The Origins And History Of Consciousness (International Library of Psychology)

by Erich Neumann

creative individuals possessed of a stronger consciousness are even branded by the collective as antisocial.

The individualized conscious man of our era is a late man, whose structure is built on early, pre-individual human stages from which individual consciousness has only detached itself step by step.

The dawn state of the beginning projects itself mythologically in cosmic form, appearing as the beginning of the world, as the mythology of creation. Mythological accounts of the beginning must invariably begin with the outside world, for world and psyche are still one. There is as yet no reflecting, self-conscious ego that could refer anything to itself, that is, reflect. Not only is the psyche open to the world, it is still identical with and undifferentiated from the world; it knows itself as world and in the world and experiences its own becoming as a world-becoming, its own images as the starry heavens, and its own contents as the world-creating gods.

And he established the universe a sphere revolving in a circle, one and solitary, yet by reason of its excellence

able to bear itself company, and needing no other friendship or acquaintance.

The perfection of that which rests in itself in no way contradicts the perfection of that which circles in itself. Although absolute rest is something static and eternal, unchanging and therefore without history, it is at the same time the place of origin and the germ cell of creativity. Living the cycle of its own life, it is the circular snake, the primal dragon of the beginning that bites its own tail, the self-begetting ’Oυϱóβοϱος

This is the ancient Egyptian symbol9 of which it is said: “Draco interfecit se ipsum, maritat se ipsum, impraegnat se ipsum.” 10 It slays, weds, and impregnates itself. It is man and woman, begetting and conceiving, devouring and giving birth, active and passive, above and below, at once.

“I am Alpha and Omega.”

“prenatal” time. It is the time of existence in paradise where the psyche has her preworldly abode, the time before the birth of the ego, the time of unconscious envelopment, of swimming in the ocean of the unborn.

And just as there is no time before the birth of man and ego, only eternity, so there is no space, only infinity.

Nothing is himself; everything is world. The world shelters and nourishes him, while he scarcely wills and acts at all. Doing nothing, lying inert in the unconscious, merely being there in the inexhaustible twilit world, all needs effortlessly supplied by the great nourisher—such is that early, beatific state.

Only at a very much higher level will the “good” Mother appear again. Then, when she no longer has to do with an embryonic ego, but with an adult personality matured by rich experience of the world, she reveals herself anew as Sophia, the “gracious” Mother, or, pouring forth her riches in the creative fullness of true productivity, as the “Mother of All Living.”

the desire to remain unconscious, is a fundamental human trait.

So long as the infantile ego consciousness is weak and feels the strain of its own existence as heavy and oppressive, while drowsiness and sleep are felt as delicious pleasure, it has not yet discovered its own reality and differentness. So long as this continues, the uroboros reigns on as the great whirling wheel of life, where everything not yet individual is submerged in the union of opposites, passing away and willing to pass away.

In uroboric incest, the emphasis upon pleasure and love is in no sense active, it is more a desire to be dissolved and absorbed; passively one lets oneself be taken, sinks into the pleroma, melts away in the ocean of pleasure—a Liebestod. The Great Mother takes the little child back into herself, and always over uroboric incest there stand the insignia of death, signifying final dissolution in union with the Mother.

Many forms of nostalgia and longing signify no more than a return to uroboric incest and self-dissolution, from the unio mystica of the saint to the drunkard’s craving for unconsciousness and the “death-romanticism” of the Germanic races. The incest we term “uroboric” is self-surrender and regression. It is the form of incest taken by the infantile ego, which is still close to the mother and has not yet come to itself; but the sick ego of the neurotic can also take this form and so can a later, exhausted ego that creeps back to the mother after having found fulfillment.

for the infantile ego consciousness always feels its reawakening, after having been immersed in death, as a rebirth.

not only in the history of mankind is consciousness a late product of the womb of the unconscious, but in every individual life, consciousness re-experiences its emergence from the unconscious in the growth of childhood, and every night in sleep, dying with the sun, it sinks back into the depths of the unconscious, to be reborn in the morning and to begin the day anew.

How could the conjunction of opposites, as the initial state of existence, ever be represented mythologically except by the symbol of the conjoined

World Parents!

Their unity is a state of existence transcendent and divine,

“unending plenitude” and “nothingness.”

