Primitive Unconscious
Primitive
man impresses us so strongly with his subjectivity that we should really have
guessed long ago that myths
refer to something psychic. His knowledge
of nature is essentially the language and outer dress of an unconscious psychic
process. But the very fact that this
process is unconscious
gives us the reason why man has thought of everything except the
psyche in his
attempts to explain myths.
He simply didn’t know that the psyche contains all the images that
have ever given rise to myths, and that our unconscious is an active and
suffering subject with an
inner drama
which primitive man rediscovers, by means of analogy, in the processes of nature
both great and small.
The ancestral spirits play an important part in primitive rites of renewal.
The aborigines of central Australia even identify themselves with their mythical
ancestors of the alcheringa period, a sort of Homeric age.
Similarly the Pueblo Indians of Taos, in preparation for their ritual dances,
identify with the sun, whose sons they are. This atavistic identification
with human and animal ancestors can be interpreted psychologically as an
integration of the unconscious, a veritable bath of renewal in the life-source
where one is once again a fish, unconscious as in sleep, intoxication, and
death.
The
symbolism of the rites of renewal, if taken seriously, points far beyond the
merely archaic and infantile to man's innate psychic disposition, which is the
result and deposit of all ancestral life right down to the animal level - hence
the ancestor and animal symbolism. The rites are attempts to abolish the
separation between the conscious mind and the
unconscious, the real source of
life, and to bring about a reunion of the individual with the native soil of his
inherited, instinctive make-up.
When you observe primitives, for instance, you will see that on the
slightest provocation or with no provocation whatever they doze off, they
disappear. They sit for hours on end, and when you ask them, ‘What are you
doing? What are you thinking?’ they are offended, because they say, ‘Only a man
that is crazy thinks – he has thoughts in his head. We do not think’. If they
think at all, it is rather in the
belly or in the
heart. Certain Negro tribes
assure you that thoughts are in the belly because they only realize those
thoughts which actually disturb the liver, intestines, or stomach. In other
words, they are conscious only of emotional thoughts. Emotions and affects are
always accompanied by obvious physiological innervations. AP 9
We have control of our will power, but the primitive has not.
Complicated exercises are needed if he is to pull himself together for
any activity that is conscous and intentional and not just emotional and
instinctive. Our
consciousness is safer and more dependable
in this respect; but occasionally something similar can happen to civilized man,
only he does not describe it as “loss of soul” but as an “abaissement du niveau
mental,” Janet’s apt term for this phenomenon. A&CU
If the primitive mind thinks a thing, it is.
A dream, for instance, is to them as real as this chair.
They must be very careful not to think certain things, as the thought
easily might become reality. We are still like that – we say
a mouthful, and at the same time we touch wood. TPoKY10
Apparently
for a human being to
face the
unknown – not to know in advance what is coming and yet be able to keep steady
in the dark – is the most difficult thing. Man’s most
ancient fear and cause of panic seems always to have been the unknown.
The first time a primitive sees an airplane or a car, he runs away, for
everything unknown is inevitably terrible. TPoPA 151
Statistics
were compiled during the last war to discover whether primitive or more highly
educated people stand imprisonment best, and it was found that the more
primitive the person the greater the rate of suicide from despair.
The Red Cross compiled the statistics, and I got the information from my
sister who was working with the Society. Apparently among the
most primitive people there were mass suicides; they just ran amok.
… It is also well known that primitive Africans cannot be imprisoned for
more than three days. Bushmen, for instance, cannot be
imprisoned, for no matter how well they are treated they just fade away.
They lose hope and die for psychological reasons.
TPoPA 170
For
example, to a primitive tribe its own tradition appears to it as
consciousness. In an African tribe, if a novice – having been tortured
and having had his teeth knocked out, or whatever – is taught how the world was
created, how evil comes about, that illness means a certain thing, that men must
marry women of a certain clan for certain reasons, that to him is consciousness.
The Africans say that a man is an animal until he has gone through an initiation
whereby he assimilates the tribal tradition. The uninitiated they call
animals, which shows that they would maintain that the acquisition of such
knowledge is the step from animal unconsciousness to human consciousness.
To us, however, who have a different tradition, the
mythological teachings
that the young primitive absorbs seem purely unconscious. We even
interpret such teachings as we do dreams; that this is possible shows that what
signifies collective consciousness to a primitive tribe is in reality full of
unconscious symbolism. TPoPA 221
You
know that in primitive countries it is impossible to hurry people.
If you travel in
The continuity of consciousness is, in point of fact, the
condition sine qua non of human
mental and cultural development. The reason the redemption
depends on the “question” concerning a knowledge of the ancestors is thus easily
explained. It must be remembered that at that time
consciousness was very
much less developed than it is today. TGL 296
It
is assuredly no accident that primitive peoples, even in adult life, make the
most fantastic assertions about well-known sexual processes, as for instance
that coitus has nothing to do with pregnancy. From this it has
been concluded that these people do not even know there is such a connection.
But more accurate investigation has shown that they know very well that
with animals copulation is followed by pregnancy. Only for human
beings is it denied-not not known, but flatly denied – that this
is so, for the simple reason that they prefer a mythological explanation which
has freed itself from the trammels of concretism