Altered states belong to our inherited equipment and help to justify the claim that the mind that painted the Ice Age caves is the same mind that sends astronauts into space. Similarly, the shamans of the Paleolithic are close relatives of the often-maligned “urban shamans” of the late twentieth century. The social context has changed but not our organism’s capacities. The same autonomic nervous system has been “tuned” for at least 50,000 years — if not 600,000 or perhaps two million. The previous chapter has examined what has remained always and everywhere the same throughout the history of humanity and very likely much longer, back into the lives of our extinct relatives.

          Every faculty, however, can be used for a variety of purposes. Just as the wheel can be used to make toys to entertain children, carts to move freight, and grinding stones to mill grain, so our capacity for altered states has been used for healing the sick, transforming our personalities and manipulating one another. Evolution moves so slowly that there is no essential difference between our computer-using selves and the cavemen of legend. History, however, is another matter. Over time, our ancestors gradually moved from tiny isolated bands of hunter-gatherers to complex coalitions of larger bands and then to herding and agriculture. Artisans, traders, and industrialists have changed the human landscape no less significantly than the oscillations of a climate that has moved from tropical to arctic conditions and back again repeatedly. In the course of all these social, technological and climatic changes, different social classes learned to use altered states of consciousness in different ways and for different purposes. Today we can sketch in broad strokes a history of human consciousness that draws upon evidence from archaeology and anthropology while not forgetting the larger context of what has remained the same in human neurobiology.

          This chapter and the one that follows will take up the history of consciousness — the progressive story of what we have done with our psychological capacities — by paying special attention to the evidence for how our ancestors used rituals. In this chapter, we will follow the phylogenetic story, as evolution produced ever more elaborate brains that were capable of ever more complex societies and ritual behaviors to maintain those societies. We will trace a process of development from monkeys to our modern Homo sapiens relatives who painted the Ice Age caves. In the following chapter, we will follow the progress of our species as it grew in complexity from the Paleolithic through the Mesolithic and Neolithic up to “historical” times, for which we have literature to supplement the archaeological record.

          We cannot read the minds or divine the thoughts of our forebears in prehistory, for they left us artifacts, graves, and monuments rather than literature. But knowing something of what is constant — the human brain-and-mind and the archetypal patterns by which they operate — we can draw some interesting conclusions. We have no doubt, for instance, that ritual has been used throughout our history to tune the autonomic nervous system and produce changes in consciousness. Our ancestors reduced their mutual suspicions, bonded with one another in common enterprises, and left lasting accomplishments like Stonehenge — all because they learned to alter their everyday conscious states. They returned from those states with compelling stories of mythic import. The evidence left behind in stone, bones, holes in the ground, carved antlers and the like, reveals a history of how altered states of consciousness have been employed for social, environmental, and economic purposes down through the millennia.

          Before entering upon this recently gathered evidence, however, we shall leap back to Jung’s lifetime and summarize his views on how consciousness developed over time.

Jung on the History of Consciousness

          The most persistent theme in Jung’s views on the long-range development of the psyche is that it requires a great effort to “throw off unconsciousness,” something that can only be accomplished with “regular work,” for that is the force that “has made our humanity,” and it first appeared when primitive humans engaged in their “ceremonies” (Sem25: 30). Hard work, too, is required of us moderns, “For the strongest thing in man is participation mystique . . . stronger than the need for individuality” (Sem28: 63). In this formulation, Jung expands the meaning and application of Lévy-Bruhl’s concept of mystical participation. Lévy-Bruhl means empirical objects and events “participate” in an invisible world of collective representations. Thus the inert corpse participates in the reality of the dangerous, demanding but invisible ghost that hovers near it; and the crocodile that killed a villager on the bank of the river mystically participates in the identity of the witch who is believed to have caused the death (Lévy-Bruhl, 1922: 51-7). Without denying Lévy-Bruhl’s understanding of the term, Jung emphasizes that participation mystique is an everyday experience for every human being. For example, individual family members are regularly submerged in a collective family identity.

Everything that lives together is influenced by one another, there is a participation mystique . . . This clinging together is a great hindrance to individual relationship. If identical, no relationship is possible; relationship is only possible where there is separateness. Since participation mystique is the usual condition in marriage . . . one sinks into that bottomless pit of identity and after a while discovers that nothing happens any longer (Sem28: 63).

Efforts to throw off such stultifying unconsciousness “is the principle underlying the history of the West in the past two millennia” (Sem25: 30). Jung admits, too, that participation mystique may also affect his own historical outlook: “Unfortunately we cannot see into the future, and so we do not know how far we still belong in the deepest sense to the Middle Ages. If, from the watch-towers of the future, we should seem stuck in medievalism up to our ears, I for one would be little surprised” (CW15: ¶179).

The ancients. Since Jung acquired most of his information from the writings of people like Lévy-Bruhl who studied present-day “primitives,” he assumed as most Westerners seemed to do in the first half of the twentieth century, that the hunter-gatherers living on the margins of our modern world, protected by terrain and climate from predatory industrial entities, give us a pretty good idea of what our Stone Age ancestors must have been like. He thought they had “no trace of individuality,” but only the collective identity of participation mystique. Individuality, in fact, “is a relatively recent acquisition in the history of the human mind and human culture” (CW6: ¶12).

          As might be expected of a European who acquired an upper class education [1] at a time when archaeology was in its infancy — a field that fascinated him but promised no income — the “ancients” for Jung were primarily the people of classical antiquity, the Hellenistic world. He did not idealize them. In fact, he held that they had “no control over themselves and were at the mercy of their affects” (CW5: ¶644). He illustrates this claim with a passage from St. Augustine’s Confessions, where poor Alypius, who had sworn off the bloody entertainment of the circus, allows himself to be dragged along with his friends to watch the gladiators. He vows to conquer himself despite temptation, even closes his eyes and covers his ears, but eventually he is drawn in by the roar of the crowd and becomes more dissolute than ever (Ibid., ¶102).

          For Jung, late antiquity represented the end of an era, “full of sickish sentimentality” because “the spark had gone out of the conscious standpoint” (Sem25: 69). Those who did overcome “the world of the senses,” did so though a rarefied “type of thinking [that was] independent of external factors.” They were fascinated by the “sovereignty of the idea” (CW5: ¶113); and although they knew mathematics and physics and had master craftsmen, “they never got beyond the stage of inventing amusing curiosities. . . . What they lacked was training in directed thinking. The secret of cultural development is the mobility and disposability of psychic energy” (CW5: ¶17). Because it never occurred to them to apply their ideas, they did no real “work.” Hunter-gatherers with their rituals were superior insofar as they had learned to focus their energies on the practical demands of life.

          The upper classes got their work done by enslaving the masses. The slaves and downtrodden embodied the unconscious in late antiquity, overlooked and forgotten forces which finally transformed the world. They were easily attracted to the mystery religions, Gnosticism, and Christianity, all of which strove to reverse the value system of the larger culture. Participants in these movements “transferred power relations inward,” that is, they suppressed their own instinctual life much as they were suppressed by the upper classes (CW6: 108). Many of them fled to the desert to live as anchorites. Their “libido went over into spiritual values” which brought about an “enormous change in human mentality in 300 years” (Sem25: 68f). They began the West’s two-millennia-long effort to “throw off unconsciousness” and liberate an effective ego from forces that otherwise have held us in a state of participation mystique.

The Middle Ages. Christianity suppressed instinct and the material world by idealizing unseen “metaphysical powers,” particularly “the imperishable value of the human soul” (CW6: 8). “Though unfree and tyrannized by superstition, [medieval man] was at least biologically nearer to that unconscious wholeness which primitive man enjoys in even larger measure, and the wild animal possesses to perfection” (CW8: 426). By the time of the Gothic period, Christianity was in complete control, and there was a single “language and belief from north to south” in Europe. The people of Gothic culture were completely convinced of a single set of truths, “all doubt [was] excluded” (Sem25: 56).

          Jung says he made a collection of portraits covering the past six centuries or so, and found that from about the middle of the sixteenth century through the nineteenth he felt he knew the people who had been painted. But before that, the “Gothic man” appears as a stranger: “His eyes are stone-like and inexpressive; none of the vivacity to be seen in our eyes is in them . . .” They were not “individuals” as we are, but they shared a commonality of mind that Jung found symbolized in the smile of the Mona Lisa. It is “the smile of a man who meets on the street the woman with whom he is having a secret liaison. There is understanding in that smile — ‘We know,’ it seems to say” (Ibid., 55). The participation mystique that had kept the ancients locked in a world of materialism and sensory gratification gave way to a spiritual participation mystique, in which daily life became a gray testing ground on behalf of the eternal life of the soul to be enjoyed after death.

The Renaissance. The central theme of Western civilization underwent a sea change with the Renaissance, when Europe exchanged a heavenly goal for an earthly one, and the verticality of the cathedrals gave way to the horizontality of the voyages of discovery. Contrary to general opinion, the spirit of antiquity was not reborn, rather “the spirit of medieval Christianity underwent strange pagan transformations” (CW9ii: ¶78). Thus, when the great pioneer of the new cultural vision, Francesco Petrarch climbed Mt. Ventoux in the fourteenth century, [2] he found the earthly panorama overwhelming, and instead of enjoying it — for he showed greater self-mastery than Alypius a millennium earlier — he opened his constant companion, St. Augustine’s Confessions, and read: “‘And men go forth and admire lofty mountains and broad seas, and roaring torrents, and the ocean, and the course of the stars, and turn away from themselves while doing so.’ His brother to whom he read these words could not understand why he closed the book and said no more” (CW5: ¶21, n.21).

