The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
Harry Hillman Chartrand
April 2002
I
THE
UROBOROS
|
Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness Foreward by C.G. Jung A: THE CREATION MYTH I The Uroboros p. 1, p. 2 |
For what
the center brings
Must
obviously be
That which
remains to the end
And was
there from eternity.
GOETHE,
WestöstUcher
Diwan
THE MYTHOLOGICAL STAGES in the evolution of
consciousness begin with the stage when the ego is contained in the unconscious,
and lead up to a situation in which the ego not only becomes aware of its own
position and defends it heroically, but also becomes capable of broadening and
relativizing its experiences through the changes effected by its own
activity.
The first cycle of myth is the creation
myth. Here the mythological
projection of psychic material appears in cosmogonic form, as the mythology of
creation. The world and the
unconscious predominate and form the object of myth. Ego and man are only nascent as yet, and
their birth, suffering, and emancipation constitute the phases of the creation
myth.
At the stage of the separation of the World
Parents, the germ of ego consciousness finally asserts itself. While yet in the fold of the creation
myth it enters upon the second cycle, namely, the hero myth, in which the ego,
consciousness, and the human world become conscious of themselves and of their
dignity.
In the beginning is perfection, wholeness.
This original perfection can only
be “circumscribed,” or described symbolically; its nature defies any description
other than a mythical one, because that which describes, the ego, and that which
is described, the beginning, which is prior to any ego, prove to
be
5
incommensurable quantities as soon as the
ego tries to grasp its object conceptually, as a content of
consciousness.
For this reason a symbol always stands at
the beginning, the most striking feature of which is its multiplicity of
meanings, its indeterminate and indeterminable
character.
The beginning can be laid hold of in two
“places”: it can be conceived in the life of mankind as the earliest dawn of
human history, and in the life of the individual as the earliest dawn of
childhood. The self-representation
of the dawn of human history can be seen from its symbolic description in ritual
and myth. The earliest dawn of
childhood, like that of mankind, is depicted in the images which rise up from
the depths of the unconscious and reveal themselves to the already
individualized ego.
The dawn state of the beginning projects
itself mythologically in cosmic form, appearing as the beginning of the world,
as the mythology of creation. Mythological accounts of the beginning
must invariably begin with the outside world, for world and psyche are still
one. There is as yet no reflecting,
self-conscious ego that could refer anything to itself, that is, reflect. Not only is the psyche open to the world,
it is still identical with and undifferentiated from the world; it knows itself
as world and in the world and experiences its own becoming as a world-becoming,
its own images as the starry heavens, and its own contents as the world-creating
gods.
Ernst Cassirer 1 has shown how,
in all peoples and in all religions, creation appears as the creation of
light. Thus the coming of
consciousness, manifesting itself as light in contrast to the darkness of the
unconscious, is the real “object” of creation mythology. Cassirer has likewise shown that in the
different stages of mythological consciousness the first thing to be discovered
is subjective reality, the formation of the ego and individuality. The beginning of this development,
mythologically regarded as the beginning of the world, is the coming of light,
without which no world process could be seen at
all.
1 The
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Manheim, Vol. II, pp. 94
ff.
6
But the earliest dawn is still prior to this
birth of light out of darkness, and a wealth of symbos surrounds
it.
The form of representation peculiar to the
unconscious is not that of the conscious mind. It neither attempts nor is able to seize
hold of and define its objects in a series of discursive explanations, and
reduce them to clarity by logical analysis. The way of the unconscious is
different. Symbols.gather round the
thing to be explained, understood, interpreted. The act of becoming conscious consists in
the concentric grouping of symbols around the object, all circumscribing and
describing the unknown from many sides. Each symbol lays bare another essential
side of the object to be grasped, points to another facet of meaning. Only the canon of these symbols
congregating about the center in question, the coherent symbol group, can lead
to an understanding of what the symbols point to and of what they are trying to
express. The symbolic story of the
beginning, which speaks to us from the mythology of all ages, is the attempt
made by man’s childlike, prescientific consciousness to master problems and
enigmas which are mostly beyond the grasp of even our developed modern
consciousness. If our
consciousness, with epistemological resignation, is constrained to regard the
question of the beginning as unanswerable and therefore unscientific, it may be
right; but the psyche, which can neither be taught nor led astray by the
self-criticism of the conscious mind, always poses this question afresh as one
that is essential to it.
