Chapter 2
The Imprints of Experience
I. Suffering and Rapture
James Joyce, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, supplies an excellent structuring principle for a cross- cultural study of mythology when he defines the material of tragedy as “whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings”; [Note 1] for it is from the “grave and constant” that the imprints common to the mythologies of the world must be derived. And of such imprints, suffering itself — the raw material of tragedy — is surely the most general, since it is, in a preliminary sense at least, the sum and effect of all.
Moreover, tragedy — the Greek tragedy — was a poetic inflection of mythology, the tragic catharsis of emotion through pity and terror of which Aristotle wrote being precisely the counterpart, psychologically, of the purgation of spirit [Greek word] effected by a rite. Like the rite, tragedy transmutes suffering into rapture by altering the focus of the mind. The tragic art is a correlate of the discipline termed, in the language of religion, “spiritual cleansing,” or “the stripping of the self.” Released from attachment to one’s mortal part through a contemplation of the grave and constant in human sufferings — “correcting,” to use Plato’s felicitous phrase, “those circuits of the head that were deranged at birth, by learning to know the harmonies of the world” [Note 2] — one is united, simultaneously, in tragic pity with “the human sufferer” and in tragic terror with “the secret cause,” Plato’s “likeness of that which intelligence discerns.” Whereupon, one day, with a cry of joy, leaving both humanity and intelligence behind, the soul may leap to what it then suddenly recognizes beyond the mask. Finis tragoediae: incipit comoedia. The mode of the tragedy dissolves and the myth begins.
“O Lord, how marvelous is Thy face,” wrote Nicholas of Cusa,
The face, which a young man, if he strove to imagine it would conceive as a youth’s; a full-grown man, as manly; an aged man as an aged man’s! Who could imagine this sole pattern, most true and most adequate, of all faces — of all even as of each — this pattern so very perfectly of each as if it were of none other? He would have need to go beyond all forms of faces that may be formed, and all figures. And how could he imagine a face when he must go beyond all faces, and all likenesses and figures of all faces and all concepts which can be formed of a face, and all color, adornment and beauty of all faces? Wherefore he that goeth forward to behold Thy face, so long as he formeth any concept thereof, is far from Thy face. For all concept of a face falleth short, Lord, of Thy face, and all beauty which can be conceived is less than the beauty of Thy face; every face hath beauty yet none is beauty’s self, but Thy face, Lord, hath beauty and this having is being. ‘Tis therefore Absolute Beauty itself, which is the form that giveth being to every beautiful form. O face exceedingly comely, whose beauty all things to whom it is granted to behold it, suffice not to admire! In all faces is seen the Face of faces, veiled, and in a riddle; howbeit unveiled it is not seen, until above all faces a man enter into a certain secret and mystic silence where there is no knowledge or concept of a face. This mist, cloud, darkness, or ignorance into which he that seeketh Thy face entereth when he goeth beyond all knowledge or concept is the state below which Thy face cannot be found except veiled; but that very darkness revealeth Thy face to be there, beyond all veils. [Note 3]
Here is the secret cause — known not in terror but in rapture. And its sole beholder is the perfectly purified spirit, gone beyond the normal bounds of human experience, thought, and speech. “There the eye goes not,” we read in the Indian Kena Upaniṣad, “speech goes not, nor the mind.” [Note 4] And yet the impact has been experienced by a great many on this earth. It has been rendered (though seldom as wonderfully as in this inspired utterance of Cusanus )in many mythologies and many paeans of the mystics, in many times and many lands. Without question, it is an available experience, and should even, perhaps, be counted paramount among the “grave and constant” in human suffering and joy. Furthermore , the images rendering it must be classified in our science as of one order, no matter how alien they may be to our local forms of religious symbolization.
The Fifth Danish Thule Expedition (1921-1924) across arctic North America, from Greenland to Cape Prince of Wales, Alaska, was conducted by the seasoned scholar and explorer Knud Rasmussen, who, in the course of this extraordinary journey, met and won the confidence of a number of Eskimo shamans: first, a generous-hearted, warmly hospitable, sturdy old man named Aua at Hudson Bay; next, in the harsh Baker Lake area, among the so-called Caribou Eskimo (who are as primitive as any people on earth), a ruthless, highly intelligent, strongly independent savage named Igjugarjuk, who, when as a youth he had wished to take to wife a girl whose family objected, went with his brother to lie in wait not far from the entrance to the young woman’s hut and from there shot down her father, mother, brothers, and sisters — seven or eight in all — until only the girl that he wanted remained; and finally, at Nome, an old scalawag named Najagneq, who had just been released from a year in jail for having killed seven or eight members of his community. In his distant village, Najagneq had made a fortress of his house and from there, alone, had waged war with the whole of his tribe — and against the whites too — until he had been taken by stratagem by the captain of a ship and brought to Nome. He was held in jail there until ten witnesses of his killings could be fetched from his settlement; but when these were confronted with him they dropped their charges, much as they would have liked to see him done away with. His small piercing eyes roamed about wildly, and his jaw hung in a bandage that was much too slack, a man who had tried to kill him having injured his face. And when the ten men who would have accused him met his look in the witness box, they lowered their eyes in shame.
It is worth considering for a moment the character of these rugged shamans, lest we suppose that the highest religious realizations are vouchsafed only to the saintly.
Dr. H. Ostermann, in his report of the Fifth Thule Expedition, wrote:
Najagneq’s powers of imagination had been stimulated in the big town of Nome. Although knowing of nothing except earth huts, sledges ad kayaks, he was not at all impressed by the large houses, the steamers and the motor-cars, but he had been fascinated by the sight of a white horse hauling a big lorry. So he now told his astonished fellow villagers that the white men in Nome had killed him ten times that winter, but that he had had ten white horses as helping spirits, and he had sacrificed them one by one and thus saved his life.
This man of “ten-horse-power” had authority in his speech, and he completely swayed those to whom he spoke. He had conceived a curious feeling of mild goodness for Dr. Rasmussen, and when they were alone together he was not afraid to admit that he had pulled the legs of his countrymen somewhat. He was no humbug, but a solitary man accustomed to hold his own against many and therefore had to have his little tricks. But whenever his old visions and his ancestral beliefs were mentioned, his replies, which were brief and to the point, bore the impress of imperturbable gravity. When Dr. Rasmussen asked him if he believed in any of all the powers he spoke of, he answered: “Yes, a power that we call Sila, one that cannot be explained in so many words. A strong spirit, the upholder of the universe, of the weather, in fact all life on earth — so mighty that his speech to man comes not through ordinary words, but through storms, snowfall, rain showers, the tempests of the sea, through all the forces that man fears, or through sunshine, calm seas or small, innocent, playing children who understand nothing. When times are good, Sila has nothing to say to mankind. He has disappeared into his infinite nothingness and remains away as long as people do not abuse life but have respect for their daily food. No one has ever seen Sila. His place of sojourn is so mysterious that he is with us and infinitely far away at the same time.”
And Dr. Rasmussen adds [Dr. Ostermann is quoting from the notes found in Rasmussen’s posthuma]: “Najagneq’s words sound like an echo of the wisdom we admired in the old shamans we encountered everywhere on our travels — in harsh King William Land or in Aua’s festive snow hut at Hudson Bay, or in the primitive Eskimo Igjugarjuk, whose pithy maxim was:
“‘The only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and it can be reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone can open the mind of a man to all that is hidden to others.’” [Note 5]
We shall return in a later chapter to Igjugarjuk and his story of the sufferings through which he learned true wisdom. The present point is that from the great Cusanus to the great Igjugarjuk we have a considerable span of human character and experience, as well as of cultural inheritance; yet, unless I am deceived, the ultimate reference of their mutually independent statements is the same. Nor is this the last that we shall learn of the hidden wisdom achieved through suffering, “in the great loneliness,” which is “beyond all forms of faces that may be formed, and all figures,” or as Najagneq put it, “cannot be explained in so many words.”
The “grave and constant” in human suffering, then, leads — or may lead — to an experience that is regarded by those who have known it as the apogee of their lives, and which is yet ineffable. And this experience, or at least an approach to it, is the ultimate aim of all religion, the ultimate reference of all myth and rite. Moreover, those by whom the mythological traditions of the world have been developed and maintained have been the shamans, sages, prophets, and priests, many of whom have had an actual experience of this ineffable mystery and all of whom have revered it. One of the ironies of our subject is that much of the research and collecting among primitive tribes has been conducted either by scientists whose minds are sterilized to this experience and for whom the word “mystic” is a term of abuse, or else by missionaries for whom the only valid approach to it is in their own tradition of spiritual metaphor. Yet occasionally a scholar of Rasmussen’s stature appears and the truth is out.
The first point to be noticed is that a primitive wizard is perfectly capable not only of uttering as profound a statement concerning the relationship of man to the mystery of his being as any that will be found in the annals of the higher religions, but also of wantonly producing parodies of his own mythology to intimidate and impress his simpler fellows. The fact that valid mythological motifs (for example, death and resurrection) have been used in this way for deception does not mean that in proper context they are still, necessarily, the “opiate of the people.” Yet they certainly may become just that; for since the ultimate reference of religion is ineffable, many of those who live most sincerely by its mythology are the most deceived — this deception itself being part of the suffering and darkness through which the mind must pass before the Face-that-is-no- face becomes known.
There is a word in Sanskrit, Upadhi, which means “deceit, deception, disguise,” but also, “limitation, idiosyncrasy, or attribute.” The ultimate truth, being without attributes, cannot be contemplated by the mind. As Igjugarjuk says, it “lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness.” Therefore, in rites and meditations designed to ready the mind for an experience of the beauty that is Absolute Beauty, “attributes” (upadhis) are assigned to it; for example, in the meditation of Cusanus, the property of being a face — and of being beautiful.
Gerhart Hauptmann has somewhere said that poetry is the art of causing the Word to resound behind words (Dichten heißt, hinter Worten das Urwort erklingen lassen). [Note 6] In the same sense, mythology is a rendition of forms through which the formless Form of forms can be known. An inferior object is presented as the representation, or habitation, of a superior. The love or attachment felt for the inferior is a function actually of one’s potential establishment in the superior; yet it must be sacrificed (therein the suffering!) if the mind is to pass on to its proper end.
The science of comparative mythology is, then, a comparative study of upadhis: the deceptive attributes of being, through which the human mind, in the various eras and areas of its domain, has been united with the secret cause in tragic terror, and with the human sufferer (the self being stripped away) in tragic pity. And these upadhis are of two orders: those inevitably deriving from the primary conditions of all human experience whatsoever (la condition humaine), and those particular to the various areas and eras of human civilization (die Völkergedanken). Of the first we treat in the present chapter; of the others, in the remaining sections of the work.
But all, certainly, will not be of suffering, the tragic upadhi (or deception) of suffering; for the paramount theme of mythology is not the agony of quest but the rapture of a revelation, not death but the resurrection: Hallelujah!
“I am she,” declared the great goddess of the universe, Queen Isis, when she appeared to Lucius Apuleius, her devotee, at the conclusion of the ordeal described allegorically in his novel, The Golden Ass:
I am she that is the natural mother of all things, mistress and governess of all the elements, the initial progeny of worlds, chief of the powers divine, queen of all that are in hell, the principal of them that dwell in heaven, manifested alone and under one form of all the gods and goddesses. At my will the planets of the sky, the wholesome winds of the seas, and the lamentable silences of hell are disposed; my name, my divinity is adored throughout the world, in divers manners, in variable customs, and by many names.
For the Phrygians that are the first of all men call me the Mother of the gods of Pessinus; the Athenians, which are sprung from their own soil, Cecropian Minerva; the Cyprians, which are girt about by the sea, Paphian Venus; the Cretans, which bear arrows, Dictynian Diana; the Sicilians, which speak three tongues, infernal Proserpine; the Eleusians their ancient goddess Ceres; some Juno, others Bellona, others Hecate, others Ramnusie, and principally both sort of the Ethiopians, which dwell in the Orient and are enlightened by the morning rays of the sun; and the Egyptians, which are excellent in all kind of ancient doctrine, and by their proper ceremonies accustomed to worship me, do call me by my true name, Queen Isis.
Behold I am come to take pity of thy fortune and tribulation; behold I am present to favor and aid thee; leave off thy weeping and lamentation, put away all thy sorrow, for behold the healthful day which is ordained by my providence. [Note 7]
Suffering itself is a deception (upadhi); for its core is rapture, which is the attribute (upadhi) of illumination.
The imprint of the rapture enclosed in suffering, then, is the foremost “grave and constant” of our science. Compassed in the life wisdom of perhaps but a minority of the human race, it has nevertheless been the matrix and final term of all the mythologies of the world, yielding its radiance to the whole festival of those lesser upadhis — or imprints — to which we now must turn.
II. The Structuring Force of Life on Earth
Certainly one force that can never have been absent from human experience, as Adolf Portmann has pointed out in a suggestive paper on “The Earth as the Home of Life,” [Note 8] is gravity, which no only works continuously on every aspect of human affairs, but has fundamentally conditioned the form of the body and all its organs. The diurnal alternation of light and dark is another ineluctable factor of experience, to which, indeed, considerable dramatic value accrues as a result of the fact that at night the world sleeps, dangers lurk, and the mind plunges into a realm of dream experience, which differs in its logic from the world of light. In dream, objects shine of themselves, without illumination from without, and moreover, are of a subtle substance that is capable of magical and rapid transformation, appalling effects, and non-mechanical locomotion. The can be no doubt but that the world of myth has been saturated by dream, or that men were dreaming even when they were little more than apes. And, as Géza Róheim has observed, “there cannot be several ‘culturally determined’ ways of dreaming, just as there are no two ways of sleeping.” [Note 9]
Dawn, and awakening from this world of dream, must always have been associated with the sun and sunrise. The night fears and night charms are dispelled by light, which has always been experienced as coming from above and as furnishing guidance and orientation. Darkness, then, and weight, the pull of gravity and the dark interior of the earth, of the jungle, or of the deep sea, as well as certain extremely poignant fears and delights, must for millenniums have constituted a firm syndrome of human experience, in contrast to the luminous flight of the world-awakening solar sphere into and through immeasurable heights. Hence a polarity of light and dark, above and below, guidance and loss of bearings, confidence and fears (a polarity that we all know from our own tradition of thought and feeling and can find matched in many parts of the world) must be reckoned as inevitable in the way of a structuring principle of human thought. It may or may not be fixed within us as an “isomorph”; but, in any case, it is certainly a general and very deeply known experience. The moon, furthermore, and the spectacle of the night sky, the stars and the Milky Way, have constituted, certainly from the beginning, a source of wonder and profound impression. But there is actually a physical influence of the moon upon the earth and its creatures, its tides and our own interior tides, which has long been consciously recognized as well as subliminally experienced. The coincidence of the menstrual cycle with that of the moon is a physical actuality structuring human life and a curiosity that has been observed with wonder. It is in fact likely that the fundamental notion of a life-structuring relationship between the heavenly world and that of man was derived from the realization, both in experience and in thought, of the force of the lunar cycle. The mystery, also, of the death and resurrection of the moon, as well as of its influence on dogs, wolves and foxes, jackals and coyotes, which try to sing to it: this immortal silver dish of wonder, cruising among the beautiful stars and racing through the clouds, turning waking life itself into a sort of dream, has been a force and presence even more powerful in the shaping of mythology than the sun, by which its light and its world of stars, night sounds, erotic moods, and the magic of dream, are daily quenched.
The contrast in physical form and spheres of competence of the male and female surely is another universal of human experience; and we must reckon also, in this context, with the “instinct crossing” between the two, which makes possible — or rather, inevitable, and sometimes even against better judgment — the awakening of the two bodies in synchronization to that curious mutual engagement which the Freudians like to call a “re-enactment of the primal scene,” and which many have found to be the one consummation of appetite most difficult to resist. In a number of meticulous studies of animal behavior it has been shown that a trimly meshed sequence of sign stimuli, flashed from the male organism to the female and from the female to the male, can be identified as releasers of the sometimes exceedingly complicated performances that must be undertaken in perfect synchronization before the species can be reproduced; and I do not know anyone outside of the most carefully schooled scientific circles who would suppose for a moment that a comparable criss-cross of isomorphs might not safely be assumed to exist on the human level as well. But since nothing is to be assumed recklessly on the basis of merely personal experience, and no one has yet been able to raise two young human beings in absolute isolation from social conditioning and introduce them to each other when the moon is full, we shall not presume to say how much of what everyone knows about this matter is due to imprint, or how much to inherited image. Let us remark only that the perfumes of flowers, the beautification of the body, night, secret meetings, music, token exchanges, anguish, remorse, rivalry, jealousy, murder, and the whole opera, can be identified in human history as far as our eyes can see.
And we have the voluminous literature of the Freudian school to assure us that the covert as well as obvious analogies, puns, and inflections by which sex, the sex organs, and the sexual act are implicated in our thoughts are known to every tradition in the world, whether oral or literate. In mythology, of course, the image of birth from the womb is an extremely common figure for the origin of the universe, and the sexual intercourse that must have preceded it is represented in ritual action as well as in story. Furthermore, the mysterious (one might even say, magical) functioning of the female body in its menstrual cycle, in the ceasing of the cycle during the period of gestation, and in the agony of birth — and the appearance, then, of the new being; these, certainly, have made profound imprints on the mind. The fear of menstrual blood and isolation of women during their periods, the rites of birth, and all the lore of magic associated with human fecundity make it evident that we are here in the field of one of the major centers of interest of the human imagination. In the earliest ritual art the naked female form is extremely prominent, whereas the male is usually ornamented, or masked, as shaman or hunter in the performance of some act. The fear of woman and the mystery of her motherhood have been for the male no less impressive imprinting forces that the fears and mysteries of the world of nature itself. And there may be found in the mythologies and ritual traditions of our entire species innumerable instances of the unrelenting efforts of the male to relate himself effectively — in the way, so to say, of antagonistic cooperation — to these two alien yet intimately constraining forces: woman and the world.
