Subject: Re: Biblical view of Egypt cannot be disproven by mere rude propaganda
From: Pharaoh Chromium 93
Date: Sat, 26 Oct 1996 10:32:35 -0400
CHAPTER XII
THE CHILD IS FATHER OF THE MAN
It has been a maxim of both biology and philosophy that each individual
recapitulates in the early or initial stages of its growth the entire
previous phylogenetic history of the species to which it belongs and
indeed that of all zoological evolution. This is to say that each new
individual in the stream of evolving life quickly retraces in its birth
and early growth the biological history of the race from monocell up to
the complex and differentiated forms at the point it itself occupies.
The childhood of the individual then republishes the long-past childhood
of the race. The human foetus clearly exhibits the stages of unicell,
multicell, worm, reptile, bird, vertebrate, mammal and all intermediate
forms up to the human as at present constituted. It would have been
thought that the knowledge of a principle of evolution so pregnant with
intimation as this should have yielded more patent discovery and
application than it seems to have done.
That it has come forward as a principle of elucidation and understanding
in the field of psychoanalysis, however, is one of the robust
attestations of the great basic rightness and fruitfulness of this
modern development in psychology. In full view of the profounder aspects
of the human psyche revealed by this new science it will not come as a
surprise that psychoanalytic research has discovered almost the
principle keys and solutions of the complexities of mental problems in
the previously disdained terrain of childhood. The chief clues to the
unbalance and irrationality manifesting in adult life are generally to
be traced back to inhibitions and frustrations in childhood. The
experiences undergone even in infancy are seen to set the stage for
abnormalities that come to the surface in
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later life. The child conditions the man. Childhood comes first and
through the intense sensitiveness of its consciousness to impressions
and its durable retention of memories it in reality gives birth to the
adult man. Men and women are but grown children. The substance of mind
can be said to be in childhood quite plastic, hardening and
crystallizing, however, as childhood passes. The impressions made upon
it in its tenderer condition at the start become solidified for
permanency and fix the life habitudes over the pattern of the first
molds. He who can bend the twig has shaped the tree. He who conditions
the child has formed the man.
In the course of time it was destined that psychological investigations
should seek the causes of mental abnormality back in the individual's
childhood. The evidences of this connection were abundant and would not
forever miss discovery. The finding was delayed only by the inveterate
recalcitrancy of the modern mind to the wisdom of the past. Principles
announced in the tomes of archaic mastership would all along have
furnished modern research with the fundamenta of discovery and a true
psychological science. For every fresh revelation coming from
present-day study in the field of psychology is but a re-affirmation of
data known of old.
Such a splendid work as Jung's The Psychology of the Unconscious is
largely an elucidation of the symbols and dramatizations found occurring
in the dreams of his patients, and all approached and systematized
through a comparative analysis of them with the stories and formulations
of ancient mythology! The world has not yet appreciated the significance
of this correlation. That a psychoanalyst should have to resort to the
allegedly fanciful if not fantastic constructions of such products of
racial child-mindedness as mythology and folk-lore for keys and formulae
by which to reach a comprehension of the dreams of a modern young woman,
has not been measured in its true dimensions of significance. And that
the same psychologist has been able to announce that he has, in
life-long study, found the same set of symbols promenading in the dreams
of his modern patients as he has found in the whole field
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of ancient religious symbolism, in the Bibles and folk-lore of the
nations to remote antiquity, is again a fact which has not found its
true evaluation. The obfuscations of medieval benightedness still dim
our vision and make us slow to recognize great truth even when we stand
in its very doorway.
We stand, then, face to face with these great determinations: the basic
conditioning factors in the individual's psychological life are
established largely in childhood and, for purposes of later
rectification, must be re-located and dealt with through adult
correction of infantile fixations; the propensities and instincts
dominating the child mind, and thus clinching their hold on the whole of
the life period of the individual, are both analogous and directly
kindred to the instincts and proclivities of the race as a whole in its
infancy, and are dramatized in consciousness by the same symbols now as
then; and lastly that the whole battle in consciousness for all
individuals is epitomized in the finale by the formulary that it is the
eternal struggle between the reason, knowledge, intelligence and wisdom
of the divine counterpart in man, that comes to open consciousness in
adult life, on the one side, and the instinctive, natural, irrational,
infantile forces of physical life, that dominate in the childhood
period, on the other. Both in the individual and in the race as a whole,
the great Battle of Armageddon goes on between the powers of adulthood
and those of childhood. In the terms of Greek or Platonic philosophy it
is the conflict of the higher dianoia, or thorough knowing, the genius
of divine intelligence in man, with the irrational instincts of the
purely animal nature, which man shares by virtue of his body. The forces
that build the body must have play first; the powers of mind come later
to unfoldment, to be the king and ruler of those natural energies, to
employ them for its purposes rationally determined.
The childhood of the race, as of the individual, develops the natural
man, whom Paul says comes first; the adult period brings the mind to
function, so that the forces of nature may come under the direction of
intelligence and be made the agencies of the creation
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of a cosmos out of an elementary chaos. Life must first deploy the
forces that build the universe physically and then evolve the mind to
direct them in the accomplishment of its purposed ends. Mind itself must
have its genesis in physical nature. It is brought to birth in the womb
of matter. Just as solar energy is neither light, heat nor kinetic power
while in its pure state, but only develops these manifestations of its
nature when brought into contact with a material body, so pure spirit,
pure ideality, is not mind until it is harnessed, so to say, with the
elemental energies found potential in the atomic matter of physical
organisms. Mind can not come to function in pure abstraction, of its own
sheer being. It must be the product of the forces generated in an
organism. In short it must be instrumentalized in and by a brain. Life
first builds its physical body, since only through the implementation of
such a structure can it bring its powers of consciousness to concrete
realization to and for itself. And the forces it uses to build the
structure fall below the level of mind and are irrational. They are
denominated in all ancient systems the elementary powers. St. Paul so
clearly says that the race was under the governance of these "elementals
of the earth" and "elementals of the air," or "the elements of the
world," before it developed the rulership of the higher mind. And most
pertinently for the interests of our exegesis he states that this
"bondage to them that by nature are no gods" prevailed in the period of
our evolution "when we were yet children." Then it was, he says, that
"Christ died for us." True indeed, since the "death" of the Christos or
divine mind principle came with its first entry into the life of body.
