‘God created man in order to tell stories.’
Hasidic saying quoted by Franz Kafka
‘Because of our traditions everyone knows who he is and what God expects him to do.’
Fiddler on the Roof, adapted by Joseph Stein from stories by Sholem Aleichem
‘Try to submerge yourself in that light, giving up all belief in a separate self, all attachment to the illusory ego. Recognise that the boundless Light of this true Reality is your own true self, and you shall be saved!’
Tibetan Book of the Dead
‘Who sees the variety and not the unity must wander on from death to death.’
Katha Upanishad
In 1988 two archaeologists reported on a remarkable discovery they had made in a cave complex in the Pyrenees which contained Palaeolithic paintings. They noticed that the places where the images were most thickly clustered, some tucked away in narrow side passages, awkward to reach, all had one thing in common. If a note was sung in them by the human voice, the sound gave off a resonance, more obviously than anywhere else in the caves.1
These and other Palaeolithic paintings are the earliest records we have of the human ability to conjure up images of the world around us: the basis on which we create stories. The pictures they show, of men and animals and even dots apparently representing the monthly cycle of the moon, are the beginning of narrative. And although we do not know why our ancestors around 20,000 years ago should have devoted so much skill to inscribing these particular images on the rock-faces of pitch-black underground caverns, the fact that they particularly chose to do so in places where the sound of the human voice reverberates may provide a significant clue. Because when we experience that kind of resonance with our surroundings, we have the sense of being in touch with an unearthly ‘other dimension’. Whatever the conscious purpose of those paintings, it seems that what lay behind it was their creators’ sense that, in making them, they were in some way being brought ‘into tune’ with something larger than themselves.
Nothing has fascinated us more about our prehistoric ancestors, as they progressively emerged from the state of unconscious unity with nature, than their more spectacular artefacts. We endlessly speculate, for instance, as to why the ancient Egyptians built their mighty pyramids or why the Neolithic inhabitants of Britain raised up their great stone circles at Stonehenge and Avebury. Certainly these awe-inspiring structures show the organising and ordering function of human consciousness already developed to a very high degree. But what is also obvious about them is that they were designed as symbols. The three pyramids of Giza are based on a combination of those familiar archetypal numbers three and four, four triangles arranged in a quaternity to make a symbolic whole: three becoming four to make one. The stones of Stonehenge, composed in a set of concentric circles, including the tripartite structures known as trilithons, were precisely aligned not with the rising of the sun on midsummer’s day, as has been commonly supposed, but with the sun’s setting at the winter solstice, on the shortest day of the year.2 What these structures had in common was that, like cave paintings more than 10,000 years earlier, they were designed to give the people who made them a sense of connection with something infinitely greater than themselves. And nothing struck in them a deeper chord of recognition than the patterns they discerned in the movement of those mysterious sources of light wheeling silently through the heavens above them; the life-giving sun defining the lengths of their days and years, the waxing and waning moon defining their months, the constellations of stars progressing with unfailing regularity across the night sky. It was to harmonise their own lives on earth with these indications of heavenly pattern and purpose that those Palaeolithic artists recorded the lunar cycle on their cave walls, that those Neolithic builders designed Stonehenge to accord so precisely with the moment in the annual cycle when the year and nature are ‘reborn’.
What our prehistoric ancestors were doing was to try to reconnect themselves with that sense of unity from which they had been exiled by the emergence of their new type of consciousness. The structures they created to that end we recognise from storytelling as representations of the archetype of the Self. They stood for that sense of ‘wholeness’ which we derive from the Greek holos, which also gives us ‘holy’ and ‘holiness’. In creating these ‘holy’ symbols they were trying to establish a correspondence between their own lives and the totality of the cosmos.
However, in the thousands of years which elapsed between the painting of those cave walls in the Old Stone Age and the raising of these vast monumental structures in the New Stone Age, the consciousness of Homo sapiens had in fact been through a revolution as profound as any in the history of our species.
The earliest artefacts we recognise as unmistakably religious in purpose were a large number of clay and stone figurines which have been found all across Europe from Spain to Siberia. The late Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers who made them often placed them in caves which seem to have been used as sanctuaries or ‘holy places’. The word ‘religion’ comes from the Latin ligare, to bind, as in ligature and ligament. The prefix ‘re-‘ implies the re-establishing of a connection which has been lost. The vast majority of these statuettes show a woman in all her rounded, nurturing, protective, life-giving female-ness, emphasising the curves of breasts, belly, buttocks and vulva. They are generally described as symbolising the Great Mother, Mother Earth, the Mother Goddess. They were symbols of fertility: that Mother Nature who must be treated with holy awe because it was from her that all life emerged, and on her that the creators of these figures depended for the animals and plants which supplied all their food, clothing and shelter.3
By the time we arrive at the height of the ‘New Stone Age’ or Neolithic period, between 4000 and 2500 BC, which created the great stone monuments of Egypt, Britain and elsewhere, a psychological earthquake has taken place. As men have further emerged from their original state of nature, they are no longer dependent on hunting wild animals for their survival. They have become herdsmen and cultivators of the soil. They are no longer so directly dependent on Mother Nature, as something of which they are still unconsciously a part. They are now much more consciously separated from nature. They have developed a degree of conscious control over the natural world around them. And to match this mighty advance in consciousness, they are now looking upwards to the sky, the source of light. The Greek and Latin words for ‘god’, theos and deus, derive from the same Sanskrit root dyaus from which we get the word ‘day’. Originally this meant simply ‘that which shines’: that from which light comes. Certainly it was from the sky that light came, not least in the life-giving warmth of the sun. It was also the sky which provided life-giving rain. As men now planted seeds in the earth, which the powers of sun and rain would assist to grow, the relationship of man to nature had become more like that of a marriage, with the earth as the unconscious female partner, fertilised by a masculine alliance between human consciousness and those powers deriving from the sky above.
In fact, as we can see from various cosmologies of that period, the more advanced agricultural peoples had come to see the world as divided into three levels. In the middle was the mundane, earthly level on which they lived their lives. But above them now was the sky, the heavens, the source of light, corresponding to a higher state of consciousness; while below them, corresponding to the dark unconscious, was a shadowy underworld. And in the way that is natural to the human unconscious, as it reveals its workings to the conscious mind through symbolism, they had come to see each of these levels peopled with mysterious supernatural beings, personifying the forces which shaped their lives.4
These powers came under two main headings. On one hand they represented external, natural forces, such as the Sun, the Moon, air, wind, fire, water, thunder, lightning. On the other they were projections of those internal psychic forces and states which govern human emotions and actions, such as love, justice, war, wisdom. Each of these powers was personified in its own way by its own ‘god’, ‘goddess’ or spirit. Because what these figures represented were the forces which dominate human life they took on a numinous power, that which pertains to a ‘god’. It was natural that they should be treated with awe and reverence and that efforts should be made to harmonise with the forces they represented or to placate them by ritual acts of worship and sacrifice. What they also had in common was that woven around them was a great web of myth. For our prehistoric ancestors, the most profound way in which they could express their sense of how they should relate to these mysterious powers governing their lives was through their ability to imagine stories.
One of the earliest cosmologies we know was that of the civilisation of ancient Egypt, which teemed with more than 700 separate divinities. Increasingly, however, these came to be dominated by a central quartet of figures. The great god Osiris represented the masculine principle. It was he, according to the myth, who had originally brought order and civilisation to the Egyptian people, instructing them in law and justice, teaching them the arts of fishing and agriculture, introducing them to religion, building the first temples. The great goddess Isis, his wife and sister, represented the feminine principle. She brought them all the arts of home-making, nurturing children, spinning, weaving, and grinding corn. She was also the goddess of wisdom. The son-god Horus was born as their Eternal Child. And as a shadowy fourth came Osiris’s brother Set, who was jealous, twisted and dark. It was the treacherous Set who eventually slew Osiris, cutting him into 14 pieces, twice the magical number seven. It was the wise and loving Isis who brought them together again and miraculously reimbued them with life. It was Horus, the redeeming Child, who finally avenged his father by slaying Set. This myth provides the earliest example we know of the God who dies and is reborn. And although its cycle of death and rebirth was associated with similar patterns in nature, such as the nightly death and rebirth of the sun or the yearly alternation of drought and flood which restored life-giving fertility to the valley of the Nile, there can be no mistaking that the cause of Osiris’s death was that dark power in human nature which it was the purpose of Set to personify.
No creations marking this dawn of human civilisation were more spectacular than the first cities. It was Lewis Mumford in The History of the City who first observed that there seems to be a universal archetype behind the idea of the city. Wherever we look in the world at the remains of the earliest cities, in the plains of Mesopotamia or the jungles of central America, we see them exhibiting certain common characteristics. They are laid out according to geometric, formal patterns, often clearly marked off from the surrounding countryside, as by walls. And they are centred on symbolic monumental structures which represent a combination of spiritual and earthly power: such as the temple-palaces of Babylon, Nineveh, Nippur and Ur, with their ziggurats, or stepped pyramid-like towers made from sun-baked brick, soaring over the rooftops of the city to bring its priest-kings closer to the heavens.5 By definition a city stands for the four-sided totality of human functioning. It represents the masculine principles of power and order, both of which have been required to build such a monumental creation in the first place. But these are made life-giving by the feminine way it provides nurture for the citizens under its protection, and feeds their spiritual life as a storehouse of their collective wisdom and as a symbol of totality. A city implies a complete hierarchy of social organisation, made up of all the classes and groups whose contribution is necessary to keep its complex life functioning, from those ‘above the line’ who represent its ruling consciousness down to the helot class ‘below the line’ at the bottom who help maintain it with their physical labour. As we say of a city, ‘all human life is there’. All those who belong to a city are potentially enlarged by the sense of being part of a mighty organism much greater than any of its constituent parts. In this sense it is not surprising that all the way through the history of storytelling we see the city itself symbolising the archetype of the Self, as ‘the centre’, the place where heroes and heroines can realise their full human potential (unless like Chekhov’s three sisters they cannot get there). Something else we soon recognise when we study the earliest cities, like those of Mesopotamia, Egypt or Greece, is how each had its own story, to explain its origins; and how each had its tutelary deity or deities in whose honour those great central symbolic structures were raised to the sky. But there was one thing above all which distinguished these heavenly beings from the human beings who viewed them with such awe. The gods were immortal. Mankind was not.
There was a second obvious purpose for which our prehistoric ancestors created imposing symbolic structures. This was to house the remains of their dead. What all these burial places had in common, from the royal tombs of the Valley of the Kings to the barrows and tumuli of Salisbury Plain, was the belief that, after death, their occupants might somehow live on, in some other dimension.
In the ancient Middle Eastern legend of the Fall, one of the most significant consequences of Adam and Eve emerging to a new kind of self-consciousness was that for the first time knew they were going to die. Because, in emerging from the instinctive state of nature, human beings had developed a sense of their own individual, ego-centred existence, separate from the unity of all life, they now knew, unlike any other animals, that this would one day come to an end. Yet still within them was the half-remembered knowledge that they were part of that totality of life which continues in ‘eternity’, irrespective of the finite little lives of each separate organism which temporarily embodies it. Out of this sense that they were part of that ‘eternity’ came the belief that those who died might be reunited with it; and this belief took two forms, each of which was to have enormous influence on the developing consciousness of mankind.
The first of these beliefs, essentially collective, reflected the attitude of the living towards those who had died before them. One of the most widespread characteristics of societies in the earlier stages of humanity’s emergence from a state of nature was their intimate sense of being part of a chain of life stretching back into the past. As can still be seen in certain parts of the world today, such cultures are marked by a profound reverence for the ‘ancestors’, who are looked on as a living presence. The highest duty of the living is to please the ancestors, by maintaining those inherited customs and beliefs which enshrine the tribe’s collective spiritual identity. This gives significance to every aspect of their lives. In such a culture the death of any individual is seen merely as marking the moment when he or she merges back into a collective whole, which connects them in turn to the spirit which animates the universe.6
Eventually, however, a second attitude towards death began to emerge, centred more on the attitude of individuals to their own death, and on the possibility that they themselves might survive death in some personal form. It was this which in early Neolithic times, as we see in Egypt and across Europe, led to the practice of placing of food and other ‘grave goods’ in their tombs, to assist them on their journey after death. So haunting did this dream of personal immortality become that it plays a key part in that first story of which we have historical record, thought to date back at least to the third millennium BC.
The Epic of Gilgamesh was the central inspiring myth of the civilisation which sprang up in the fertile, originally forested plains between the two great rivers which defined Mesopotamia. The story of the great hero Gilgamesh, two thirds divine and a third human, divides into three main parts. He begins as an unruly king, physically strong and powerful, but entirely at the mercy of his physical appetites, such as insisting on the right to deflower every maiden in his kingdom as she reaches the time of marriage. He is an embodiment of the untrammelled human ego. The turning point is when the gods arrange for him to meet Enkidu, a true child of nature who has grown up with wild beasts and never been part of human society. Enkidu is tamed when a harlot is sent out into the wilderness to seduce him. When she exposes her naked beauty to him he succumbs, with the result that all the wild creatures flee from him. He has emerged from the state of nature to become human. But his real role in the story is to represent the hero’s shadowy alter-ego. Enkidu is as strong and unruly as Gilgamesh, and when they first meet they fight. But after this they are so inseparable they are like two halves of one person, making a new whole. By thus splitting into two, confronting his ‘natural self’ and becoming self-aware, Gilgamesh begins to mature, to develop a sense of selfless responsibility. And it is this which, when his kingdom falls under the shadow of a mysterious and deadly evil, inspires Gilgamesh and Enkidu to make the long ‘forest journey’ half across the world to track down and slay the source of that evil, the monstrous Humbaba, the ‘guardian of the forest’.
However, when Enkidu strikes the third and fatal blow which kills Gilgamesh’s Humbaba, we see the giant’s death has been far from an unmixed blessing. Gilgamesh and Enkidu go on to fell all the trees of that great forest of which Humbaba had been the guardian. Nature is being forced into retreat before the growing power of men to subdue it. This may have seemed a triumph for advancing human consciousness. But, as we now know, it was that clearing of the Mesopotamian forests to make way for agriculture which was eventually to reduce those lands through soil erosion to arid desert, bringing an end to the civilisations they had supported. Humbaba had not in fact been so much a personification of human egotism as a spirit of unconscious nature, crushed by the ego-consciousness of man.
This leads on to the next episode, which shows the Queen of Heaven, Ishtar, angry at the slaying of Humbaba, deciding to tempt Gilgamesh by offering herself to him as a bride. If only he will succumb to her embraces, she promises him riches, glory and power over all the earth. But Gilgamesh rejects her, pointing out that everyone else she has ever seduced has ended up being emasculated or humiliated. Ishtar is here like the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute, playing the role of the Temptress/Dark Mother, that Mother Nature from whom the hero must escape if he is to reach fully conscious autonomy. In vengeance for Gilgamesh’s rejection she sends the Bull of Heaven to kill him, and after it has launched two ferocious assaults, inflicting death on many of his warriors, the third encounter ends in glorious victory as, with Enkidu’s help, the bull is slain. For this triumph, Gilgamesh and Enkidu are acclaimed by the people as the greatest of heroes. But Ishtar is so enraged that she wins agreement from the other gods that one of the two must die. The price of separation from nature is the knowledge that we are mortal. The episode ends with Enkidu sinking to his death, leaving Gilgamesh to grieve bitterly over the ‘brother’ he has lost. The great hero, who has enjoyed such earthly glory, is now all alone, facing the realisation that he too must one day die. He has come to his ‘central crisis’. Having lost that which was most dear to him, facing the certainty of extinction, he must now confront the central task of the ‘second half of life’, as he sets out on his own on a long hazardous Quest for the secret of immortality.