Still another profoundly important structuring system of experiences that can be said, without question, to constitute a pattern of imprints on our own readiness for life is that of the normal stages of human growth and emotional susceptibility, from the moment of birth to that of death and the stench of decay. A great deal of excellent writing on this subject has been produced recently by the various authorities on child psychology and psychoanalysis, so that to review the whole matter in detail would be only to repeat what is already very well known. However, I am not aware of any work that has yet drawn attention in systematic series to the mythological motifs developed from the imprints of this sociologized biology of human growth.
As we have noted, it requires twenty years of the human organism to mature, and during the greater part of this development it is dependent, utterly, upon parental care. There follows a period of another twenty years or so of maturity, after which the signs of age begin to appear. But the human being is the only animal capable of knowing death as the end inevitable for itself, and the span of old age for this human organism, consciously facing death, is a period of years longer than the whole lifetime of any other primate. So we see three — at least three — distinct periods of growth and susceptibility to imprint as inevitable in a human biography: (1) childhood and youth, with its uncouth charm; (2) maturity, with its competence and authority; and (3) wise old age, nursing its own death and gazing back, either with love or with rancor, at the fading world.
It has been the chief function of much of the mythological lore and ritual practice of our species to carry the mind, feelings, and powers of action of the individual across the critical thresholds from the two decades of infancy to adulthood, and from old age to death; to supply the sign stimuli adequate to release the life energies of the one who is no longer what he was for his new task, the new phase, in a manner appropriate to the well-being of the group. And so we find, on the one hand, as a constant factor in these “rites of passage,” the inevitable, and therefore universal, requirements of the human individual at the particular junctures, and on the other hand, as a cultural variable, the historically conditioned requirements and beliefs of the local group. This gives that interesting quality of seeming to be ever the same, though ever changing, to the kaleidoscope of world mythology, which may charm our poets and artists but is a nightmare for the mind that seeks to classify. And yet, with a steady eye, even the phantasmagoria of a nightmare can be catalogued — to a degree.
The remaining sections of the present chapter develop, therefore, in the way of a tentative, preliminary sketch, the main lines and phases of what would appear to have been — up to the present moment, at least — the chief sources of imprint in the course of the archetypal biography of man.
III. The Imprints of Early Infancy
Certain imprints impressed upon the nervous system in the plastic period between birth and maturity are the source of many of the most widely known images of myth. Necessarily the same for all mankind, they have been variously organized in the differing traditions, but everywhere function as potent energy releasers and directors.
The first indelible imprints are those of the moment of birth itself. The congestion of blood and sense of suffocation experienced by the infant before its lungs commence to operate give rise to a brief seizure of terror, the physical effects of which (caught breath, circulatory congestion, dizziness, or even blackout) tend to recur, more or less strongly, whenever there is an abrupt moment of fright. So that the birth trauma, as an archetype of transformation, floods with considerable emotional effect the brief moment of loss of security and threat of death that accompanies any crisis of radical change. In the imagery of mythology and religion this birth (or more often rebirth) theme is extremely prominent; in fact, every threshold passage — not only this from the darkness of the womb to the light of the sun, but also those from childhood to adult life and from the light of the world to whatever mystery of darkness may lie beyond the portal of death — is comparable to a birth and has been ritually represented, practically everywhere, through an imagery of re-entry into the womb. This is one of those mythological universals that surely merit interpretation, rather from a psychological than from an ethnological point of view.
The water image in mythology is intimately associated with this motif, and the goddesses, mermaids, witches, and sirens that often appear as guardians or manifestations of water (wells, water courses, youth-renewing caldrons), Ladies of the Lake and other water nixies, may represent either its life-threatening or its life-furthering aspect.
The Late Classical story of Actaeon, for example, as rendered in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, [Note 10] tells of a hunter, a vigorous youth in the prime of his young manhood, who, when stalking deer with his dogs, chanced upon a stream that he followed to its source, where he broke upon the goddess Diana bathing, surrounded by a galaxy of naked nymphs. And the youth, not spiritually prepared for such a supernormal image, had only the normal look in his eye; whereupon the goddess, perceiving this, sent forth her power and transformed him into a stag, which his own dogs then immediately scented, pursued, and tore to bits.
On the simple level of a typical Freudian reading, this mythical episode represents the prurient anxiety of a small boy discovering Mother; but according to a more sophisticated, “sublimated” vein of reference, more appropriate to the post-Alexandrian atmosphere of Ovid’s elegant art, Diana was a manifestation of that goddess-mother of the world whom we have already met as Queen Isis, and who, as she herself has told us, was known to the cultures of the Mediterranean under many names. The case, surely, is that of an upadhi: an inferior object (mother image) serving as symbol of a superior (the mystery of life). Meditating, we may emphasize the superior, in which case we are performing what in India is termed sampad upāsāna, ” accomplished, or perfected, meditation” ; or we may emphasize the inferior, which is termed adhyāsa upāsāna, “superimposed, or false, meditation.” The first elevates to the supernormal; the second leaves one about as Actaeon: to be psychoanalyzed, finally, to bits and returned to the womb.
Figure 2. Artemis of Ephesus
At her greatest temple city in Asia Minor, at Ephesus (where, in a.d. 431, the Virgin Mary would be declared to have been truly “the Godbearer”), the great goddess, the mother of all things, was represented as Artemis (Diana) with a multitude of breasts. Innumerable figurines, furthermore, of naked goddesses (or rather, in the spirit of her own perfected teaching, we should say, of the Naked Goddess) have been found throughout the excavated ruins of the ancient world. As Heinrich Zimmer observed in his commentary on a Hindu version of her story:
If one inquires to know her ultimate origin, the oldest textual remains and images can carry us back only so far, and permit us to say: “Thus she appeared in those early times; so-and-so she may have been named; and in such-and-such a manner she seems to have been revered.” But with that we have come to the end of what can be said; with that we have come to the primitive problem of her comprehension and being. She is the primum mobile, the first beginning, the material matrix out of which all comes forth. To question beyond her into her antecedents and origin, is not to understand her, is indeed to misunderstand and underestimate, in fact to insult her. And anyone attempting such a thing well might suffer the calamity that befell that smart young adept who undertook to unveil the veiled image of the Goddess in the ancient Egyptian temple of Sais, and whose tongue was paralysed forever by the shock of what he saw. According to the Greek tradition the Goddess has declared of herself: [Greek terms], “no one has lifted my veil.” It is a question not exactly of the veil, but of the garment that covers her female nakedness — the veil is a later misinterpretation for the sake of decency. The meaning is: I am the Mother without a spouse, the Original Mother; all are my children, and therefore none has ever dared to approach me; the impudent one who should attempt it shames the Mother — and that is the reason for the curse. [Note 11]
In the tale of Actaeon we have this same religious theme rendered in a comparable image. “And though Diana would fain have had her arrow ready,” Ovid tells us, “what she had she took up, the water, and flung it into the young man’s face. And as she poured the avenging drops upon his hair, she spoke these words, foreboding his coming doom: ‘Now you are free to tell that you have seen me unrobed — if you can tell.’” [Note 12]
The water is the vehicle of the power of the goddess; but equally, it is she who personifies the mystery of the waters of birth and dissolution — whether of the individual or of the universe. For in the vein of myth the elemental mode of representation may alternate with that of personification. At the opening of the Book of Genesis is it not written, for example, that “the Spirit [or wind] of God was moving over the face of the waters”? Water and wind, matter and spirit, life and its generator: these pairs of opposites are fused in the experience of life; and their world-creating juncture may be represented elementally, as in this opening of the Bible, or on the other hand, as in the art of the Tantric Buddhism, in the image of a divine male and female in sexual embrace. The mystery of the origin of the “great universe” or macrocosm is read in terms of the procreation of the “little universe,” the microcosm; and the amniotic fluid is then precisely comparable to the water that in many mythologies, as well as in the pre-Socratic philosophy of the Greek sage Thales of Miletus (c. 640-546 b.c.), represents the elementary substance of all things.
This manner of homologizing the personal and the universal, which is a basic method of mythological discourse, has made it possible for Freudian psychoanalysts, whose training in the language of symbols has been derived from a study primarily of neurotics, to translate the whole cultural inheritance of mankind back into nursery rhymes. But the problem of the neurotic is, precisely, that instead of accomplishing the passage of the difficult threshold of puberty, dying as infant to be reborn as adult, he has remained with a significant fraction of his personality structure fixed in the condition of dependency. Rejecting emotionally the reorganization of his childhood imprints through the myths and rites of a maturely functioning community, he can read the picture language of his civilization only in terms of the infantile sources of its developed and manipulated figures; whereas in the mythology and rites these have been applied to a cultural and simultaneously metaphysical context of allusions. Freud theoretically devaluated such culturally and philosophically inspired repatternings, terming them mere “secondary elaborations” — which is perhaps appropriate when the case in question is the nightmare of some forty-year-old sub- adolescent, weeping on a couch. But in the reading of myth such a reductive method commits us to the monotony of identifying in every symbolic system only the infantile sources of its elements, neglecting as merely secondary the historical problem of their reorganization: pretty much as though an architect, viewing the structures of Rome, Istanbul, Mohenjo-Daro, and New York, were to content himself with the observation that all are of brick. In the present chapter we are examining bricks. Hereafter we may take bricks for granted and concern ourselves with their employment. For, as a Jungian friend of mine once epitomized the problem: “It is the predicament of the neurotic that he translates everything into the terms of infantile sexuality; but if the doctor does so too, then where do we get?”
The state of the child in the womb is one of bliss, actionless bliss, and this state may be compared to the beatitude visualized for paradise. In the womb, the child is unaware of the alternation of night and day, or of any of the images of temporality. It should not be surprising, therefore, if the metaphors used to represent eternity suggest, to those trained in the symbolism of the infantile unconscious, retreat to the womb.
The fear of the dark, which is so strong in children, has been said to be a function of their fear of returning to the womb: the fear that their recently achieved daylight consciousness and not yet secure individuality should be reabsorbed. In archaic art, the labyrinth — home of the child-consuming Minotaur — was represented in the figure of a spiral. The spiral also appears spontaneously in certain stages of meditation, as well as to people going to sleep under ether. It is a prominent device, furthermore, at the silent entrances and within the dark passages of the ancient Irish kingly burial mound of New Grange. These facts suggest that a constellation of images denoting the plunge an dissolution of consciousness in the darkness of non-being must have been employed intentionally, from an early date, to represent the analogy of threshold rites to the mystery of the entry of the child into the womb for birth. And this suggestion is reinforced by the further fact that the paleolithic caves of southern France and northern Spain, which are now dated by most authorities circa 35,000–11,000 b.c.*, were certainly sanctuaries not only of hunting magic but also of the male puberty rites. A terrific sense of claustrophobia, and simultaneously of release from every context of the world above, assails the mind impounded in those more than absolutely dark abysses, where darkness no longer is an absence of light but an experienced force. And when a light is flashed to reveal the beautifully painted bulls and mammoths, flocks of reindeer, trotting ponies, woolly rhinos, and dancing shamans of those caves, the images smite the mind as indelible imprints. It is obvious that the idea of death-and-rebirth, rebirth through ritual and with a fresh organization of profoundly impressed sign stimuli, is an extremely ancient one in the history of culture, and that everything was done, even in the period of the paleolithic caves, to inspire in the youngsters being symbolically killed a reactivation of their childhood fear of the dark. The psychological value of such a “shock treatment” for the shattering of a no longer wanted personality structure appears to have been methodically utilized in a time-tested pedagogical crisis of brainwashing and simultaneous reconditioning of the IRMs, for the conversion of babes into men, dependable hunters, and courageous defenders of the tribe.
The concept of the earth as both bearing and nourishing mother has been extremely prominent in the mythologies both of hunting societies and of planters. According to the imagery of the hunters, it is from her womb that the game animals derive, and one discovers their timeless archetypes in the underworld, or dancing ground, of the rites of initiation — those archetypes of which the flocks on earth are but temporal manifestations sent for the nourishment of man. Comparably, according to the planters, it is in the mother’s body that the grain is sown: the plowing of the earth is a begetting and the growth of the grain a birth. Furthermore, the idea of the earth as mother and of burial as a re-entry into the womb for rebirth appears to have recommended itself to at least some of the communities of mankind at an extremely early date. The earliest unmistakable evidences of ritual and therewith of mythological thought yet found have been the grave burials of Homo neanderthalensis, a remote predecessor of our own species, whose period is perhaps to be dated as early as >200,000–23,000 b.c.* [Note 13] Neanderthal skeletons have been found interred with supplies (suggesting the idea of another life), accompanied by animal sacrifice (wild ox, bison, and wild goat), with attention to an east-west axis (the path of the sun, which is reborn from the same earth in which the dead are placed), in flexed position (as though within the womb), or in a sleeping posture — in one case with a pillow of chips of flint. [Note 14] Sleep and death, awakening and resurrection, the grave as a return to the mother for rebirth; but whether Homo neanderthalensis thought the next awakening would be here again or in some world to come (or even both together) we do not know.
So much, then for the imagery of birth.
The next constellation of imprints to be noted is that associated with the bliss of the child at the mother’s breast; and here again we have a context of enduring force. The relationship of suckling to mother is one of symbiosis: though two, they constitute a unit. In fact, as far as the infant is concerned — who is still far from having conceived even the first notion of a dissociation between subject and object, inside and outside — affective aspect of its own experience and those external stimuli to which its feeling, needs, and satisfactions correspond are exactly one. Its world, as Jean Piaget has clearly shown in his study of The Child’s Conception of the World, is a “continuum of consciousness,” [Note 15] at once physical and psychic. Whatever impinges upon its unpracticed senses is uncritically identified with the attendant tonalities of its own interior, so that between the external and internal poles of its world there is no distinction. And this undefined, undefining experience of continuity is only emphasized by the readiness of the mother to respond to, or even to anticipate, its requirements. [Note 16] The whole tiny universe of this self- centered mite is ” a network of purposive movements, more or less mutually dependent,” [Note 17] and all tending toward the good of — itself.
But the mother cannot anticipate everything. There are moments, consequently, when the universe does not correspond exactly to experienced need. whereupon the imprints of that first terrifying shock of separation, the birth trauma, which afflicted the whole organism in its initial experience of the assault of life, are more or less forcefully reactivated. The mother is absent; the universe, absent; the bliss of the blessed infant imbibing forever the ambrosia of the madonna’s body is gone forever. Melanie Klein, who has devoted particular attention to this very early chapter of our universal biography, has suggested that at such moments an impulse to tear “good body content” from the mother is immediately and simultaneously identified by the child with the danger of its own bodily destruction. [Note 18] Hence, when the mother image begins to assume definition in the gradual dawn of the infantile consciousness, it is already associated not only with the sense of beatitude, but also with fantasies of danger, separation, and terrible destruction.
Figure 3. Devouring Kālī
We all know the fairy tale of the witch who lives in a candy house that would be nice to eat. Indeed, we have seen already what a scare she gave to a child who conjured her up in play. She is kind to children and invites them into her tasty house only because she wants to eat them. She is a cannibal. (And for some six hundred thousand years of human experience cannibals, it should be born in mind — and even cannibal mothers — were grim and gruesome, ever-present realities.) Cannibal ogresses appear in the folklore of peoples, high and low, throughout the world; and on the mythological level the archetype is even magnified into a universal symbol in such cannibal-mother goddesses as the Hindu Kālī , the “Black One,” who is a personification of “all-consumming Time”; or in the medieval European figure of the consumer of the wicked dead, the female mouth and belly of Hel.
In a myth of the Melanesian island of Malekula in the New Hebrides, which describes the dangers of the way to the Land of the Dead, it is told that when the soul has been carried on a wind across the waters of death and is approaching the entrance of the underworld, it perceives a female guardian sitting before the entrance, drawing a labyrinth design across the path, of which she erases half as the soul approaches. The voyager must restore the design perfectly if he is to pass through it to the Land of the Dead. Those who fail, the threshold guardian eats. One may understand how very important it must have been, then, to learn the secret of the labyrinth before death; and why the teaching of this secret of immortality is the chief concern of the religious ceremonials of Malekula.