The question of the beginning is also the
question “Whence?” It is the
original and fateful question to which cosmology and the creation myths have
ever tried to give new and different answers. This original question about the origin
of the world is at the same time the question about the origin of man, the
origin of consciousness and of the ego; it is the fateful question “Where did I
come from?” that faces every human being as soon as he arrives upon the
threshold of self-consciousness.
The mythological answers to these questions
are symbolical, like all answers that come from the depths of the psyche, the
unconscious. The metaphorical
nature of the symbol says: this
7
is this, that is that. The statement of identity and the logic
of consciousness erected upon it have no value for the psyche and the
unconscious. The psyche blends, as
does the dream; it spins and weaves together, combining each with each. The symbol is therefore an analogy, more
an equivalence than an equation, and therein lies its wealth of meanings, but
also its elusiveness. Only the
symbol group, compact of partly contradictory analogies, can make something
unknown, and beyond the grasp of consciousness, more intelligible and more
capable of becoming conscious.
One symbol of original perfection is the circle. Allied to it are the sphere, the egg, and the’ rotund urn - the “round” 2 of alchemy. It is Plato’s round that was there in the beginning:
Therefore the demiurge made
the world in the shape of a sphere, giving it that figure which of all is the
most perfect and the most equal to itself.
3
Circle, sphere, and round are all aspects of
the Self-contained, which is without beginning and end; in its prewordly
perfection it is prior to any process, eternal, for in its roundness there is no
before and no after, no time; and there is no above and no below, no space.
All this can only come with the
coming of light, of consciousness, which is not yet present; now all is under
sway of the unmanifest godhead, whose symbol is therefore the
circle.
The round is the egg, the philosophical World Egg, the nucleus of the beginning, and the germ from which, as humanity teaches everywhere, the world arises.4 It is also the perfect state in which the opposites are united – the perfect beginning because the opposites have not yet flown apart and the world has not yet begun, the perfect end because in it the opposites have come together again in a synthesis and the world is once more at rest.
The container of opposites is the Chinese t’ai chi, a round con
2. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, index, s.v.
“rotundum.”
3. Plato, Timaeus (based on the Cornford
trans.).
4. Frobenius, Vom Kulturreich des Festlandes, p. 69;
Shatapatha Brahmana 6. 1. 1.8; Geidner,
Vedismus und Brahmanismus, pp. 92 f.
8
taming black and white, day and night,
heaven and earth, male and female. Lao-tzu says of
it:
There was something
formless yet complete,
That existed before heaven
and earth;
Without sound, without
substance,
Dependent on nothing,
unchanging,
All pervading,
unfailing.
One may think of it as the
mother or all things under heaven.5
Each of these pairs of opposites forms the
nucleus of a group of symbols which cannot be described here in any great
detail; a few examples must suffice.
The round is the calabash containing the
World Parents.6 In Egypt
as in
In the beginning this world
was Soul (Atman) alone in the form of a person. Looking around, he saw nothing else than
himself. He said first: “I am.”. . . He was, indeed, as large as
a woman and a man closely embraced. He caused that self to fall (pat)
into two pieces. Therefrom
arose a husband (pati) and a wife
(patni)?
What is said here of the deity recalls
Plato’s Original Man; there too the hermaphroditic round stands at the
beginning.
This perfect state of being, in which the
opposites are contained, is perfect because it is autarchic. Its self-sufficiency, self-contentment,
and independence of any “you” and any “other” are signs of its self-contained
eternality. We read in
Plato:
5. Tao Teh Ching, No. XXV;
trans. by Arthur Waley in The Way and its
Power.
6. Frobenius, op. cit., p.’
112.
7. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
1. 4. 1.-3, trans. by Hutne, The Thirteen Principal
Upanishads.
9
And he established the
universe a sphere revolving in a circle, one and solitary, yet by reason of its
excellence able to bear itself company, and needing no other friendship or
acquaintance.8
The perfection of that which rests in itself
in no way contradicts the perfection of that which circles in itself. Although absolute rest is something
static and eternal, unchanging and therefore without history, it is at the same
time the place of origin and the germ cell of creativity. Living the cycle of its own life, it is
the circular snake, the primal dragon of the beginning that bites its own tail,
the self –begetting [Editor: replaced Greek letters with: uroboros}
8a
This is the ancient Egyptian symbol 9
of which it is said: “Draco interfecit se ipsum, maritat se ipsum,
impraegnat se ipsum.” 10 It slays, weds, and impregnates
itself. It is man and woman,
begetting and conceiving, devouring and giving birth, active and passive, above
and below, at once.