The final episode shows Gilgamesh wandering despairingly through the wilderness and eventually coming to a great mountain whose twin peaks rise to heaven and whose roots reach far down into the underworld. This is the Self, combining the consciousness of the heavenly upper world with the dark unconscious, buried from view. Gilgamesh enters the mountain, where for 12 leagues he journeys underground through impenetrable darkness, where no mortal man has travelled before. After travelling ever further into the unconscious, he finally emerges into blazing light and the ‘garden of the gods’ and here he has three encounters. Each of the three people he meets exclaims in turn how worn and starved Gilgamesh is looking, and to each he explains how the death of Enkidu has brought home to him that he must die. The first is Shamash, god of the sun, justice and wisdom, attributes of full-developed consciousness. The second is a young woman Siduri, an anima-figure tending her vineyard and making wine, who tells him he must seek out Utnapishtim, the only mortal who has ever been granted eternal life. The third is the ferryman who can carry him over the waters of death to meet Utnapishtim.
After further ordeals, Gilgamesh finally reaches his goal and meets Utnapishtim, ‘the far off one’, who tells him how he came to enjoy immortality. This was the episode which particularly electrified the Victorian public when George Smith unveiled his translation of the story in 1872, because what Utnapishtim describes was the Sumerian version of the Biblical myth of Noah’s flood. He recalls how the human world had become a babel of pride and greed, how the gods had decided that mankind must be punished for its wickedness with a great flood and how they had ordered him alone to build a boat to enable him to survive. The god Enlil, born of a marriage between earth and air, then unleashed the deluge which covered the earth. After seven days the rains ceased and, as the waters went down, Utnapishtim found, like Noah, that his boat had grounded at the top of a high mountain. He then, like Noah, sent out a succession of birds, ending in a raven, which told him, after seven more days, that dry land was re-emerging. The god Ea, the supreme god of wisdom ‘who alone knows all things’, told Enlil he had gone too far. Although it is right that sinners should be punished, they must not be driven too hard or they will die. Relenting a little, Enlil therefore decided that Utnapishtim and his wife should become immortal.
In answer to Gilgamesh’s plea that he too should be given the secret of eternal life, Utnapishtim sets him a test. He can have what he craves if he can survive for seven nights and six days without sleeping. Long before the seventh day it is clear that Gilgamesh, filthy and worn out from his ordeals, has hopelessly failed. But Utnapishtim too now relents, and promises that at least Gilgamesh can be made to look fresh and young again for his return to Uruk. After an intervention by his wife, Utnapishtim relents still further and tells Gilgamesh how he can obtain the secret of eternal youth, by diving down into water and plucking a magical herb. The hero does this and sets on his long journey home. But eventually he wearies and falls asleep by a well, from which a serpent emerges, ‘sensing the sweetness of the flower’, and snatches the herb away. From that day forth, snakes had the power to renew themselves, by sloughing off their old skin to emerge looking fresh and young. But Gilgamesh had to return home empty-handed. He was hailed as the king who had been on a long journey, ‘who was wise, who knew mysteries and secret things’. But now he was ‘worn out with labour’, and so he died, the greatest of heroes.
This great Sumerian epic brilliantly reflected how far mankind had travelled since it began the long process of emerging from unconscious dependence on instinct and nature. It tells the story of a man who begins at the mercy of his egocentric physical appetites, without any controlling discipline or self-understanding. To reach maturity and self-awareness it is first necessary for him to begin an inner dialogue, which is what is represented by the arrival of his shadowy alter-ego Enkidu. Just as Enkidu has emerged from the state of nature, so the two-in-one hero now overcomes Humbaba, further representing the unconscious state of nature which has to be subdued to make the self-advancement of mankind possible. This is repeated in their victory over Ishtar. But all these victories for ego-consciousness, marking an ever greater emancipation from unity with nature, also bring with them an awareness of the inevitability of death. Gilgamesh then has to set out on his lonely quest, symbolised as an outward journey, in fact an inner journey, in search of that lost connection with the totality of life. Although, as he grows physically old and weary, he at least seems to come near to grasping the elusive secret he is seeking, it slips away from him. At last, full of years, he is forced to accept that which he has dreaded so long: the extinction of his separate conscious existence.
In showing how its hero eventually dies a natural death of old age, the epic of Gilgamesh was in fact to remain highly unusual in the history of storytelling. The riddle of how humankind was to cope with this new realisation that each individual centre of consciousness must die was one to which it would continue to come up with differing answers. But what was to remain crucial to how this riddle was resolved was whether those answers ultimately stemmed from the ego, or were drawn from the deeper, universal realm of the Self.
While the civilisations of Mespotamia and Egypt were at their zenith, the more primitive tribes of a peninsula hundreds of miles to the west and north of them were evolving a new mythology much more complex than anything which had gone before. The stories of Greek mythology have continued to resonate through the history of our Western civilisation like no others. So rich was the archetypal imagery with which they reflected the human condition that it still haunts our thinking to this day, as when we refer to a ‘labyrinth’, a ‘Herculean task’, a ‘hydra-headed monster’, ‘cleansing the Augean stables’, a ‘Gorgon’, an ‘Oedipus complex’, ‘narcissism’, an ‘echo’, an ‘atlas’, ‘panic’, ‘tantalising’, a ‘Trojan horse’.
Considering the unique subtlety with which the Greek imagination tapped into the collective unconscious, it may not be surprising that this was the people whose literature was the first to present us with stories based on all the archetypal plots we have been looking at in this book. Starting with what is arguably the world’s most profound Quest story, it contains examples of all the others, culminating in their invention of Comedy and Tragedy. Nevertheless, the foundations of all this wealth of storytelling lay in their myths. And the world these conjured up contains one feature which we find particularly puzzling. Most of the better-known stories are centred on mythic human heroes and heroines, representing the four central roles in the archetypal family drama, as kings, queens, princes or princesses. Theseus, Perseus, Odysseus, Agamemnon, Jason, Medea, Oedipus are all familiar examples. But whichever basic plot is shaping the story, we are almost invariably made aware of the presence of one or more of the Greek gods or goddesses, hovering on the edge of the action. These supernatural beings are either able to give the hero or heroine assistance, as by providing them with advice or with magic weapons; or to hinder them by placing obstacles in their path. But they are not able to intervene in the action directly. Once we appreciate the hidden significance of the role the gods play in these stories, however, the true purpose of Greek mythology emerges in a striking new light.
Like other cultures, the Greeks imagined the world as divided into three levels, each peopled with a mass of divinities. In the centre was the everyday earthly world in which they lived. This was inhabited by many lesser spirits associated with the natural features which connected the visible, ‘conscious’ world with some more mysterious ‘unconscious’ dimension: such as the nymphs associated with springs gushing water from some invisible underground source, or the echo which reverberated from cliffs or hillsides. Below the visible conscious world was the shadowy underworld, ruled over by divinities of its own, such as the god Hades or Pluto. It was here that human beings went when they died. A few, if they had performed heroically on behalf of their community, enjoyed bliss in the Elysian fields. Another minority, those who had been particularly wicked and egotistical, was doomed to eternal punishment, like Sisyphus, eternally pushing his stone up a hill, only for it to roll down again; or Tantalus, constantly hoping to seize the grapes which would quench his terrifying thirst, only for them to be snatched away. Most former mortals spent their time in eternity just as bloodless shades, ghosts of their former selves.
By far the most important set of divinities, however, were those inhabiting the uppermost level, the 12 supreme gods: those who were ‘above mankind’ because they lived in the sky or on the snow-capped summit of Greece’s highest mountain, Olympus. These represented an exact balance of masculine and feminine. Six were male, six female. King of the gods was Zeus, whose name derived from the same root, dyaus, the source of light, as the Greek theos. He represented the masculine principle, above all kingly and fatherly authority. His queen Hera, whose name derived from the Sanskrit svar, the sky, similarly represented the feminine principle, presiding over marriage and motherhood. Alongside Zeus were five other gods, each representing a particular aspect of masculinity: his son Apollo, god of light and order (and therefore consciousness), also of youthful energy and male physical perfection7; Poseidon and Ares, gods of the sea and of war; Hephaestus, god of craftsmanship, who presided over the use of fire to work metal; and finally Hermes, the divine messenger. Alongside Hera were five goddesses, each representing a particular aspect of femininity: Aphrodite, goddess of love; Athene, goddess of wisdom; Artemis, the huntress; Hestia, who presided over home-making and the domestic use of fire for cooking and warming; and Ceres, or Demeter, presiding over fertility, natural growth and cultivation of the soil. Ranked below them was an array of lesser divine beings, all with their own role to play in the life of mankind, ranging from gods personifying the forces of nature, such as Aeolus, god of the winds, to the nine Muses, personifying different forms of artistic inspiration and learning.
Around all these figures the Greeks wove an immense thicket of stories, which really come under two headings. Firstly, there are stories just about the interrelationships of the gods themselves. But alongside them are all those myths which, although centred on human heroes and heroines, also feature the gods in their mysteriously influential role on the edge of the action. And it is here we see that the true purpose of these supernatural beings is to personify all those dynamic forces in the psyche which govern human emotions and behaviour.
The key to understanding the role of the Greek gods is to see how they appear in a story at just the moment when the particular psychic force they represent becomes relevant to the action which is about to unfold. They thus give us a clue as to what psychic powers are in play: either to help the heroes and heroines on their way to success, or to personify the nature of the challenges they will have to face. One of the most crucial figures in this respect, as we have already seen several times in this book, is Poseidon. As Zeus’s brother, the god who lives in the mysterious depths of the sea represents, in his dark aspect, the negative, ‘inferior’ version of full-grown masculinity. In this aspect he thus becomes the ‘Dark Father’. Whenever a hero in some way comes into conflict with Poseidon or one of his agents, we know he is going to have to show himself to be his ‘light opposite’: fully masculine but also balanced, open to the feminine values of selfless feeling and intuition.
Thus when Theseus sets out for Crete to confront the power of the Tyrant Minos, the chief physical opponent he is about to face, the Bull, is a creation of Poseidon. But as Theseus embarks, the protective deity hovering over him is Aphrodite, goddess of love. This tells us that the loving feminine will somehow prove the key to overcoming the dark masculine he is setting out to challenge; as we see when, on his arrival, Ariadne falls in love with him and supplies all he needs to overcome the monster and escape the labyrinth.
When Danae is shut away in a tower by her tyrannical father Acrisius, it is the king of the gods, Zeus, representing ‘light masculinity’, who impregnates her, disguised as a shining shower of gold. Like many mythic heroes, her child Perseus is thus half-man, half-god; and we then see him – with the help of Hermes, Athene and Pluto – winning his manhood by overcoming the Gorgon, representing the emasculating power of the dark feminine. His final task, to show that his manhood is fully balanced, is to rescue Andromeda, the anima, from the sea-monster, which is again a creation of Poseidon.
Similarly, Poseidon is the hero’s chief opponent all through the Odyssey, deter-mined that he should not reach his goal. It is Poseidon who has fathered Odysseus’s most terrifying opponent, Polyphemus. What Odysseus needs to survive this ordeal is the intuition which eventually teaches him how to outwit the foolish giant (whose inner blindness is then symbolised by the outer blindness Odysseus inflicts on him).8 All through the story Odysseus’s chief ally is Athene, the goddess of wisdom, representing precisely that feminine value which Odysseus needs to overcome the blind and heartless masculinity represented by Poseidon. Gradually, under Athene’s tutelage, we see Odysseus developing his understanding and self-control, until at last he is ready for that showdown with the suitors which shows he has reached fully-balanced maturity.
One of the most ingenious of the Greek gods is Hermes, best-known in his role as the divine messenger. But he had many more roles than this; and once we see what they all have in common, we begin to recognise just what a subtle part Hermes played in the Greeks’ understanding of human psychology. Essentially Hermes is the god who presides over transitions between one state and another. This is why, for instance, he was the god of travellers and of sailors, each of which imply movement between one place and another. He was also the god of merchants, markets and buying and selling, as goods and property are transferred from one person to another. For the same reason he was the god of thieves. But at a deeper level, Hermes is the god who presides over all transitions between what is known and what is unknown; what is visible and what is invisible; between the world of consciousness and the unconscious. This is why he was the god of twilight, the transition from day to night; and the god presiding over burials and graveyards, the transition from life to death. He was also the god of dreams, images passed from our unconscious to consciousness. He was the god representing our sense of intuition, which is why he was also the god of gambling and luck. And it was in this respect that he was the carrier of messages from the gods to men; because he is the god who presides over all that vital process whereby the objective unconscious tries to inform us of that which our subjective consciousness is blocking out. In archetypal terms he thus plays the role of the ‘Trickster’, not dissimilar to that played by Ariel in The Tempest.9
There is no more crucial moment in the Odyssey than that on Circe’s island, where Odysseus’s men have been trapped by the witch-goddess’s enchantments. For the first time we have seen Odysseus developing the self-protective understanding which has led him only to send half his men forward to explore the island, while he remains behind. At this point who should turn up in the forest but Hermes, giving Odysseus a magic herb and the advice he needs to withstand Circe’s magic. This is really the turning point of the story, because from now on Odysseus becomes more and more conscious of what he has to do. Once mastered, Circe shows him how to get in touch with the spirits of the underworld, including Teiresias, symbolising his new contact with the wisdom of the unconscious. He develops that self-control he has previously lacked, and which will eventually carry him to his goal.
The greatest of the Greek mythic heroes was Heracles or Hercules who, like Perseus, was the son of Zeus and a mortal mother: half-man, half-god. The complex of legends which eventually accumulated round Hercules begin when his birth arouses the rage and jealousy of Zeus’s queen Hera, who thus takes on her negative aspect as the ‘Dark Mother’.10 Faced with the deadly enmity of the ‘dark feminine’, his task is thus to win his full manhood from the power of unconsciousness she represents. He wins his first victory when, as a newborn baby, he strangles the two deadly serpents Hera has sent to kill him (rather like Tamino overcoming the serpent at the start of The Magic Flute). He grows up to adulthood, winning several more symbolic battles, and is rewarded by being given the Theban princess Megara as his wife. But then comes the ‘central crisis’ when, rendered ‘unconscious’ by a fit of madness inflicted on him by Hera, he murders his wife and children, thus losing all that is most dear to him.
