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Chapter 1. Ego and Psyche.

In September, 1959, Carl Jung was asked to 'repeat the principal points of his system which may assist man to discover his totality...' Jung's reply was,

"In the first place, I have no system, no doctrine, nothing of that kind. I am an empiricist, with no metaphysical views at all. I have only hypotheses. From them I have gained some basic principles. There is the self, which is the totality of one's being, known and unknown, conscious and unconscious, as opposed to the distinction between physical and psychic. Then there are the archetypes, those images of instinct. For instinct is not just an outward thrust, it also takes part in the representation of forms....Our instincts do not express themselves only in our actions and reactions, but also in the way we formulate what we imagine. Instinct is not only biological, it is also, you might say, spiritual. And it always repeats certain forms which can be studied down the ages among all peoples. These are the archetypes...

"There is also the collective unconscious, that immense treasury, that great reservoir, whence mankind draws the images, the forces, which it translates into very different languages, but whose common source is being found out more clearly all the time. So many coincidences come from there."

#Jung Speaking p 372.

Most of Jung's hypotheses and basic principles mentioned above, have been 'rediscovered,' demonstrated and established by contemporary neurological and psychological workers without reference to Jung himself. Thus Jung's major ideas can now be derived from biological and anthropological research all of which has occurred since his death in 1961. Here is an over-view.

Our brains are shrinking. The rapid increase in brain size, which began rather more than two million years ago, peaked about two hundred thousand years ago, and cerebral volume has decreased slowly ever since. The shrinkage may not matter, but the rapid expansion does.

The stage was set some three to five million years earlier with the acquisition by our ancestors of bipedal gait. Much has been made in the past, of how walking on our hind-limbs set free our forelimbs to make tools, and some anthropologists have attributed increase in brain size to tool-making. It won't wash. Kangaroos developed bipedal locomotion long before we did, and the prehensile strength of their 'hands' is considerable, as I found out when a calm but inquisitive adult grey decided to abort a photo session by trying to take my camera. Young female kangaroos manipulate objects in play behaviour, and even have their own 'favourite toys.'

#Australian Nature

In any event, bipedalism preceded cerebral expansion by some three to five million years, which makes a direct cause and effect link tenuous. Its direct advantage to our ancient Homo erectus ancestors was purely thermodynamic efficiency.#L19

It had one vital side-effect. The proto-human pelvis became more short and box-shaped, which meant that when, for whatever reason, our ancestors' brains started to expand, larger foetal heads could fit through maternal pelvises without causing death of both. Hence, a vital limit factor disappeared.

So why did human brains expand, and why so fast?

Harry Jerison,#of UCLA, developed a method for determining brain size which 'factored out' the need for larger animals to have larger brains just for daily maintenance.

His concept of 'Encephalisation quotient' or EQ compares logarithms of brain weight over body weight, then standardises the quotient against average figures for a major group of animals. (e.g. Class Mammalia.)#Dawkins p 189.

Jerison's studies on brain size in wide varieties of animals, both extant and extinct, showed that each time a new faunal group evolved, there was a corresponding increase in encephalisation. The first mammals had brains five times as 'big' as reptiles, primates have twice the brain size of mammals in general, apes have brains twice the size of average primates, and humans are three times more encephalised than the average ape.#Leakey p143.

Of equal significance was his finding that carnivores tend to have higher EQs than the herbivores on which they prey.

#Dawkins p 190. Significant because for 1.8 million years, we, unlike our simian cousins, have been carnivores. More significant yet is that the increase in brain size started off looking like a learning curve, but then took off - almost exactly 1.8 million years ago.#Leakey p 136.

For reasons shown below, brains are metabolically very expensive organs. The human brain weighs 2% of the total body, but consumes 20% of its energy.#L54 Brain size could not have increased so fast without the concentrated energy, protein and vitamins available in meat.

Moreover, for a social species, meat-eating enhances life of the social unit.

The enormous advantages, metabolic and social, conferred by a partly or wholly carnivorous diet, can be observed in the life patterns of lions, compared to their prey species. In a reasonable season, lions only spend about four hours per day moving around at all. The other twenty is spent resting, playing and copulating. Their prey species have done most of their metabolic work for them, by converting cellulose into tasty meat with plenty of vitamins: and they keep moving and eating most of the day to do it.