The uroboros also symbolizes the creative impulse of the new beginning; it is the “wheel that rolls of itself,” the initial, rotatory movement in the upward spiral of evolution.

spontaneous generation or the self-manifestation of a god.

The uroboric mode of propagation, where begetter and conceiver

are one, results in the image of immediate genesis from the semen, without part...

It is only personalistic misunderstanding that makes these sacral contents “obscene.” Judaism and Christianity between them—and this includes Freud—have had a heavy and disastrous hand in this misunderstanding. The desecration of pagan values in the struggle for monotheism and for a conscious ethic was necessary, and historically an advance; but it resulted in a complete distortion of the primordial world of those times. The effect of secondary personalization in the struggle

against paganism was to reduce the transpersonal to the personal. Sanctity became sodomy, worship became fornication, and so on. An age whose eyes are once more open to the trans-personal must reverse this process.

At this point in Egyptian mythology and its wrestlings with the problem of creation, we have the first beginnings of what was to be expressed several thousand years later as the “Word of God” in the Bible story of the creation and in the doctrine of the Logos—an expression that was never able to break away altogether from the primordial image of the “self-manifesting” and “self-expressing” god.

The self-incubating effect of introversion, a fundamental experience of the self-generating spirit,

In the beginning this world was nothing at all. Heaven was not, nor earth, nor space. Because it was not, it bethought

itself: I will be. It emitted heat.

Just as the maternal side of the uroboros gives birth without procreation, so the paternal side procreates without the maternal womb.

creation is something not altogether expressible in the symbols of sexuality,

The creative word, creative breath—that is creative

sp...

Only if a thought is a passion that grips the heart can it reach ego consciousness and be perceived;

It had no need of eyes, for there was nothing outside it to be seen; nor of ears, for there was nothing outside it to be heard. There was no surrounding air to be breathed, nor was it in need of any organ by which to supply itself with food or to get rid of it when digested. Nothing went out from or came into it anywhere, for there was nothing. Of design it was made thus, its own waste providing its own food, acting and being acted upon entirely within and by itself, because its designer considered that a being which was sufficient unto itself would be far more excellent than one which depended upon anything.

So far we have distinguished three stages of uroboric autarchy: the first is the pleromatic stage of paradisal perfection in the unborn, the embryonic stage of the ego, which a later consciousness will contrast with the sufferings of the nonautarchic ego in the world. The second stage is that of the alimentary uroboros, a closed circuit whose “own waste provides its own food.” The third, genital-masturbatory phase is that of Atum “copulating in his own hand.” All these images, like the self-incubation of one made pregnant through tapas—a later spiritual form of autarchy—are images of the self-contained creative principle.

Autarchy is just as necessary a goal of life and development as is adaptation.

Detachment from the uroboros, entry into the world, and the encounter with the universal principle of opposites are the essential tasks of human and individual development. The process of coming to terms with the objects of the outer and inner worlds, of adapting to the collective life of mankind both within and without, governs with varying degrees of intensity the life of every individual. For the extravert, the accent lies on the objects outside, people, things, and circumstances; for the introvert, it lies on the objects inside, the complexes and archetypes.

the introvert’s development,

being psychic forces

rather than social, economic, or physical ones.

building up and filling out of a personality which, as the nucleus of all life’s activities, uses the objects of the inner and outer worlds as building material for its own wholeness.

This wholeness is an end in itself, autarchic; it is quite independent of any utility value it may have either for the collective outside or for the psychic powers inside.

Self-formation, whose effects in the second half of life Jung has termed “individuation,” 50 has its critical developmental pattern not only in the first half of life, but also back in childhood. The growth of consciousness and of the ego is largely governed by this pattern. The stability of the ego, i.e., its ability to stand firm against the disintegrative tendencies of the unconscious and the world, is developed very early, as is also the trend toward extension of consciousness, which is likewise an important prerequisite for self-formation. Although in the first half of life, ego and consciousness are mainly preoccupied with adaptation, and the self-formative trend seems to be in abeyance, yet the beginnings of this self-realization process, while it only becomes noticeable with increasing maturity,

The goal of life now is to make oneself independent of the world, to detach oneself from it and stand by oneself. The autarchic character of the uroboros appears as a positive symbol pointing in a new direction.

the mature man

must once more free himself from this world—for now he is “fed up” with it—and come to himself.