In short, the principles of ego, free thought, free will, and self-responsibile action are in those societies abhorred and rejected as antithetical to all that is natural, good, and true; so that the ideal of individuation, which in Jung’s view is the ideal of psychological health and of an adult life fulfilled, is in the Orient simply unknown. Let me quote just one example, a passage from the Indian Laws of Manu, concerning the regulations for the whole life long of an orthodox Hindu wife:
Nothing is to be done, even in her own house, independently, by a girl, a young or even an aged woman. The female in childhood is to be subject to her father; in young womanhood, to her husband; and when her lord is dead, to her sons. A woman is never to be independent. She must not attempt to free herself from her father, husband, or sons. Leaving them, she would make both her own and her husband’s families contemptible. She must always be cheerful, clever in the management of her household affairs, careful in cleaning her utensils, and economical in expenditure. She shall obey as long as he lives him to whom her father (or, with her father’s permission, her brother) has given her; and when he is dead, she must never dishonor his memory... Even a husband of no virtue, without any good qualities at all, and pursuing his pleasures elsewhere, is to be worshiped unflaggingly as a god... In reward for such conduct, the female who controls her thoughts, speech, and actions, gains in this life highest renown and in the next a place beside her husband.4
The philosophies of India have been classified by the native teachers in four categories, according to the ends of life that they serve, i.e., the four aims for which men strive in this world. The first is dharma, “duty, virtue,” of which I have just spoken, and which, as we have seen, is defined for each by his place in the social order. The second and third are of nature and are the aims to which all living things are naturally impelled: success or achievement, self-aggrandizement, which is called in Sanskrit artha; and sensual delight or pleasure, known as kāma. These latter two correspond to the aims of what Freud has called the id. They are expressions of the primary biological motives of the psyche, the simple “I want” of one’s animal nature; whereas the principle of dharma, impressed on each by his society, corresponds to what Freud has called superego, the cultural “Thou shalt!” In the Indian society one’s pleasures and successes are to be aimed for and achieved under the ceiling (so to say) of one’s dharma: “Thou shalt!” supervising “I want!” And when mid-life has been attained, with all the duties of life fulfilled, one departs (if a male) to the forest, to some hermitage, to wipe out through yoga every last least trace of “I want!” and, with that, every echo also of “Thou shalt!” Whereupon the fourth goal, the fourth and final end of life, will have been attained, which is known as mokṣa , absolute “release” or “freedom”: not “freedom,” however, as we think of it in the West, the freedom of an individual to be what he wants to be, or to do what he wants to do. On the contrary, “freedom” in the sense of mokṣa means freedom from every impulse to exist.
“Thou shalt!” against “I want!” and then, “Extinction!” In our modern Occidental view, the situation represented by the first two in tension would be thought of as proper rather to a nursery school than to adulthood, whereas in the Orient that is the situation enforced throughout even adult life. There is no provision or allowance whatsoever for what in the West would be thought of as ego-maturation. And as a result—to put it plainly and simply—the Orient has never distinguished ego from id.
The word “I” (in Sanskrit, ahaṁ ) suggests to the Oriental philosopher only wishing, wanting, desiring, fearing, and possessing, i.e., the impulses of what Freud has termed the id operating under pressure of the pleasure principle. Ego, on the other hand (again as Freud defines it), is that psychological faculty which relates us objectively to external, empirical “reality”: i.e., to the fact-world, here and now, and in its present possibilities, objectively observed, recognized, judged, and evaluated; and to ourselves, so likewise known and judged, within it. A considered act initiated by a knowledgeable, responsible ego is thus something very different from the action of an avaricious, untamed id; different, too, from performances governed by unquestioning obedience to a long-inherited code—which can only be inappropriate to contemporary life or even to any unforeseen social or personal contingency.
The virtue of the Oriental is comparable, then, to that of the good soldier, obedient to orders, personally responsible not for his acts but only for their execution. And since all the laws to which he is adhering will have been handed down from an infinite past, there will be no one anywhere personally responsible for the things that he is doing. Nor, indeed, was there ever anyone personally responsible, since the laws were derived—or at least are supposed to have been derived—from the order of the universe itself. And since at the source of this universal order there is no personal god or willing being, but only an absolutely impersonal force or void, beyond thought, beyond being, antecedent to categories, there has finally never been anyone anywhere responsible for anything—the gods themselves being merely functionaries of an ever-revolving kaleidoscope of illusory appearances and disappearances, world without end.
Fig. 4.6 — The Thinker
3.
