Chapter 1 The Enigma of the Inherited Image
I. The Innate Releasing Mechanism
A number of popular moving-picture films have shown the amazing phenomenon of the laying and hatching of the eggs of the sea turtle. The female leaves the water and crawls to a point on the beach safely above the tide line, where she digs a hole, deposits hundreds of eggs, covers the nest, and turns back to the sea. After eighteen days a multitude of tiny turtles come flipping up through the sand and, like a field of sprinters at the crack of the gun, make for the heavily crashing waves as fast as they can, while gulls drop screaming form overhead to pick them off.
No more vivid representation could be desired of spontaneity and the quest for the not-yet-seen. There is no question here of learning, trial-and-error; nor are the tiny things afraid of the great waves. They know that they must hurry, know how to do it, and know precisely where they are going. And finally, when they enter the sea, they know immediately both how to swim and that swim they must.
Students of animal behavior have coined the term “innate releasing mechanism” (IRM) to designate the inherited structure in the nervous system that enables an animal to respond thus to a circumstance never experienced before, and the factor triggering the response they term a “sign stimulus ” or “releaser.” It is obvious that the living entity responding to such a sign cannot be said to be the individual, since the individual has had no previous knowledge of the object to which it is reacting. The recognizing and responding subject is, rather, some sort of trans- or super-individual, inhabiting and moving the living creature. Let us not speculate here about the metaphysics of this mystery; for, as Schopenhauer sagely remarks in his paper on The Will in Nature, “we are sunk in the sea of riddles and inscrutables, knowing and understanding neither what is around us nor ourselves.”
Chicks with their eggshells still adhering to their tails dart for cover when a hawk flies overhead, but not when the bird is a gull or duck, heron or pigeon. Furthermore, if the wooden model of a hawk is drawn over the coop on a wire, they react as though it were alive — unless it be drawn backward, when there is no response.
Here we have an extremely precise image — never seen before, yet recognized with reference not merely to its form but to its form in motion, and linked, furthermore, to an immediate, unplanned, unlearned, and even unintended system of appropriate action: flight, to cover. The image of the inherited enemy is already sleeping in the nervous system, and along with it the well-proven reaction. Furthermore, even if all the hawks in the world were to vanish, their image would still sleep in the soul of the chick — never to be roused however, unless by some accident of art; for example, a repetition of the clever experiment of the wooden hawk on a wire. With that (for a certain number of generations, at any rate) the obsolete reaction of the flight to cover would recur; and, unless we knew about the earlier danger of hawks to chicks, we should find the sudden eruption difficult to explain. “Whence,” we might ask, “this abrupt seizure by an image to which there is no counterpart in the chicken’s world? Living gulls and ducks, herons and pigeons, leave it cold; but the work of art strikes some very deep chord!”
Have we here a clue to the problem of the image of the witch in the nervous system of the child? Some psychologists would so. C.G. Jung for example identifies two fundamentally different systems of unconsciously motivated response in the human being. One he terms the personal unconscious. It is based on a context of forgotten, neglected, or suppressed memory images derived from personal experience (infantile impressions, shocks, frustrations, satisfactions, etc.), such as Sigmund Freud recognized and analyzed in his therapy. The other he names the collective unconscious. Its contents — which he calls archetypes — are just such images as that of the hawk in the nervous system of the chick. No one has yet been able to tell us how it got there; but there it is!
“A personal image,” he writes, “has neither archaic character nor collective significance, but expresses unconscious contents of a personal nature and a personally conditioned conscious inclination.
“The primary image (urtümliches Bild), which I have termed ‘archetype,’ is always collective, i.e. common to at least whole peoples or periods of history. The chief mythological motifs of all times and races are very probably of this order; for example, in the dreams and fantasies of neurotics of pure Negro stock I have been able to identify a series of motifs of Greek mythology.