          Why he said no more, Jung thought, was that the antique feeling for nature was breaking through in his own mind and endangering the Christian principles in which he had been raised. In a vague but accurate sense, he seemed to know that, “The more successful the penetration and advance of the new scientific spirit, the more [the newly won rational and intellectual stability of the human mind would become] prisoner of the world it had conquered.” The Renaissance represented not that Christian spirituality was about to be “incarnated” in the newly discovered material world but that it would be submerged as “the descent of the . . . Nous into the dark embrace of Physis” (CW5: ¶113). The occluding embrace of spirit by matter (Nous by Physis) is the theme underlying the European alchemy that Jung studied for so many years. In Jung’s interpretation, the spirit had gone underground again in the Renaissance, and the alchemists tried to free it through their laboratory work. Unlike us, they projected their unconscious intimations of spirit into the mercury, sulfur and salt of their experiments. They saw with their imagination as well as with their physical eyes, and they did not know the difference. Very much as Lévy-Bruhl’s primitives mixed up empirical objects and events with collective representations, the alchemists operated in a material world enriched with archetypal significance, making it far more mythic and mysterious than ours.

The great schism. By the sixteenth century a real split had taken place, and the world had lost most of its mystery and wonder. There was no longer any reason for a young Petrarch to shield his eyes from a magnificent vista, for he had nothing left to lose. Alchemy was abandoned because the scientific spirit it had helped to generate no longer had room for collective representations. Scientists had to attend to their empirical measurements, only, and banish emotion and imagination from their work. They knew what “ordinary states of consciousness” were for the first time. The materials with which they worked were less mysterious and thrilling, once the great schism had separated perception from imagination (CW14: 101). In fact, there were a great number of schisms taking place: between science and philosophy, between Protestant and Catholic, between nation and nation, between science and experience. The world of everyday life became much poorer, while technology flourished. Three and a half centuries ago, we finally learned to work with directed thinking, and this forced us to separate ourselves from one another. Our modern sense of individuality had begun to develop.

The modern world. Today, we are far more concerned with a strident and superficial “individualism” than with genuine “individuation” (CW7: ¶267). We look outward to the rest of the world for guidance, but we need “to apply some concentration and criticism to the psychic material which manifests itself not outside, but in our private lives (CW6: ¶317). Christian truths have become “mystical absurdities” (CW11: ¶56) to our “sham enlightenment. . . . Most people are satisfied with the not very intellectual view that the whole purpose of dogma is to state flat impossibilities” (CW5: ¶113). We never imagine the sort of altered state that would produce a dogma which does not resent irrationalities, for our monophasic culture values only the results of directed thinking.

          The modern individual, therefore, has but a “veneer of civilization” covering “a dark-skinned brute” who has no interest in self-development and self-criticism (CW7: ¶156). Disunity is our “hallmark.” “The neurotic is only a special instance of the disunited man who ought to harmonize nature and culture within himself (Ibid., 16). For this, though, we need a living myth, as powerful as that of Mountain Lake, but adapted to each of us, individually. Only a “living religion . . . allows the [inner] primitive man adequate means of expression through richly developed symbolism” (Ibid., 156). The modern individual has an ego, finally, but not much depth. In the huge impersonal societies of today, our individuality is submerged in a collective “mass” identity. It must learn to recover its instinctual and archetypal roots.

          In his 1925 Seminar, Jung seems to have had a genuine hope that some sort of progress along these lines might be on the horizon, for he used the same words to describe European society prior to the First World War as he did the upper classes of late antiquity: “We lived in a world of sickish sentimentality” (Sem25: 53). If sickish sentimentality means that the spark has gone out of a civilization’s consciousness, as it had two millennia ago when it set the stage for the spiritual revolution that Christianity and her sister religions provided — a revolution that still needed an ego to solidify its gains — perhaps the sickish sentimentality of the fin de siècle and the violence to which it led might yet be setting the stage for another revolution. Maybe we can finally use the coherence and stability of a dependable ego to integrate instinct with social adaptation and thereby find the track of our personal myth. [3]

Erich Neumann (1905-1960). Discussion of Jung’s views on the history of consciousness would not be complete without including the classic work of the man who, in his short life, was arguably Jung’s most promising disciple. Erich Neumann was thirty years Jung’s junior and studied with him in the early 1930’s before emigrating from Berlin to Tel Aviv. He published The Origins and History of Consciousness in 1949, and Jung warmly praised it in a Foreword, in which he says that the book “begins just were I, too, if I were granted a second lease on life would start to gather up [the fragments and unfinished thoughts] of my own writings . . . and knead them into a whole.”

          There is some question in my mind, however, as to whether this claim is accurate, for Origins contains none of the history we have just discussed, devotes no attention to how people lived their lives, and sketches no series of ages, each with its distinctive attitude toward the world. Furthermore, Neumann makes no attempt to enter into “pre-history,” the much larger piece of our past, when our species and those that preceded us were unable to write, or possibly even to speak. Those people were surely conscious, however, for they left behind substantial evidence. Neumann’s sources do not go much further back than 6000, b.p., when cuneiform writing began. Even then, however, he is not careful to organize his materials in a strictly historical manner.

          Origins tells the history of consciousness as though our race were born about 6000 years ago with the mentality of an infant. We then went through infancy, childhood, adolescence, heroic adulthood, and transformative middle age. In fact the book has two parts in each of which the same development is described, once as “mythological stages” in the evolution of the human race, and again as “psychological stages” in the development of the individual. Like Freud in Totem and Taboo, Neumann uses the development of the individual according to theory [4] as the template that gives shape and meaning to history. It is an idealized history and a work in which theory takes precedence over evidence. But he does agree with Jung on the fundamental point: that the central theme of our history is our on-going attempt to throw off our unconsciousness.

A Comprehensive Approach to Ritual

          When Jung cited primitive rituals as the sort of “work” primitives do to “throw off unconsciousness,” he meant that “ritual actions bring about a spiritual preparation . . . to direct the libido towards the unconscious to compel it to intervene.” “Magical ceremonies, sacrifices, invocations, prayer, and suchlike” activities create an energy-gradient much the way active imagination does and mobilizes an archetypal state of mind, with enough of an emotional charge to persuade participants to engage in activities that might otherwise be resisted (CW5: ¶450). One of his favorite examples of this comes from Australia, described in a 1904 article by K. T. Preuss on the origins of religion and art. [5] Men of the Wachandi tribe dig a pit in the earth, surround it with bushes to make it resemble a woman’s genitals, and dance around it all night with their spears held before them like erect penises, shouting: “‘Pulli nira, pulli nira, wataka!’ (Not a pit, not a pit, but a c—-!)” (Ibid., ¶213). Jung understood this ritual as a means to mobilize their sexual energy and direct it toward the earth, where — unlike the pleasures of the hammock — the process of fecundation requires the hard work of planting, weeding and harvesting. They might have been too lazy to work for objectives far removed in the future unless they could generate an energy gradient to make the work compellingly attractive right now.

          Such an argument is not out of favor with many anthropologists and archaeologists, but Brian Hayden warns us not to take it too far. He doubts “religious monuments requiring huge amounts of labor such as Stonehenge or the Pyramid of the Sun in Mexico were built because of religious fervor” (Hayden, 2003: 18). Archaeologist Hayden does not rule out religion as a motive, but he wants us to know that economic interests and political power also play important roles. It appears to me that Hayden is in the mainstream of scientific opinion today regarding the role of ritual. It must be understood within the entire context of a people’s life, and that means that psychology, neurobiology, economics, politics and history must all be taken into consideration. For this we need a coherent cross-disciplinary approach.

Biogenetic Structuralism. Our aim is to sketch a history of consciousness by tracing the one behavior pattern that is widely accepted to be the sort of “work” that our ancestors have done, age after age, to “throw off” their unconsciousness, a pattern that has left a trail of evidence through pre-history. That archetypal pattern is precisely the one Jung identified in his 1925 seminar, ritual. But here we wish to braid a rope comprised of several strands, each belonging to a different scientific discipline. Those strands should include evolution, ethology, archaeology, anthropology, neurobiology, and psychology — just the sort of collaborative effort Jung dreamed of. Fortunately, there exists a group of scholars that has been collaborating in just this way for the past three decades. They call themselves “biogenetic structuralists.”

          The central concern of Biogenetic Structuralism is that interpretations of behavior have to be consistent with the evidence for how our intelligent organism works, as discovered by the neuro-sciences (McManus, et al., 1979: 343). They, therefore, address the issue that lies at the heart of this book, whether a scientific foundation exists for the behaviors Jung called “archetypal.” Biogenetic structuralists agree with the stance I have taken above in Chapter 5, that mind and brain are two aspects of the same reality. Mind is the name we give to the brain’s experience of its own functioning, while the brain provides mind with its structure (C.D. Laughlin, et al., 1990: 13). Biogenetic structuralists, therefore, hold that the evolution of the genome — to some degree — determines the brain’s structure, and a brain so structured generates characteristic activities which are our behavior (Ibid., 5). When they say that genes determine brain structure “to some degree,” they mean that neural structure develops only when phenotype (the organism) interacts with its environment (Ibid., 8). They call this process the biogenetic law: behavior is always a function of the nervous system interacting with the environment (Ibid., 5).

          Most of the principal authors who call themselves biogenetic structuralists have already been met with in this volume. They are, in alphabetic order: Eugene D. d’Aquili, until his recent death, Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania; Charles D. Laughlin, Jr., Professor of Anthropology at Carleton University in Ottawa; John McManus, independent scholar of psychology and the cognitive sciences; Andrew B. Newberg, Clinical Assistant Professor of Radiology and Instructor in Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania; and, finally, a man who has not collaborated with the others, but cites their work as foundational for his own, Michael Winkelman, Senior Lecturer and Director of the Ethnographic Field School in the Department of Anthropology, Arizona State University. There are at least eighteen other scholars who have contributed to the cross-disciplinary project. [6] In addition to the work of the biogenetic structuralists, and particularly their classic, The Spectrum of Ritual (d’Aquili, et al., 1979), our account of the history of consciousness through the millennia of ritual activities conducted by our ancestors will draw upon the work of several archaeologists. [7]

          This group describes itself as biogenetic to emphasize their contention that behavioral patterns are inherited, the archetypes biologically generated. They want to avoid the blithe indifference the social sciences have for too long displayed towards the biology of the material organisms that comprise societies, as well as their evolutionary history. To ignore neural networks and rhythms is to risk perpetuating the confusion of having two separate theories and two separate data collections with no bridge to connect them (C.D. Laughlin, et al., 1990: 83).