And until that entry, in the far developed stage of biological
evolution, in the old age of Mother Nature, animal man could have no
knowledge of divine mind. To the truth of this analysis the three or
more allegories of aged woman bearing the Messianic Son of God in the
scriptures bear most striking testimony. The natural man can not know
the things of the spirit, declares the Apostle. And he adds that when we
were yet children we did not know God. Surely
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this was so, for the god had not yet risen to function in the animal
organism.
How amazingly the author of the Epistles set forth the basic principles
that are only now being brought to light by the more enlightened
approach of modern psychology! He not only marked out the
anthropological grounds of the psychic conflict in the nature of man,
but with the utmost perspicacity delineated the many varied aspects of
the struggle. In what trenchant terms does he represent the fierce
combat between the soul and the flesh! When he would do good, he says,
he perceives in his members a law which wars against the law of the
mind. This conflict is the source of his wretchedness. He refers to the
flesh as "the body of this death." To be carnally minded is sin and
"death." The interests of the spirit are in opposition to those of the
flesh, which he says mean death.
Psychoanalysis has now discovered that for the maintenance of normal
sanity and for the more complete integration of the individual's life
the higher intelligence of adulthood must "frustrate" the animal
instincts of childhood. Here in the proverbial nutshell is the summary
manifesto of the science of psychoanalysis. "Disturbance" is not
abnormal, is not psychopathic, because it is the function of developing
mind to "disturb," even to "frustrate," the instinctive automatism of
the animal nature springing quickly to life in the recapitulatory
process in early childhood. This pitting of the two natures against each
other in the life of mankind is the ground of the whole moral problem of
the race. The issues of evolution depend upon the course of the battle,
the ebb and flow of the tides of mental and spiritual force. Ascetic
religionism decreed that the animal in man was to be crushed, smothered,
extirpated. But this was false theory and ruinous practice. The animal
is not to be crushed. He is to be domesticated, so that his wild
energies may be turned to the use and advantage of mind, the king. And
through his association with man the thinker his genus is in the course
of the cycle to be elevated to the level now held by the human, while
man advances further to godhood. The gods resident in the inner-
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most recesses of human nature are divinizing man as man in turn is
domesticating and humanizing the animal. In each case the end result is
the neutralizing of conflict between the evolving faculties of
consciousness and the blind instinctual forces of physical energy. It is
mind seeking to harness the wild forces of elementary chaos.
Turning back to study the mind of childhood, psychoanalysis should not
have been surprised to discover that its phenomena were a miniature
replica of those of earliest humanity. Says Jung (Psychology of the
Unconscious, p. 28):
"Consequently it would be true as well that the state of infantile
thinking in the child's psychic life, as well as in dreams, is nothing
but a re-echo of the prehistoric and the ancient."
Here is one of the main supporting pillars in the temple of
psychoanalysis. To re-examine the infantile mind of humanity in its
early period it was but necessary to look at the infantile mind in the
child. The two sets of phenomena would be found analogous and kindred.
Both bespoke the play of the irrational and instinctive forces. In
neither had mind come to assert rulership. Both were under the
governance of Mother Nature. They had not graduated from her tutelage to
enroll in the school of Father Spirit. As twelve was the number of
spiritual perfecting, the Gospel allegory has it that Jesus deserted his
mother at that age and sought "the things of his Father." The intimation
that these higher interests were concerned with the mind is conveyed in
the allegory by the particular that he was found in the temple in
profound disputations with the learned doctors. Nature herself carries
out the force of the analogue in the fact that at the age of twelve, or
at puberty, the child passes from childhood into manhood and begins the
active development of the mind. And again psychoanalysis finds its basic
principles exemplified and vindicated in both nature and the scriptures.
The tracing of parallelism in the two sides of the analogue revealed the
most significant correspondences. The infantile mind
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of early humanity, lacking mature reason and piercing intelligence,
devised an elaborate series of allegedly fantastic representations to
account for and explain the reality of the world about it. This process
gave rise to the wondrous volume of ancient myths, the cycles of epic
legends, the hero-tales and folk-lore among all nations. The universal
prevalence of such productions is in itself a phenomenon of
extraordinary character. It represented, not, as is mistakenly supposed,
the effort of infantile mentality to explain the mysterious reality in
whose bosom its life was cast, but the discerning inventiveness of
mature mind to explain the mystery to the child humanity in terms suited
to its then limited capacity to understand. The child mind would hardly
be able to devise the elaborated and involved complexities of the
Grecian or Egyptian myths. Children now do not invent Mother Goose and
the fairy tales. These are given them by the elders, being assumed to be
in a form suitable for apprehension by the immature mind. As a matter of
fact the myths are most astutely constructed to convey the profoundest
of moral and cosmic truths. Infantile mind could not have hit upon such
marvelous and precise dramatizations of verity. The marvel of their
typical typal accuracy and pictorial fidelity to truth has never yet
been fully seen by students. They obviously were the creations of a
genius for consummate dramatization unparalleled in human history. But
as the representation was designed for the child mind of early mankind,
it was cast in forms that would be appreciable and meaningful to the
infantile stage of the race's mental development.