“The primary image,” he then suggests, “is a memory deposit, an engram, derived from a condensation of innumerable similar experiences…the psychic expression of an anatomically, physiologically determined natural tendency.” [Note 1]
Jung’s idea of the “archetypes” is one of the leading theories, today, in the field of our subject. It is a development of the earlier theory of Adolf Bastian (1826- 1905), who recognized, in the course of his extensive travels, the uniformity of what he termed the “elementary ideas” (Elementargedanke) of mankind. Remarking also, however, that in the various provinces of human culture these ideas are differently articulated and elaborated, he coined the term “ethnic ideas” (Völkergedanke) for the actual, local manifestations of the universal forms. Nowhere, he noted, are the “elementary ideas: to be found in a pure state, abstracted from the locally conditioned “ethnic ideas”through which they are substantialized; but rather, like the image of man himself, they are to be known only by way of the rich variety of their extremely interesting, frequently startling, yet always finally recognizable inflections in the panorama of human life.
Two possibilities of emphasis are implicit in this observation of Bastian. The first we may term the psychological and the second the ethnological; and these can be taken to represent, broadly, the two contrasting points of view from which scientists, scholars, and philosophers have approached our subject.
“First,” wrote Bastian, “the idea as such must be studied…and as second factor, the influence of climatic- geological conditions.” [Note 2] Only after that, as at third factor, according to his view, could the influence upon one another of the various ethnic traditions throughout the course of history be profitably surveyed. Bastian, that is to say, stressed the psychological, spontaneous aspect of culture as primary; and this approach has been the usual one of biologists, medical men, and psychologists, to the present day. Briefly stated, it assumes that there is in the structure and functioning of the psyche a certain degree of spontaneity and consequent uniformity throughout the history and domain of the human species — an order of psychological laws inhering in the structure of the body, which has not radically altered since the period of the Aurignacian caves and can be as readily identified in the jungles of Brazil as in the cafés of Paris, as readily in the igloos of Baffin Land as in the harems of Marrakech.
But on the other had, if climate, geography, and massive social forces are to be regarded as of more moment in the shaping of the ideas, ideals, fantasies, and emotions by which men live than the innate structures and capacities of the psyche, then a diametrically contrary philosophical position must be assumed. Psychology in this case becomes a function of ethnology; or, to quote one representative authority, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, in his work on The Andaman Islanders:
A society depends for its existence on the presence in the minds of its members of a certain system of sentiments by which the conduct of the individual is regulated in conformity with the needs of the society. Every feature of the social system itself and every event or object that in any way affects the well-being or the cohesion of the society becomes an object of this system of sentiments. In human society the sentiments in question are not innate but are developed in the individual by the action of the society upon him [italics mine]. The ceremonial customs of a society are a means by which the sentiments in question are given collective expression on appropriate occasions. The ceremonial (i.e. collective) expression of any sentiment serves both to maintain it at the requisite degree of intensity in the mind of the individual and to transmit it from one generation to another. Without such expression the sentiments involved could not exist. [Note 3]
It will be readily seen that in such a view the ceremonials and mythologies of the differing societies are in no sense manifestations of psychologically grounded “elementary ideas,” common to the human race, but of interest locally conditioned; and the fundamental contrast of the two approaches is surely clear.
Was the little girl’s reaction to the idea of the witch that she had conjured into her mind comparable to the chick’s reaction to the fashioned image of a hawk? Or should we say, rather, that because she had been brought up on the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, she had learned to associate certain imagined dangers with a German fictional character and these alone were the cause of her fright?
Before being satisfied that we know the answer, we must consider seriously the now well-proven fact that the human nervous system was the governor, guide, and controller of a nomadic hunter, foraging for his food and protecting himself and his family from becoming food in a very dangerous world of animals, for the first 600,000 years of its development; whereas it has been serving comparatively safe and sane farmers, merchants, professors, and their children for scarcely 8000 years (segment of less that 1 1/2 per cent of the known arc). Who will claim to know what sign stimuli smote our releasing mechanisms when our names were not Homo sapiens but Pithecanthropus and Plesianthropus, or perhaps even — millenniums earlier — Dryopithecus? And who that has knowledge of the numerous vestigial structures of our anatomy surviving from the days when we were beasts (for example, the muscles of the caudal vertebrae that once wagged our tail), would doubt that in the central nervous system comparable vestiges must remain: images sleeping, whose releasers no longer appear in nature — but might occur in art?
