between them; for example, the modern writer and poet trace their lineage to the
shaman and the reader to the archetypal participant in the shamanic reverie. That
historical paradigm also serves the purpose of providing the intellectual context of
the thesis, since perceived historically, is seems more convincing than does the
more conventional literature review.
Carl Jung, Julian Jaynes and Eric Neumann assert that somewhere between
3,000 to 5,000 years ago, a momentous event occurred in which the human being
attained, as Jung says, consciousness, or in terms of Jaynes’ hypothesis, there
occurred the breakdown of the bi-cameral mind and, in Neumann’s terms, egoic or
self-consciousness came into being. More recent research by Lewis-Williams (2002
and 2007) and others suggests that this may be as far back as 35,000 years.
Albeit, the experience of day-to-day individual and collective existence prior to this
was enmeshed with the external world, it was existence with a myth-like quality of
participation mystique where the concept of self was coterminous with place (Jung,
1977, Jaynes, 1977, Neumann, 1970). However, it seems that a fracture occurred
in this psychic state; this primordial consciousness and ego or self-conscious-
consciousness emerged and with it the sense of alienation, of being cut away from
something primordial, paradisaical; a feeling we now express through the archetypal
paradigm of elsewhere-place and of our longing to be there. Julian Jaynes’ theory
of the break-up of the bicameral mind contributes to an understanding of this
process, a process that must be seen as one of the most formative events in human
evolution. This event, one may well surmise, structured human consciousness
between the polarities of place and elsewhere-place, self and other.
Jung described the consequences of this fracture in modern humans and
how in the past and even today pre-literate peoples regarded the earth as a sacred
place where the narrative of the soul was indistinguishable from the narrative of the
exterior world:
Through scientific understanding, our world has become
dehumanised. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos. He is no
longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional participation
in natural events, which hitherto had symbolic meaning for him.
Thunder is no longer the voice of a god, nor is lightning his
avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree means a man’s
life, no snake is the embodiment of wisdom, and no mountain still
harbours a great demon. Neither do things speak to him nor can
he speak to things, like stones, springs, plants and animals. He no
longer has a bush-soul identifying him with a wild animal. His
immediate communication with nature is gone forever, and the
ron
(Ron)
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