To learn how he can expiate this dreadful crime, he visits Delphi to consult the oracle of Apollo. This again always symbolises the obtaining of wisdom from the unconscious, because Apollo, the god of light and consciousness, is served by priestesses who pass up messages from that mysterious dark underworld with which they are in contact. The oracle tells him the only way he can remedy his offence is to embark on the series of 12 tasks for which he is famous (the Greek for these is athloi, meaning ‘ordeals which offer a great prize’, from which we derive ‘athlete’). He nominally has to carry these out at the behest of Eurystheus, king of Tiryns, in the north-east Peloponnese, who is presented as an unmanly, cowardly creature, the negative opposite of the fully-masculine figure Hercules is to become. The pattern of these ordeals, to show how Hercules is growing in stature as they progress, is that they gradually widen out geographically from Tiryns. The first five, including the slaying of several monsters, such as the Nemean lion and the many-headed Hydra of the Lernean marshes, all take place not far from Tiryns. The sixth, the cleansing of the Augean stables at Elis, takes Hercules to the other side of the Peloponnese; and from here the circle grows ever wider. He is taken in turn to Crete, to Thrace in the north of Greece, to the Black Sea, to win the girdle of the queen of the Amazons; to the westernmost end of the Mediterranean (hence ‘the Pillars of Hercules’ as the ancient name for the straits of Gibraltar); and then even further to the west, the direction of the setting sun and of death, to seize the golden apples from the remote Garden of the Hesperides (this also requires him to visit Africa to see the giant Atlas who carries the world on his shoulders, hence, of course, our word ‘atlas’). Hercules’s final ordeal takes him down to the underworld itself, to seize the monstrous Cerberus, which he does with the aid of both Hermes and Athene, the god and goddess who supremely represent that those powers of intuition and wisdom only available to those who are most closely in harmony with the unconscious.
In mastering the terrifying guardian of the kingdom of Hades, Hercules has conquered death. And although in his mortal self he must eventually die, poisoned by the blood of the Hydra, he is taken up into heaven. Here he is finally reconciled with Hera, who gives him in marriage her daughter Hebe, the handmaiden of the gods, associated with eternal youth. United with his anima, he has become one of the immortals.
All these myths emerge from the mists of Greek prehistory, anonymous products of the Greek collective unconscious. But we finally come to the two epics which are the first Greek stories ascribed to a named author, dating back to the dawn of post-Mycaenean Hellenic civilisation at the end of the Bronze Age. One of these, like Gilgamesh the individual story of a great hero, we have already looked at many times in this book, as the first and greatest of all stories based on the archetype of the Quest. Homer’s other epic poem, the Iliad, concentrates on only a comparatively small part of what had become the central collective legend of the Greek peoples, as it describes how they united, under the leadership of kings and heroes from all over Greece, to fight a mighty war with their greatest external enemy. Despite archaeological evidence that there was a succession of cities on the site of Troy in Asia Minor, there is no historical evidence that a war such as that described in the story ever took place. But what is significant is the basic symbolism behind it.
The story of this great conflict begins with rivalry on Olympus when the three leading goddesses, Hera, Athene and Aphrodite, decide to ask the young Trojan prince, Paris, to judge which of them is most beautiful. For him, as a handsome young man, love is to be preferred above motherhood or wisdom, and he awards the prize to Aphrodite. This provokes Hera to vengeful ‘dark feminine’ fury, and she arranges that Paris shall be paid out for his folly by falling in love with the wife of one of the greatest of the Greek kings, Menelaus of Sparta, and abducting her back to Troy. The Greeks all join together to win her back, and we thus see in the essential story of the Trojan war that all too familiar archetypal scenario which shows a group of heroes setting out to challenge a ‘dark power’ which has in its grip the shining feminine, the anima, the spirit of life. As they lay siege to the monster’s citadel, it is to be a long and fiercely fought struggle. But the Greek heroes have one ultimate advantage. Their protective deity is Athene, the goddess of wisdom. It is she who in the end, after all their direct assaults on the city have been in vain, guides them to realise that the only way to win this war is through cunning. They trick the Trojans into accepting the gift of the wooden horse, so that the Greek warriors concealed within it can win access to the city. Within a short time, thanks to their ‘feminine’ guile, all they have failed to achieve by mere masculine heroics has been delivered up to them. Troy lies in ruins, its brave defenders slain. Helen, the ‘eternal feminine’, has been liberated from her imprisonment.
But this is not of course the end of the story. So curious was the Greek intelligence that, as we have seen, they were always wanting to know what happened before the beginning of a story, and what came after it ended. That central legendary event of their history, the Trojan war, gave rise to a host of ancillary tales. Some of these described events which took place in the run-up to the great siege, such as those featuring the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia. Even more described the fate of the various heroes on their return from the war, such as that which befell Agamemnon on his return to Mycenae, when he was murdered by his adulterous wife Clytemnestra, then avenged by his son Orestes. This particular cycle was to end when Athene, as goddess of wisdom, was called in to rule that Orestes had finally expiated his crime. But the greatest of these stories was that describing the return home of Odysseus. And of course this, like the story of the war itself, ends in a last great battle to liberate the anima from the deadly grip of the dark power.
One of the most striking features of Greek mythology was the way it, for the first time, gave a central place to the ‘feminine value’, personified above all in that goddess of wisdom who was revered so highly that she gave her name to the foremost city of Greek civilisation, and whose greatest temple, looking down over that city from the mighty rock of the Acropolis, remains alongside the pyramids of Egypt as the most famous single building of the ancient world. In myth after myth we see the release of the ‘eternal feminine’ from the grip of darkness as the moment of ultimate fulfilment, when the true hero reaches the state of wholeness.
Such was the power of this body of stories that when the civilisation centred on Athens achieved its finest flowering in the fifth century BC, it continued to shape many of those tragedies which represented the first great written literature of the Western world. The Greeks looked back to that dawn-time when the gods mingled with those legendary heroes who had created their world centuries before, and found in these ancient stories, like those of Orestes or Oedipus or Medea, the themes of human folly and redemption which could provide them with catharsis: that purification of the emotions and the soul described by Aristotle, which comes from watching the acting out in a theatre of the most profound psychological patterns in human life.
But in some quarters there was already a sense that there was something archaic about this way of looking at the world; that all this profusion of mythical beings belonged to a former, more primitive age. Already, more than two centuries earlier, the poet Hesiod had portrayed the history of mankind as having unfolded through four ages, Once, in the beginning, had been the Golden Age, when men had lived happily and innocently at one with nature and each other, with all their needs taken care of. Then had come a Silver Age, when men had become proud, rebelling against the gods, eventually provoking Zeus to such anger that he destroyed many of them. Then had come the age of Bronze, when men had turned on each other, using their new weapons to kill and wage war. This had eventually led to the Heroic Age, a kind of interlude, the time of the Trojan and Theban wars, when at least the great warrior heroes had redeemed themselves by their nobility. But now had come the worst time of all, the age of Iron, when humanity had sunk back from this heroic level and become petty, mean, greedy, lustful, vain and quarrelsome, without any real redeeming features. And at this point Hesiod personified that principle of ‘wholeness’ from which men had so fallen short as one single ‘God’.
This picture of how, following his emergence from a state of nature, man’s increasing consciousness had progressively brought him more and more problems long pre-dated the flowering of Athenian civilisation between 600 and 400 BC. But during this period a new impulse was beginning to show itself in the psyche of mankind which was to come up with a quite different way of looking at the relationship of human beings to that state of ‘wholeness’ from which they felt exiled. What if, behind all this profusion of anthropomorphic gods personifying the forces shaping human thinking and behaviour, there was only One? What if, behind all the multitude of creatures on this earth and beyond it, there was just one immeasurably mysterious, all-powerful and omniscient Spirit or Mind, responsible for creating the entire universe and everything in it; and of which all created things, including human beings themselves, were in some way just transitory physical embodiments?
A further great earthquake was taking place in human consciousness: as great as the one which had given rise to the sky gods two or three thousand years earlier.
In all the more advanced civilisations of the world at this time we can see an impulse to unify: to imagine all the bewildering variety of creation as being governed not by a range of separate divinities but by one Ultimate Power, Spirit or Principle. We see this not just in the west, where Hesiod had already written of a single God as ruling over the affairs of mankind. It emerges even more dramatically in the world’s two most populous civilisations, those of China and India.
Just as in Greece and Egypt, the prehistoric mythologies of China and India had developed a dazzling multiplicity of deities to explain the invisible forces which presided over human affairs. In the early period of the Chinese empire, the chief god was the August Personage of Jade.11 He was seen as like a heavenly version of the emperor, surrounded by his court, living in a jade palace on top of a fabulous mountain. This imperial god ruled over a vast heavenly government, made up of bureaucratic ‘ministries’ responsible for all areas of natural and human existence. The rule they represented to mankind was known as ‘T’ien Ming’ or ‘the Mandate of Heaven’. Eventually the Chinese devised an equally bureaucratic version of hell: an underworld complete with its own law courts and carefully prescribed punishments for each form of failure to obey the Mandate of Heaven; while those selfless, virtuous mortals who did fulfil it might be rewarded after their death by being admitted to the gardens of the heavenly palace, to eat the fruit of the Peach Tree of Immortality.
The peoples of India had already begun weaving the most convoluted mythic web of all, out of which were eventually to spring several different religions, including the various forms of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. In earliest times the Zeus-figure of their pantheon was the sky god, Indra, celebrated in Vedic hymns before 1000 BC, associated with explosive masculine power, god of thunder and war, bringer of fertility by his splitting of mountains and clouds to provide rivers, sunshine and rain. He was associated with another great god, Viruna, representing that cosmic principle of order which governs both the workings of the universe and the moral law written in the hearts of mankind. They were accompanied by innumerable lesser divinities, from among whom two more great gods gradually came to the fore, Siva and Vishnu, ‘creator, preserver and destroyer of worlds’. These were eventually joined by a third, Brahma, to form the celebrated Hindu trinity, trimurti. According to one version Brahma describes how he observed:
‘the great Narayana, the soul of the universe, with a thousand omniscient eyes, at once being and not-being, brooding over the waters without form, supported by the thousand-headed snake of the infinite.’
But when Brahma addresses this apparently supreme being, the voice which answers is that of Vishnu:
‘Do you not know that it is I who am Narayana, creator, preserver and destroyer of worlds, the eternal male, immortal source and centre of the universe? You yourself were born from my imperishable body.’
Eventually Siva joins them and is welcomed by Vishnu as the ‘god of gods’. Siva ends his reply:
‘I, the supreme indivisible Lord, am three ... Brahma, Vishnu and Siva: I create, I preserve, I destroy.’
The three great Hindu divinities have by this time become virtually interchangeable aspects of each other, like three different faces of the same single god.
During the centuries between 700 BC and 500 BC this tendency for all the multiplicities of gods to dissolve in favour of a single supreme being was gathering momentum in many different cultures. And this brought with it a wholly new perception of how mankind should relate to the unseen dimension beyond his mortal, physical existence.
In China in the sixth century, we see this in the teachings of Lao-Tzu, a pupil of Confucius. The Chinese had already begun to view everything in the universe as being made up of the interplay between two opposing principles, the yang and the yin: male and female, light and dark, strong and weak, dominant and submissive, upper and lower, solid and fluid, hot and cold. There was nothing which could not be seen in these terms. Yang was creation, yin was completion, yang was the idea, yin its material realisation. Yet the two opposites were always two halves of one whole. If, in any context, one principle predominated, this was because the state of cosmic balance had been lost; and there would then be a tendency for it to become unbalanced in the opposite direction. The teaching of Lao-Tzu was that the only way to understand life and the universe was to see that everything in them ultimately belongs to a single, indivisible, living entity: ‘the One’. The central principle of life is ‘Tao’, ‘the Way’, to become at one with the One, which implies rising above all opposites, because the Tao is the state of perfect balance in which the opposites no longer exist. In the Tao the yin and the yang are one. All partial views and divisions are illusory. All sense of separate existence must be transcended, to achieve union with the One that is eternal.
A remarkably similar perception was being arrived at in India through the body of Hindu teachings known as the Upanishads, which were being set down from around 700 BC onwards. The divided nature of human consciousness means that we are imprisoned in maya, that state of illusion which comes from seeing the world in terms of opposites, which are always getting out of balance. But within us is the atman, our true Self, that part of us which is part of the Atman, the Universal Soul. The only way to escape imprisonment in maya is to reach the state where all individual appetites and distortions of subjective consciousness are transcended. This is the state of nirvana, where all personal attachments end, and where the individual atman can be rejoined in perfect union with the Atman which is the state of perfect consciousness ruling the universe.
Until the reaching of nirvana, the Hindus believed, each separate individual soul is doomed to continue being reborn, taking on different bodily forms, as humans or as animals, until it has reached the state of ‘enlightenment’ or complete consciousness which can enable it to released into the One. To work towards that state of illumination is the purpose of meditation or yoga, from the Sanskrit word for ‘union’ (from which we also get ‘yoke’, that which ‘joins together’). In the sixth century BC, there grew up in India the legend of a particular hero, a prince, who managed through his meditation to become so liberated from his lower, individual self, so dedicated to love, selflessness and the light, that midway through life he attained ‘enlightenment’. He was thus ready to be taken up into heaven and to become immortal, as part of the Universal Soul. But selflessly he remained on earth for another 40 years to spread his teachings as to how this state of perfect light can be achieved. This was the Buddha, who became the central exemplary figure of a whole new religious tradition.
We see a parallel development in sixth century Persia, where the prophet Zoroaster taught that a single spirit of light rules the universe, dispelling the darkness of illusion which shrouds all material existence. In the Mesopotamian civilisation now dominated by the great city of Babylon, the old polytheism had given to a form of monotheism centred on a single supreme spirit, Marduk or Baal, of whom lesser gods were considered to represent particular aspects. In northern Mesopotamia, dominated by the Assyrians, the same tendency centred on their supreme god Ashur. Even in the Mediterranean Greek world, where officially the traditional divinities still held sway, philosophers such as Heraclitus, Empedocles, Pythagoras and Parmenides were wrestling intellectually and spiritually with problems strikingly similar to those which were being confronted by the religions of the east. How, if all created things are in a permanent state of flux, growth and decay, can we see behind them something which is changeless and eternal? How, since the world consists of a myriad separate entities, can we see that they all ultimately resolve in the One?12
Meanwhile the new religious impulse of the time was finding its most dramatic expression in the Greek world in the ‘Orphic mysteries’, centred on the cult of the god Dionysus. This son of Zeus had long been part of Greek mythology, associated particularly with the effect of wine to ‘take men out of themselves’, and many stories had been woven around him, not least that of how he had been put to death by the jealousy of the other gods, then brought back to life again, through his father Zeus. But now he had changed his character. He had come to be seen in a new, more serious, more cosmic guise, as if he had been re-conceived as a new and more significant divinity altogether. He aroused in his followers that state of ‘enthusiasm’ or entheosiasmos which literally means ‘being possessed by the god’. And the key to the power he exercised over them, in the words of the historian Plutarch, was that he was:
‘the god who is destroyed, who disappears, who relinquishes life and then is born again.’
Dionysus, in whose honour in fifth century Athens were staged the great religious theatrical festivals which inspired Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides to conceive some of the greatest plays ever written, had come to be viewed as a symbol of everlasting life.
There was one racial group in the ancient world which had seen the universe as ruled by a single divine being long before the others, back into the mists of prehistory. This was that branch of the Semitic peoples living at the eastern end of the Mediterranean who called themselves the ‘children of Israel’. As with all other peoples, the chief way in which they sought to define their identity was through telling stories. And the most important form these took was to rehearse the history of their tribe, generation by generation, back to the beginning: to that moment when the world was called into being by a single Creator-spirit, their god Jaweh. But between these Jewish stories and those of other cultures lay two significant differences.