According to a number of authorities cited by W.F. Jackson Knight in a highly interesting and suggestive article on “Maze Symbolism and the Trojan Game,” the labyrinth, maze, and spiral were associated in ancient Crete and Babylon with the internal organs of the human anatomy as well as with the underworld, the one being the microcosm of the other. “The object of the tomb-builder would have been to make the tomb as much like the body of the mother as he was able,” he writes, since to enter the next world, “the spirit would have to be re-born,” [Note 19] “The maze form — which is an elaborated spiral — gives a long and indirect path from the outside of an area to the inside, at a point called the nucleus, generally near the center. Its principle seems to be the provision of a difficult but possible access to some important point. Two ideas are involved: the idea of defence and exclusion, and the idea of the penetration, on correct terms, of this defence.” [Note 20] “The maze symbolism,” he states further, “seems somehow to be associated with maidenhood….The overcoming of difficulties by a hero frequently precedes union with some hidden princess.” [Note 21]
In the celebrated story of Theseus, the labyrinth, and the princess Ariadne, the Cretan labyrinth was difficult to enter and as difficult to leave, but Ariadne’s thread supplied the clue. And when the legendary founder of Rome, the hero Aeneas, arrived, in the course of his journey from Troy, at the cavern-entrance of the underworld, he found engraved there, upon the rocky face, a figure of the Cretan labyrinth. And when he and his company had made sacrifice of abundant beeves and lambs to the ultimate deities of that abyss, “Lo! about the first rays of sunrise the ground moaned underfoot, and the woodland ridges began to stir, and dogs seemed to howl through the dusk as the terrible guardian, the Sibyl, arrived. ‘Away! Depart, you unsanctified!” she cried. ‘Retire from the grove! But thou, Aeneas, come, unsheath thy steel; now is need of courage, now of strong resolve!’ Whereupon she plunged in ecstasy into the cavern opening, and he, unflinching, depth pace with his advancing guide.” [Note 22]
We have already noted that in the early Irish kingly burial mound of New Grange (which is to be dated somewhere in the second millennium b.c.) labyrinthine spirals are prominent, not only within the narrow passages to the “nucleus” but also, and most conspicuously, on the great threshold-stones at the entrances, where they guard the four gates, one facing in each of the four directions. In ancient Egypt the structure known as the Labyrinth (mentioned by Herodotus and Strabo, and excavated by Flinders Petrie in 1888) was a vast complex of buildings beside an artificial lake, with the tombs of kings and sacred crocodiles in the basement. The relationship (if any) of such megalithic structures and the rituals of their use in Egypt, Crete, and Ireland to the mortuary customs of remote Melanesia, which are also associated both with megaliths and with the symbolism of the spiral and the labyrinth, as well as with animal sacrifice (the sacrificial animal there, however, being the pig), we shall consider when we come to the problem of the origins and diffusion of the mythological motifs of the neolithic and equatorial culture spheres. For the present, it will suffice to remark that in Malekula, when the voyager to the Land of the Dead has proved himself qualified to enter the cave by completing the labyrinth-design of the dangerous guardian, he discovers therein a great water, the Water of Life, on the shore of which grows a tree, which he climbs, and from which he dives into the waters of the subterranean sea. [Note 23]
The Hindu mother-goddess Kālī is represented with her long tongue lolling to lick up the lives and blood of her children. She is the very pattern of the sow that eats her farrow, the cannibal ogress: life itself, the universe, which sends forth beings only to consume them. And yet she is simultaneously the goddess Annapurna (anna meaning “food,” and pūrnā, “abundance”), India’s counterpart of Egyptian Isis with the sun-child Horus at her breast, or of Babylonian Ishtar, nursing the moon-god reborn, the archaic prefigurements in Mediterranean mythology and art of the Madonna of the Middle Ages.
And so, in mythology and rite, as well as in the psychology of the infant, we find the imagery of the mother associated almost equally with beatitude and danger, birth and death, the inexhaustible nourishing breast and the tearing claws of the ogress. The heavenly realm, where the paradisial meal is served forever, and Olympus, the mountain of the gods, where ambrosia flows — these, certainly, are but versions fit for adult saints and heroes of the bliss of the well-nursed child. And the primary imprint of which the fury and fright of the disemboweling maw of hell is the adult amplification is no less certainly the child’s own fantasies of its raging body — its whole universe — torn apart.
A third system of imprints that can be assumed to be universal in the development of the mentality of the infant is that deriving from its fascination with its own excrement, which becomes emphatic at the age of about two and a half. In many societies the infant experiences the first impact of severe discipline in the matter of when, where, and how it may permit itself to respond to nature; the worst of it being that for the child, at this period of its life, defecation is experienced as a creative act and its own excrement as a thing of value, suitable for presentation as a gift. In societies in which this pattern of interest and action is regarded as unattractive, a socially determined reorganization of response is imposed sharply and absolutely, the spontaneous interest and evaluations of the earlier period of the child’s thought being then strictly repressed. But they cannot be erased. They remain as subordinated, written-over imprints: forbidden images, apt on occasion, or under one disguise or another, to reassert their force.
Throughout the higher mythologies there is abundant evidence of dualistic systems of imagery deriving from this circumstance. They are to be recognized in the prevalence of an association of filth with sin and cleanliness with virtue. Hell is a foul pit and heaven a place of absolute purity, whether in the Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Hindu, Moslem or Christian organization of the afterworld. Furthermore, there has been a suggestion from Dr. Freud to the effect that the infantile urge to manipulate filth and assign it value survives in our adult interest in the arts — painting, smearing of all kinds, sculpture, and architecture — as well as in the urge to collect precious stones, gold, or money, and in the pleasures derived from the giving and receiving of gifts. The aim of the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century alchemists to sublimate “base matter” (filth and corruption) into gold (which is pure and therefore incorruptible) would represent perfectly, according to this view, an urge to carry the energies locked in the first system of interests into the sphere of the superimposed second, so that, instead of suppression and therewith division, there should be effected a sublimation, or vital fusion, of the two socially opposed systems of the psyche, or, to use the phrase of the poet Blake, a Marriage of Heaven and Hell. And the fact that it was precisely at the time of the collapse (for many) of the authority of the medieval dualism of God and devil that the greatest flowering not only of alchemy but also of the Occidental arts took place may tend to confirm this psychoanalytical reading of the urge that brought them forth. The value of gold, of the marble and clay of the sculptor, and of the materials of the painter may be supposed, furthermore, to have been the greater inasmuch as all were derived from the bowels of the earth — which, according to the system of the saints, had long received an emphatically negative interpretation as the seat of hell.
And it may be noted further, in this connection, that in practically every primitive society ever studied the smearing of paint and clay on the body is thought to give magical protection as well as beauty; that in India, where cowdung is revered as sacred and the ritual distinction between the left hand (used at the toilet) and the right (putting food into the mouth) is an issue of capital moment, a ritual smearing of the forehead and body with colored clays and ash is a prominently developed religious exercise; and, finally, that among many advanced as well as primitive peoples the sacred clowns — who in religious ceremonies are permitted to break taboos and always enact obscene pantomimes — are initiated into their orders by way of a ritual eating of filth.
Among the Jicarilla Apache of New Mexico the members of the clown society are actually called “Striped Excrement.” [Note 24] They are smeared with a white clay and have four black horizontal stripes crossing their legs, body, and face [Note 25] In our own circuses the clown is garishly painted, breaks whatever taboos the police permit, and is a great favorite of the youngsters, who perhaps see reflected in his peculiar charm the paradise of innocence that was theirs before they were taught the knowledge of good and evil, purity and filth.
A fourth constellation of imprints engraved on the maturing psyche of the infant appears (at east in those provinces of our own civilization that have been studied for these effects) at about the age of four, when the physical difference between the sexes becomes a matter of keen concern. The petite différence leads the girl to believe (we are told) that she has been castrated, and the boy that he is liable to be. Thereafter, in the masculine imagination all fear of punishment is freighted with an obscurely sensed castration fear, while the female is obsessed with an envy that cannot be quite quenched until she has brought forth from her own body a son. Hence the value, from the female point of view, of the madonna image and the whole system of religious references imputing cosmic significance to her womb and breasts. But in the male the sense of her dangerous envy is ever present. Hence the negative estimate of the woman as a potential spiritual, if not physical, castrator, which in the mind of the child tends to become associated with the image of the ogress and cannibal witch, and in religious traditions where a monastic spirit prevails is an extremely prominent trait.
In this connection it should be noted that there is a motif occurring in certain primitive mythologies, as well as in modern surrealist painting and neurotic dream, which is known to folklore as “the toothed vagina” — the vagina that castrates. And a counterpart, the other way, is the so-called “phallic mother,” a motif perfectly illustrated in the long fingers and nose of the witch. According to Freud, [Note 26] the capacity of the sight of a spider to precipitate a crisis of neurotic anxiety — whether in the nursery rhyme of Miss Muffett or in the labyrinths of modern life — derives from an unconscious association of the spider with the image of the phallic mother; to which, perhaps, should be added the observation that the web, the spiral web, may also contribute to the arachnid’s force as a fear-releasing sign.
There is a myth of the Andamanese, according to which there were at first no women in the world, only men. Sir Monitor Lizard (whom we shall later meet at leisure) captured one of these, cut off his genitals, and took him to wife. Their progeny became the ancestors of the only race in the world with which the Andamanese and their mythology are concerned — to wit, the Andamanese. [Note 27]
According to another myth — told in New Mexico by the Jicarilla Apache Indians [Note 28] — there once was a murderous monster called Kicking Monster, whose four daughters at that time were the only women in the world possessing vaginas. They were “vagina girls.” And they lived in a house that was full of vaginas. “They had the form of women,” we are told, “but they were in reality vaginas. Other vaginas were hanging around on the walls, but these four were in the form of girls with legs and all body parts and were walking around.” As may be imagined, the rumor of these girls brought many men along the road; but they would be met by Kicking Monster, kicked into the house, and never returned. And so Killer-of-Enemies, a marvelous boy hero, took it upon himself to correct the situation.
Outwitting Kicking Monster, Killer-of-Enemies entered the house, and the four girls approached him, craving intercourse. But he asked, “Where have all the men gone who were kicked into this place?” “We ate them up,” they said, “because we like to do that”; and they attempted to embrace him. But he held them off, shouting, “Keep away! That is no way to use the vagina.” and then he told them, “First I must give you some medicine, which you have never tasted before, medicine made of sour berries; and then I’ll do what you ask.” Whereupon he gave them sour berries of four kinds to eat. “The vagina,” he said, “is always sweet when you do like this.” The berries puckered their mouths, so that finally they could not chew at all, but only swallowed. “They liked it very much, though,” declared the teller of the story. “It felt just as if Killer-of-Enemies was having intercourse with them. They were almost unconscious with ecstasy, though really Killer-of-Enemies was doing nothing at all to them. It was the medicine that made them feel that way.
“When Killer-of-Enemies had come to them,” the story-teller then concluded, “they had had strong teeth with which they had eaten their victims. But his medicine destroyed their teeth entirely.” [Note 29] And so we see how the great boy hero, once upon a time, domesticated the toothed vagina to its proper use.
Now it must have occurred to the reader during the preceding review of a series of imprints that, although a number of the images discussed are no doubt impressed upon our “open” IRMs from without, certain others can be the products only of the nervous structure itself. For where in the world would the cannibal ogress be? Or where the phallic mother and toothed vagina? Judging from the power of such images to release affects in children, as well as in many adults, we should call them sign stimuli of considerable force. Yet they are not in nature, but have been created by the mind. Whence then? Whence the images of nightmare and of dream?
Perhaps a suggestive analogy is to be seen in the case of the grayling moth, which prefers darker mates to those actually offered by its present species. For if human art can offer to a moth the supernormal sigh stimulus to which it responds more eagerly than to the normal offerings of life, it can surely supply supernormal stimuli, also, to the IRMs of man — and not only spontaneously, in dream and nightmare, but even more brilliantly in the contrived folktales, fairy tales, mythological landscapes, over-and underworlds, temples and cathedrals, pagodas and gardens, dragons, angels, gods, and guardians of popular and religious art. It is true, of course, that the culturally developed formulations of these wonders have required in many cases centuries, even millenniums, to complete. But it is true also (and this, I believe, is what the present review is showing) that there is a point of support for the reception of such images in the déjà vu of the partially self-shaped and self-shaping mind. In other words, whereas in the animal world the “isomorphs,” or inherited stereotypes of the central nervous structure, which for the most part match the natural environment, may occasionally contain possibilities of response unmatched by nature, the world of man, which is now largely the product of our own artifice, represents — to a considerable extent, at least — an opposite order of dynamics; namely, that of a living nervous structure and controlled response system fashioning its habitat, and not vice versa; but fashioning it not always consciously, by any means; indeed, for the most part, or at least for a very considerable part, fashioning it impetuously, out of its own self-produced images of rage and fear.
A fifth and culminating syndrome of imprints of this kind, mixed of outer and inner impacts, is that of the long and variously argued Oedipus complex, which, according to the orthodox Freudian school, is normally established in the growing child at the age of about five or six, and thereafter constitutes the primary constellating pattern of all impulse, thought and feeling, imaginative art, philosophy, mythology and religion, scientific research, sanity and madness. The claim for the universality of this complex has been vigorously challenged by a number of anthropologists; for example, Bronislaw Malinowski, who in his work on Sex and Repression in Savage Society declares, “The crux of the difficulty lies in the fact that to psychoanalysts the Oedipus complex is something absolute, the primordial source…the fons et origo of everything….I cannot conceive of the complex as the unique source of culture, of organization and belief,” he goes on then to say; “as the metaphysical entity, creative, but not created, prior to all things and not caused by anything else.” [Note 30] Géza Róheim, on the other had, replied in defense of Freud in a strong rebuttal, [Note 31] to which, as far as I know, there has been no response. However, since our problem for the present is not that of the ultimate force or extent in time and space of this imprint, but that simply of the possibility of its derivation from infantile experience, we may say that whether it is quite as universal as strict Freudians believe, or significantly modified in force and character according to the sociology of the tribe or family in question, the fact remains that at about the age of five or six the youngster becomes implicated imaginatively (in our culture world, at least) in a ridiculous tragi-comedy that we may term “the family romance.”
In its classical Freudian structuring, this Oedipal romance consists in the more or less unconscious wish of the boy to eliminate his father (Jack-the-Giant-Killer motif) and be alone with his mother; but with a correlative fear, which is also more or less unconscious, of a punishing castration by the father. And so here, at last, the imprint of the Father has entered the psychological picture of the growing child — in the way of a dangerous ogre. As Róheim represents the case in his study of the psychology of primitive warfare, the father is the first enemy, and every enemy i symbolic of the father; [Note 32] indeed, “whatever is killed becomes father.” [Note 33] Hence certain aspects of the headhunting rites, to which we shall presently be turning; hence, too, the rites of the paleolithic hunters in connection with the killing and eating of their totem beasts.
For the girl, the corresponding Freudian formula is that of the legend of Electra. She is her mother’s rival for the father’s love, living in fear that the ogress may kill him and draw herself back into the web of the nightmare of that presexual cannibal feast (formerly paradise!) of the bambino and madonna. for times have changed, and it is now the little girl herself who is to play the madonna — to a brood of dolls.
Since the following chapters furnish abundant instances of this romance of a Lilliputian and Two giants, we need not pause to document it here, but observe, simply, that one example has already been supplied in the episode of Killer-of-Enemies (the boy hero), Kicking Monster (the father-ogre), and the Four Vagina Girls (who are dangerous in the father’s service but susceptible of domestication). Four is ritual number in American Indian lore, referring to the four directions of the universe, and appears in this story because the figures have no personal, or historical, but rather a cosmic mythological reference. The girls ar personifications of an aspect of the mystery of life.
And so, finally, to conclude this brief sketch of the Freudian notion of the family romance and its variations, the reaction of the very young male who vaguely senses that his mother is a temptress, seducing his imagination to incest and parricide, may be to hide his feelings from his own thoughts by assuming the compensatory, negative attitude of a Hamlet — a mental posture of excessive submission to the jurisdiction of the father (atonement theme), together with a fierce rejection of the female and all the associated charms of the world (the fleshpots of Egypt, whore of Babylon, etc.):
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there;
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter: yes, by heaven!
O most pernicious woman!
O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain! [Note 34]
Here we are on the way to the worship of the omnipotent father alone, monkdom, puritanism, Platonism, celibate clergies, homosexuality, and all the rest. And there is much of this, too, to be found in the chapters to come.
For as long as the nuclear unit of human life has been a man, woman, and child, the maturing consciousness has had to come to a knowledge of its world through the medium of this heavily loaded, biologically based triangle of love and aggression, desire and fear, dependency, command, and the urge for release. It is a cooky-mold competent to shape the most recalcitrant dough. So that, even should it finally be shown, somehow, that the human nervous system is without innate form, we should still not be surprised to find in all mythology an order of sign stimuli derived from the engrams of these inevitables.
IV. The Spontaneous Animism of Childhood
It is during the years between six and twelve that youngsters in our culture, and apparently in most others, develop their personal skills and interests, moral judgments, and notions of status. The differentiating factors of the various natural and social environments now begin to preponderate to such a degree that further talk of common modes of thought and action might seem to be out of place. Yet all the new, structuring impressions, derived form the greatly differing local scenes, whether accidental in their impact or pedagogically systematized in imposed routines of training, are received in terms of the mentality not of adulthood but of growing childhood, which has certain common traits throughout the world.
Figure 4. A child’s drawing of his dream of the devil. After
Piaget
The enigma of the dream, for example, is at first interpreted as in no sense mental: it is external to the dreamer, even though invisible to others. And the memory of the dream is confused with ordinary memories, so that the two worlds are mixed. [Note 35] A little boy of five years and six months was asked, “Is the dream in your head?” and he answered, “I am in the dream, it is not in my head. When you dream you don’t know you are in bed. You know you are walking: you are in the dream. You are in bed, but you don’t know you are.” [Note 36] Even at the age of seven or eight, when dreams can be recognized as arising in the head instead of coming from outside — from the moon, from the night, from the lights in the room or in the street, or from the sky — they are still regarded as in some way external. “I dreamt that the devil wanted to boil me,” said a little fellow of seven, explaining a picture that he had drawn (figure above). On the left (I) was the child himself, in bed. “That’s me,” he said. “It was specially my eyes that stayed there — to see.” In the center was the devil. And on the right of the picture (II) was the little boy again, standing in his nightshirt in front of the devil, who was about to boil him. “I was there twice over,” he said in explanation. “When I was in bed I was really there, and then when I was in my dream I was with the devil, and I was really there too.”