          Structuralism was the name of the dominant school of anthropology when the biogenetic group formed. Its most illustrious member was Claude Lévi-Strauss, and it sought to find the “deep structures” of a society’s behaviors by examining the imagery of its myths and social conventions. “Semiotic structuralism,” as our group describes Lévi-Strauss’s school, was looking at symbols to find “the unconscious in culture.” [8] Our biogenetic collaborators agree that deep structures should be found, but they look to genes and neurons for the deepest and most dependable foundation. They have no argument with the likelihood deep structures will manifest in a society’s imagery, but they look first to neurobiology to avoid contributing to irreconcilable theories. In addition, they criticize Lévi-Strauss’s approach for being unrealistically based upon a timeless view of unchanging social structure (“synchronic”), while their own school presumes the constant change that societies everywhere manifest (“diachronic”).

          They claim an illustrious set of precursors for Biogenetic Structuralism: C. G. Jung, for his theory of inherited archetypal patterns [9] and the philosopher, A. N. Whitehead, for his process metaphysics, wherein the fundamental reality is the event rather than the object, and events comprise “organismic systems within systems” rather than “basic units.” Other precursors include Jean Piaget, Teilhard de Chardin, Henri Bergson, and the early anthropologist, E. B. Tylor, who introduced the term animism (C.D. Laughlin, et al., 1979: 3-6).

          The biogenetic structuralists hold that any adequate theory of consciousness must begin from “neurognosis,” the fact that everything we know (gnosis = knowledge) is a function of the neural activity of the brain. Neurognosis is broadly conceived as including the input of all information, the storage and retrieval of memories, the capacity to evaluate the environment and the internal states of the organism, the assignment of affect, and any subsequent action that our organism takes (Ibid., 8f). Probably their most pervasive and useful assumption is that the neocortex is constantly driven by a “cognitive imperative,” an “impetus to apply cognitive operations” to every bit of information arriving from the outer or inner worlds in order to construct a comprehensive understanding of the whole domain of our experience (d’Aquili & Newberg, 1999: 196). The empirical data of ordinary perception arriving from the sense organs, therefore, the data our monophasic society accepts as, alone, reliable, is but a small part of our experience. The cognitive imperative that drives our neurognostic apparatus relentlessly searches for broader understanding, to get at ultimate questions about why events occur and what we are up to in life. Consequently, it compulsively gives rise to “theoretical entities” to account for what the raw data do not supply, and urges us in the direction of a polyphasic mentality. This never-sleeping drive within every organism to organize a world, therefore, is the origin of the universal human tendency to invent “spirits, powers, gods, black holes, viruses, photons, and libidos that operate to ‘cause’ events or to inhibit them” (C.D. Laughlin, et al., 1979: 12).

The nature of ritual. Ritual is perhaps the only universal human activity that leaves datable evidence behind, and “can be understood in the same terms as the genesis and development of the human intellect” (McManus, 1979a: 183). Because ritual is employed by a group of people to alter its members’ consciousness, the artifacts, monuments and grave goods it leaves behind for archaeologists to discover can be used to sketch a reliable history of consciousness.

          The mere fact of “being conscious” is something we humans share with chimpanzees, macaques, foxes, and sparrows. What sets us apart is our ability to manipulate consciousness deliberately. We can turn our awareness back on itself to reflect upon our feelings and behaviors, to imagine new goals for ourselves and find ways of attaining them. We can contemplate alternate realities and use them to transform our self-identity and the nature of our relations with one another. Thus, while the wild bonobos of today live lives that are essentially identical to those of their ancestors six million years ago, our lives are quite different from those of cave painters who lived a mere 30,000 years ago. Our mental capacities are surely the same as they were in the Upper Paleolithic, but what we have learned to do with them has changed. Ritual has always been about changing consciousness and changing identity.

          If we consider, for example, a puberty ritual, some may argue that boys are not really turned into men but that the ritual only creates the illusion of such a change (e.g., Boyer, 2001: 255). Probably it is true that, with their painted markings washed off and their hair unshaven, the boys who exit the ritual will appear to an outside observer to be indistinguishable from those who entered it. But their minds will have been changed; they will have had numinous experiences; their autonomic nervous systems will have been tuned. In their world, in the world of their society, they will have become — in a real sense — new people. They will feel differently about themselves, and their relations with everyone in their village will have been irrevocably changed. This is no illusion, for it will have become a fundamental fact of everyday life.

          Rituals are both symbolic statements and society-changing events, for they articulate a culture’s basic values and dramatize the obligatory conditions of social life. Those boys who have been made into men will have a whole new set of duties, perhaps live in different dwellings, address their fellow villagers in new terms. They will experience themselves as having a new moral and social identity. Ritual, in effect, tunes the consciousness of everyone in the village to make such immense transformations possible.

          The biogenetic structuralists have been careful to define ritual in a manner that does not blur the evolutionary continuity that obtains between humans and our non-human relatives — primates, mammals, and lower animals. Ritual behavior, therefore, is the “subset of formalized behavior that involves two or more individuals in active and reciprocal communication.” It is always structured, stereotyped, and repeated over time; and it “results in greater coordination of conspecifics toward some social action, purpose, or goal” (C.D. Laughlin, et al., 1979: 29). The key feature in this definition, the recurrent pattern, when observed among non-human animals, shows up most conspicuously in courting displays. On this basis, we can verify that butterflies, fish, birds, dogs, and wildebeests all engage in formalized interactions that manifest intention, influence upon one another’s responses, and coordination in the interest of procreation (W. J. Smith, 1979: 66-8).

          Displays are, in effect, declarations of an animal’s intentions. Therefore, both the execution of a stereotyped series of actions and the capacity to recognize the pattern when another performs it are inherited tendencies, reducible, in the final analysis, to genes. The advertisement of sexual availability in an individual of the opposite sex produces an affective state of sexual arousal, and the molecules of arousal — neurotransmitters, hormones, endorphins — set off a cascade of discrete actions in a precise sequence that together constitute the mating dance. But even though these behaviors are the same from generations to generation, millennium to millennium, [10] they are not as rigid as they might seem to be. They depend upon the context in which they are performed and the tiniest variations in their execution (Ibid., 63). Intense attention paid to subtleties in the partner’s movements produces tiny differences in emotional response and corresponding variations in posture and execution. When we humans participate in a process like this, we claim we have been in conscious control, that our “ego” was responsible for the nuances in our behavior. No doubt we do exercise more conscious control than do geese or elk. But our displays, too, are inherited patterns. We know something of what it feels like to engage in a mating dance because we, too, approach attractive individuals while charged with interest and lust mixed with the fear of rejection; and we, too, carefully watch our potential partner for subtleties of gesture and posture that we use as clues for how to conduct ourselves.

          Genetic structuralist, W. J. Smith, describes human “salutation displays,” which are behaviors related to courting but generally carry a smaller emotional charge. Although they admit some variation, their general form is as genetically structured as that of any animal. When two humans approach one another from a distance, we toss our heads, raise our eyebrows and smile, but then avert our gaze. When quite close, we glance at one another and again avert our gaze while smiling and vocalizing. Physical meeting involves a handshake or embrace, an exchange of verbal greeting formulas that may contain more or less information. Finally, we move apart and change our bodily orientation with regard to one another (Ibid., 69).

          Smith’s description of human salutation displays adds further evidence to support Dunbar’s thesis that human gossip is a verbal variation on primate grooming behavior. “The evolution of linguistic behavior began in a primate that already had displays and formalized patterns of interacting. . . . We can greet, court and challenge, for instance, entirely with glances, eyebrow raisings, fist waves, growls, and other displays” (Ibid., 73). Ritual, therefore, is a traceable, archetypal link between ourselves and our cave-painting ancestors; but it is also a link to our primate cousins, who have their rituals as well. The biogenetic structuralists cite one of their mentors, Elliot Chapple, [11] on this point: “The actions the human animal performs may appear to be capable of almost infinite variety, but they are more properly regarded as variations on a set of action ‘themes.’ These are probably little more in number than the repertoire of fixed action patterns of the nonhuman species” (C.D. Laughlin, et al., 1979: 11).

Ritual: Monkeys to Archaic Humans

          Regardless of species, rituals are largely about changing consciousness. Even the human salutation display has to do with stating one’s intentions and divining those of one’s partner, putting one another at ease, and reducing the likelihood of aggression. Usually when we think of ritual, however, we imagine a much larger change in consciousness. A puberty ritual really does change the mind of the initiate and also the collective mind of the group. Altered states of consciousness may be induced by fasting, strenuous rhythmic activities, isolation in an uninhabited sector of the countryside, etc. But a permanent change is effected, too, insofar as the villagers have altered their relations with one another. Human rituals usually also have a “religious” dimension, in which alternate worlds are encountered in altered states and alternate senses of oneself generated. In all such cases, our cognitive imperative is stimulated to see the objects and events of our empirical environment in a larger context. Some sort of ultimate, even cosmic, vision of the world and our part in it becomes available, and not just for the individual but for the community as a whole. Ritual plays a significant role in shaping society: in establishing relations between its members, in giving them an identity and meaningful place in the cosmos, and in carrying the society through dangerous times, as when food is scarce or people have died.