What goes through lions' minds while resting is hard to tell; my own answer after spending long hours close to prides, is "Probably not much," but the potential value of all that spare time for our early forebears must have been considerable. So much so, that it overshadows intelligence in determining geographical distribution of species. If intelligence was the major criterion, the second most widely distributed species on earth would be our close cousins, the forest chimps. In fact they are confined to small areas of sub-Saharan Africa. The second most wide-spread land mammal in the world is the Leopard, whose range extends throughout Africa, the Middle East and Iran, through Asia as Far north as the Amur river and as far south as India and Malaysia. (That does not even include the related Snow Leopard Panthera uncia, just Panthera pardus.)

Little wonder: at last count, its diet consisted of no less than 136 different species, from game animals to oysters!

#T/Kemp &/or Coheleach.

Bigger brains mean smarter hunters, and smarter hunters are better nourished, hence healthier, hence better hunters. But we were already encephalised out of our minds compared to any of our prey species, and to any carnivores with whom we competed. So why make a big brain that much bigger; so fast?

Cherchez la femme! Nobel Laureate Richard Dawkins says of positive-feedback-driven processes of evolution, that

"...the really spectacular examples are to be found in organs of sexual advertisement." #Dawk p 199.

Dawkins attributes understanding of this process of evolution to R.A. Fisher's work in the 1930s, and uses the examples of plumage in the peacock, partridge and African widow-bird. However the principles are much the same for any rapid and dramatic evolutionary trend, which I submit is a fair description of human brain expansion.

Fisher's original idea was that female preference for certain types of male adornment,(he was discussing peacocks here,)was not static or whimsical, but evolved dynamically in step with development of the trait in question.

Head or brain size is influenced by large numbers of genes (called polygenes,) whose effect is additive. Height and build are other examples of such an effect. But another, and crucial example of polygenetic influence is female preference, especially in a species such as ours, with a long gestational period, followed by low female fertility while nursing. In such a species, male attractiveness is crucial in order for him to be first to get in his two-pennerth, so to speak.

Thus big-headed females are more likely to have big-headed parents, but in addition will have probably inherited from their mothers, genes causing preference for big-headed males. These preference genes are passed to their daughters. Thus , any individual of either gender contains polygenes for big heads,and genes for preference-for-big-heads in their mates.

The limit factor in the case of exaggerated bird plumage is the need to balance the sexually attractive trait against other survival requirements of the animal. (e.g. Escape from predators, conflicting energy demands etc.) However, in the case of the brain, its own intrinsic evolutionary utility over-rides every other consideration save only the limit factors imposed by female pelvic size and shape, which, because of the architecture required for locomotion, evolve much more slowly. (e.g. Fusion of 5th lumbar vertebra to 1st Sacral vertebra in about 10% of the population.)

Inevitably, such a exuberant burgeoning met its limit about 200,000 years ago, when heads jammed in pelvises, but by then the brain could tolerate a moderate reduction in size by simply convoluting its cortex somewhat, so here we are!

One more thing; most sexually attractive traits become associated with other traits so as to draw attention to themselves, and this is no exception. The only thick hair left on the 'Naked Ape' is in two places; genitals and head!

Furthermore, men have hairy chests, more marked in some 'races' than others. Women don't; but they do have attributes which reside in the thoracic region, and have a remarkable ability to act a sexual stimuli to men, with no apparent reason. Why? Our male ancestors had one genetic job, given the fact that females did not become pregnant during pregnancy, nor for a long but unpredictable lactation phase. First in was first served, from the point of view of reproduction of one's genes. Thus the male who was sexually stimulated by large (i.e. lactating) breasts, had an advantage over the male who was less enthused. The Freudian explanation that large breasts had something to do with 'mother' has rather less evolutionary justification, especially when one considers that modern men are turned on by enlarged breasts in women who (usually) are not even slightly of an age group who might approximate appropriately to 'mother.'