Now when and how (it might be asked) did the historic turn occur from what I have just described as the Oriental to what we all know to be the Occidental view of the relationship of the individual to his universe? The earliest certain signs of such a turn appear in the Mesopotamian texts of about 2000 B.C., where a distinction is beginning to be made between the king as a mere human being and the god whom he is now to serve. He is no longer a god-king like the pharaoh of Egypt. He is called the “tenant farmer” of the god. The city of his reign is the god’s earthly estate and himself the mere chief steward or man in charge. Furthermore, it was at that time that Mesopotamian myths began to appear of men created by gods to be their slaves. Men had become the mere servants; the gods, absolute masters. Man was no longer in any sense an incarnation of divine life, but of another nature entirely, an earthly, mortal nature. And the earth itself was now clay. Matter and spirit had begun to separate. I call this condition, “mythic dissociation,” and find it to be characteristic mainly of the later religions of the Levant, of which the most important today are, of course, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Let me take, as an illustration of the effect on mythology of this disenchanting turn of mind, the example of the Deluge. According to many of the mythologies still flourishing in the Orient, a world flood occurs inevitably at the termination of every aeon. In India the number of years of an aeon, known as a Day of Brahma, is reckoned as 4,320,000,000; after which there follows a Night of Brahma, when all lies dissolved in the cosmic sea for another 4,320,000,000 years, the sum total of years of an entire cosmic round thus being 8,640,000,000. In the Icelandic eddas it is told that in Valhall there are 540 doors and that through each of these there will go at the end of the world 800 battle-ready warriors to join combat with the anti-gods.5 But 800 times 540 is 432,000. So it seems that there is a common mythological background theme, here shared by pagan Europe with the ancient East. In fact, I note, with a glance at my watch, each hour with 60 minutes and each minute with 60 seconds, that in our present day of 24 hours there will be 86,400 seconds; and in the course of this day, night will automatically follow light, and, next morning, dawn follow darkness. There is no question of punishment or guilt implied in a mythology of cosmic days and nights of this kind. Everything is completely automatic and in the sweet nature of things.
But now, to press on a few steps further: according to a learned Chaldean priest, Berossos, who rendered in the early third century B.C. an account of Babylonian mythology, there elapsed 432,000 years between the crowning of the first Sumerian king and the coining of the Deluge, and there reigned during this period ten very long-lived kings. Then we observed that in the Bible it is reckoned that between the creation of Adam and coming of Noah’s Flood there elapsed 1656 years, during which
there lived ten very long-lived patriarchs. And if I may trust the finding of a distinguished Jewish Assyriologist of the last century, Julius Oppert (1825–1906), the number of seven-day weeks in 1656 years is 86,400.6
Thus the early Mesopotamian model of mathematically ordered recurrent cycles of world manifestation and disappearance, with each round terminated by a deluge, can be recognized even in the Bible. However, as we all well know, the more popular and evident explanation of Noah’s Flood given in this text is that it was sent by Yahweh as a punishment for men’s sins—which is a totally different concept, giving stress rather to free will than to the earlier, now hidden idea of a wholly impersonal cycle as innocent of guilt as the rounds of day and night or of the year.
The earliest extant examples of this second way of reading the Deluge legend appear in two Sumerian cuneiform texts of about 2000 to 1750 B.C. In these the name of the angry god is Enlil, and the man who builds the ark is the tenth king of the old Sumerian ziggurat-city of Kish. The period of the tablets is the same as that, already mentioned, of the designation of the ancient Mesopotamian kings as the “tenant farmers” of their deities, and the implications of the shift of view are enormous. For, in the first place, a dimension of wonder has been lost to the universe. It is no longer itself divine, radiant of a mystery beyond thought, of which all the living gods and demons, no less than the plants, animals, and cities of mankind, are functioning parts. Divinity has been removed from earth to a supernatural sphere, from which the gods, who alone are radiant, control terrestrial events.
But on the other hand, along with—and as a consequence of—this loss of essential identity with the organic divine being of a living universe, man has been given, or rather has won for himself, release to an existence of his own, endued with a certain freedom of will. And he has been set thereby in relationship to a deity, apart from himself, who also enjoys free will. The gods of the great Orient, as agents of the cycle, are hardly more than supervisors, personifying and administering the processes of a cycle that they neither put in motion nor control. But when, as now, we have a deity who, on the contrary, can decide on his own to send down a flood because the people he has made have become wicked, himself delivering laws, judging, and administering punishment, we are in a totally new situation. A radical shift of consciousness has bathed the universe and everything in it in a new, more brilliant light—like the light of a sun, blotting out the moon, the planets, and the other lights of the stars. And this new light, in the centuries then following, penetrated and transformed the whole world westward of Iran.
No longer were gods and men to be known as mere aspects of a single impersonal Being of beings beyond all names and forms. They were in nature distinct from each other, even opposed to each other, and with mankind subordinate. A personal god, furthermore, sits now behind the laws of the universe, not in front of them. Whereas in the older view, as we have seen, the god is simply a sort of cosmic bureaucrat, and the great natural laws of the universe govern all that he is and does and must do, we have now a god who himself determines what laws are to operate; who says, “Let such-and-such come to pass!” and it comes to pass. There is, accordingly, a stress here rather on personality and on whim than on irrefragable law. The god can change his mind, as he frequently does; and this tends to bring the Levantine spirit into apparently close approach to the native individualism of Europe. However, there is even here a distinction to be made.