          While it is most improbable that baboons and chimpanzees enter an ultimate cosmos in their rituals, they do explore, confirm, and alter relationships between members of their groups; and their consciousness is surely changed, their autonomic nervous system tuned, their bodies and minds placed in some state of arousal (aggression, lust, etc.). Furthermore, it seems clear from the many examples cited in previous chapters of this book, that mammals and birds and to some extent lower animals know their environments very well and assemble coherent mental maps. The biogenetic structuralists agree: “It seems probable to us that there exists a number of animal species capable of conceptualizing [their environment] [12] without the ability to communicate that material to conspecifics” (C.D. Laughlin, et al., 1979: 17).

Monkeys. We have discussed primate grooming behavior as a precursor to human gossip. But it is also an autonomic tuning ritual that stimulates the parasympathetic system so that animals can safely decrease the distance between themselves by inhibiting the sympathetic nervous system which governs the aggression and fear responses that would otherwise predominate when two or more individuals come into close proximity (Ibid., 93). Parasympathetic dominance — including the endorphins that reinforce grooming rituals with pleasurable feelings — is probably related to the increased size of the cerebral cortex in primates, compared with other mammals, for this is what gives us an ability to differentiate our affective responses. Primates are capable of the most subtle and broadest range of affective states, with chimpanzees more accomplished than macaques and hominids more accomplished still (Ibid., 91).

          Perhaps because it is a more dangerous issue in primate societies, intragroup aggression rituals tend to be much more highly structured than grooming behaviors. Indeed, C. D. Laughlin and McManus (1979) argue that such rituals are a primary means by which monkeys re-enact “the cognized social ordering of [their] group,” remembering and reinforcing the social hierarchy. Intragroup aggression rituals are more than empty drama and more than conceptual rehearsals, as their primary function is to tune the autonomic nervous system in the direction of sympathetic dominance. Those monkeys who play the roles of the main aggressors in such rituals are “coordinating crucial neural subsystems in order to maintain the social fabric” of the troop. It is, in fact, not only their own brains that benefit, for even the animals who only watch and whoop undergo autonomic tuning and network reinforcement.

          In one such aggression ritual, called “mobbing” or “line formation” behavior in Cayo Santiago rhesus monkeys, the animals form themselves into two parallel lines facing one another. Then individuals occupying the lines lunge, swing their arms menacingly and growl across the divide at the opposing camp, while mostly restraining themselves from making physical contact. Meanwhile, a second rank of monkeys stands behind each of the “front lines” like tiny companies of reserves, and individuals from this group of “seconds” lunge through the line and then retreat quickly to the rear. Most of the participants are adult females and younger males between two and five years old. Older males pace back and forth behind the lines. “Each animal participating in the line formation alternates between making threatening gestures at the opposite ‘camp’ and turning his head to watch what his fellow group members are doing.” The actions taken are archetypal in form, that is, based in fixed action patterns common to all primates; but exercising these archetypal behavior patterns in the context of an aggression ritual works to coordinate the brains of individual monkeys to engage in effective activity as a social group. Each animal must exercise its neuro-endocrine tuning, and the group must be tuned, as well, so that all can find their place in the social hierarchy (C.D. Laughlin & McManus, 1979: 89-93).

Chimpanzees. In the same paper, Laughlin and McManus discuss chimpanzee rituals of two sorts. The first type, they describe as “danger rituals,” and base their remarks on accounts of a chimpanzee “rain dance,” as observed by Jane Goodall in the wild, three times over the course of ten years, and a quarter of a century earlier among captive chimpanzees by Wolfgang Köhler. A second instance of the danger ritual is the “war dance” elicited by the appearance of a dangerous enemy. Experiments by Kortland and Kooij in the mid 1960’s used an electrically animated leopard.

          In the “rain dance,” it appears that thunder and lightning stimulate the males of a troop, one-by-one, to run down hills, grabbing tree trunks with one hand to swing around them, breaking off branches, and throwing or brandishing them. When they reach the bottom of the hill, they plod back up to begin all over again. Meanwhile the females and immature males climb trees and watch. In the “leopard dance,” chimpanzees “mob” the predator by forming a semicircle line before it and threaten it with “synchronized individual charges, the animals stamping the ground, screaming in unison, and brandishing (or throwing) uprooted trees, broken branches and other ‘clubs’ at the leopard” (Ibid., 104). C.D. Laughlin and McManus justify their general designation of a chimpanzee “danger ritual” by reminding us that when our human “cognitive imperative” encounters uncanny and disturbing mysteries, that is to say a “zone of uncertainty” in the cognized world, that is when mythic explanations emerge from unconscious processes in our brains and psyches. Without the linguistic benefits of our human story-telling abilities, chimpanzees enact rituals that express their fear and readiness to react with aggression in dance-like behaviors that are driven by an aroused sympathetic nervous system.

          By contrast, the second type of chimpanzee ritual, meat exchange, tunes the ANS in the direction of the parasympathetic system. The emotional tone of a troop eating shared meat is relaxed, leisurely, uncompetitive enjoyment. Frequently, individual animals will interrupt their gnawing and chewing to beg for more food from other chimpanzees, and about half the time they will be successful. Aggression and thievery are clearly against the rules, and any chimpanzee who gets out of line will be corrected by the group. Not even a higher ranking in the social hierarchy justifies taking another ape’s meat. “It is not entirely unreasonable to hypothesize that the meat itself . . . takes on the conceptual status of symbol for chimpanzee participants” (Ibid., 107).

Australopithecines. Although there are no records of Australopithecus rituals in the literature, Laughlin and McManus draw some tentative conclusions based on the shapes of fossilized skulls which show that the frontal lobe had reached hominid proportions in chimpanzees. What has changed by the time of the Australopithecines is in the parieto-occipital region, where neural information is compared across sensory modes (hearing, sight, etc.) and where conceptualization, logic, and mathematical functions are located in Homo sapiens. The authors take the rather extreme position that Australopithecus might have had speech. Surely, they are not wrong, however, in affirming that these pre-Homo ancestors communicated in gestures, for we have already seen evidence in previous chapters that bonobos and chimpanzees have that capability (Ibid., 108f).

          On the basis of such evidence, the biogenetic structuralists conclude that the Australopithecine worldview had a “zone of uncertainty” that was much larger than that of chimpanzees. They had to have been more aware of the threat posed by illness, death, the distribution of scarce resources, and the maintenance of group relations. Their memories had to have been more “time-bound.” If so, they were capable of modeling a world that extended beyond the merely empirical, into the future — that is into a set of imagined possibilities for what might come to be.

          Their affect has to have been more differentiated than that of the apes, and that must have enabled them to have more complex societies, possibly with recognized stages of life and corresponding rites of passage. Intragroup aggression must have been a much smaller problem for Australopithecines, than for their ape forebears. An increased memory capacity together with a more nuanced spectrum of affects would have enabled them to remember their relations with specific individual troop mates in greater specificity so that they would not have had frequently to re-enact the hierarchy of the group in the aggression rituals we have considered among monkeys and chimpanzees (Ibid., 110f).

Archaic humans. “Archaic Homo sapiens” is a widely used phrase that conveniently lumps together all the many (sometimes disputed) species of our human ancestors that emerged between Homo erectus (ca. 1.6 to 0.5 million years ago) and Modern Homo sapiens (from approximately 50,000 years ago). Very little can be said about the consciousness of these species unless we enter into further speculations of the type employed above in our sketch of Australopithecus’ mentality. But there is one momentous fact: about 600,000 years ago a few of our ancestors began burying some of their dead. Never before in the course of evolution had a species devoted enough thought to the phenomenon of death to have considered burial or any rites that might go with it. Apparently no previous species had been capable of wondering what might happen to an individual after death, the capability for which would imply a greatly enlarged “zone of uncertainty” within their worldview. Archaeologist Timothy Taylor says, in the subtitle of his book (2002), “Humans invented death.” He means that our Homo ancestors were the first species to steadily contemplate the uncanniness of death and to devise rituals to manage their emotions.

          Archaic humans, however, were not the first to notice death or to find it disturbing. Brian Hayden notes that “chimpanzees exhibit innate fear of deathlike appearances in other chimpanzees” (2003: 184) — although they are not, of course, disturbed by the deathlike appearances they cause in the monkeys and other animals whose meat they treat so ceremoniously. It is safe to say, therefore, that beginning at least with chimpanzees, primates show an increasing capacity to see the deaths of their conspecifics as a problem for which solutions had to be imagined. As their ability to contemplate future possibilities and invisible worlds evolved with their ever-enlarging brains, rituals, graves, grave goods and monuments were devised; and such artifacts are our main source of evidence to indicate what they were doing with their consciousness. They are our primary data for the evolution of consciousness between the time our line split off from the common ancestor we share with the chimpanzees, about six million years ago, and the invention of writing about 6,000 years ago.

          One further fact must be noted. The evidence seems to be that relatively few archaic humans were buried. Before burials occur at all in the archaeological record, it is reasonable to assume that Australopithecus and Homo erectus left their relatives lying where they fell to be scavenged by other animals, their bones gnawed, “scattered, then shattered and powdered by wind and rain” (Taylor, 2002: 30). This does account for the fact that whole skeletons are extremely rare until about 26,000, b.p. Cannibalism, however, is a likelihood that cannot be ignored, for human bodies are no less nutritious than those of deer or wooly mammoths. In a world where starvation was a constant threat, eating dead members of the troop and even hunting the humans of other troops as game cannot be ruled out.

