CHAPTER 2
THE EVOLUTI ON OF THE NARRATI VE PSYCHE
(Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Titian, c. 1550.)2.1 I ntroduction
Throughout history and across many cultures shamans, writers and
storytellers have recounted narratives about the origins of the gods, the birth of the
universe, the creation of the world and of animals and the first human beings. All
conclude with a common, yet essential structuring element: the motif of alienation
from a primordial place, the theme of the Fall, the great disjunction or transition
and the imperative to recover that lost state. These narratives are amongst the
earliest manifestations of MLC and mythopoeic literature and are evident in Classical
Greek literature and the texts of the Abrahamic tradition, which in turn, rest on
more ancient sources, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, which set the pattern for all
ensuing Hebrew and Greek literature (Thompson, 1981:199). This structuring
theme or motif of alienation from an original or elsewhere-place and the imperative
to return is, indeed, inherent in all major religious beliefs and seems, in some guise,
to underpin many doctrines, philosophies and even psychoanalytic theories.
The great religions and spiritual traditions recount a time when humankind
was somehow closer to God and nature. I t was a time, the bards declare, when
human nature was somehow pure and incorrupt in a place that we familiarly call
Eden or Paradise. I t was, in effect, a state of participation mystique, a term used in
the anthropological conclusions of Levy-Bruhl to describe a state of wholeness, in
which there is no distinction in the human psyche between interior and exterior,
between subject and object, between the psychical and physical. This historical
context is vital to understanding the contemporary writer, reader and shaman
because it reveals what amounts to an intense and continuing interrelationship