29. The Mythological Event Par Excellence. II

Sacrificial killing

What I think the mythological event par excellence tells us is that the first sacrificial killing for the good of mankind made us aware, in one single instant, that death comes by way of murder but also leads to generation, and that the plants man lives on derive from the murder of a god. In every version of the myth sex and death are linked to each other and accepted as an inevitable sequence in the eternal cycle of death and resurrection. 

Only in Christianity is man made guilty for the god's death, and only in the Bible is the ‘fall’ of Adam and Eve seen as a human mistake that only God can rectify. Eastern religions see creation itself as a ‘fall’ in the sense of an act of will-to-be-more that’s absolutely necessary for life to come about.

The myth differs from the rites.
What about the differences between the ritual and the myth? For instance, if male sacrifice appears at the time of the breakthrough of consciousness, as I would have it, why does the myth place the event at ‘the beginning of time?’ I guess it’s because in the human mind time doesn't start until humanity first becomes aware of it, i.e., when entering the conscious stage.

Why does the myth say people lived forever and had no sexual organs before this momentous event? To me, it’s a correct description of an era when-sex was not yet connected with birth, and people didn’t know how they came into being nor that they were going to die. And in retrospect this benighted era stands out as an archaic paradise, a ‘dream time.’

Why did the food plants come up from the buried parts of the murder victim? Because people believed that crops magically depended on the sacrifice of the god that represented vegetation. And how come sex organs grew out only after they had eaten of the fruits of these plants? I think it’s their way of saying that they owe the gift of procreation to a god. This belief accounts for the sacral character given to sexuality in ancient times while also confirming that the price of regeneration is death. Sex may stand in the service of life but so does death, for both lead to birth.

Why did the murder happen? As far as I know, in no version of the myth is there a rationale for it. It’s presented as a fact, as inexplicable as it’s irreversible, probably because people find it too painful to face the part human beings play in this horrible event, and simply have to repress it.

Why, in the myth unlike in the ritual, does the murder take place before there’s any sexual act at all, and why have both the goddess and the sacred marriage dropped out of the picture? Again, because people needed to suppress unbearable facts, men not least who at the beginning of the patriarchal era wanted to forget the once absolute power of women--and even deny that it had ever existed. 

Who committed the murder? The myth doesn’t explain that either and probably for the same reason. In some Native American versions, however, the victim-to-be asks a family member or lover to commit the murder, i.e., he (or sometimes she) willingly sacrifices himself. 

But how on earth could people connect such natural human processes as sex and death with murder? To many preliterate peoples there are no natural causes, says Lévy-Brühl, because they attribute everything to interference from some mystic force, like witchcraft or spirits. And since they know why something occurs they aren’t interested in how.

Sum up, 
I propose that the mythological event par excellence describes the first male sacrifice, and that the shock it inflicted was so strong that people everywhere chose to bury the circumstances around it in their unconscious. The myth serves the same function in our collective experience as the dream symbol in an individual’s life: to both remind people of a crucial occurrence in their past and offer them a chance to come to terms with it. Not only has the mythological event something true to say, it is indeed an important psychological truth.

An example of the remarkable tenacity of this universal myth is the way Christianity re-enacts the pagan murder drama complete with cannibalism. In the Eucharist service we find a latter-day version of the ritual killing and devouring of a god. For the congregation  to partake of bread and wine, symbols of the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ, is to commemorate that the god died for them. 

But this ritual also keeps alive the guilt that clings to the believers for the god's death,  and in so doing demonstrates that the tendency to repeat the childhood trauma that was never made conscious (what Freud called the repetition-compulsion and saw as one of the “fundamentals of human behavior”) may apply also to society as a whole.

Now over to what finally brings the matriarchal era to an end. See next post.