          Furthermore, for a species that is beginning to be struck by the uncanniness of death, the “endo-cannibalism” of relatives would have been considered a mark of respect and remembrance, while “exo-cannibalism,” the eating of one’s enemies, could be seen as an appropriate insult (M. & S. Aldhouse-Green, 2005: 27). Because the issue is repugnant for us to consider, Taylor cites the Greek historian Herodotus, on Darius the Great of Persia, who asked some Greeks in attendance at his court what price they would take to eat their dead fathers. They said that no price would be high enough. Then he called before him some members of the Callatian tribe of India, who do eat their parents and asked them what price it would take to cremate their fathers. “They shouted aloud, ‘Don’t mention such horrors!’” Herodotus closes his remarks by quoting Pindar, who said, “Custom is king of all” (Taylor, 2002: 82f). Endo-cannibalism, where it existed, may have been incorporated in rituals that did not involve burial and left no archaeological traces behind. But in the Chasm of Bones (Sima de los Huesos) in Spain, thousands of bones from Homo heidelbergensis (300,000 to 200,000, b.p.) reveal systematic butchering by archaic humans, “the earliest unequivocal evidence of a death ritual anywhere in the world” (Ibid., 77-9).

Ritual and Consciousness in the Upper Paleolithic

          Modern human consciousness began around 50,000, b.p., perhaps earlier. Caves were being painted by about 36,000, b.p. The ice began to retreat by 10,000; and by 7,000, “the foundations of the modern world had been laid and nothing that has come later has ever matched the significance of these events” (Mithen, 2003: 3). The achievements of the European Upper Paleolithic include magnificent ivory carvings, masterpieces in flint, and undisputed evidence for elaborate rituals and religious concepts. The first reverential burials occurred, implying religious belief and the corresponding intellectual development (Taylor, 2002: 31). The people of the Upper Paleolithic explored concepts of an afterlife, practiced ecstatic rituals in connection with animal cults, initiated one another to positions of prestige, discovered shamanism and established ancestor cults (Hayden, 2003: 122).

          What was different about the Upper Paleolithic that enabled it to support such an explosion of cultural development seems to come down to feats of conscious “integration” or “mastery” on two levels. First of all, evidence from earlier in prehistory indicates art, art objects, graves, and the like had been produced on and off for tens, even hundreds of millennia. What was different about the Upper Paleolithic was that humans who had long had the capacity to do these things, now employed their talents habitually and repeatedly. The social and cultural context had begun to support such determined “performance” as efficacious and meaningful (Soffer & Conkey, 1997: 6). They had begun the “steady work” that Jung has identified as “throwing off unconsciousness.”

          Probably prior to such steady work was “the explosive fusion of language and imagination [so as] to pursue a new type of dialogue” (Harris, 2000: 195). We have already considered Mithen’s metaphor of the human mind patterned like a cathedral, with separate archetypal capacities isolated from one another in “side chapels.” When we learned to use language for more than gossip, we gained the ability to integrate data sets and perspectives from several different mental modules, giving our minds greater capacity and flexibility. Harris suggests that, in addition to the conceptual, empirical thinking that Mithen privileges, there was a recognition of the possibilities inherent in imagination so that conceptual thought could be applied to “the distant past and future, as well as the magical and the impossible.” In short, the modern minds of the Upper Paleolithic were driven by their “cognitive imperative” to explore an enlarged “zone of uncertainty,” and to do so habitually and compulsively.

Archetypal lessons from the caves. A standard “Jungian” approach to the imagery of an unknown society such as that of the European Upper Paleolithic would likely be to try to determine the meaning of the animals, vulvas, and other painted forms by comparing them with more recent images whose mythic status and general significance is not in dispute, such as those of Greek mythology. Greek mythology is useful largely on account of its narratives. But we have no narratives from the Upper Paleolithic, and the animal imagery does not suggest any. Our contemporary minds have been shaped by a literary continuity with the Greeks, but the Greeks did not shape Ice Age minds, and there is no way to trace a tradition that connects them. The archetypes may be unchanging, but their cultural expression is not.

          In the end, these are the sorts of things we can know about the mind of the Upper Paleolithic, that it conceptualized and imagined in the same way ours does but made sense of things at the local level, where specific images had shared social meanings (Ibid., 185). Just as monkeys and apes maintained and refreshed the shape of their societies with their aggression rituals, “caves were active instruments in both the propagation and the transformation of society during the Upper Paleolithic” (Ibid., 229). They “worked out their relationship with the land and each other through this ‘art’” (Davidson, 1997: 125). Like the boys who become men in puberty rituals, people were “transformed mentally and socially by their experiences [in the caves], questers returned to the level of daily life . . . [and] entered into new kinds of social relations with other members of their community” (Lewis-Williams, 2002: 234).

Ritual and myth in the caves. Evidence that the caves were used for ritual performances begins with the fact that very few of the painted caves contain any signs of habitation and those that do, reveal only that people may have lived in a space near the entrance — usually nowhere near the most arresting artwork. In addition, there is a strong correlation between those areas of the caves that produce the best resonance — and therefore would be best for drumming and singing — and those where walls and ceilings are the most likely to have been painted (Lewis-Williams, 2002: 225; Bahn & Vertut, 1997: 199). “Sometimes 80% of the art was located in areas with resonant stalactites and draperies” (M. & S. Aldhouse-Green, 2005: 58).

          Earlier in Chapter 3, we discussed the fact that the layout of the caves suggests an underworld through which shamans traveled in their altered states. The “entoptics” or phosphenes that often appear in an early phase of trance have been painted on the walls alongside the animals. Many of the half-man, half-animal figures that have been called shamans or sorcerers are depicted with erections, which suggests not death but ecstatic states with strong parasympathetic contributions. Composite beings, masks and costumes also suggest a universal theme whereby the shamanic journeyer becomes his animal familiar. A further theme links the apparent death of the shaman with the death of an animal and the transformations experienced in altered states as interchangeable images. Finally, the small, hidden “diverticules” in the caves suggest locations for vision questers to seek seclusion a short distance from richly painted chambers (Hayden, 2003: 148-50). Hence, there is wide agreement among researchers that, the cave-painting societies entertained conceptions of a soul and an afterlife, practiced rituals and initiations, favored cults centered on animal/human transformation and the importance of dead ancestors, together with the notion that at least some individuals, the shamans, could visit the invisible worlds that provide ultimate meaning for human life in the empirical world (Ibid., 95).

          Shamanism is an important factor in this mix because it implies an active engagement with the spirit world. As in the active imagination and “original thinking” that Jung describes, the symbolic world appears, in the first instance, on its own terms, unbidden and autonomous. Thus, cave artists first “saw” animals emerging from the surface of the rock and then assisted that process of emergence with their scrapers, charcoal and paints. They were becoming more active in their engagement with images: “With the rise and development of shamanistic practices, we cross the threshold marking the beginnings of systematization of the preternatural world” (Ripinsky-Naxon, 1993: 127). Taking active possession of that invisible world is one of the major developments of the Upper Paleolithic; it is how “throwing off unconsciousness” through steady work was manifesting itself at the moment when modern humanity emerged from its less conscious ancestry: “Ritual is the engine of shamanic ecstasy and symbol is the pilot.” The repetitious behavior of ritual “turns off the conceptual mind,” while the symbols that manifest in altered states entrain neural networks that are normally unconscious and make them visible (C.D. Laughlin, et al., 1990: 276-8).

          Shamanic practices imply a unified cosmos that allows journeying between its planes and is organized around the changing seasons of the year with their visible rhythms involving animals, vegetation, and the stars (Fagan, 1998: 4-8). Unquestionably, some narrative tied all these elements together to answer ultimate questions:

The past three generations of researchers have recognized . . . [that] the spatial relationships among cave images are highly structured and the association of subjects is repetitive from one cave to the next. This has led researchers . . . to see caves as “mythograms.” The strong suspicion is that caves are the visual/experiential accompaniment to verbal narratives concerning such matters as group origins, history, and cosmology (R. White, 2003: 117f).

The growing complexity of Paleolithic society. In a series of drawings depicting the changes over time on a very interesting cave wall — what is now known as the Panel of the Horses in the Chauvet Cave, to date the most ancient of the Ice Age caves to have been discovered — Jean Clottes and his collaborators show how the artwork accumulated over the perhaps 15,000 years that humans decorated the walls (Clottes, et al., 2003: 107). First, a cave bear standing on its hind legs leaves claw marks that slice though the yellow veneer on the wall, leaving white gouges. Later humans have engraved a wooly rhinoceros and mammoth over the claw marks. Then, humans “prepare a surface” by scraping off a large area of the yellow veneer on the rock to uncover a “canvas” of white “moon milk” [13] at about the height of a human chest and shoulders. Black outlines of rhinoceros, elk and bison are painted on the white surface. In a fifth stage, the black outlines of dueling wooly rhinoceroses appear lower down on the wall, directly on its yellow oxidized veneer. Next aurochs are painted on the white surface, partially overlapping some of the earlier paintings; and this time the outlines are shaded in with black paint. Finally, three stages of horse paintings are made on top of everything that was painted earlier, tying together the white and yellow portions of the rock surface and giving the impression of a massive herd of animals moving mostly upward and to the left, with a couple of them bucking traffic by moving to the right and lending the whole scene a sense of dynamism. This one panel gives us a suggestive account of how the artwork in the caves developed from the early work of individual artists to the collective work of organized artists. Human society in the European Upper Paleolithic underwent a similar development.

          We have seen that the most elaborately painted caves required careful planning of an entire complex of galleries and passageways, scaffolding to reach some ceilings and high wall surfaces, and large amounts of pigment that could only be obtained through extensive trading networks. Somehow a group of talented artists and other workers had to be inspired to engage in an organized project while having their daily needs met, and those of their families. Such an enterprise resembles in its complexity what their descendants of the Gothic period achieved during the centuries when Europe’s great cathedrals were built.

          These facts have forced archaeologists to distinguish two types of hunter-gatherer society, simple and complex. A simple hunter-gatherer society entails a fairly small group of individuals who are entirely dependent upon one another for all their needs and able to produce only limited resources (food, tools, clothing, etc.) that necessarily fluctuate in quantity and quality with the seasons, the climate, and the game. Because life is so bare and subsistence so precarious, a simple hunter-gatherer society can afford to allow no private ownership. Everyone has to be equal with everyone else. Furthermore, they have to be constantly on the move to exploit the fluctuating resources that nature provides. Their lifestyle allows them no valuables, no rich burials, no permanent campsites, no storage of resources.

          Before the “cultural explosion” of the Upper Paleolithic, our ancestors lived exclusively in such simple societies. But over the course of perhaps twenty millennia, say, from 35,000 to 15,000, b.p., they gradually made the transition to complex hunter-gatherer societies. What made the transition possible was the production of abundant, stable resources by improved weapons and hunting techniques and favorable turns in the climate. They could store resources against less prosperous seasons, and the stable supplies allowed them to settle down for part or all of a year and begin to accumulate private possessions. The population grew, small bands joined forces with one another, and permanent architecture became possible for the first time. Having abandoned the forced equality of simple societies, they became involved in economic competition, trade, warfare against other groups, and slavery. Society became hierarchical, trade networks grew; wealthier, more powerful people distinguished themselves from others by their ownership of status items and by their elaborate burials. Cemeteries have been found from this period showing high levels of violent death, evidence that strife grew along with the competition (Hayden, 2003: 124).

          History was being made at the end of the last Ice Age, not in placid contentment, but through struggle and contest (Lewis-Williams, 2002: 181). “Image-making played an active role in the evolution of social relations,” not for the sake of beauty but for social discrimination. “Social competition drove a spiral of social, political and technological change” (Ibid., 95f). Even “the shapes of one’s stone artifacts (rather like a car today) signaled one’s social group” (Ibid., 76). It was private ownership and the need to impress that drove the explosion of art and the elaboration of ritual (Hayden, 2003: 132). Simple hunter-gatherers could have a feast only when the hunt was spectacularly successful, and then everyone, hunters and non-hunters alike, participated equally. But among complex hunter-gatherers, the ability to produce food surpluses on a regular basis gave some families the ability to call a feast whenever they wished to compete for labor and power with other families (Ibid., 137). For this reason, “rituals and [their attendant] beliefs benefited some people more than — and often at the expense of — others” (Lewis-Williams & Pearce, 2005: 79).

          On the basis of such inequality, secret societies and initiatory rites limited to wealthy and influential families became the means “to consolidate economic, social, and political control.” Initiatory rites that involved altered states of consciousness and acquiring animal guardians were well suited to the painted caves, which were not used regularly and whose spaces were usually too cramped for anything but small segments of a complex society to use at any one time. The “great art” of the caves required skill and organization which only the wealthy could afford to sponsor, and this allowed them to produce rituals of high drama and feasting — for which there is evidence in some of the caves (Hayden, 2003: 142-5).

          Paleolithic art “is the expression of the ideals of a human group, through which religions, myths, and feelings are revealed while also acting as a form of social control” (Ramos, et al., 1999: 56). Based on his comparison of rock art and its uses by Australian Aborigines with what we know of the Ice Age caves, Iain Davidson reaches a similar conclusion, “The marking of places through symbols painted and engraved on cave walls might [have been] involved with the identification of the manner of corporate ownership of territories” (Davidson, 1997: 150). He means that if social networks were open and mobility between groups was relatively frequent, a movement must have begun to form closed social networks that had their own ways of symbolizing their identities. The complex societies of the Upper Paleolithic were a new phenomenon and required a new set of social distinctions.

Socialized altered states of consciousness, cosmology, religion, political influence and image-making (the forerunner of “art”) all come together in the sort of society that we consider fully modern. Individual people could now use esoteric resources to fashion their personae in relation to their fellows’. Those resources could be guarded and could thus become a controlled mechanism of social diversity, stratification and exploitation. Caves . . . brought the spirit realm into tangible reality (Lewis-Williams, 2002: 286).

The Neurobiology of Ritual in the Upper Paleolithic

          Ritual can effect enormous changes in personality and social structure. We begin with a powerful image of this process from one of Jung’s friends and correspondents, the great German Indologist, Heinrich Zimmer:

Dancing is an ancient form of magic. The dancer becomes amplified into a being endowed with supra-normal powers. His personality is transformed. Like yoga, the dance induces trance, ecstasy, the experience of the divine, the realization of one’s own secret nature, and, finally, mergence into the divine essence. . . .

Pantomimic dance is intended to transmute the dancer into whatever demon, god, or earthly existence he impersonates. . . .

The dance is an act of creation. It brings about a new situation and summons into the dancer a new and higher personality. It has a cosmogonic function, in that it arouses dormant energies which may then shape the world (Zimmer, 1946: 151f).

Dance is a rhythmic, repetitive activity that alters our physiology, and it lies at the heart of most human ritual. Barbara W. Lex, one of the collaborators in the Biogenetic Structuralism project, defines ritual as a “precisely performed emotional-interactional form” that entrains biological rhythms and enhances survival. She says that whereas ordinary events produce “dysphasic emotional responses” among a group of individuals, ritual events ensure uniformity of emotional state and behavior among participants (Lex, 1979: 120). Patterned repetition acts upon the mammalian nervous system to produce altered states of consciousness (Ibid., 117).

The neurobiology of ritual. C.D. Laughlin and his associates say that the simplest forms of ritual achieve their effects by releasing “fixed action patterns” (what might be called “motor-archetypes”) and entraining neuro-motor subsystems that coordinate an array of physiological processes within the individual and also stimulate cohesive social forces within the group. Ritual is therefore “necessary for coherent, cooperative responses,” that have a “common motive and drive” (C.D. Laughlin, et al., 1979: 33-5). Brian Hayden implicitly connects such observations with the theological tone of Zimmer’s description of the dance, when he says, “Any act can be performed in either a profane or a sacred fashion. If it is done in a sacred fashion, the connection is made and the world lights up. We feel euphoric” (Hayden, 2003: 54). The larger cosmos thus revealed is experienced as “invigorating,” while the rest of our lives fade into dull unreality devoid of genuine interest. The difference reminds us of Jung’s declaration that he had to return from his near-death experience to the gray, two-dimensional “box world.”

          The simplest sorts of rhythm — even drumming and flashing lights experienced passively, i.e., without dancing — have been shown to have significant effects upon the brain. Lex reports that lights flashing near the frequency of alpha brain waves increase the amplitude of those waves, as demonstrated in EEG studies. Furthermore, such “entrainment of brain rhythms is quickly established and spreads throughout the brain” to the point that those who are seizure prone may experience an epileptic attack and “even normal individuals can experience unusual jerks.” These effects also occur to people who only stand and watch at rituals (Lex, 1979: 122f).

          D’Aquili and Laughlin provide more specific information. Auditory and visual repetitive stimuli “can drive cortical rhythms and produce intensely pleasurable, ineffable experience” though “simultaneous intense discharges from the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems.” When the dancing is prolonged, the autonomic discharges stimulate the median forebrain bundle, “generating not only a pleasurable sensation but, under proper conditions, a sense of union or oneness with conspecifics” much the way orgasm does in a pair of lovers. The rhythm itself produces discharges from the limbic system which result in a decrease in the sense of distance we feel from one another and an increase in a sense of social cohesion. Because observers are strongly affected by the rhythms, too, infants and children that are present at rituals undergo a socialization process that causes them to value ritual and cohesive social action in their later years (d’Aquili & Laughlin, 79: 156-9).

          Charles Laughlin reports on his own experience of dancing with Mevlevi Sufis, the “whirling dervishes.” He learned to spin with arms out “while visualizing a central crystal-form axis running up the center of his body and colorful streams of energy flowing out of his palms.” As he persisted in whirling to the music in a structured format with others, he eventually found that “the entire world of phenomena appeared to be spinning around the center of consciousness, which was the axis.” The cosmic state of consciousness abruptly ended when his ordinary awareness inadvertently broke through and began to talk about the extraordinary things that were happening to him. At this point, his left hemisphere regained its dominance, and the religious experience was only a memory (C.D. Laughlin, et al., 1990: 300).

          Some of the most important factors in producing altered states of consciousness through ritual depend upon tuning the autonomic nervous system, as we saw in the previous chapter, leading to spillover or reversal phenomena between the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. Lex reports that such reversals sensitize certain centers in the central nervous system. The rhythmic “driving” behaviors of ritual (drumming, dancing, and the like) “evoke a greater accentuation of right-hemisphere activities than usually prevails” (Lex, 1979: 130). This can lead to “oceanic feelings, ineffability, or pseudo-perceptions emanating from the right-hemisphere preeminence, evoked by the stimulation of subcortical and cortical centers.” These phenomena, which are also associated with increased alpha-wave activity, “may also underlie such concepts as ‘mana,’ ‘faith,’ ‘power,’ and other labels for both personified and impersonal forces” (Ibid., 128). These are the phenomena that Jung frequently cites as characteristic of “experiencing an archetype,” “numinosity,” and becoming a “mana personality.”

          Such language applies equally well to episodes of spontaneous religious states of mind, like near-death experiences, and to trances deliberately provoked through prolonged participation in rhythmic rituals. In either case, the powerful experiences “begin with unusually high stimulation of hypothalamic or limbic structures” (d’Aquili & Newberg, 1999: 103). In ritual behavior, “feedback from proprioceptors [the body’s sensation system that keeps us oriented in space] as in singing and dancing, seems to evoke new patterns of affective response in hypothalamus, limbic system, and neocortex” (Lex, 1979: 143). Among these brain parts, the limbic system functions as the “seat of motivation and affect” (C.D. Laughlin, et al., 1979: 30). The limbic system acting in concert with the hypothalamus and reticular formation integrates purposive, foresighted behavior when acted upon by a “tuned” autonomic nervous system (Lex, 1979: 135). D’Aquili and Newberg add to this picture the component of religious awe, generated when human ceremonial ritual activates the amygdala and makes it more than normally responsive (d’Aquili & Newberg, 1999: 101).

Ritual and human survival. Most sorts of externally imposed emergency that modern humans and their ancestors have had to face are economic. Climate change, for instance, generates a variety of economic crises for hunter-gatherers: sudden loss of food, clothing, tools and shelter; sudden threats from neighboring groups of conspecifics who need to expand their hunting range and eliminate competitors for dwindling resources; greater difficulty in dealing with large predatory animals who may be inclined to see human meat as a supplement to their shrinking diet; and greater danger from hungry scavengers when the hunt has been successful. When such crises persist, the social order will break down, leading to new instabilities, including damage to trading networks. All these factors threaten group survival.

          “The principal technique that hunter-gatherers throughout the world developed to cope with such recurring [economic] crises was to establish alliances with other bands, both near and, especially, far” (Hayden, 2003: 29). When dealing with other bands of conspecifics, there are only two ways to proceed: make war upon the neighbors to eliminate competition and acquire slaves or make friends and cooperate with them. In the long run alliances provide longer lasting benefits. They are “the unique survival characteristic of humans,” a strategy that requires overcoming the xenophobia natural to all primates. This is the fundamental reason why “virtually all hunter-gatherers have had strong ritual relationships”; for bonding with strangers requires “earth shaking emotional experiences created in ecstatic religious rituals that were adaptive in this respect” (Ibid., 31).

          Emotional bonding is the ultimate “glue” for alliances based in ritual, but image and narrative are also important. Ritual must protect and maintain the story that links the empirical world of everyday experience in ordinary consciousness with the greater cosmos revealed in altered states. A society cannot survive unless its members share most of the features of an effective and single vision of the world (McManus, 1979b: 224). What distinguishes us from other primates lies in the flexibility by which we can “learn to use alternate meanings of the same stimulus and to develop different patterns of interrelationship within the same set of meanings” (Ibid., 216). It is primarily ritual which establishes this flexibility and harmony, and it is the reason anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace famously declared, “Ritual is religion in action; it is the cutting edge of the tool” (Wallace, 1966: 102).

Stages of transformation through ritual. There are three stages in every ceremonial ritual. First, by entering the ritual space and beginning the sacred invocations, songs, and drama, a community separates itself from the activities of normal, or profane, life. Then, in a second stage, the repetitive behaviors of ritual enact a cosmic worldview that replaces the old profane perspective with a new sacred vision and anchors it in the aroused emotional state of the participants. This cognitive/affective condition is the altered state of consciousness that ritual generates by tuning the autonomic nervous system and reversing the usual balance between the two cerebral hemispheres (McManus, 1979b: 227). The third stage integrates the cosmic perspective of the myth with the activities of everyday life (Ibid., 211). In the puberty ritual, for example, the third stage is accomplished when the former boys have been reintegrated into society as men. By this time, everybody’s mind has been changed, and the reality of village life has undergone a transformation.

          Every participant in a ritual makes a parallel passage through three stages. At the beginning, joining in the ritual challenges the profane perspective of everyday life and causes the participant to believe in the visionary experiences. The content of this new belief will be in some degree incompatible with the profane outlook that returns inevitably when the ritual ends and everyday problems have to be faced again. In a second stage, however, one finds that direct experience confirms elements of the mythic worldview and helps to make the cosmic perspective understood. Understanding gradually replaces belief. Finally, in a third stage, one enters into full participation in the mythic cosmos. The myth is realized, becomes fully real (C.D. Laughlin, et al., 1990: 228). By repeated participation in their community’s ceremonies, therefore, members take possession of a new model of reality characterized by “entirely new sensitivities to events in the operational environment previously not perceived” (McManus, et al., 1979: 228). The same outer world will now be seen differently, aspects of it that formerly were overlooked will now be noticed and accorded new significance.

          Ritual is the cutting edge of religion because it transforms the lived world. It does so through consolidating a worldview through repetition and habituation. As we become habituated to the new worldview, the flow of information from the outer world becomes “redundant”: we see evidence for the new cosmic vision everywhere, and this gives us conceptual certainty and the feeling that this is the way things necessarily are. Such redundancy in our experience is supported by redundancy in our brain. New neural networks are established and their wiring “hardened,” and this gives rise to our increasing confidence (McManus, 1979a: 196-200).

          Lest we think that hunter-gatherers and church-goers are activating inferior brain processes in opening themselves up to such alternate worlds — for this is surely what our monophasic society wants us to believe — the biogenetic structuralists, following Thomas Kuhn (1970), admit that they, too, and all scientists, live in a world confirmed by repetition and habituation. A scientist “remains in a cycle of repetitive action and confirmation of the model until expectancy is violated.” When this violation affects “structural expectations,” the scientist stops trying to fit discrepant data into his model, and, after struggling through “a phase of more or less severe alternation in interpretation and behavior, . . . there emerges a reorganization of the structure of expectations that leads to a new structure of knowledge . . . a new reality model . . . characterized by entirely new sensitivities to events in the operational environment previously not perceived” (McManus, et al., 1979: 352-4).

Ritual and Myth

          There is an old debate about which came first, ritual or myth. Those who held that myth was prior argued quite reasonably that ritual always enacts a perspective on the world and our place in it; and since it is the business of myth to tell the story of how and why we came to be, it seems self-evident that myth came first and that ritual dramas were subsequently devised to illustrate it and thereby to focus the energies of participants in socially useful ways; for it is more than obvious that ritual’s ceremonies enact some part of a larger story that is the myth.

          Our evolutionary approach to ritual, however, calls such logic into question. For, as our ancestors evolved through stages resembling monkeys, then apes, Australopithecus and Archaic Homo, the only thread to be followed is the frequently performed, repetitive behavior patterns that articulate and clarify questions related to social structure and life’s emergencies. Because chimpanzees enact their rain and leopard dances without benefit of story-telling, and our archaic hominid ancestors probably enjoyed only the most rudimentary forms of communication, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that ritual came first. The most likely scenario is that our distant ancestors found themselves acting out rituals that had been handed down through countless generations before their cognitive imperative began to concoct rationales for why they had “always” done such things and why they continued to do them.

          Anthropologist Pascal Boyer says much the same thing when he takes exception to émile Durkheim’s sociology, which claims that we “have gods because that makes society function.” Boyer turns the argument around, “We have gods in part because we have the mental equipment to make society possible, but we cannot always understand how society functions” (Boyer, 2001: 28). In other words, gods, the protagonists of myth, arise as our cognitive imperative struggles with the zone of uncertainty surrounding questions of who we are and why we do the things we do. Meanwhile John McManus says ritual maintains our cognitive imperative by the enactments we and our ancestors perform because they are “both adaptively efficacious and phenomenologically satisfying” (McManus, 1979a: 184). In performing our rituals, we satisfy ourselves but do not know why. A large zone of uncertainty is uncovered. “Myth provides solution to the ambiguity” — seemingly on the basis of the story it tells, but actually “by its effect on the limbic system and the autonomic nervous system” (d’Aquili & Laughlin, 1979: 162). Drawing upon our linguistic capabilities, myth articulates a deeply felt existential issue; and when its ritual enactment works, the problem the myth articulates is “vividly felt to have been resolved” (d’Aquili & Newberg, 1999: 85).

          Generally, the monophasic West believes that myth belongs to its past, that directed thinking and double-blind experiments have taken us well beyond such narrative ventures into the unknowable. But the need for mythic explanations is universal. Jung felt it at Taos Pueblo and the Athai Plains. “This need is an inescapable condition of human existence, pervading all areas of interactions: from techno-mechanical and sexual to highly symbolic and creative” (Ripinsky-Naxon, 1993: 10). Every paradigm is “mythic” at its core, for it places the empirical against a larger horizon: “Something extra-scientific supplies the connecting tissue for a particular scientific theory” (Linden, 1974: 203). Douglas Candland illustrates myth’s survival and necessity with three propositions: “Psychoanalysis builds a myth about ourselves”; “evolution is a myth in the same sense”; and “the greatest ideas of which humankind is capable are myths” (Candland, 1993: 91).

Myth and the union of opposites. Jung says that the numinous power of every archetype stems from the tension between opposites which the archetype contains. Thus good and evil, the divine-spiritual and the animal-instinctual, the nurturing and the devouring. [14] God, the archetypal image par excellence, and symbol of the self, is always described in Jung’s works as the coincidentia oppositorum, the abiding together of the opposites, in the phrase made famous by the medieval philosopher Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464).

          The biogenetic structuralists have taken up this theme in their discussion of myth, arguing that the human capacity to mythologize requires three faculties: the ability to conceptualize, the ability to think in abstract causes, and the ability to think in terms of pairs of opposites. The first two may be fairly obvious: myth relies upon concepts about the world and ascribes causes to what happens by going outside the empirical to abstract principles and invisible forces that purport to explain. The third quality — handling “antinomies” or pairs of opposites — is the most interesting and characteristic quality of myth, which generally arrays benevolent forces against destructive, celestial principles against earthly, male against female, and so forth. For the biogenetic structuralists, “The ultimate union of opposites,” is the union between “the contingent and vulnerable in man and a powerful, possibly omnipotent force” (d’Aquili & Laughlin 1979: 162). Myth and its partner, ritual, “existentially unite opposites to achieve some form of control over what appears to be an essentially unpredictable universe” (d’Aquili & Newberg, 1999: 87). On a more mundane level, the major component in any effective alliance between two or more social groups will be found in the “supraordinate goals” articulated in myth, that is “goals that are compelling and highly appealing to members of groups in conflict and that cannot be achieved with the resources and energies of the groups separately” (C.D. Laughlin & d’Aquili, 1979: 297). This is the foundation for our successful human survival strategy, alliance building.

