28. The Mythological Event Par Excellence. I

I now turn to what Campbell calls the “mythological event par excellence.” It’s a theme revolving around a sacrificial killing for the good of humanity that shows up in myths all over the world and in the most diverse cultures.

In the dreamlike age at the beginning of time, when neither death nor the two sexes existed, a murder is committed. The body is cut up and from the ground where the parts are buried food plants come up. On all who eat of the fruits of these plants sexual organs grow out. This event puts an end to the earlier paradise-like era, because now life and death, which so far have been one, become two and so do the sexes,  which have also been one.

The story is narrated in a slightly different way in different cultures. What varies among other things is the kind of food plant that arises; in an American Indian myth it’s the maize plant, in a Polynesian the cocoa nut palm and in a Hawaiian the breadfruit tree, etc. But they all amount to the same thing: food plants are sacred and eating them is a way of communing with, and partaking of, divine life.

We recognize parts of this myth from the Bible where, after eating from the Tree of Knowledge, Adam and Eve realize both that they are mortal and of different sexes. In Plato’s Symposion male and female exist as one being, which--until Zeus splits it into two--has four arms and four legs, one head but two faces. Similar myths can be found in China, India and elsewhere. Throughout the world terrible rites of cannibal communion enact the original event connected to this mythological theme. They all include a sexual act, a murder scene and a festival meal and they all represent creatures coming into being, living on the death of others and then dying and becoming food for others.

Cannibal Society Kwakiutl Vancouver Island

But what is a myth? 
Campbell thinks mythologies are built on shocks that occurred in the past of peoples. Just as, according to Freud, the dream symbol refers to some shock in the dreamer’s infancy, so do mythologies refer to traumatic experiences in the early life of humankind. Anthropologist E. B. Tylor talks of myths of observation; they contain statements that could only have come into the minds of the original narrators through actual experience--although the conclusions drawn may not be true according to historical or scientific canons of truth.

One example is the Chinese legend of the ancient sage who taught his people to make fire by the friction of wood. Many cultures ascribe fire-making to mythic heroes, so that story (though not real history) is no doubt a recollection of a time when this was the ordinary way of producing fire. As Jane Ellen Harrison puts it, “Mythology invents a reason for a fact, it does not base a fact on a fancy.” According to Jung, “Every myth (is) an important psychological truth.”

I believe the mythological event par excellence is a myth of observation, for unless there once was a real, concrete murder followed by a burial, how could it have come up in the minds of people all over the world? And because it’s essentially identical with the key event in the fertility rites practiced in the earliest agricultural communities, I propose that it actually refers to the first male sacrifice at the first spring festival in the first farming village. Which also makes it a traumatic experience in humankind’s early history, akin to a startling dream symbol in an individual’s life. 

Anthropologists distinguish between ‘parallel developments’ (phenomena appear in many different places thanks to spontaneous operations in the psyche) and ‘diffusions’ (phenomena spread from region to region through migrations and commerce). This would make ritual regicide a parallel development and a ‘first’ in the sense that it begins in farming communities everywhere, independent of each other (if not at exactly the same time). 

So what’s the mythological event trying to tell us? See next post.

myth (according to Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary) = a usually traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon.


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19. Consciousness

Jung pointed out that just as the human body has an anatomical prehistory of millions of years, so does the psyche; and both body and psyche still display “numerous vestiges of earlier evolutionary stages going back even to the reptilian age.” For most of our life as a species we live in an unconscious state, from which a conscious ego slowly rises. With his concept of participation mystique, Lévy-Brühl has helped clarify that prior to the formation of the ego humanity lives in an original, purely animal state of non-differentiation (or total oneness with nature and the group). People don’t yet think of themselves as subjects nor as distinguishable from other persons or objects around them.

The impact of consciousness

But with the awakening of consciousness, when moving on to assume an ego and identify a personality with it, humanity encounters for the first time the possibility of a self-orienting consciousness. As the conscious human mind--symbolized by the ‘ego’--pushes its way out of the unconscious and up to a place in the limelight, a new and potentially most powerful actor has entered the world theatre. One that‘s ready at last to take on an equal partnership with the other lead player in the human drama, the unconscious human instinct--symbolized by the ‘id,’ the Freudian term for the source of psychic energy that’s derived from instinctual needs and drives.

Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould calls consciousness the greatest invention in the history of life, because it allows life to become aware of itself. By enabling us to see things objectively and in pairs of opposites, it adds an entirely new dimension to human existence. From a non-conceptual and essentially childlike way of perceiving the world, we now turn to an adult and highly discerning view--one that includes the ominous realization that we possess personal power.

Being the culmination of eons of mental development (though it may have emerged suddenly), consciousness marks our coming of age as a species. If up to this moment things have just happened to us and we’ve been more or less powerless pawns on the chessboard of an inscrutable destiny, we now rise in rank and become co-creators with evolution. Because how we evolve as a species no longer depends merely on the mutation of genes or natural selection but also on culture, i.e., on our own inventions. We have, in a sense, acquired the power of gods.

This is the point of no return.

Mumford puts it this way in his book The Transformation of Man, ”By means of his culture (man) wrought changes in himself within a few thousand years that nature would have needed millions of years to accomplish by the tedious process of organic evolution.”

Before consciousness

The arrival of consciousness doesn’t mean that we couldn’t think during earlier non-conscious stages. We both felt, thought, made decisions, solved problems, even made art. But rather than products of individual minds, these skills emanated from a deeper psychic level that existed in us long before the formation of the ego. What’s new at this stage is only being able to say, “I’m conscious of doing all this. I know I’m a feeling, thinking, willing individual who chooses how to behave.”

Jung calls that lower pre-conscious level the ‘collective unconscious.’ By it he means a substratum that’s inborn and identical in all people and consists of archetypes (or images and patterns derived from common human experiences) that come up in the mind automatically and determine behavior independently of the individual’s own experience.

According to Neumann the development of culture depends on the capacity of the conscious mind to absorb more and more of the unconscious. Early man, who lacks a self-conscious ego capable of reflecting, only perceives an unconscious content in the form of symbols. Being spontaneous expressions of the unconscious, symbols are elusive and have manifold meanings. But because myth is the language of symbol, Jung sees in it the original language of mankind and the unconscious, the natural way for the collective unconscious to communicate with consciousness.

For a view of how the growth of consciousness is described in mythology, see next post.

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