The first was the degree to which Jaweh was seen as very much the proprietary god of the people of Israel themselves. Although he begins as a universal, world-creating spirit, by the time their world-history reaches the legends of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, it is obvious that a special relationship has been established between Jahweh and the people who believe that he has singled them out for a unique destiny. Their most holy religious object, which their temple in Jersualem was built to house, was the ‘ark’ or chest containing a record of the ‘covenant’ between them and God; the bond which had been cemented in the story of Moses leading the ‘chosen people’ out of captivity in Egypt into the Promised Land. We have already looked at that episode in Deuteronomy where Moses reminds his followers how he had climbed the great mountain to receive from God the rules which they must obey. At first sight these might be taken as ten absolute laws, intended to govern all human behaviour. But Moses goes on to explain that when the Jews reach the Promised Land they will find it full of other peoples for whom it is already their homeland, and that they must be shown ‘no mercy’. The law does not apply to these alien tribes. They must be killed, their land taken from them and the altars of their gods overthrown. In other words the ‘one true God’ is seen as above all a Jewish god. The Jews are set apart from and above all other races. All other gods are just ‘false idols’, to be treated with contempt.
The other distinctive feature of the Jewish story recorded in what Christians call the Old Testament is the exceptional degree to which it is dominated by masculine values. We have seen how the Jewish Creation myth is unique in the orderly way in which God sets out his created world in six days like checking off a shopping list. This ‘Father God’ is the ordering function of human consciousness personified. There is none of that female creative process associated with the cosmogonic myths of other cultures, where the created world is gradually, laboriously evolved out of a dark, unconscious matrix. And what is striking about the stories which follow is how often in them the feminine value is absent or downplayed; or, if it is has to be present, is personfied in a male rather than female character. This is particularly noticeable when we compare these Old Testament stories to the Greek myths, where female figures such as Athene, Ariadne or Penelope play such a central role in symbolising the life-giving feminine value. In the story of Joseph, for instance, when it is necessary for the feminine values of love and seeing whole to be called into play to bring about the reconciliation of Joseph and his brothers, this is not personified in a feminine figure. It has to be conjured up by the tortured device of turning ‘little Benjamin’ back into an archetypal Child. The story of the journey to the Promised Land, as we have seen, is in many ways an archetypal Quest. But where, at the end of a Quest story, one could normally expect a symbolic union with the feminine, to convey the image of completion and fulfilment, the nearest the story can come up with to a feminine image is to portray the goal, in soft, welcoming guise, as a land ‘flowing with milk and honey’.13 In the story of David, although Saul rewards him for his victory over Goliath with the hand of the Princess Michal, she plays little further part. David’s real reward is his loving friendship with her brother Jonathan, as his alter-ego. In fact the feminine element in this story is chiefly personified in the character of David himself, so carefully depicted as combining both masculine and feminine qualities.
This preponderance of the masculine value of course colours much of the history of the Jewish people presented by the Old Testament. Two features of this story are particularly familiar to us. The first is how much of it is taken up by the endless violent struggle of ‘God’s chosen people’ to defend themselves against their enemies, notably the Philistines, but also those neighbouring civilisations which twice took them into captivity, the Egyptians and the Babylonians. The other is how their rigid, legalistic morality rested ultimately on the unyielding masculine principle of the lex talionis: the idea that a crime must be paid out by identical retribution, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. There is little place in the ‘ruling consciousness’ of this people for the softer feminine values of compassion, mercy and understanding. Where women do play a significant role in these stories, they tend to be presented negatively (e.g., the Temptress Delilah, the raging virago Jezebel) or in an ‘active’ masculine fashion like Deborah, portrayed as tough matriarchal leader of her people in the Book of Judges, or Esther, wife of the Persian emperor Xerxes, who saves her Jewish compatriots from a treacherous massacre through her brave ingenuity. There are exceptions, as in the Book of Ruth, where the widowed non-Jewish heroine movingly insists on accompanying her mother-in-law back to Judaea (where she marries a Jewish husband); and the Song of Solomon where, untypically, the feminine is mystically portrayed in her full, inspiring anima role as the soul of man.14 In general, however, the picture we are given by their storytelling is of a people outwardly dominated by the hard masculine values of strength and order. The most important defining characteristic of their individual identity was their membership of the tribal group, set apart from all others. In archetypal terms, they had thus become a people whose stern, unrelenting ‘Father God’ represented not so much the Universal Self, of equal relevance to all mankind, but more an expression and sanctification of their own collective ego-identity, giving rise to a profound example of ‘ego-Self confusion’.
The Jews were not the only people whose storytelling reflected a bias towards masculine consciousness. When the Romans took over their pantheon of gods and much of their mythology from the Greeks, it is noticeable how the role the Greeks accorded to the feminine became less prominent. The most famous city of the Greek world may have been named after the goddess of wisdom, but when the Romans renamed Athene as Minerva she became markedly less significant in their collective life. Much of the subtlety with which the Greek mythology had personified the dynamic forces in the human psyche becomes blurred over. In making Neptune their sea-god, the Romans lost sight of that hugely important role played by his predecessor Poseidon as symbolic of the ‘Dark Father’. The role of Jupiter, as the incarnation of masculine power and authority, becomes markedly more dominant and less open to challenge than that which the Greeks had given to Zeus. The role of Mars, equating to Ares as god of war, also becomes more prominent. On all sides we see a shift of the masculine-feminine balance in favour of the masculine, and this can be seen clearly reflected in the greatest single Roman poem, Virgil’s Aeneid, their equivalent to the Odyssey.
The Romans evolved two quite separate stories to explain the origins of their city. One was the legend of how the orphaned twin babies Romulus and Remus had been suckled and brought up by a she-wolf. This obscurely recalled the primordial emergence of humankind from the state of nature; and Romulus eventually grew up to found the city which took his name. The other ‘national myth’, so powerfully developed by Virgil, told how the Romans were really descended from the Trojans, and how their city had been founded by Aeneas after he had escaped from the smoking wreck of Troy. There had been no subtler element in the Odyssey than the contest between Poseidon and Athene. One is the hero’s chief antagonist, trying to prevent him reaching home, the other his chief ally, putting him in touch with the self-knowledge which eventually enables him to reach his goal. In the Aeneid, the hero’s chief antagonist is Juno, queen of the gods, the Roman Hera, in her role as ‘Dark Mother’. It is she, for instance, who arranges for him to fall in love with the widowed Queen Dido, whose emasculating charms are almost enough to make Aeneas forget his mission to establish a new city. This shows us, in archetypal terms, that Aeneas’s task is not to discover self-knowledge. It is to win his independent manhood from the ‘dark feminine’. And his chief ally is not the goddess of wisdom but Venus, the goddess of love.
As the story approaches its climax, it carries echoes of the ‘children of Israel’ arriving in the Promised Land. The main task of Aeneas and his men is to overcome the opposition of all the tribes already living there, to establish their new city. But as a token of their eventual success Aeneas has already won the support of one of the most powerful Italian tribes, by promising to marry Lavinia, their king’s daughter. This is why the tutelary goddess hovering over the action in Aeneas’s showdown with Turnus, the leader of the opposing tribes, is Venus. When he is finally victorious, we imagine he will go on to marry Lavinia and found his new city, and that this is to be the happy ending of the story. But we are only left to assume this. We are not shown it. The story ends simply with Turnus’s death. Compare this with the resounding conclusion Homer provides to the Odyssey, and we see just how much more profoundly the Greek version succeeds in exploring the underlying archetype. One story shows its hero developing to the most complete state of personal fulfilment of which an individual human being is capable. The other in comparison is no more than a two-dimensional strip cartoon or a Hollywood film: entertaining propaganda designed to reinforce the collective self-image of the Romans just when they had established the most powerful empire the world had ever seen.
The qualities which enabled the Romans to do this were above all those masculine values of strength and order, power and organisation, with which Roman civilisation has been identified all through subsequent history. When we think of Rome, we think of Roman legions, die-straight roads carving across the landscape, superb engineering, Roman law, triumphant monuments to military conquests. We think of a highly materialistic civilisation, dedicated also to physical pleasures, hot baths and spectacular entertainments, to ‘bread and circuses’: a civilisation which eventually decayed because it became soft within, losing the virility and unity of will which had enabled it to dominate the world and choked by that proliferating bureaucracy which was the negative side of the Roman ability to organise. But all this was still far ahead when Virgil spent the last 11 years of his life writing his great epic poem in celebration of Roman power, before his death in 19 BC.
Eight years earlier Virgil’s friend Octavian, who had become de facto leader of Rome in the years of civil war which followed the assassination of his uncle Julius Caesar in 44 BC, was granted by the Senate the title of Augustus Imperator, ‘the most august leader’. This made him the first Roman Emperor. In 12 BC, to complete his attainment of supreme earthly power, Augustus also became Pontifex Maximus, the official head of the Roman religion. Increasingly he was being revered by his millions of subjects as a semi-divine figure. On his death in 14 AD the transformation became complete, when he was officially declared to have become a god.
Other priest-kings in earlier civilisations, notably the Phaoroahs of Egypt, had been accorded divine status, because of their ceremonial closeness to the unseen supernatural beings who ruled the world. But this was the first time in history that the principle had applied the other way round: where a mere mortal had become so identified with his unprecedented earthly power that he was elevated to become a god in his own right. By that principle which Heraclitus had recognised as the tendency of everything when it reaches its extreme to produce its opposite, at that very moment in a remote village in Augustus’s vast empire an obscure young boy was growing up whose billions of followers over the centuries ahead would declare that he was not ‘man made god’ but ‘God made man’.
If we look at the story of Jesus in terms of its underlying archetypes, we can do so under three related headings. First, there is what may be called the ‘Christ myth’, those elements in the story which are of familiar mythic dimension. Second, there is what his actions and teachings represent in terms of archetypal psychology. Thirdly, there is the way in which all this was interpreted by his followers after his death.
The ‘mythic’ element in the story of Christ’s life itself centres on three chief episodes. Easily the most important of these are the events surrounding each end of his life, his birth and death. But between them comes the curiously revealing episode which shows his temptations by ‘the Devil’.
With Jesus’s birth we are at once on familiar archetypal ground. Like other mythic heroes before him, such as Perseus and Hercules, the sons of Zeus, he is born the son of a divine father and a human mother. He is therefore half-god, half-mortal. In the imagery associated with his birth, what we see coming into the world is that archetypal redeeming figure, the Eternal Child: that image of defenceless innocence symbolising the renewal of life which evokes one of the deepest archetypal responses we know.
At a still deeper archetypal level, the image of Christ’s nativity is that conveyed by Rembrandt in his painting of the scene in the National Gallery. The infant Jesus in his cradle is softly illuminated while everything else in the picture is almost invisible in surrounding darkness. Christ is represented as the ‘treasure in the cave’, the source of light shining in the darkness of the world.
Another crucial feature of the symbolism of the birth is the way it takes place ‘below the line’. ‘Above the line’, the Emperor Augustus himself, representing the ruling consciousness at the very pinnacle of earthly power, has decreed a census or roll-call of everyone in the Roman empire. Below the line, in faraway Palestine, an insignificant couple, Joseph and Mary, are thus forced to travel from their village to register in Bethlehem, where so many others are doing the same that they are pushed even further beyond the social pale, in being forced to find shelter in a mere stable for animals. The only people who recognise the cosmic significance of what is going on are a group of humble shepherds: until later they are joined by ‘wise men from the East’, from that Mesopotamian civilisation which finds spiritual guidance in the movement of heavenly bodies, and who represent that ‘higher consciousness’ which recognises it is ‘below the line’ that truth is to be found.
A final archetypal element is the determined effort by King Herod shortly after Jesus’s birth to have him killed. Again, as in the myths of Zeus, Perseus, Hercules, Romulus and others, we recognise the pattern whereby the life of the new-born hero is threatened by the dark power. The ‘Dark King’ is attempting to stifle the ‘Light King’. But in a ‘thrilling escape from death’, the baby is carried by his parents to safety in Egypt. He thus fulfils yet another recurring ingredient in the ‘hero archetype’: that which dictates that the hero destined to become king, like Theseus, Oedipus and others, should spend time in his youth exiled from his homeland.
The hero grows up to manhood in normal fashion, marked out only by the episode when, in his early teens, he astonishes the elders in his local synagogue by the authority with which he expounds the scriptures. But then, when he is finally ready to reveal his message to the world, comes the second ‘mythic’ passage in the story, the dream-like episode when goes out alone into the wilderness to be put to the test by the Devil. He is offered three temptations: that he should use his divine power to turn stones into bread; that he should throw himself off the temple roof, so that he can demonstrate his power by being saved by angels; and that, when he is taken up ‘into a high place’ to be shown ‘all the kingdoms of the world’, he can be given the power to rule over them.
This is a significant moment in the history of the human imagination. The figure of ‘Satan’, as ‘God’s opposite’, has appeared before in Jewish legend, most notably in the story of Job.15 But never before has this Tempter-figure emerged so openly and in such uncompromisingly personal guise. He is a complete personification of all the treacherous, self-deceiving, self-destructive power of the human ego. And the reason he can be now be portrayed in such an extreme way, as a ‘dark opposite’ to the hero, is that in no story before has the hero ever been portrayed so uncompromisingly as a personification of the Self (perhaps the only exception is the Indian legend of the Buddha). In rejecting the three temptations out of hand, Jesus shows he is so completely identified with the Self that he has no ego to be tempted. Of course he will not turn stones into bread, because what he stands for has nothing to do with gaining advantage in the outward, material world. He is concerned solely with the internal realm of the human spirit. Equally he will not be party to a spectacular demonstration of his power simply in the name of saving himself. Again he has no interest in exercising power over the ‘kingdoms of the world’ because his message is concerned with a wholly different ‘kingdom’: that spiritual domain within each human individual which has nothing to do with the exercise of power over other people.
What was revolutionary about this message was that it was directed so precisely to that central problem of human psychology at which, because it is also the central problem addressed by storytelling, we have been looking at all through this book. He was not concerned with his hearers’ outward status, or to which race or social grouping they belonged. He was addressing each as an individual, on that inner level where all human beings start off on completely equal terms (exactly as we see them portrayed in stories). On this level, the only question which matters, whether someone is ruler of the Roman empire or a humble fisherman, is what sort of a person they are. How do they measure up inwardly to the challenge of what it is to be human? Are they centred on the ego or on the Self? Are they weak, self-centred, heartless, greedy, vain, proud, cruel, treacherous, mean-spirited, lustful, bad-tempered, vengeful, intolerant, narrow-minded, humourless, lazy, irresponsible and ultimately immature? Or are they centred on that deeper ego-transcending level of the personality which can make them strong, selfless, loving, generous, modest, self-effacing, compassionate, loyal, understanding, good-humoured, self-disciplined, even-tempered, merciful, tolerant, hard-working, responsible and ultimately mature?
The essence of Jesus’s message, much of it put across in the form of parables or stories, was that, for any of us, this is the only test which matters. Is our personality centred on the ego or the Self? And it was because he viewed this distinction as of such crucial importance that he was able to come up with that other revolutionary idea at the heart of his message: that the first responsibility of those who heard it was to ‘repent’ of their ‘sins’ (for which, as we have seen, his word in Greek was hamartia, ‘missing the mark’). What this meant was that they must develop the self-awareness to recognise just how all-pervasive a part egocentricity plays in all our human thinking and behaviour. Only through this self-understanding can we properly appreciate the other ‘centre’ in our nature: and how far egotism holds us back from ‘hitting the mark’, in realising that which we have the potential to become. Only then can we appreciate what Jesus constantly proclaimed as the two supreme human values, love and truth: the capacity for selfless love and the ability to see the world objectively, free from subjective distortion. In other words, precisely those two key principles we see represented all through storytelling as ‘the feminine value’: selfless feeling and the ability to ‘see whole’. And to achieve the state where this can be realised, he insisted, requires real strength of will and self-discipline: in other words, those values which stories represent as masculine. The essence of his message was thus that the highest state of individual human development can only be achieved through a combination of masculine and feminine qualities. One cannot be fully developed without the other. It is simply another version of that message we see at the heart of the archetypal patterns of storytelling (and which, as we see in the Odyssey and other examples, both western and eastern, was evident long before Christianity).
