emotional energy it generates has sunk into the unconscious
(Jung, CW 18, par. 585).More recently, Robert Sardello wrote that:
We imagine that there was a time, long ago, when human beings
lived reverently in relation to the earth and the cosmos. We felt,
so the story says, whole, in our place, with God at the centre and
the periphery. Then the Great Disjunction happened. Matter and
Spirit were split into two isolated realms. God was removed from
the world and placed in His Heaven and the earth, gradually at
first, and then more and more rapidly, became the great supplier
of commodities, mere material substance (Sardello in Cheetham,
2005:xi).The great religions and spiritual traditions recount this time when humankind
was closer to God and nature, innocent, incorrupt in a place that we call Eden or
Paradise. The Christian creation parable ends in the Fall, when a new aspect of
consciousness, expressed in the feminine (Eve) or anima, challenged the established
order. Carl Jung writes of this:
The coming of consciousness was probably the most tremendous
experience of primeval times, for with it a world came into being
whose existence no one had suspected before. “And God said,
‘Let there be light’” is the projection of that immemorial experience
of the separation of consciousness from the unconscious (Jung,
CW 11, par. 284).
The parable of the Fall, might now be seen in its true light as the story of
the breakthrough to hominization and the emergence of human responsibility, or
perhaps more accurately, irresponsibility. The banishment from Eden is the
metaphorical story of the gradual evolutionary development of consciousness and
sense of alienation, of being cut away from something primordial, paradisaical; a
feeling now expressed through the archetypal paradigm of elsewhere-place and of
our longing to return there. This event probably gave rise to mythopoeic
imagination, the longing for elsewhere-place, Paradise, in fact it made Humankind
aware of place; aware also, as perhaps alluded to in Plato’s great myth, of the
elusive ‘other’ (or de-centred self) that we might one day be reconciled with. Such
is the narrative function within the human psyche or soul, but what is its aetiology?
“The beginnings of the art of words are hidden in a dateless past ... ”, so
avers Sir Maurice Bowra in the preface of his monumental study into the origins of
literature (Bowra, 1962:xi). He also asks his reader to surmise that in the Late
Palaeolithic Age, c. 30,000-15,000 BCE, the cave painters also “ ... delighted in the