As N. Tinbergen has so well advised in his introductory lectures on The Study of Instinct, since generalization based on too narrow a foundation tends to give rise to unnecessary controversy, special emphasis should be placed on the importance of a complete inventory of the behavior patterns of a species before conclusions are announced. [Note 4] For the problem of the relationship of innate to conditioned behavior is for from resolved even for animal species very much less complicated than our own. Nor can general laws be announced for the animal world that will necessarily be valid from one species to the next.
The young of the cuckoo, hatched from an egg laid in the nest of another species and without previous experience of its own kind, when it is fledged flocks only with cuckoos — all of which, likewise, have been raised in the nests of other birds and have never been taught to recognize their own kind. But, on the other hand, a duckling will attach itself, as to a parent, to the first creature that greets its eye when it leaves the egg — for example, a mother hen.
The case of the cuckoo, like that of the chicks responding to the hawk, or of the turtles rushing for the sea, illustrates the first point to be emphasized in our brief consideration of this problem of the physiology of the inherited image; namely, the now well-demonstrated fact, already noted, that in the central nervous systems of all animals there exist innate structures that are somehow counterparts of the proper environment of the species. The Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler has termed these structures in the central nervous system “isomorphs.” The animal, directed by innate endowment, comes to terms with its natural environment not as a consequence of any long, slow learning through experience, through trial-and-error, but immediately and with the certainty of recognition. The case of the duckling, on the other hand, illustrates a second point that must be noted if we are to appreciate the relevance of these studies to our own problem of the mythological archetypes; namely, the fact that although in many instances the sign stimuli that release animal responses are immutable and correspond to the inner readiness of the creature as precisely as key to lock (in fact, have been termed “key-tumbler” structures), there also are systems of response that are established by individual experience. In such the structure of the IRM is described as “open.” It is susceptible to “impression” or “imprint” (Prägung). Moreover — as in the instance of the duckling — where these “open structures” exist the first imprint is definitive, requires sometimes less than a minute for its completion, and is irreversible.
Furthermore, according to Professor Tinbergen, who has given particular attention to the problem of animal learning , not only do differing species have different dispositions to learn, but such innate dispositions come to maturity only in certain critical periods of the animal’s growth. “The Eskimo dogs of east Greenland,” he writes, for example,
live in packs of five to ten individuals. The members of a pack defend their group territory against all other dogs. All dogs of an Eskimo settlement have an exact and detailed knowledge of the topography of the territories of other packs; they know where attacks from other packs must be feared. Immature dogs, however, do not defend the territory. Moreover, they often roam through the whole settlement, very often trespassing into other territories, where they are promptly chased. In spite of these frequent attacks, during which they may be severely treated, they do not learn the territories’ topography and for the observer their stupidity in this respect is amazing. While the young dogs are growing sexually mature, however, they begin to learn the other territories and within a week their trespassing adventures are over. In two male dogs the first copulation, the first defence of territory, and the first avoidance of strange territory, all occurred within one week. [Note 5]
After the work of Sigmund Freud and his school on the stages of the maturation of the human infant and the force of the imprints acquired in those stages on the responses of the individual throughout life, it will hardly be necessary to argue the relevance of the concepts of “inner readiness” and “imprint” to the sphere of human learning. Much of what the infant has to learn, furthermore, resembles remarkably the sociology of the Eskimo huskies, since it has to do largely with the various aspects of group affiliation. There is, however, in the human sphere a factor that makes all study of instinct and innate structures extremely difficult; for, whereas even the animals most helpless at birth mature very quickly, the human infant is utterly helpless during the first dozen years of is existence and, during this period of the maturation of its character, is completely subject to the pressures and imprints of its local society. In fact, as Adolf Portmann, of Basel, has so well and frequently pointed out, precisely those three endowments of erect posture, speech, and thought, which elevate man above the animal sphere, develop only after birth, and consequently, in the structure of every individual, represent an indissoluble amalgam of innate biological and impressed traditional factors. We cannot think of one without the other.
And so, in the name of science, let us not try to do so!
