Between the primary stages of the prototaxic mode manifested in trance and gross somatic behaviors, expressing the dreadful and uncanny aspects of the numinous element, and the terminal cognitive levels of the syntaxic mode in meditation, peak experiences, and theophanies, all reflecting benign aspects of the numinous, there is certainly a great gulf fixed. This neutral area is occupied by the parataxic mode in which the "awful" aspects of the numinous element are veiled, and the syntaxic glories not yet unfolded. Although archetypes, dreams, myth, and ritual are also in the mode, in the popular mind these outlets are stereotyped as "art."

"Parataxic" according to Sullivan (1953:xiv) is a mode of representation using symbols and images in a private or idiosyncratic manner, similar to Bruner's "iconic" representation. Parataxic representation is identified by a presentational form or image, which has a hidden meaning or one not clearly evocated, and generally ambiguous in that it may often be understood in different ways or at several levels of meaning. The representation is not a reproduction of nature, but some transformation or interpretation of it. The form is figural and non-verbal and tends toward action, but the action is not definitive or a solution to the psychic tension; it is more like a rehearsal of it. The form may have numinous or uncanny qualities, but these are commonly more muted than in the prototaxic mode, as though they were veiled; and there is a gradual increase of ego control from the ASC and dim cognition of the procedures of archetype and dream,

(page 175)

surfacing in OSC in myth and ritual and finally expressed in the creative products of art.

In the parataxic mode, encounters with the numinous element are veiled. There is veiling first of the numinous element itself in archetype; there is veiling of the ego's cognition of the numinous element so that the product appears as an incompletely differentiated image, and finally there is veiling of the mysterium tremendum quality so that the numinous is gradually stripped of its awe-full-ness and hence appears in a more benign and aesthetic guise. The result is not ecstatic nor awe-inspiring, but is diminished to the human dimension. As art is nature transformed, so the parataxic mode represents the numinous element transformed. There is an element of magic in this change: representations of the parataxic are not so much gods, asuras, or demons, as they are fairies, sprites, and sylphs.

This veiling of the numinous element allows the ego to remain intact in the encounter, but it also decreases the possibility of paranormal effects, noticeable in the other modes. For these effects (like physical children) are engendered by the copula of the naked individual mind with the general numinous. But in this initial attempt to encounter the numinous with the emotions instead of with the body, we must expect indirect, rather than direct knowledge, and therefore be satisfied with intimations, allegory, implications, and transformations. These metamorphoses are as old as Ovid, as modern as the product dimension of Guilford's Structure of Intellect, as aesthetic as Coomoswarny's Transformation of Nature in Art and as mathematically rigorous as affine transforms in projective geometry,

A number of writers including Abell, Cassirer, Collier, Langer, Jung, and Sullivan have suggested at the relationship between the numinous element and the procedures of the parataxic mode, namely archetype, dream, myth, ritual, and art. Confirmation of this relationship is found in this passage from Sullivan, the inventor of the term "parataxic," (1953;342-3):
 

Both myth and dream represent a relatively valid parataxic operation for the relief of the insoluble problems of living. In the myth the problems concern many people, and it is this fact which keeps the myth going ... The dream has function for a person in an immediate situation. . . .

Sullivan is not the only writer who can testify to the validity of grouping archetype dreams, myth, ritual, and art into a common mode whose defining attribute is an ambiguous image.

Langer (Schilpp 1949:387)points out that language and myth are twin functions. She quotes Cassirer that the earliest product of mythic

(page 176)

thinking "are dream elements, objects endowed with daemonic import, haunted places" and identifies the quality common to early myth and language as numinous. Abell describes the origin of the tension-imagery process as due to the accumulation of psychic energy encountered when there are difficulties in usual action procedures. (Hamlet's vacillation is a good example). He continues, (1966:60):
 

These tensions stimulate our imaginations to form images embodying their emotional essence. The mental activity through which psychic tensions are translated into mental imagery we shall call the tension imagery process (i.o.). This process is the dynamic agency behind both individual fantasies and forms of cultural expression.

Because of his discovery of the archetypes, Jung had an excellent intuition about the numinous aspects of parataxic images (1964:4):
 

Thus a word or an image is symbolic when it implies something more than its obvious and immediate meaning. It has a wider "unconscious" aspect that is never precisely defined or fully explained. Nor can one hope to define or explain it. As the mind explores the symbol, it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason.

 
There are historical reasons for this resistance to the idea of an unknown part of the human psyche. Consciousness is a very recent acquisition of nature, and it is still in an "experimental" state. . . . One of the most common mental derangements that occur among primitive people is what they call loss of soul, which means, as the name indicates, a noticeable disruption (or more technically a dissociation) of consciousness. One might compare these quotations from Jung with what Rogers said (Kepes 1966:242): "The image is always and of necessity the work of an ordering will."

But perhaps the clearest statement on the subject is that of Cassirer (1925:1125-6) who says of the procedures of the parataxic mode:
 

The mythical world is concrete ... because in it the two factors, thing and signification are undifferentiated ... The concrescence of name and thing in the linguistic consciousness of primitives and children might well be illustrated: striking examples: name tabus. But as language develops ... distinct from all merely physical existence . . . the word emerges in its own specificity, in its purely significatory function. Arid art leads us to still another stage of detachment . . . Here for the first time the image world acquires a purely imminent validity and truth . . . Thus for the first time the world of the image becomes a self-contained cosmos ... In severing its bonds with immediate reality, with material existence and efficacy, which constitute the world of magic and myth, it embodies a new step toward the truth.

It would be hard to summarize the procedures of the parataxic mode with more clarity and precision than this.

Table V illustrates the progression of parataxic procedures across five properties - state of consciousness, direction of action, modality, goodness/ badness, and numinous aspect. The prototaxic mode and the syntaxic mode are shown for comparison anchor points on either side.

(1) State of consciousness progresses from trance in the prototaxic, through REM states in the early parataxic to the normal state.
(2) Direction of action starts with action being impressed on the individual, and ends with action being expressed by the individual.
(3) The cognitive modality changes from being excursed in the prototaxic mode, through pictorial, oral, and then expression in enactive, iconic,

(page 177)

Table V Properties of Parataxic Procedures

(page 178)
 

and symbolic representation at the higher levels.
(4) Goodness / badness goes from very bad in the prototaxic to very good in the syntaxic through intermediate levels in the parataxic.
(5) Finally, the numinous aspect loses the dreadful characteristics of the prototaxic and in the parataxic evolves from worrisome in archetype, paranormal in dreams, religious in myth, magical in ritual, and finally creative in art.

3.2 ARCHETYPE¹

The concept archetype belongs to C. G. Jung. Ira Progoff in his book Jung's Psychology and Its Social Meaning presents an introductory statement to Jung's psychological theories and an interpretation of their significance for the social sciences. Progoff says about archetype (1973, 1952:58):
 

When psychic contents come up from the lower layers (referring to the preconscious structure of the psyche), they may become part of the conscious attitude of individual personality, but the first question is what these contents are in themselves. In this regard Jung has developed the concept of "archetype," by which he means "forms or images of a collective nature which occur practically all over the earth as constituents of myths and at the same time as autochthonous, individual products of unconscious origin" (C. G. Jung: Psychology and Religion (Terry Lectures, 1937), Yale University Press, New Haven, 1938, p. 63).

Archetypes are identified as "fundamental patterns of symbol formation." They have been present since ancient days "because they grow out of the nature of the psyche in its most rudimentary form." These primordial images, once they have occurred in human history are then passed on to future generations as "part of a collective inheritance"; a collective unconscious. Jung sees these as "inherited pathways" not "inherited ideas" (Progoff 1973, 1952:59).

 
What are inherited are the same tendencies . . . it is the underlying patterns of symbol formation and not their specific details that are always the same.

(page 179)
 

Archetypes gain life and meaning only when you try to take into account their numinosity (psychic energy) - their relationship to the living individual. . . . Their names mean very little . . . the way they are related to you is all important.

The fluidic character of the numinous element enables it to take on whatever characteristics are impressed upon it by passive will. Imagine this element as a great ocean of water. Since the property of our vivency produces in spirit a tendency to form, the interface or surface of the ocean will develop waves. These waves are as apersonal as the medium in which they are formed, nearly as enduring, and almost as hard to conceptualize. They are, of course, Jung's "archetypes of the collective unconscious." Others call them "generating entities" for they behave like a mathematical function which generates other functions (see Appendix). Blofeld (1970) calls them "gods of the mandala," and if one is religious they can be regarded as tutelary deities, but that is not necessary. We will use Jung's word "archetype"; as such they represent the first effort toward distinguishing form in an otherwise formless substance.

Being "presentational" (in Van Rhijn's sense - that is, cognized at less than the full symbolic level), such archetypes are most commonly seen during waking hours in art, which is also a creative legacy from the collective preconscious. Art is especially rich in dealing with the myth and folklore in a culture, and hence, with the archetype, is a symbol of the collective unconscious of a culture. Archetypes are also revealed in dreams, mandalas, tarot cards, ideographs, and glyphs, and indeed wherever the presentational form outweighs the idiographic.

Roberts (1970:x) states that her control "mentions the existence of symbolic figures which assume identifiable forms within the unconscious in order to communicate more effectively. . ."Jung noted the existence of what he called archetypal figures in the unconscious who often communicate to the conscious mind through the symbolic garb of mythical, religious, or great historical figures."

Jacobi quotes Jung (Jacobi 1959:31) writing in "The Psychology of the Child Archetype" (Works, 9:1:267):
 

"Archetypes are factors and motifs that arrange the psychic elements into certain images, but in such a way that they can
 

be recognized only by the effects they produce. They exist preconsciously, and presumably they form the structural dominants of the psyche in general."

Jacobi continues (1959:32) that from the study of archetypes we

. . . gain insight into the psyche of the archaic man who still lives within us, and whose ego as in mythical times is present only in germ, without fixed boundaries and still interwoven wholly with the world and nature.
 

Archetypes may be considered the fundamental elements of the conscious mind, hidden in the depths of the psyche . . . they are systems of readiness for action, and at the same time, images and emotions. They are inherited with the brain structure - indeed they are its psychic aspect.
 

 
It was Jung's understanding that the archetypes, as structural forming elements in the unconscious, give rise both to the fantasy lives in individual children and to the mythologies of a people (i.o.).

These archetypes represented certain regularities, consistently recurring types of situation and types of figures. Jung categorized them in such terms as "the hero's quest," "the battle for deliverance from mother," "the night-sea journey" and called them archetypal situations. He suggested designations for archetypal figures also, for example, the divine child, the trickster, the double, the old wise man, the primordial mother.

