The Collective Unconscious of Rome and India: Narrative Archetypes in the Abduction of Proserpina of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Sita of the Ramayan

Ovid’s Metamorphoses has long served as a window into Greco-Roman culture and mythology. However, the ways in which the Metamorphoses may be shaped by, and in turn shape, the interactions between myths and cultures beyond the Greco-Roman world are underexplored. The Ramayan, a seminal South Asian mythological text, has received less attention in scholarship in the Global North, in part due to the overwhelming focus on the Greco-Roman canon. This article highlights stark narrative parallels between the abduction of Proserpina in the Metamorphoses and the abduction of Sita in the Ramayan. Given that these texts are genetically and geographically distinct, tracing the origin of these parallels remains challenging. Here, I leverage a Jungian analytical framework to propose that “narrative archetypes”—collections of images stored in the collective unconscious which manifest in myths across cultures—may explain why episodic details are conserved between the Metamorphoses and the Ramayan.