As the Heavenly Serpent, the uroboros was
known in ancient Babylon; 11 in later times, in the same area, it was
often depicted by the Mandaeans (illus. 2); its origin is ascribed by
Macrobius to the Phoenicians.12 It is the archetype of the
[Editor unscanable Greek letters], the All One, appearing as Leviathan
and as Aion, as Oceanus (illus. 3 and 5) and also as the Primal Being
that says: “I am Alpha and Omega.” As the Kneph of antiquity it is the
Primal Snake, the “most ancient deity of the prehistoric world.” 13
The uroboros can be
traced in the Revelation of St. John and among the Gnostics 14
as well as among the Roman syncretists; 15 there are
pictures of it in the sand paintings of the Navajo Indians 16
and in
8. Plato, Timaeus, 34 (based on the Cornford
trans.).
8a. Hereinafter transcribed
as “uroboros.”
9. Goldschmidt, “Aichemie der Aegypter.”
10. Cf. Jung, “The Visions
of Zosimos.” Cited from the Artis auriferae (Basel, 1593), Vol. I,
“Tractatulus Avicennae,” p. 406.
11. Leisegang, “The Mystery
of the Serpent.”
12. Numerous examples of representations were collected in
the Eranos Archives, Ascona, Switzerland; a duplicate of the Archives is in the
possession of the Bollingen Foundation, New York, and the Warburg Institute,
London.
13.Kees, Der
Gotterglaube im alten Aegypten, p. 347.
14. Pistis Sophia,
trans. by Horner, pp. 160—84 and 166—68.
15 Kerényi, “Die Göttin
Natur.”
16 Cf. Newcomb and
Reichard, Sandpaintings of the Navajo Shooting Chant, especially P1.
XIII.
10
Giotto; 17 it is found in Egypt
(illus. 4), Africa (illus. 6), Mexico (illus. 7), and India
(illus. 8), among the gypsies as an amulet,18 and in the
aichemical texts (illus. 9) 19
The symbolic thinking portrayed in these
images of the round endeavors to grasp contents which even our present-day
consciousness can only understand as paradoxes, precisely because it cannot
grasp them. If we give the name of
“all” or “nothing” to the beginning, and speak in this connection of wholeness,
unity, nondifferentiation, and the absence of opposites, all these “concepts,”
if we look at them more closely and try to “conceive” them instead of just going
on thinking them, are found to be images derived and abstracted from these basic
symbols. Images and symbols have
this advantage over the paradoxical philosophical formulations of infinite unity
and unimaged wholeness, that their unity can be seen and grasped as a unity at
one glance.
More: all these symbols with which men have
sought to grasp the beginning in mythological terms are as alive today as they
ever were; they have their place not only in art and religion, but in the living
processes of the individual psyche, in dreams and in fantasies. so long as man
shall exist, perfection will continue to appear as the circle; the sphere and
the round; the Primal Deity who is sufficient unto himself, and the self who has
gone beyond the opposites, will reappear in the image of the round, the
mandala.20
This round and this existence in the round,
existence in the uroboros, is the symbolic self-representation of the dawn
state, showing the infancy both of mankind and of the child. The validity and reality of the uroboros
symbol rest on a collective basis. It corresponds to an evolutionary stage
which can be “recollected” in the psychic structure of every human
being.
17. See his “Envy,” one of
the Vices in the frescoes (c. 1305) of the Arena Chapel, Padua: the figure is of
a horned, bat-eared witch, from whose mouth a serpent issues, circling back to
bite her face.
18. Ciba-Zeitschrift,
No. 31, illustration, “Heil-Aberglaube der
Zigeuner.”
19. See also illustrations
in Jung, Psychology and Alchemy and
“Paracelsus
as a Spiritual
Phenomenon.”
20. Cf. the work of Jung and
his school on the mandala in normal and pathological people, children (illus.
5), etc.
11
It functions as a transpersonal factor that
was there as a psychic stage of being before the formation of an ego. Moreover, its reality is re-experienced
in every early childhood, and the child’s personal experience of this pre-ego
stage retraces the old track trodden by humanity.
