The Origins and History of Consciousness

“The picture we have drawn of our age is not intended as an indictment, mush less as a glorification of the ‘good old days’; for the phenomena we see around us are symptoms of an upheaval which, taken by and large, is necessary.  The collapse of the old civilization, and its reconstruction on a lower level to begin with, will justify themselves because the new basis will have been immensely broadened.  The civilization that is about to be born will be a human civilization in a far higher sense than any has ever been before, as it will have overcome important social, national, and racial limitations.  These are not fantastic pipe dreams, but hard facts, and their birth pangs will bring infinite suffering upon infinite numbers of men.  Spiritually, politically, and economically our world is an indivisible whole.  By this standard, the Napoleonic wars were minor coups d’état and the world view of that age, in which anything outside Europe had hardly begun to appear, is almost inconceivable to us in its narrowness.

“The collapse of the archetypal canon in our culture, which has produced such an extraordinary activation of the collective unconscious – or is perhaps its symptom, manifesting itself in mass movements that have a profound effect upon our personal destinies – is, however, only a passing phenomenon.  Already, at a time when the internecine wars of the old canon are still being waged, we can discern, in single individuals, where the synthetic possibilities of the future lie, and almost how it will look.  The turning of the mind from the conscious to the unconscious, the responsible rapprochement of human consciousness with the powers of the collective psyche, that is the task of the future.  No outward tinkerings with the world and no social ameliorations can give the quietus to the daemon, to the gods and devils of the human soul, or prevent them from tearing down again and again what consciousness has built.  Unless they are assigned their place in consciousness and culture they will never leave mankind in peace.  But the preparation for this rapprochement lies, as always, with the hero, the individual; he and his transformation are the great human prototypes; he is the testing ground of the collective, just as consciousness is the testing ground of the unconscious.

The Origins and History of Consciousness

“Despite the tendency to conservatism innate in every canon, the Western canon also has in it a revolutionary ingredient deriving from its acceptance of the hero archetype.  It goes without saying that this hero figure is not the central point of the canon, nor is its revolutionary influence very easy to recognize; but when one sees in how short a space of time the most revolutionary figures of ecclesiastical history became assimilated and produced a new variation of the canon, one realizes the full significance of the acceptance into it of the hero archetype.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness

“Thus the hero, like the ego, stands between two worlds: the inner world that threatens to overwhelm him, and the outer world that wants to liquidate him for breaking the old laws.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness

“The hero, as the vehicle of this effort at compensation, becomes alienated from the normal human situation and from the collective.  This decollectivization entails suffering, and he suffers at the same time because, in his struggle for freedom, he is also the victim and representative of the obsolete, old order and is forced to bear the burden of it in his own soul.

“…Jung puts it that the danger to which the hero is exposed ‘isolation in himself.’  The suffering entailed by the very fact of being an ego and an individual is implicit in the hero’s situation of having to distinguish himself psychologically from his fellows.  He sees things they do not see, does not fall for the things they fall for – but that means that he is a different type of human being and therefore necessarily alone.  The loneliness of Prometheus on the rock or of Christ on the cross is the sacrifice they have to endure for having brought fire and redemption to mankind.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness

“The hero is not creative in the sense that he decorates embellishes the existing canon, although his creativeness may also manifest itself in shaping and transforming the archetypal contents of his age.  The true hero is one who brings the new and shatters the fabric of old values, namely the father-dragon which, backed by the whole weight of tradition and the power of the collective, ever strives to obstruct the birth of the new.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness

“The important thing is that the archetypal canon is always created and brought to birth by ‘eccentric’ individuals.  These are the founders of religions, sects, philosophies, political sciences, ideologies, and spiritual movements, in the security of which the collective man lives without needing to come into contact with the primordial fire of direct revelation, or to experience the throes of creation.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness

“By freeing the captive and raising the treasure, a man gains possession of his soul’s treasures, which are not just ‘wishes,’ i.e., images of something he has not got but would like to have, but possibilities, i.e., images of something he could have and ought to have.  The task of the hero, which is to ‘awaken those sleeping images that can and must come forth from the night, in order to give the world a better face,’ is far indeed from ‘masturbation.’  And yet it is a preoccupation with oneself, a case of letting the libido stream inward, without a partner – a kind of masturbatory self-fertilization in the uroboric manner, which alone makes possible the creative process of psychic palingenesis or self-birth.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness

“In this [the hero's] conflict the ‘inner voice,’ the command of the transpersonal father or father archetype who wants the world to change, collides with the personal father who speaks for the old law.  We know this conflict best from the Bible story of Jehovah’s command to Abraham: ‘Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee’ (Genesis 12:1), which the midrash interprets as meaning that Abraham is to destroy the gods of his father.  The message of Jesus is only an extension of the same conflict and it repeats itself in every revolution.  Whether the new picture of God and the world conflicts with an old picture, or with the personal father, is unimportant, for the father always represents the old order and hence also the old picture current in his cultural canon.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness

“Wundt characterizes the heroic age as the ‘predominance of individual personality.’  This, he says, is what the hero represents; in fact he derives the divine figure from the hero, seeing in God only an intensified hero figure.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness

“It must be emphasized yet again that the mythological fate of the hero portrays the archetypal fate of the ego and of all conscious development.  It serves as a model for the subsequent development of the collective, and its stages are recapitulated in the development of every child.”