The numinous aspects of archetypes are well explicated in the following Jungian passages. Jung (1964:68) says:
 

One can perceive the specific energy of archetypes when we experience the peculiar fascination that accompanies them. They seem to hold a special spell. Such a peculiar quality is also characteristic of the personal complexes and just as personal complexes have their individual history so do social complexes of an archetypical character. But while personal complexes never produce more than a personal bias, archetype create myths, religions and philosophies that influence and characterize whole nations and epochs of history,
 

(page 181)
 

they are both emotions and images; it is through emotion that psychic energy or numinosity comes to the image. Franz (ibid;377) points out that the dynamic aspect of archetypes have great emotional impact on the individual. Since their arrangement relates to the integration or wholeness of the individual they can affect healing and even creativity.

Neumann (1954:xv) calls archetypes "pictorial forms of the instincts." Calling the archetypes "psychic organs" Neumann (1954:xvi) says that
 

. . . they are the main constituent of mythology, that they stand in an organic relation to one another, and that their stadial* succession determines the growth of consciousness.

Neumann sees the mythological state arising out of the archetypes as the primal state of consciousness. In this primordial state man is literally one with nature. But (1954:xxiii) "contents which are primarily transpersonal, are in the course of development taken to be personal." Thus does the ego emerge out of the uruboros in both evolutionary development of the species and (by recapitulation) in the individual development of each human. (The uruboros is the primitive world - womb or circle depicted by a snake biting its own tail).

Neumann (1954:5) puts it:
 

The mythological stages in the evolution of consciousness begin with the stage when the ego is contained in the unconscious, and lead up to a situation in which the ego not only becomes aware of its own position and defends it heroically, but it also becomes capable of broadening and relativizing its experiences through the changes effected by its own activity.
 

The myth, being a projection of the transpersonal collective unconscious depicts transpersonal events, and whether interpreted objectively or subjectively in no case is a personalistic interpretation adequate . . . Consequently the hero myth is never connected with the private history of an individual, but always with some prototype or transpersonal event of collective significance.

Neumann (1954:264) believes that much of the uruboros comes before the Great Mother, and she before the dragon fight. He believes that
----------------------------------------------
*stadial means "stage of development."

(page 182)

this shows their archetypal structure, and allows a method of comparing and dating different civilizations. The uruboroshe points out (1954:266)
 

... is a borderline experience being individually and collectively prehistoric in the sense that history only begins with a subject ... when an ego and consciousness are already present.¹⁵

The uruboros hence:
 

. . . corresponds to the psychological stage in man's prehistory when the individual and the group, ego and unconscious, man and the world were so indissolubly bound up with one another that the law of participation mystique, of unconscious identity, prevailed between them.
 

Man's original fusion with the world ... has its best known anthropological expression in totemism which regards a certain animal as an ancestor, a friend, or some kind of powerful and providential being ... The same phenomenon of fusion as originally existed between man and the world also obtains between the individual and the group ...

Neumann (1954:270) points out:
 

The cardinal discovery of transpersonal psychology is that the collective psyche, the deepest layer of the unconscious, is the living ground current from which is derived everything to do with a particularized ego possession consciousness.

Franz (Jung 1964:378) believes that the archetypes appear not only in clinical analysis, but in the gamut of cultural activities, mythological, religious, and artistic, by which man expresses himself. And they have purpose. She says:
 

One can often decipher in them as in dreams the message of some seemingly purposive, evolutionary tendency of the unconscious.

We conclude this section on archetypes with Table VI which gives some representative archetypes. These should be thought of as basic motifs, which are seen alike in the individual dream and personal unconscious, and in the social and racial unconscious of myth and ritual. They are often explicated in art forms. Since two of these archetypes have special relationships with creativity in individuals, they bear a bit more comment. These are

(page 183)

Table VI Examples of Archetypes

(page 184)

the anima in men and the animus in women, the psychic gender opposite number for each individual. Despite Jung's investigation, we know too little about them, but apparently the way they operate on the conscious ego is different for each sex.

In speaking about the animus Castillejo (1973:73) puts it thus:
 

The animus, who is indeed like the woman's male partner, is not only intimidating and destructive, but is of the utmost value and is essential for any creativeness on her part. The first thing to stress is the collective nature of this figure. Like the anima of a man, he is the personification of a function which belongs in the psyche of all women, and is not a personal idiosyncrasy.

And again, discussing creativity, she remarks (Ibid:76-7):

"The power to focus is the essential quality which makes man the creative creature he is. . . ." "The power to focus is man's greatest gift, but not man's prerogative; the animus plays this role for women."
 

 
The archetypes to be discovered and assimilated are precisely those which have inspired the basic images of ritual and mythology.

(page 185)
 

These "eternal ones of the dream" are not to be confused with the personally modified symbolic figures that appear in nightmares or madness to the tormented individual. Dream is personalized myth - myth is depersonalized dream.

3.31 Introduction

If the stars only appeared once in a hundred years instead of every night, they would be considered a magical phenomenon of surpassing beauty. If dreams were as infrequent, they would be accorded the same awe. Insufficient attention has been paid to the fact that all human beings spend one third of their lives in the two altered states of consciousness known as sleep and dreaming, Both states appear necessary for physical and mental health, and they are generally distinguished physiologically by the rapid-eye movements (REM) of dreams which are absent in deep sleep.

Krippner (1970) and Buck (1971) describe and distinguish about twenty different states of consciousness, several associated with sleep and dreaming. Among the latter are the hypnagogic (falling asleep) and the hypnopompic (waking up) states with their special openness to suggestibility, vivid imagery, and the collective preconscious. Tart also distinguishes the "high dream" or the "lucid dream" (1969:169ff) where the dreamer "witnesses" the fact that he is indeed dreaming.

Dreaming is also associated with its two contiguous procedures in the parataxic mode - archetypes and myth. Dreaming relates to archetypes, because they usually only appear in dreams. Dreaming indeed, contributes to mental health because it "ventilates" the archetypes and expresses psychic tension which would otherwise be bottled up. Research studies have shown that when volunteer subjects are kept from dreaming for prolonged periods their mental health suffers.

Campbell, the great explicator of myth, states the fundamental relationship between myth and dream as follows (1956:11-14):
 

It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbolic thrust that carries the human spirit forward. ... In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has a private, unrecognized and yet secretly potent pantheon of dreams. . . . There is something in these initiatory messages so necessary for the psyche that if they are not supplied from without through myth and ritual, they have to be announced again through dreams . . . .

(page 186)

Sullivan (1953:342) adds:
 

Both the myth and the dream represent a relatively valid parataxic operation for the relief of insoluble problems of living. ... In the myth the problems concern many people, and it is this fact which keeps the myth going and refines and polishes it. . . . The dream has that function for a person in an immediate situation. . . . The schizophrenic illness . . . is the situation into which one falls, when for a variety of reasons the intense handicaps of living are so great that they must be dealt with during a large part of one's waking life in the same dream-myth sort of way. . . . In all these cases the psychiatrist is dealing with the type of referential material which is not in the syntaxic mode, and one merely stultifies himself, to my way of thinking, by trying to make this kind of report syntaxic.

3.32 Physiology of Sleep and Dreaming

Jouvet (1967) in a review of the subject points to Klaue's pioneer work in distinguishing sleep from dreaming by brain wave analysis. Kleitman and Dement correlated this activity with eye movements, showing that REM activity coincided with periods of dreaming, and with paradoxical deep sleep. Both emerge from a delicate balance between the raphe system which (apparently fueled by serotonin) puts the individual to sleep, and the reticular formation which sustains wakefulness. Paradoxical (deep) sleep seems to occur only in the higher mammals, and appears to facilitate some chemical restoration necessary for human consciousness.

Dement (1974) points out that the REM state "occurs in every human six or seven times in each sleep period and takes two or three hours in every adult's day. It is a highly elaborate fantastic window into a hallucinatory world." However, Dement is convinced that "the dream world is a real world." In his view the process consists of (1) a hypnagogic period, (2) light sleep, (3) deep or paradoxical sleep, (4) several periods of REM sleep or dreaming, alternating with (3) but with sleep becoming

(page 187)

lighter, and finally (5) the hypnopompic state which just precedes wakening. Kleitman (1960) traced these stages in detail.

There has been a great deal of progress in sleep and dreaming research since 1960. The effect of stress on dreams was well researched by Breger, Hunter, and Lane in 1971 in a book of the same title in which they found that dreams were the primary means by which the individual deals with stress in his environmental life. Peterfreund and Schwartz (1972) presented a unified approach to the phenomena of sleep and dreaming in which differences were explained in terms of activation and deactivation of certain programs in the brain. Williams (1970) reviewed sleep and dream research, and concluded that the subject was complex and not fully understood. Ephron and Carrington (1971) did a similar study on sleep phases. French (1957) continued an early paper on the reticular formation as the physiological means of keeping us awake, something like the little dog that wakes up the big dog of the cortex. Stoyva and Kamiya (1968) recognized electrophysiological studies of dreaming as a new strategy in the study of consciousness. Bourguignon (1973) discusses REM dreaming, sleep, trance, and hallucinations in the cultural aspects of her research.

Hadfield (1954:117) quotes LeGros Clark on the group of cells in the thalamus and mid-brain which:

 
... comprises a series of relay stations through which most sensory impulses must pass before they reach the cerebral cortex. . . . These groups of cells are more than simply relay stations; they are sorting stations which allow for the sorting and resorting of the incoming impulses so that they are projected on to the cerebral cortex in a new kind of pattern.

The physiological function described is very nearly that assigned by psychiatrists such as Kubie to the preconscious.

3.33 Theories of Dreaming

Virgil told us that dreams came through two gates of horn and ivory, and that the former were fantasy and the latter true. Since Virgil's time there have been many theories about dreams:
 

1. that they represent a somatic response (too much food)
2. that they outlet repressions (Freudian)
3. that they are required for mental health to restore proper brain function (physiological)
4. that they involve some kind of symbolization (parataxic)
5. that they open the door to the preconscious (ESP, creativity)
6. that they come from outside (collective unconscious or precognitive warning).

(page 188)

Hadfield (1954:5-12) enumerates various theories of dreaming as follows:
 

a. the physiological or "heavy supper" theory
b. the personal reminiscence theory
c. the theory of racial reminiscence
d. the premonitory theory.