It is possible, of course, to identify even in man a certain number of innate “key-tumbler” responses: that of the infant to the nipple, for example. It is obvious, also, that in man, just as in the lower animals, there are certain “central excitatory mechanisms” (CEMs) which receive stimulation both from within and from without and move the individual to “appetitive behavior” — sometimes even against his better judgment. A manifest example is the response of the sexual appetite to the stimulus of certain hormones (e.g., testosterone propionate and estrogen) and the reaction, then, even of the innocent individual, to the sign stimuli so well known to the whole species. these phenomena, I should say, require no laboratory tests to warrant our regard. But it must not be forgotten that the entire instinct structure of man is much more open to learning and conditioning than that of animals, so that when evaluating human behavior we have always a very much stronger factor of individual experience to consider than when measuring the central excitatory mechanisms (CEMs) and the innate releasing mechanisms (IRMs) of insect, fish, bird — or even ape.
This important fact may help to clarify the main lines of the problem announced in Bastian’s contrast of elementary with ethnic ideas. The elementary, or innate, ideas we must interpret, I believe, as a reference, in nineteenth- century terms, to what now would be called the innate neurological structures (CEMs and IRMs) of the biological species Homo sapiens: those inherited structures in the central nervous system that constitute the elementary foundations of all human experience and reaction. The ethnic ideas, on the other hand, refer to the historically conditioned context of sign stimuli through which the activities of man, in any given society, are released. But since there is no such thing as man qua “Man,” abstracted from all sociological conditioning, there are very few examples of unimprinted sign stimuli on the level of human ethology — and this is what has made it possible for students of the phenomenology of our species to write, sometimes, as though there were in the human race no inherited structuring system whatsoever. It is now, however, a thoroughly proven fact that the human mind is by no means the mere tabua rasa of seventeenth-century epistemology. Indeed, quite the contrary! It is an aggregate of a great many predicating structures, each with its own readiness of response. The mere fact that they are more open than their animal homologues to individual experience must not be allowed to distract us from the more basic fact of their existence — or of their force in establishing and maintaining those basic similarities in human culture the world over which are vastly more massive than the variations. But equally, and on the other hand, we must not be quick to suppose that because an extensive, or even universal, distribution has been established for any given sign stimulus, this then may be regarded as innate and not impressed.
II. The Supernormal Sign Stimulus
It is by now a commonplace of biological thought to observe that man, in his character as animal, is born at least a year too soon, completing in the sphere of society a development that other species accomplish within the womb. It has been observed that our hairlessness is a fetal trait, that our numerous psychological difficulties are functions of the prematurity of our birth, and that — to use Nietzche’s picturesque term — we cannot but expect to remain das kränke Tier, “the sick animal,” throughout life and to the end of our days. It was the great French naturalist Buffon (1707- 1788), I believe, who first remarked that “man is no more than a decadent ape.” And it was a Dutch anatomist, Ludwig Bolk, who, in 1926, in a work entitled The Problem of Human Incarnation, gave a scientific foundation to this idea by showing that mutations inhibiting maturation actually occur in animals, and suggesting that the evolution of man must have been effected by a series of such modifications. According to Bolk’s view, man has been arrested at a stage of growth represented by a late phase in the development of the embryo of a chimpanzee. [Note 6]
A more generous view, however, recognizes in the hairlessness of our species the enhancement of the skin as a sense organ and of the parts of the body as foci of optical interest. For in man the sensory nerves running through the spine are much more numerous than in any of the furry tribes, while the range and subtlety of the sign stimuli afforded not only by our nakedness but also by our various modes of covering and uncovering it evoke responses of considerably more diversity than those of mere animal appetite and consummation. The hairless face has become an organ of exquisite mobility, capable of a range and refinement of social signaling infinitely more versatile than the social “releasers” (the bird cries, flourished antlers, and tail- flashes) of the animal kingdom. The mutation, that is to say, was not negative but positive; and the long gestation, going beyond the capacity of the mother’s womb to support it, was the consequence of an advance. For, as Schopenhauer declares, “All great things mature slowly.”