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26. Newly Conscious Man

Awakening to a conscious apprehension of the world is no doubt a mixed experience. At the same time as their species has mutated into a smarter, more complex form of life than that of all the others, our forebears must learn to use faculties that up to now have lain dormant (like judgment, discipline and responsibility for the choices they make). Here they are, still part of earth and yet on a strangely elevated plane, forced to listen to a different drummer--one that no longer calls them to passive obedience but to sovereign action. And only now does it strike them, perhaps with the force of a sledge-hammer, how utterly dependent they are on guidance from outside.

The conscious mind also makes a rift in their sense of wholeness. Becoming aware of their individuality, and of two distinctly different sexual identities, forces them to leave behind their vertical and childlike bonds with mother.They must now establish altogether different, horizontal and more adult bonds with their peers.

In Genesis, this is metaphorically described as the Fall. Once their “eyes are opened” after having eaten of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden. Quite comically, the authors of the Old Testament, who can’t see Nature’s own plan in this event, make God into a petulant old patriarch, angry and vindictive for being deprived of his dictatorial powers. (Something that becomes even funnier when we realize that God is only a male counterpart to the ancient Great Goddess, in whose name the matriarchs are speaking.)

Need for guidance.

The time of miracles has given way, once and for all, to the time of human trial and error, and people are bound to feel both doubt and conflict. With their first glimpse of the inherent duality of things comes the suspicion that something else may be hidden behind appearances. Lost is all absolute certainty, vanished forever the conviction of doing things right. I therefore think that fear may be as normal in the psychology of newly conscious man as in that of the child: both feel small, feeble and helplessly dependent.

Assuming that the process of becoming conscious is first accomplished in the leaders, I think the population at large only learns about it by watching them and their novel and fascinating ways from afar. Even if the ordinary man is in awe of those favored few who get the first chance in history to exhibit a definite will, set their own goals and implement them, he most likely prefers to stick to the old, unifying Mother figure whose omnipotence he questions as little as an infant does its mother‘s.

But I also think that when finding themselves alone and without guidance in an unknown world, our ancestors feel an urge to overcome separateness--to somehow make themselves stronger by transcending their individual existence and achieve union with others. The birth of consciousness, I therefore suggest, is also the birth of our need for love, and the striving to fulfill this much overlooked--and as it seems forever unmet--need what history is all about.

Furthermore, I imagine that their subjects’ absolute trust in them inflates the leaders’ egos and tempts them to abuse it. Instead of encouraging the process of individuation I think the matriarchs decide to nip it in the bud. And--alongside their own fear--this attitude makes our ancestors succumb to what Neumann speaks of as ‘uroboric incest,’ or the tendency of the budding ego towards voluptuous self-dissolution in the unconscious. Rather than seize the opportunity to exercise a will of their own, they choose to return to the womb and be dissolved in the union with Mother. (The uroborus, we recall, is a circular snake biting its own tail, an image used in mythology to symbolize wholeness, the first stage in the growth of consciousness.)

The desire of the leaders to deny their subjects the use of a conscious mind thus meets the need of the subjects to shrink from the responsibility entailed in it.

A still unanswered question
Can the lure of 'uroboric incest' be the ultimate reason why we still hold on to the childish belief that a supreme parental personality keeps the universe under control--rather than impersonal physical forces? And that it's this parent who fulfills our wishes, not we ourselves? Can it also be why many in the 20^th century West rushed into totalitarianism (state communism, fascism, nazism) at the advent of democracy and the slackening grip of religion? Were freedom and autonomy still so burdensome that they had to flee into new dependencies and submissions? And is there even a similar need for outside assurances behind the current rush to immerse ourselves in new technologies and an unfettered consumerism? You tell me.

For a sum-up of the Malevolent Matriarchy (which I guess lasted anywhere from 3000 to 5000 years) and the marks it left not only on the male psyche but on all humanity, see next post.

I welcome feedback and would love for you to leave a comment. You can post a comment below this article or you can click on this article's headline. 

For the full blog click  originofsexism.blogspot.com