, a ‘goat’. The tragic figure is the ‘scapegoat’ whose death purges the community of darkness, so that light and wholeness can be restored.1. Reznikoff, Iegor, and Dauvois, Michel (1988), Bulletin de la Societe Prehistorique Francaise (85,238-246). Their discovery was subsequently confirmed by study of other cave complexes (cf. Devereux, Paul, and Richardson, Tony (2001), Stone Age Soundtracks: The Acoustic Archaeology of Ancient Sites, (Vega)).
2. Although it was long supposed that the chief alignment of Stonehenge was with the rising of the sun at the summer solstice (hence those familiar Druidical and ‘hippy’ gatherings on midsummer morning), this assumption has lately been dramatically challenged by the studies of Professor John North (recorded in Stonehenge: Neolithic Man And The Cosmos, HarperCollins, London, 1997). These convincingly show that the alignment of the stones corresponds not to the summer solstice but much more precisely to the setting of the sun on the year’s shortest day. Thus, for its Neolithic architects, the purpose of Stonehenge was to provide their own equivalent of all those familiar archetypal festivals, such as the Roman Saturnalia and our own Christmas, which celebrate that lowest point of the year when nature ‘dies and is reborn’.
3. See The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype by Erich Neumann (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1955), particularly the chapter on ‘The Primordial Goddess’.
4. It was the Sumerian builders of the first cities in Mesopotamia who first gave the names of their gods to the five planets nearest to earth. These were later translated into their Greek and Roman equivalents with the names we still give them today: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The Mesopotamians particularly believed there was an intimate connection between the dispositions of heavenly bodies and events on earth, and that the spirits embodied in planets, stars, comets, sun and moon could not only influence earthly events but foretell what was going to happen in the future. It was they who divided the sky into the 12 signs of the Zodiac, thus establishing that link between the Zodiac and astrology which persists in popular folklore to this day. So preoccupied were they with astronomical observation that it was they who divided the lunar month into four weeks of seven days, each day into 24 hours of 60 minutes, and the circumference of the horizon (or a circle) into 360 degrees.
5. At this stage of human development, the exercise of spiritual and secular power was still very much conjoined. One ritual purpose of the ziggurats, we know from Herodotus and other authors, was to enable a priest-king to engage in sacred sexual intercourse on the top, or a priestess to enact the same. This was the hieros gamos or ‘holy marriage’, symbolising the reunion of heaven and earth, masculine and feminine, consciousness and the unconscious.
6. Even at the end of the twentieth century an old Kalahari bushman could be filmed for television explaining how ritual dance was so important to his people because ‘our dancing makes the ancestors happy, which in turn makes God happy. So our dancing makes a link between us, our ancestors and our God’. (Roy Sesana, filmed in 1997, shown in 2002 as part of The Last Dance of the Bushmen, made for the BBC by James Smith).
7. Apollo was also god of music, which unites life-energy and emotion with order; of healing, the restoration to physical health or ‘wholeness’; and of prophecy and oracles, the means whereby rational consciousness can divine from the irrational ‘underworld’ what is to happen in the future.
8. This is an example of how the meaning of symbolism can sometimes be interpreted only by seeing it in context. The blindness of Polyphemus, after Odysseus has rammed a red-hot stake into his single eye, stands for the opposite of the self-inflicted blindness of Oedipus, when he gouges out his own eyes. Oedipus’s outer blindness reflects his attainment of inner vision, in parallel to the blindness of the wise Teiresias. Polyphemus’s blindness acts merely to confirm the lack of vision he has already shown in being outwitted by Odysseus.
9. In this way Hermes represented the act or process of intuition, the intuitive ‘flash’ which gives consciousness a glimpse of that which has been unconscious (it was this ‘quicksilver’ property which led the Romans to use their version of his name to describe the metal Mercury). But he did not represent that deeper state of understanding which the intuitive link with the unconscious can lead to. This was reserved for Athene in her role as goddess of wisdom. This is why both of them can appear in the same story, as they do to Perseus and Odysseus, because what they stand for is subtly different.