          But this success is only possible on the basis of what happens within the psyche of each group member, where the ultimate “glue” lies in “the ineffable, positive affect associated with the resolution of a crucial antinomy” (d’Aquili & Laughlin, 1979: 172). Surely not every member of a society is equally aware of what is going on. Hayden reports of his experience with the Maya of Guatemala, Australian Aborigines, and hill tribes in Southeast Asia that “about ten percent of the people simply did not care about rituals or supernatural beliefs, while another ten to twenty percent had abandoned their traditional beliefs in favor of new belief systems being promoted by missionaries . . . and most people in the Kuma culture of New Guinea did not have a working knowledge of their own religious doctrines or myths, even though these were accessible” (Hayden, 2003: 15). We would therefore be well advised not to romanticize our ancestors, for they, too, probably tolerated a range of attitudes among their societies’ members.

          Still, such conscious mind-sets do not necessarily imply that the rituals and their mythic imagery had no effect — even on the indifferent. Alternation in states of brain and psyche occur for the most part unconsciously. Undergoing the experience, regardless of initial attitudes, can be satisfying for people even when they do not know why. For, “If [mythic] structures ritually activated are reciprocally assimilated to [the] ego, then a structure greater than the ego is gradually integrated into a wider consciousness” (C.D. Laughlin, et al., 1990: 281). This position is quite similar to Jung’s notion that the whole personality gains when the ego begins to experience its relationship with the greater reality of the self. The least articulate or inward-looking individual may profit in this way from exposure to myth’s integrating potential. For the ritual expert, the shaman, however, conscious familiarity with the myth is essential. “Myth instructs, stabilizes, and integrates the shaman’s experience and provides the context and meaning without which he might sink into psychosis . . . [myth] tells the shaman what he has seen and how it fits into a coherent whole” (Ibid., 280).

Myth and neuropsychology. Biogenetic Structuralism proposes an easily understood model for what occurs in the brain when we enter altered states of consciousness and encounter a numinous solution to mythic conundrums. Tuning the autonomic nervous system is the key, for the cerebral hemispheres are each associated with one of its antagonistic subsystems. The rational, linear and linguistically-oriented dominant hemisphere (usually the left) is closely connected to the energy-expending sympathetic system, which deals with emergency situations. Meanwhile, the gestalt and pattern-recognizing non-dominant hemisphere is closely connected to the relaxed and energy-conserving parasympathetic. Driving either to the spillover effect can lead to an ecstatic state in which both systems are intensely stimulated. Most characteristically, such states involve the satisfaction of feeling that “polar opposites as presented in myth appear simultaneously, both as antinomies and as unified wholes . . . [what Christian theologians have called] conjunctio oppositorum” (d’Aquili & Laughlin, 1979: 176). They may also “yield . . . an intense awareness that death is not to be feared, accompanied by a sense of harmony of the individual with the universe” (Ibid., 178).

          Tuning the autonomic nervous system is essential for the production of altered states of consciousness that explore and unite antinomies, even as the brain’s regions and tendencies are harmonized by slow rhythmic waves. Probably these processes occur in other primates when they engage in ritual behaviors, but our more developed human brain makes possible a distinctly mythic consciousness that must be absent in apes. Over the course of phylogeny, the nervous system has increased in anatomical elaboration and complexity in ways that enable: (a) making conceptual and affective connections between experiences separated by larger gaps of space and time, (b) making more elaborate and diverse associations, (c) finding more flexible ways to apply such associations to our intentions, (d) ordering larger arrays of priorities within a hierarchical structure, (e) detaching logic from emotional inclination, (f) developing more extensive and nuanced behaviors. All of these increased capacities have been made possible by the “elaboration of prefrontal, parietal, and temporal association [regions of the] cortex” (C.D. Laughlin, et al., 1990: 181).

          As a shorthand notation, the biogenetic structuralists have given these interconnected regions of the brain a collective name, the causal operator; for the neural networks connecting these areas automatically search for and concoct causal rationales. Data presented in Chapter 3 on the inheritance of a “physics module” indicates that all mammals have some sort of causal operator. Ours is simply more elaborate and complex, and it has the advantage of language. On account of the causal operator inherited with the human brain and developed through cultural and personal experience, “human beings have no choice but to construct myths to explain their world . . . codifications of unexplained reality in terms of antinomies and causal narratives” (d’Aquili & Laughlin, 1979: 171). The causal operator “automatically generates gods, powers, spirits, and personified forces.” It lies, too, at the foundation of Western science, although the scientific disciplines have “imposed restrictions on the causal operator” to keep it in line with experimental evidence. Nevertheless, the history of science celebrates numerous instances in which theoretical breakthroughs have occurred through the dreams, visions and other altered states of scientists (Ibid., 170).

Symbolic penetration. Just as rhythms in sound and light entrain our neural networks and tune our autonomic nervous system, even when we just stand at a ritual and watch, so mythic symbols in narrative, icon, and drama “penetrate” beneath the conscious field and activate unconscious processes in our brain and psyche. The biogenetic structuralists refer to this process as symbolic penetration: “Symbolic penetration created by ritual can evoke [“infra-egoic”] structures and their intentionalities and can operate on them, mediating and transforming them outside of awareness” (Winkelman, 2000: 244).

          When Jung argues that images can “constellate” an archetype in the unconscious and begin or carry forward an important unconscious process, he is describing what the biogenetic structuralists call symbolic penetration. Occasionally, our authors say so straightforwardly: “All religious systems in the world use symbols to penetrate to and activate intentionalities that are either neurognostically present in all human brains (i.e., archetypes) or that have been developed through programs of enculturation” (C.D. Laughlin, et al., 1990: 195). Because symbols point to meanings that are, in the words of Jung, “partly known but mostly unknown,” [15] they act upon neural networks that lie outside of the conscious field, and these networks “exercise effects . . . upon other neural, endocrine, and physiological systems within the being” (Ibid., 190). Instances of such penetration, since they occur outside of awareness — even if we are conscious enough to find the images strangely interesting — “bypass [our] inhibitions” and thereby “transform, elaborate, and even integrate with the conscious network previously suppressed models [i.e., networks]” (Ibid., 196).

          Along with rhythm, symbolic penetration — achieved through words, costumes, choreography and the like — probably constitutes the first and most important effect of any ritual upon its participants and observers. It begins the process of producing altered states of consciousness in human beings, certainly, and very likely in all primates. For as “a complex of standardized activity . . . ritual may operate to amplify a symbolic penetration technique” (Ibid., 196). Therefore the drama of ritual functions in each participant and audience member as a sort of movie projector that generates a “theater of the mind,” entraining neural processes that in the best of cases bring about psychological and sociological transformation (Ibid., 213).

 

---

§
1. As the son of a poor country pastor, Jung was certainly not a member of the upper class, but he attended school with the best and the brightest, the Gymnasium and University in Basel. His “residency” in psychiatry at the Burghölzli, one of the most prestigious mental hospitals in Europe, was officially part of the University of Zurich.


§
2. Jung quotes, here, from Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Jacob Burckhardt (1818-97) was one of the great intellectuals of Basel, still an authority to be seen on the streets when Jung was a student in Gymnasium and University there. Jung had a high admiration for him.


§
3. Clearly no such revolution occurred eighty years ago, and it appears to this writer that sickish sentimentality is still with us and is the strongest characteristic of our American response to “terrorism.” We continue to try to suppress the masses, though they no longer live so near us. Another revolution is surely due, but no one can predict when or if it will come. I have discussed the evidence that points to our longing for an integration of the rational with the irrational and the “Gnostic” in Perils of the Soul (Haule, 1999a).


§
4. Neumann’s theory of psychology is very clearly derived from Jung, but he systematizes Jung’s ideas, solidifies them and reduces their flexibility.


§
5. K. T. Preuss, “Der Ursprung der Religion und Kunst.” In Globus (Brunswick) 86: 355-63.


§
6. They are: A. Alavi, J.B. Ashbrook, M. Baime, E.D. Bigler, A. Brady, S. Brandais, T. Burns, L. Chetelat, M.L. Foster, B. Lex, G.R. Murphy, R.M. Pankin, S. Richardson, R.A. Rubinstein, J. Shearer, W.J. Smith, and M. Webber.


§
7. Especially, Brian Hayden, Professor of Archaeology at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia; David Lewis-Williams, Professor Emeritus and Senior Mentor in the Rock Art Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg; Steven Mithen, Professor of Early Prehistory and head of the School of Human and Environmental Sciences, The University of Reading, U.K.; and Timothy Taylor, Department of Archaeological Sciences, University of Bradford, U.K.


§
8. The Unconscious in Culture, title of a collection of critical papers edited by Ino Rossi. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974.


§
9. Although they are fairly accurate in their understanding of Jung’s archetypes, they tend to reduce archetypes to symbols rather than seeing them in their full reality as tendencies to enact behavioral patterns, whether they be motoric, emotional, or imaginal. D’Aquili & Newberg (1999: 135), for example, reveal their bias toward imagery-alone as the nature of archetype when they try to “locate” the archetypes near the junction of the temporal and occipital lobes of the right hemisphere because that region has been shown to produce vivid memories, complex hallucinations, and dream-like states.


§
10. Minor change is, of course, possible, as we know from listening to “dialects” in birdsong.


§
11. Elliot Chapple. Culture and Biological Man. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston: 1970.


§
12. The authors use the symbol “Eo,” in place of my bracketed insertion. They mean “operational environment,” i.e., the environment as it would be described by an outside observer, such as an anthropologist or an ethologist. The contrasting expression that corresponds to a subjective worldview is “cognized environment” (“Ec”), which results when the cognitive imperative assembles a coherent world in the mind of the animal.


§
13. “Moon milk” is a literal translation of Mondmilch, which in geology is a descriptive term for calcite (calcium carbonate), on account of its milky-white appearance. It also occurs in a viscous fluid form and is a major component of stalactites.


§
14. E.g., CW5: ¶576; CW9i: ¶293; CW12: ¶553.


§
15. E.g.,CW5: ¶114, 180, 329; CW6: ¶201, 788, 814; CW7 ¶492; CW8: ¶88, 644; CW9ii: ¶127.