Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief

by Jordan B. Peterson

It is the conservative aspect of society that ensures that the past, as presently reincarnated and remembered, continues to serve as ultimate source of moral virtue and emotional protection. This remembered past is the mythical Father, echoed more abstractly in one "person" of the Christian Trinity. The power of the past is given due recognition in the ritual of an ces tor worship, for example, which is motivated by desire to remain "in communication" with the dead (to retain the wisdom, protective power and guiding hand of the dead). Such motivation comprised a force sufficient to give impetus to the construction of megaliths-massive stone "testaments to the past"-in a geographical zone stretching from western and northern Europe, through the Middle East, into Tibet and Korea, from 4000 B.C. to the present day.340