The analogue of the child's rearing in early life under the care and
tuition of the mother is another of the numberless instances wherein
nature presents in the small a living ideograph of universal truth or
truth in the large. There is no mythology in which the mother is not the
typal representative of the great Mother, Nature. Nature mothers us and
mind or spirit fathers us. Nature develops and provides for us the
physical mechanism of life; spirit comes to birth through it and seats
consciousness on the throne as ruler.
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The mother-forces dominate the child; the spirit or father-forces rule
the adult. The ancient representations of the mother and child yield a
new and profounder significance when viewed in this light. Both mother
and child typify physical nature, operating before the advent of mind.
They speak of nature and her progeny, the physical world. They tell of
the production and preparation of physical life to become the vehicle of
mind, the king. They go before him to prepare his way and to make his
paths straight.
But when he comes he must supersede their irrational governance with the
reign of reason. Their habitual and instinctive activities must be bent
to subserving the offices of intelligence and conscious design. Their
wild and impetuous sweep in given directions must be curbed and
eventually turned into channels of service for the achievement of goals
set by the divine knower within. Their blind elemental forces must be
harnessed to the chariot of cosmic Purpose.
The attempt and effort of conscious mind in evolving man to administer
this "conversion" of elemental instincts into helpful servants sets the
scene and supplies the motive for the great moral conflict in the breast
of humanity. It is the father powers against the native forces of the
mother and the child. As Jung has so well shown, the instincts of what
the Greeks called physis, or nature, predominate in the first
thirty-five years of a human life, but give place in the second similar
period to those of the mind, philosophy and intellectuality. The first
period builds the body and establishes its sustenance, comfort and
well-being. The second advances from those concerns to the matters of
life and consciousness, to the effort to gain knowledge and
understanding.
A second and more particular item of the parallelism between the racial
and the individual childhood periods is well adduced by Jung, citing a
passage from the scholar Abraham (Dreams and Myths) as follows:
"Thus the myth is a sustained, still remaining fragment from the
infantile soul-life of the people, and the dream is the myth of the
individual."
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The assumption that the myth is an infantile creation because it was
extant in the early life of the nations (if only three or four thousand
years back of the present can be considered an "early" period in the
history of humanity) is gratuitous and conjectural and has arisen only
because of the decay of philosophic enlightenment in the dark ages. A
better understanding is formulated in the statement that the myths were
designed and constructed by the loftiest genius for dramatization of
truth and were adapted to yield instruction and enlightenment for both
the infancy and the adulthood of the race and of the individual. Their
truths were ageless and their application universally relevant. They
were designed to be remembered, if not understood, by childhood, and to
be understood by all in their maturity. They were given to the race at
an early stage, because they were intended to stand as guiding light for
the whole race throughout the evolutionary journey. But it is impossible
that they could have been the creation or the product of the child-mind.
They were put forth in the race's childhood because the mind of
childhood is receptive to impressions stamped upon it and will hold
vital truth, even if only the shell of the truth or meaning is
perceived, until the maturing mind can probe into the kernel and discern
the living essence of truth therein. It has not been perceived that the
prime purpose behind the promulgation of the myths was their
preservation in racial memory. They were taught in the childhood of the
race, and repeated in the childhood of the individual in each
generation, that first of all they might be perpetuated. They were
constructed in a fashion that rendered them automatically easy to
remember. They were set to poetic meter and rhythm, so that they held
their place in memory like music. And even the scriptures were
constructed on the pattern of number formations, based chiefly on the
number seven. This has come to light in the discovery of the almost
universal prevalence of the chiasmus structure in the Christian Bible
and the omnipresent run of multiples of seven in the numerical values of
numberless phrases, verses and
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other groupings in the Greek and Hebrew translations of the scriptures.
What is impressed upon the child mind is hardly ever lost, perhaps never
really. Therefore the ancient impartation of knowledge in allegorical
and symbolic and dramatic forms was made with the motive of transmission
and remembrance, so that adulthood in every generation might not be
wanting the ever-significant structures of truth to redeem to esoteric
meaning. And, perhaps of most challenging import is the great
understanding, lost for so long, that nature carries in her phenomena
the eternal pictorialization of living truth. For human understanding
the one final and irrefutable language of truth is the symbolism of
nature. For nature is truth and verity in the concrete. Its every form
is a hieroglyph of reality, staring us in the face. A living creature,
with all its habits and characteristics and traits, is an epiphany of
ubiquitous law and universal modus. The life of a vegetable is an
epitome of all life. For there are varying levels and degrees at which
life manifests, rated as higher and lower, and the manifestation at any
of the levels is typal of the one universal procedure.
Hence the masters of ancient knowledge put forth their sagas of
profoundest cosmic truth almost entirely in the language of nature
symbolism. "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways and be
wise," might be cited as the key slogan of the teaching of antiquity.
The writings of the sages send the thought of the reader again and again
to the bee, the snake, the bird, the cat, dog, lion, crocodile, ape,
dragon-fly, locust, grasshopper, the tree, the bush, flower, grass,
leaf, root, mountain, river, lake, brook, sea, water, lightning, sun,
moon, star, constellation, summer, winter, month and year. Wheat for
bread, the grape for wine, and the bee for honey stand as the three
great symbols of the divine soul in the mortal body.