He also (1954:67ff) sees specific functions for dreams
 

a. to reproduce worrying situations through perseveration
b. to serve as a form of ideation
c. to stand for experience by the reproduction of the problem
d. to warn of the consequences of action
e. to point to the causes of our troubles, often by rehearsing them
f. to make us face a situation we are trying to avoid
g. to point to the solution to a problem
h. to relieve hidden potentials and repressed emotions so that we may be restored to health.

He points out (1954:104) that "whatever we worry about, we dream about." But the helpfulness of dreams (since they are parataxic) is hindered by their being characterized by primitive thinking (Hadfield, 1954:140)
 

a. which is concrete not abstract, and therefore takes the form of image or symbol;
b. which takes place on the plane of sensation and perception rather than idea; and
c. which is characterized by lack of ability to relate cause and effect.

Hartman (1973:13-17) cites research showing the large percentage of dream-time in sleep found in young animals and humans, leading to the belief that newborn primates need more stimulation to the cortex than can be provided by sensory stimulation during waking hours. He also cites research (1973:14) that dream-time has a role in dealing with learning and memory, and another theory that it is associated with reprogramming the brain. Other research (1973:15) holds that dreaming bears a special relationship to intellectual ability. Elsewhere Hartman (1973:30) cites research suggesting that "D-sleep is an especially primitive state," and he notes (1973:38) that "during D much of the forebrain is in a state similar to that of alert waking." Studies in D deprivation suggest (1973:48) that it produces interference with memory and learning, but the amount of time required for D-sleep is "far from constant" (1973:62).

Hartman (1973:67) notices personality relationships with dreaming. Worriers require more D-time sleep. But this is also true of "tortured geniuses" (1973:68) for "certain very creative, concerned persons, both

(page 189)

in art arid science, often are long sleepers." Psychotherapy and Transcendental Meditation appear to reduce sleep requirements by 1-2 hours (1973:77), especially D-time sleep, whereas "an increased sleep need is associated with intellectual and emotional work" (1973:78).

Hartman's own hypothesis is then given (1973:116):

 
. . . that there may be a feedback mechanism connecting catecholamines and D-sleep such that conditions characterized by low catecholamines produces increased D-time, and that D-time in some way restores the integrity of the catecholamine brain systems, which, as we have seen, play important roles during wakefulness ...
 

Jones (1962:43) (from a psychoanalytic stance) views a dream as the product of several psychodynamic forces:
 

1. a motivating repressed wish of infantile origin;
2. the defense ego which discharges the energy of the repressed wish so as to maintain a healthy state of sleep;
3. the synthesis ego which governs the setting, style, and rhythm ... as a preconscious process of redifferentiation and reintegration of pre-adaptive epigenetic successes and failures . . . under the . . . pressure of phase-specific readaptive crises.
 

Another mental health implication of dreaming is brought out by Moss (1967:57-8):

 
Psychoanalytic theory postulates that dreaming is a safety valve and that failure of this outlet can result in a compulsion to dream

(page 190)
 

(hallucinate) in the waking state. Fenichel (1945:432) aptly represents this psychoanalytic viewpoint that because the unconscious has become conscious, the psychotic is dominated by archaic modes of thinking. He writes: "The schizophrenic shows an intuitive understanding of symbolism. Interpretation of symbols, for instance, which neurotics find so difficult to accept in analysis, are made spontaneously and in a matter of course by the schizophrenic." The verbalizations of the schizophrenic are similar to the unconscious repressed thoughts of the normal or neurotic. Symbolic thinking for them is not merely a method of defensive distortion; it is an archaic pictorial mode of thinking that occurs in all regressive states.

Dream symbols appear to allow repressed impulses to be expressed in disguised form. Sweetland and Quay (1952, 1953) and Moss (1967:167ff) made a series of studies on the content of dreams, arranged by personality patterns in conscious waking life. Well adjusted subjects produced "integrated" dreams with a minimum of emotional affect and considerable elaboration of the motif, whereas maladjusted subjects produced less structured dreams with high emotional content. The MMPI was used as a measure of adjustment. Surprisingly, the K score (until then considered a defensive suppressor variable) had the highest correlation with mental health and integrated dreams. In one of his earlier efforts the author (1955) who was then studying the high K factor found in effective teachers, connected these studies of Sweetland and Quay, and concluded that the K score was a measure of ego-strength. Apparently the creative impulse in mentally healthy dreamers results in innovation and elaboration of their dreams as well as their waking thoughts.

Jung (1964:37) says;
 

For the sake of mental stability and even physiological health the unconscious and the conscious must be integrally connected and then move on parallel lines. If they are split apart or dissociated, psychological disturbance follows. In this respect, dream symbols are the essential message carriers from the instinctive to the rational parts of the human mind, and their interpretation enriches the poverty of consciousness so that it learns to understand again the forgotten language of the instincts.

Jung (1964:41) in noting the difference between a sign and a symbol, says:
 

The sign is always less than the concept it represents, while

(page 191)
 

a symbol always stands for something more than its obvious and immediate meaning.

Kubie (1953:59) sees the symbolic function as bridging man's inner and outer world. Symbolism represents a continuity of conscious and unconscious mental activity, in which the unconscious extends beyond the boundary of the individual.

Jung (1964:33) reinforces this when he says of dreams:
 

That is what dream language does; its symbolism has so much psychic energy that we are forced to pay attention to it.
 

 
So long as we admit only discursive symbolism as a bearer of ideas, thought in this restricted sense must be regarded as our only intellectual activity.

In this physical space-time world of our experience there are things which do not fit the grammatical schema of expression. But they are not necessarily blind, inconceivable mystical affairs; they are simply matters which require to be conceived through some symbolic schema other than discursive language ...

Tauber and Green (1959:27) point up the difficulty of conveying the presentational form of a dream in the discursive language of everyday life when they say:
 

Dreams, as we know, are usually presented in the form of visual imagery. Therefore, in order to communicate a dream to a listener, one has to translate its visual imagery into a language. They continue that since a large proportion of man's experience in the dream is presentational, the psychotherapeutic session can be greatly handicapped by such a restriction as verbal discourse only.

Tauber and Green (1959:33) echo this concept when they say:
 

There is a fallacy in identifying the prelogical processes with infancy, a chronological condition. Prelogical thinking is part of the basic endowment of man throughout his life.

Jones (1962:19-20) declares:
 

The psychological function of dreaming for Jung is that of

(page 192)
 

compensation- for a kind of conscious myopia by a kind of unconscious vision. Each life, says Jung, is guided by a "private myth" grounded in both individual instinctual patterns, and the history of mankind, and mediated by the "archetypes" which are deployed by both. The function of dreaming is to restore connection between the profound awarenesses of the unconscious and the conscious with its "lopsided attention to superficialities."

Silberer is noted by Jones (1970:23) as believing that dreams perform a restorative function in permitting the (parataxic) symbolization of psychic tensions.

Tauber and Green (1959:ix) say:
 

Our general thesis will be that these prelogical processes are an inherent part of man's symbolizing equipment and that they illuminate and present his inner experience of himself and his relation to others. . . .
 

Dreams are the manifestations in consciousness, during sleep, of the workings not only of the unconscious ... but of the subconscious mind. They are more than the mere reproductions of problems left during the day; they sift out the material and work out the problems by their own methods, and on principles different from those of the conscious mind ... instead ... they use the function of analogy, of simile, or parable, and of symbolism. It is for that reason ... that the subconscious mind is manifested in dreams and is able to solve problems which the conscious mind by its reasoning has failed to solve.

But not only are dreams "restorative" to the individual in that they permit the outletting of psychic tension from the subconscious, and idiosyncratic in that, as Jung (1964:viii) notes: "The dreamer's unconscious is communicating with the dreamer alone, and is selecting symbols which have meaning to the dreamer and no one else . . ."' they also involve the collective unconscious whose expressions may be social rather than personal.

As Deveraux says in the introduction of Lincoln (1970:vi):

 
He highlighted with great clarity a process which might be called the "socialization" of the dream; its integration into the institutional culture of the dreamer. . . . Expanding a hypothesis . . . that certain supernaturalistic beliefs are derived from dream experiences, Dr. Lincoln shows that other culture elements too
 

... may be inspired by dreams. In this connection he cites not only ritual acts, political decisions, and works of art, but three examples of scientific activity.

The psychological significance of this concept is that dreams may be interpreted equally well as due to the culture pattern of the collective preconscious, as well as the tensions in the individual unconscious.

This conclusion is reached by Lincoln (1970:26) when he says:
 

The structure of dreams and myths . . . in primitive cultures, can be regarded, therefore, as similar manifestations of the unconscious mind.

3.34 Nightmares

Nightmares (the word derives from a spirit not a horse) evoke the uncanny dread of an early and prototaxic exposure to the numinous. They are, hence, characteristic of rather immature individuals (children) or regressed and mentally unhealthy adults. They can be looked upon as severe "unstressing" experiences which are traumatic to the conscious ego, (see section 2.23).

As Hadfield (1954:176) explains:
 

The distinctive features of a nightmare in the more restricted sense of the term is that of a monster, whether animal or subhuman, which visits us during sleep and produces a sense of dread.

Hadfield (1954:177) quotes Ernest Jones that there are:
 

...three cardinal features of the malady: (a) agonizing dread, (b) a sense of oppression or weight at the chest which alarmingly interferes with respiration, (c) a conviction of helpless paralysis, together with other subsidiary symptoms such as palpitation.
 

But all of these are the accompaniments of any intense fear; any severe enough dread will affect our respiration, produce sweating and palpitation, and the sense of paralysis as when we say we are paralyzed by fear.

Regarding dreams of devouring animals such as wolves, Hadfield (1954:195) says:
 

So too with the nightmare and myths of "devouring wolves" where the emphasis is upon the same sadistic desires in relation to food.We are the devouring wolves. In the stories of the werewolf,
 

 
men turn into wolves, this being a reproduction and representation of what happens to a man under the dominance of an overwhelming passion. . . .

3.35 Hypnotic Investigation of Dreams

One of the favorite (though not the most fruitful) methods of psychological study of dreams has been through hypnotic investigation. The most comprehensive material on this is the book by Moss (1967) of the same title as the heading. It is both a book of facts, and a compendium of readings.

As Moss tells us (1967:3-4):
 

The central proposition of the psychoanalytic theory of dreams is that dream formation is an unconscious event.... It was in his attempt to understand the language of the dream that Freud first differentiated between a primary and a secondary mode of thinking. . . . Thus in psychoanalysis the dream has both a manifest content, and a latent or repressed meaning, and the interpretation of the latter appears to be resisted by powerful forces. . . . Dreams were regarded as a distorted, perceptual-hallucinatory form of direct wish fulfillment, vis-a-vis the logical orderly manner of thinking of normal waking life. In later formulations Freud recognized the dream as a regressive or primitive mode of thought.

