew the monster by cutting his way out from its belly.

Significantly, for purposes of this study, Campbell (1949/1973) ended his section on “The Belly of the Whale” with an iconographic, pictorial image taken from a page of a fifteenth-century Christian manuscript, the Biblia Pauperum, which Campbell entitled “The Night-Sea Journey” (p. 95). The image juxtaposed an illustration of Jonah about to be released by the fish with a second image of Christ rising from the tomb, that is, an allusion to the Sign of Jonah. These interlinked metaphorical images, as well as the title Campbell gave them—especially when combined with Campbell’s reference to Hiawatha—offer a convenient segue into Carl G. Jung’s earlier writings on the subject. Eliade (1958), for his part, drew the reader’s attention to Jung in Rites and Symbols of Initiation, suggesting the relevance of initiatory themes to his contemporaries, the collective “unconscious desire to share in the ordeals that regenerate and finally save a Hero.”  “C. G. Jung,” Eliade observed, “has stressed the fact that the process that he terms individuation, and that in his view, constitutes the ultimate goal of human life, is accomplished through a series of ordeals of the initiatory type” (p. 135).

The night sea journey—a term Jung borrowed from scholar Leo Frobenius—is, according to Jung, one of the major archetypal motifs associated with the transformative psychological processes that attend the individuation process, the lifelong process of achieving wholeness by becoming one’s complete Self. Jung differentiated the Self from the conventional ego-identity learned from socializing authorities, including parents, educators, and the State. Jung theorized the archetypes—widely recurrent metaphorical imagery transcending history and geography—as primordial images that portray affect-laden situations in life. Both Jung and Campbell identified archetypes as symbols depicting universal, transformative crises in the human developmental process. For Jung, periodic eruptions of unconscious complexes are essential to human development. Images like the hero’s night-sea journey, and other depth imagery depicting the hero’s journey of descent through enchanted forests or subterranean Underworld caverns (Boyer, 2014c)—or, analogously, being devoured by a symbolic monster—are typical routes taken by mythic heroes into the depths of the collective unconscious, representative images portraying the necessary crises of initiatory death-rebirth essential for ego-Self transformation.

Jung (1950/1973, pp. 45-81; also see Boyer, 2017) interpreted rebirth imagery, a subject on which he wrote extensively, including a major lecture in 1939, as the archetype of transformation. The night sea journey into dark watery depths symbolically portrays this process of descent into the unconscious necessary for psychological and spiritual development. Eliade symbolically equated the initiate entering the womb by either being swallowed by a marine monster like Jonah or by the heroic route of descent into the subterranean caverns of Mother Earth taken by Jesus Christ in the Harrowing of Hell; Jung equated the night sea journey (Jonah) with the heroic descent into the subterranean Underworld or Land of the Dead (Jesus Christ), which he referred to as the nekyia or katabasis. “The night sea journey,” Jung (1954/1992) wrote, “is a kind of descensus ad inferos, a descent into Hades, and a journey to the land of ghosts somewhere beyond this world, beyond consciousness, hence an immersion in the unconscious” (pp. 83-84). Jung based his metaphor of the night sea journey on the writings of Frobenius, whose early writings on the symbolism of devouring sea monsters laid the basic interpretive foundation later developed by Jung, Campbell, and Eliade.  Frobenius illustrated his exegesis with a composite legend in which a “hero is devoured by a water monster in the West (to devour).  The animal carries him within him to the East (sea journey)” (as cited in Jung, 1916/2001, p. 205). “All these sea-going gods,” Jung observed, “are sun symbols. They are enclosed in a chest or an ark for the ‘night journey on the sea’…. During the night journey on the sea, the sun-god is enclosed in the mother’s womb.” Frobenius described a pregnant woman metaphorically identical to a great fish or the sea itself:

We proceed from the assumption that the Sun descends into the sea as well as arises from  it…. The primitive [idea] is that this sea has previously swallowed the old Sun.  Consequently the resulting myth is that the woman (sea) has formerly devoured the Sun and now brings a new Sun into the world, and she has become pregnant. (as cited in Jung, 1916/2001, p. 205)

Jung (1916/2001) developed this idea into a conglomerate myth of the sun-hero, further developed by Campbell as the mythical hero quest, based on this ancient analogy of the cycles of the Sun’s daily descent (into night) and ascent (into day), the underlying nature-based symbolic structure of the myths and rites previously discussed. “The meaning of this cycle of myths … is clear; it is the longing to attain rebirth through the return to the mother’s womb, that is to say, to become as immortal as the sun [emphasis added]” (p. 204). To illustrate his point, Jung cited the question of Nicodemus to Jesus Christ concerning rebirth: “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb, and be born” (John iii, 4)? Jesus answered that a man must be “born of water and the spirit” to attain immortality, providing the scriptural basis of baptismal symbolism—initiatory rebirth symbolism—in Christian liturgical ritualism. Like shamans, ritual initiates and mythic heroes, baptized Christians are symbolically twice-born.

To further illustrate Frobenius’ view, Jung (1916/2001, pp. 298-334) interpreted Longfellow’s epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha, a Native American hero myth in which the hero, like Jonah, is devoured by a giant fish, Mishe-Nama, in whose belly he resided for a time before escaping back to life. Jung viewed Hiawatha’s encounter with the fish as a typical battle of the sun-hero.  “It is the typical myth of the work of the hero, distributed over the entire world,” said Jung (1916/2001). “He takes to a boat, fights with the sea monster, is devoured … having arrived in the interior of the whale-dragon” (p.325). With the help of birds, associated by Jung with the re-ascent of the Sun and rebirth of the mythical Phoenix (p. 327), the indigenous hero Hiawatha restored himself to life, slaying the great fish. As Jung might say, “He mysteriously creates [life, the rising sun] in the womb of death.”  Jung often spoke of the treasure hard to attain, the numinous object of the mythic hero’s quest in the underworld. “The treasure which the hero fetches from the dark cavern,” he concluded, “is swelling life; it is himself, the hero, newborn” (p. 350).

