The metempsychosis of gods: The resurfacing image of Greek Gods as a backlash against the Industrial Revolution and Protestantism from a Jungian perspective

The period of literature and dubbed as ―English Romanticism‖, begins towards the end of the 18th Century with Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads and ends with the coronation of Queen Victoria (Greenblatt, 2018). This period, marked by great influence from classical works of literature is characterized by a return to the Greek roots of the Western Canon. The rapidly changing environment and the agricultural and industrial revolution it brought about, the Reformation preceding them, naturally had a counterpart which ruminated on bygone eras and the ―simplicity‖ they brought about. However, what the Romantics brought from the Classical Era was not only an idealized version of the past that would be to reduce them into simple reactionaries. The thesis, through the concepts of The Collective Unconscious, Archetypes, Enantiodromia, Abaissement du niveau mental and Synchronicity by Jung is going to argue that the Romantic poets were not reactionaries, but clinicians of the unconscious who undertook the task to warn and heal the society against the maladies it is suffering. The chief arguments of the thesis are going to be assisted by works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, Max Weber, Marie-Louise von Franz and Karen Horney. The works of Jung which are going to be chiefly used in the study are Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, The Structure and the Dynamics of Psyche, The Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry, Modern Man in Search of a Soul and Civilization in Transition. Keywords: Archetypes, Romantic Period, Industrial Revolution, Protestant Reformation, Greek Paganism