An embryonic and still undeveloped germ of
ego consciousness slumbers in the perfect round and awakens. It is immaterial whether we are dealing
with a self-representation of this psychic stage, manifesting itself in a
symbol, or whether a later ego describes this preliminary stage as its own past.
Since the ego has and can have no
experiences of its own in the embryonic state, not even psychic experiences -
for its experiencing consciousness still slumbers in the germ - the later ego
will describe this earlier state, of which it has indefinite but symbolically
graspable knowledge, as a “prenatal” time. It is the time of existence in paradise
where the psyche has her preworldly abode, the time before the birth of the ego,
the time of unconscious envelopment, of swimming in the ocean of the
unborn.
The time of the beginning, before the coming
of the opposites, must be understood as the self-description of that great epoch
when there was still no consciousness. It is the wu chi of Chinese
philosophy, whose symbol is the empty circle. 21 Everything is still in the “now and for
ever” of eternal being; sun, moon, and stars, these symbols of time and
therefore of mortality, have not yet been created; and day and night, yesterday
and tomorrow, genesis and decay, the flux of life and birth and death, have not
yet entered into the world. This
prehistoric state of being is not time, but eternity, just as the time before
the coming of man and before birth and begetting is eternity. And just as there is no time before the
birth of man and ego, only eternity, so there is no space, only
infinity.
The question “Whence?” - which is both the
original question and the question about the origin - has but one answer, and
of
21. Richard Wilhelm, in
Das Bach des Alten vom Sinn und Leben (his German edn. of the Tao Teh
Ching), p. 90.
12
this there are two interpretations. The answer is: the round, and the two
interpretations: the womb and the parents.
It is crucial for every psychology, and
especially for every psychology of childhood, to understand this problem and its
symbolism.
The uroboros appears as the round
“container,” i.e., the maternal womb, but also as the union of masculine and
feminine opposites, the World Parents joined in perpetual cohabitation. Although it seems quite natural that the
original question should be connected with the problem of the World Parents, we
must realize at once that we are dealing with symbols of origination and not
with sexuality or a “genital theory.” The problem around which mythological
statements revolve and which was from the very beginning the crucial question
for man is really concerned with the origins of life, of the spirit and the
soul.
This is not to say that early man was
something of a philosopher; abstract questions of this kind were wholly alien to
his consciousness. Mythology,
however, is the product of the collective unconscious, and anyone acquainted
with primitive psychology must stand amazed at the unconscious wisdom which
rises up from the depths of the human psyche in answer to these unconscious
questions. The unconscious
knowledge of the background of life and of man’s dealings with it is laid down
in ritual and myth; these are the answers of what he calls the human soul and
the human mind to questions which were very much alive for him, even though no
ego consciousness had consciously asked them.
Many primitive peoples do not recognize the
connection between sexual intercourse and birth. Where, as among primitives, sexual
intercourse often begins in childhood but does not lead to the begetting of
children, it is natural to conclude that the birth of the child has nothing to
do with impregnation by a man in the sexual act.
The question about the origin, however, must
always be answered by “womb,” for it is the immemorial experience of mankind
that every newborn creature comes from a womb .
Hence
13
the “round” of mythology is also called the
womb and uterus, though this place of origin should not be taken concretely.
In fact, all mythology says over
and over again that this womb is an image, the woman’s womb being only a partial
aspect of the primordial symbol of the place of origin from whence we come.
This primordial symbol means many
things at once: it is not just one content or part of the body, but a
plurality, a world or cosmic region where many contents hide and have their
essential abode. “The Mothers” are
not a mother.
Anything deep - abyss, valley, ground, also
the sea and the bottom of the sea, fountains, lakes and pools, the earth
(illus. 10), the underworld, the cave, the house, and the city - all are
parts of this archetype. Anything
big and embracing which contains, surrounds, enwraps, shelters, preserves, and
nourishes anything small belongs to the primordial matriarchal
realm.22 When Freud saw
that everything hollow was feminine, he would have been right if only he had
grasped it as a symbol. By
interpreting it as the “female genitalia” he profoundly misunderstood it,
because female genitalia are only a tiny part of the archetype of the Primordial
Mother.