A third echo of the archetypal structure of storytelling was Jesus’s insistence that the only way for people to realise their full human potential is by avoiding all the psychological pitfalls associated with living ‘above the line’. This is why he constantly reiterated that only those who inwardly have a ‘below the line’ view of themselves can inherit that ‘kingdom of heaven’ which lies within: those whom he portrayed as the ‘poor’ and the ‘meek’, those who are not proud, those who think and feel ‘as little children’. In outward terms, Jesus had no argument with that worldly power which is ‘above the line’. He respected the Roman centurion as one ‘in authority’. When they brought him a coin bearing the image of the emperor, hoping he might pass some subversive comment, he did not hesitate in saying it was right to ‘render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s’. In the outward world, as one exercising power and authority, Caesar should be respected and obeyed. But it was vital to make the distinction between that outer kingdom which was Caesar’s and that inner kingdom of the psyche, which should be ruled only by God. And the greatest obstacles to recognising that inner kingdom, he constantly pointed out, are all those temptations to egotism which inevitably come with riches, worldly power, social position, priestly rank or any of the outward persona trappings which can so easily engender a sense of superiority to others and of being ‘above the line’.
Reading the stories of Jesus wandering through Palestine in the years when he was putting over his message, the central impression they convey is how he is portrayed as psychologically complete. In terms of the four functions shown in stories as making up human wholeness, he scores fully on all counts. He is always shown as strong and commanding, speaking with authority. He is disciplined, with an exact sense of order; his mind whenever he is challenged or questioned is razor sharp. He is wholly selfless: loving, compassionate and sensitive to the needs of others, as when he invariably tries to help the suffering or heal the sick. And he always shows that intuitive understanding which enables him to relate everything which happens to one unified view of the world, centred on that God whom he portrays as like an ideal human father.
In fact the image of God presented by Jesus had no real precedent, in that it combines in such perfect balance the four archetypal attributes of the Self. The picture he conveyed of this mysterious presence ruling the universe was of a being which is somehow all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving and all-seeing: displaying strength, order, compassion and understanding, in perfect equation. The power of Jesus’s own image lies in how he is portrayed in the Gospels as a human embodiment of the same balance of attributes. So completely is he identified with the state of ‘wholeness’ which is the Self that when he speaks of himself as ‘the way, the truth and the life’, he uses the word ‘way’ much as the Lao-Tzu speaks of ‘Tao’. He himself represents that state of totality to which all human beings can aspire. This was why his ‘first commandment’ to his followers was that they must love God with the same equation of attributes: ‘with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind and with all thy strength’.
But such a symbol of wholeness is, by definition, an affront to the ego, something the ruling consciousness cannot understand. What we see next, when Jesus’s three years of teaching are up, is what happens when the ruling consciousness finally loses patience with the challenge this presents.
The final mythic episode in the story is that which centres on the last week of Jesus’s earthly life. He travels up to Jerusalem, the holy city which is the symbolic centre of the Jewish world. And what we then see unfolding is a perfect example of the archetypal five-stage cycle of Tragedy. The Anticipation Stage has been his preparation for this supreme moment. We see the Dream Stage when, as he enters the city on a donkey, he is welcomed by wildly cheering crowds. The Frustration Stage reaches its height in the air of foreboding which hangs over the Last Supper, and when, in the garden of Gethesamane, he must inwardly face up to the horror of what lies ahead. The forces of opposition are constellating against him. The Nightmare Stage begins with his betrayal by Judas and his arrest by the High Priest’s armed guards. It continues with his one-sided trial for blasphemy, his subjection to physical torture and his interrogation by the decent but weak Roman governor Pontius Pilate, with the mob outside howling for his blood. The Destruction Stage begins when he is led out of the city to be crucified by Roman soldiers between two common criminals and, after three hours of agony, he meets his death.
What is so striking is that this appears to be such a complete inversion of what the pattern of Tragedy is about. The purpose of the tragic archetype is to show what happens when human beings become so possessed by the darkness of the ego that in the end they bring about their own destruction, so that unity can be restored and light triumph over darkness. Yet Jesus, as portrayed in the story, is wholly ego-free. The darkness in the story is all outside him. Thus his death on the cross seems to be a total victory for darkness. But herein, of course, lies the point. Although the dark power may have managed to kill him in his earthly outward state, this is not his true identity, which lies in the fact that he is so completely at one with the Self: that totality which is eternal and which cannot be destroyed. Accordingly, when the third day comes, he reappears, bathed in that soft light of eternity which characterises all his appearances after the resurrection. He has overcome death because in reality he has always been part of that which cannot die. And he is then taken up into heaven to merge with the One.16
Thus ends the most famous of all those myths, found in many parts of the world, telling of the god who dies and is reborn. In the Egyptian version, the great god Osiris had been put to death by the dark part of himself, his brother Set, but then brought to life again. It was his son Horus who had completed the story, by avenging his father and thus overcoming the cause of death. In the Greek version it was Dionysus, also the ‘son of god’, who had been put to death and then been brought back to life by his father, representing the boundless power of life which cannot be destroyed.
In archetypal terms, the myth of Jesus shows how, in acting out the pattern of Tragedy, he acted out the pattern of how all human beings imprisoned in ego-consciousness must die. Yet it also shows how, if only they can make contact with the selfless part of themselves which lies beyond ego-consciousness, that state of ‘sin’ which only came into the world with the ‘Fall’ and mankind’s emergence from unconscious unity with nature, they can be reunited with that state of One-ness which cannot die because it is eternal. In the words of St Paul used in the Christian burial service, ‘as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive’. In this respect, acting out his own statement that ‘greater love hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friends’, Jesus’s death also represents that other great recurring feature in the religions of the world, the practice of offering life as a ‘sacrifice’, a ‘making whole’. In innumerable religions, the lives of animals and humans have been ritually offered to the gods as a way of healing the separation between gods and men. The sacrificial animal, like the scapegoat, was supposed to carry with it all the offences and imperfections of the tribe or the individual, thus leaving those who had offered the sacrifice ‘cleansed’ and restoring the unity which had been broken.17 In taking upon himself the ‘sin’ of all mankind, the story ran, Jesus had ‘redeemed’ the whole world. But this kind of interpretation belongs not so much to the story itself as to what was to be made of it in later years, when the myth of the God who had died and been reborn became the central inspiration for something rather different: the story of the religion known as ‘Christianity’.
Over the next three centuries, although the story of ‘the man-God who died and was reborn’ spread all over the Roman empire and even to India and China, the religion of those who followed ‘the Way’ remained very much ‘below the line’. In the catacombs of Rome these new ‘Christians’ literally went underground. During that time the new faith, built on the stories of Jesus’s life, gradually built up its own collective consciousness. Paul, a Jew from the heavily Greek-influenced region of Asia Minor, played a key part in shaping the message, emphasising what a break it marked from traditional Judaism, in that its God was equally ‘father’ to every member of the human race, ‘Jew or Gentile, slave or free’. Its central ritual was formalised round the act of sharing bread and wine, symbolising the coming together of all Christians in the ‘one-ness’ of Christ’s ‘mystical body’. The other supreme Christian symbol was the cross, representing not just the instrument of his ‘act of atonement’ or ‘at-One-ment’ between God and all mankind, but as itself a four-cornered symbol of wholeness; so that, as Christians made the ‘sign of the cross’, they were ‘centring’ themselves in an act which marks a bringing together of the four components of the human personality: body, mind, heart and soul.18
In obvious respects the new religion inherited from Judaism its ‘masculine’ bias, in that it centred on a male trinity of ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Holy Spirit’, regarded, like other divine trinities elsewhere in the world, as three different aspects of one single God. But behind this, reflecting the central significance of the ‘feminine’ in Christ’s own teaching, a fourth figure soon became closely related to the male trinity, Mary, ‘wife of the Father’, ‘Mother of the Son’, representing all the archetypal attributes of an idealised, loving human mother. After the crucifixion itself, no image was to play a more central part in Christian symbolism than the representation of the ‘Holy Mother and Child’; although, as a virgin, Mary also represents the anima. Equally significant was the enigmatic nature of the third member of the trinity, the Holy Spirit. As its name implies, this mysterious being represents the ‘spirit of wholeness’, all those psychic forces which draw human beings towards integration with the One. In terms of its underlying archetype, the ‘holy spirit’ thus represents the dynamic power of the Self. But since no archetype symbolises this more completely than the anima, as supreme embodiment of the feminine value, the ‘holy spirit’ must by definition include a strong, if disguised, feminine component. This was later to become manifest when individual Christians sought to personify the spiritual power guiding them to wholeness, as when the fourth century writer Boethius imagined the awe-inspiring figure opening his eyes to the ‘light’ of spiritual understanding as ‘Sophia’. She was as much a feminine embodiment of the spirit of wisdom as Athene had been to the Greeks. And it was apt that the greatest Christian shrine in the Greek world, in that new centre of the Roman empire set up on the banks of the Bosphorus by the emperor Constantine, was to be a cathedral dedicated to Hagia Sophia, ‘holy wisdom’.
In the early years of the fourth century AD, just after the emperor Diocletian had made a last ruthless but forlorn effort to re-establish the status of the old Graeco-Roman gods, came the dramatic moment in 312 when, on the eve of the battle of the Milvian Bridge which was finally to confirm him as sole ruler of the Roman empire, Constantine had a dream of the cross of Christ, accompanied by the legend ‘In hoc vinces’: ‘in this sign you shall conquer’. The following year, in his Edict of Milan, for the first time Christians were given full civil rights throughout the empire which had put the founder of their religion to death three centuries before. In 324 Constantine declared Christianity to be its official religion, and six years later established his ‘city of Constantine’, Constantinople, as its new capital. In one mighty bound, Christianity had finally moved from ‘below the line’ to being so ‘above the line’ that it was to shape the ruling consciousness of European civilisation for much of the next 2000 years.
Even in the century before Constantine, the Roman empire had already been under attack from that other presence which the Roman world viewed as ‘below the line’: those troublesome tribes of Goths, Vandals, Franks, Alemanni and Huns who inhabited the ‘badlands’ of central and eastern Europe beyond its frontiers. A century later the great secular power which had dominated the Mediterranean world and half of Europe for seven centuries was in terminal disintegration. The city of Rome itself was repeatedly sacked and pillaged by the ‘barbarian hordes’, until in 476 the last western emperor, tellingly named after the city’s founder Romulus, was deposed. In the west the only ghostly legacy of Rome’s imperium was the Papacy, which remained the ruling power of the Christian church. The eastern empire, centred on Constantinople, lived on to enjoy a last sunset moment of glory in the early sixth century, in the reign of Justinian, before beginning its long fade into that twilight which would only end 900 years later.
From the deserts of the Arabian peninsula to the south, the seventh century saw the sudden meteoric rise of the world’s last great new monotheistic religion. Islam (meaning ‘submission’ of the individual ego to the will of God) took on elements of both Judaism and Christianity, while omitting others. Born in the harsh world of the desert, the new religion shared the overtly ‘masculine’ character of Judaism, with its emphasis on obedience, rituals, law and discipline. It thus had little place for that emphasis on love and compassion by which Christianity had softened and ‘feminised’ the Judaism from which it originally sprang. But, unlike Judaism, Islam did not see itself as the religion just of one tribal group. It shared with Christianity a missionary zeal to convert the whole of mankind. Indeed, such was the power of the explosive new spiritual force unleashed by the prophet Mohammed that, within a century of his death, his armed followers had not only swept through North Africa and Spain but seemed on the verge of taking over much of western Europe, until in 732 their advance was halted by the Franks at Tours. But in many ways, with its intellectual vitality, its art, architecture and mathematics and its preservation of Greek learning, the consciousness of this new southern civilisation was to outshine the rest of the western world for 300 years.
Bereft of that unifying power which for so long had brought it order and civilisation, western Europe was now firmly plunged into what became known as the Dark Ages. The remains of the Roman cultural inheritance rapidly crumbled before the expansionism of those Germanic and Norse peoples who had never been part of the Roman empire: the Franks, who gave their name to France; the Angles and Saxons who occupied much of the island of Britain; Jutes, Danes, Swedes and Vikings from Scandinavia. But even in these dark and confused times, Christianity continued to make its own advances, as when in the seventh century the new Anglo-Saxon rulers of what would eventually be named after them as ‘England’ were converted to Christianity, abandoning the Teutonic gods after whom the English-speaking world still names its days of the week.19 And out of the mists shrouding those centuries have survived some remarkable stories, not least that Anglo-Saxon epic dating from the eighth century with which this book began, Beowulf.
The story of Beowulf falls into two parts. The first tells of how its hero comes from overseas to save the land of Heorot by overcoming two deadly monsters: first the semi-human Grendel, then his even more terrible mother, after a mighty battle at the bottom of the lake which had been their lair. After this victory, Beowulf is rewarded with finely-wrought gold and made king over his own people, whom he rules as their loved and revered leader for 50 years. In archetypal terms, this first half of the story has shown Beowulf defeating that symbolic dark combination of ‘son and mother’ which represents immaturity. As a young man he has demonstrated those attributes of fully developed manhood which qualify him to become a strong, wise and mature father-figure. But then, when he is old and nearing the end of his days, comes a new episode, quite different in its character. A fearful dragon, guarding a great treasure in an undergound cave in his kingdom, is disturbed from its long sleep. The monster flaps forth from its lair, wreaking devastation on the kingdom, even burning Beowulf’s great hall with its fiery breath. Beowulf summons up his strength and prepares for his last great battle, accompanied by his brave young kinsman Wiglaf. After two bouts, Beowulf has succeeded in inflicting mortal wounds on the dragon, when his mighty ancestral sword shatters in pieces. The monster unleashes its third attack, filling Beowulf with deadly poison. Rushing to the rescue, young Wiglaf helps Beowulf to finish off the monster and the dying hero gazes on the mighty corpse of the ‘Worm’ they have slain, exulting at how they have liberated the treasure it was guarding, for the benefit of his people. He declares Wiglaf worthy to succeed him to the kingdom, then dies. His sorrowing people place his body on a pyre and bury his ashes in a great barrow on a headland looking over the sea, ‘the finest vault that men could build’. Apart from recalling his manly deeds, they also remember how ‘of all kings’ he had been ‘the gentlest and most gracious of men, and kindest to his people’.
What is remarkable about this concluding episode is how the dragon clearly personifies death itself. Its first stirring from sleep to wreak devastation over Beowulf’s kingdom represents the physical effects of advancing age, and eventually Beowulf is forced to succumb to its irresistible power. But even as he dies he also knows that he has slain his fearful antagonist, thus winning the great treasure of life for his people. And he has done so with the aid of the young hero who, in assisting him to win this mighty victory, has shown himself worthy to succeed to the kingdom.