And are we to forget, furthermore, the rapid growth, during the first year of extra-uterine life, of this wonderful head and brain? It is perfectly true that, because of the prematurity of our birth, we do not have as many stereotyped, key-tumbler responses as the other vertebrates, and that, having consequently a more open reflex structure than they, we are less rigidly patterned in our instincts, less conservative, dependable, and secure than the animals. But on the other hand, we do have this developed brain, which is three times as great in size as its nearest rival and has given us not only new knowledge ( including that of our own inevitable death), but also a capacity to control and even to inhibit our responses.
Best of all, however, is the gift of immaturity itself, which has enabled us to retain in our best, most human, moments the capacity for play. In puppyhood animals show a capacity for play, when they are protected from the dreadful seriousness of the wilderness by the guardianship of parents; and practically all make a charming display of it again in courtship. However, in man — or perhaps we should say, rather, in the best of men, though indeed in the majority of women — the capacity is retained throughout life. It is in fact, only those who have failed, one way or another, in their manhood or womanhood, who become our penny-dreadfuls, our gorillas and baboons. In a highly suggestive paragraph, the animal psychologist Konrad Lorenz presents an excellent statement of our indebtedness to this capacity of our for play, reminding us that:
Every study undertaken by Man was the genuine outcome of curiosity, a kind of game. All the data of natural science, which are responsible for Man’s domination of the world, originated in activities that were indulged in exclusively for the sake of amusement. When Benjamin Franklin drew sparks from the tail of his kite he was thinking as little of the lightning conductor as Hertz, when he investigated electrical waves, was thinking of radio transmission. Anyone who has experienced in his own person how easily the inquisitiveness of a child at play can grow into the life work of a naturalist will never doubt the fundamental similarity of games and study. The inquisitive child disappears entirely from the wholly animal nature of the mature chimpanzee. But the child is far from being buried in the man, as Nietzche thinks. On the contrary, it rules him absolutely. [Note 7]
Animals are without speech — and one reason, surely, is their inability to play with sounds. They are without art — and the reason, again, is their inability to play with forms. Man’s capacity for play animates his urge to fashion images and organize forms in such a way as to create new stimuli for himself: sign stimuli, to which his nervous system may then react much in the way of an isomorph to its releaser. We have observed the case of the little girl, seized by her own creation of a witch. Let us consider, now, what can happen to a poet. The following statement, by the British poet and critic A.E. Housman, supplies the most satisfactory definition I know of a certain triggering principle that is effective in the poetic impact:
Poetry seems to me more physical than intellectual. A year or two ago, in common with others, I received from America a request that I would define poetry. I replied that I could no more define poetry that a terrier can define a rat, but that I thought we both recognized the object by the symptoms which it provokes in us. One of these symptoms was described in connection with another object by Eliphaz the Temanite: “A spirit passed before my face: the hair of my flesh stood up.” Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act. This particular symptom is accompanied by a shiver down the spine; there is another which consists in a constriction of the throat and a precipitation of water to the eyes; and there is a third which I can only describe by borrowing a phrase from one of Keat’s last letters, where he says, speaking of Fanny Brawne, “everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.” The seat of this sensation is the pit of the stomach. [Note 8]
The reader hardly need be reminded that the images not only of poetry and love but also of religion and patriotism, when effective, are apprehended with actual physical responses: tears, sighs, interior aches, spontaneous groans, cries, bursts of laughter, wrath, and impulsive deeds. Human experience and human art, that is to say have succeeded in creating for the human species an environment of sign stimuli that release physical responses and direct them to ends no less effectively than do the signs of nature the instincts of the beasts. The biology, psychology, sociology, and history of these sign stimuli may be said to constitute the field of our subject, the science of Comparative Mythology. And although no one has yet devised an effective method for distinguishing between the innate and the acquired, the natural and the culturally conditioned, the “elementary” and the “ethnic” aspects of such human-cultural catalysts and their evoked responses, the radical distinction here made by the poet Housman between images that act upon our nervous structure as energy releasers and those that serve, rather, for the transmission of thought, supplies an excellent criterion for the testing of our themes.