For in the Levant the accent is on obedience, the obedience of man to the will of God, whimsical though it might be; the leading idea being that the god has rendered a revelation, which is registered in a book that men are to read and to revere, never to presume to criticize, but to accept and to obey. Those who do not know, or who would reject, this holy book are in exile from their maker. Many nations great and small, even continents, are in actuality thus godless. Indeed, the dominant idea in all the major religions stemming from this area—Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—is that there is but one people on earth that has received the Word, one holy people of one tradition, and that its members, then, are the members of one historic body—not such a natural, cosmic body as that of the earlier (and now Eastern) mythologies, but a supernaturally sanctified, altogether exceptional social body with its own often harshly unnatural laws. In the Levant, therefore, the essential hero is not the individual but the god-favored Chosen People or Church, of which the individual is no more than a participating member. The Christian, for example, is blessed in that he is a baptized member of the Church. The Jew is to remember ever that he is in covenant with Yahweh, by virtue of the mystery of his birth from a Jewish mother. And at the end of the world, only those faithful to the Covenant—or, in the Christian variant, those properly baptized who died in the “state of grace”—will be resurrected in the presence of God, to participate forever (as one happy version has it) in the everlasting paradisal meal of the meats of Leviathan, Behemoth, and the bird Ziz.
One striking sign of the profound difficulty experienced in Europe in assimilating this Levantine communal idea to the native Greek and Roman, Celtic and Germanic feeling for the value of the individual may be seen in the Roman Catholic doctrine of two judgments to be endured by the soul in the afterworld: the first, the “particular judgment,” immediately after death, when each will be assigned separately to his eternal reward or punishment; and the second, at the end of the world, the prodigious “general judgment,” when all who will ever have lived and died on earth shall be assembled and in public judged, so that the Providence of God (which may in life have allowed the good to suffer and the wicked to seem to prosper) may in the end be shown to all men to have been eternally just.
Fig. 4.7 — The Creation of Eve
4.
Let me now, therefore, in conclusion, recount three versions of a single ancient myth, as preserved separately in India, in the Near East, and in Greece, to illustrate in an unforgettable way the contrast of the general Oriental and the two differing Occidental views of the character and highest virtue of the individual.
First the Indian myth, as preserved in a religious work, the Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad , of about the eighth century B.C.
This tells of a time before the beginning of time, when this universe was nothing but “the Self” in the form of a man. And that Self, as we read, “looked around and saw that there was nothing but itself, whereupon its first shout was, ‘It is I!’; whence the concept ‘I’ arose.” And when that Self had thus become aware of itself as an “I,” an ego, it was afraid. But it reasoned, thinking, “Since there is no one here but myself, what is there to fear?” Whereupon the fear departed.
However, that Self, as we next are told, “still lacked delight and wished there were another.” It swelled and, splitting in two, became male and female. The male embraced the female, and from that the human race arose. But she thought, “How can he unite with me, who am of his own substance? Let me hide!” She became a cow, he a bull and united with her, and from that cattle arose; she a mare, he a stallion ... and so on, down to the ants. Then he realized, “I, actually, am Creation; for I have poured forth all this.” Whence arose the concept “creation” (Sanskrit sṛṣṭa, “what is poured forth”). “Anyone understanding this becomes, truly, himself a creator in this creation.”
So the Sanskrit version of our legend. Next the Levantine, of about the same date, as preserved in the second chapter of Genesis: that melancholy tale, namely, of our simple ancestor, Adam, who had been fashioned of dust by his maker to till and to keep a garden. But the man was lonely, and his maker, hoping to please him, formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. None of them gave delight. “And so the Lord,” as we read, “caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs...” And the man, when he beheld the woman, said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” We all know what next occurred—and here we all are, in th
is vale of tears.
But now, please notice! In this second version of the shared legend it was not the god who was split in two, but his created servant. The god did not become male and female and then pour himself forth to become all this. He remained apart and of a different substance. We have thus one tale in two totally different versions. And their implications relevant to the ideals and disciplines of the religious life are, accordingly, different too. In the Orient the guiding ideal is that each should realize that he himself and all others are of the one substance of that universal Being of beings which is, in fact, the same Self in all. Hence the typical aim of an Oriental religion is that one should experience and realize in life one’s identity with that Being; whereas in the West, following our Bible, the ideal is, rather, to become engaged in a relationship with that absolutely other Person who is one’s Maker, apart and “out there,” in no sense one’s innermost Self.
Myths to Live By Page 9