Compared with this maternal uroboros, human
consciousness feels itself embryonic, for the ego feels fully contained in this
primordial symbol. It is only a
tiny helpless newcomer. In the
pleromatic phase of life, when the ego swims about in the round like a tadpole,
there is nothing but the uroboros in existence. Humanity does not yet exist, there is
only divinity; only the world has being. Naturally, then, the first phases of
man’s evolving ego consciousness are under the dominance of the uroboros. They are the phases of an infantile ego
consciousness which, although no longer entirely embryonic and already
possessing an existence of its own, still lives in the round, not yet detached
from it and only just beginning to differentiate itself. from it. This initial stage when ego consciousness
is still on the infantile level is marked by the predominance of the maternal
side of the uroboros.
22. Jung,
“Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype.”
14
The world is experienced as all-embracing,
and in it man experiences himself, as a self, sporadically and momentarily only.
Just as the infantile ego, living
this phase over again, feebly developed, easily tired, emerges like an island
out of the ocean of the unconscious for occasional moments only, and then sinks
back again, so early man experiences the world. Small feeble, and much given to sleep, i.e., for the most part unconscious, he swims about in his
instincts like an animal. Enfolded
and upborne by great Mother Nature, rocked in her arms, he is delivered over to
her for good or ill. Nothing is
himself; everything is world. The
world shelters and nourishes him, while he scarcely wills and acts at all. Doing nothing, lying inert in the
unconscious, merely being there in the inexhaustible twilit world, all needs
effortlessly supplied by the great nourisher - such is that early, beatific
state. All the positive maternal
traits are in evidence at this stage, when the ego is still embryonic and has no
activity of its own. The uroboros
of the maternal world is life and psyche in one; it gives nourishment and
pleasure, protects and warms, comforts and forgives. It is the refuge for all suffering, the
goal of all desire. For always this
mother is she who fulfills, the bestower and helper. This living image of the Great and Good Mother has at
all times of distress been the refuge of humanity and ever shall be; for the
state of being contained in the who1e, without responsibility or effort, with no
doubts and no division of the world into two, is paradisal. and can never again
be realized in its pristine happy-go-luckiness in adult
life.
The positive side of the Great Mother seems
to be embodied in this stage of the uroboros. Only at a very much higher level will the
“good” Mother appear again. Then,
when she no longer has to do with an embryonic ego, but with an adult
personality matured by rich experience of the world, she reveals herself anew as
Sophia, the “gracious” Mother, or, pouring forth her riches in the creative
fullness of true productivity, as the Mother of All
Living
The dawn state of perfect containment and
contentment was never an historical state (Rousseau was still projecting
this
15
psychic phase into the historical past, as
the “natural state” of the savage.) It is rather the image of a psychic stage
of humanity, just discernible as borderline image. However much the world forced early man
to face reality, it was with the greatest reluctance that he consciously entered
into this reality. Even today we
can see from primitives that the law of gravity, the inertia of the psyche, the
desire to remain unconscious, is a fundamental human trait. Yet even this is a false formulation,
since it starts from consciousness as though that were the natural and
self-evident thing. But fixation in
unconsciousness, the downward drag of its specific gravity, cannot be called a
desire to remain unconscious; on the contrary, that is the natural thing.
There is, as a counteracting force,
the desire to become conscious, a veritable instinct impelling man in this
direction. One has no need to
desire to remain unconscious; one is primarily unconscious and can at most
conquer the original situation in which man drowses in the world, drowses in the
unconscious, contained in the infinite like a fish in the environing sea. The ascent toward consciousness is the
“unnatural” thing in nature; it is specific of the species Man, who on that
account has justly styled himself Homo sapiens. The struggle between the specifically
human and the universally natural constitutes the history of man’s conscious
development.
So long as the infantile ego consciousness
is weak and feels the strain of its own existence as heavy and oppressive, while
drowsiness and sleep are felt as delicious pleasure, it has not yet discovered
its own reality and differentness. So long as this continues, the uroboros
reigns on as the great whirling wheel of life, where everything not yet
individual is submerged in the union of opposites, passing away and willing to
pass away.
Man is not yet thrown back upon himself, against nature, nor the ego against the unconscious; being oneself is still a wearisome and painful experience, still the exception that has to be overcome. It is in this sense that we speak of “uroboric incest.” It goes without saying that the term “incest” is to be understood symbolically, not concretistically and sexually.
