Part one of this three part series (V 10 Nos. 2&3, p. 29) provided the foundation for exploring the four epochs through which we have evolved over time on our collective mythic journey. Here, we will look at three of these four mythological 'Epochs'. Part three (in the next issue) will conclude this study.
The Archaic Epoch
Some three million years ago, humanlike creatures were making tools and walking on two legs. Ken Wilber portrays humanity's earliest eras as involving no sense of self separate from the experience of the body; the first stages of human evolution were "dominated by physical nature and animal body". The earliest humans were immersed in the subconscious realms of their biological existence in what anthropologists have termed a participation mystique. They did not experience themselves as separate from their surroundings. Self and world were "basically undifferentiated, embedded, fused and confused". Wilber speculates that out of this primitive unity, with no capacity for verbal representation or true mental reflection yet developed, there could be no experience of anxiety (fear of that which is not present), no real comprehension of death, and thus no existential fears.
Sagan has wondered if "the Garden of Eden is not so different from Earth as it appeared to our ancestors of some three or four million years ago, during a legendary golden age when the genus Homo was perfectly interwoven with the other beasts and vegetables. These [Eden myths] all correspond reasonably well to the historical and archaeological evidence". Neumann noted that this period, which is represented mythologically as the uroboros (a serpent biting its own tail), "corresponds to the psychological stage in man's prehistory when the individual and the group, ego and unconscious, man and the world, were so indissolubly bound up with one another that the law of participation mystique, of unconscious identity, prevailed between them".
The Archaic Epoch roughly parallels the infantile "sensorimotor period" hypothesized by Piaget. During this period of their development, children are unable to differentiate between themselves and anything else in the world. They do not distinguish between inner and outer, between stimuli that come from their own bodies, such as hunger, and those that come from the outside, such as light. If we may speak of cultural myths at all during this period, we would call this the dreamlike era of a unified, primordial bodymyth. Consciousness was fully identified with the life of the body - the two were isomorphic. Instinctual impulses and conditioned responses functioned without competition from "higher" mental processes in motivating these protohumans. Reality was structured primarily around the pleasures, the pains, and the perceptions emerging from one's biological self. Thoughts regarding the aspects of life that concern mythology, such as identity and purpose, were direct and concrete. The life of the body was the life of myth. As Freud once noted, the ego is "first and foremost a body-ego".
The Magical Epoch
It was probably not until 200,000 years ago, with the Neanderthals, that the ability to clearly differentiate between oneself and one's environment began to emerge, although the ability may not have become fully developed, according to Wilber, until as late as 10,000 B.C. Adam and Eve's mythical "Fall" and departure from the Garden of Eden may be likened to the shift to this epoch. Human beings "fell" from their close identity with nature, and "fell" into self awareness with its accompanying anxiety, guilt, pain and vulnerability. Houston has speculated that the infant, after birth, may recapitulate the Archaic Epoch "in some thirty months equivalent to" that whole stage of humanity's development. And then the Fall. The realization that there is a dividing line between self and the rest of the world robs the infant of his or her innocent sense of omnipotence. The most elemental personal myth, constructed from the Eden-like peace of the embryo's unity in the womb, is rudely shattered with the first taste of the fruit from the tree of knowledge, the dawning of selfconsciousness. According to Houston, as individual consciousness arose, myths of Paradise and the Fall developed, which she has interpreted as the "widespread nostalgia for the integral world of the childhood in man".
Wilber explains that out of the "almost' paradisical' state of dreamy immersion" in the world of nature came the awakening of a highly individual awareness and a 'loss' of a primitive slumber". He uses the mythological image of the Typhon, half man and half snake, to represent the epoch. Typhon, son of Gaia, the Greeks' Earth goddess, had separated himself from the Earth but his mind and body were still unified. While people of this era were no longer totally immersed in nature, events in dreams were considered to be as real as waking experiences, and artistic images were accorded the same validity as the objects they represented. The animal paintings found in Paleolithic caves are thought to bear silent witness to the magical rituals used to insure success in hunting, in which art and object are fused.
Reality in this era was patterned after the recognition of "me" and "other," and it was experienced in the trance-like relationship of the newly-emerged self to the world. Wilber emphasizes that during this period, the self, while distinguished from the natural environment "remains magically intermingled with it". The self has become differentiated from the environment in these early stages of mental evolution, but it is still embedded in and undifferentiated from the body, it is still a "bodyself." While the distinction between person and environment has come into being, the boundary is still fluid and porous. Subject and object, image and reality, are not yet fully differentiated in this era. People are at the center of their world and magically intermingled with it. An object was treated as the same as the image of it, a word the same as what it represented, a dream the same as the events it portrays. A man dreaming would not think of the dream as a construction or a symbol, but rather as something which actually occurred in the "other world". Studies of traditional cultures suggest that he might be compelled to retaliate for the harm done, though his revenge might also take place in a· dream or other symbolic form. To manipulate the symbol, according to this magical logic, was to affect the object symbolized. Wilber elaborates:
"That magical world, primitive but real enough, which in us moderns has been relegated to the state of dreaming, was apparently conscious in our remote ancestors. As Freud put it, 'What once dominated waking life, while the mind was still young and incompetent, seems now to have been banished into the night'"
In the child's development, the Magical Epoch roughly parallels Piaget's "preoperational period". Four year old children are typically embedded in their perceptions, but are no longer at the mercy of them. Children at this stage cannot distinguish between image and reality; they cannot easily be consoled by being told "but it's only a dream." They believe that if they make a wish, it will be granted-and they are upset when this logic proves to be faulty. In a similar manner, humans in the Magical Epoch were convinced that their rituals brought back the sun when it disappeared during an eclipse, or that their sacrifices prevented earthquakes and other disaster.