The life of the child and of early humanity alike stand far closer to
nature than that of the individual or the collective adult. The
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child is born in the lap of Mother Nature and he is bathed within and
without by the stream of her ubiquitous forces. Her influences shape his
physical body and the automatic functioning of her powers carries him
along toward maturity. All this being so, it is the decree of fitness
and necessity that any cultural heritage formulated for his immediate
and continuing behoof should be framed and expressed in the language of
nature symbols. For these are the things whose constant objectivity in
his life dowers them with pedagogical power and enlightening
significance. Their known phenomena hold the mirror up to truth, for
they are that truth themselves in the concrete. Through and behind the
visible world of actuality there broods the other world of invisible
reality. The visible thing is the only lens through which the figures
and shapes of that deeper reality can be brought to focus for the human
mind. The philosophic aphorism that the things of the outer world are
cast in the image of "those things which are above" is the statement of
man's only means of rising to an apprehension of spiritual realities.
When seen, they are revealed to be not foreign and exotic creations, but
bear the familiar stamp of the known things in the world here below. The
seen world is man's only clue to the realities of the unseen world.
The obvious effort and aim of the archaic literary constructions then
was to embody the principles of truth in a language and in narrative
that would hold the mind close to nature and her forms and phenomena.
This was the language, not of childhood, but for childhood. But it is
equally the language for adulthood, for even now, in an age of the world
considered adult, the same language of symbol and myth still beats back
the efforts of the united acumen of world scholarship to grasp the
esoteric meaning. And it is still claimed that these masterly devices to
purvey the most recondite truth and wisdom were the spontaneous
creations of the race's "child-mind."
The sages availed themselves of the known capabilities of the mind in
the childhood of the world and the childhood of each suc-
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cessive generation to achieve the primary aim of preserving their
writings in memory. Both the race and the individual possess in their
childhood a virtually unforgetting memory. For both function in the
realm of the subconscious. The child, the animal and child-humanity all
alike live consciously at the level of the subconscious. Their actions
are directed by instinct and automatism. Mind has not come to play in
either of them as yet. Hence the phenomena of conscious life in all of
them display similarity and are to be measured by the same standard.
Their various manifestations are kindred and analogous. Their activities
are motivated by the autonomic nervous system, their memory is automatic
and practically unfailing and impressions are made everlasting by
repetition. The human child of course stands above the animal, but he
nevertheless passes through the animal stage of evolution and still
bears the animal nature with him in his physical body.
It is now possible to summarize what this unfoldment has dialectically
been leading to. The myths, symbols and dramas embodying the mighty
ancient wisdom had to be given to child humanity in a form to be
eternally remembered. They had to be given in the race's childhood and
to the race in its childhood because humanity was still in its animal
stage and both the animal and the child have automatic powers of memory.
And they had to be framed in a language and under imagery based on
naturographs, because natural phenomena constitute the only universal
lexicon or alphabet of unerring truth. They constitute the only language
universally comprehensible, and, what is still more, the only language
capable of yielding to each level of intellectual capacity and
development the truth which that stage is able to grasp. It teaches
simple truth to the simple and profound truth to the sagacious. In brief
summary, truth had to be organized and indelibly stamped upon the
subconscious mind of the race so that it would live automatically, and
be perpetuated for the use of the conscious intelligence when at a later
stage that genius burst into flower in the denouement of organic
evolution.
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What Jung and Abraham and other students say about the myths of early
humanity matching the myth-making power of the subconscious today (or
vice versa), and the dreams of the under-mind continuing to cast up the
wrack of the ancient language of myth and symbol has pertinent bearing
upon the entire subject of mind-analysis. The repetition of the ancient
symbols in modern dreams is interpreted to be the method adopted by the
subconscious--which is the recorded memory of the race's and the
individual's past--for the most part to protest against the willful
suppression by the present conscious mind of the instinctive native
propensities and calls of the natural or animal man for their
expression. It is in brief the form of the first or natural-animal man's
protest against the repression of its instinctual life by the incipient
rise of the second or spiritual man's mind to dominion over the whole
life of the organism. As such it is inevitable, natural and good. The
concern of the individual is to manage it with the least degree of
tragic conflict and severe disturbance. It is not abnormal that
disturbance should come. The tragedy is that it should come under such
conditions of unintelligence and unbalance that wreckage should so often
occur.
It is well to note a dialectical point in the form of Abraham's
presentation of the identical function and status of the myth of the
early race and the dream of childhood. It has been an assertion of this
essay that the myth was not produced or created by the child mind of
early humanity. If now the myth and the dream symbol or dream myth are
of parallel order and status, then the parallelism should hold in
respect to their origin or production. It can not be said that the dream
of the child mind in individual childhood is a conscious creation of the
child's genius. It is in reality simply given to the child. It is more
of the nature of a projection into the child's mind by a superior
intelligence. The child mind did not consciously and designedly produce
it. It came down "from above," or out from within. If there is
instruction, then, in the law of cor-
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respondences, as most certainly there is, the conclusion is that neither
was the myth in early history a conscious creation of the child mind of
infant humanity.
In the light of all this it is of interest to hear Jung in a further
elaboration of the idea dealt with here (Psychology of the Unconscious,
p. 29):
"The conclusion results almost from itself, that the age which created
the myths thought childishly--that is to say, phantastically, as in our
age is still done to a very great extent (associatively or analogically)
in dreams. The beginnings of myth formations (in the child), the taking
of phantasies for realities, which is partly in accord with the
historical, may easily be discovered among children."
It is probably a bit difficult to allocate a precise or scientific
meaning to Jung's use of the words "childishly" and "phantastically"
here and elsewhere. Always the first word and generally the second
carries with it the connotation of a mental picture that either misses
or weirdly caricatures reality. Phantasy is commonly taken to be the
creation of illusion. Its formations do not match truth or reality.
