Note: my notes on pages 1 - 39 were wiped

Summary

Part 1: The Mythological Stages in the Evolution of Consciousness

A: The Creation Myth (Nature rejoices in nature)

  • “The woman first exists as a mother, and the man first exists as a son.” p. 48
  • “hairlessness is always associated with sexual abstinence and celibacy” p. 59
  • “Only in the light of consciousness can man know. And this act of cognition, of conscious discrimination, sunders the world into opposites, for experience of the world is only possible through opposites.” p. 104
  • discussion on children and how society/culture shapes their sex/gender - pg 112
  • “It is the mark of man to be pitted against the world, it is his sorrow and his specialty; for what at first seems loss turns out a positive gain.” p. 116
  • “The original unity of the world and God is supposed to have been cleft asunder by some prehuman guilt, and the world born of this rupture must accordingly suffer punishment.” p. 118
  • “in Gnosticism, the way of salvation lies in heightening consciousness and returning to the transcendent spirit, with loss of the unconscious side;…” p. 119
  • “Man is not only the end purpose of creation, nor is his dominion limited to this world alone, but on him depends the perfection of the higher worlds and of God himself.” p. 119
  • “Fear of the vengeance of the powers that be for the separation of the World Parents and for man’s criminal emancipation from the power of the divine Uroboros, this is the feeling of dread and guilt, this the original sin, which which the history of mankind opens.” p. 124
  • “Man experiences the ‘masculine’ structure of his conscious as peculiarly his own, and the ‘feminine’ unconscious as something alien to him, whereas woman feels at home in her unconscious and out of her element in consciousness.” p. 125
  • The great and differentiated individuals are the representatives of the group’s consciousness. They are the ones that the other individuals mimic, which eventually gets turned into ‘common knowledge’ or the ‘collective conscious’ - paraphrased from pg 127
    • ex: Christ as the soul of every Christian, the soul of Osiris becomes the soul of every Egyptian, the marriage between King and Queen becomes the model for all marriages, etc
  • The masculinization of consciousness occurs through the ‘Hero Myth’. This myth is the story of self-emancipation of the ego, struggling to free itself from the power of the unconscious and to hold its own against overwhelming odds. - paraphrased from pg 127

B: The Hero Myth (Nature subdues nature)

I: The Birth of the Hero

  • The Hero myth is the personal development of every individual - pg 131
  • The hero is born of a virgin mother, the Great Mother. There is an aspect of divinity typically involved. The hero’s father is not a man, rather it comes from the miracle of God, i.e. a suprapersonal progenitor/power
    • What does this sound like? Jesus!
    • There are countless stories and myths of the ‘hero’ being born of a mortal mother and an immortal or god-like father. These are in Greek and Roman mythology.
      • Ex: Theseus’s mother was impregnated by Poseidon and King Aegeus. Dioscuri’s mother conceived in the embrace of Zeus.
  • Side note:
    • The Oedipus complex is a psychoanalytic theory proposing that children have possessive sexual desires for their opposite-sex parent while viewing their same-sex parent as a rival
  • interesting discussion on the position of male in ancient society, pg 139-140
    • essentially male’s leave their own tribe to live with their wife’s tribe as a ‘tolerated stranger’. “(males) are at the outset in constant danger of succumbing to feminine influence…” p. 140
  • “The man’s world, representing ‘heaven’, stands for law and tradition… It is no accident that all human culture, and not Western civilization alone, is masculine in character, from Greece and the Judaeo-Christian sphere of culture to Islam and India. Although woman’s share in this culture is invisible and largely unconscious, we should not underestimate its significance and scope.” p. 143
  • “man discovers his true self in consciousness, and is a stranger to himself in the unconscious, which he must inevitably experience as feminine, the development of masculine culture means development of consciousness.” p. 143-144

II: The Slaying of the Mother

  • There’s a lot of discussion on the loss of hair, it being the same as castration, etc. p. 159
    • A lot of religions have an opinion on hair. This is quite interesting
  • “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.” p. 160
  • the mother, rather the Great Mother, does not allow her son to become the hero, i.e. to progress and move away from her and build his own consciousness - paraphrased pg 166-168