The reader will not need to be told that we have here a type of logic that is not precisely that of Aristotle, but familiar enough in fairy tale and myth, where the miracle of bi-presence is possible and the same person or object can be in two or more places at the same time. Shamans, we shall presently see, leave their bodies and ride on their drums or mounts beyond the bounds of the visible world, to engage in adventures with devils and gods, or with other shamans, all of whom, likewise, can be in more that one place at a time. Or we may think of the Roman Catholic dogma of the multipresence of Christ in the sacrament of the altar. “There are not as many bodies of Christ as there are tabernacles in the world, or as there are Masses being said at the same time,” it is declared in a Catholic catechism of Christian doctrine, “but only one body of Christ, which is everywhere present, whole and entire in the Holy Eucharist, as God is everywhere present, while he is but one God.” [Note 37] Or one may think of the multipresence of the Hindu savior, Kṛṣṇa, when he was dancing with the many milkmaids of Vrindavan; and the charming explanation of the religious experience of multipresence that was given by the maids of Vrindavan to one of their number. “I see Kṛṣṇa everywhere,” the beautiful Radha had said, and they replied, “Darling, you have painted your eyes with the collyrium of love; that is why you see Kṛṣṇa everywhere.” [Note 38]
We have noted that in the world of the infant the solicitude of the parent conduces to a belief that the universe is oriented to the child’s own interest and ready to respond to every thought and desire. This flattering circumstance not only reinforces the primary indissociation between inside and out, but even adds to it a further habit of command, linked to an experience of immediate effect. The resultant impression of an omnipotence of thought — the power of thought, desire, a mere nod or shriek, to bring the world to heel — Freud identified as the psychological base of magic, and the researches of Piaget and his school support this view. The child’s world is alert and alive, governed by rules of response and command, not by physical laws: a portentous continuum of consciousness, endowed with purpose and intent, either resistant or responsive to the child itself. And as we know, this infantile notion (or something much like it) of a world governed rather by moral than by physical laws, kept under control by a super-ordinated parental personality instead of impersonal physical forces, and oriented to the weal and woe of man, is an illusion that dominates men’s thought in most parts of the world — or even most men’s thoughts in all parts of the world — to the very present. We are dealing here with a spontaneous assumption, antecedent to all teaching, which has given rise to, and now supports, certain religious and magical beliefs, and when reinforced in turn by these remains as an absolutely ineradicable conviction, which no amount of rational thought or empirical science can quite erase.
And so now it must be observed that, just as the imprints discussed in Section III of the present chapter are susceptible of either infantile or adult interpretation, so too are these experiences of indissociation. For even from the point of view of a strictly biological observation it can be shown that in a certain sense the indissociation of the child has a deeper validity than the adult experience of individuation. Biologically, the individual organism is in no sense independent of its world. For society is not, as Ralph Linton assumed, “a group of biologically distinct and self-contained individuals.” Nor is society, indeed, apart from nature. Between the organism and its environment there exists what Piaget has termed “a continuity of exchanges.” [Note 39] An internal and an external pole have to be recognized, “but each term is in a relation of constant equilibrium and natural dependence with respect to the other.” And it is only relatively slowly that a notion of individual freedom and sense of independence are developed — which then, however, may conduce not only to a manly sense of self- sufficiency and an order of logic in which subjective and objective are rationally kept apart, but to a deterioration of the unity of the social order as well, and to a sense of separateness, which may end in a general atmosphere of anxiety and neurosis.
It has been one of the chief aims of all religious teaching and ceremonial, therefore, to suppress as much as possible the sense of ego and develop that of participation. Such participation, in primitive cults, is principally in the organism of the community, which itself is conceived as participating in the natural order of the local environment. But to this there may be added the larger notion of a community including the dead as well — as, for example, in the Christian idea of the Church Militant, Suffering, and Triumphant: on earth, in purgatory, and in heaven. And finally, in all mystical effort the great goal is the dissolution of the dewdrop of the self in the ocean of the All: the stripping of self and the beholding of the Face.
“And when Thou didst approach my unworthiness with Thy greatly desired face, which bestows all bliss,” wrote Saint Gertrude of Helfta (1256-1302), “I felt that a light, ineffably vivifying, proceeded from Thy divine eyes into mine. Penetrating my entire inner being, it produced in every member a most marvelous effect, inasmuch as it dissolved my flesh and bones to the very marrow; so that I had the feeling that my whole substance was nothing but that divine splendor which, playing upon itself in an indescribably delightful way, was communicating to my soul incomparable serenity and joy.” [Note 40]
A like sentiment appears in the well-known verse of the Indian Brhadaranyaka Upaniṣad (c. 800 b.c.): “Just as a man, when in the embrace of a beloved wife, knows nothing within or without, so does this being, when embraced by the Supreme Self, know nothing within or without.” [Note 41]
Among the treasures of the Buddhist mystics of Japan we find the following in the journal of the sandal-maker Saichi (c. 1850-1933):
My heart and Thy heart —
The oneness of hearts —
“Homage to Amida Buddha!” [Note 42]
And once again, in the words of Omar Khayyam (1048?-1126):
My being is of Thee, and Thou art mine,
And I am Thine, since I am Lost in Thee! [Note 43]
In childhood the earliest questions asked concerning the origins of things betray the spontaneous assumption that somebody made them. “Who made the sun?” asks the child of two years and a half. “Who puts the stars in the sky at night?” asks another of three and a half. [Note 44] In these early ruminations the first point of focus is the problem of origin of the child itself, the second, the origin of mankind, and the last, the origin of things; but the compass of the search presents even learned parents with more than they can handle in the way of scientific and metaphysical challenge. One little boy, for example, presented his scholarly father with the following recorded series:
At two years and three months: “Where do eggs come from?” And when told: “Well, what do mummies lay?”
At two years and six months: “Papa, were there people before us?” Yes. “How did they come there?” They were born, like us. “Was the earth there before there were people on it?” Yes. “How did it get there if there were no people to make it?”
At three years and seven months: “Who made the earth?”
And at four years and five months: “Was there a mummy before the first mummy?”
At four years and nine months: “How did the first man get here without having a mummy?”
And only then, but shortly following: “How was water made?” “What are rocks made of?” [Note 45]
The first notion entertained by the majority of the youngest children seems to be that babies are not born or made, but found. “Mamma, where did you find me?” asked a youngster of three years and six months. “Mamma, where did I come from?” asked another, of three and eight. “Where is the baby now that a lady is going to have next summer?” asked one little genius of four years and ten months; and, when told: “Has she eaten it, then?” Another: “Do people turn back into babies when they get very old?” Or again, at an age of five years and four months: “When you die, do you grow up again?” [Note 46]
As Professor Piaget observes, in this first stage of theorization babies are thought to pre-exist; however, it is realized that parents must have something to do with the mystery. The reader will have noted that the various explanations on this level come very close to certain well- known primitive and archaic ideas; for example, that of conception through eating, which is found in myths and folktales throughout the world; or the idea of rebirth, which is perhaps already suggested even in the burial, circa 100,000 b.c., of Neanderthal Man.
The second type of infantile question concerning birth involves the problem not only of the whence but also that of the how. But this time the child’s interest in his own acts of creation, liquid and solid, has suggested at least two possibilities, which he is not usually willing to formulate, yet may be covertly testing through his questions. The queries just cited concerning the origins of water and rocks are manifest examples. Some sort of mysterious fabrication by the parents is supposed, either outside of their bodies or within, and these vaguely conceived processes then are taken to be possible models for the creation of other things in the world as well. The child begins by assuming that adults were the makers of all things; for they are thought to be omniscient and omnipotent until events make is all too evident that they are neither. Whereupon the cherished image of an all-knowing, all-potent, manually or otherwise creating parent is simply transferred to the vague figure of an anthropomorphic though invisible God, which has already been furnished by parental or other instruction.
The figure of a creative being is practically, if not absolutely, universal in the mythologies of the world, and just as the parental image is associated in childhood not only with the power to make all things but also with the authority to command, so also in religious thought the creator of the universe is commonly the giver and controller of its laws. The two orders — the infantile and the religious — are at least analogous, and it may well be that the latter is simply a translation of the former to a sphere out of range of critical observation. Piaget has pointed out that although the little myths of genesis invented by children to explain the origins of themselves and of things may differ, the basic assumption underlying all is the same: namely, that things have to be made by someone, and that they are alive and responsive to the commands of their creators. The origin myths of the world’s mythological systems differ too; but in all except the most rarefied the conviction is held (as in childhood), without proof, that the living universe is the handiwork or emanation — psychical or physical — or some father-mother or mother-father God.
The sense, then of this world as an undifferentiated continuum of simultaneously subjective and objective experience (participation), which is all alive (animism), and which was produced by some superior being (artificialism), may be said to constitute the axiomatic, spontaneously supposed frame of reference of all childhood experience, no matter what the local details of this experience may happen to be. And these three principles, it is no less apparent, are precisely those most generally represented in the mythologies and religious systems of the whole world.
In fact, the notion of participation — or indissociation between the subjective and objective aspects of experience — goes so far in the usual thinking both of infants and of the archaic philosophical systems that the names of things (which are certainly subjective, simply within the mind, and differ greatly from culture to culture) are thought by all children and by most archaic thinkers to be intrinsic to things, as their audible aspect. In the Hebrew Kabbala, for example, the sounds and forms of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are regarded as the very elements of reality, so that by correctly pronouncing the names of things, of angels, or even of God, the competent Kabbalist can make use of their force. The pronunciation of the name of God (YHVH), indeed, has always been guarded with great care. In ancient times the sages communicated the pronunciation of the name to their disciples only once in seven years. [Note 47] A scribe inditing biblical scrolls was required to place his mind in a devotional attitude when writing the name of God, and if he made an error in the name, in certain cases the mistake was irremediable and the whole column on which the error occurred had to be withdrawn from use; [Note 48] for the name itself could not be erased. Comparably, in the mystical disciplines of the Indian Tantric tradition, where not Hebrew but Sanskrit is regarded as the primal language of the universe, the pronunciation of the name of any god will cause him to appear and his force to operate, since the name is the audible form of the god himself. The supreme Word, of which the whole universe, visible and invisible, is the manifestation, is in the Indian tradition the syllable AUM. And, of course, then there is that celebrated opening of the Gospel according to John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” [Note 49]
“And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” [Note 50]
“If there weren’t any words it would be very bad,” said a little boy of six years and six months; “you couldn’t make anything. How could things have been made?” [Note 51]
The very young child does not remember when or how he first heard the names of things whose names he knows. He commonly believes that he came to know them simply by looking, and that the name comes into being simultaneously with the object. “What are names for?” a child of five years and a half was asked. “They are what you see when you look at things,” he replied. [Note 52] The name is a quality of the object, situated within it, and likewise known to the object. “Where is the name of the sun?” “Inside the sun,” a child of seven said. [Note 53] “Does a fish know its name?” the same little boy was asked when he was nine, and he answered, “Yes.”
What has been termed “creation from nothing,” and celebrated by theologians as an extremely elevated notion, is actually — at least in the text in which the notion is supposed to be documented — a creation from the word. through naming the name, which is one of the primary notions of creation entertained by the human infant. Moreover, in the cosmologies of archaic man, as in those of infancy, the main concern of the creator was in the weal and woe of man. Light was made so that we should see; night so that we might sleep; stars to foretell the weather; clouds to warn of rain. The child’s view of the world is not only geocentric, but egocentric. And if we add to this simple structure the tendency recognized by Freud, to experience all things in association with the subjective formula of the family romance (Oedipus complex), we have a rather tight and very slight vocabulary of elementary ideas, which we may expect to see variously inflected and applied in the mythologies of the world.
It is already clear from the studies that have been made of children in the West — who are the only ones that have been systematically examined — that the rational logic and scientific views that ultimately replace in their thinking the spontaneous animistic and artificialist theories of infancy only gradually suppress or dissolve the earlier notions. Names are not correctly distinguished from their referents until somewhere about the tenth or eleventh year. Life becomes restricted to animals and plants, and consciousness to animals, hardly before the ages of eleven or twelve, And yet even after the basic laws of physics and chemistry have been learned, which have been so painfully drawn from nature by the long toil of science, when the adult is asked about the mysteries of creation it is seldom that he will answer in other term than those of the infantile artificialist or animist: the world has been made by some omniscient god for some purpose, and we for some end, which we must learn to know and to serve; or else — in replies somewhat more sophisticated — there is within things themselves some force that makes them, an immanent power out of which they arise and back into which they go.
In mythologies of the world a great number of origin myths appear, but few more wonderful than the following, spontaneously invented by a nine-year-old when asked concerning the origins of his country
“How did Switzerland begin?”
“Some people come,” he answered.
“Where from?”
“I don’t know. There were bubbles on the water and a little worm underneath. Then it got big and came out of the water and fed and grew arms and teeth and feet and a head and it turned into a baby.”
“Where did the bubble come from?”
“From the water. The worm came out of the water and the bubble broke and the worm came out.”
“What was there at the bottom of the water?”
“The bubble, which came out of the ground.”
“And what happened to the baby?”
“He got big and had babies. By the time he died the babies had children. Later on some of them became French, some German, some Savoyards….” [Note 54]
It seems safe to assume, at this point, that no comment on this origin myth is necessary. Most reader can no doubt recall early myths of their own invention that were of somewhat the same order. With this we leave the course of our common childhood behind — the childhood of our species, perhaps, since the hoary days of Neanderthal — and move on to see what the adult shamans, priests, and philosophers have managed to achieve beyond this level, in the reading and representation of the enigma of life.
V. The System of Sentiments of the Local Group
The transformation of the child into the adult, which is achieved in higher societies through years of education, is accomplished on the primitive level more briefly and abruptly by means of the puberty rites that for many tribes are the most important ceremonials of their religious calendar.
When a Central Australian Aranda youngster is between ten and twelve years old, for example, he and the other members of his age group are taken by the men of the village and tossed several times into the air, while the women, dancing around the company, wave their arms and shout. Each boy then is painted on his chest and back with simple designs by a man related to the social group from which his wife must come, and as they paint the patterns the men sing: “May he reach to the stomach of the sky, may he grow up to the stomach of the sky, may he go right into the stomach of the sky.” The boy is told that he now has upon him the mark of the particular mythological ancestor of whom he is the living counterpart; for it is thought that the children born to women are the reappearances of beings who lived in the mythological age, in the so-called “dream time,” or altjeringa. The boys are told that from now on they will not play or camp with the women and girls, but with the men; they will not go with the women to grub for roots and to hunt such small game as rats and lizards, but will join the men and hunt the kangaroo. [Note 55]
In this simple rite it is apparent that the image of birth has been transferred from the mother to the sky and that the concept of the ego has been expanded, simultaneously, beyond the biography of the physical individual. A woman gave birth to the boy’s temporal body, but the men will now bring him to spiritual birth. They will continue and consummate his post- uterine gestation, the long process of his growth to a fully human maturity, refashioning his body, and his mind as well, joining him to his eternal portion, beyond time. Furthermore, in the ceremonials that he will presently observe the tasks proper to his manhood will in every detail be linked to mythological fantasies of a time-transcending order, so that not only himself but his whole world and his whole way of life within it will be joined inseparably, through myths and rites, to the field of the spirit.
Henceforth, all life on earth is to be recognized as a projection on the plane of temporal event of forms, objects, and personalities forever present in the permanent no-where, no-when, of the mythological age, the altjeringa, “dream time,’ when all was magical, as it is in dream: the realm that is seen again in dream and shown forth in the rites. The boy is himself a mythological, eternal being who has become incarnate; his fellows, too, are the manifestations of eternal forms; likewise, the kangaroos that he will soon be hunting and the well-known desert reaches where the magical mystery play of the hunt will be enacted in the serious game of life — the mystery play of the death and reappearance of the kangaroo, who is to give his flesh, as a willing victim, to be the food of men. No child — no woman — is aware of the real marvel of this dual mystery, wherein the timeless and the temporal are the same. This secret dimension of the world is the revelation of the men’s rites, through witch the mind grows to knowledge, and after beholding which one is far above the plane of the mental system of the child. It is a marvel, a source of wonder, well worth the pain and fright of a second birth. And meanwhile, throughout the physical as well as psychological ordeal of transformation, in compensation for the earthly mother lost, the boy’s pliant mind and will are to be directed forward to the image of his manhood with an earthly wife.
It is clear what is happening. The imprints irreversibly established in infancy as energy-releasing signs are being reorganized, and through an extremely vivid, increasingly frightening and unforgettable series of controlled experiences are in the end to be so recomposed that the boy’s course will be directed forward into manhood: not to any merely open, uncommitted manhood, but specifically to a certain style of thought and feeling, impulse and action, comporting with the requirements of the local group. For it is at this point in his development that the mores, ideology, and motivations of the local system of life are to be assimilated into his psyche, fused with his spiritual substance, and thus made his own, as he is made theirs.