Current major theories of cerebral expansion include:-

1. Man the toolmaker: Proposed by Kenneth Oakley in 1949, but unlikely to explain much brain expansion, let alone such dramatic increase. Jerison pointed out that "...tool-making can be accomplished with very little brain tissue."#Leak 128

2. Social intelligence hypothesis: Arose out of studies on vervet monkeys in Amboseli National Park by Cheney and Seyfarth, and was further developed by the Cambridge theoretical psychologist, Nicholas Humphrey. Its major tenet appears to be that in order to live in large groups, with all their complex interactions, we need large brains. It leads easily and seductively to a theory of consciousness, based on the idea that anticipation of others' behaviour requires some form of self-monitoring. # Leak 149.Maybe so, but that does not require a large brain. Cheney and Seyfarth's own observations prove this. Vervet monkeys do quite nicely in just such large groups, and their brains are quite small.146

3. The Language-driven brain: Jerison # Leak 128 argues in favour of language being "the engine of brain growth," on the basis that "a substantial amount of brain tissue" is required for production of simple useful speech.

The first objection to this is that reference to standard neuroanatomy textbooks shows three principal areas of cerebral cortex are involved:-

. Broca's area at the lower end of the motor cortex,

about three square cm.

. Heschl's gyri, on the upper surface of each temporal

lobe, again about three square cm.

. Wernicke's area at the back of the lateral sulcus,

impinging on the visual cortex, about the area of

the backs of two fingers.#W&G P128

While other areas are involved in association of language with other activities, the total area for speech alone is a small proportion of total cortical area. Not only that, but Wernicke's area, the largest, is used for reading(sic), which does not seem to have been a major occupation two million years ago!#?Netter.

Another objection to language being an engine for brain growth is that in 99% of right-handed people, and at least 40% of left-handers, speech abilities reside in the left cerebral hemisphere.#W&G? If speech caused a massive increase in brain size, one would expect us by now to have heads like flounders. There is some asymmetry, but marginal at best, mainly because Broca's area is so small.

So,Richard Leakey's sober observation that complex spoken language and large brain are related #L119 only addresses one side of the possible relationship, viz that language may have driven brain size increase. My sexual selection hypothesis explores the other side, viz. that large brains permitted the evolution of the neurological mechanisms which made speech possible. This conclusion, though not its rationale or mechanism, accords with Daniel Dennett of Tafts University, who states,"The innate specialisations for language, hypothesised by the linguist Noam Chomsky and others, and now beginning to be confirmed in details of neuroanatomy, are a very recent and rushed add-on, no doubt an exploitation of earlier sequencing circuitry (Calvin 1989a)"#dennett 190

If you gently pull a human brain apart from the back, your two hands will just barely be able to cover the areas of the occipital cortex dedicated to vision: rather a lot more than the language areas, especially when one considers that the major part of them have 250,000 neurones per square mm, compared to 100,000 per square mm in average cortical areas.#Crick140.

The need for such a large area, so densely packed with highly complicated neurones is not just to represent a picture of what hits our retinas. Nobel Laureate, Sir Francis Crick says,"So the brain cannot get by with just sets of cells that merely show what sort of light intensity is where. It must produce a symbolic description at a higher level, probably at a series of higher levels. As we have seen, this is not a straightforward matter, since it must find the best interpretation of the visual signals given its past experience....and their meaning to us."

"The brain must make those interpretations explicit. An explicit representation of something is what is symbolised there without further extensive processing."

"Thus it is plausible that we need an explicit multi-level, symbolic interpretation of the visual scene in order to "see" it." #Crick 32-33.

It is reasonable to argue that similar symbolic representations must be generated from the other sensory modalities, including hearing.

Language, a unique way of structuring sounds, will be explored shortly; but first a digression to consider what order of figures we are dealing with.

Each (cell) nucleus..."contains a digitally coded data-base larger, in information content, than all 30 volumes of Encyclopaedia Britannica put together."

"The total number of cells in the body (of a human) is about ten trillion." #Dawk p17-18.

"Amazingly, only about 1 per cent of the genetic information in, for example, human cells, seems to be actually used...Nobody knows why the other 99 per cent is there."

#Dawk 116

He indicates that the more advanced the organism, the more'redundant-for-heredity' DNA is present in each cell, and that ..."a different subset of genes is read in different kinds of cells, the others being ignored." #Dawk121

"The human brain (apart from the cerebellum, which does not seem to be involved in cognitive functions) contains about ten billion neurones."