Sometimes a slightly more generous allowance on the side of reliability
is made for phantasy when speaking of the phantasies of the poet as
depictions of the actual. But generally the word carries the imputation
of fallacy. Phantasies are fictions of the mind made in an effort to
explain or interpret reality, but missing its faithful portraiture. They
are imaginative failures and falsities.
Jung confirms this broad definition of the meaning of phantasy when he
says that the mind of childhood is addicted to "the taking of phantasies
for realities." Its imaginings about the world and life are not true
pictures. This can be readily granted without debate, inasmuch as it is
conceded that the mind of the child is not fortified with the data of
experience and the developed powers of the intellect to interpret things
aright, or at least according to the norms of adult mentation. But when
the eminent psychologist goes on to say that, because the child makes
erroneous guesses about reality and conceives with the error of
infantile incapacity, likewise the myth-
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makers of antiquity "thought childishly--that is to say phantastically,
as . . . in dreams," when they constructed the great myths, it is
obvious that he is guilty of a non sequitor. He convicts himself of bad
logic on two counts, both, oddly enough, brought against this conclusion
by himself! For, in the first place he himself devotes some hundreds of
pages in The Psychology of the Unconscious alone, and more in other
works, to an elucidation of psychoanalytic rationale and interpretation
entirely on the basis of constructions supplied by the ancient myths,
which thus are found to be accurate and reliable norms of truth and
reality. And, secondly, his own work, as well as the whole burden of
psychoanalytic science, has validated the authenticity of the dream,
when properly analyzed, as a faithful picture or dramatization of
reality. If, in the ordinary derogatory sense of the terms, it is
affirmed that the myth and the dream are childish and phantastic
constructions, then Jung's entire splendid contribution to psychological
science must be written off as similarly childish and phantastic, for it
is based solidly on the truth-telling character of both the dream and
the myth. The dream is the production of an unconscious faculty now
recognized to exercise the most recondite intelligence, not to say
incredible genius in the art of semantic dramatization. Likewise the
myths of ancient formulation are seen by psychoanalysts themselves to be
marvelously astute creations to represent the profoundest conceptions
and motions of the human spirit, which they do with astounding precision
and clarity. If both are "childish and phantastic," then childish
phantasy must be elevated to the rank of the supreme faculty of the
human psyche.
Phantasy may reign in the conscious life of the child, when its
imaginations conceived to picture reality widely miss the mark of truth.
But the dream is not the conscious production of the child, neither is
the myth the production of child humanity, that is, humanity functioning
at the child level. The dream is given to the child and the myth was
given to humanity in its childhood. Until
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the study is oriented in line with this understanding it will not yield
true insight or clarification.
Civilized society is shocked from time to time by the exhibition in
certain quarters of the crudest forms of gross animalism or brutality.
Jung says that these always remain germinally in the unconscious and can
surge to the surface when conventional restraints are temporarily
relaxed. Some of them are so gross and bestial in their manifestation
that Jung is led to say that "today we feel for such a thing nothing but
the deepest abhorrence, and never would admit it still slumbered in our
souls." But it is well to note his statement that we go through the
period corresponding to the animal evolution in our childhood, when by
analogy at least we are classified as little savages. He says (p. 35):
"Yet all this does not affect the fact that we in childhood go through a
period in which the impulses toward these archaic inclinations appear
again and again, and that through all our life we possess, side by side
with the newly recruited, directed and adapted thought, a phantastic
thought which corresponds to the thought of the centuries of antiquity
and barbarism. Just as our bodies still keep the reminders of old
functions and conditions in many old-fashioned organs, so our minds,
too, bear the marks of the evolution passed through and the very ancient
re-echoes, at least dreamily, in phantasies."
In childhood we each quickly recapitulate the age of animal barbarity
and thereafter keep it, as it were, buried in the basement of
consciousness, covered over as well as we are able to contrive it, with
the traditional masks and facades of "civilization." Wars, crime waves
and occasional reversions to the elemental and the primitive at times
lift the lid of conventional restraint sufficiently to allow an upsurge
of the native animal forces.
One of the discernments brought out by Jung in connection with mythology
deserves a word of comment. He observes tersely that the masses never
free themselves from mythology. This is hardly more than a trite
notation, since the masses are those who remain
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bound in the commonplace conventional and traditional, the accepted
standards of conduct and thought. The myths have played their part,
perhaps away back in time, in setting the established mores. Thus the
life and influence of the myths are perpetuated down the ages. In so
far, however, as the myths did originally portray, no matter with what
subtle deftness, the realities of man's history, it is inevitable that
they should linger as normative influences over the consciousness of the
masses, even though, as is always the case, the kernel of their real
meaning has been lost, and only their desiccated husks survive. In this
sense it is the fate of the vast majority of mankind to be perpetually
influenced if not ruled by conceptual phantoms! The saving consideration
in the situation, however, is the fact that in large part the phantoms
are the wraiths of truth formerly apprehended, but since lost, and that
so long as there is even the subtlest suggestion of true and vital
meaning in the traditional forms of thought and behavior, the dominance
of the mores will not work outright catastrophe. Even the phantoms of
truth have saving grace.
It is admittedly a journey somewhat afield from the main thesis, but
nevertheless of much importance to note what Jung has wisely observed as
to the relation of the myth to history. Speaking of the "mythical
tradition" he says that
"it does not set forth any account of old events, but rather acts in
such a way that it always reveals a thought common to humanity and once
more rejuvenated. Thus for example, the lives and deeds of the founders
of old religions are the purest condensations of typical contemporaneous
myths, behind which the individual figure entirely disappears."
