William Shakespeare.
CHAPTER 11
CONCLUSI ON: THE SACRED HERI TAGEThe centuries come and go, literary fashions pass, but the
magician reappears before us: shifting his shape and changing his
name, now mocking, now awe-inspiring, but essentially the same
character whose flame flew over all Europe eight centuries ago.
Trickster, illusionist, philosopher and sorcerer, he represents an
archetype to which the race turns for guidance and protection
(Tolstoy, 1985:19-20).This dissertation has examined issues of polarities: the conscious and
unconscious, place and elsewhere-place, the inner and the outer, the relationships
between mythopoeic writer and reader, the exoteric and esoteric. Another evident
concern has been the nature of the I maginal and the I maginal Realm and, of
course, that of the soul and the de-centred self.
11.1 An Epistemology
The concepts that I believe necessary for an understanding of Shamanic
Consciousness and Mythopoeic Literary Consciousness rest on the assertion that the
universe consists not only of material substances but also of events or energies that
occur in complex interlocking relations to form a vast web of interconnectivity. This
web which anticipates the participation mystique, de Chardin’s Noosphere, the Web
of Wyrd, Sheldrake’s morphic resonance and Jung’s collective unconscious.
Each individual psyche possesses a complex narrative potential arising from
memories of significant events and multiple explanations of past events and places
that allows them to shape their essence or soul and determine its boundaries. What
emerged from the cohort responses was that below the sensory perception of the
places we inhabit and the events that unfold in them lies a palimpsest of embodied