"An average neurone in the human brain has between 1,000 and 10,000 synapses or links with adjacent neurones... If each synapse responds by a single yes-or-no answer to an elementary question...the maximum number of ...bits of information that the brain could contain is about ...1013...or 1014 bits if we had used 104 synapses per neurone"

"The human brain is characterised by some 1013 synapses. Thus the number of different states of a human brain is 2 raised to this power - i.e. multiplied by itself ten trillion times. This...number (is) far greater than the total number of elementary particles in the entire universe."#Sagan p42-43.

Cerebral neurones do not have to move. They don't need to look for food; it's there: and they don't have to avoid danger; they are relatively protected by the calvarium. All they have to do is to process RNA and hence protein, probably from that 'redundant' DNA mentioned above.

This is the sort of structure in which language arose, with all its consequences.

Leakey states,"Equipped with language, humans were able to create new kinds of worlds in nature: the world of introspective consciousness and the world we manufacture and share with others, which we call "culture." Language became our medium and culture our niche. In...Language and Species,...

Derrick Bickerton puts this cogently:"Only language could have broken through the prison of immediate experience in which every other creature is locked, releasing us into infinite freedoms of space and time."#Leak119

Perhaps. Both Leakey and Bickerton have overlooked the value of symbolism mentioned in the quotes from Crick above. Without that cerebral symbolism, all and any language will not impinge one iota upon the organism's idea of itself or its world. Language is a unique and powerful tool for refining symbolism, and sharing experience, but

a. It is still subject to biological laws.

b. Language and cultural tradition themselves opened up new possibilities for self-replicating entities.

These are the "patterns of information that can thrive only in brains or the artificially manufactured products of brains - books, computers, and so on" which Dawkins called memes. These new replicators "...can propagate themselves from brain to brain, from brain to book, from book to brain, from brain to computer, from computer to computer."

"...memic evolution is in its infancy. It is manifested in the phenomena that we call cultural evolution."#Dawk 158

"These new replicators are, roughly, ideas. Not the 'simple ideas' of Locke and Hume (the idea of red, or the idea of round or hot or cold), but the sort of complex ideas that form themselves into distinct memorable units (italics mine)- such as the ideas of wheel, wearing clothes, vendetta, alphabet, calendar, the Odyssey, calculus, evolution by natural selection, Impressionism, Greensleeves,"#Dennett201.

After pointing out the advantage for memory and efficiency granted by grouping of related ideas, and paraphrasing Dawkins' description of meme selection as being subject to similar rules to gene selection, Dennett proposes,

"There is no single, definitive "stream of consciousness," because there is no central Headquarters...there are multiple channels in which specialist circuits try...to do their various things...The seriality of (consciousness) is...the upshot of a succession of coalitions of these specialists.

The basic specialists are part of our animal heritage, often enlisted in new roles, for which their native talents more or less suit them. The result is not bedlam only because the trends that are imposed on all this activity are themselves the product of design. Some of this design is innate, and is shared with other animals...augmented...by microhabits of thought that are developed in the individual, partly idiosyncratic results of self-exploration and partly the predesigned gifts of culture. Thousands of memes, mostly borne by language, but also by wordless "images" and other data structures take up residence in an individual brain, shaping its tendencies and thereby turning it into a mind."#Dennett254.

Although Dennett says he hasn't "come to terms with all the ideas in (Nicholas Humphrey's) A History of the Mind (1992)" #K/M 170, the above quote is close to some of them.

Part of the difference between Dennett's and Humphrey's points of view seems to evolve from their perceptions of the massive parallelism in neurological circuits (made possible by the immense numbers of synapses mentioned earlier.)

Humphrey argues that a stimulus is given "extensive quantity" (in the Kantian sense,) by a set or sets of neurological feedback loops, which resonate with varying rates of decay.#Hum 172,

While quite self-critical and cautious, he essentially asserts "...that consciousness is the activity of being the author of reverberating cerebral sentiments,..." #H 211.

(He limits this assertion by saying it establishes the terms of the identity,but does not claim that it explains the reason. #211

His concluding deduction is "For it is consciousness, with its power to make the vanishing instant of physical time live on as the felt moment of sensation, that makes it like something to be ourselves -..." #H219.