In this respect, the story of Beowulf, written by a Christian (as we can see from internal evidence in the poem), echoes the story of Christ, in showing a mighty hero who, in dying himself, at the same time overcomes death. But apart from a perfunctory reference to his ‘soul leaving his body to receive the reward of the just’, there is no further indication that, as a result, Beowulf himself ‘lives on’ in any more obvious personal sense. In essence his ending is not portrayed very differently from that 3000 years before of the great hero Gilgamesh who, having sought in vain for the secret of immortal life, dies of old age, physically worn out but mourned by his people as their greatest and wisest king. Indeed this may also recall just how unusual it is in the history of storytelling to see a story which ends with its hero’s death from old age. Infinitely more familiar are those two great archetypal endings which show the hero either ending up happily united with the heroine and ‘living happily ever after’, or dying ‘tragically’ and prematurely as a result of his ‘missing the mark’. And at this point we must consider just how the immense changes in consciousness which had come about in the preceding 1000 years had provided answers to that perennial puzzle: what happens to human beings when they die?
The orthodox Christian answer to this question was that, following Christ’s death and resurrection, everything was now different. According to the Christian creed, dating back to the year after Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire, after Christ’s crucifixion he had ‘descended into hell’ to confront the power of death. But on ‘the third day’ he had risen again, having conquered death, as a result of which every Christian could look forward to sharing in his resurrection to enjoy eternal life. Based on various of the reported teachings of Jesus himself, this belief had then been further refined. As each person died, their ‘soul’ – the non-physical essence of their personality – would face a divine judgement as to how they had lived on earth. If they were found to have lived well, according to the Christian way, they could look forward to being received into heaven, to enjoy eternal happiness with God. If they were found to have failed, or to have ‘missed the mark’, they faced ‘damnation’, doomed to be sent down to hell to face the horror of eternal punishment with the devil.
In fact there was nothing uniquely Christian about this idea. Behind it lay an archetypal model which went back into the mists of history. In ancient China, well over 1000 years earlier, there had already been a belief that when individuals died they faced a judgement as to how well they had lived in accordance with the ‘Mandate of Heaven’. If approved, they could live in the heavenly garden surrounding the palace of the gods, eating from the Peach Tree of Immortality. If they failed, they faced appropriate punishment in the underworld. The ancient Greeks envisaged a similar form of judgement, whereby those who had lived particularly heroically could share eternity in the Elysian Fields, while those who had been particularly wicked, like Sisyphus, faced eternal punishment in the kingdom of Hades. For the majority there was nothing but limbo, where the shades of the dead lived in an insubstantial twilight, only able to speak if some earthly visitor, such as Odysseus, was able to animate them by giving them human blood to drink (as if the dead can only be brought back briefly to a semblance of life when they are remembered by those still alive on earth). Very rarely there were also mortals, such as Hercules, whose performance on earth was so exceptionally heroic that, when they died, they were allowed to join the gods, to be numbered among the ‘immortals’.
According to the religious tradition of India, another form of ‘judgement’ awaited the dead in that, according to how they had lived, they could expect to be reincarnated in some other physical existence, either as a human being, higher or lower in status than their previous existence, or as some form of animal.20 Only those exceptional spirits who had reached complete ‘enlightenment’, that nirvana which marked the transcending of all earthly attachments, could hope for release from mortal existence altogether, in merging back into indivisible union with the World Soul.
In terms of the fundamental archetype underlying these various mind-pictures, we can see how they were constantly trying to reconcile two very different perspectives. On one hand it was only when mankind became separated from all other animals in emerging from unconscious unity with nature that this problem had arisen in the first place. Only then had individual human beings begun to develop that sense of their own separate existence, centred on the ego, which made them aware that one day this existence must come to an end. Yet the fundamental drive behind men’s religious impulse was to resolve that split between ego-consciousness and the selfless level of their psyche which still identified with the ‘One’. What the unconscious was trying to tell them, not least through the imagery of storytelling, was that living through the ‘darkness’ of the ego must lead eventually to death, and that only by transcending ego-consciousness was it possible to reconnect with the ‘light’ of that unity which is eternal and indestructible.
By this first view, therefore, human beings are merely fleeting embodiments of that universal spirit which lies behind all creation, like bubbles coming to the surface of a pool. With death the individuality of each bubble dissipates, but the pool it emerged from remains. This view is summed up in the instruction given to Buddhist monks in the words from the Tibetan Book of the Dead quoted at the head of this chapter:
‘Try to submerge yourself in that light, giving up all belief in a separate self and all attachment to the illusory ego. Recognise that the boundless Light of this true Reality is your own true self, and you shall be saved.’
On the other hand, so all-pervasive is the power of ego-consciousness and the sense that each human being enjoys a unique existence, that it has been difficult to shake off the hope that in some way death might not mark the extinction of the individual personality; and that some non-physical essence of each person, the ‘soul’, might still carry on after death. This was why those prehistoric tombs had contained food and other material possessions, to assist the dead when they crossed over into that mysterious ‘other world’ beyond the grave. This was why one religion after another had conceived of an ‘after-life’, where individual souls or spirits might live for eternity. And this became further refined by the idea that they would here be rewarded or punished according to how they had lived their lives on earth. This sprang from that archetypal pattern, coded into the unconscious, which tells us that to live by the ego must lead ultimately to destruction, whereas to live in accordance with the Self reconnects us with ‘the One’ which is eternal. Hence the idea in folklore that the hero or heroine who meet all the archetypal requirements which connect them to the Self will ‘live happily ever after’: because they are now identified with that ego-transcending part of them which lives forever.
In the eastern religions this sense that all life is ultimately one and indivisible had been expressed through the belief that, as each human being relinquishes its hold on life, so that indestructible substance takes on new bodily form through its ‘re-incarnation’ in another creature. But even here the power of ego-consciousness retained its hold, in that the soul which passes from one physical body to another was still viewed as possessing its own individual essence; unless or until that moment comes when it attains such complete consciousness that it can merge back into indistinguishable unity with the World Soul, the universal light.
How this great question was answered therefore lay ultimately in whether the answer was coming from the ego or the Self. And although the ruling consciousness now emerging in the West might have seemed to be offering its own unequivocal response, as we can see from two of the greatest stories arising from the centuries which followed the answer which emerged from the unconscious was not always so clear cut.
By the eleventh century, we can begin to speak of a ‘Christian Europe’, and the emergence of that civilisation we associate with the ‘Middle Ages’. At its centre, now acknowledged all over Europe as the supreme source of spiritual authority, stood the Papacy, still based on Rome. Its secular counterpart, at least in theory, was the ‘Holy Roman Empire’, centred on Germany and established since the crowning of Charlemagne as its first ‘emperor’ in 800. For the people of Europe, from kings and feudal lords to the humblest serf, the symbols and rituals of the Christian religion had come to provide a transcendent framework to every aspect of their lives, from birth and marriage to death and beyond. And in nothing was this more conspicuously made manifest than in those mighty buildings now beginning to soar hundreds of feet into the sky above the rooftops of Europe’s cities, the ‘Romanesque’, later ‘Gothic’ cathedrals, standing at the centre of their citizens’ consciousness as great symbolic embodiments of the inspiring totality of the Self.
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries we see the heyday of that greatest cycle of mediaeval storytelling, originally derived from British legend and set in an imaginary Britain of the dark ages, but developed to some of its highest literary expressions in France and Germany: the complex of stories centred round the life and reign of the fabulous King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. So rich was the imagery of chivalry and romance conjured up by these tales that they would continue to inspire poets, composers, painters and film-makers for centuries to come; not least through some of those subsidiary stories which grew out of the main narrative, such as the quest for the Holy Grail, the tragedy of Tristan and Isolde, the rebirth and redemption story of Parsifal. But the central story of the life of Arthur himself falls into three main stages. The first is the archetypal Rags to Riches story of Arthur’s initial emergence from obscurity, until he is established in his role as an idealised ‘Good King’. The second includes all the different stories centring on Camelot and that shining image of the Self, the Round Table, around which his legendary knights are drawn together, and from which they can then sally forth to perform their chivalric tasks, such as rescuing ‘damsels in distress’ or seeking the Grail. But the closing stage of the story shows Arthur’s kingdom beginning to decay and lose its unifying power. This includes the episodes describing how Arthur falls out irreparably with his most loved knight, Sir Lancelot, who has been locked in the long-standing love affair with Arthur’s Queen Guinivere which is eventually to end for both on a note of wistful tragedy. Before this, however, comes the strange episode which marks the end of Arthur’s own long, heroic life.
A shadow has intruded on the ageing king, that of his nephew Mordred, his name echoing that of death. In a premonitory fit of dread, Arthur had sought to preserve his kingdom by ordering that a group of children should be sent into exile on a ship, which is then wrecked. The only survivor of this wreck, unknown to Arthur, is Mordred, who grows up in secret until, now a man, he returns with a foreign army to seek vengeance. So successfully does Mordred win over the people that he is crowned king, forcing Arthur to retreat deep into the west of his island kingdom. In a final great battle, sometimes interpreted as the last stand of Celtic Britain against the advancing Saxon invaders. Arthur strikes down the usurper. But, just as Beowulf is mortally wounded in his victorious battle with the dragon, Arthur too is dealt a fatal wound. Just as Beowulf loses his great sword, so Arthur now orders the faithful Sir Bedevere to throw his mighty sword Excalibur into a western lake, where it is caught by an arm clothed in white samite and drawn down into the depths. Then in the mists across the lake comes a boat draped in deepest black, crewed by three weeping feminine figures. Arthur enters the boat and disappears from view into the mist and gathering darkness. The storytellers suppose that he passed from there into the mysterious Isle of Avalon, where it is eternal summer. But folklore also dictates that, when his nation again one day has need of its greatest hero, he will return.
The odd thing about this ending is that, although the story grows out of the heart of the Christian Middle Ages and is so full of Christian imagery, there should be so little that is overtly Christian about Arthur’s death. Certainly, archetypally, the closing episodes of his life provide echoes of the death of Beowulf. Both are great heroes who, when full of years, are confronted by a treacherous enemy representing death. Each in his last great battle is mortally wounded but at the same time wins the victory, overcoming his antagonist. At least in Beowulf’s case we know he is physically dead, as we see his ashes consumed on a funeral pyre. But Arthur simply passes from sight, merging into some new state of wholeness and light, accompanied by that shining threefold presence of the ‘feminine’. Whatever the nature of this blessed world he has passed into, it is not the orthodox Christian heaven. There is no sign of God, or angels, or judgement. And in this sense he might simply be taken to have merged mystically with the One. Yet it then appears this is not the end of Arthur’s story. He has seemingly survived in his full individual identity, to such effect that he may one day ‘awaken’, to return as redeemer of his nation: although not as a spiritual saviour but as the warlike hero he had been in life. As a compromise between ego and Self, it was a brilliantly fudged formula. The one thing it was not was a Christian answer to that perennial riddle.21
The story which did provide a Christian answer, more profoundly than any other, was the long poem written in the early years of the fourteenth century by a Florentine scholar, soldier, diplomat, politician and philosopher, Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy was one of the towering imaginative achievements of the Middle Ages. In three books, describing Dante’s journey down through Hell and up through Purgatory to Paradise, it is constructed as completely around the Rule of Three as any story in the world. Each book is divided into thirty-three cantos, plus one more as a prologue to the whole poem, making a hundred in all. His narrative famously begins with those words ‘Midway through the journey of this life I found myself in a dark wood where the way was lost’. Outwardly this referred back to the time in his own life when, in his mid-thirties, as one of the civic leaders of his city-state, he had become caught up in a violent political conflict which resulted in his expulsion from the city. Cast penniless into exile, his world seemed in ruins. But inwardly Dante was describing that ‘central crisis’, where a hero suddenly finds himself forced to set out from the ‘City of Destruction’ on a Quest for the innermost meaning of human existence.
At the start of the first book, the Inferno, Dante sees before him a great mountain, rising out of darkness into sunlight far above. He sets off to climb it, but finds his way barred in turn by three fierce animals, a leopard, a lion and a wolf. As he runs away, stumbling in his desperation to escape, he is confronted by an imposing figure who turns out to be Virgil, revered in the Middle Ages above all other pre-Christian writers. This ‘wise old man’, who is to be Dante’s guide through the first part of his journey, tells him that, if he wishes to escape from this savage place, he will have to take another road:
‘This beast [the ego] which makes you weep does not allow anyone to pass by her, but so entangles them that she kills them; and she has a nature so perverse and vicious that her craving appetite can never be satisfied, so that after feeding she is hungrier than before.’
Dante cannot hope to climb the mountain without first going down through all the nine circles of Hell which contain those shades condemned to eternal punishment for their sins on earth. Virgil leads him to a grim gateway, bearing the legend ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’. As they go through, his guide tells him:
‘“We are come to the place where, as I said, you would see the wretched people who have lost the good of their understanding” ... here sighs, cries and deep wailings resounded through the starless air, at first bringing tears to my eyes. Strange tongues, horrible outcries, words of pain, tones of anger, voices deep and hoarse ... made a tumult which echoes forever through that tainted air, like the whirlwind eddies of desert sand.’
They see queues of newly-arrived souls miserably waiting to be ferried across a black river into the underworld, and Virgil arranges for them to cross over. Before reaching the pit of Hell proper, they first pass through Limbo where, in meadows around a seven-walled, seven-gated castle, they meet ‘the virtuous pagans’, noble figures from pre-Christian and even post-Christian times, such as Aeneas, Orpheus, Socrates, Plato, Euclid, Heraclitus, Saladin and Averroes,22 who could not hope to enter heaven because they had not had the benefit of Christian salvation. But from here, as they enter the true Inferno, ‘a place where nothing shines’, Virgil begins to lead Dante down, level by level, through a carefully structured portrayal of all the gradations of human egotism.
As they travel downwards through an ever darker and more nightmarish landscape, with its fogs, marshes, beetling cliffs and stinking pools, each new circle represents states of separation from ‘wholeness’ more extreme than those which came before. The three animals Dante had encountered characterised the general nature of these sins. The topmost three circles, symbolised by the untamable leopard, contain those who have committed sins associated with ‘incontinence’, lack of self-control. The first, dedicated to those who have given way to lust, contains pairs of illicit lovers, such as Paolo and Francesca of Rimini. Trapped in marriage to a monster, she had sought refuge in a love affair with her brother-in-law until her husband murdered them both. But at least the sin of these couples had been based on a shared love. The second circle contains those who allowed their physical appetites to run to excess in greed or gluttony. But again this can at least imply a measure of sociability. The third contains those who had lived enslaved to material wealth, as hoarders or spendthrifts, and below them, in a fourth, transitional circle, are those whose lives had become consumed by anger. Here the states of egocentricity are becoming more obviously and aggressively turned against other people. Dante and Virgil then come to the gates of the infernal city, ‘lower Hell’, where three more circles, symbolised by the raging lion, contain those who had been guilty of crimes of violence: first those murderers and torturers who had been violent against others; then the suicides who had committed violence against themselves; finally those who had violated nature, as ‘sodomites’ or by living parasitically on the efforts of others through usury.