And Moss adds (1967:5):
 

Freud, then, did not regard symbols as exclusively or even primarily a problem of dream interpretation, but basically a problem of the understanding of unconscious or primary thought processes. . . .

Besides Moss' (1967) book, two reviews of the subject of hypnotic dreams, one by Barber (1962a), and the other by Tart (1965) are worthy of note. Both have continued their investigations since then. Barber's work is well represented in the Aldine Annuals Biofeedback and Self Control(1970,1971, 1972). Whereas Barber tends to a position which discredits the genuineness of hypnotism and the hypnotic dream, Tart (1969), using new techniques, tends to support the reality of the phenomena.

Honorton (1971) discusses a number of methodological problems, and suggests that future studies in the area should be directed toward:
(a) further exploration of electrophysiological concommitants of nocturnal and induced dreams, and
(b) comparison of nocturnal and hypnotic dreams from the same Ss.

(page 195)

Silberer, the pioneer researcher on hypnagogic phenomena, analyzed the image-making ability of the dreamer and concomitant conditions. As Tauber and Green (1959:42) tell us:
 

In analyzing this experience Silberer states that it consisted really of two conditions - drowsiness and an effort to think. Silberer called this effect "the autosymbolic phenomenon."

Moss (1967:2-3) points out that the central proposition of the psychoanalytic theory of dreams is that dream formation is an unconscious event in which the dream is a distorted, hallucinatory form of wish-fulfillment, and a regressive, or primitive mode of thought. Furthermore, dreams involve symbolization which, in Freudian terms, disguise meaning as well as represent it.

The structure and function of hypnotically induced dreams has been a general method of focus in research. Schnek (1967) reviewed the literature on this subject. Brady and Bosner (1967) investigated rapid eye movement during such dreams. Sacerdote (1968) discussed induced dreams and pointed out their therapeutic value.

Some miscellaneous studies deserve mention. Suttcliffe and others (1971) found a curvilinear relationship between hypnotic suggestibility and vividness of imagery. Stross and Seevrin (1967) did an interesting study which connected recall of dreams with susceptibility to hypnosis, thereby verifying that hypnosis opens up the recall channel in some manner. Tart and Dick (1971) reported on the posthypnotic dream.

One of the peculiar aspects of hypnotic research on dreams is that there is lots of it, but no clarifying overall theories. It almost looks as though this method, while appealing to the psychologist, is not in the main stream of the underlying variables. Perhaps this situation is due to the fact that generally hypnosis does not give enough weight to dreams as the avenue to the numinous.

3.36 Dreams and Creativity

If creativity results from psychological openness to the preconscious, then dreams, reveries, and fantasies should be prime channels to creative insight. There are, in fact, many testimonies from creative people that this is the manner by which they have made their discoveries, (see below). Dreaming still seems to be one of the easiest methods of contact with the numinous through the preconscious. This encounter usually results in an image, not always clear at first, capable of different interpretations, and presentational not verbal, hence a symbol in its emergent sense.

Silberer's "autosymbolic phenomena" closely approximate creative intuition. Both are products of the hypnagogic state when the contact

(page 196)

between the conscious mind and the generalized preconscious is most easily effected. Since this juncture is fraught with some dissociation of the ego and loss of command over ideas, images or signs are used as a substitute. Silberer notes the corresponding process in the development of the race (Rapaport 1951:217):
 

Generation after generation, man pursues knowledge through a series of images and mythologies - then the symbol as a substitute for ideas of which humanity has no command as yet. . . .

One of the functions of dreams, according to Lincoln (1970:27), is that "the soul wanders while the body sleeps and undergoes experiences in a supposedly real world." The dream experience is regarded as having a reality of its own, cognate with the reality of waking. Dreams are especially important in this view as they furnish experience for the spirit in sleep, as nature does for the body while awake.

In many cultures dreams are accounted to be communications from on High to the individual, giving knowledge important for his safety or welfare. This concept leads to the modern psychological view of the dream as irruptions of internal psychic tensions from the personal unconscious. Dreams may also concern social as well as personal problems, and such dreams, which tap the collective unconscious, are not (as Sir Edward Tylor first noted) the womb of creativity in the individual, but of collective myth and religion in the tribe. Cures, magic, totems, ritual, ceremonies, and many other aspects of culture result from such information. As Lincoln (1970:95) notes:
 

Much of primitive culture is derived from the ancestor spirit who communicated through the culture pattern dream, the dream image being accepted as the real ancestor (i.i.o.).
 

In the creative activity of individual man, as in the creative activity of the race, the image plays an equally significant role. Poets and artists throughout the ages have told of the image that comes as a step in the creative experience.... Language itself has its origin in man's inherent tendency to give form and appearance to his feelings and thoughts. . . .
 

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are used in creative behavior. Hamilton (1971) studied dreams in the creativity of the poet Keats. Garcia-Barroso (1972) discusses the relationship between dreams, reveries, and unconscious fantasies, noting that they are all aspects of desire which may or may not be explicated in creative performance.

Several systems have been developed to use dreams and fantasy to solve creatively problems too baffling for the conscious mind. Mention may be made of the autogenic system of Shultz, the dream programming for creative response of Cora Flagg (sect.3.38) the hypnoprojective technique of Moss, the guided fantasy of Desoille, and several others.

Dreams also constitute an excellent avenue to projection. The hypnoprojective fantasy technique, as Moss (1967:25) reminds us, bears a close resemblance to the waking guided dream or fantasy of Desoille (1961), developed in France and popularized in the U.S.A. by Gil Repaille at the Buffalo Creative Problem-Solving Workshop. The subject after being relaxed, is given the suggestion that he "prepare for imaginary trips into the realm of creative imagination: an object may be presented, and the person is then asked, "What might you do with it?" This quickly allows the healthy subject to exhibit creative innovation, which is the aim of the fantasy technique. Van Berg (1962) points out that whereas under these conditions, the healthy person can cooperate in these descents into the preconscious, the neurotic always encounters hindrances, embodied in a figure (the keeper of the threshold) which prohibits exploration. These activities are similar to the Jungian technique of "active imagination."

Moss (1967:27) reports that Desoille believes that his client is in a hypnagogic state intermediate between true hypnosis and dreaming: "In this hypnagogic state ... the imagination, accompanied by imagery of a hallucinatory intensity is dissociated from the critical facilities."

And Moss (1967:26-7) concludes his analysis by pointing out that like "Jung, Desoille believes that when the patient can relate himself to the archetypes of the "Collective Unconscious" he has attained an appropriate basis for resolving the problems of life."

Moss (1970) has since developed a new study on dreams, images, and fantasy using the Semantic Differential technique.

In commenting on this matter, Green et. al. (1971a) say:
 

From these experiments it appears that there is a relationship or link between alpha and theta rhythms, reverie, and hypnagogic-like imagery. That there is also a link between (them) and creativity is revealed by the many true creative or intuitive
 

creative ideas and solutions (in contradistinction to logical problem-solving solutions) that have come to consciousness out of or during reverie and dream-like states.

After a discussion of this type of creative experience of Cocteau, Stevenson, Kekule, Loewi, and others, they go on:
 

There are literally hundreds of anecdotes that show in some way not yet clearly understood, hypnagogic imagery . . . dreaming, and creativity are associated. The terminology used to describe the state we have called reverie is extremely varied, as for instance the "fringe" of consciousness (James 1959), the "preconscious" (Kubie 1958), the off-conscious and the transliminal mind: (Rugg, 1963), and the "transliminal experience" (MacKinnon 1964).

Lincoln (1970:90) quotes Seafield as follows:
 

The Divina Comedia was inspired by a dream; Hermas wrote his "Pastor" to the dictation of a voice heard in sleep; Condorcet saw in a dream the final stages of a difficult calculation, and Condillac frequently developed and finished a subject in his dreams.
But the most complete summary of the use of dreams for discoveries and inventions by scientists is by Krippner (1972):

There are records of many instances of artistic, scientific, and philosophical insights occurring during dreams. However, an important question has never been resolved: Does the creative dream represent a consolidation of ideas attained while one is awake (and in ordinary reality), or does it represent insights gained from experiences attained within the non-ordinary reality of the dream itself?

Robert Louis Stevenson (cited by Woods, 1947:871-879) wrote that he learned early in his life that he could dream complete stories and that he could even go back to the same dreams on succeeding nights to give them a different ending. Later he trained himself to remember his dreams and to dream plots for his books. He wrote that his dreams were produced by "little people" who "labor all night long," and set before him "truncheons of tales upon their lighted theatre." Stevenson described how he obtained the plot for his short story, "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde:"

 
For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the

(page 199)
 

window, and a scene afterwards split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers. All the rest was made awake, and consciously ... All that was given me was the matter of three scenes, and the central idea of a voluntary change becoming involuntary . . . "
 

Jean Cocteau (1952) dreamed he was watching a play about King Arthur; he later noted that it was "an epoch and characters about which I had no documentary information." The dream was so challenging that Cocteau was led to write his "The Knights of the Round Table". He concluded, "The poet is at the disposal of his night. He must clean his house and await its visitation."

Do these creative dreams of artists consolidate old material or do they find and explore a new reality? It appears that these dreams do both; they find and give expression to non-ordinary reality by giving better insight into people and events, and they do so by consolidating or integrating past material. Conversely, we can also say that by giving expression to a non-ordinary reality these dreams synthesize a great deal of material.²
 

Since the most ancient times dreams are reputed to have paranormal associations. Examples are found in the Bible, (e.g. Moses, Joseph) and in the sacred writings of nearly every high culture. Impressively, precognition is frequent in such dreams, which indicates a reality outside time, that is, the numinous element. Telepathic dreams are also found, as are dreams of monition and advice, and even those of assurance from beyond the grave. A dream may incorporate several or all aspects.

Hill (1968) has compiled accounts of precognitive dreams. Cicero dreamt that a fair young man would become emperor, and later recognized Octavius as the lad when he was introduced (p. 7). William II of England had a precognitive death warning the night before he was shot (p. 9). A Kentish father wrote his son at Oxford about a coming robbery, which was instrumental in the culprit's apprehension (p. 14). A British M.P. dreamed about the coming assassination of Lord Perceval, the Chancellor (p. 21). Lincoln dreamed of his own assassination (pp. 28-9). Dickens dreamed of a certain woman the day before he met her (p. 30). Similar material can also be found in Prince (1963). Ullman, Krippner, and Vaughan (1973:178-189) devote an entire chapter to precognitive dreams.