Dennett's "Multiple Drafts Model" of consciousness seems mainly to take large multiples of Humphrey's reverberating loops, to form "something like a narrative stream or sequence ... subject to continual editing by many processes distributed around in the brain, and continuing indefinitely." #Den135.

In fact, Dennett's view seems to reflect totality of brain behaviour, whereas Humphrey is concerned more with the behaviour of that one part of the brain concerned with relating external events to an image of the body.

Two consequences would arise from this:

1. Humphrey's model would be unable to distinguish 'actual' external events, from 'apparently' external events, (although in a 1978 paper, cited by Dennett, he argued that self-consciousness was a stratagem for hypothesising what went on in the minds of others.)#KM p120

2. Humphrey's 'consciousness' would require constant external stimulation of the body for its maintenance. Given that perception of constant stimuli tends to undergo exponential decay, (e.g. we don't feel constantly aware of the presence of comfortable clothing etc.) introspective thought and related activities will not necessarily be conscious.

One of Dennett's "specialist circuits doing their various things" must, in any animal be a set of ideas (or a meme) which relates all events inner or outer, to its body. It is reflected in all mammals by the post-central and pre-central gyri, with some related areas. As this contending specialist, (OK let's call it a complex,) is going to be used with high relative frequency, it will be associated with consciousness so often that it might have a tendency to be identified with it.

If it happens to associated with speech, (and its anatomical substrate is contiguous to Broca's area,) it will be likely to behave as a 'teacher's pet' whenever speech or its corollary, introspective thought, engages the brain, especially the left brain. Such a complex might even be prone to literalisation, generating the strange notion that conscious thought had to pass through a specific part of the brain in order to be conscious - and guess which part!

It is significant that the sensory cortex has specific areas corresponding to all parts of the body except the brain. It can thus represent events going on in any part of the body, but has no intrinsic ability to represent events going on in the rest of the brain. It is simply unaware of them; and a meme, an idea, or a complex devolving from it, will perceive complexes or memes arising from such areas as extrinsic and alien.

As it represents body, it may call the body "I", which could be interesting if it uses the Latin word, ego.

While there is a clear evolutionary advantage in an animal having a large area of cortex devoted to 'Looking after No.1'; and in most mammals the sensori-motor cortex occupies quite a large proportion of the total surface, our sudden brain expansion was not random, but involved principally the association areas of the parietal lobes, and the frontal areas. Hence, to identify too closely with a now relatively smaller proportion of cortex becomes increasingly unrealistic.

It would thus be advantageous to learn a technique for more efficient integration of the bit of us we each call "I" with the rest of us, so we each act from an integrated "Self."

That technique is called "Individuation."

Individuation can be described if not defined as the process whereby we develop towards recognising and becoming complete and integrated individuals able to utilise our full potential. It is a process which continues throughout our lives, "an ineluctable psychological necessity" so we have no choice about whether it happens; our only choice is whether we cooperate with it or not. Four phases are usually recognised:

1. Dissolution of identification with Persona.
2. Recognition and integration of Shadow.
3. Recognition of, and optimising relationship to the syzygy.
4. Relationship of Ego to Self.

The unconscious behaves like an animal, admittedly an unbelievably clever and sophisticated one, but zoological none-the-less. Each time the Ego changes its attitude to it, there is a corresponding alteration in the unconscious which reflects the new relationship. In other words, a constant dynamic equilibrium exists between what we think we are, and how our psyche as a whole, responds. As each of the four phases is attended to (and to make matters worse, they overlap,) new responses come from the unconscious, making new demands on us for new equilibria to be sought.

