Stephen Greenhouse

“As Dr. Jung points out, the theory of the archetypes is by no means his own invention.[18] Compare Nietzsche: “In our sleep and in our dreams we pass through the whole thought of earlier humanity. I mean, in the same way that man reasons in his dreams, he reasoned when in the waking state many thousands of years....The dream carries us back into earlier states of human culture, and affords us a means of understanding it better.”[19] Compare Adolf Bastian’s theory of the ethnic “Elementary Ideas” (Elementargedanken), which, in their primal psychic character (corresponding to the Stoic Logoi spermatikoi), should be regarded as “the spiritual (or psychic) germinal dispositions out of which the whole social structure has been developed organically,” and, as such, should serve as bases of inductive research.[20] Compare Franz Boas: “Since Waitz’s thorough discussion of the question of the unity of the human species, there can be no doubt that in the main the mental characteristics of man are the same all over the world....Bastian was led to speak of the appalling monotony of the fundamental ideas of mankind all over the globe....Certain patterns of associated ideas may be recognized in all types of culture.”[21] Compare Sir James G. Frazer: “We need not, with some enquirers in ancient and modern times, suppose that the Western peoples borrowed from the older civilization of the Orient the conception of the Dying and Reviving God, together with the solemn ritual, in which that conception was dramatically set forth before the eyes of the worshippers. More probably the resemblance which may be traced in this respect between the religions of the East and West is no more than what we commonly, though incorrectly, call a fortuitous coincidence, the effect of similar causes acting alike on the similar constitution of the human mind in different countries and under different skies.”[22]”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces