Archetypal Archaeology

Image by WikiImages from Pixabay

In the course of its ontogenetic development, the individual ego consciousness has to pass through the same archetypal stages which determined the evolution of consciousness in the life of humanity. The individual has in his own life to follow the road that humanity has trod before him, leaving traces of its journey in the archetypal sequence of the mythological images we are now about to examine.¹

In a reemphasis of the Hermetic doctrine of as above, so below, Neumann plots the course of his historic book, The Origins and History of Consciousness, written in the early 1950’s. As I was reading the above passage, I had the amazing idea that Neumann’s thesis is a kind of archetypal archaeology, which, instead of searching for and excavating ruins of ancient civilization in the literal earth, he is suggesting an archaeological dig in the psyche of humanity to examine the strata of archetypal development we have passed through during the evolution of human consciousness. Furthermore, he is also claiming than an individual also passes through analogous strata on the road to what Carl Jung calls individuation, or wholeness. The way of the Macrocosm is the way of the Microcosm.

An archetype has both historical and ahistorical aspects. In itself it is eternal, but it also plays a temporal role in human lives. Both the collective and individual ego experiences the “eternality of the archetypal images”² as a series of moments in time. 

The ability to perceive, to understand, and to interpret these images changes as ego consciousness changes in the course of man’s phylogenetic and ontogenetic history; consequently the relativity of the eternal image to the evolving ego consciousness becomes more and more pronounced.³

In order to gain a better understanding of these changes, we must examine the cornucopia of symbolism that has arisen in the history of human consciousness over the last ten thousand years. It certainly goes back further, but we have paltry knowledge of it prior to the late Pleistocene era. 

Neumann is pursuing the “deeper layers of humanity still alive” in mankind. He is, in essence, going to attempt a psycho-archaeological excavation in search of the archetypes that have so molded our collective and individual personalities.

Neumann claims that human evolution of consciousness has been a “continuous process stretching over thousands of years,”⁴ through which our psychic boundaries have been expanded. I wonder, though, about the phenomena occurring in our day, where logical thinking and true science is disdained by our current culture. It seems to me a regression in human consciousness, but I am of the opinion that there are troughs and peaks in the sine wave of human psychic development. We are currently experiencing one of those troughs, indeed. 

Even though Neumann believes the evolution of consciousness is a continuous process, he seems to agree with me that there can arise impediments that can halt that development. This has happened many times in human history, and is occurring now as I write these words. The good thing is that the pendulum always swings back to the creative expansion of human consciousness.

The creativity of consciousness may be jeopardized by religious or political totalitarianism, for any authoritarian fixation of the canon leads to sterility of consciousness. Such fixations, however, can only be provisional. So far as Western man is concerned, the assimilative vitality of his ego consciousness is more or less assured. The progress of science and the increasingly obvious threat to humanity from unconscious forces impel his consciousness, from within and without, to continual self-analysis and expansion. The individual is the bearer of this creative activity of the mind and therefore remains the decisive factor in all future Western developments.⁵

In archaeology, we find the most important structures have been built on top of older layers and structures. This is seen in the excavation of cities, temples, churches, etc. A  psycho-archaeological excavation reveals similar results. 

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.⁶

There is a distinction to be made, however, between the personal and transpersonal psychic factors, just as Jung distinguished between the personal and collective unconscious. Neumann says that “every historical inquiry—and every evolutionary approach is in this sense historical—must therefore begin with the transpersonal.”⁷ Furthermore, there is a crucial interdependence between the two during the entire history of the human development of consciousness.

This interdependence of collective and individual has two psychic concomitants. On the one hand, the early history of the collective is determined by inner primordial images whose projections appear outside as powerful factors—gods, spirits, or demons—which become objects of worship. On the other hand, man’s collective symbolisms also appear in the individual, and the psychic development, or misdevelopment, of each individual is governed by the same primordial images which determine man’s collective history.

Neumann believes that “only by viewing the collective stratification of human development together with the individual stratification of conscious development can we arrive at an understanding of psychic development in general, and individual development in particular.”⁸

Mark Dotson - https://soulspelunker.com/2022/01/archetypal-archaeology.html

Neumann, Erich. The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton Classics, 113) (p. xvi). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.