The very husks and shells of the myths, still prevalent in universal
tradition, are capable, as Jung intimates here, of "rejuvenation." And
this is the hope of humanity. It is always possible that intelligence
may return in sufficient force to revitalize the myths with their
original dynamic potency. This is the need of the world of culture
today. The obstacle that so stubbornly blocks the way to
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this renaissance is the incredible fact that large sections of what was
created as mythology have been crassly and stupidly mistaken for
veridical history itself! Ages of mental hallucination and ideological
folly could have been obviated if the myths had not been obtruded into
the terrain of objective history. Possibly nine-tenths of the material
embodied in the Christian scriptures has been taken for ancient Jewish
history, when in truth the book is almost entirely a collection of
aboriginal mythical constructions. So obvious is this to competent
students who have conscientiously surveyed the field of ancient religion
that Kalthoff has written the following doubtless well-considered
paragraph (Entstehung des Christentums):
"The sources from which we derive our information concerning the origin
of Christianity are such that in the present state of historical
research no historian would undertake the task of writing the biography
of an historical Jesus."
And he strengthens this with another asseveration (Ibid, p. 10):
"To see behind these stories the life of a real historical personage
would not occur to any man if it were not for the influence of
rationalistic theology."
The Messiahs, Sun-gods, Saviors, Christs and Jesus figures, of whom
there were scores in the religions of early times, it is to be inferred,
were not historical persons in the flesh, but the typal characters
designed to portray man's ever-coming divinity. They were mythical
figures and not men in history. Kalthoff goes on to say that the divine
element in Christ was always considered an inner attribute and possessed
or manifested by the Christ figure in common with humanity, which is to
evolve the same divinity in its own life. He adduces the fact that
everywhere the Christ figure is shown exhibiting "superhuman traits;
nowhere is he that which critical theology wished to make him, simply a
natural man, an historical individual." Well had it been for western
civilization if it had been known that the alleged lives and deeds of
the founders of old religions, as well as the "historical careers" of a
score or
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more of Messiahs and Sun-gods and Christs, were, as Jung says,
"condensations of typical contemporaneous myths, behind which the
individual figure entirely disappears." When myth was converted into
"history" the Dark Ages began.
The great need of a distinctive differentiation between the two forms of
the unconscious, the subconscious and the superconscious, is vividly
emphasized when we compare certain of Jung's statements with one
another. We have seen the psychologist saying that all the memory-record
of our past in the animal stage of evolution, with all its inhuman
bestial manifestations that he admits are so revolting that we hesitate
to believe we carry the memory of them in the depths of our being, is
buried in our consciousness and may surge upward from the unconscious.
Yet with this characterization given to the content of the unconscious,
Jung is found writing that
"comparison with the sun teaches us over and over again that the gods
are libido. It is that part of us which is immortal, since it represents
that bond through which we feel that in the race we are never
extinguished. It is life from the life of mankind. Its springs, which
well up from the depths of the unconscious, come, as does our life in
general, from the root of the whole of humanity, since we are indeed
only a twig broken off from the mother and transplanted."
And again he is affirming that
"since the divine in us is libido, we must not wonder that we have taken
along with us in our theology ancient representations from the olden
times. . . ."
Everywhere in psychoanalysis the unconscious is the seat of the libido.
The libido is that inner governor who, from behind the throne of
consciousness, dominates the life and speaks to the personality in the
devious and often obscure language of dreams and symbols. A hundred
times the libido is described as the voice and consciousness of the
past, of the youthful history of the race in its individual
recapitulation, the surging force of the native elemental
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mind of the race, speaking generally against the suppression of its
drive for recognition and free play by the restraints of civilization.
Assuredly it can be seen that the libido is here described in the terms
and characters of two things that are at the very opposite poles of
rating in spiritual or cultural values. It is at one and the same time
the memory of our animal past, with all its horrific and revolting
murder-lust and brutality, slumbering in the depths of the unconscious
and capable of resurrection therefrom, and also equally nursed
germinally within us. This is to ignore or erase all difference in grade
and status and nobility between the god and the animal in our
constitution and to make the unconscious the dwelling place of the
divine genius as well as the lair of the beast. Surely it can be seen
that it is the voice of the animal which speaks to us out of the past
that we have lived through and compressed into the subconscious, and
that it is the voice of the god which speaks to us out of the as yet
unborn future whose terrain in the superconscious we are little by
little adventuring into. To heed the voice of the animal is to sink back
in retrogression into the repellent past; to hearken unto the voice of
the god is to step forward into more inviting prospects, and to follow
rosier pathways through the meads and uplands of evolution. The terrain
of these two regions of consciousness in the human nature is precisely
what was meant by the ancient Egyptians in their allegorical division of
their country into "the two lands," or "Upper and Lower Egypt," the
location and histories of which have perplexed even such a noted
Egyptologist as the late William H. Breasted and others. The student of
Egyptian history will note that time after time one Pharaoh after
another is obliged to fight a war from his capital in Upper Egypt with
the kingdom of Lower Egypt, conquer it afresh and unite it again "under
the double sovereignty of the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt." Over and
over again a kingdom divided against itself in two warring parts has to
be unified. It has never dawned
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upon the savants that this is beyond reasonable probability as history,
and points to the trick of allegory. For it is an exact repicturing of
what takes place in the human constitution, where the two kingdoms, that
of the animal and that of the god, are long hostile to each other and
must be reconciled and brought to an atonement, by the stronger agency
of the divine as it wins victory over the "lower Egypt" of the human
realm. Even Paul tells us that a wall of partition between us will be
broken down, enabling the two natures to merge in harmony into a new
creature, "so making peace."