16
Wherever the incest motive appears, it is
always a prefiguration of the hieros gamos, of the sacred marriage which
its true form only with the hero.
Uroboric incest is a form of entry into the
mother, of union with her, and it stands in sharp contrast to other and later
forms of incest. In uroboric
incest, the emphasis upon pleasure and love is in no sense active, it is more a
desire to be dissolved and absorbed; passively one lets oneself be taken, sinks
into the pleroma, melts away in the ocean of pleasure - a Liebestod. The Great Mother takes the little
child back into herself, and always over uroboric incest there stand the
insignia of death, signifying final dissolution in union with the Mother. Cave, earth, tomb, sarcophagus, and
coffin are symbols of this ritual recombination, which begins with burial in the
posture of the embryo in the barrows of the Stone Age and ends with the cinerary
urns of the moderns.
Many forms of nostalgia and longing signify
no more than a return to uroboric incest and self-dissolution, from the unio
mystica of the saint to the drunkard’s craving for unconsciousness and the
“death-romanticism” of the Germanic races. The incest we term “uroboric” is
self-surrender and regression. It
is the form of incest taken by the infantile ego, which is still close to the
mother and has not yet come to itself; but the sick ego of the neurotic can also
take this form and so can a later, exhausted ego that creeps back to the mother
after having found fulfillment.
Notwithstanding its own dissolution and the
deadly aspect of the uroboros, the embryonic ego does not experience uroboric
incest as anything hostile, even though it be annihilated. The return to the great round is a
happening full of passive, childlike confidence; for the infantile ego
consciousness always feels its reawakening, after having been immersed in death
as a rebirth. It feels protected by
the maternal depths even when the ego has disappeared and there is no
consciousness of itself. Man’s
consciousness rightly feels itself to be the child of these primordial depths;
for not only in the history of mankind is
17
consciousness a late product of the womb of
the unconscious, but in every individual life, consciousness re-experiences its
emergence from the unconscious in the growth of childhood, and every night in
sleep, dying with the sun, it sinks back into the depths of the unconscious, to
be reborn in the morning and to begin the day anew.
The uroboros, the great round, is not only
the womb, but the World Parents. The World Father is joined to the World
Mother in uroboric union, and they are not to be divided. They are still under
the rule of the primordial law: above and below, father and mother, heaven and
earth, God and world, reflect one another and cannot be put apart. How could the conjunction of opposites,
as the initial state of existence, ever be represented mythologically except by
the symbol of the conjoined World Parents!
Thus the World Parents, who are the answer
to the question about the origin, are themselves the universe and the prime
symbol of everlasting life. They
are the perfection from whence everything springs; the eternal being that
begets, conceives, and brings itself to birth, that kills and revivifies. Their unity is a state of existence
transcendent and divine, independent of the opposites - the inchoate “En-Soph”
of the cabala, which means “unending plenitude” and “nothingness.” The tremendous force of this primordial
symbol of the psyche does not lie only in the fact that it contains in itself
the non-differentiated state of union beyond the opposites. The uroboros also symbolizes the creative
impulse of the new beginning it is the “wheel that rolls itself,” the initial,
rotary movement in the upward spiral of evolution.
23
This initial movement, the procreative
thrust , naturally has an affinity with the paternal side of the uroboros and
with the beginning of evolution in time, and is far harder to visualize than the
maternal side.
23. Schoch-Bodmer, “Die
Spirale als Symbol und als Strukturelement des Lebendigen”; Leisegang, ‘~Das
Mysterium der Scliange.”
18
For instance, when we read in Egyptian
theology such passages as:
Atum, who indulged himself
in Heliopolis, took his phallus in his hand in order to arouse pleasure. A
brother and sister were produced, Shu and Tefnut.
24
or:
I copulated in my hand, I
joined myself to my shadow and spurted out of my own mouth. I spewed forth as Shu and spat forth as
Tefnut. 25
this clearly expresses the difficulty of
grasping the creative beginning in a symbol. What js meant would nowadays be called
spontaneous generation or the self-manifestation of god. The original force of the images still
shines through our rather more abstract terms. The uroboric mode of propagation, where
begetter and conceiver are one, results in the image of immediate genesis from
the semen, without partner and without duality.