Hadfield (1954:218ff) discusses three types of precognitive dreams:
 

a. those apparently precognitive but capable of a simpler explanation;

(page 200)
 

b. veridictical information of contemporary events explainable by telepathy;
c. apparently precognitive dreams, explainable by neither of the above.

Jung (1964:36) notes the precognitive aspect of such dreams in declaring:
 

Thus dreams may sometimes announce certain situations long before they actually happen. This is not necessarily a miracle. ... Many crises in our lives have a long unconscious history. We move toward them step by step unaware of the dangers that are accumulating. But what we consciously fail to see is frequently perceived by our unconscious, which can pass the information on through dreams.
 

Precognitive dreams have been baffling because until now there has been no rationale to explain the time distortion. Most people find this distortion difficult to accept because to them it demands a deterministic universe. But contact with the numinous (sect. 1.32, 4.13, 4.72) evokes its posture of being outside time and space, and this concept should help us to see the reasons for these stubborn and unusual facts. If precognitive dreams are monitions of a probable but not certain future, which may be avoided if we take action (as did Scrooge), they are precognitive only if we ignore them.

Telepathic dreams are easier to understand, although what is a time distortion in precognition has become a space distortion in telepathy. The most common telepathic dream is death-bed telepathy which is sometimes experienced in a dream, and sometimes in a waking vision. Both Hill (1968) and French (1963) are full of such accounts in which a person wakes up in the morning and announces that a distant relative or friend is dead, only receiving verification of the matter later. Our earlier book (1974:12-25) has several such accounts which are rather common even in the general literature. Apparently the lapse of the agent into the hypnagogic state preceding death brings his mind (still freighted with the desire to communicate his plight) into contact with the numinous element, and that is all that is required.

(page 201)

Unfortunately, research on telepathic dreams must be content with much less motivated circumstances than death-bed agonies: what usually results is the calling of Zener cards or the targeting of pictures from a distance. Of all the research in this area the best and most extensive in this country has been done at the Maimonides Hospital Dream Study Laboratory by Ullman, Krippner, and their associates. In general, results have been evidential, but rationale hard to find. Honorton (1973) investigating dream recall and ESP reported results at p = .002; Krippner (1970) reported transmission of artistic stimuli telepathically during sleep (p - .004). Krippner (1971) investigated sex differences; and he (1972) also reported a long distance (fourteen miles) dream telepathic success (p - .004). Krippner, Honorton and Ullman (1972) reported on the dream telepathy of art prints. Previously Krippner and Ullman showed that telepathic communication can appear in dreams. (See Table II, page 112.)

Ullman (1968) reported early on the dream laboratory research. In 1972 he recounted some of the studies suggesting telepathy in dreaming. Ullman, Krippner and Feldstein earlier (1967) demonstrated that dream telepathy was feasible. Ullman and Krippner (1970) reported three studies indicating the effect; in 1971 they did a popular article on ESP in dreams; in 1972, using REM monitoring techniques, they were able to prove dream telepathy (p = .001). Ullman, Krippner, and Vaughan (1973) finally published the bulk of the dream laboratory studies in a book Dream Telepathy.

The explanation, of course, for this well-designed and replicated research is that contact with the numinous element during the REM dream state allows the transmission of the message through space, as well as through time.

Several other kinds of paranormal dreams certainly suggest a beneficent view of the cosmos. One is the accident warning precognitive dream, which indicates the possibility of an accident and contains information which, if properly used, can help to prevent it. (A precognitive dream of a determined future would not have this feature). Another kind of dream has assurance or hope purportedly communicated from a dead agent who passes knowledge which can be of advantage but is unknown to anyone living. Hill (1968:33) gives a classic example of a dead father appearing in a dream to tell where he has secreted money unknown to anyone alive. Note that the hypothesis that this knowledge is in the numinous element does not require the belief in a returning spirit.

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3.38 High Dreams, Lucid Dreams, Programming Dreams

It is now time to look at some anomalous types of dreams whicha lso appear to have relationships with the numinous. First is the "high dream" described by Tart (1970) as "a new state of consciousness." The abstract reads:
 

Three distinct types of mental activity are described as occurring during sleep:

(a) dreaming associated with a Stage 1, EEG pattern with intense effects, visual imagery and activity;
(b) sleep thinking, associated with a Stage 2, 3, or 4 pattern somewhat resembling the waking reverie; and
(c) the lucid dream in which a sort of overlap occurs, during which the dreamer seems to possess normal waking consciousness interwoven with the sleeping phase of his dream.

Tart (1969:169) also describes similar unusual dreams, which can hardly be distinguished from a waking revery or vision. They are psychedelic in that the sensations are intensely strong, - colors vivid, sounds vibrant. Satprem (1964:122) distinguishes between dreams and "vivid experiences" of a dream-like nature, which are "infinitely more real than physical scenes."

Similar experiences are recounted in the nature mystic experiences of section 4.71.

The "lucid dream" is an interesting phenomenon that appears more often with those advanced in the syntaxic stages. It consists of "witnessing" to the fact that one is dreaming. Such persons begin to acquire will about dreaming, which hitherto has been absent from this ASC. Some authors posit that this achievement represents the gradual purification of the subconscious as a side effect of meditation or the higher jhanas.

In regard to programming of dreams, the late Kilton Stewart did extensive study of the dream training of Senoi children (Tart 1969:159ff) in which he showed how the Senoi improved the mental health of their children by systematic training in removing the traumatic aspects from children's dreams. This consisted in hearing a recitation of the night's dreams at breakfast, in which the father might say to the child: "The monster who chased you was just your friend in a disguise; next time step up to him and be friendly, and all will be well." Stewart's interesting work is comparatively unknown, the most accessible article (other than Tart) being one in 1962. But even this piece does not give the full flavor of his teaching about programming dreams to accomplish whatever we wish, such as "Tomorrow, I will wake up with a new, creative idea about how to solve this problem." This work is now carried on by Stewart's widow,

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Clara Flagg, at the Kilton Stewart Foundation for Creative Psychology 144 E 36th St. New York.

Stewart writes: "The sleep mind is the total mind, and the "I" of the dream is the primary central self"; in further writing, he equates this self to the Kahuna "low mind" (section 4.54) or to the collective preconscious, attributing to it thereby powers verging on the numinous. His thesis is that by a kind of autogenic training we can program this "computer" to work for us while we are asleep. Stewart's work in this field was ahead of his time; consequently his research was ignored; we are now beginning to see that it deserves much more attention.

3.39 Conclusion

This section has given careful attention to an important and neglected subject - dreaming - which is the most natural altered state of consciousness in which the numinous element can be contacted. Dreaming is common, safe, cheap, usually not scary or traumatic, neither addictive nor fattening, and can easily be practiced in bed. It is a wonder that more people have not payed more attention to it. But few of us keep a record of our dreams; fewer still attempt a scientific study of them. Dreams are, however, the road to creativity, and the genie of the Aladdin's lamp who can disclose the hidden cave of treasure. When people ask how they can become psychic, there is no better response than to reply "First examine your dreams, then use them to become creative." For as we become more aware of our dreams, preconscious material becomes more accessible to the ego; hence we become more spontaneous and as a result, more creative.

Dreams also have a mental health and restorative function. They contain the symbolization of feelings, ideas, memories, and experiences in the preconscious. They provide access to these elements as a result of which creative ideas can express themselves. They also offer an entrance toward the paranormal, and by virtue of this easy contact with the numinous, they offer both intuitive experiences with this primary source of energy and its initial non-traumatic relationship with the ego.

Dreams can be considered the highest form of the prototaxic mode, for they are the last procedure which takes place in an altered state of consciousness from the prototaxic end. As the highest procedure they have unique functions which already have become greatly humanized in comparison with some of the earlier prototaxic effects of Chapter 11. But having paid our respects here, we must now move to consider myth, - the first procedure in the normal state of consciousness.

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3.4 MYTH

3.41 General Introduction

True myth is defined by Graves (1955:10) as "the reduction to narrative shorthand of ritual mime performed on public festivals. ... Their subjects were archaic magic-makings that promoted the fertility or stability of a sacred queendom, . . ."  Graves goes on to point out that magic, supernatural or totem calendar-beasts figured in these rituals, and that to understand Greek mythology we must appreciate the matriarchal and totemistic system which held sway there before incursion of patriarchal invaders. An example of such a mythical beast was the chimera, with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail.

While Jung believes that myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, Graves holds that a "true science of myth should begin with a study of archaeology, history, and comparative religion" (1955:22).

Eliade concludes that the value of myth lies in its ability to evoke a numinous relationship through a priest or by proxy for a believer who is otherwise, however, incapable of any other relationship with the ground of being. He says (1969:59):
 

The myth continually reactualizes the Great Time and in so doing raises the listener to a superhuman and suprahistorical plane; which among other things, enables him to approach a Reality that is inaccessible at the level of profane, individual existence.

It may be seen that this indeed is the function of all parataxic representation, not only with myth, but also with archetypes, dreams, art, and especially ritual. For whether we consider ritual magic or the Mass of the Church, it is obvious that ritual has the common purpose of gaining merit and personal advantage for the celebrant and his constituency, through approach to the numinous element or some manifestation of it.

The archeology of man's developing social thought is preserved in myth. Recently acquired is the "loose and separate" consciousness of Western man which separates him from the continuum of nature in time, space, and personality. More primitive consciousness was not so differentiated; it was more dreamy and less clear. In myth we find remnants of images now less than precise, whose equivocal ambivalence was once an asset. In the dawning of consciousness, wherein myth abounded, it was easier to believe that man might

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be metamorphosed into an animal or vice versa, that magical flight could conquer space, and that precognition could reverse time. The vestiges of these motifs in myth is testimony to the development of a conscious ego from a primal self which did not know itself as distinct from nature. The periodic developmental stage theory (Gowan 1972,1974) presents an ontogenic recapitulation of evolutionary phylogeny. The differentiation of ego functioning culminates in stage 5, (the Eriksonian identity crisis), as the individual correlate of the evolution of the personal ego in the species.

Eliade (1969:14) points out that this mythical repository in modern man has been relegated to the attic of the unconscious:
 

For the unconscious is not haunted by monsters only: the gods, goddesses, the heroes, and the fairies dwell there too; moreover, the monsters of the unconscious are themselves mythological, seeing that they continue to fulfill the same functions that they fulfilled in all the mythologies - in the last analysis that of helping man liberate himself. . . .
 