This epoch, in which consciousness is not as differentiated as it will become in subsequent mythological expressions, might be thought of as the magical era of mythic participation. The self had emerged from its environment and was magically participating in its newly discovered world, but this involvement was laced with magical beliefs that blurred the relationship between inner and outer life in self-aggrandizing ways. In this stage, the primitive mythology of the clan or the tribe defined the nature of the magic that permeated life, and it dictated how individuals would participate in that magic. The mythic structuring of reality at this time was still bound by the body, it still antedated cognitive thought, but an external world was now recognized and responsibility for events could be assigned to it. the foundation of a mythology that separates self from other had now emerged, but the far-reaching implications of its development were yet to be realized.
The Mythical Epoch
Where the development of the oppositional thumb made possible the use of complex tools, the ability to conceptualize the difference between "self" and "other" prepared the way for such cognitive abilities as delaying one's responses, planning for the future, and becoming aware of death. By the time of the Cro-Magnons some 50,000 years ago, the brain had increased in size, become reorganized neurologically, and sophisticated forms of language had emerged. According to some informed estimates, however, language sophistication reached its full influence only as recently as 10,000 B.C.
At that time, according to Wilber, cognitive abilities had expanded so that people were able to anticipate the future more accurately, and thus plan and farm for it. "Still close to the lilies of the field, mankind took no extended thought of the morrow, and therefore neither toiled nor tilled the earth". But when tribes that had once subsisted on hunting and gathering began to settle down and cultivate crops, the anthropological evidence is unequivocal that they "sustained the most prodigious mutation in consciousness that had yet appeared". The world of agriculture is the world of extended time, of making preparations for the future harvest, and gearing the actions of the present toward important goals. The farmer had to learn how to control, postpone, and sublimate instinctive body-bound activities for the benefit of the crop. With language, the verbal mind could differentiate itself . more definitely from the physical body. People began to understand that the word is not the object for which it stands. The physical world could be represented and manipulated through mental symbols. All the requirements for developing sophisticated mythologies had become available. The hard-earned knowledge and deeper insights of the elders could now be represented in myth and carried to new generations by means of story and ritual.
In Wilber's scheme, language was the major psychological vehicle for this new development in consciousness. He presents evidence showing that humankind possessed no truly developed language during the magical era, and was thus structurally incapable of projecting into the future or of organizing itself in large membership communities. But "because language transcends the present, the new self could transcend the body. Because language transcends the given, the new self could see into tomorrow. Because language embodies mental goals and futures, the new self could delay and channel its bodily desires". With language, people could rise above " the prison of the immediate" and envision long-term goals. "From this point on, humanity would be able to reproduce itself not just physically (food) and biologically (sex) but also culturally (mind). For the reproduction of the human mind, generation to generation, is an act of verbal communication".
In this Mythic Epoch, personal mythologies closely mirrored the mythology of the culture. Individuals had not yet fully developed the mental capacities required for self-reflection. This period resembles the child's "concrete-operational" stage in Piaget's schema. The 10 year-old child is able to categorize concrete objects and make simple inferences. More objective than the preoperational child, these children are still unable to consider meanings outside the concrete world or to contemplate on the design behind the phenomena they can observe. Human beings in the Mythic Epoch were able to engage in social learning but were not able to reflectively establish much perspective on what was being passed down to them. If a person violated a taboo or other norm of the group-even if the infraction were due to some unusual and unavoidable situation-the person typically would be punished, and there would be no question in anyone's mind that the punishment was justified. Without the capacity for self-reflection, the individual is not yet capable of questioning the social code, nor would the group be in a position to make allowances for extenuating circumstances. Ashley Montagu noted that:
"in non-literate societies the acts of the individual are believed by everyone to have consequences for the group as a whole; hence, the individual tends to regulate his conduct by the recognition of his social responsibility to the group".
With the development of language and of community relationships that in some ways transcended the powers of nature, mythology came into full bloom, and the results can be observed in the stunning mythic tales of such areas as ancient China, Crete, Egypt, Greece, Guatemala, India, Mexico, and Peru. As the verbal mind climbed out from the body, the accumulated wisdom of the group as communicated by myth, gave structure to the mind's extraordinarily flexible capacity for defining reality. These myths were carried to new generations via language as well as other cultural forms such as art, ritual and religious and civic practices. The individual's emerging sense of self took the form prescribed by the culture's mythology. During this era, the cultural myths that structure reality were all-important and all-pervasive. In this pre-rational, pre-personal era of cultural mythology, the society's mythology reigned supreme.
References:
Wilber, K. 1981. Up from Eden: A transpersonal view of human evolution. Garden City, NY: Anchor/ Doubleday.
Sagan, C. (1977). The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence. NY: Random House.
Neumann, E. (1973). The Origins and History of Consciousness. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kegan, R. (1982). The Evolving Self: Problem and process in human development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Freud, S. (1923). The Ego and the Id, In J. Strachey (Trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 19). London: Hogarth Press.
Houston, J. (1980). Lifeforce: The psycho-historical recovery of the self. New York, Delacorte.
Montagu, A. (1969). Man. His First Two Million Years. New York: Delta.
This article by Dr. Feinstein is adapted from an earlier paper published in the Humanistic Psychologist, 18 (2), 1990, and is reprinted with his permission.