The theological tradition of literalistic interpretation of the Old Testament story of Jonah and the Whale as an allegory of Christ’s archetypal death, descent for three days into the earth, and subsequent resurrection, if received uncritically, requires the receiver’s unconditional leap of faith in divine miracles that defy modern secular and scientific understanding. Viewed through the lens of archetypal literary criticism and psychological criticism, however, the relationship between these two intertwined Biblical passages is far less problematic. The archetypal perspective points to a symbolic grammatical heritage that is neither literal nor exclusive, but rather opens out into a vast contextual network of symbolic initiatory structures and meanings found all over the world, and whose origins are rooted in aboriginal, mythico-ritual traditions that predate both the birth of Jesus and the Jonah myth by many tens of thousands of years.

During the past century or so, these widely recurrent primordial images or initiatory myth-motifs have been interpreted by a growing multidisciplinary and sometimes interdisciplinary consensus of scholars as symbolic representations of transformative processes of human development expressed in the cyclic paradoxical imagery of death-rebirth, psychologically relevant to modern people independent of faith. Interpreted as psychology and mythopoetics (myth-making, mythology) rather than theology, the descent into the whale’s belly and the descent into the subterranean Underworld called Hell—and, importantly, the subsequent restoration to life of shamans, initiates, mythic heroes and prophets like Jonah and Christ—reveal deeper structural and symbolic affinities than indicated by mere allegory. Viewed archetypally, the integrally connected motifs of Jonah’s descent into the whale’s belly and Jesus’ descent into Hades suggested by Jesus Christ’s reference to the Sign of Jonah, represent a Judeo-Christian variant of cyclical, transformational imagery evident in a primordial, worldwide legacy of mythopoeic rituals and stories.  Images foundational to these ancient narratives and wisdom tales, that establish metaphorical correspondences between objective nature and the psyche, are symbolically portrayed and preserved, in countless local variations, in myths and rites as well as their modern and post-modern secular storytelling equivalents in literature and film—dark mirrors of the human soul as relevant and meaningful for psychological development today as they ever were.  

1.   The Celtic myth of Tristan and Isolde contains imagery remarkably similar to many motifs in the Jonah tale. Like Jonah, Tristan is not a voluntary hero. Like Jonah, his ship and crew are threatened by a supernatural tempest, calmed by sacrificing the hero. In Tristan’s case, the sea was becalmed as soon as they left the captive alone on a wild shoreline in Cornwall, just like Jonah abandoned on the shores near Ninevah. See Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan: with the ‘Tristan’ of Thomas (Arthur Thomas Hatto, Trans.). New York: Penquin, 1967, pp. 72-74.  

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Figure 1. Jonah Leaving the Whale. Painting by Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625). Netherlands.

Figure 2. Illustration from “Ninnillo and Nennella” by Giambattista Basile in The Pentamerone, or The Story of Stories. London: David Bogue, 1847.  Illustration by George Cruikshank.

Figure 3. “Christ Descending into the Grave,” object 3, in Robert Blair, The Grave, 1808. Engraving by Louis Shiavonetti based on a sketch by William Blake (Blake Archives).

Figure 4. Page from the Biblia Pauperum, 1471. Edition of the Weimar Gesellschaft der Bibliophilen, 1906.

Figure 5. Hiawatha and the King of Fishes in The Story of Hiawatha, adapted by Clayton Edwards with the original poem. Illustration by M. L. Kirk

Ronald L. Boyer is a scholar, teacher, and award-winning poet, fiction author, and screenwriter. He completed his MA in Depth Psychology at Sonoma State University and is also a graduate of the Professional Program in Screenwriting at UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Ron taught his first university course, “Mythic Structure in Storytelling,” for his graduate Internship as a volunteer member of the SSU Psychology Department Faculty. He is a two-time Jefferson Scholar to the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, and two-time award-winner for fiction from the John E. Profant Foundation for the Arts, including the McGwire Family Award for Literature. Ron’s first short story was published in the horror anthology, America the Horrific. His poetry has been featured in the scholarly e-zine of the Jungian and depth psychology community, Depth Insights: Seeing the World with Soul (Issues 3, 5, & 7); Mythic Passages: A Magazine of the Imagination; Mythic Circle, the literary magazine of the Mythopoeic Society; and many other publications.

Ron is a doctoral student in the PhD in Art and Religion program at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA, where he also attends classes at UC Berkeley. His scholarly research emphasizes archetypal theory applied to mythology, literature, and film, with a concentration on mythopoeic imagery in the art of Dante Alighieri, William Blake, and J. R. R. Tolkien. He is an associate editor/reviewer for the peer-reviewed journal, the Berkeley Journal of Religion and Theology, and a referee and regular contributor to the peer-reviewed journal, Coreopsis: Journal of Myth and Theater. Ron has presented academic papers at the first Symposium for the Study of Myth at Pacifica Graduate Institution, the International Conference for the International Association of Jungian Studies at Arizona State University, and the 33rd annual International Conference for Ancestral and Traditional Wisdom, Healing, and Transformation at Dominican University.

A practitioner of shamanism, Ron has participated in numerous indigenous ceremonies and received initiations from shamans of many tribes, including the Mayans, Shuar (Ecuador) and Siberians of the Altai Mountains.