Jung mentions an additional complication. He propounded two types of thinking (and presumably feeling,) # 6/308/518 which he called Apollinian and Dionysian, # 6/137/225 the full nature of which far exceeds Nietzsche's aesthetic description of them. While these are more or less opposites, the pair of them stand in contrast to what Neitzsche called Socratic thinking. For modern Westerners, the essential conflict seems more between conscious Socratic and unconscious Dionysian forces, with "… Apollo himself as the glorious divine image of the principle of Individuation." # 6/507/876 Unfortunately it is not that simple, for an Apollinian approach is essentially introverted, and "… the process of individuation must lead to more intense and broader collective relationships and not to isolation." # 6/448/758 In fact Neitzsche's Dionysian vision # ibid. 877 of "Nature, hostile or enslaved [reconciled] with her prodigal son - Man" closely parallels Dorn's concept of unus mundus as "a synthesis of the conscious with the unconscious." # 14/539/770 However that synthesis becomes more difficult to aspire to when consciousness speaks like a Socrates, and the unconscious replies visuo-spatially and sensuously as Dionysos. Apollo is an admirable image of the sunlight of consciousness, but that is only one component. The reflective lunar nature of Artemis complements this. She is not simply darkness: she is, much more than John's logos, truly "… the light that shines in the darkness …" John 1:5

Yet there is another feminine element missing. Dionysos and Apollo represent the downward and upward expansions of the ego as it explores the individuation process, instinct in its raw and transformed cultural forms; and to assimilate both requires a link between them. Here lies anima as a bridge, not just from ego to unconsciousness, but from instinct to culture. She partakes of both, so she joins both. This phenomenon has been noted since the earliest written records in the third millennium BCE in Sumer. The poem "Inanna and the God of Wisdom" describes how the me (the 85 attributes of civilisation) were taken by this quintessential anima symbol, from Enki, the wise and wily God of the Waters. But Inanna had some ideas of Her own. When She returned to Her city, Uruk, there were more me than Enki had provided. Perhaps it is no surprise that several of these were feminine attributes, but the most significant one was

"She brought the perfect execution of the me." # 26

Throughout history, the powers of the gods have been made available to humans, but only when they are mediated by this anima characteristic have they been beneficial. Nietzsche seemed to lack any anima figure to act as a 'step-down transformer' from the archetypal world to consciousness, and by his illness showed the inevitable consequences of it. Identification with Apollo led to his 'superman' motif, and inevitably to his psychological decline.

It cannot be that Apollinian consciousness underpins the Individuation process. The unconscious gave rise to consciousness, so a symbol including both must exist, and it does in Enki (lit. God of Earth, but also God of the Waters) whom the Egyptians called Thoth, the Greeks called Hermes, in Latin Mercurius. This protean giver of, and potential thief of civilisation and culture has not only stood behind and inspired every personal attempt at Individuation, but for five thousand years has exercised a fascination that found its expression in alchemy (i.e. Hermetic philosophy,) literature, religion, and science of all kinds, most particularly in that grandchild of alchemy which we call quantum physics. This epithet is deliberate: Cohen and Stewart describe quantum mechanics as the precursor of chemistry and cosmology # 17, and link it to relativity via light # 49. Moreover it shares with Mercurius one fundamental characteristic. He epitomises paradox and we now know matter to be able to be studied as particles and/or waves. So alchemical philosophy did not die with Newton, (nor even Robert Boyle who "was deeply immersed in alchemy and other Hermetic studies …He conducted his research in secret …In public, and in his dealings with the Royal Society, he championed Bacon, endorsed empirical rationalism …and proclaimed his hostility to 'hermetick doctrine' …" # Baigent/Leee 234

Hermetism may have gone into the shadows for a couple of hundred years, but nothing as shrewd as Enki could possibly remain imprisoned for long, and 200 years is only 4% of 5,000. The physical scientists may take pride in their 'suppression' of Hermetism after Descartes, but the notion of unity in diversity was a major influence in the life sciences with the work of Darwin and Linnaeus, and even more so with biochemistry. Not only did Hermetic thought give rise to chemistry: with the work of Herbert Silberer and Later Jung, it has founded the whole science and art of depth psychology.

And should anyone doubt the power of an archetype to manifest itself in the outer world, consider this: Enki, by his gift of the me to Inanna, set civilisation in a direction whereby now, any person anywhere, can use a computer to access any knowledge on any topic from anywhere in the world, via a system which defies governmental rules, cannot be owned by any individual, and cannot be destroyed - the Internet. Not bad for a God who represents the wisdom of the collective unconscious - a God of communication, for all humanity.

The evolutionary process applied to thought has been described as entities being seen first as projected deities, but as they become more conscious, they become phenomena. This is the cosmic equivalent of the 'first half of life.' Resacralisation is characteristic of the second half of life. Russell's description of mathematics, "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture" # was made when he was 46, in transit from the first to the second half of his life.