 
Images by their very nature are multivalent (i.o.). If the mind makes use of images to grasp the ultimate reality of things, it is just because reality manifests itself in contradictory ways, and therefore cannot be expressed in concepts.

Eliade (1969:57) tells us:
 

Myth is an account of events which took place in principio, that is "in the beginning," in a primordial and non-temporal instant, a moment of sacred time (i.o.). The mythic or sacred time is qualitatively different from profane time, from continuous and irreversible time of our everyday de- sacralized existence. In narrating a myth one reactualizes in some sort the sacred time in which the events narrated took place.

Myth, therefore is a way of bringing the numinous to the common man without involving him in an altered state of consciousness. Its sacramental character veils an inner numinous truth which is explicated by the ritual which the myth demands, and which action reaffirms the relationship between the present which is in time, and the numinous which is out of time.

Eliade (1963:18) says:
 

Myth as experienced in archaic societies:
 

(1) constitute the history and acts of the supernaturals;
(2) this history is considered to be absolutely true ... and sacred;
(3) that myth is always related to creation (it tells how something came into existence);
(4) that by knowing the myth one knows the origin of things, and hence can control and manipulate them at will (by) a knowledge that one "experiences" ritually, either by ceremonially recounting the myth, or by performing the ritual for which it is the justification;
(5) that in one way or another one "lives" the myth, in the sense that one is "seized" by the sacred exalting power of the events recollected or re-enacted.

Gaster (1950:11) traces the origin of myth as "a sequence of ritual acts, which ... have characterized major seasonal festivities." These as he explains (1950:9) are "derived from a religious ritual designed to ensure the rebirth of a dead world." He elaborates on the central thesis (1950:17) as follows:
 

Seasonal rituals are functional in character. Their purpose is to revive the topocosm (i.o.), that is, the entire complex of any given locality conceived as a living organism. But this topocosm possesses a ... durative aspect, representing not only actual and present community, but also the ideal of community, an entity, of which the latter is but the current manifestation. Accordingly, seasonal rituals are accompanied by myths which are designed to present the purely functional acts in terms of ideal and durative situations. The impenetration of myth and ritual creates drama. ... What the King does on the punctual plane, the God does on the durative. . . . The pattern is based on the conception that life is vouchsafed in a series of leases which have annually to be renewed.³

It would be difficult to state more clearly and concisely the central motivating elements of myth than has here been done. The concept that the topocosm needs to be renewed like an annual lease, and that since it exists on the transcendental (durative) level, it can be affected as if in sympathetic magic on the temporal (punctual) level, and finally that it is a living organism amenable to the efforts of man, is both good anthropology and excellent psychology regarding man's parataxic relationship to the numinous element.

In contrast to the void of the numinous element, but in no wise the antithesis of it, stands a conceptualization identified by Gaster (1950) as the "durative topocosm." It would be easy to say that this represents nature, seen in her anthropomorphic aspects, but that is too simple; another partial view would equate this conceptualization

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to the goddess Ceres with all her manifestations of bounty, but even this does not capture the full "durative" aspect. For it embraces not merely the progression of the seasons, and the fecundation of nature, processes which eventuate at a given time and place, but the generative element in these processes which continues as in a procession or ceremony to provide the continual source and origin of what man merely sees as an outcome at a given time and place. It is the numinous clothed and housed in forms which we perceive as natural.

Thus Malinowski (1928:23) says:
 

We can find among the most primitive peoples and throughout the lower savagery a belief in a supernatural impersonal force, moving all those agencies which are relevant to the savage and causing all the really important events in the domain of the sacred. Thus mana (i.o.) not animism is the essence of "pre-animistic religion," and is also the essence of magic. . . .

The durative topocosm is generally celebrated as Sir James Frazer noted in "The Golden Bough"in cults and ceremonies of vegetation and fertility. As in totemism (Malinowski 1968:45) "This ritual leads to acts of a magical nature, by which plenty is brought about" and man by his rites certifies the renewal of the annual lease of the potential bounty of the topocosm.

Malinowski (1968:73) quotes Codrington as saying:
 

This mana is not fixed in anything, and can be conveyed in almost anything. (It) acts in all ways for good and evil . . ., shows itself in physical force or in any kind of power or excellence which a man possesses.

Ultimate reality, in the guise of the durative topocosm, cannot adequately present itself through a language of tensed verbs. Hence it must do so through a metaphor of continual recurrence; we should learn to recognize such usage in myth and fable as signifying the advent of the "spacious present" in which clock time is transcended. Such fables as Sisyphus rolling up the stone, which rolls down again, the Medusa which grows two heads when one is cut off, Brigadoon which keeps appearing one day every hundred years, ghosts which keep haunting a castle on an anniversary, are alike examples of an incident which "occur" in durative time, and which, therefore, seem to keep repeating in ours. A second example of the durative nature of this reality is the fact that mortals immersed in it (in fable) are apt to find that a shorter duration in it amounts to a

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much longer elapse of clock time. Examples which come to mind include Brigadoon, Rip Van Winkle, and many fairy tales.¹⁰
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Myth involves explication of psychic tensions which activate archetypes and dreams, but are now expressed in the ordinary state of consciousness in terms of images. Cassirer (1955:11:25-36) points out the development of image in the parataxic mode as follows:

 
The mythical world is concrete ... because in it the two main factors, thing and signification are undifferentiated. . . . The concresence of name and thing in the linguistic consciousness of primitives and children might be illustrated ... (striking example: name tabus).... But as language develops, distinct from all mere physical existence and all physical efficacy, the word emerges in its own specificity, in its purely ideal significatory function. And art leads us to still another stage of development. . . . Here for the first time the image world acquires a purely immanent validity and truth. . . . Thus for the first time the world of images becomes a self-contained cosmos ... severing its bonds with immediate reality, with material existence and efficacy which constitute the world of magic and myth; it embodies a new step.

Psychic tensions exist in a society as well as in individuals. The parataxic outlet for these tensions in the individual is art; in society it is myth and ritual. Myth of course is an example of the outletting of such tensions: Abell explains (1966:94):
 

Similarly a myth has not only its "active period of psychic eruption and imaginative overflow, but also its subsequent period of extinction and disintegration." A later form of extinct myth will differ greatly from the earlier expression of the active period and may retain little of the tension-imagery.

He continues (1966:96):
 

The action of eruptive and erosive forces in the sphere of the near myth can be observed in the phases through which every artistic movement seems destined to pass. An exploratory or "creative" phase is eventually succeeded by a stereotyped or "academic" phase. Artists, participating in the exploratory phase,
 

... work with feverish intensity and bring forth results that are dazzling, often bewildering and seemingly unreasonable to those who witness their cultural emergence.
 

Hall (1960: 10) points out that from an occult point of view mythologies and mythological characters may have developed from racial memories of super-identities who helped our species become human.

3.42 Examples of Myth¹¹

Henderson (Jung 1964:101) points out that the "hero myth" is the most common and popular in the world. He says:
 

Over and over again one hears a tale describing a hero's miraculous but humble birth, his early proof of superhuman strength, his rapid rise to prominence or power, his triumphant struggle with the forces of evil, his fallibility to the sin of pride (hubris) and his fall through betrayal or a heroic sacrifice that ends in death.

Radin (1948) in Hero Cycles of the Winnebago notes four cycles in the evolution of the hero myth, calling them (1) the trickster cycle, (2) the hare cycle, (3) the red horn cycle, and (4) the twin cycle. The trickster sees his environment as a giver or withholder of good things, and craftily exploits it or appeases it to get what he wants. The hare represents a socialization of the trickster for he cooperates with his group instead of exploiting them. The third cycle Red Horn, is a younger brother who has envious brethren and who proves himself through endurance, thus raising his self-esteem. Finally, the twins are a pair of superhuman brothers who conquer heaven and earth, but finally sicken of their power, and either fall out or one betrays the other, and the death of one ensures. It is very easy to see in this hero myth parallels to the development of self-concept in the growing boy from a solitary exploiter of the world (in the third stage), through socialization in the fourth stage to identification with a brother in the fifth stage. Thus does ontogeny in the individual parallel phylogeny in the species.¹²

Henderson (Jung 1964:130) points out another universal myth that is often found in dreams of adolescent girls who are having difficulty accepting their feminine role as wife and mother. He says:
 

A universal myth expressing this kind of awakening is found in the fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast. The best known version

(page 210)
 

of this story related how Beauty, the youngest of four daughters, becomes her father's favorite because of her unselfish goodness. When she asks her father for only a white rose, she is aware only of her inner sincerity of feeling. She does not know that she is about to endanger her father's life and her ideal relation with him. For he steals the white rose from the enchanted garden of the Beast, who is stirred to anger by this theft, and requires him to return in three months for his punishment, presumably death.

As Henderson points out, the rose is the (sublimated) sexual love between daughter and father, a love which really belongs to a younger rival (the Beast), whose bestial aspects personify the rejected overt sex from which Beauty is free as long as she is "daddy's little girl." But as the tale tells us, Beauty is required to make an overt sexual advance (kiss the beast), and when she does so, she finds that he is transformed into a wonderful prince.

A third example of universal myth comes from tribal Africa. In Hahn's book on Africa (1961) "Ntu" is the numinous element, never seen but in its manifestations which are Muntu (man), Nommo (the power of the word) Kuntu (Modes and Styles), and Hantu (culture). All of these are part of the topocosm, that durative world of which our own series of events in space and time is only a shadow.

These three examples of myth account for bravery in males, beauty and charm in females, and the numinous quality found in man and indeed in nature.

3.43 Myth and Animals

Because primitive man lived much closer to the animals than we do and had reason to fear and totemize some of them, it is natural to find that animals play a great part in his myths. Myths about animals fall into three categories: (1) the transformation of man into animal or vice versa, (2) the totemization of a feared animal, and (3) the nagual or animal-twin of individual men. These categories are of course interconnected. They all represent attempts to extract the numinous quality from the animal and incorporate it into the individual (in character) or in society (in totem).

One of the environmental penalties of modern urban life is the estrangement of mankind from the animals. We do not realize this until we revert to the farm in the country or visit a game park. Man in simpler times, whether hunter or agriculturalist, lived on intimate terms with the animals in his habitat. He hunted them, he was hunted by them, he used them, he had them round and often

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in his dwelling, he played with them, lived close to them, and used anecdotes about them in his songs and dances. The importance of animals in the thinking of primitive man can scarcely be exaggerated; it is seen in myth and legend. The importance of animals in the farm life of man during the last millenium can be seen even in the different etymology and plurals of such ancient words as oxen, geese, mice, kine, deer.