“I cannot satisfy myself,” he writes, “that there are any such things as poetical ideas. No truth, it seems to me, is too precious, no observation too profound, and no sentiment too exalted to be expressed in prose. The utmost that I could admit is that some ideas do, while others do not, lend themselves kindly to poetical expression; and that these receive from poetry an enhancement which glorifies and almost transfigures them, and which is not perceived to be a separate thing except by analysis.” [Note 9]
When Housman writes that “poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it,” and when he states again “that the intellect is not the fount of poetry, that it may actually hinder its production, and that it cannot even be trusted to recognize poetry when it is produced.” [Note 10] he is no more than reaffirming and lucidly formulating the first axiom of all creative art — whether it be in poetry, music, dance, architecture, painting, or sculpture — which is namely, that art is not like science, a logic of references but a release from reference and rendition of immediate experience; a presentation of forms, images, or ideas in such a way that they will communicate, not primarily a thought or even a feeling, but an impact.
The axiom is worth recalling here, because mythology was historically the mother of the arts and yet, like so many mythological mothers, the daughter, equally, of her own birth. Mythology is not invented rationally; mythology cannot be rationally understood. Theological interpreters render it ridiculous. Literary criticism reduces it to metaphor. A new and very promising approach is opened, however, when it is viewed in the light of biological psychology as a function of the human nervous system, precisely homologous to the innate and learned sigh stimuli that release and direct the energies of nature — of which our brain itself is but the most amazing flower.
One further lesson may be taken from animals. There is a phenomenon known to the students of animal behavior as the “supernormal sign stimulus,” which has never been considered, as far as I know, in relation either to art and poetry or to myth; yet which, in the end, may be our surest guide to the seat of their force, and to an appreciation of their function in the quickening of the human dream of life.
“The innate releasing mechanism,” Tinbergen declares, “usually seems to correspond more or less with the properties of the environmental object or situation at which the reaction is aimed….However, close study of IRMs reveals the remarkable fact that it is sometimes possible to offer stimulus situations that are even more effective than the natural situation. In other words, the natural situation is not always optimal.” [Note 11]
It was found, for instance, that the male of a certain butterfly known as the grayling (Eumenis semele), which assumes the initiative in mating by pursuing a passing female in flight, generally prefers females of darker hue to those of lighter — and to such a degree that if a model of even darker hue than anything known is nature is presented, the sexually motivated male will pursue it in preference even to the darkest female of the species.
“Here we find,” writes Professor Portmann, in comment, “an ‘inclination’ that is not satisfied in nature, but which perhaps, one day, if inheritable darker mutation should appear, would play a role in the selection of mating partners. Who knows whether such anticipations of particular sign stimuli may not play their part in the support and furthering of new variants, inasmuch as they may represent one of the factors in the process of selection that determines the direction of evolution?” [Note 12]
Obviously the human female, with her talent for play, recognized many millenniums ago the power of the supernormal sign stimulus: cosmetics for the heightening of the lines of her eyes have been found among the earliest remains of the Neolithic Age. And from there to an appreciation of the force of ritualization, hieratic art, masks, gladiatorial vestments, kingly robes, and every other humanly conceived and realized improvement of nature, is but a step — or a natural series of steps.
Evidence will appear, in the course of our natural history of the gods, of the gods themselves as supernormal sign stimuli; of the ritual forms deriving from their supernatural inspiration acting as catalysts to convert men into gods; and of civilization — this new environment of man that has grown from his own interior and has pressed back the bounds of nature as far as the moon — as a distillate of ritual, and consequently of the gods: that is to say, as an organization of supernormal sign stimuli playing on a set of IRMs never met by nature and yet most properly nature’s own, inasmuch as man is her son.
But for the present, it suffices to remark that one cannot assume out of hand that simply because a certain culturally developed sign stimulus appeared late in the course of history, man’s response to it must represent a learned reaction. The reaction may be in fact, spontaneous, though never shown before. For the creative imagination may have released precisely here one of those innate “inclinations” of the human organism that have nowhere been fully matched by nature. Hence, not only the ritual arts and the development from them of the archaic civilizations, but also — and even more richly — the later shattering of those arts by the modern arrows of man’ flight beyond his own highest dream, would perhaps best be interpreted psychologically, as a history of the supernormal sign stimuli that have released — to our own fright, joy, and amazement — the deepest secrets of our being. Indeed, the depths of the mystery of our subject — which are the depths not only of man but of the living world — have not been plumbed.
