Dreaming the Earth

[Dover]

Dreaming the Earth
from Symbolic Landscapes

by Paul Devereux

Chapter 2
DREAMING THE EARTH


It seems difficult to arrive at a clear understanding of the nature of myth, for it is a particularly mercurial aspect of humanity. Scholars still fail to agree on a precise definition.

It was because C.G. Jung saw basic mythological motifs (mythologems) occurring in the dreams of his modern patients that he came to the conclusion that there had to be such a thing as a Collective Unconscious. He postulated the existence of transpersonal processes he called archetypes deep in the Collective Unconscious that can produce related thematic imagery in any society or person of any period. These images can vary dramatically according to the cultural context they occur in, but their underlying function remains true to the archetype that originated them. Because it exists in the unconscious realms of mind, the archetype itself can never be directly known or understood but merely interpreted by the imagery it occasions in a dream or vision – or in a myth. Jung warned that modern society in cutting itself off from such mythological roots ran the risk of neurosis and 'psychic epidemics', as it had a literally rootless consciousness. According to Jung, this modern condition has come about because of the pronounced development of differentiated, conscious mentality in civilised peoples, which leads to a one-sidedness and a deviation from the roots of our being. Archetypal material does not come from our rationally-conscious minds.

The recurrence of certain mythological themes at widely separated times and places around the world gives great credence to some kind of Collective Unconscious. The mythologem of the ladder to heaven, for instance, occurred virtually everywhere. There is of course the Biblical story of Jacob's visionary dream of angels on a ladder leading to heaven, but versions of the theme, which I suggest derives from shamanic trance experience, as we shall see below, can also be found in the myths of Arctic Europe, Siberia, Tibet, the Americas and Oceania. Depictions of figures in a shamanic context teetering atop ladders is even found in the rock art of southern Africa. French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss has studied the myths of related tribes in Brazil and Paraguay as recorded by missionaries over hundreds of years, and found that though particular personages and events in them changed over time, the fundamental structure of a story remained constant.

Clearly, there seems to be something in the human mind, or at least in the common neurological structure and functioning of the human central nervous system, that is outside the timescale of individual persons or societies.

Since Jung's time, it has been suggested that archetypal images can provoke automatic responses analogous to the way that certain sensory cues can cause an animal to react in a predetermined manner. (For example, a newly-hatched chick will cower if shown the shape of a hawk, yet will not react to other bird forms.) 'Each society gives its own particular form to such "archetypal images" or stimuli,' says Sheila Savill, 'for myths and legends are expressions of communal feelings and intuitions.' Joseph Campbell warned that even though our culture no longer lives by myths, they are active and dynamic parts of the psyche, however we might ignore or forget them. Myths derive their source from 'an immemorial imagination', and can be driving us in ways our conscious, civilised minds do not perceive.

Alan Watts defined myth as 'a complex of stories.., which, for various reasons, human beings regard as demonstrations of the inner meaning of the universe and human life'. He saw myth as quite distinct from philosophy, as it was 'always concrete – consisting of vivid, sensually intelligible, narratives, images, rites, ceremonies and symbols'. The processes that give a story a mythic dimension are 'very largely unconscious', which, if Jung was right, they would have to be. Watts further noted that if the appearance of archetype-derived transpersonal images in a person's dreams indicated a healing process, as Jung maintained, then those societies that lived by myth were also healthy – healthier, indeed, than our own peculiar culture. He remarked that A. Coomaraswamy saw myths as one of the ways the 'perennial philosophy' was communicated, the perpetual spiritual reality underlying all religious forms and yearnings, the reality that allowed those who could partake of it to 'wake up' to 'a vision of the world startlingly different from that of the average socially conditioned man... because of the discovery that time – as ordinarily under stood – is an illusion'.


Great time

Greek scholar G.S. Kirk has warned that myths are so varied that it is unwise to seek one single definition of them. He finds some of the theories to be questionable, while others work for certain bodies of myth in the world but not for all of them. But while he is cautious about accepting Jung's ideas in toto, he admits that myths can have a dream-like quality, with the dislocations of sequence and location common to dreams. He notes, too, that it 'is a commonplace among several tribal societies... that myths and dreams evince a similar insight into reality. Many of the Indian tribes of the American South-west agree in spite of other cultural differences that myths are dreamed, and are created in that way. They are of great importance, being closely connected with the complex of rituals on which the life of the Pueblo Indians, in particular, is centred'...cont'd

http://www.gothicimage.co.uk/books/symboliclands1.html

[Elidor]

1. The thing about Jung

Whatever you want to call the collective unconscious, it is real, but his interpretation of it is open to question. We all have places we go when we dream, places we know intimately, places with recognizable rules and laws. But he saw myth where some see human psychology. His view is not necessarily wrong, but it seems limited to me, only one side of the coin. He has tried to fit one model to the vast array of human dreams, and it doesn't fit neatly.