The Whale
Leviathan
The monster of the deep that swallows.
The Whale: what does it mean in analytical psychology?
The whale-dragon that swallows the hero is the vessel of the night sea journey: the devouring unconscious, and the womb from which the hero is reborn. Jung followed it through the myths Frobenius gathered.
Leo Frobenius, in Das Zeitalter des Sonnengottes (1904), gathered the tales from every coast in which a hero is swallowed by a sea-monster, lights a fire in its belly, cuts out its heart, and comes out the other side, often bald from the heat: Jung took the pattern from him and read the belly as the unconscious, the fire as the hero’s consciousness kept alight in the dark, and the coming out as rebirth, with the loss of hair as a sign of the newborn.
Jonah, who is swallowed because he flees his calling and is cast up where he was sent, is the clearest Western form: the whale does not destroy him but carries him where he would not go.
The Whale: where does it appear in myth and tradition?
Jonah’s great fish, Leviathan, whom none can draw out with a hook, Moby Dick, Pinocchio’s dogfish. The Maori hero who enters the sea-monster; Hiawatha swallowed by the sturgeon; Raven, in the tales of the Pacific coast, swallowed by the whale and lighting a fire inside.
From the Sources
Jung writes that the hero, having arrived inside the 'whale dragon', cuts off or destroys its vital organ, or kills the monster by a fire he secretly makes within it, and so creates life, the rising sun, in the womb of death.
“…having arrived in the interior of the "whale dragon," he seeks the vital organ, which he cuts off or in some way destroys. Often the death of the monster occurs as the result of a fire which the hero secretly makes within him; he mysteriously creates in the womb of death life, the rising sun.”
Dr. C. G. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido, Part II, Chapter VII, "The Dual Mother Role". Authorized translation, with introduction, by Beatrice M. Hinkle, M.D.; New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1916. The text, read in part
Matthew's Gospel compares Jonah's three days and nights in the whale's belly with the three days and nights the Son of man will spend in the heart of the earth.
“For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”
The King James Version of the Bible, Matthew 12:40. King James Version, Project Gutenberg eBook #10. The text, read in part
Each passage is quoted from the text named, which the press fetched and read, and was checked word for word against a fresh copy of it; the link opens that copy. Passages are given as printed, without the editors’ footnote numbers, and with words broken across lines joined.
Where to Read
- Symbols of Transformation, CW 5
- Leo Frobenius, Das Zeitalter des Sonnengottes (1904)
- Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), “The Belly of the Whale”
Jung’s writings are cited by the volume of the Collected Works (CW), Bollingen Series / Princeton, 1953–79.
Related Symbols
Also among Creatures of the Water
“Learn as much as you can about symbolism; then forget it all when you are analysing a dream.”
Cite This Entry
“The Whale.” In Symbols of the Psyche, the Symbolarium. The Thinking Press, 2026. https://thethinkingpress.org/symbolarium/psyche/whale.
Nearby in the alphabet: The Well: The deep source, and the way down. The Wheel: Turning time, fortune, and the round of birth and death. White: The whitening: the first light after the dark.