# The Origins and History of Consciousness  ## Metadata - Author: [[Erich Neumann, C. G. Jung, and R. F.C. Hull]] - Full Title: The Origins and History of Consciousness - Category: #books ## Highlights - The structural elements of the collective unconscious are named by Jung “archetypes” or “primordial images.” They are the pictorial forms of the instincts, for the unconscious reveals itself to the conscious mind in images which, as in dreams and fantasies, initiate the process of conscious reaction and assimilation. ([Location 199](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=199)) - It is the task of this book to show that a series of archetypes is a main constituent of mythology, that they stand in an organic relation to one another, and that their stadial 3 succession determines the growth of consciousness. ([Location 209](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=209)) - Note: Thesis of the book - Creative evolution of ego consciousness means that, through a continuous process stretching over thousands of years, the conscious system has absorbed more and more unconscious contents and progressively extended its frontiers. ([Location 249](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=249)) - In stationary cultures, or in primitive societies where the original features of human culture are still preserved, the earliest stages of man’s psychology predominate to such a degree that individual and creative traits are not assimilated by the collective. Indeed, creative individuals possessed of a stronger consciousness are even branded by the collective as antisocial. ([Location 259](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=259)) - The creativity of consciousness may be jeopardized by religious or political totalitarianism, for any authoritarian fixation of the canon leads to sterility of consciousness. ([Location 263](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=263)) - The individualized conscious man of our era is a late man, whose structure is built on early, pre-individual human stages from which individual consciousness has only detached itself step by step. ([Location 276](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=276)) - The psyche blends, as does the dream; it spins and weaves together, combining each with each. ([Location 421](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=421)) - Circle, sphere, and round are all aspects of the Self-contained, which is without beginning and end; in its preworldly 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. ([Location 428](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=428)) - Anything big and embracing which contains, surrounds, enwraps, shelters, preserves, and nourishes anything small belongs to the primordial matriarchal realm. ([Location 529](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=529)) - 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. ([Location 564](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=564)) - Detachment from the uroboros, entry into the world, and the encounter with the universal principle of opposites are the essential tasks of human and individual development. ([Location 892](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=892)) - only when the ego experiences itself as something distinct and different from the unconscious is the embryonic stage overcome, and only then can a conscious system be formed that stands entirely on its own. ([Location 1132](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=1132)) - From the son, we infer the father; the existence and nature of masculine power are evidenced only by the son. ([Location 1157](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=1157)) - the woman first exists as a mother, and the man first exists as a son. ([Location 1160](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=1160)) - The relation of son-lover to Great Mother is an archetypal situation which is operative even today, and the overcoming of it is the precondition for any further development of ego consciousness. ([Location 1210](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=1210)) - Not only man’s theology, religion, and ritual, but the legal and economic orders that later grew out of them, the formation of the state and the whole pattern of secular life, down to the notion of property and its symbolism, are derived from this act of discrimination and the setting of boundaries made possible by the coming of light. ([Location 2315](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=2315)) - The immortal soul of the divine king Osiris becomes the immortal soul of each and every Egyptian, even as Christ the Saviour becomes the Christ-soul of every Christian, the self within us. In the same way, the function of the chief, which is to will and to decide, becomes the model for all subsequent acts of free will in the ego of the individual; and the law-making function, originally attributed to God and later to the mana personality, has in modern man become his inner court of conscience. ([Location 2625](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=2625)) - The male collective is the source of all the taboos, laws, and institutions that are destined to break the dominance of the uroboros and Great Mother. Heaven, the father, and the spirit go hand in hand with masculinity and represent the victory of the patriarchate over the matriarchate. This is not to say that the matriarchate knows no law; but the law by which it is informed is the law of instinct, of unconscious, natural functioning, and this law subserves the propagation, preservation, and evolution of the species rather than the development of the single individual. ([Location 2926](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=2926)) - “god in the background”–a very early figure in the history of religion—that he is regarded not as a forefather, but more as the father who is the “author of all things.” He is a spiritual figure not primarily connected with nature; he belongs to the primordial age, to the dawn of history, and steps out of it to bring culture and salvation to mankind. ([Location 2938](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=2938)) - The dragon fight has three main components: the hero, the dragon, and the treasure. By vanquishing the dragon the hero gains the treasure, which is the end product of the process symbolized by the fight. ([Location 3032](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=3032)) - The hero’s fight is always concerned with the threat to the spiritual, masculine principle from the uroboric dragon, and with the danger of being swallowed by the maternal unconscious. ([Location 3160](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=3160)) - The hero is always a light-bringer and emissary of the light. ([Location 3166](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=3166)) - At this same lowest point of the year Christ is born as the shining Redeemer, as the light of the year and light of the world, and