The Eternal Mythos of Anima: A Comparative Study of ‘Amazonian’ Narratives from Taiwan to Across the Globe

• Main Authors: Yu-Tzu Chang, 張祐慈
• Other Authors: Fanfan Chen
• Format: Others
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/5ru3pr

碩士 === 國立東華大學 === 英美語文學系 === 105 === This thesis evaluates the global myth of the land of women using mythic texts to examine its universality and meanings. I mainly apply Jungian analytical psychology and Barfield’s “semantic unity” to further illuminate contemporary fantasy using approaches from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Secondary World” and Fanfan Chen’s crystallization of mythos and logos that conduces to the mythopoeia. In Chapter One I begin with collections and translations of numerous Amazonian myths and folktales from Taiwanese Formosan aborigines with comparisons to show the recurrent structure and elements. By doing so, a consonance takes place that links the Formosan Amazonian stories to those from around the world as I show in Chapter Two. Furthermore, in Chapter Three, I explain how the Jungian “anima” archetype accounts for this cohesion of the myth at the collective unconscious level, triggering one’s individuation from the ego to the Self, and leading to a spiritual firmness. Finally, and importantly, I show how a philological and fantastic approach to the mythical dialectic between mythos and logos sheds light on the pristine language’s original unity, its splitting along with the evolution of the human consciousness, and the synthetic reunion through the creation of mytho-poetic fantasy. In short, Chapter One provides numerous Formosan aboriginal myths and folktales as well as comparisons, Chapter Two collects global texts to make the Amazonian narratives’ irreducibility and universality prominent, and Chapter Three delves into analytical approaches to discerning the significant meanings the world’s Amazonian myths reveal. The main purpose of this thesis is to strengthen the importance of noticing one’s fantasies and Self to reach a mental harmony, recover the broken relationship with pristine language, and to further reconcile the nature of the divine.