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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13. Ritual Regicide

Scholarly interpetations
Because coercing the spirits to fulfill man’s needs is a central ingredient in both magic and religion, the early farmers probably feel a genuine and imperative need to coax the powers-that-be to promote the fertility of the earth. Maybe they regard planting and harvesting as a mystery comparable to the process of impregnation followed by the birth of a child, and need a ritual to express it. Maybe they relate their own destiny to that of plants, which some scholars believe, like Campbell and German anthropologist Leo Frobenius, (author of Childhood of Man); and maybe--because to them harvesting is a killing--the farmers simply accept death as a natural part of the eternal cycle of growth and decay.

Or, as suggested by British anthropologist Sir James George Frazer (author of  The Golden Bough), perhaps they believe that the rites of marriage, death and rebirth will magically bring about the annual cycle of growth and decay. This is an idea derived from the primitive ritual of sympathetic magic, according to which you can produce the events you desire by using objects or actions that resemble or are associated with it.

For all these reasons the farmers are well prepared to accept the matriarchs’ brilliant idea to make vegetal seed (‘dying’ in the earth to give rise to a plant) a metaphor for male seed (‘dying’ in the womb to beget a child), and to celebrate it in a sacred marriage. Nevertheless, if it’s the ‘death’ of the seed in the ground and its ‘rebirth’ as a plant they want to imitate, wouldn’t a simple marriage and birth ritual be more appropriate (to celebrate the transformation of the male seed in the womb and the birth of a new human being)? Isn’t it to wildly overplay it when the siring process winds up bumping off the sire? Besides, what could be more contradictory to a ritual meant to enhance life than murder?

Moreover, in every study I’ve come across of preliterate societies, murder is never a normal event and death is always sad, something to be avoided. Neumann means it’s precisely because of the elemental bond with nature that the primeval mind has always regarded killing as an outrage on the world order. And Mumford admits to being puzzled how a ceremony that begins by invoking a more abundant life can turn into its very opposite.

I’m astonished that none of the scholars raises an eye-brow at an institution as appalling in its brutality as male sacrifice (and one so dismissive of men’s pivotal role as initiators of new life). Instead  they all seem to accept it as somehow logical. As if the standard for human mating behavior were set by the praying mantis--the insect whose female after copulation bites the head off the male and eats him!

I’m equally shocked that nobody asks how it may affect the early farmer to be exposed, repeatedly and with great fanfare, to such merciless killings of men. Wouldn’t his reactions be akin to those of people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)--heightened states of rage and vigilance, distrust of everyone, a profound sense of guilt and aloneness? And since these feelings had to be repressed, wouldn’t they have grown increasingly explosive with time?

My interpretation

In my interpretation the spring festival is not a feast in honor of renewed life, and fertility is not the reason why men have to be ritually sacrificed. The reason is another altogether. It’s to ensure that the female sex retains its superiority over the male. It’s to drum in that woman is and remains the principal creator of new life. And it’s to engrave on the collective mind that woman alone has the divine right to dispense death as well as life.

I therefore conclude that ritual regicide--this four-headed hydra sanctioning incest, castration, murder and cannibalism--is a contrivance of the women rulers in the first farming villages when their authority is under attack. It’s not born of religious fervor but of a specific intention arising in these women’s minds: to block all expressions of fatherhood beyond the purely biological and to crush any sign of equality between the sexes. As the first trauma inflicted on newly conscious man, male sacrifice is, I contend, the spark that sets ablaze the discord between the sexes--one that simmers in matriarchy, flares up in patriarchy and is still raging. And as such it’s the prime motor of both the male inferiority complex and its corollary, the practice of misogyny.

But what motivated the matriarchs to create an institution like ritual regicide? To lead up to an answer I first need to describe how I think the matriarchy developed. See next post.

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