By its nature, what Jung called anima (and we will soon call it something else) is always at least partly unconscious. To that degree, and for the purpose of seeing it for what it really is, with its own inevitable numinosity, a goddess symbol is still intrinsic to its nature. And by that, we should not be satisfied with the politicised goddesses of the Greeks, (for they had thus already been contaminated with input from ego;) but of something much more elemental, a goddess at the very core of our imaginations.

"Thus Layard logically derives the anima from the numen of the goddess. In the shape of the goddess the anima is manifestly projected, but in her proper (psychological) shape, she is introjected; she is, as Layard says, the "anima within."" # 16/229/438 cf. 5/¶464ff

Jung's delineation of anima was revolutionary for his time. But it led to extraordinary claims about the syzygy. Hillman (1974) propounded the idea that ego is an animus construct. In both sexes? He doesn't say. May we not do what Jung suggested, and build on what he discovered? Is anima all there is? It seems an almost unconscious phenomenon has been desacralised before we have done our homework. This thesis aims at

1. Deliberately going back to the earliest accounts of this phenomenon in projected form to examine its features before it became contaminated; while it was still beyond that.
2. Examining the apparatus by which we encounter, perceive and experience what Jung called anima for both sexes.
3. Deriving therefrom, a more accurate description of what we are discussing.

Jacquetta Hawkes, the great archaeologist (also known as Mrs. J.B. Priestley) cites Henri Frankfort, who proposed that each civilisation has a unique vital identity which he called 'form', "...a certain cultural 'style' which shapes its political and judicial institutions, its art as well as its literature, its religion as well as its morals." He sees the emergence of this 'form' not as a slow evolution but the "outcome of a sudden and intense change producing a rapid maturity". This Athena-like birth is followed by a long period of internal development, more or less affected by outside influences.¹

This idea of sudden bursts of cultural advance, followed by a period of coming to terms with it, is observable in our own lifetimes by looking at the impact of flying, television and computers; but it has been going on throughout human evolution.

But to understand our own cultural and psychological perspectives, we must look at a more ancient and dramatic 'big bang'. "If the Attis-Cybelle myth is any guide, humankind suffered a psychotic episode at the end of the Neolithic, and out of this psychosis solar rational thinking gradually emerged and totally suppressed the other kind of thinking and other relationship to the numinosum. Furthermore, we are still reeling from this psychotic episode. The dark, devouring face of the Great Goddess, Cybelle's madness, still haunts us, as it did the Latin poet Catullus in the first century BC" ²

In the next chapter, we will look critically at whether this was Cybele's madness or the appearance of a fresh new Goddess equal in power to Cybele, but representing a new discrimination in the human mind.

For the moment we note that Schwartz-Salant does not specify precisely what this psychotic episode entailed, but Joseph Campbell does. "... at circa 3,500 BC, the south Mesopotamian temple areas can be seen to have increased notably in size and importance; and then, with stunning abruptness, at a crucial date that can be almost precisely fixed at 3,200 BC ... there appears in this little Sumerian mud garden - as though the flowers of its tiny cities were suddenly bursting into bloom - the whole cultural syndrome that has since constituted the germinal unit of all the high civilizations of the world. ... the highly conscious creation ... of the mind and science of a new order of humanity, which had never before appeared in the history of mankind; namely the professional, full-time, initiated, strictly regimented temple priest." Campbell then argues that this had to do with discovery of the established courses of the visible planets, together with the notion that they were governed by the same laws that governed life and thought of humanity. "It was at this moment in human destiny that the art of writing first appeared in the world and that scriptorially documented history therefore begins. Also, the wheel appeared. And we have evidence of the development of the two numerical systems still normally employed throughout the civilised world, the decimal and the sexigesimal; the former was used mostly for business accounts ... and the latter for ritualistic measuring of space and time as well. Three hundred and sixty degrees, then as now, represented the circumference of a circle - the cycle of the horizon - while three hundred and sixty days, plus five, marked the measurement of the circle of the year, the cycle of time. The five intercalated days.... Were taken to represent a sacred opening through which spiritual energy flowed into the round of the temporal universe [so] they were designated, consequently, days of holy feast and festival.