As already remarked, in the words of Radcliffe-Brown: “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”; and further: “the sentiments in question are not innate but are developed in the individual by the action of the society upon him.” It is in the rites of initiation that these sentiments of the local system are established through a forced fusion with the primary system of the mentality of childhood, which, as we have seen, is universal — or practically universal — to the human race. The system of sentiments of the local group, however, has been constellated not primarily, or even secondarily, to gratify the crude wishes of the growing adolescent for sensual pleasure and manly power, but rather in the general interest of a group having certain specific local problems and limitations. The crude energies of the young human animal are to be cowed, broken, recoordinated to a larger format, and thus at once domesticated and amplified. Hence, although the rites certainly have a psychological function and must be interpreted in terms of the general psychology of the human species, each local system itself has a long history behind it of a particular sort of social experience and cannot be explained in general psychological terms. It has been closely adjusted to specific, geographically determined conditions of existence, and comprehends, furthermore, certain archaic notions of cosmology that have been derived from millenniums of meditation on the recognized natural order of the living world. From culture to culture, the sign symbols presented in the rites of initiation differ considerably, and they have to be studied, consequently, from a historical as well as from a psychological point of view. It must be recognized that either view alone is an oversimplification.
No functioning mythological system can be explained in terms of the universal images of which it is constituted. These images are developed largely from such infantile imprints as those that we have just reviewed and constitute merely the raw material of myth. They carry the energies of the psyche into the mythological context and weld them to the historical task of the society, where the symbols function, not in the way of a regressive recall of the spirit of the joys and sorrows, desires and terrors of little Oedipus, or of the earlier bambino, but rather as releasers and directors of the energies into the field of adult experience and performance. Mythology, that is to say, is progressive, not regressive. And the rites themselves, through which the new sign symbols are impressed on the minds of the growing young in such a way as to recondition the entire system of their innate releasing mechanisms, constitute one of the most interesting and crucial foci of our subject. For it is precisely here that we confront directly the problem of the meeting of the general and the particular, of the elementary and the ethnic, in the field of myth. The initiation rite is the caldron of their fusion.
And should the fusion not take place?
If it should happen in the case of any particular individual that the impress of the socially enforced reorganization of the infantile imagery should fail of its proper effect, that particular individual’s personal system of references, and consequently of sentiments, would remain essentially infantile and therefore aberrant, isolating, shameful, and frightening, so that the sort of disorientation known so well to the psychoanalytic couches of our contemporary, literarily instead of mythologically and ritually educated civilization would inevitably result. In the traumatic experience of his second birth the individual would have suffered an accident precisely comparable to a misbirth or physical accident in the first. In which case, of course, a regressive interpretation of his peculiar mode of experiencing the imagery of local myth would be in order. However, for the psychoanalyst then to make use of the fantasies of that regressive case as a key to the scientific understanding of the progressively functioning mythology and ceremonialism of the social group in question would be about as appropriate as to mistake a pancake for a souffle.
It is possible that the failure of mythology and ritual to function effectively in our civilization may account for the high incidence among us of the malaise that has led to the characterization of our time as The Age of Anxiety.” Or it may be that it is only among our poets and artists, journalists and Ph.D.s that the impress of our socially framed system of sentiments has failed of effect; so that this notion of the prevalence of anxiety is a invention peculiar to them, based rather on their own sophisticated pathology than on the more naïve state of health of the majority of their fellows. But in either case it would certainly seem that when an essentially cerebral emphasis preponderates in the schooling of the young, as it does in our highly literate society, an alarming incidence of serious failure is to be expected in the difficult passage of the critical threshold from the system of sentiments proper to infancy to that of the responsibilities of the hour — and that, consequently, any attempt to interpret the symbolism of archaic man on the basis of contemporary thought and feeling must be extremely dangerous.
In following the further progress of the puberty rites and ordeals of the Central Australian Aranda, therefore, it will be well to leave the clichés of modern psychology to one side and focus, rather, on the particular character and tasks of the local desert scene, where the temperature at noon is frequently as high as one hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit; where the normal social unit is a little cluster of intimately known relatives and companions, all of whom, both male and female, are stark naked; where there is no written tradition through which the corpus of tribal knowledge, style of spiritual life, and techniques of subsistence can be communicated; and where the chief object of the hunt is the bounding kangaroo.
The real trials of the growing youngster, and the second stage of his initiation into both the duties and the knowledge of his inevitable estate, commence one evening, suddenly, in the men’s camp, when he is pounced upon by three strong young fellows, loudly shouting, who bear him off, frightened and struggling, to a ceremonial ground that has been prepared for his circumcision. The whole community is there to greet him, women as well as men, and when he finds himself among them his struggles cease.
He is placed among the men, and the women at once begin to dance, flourishing shields. They are now the women of the age of dream, the altjeringa age, who danced this way when the young men of the age of the ancestors were to be initiated; and the men sing while they perform. When the boy has watched and listened for some time — never having seen such things before — strands of fur string are wound around his head to make a tightly fitting cap, and there is tied about his waist a girdle of twisted hair, such as he has seen the men wear. Three men then lead him through the dancing women to a brake of bushes behind which he is now to remain for a number of days. They paint on him a design and warn him that he has now entered upon a higher stage of young manhood. He must never disclose to any woman or boy any of the secret things that he is about to see and learn. Throughout the coming ceremony he is not to utter a word unless addressed, and then only to answer as briefly as possible. And he is to remain crouching behind his brake until called. Should he attempt to see what he is forbidden to see, the great spirit whose voice he has heard in the sound of the bull-roarers would carry him away. And so he sits alone and silently all night, behind the brake, while the men dance on the ceremonial ground.
The next day the boy’s mother arrives, accompanied by the sisters of his father and by the woman whose daughter has been assigned to become his wife. All night the boy’s mother has kept a fire burning in her camp, and she now brings in her hands two long sticks lighted from this fire. The men sing a fire-song while the mother hands one stick to the woman who is to become the boy’s mother-in-law, and the latter, approaching the boy, ties some bands of fur string around his neck, hands him the fire-stick, and tells him to hold fast to his own fire; that is to say, never to interfere with women assigned to other men. This rite concluded, the boy returns to his brake with the fire-stick, and the women go back with the second fire-stick to their camp.
The boy is now taken into the forest, where he sits quietly for three days and is given little to eat. The great solemnity of the rites that he is about to behold is thus impressed upon his whole mind and he is prepared to receive the impact of their imagery. On the fourth day he is returned to his brake, and that night the men’s performances begin. They are continue for about a week.
The first rite of the particular series observed by Baldwin Spencer and F.J. Gillen, described in their important work on The Native Tribes of Central Australia, [Note 56] commenced after dark, with the boy still crouching in his retreat. The old men sang the legend of the ancestors of the Little Hawk totem group, who in the altjeringa, “dream time” of the mythological age, introduced the art of circumcising with a stone knife instead of with a fire-stick. We may read in this theme a dim reference to some recent or ancient transformation of the ritual tradition, perhaps following such a fusion of two peoples as the recent studies of Australian culture strata and ancient petroglyphs have begun to indicate. [Note 57] But we must recognize also that the fire- stick that the boy has just received from the two mothers is in the context of the rite an explicit reference to the controlled release of his own sexual fire, which is to be socially authorized through the ritual ordeal of his impending circumcision — the second stick, to which his own is to be directed, being now in the precinct of his selected wife.
The series of remarkable rites, crude as it may seem to the civilized eye, is not to be dismissed as simply a superstitious work of primitive ignorance. On the contrary, it is the functioning implement of a primitive wisdom, which, in some aspects at least, is more sophisticated and effective than much of our own, the chief aim being pedagogical, or, as we might perhaps better say, hermetical: the magical transformation of a psyche. In fact, in a very real sense, it is an example of the early actuality from which the later medieval European idea of homunculus evolved, which Goethe has handled with such subtle psychological and historical understanding in the second part of his Faust: the mysterious art through which a little man (homunculus) is brought into being from the crude stuff (materia prima) supplied by nature.
At midnight the boy undergoing the ordeal was blindfolded, led from his brake, and placed face downward at the edge of the dance ground, then, after a time, was told to sit up and look; whereupon he saw lying before him a decorated man who represented, as he was told, a wild dog. A second decorated man was standing with legs apart at the other end of the dance ground, holding up twigs of eucalyptus in each hand, and having on his head a sacred ornament emblematic of the kangaroo. The kangaroo moved its head from side to side, as though watching for something, and every now and then uttered the call of the kangaroo. The dog looked up, saw the other, began barking, and suddenly, running along on all fours, passed between the other’s legs and lay down behind him, the kangaroo watching the dog over his shoulder. The wild dog then ran between the kangaroo’s legs once again, but this time was caught and thoroughly shaken. A pretense was made of dashing his head against the ground, whereupon he howled, as if in pain, until, finally, he was supposed to have been killed. He lay still for a while, but then, on all fours, came running to the boy candidate and lay on top of him. The kangaroo hopped over and lay on top of the two, and the boy had to bear their weight for about two minutes; when they got up, he was told that their mine represented an event of the altjeringa age, when a wild-dog man attacked a kangaroo man and was killed. He was sent back to his brake, and the men continued singing throughout the night.
This sort of thing went on for the boy’s instruction for six days and nights. kangaroo men, rat men, dog men, little night hawks and big performed their legends, lay on top of him, and went away. But then, on the seventh day, behind his brake, the boy was solemnly rubbed all over with grease and three men carefully painted his back with a design of with pipe-clay, while on the dance ground a number of performances were enacted in which the women had a role. Suddenly the sound was heard of approaching bull-roarers, and the women fled. The lad was lying on his back. The men piled poles on top of him, banging them up and down upon his body, beating time, while they sang, over and over, the following verse:
Night, twilight, a great clear light:
A cluster of trees, sky-like, rising red as the sun.
“All.” as our observers tell us, “was now excitement.”
The fire was giving out a brilliant light and the two men who were to perform the circumcision took their position at the western end of the ceremonial ground.
With their beards thrust into their mouths, their legs widely extended and their arms stretched forward, the two men stood perfectly still, the actual operator in front and his assistant pressing close up behind him, so that their bodies were in contact with each other. The front man held in his extended right hand the small flint knife with which the operation was to be conducted, and, as soon as they were in position, the boy’s future father-in-law, who was to act as shield bearer, came down the lines, carrying the shield on his head and at the same time snapping the thumb and first finger of each hand. Then, facing the fire, he knelt down on one knee just a little in front of the operator, holding his shield above his head. During the whole time the bull- roarers were sounding everywhere so loudly that they could easily be heard by the women and children in their camp, and by them it is supposed that the roaring is the voice of the great spirit Twanyirika, who has come to take the boy away. [Note 58]
The legend told to the women and children concerning Twanyirika is not a true myth but a “screening allegory,” coined to hide from exoteric view the facts of an esoteric rite, while suggesting symbolically the rite’s spiritual sense. Many such screening legends are represented in the history of religion, hermetic philosophy, mysticism, and pedagogy. They are not to be confused with such outright parodies and frauds as those of the old Eskimo shaman Najagneq, which were invented to intimidate this fellow villagers. They serve a double function. The first is that of excluding those not eligible for initiation from the knowledge of the crucial mystery and thus protecting the force of the rites when properly applied; but the second is that of readying the minds of those to be initiated for the full impact of the shock of a revelation that will not controvert the allegory but disclose its reference. The allegory of Twanyirika, tells of a spirit dwelling in wild, inaccessible regions, who arrives at initiation time to enter the body of the boy, after the operation, and bear him away into the wilderness until he is well. The spirit then quits the boy, who returns to the camp an initiated man. [Note 59]
Still believing in Twanyirika, the boy is lying on his back beneath the rising and falling poles. The deep, loud tones of the circumcision song are being thundered out by all the men, when suddenly, the poles are removed and the boy, lifted by two strong fellows, is carried feet foremost to the shield, upon which he is placed. Quickly the assistant circumciser grasps the foreskin, pulls it out as far as possible, and the operator cuts it off. Immediately, all the men who have acted in any official capacity in the rite disappear, and the boy, in a more or less dazed condition, is told by those who carried him, “You have done well, you have not cried out.” He is conducted back to the place where the brake had stood but now is gone, and receives the congratulations of the men. The blood from his wound is allowed to flow into a shield and while he is still bleeding some of the bull-roarers are brought up and pressed against the wound. He is told that it was these, and not Twanyirika, that made the sound — and thus he is forced past the last bogey of childhood. He learns at the same time that the bull-roarers are tjurunga, sacred objects deriving from the mythological age and realm. He is introduced to all the functionaries by their ceremonial names and given a packet of tjurungas by the eldest.
“Here is Twanyirika, of whom you have heard so much,” the old man tells him. “These are tjurunga. They will help to heal you quickly. Guard them well and do not lose them, or you and your blood and tribal mothers and sisters will be killed. Do not let them out of your sight. Do not let your blood and tribal mothers and sisters see you. The man in charge will remain with you. Do not eat forbidden food.”
The boy, meanwhile, is standing over a fire whose smoke is supposed to heal his wound; [Note 60] but there is a second meaning to this action of the smoke, for in Australia a child is smoked at birth, to purify it: the lad has just undergone at this moment his second birth.
Géza Róheim, in his psychoanalytic studies of Australian ritual and myth, has pointed out that the simulated attitude of the circumcisers in this rite “is that of a furious father attacking his son’s penis”; the two men chew their beards to simulate wrath, and their ceremonial name is the “pain makers.” [Note 61] Moreover, in the myths of the origin of the rite it is told that originally the boys died, but that the substitution of the flint knife for the fire-stick mitigated the danger of the operation. “The dramatized anger of both the father and the circumciser and the myths of the original initiation in which all the boys were killed.” wrote Dr. Róheim, “certainly show the Oedipal aggression of the elder generation as the basic drive behind initiation. In this sense therefore we are perfectly justified in calling circumcision a mitigated form of castration.” [Note 62]
“The growing boy,” observes Róheim further, “with his increased strength and sexual desire is a dangerous threat to the stability of the horde. Among the Pitjentara tribe (who dwell just to the west of the Aranda), when the lads are beginning to show development (in stature, in the appearance of public hair, and in general demeanor) with the approach of puberty, their female kinsfolk arm themselves with digging- sticks and at dusk form a circle around one or more of the youths. They prod and beat the boys about the legs and shoulders unmercifully so that they become half-stupefied. This may happen just before initiation ceremonies are to be held, or weeks or even months before….
“According to the Ngatatara and Western Aranda, if the young men were not subjected to the discipline of the initiation ritual they would become demons (erintja), would fly up into the sky, and kill and eat the old men.” [Note 63] To keep them down, the old men kill and eat the boys symbolically — or even actually if the boys do not obey, which, if we may judge from what has been learned about the phenomenology of juvenile delinquency in recent years, is perhaps not an excessive threat, after all.
But there is another side to the work of the elders besides that of intimidation. They must woo their sons fro the primary infantile attachment to their mothers through an effective conjuration of their sympathy. During the course of the painful rites, therefore, the lads, at times, are given nothing to eat or drink but the men’s blood. They take it from bowls, either in liquid form or coagulated and carved like cake. The blood is poured over them, also, as a bath. And so they are literally soaked, inside and out, in the good body content of the fathers, which has been drawn in almost incredibly great quantities from the men’s arms and subincision wounds. The men jab the subincision scars of their penises or slash the insides of their arms, and the blood pours forth, which then is used not only as food and drink for the boys, but also as paint for the ceremonials and as a kind of glue, to make the bird down decorations stick to their bodies when they assume the forms of the ancestors for the sacred rites. Thus the blood is physical food, like mothers’ milk, but spiritual food also (which the mothers cannot furnish): no mere children’s food, nourishing only the body, but truly man’s food, the amniotic fluid and energizing force of the alchemy of this frightening yet fascinating crisis of the second birth.
On the psychological side, then, we may say that the boy is being carried across the difficult threshold, from the sphere of dependency on the mothers to that of participation in the nature of the fathers, not only by means of a decisive physical transformation of his own body (first, in the rite of circumcision, just reviewed, and then, more cruelly, as we shall presently see, in the rite of subincision), but also by means of a series of intense psychological experiences, reawakening but at the same time reorganizing all the primary imprints and fantasies of the infantile unconscious. Or, to use the Freudian jargon, the elders arouse, absorb, and redirect their sons’ Oedipal impulses to aggression (destrudo: thanatos) and simultaneously their will to live and love (libido: eros). As we have just seen, the boy’s future father-in-law is the functionary who offers him on a shield to the operation. “What is cut off the boy,” writes Dr. Róheim, “is really the mother; as compensation he naturally receives a wife….The glans in the foreskin is the child in the mother.” [Note 64]
But there is another aspect to this great world of the men’s rites, for which no merely psychological reading of their symbolism can adequately account; namely, the particular mythological field to which the boy’s intellect is being introduced. His crude energies of love and aggression are being broken from their primary spheres of reference and reorganized for manhood; but the particular system of imagery through which this psychological transformation is being effected has been determined not exclusively by general psychological laws, but also, and perhaps equally, by the particular social concerns of the local group.
And we may well marvel at the simple, adroit, wonderfully direct manner in which the participation of his interest is elicited. We have already seen how the sacred objects of his tribe were first presented to his awakened imagination. Throughout his childhood the boy had heard the awesome sound of the bull-roarers at the time of the mysteries of the men’s camp, and had been told that the curiously whirring hum was the voice of a spirit that at the time of his own initiation would enter his body and support him to manhood. An anxious sense of interest and curiosity had thus been aroused, which, at the time of the revelation, was considerably shocked when it appeared that the actual spirit was a bit of flat wood, about a foot and a half long, bearing a scratched design on its surface, and whirled at the end of a long string. The childhood bogey was abruptly collapsed into this tangible stick — which, however, was declared to have been derived from the mythological realm and to be of the profoundest import both to the boy himself, as representing his own eternal aspect, and to his people, as constituting one of a constellation of sacred objects, known as tjurunga, revered in the tribal rites. Pressed to the boy’s bleeding circumcision wound, his tjurunga turned his mind from a sense of loss to one of gain and directly joined him, both emotionally and in thought, to the realm of myth.