10. It is no accident that the two gods we see most often in their dark, negative aspects are Hera and Poseidon, because they then represent those key archetypal figures, the ‘Dark Mother’ and the ‘Dark Father’. But of course each can also appear in a light aspect: Hera when she plays a positive role as loving wife and mother; Poseidon when we see him in his ‘above the line’ role as sea god, benignly presiding over ‘calm seas and prosperous voyages’. It is only when he assumes his ‘below the surface’ role that we see him as the angry ‘Dark Father’, whether he is sending storms at sea or creating monsters.
11. Although even he was part of a trinity, the Supreme Triad. This included his predecessor, the Heavenly Master of the First Origin, and the Heavenly Master of the Dawn of Jade of the Golden Door who would one day succeed him, so that the three gods represented past, present and future.
12. As an expression of this new phase in the evolution of human consciousness, the parallels between east and west are particularly striking since culturally they were wholly independent of each other. To Heraclitus, living in Asia Minor around 500 BC, there was a supreme unity, the One, which he also called ‘God’, but made up from the reconciliation of all opposites. ‘All things emerge from the One and the One emerges out of all things.’ Only ‘the One’ is ultimately real. All oppositions or separate forms of existence to which it gives rise are by definition less real: just as in India at the same time the Hindus were coming to see the world of maya, governed by the interplay of opposites, as illusion. At much the same time, in China, Lao Tzu was writing in similar vein that ‘the myriad creatures are only alive by virtue of the One’; ‘all the myriad creatures in the world are born from Something, and Something from Nothing’, and ‘the Tao begets One, one begets two, two begets three; three begets all the myriad creatures’. Lao Tzu also observed the tendency of all imbalances to produce a contrary impulse which eventually leads to an imbalance in the opposite direction, echoing Heraclitus’s law of enantiodromia, whereby everything in the created world has a tendency to ‘run about into its opposite’. This is the pattern which two thousand years later Hegel was to identify as the ‘dialectic’, whereby ‘thesis’ produces ‘antithesis’ which leads to ‘synthesis’. But from the way in which this pattern appears in storytelling we can see it is an archetypal response by the human unconscious to that innate tendency of ego-consciousness to perceive the world in terms of opposites which inevitably swing between extremes before finding a point of balance.
13. The archetypal role of the feminine remains vestigially present in this story, in the part played, as a symbolic figure helping the Israelites on towards their goal, by ‘Rahab the harlot’. Betraying her own people, she assists the Israelites when they are besieging the city of Jericho, by letting down a rope from its walls. But Rahab represents the feminine in very much an ‘inferior’ guise. Her walk-on part as a traitrous prostitute hardly equates to the inspiring central roles played in Greek myth by figures such as Athene or Ariadne; and her part in the story is not even crucial to its outcome. What wins the victory for Joshua’s followers is not her betrayal but the trumpet blast which brings down the city walls.
14. The feminine value is also presented positively in the ‘books of wisdom’, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. The first nine books of Proverbs take the form of a ‘hymn to Wisdom’ who is personified in anima-guise as a woman, like the Greek Sophia or Athene. This book also contains the famous passage in praise of the perfect wife, whose ‘price is above rubies’.
15. Satan also, of course, became later identified with the serpent which tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden, although in the original account in Genesis this personification of ego-consciousness is given no name.
16. A striking feature of the story of Jesus, as presented in the Gospels, is how consistently it is structured round the Rule of Three. We see this in the original triad of Mary, Joseph and Jesus; the three wise men; the three temptations; the three years of his teaching; the three crosses; the three hours of his death agony, his resurrection on the third day. After 40 days, a multiplication of four as the number of completion, he ascends into heaven, to become part of the Trinity. He lived on earth for 33 years, and chose the archetypal number of 12 apostles, multiplying three by four.
17. It was precisely this which first gave rise to the Greek word ‘tragedy’, derived from , a ‘goat’. The tragic figure is the ‘scapegoat’ whose death purges the community of darkness, so that light and wholeness can be restored.