is worshiped with the Christmas tree at the winter solstice. ([Location 3167](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=3167)) - There is one phenomenon which is of great importance in psychological interpretation, and this phenomenon we would call the typological dual focus of myth and symbol. ([Location 3710](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=3710)) - Note: What does this mean? - the myth must be interpreted on the objective level for the extravert and on the subjective level for the introvert,3 but both interpretations are necessary and meaningful. ([Location 3713](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=3713)) - The background events in the soul are projected outwards and are experienced through the object, as a synthetic unity compounded of external reality and the psychic activation of this reality. ([Location 3726](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=3726)) - The freed captive is not merely a symbol of man’s erotic relations in the narrow sense. The task of the hero is to free, through her, the living relation to the “you,” to the world at large. ([Location 3819](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=3819)) - An effect that proceeds from an alteration in the subject is objective and real. ([Location 3936](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=3936)) - The self-generating power of the soul is man’s true and final secret, by virtue of which he is made in the likeness of God the creator and distinguished from all other living things. ([Location 3957](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=3957)) - Man’s magico-religious behavior, which anthropocentrically includes his own actions as an essential part of the natural process, is the fountainhead of all culture. It is not true to say that he “reproduces” nature; rather, by means of an analogous set of symbols, he produces in his own soul the same creative process which he finds outside himself in nature. ([Location 3969](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=3969)) - Every culture-hero has achieved a synthesis between consciousness and the creative unconscious. ([Location 3978](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=3978)) - The inner object of the ritual is not the natural process, but the control of nature through the corresponding creative element in man. ([Location 3984](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=3984)) - His father a god and his mother the bride of a god, a personal father who hates him, then the killing of the transpersonal First Parents, and finally the liberation of the captive—these are the stages that mark the progress of the hero. But this path can only be trodden to its triumphal conclusion with the help of the divine father, whose agent here is Hermes, and with the help of Athene, whose spiritual character and hostility to the Great Mother we have already emphasized. ([Location 4053](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=4053)) - Dismemberment, whose symbols are the “knife of Set,” the Apopis serpent and the whole demonic horde of scorpions, snakes, monsters, and gorillas, is the danger that threatens the dead.13 It is the danger of psychophysical decay and extinction. The most vital parts of the Egyptian religion, and the whole of the Book of the Dead, are devoted to averting this danger. ([Location 4252](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=4252)) - Note: The enemy in the Egyptian view was death, decay and extinction - The fundamental trend of centroversion–the conquest of death through everlastingness—finds its mythological and religious symbol in Osiris. Mummification, the preservation for all eternity of the body’s shape, as the outward and visible sign of its unity—this gives living expression to the anti-Set principle of Osiris. ([Location 4262](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=4262)) - Trees, and particularly very big trees like the cedars of Lebanon, offer a powerful contrast to the fleeting life of vegetation, which in a treeless land like Egypt comes and goes with the season. They are the things that endure, so it is understandable that in early times the tree became the symbol of the djed, signifying duration: for the tree is a fully grown thing that nevertheless endures. To the primitive Egyptian, wood symbolized organic, living duration as opposed to the inorganic, dead duration of stone and the ephemeral life of vegetation.18 In the Canaanite sphere of culture centering upon Byblos, the tree trunk was sacred to the Great Mother, “Queen Astarte,” in the form of a post with hewn-off lateral branches;19 at all events it comes under the broad category of sacred trees and posts. ([Location 4288](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=4288)) - This reuniting of the head with the body, for the purpose of producing a whole figure and nullifying the dismemberment, is one of the main features of the Osiris cult. ([Location 4328](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=4328)) - Every king was once Horus and becomes Osiris (illus. 30); every Osiris was once Horus. Horus and Osiris are one. ([Location 4578](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=4578)) - The world as the outside world of extrahuman events, the community as the sphere of interhuman relationships, the psyche as the world of interior human experience—these are the three basic factors which govern human life, and man’s creative encounter with each of them is decisive for the development of the individual. ([Location 4933](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=4933)) - History teaches that in the beginning the individual did not exist as an independent entity, but that the group dominated and did not allow the emancipation of a separate ego. ([Location 4960](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=4960)) - So long as an apperceptive ego consciousness is lacking, there can be no history; for history requires a “reflecting” consciousness, which by reflecting constitutes it. ([Location 5164](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=5164)) - Logical contraries united in participation mystique—that is the law of this magical world where everything is full of holy workings. ([Location 5171](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=5171)) - instincts command a knowledge of reality infinitely superior to our conscious knowledge even today. ([Location 5222](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=5222)) - only when hunger is centrally represented and is perceived by an ego center do we get the beginning of consciousness, not when instinct merely sets the body-whole in motion by reflex action. ([Location 5349](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=5349)) - We contend, therefore, that the physical process of oxidation, fire, is experienced with the aid of images which derive from the interior world of the psyche and are projected upon the external world, rather than that