The last two circles, symbolised by the ravening wolf, contain those who lived by deceiving others. One includes a bewildering variety of sinners, from those whose deceit had lain in seduction or flattery to those whose offence had been hypocrisy or fraud. The lowest circle includes those guilty of betraying a fundamental loyalty or trust: those who had betrayed their kin or their country; those who had violated the trust of hospitality by betraying their guests; lastly those who had betrayed their lord. At this deepest part of Hell, Dante and Virgil are finally confronted by the terrifying figure of the Devil himself, a huge monster with three faces, each munching the shade of a particularly notorious traitor, Brutus and Cassius, the treacherous assassins of Caesar, and Judas, the betrayer of Christ. And at this point, when they begin to clamber down the Devil’s immense body, comes that dazzling stroke whereby, as they continue to descend ever deeper, they suddenly sense they are no longer moving downwards. Having reached the very centre of the earth, they are now climbing upwards: until, in the book’s closing lines, they glimpse, shining far above them, the light of the stars. Their hellish slog through the claustrophobic underworld of the ego is over. They are at the start of the next stage of their journey, at the foot of the towering mountain of Purgatory.
The next book, Purgatorio, is devoted to those who, although they had lived selfishly on earth, still had enough good in them or sense of remorse to hope for eventual salvation. The first two ‘terraces’ of the precipitous mountain contain the shades of those excommunicated by the Church, or who for some reason, such as sudden death, had not repented of their sins before dying. Then, through Peter’s Gate, Dante and Virgil come to the seven cornices inhabited by those who are painfully working off their indulgence in each of the seven deadly sins: pride, envy, anger, sloth, covetousness, gluttony, lust. Each is presided over by an angel representing the ‘light’ opposite to its particular form of egotism: humility, generosity of spirit, peace, zeal, acceptance, temperance, chastity. Higher and higher Dante mounts until he finds himself in a place of flowers, trees and running water, the garden of mankind’s innocence before the Fall, the earthly Paradise. Here an amazing pageant unfolds before him, and while he is gazing at it, transfixed, he realises his guide Virgil has silently departed. As he weeps at his loss, he realises he is now looking instead at the visionary beauty of Beatrice, the woman who has been the central inspiration of his life ever since their first childhood meeting in Florence, personifying his anima, the carrier of his soul. It is she who, unknown to him, has arranged from on high that he can make this journey, and that for the first part he should be accompanied by Virgil, representing spiritual wisdom on earth. But now Dante is ready for the next stage, which begins when, enlightened by all he has seen, he is finally overwhelmed by a sense of his own unworthiness. He faints at the horror of his past blindness and inadequacy, but regains consciousness to find he is being dragged across Lethe, the river of Forgetfulness, which blots out all his unhappy recollections. Beatrice leads him past the Tree of Knowledge, which bursts into blossom, he drinks of the waters of Good Remembrance and now, purged and filled with a sense of heavenly peace, he feels reborn, ‘pure and prepared to leap up to the stars’. The second book thus ends on the same starry image as the first. He is ready for his anima to lead him on to the final stage.
The third book, the Paradiso, begins with a mystical vision as Dante sees Beatrice gazing into the light of the sun, hears the music of the heavenly spheres, finds himself surrounded by a shimmering sea of light and flame and realises that they have floated weightless above the earth. They rise into the first of nine heavens, each presided over by one of the nine orders of angelic beings. The first heaven, that of the Moon, is guarded by the lowest order of angels, those who watch over each individual through life. The second, that of Mercury, is guarded by the archangels who protect whole nations and bring tidings of great import to mankind, as Gabriel brought news to Mary that she was to give birth to Jesus. Here Dante talks to the Emperor Justinian, as an ideal Christian ruler and lawgiver. This takes them on to the third heaven, that of Venus, guarded by the beings known as ‘Principalities’, who preside over just and well-ordered earthly government. The fourth heaven, that of the Sun, is guarded by the ‘Powers’, images of divine power in combating the powers of darkness. Here Dante sees a dazzling array of philosophers, moral teachers, wise men and saints, from Thomas Aquinas to Solomon. The fifth heaven, Mars, guarded by the ‘Virtues’, the angelic images of strength and fortitude, is peopled by righteous warrior-leaders, from Joshua to Charlemagne. The sixth heaven, Jupiter, guarded by ‘Dominions’ representing justice and the ultimate dominion of God over the world, includes King David and the first Christian Emperor Constantine. The seventh, Saturn, guarded by ‘Thrones’, represents divine steadfastness and self-discipline, personified in saintly contemplatives such as Benedict, founder of Christian monasticism.
Here, appropriately, Saturn marks the end of one sequence and the beginning of another, as Dante and Beatrice ascend a Celestial Ladder to the final two heavens. The previous five have represented different aspects of power, justice and self-discipline, the masculine virtues. Now at last we come to the feminine values, beginning in the eighth heaven, that of the fixed stars guarded by Cherubim, representing Divine Wisdom. Here Dante is quizzed by St Peter, St James and John on the meaning of the three supreme Christian virtues, Faith, Hope and Love. When they ascend to the ninth heaven, guarded by Seraphim, the highest angelic order, representing Divine Love, this turns out to be the prelude to their ascent onto yet another level, incomparably different from all those which have preceded it. First they see a point of intense light, surrounded by nine concentric rings, which Beatrice explains is a vision of God, surrounded by the nine orders of angels. Dante sees her beauty now so transfigured that it is beyond his powers to describe, and bathed in such light that he is temporarily blinded. She tells him they have come into the Empyrean and, as he recovers his sight, he sees rising above them a great shining mystical rose. Here, in the snow-white petals of this mighty symbol of heavenly totality are tier upon tier of the souls of the blessed, bathed in peace and love. Dante turns to Beatrice for an explanation, to find she has gone and been replaced by a figure who looks on him with immense benevolence. It is St Bernard, his third and final guide, who shows him Beatrice now enthroned in the rose, crowned in glory, while higher up sits the Queen of Heaven herself, the Virgin Mary, attended by countless angels.
Dante is then confronted with a final astonishing vision: three spheres of radiant light, all distinct, but all occupying the same space: an emblem of the Trinity and of that number which is the archetype of growth and transformation. While he is gazing at it, trying to puzzle out with his intellect how the three spheres can be separate yet one, he suddenly feels he is able to let go. He no longer has any separate will or mind or existence. Dante feels his entire being taken over, by the power of a love so total that it is beyond all comprehension.
‘As a wheel moves smoothly, free from jars,
My will and my desire were turned by love.
The love that moves the sun and the other stars.’
So the story ends, on this breathtaking image in which Dante sees love as the power which ultimately gives purpose, meaning and connection to everything in the universe. What is particularly striking about this vision is that the ‘love that moves the sun and the other stars’ is seen not just as a force which can bind animate creatures together, but as the all-uniting power which shapes and impels all inanimate matter as well. For Dante, at the end of his mighty inner journey, imagines his own separate existence finally dissolving into the light of that single mind which called everything into being in the first place. He is portraying the entire universe as a just a single great thought, based on unimaginable love. In all storytelling it is the supreme example of a hero finally merging into the One.
Immeasurably remote though it now seems to us, the world-picture developed by mediaeval Christendom was one of the most remarkable achievements of the human imagination. For the peoples of Christian Europe it provided a psychological framework which could explain and give meaning to the entire way in which they viewed their existence. The picture of the world it presented was made up of two separate but interfused dimensions, one material, the other spiritual. On the outward, worldly plane, the earth was the centre of the universe. Europe stood at its centre. Its secular society, with its feudal system, was built around a hierarchy which gave each person an allotted place, owing loyalty to their lord and their king (even, in parts of Europe, to that ghostly echo of a long-vanished political unity, the ‘Holy Roman Emperor’). But this outward world was subordinate to the unseen eternal dimension which was viewed as the true reality. Although this was visibly represented by the Church, with its ranks of priests, monks and bishops rising to the Pope at its head, these were mere earthly intermediaries for the heavenly hierarchy of saints and angels, centred on the power which had created the universe and which ruled over all earthly existence. In itself such a power might have seemed so immense as to be unimaginable. Yet it had become possible for people to relate to it inwardly through the humanising of God in the figure of Christ himself, representing a projection of human nature in its most perfect state. The purpose of prayer and Christian ritual was to dissolve the barrier between ego and Self, to bring people into contact with that level of their psyche which transcended the imperfect ego, thus linking them back to the unseen totality.
So all-embracing was this ‘Christian myth’ that it could give a sense of significance to every aspect of individual and collective life. And not the least reflection of its power was the way, for hundreds of years, the chief visual self-expression of European civilisation, alongside its churches and cathedrals, was centred on a particular set of images, endlessly painted, sculpted and depicted in stained-glass, the purpose of which was constantly to focus people’s minds on this other dimension to their lives. These stylised icons of the crucified Christ and the Mother and Child made no attempt to relate to the imperfect, everyday, material world. They were windows onto that eternal plane of perfection which was regarded as the only true reality.
One of the earliest signs of how all this was to change began to appear at the very time Dante was writing his Divine Comedy. In the paintings of a fellow Florentine who was his almost exact contemporary, we see Western art at last bursting out of that two-dimensional iconographic frame which had constrained it for so long as, with a mighty leap of the imagination, Giotto brought the central events of the Christian story out into the visible, material world: a world of sky and hills, trees and buildings, peopled by real three-dimensional human beings showing real human emotions. Just when the power of that all-unifying world-picture was reaching its zenith in Dante’s vision, we see the beginnings of another great shift in consciousness which was eventually to reshape the human world more fundamentally than anything which had come before.
The disintegration of the mediaeval world-image was to be a centuries-long process. But an early reflection of it was the way in which, in the two centuries following Giotto, artists took the subject matter of their paintings ever further out into the earthly world. Their pictures remained centred on Christian imagery. But as artists such as Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, Ucello and Jan van Eyck developed an ever greater ‘realism’ in the way they portrayed the physical world, a profound shift was taking place in where that ‘reality’ was perceived to lie. Their art was still subordinated to a vision of heavenly perfection. Through images of Christ’s suffering on the cross which represented humanity’s struggle to escape the imperfections of the ego, it was still imbued with the transcendent values of the Self. But the spiritual dimension was now coming to be expressed through an ever more life-like recreation of the world of physical appearances. And, as they steadily widened the range of their subject matter in painting landscapes, secular portraits and even scenes from classical mythology, it was no longer necessary that their sources of inspiration should be explicitly Christian at all.
Equally significant was the way this shift in consciousness was reflected in architecture. Nothing had more majestically expressed the transcendent world-view of the Christian Middle Ages than its great cathedrals, with their dark, mysterious interiors leading up towards the central focus of the high altar, their luminous stained-glass windows, their spires and towers soaring heavenwards. Their purpose, reinforced by music, incense and the profusion of holy images, was to lead worshippers into the presence of an unearthly spiritual mystery. But quite suddenly, around the end of the fifteenth century, the Gothic style which had expressed this all but vanished from view. Taking conscious inspiration from the pre-Christian civilisation of Greece and Rome, the dominant buildings of the new age, like St Peter’s, Rome, sought, like the temples of the ancient world, to express perfection in more earthly form, as ideal images based on the language of symmetry, harmony and intellectual order.
There is no better clue to the new spirit underlying the Renaissance than the great staircase designed by Piero della Francesca for the palace of the Duke of Urbino in the mid-fifteenth century. The steps are so arranged that it is impossible to descend them except in the most stately and dignified fashion. Merely to walk down a set of stairs gives a sense of elevation and nobility. One cannot do so without having to ‘walk tall’. The Renaissance was thus inspired by a vision of man being drawn up to his fullest stature, realising the highest potential of which he was capable: as we see in the lofty view of humanity conveyed by those grave and luminous figures in Piero’s own paintings. It was in this sense that Kenneth Clark identified the essence of the Renaissance in the words of Plato’s Protagoras: ‘man is the measure of all things’. It was this vision of human nature at its most ideal, with all darkness and deformity purged away, which inspired the artists of the later Renaissance, such as Leonardo and Michelangelo. It was a new vision of the perfection of the Self. But it was far removed from that world-view of the Middle Ages in the time of Dante only 200 years before, with its image of a fallen humanity which could only hope to be made perfect on the plane of eternity.
A further great hole was punched in the frame of that mediaeval world-picture by the great voyages of exploration at the end of the fifteenth century, which opened up the realisation that whole ‘new worlds’ lay beyond the confines of Christian Europe, above all those vast unknown continents across the Atlantic. But just as important as these discoveries themselves was that, in order to make them, men were coming to rely on a new perception of what constituted ‘reality’, as something which lay in the outward, physical world. In doing so, they were learning to reject that central assumption of the mediaeval world-picture that the earth was flat in favour of a new, empirical realisation that it was round.
Another significant chunk of the unified world-picture slipped away when, all over northern Europe in the first half of the sixteenth century, men challenged the authority of the Papacy to rule over Western Christendom. No longer were they prepared just blindly to accept the rule of a system which had become only too obviously worldly and corrupt. Like Luther when he declared ‘here I stand, I can say no other’, they had found a new source of authority in their own judgement, as they looked anew at the image of Jesus presented in the Bible, the book on which Christianity rested. Possessed by this new vision of the Self, they set about destroying all those outward trappings which had been designed to convey religion as the gateway to an other-worldly spiritual dimension. In their newfound zeal, they tore down statutes of the saints and images of the Virgin, poured contempt on the belief in Purgatory, and lectured bemused worshippers that unless they were among the ‘elect’, chosen by God, they faced eternal damnation. But as they did so they became all too easily inflated by that self-righteousness which arises from confusing ego with Self, potentially the most deadly form of egotism of all.
Yet another shock came from the discovery of the later sixteenth century, with the aid of new scientific inventions such as the telescope, that the earth did not stand at the centre of the universe. Again, this derived from the growing perception that true ‘reality’ could only be established through understanding the structures of the outward, physical world. But the way this shook the foundations of Western man’s sense of identity was caught by one of the most intelligent thinkers of the early seventeenth century, John Donne:
‘And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out;
The sun is lost; and th’earth; and no man’s wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world’s spent,
When in the planets and the firmament,
They seek so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.’23
When Donne spoke of how ‘all coherence’ had been lost, what he was really talking about was the disintegration of that mediaeval world-picture which had seemed to explain so perfectly how everything fitted together with everything else, in that unified and universal image which was unconsciously a projection of the totality of the Self. But just when Donne was lamenting how, thanks to the ‘new philosophy’. everything seemed to be falling apart, a wholly new vision of that totality had lately been emerging through the imagination of one of Donne’s contemporaries and fellow-countrymen. Originally it had been the visual arts which first expressed the disintegration of that mediaeval world-view, while at the same time conjuring up a new, more earthly vision of the Self. Now the torch of achieving a new synthesis passed to a different art-form, literature: most notably through the works of just one writer, Shakespeare.
What above all made Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies unique was how they sprung from a vision of the world which was so completely unified. From his sense of the fundamental patterns governing human behaviour down to the unerringly exact observation of his individual images, the essence of his greatness lay in his ability to portray the world as it is, unclouded by any subjective notion of how it might be. ‘Life with Shakespeare’ as the writer Christopher Hollis put it, ‘is not a debate on principles. The principles are settled. Life is the pageant of men living up to them or failing to live up to them.’ To Shakespeare those principles were the outward expression of a living framework of order which equally encompassed personal morality, the social order and the natural order of the universe, all making up a harmonious whole which can only be flouted at ultimately fatal risk. And the reason he was able to see the world so clearly was because, more than any other author, he was so instinctively at one with the values of the Self.