But the reader, meanwhile, must certainly have recalled, perhaps with a touch of wonder, the celebrated Classical myth of the death and second birth (through his father Zeus) of the babe Dionysos.
When the great goddess Demeter — we are told — arrived in Sicily from Crete with her daughter Persephone, whom she had conceived of Zeus, she discovered a cave near the spring of Kyane, where she hid the maiden, setting to guard her the two serpents that were normally harnessed to the maiden’s chariot. And Persephone there began weaving a web of wool, a great robe on which there was to be a beautiful picture of the universe; while her mother, Demeter, contrived that the girl’s father, Zeus, should learn of her presence. The god approached his daughter in the form of a serpent, and she conceived of him a son, Dionysos, who was born and nurtured in the cave. The infant’s toys were a ball, a top, dice, some golden apples, a bit of wool, and a bull-roarer. But he was also given a mirror, and while he was gazing into this, delighted, there approached him stealthily, from behind, two Titans, who had been sent to slay him by the goddess Hera, the jealous wife and queen of his father, Zeus. And they were painted with a white clay or chalk. Pouncing upon the playing child, they tore him into seven parts, boiled the portions in a caldron supported by a tripod, and then roasted them on seven spits. However, when they had consumed their divine sacrifice — all except the heart, which had been rescued by the goddess Athene — Zeus, attracted by the odor of the roasting meat, entered the cave and, when he beheld the scene, slew the white-painted cannibal Titans with a bolt of lightning. The goddess Athene thereupon presented the rescued heart in a covered basket to the father, who accomplished the resurrection — according to one version of the miracle — by swallowing the precious relic and himself then giving birth to his son. [Note 65]
It surely is no mere accident, nor consequence of parallel development, that has brought the bull-roarers on the scene for both the Greek and the Australian occasion, as well as the figures masquerading in white (the Australians wearing bird down, the Greek Titans seared like clowns with a white clay). For the Titans were divine beings of an earlier generation than the gods. They were the children of the sky and earth, and from two of their number, Kronos and Rhea, the gods themselves — the Olympians — were born. They and their mythology derive form an earlier stratum of thought and religion than the Classical pantheon of the Olympians, and the episodes in which they appear have frequently traits of an extremely primitive tone. A number of recent scholars have pointed to the parallels between these traits and those of the rites of living primitive tribes. [Note 66] From the Greeks, however, we do not learn through what motherly organ Father Zeus could have given birth to his son. In the primitive ritual this now appears.
For the next dramatic series of instructions and ordeals to which the young Australian is subjected are those of his subincision, which follow the rites of circumcision after an interval of some five or six weeks — depending on the time required by the boy for recovery from the first operation. These extremely painful rites commence with a brief series of instructive mimes, which terminate with the planting of a sacred pole in the ground: a pole made of a long spear ensheathed in grass, bound with a string of human hair, and ornamented with alternate rings of red and white birds’ down, having a large tuft of eagle-hawk feathers affixed to the top. And when the pole, following a final mime and dance, has been planted, the youth is told to embrace it, for it will prevent the operation from being painful; he need no be afraid. One of the men lies on the ground, face downward, and a second lies on top of him. The boy is led form the pole and placed full length, face upward, on this living table, while the company sets up a great shout. Immediately a third man, sitting astride the boy’s body, grasps the penis and holds it ready for the stone knife, while the operator, appearing suddenly, slits the whole length of the urethra from below.
Meanwhile, in the women’s camp, the boy’s female relatives, having heard the men’s shout, are ceremonially slashed across the stomach and shoulders by the boy’s mother.
The boy is lifted away and squats over a shield into which the blood is allowed to drain, while one or more of the younger men present, who have been operated on before, stand up and voluntarily undergo a second operation to increase the length of their incisions. These stand, hands behind their backs and legs wide apart, close to the sacred pole, and shout, “Come and slit mine to the root!” They are pinioned from behind, and the operator cuts them to the root. “Most men at some time or other undergo the second operation,” write Spencer and Gillen, “and some come forward a third time, though a man is often as old as thirty or thirty-five before he submits to this second operation.” [Note 67]
The sexual aspect of the symbolism of this fantastic rite is almost too obvious to require comment. The subincision wound is frequently referred to as a “penis womb or vagina”; [Note 68] so that the male has been intentionally converted by the operation into a male-female. “The ‘vaginal father,’” as Dr. Róheim has observed, “replaces the ‘phallic mother’ of the infantile situation,” [Note 69] and the blood that is drawn from the subincision wounds, therefore, corresponds in the men’s imagination to the menstrual blood of the women — which in the usages of women’s magic is extremely potent. That one of the most pronounced traits of primitive psychology, in many parts of the world, is the savage male’s horror of menstruation has long been a commonplace of anthropological knowledge. [Note 70] “It is a well-known fact,” states Dr. Róheim, “that the sight of the bleeding vagina produces castration anxiety in the male….The boys must always have been afraid of the castrating vagina; now the fathers have this powerful weapon.” [Note 71] But now, too, the lads themselves have been given it. Their traumatic separation from the mother in the rite of circumcision has thus bee balanced by an achievement of identification, simultaneously with the mothers and with the fathers. “We are not afraid of the bleeding vagina,” they now can say; “we have it ourselves. It does not threaten the penis; it is the penis.” And finally: “We are not separated from the mother; for ‘we two are one’” [Note 72]
But there is more to the matter than this psychological theme; for there is a mythological theme consciously associated with the rite, which has to be taken into account also.
The Western world is well acquainted with one version of the associated myth in its biblical tradition. In the Book of Genesis it is written that God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, “and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; and the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, ‘This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; and she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.’ Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife and they become one flesh.” [Note 73] Before the separation of Eve, Adam was both male and female.
Or consider the allegory in Plato’s Symposium, where it is said by Aristophanes — playfully, yet in the form of the same myth — that the earliest human beings were “round and had four hands and four feet, back and sides forming a circle, one head with two faces looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond.” According to this Platonic version of the great theme, these original creatures were of three kinds; male-male, male-female, and female-female. They were immensely powerful; and since the gods were in fear of their strength, Zeus decided to cut them in two. like apples halved for pickling,
or as you might divide an egg with a hair; and as he cut them one after another, he bade Apollo give the face and the half neck a turn….Apollo twisted the face and pulled the skin around over that which in our language is called the belly, like the purses which draw in, and he made one mouth at the center, which he fastened in a knot (this is called the navel); he also moulded the breast and took out most of the wrinkles, much as a shoemaker might smooth out leather upon a last; he left a few, however, in the region of the belly and navel, as a memorial of the primeval change. After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and threw their arms about one another eager to grow into one, and would have perished from hunger without ever making an effort, because they did not like to do anything apart..: so ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man. Each of us when separated is but the indenture of a man, having one side only like a flat fish, and he is always looking for his other half. [Note 74]
In China we learn of the Holy Woman, the Great Original, Tai Yuan, who combined in her person the active-masculine and the passive-feminine powers of nature, the yang and the yin. [Note 75]
And finally, in the Vedic Indian Brhadaranyaka Upaniṣad we read:
…in the beginning this universe was but the Self in the form of a man. He looked around and saw nothing but himself. Thereupon, his first shout was, “It is I!”; whence the concept “I” arose. — And that is why, even today, when addressed, one answers first, “It is I!” then gives the other name that one bears….
Then he was afraid. — And that is why anyone alone is afraid. — He considered: “Since there is nothing here but myself, what is there to fear?” Whereupon the fear departed; for what should have been feared? it is only to a second that fear refers.
However, he still lacked delight. — Therefore, one lacks delight when alone. — He desired a second. He was just as large as a man and woman embracing. This Self then divided himself in two parts; and with that, there were a master and mistress. — Therefore this body, by itself, as the sage Yajnavalkya declares, is like half of a split pea. And that is why, indeed, this space is filled by a woman. — He united with her, and from that mankind arose.
She, however, reflected: “How can he unite with me, who am produced from himself? Well then, let me hide!” She became a cow, he a bull and united with her; and fro that cattle arose. She became a mare, he a stallion; she an ass, he a donkey and united with her; and from that solid-hoofed animals arose. She became a goat, he a buck; she a sheep, he a ram and united with her; and from that goats and sheep arose. — Thus he poured forth all pairing things, down to the ants.
Then he realized: “I, actually, am creation; for I have poured forth all this.” Whence arose the concept “Creation” [srstih: literally, “what is poured forth, projected, sent forth, emanated, generated, let go, or given away”]. — One who thus understands becomes, himself, truly a creator in this creation. [Note 76]
The primitive Australian renditions of this mythological motif that has served so well to support some of the most elevated themes of the high civilizations are numerous and give a new dimension to the mystery of the ritual that we have just observed.
In the beginning, we hear, for example, form the Northern Aranda of the Bandicoot Totem, all was darkness: night oppressed the earth like an impenetrable thicket. And the ancestor of the bandicoots, whose name was Karora, lay asleep in the everlasting night, at the bottom of the soak of Ilbalintja, where there was not yet water. Above him the soil was red with flowers and overgrown with many grasses; and a great sacred pole swayed above him, which had sprung from the midst of the bed of flowers. At its root rested the head of Karora, whence it mounted upward toward the sky, as though to strike the vault of the heavens. It was a living creature, covered with a smooth skin, like the skin of man.
Karora’s head lay at the root of this great swaying pole, and had been resting thus from the beginning. But Karora was thinking: wishes and desires flashed through his mind. Bandicoots then began to come out of his navel and from his armpits. They burst through the sod above and sprang into life. Dawn began to break. The sun began to rise. And the bandicoot ancestor rose too: he burst through the crust that had covered him and the gaping hole that he left behind became Ilbalintja Soak, filled with the sweet dark juice of the honeysuckle buds.
The bandicoot ancestor now felt hungry, for the magic had gone out of his body. Feeling dazed, slowly fluttering his eyelids, he opened his eyes a little and, groping about in his dazed state, he felt a moving mass of bandicoots all around him. Seizing two, he cooked them in the white-hot sand close to where the sun stood, the sun’s fingers providing him with the needed fire.
Evening approached. The sun, hiding his face with a veil of hair string and his body with hair-string pendants, vanished form sight, and Karora, with his thoughts turning toward a helpmate, fell asleep, stretching his arms out to both sides.
And while he slept there emerged from underneath his armpit something in the shape of a bull-roarer. It assumed human form and grew in one night to the stature of a young man fully grown. Karora, feeling that his arm was being oppressed with the weight of something heavy, awoke; and he saw his first-born son lying at his side, his head resting on his father’s shoulder.
Dawn broke. Karora rose and sounded a loud, vibrating call. The son then stirred into life, got up, and danced a ceremonial dance around his father, who was now sitting adorned with full ceremonial designs worked in blood and feather-down. The son tottered and stumbled, being only half awake; but the father put his body and chest into a violent quiver, and the son placed his hands upon him. and when this had been done, the first ceremony came to an end. [Note 77]
Numerous parallels to this primitive origin legend of the Bandicoot Clan exist in the various high mythologies of the world, among the most striking the resemblance of the living pole growing from Karora’s head to the Tree of Jesse, in the symbolism of the Middle Ages (for example, as in the Tree-of-Jesse window of Chartres Cathedral), whence the second Adam, Jesus, was derived; or the cross itself on which Jesus hung, placed on the hill of Golgotha, “Hill of the Skull,” so called because it was there that the skull was buried of Adam, the androgynous dawn man of the Hebrew myth. Or again, we think of the curious, somnolent first man, Ymir, of the Icelandic Eddas, who took form in the “yawning void” of the beginning, when the ice-waves pressing down from the north met the heat-waves of the south. “Now it is said that when he slept, a sweat came upon him, and there grew under his left hand a man and an woman, and one of his feet begat a son with the other; and thus the races are come.” [Note 78] Ymir’s great somnolent body then was cut up to form the world:
Of Ymir’s flesh the earth was fashioned,
And of his sweat the sea;
Crags of his bones, trees of his hair,
And of his skull the sky. [Note 79]
In many of the myths of India the cut-up man, the primordial, world-creating sacrifice of whom the visible world was fashioned, is called Purusha, which means simply, “Man.” [Note 80] In the ancient Babylonian epic of creation, the figure was a monstrous female, the goddess-mother of the world abyss, Tiamat. [Note 81] In the Australian legend of Karora, this same universal archetype, or elementary idea, of the all-containing primal being has been adjusted to the conditions of the local scene and ceremonial style. There is no glacial cold, as in Iceland; no reference to the Brahmanic sacrifice, as in India; no mention of the female sex, as in all the others. The pattern is exclusively masculine — as in the case of the Hebrew Lord God’s unassisted creation of the world and production without female intervention of Adam, his original son. The Australian rituals of the circumcision and subincision, with their emphatically patriarchal bias, find their validation in a myth of this kind, where the whole life stage of the child with the mother is simply disregarded, and the son is born as the full-grown son of the father in one night.
The living, swaying pole, rising from Karora’s head, which mounted upward as though to strike the vault of the heavens and was a living creature, covered with a smooth skin like the skin of a man, is represented in the rite by the ceremonial pole that the young initiate embraces immediately before submitting to the operation of the subincision. The pole of the rite, before being planted in the ground, is carried upright on a man’ back, paralleling the line of his spine and continuing, like a flagpole, far above his head. Both the pole and the man are decorated with bird-down, stuck on with blood drawn from subincision wounds, and this down, flying off as the man jumps about, is symbolic of the life- generative power that went out in all directions from the ancestors. The cosmic pole and the subincised phallus are the same: they are the male-female, self-sufficient, all- producing ancestor of the beginning. The temporal polarity of past and present, the sexual of the male and female, the ritualistic of the ceremonial ground and place of the beginning are all, equally and simultaneously, dissolved. And the phallic operation, which, according to an authentic Freudian reading, enables the men to say to themselves, “We are not separated form the mother, for we two are one,” simultaneously and equally enables them to participate in their own way in a mythological image of the metaphysical mystery of the cosmos: the mystery of that cosmogonic sleight-of-hand by which the one became and continues to become the many, and by which the timelessness of eternity is reflected in the changing scene of time.
The enigma of this ultimate mystery, which Schopenhauer aptly termed the “World Knot,” is no better explained in the formulas of philosophy or theology than in the image of the ancestor of the bandicoots; nor can we dismiss the Aranda myth as a mere curiosity of the primitive mind if we are going to ponder in a serious way the analogous imagery of the Book of Genesis, the Brhadaranyaka Upaniṣad, or Plato’s Symposium. The mystery of the universe and the wonder of the temple of the world are what speak to us through all myths and rites — as well as the great effort of man to bring his individual life into concord with the whole. And the imagery by which this mystery, wonder, and effort have been rendered in the recorded traditions of mankind is so marvelously constant — in spite of all the varieties of local life and culture — that we well may wonder whether it may not simply be coeval with the human mind.
But in this section of the present chapter the chief concern is not the problem of the universals, to which the following section returns, but the local, geographically and historically conditioned, various manners of rendering and applying those general themes. And even the brief view already given of the spectrum of the myth of the primordial androgynous giant suffices to afford a preliminary notion of the ways in which one common image can be turned to differing ends. eW observe, for example, that whereas in the Greek and Hebrew versions man is split in two by a god, in the Chinese, Hindu, and Australian it is the god itself who divides and multiplies.
In the Hindu version, furthermore, the image of the androgynous ancestor is developed in terms of an essentially psychological reading of the problem of creation. The universal Self becomes divided immediately after conceiving and uttering the pronoun “I” (Sanskrit aham). This illustrates the fundamental Indian conviction that a sense of ego is the root of the world illusion. Ego generates fear and desire, and these are the passions that animate all life and even all being; for it is only after the concept “I” has been established that the fear of one’s own destruction can develop or any desire for personal enjoyment. The aim of Indian yoga, therefore, is to clear the mind of the concept “I” and therewith dissolve both fear and desire. But this amounts to an undoing of creation — or, at least, of one’s psychological participation in its effects. For it leads not only to the knowledge that the seat of anxiety and sorrow is ego, but also to a level of immediate experience, antecedent to all thought, where there is neither hope nor fear but only the rapture of a sheer — and mere — consciousness of being.
In the Hebrew version, on the other hand, the image of the primal androgyne has been applied to a theological reading of the mystery of creation — culminating in a concept of the Jewish people as the agents of God’s will, following the failure and disobedience of the divided androgyne in the Garden. To maintain the tension between God and man, the creator is in this mythology held aloof from his creation. It is not the god who falls into a state of exile from his own true nature, but rather his creature; and the exile is not an essentially psychological one, antecedent to and inherent in the concept of the manifold of the universe, but a concrete historical episode occurring in a world already created by a transcendent but not immanent Lord God and universal disciplinarian.
Finally, in the Greek allegory of Plato, the same basic theme has been applied poetically, to give point to a genial, metaphorical interpretation of the mystery of human love, its trials, depth, and delight. And it is worth observing that though the gods are here represented as in a certain sense superior to the human beings whom they divide, in a second, ironical sense it is the human beings who are in their love superior. The jealous gods divided them out of fear of their strength.
