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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3. The Beginning Digs

One thing that inspired me to construct my theory about the origin of sexism was the conviction that, to succeed in getting rid of this now several thousand-year-old peculiarity, we need to find an answer to how it began.

Prehistory

At the dawn of recorded history (written language was first invented c 3200 BCE), most of society was already male-ruled. So to find the roots of misogyny we must delve into pre-patriarchal times. Given that much of our knowledge about this early period only exists in myth and legend, my effort at reviving it consists to a large extent of ideas and hypotheses that are based on informed suppositions rather than on scientific evidence.

Many discard attempts at theorizing about what happened before recorded history because it may not be scientifically provable. To them I offer the objection that what can’t be proved also can’t be disproved. We may never have a conclusive answer to what kind of society existed in the prehistoric and pre-literate era, but why should that prevent us from doing some educated guesswork? 

Let’s also keep in mind that a real myth (by which I mean myth in the original sense of the word) is an interpretation of something in nature; it has nothing to do with the supernatural nor is it a synonym for a falsehood. “Myths,” says one Greek scholar, Edith Hamilton, “are early science, the result of men’s first trying to explain what they saw around them,” Another, Jane Ellen Harrison,, points out that “Mythology invents a reason for a fact, it does not base a fact on a fancy.”

Research

As far as possible I do, however, take my speculative leaps and broad generalizations from a foundation of facts (historical accounts of remaining matriarchies, research in archeology, anthropology, mythology, art and analytic psychology). For the rest I feel all right to give my imagination free rein--as long as I retain the coolness of my judgment and, to quote Sigmund Freud, “do not mistake the scaffolding for the building.” I don’t presume to be right; all I want is to launch ideas and stimulate a discussion.

It’ll take me a while, okay, before I get down to it all. But if you like ideas that besides apprehending facts also try to comprehend the world and ourselves, and if you don’t mind the winding road, welcome on board the bandwagon of my Thought Adventure.

The gist of my theory.
Men don't put women down because they consider them lesser than men (as we’ve been made to believe and it certainly looks like). On the contrary, they do it because they want to claim for themselves what they perceive to be women’s higher rank. Men’s chief motive for oppressing women is the desire to overcome a monumental Inferiority, or Mother, Complex inflicted on them by a pre-patriarchal matriarchy and rooted in a deep, and deeply repressed, fear of female power. It’s against this ancient social order--where women are the first sex due to their fertility and men are sacrificed on the altar of a Great Mother Goddess--that patriarchy arises in revolt.

Differently put, women were the first sexists.

Let me start by explaining what I mean by the male inferiority complex, in which I see the key to what‘s gone wrong with men‘s sexual instincts. See next post.

Mother Goddess from Ҫatal Huyük (6000-5500 BCE) Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara 

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