18. As a four-cornered mystical symbol of ‘wholeness’, sometimes representing the four points of the compass, the cross in numerous forms is found in different cultures all over the world. It was a holy symbol in Egypt millennia before Christ. To the Aztecs it was a sign of Quetzalcoatl the creator, master of life and god of the four winds. One ancient form, found widely, was the cross as a symbol of the sun, with arms trailing backwards from the four points as if it is revolving clockwise. This was known in Sanskrit as sv-astika from sv-asti, ‘well-being’. In the old Teutonic religion the trailing arms were reversed, so that they look either as if they are revolving anti-clockwise or are like menacing hooks. This was the form adopted by Hitler’s Nazis, whose hakenkreuz, or ‘hooked cross’ thus inverted the ancient symbol of ‘well-being’.
19. The central day of the Anglo-Saxon week was reserved for Woden, chief of the Germanic gods. ‘Woden’s day’ (Wednesday) is flanked by those named after gods representing the masculine values: ‘Tiw’s day’ (Tuesday) after the god of justice, law and order, and ‘Thor’s day’ (Thursday) after the god of thunder, battles and physical strength. On each side of them are days dedicated to female divinities, the Moon goddess (Monday) and Freya (Friday) commemorating the wife of Woden, representing the feminine attributes of love, beauty, marriage and care for the sick. The week ends on ‘Surtur’s day’, named after the god who, like his Roman equivalent Saturn, presided over the transition between endings and beginnings (which was why the Roman festival of the winter solstice, marking the transition from the old year to the new, was the Saturnalia). Surtur plays a similar role in Norse/Teutonic mythology (hence, as we shall see, the crucial part he plays in the events of Ragnarok/Gottderdammerung, the end of the world). Thus Saturday marks the moment when the old week ends, followed by the resurrection of the ‘Sun’ to mark the first day of the next (in Russian, Sunday is still named ‘resurrection day’). This also links up with the Christian ‘Easter’, the festival marking Christ’s resurrection, named after the place where the sun rises: in the east, from the original Sanskrit usra, ‘the dawn’ (from which the Greeks also derived their word for ‘dawn’, ‘eos’, beloved by Homer). Thus Christ, like the Sun, is the source of light which dies and is then resurrected, on Easter Sunday morning (just as Christian churches are aligned east-west, so that the sun rises over the altar).
20. This belief in the ‘transmigration of souls’ through a series of bodily incarnations was also shared by some in the west, most notably by the followers of Pythagoras, as Shakespeare quizzically reflected in Twelfth Night:
‘Clown: What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl?
Malvolio: That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.
Clown: What thinkest thou of his opinion?
Malvolio: I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion.’
21. There is a semi-archetypal influence at work behind the desire to believe that a great national leader may one day return to assist his country in its hour of need. Such beliefs are not uncommon in history: Frederick Barbarossa, James IV of Scotland, Sebastian of Portugal, Alexander I of Russia and Francis Drake were among those who inspired such legends.
22. Averroes (1126-98), the Moslem scholar and philosopher, born in Spain, was exceptional among Western thinkers in believing that there was no such thing as personal immortality for individual souls, but that each human being merges back after death into an eternal whole.
23. Donne, An Anatomy of the World, First Anniversary (1611).
24. As William Hazlitt put it: ‘the striking peculiarity of Shakespeare’s mind was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds, so that it contained a universe of thought and feeling within itself, and had no particular bias or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egotist that it was possible to be.’ (On Shakespeare and Ben Jonson).
25. Recorded by Bettina von Brentano in a letter to Goethe, May 1810.
26. As Tolstoy wrote in What Is Art?, ‘Only two kinds of art can be considered good art in our time ... first, art transmitting feelings from a religious perception of man’s position in the world, in relation to God and his neighbour ... secondly, art transmitting the simplest feelings of common life, such as are accessible to all men throughout the world: the art of common life, the art of the people, universal art.’
27. Histoire ou Contes du Temps Passé (1695).
28. A fascinating historical account of this triumph of ego-consciousness is given in The Measure of All Things by Ken Alder (2002). He goes on to describe how in 1801 Napoleon decreed that exclusive use of the metric system should be compulsory throughout France. But this led to such chaos and proved so unpopular that in 1812 he allowed the French to return to their traditional measures. The French government only reimposed the metric system in 1840.
29. Preface to second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800).