III: The Slaying of the Father

  • Just like the Great Mother who has 2 sides, an evil side, and a benevolent side, the Father also has these 2 sides, a creative side, and a destructive side. Both of these sides are present in modern man. - pg 170-171
  • ‘The mother image is less conditioned by the temporal and cultural pattern… (the father image) is conditioned less by his individual person than by the character of the culture and the changing cultural values which he represents.’ p. 171 - 172
    • So the feminine is conditioned more by her individuality, she’s more independent, etc. The masculine is a reflection of his culture and cultural values.
  • “(the fathers) hand down the highest values of civilization, whereas the mothers control the highest, i.e., deepest, values of life and nature. The world of the fathers is thus the world of collective values…” p. 173
  • The Terrible Father is similar to the Terrible/Evil mother in the sense that they both will ‘castrate’ their son and prevent him from becoming a hero - p. 186
  • Man can be ‘castrated’ in 2 ways: captivity and possession. In captivity, the ego remains totally dependent upon the father as a reference point of collective norms, and it loses its connection with the creative powers. The ego remains bound by traditional morality. It loses the higher half of its dual nature p. 187
    • This sounds like following organized religion
  • Heavenly Father = the spirit
  • Earth Mother = the unconscious
  • the 3 elements of the hero myth: the Hero, the Dragon, and the Treasure. The Dragon was the slaying of Mother and Father. The Treasure, in its apparent or obvious form is the maiden, the gold chest, whatever is beloved, etc, but the real treasure is the transformation of the Hero. This leads us to the Transformation Myth

C: The Transformation Myth (Nature rules over nature)

I: The Captive and the Treasure

  • The treasure is the virgin, the captive, or the ‘treasure hard to attain’. It being purely ‘gold’ is a later development and a degenerate form of the original motif. But we must remember that in the earliest mythologies, gold and precious stones “were symbolic carriers of immaterial values.”… other treasures were the water of life, the healing herb, the elixir of immortality, the philosophers stone, etc - p. 195
    • essentially the treasure is exactly “hard to attain”, it’s the thing one desires the most, the hardest to get. It is a treasure that is worth killing the dragon over, i.e. slaying the Great Mother and Father
  • The treasure is the maiden, the wife to the Hero. It is where the Hero or the masculine combines with a feminine partner of his own age and kind, essentially breaking off from the Great Mother. Now, and only now is the Hero mature enough to reproduce himself. This is where the patriarchal age begins. - p. 198-199
  • ‘Only by killing the First Parents can a way be found out of the conflict into personal life.’ p. 205
    • this means establishing your independence by leaving your parents

II: Transformation, Or Osiris

  • Pig were ‘sacred and unclean’ in ancient Egypt - p. 224
  • ‘In some of the classical mystery religions there is evidence of initiation rites who purpose it was to produce the higher masculinity, to transform the initiate into the higher man and so make him akin to, or identical with, God. p. 253
    • Reminds me of the concept of wahdat al wujud or union with God

Part 2: The Psychological Stages in the Development of Personality

  • the purpose of part 2 is to evaluate, in light of analytical psychology, the processes whose mythological projection was described in the first part, as well as to show the significance of myth for modern Western man and to show how it has assisted the growth of his personality

A: The Original Unity (corresponds to the Mythological Stages of “Uroboros and Great Mother”)

  • “Just as unconscious contents like dreams and fantasies tell us something about the psychic situation of the dreamer, so myths throw light on the human stage from which they originate and typify man’s unconscious situation at that stage.” p. 263
  • “the further back we go in human history, the rarer individuality becomes and the more undeveloped it is.” p. 269
  • to advance and evolve past the Great/Terrible Mother, you must conquer fear and turn it into joy - p. 312

B: The Separation of the Systems (corresponds to the Mythological Stages of “Separation of the World Parents and Dragon Fight”)

C: The Balance and Crisis of Consciousness

  • “Myth, art, religion, and language are all symbolic expressions of the creative spirit in man; in them this spirit takes on objective, perceptible form, becoming conscious of itself through man’s consciousness of it.” p. 369
  • “The true hero is one who brings the new and shatters the fabric of old values…” p. 377
  • “the stability of the cultural canon guaranteed the individual a set of ordered values…” p. 392

D: Centroversion and the Stages of Life

  • “Pilgrim, pilgrimage, and way are but myself toward myself.” p. 395
  • “An important goal of childhood development and education is the utilization of the individual in the sense of making him a useful member of the community.” p. 399

Appendix

  • in Ancient Egyptian text/belief, the king was already in existence before the creation of the world. This is similar to the doctrines of ‘the messiah’ found in other belief systems p. 428