In this connection it is appropriate to present what Jung has to say as
to how the truth embalmed in the myths is to be apprehended. After
remarking, most discerningly, that it is more or less imperatively
demanded that the psychoanalyst should "broaden the analysis of the
individual problems by a comparative study of historical material
relating to them,"--and Jung himself has done this most exhaustively--he
goes on to say that
"It is a well-known fact that one of the principles of analytic
psychology is that the dream images are to be understood symbolically;
that is to say that they are not to be taken literally, just as they are
represented in sleep, but that behind them a hidden meaning has to be
surmised. It is this idea of a dream symbolism which has challenged not
only criticism, but, in addition to that, the strongest opposition."
What is true here of the dream symbolism is true also of the mythic
symbolism. Jung repeats it--and underscores it--"it is not literally
true, but is true psychologically." It is easy to understand and pardon
a symbologist's contemptuous fling at uncomprehending scientists and
scholastics in his further comment:
"In this distinction lies the reason why the old fogies of science have
from time to time thrown away an inherited piece of ancient truth;
because it was not literally but psychologically true. For such
discrimination this type of person has at no time had any
comprehension."
Indeed Jung goes so far as to assert that
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"Dreams are symbolic in order that they can not be understood; in order
that the wish, which is the source of the dream, may remain unknown."
This pretty well matches the statement of the Jesus figure in the
Gospels that truth was given to them that are without in parables, lest,
hearing, they might understand and be converted, and seeing, they might
believe. This is to imply that the subconscious presents its symbolic
messages furtively, wishing to remain unidentified in connection with
its wish, unwilling to be known as sponsoring such a wish. From the very
fact that such a furtive motive would not be easily ascribable to the
god, who likewise presents his wishes in the higher interests of the
personal life, and would have no reason to dodge recognition, it would
be inferable that symbolism in dreams is a usage of the subconscious or
animal memory alone. This, however, is not the case, since the very
highest messages are likewise clothed in the most complex and recondite
forms of symbolism. The god and not the animal is the consummate
craftsman in the formulation of the symbolic dream. Must it be said that
modern psychological science has shown itself totally incapable of
recognizing any difference between the two voices of the god and the
beast in human consciousness?
Great stress is laid by modern psychology upon what are called "escape
mechanisms" and "retreats from reality into phantasy." Religious
devotionalism, addiction to idealistic philosophies, surrender to
mystical experience even in poetry, music and art, are broadly
characterized as houses of refuge from stark reality. But psychoanalysis
itself has endorsed the ancient Egyptian and Greek division of man's
psychic life into its two aspects of immortal divine mind and lower
animal sensuousness, and it would be only a natural question to ask
which of the two is seeking to escape from the other! Since the whole
crux of the moral problem for man is the conflict between the two
natures, the analysis of every phase of the struggle hinges on discovery
of which nature in man is trying to
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dodge its opponent. Perhaps the difficulty and the confused intermixture
of the two in psychoanalytic interpretation arises from what is implied
in the Egyptian symbol of the "horizon." Man stands directly upon the
"horizon" or dividing line between the two kingdoms of consciousness,
and as so poetically stated in texts from the hieroglyphic writings, "he
cultivates the crops on both sides of the horizon," "he cultivates the
two lands, he pacifies the two lands, he unites the two lands." "He
makes the two Rheti goddesses, whose hearts are at enmity with each
other, to be at peace." To the soul it is said: "The horizon is covered
with the tracks of thy passing." This is to say that, as man can focus
his consciousness in the world of spiritual realities or equally in that
of carnal sensuality, he keeps continually passing back and forth, or up
and down, across the middle-line of demarcation, the horizon. Hence on
the line of open consciousness, which is directly between the two, god
and animal constantly are intermingling their motivations and
propensities, with the result that the clear distinction between the two
is blurred. This may perhaps be the explanation of the failure of
psychology to differentiate between the two widely separated regions of
the unconscious world, the subconscious and the superconscious. For, as
stated before, man's narrow area of consciousness is closely hemmed in
between two dark regions of unconsciousness.
It is possible that in this situation lies the difficult determination
of one of the strange devices of ancient symbolic representation, one
that has too often been most weirdly and erroneously guessed at,--the
crucifixion of the Christ between two thieves. In human incarnation and
evolution the potential Christ principle does step out upon this line of
open consciousness between the two bordering areas of unconsciousness,
and it is not too great a strain on poetic imagery to think of
unconsciousness as stealing away the priceless gift or faculty of
consciousness. Likewise the conditions of stress and strain, suffering
and anguish, that necessarily go with the struggle of the soul as it is
torn between the pulls of the two con-
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flicting natures, fulfill every esoteric phase of the meaning of
crucifixion. In this position the soul stands precisely at the point
where divine and carnal natures cross each other, and are at cross
purposes each to other. The final meaning of the cross as symbol is
simply the incarnation. The soul is on the cross when it is linked to
mortal body. The loss of this explicit determination is one of the
tragic consequences, as well as attestations, of the debacle of esoteric
wisdom in the third century.
The confusion of modern study just alluded to as due to the failure to
keep the two natures in the human breast clearly differentiated is again
well illustrated in a passage from so discerning a student as Jung
(Psychology of the Unconscious, p. 94):
"It is shameful or exalted, just as one chooses, that the divine longing
of humanity, which is really the first thing to make it human, should be
brought into connection with an erotic phantasy. Such a comparison jars
upon the finer feelings."
And he adds that
"Nature is beautiful only by virtue of the longing and love given her by
man."