In that famous speech of Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare showed that he had just as comprehensive a sense of a universal order as anything conceived in the Middle Ages.
‘The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre,
Observe degree, priority and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office and custom in all line of order ...’
The same kind of order governed the affairs of mankind. Yet when its balance becomes disturbed, ‘when the planets in evil mixture to disorder wander’, then:
‘What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,
What raging of the sea, shaking of earth,
Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states.’
When human affairs thus become disintegrated, nothing reflects this more clearly than the way in which each component part rebels against the whole: that unleashing of the power of individual and collective egotism which Shakespeare so vividly portrays in each of his tragedies:
‘Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows! Each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy ...’
‘Every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite,
And appetite, an universal wolf ...
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.’
Nowhere else in his plays does Shakespeare so explicitly summarise the fundamental world-view which underlies them all. Ulysses’s speech sets out that cosmic polarity between the Self and the ego which informs almost every line Shakespeare wrote, and which no other writer has ever explored with such penetrating depth. And he did so, not with the aid of some external, projected model of the kind which had provided the inspiration of the Middle Ages, but because, more than any other storyteller, his conscious mind was so instinctively at one with the objective unconscious within him: that ‘Secret’ which ‘sits in the middle and knows’.24
In this respect Shakespeare’s plays demonstrate how, as it emerged from the constraints of the mediaeval world-picture, it was possible for the consciousness of Western man to reach a depth of psychological understanding which hitherto would have been impossible. In Shakespeare’s perception of human nature, the fourfold components of totality, strength, mind, heart and soul, could still be held in perfect balance. But within 20 years of his death the French philosopher Descartes gave an early indication of the way the consciousness of Western man was now moving when he proclaimed ‘I think, therefore I am’. He did not say, as the Middle Ages might have had it, ‘God thinks, therefore I am’. For Descartes, the greatest riddle in human nature was to unravel the distinction between body and mind. For him the heart and the soul had begun to drop out of the picture. As Western civilisation moved still further from the Middle Ages, consciousness centred on the ego was now beginning to split off from the unconscious in a way which was wholly new.
In the later seventeenth century Newton’s discovery of the law of gravitation paved the way for a new mental image of the universe, whereby it could be seen as essentially an immense physical mechanism which was open to understanding by the human mind because its workings were governed by wholly consistent physical laws. Newton himself was deeply religious and for him this vision of a perfectly-ordered universe was merely confirmation that it must be the creation of a supernatural mind. The more his own intelligence came to understand how physical creation fitted together, the more he was awed by its unity (‘nature’, as he put it ‘is very consonant and conformable with itself’). Yet, equally, the more he discovered, the more he sensed just how little of the workings of the physical universe the human mind could ever hope to understand. As he also put it in a famous passage:
‘I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.’
By the mid-eighteenth century, however, we see a world in which even this sense of awe before an immense mystery has begun to vanish. ‘Above the line’ we see a civilisation bathed in the confident light of a consciousness which is based above all on the ordering function of the human mind. Its architecture is harmonious and orderly, its painting and literature likewise. When it observes nature it does so by means of classification and taxonomy. Its thinkers imagine there is no problem confronting mankind, from the making of political constitutions to increasing the productivity of agriculture, which cannot be resolved by use of the human intellect to perceive the laws and principles which lie behind it. So bright now is the ‘light of reason’ that the remnants of that old mediaeval sense of a transcendent, supernatural dimension to human existence are beginning to fade away into little more than high-minded sentimentality. The spirit ruling this world has come to be seen as no more than a ‘benevolent Deity’. Yet when we look at this ‘age of enlightenment’ in terms of its storytelling, we see how much of what constitutes psychic totality had now dropped out of view.
It was revealing that such a characteristic plot of stories in the eighteenth century was the ‘Voyage and Return’, describing the adventures of travellers such as Gulliver, Robinson Crusoe, Candide, Rasselas and the Ancient Mariner venturing into unknown realms. This was not just because the eighteenth century, with its voyages into the uncharted southern hemisphere, was one of the great ages of European exploration in the outward, physical world. The essence of this type of story is that it shows someone living in a state of limited consciousness suddenly falling through the floor into some hidden realm which contains a whole dimension of existence of which they were previously unaware. The appearance of this plot (as in the novels of Kafka, Evelyn Waugh or J. D. Salinger) is always a sign that consciousness has become dangerously one-sided and split off from the unconscious. And nothing is more striking about eighteenth-century storytelling than the extent to which it manages to diminish or shut out the dark side of human nature. The Overcoming the Monster plot in its more grotesque expressions virtually drops out of western storytelling (except occasionally in pastiche form, as in the sea-monster which appears in Mozart’s opera Idomeneo). The eighteenth century was much more naturally at home with the cosy, optimistic world of comedy. So ill at ease was it with the darker spirit of Tragedy that attempts were even made to rewrite the tragedies of Shakespeare to give them happy endings, such as the famous reworking of King Lear by Nahum Tate, defended by Dr Johnson, which showed Lear and Cordelia surviving to take a final curtain.
Beneath the harmoniously ordered surface of this civilisation, however, behind the elegant crescents of Bath, the calmly rational prose of the French Encyclopaedists, the dancers circling to a stately minuet beneath the chandeliers of a Viennese ballroom, the well-bred pleasure those English aristocrats took in going on their ‘Grand Tours’ of the classical sites of Italy, subterranean energies were stirring which were about to unleash an even greater earthquake in the collective psyche of the western world than anything seen so far.
The theme of this chapter has been the most obvious of the ways in which, since far back into prehistory, human beings have tried to reconcile the psychic split which arose from the moment they began emerging from a state of nature. Its central importance to human civilisation could be seen in how its symbolic structures dominated the settlements of almost every culture in the world, from the cathedrals of Europe to the ziggurats and minarets of the Middle East, from the pagodas of Asia to the carved totems of North America.
Closely allied to religion, however, as these structures showed, was that other chief means whereby human beings had used imagination to connect their conscious lives with the ego-transcending realm of the unconscious: through the power of art.
During the Middle Ages the art form which most dramatically expressed this desire for re-connection to the Self was architecture, in those Gothic cathedrals. But over the centuries which followed the central focus of that imaginative effort had moved at different times from one art form to another. As the European imagination broke out from its mediaeval frame, it initially found its most complete psychological expression in the new styles of painting which produced the glories of the fifteenth and early sixteenth-century Renaissance. By the early seventeenth century, the focus had moved to literature acted out on a stage. It was the plays of Shakespeare which now showed the greatest ability to penetrate to the objective level of the human psyche (although the isolated genius of Rembrandt, a little later, matched his depth of insight). By the eighteenth century, literature and painting were no longer capable of reaching such psychological and spiritual depths. The form which now most profoundly conveyed the power of the Western imagination to express psychic totality was music. In the age first of Bach and Handel, then of Haydn and Mozart, finally of Beethoven and Schubert, it was music, the most inward and abstract of all the arts, which most completely expressed that power by which great art harmonises consciousness with the Self. And no composer was more consciously aware of the significance of this than the towering figure who stood at the end of this period when, psychologically, music stood unrivalled among the arts. In Beethoven’s own words:
‘like all the arts music is founded on the exalted symbols of the moral sense; all true invention is a moral progress. To submit to its inscrutable laws, and by means of these laws to tame and guide one’s own mind, so that the manifestations of art may pour out: this is the isolating principle of art ... so art always represents the divine, and the relationship of men towards art is religion: what we obtain through art comes from God ... thus every genuine product of art is independent, more powerful than the artist himself ... connected with men only inasmuch as it bears witness to the divine of which they are a medium. Music relates the spirit to harmony.’25
In fact, at a less rarified level, the same principle governed those more popular forms of art which had entertained and uplifted the great mass of ordinary people for thousands of years, from the songs and dances associated with all the world’s rich traditions of folk music to the skills of the popular storytellers.26 It is no accident that so much of this book has been taken up with discussing stories derived from folk tales, those anonymous products of the collective imagination of mankind whose origins are so mysterious that we can usually only track them down to the forms in which they were first collected. By the time at the end of the seventeenth century when the Frenchman Charles Perrault first came to publish versions of such folk tales as Sleeping Beauty, Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard and Cinderella,27 or when the Grimm brothers produced their collection of German folk tales in the early nineteenth century, many centuries had probably elapsed since most of these stories had first begun to evolve, to be passed on by oral retelling through many generations.
In psychological terms these tales provide as perfect a reflection of the underlying archetypes of storytelling as anything we find in more self-consciously sophisticated forms of literature, which is why in this book we have returned to such examples as Cinderella or Jack and the Beanstalk again and again. There is nothing overtly religious or ‘Christian’ about these stories (indeed variations of them are found in cultures all over the world). But they can be seen to reflect the same fundamental picture of human nature as that which underlies Christianity or other religions, because they spring so directly from the same archetypal roots. Just as surely as we see expressed through the religious impulse in mankind, they reflect the patterns whereby humanity can transcend the limitations of the ego to make contact with the Self. In that respect the folk tales which were so important to the ‘below the line’ culture of mediaeval and post-mediaeval Europe were as much part of the psychological framework which helped connect people to the values of the Self as religion itself.
In the centuries following the Middle Ages, as European civilisation began to discover a quite different basis on which to look at the world, the imaginative and cultural framework created to provide this sense of unity in people’s lives had begun subtly to disintegrate. For a long time the outward signs of this might not have seemed too obvious. But towards the end of the eighteenth century three developments coincided which were to mark the onset of a wholly new phase in the psychic development of mankind.
The first stemmed from all those advances in scientific knowledge and technological skill which were bringing about the industrial revolution. It is hard to exaggerate the psychological impact of the change this was to bring about in Western civilisation, as it began to become ever more dependent on the machine. The new machines, combining unprecedented power with the rigid repetitive patterns of mechanical order, helped to reinforce the masculine element in the collective psyche like nothing in human experience. They provided the means whereby civilisation could amass unheard of new wealth, reshaping the world with great new cities, joined together by such triumphs of nineteenth-century engineering as the railways, steam trains, steamships, great metal bridges. The effect of all this was immense, not least because it created the sense that men were now as never before emerging from their old dependence on nature to become masters of the world around them, controlling it to their own purposes. This was reinforced by that radical new mind-picture, first put forward by Erasmus Darwin and others before the end of the eighteenth century, which showed how life on earth had evolved over millions of years, from lower forms of life to higher, until it culminated in Homo sapiens. All this helped build up what over the next 100 years was, ‘above the line’, to be seen as the new ‘religion of progress’, portraying the entire history of the world as a long and painful upward climb from darkness into light, of which nineteenth-century man, with all his newfound power and mental ingenuity, was the crowning achievement.
But ‘below the line’ this triumphant onward march of human consciousness cast a long shadow. As people were drawn off the land in their millions to crowd into the cities and factories, many were forced to live out their lives in surroundings more oppressive and dehumanised than anything experienced by human beings before. They were becoming cut off from the living rhythms of nature in a way that was entirely new. And that ingenuity which was creating the new machines and new wealth was also creating new weapons of mass-destruction which would eventually exact a terrible price.
A second, more specific break with the past at the end of the eighteenth century was exemplified in the tumultuous events of the French Revolution. More self-consciously than any generation before them, the French revolutionaries saw themselves as launching a wholly new era in the life of mankind, putting behind them all the darkness and superstition of the past. They were determined to tear down not just the monarchy and the social hierarchy which had ruled France since far back into the Middle Ages, but also the entire legacy of the Christian religion. Their revolution was seen as marking a final victory for that spirit of rationalism which had found expression in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The idea of a transcendent God was to be replaced by a new ‘Supreme Being’, the ‘Goddess of Reason’: a glorified projection of the power of human consciousness. And nothing better symbolised this triumph for the ordering function of the human brain than the desire of the new revolutionary rulers to force the people of France to live in a new mental universe. They were to have a new calendar, replacing the dating of years from the birth of Christ with a new system which began with 1792 as ‘Year One’ of the Revolution. There were to be new names for their months; a new decimal week, replacing the Babylonian week of seven 24-hour days with one of 10 days, each divided into 10 hours; a new decimal currency. Above all they were to have a new system of weights and measures. The confusion of old traditional measures was to be replaced by a perfectly rational system in which all weights and measures would be defined in terms of the new ‘metre’, precisely equivalent to one ten-millionth of a quarter of the circumference of the earth, In 1799, after two leading French savants had spent seven years meticulously measuring every inch of the distance between Dunkirk and Barcelona, to establish the exact length of this new standard, a huge crowd assembled in Paris to see the unveiling of the platinum bar which was to define the length of the metre for all time. It was the most holy object of the Revolution: the central symbol of how the world had been made new.
But again, to all this triumphant celebration of human consciousness there was a dark underside. For the privilege of living in this new era of liberty and equality, the people of France paid in a sea of blood, starting with the heady spectacle of thousands of aristocrats being sent to the guillotine, ending in the deaths of millions on the battlefields of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. When the churches of France were rededicated as ‘Temples of Reason’, the role of the ‘Goddess’ was more than once acted out by a local prostitute, paraded in triumph through the streets before being enthroned on the high altar of the cathedral. So mad was the new revolutionary calendar that within only a year or two it had been shame-facedly abandoned. As for the hubris which inspired that sacred symbol of the revolutionaries’ brave new world, the platinum metre, it was somehow appropriate that one of the two savants employed to ensure that it precisely corresponded to that fraction of the earth’s circumference had secretly discovered that his sums did not add up, provoking him to a nervous breakdown. Rather than admit the truth, he falsified his figures: with the result that the strip of metal defining what is still to this day the metre’s length all over the world, is a fraction of a millimetre short of what it should be. The entire metric system, symbol of the power of human reason to make the world anew, is based on a tiny but symbolic lie.28
The third fundamental break with the past taking place towards the end of the eighteenth century was in important respects related to the other two. The extraordinary drama of the French Revolution had sent a psychic shock wave through Europe, the repercussions of which ran much wider and deeper than just the world of politics. As William Wordsworth wrote in his famous lines remembering the euphoric mood of that revolutionary time:
‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!’
A generation later, lecturing in On the Living Poets (1818), William Hazlitt recalled how:
‘There was a mighty ferment in the heads of statesmen and poets, kings and people. According to the prevailing notions, all was to be natural and new. Nothing that was established was to be tolerated ... authority ... elegance or arrangement were hooted out of countenance ... everyone did that which was good in his own eyes ... the licentiousness grew extreme ... it was a time of promise, a renewal of the world.’
One of the poets about whom Hazlitt was writing, Wordsworth himself, had written in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution of how:
‘A multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and ... to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency ... the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves. The invaluable works of our older writers ... are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories.’29
Nothing indeed was more expressive of Hazlitt’s ‘mighty ferment’ than that great fever which had already begun to sweep through the artistic imagination of Europe and that was to be associated with all the dreams, delusions and excesses we associate with the phenomenon known as Romanticism. And nowhere was this upheaval more evident, as we have already seen, than in the shift which was taking place around that time in the psychic centre of gravity from which writers imagined stories. It is here we can see more clearly reflected than anywhere else how what was happening in Western civilisation was a new kind of split developing between the ego and the Self. As all the cultural framework of beliefs and customs which provided people with a spiritual and mental centre to their lives was being dismantled, what was emerging was storytelling of a kind which had never been seen before.
The ego was slipping its leash. It was the beginning of that new phase in the psychic evolution of mankind with which we are still living two centuries later.