To call such images “obscene” is to be
guilty of a profound misunderstanding. Actually, life in those times was far
more disciplined sexually, far purer, than in most of the later cultures; the
sexual symbolism that appears in primitive cult and ritual has a sacral and
transpersonal import, as everywhere in mythology. It symbolizes the creative element, not
personal genitality. It is only
personalistic misunderstanding that makes these sacral contents “obscene.” Judaism and Christianity between them -
and this includes Freud - have had a heavy and disastrous hand in this
misunderstanding. The desecration
of pagan values in the struggle for monotheism and for a conscious ethic was
necessary, and historically an advance; but it resulted in a complete distortion
of the primordial world of those times. The effect of secondary personalization
in the struggle against paganism was to reduce the transpersonal to the
personal. Sanctity became sodomy,
worship became fornication,
24. Pyramid Texts, spell
1248, in Sethe, Pyramidentexte.
25. Book of Apopis, in
Roeder, Urkunden zur Religion des alten Aegypten,
p.108.
19
and so on. An age whose eyes are once more open to
the transpersonal must reverse this process.
Later creation symbols show how these
matters came to be better formulated. Not that any repression had crept in.
What was to be expressed had from
the very outset no sexual connotations, it was meant symbolically; but the
efforts with which early man wrestled for words give us some indication of what
it was all about.
The image of the sef-fecundating primal god
undergoes new variations in Egypt and India, and in both cases there is a move
in the direction of spiritualization. But this spiritualization is the same as
the endeavor to apprehend the nature of the creative force that was there in the
beginning:
It is the heart which makes
all that results, to come out, and it is the tongue which repeats (expresses)
the thought of the heart. . . That
is what causes all the gods to be born.
Atum with his Ennead, and every divine utterance manifests itself in the
thought of the heart and speech of the tongue.
26
Or:
The Demiurge who created
all the gods and their Kas is in his heart and in his tongue.
27
And finally we come to the most abstract and
spiritual symbolism of all, where God is the “breath of
life”:
He did not bring me forth
from his mouth, nor conceive me in his hand, but he breathed me forth from his
nostrils.28
The transition from image to idea in this
formulation of the creative principle becomes doubly clear when one knows that
in the hieroglyphs “thought” is written with the image for “heart” and “speech”
with that for “tongue.”
At this point in Egyptian mythology and its
wrestlings with the problem of creation, we have the first beginnings of what
was to be expressed several thousand years later as the “Word of God” in the
Bibles story of the creation and in the doctrine of
26. Moret, The Nile and
Egyptian Civilization, p. 876.
27. Kees, Aegypten,
p. ii.
28. Kees, Gotterglaube,
p. 312 n.
20
the Logos - an expression that was never
able to break away altogether from the primordial image of the
“self-manifesting” and “self-expressing” god.
Understandably enough, the creative
principle that brings the world into being is derived from the creative nature
of man himself. Just as a man - our
figures of speech say the same thing today - brings forth his creations from his
own depths and “expresses” himself, so do the gods. In like manner Vishnu the Boar scoops the
earth out of the sea, and the god ponders the world in his heart and expresses
it in the creative word. The word,
speech, is a higher product, the utterance of one sunk in himself, in his own
depths. When we talk of
“introversion” we say the same thing. In India, tapas. “inward heat” and
“brooding,” is the creative force with whose help everything is made. The self-incubating effect of
introversion, a fundamental experience of the self-generating spirit, is clearly
expressed in the following text::
He, Prajapati, took to
praying and fasting, because he desired offspring, and he made himself fruitful.
29
An Egyptian text
says:
My name was “he who created
himself, first god of first 30
The same principle of “heating” is described
in another Brahmana as the way of creation:
In the beginning this world
was nothing at all. Heaven was not, nor earth, nor space. Because it was not, it
bethought itself: I will be. It
emitted heat.
After describing a long series of cosmogonic
heatings and the production of elements, the text goes
on:
He found foothold on the
earth. When he had found a firm
foothold there, he thought: I will propagate myself. He emitted heat and became pregnant.
31
29. Shatapatha Brahmana 11.
1. 6. 7, trans. from Geldner, Vedismus und
Brahmanisnus.
30. Book of Apopis, in
Roeder, op. cit.
31. Taittfriya Brahmana 2.
2. 9. 5, trans. from Geldner, op. cit., p. 90.
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