In sum, then: Within the field of the study of animal behavior — which is the only area in which controlled experiments have made it possible to arrive at dependable conclusions in the observation of instinct — two orders of innate releasing mechanisms have been identified, namely, the stereotyped, and the open, subject to imprint. In the case of the first, a precise lock-key relationship exists between the inner readiness of the nervous system and the external sign stimulus triggering response; so that, if there exist in the human inheritance many — or even any — IRMs of this order, we may justly speak of “inherited images” in the psyche. The mere fact that no one can yet explain how such lock-key relationships are established does not invalidate the observation of their existence: no one knows how the hawk got into the nervous system of our barnyard fowl, yet numerous tests have shown it to be, de facto, there. However, the human psyche has not yet been, to any great extent, satisfactorily tested for such stereotypes, and so, I am afraid, pending further study, we must simply admit that we do not know how far the principle of the inherited image can be carried when interpreting mythological universals. It is no less premature to deny its possibility than to announce it as anything more than a considered opinion.
Nor are we ready, yet, to say whether the obvious, and sometimes very striking, physical differences of the human races represent significant variations of their innate releasing mechanisms. Among the animals such differences do exist — in fact, changes in the IRMs of the major instincts appear to be among the first things affected by mutation.
For example, as Tinbergen observes:
The herring gull (Larus argentatus) and the lesser black-backed gull (L. fuscus) in north-western Europe are considered to be extremely diverged geographical races of one species, which, having developed by geographical isolation, have come into contact again by expansion of their ranges. The two forms show many differences in behavior; L. fuscus is a definite migrant, traveling to south-western Europe in autumn, whereas L. argentatus is of a much more resident habit. L. fuscus is much more a bird of the open sea that L. argentatus. The breeding -seasons are different. One behavior difference is specially interesting. Both forms have two alarm calls, one expressing alarm of relatively low intensity, the other indicative of extreme alarm. L. argentatus gives the high-intensity alarm call much more rarely than L. fuscus. The result is that most disturbances are reacted to differently by the two forms. When a human intruder enters a mixed colony, the herring gulls will almost always utter the low-intensity call, while L. fuscus utters the high-intensity call. This difference, based upon a shift of degree in the threshold of alarm calls gives the impression of a qualitative difference in the alarm calls of the two forms, such as might well lead to the total disappearance of one call in one species, of the other in the second species, and thus result in a qualitative difference in the motor-equipment. Apart from this difference in threshold, there is a difference in the pitch of each call. [Note 13]
Between the various human races differences have been noted that suggest psychological as well as merely physiological variation; differences, for example, in their rates of maturing, as Géza Róheim has indicated in his vigorous work on Psychoanalysis and Anthropology. [Note 14] However, it is still far from legitimate, on the basis of the mere scraps of controlled observation that have been recorded, to make any such broad generalizations about intellectual ability and moral character as are common in discussions of this subject. Furthermore, within the human species there is such broad variation of innate capacity from individual to individual that generalizations on a racial basis lose much of their point.
In other words, the whole question of the innate stereotypes of the species Homo sapiens is still wide open. Objective and promising studies have been commenced, but they have not yet progressed very far. An interesting series of experiments by E. Kaila, [Note 15] and R.A. Spitz and K.M. Wolf, [Note 16] has shown that between the ages of three and six months the infant reacts with a smile to the appearance of a human face; and by fashioning masks omitting certain of the details of the normal human countenance, the observers were able to establish the fact that in order to evoke response the face had to have two eyes (one-eyed, asymmetrical masks did not work), a smooth forehead (wrinkled foreheads produced no smile), and a nose. Curiously, the mouth could be omitted; the smile, therefore, was not an imitation. The face had to be in some movement and seen from the front. Moreover, nothing else — not even a toy — would evoke this early infant smile. Following the sixth month, a distinction began to be made between familiar and unfamiliar, friendly and unfriendly faces. The richness of the child’s experience of its social environment having already increased, the innate releasing mechanism had been altered by impressions from the outer world, and the situation had changed.