If we now allow all three of these versions — the Hindu, the Hebrew, and the Greek — to supplement and play against one another in our minds, we shall certainly find it difficult to believe that they have not been derived form a single common tradition; and this probability becomes even more confounding and amazing when the primitive Australian example is considered in relation to the rest. The circumcised boy initiate, embracing the living tree that rises from the head of the first ancestor, before being lanced and therewith identified with the father! Who is he? In this science we must have the courage to compare, so let us not be afraid to draw the obvious parallel (though we may not yet be ready to understand why it should be possible) with Jesus on the cross that rises on the hill of the skull of the first ancestor, whose side is to be opened by a lance in the awesome rite of his at-one-ment with the Father.
There can be little doubt that there is a common tradition back of all these myths. Is it, however, the one and only mythological tradition of our species, so that we may expect to find that its themes and motifs have been coextensive with human thought? If so, then perhaps we should accept without further ado Bastian’s theory of the elementary and ethnic ideas. But if it should appear, on the other hand, that this mythological tradition, though broadly diffused and of prodigious import, is but one of many, or even one of two, completely disparate traditions, then we must inquire when and where it may have originated and what experiences or insights can have brought it forth; likewise, when and where the other traditions originated and from what different experiences or insights. Furthermore, with respect to this particular mythology, are we to think of it as having been diffused, at some remote but determinable period of the past, from the centers of a higher civilization to Australia, where, on flinty soil, a regressive metamorphosis reduced the imagery to its present form; or did a reverse process take place, the material being sublimated from its primitive to the higher forms through centuries of progressive transformation? Or does it represent, rather — as some of the leading theological students of the problem have suggested — the vestiges of a primitive Revelation vouchsafed to man at the commencement of his career of earth?
An early theory of this kind was proposed in the first part of the nineteenth century by the Romantic philosopher Friedrich W.J. von Schelling (1775-1854), who claimed that man was created in the “Center of Godhead,” where he beheld all things as they are in God, which is to say, in terms of their essential order; and in this view there was no room or need for myth. but when man had moved from this center to the periphery, his unity in the center being gone, his vision was no longer superior to things, for he had sunk to the level of being a mere thing himself; and it was on this level that the various polytheistic mythologies arose as uncentered man’s dreams of his own lost state of being. Schelling believed, however, that man’ original unity in God had been imperfect, since in this state he had not yet had the experience of testing his own freedom. Hence, the polytheistic mythologies represent a stage (or rather, series of stages) in a historical progress toward the manifestation of the Second Adam in the ultimate religion of Christ. In the heathen religions Christ is implicit; in the Old Testament, prophesied; and in the New Testament, revealed. Thus Christianity is innate in human life and as old as the world. [Note 82]
Such an idea could have been developed from a reading of certain passages of the early Church Fathers; for example, Tertullian’s statement (c. 155?–240 a.d.) that “the soul is naturally Christian” (anima naturaliter christiana). ]
But Schelling might also have developed his thought independently; for the phenomenology that gave rise to Bastian’s theory of elementary ideas has been observed by many throughout the history of the intercourse of the races. Analogies — even minute analogies — exist far too numerously between the mythological traditions of the higher and lower cultures to be dismissed as the mere fall of chance; and those weaving a net of common strands between the Christian liturgy and such barbarous rites as those of our severely shaken Aranda lads are particularly strong. Let us return, therefore, to the mystery of their resurrection.
When the boys have died their death to childhood and survived their painful metamorphosis into incarnations of the original androgynous being, they are told that they have no further operations to fear. There is one more extremely interesting event in store, however, when, following a season of some four full months of continuous dancing and viewing of the world-establishing mythological age of the cosmic “dream time,” they will be shown — in a very mysterious way — a particularly important double tjurunga, after which they will be roasted on a hot, though smothered, fire, and finally sent back to the women’s camp to be received by their waiting brides as fully tested and warranted Aranda males.
The great festival of initiatory rites at the conclusion of which the double tjurunga is exposed is known as the Engwura ceremony, and the detailed account if its pantomimes in the work of Spencer and Gillen occupies more than a hundred pages. The ceremonies are conducted by a number of tribal groups, which have come together with some eighteen or twenty young men to be initiated, and the festal spirit, growing greater and greater from week to week, keeps the whole company, by some miracle of the gods, from collapsing in sheer fatigue. The daytime temperature at times reaches a broiling hundred and fifty-six degrees Fahrenheit; [Note 83] nevertheless, the rites go on unabated, and if anyone dies of sunstroke the blame is placed on the black magic of some alien tribe.
A supernatural being called Numbakulla, “Eternal,” is supposed to have fashioned the original tjurungas, and then, by splitting these, to have made pairs. The pairs were then tied together, one having a man’s spirit and one a woman’s, the two being mates. And the name of these double tjurungas is ambilyerikirra. [Note 84]
“The ceremonies,” write Spencer and Gillen, “now became very interesting….The leader of the Engwura remained in camp preparing, with the aid of the man of his locality, a special sacred object which consisted of two large wooden tjurunga, each three feet in length. They were bound together with human hair string so as to be completely concealed from view, and then the upper three quarters were surrounded with rings of white down, put on with great care, and so closely side by side, that when complete the appearance of rings was quite lost. The top was ornamented with a tuft of owl feathers. When it was made it was carefully hidden in the dry bed of a creek.” [Note 85]
The men’s camp had been divided from the woman’s throughout the four months of the ceremony by this dry bed of a stream in which the tjurunga now lay buried. There it remained until the candidates for initiation, who had been away from the camp all day on a number of assigned adventures, returned and were made to lie in a row on their backs, while an old man, delegated to watch them, walked back and forth along the line. Perfect silence now fell over the camp. Night had descended; the young men were lying still; their guard was slowly pacing; it was perfectly dark; and the leader of the festival, who had spent the day fashioning the double tjurunga, was now squatting with the sacred object in his two hands, having dug it up from its place of hiding in the stream bed. He was holding it upright before his face by the undecorated end, holding it like a bat; and kneeling beside him, at either elbow was an assistant. These two were supporting his arms, and the man was lifting and lowering the sacred object slowly before his face.
When the boys, returning to camp, had been made to lie down, the solemn trio had been screened from view by a phalanx of old men. Throughout the night, therefore, lying on their backs in the silence, the boys were unaware of what was taking place. The old man with his two assistants, however, was continually lifting and lowering the sacred symbol, as Spencer and Gillen declare, “without any cessation, save for a few seconds at a time, during the whole night.” [Note 86]
At a certain moment of the night the older men began chanting, but the boys remained as they were. The guardian still paced before them. And it was not until dawn, when the boys were roused, that the old leader and the two men supporting him ceased form lifting and lowering the ambilyerikirra. “There was little wonder,” wrote Spencer and Gillen, “that they looked tired and haggard, but even yet their work was not quite done.”
Getting up, they moved to the north end of the ceremonial area, the two sides-men still retaining hold of the leader’s arms. The young candidates proceeded to a line of sacred bushes, and having taken boughs, arranged themselves so as to form a solid square behind the leaders. Most of the older men remained on the Engwura ground, from which one of them, the watcher over the candidates, shouted instruction across to the women. The main party, headed by the three men bearing the ambilyerikirra, and accompanied by a few of the older men, moved in the form of a solid square out from the Engwura ground, over the river and up the opposite bank to where the women stood grouped together….Each woman, with her arms bent at the elbow, moved her open hand, with the palm uppermost, up and down on the wrist as if inviting the men to come on, while she called out “Kutta, Kutta, Kutta,” keeping all the while one leg stiff, while she bent the other and gently swayed her body….The party approached slowly and in perfect silence, and when within five yards of the front rank of the women, the men who carried the ambilyerikirra threw themselves headlong on the ground, hiding the sacred object from view. No sooner had they done this than the young initiates threw themselves on the top, so that only the heads of the three men could be seen projecting from the pile of bodies. Then, after remaining thus for two minutes, the young men got up and formed into a square facing away from the women, after which the three leaders rapidly jumped up, turned their backs on the women, and were hustled through the square which they then led back to the Engwura ground, and with this the ambilyerikirra ceremony came to an end. [Note 87]
Thus were the boys, led by their trinity of mystagogues, introduced as marriageable men to the land of fair women, where the naked sirens who formerly had driven them away were now quaintly beckoning, cooing “Kutta, Kutta, Kutta“; and we may compare their role to that of Solveig in the poet Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, who softly sang her cradle song to the spiritual adventurer when he returned to her, following his long man’s- madness:
I will cradle thee, I will watch thee;
Sleep and dream thou, dear my boy! [Note 88]
I think we shall not be going too far if we also compare the long night of silence, when a deep sleep was allowed to fall upon the young men and the wonderful double tjurunga was lifted and lowered, lifted and lowered from nightfall until dawn, with the deep sleep that fell upon Adam when Eve was taken from his side. For after their rite of subincision, the youths, as we have seen, were comparable to Adam as the primordial male-female, fashioned in the image of a god; but, following that night, they were to be shown the Woman. Traversing the river, they passed from the men’s dancing ground, the magical land of myth, where the eyes see beings that are eternal and the dream can be lived of “we two are one,” to the shore of time, death, and procreation, where the two that are mystically one are to be recognized as practically two: the land, resented by all good Platonists, to which woman leads, as from the Garden Eve. And the way of the young initiate now should be to recognized the wisdom of “Kutta, Kutta, Kutta” as well as that of the bull-roarers’ thrilling hum, and to let even the subincised penis be a bridge to the toils of life in the world as well as to the garden of the gods.
These rites, then, on the one hand, are certainly particular to Australia, inasmuch as their references to the local animal ancestors — the bandicoot, kangaroo, etc. — are not precisely duplicated anywhere else in the world. Nor shall we find elsewhere anything precisely duplicating the sacred tjurungas, to which all Australian mythological themes are systematically referred. In different religions different objects serve as sacra. Yet the idea of regarding as of divine origin a certain specific type of stick or stone, holy wafer, piece of bone, sacred utterance, or what not, is one of those universal traits of the religious life that Bastian termed elementary. Likewise, the motif of the male-female original being, which, as we have seen, has been developed in these Australian rites in considerable detail, from the moment of its first sounding in the ceremony of the two mothers and the two fire-sticks, through the ordeals and related myths of the subincision, to the final night ritual of the supremely sacred double tjurunga and the return of the initiates to the women’s camp: the richly suggestive symbolism of this powerful motif is certainly duplicated in essence, and often even in detail, in many other traditions of the world. Furthermore, if we consider the underlying hermetic principle of the ritual series we are again on common ground; for in any rite, or system of rites, of initiation the same three stages are to be distinguished as in the rituals of Australia, namely: separation from the community, transformation (usually physical as well as psychological), and return to the community in the new role. The ritual of tossing in the air represented the crisis of separation. The rites of circumcision and subincision effected, irreversibly, the transformation. And the ritual of the double tjurunga marked the return.
In sum, then it may be said that in the education of the young it has been the general custom in traditionally based societies to reorganize the common human inheritance of infantile imprints in such a way as to conduct the energies of the psyche from the primary system of references of infantile dependency into the sphere of the chief concerns of the local groups, but that in this developed reorganization of the primary symbols certain motifs appear that cannot be convincingly described as infantile and yet are not exclusively local either. Throughout the world the rituals of transformation from infancy to manhood are attended with, and effected by, excruciating ordeals. Scourgings, fastings, the knocking out of teeth, scarifications, finger sacrifices, the removal of a testicle, cecatrization, circumcision, subincision, bitings, and burnings are the general rule. These, indeed, make brutally actual a general infantile fantasy of Oedipal aggression; but there is an additional aspect of the situation to be considered, inasmuch as the natural body is transformed by the ordeals into an ever- present sign of a new spiritual state. For even in the gentler, higher societies, where the body is no longer naked and mutilated, new clothes and ornaments are assumed, following initiations, to symbolize and support the new spiritual state. In India the caste marks, tonsure, clothes, etc., represent precisely the individual’s social role. In the West we know the military uniform, clerical collar, medical goatee, and judge’s wig. But where people are naked, it is the body itself that must be changed. A Marquesan physique fully tattooed was hardly a natural body any more; it was a mythological epiphany, and the consciousness inhabiting it could hardly have wished to behave otherwise that in the manner comporting with the physical form.
One is linked to one’s adult role, that is to say, by being identified with a myth — participating actually, physically, oneself, in a manifestation of mythological forms, these being visibly supplied by the roles and patterns of the rite, and the rite, in extension, supporting the form of the society. So that, in sum, we may say that whereas the energies of the psyche in their primary context of infantile concerns are directed to the crude ends of individual pleasure and power, in the rituals of initiation they are reorganized and implicated in a system of social duty, with such effect that the individual thenceforth can be safely trusted as an organ of the group.
Pleasure, power, and duty; these are the systems of reference of all experience on the natural level of the primitive societies. And when such societies are in form, the first two are subordinated to the last, which, in turn, is mythologically supported and ritually enforced. Ritual is mythology made alive, and its effect is to convert men into angels. For archaic man was not a man at all, in the modern, individualistic sense of the term, but the incarnation of a socially determined archetype. And it was precisely in the rites of initiation that his apotheosis was effected — with what cruel imprint of hermetic art we have now seen.
VI. The Impact of Old Age
Death is foreshadowed by the first signals of old age, which appear even today too soon for pleasure. How much sooner in the primitive past! When the woman of forty-five was a hag and the warrior of fifty an arthritic cripple, when, moreover, disease and the accidents of the hunt and of battle were everyone’s immediate experience, Death was a might presence who had to be faced boldly even within the safest sanctuary, and whose force had to be assimilated.
An East African vision of this great lord of the world emerges from a folktale of the Basumbwa tribe of the Victoria Nyanza district. The tale is of a young man whose dead father appeared to him, driving the cattle of Death, and conducted him along a path going into the ground, as into a burrow. They came to an area with many people, where the father hid his son and left him. In the morning the Great Chief Death appeared. One side of him was beautiful, but the other rotten, with maggots dropping to the ground. Attendants wee gathering up the maggots. They washed the sores and, when they had finished, Death said, “The one born today will be robbed if he goes trading. The woman who conceives today will die with the child. The man who works in his garden will lose the crop. The one who goes into the jungle today will be eaten by the lion.” But the next morning Death again appeared, and his attendants washed and perfumed the beautiful side, massaging it with oil, and, when they had finished, Death pronounced a blessing. “The one born today: may he become rich! May the woman who conceives today give birth to a child who will live tot be old! Let the one born today go into the market: may he strike good bargains; may he trade with the blind! May the man who goes into the jungle slaughter game; may he discover even elephants! For today I pronounce the benediction.”
“If you had arrived today,” said the father to his son, “many things would have come into your possession, but now poverty has been ordained for you; so much is clear. Tomorrow you had better go.” And the son departed, returning to his home. [Note 89]
Very for from Africa, in the mid-Pacific islands of Hawaii, the land of the dead was also thought to be entered through clefts in the earth. These were called “casting-off places,” [Note 90] and there was one for every inhabited district. The soul, arriving, found there a tree with a gathering of little children around it, who gave directions. One side of the tree looked fresh and green, but the other dry and brittle, and, according to one version of the adventure, the soul had to climb to the top by the brittle side and descend by the same to a level where the children would direct it; if a green branch were taken, it would break and the soul fall to annihilation. [Note 91] According to a second version, however, it was a branch of the green side that should be grasped, which then would break and hurl the soul quickly into “the labyrinth that leads to the underworld.” [Note 92]
It is a telling image, this of the tree with the deceptive branches, standing at the entrance to a realm where what would seem to be dead must be known to be living and what to be alive, dead. It is a image of the hope that has everywhere enabled the old to enter willingly the dark gate. And yet, not all can pass; only those who understand the secret of death — which is that death is the other side of what we know as life, and that, just as we must leave childhood when entering upon the duties of maturity, so life when going on to death.
The Hawaiians had several images of the afterlife. Many souls had no abiding place, but only wandered over the waste lands of the world and occasionally entered some living person. Others went into the bodies of sharks, eels, lizards, or owls, and might then become guardians or helpers of the living. But for those who were perfectly successful in the transit of the deceptive tree, there were abiding places according to rank (for the Hawaiians were meticulous about rank). And in these privileged realms sports were played, dangerous sports, as they had been in life, and there was food in abundance requiring no cultivation — fish and taro, yams, coconuts and bananas. The highest of these afterworlds was in a flaming crater at the top of the mountain of the volcano goddess Pele, where there was no pain, only sheer delight. [Note 93]
The atmosphere of this Polynesian warrior-paradise corresponds to that of the warrior-hall of the Germanic god of warriors, Wotan (Odin, Othin), to which the Valkyrs bore the heroic slain. “And what is the sport of the champions, when they are not fighting?” we read in the twelfth-century Prose Edda of the Icelandic warrior-poet, Snorri Sturluson. “Every day, as soon as they are clothed, they put on their armor and go out into the court and fight and fell each other. That is their sport; and when the time draws near for their midday meal, they all ride home to Valhall and sit down to drink.” [Note 94] The Valkyrs, Odin’s daughters, there attend to the flagons and table service, [Note 95] gold illumines the hall, and swords are used instead of fire. [Note 96]
The Hawaiian tree with the deceptive branches, of which one side seems to be alive but the other dead, suggests the Eddic World Ash, Yggdrasil, whose shaft was the pivot of the revolving heavens, with the World eagle perched on its summit, four stags running among its branches, browsing on its leaves, and the Cosmic Serpent gnawing at its root:
The ash Yggdrasil suffers anguish
More that men can know:
The stag bites above; on the side it rots;
And the dragon gnaws from beneath. [Note 97]
It is the greatest of all trees and the best, the ash where the gods give judgment every day. Its limbs spread over the world and stand above heaven. Its roots penetrate the abyss. And its name, Yggdrasil, means “The horse of Ygg,: whose other name is Odin; for this great god once hung on that tree none days, in the way of a sacrifice to himself.