One of the most important relationships of man to the animals in the hunting stage was success in finding game upon which sustanence and perhaps life itself might depend. Myth and ritual of the great hunter and the successful hunt thereby came to be very important.

Baumann (1954:149-50) explains the Lascaux Caves hunting magic dance pictures as follows:
 

These dances seem incredibly wild and grotesque. To an outsider the dancers appear to be quite beside themselves. And that is exactly what they are. Their burning desire carries them away while they are still dancing on the trail of the beast on which their thoughts are concentrated. In the dance their souls reach the utmost height of tension. Suddenly they let themselves go as the hunters' hand lets the arrow speed from the taut bow. They fall down; their bodies lie soulless, while their souls which have become arrows ... fly out and strike the beast.

But man was not only the hunter, he was sometimes the hunted. The universality of fear produced psychic tension which gave expression in myth. The prevalence of wolves as the primary predators upon our European ancestors is nowhere more noticeable than in the myth of lycanthropy as a projective defense mechanism. Wedeck (1961:171) tells us: "The werewolf appears in every culture and in every age. The ancients from Homer to Mela, from Varro and Virgil to Apuleius, Stabo, and Solinus testify to the prevalence of lycanthropy." The major predator explanation is reinforced again by Wedeck (1971:171) who points out that while werewolves are confined to Europe,
 

in some countries the change from man to animal involves another creature. In Malaya, for example, the human being changes into a tiger; in Iceland a bear; in Africa a tiger, hyena, or leopard; in India a tiger or leopard.

Let us remember that this fear of the supernatural animal is itself a totemization of an even more irrational fear of demons and monsters which plagued primitive man and is revealed in myth. But if animals

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were first invested with these magic properties of transformation, the fear of them could also be totemized by making the animal a blood brother ("I won't hunt you, and you won't hunt me), and this process eventually led to the myth of nagualism. Let us trace this syndrome in detail.

Abell asks (1966:155):
 

Was belief in the monster myths a useless though spontaneous result of the tensions of Neolithic life or did it perform some positive psychic function? . . . . Freud observes that "the dream relieves the mind like a safety valve, and that as Roberts has put it, all kinds of harmful material are rendered harmless by representation in dreams." No doubt the same could be said about myth.
 

 
The myth centered tribal fears in a being so formidable that no man could be condemned for fearing him; an indirect way of granting the fears a social sanction.

Abell opines that the positive note in religious belief is a developing function in culture, little seen in early man. He states (1966:158):
 

It seems evident that the positive aspects of Neolithic tension imagery were relatively little developed, offering nothing comparable in vividness or intensity to the monsters who swarmed around the negative pole.

According to Salar (1964) a nagual has two definitions; (1) the animal alter ego of an individual, a "guardian-spirit" or "destiny animal" (Middleton 1967:71, who gives many other cites), sometimes with astrological significance. Saler states that some believe in an affinity between the human and animal in regard to character traits and destiny; and (2) that of a transforming witch (akin to our werewolf) who is able to change into animal form in order to do evil at night.

Oakes (1951:170ff) reports that the Guatemalan Indians of the highlands show traces of a belief in nagualism (animal co-spirits for humans). According to this belief each child has a nagual animal and their lives are closely connected. From this it is easy to go to the ability of chimans (shamans) to change at will into animal form, and she relates tales of this sort given by the natives. Whereas the animal form in Europe is generally the wolf (werewolves), the animal form in this location is the coyote. For more on nagualism see Brinton (1894).

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Radin (1927:343) describes how the bear totem affects ceremonial treatment of the captured animal:
 

When a bear is caught, it is treated with all imaginable veneration and respect. First the hunter addresses a few words of apology and explanation to the animal. Then it is killed and dressed up in all the finery obtainable. . . . When a dead bear is dressed up, this is done as an offering or prayer to the chief of the bears, that he may send the Indians more of his children. ... In gratitude for the treatment accorded him, the bear forgives his slayers and enters their traps a willing and fascinated sacrifice.
 

And just as every Red Indian felt he was bound in some special way to some animal, so also did every ice-age hunter. The guardian spirit dwelled in this one animal. Among the Red Indians the animal is called the totem. The ice-age hunter too had his totem animal, and he also tattooed the picture of his animal on his breast.

This process of "totemizing" the fearsome aspects of experience whether found in the natural world or in the numinous is extremely important as it shows how myth was used to reduce fear and irrational dread and to bring the experience into rational consciousness from the trauma with which it was first associated. It is hence necessary to discuss the totemization of myth.

3.44  Totemization of Myth
3.441 General

For a definition of "totem" we go to Malinowski (1928:24-5):
 

Totemism, to quote Frazer's classical definition: is an inanimate relation which is supposed to exist between a group of kindred people on the one side and a species of natural or artificial objects on the other, which objects are called the totems of the human group.
 

 
"In this the totemic principle which is identical with mana and with the God of the clan ... can be nothing else than the clan itself."

As man ascends in evolutionary development, he becomes more

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conscious of the numinous element and of himself as apart from it. He also begins the totemization of the more dreadful aspects of the numinous element: indeed, the whole parataxic mode is a kind of veiling of the head of Medusa. There is also a kind of slow change in regard to man's relation to various manifestations of the generalized preconscious.

We thus have a historical progress corresponding to slow evolutionary psychic development which goes somewhat as follows in regard to man's relationship to the numinous element:
 

1. In the ancient world man is seen as the puppet of the numinous element, which behaves in a capricious and irrational manner toward him.

2. Second, man is seen at the mercy of devils and demons; while menacing, they have only the power to tempt him, and may not punish or torture him unless he sins; furthermore he may at least partially ward off their evil influence by faith in the mother church.

This Christian belief has its pagan correlate in the similar belief about monsters and mythical animals (cf. Beowulf). As time goes on, however, the man triumphs over the monster more often, and remains to tell the tale. Sometimes (St. George and the Dragon) there is fusion of the Christian and Pagan elements.

A further change reduces the Christian numinous element to ghosts and the pagan counterpart to witches, fairies, and animals with supernatural power (werewolves).

 
3. Third, as the numinous element grows less to be feared, the human will comes more to be respected, and Promethean man is in process of birth.

To trace this progression more clearly let H stand for the human protagonist, and let N stand for the numinous element in some presentation indicated by a parenthesis:
 

1. H the plaything and puppet of N (gods and demons)
2. H preyed upon by N (mythical animals) (Beowulf)
3. H wars with and sometimes conquers N (animals with supernatural powers (St. George and the Dragon)
4. H plagued by devils who tempt him, but can resist them if faithful to tenets of mother church.
5. H plagued by N (witches, ghosts) whose power is definitely limited, and who may by craft be defeated or limited.
6. H helped by N (saints) who as former humans lived good lives.
7. H helped or hindered by N (fairies) whose magic is severely limited.
8. H aided by N (now a talisman or thing) whose power is beneficent but limited.
 

  9. H uses N in a psychological manner for alleviation of pain (as in hypnotism, biofeedback, etc.).
10. H becomes creative and meditative (section 4.3, 4.6) thus "gentling" the effect of N, and placing it under more control.
11. H understands orthocognition (section 4.5) and gains fuller use of N, now expressed as power over environment.
12. H becomes psychedelic (4.7) and N is expressed in very positive affect and knowledge.

This interaction ranges from the human individual being used and persecuted to his using and exploiting, in other words from passivity to activity. The N variable goes from gods and demons through mythical animals, witches, fairies, talismans, and finally to a broader concept of the numinous element as an impersonal force.

3.442 Talismans

A talisman (Webster's International Dictionary) is a figure of a heavenly sign cut or engraved on a stone, metal, or ring sympathetic to the influence of the star, hence something that (is carried) to produce extraordinary effects, such as averting evil. "Talisman" connotes wider and more positive powers than "amulet." "Charm" may be equivalent to either.

Table VII Mythic Manifestations of Numinous Element

(page 216)

Whereas a talisman may well be a gem with general powers for good, amulet (Dictionary of Magic) is generally a specific against a particular calamity, such as black magic, imprisonment, loss of property, and the like. "The amulet may be a gem or the tail of a fox, a lizard, a mandrake root, or colored threads, a ring, nail, key, or knot." There are specific amulets against nightmares; also some amulets were considered particularly efficacious on certain days of the week or at certain locations.

The concept of a talisman is an end anchor of a sequence of continued totemization in three factor dimensions: 1) from very malignant to potentially beneficial, 2) from strong and uncontrolled will to weak and residing in an object, and 3) from very active in all aspects, to passive and useful only in certain prescribed instances. Psychologists will recognize these three factors as the three major dimensions of Osgood's Semantic Differential which is a distillation by factor analysis of all the adjectives applied to things, events, and persons. Table VII spells out the details.

Jaffe (Jung 1964:257ff) notes that even when the numinous element has gone through the full cycle from a dreadful and all powerful god to the relative immobility of a talisman, mysterious qualities still remain, making it a powerful symbol. She discusses three of these symbols, the stone, the animal, and the circle, and notes the long history of each as an object, as a talisman, and as a universal art symbol or mandala.

History shows the amelioration not only of the major presentation of the numinous (as noted above), but also in some of its specific forms. Hahn and Benes (1971:17ff) make this point clearly in the case of angels. They show that seraphs in the Bible are described as winged serpents with fiery bites. They further say (1971:21):
 

The word "cherub" comes from the Babylonian karibu designating a monster looking like the Garuda of Hindu mythology, that is a griffin or cross between a mammal and giant bird. . . . The cherubim of Moses and Solomon were sphinxes or griffins.

They note that Psalm 18 has God riding on such a cherub. These fearsome forms in the guise of mythical beasts are a far removal from the chubby cherubim that float over saints or the pale angels in the heavenly choir of more modern fancy.

While ancient and medieval man saw this process as concerned with the gradual freeing of himself from the onslaughts of gods and demons, we should not forget, looking at it from the stance of modern psychology, that what has happened is the gradual totemization of the numinous element from prototaxic states involving no cognitive

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control from the individual consciousness, through parataxic states, to syntaxic states involving considerable such control. The decrease with respect to time is in numinous entropy, and the increase is in human will.

From a psychological point of view, once the feared and dreaded aspects of the numinous can be totemized, expressed, and externalized in myth, the symbol loses its frightening aspect and becomes benign, being used in intercession and prayer to the extent that it becomes habitual and hence seems friendly.