experiences of the external world are superimposed on the inner. ([Location 5373](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=5373)) - The subjective reaction to the object always takes precedence historically, while the objective qualities of the object remain in the background. ([Location 5375](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=5375)) - Centroversion is already at work as the primary function of the psyche, causing unconscious contents to present themselves to consciousness in the form of images. ([Location 5378](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=5378)) - in mythological cosmogony the origin of consciousness and the coming of light are one and the same. ([Location 5387](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=5387)) - Originally it was impossible for the ego to distinguish the source of these images, for at the stage of participation mystique an outside could not be perceived as distinct from an inside; the two sets of images overlapped, so that experience of the world coincided with inner experience. ([Location 5391](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=5391)) - So long as the system of ego consciousness is functioning soundly, it remains an organ affiliated to the whole, combining in itself the executive and the directive functions. ([Location 5409](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=5409)) - All unconscious contents have, as complexes, a specific tendency, a striving to assert themselves. ([Location 5422](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=5422)) - The devouring side of the uroboros is experienced as the tendency of the unconscious to destroy consciousness. ([Location 5443](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=5443)) - Herein lies the real revolutionary quality of the hero. He alone, by overcoming the old phase, succeeds in casting out fear and changing it into joy. ([Location 5639](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=5639)) - all knowledge rests on an aggressive act of incorporation. ([Location 5793](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=5793)) - The more anthropomorphic the world of gods becomes, the closer it is to the ego and the more it loses its overwhelming character. ([Location 5911](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=5911)) - Originally, consciousness did not possess enough free libido to perform any activity–plowing, harvesting, hunting, waging war, etc.—of its own “free will,” and was obliged to invoke the help of the god who “understood” these things. ([Location 5919](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=5919)) - The kind of experience we shall have is prescribed by the archetypes, but what we experience is always individual. ([Location 6284](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=6284)) - During this process ego consciousness proves its difference from all other partial psychic systems—of which it is one—by throwing off that fanatical obsession with itself which is symptomatic of every system’s primary will to self-preservation. ([Location 6425](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=6425)) - sacred animals came “before” stockbreeding, just as in general the sacred meaning of a thing is older than its profane meaning. Its objective significance is only perceived afterwards, behind its symbolic significance. ([Location 6589](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=6589)) - Man can apprehend and know his own being only insofar as he can make it visible in the image of his gods. ([Location 6620](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=6620)) - He who speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is trying to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring. ([Location 6627](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=6627)) - Everywhere contact with the archetypes modifies the purely personal world. ([Location 6704](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=6704)) - The hero’s mythological accession to power is only transpersonally true. He and his world of values may conquer and come to power, but often enough he never lives to experience this power personally. ([Location 6717](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=6717)) - The artist seizes this image, and in the work of raising it from deepest unconsciousness and bringing it nearer to consciousness, he transforms its shape, until it can be accepted by his contemporaries according to their capacities. ([Location 6737](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=6737)) - 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. ([Location 6757](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=6757)) - 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. ([Location 6769](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=6769)) - 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. ([Location 6770](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=6770)) - 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. ([Location 6771](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=6771)) - Whereas the average individual has no soul of his own, because the group and its canon of values tell him what he may or may not be psychically, the hero is one who can call his soul his own because he has fought for it and won it. ([Location 6773](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=6773)) - The prophetic intensity depends upon the intensity of consciousness, and Moses is rated the greatest prophet because he beheld God by day and face to face. In other words, the profound insight of the activated transpersonal layer, and the sharp vision of a highly developed consciousness, have to be brought into relationship, and not one developed at the expense of the other. ([Location 6793](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=6793)) - 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. Only the hero can stand his ground against these collective forces, because he is the exemplar of individuality and possesses the light of consciousness. ([Location 6796](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=6796)) - The paradox that the breaker of the old canon is incorporated in the canon itself is typical of the creative character of Western consciousness whose special position we have repeatedly stressed. ([Location 6799](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=6799)) - The individual is educated up to them, but woe to any who dares to flout the cultural values, for he will instantly be outlawed by the collective as the breaker of the old tablets. ([Location 6802](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=6802)) - Too much stability can cramp the ego, a too independent ego consciousness can become insulated from the unconscious, and self-esteem and self-responsibility can degenerate into presumption and megalomania. ([Location 6852](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0851T4V6B&location=6852))