Indeed so jarring a realization has it ever been to the more enlightened
thinking of mankind that soul should be brought under the dominion of
flesh and sense that early philosophical understanding and acceptance of
the fact as beneficent has been almost completely banished and religious
sentiment has come to pronounce the soul's connection with mortal body a
thing of evil. Even Plotinus is declared to have proclaimed his sense of
shame at being incarnated in body at all. Centuries of Christian
asceticism were activated by the preachment of the shamefulness of the
flesh. Spirit alone is exalted; matter and body are denied. Nothing can
clear this befuddlement save a return to the sagacious enlightenment
that prevailed when the Book of the Dead was written. It was known then
that the soul could not progress to greater glory if she did not leave
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heavenly mansions of dreamy blissfulness and have her powers and
faculties brought out from sheer latency into actuality by taking her
stand precisely on the horizon line at the focus of the tension between
spirit and matter. Only there could she pass from unconsciousness to
consciousness. Only there, says Plotinus himself, could she ever develop
her own powers and come to know what she herself possesses.
The dynamic force of the realization that man is a god in the making so
impressed Jung at one place that he writes (p. 96):
"To bear a God within one's self signifies as much as to be a God one's
self."
Yes, in sentiment, but not quite yes in fact. The penalties for
forgetting that man is both the god and the animal at one and the same
time are not minimized by the strength of lofty sentiment. Man's
divinity is as yet mainly potential; it can be realized only through the
fulfillment of Aristotle's entelechy and emerge as end product of a time
cycle. Its actualization is linked to time and growth, and more than
that, to the outcome of a battle with the flesh. Without the battle on
the horizon soul would remain forever inane, an unplanted seed.
A final word will round out the case for the claim that the failure to
distinguish between the two realms of the unconscious has led to false
deductions and confusion. Such a result can be seen by placing side by
side two or three of Jung's statements. He has said that the divine
immortal principle in us is libido and that "the gods are libido." But
he also writes (The Psychology of the Unconscious, p. 105) that
"The phallus is the source of life and libido, the great creator and
worker of miracles, and as such it received reverence everywhere."
There is no question as to the reverence in which the phallus was held
in the olden time, and strange enough it symbolized not the lusts of the
flesh, but the highest spiritual or divine element
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in man. This is all, however, on the plane of symbolism. For psychology
to proclaim that the libido in man is alike the divine inspiration from
the supervening world of spiritual reality and the force making for
physical creation as instrumentalized through the phallus is to ignore a
gap between these two that is impassable to thought. The libido has
practically been broadened to make its meaning cover what might be
called the whole drive of life to get itself expressed in living forms
and actions of the creatures. But it seems to be forgotten that both the
animal and the divine natures in man are making a drive to get each its
particular segment of creative force expressed in the world of life. It
hardly seems compatible with the human notions of dignity and worth to
place on the same level of quality the forces that come to expression in
man's life, the one through the spiritualized intellect, the other
through the phallus. All life, in the monistic sense, is one, and in the
absolute sense is all equally "divine." But in the area of man's
perceptual world it is impossible for the mind to ignore the endless
differentiations into which life splits its unit energies. It must see
values as relative one to another and all to the whole. In its original
uses the libido, a Latin word which when encountered in the text of
Cicero's Orations against Cataline in the schools was accustomed to be
translated "lust," certainly was employed to name the tremendous sweep
of appetency that sought to perpetuate life through sexual function. It
was at first largely restricted to the general meaning of "sex."
Although its connotations have since been greatly broadened, it is
hardly legitimate to extend its meaning to make it take in that other
element in man's constitution which in all spiritual and ethical systems
has ever been regarded as its direct opposite, indeed its evolutionary
opponent and enemy! Except symbolically, it is going to be an
undertaking marked for failure to ask the human mind, as it is
conditioned by tradition, to affix the character and attributes of what
is conceived as "divine" to the physically creative energies that find
expression through the phallus.
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Universal usage has allocated the play of so-called divine forces to the
mind and spirit alone. In the world of relativity it is necessary to
make and adhere to patent and obvious distinctions in rating and value.
The libido can hardly be used to name both the godlike and the bestial
natures in the human being.
Not to prolong the matter to the point of tedium, but for the importance
of it all, another citation from Jung shows the same indecisive
delineation of libido (The Psychology of the Unconscious, p. 105):
"The possibilities of comparison mean just as many possibilities for
symbolic expression, and from this basis all the infinitely varied
symbols, so far as they are libido images, may properly be reduced to a
very simple root, that is, just to libido and its fixed primitive
qualities."
This is a bit indecisive, inasmuch as it merely says that symbols, "so
far as they are libido images," may be reduced to libido. But it comes
close to saying at the same time that "all the infinitely varied
symbols" are reducible to libido. But fully one half of ancient symbols
have reference directly to the divine element in the life and not at all
to the physically procreative psychology.
Dr. Hinkle has stated that "symbols dominate to an unbelievable extent
man's conduct and behavior, as well as his thinking; they are the bridge
over which he travels from the known to the unknown." They enable the
mind, she elucidates, to conceive the shape and nature of something
lying in an unknown realm, from the hint of its likeness to something
already at hand in the known world. Indeed she states that this process
of working over from the known things in the commonplace world to true
conceptions of things of a different nature unknown to us is "the source
of all cultural progress." What needs to be added, then, is simply that
when we come to interpret the symbols to enhance our limited
understanding, care must be taken to apply their reference discreetly
within the just boundaries of their area of connotation. The longer
symbols are
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studied, the more clearly it is seen that they constituted a language of
ancient ideological communication which does not lend itself to loose
poetic fancying, but carries meanings with almost mathematical
succinctness. The first step toward the Dark Ages was taken when this
precise knowledge of the old symbolic language began to disappear.
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