I ween that I hung on the windy tree,
Hung there for nights full nine;
With the spear I was wounded, and offered I was
To Odin, myself to myself,
On that tree that none may ever know
What root beneath it runs. [Note 98]
We have here certainly hit upon a series of images aptly contrived to render certain hopes, hears, and realizations concerning the mystery of death, such as might well have arisen spontaneously in many parts of the world in the minds of those facing the dark gate. Or, since these images of the tree or man that is at once dead and alive do not appear in isolation, but always amid comparable contexts of associated motifs, should we not look for signs of a prehistoric distribution of the syndrome from single myth-making center to the rest of the world? In the puberty rites we found the imagery of the androgyne associated with a tree or great pole. Here we again have the tree, and again a dual association: not the duality of male and female, but that of life and death. are these two dualities mythologically related? To realize that they may indeed be linked, one need only think of the Bible story of the First Adam, who became Adam and eve and fell by the tree, bringing into the world both death and its counterbalance, procreation. Add to this, then, the figure of the Second Adam, Christ, by whose death on the “tree” eternal life was given to man, and a key to the structuring of the many-faceted image will have been found. It is a threshold image, uniting pairs-of-opposites in such a way as to facilitate a passage of the mind beyond anxiety. But then, may it not have emerged independently in many parts of the world as a naturally given poetic inspiration? The associated notion of the underworld as a realm of the dead, entered by a cleft or burrow in the earth, would seem to be natural enough also; likewise, the related themes of the labyrinth and abyss of water. We have already recognized these as possible imprints from the period of the infant’s view and experience of the world. And so, once again, we are brought to the delicate psychological problem of the force of the imprints of infancy, and Bastian’s theory of the elementary ideas.
Can it be, that, as old age approaches and the body begins to fail in the manly tasks to which it was long ago assigned in the rites of initiation, the energies of the psyche drop back, regress, or revert to the earlier system of childhood and so reactivate the old contest of the dear but frightening mother womb and the terrible father? Are we to say that the old expression, “second childhood,” is thus of unexpected depth? or is it rather that, as age approaches, the mind begins everywhere to withdraw from the local system of interests (having by now, so to say, used them up), moving on, in natural anticipation (since man is the one animal that knows of death’s approach) to an anxious brooding on the mystery of the next threshold — which, indeed, can hardly be said to be a function of the local scene, but is the same for all mankind? And can it be said that then, as in the case of the imagery of infancy, and experience of such force and consistency smites the mind that we may speak confidently of an imprint universally struck upon some psychological mechanism open to receive it? Either case may be possible — or both. And either way, the shift is from a local to a generally human system of references. The concerns of house, village, and field boundary fade, and the lineaments of a dark mystery appear gradually from the night that is both without and within. The mind is summoned to a new task; one, however, which, like suffering and rapture, is a grave and constant factor in the experience of the human race. And the force of this factor in the shaping of myths, even among the remotest peoples, surely is to be held in the reckoning of our science.
For in all societies, whether primitive or advanced, the maintenance of the religious forms is in charge, largely, of the old, the younger adults being busy with the physical maintenance not only of themselves and their children, but also of their parents and grandparents. Furthermore, the old in many societies spend a considerable part of their time playing with and taking care of the youngsters, while the parents delve and spin; so that the old are returned to the sphere of eternal things not only within but without. And we may take it also, I should think, that the considerable mutual attraction of the very young and the very old may derive something from their common, secret knowledge that it is they, and not the busy generation between, who are concerned with a poetic play that is eternal and truly wise. Have we not already heard the words of the old, life-pummeled shaman Najagneq concerning the wisdom of Sila, the upholder of the universe, who is “so mighty that his speech to man comes not through ordinary words, but through storms, snowfall, rain showers, the tempests of the sea, through all the forces that man fears, or through sunshine, calm seas, or small, innocent, playing children who understand nothing”?
It is not in the writings of Sigmund Freud but in those of Carl Jung that the most profound analytical consideration has recently been given to the problem confronting all men throughout the long last portion of the human cycle of life: that, namely, of the irresistible approach of King Death. “A human being,” Jung once wrote,
would certainly not brow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species to which he belongs. The afternoon of human life must have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning. The significance of the morning undoubtedly lies in the development of the individual, our entrenchment in the outer world, the propagation of our kind and the care of our children. But when this purpose has been attained — and even more than attained — shall the earning of money, the extension of conquests, and the expansion of life go steadily on beyond the bounds of all reason and sense? Whoever carries over into the afternoon the law of the morning — that is, the aims of nature — must pay for so doing with damage to his soul just as surely as a growing youth who tries to salvage his childish egoism must pay for this mistake with social failure. Money-making, social existence, family and posterity are nothing but plain nature — not culture. Culture lies beyond the purpose of nature. Could by any chance culture be the meaning and purpose of the second half of life?
In primitive tribes, we observe that the old people are almost always the guardians of the mysteries and the laws, and it is in these that the cultural heritage of the tribe is expressed. [Note 99]
“As a physician I am convinced that it is hygienic,” Jung declares elsewhere, with an apology for employing such a clinical term with reference to religion, “to discover in death a goal toward which one can strive; and that shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose. I therefore consider the religious teaching of a life hereafter consonant with the standpoint of psychic hygiene. When I live in a house that I know will fall about my head within the next two weeks, all my vital functions will be impaired by this thought; but if, on the contrary, I fell myself to be safe, I can dwell there in a normal and comfortable way. From the standpoint of psychotherapy it would therefore be desirable to think of death as only a transition — one part of a life-process whose extent and duration escape our knowledge.” nd in fact, as Dr. Jung then notes and all of us well know, “a large majority of people have from time immemorial felt the need of believing in a continuance of life. In spite of the fact that by far the larger part of mankind does not know why the body needs salt, everyone demands it none the less because of an instinctive compulsion. It is the same i things of the psyche. The demands of therapy, therefore, do not lead us into any bypaths, but down the middle of the roadway trodden by humankind. And therefore we are thinking correctly with respect to the meaning of life, even though we do not understand what we think.” [Note 100]
Observations such as these have earned for Dr. Jung the reputation of being a mystic — though actually they are no more mystical that the recommendation of a hobby to a mind becoming ossified in its office task would be. Jung has here simply said that in the afternoon of life the symbolism of King Death does in fact conduce to a progressive inclination of the energies of the psyche, and hence to maturity. Nor does he think it necessary, or even possible, to “understand” the ultimate secret of the force of such symbolic forms. For as he asks,
Do we ever understand what we think? We understand only such thinking as is a mere equation and from which nothing comes out but what we have put in. That is the manner of working of the intellect. But beyond that there is a thinking in primordial images — in symbols that are older than historical man; which have been ingrained in him from earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is possible to live the fullest life only when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them. It is a question neither of belief nor knowledge, but of the agreement of our thinking with the primordial images of the unconscious. They are the source of all our conscious thoughts, and one of these primordial images is the idea of life after death. [Note 101]
We may let this statement stand as the most radical to be presented for the point of view of the elementary ideas; the new, important themes here added to the general theory being that of the progressive life-furthering influence of these ideas, and that of the new value they acquire in the second half of life, when, as Dr. Jung has so frequently stated, “man’s values and even his body tend to undergo a reversal into opposite.” [Note 102] Old men become womanish, old women mannish, the fear of life becomes a fear of death. And so now it is the dry branches, not the green, of the universal tree around which the heavens spin that must be grasped and painfully climbed.
However, there is an important difficulty to be noted before we commit ourselves to any general psychological interpretation of the mythological symbolism of King Death; for, as any seasoned anthropologist can readily show, neither the imprints of experience nor the images associated with the mystery of death are universal.
Leo Frobenius was the first, I believe, to point out that two contrasting attitudes toward death appear among the primitive peoples of the world. [Note 103] Among the hunting tribes, whose life style is based on the art of killing, who live in a world of animals that kill and are killed and hardly know the organic experience of a natural death, all death is a consequence of violence and is generally ascribed not to the natural destiny of temporal beings but to magic. Magic is employed both to defend against it and to deliver it to others, and the dead themselves are regarded as dangerous spirits, resenting their dispatch to the other world and now seeking revenge for their miserable state on those still alive. Indeed, as Frobenius formulates the attitude: “The power exercised by the living individual for good, the dead exercises for evil; so that the better he was, the worse will he become; and the mightier he was in life, the greater must be the restraining weight of bonds and stones upon his corpse. In short: the better and stronger the living, the more dangerous his ghost.” [Note 104] Frobenius gives a considerable series of examples from Africa and antiquity of corpses bound in ropes, bandages, or nets to keep their bodies stopped to keep the ghosts inside, buried under heaps of stones to keep them down, or simply tossed to the wolves and hyenas, with the hope that they will be consumed that very night.
Among the Australian Aranda, according to the detailed account of Spencer and Gillen, [Note 105] the village where a death has occurred is burned to the ground, the person’s name is never mentioned, a number of painful and awkward ordeals are imposed on the widow and nearest relatives to ensure that the dead man shall regard himself as properly mourned, and finally, a dance and wild commotion of shouting, ground- beating, and mutual mayhem is enacted by the relatives on the grave itself, so that the deceased may know that he must not come back in such a way as to frighten people any more — though he may still watch over his friends if he likes, visit them gently in dreams, and guard them from evil. We may say that in a cultural atmosphere of this sort death is interpreted as terminal, as far as the relationship of the deceased to his society is concerned, and its mystery is in a sense denied and defied, feared yet challenged, never having been assimilated either psychologically or philosophically, Old age then leads to an attitude of resistance and to a pattern of thought and feeling that may be called that of the plucky old warrior, fighting to the end.
For the planting folk of the fertile steppes and tropical jungles, on the other hand, death is a natural phase of life, comparable to the moment of the planting of the seed, for rebirth. As an example of the attitude, we may take the composite picture presented by Frobenius of the sort of burial and reliquary rites that he observed everywhere among the horticulturalists of South and East Africa.
When an old kinsman of the sib dies, a cry of joy immediately fills the air. A banquet is arranged, during which the men and women discuss the qualities of the deceased, tell stories of his life, and speak with sorrow of the ills of old age to which he was subject in his last years. Somewhere in the neighborhood — preferably in a shady grove — a hollow has been dug in the earth, covered with a stone. It now is opened and there within lie the bones of earlier times. These are pushed aside to make room for the new arrival. The corpse is carefully bedded in a particular posture, facing a certain way, and left to itself then for a certain season, with the grave again closed. But when time enough has passed for the flesh to have decayed, the old men of the sib open the chamber again, climb down, take up the skull, and carry it to the surface and into the farmstead, where it is cleaned, painted red and, after being hospitably served with grain and beer, placed in a special place along with the crania of other relatives. From now on no spring will pass when the dead will not participate in the offerings of the planting time; no fall when he will not partake of the offerings of thanks brought in a t harvest: and in fact, always before the planting commences and before the wealth of the harvest is enjoyed by the living. Moreover, the silent old fellow participates in everything that happens in the farmstead. If a leopard fells a woman, a farmboy is bitten by a snake, a plague strikes, or the blessing of rain is withheld, the relic is always brought into connection with the matter in some way. should there be a fire, it is the first thing saved; when the puberty rites of the youngsters are to commence, it is the first to enjoy the festival beer and porridge. If a young woman marries into the sib, the oldest member conducts her to the urn or shelf where the earthly remains of the past are preserved and bids her take from the head of an ancestor a few kernels of holy grain to eat. And this, indeed, is a highly significant custom; for when this young, new vessel of the spirit of the sib becomes pregnant, the old people of the community watch to see what similarities will exist between the newly growing and the faded life….[Note 106]
Frobenius terms the attitude of the first order “magical,” and the latter “mystical,” observing that whereas the plane of reference of the first is physical, the ghost being conceived as physical, the second renders a profound sense of a communion of death and life in the entity of the sib. And anyone trying to express in words the sense or felling of this mystic communion would soon learn that words are not enough: the best is silence, or the silent rite.
Not all the rites conceived in this spirit of the mystic community are as gentle, however, as those just described. Many are appalling, as will soon be show. but through all there is rendered, whether gently or brutally, an awesome sense of this dual image, variously turned, of death in life and life in death: as in the form of the Basumbwa Chief Death, one of whose sides was beautiful, but the other rotten, with maggots dropping to the ground; or in the Hawaiian tree with the deceptive branches at the casting-off place to the other world, one side of which looked fresh and green but the other dry and brittle.
When the rites and mythologies even of the most primitive planting villages are compared with those of any tribe of hunters, it is readily seen that they represent a significant deepening both of religious feeling and of the commitment of the individual to communal life; the hunters, comparatively, are rugged individualists. For it is in the rituals and mysteries of the group that the planters not only achieve their sense of the entity of the sib, but also learn the way by which the dangers of the journey to the happy land of the dead are to be overcome and the company joined of the ancestors, who from there work as a continuing presence in the living memory of the rite. The living and the dead are thus, so to say, the matched hemispheres, light and dark, of a singe sphere, which is being itself; and the mystery or wonder of this being is the final reference of such symbols as those just seen in the Great Chief and the paradoxical tree.
Moreover, where death and life are joined in a single living round, as in the imagery of the plant and its seed, the passage of the individual from the state of childhood, through maturity, to the period of old age is marked by his graduation through clearly recognized age grades, to each of which particular social duties and functions are assigned. Among the natives of Malekula, for example, where, as already noted, the soul at the entrance to the underworld is challenged by a spirit to complete the design of a labyrinth which the individual during his life was taught in the rites of his society, five age grades are recognized for the male. These are: (1) the male child, (2) the young man, (3) the middle-aged man, (4) the old man (gray-headed), and (5) the very old man (white-headed). These grades, furthermore, continue after death, the ghost remaining in the age grade attained during life. And only the old or the very old man is able to proceed to the end of the journey, the ultimate land of the dead, which, like the paradise of the Hawaiian chiefs, is on the summit of a great volcano. There the dead dance every night among the flames; [Note 107] whereas men of the younger age grades, not having completed the course of their initiation into the mystery of death through life, remain in the entrance cave, in which, as we have seen, there is a tree that has to be climbed, much as in the casting-off places of Hawaii.
Two contrasting images of death, then, have fashioned two contrasting worlds of myth: one deriving from the impact, imprint, or upadhi of life and death in the animal sphere; the other from the model of the cycle of death and rebirth in the plant.
In the first domain the paramount object of experience is the beast. Killed and slaughtered, it yields to man its flesh to become his substance, teeth to become his ornaments, hides for clothing and tents, sinews for ropes, bones for tools. The animal life is translated into human life entirely, through the medium of death, slaughter, and the arts of cooking, tanning, sewing. So that, if it be true, as Géza Róheim has suggested, that “whatever is killed becomes father,” it should be no caused for wonder that the animals in the mythologies of the Great Hunt are revered as spiritual fathers. The enigma of the totem (the curious dual image, at once animal and human, from which both the clan and the animal species of like name are supposed to be derived and which is the key figure in the social thinking of many hunting tribes) is by this formula perfectly interpreted. For, just as a father is the model for his son, so is the animal for the hunter. And in the way, perhaps, of a wonderful game (Huizinga), or perhaps rather of a seizure (Frobenius), the whole world of man becomes linked to the world of the animal to an extent that for people whose world picture, like our own, cleaves to the model of the plant is very difficult to conceive. The history, distribution, and chief structures of the mythologies of this type — the mythologies of the primitive hunters — are discussed in Part Three.
In Part Two, the question, already posed, of the relationship of the high mythologies of the Near East, Europe, and Greater Asia to the primitive imagery of Chief Death and the Cosmic Tree is pursued. This more mystical mythology, in which man finds life and death to be alternating phases in the temporal manifestation “of something far more deeply interfused,” is closer that the other to our own; yet the two may be of equal age. Or, at least, as far into the well of the past as the flicker of our little candle of science can reach, signs of the two are to be seen.
And so what shall be said now of Bastian’s psychological theory of the elementary and ethnic ideas? Can it be argued that two such contradictory mythologies could have stemmed from a single psychological inheritance?
Indeed it can. For, just as in the earliest stages of every human biography the images of mother and father involve contradictory traits — threatening and protecting, malignant and benign — so also, in the latter years, the image of death. And just as in one biography it is the negative aspect of a parental image, but in another case the positive, that determines the ultimate structuring of the psyche and its dreams, according to local circumstance, so here, in the larger sphere of the adult’s attitude toward death, the negative or positive attitude may be taken according to the lessons either of the fierce animals as mystagogue, or of the gentler plant. The elementary idea (Elementargedanke) is never itself directly figured in mythology, but always rendered by way of local ethnic ideas of forms (Volkergedanke), and these, as we now perceive, are locally conditioned and may reflect attitudes either of resistance or of assimilation. The imagery of myth, therefore, can never be a direct presentation of the total secret of the human species, but only the function of an attitude, the reflex of a stance, a life pose, a way of playing the game. And where the rules or forms of such play are abandoned, mythology dissolves — and, with mythology, life.