It has been remarked that in certain primitive Australian rock paintings of ancestral figures the mouths are omitted, and that a significant number of very early, paleolithic female figurines also lack the mouth. How far one can presume to carry these suggestions toward the conclusion that there is a “parental image” in the central nervous structure of the human infant, however, we cannot say. As Professor Portmann has pointed out: “Since the effect of this form on the infant can be demonstrated with certainty only from the third month, the question remains open as to whether the central nervous structure that makes possible the recognition of the human countenance and the social response of the smile is of the open, i.e. imprinted, type, or entirely innate. All of the indices available to us speak for a largely inherited configuration; and yet, the question remains open.” [Note 17]
Figure 1. Sign stimuli releasing
parental reactions in man (left), compared with counterparts that
do not (right). After Lorenz.How much more open, then, the
question broached by Professor Lorenz in his paper on “The Innate
Forms of Human Experience”: [Note 18]
the question of the parental response evoked in the adult by the
sign stimuli provided by the human baby! The figure tells the story
— as far as it goes.
And finally, it must be noted that there is no consensus among students of the subject even as to what categories of appetite may be regarded as instinctive in the human species. Professor Tinbergen, speaking for the animal world, has named sleep and food-seeking; so also, in many species, flight from danger, fighting in self-defense, and a number of activities functionally related to the reproductive urge, as, for example, sexual fighting and rivalry, courtship, mating, and parental behavior (nest-building, protection of the young, etc.). The list greatly varies, however, from species to species; and how much of it can be carried over into the human sphere is not yet known. Tentatively, it might reasonably be supposed that food-seeking, sleep, self- protection, courtship and mating, and some of the activities of parenthood should be instinctive. But the question — as we have seen — remains open as to what precisely are the sign stimuli that generally trigger these activities in man, or whether any of the stimuli that generally trigger these activities in man, can be said to be as immediately known to the human interior as the hawk to the chick. We do not, therefore, speak of inherited images in the following pages.
The concept of the sign stimulus as an energy-releasing and -directed image clarifies, however, the difference between literary metaphor, which is addressed to the intellect, and mythology, which is aimed primarily at the central excitatory mechanisms (CEMs) and innate releasing mechanisms (IRMs) of the whole person. According to this view, a functioning mythology can be defined as a corpus of culturally maintained sign stimuli fostering the development and activation of a specific type, or constellation of types, of human life. Furthermore, since we now know that o images have been established unquestionably as innate and that our IRMs are not stereotyped but open, whatever “universals” we may find in our comparative study must be assigned rather to common experience than to endowment; while, on the other hand, even where sign stimuli may differ, it need not follow that the responding IRMs differ too. Our science is to be simultaneously biological and historical throughout, with no distinction between “culturally conditioned” and “instinctive” behavior, since all instinctive human behavior is culturally conditioned, and what is culturally conditioned in us all is instinct: specifically, the CEMs and IRMs of this single species.
Therefore, though respecting the possibility — perhaps the probability — of such a psychologically inspired parallel development of mythological imagery as that suggested by Adolf Bastian’s theory of elementary ideas and C.G. Jung’s of the collective unconscious, we cannot attempt to interpret in such terms any of the remarkable correspondences that will everywhere confront us. On the other hand, however, we must ignore as biologically untenable such sociological theorizing as that represented, for example, by the anthropologist Ralph Linton when he wrote that “a society is a group of biologically distinct and self-contained individuals,” [Note 19] since, indeed, we are a species and not biologically distinct. Our approach is to be, as far as possible, skeptical, historical, and descriptive — and where history fails and something else appears, as in a mirror, darkly, we indicate the considered guesses of the chief authorities in the field and leave the rest to silence, recognizing that in that silence there may be sleeping not only the jungle cry of Dryopithecus, but also as supernormal melody not to be heard for perhaps another million years.