Swellfoot (Campbell, 1988:31). The same might apply to the therianthropic figures
of the cave paintings and then later in the mythologies of some many diverse
cultures. This suggests that myth, or rather mythic content, may emanate from the
collective unconscious and be diffused through a process rather like Rupert
Sheldrake’s morphic resonance and that dimension, as I have suggested, is
consanguineous to the Imaginal Realm. I ndeed, Carl Jung believed that the whole
of human history could be reconstructed from the contents of an individual’s
unconscious (Jung, CW 11, par.280) and, conversely, as I have suggested, where
individual psychic content contributes to the collective.
We can, however, say with Jung that there is no external physical place
where culture originates, that there is only the one universal collective unconscious
of the human species. For the Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann the culture of
the Great Mother is universal and ubiquitous; it does not diffuse from Lascaux
(Thompson, 1981:16). I am not suggesting that any one of the many geographic
locations of cave pictographs should be considered the birthplace of the collective
unconscious. What I do suspect is that they are rather the earliest manifestations
of it. Neumann, too, rejects diffusionist explanations of prehistory and argues for
an evolutionary explanation in which the human mind is everywhere true to type
and quite naturally constructs images of birds and snakes and other animals
(Neumann, 1970:264-266), and perhaps also, I would add, therianthropes. What it
does indicate, however, is that there is a collective unconsciousness that unites
minds separated by time and space. This was the point made in describing the
evolution of the narrative psyche in Chapter 2. Even Sigmund Freud was deeply
interested in prehistory and was fascinated by Greek mythology; he studied it
assiduously, and collected Greek, Roman and Egyptian statuary (Bettelheim,
1982:14). I t is of particular importance to my thesis to note that Freud makes
many allusions to classical literature, often quoting Goethe, Shakespeare,
Dostoevsky and Nietzsche and other poets and writers, and throughout his
psychoanalytic writings discusses art, literature and religion in an attempt to engage
both our conscious and unconscious understanding (Bettleheim, 1982:15).
D. H. Lawrence was convinced that there was a non-mental consciousness in
the blood, ‘blood-knowledge’ that proceeds and is more reliable than intellectual
knowledge. I n a 1915 letter to Bertrand Russell he wrote:
Now I am convinced ... that there is another seat of consciousness
than the brain and the nerve system: there is a blood
consciousness which exists in us independently of the ordinary
ron
(Ron)
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