3.45 Myth and Ritual

Myth and ritual are especially closely connected, since ritual is often the celebration of the myth. Before we turn to ritual, it may be helpful to consider the connection more closely.

Myth is finally connected with ritual as Fontenrose (1966:50-1) states:
 

We do of course, find some fairly exact correspondence of myth and ritual, both in the Old World and the New. Wherever this happens, the ritual is in fact a ritual drama, and in every instance we may suppose that it was purposely designated to enact the myth. Surely ancient Greek tragedy ... and the Japanese No plays were constructed on previously formed myths.

In general, however, Fontenrose does not believe that the origin of myth is in ritual, for he sees many kinds of myth, some of which are mere story-telling, like folklore.

But as Henderson (Jung 1964:123) tells us, ritual as well as myth recapitulates for the individual, developmental process in the race. He says:
 

In tribal societies, it is the initiation rite that most effectively solves this problem. The ritual takes the novice back to the deepest level of original mother-child identity or ego-self identity, thus forcing him to experience a symbolic death. In other words, his identity is temporarily dismembered or dissolved in the collective unconscious. From this state he is then ceremonially rescued by the rite of a new birth. This is the first act of true consolidation of the ego with the larger group, expressed as totem, clan, or tribe or all three combined.

The construct of "ritual as the enactment of myth" presents myth as source. This concept is controversial; many scholars posit that the action, the ritual, existed and the tale was created from the need to account for this action.

(page 218)

Nagendra enters the controversy by saying (1972:32):
 

In fact the controversy whether myth is prior to ritual or ritual prior to myth arises only because the two are taken to be temporal relatives. If they are viewed as atemporal forms, the question of their temporal origin would not arise at all. When we say that ritual is acting out of a myth we do not suggest that the latter is prior to the former in point of historical origin. What we aim to emphasize is that ritual cannot be understood without action. And as the action must be logically prior to ritual, so myth must logically precede ritual.

Fontenrose points out (1966:57)
 

Myth narrates the primal event which sets the precedent for an institution. It may be a ritual institution or a cult. . . .
 

3.5 RITUAL

Ritual can be defined as social mimesis or imitation (in the Toynbee sense) of a numinous event in the life of one of its creative leaders. He says of it (1947:276):
 

Growth is the work of creative personalities and creative minorities; they cannot go on moving forward unless they can contrive to carry their fellows with them. . . . and the uncreative rank and file of mankind cannot be transformed en masse and raised to the stature of the leaders . . . the only means by which mankind can be set in motion toward a goal beyond itself is by enlisting the primitive and universal faculty of mimesis. For this mimesis is a kind of social drill . . .

Thus ritual (like the Christian sacraments) often carries on the vestige of a numinous experience, being the "outward and visible form of an inward and spiritual grace."

Most anthropologists, especially the earlier ones, in emphasizing the social and personal aspects of ritual tended to neglect or de-emphasize the numinous ones. As Turner (1969:3) points out, this is a serious mistake, for we should not read our values into those of a primitive society. He cites examples of Taylor, Robertson-Smith, Frazer, Boas, and Malinowski who did not make this mistake. We shall find that the magical-religious aspects of ritual in preserving man's individual

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and corporate security is an important one.

Talamonti (1971) also considers the numinous element important in ritual. His abstract:
 

includes general observations of rites and their reason for existence. The psychic forces involved and the unexplainable effects which are derived are emphasized. There is the possibility that rites can aid "magical creativity," which is an act of the human psyche in relation to nature. Various rites are cited: those conferring blessings and others involving hate, as well as the diabolical, political, liturgical, and spiritual rites. In all of these, the power of the "collective mind" is evident. Rituals indicate the eternal need in man for autotranscendence "to break the barriers of the ego in order to become a part of something greater."

The essence of ritual is that some action takes place whose psychic significance is not fully cognized by the participant. He is therefore performing a mimetic act, and in this process of mimesis he, by proxy as it were, receives the benefits of the syntaxic knowledge of the seer who instituted the ritual in the first place.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna gives a famous discourse on right action:
 

The world is imprisoned in its own activity, except when actions are performed as worship of God. Therefore you must perform every action sacramentally and be free from all attachment to results.

It is this sacramental view of ritual in which each "outward and visible" action is an evidence of an "inward and spiritual grace" that should be emphasized.

The principal advantage of ritual is the ease of its kinesthetic approach to juncture with the numinous element which occurs, because the motor activity, decreed to take place in exact and unvarying fashion for a long time becomes habitual, and hence is reduced to the unconscious level. At this there is juncture with the collective unconscious, and the act becomes sacramental, that is "an outward and visible form of an inward and spiritual grace."

Nagendra (1971:103) says:
 

The experience of the numinosum thus consists essentially of the conscious ego's unconscious encounter with the archetypes. And since the archetypes are of bi-polar character, having both beneficent and dangerous aspects, the religious experience involves a danger too.
 

It is the function of ritual to protect this experience. He continues (p. 106):
 

We spoke earlier of the bipolarity of the archetypes and of the protective function of ritual. The experience of the numinous "whole" because of its overpowering nature constitutes a tremendous danger for the individual psyche. Human consciousness is too frail to act as an equal partner to the numinous power. Without a body of rituals and ceremonies, it would have been impossible for man in his infantile state of development to withstand the onslaught of the numinosum.

Nagendra (1971:110) declares:
 

After its birth the ego is left to its own to find out the modus operandi of coming to terms with its progenitor, the unconscious. In the first instance it tries to overcome its feeling of estrangement by a process of identification, unconsciously projecting the lost identity upon the outer world. Thus from the unconscious familial identity arises identity with parents. The claim of "mineness" upon things is thus a relic of the past unconscious identity of the ego and the non-ego. Now, insofar as the ego must rise above this identity in order to become one with the "whole," or to attain a state of self-realization, it must eventually destroy all claims of "mineness."

Nagendra (1971:113) says:
 

Ritual is ... a transcendentally necessary act, which means that the reality it symbolizes is neither social nor moral but metaphysical.

Nagendra (1971:170) points out that ritual is "the enactment of myth." He adds (Ibid: 175) "The myth has an 'archetypal' rather than a logical structure. The social view of ritual has been well explicated by Wilson (1954):
 

Rituals reveal values at their deepest level . . . men express in ritual what moves them most, and since the form of expression is conventionalized and obligatory, it is the values of the group that are revealed.
 

Turner (1969:93ff) describes ritual as society's way of emphasizing the importance of developmental discontinuities (such as sexual maturation). These rites de passage involve

(1) the separation of the ritualee from an earlier fixed point (such as childhood),
(2) a "liminal"

(page 221)
 

or boundary state (circumcision or menarche rites) in which the ritualee group is deprived of earlier rights or privileges and subjected to some ordeal (which tends to develop comradeship and in-group feeling), and
(3) reincorporation into society and investiture of new status, power, or privilege (adulthood).
 

What is interesting about liminal phenomena ... is the blend they offer of lowliness and sacredness, of homogeneity and comradeship. We are presented in such rites with a "moment out of time" and ... out of secular social structure which reveals some recognition of a generalized social bond.

Turner calls this bond "communitas," (the kind of civic egalitarianism and cooperation seen after an earthquake or other disaster), and he points out that it is the function of ritual to produce temporary communitas in the liminal phase as an antidote for the entrenched class structure. He also points out that budding saints (1969:200) seek this communitas in humility and meekness, and concludes (1969:203):

 
The structurally inferior aspire to symbolic structural superiority in ritual; the structurally superior aspire to symbolic communitas and undergo penance to achieve it.
 

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1969:1121) is in agreement with the sociologists, for the definitions listed are offshoots of the three propounded insights referred to above.
 

1. The prescribed form or order of conducting a religious or solemn ceremony.
2. The body of ceremonies or rites used in a church, fraternal organization, or the like: a system of rites.
3. A book of rites or ceremonial forms.
4. Often plural,

(a) a ceremonial act or a series of such acts, and
(b) the performance of such acts.

5. Any detailed method of procedure faithfully or regularly followed,

(page 222)
 

(a) of or characterized by a rite or rites, and
(b) practiced as a rite such as a ritual fire dance.

Bossard and Boll (1956:14) in their second edition of Ritual in Family Living develop an interesting view of ritual.

 
Words tend to be known by the company they keep; sometimes that company becomes a jealous mistress, taking a word and keeping it for its own particular use and purpose. The word "ritual" is a case in point.
 

Ritual is seen as a system of procedure by Bossard and Boll. This conclusion is the most popular one found in literature and common usage. Three characteristics are unvarying in their presence in a system of procedure as defined by ritual. According to Bossard and Boll these characteristics are (1956:15):
 

First ... ritual means exactness and precision. Second, there is the element of rigidity ... and finally, there is a sense of rightness which emerges from the past history of the process.

Bronislaw Malinowski, the social anthropologist responsible for taking anthropology from a discipline concerned with mere "origin hunting" to the status of an individual "science of culture" does not see ritual arising from social sources. S. P. Nagendra in his book The Concept of Ritual in Modem Sociological Theory (1971:73) quotes Malinowski as saying of ritual:

 
It arises from purely individual sources although it is always social by nature ... the principle of the ritual is bio-psychic.

Malinowski sees the function of ritual to lie in the role it plays in allaying anxiety and inspiring confidence in the individual as he moves and exists in "his life." He stresses the role that culture plays in a system of activities functioning in response to the basic needs of the individual.

There is evident a gradual drawing away from categorizing ritual

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as a mere system of procedure. Nagendra (1971:81) goes so far as to declare that ritual acts

 
... stand in direct contrast to technical acts insofar as the former are purely symbolic while the latter are purposive.

According to Radcliffe-Brown (Nagendra 1971:81) ritual is essentially an "expressive mode of action" and "leaves the analysis of its meaning at the figurative level (metaphorical)."
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Two basic psychoanalytic theories of ritual have come down to us from Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung. Both have as the central point the concept of the "unconscious" on the individual and collective planes. They both regard ritual as expression of the unconscious. Their separateness is in the symbolic content of ritual: according to Freud it is repressed material to be dismissed; according to Jung it is archetypal. Commenting, Nagendra says (1971:29):
 

The prototype of ritual in Freud's view is the obsessional act of the compulsive neurotic whereas in Jung's view it is the act of individuation.

Individuation can be defined as the process whereby the conscious and the unconscious of an individual learn to not only live at peace with each other, but learn to complement each other. Depth psychology, as evidenced in the words of Ira Progoff (1973:171) has this to say:
 

Ceremonials and rituals are the means provided by society for periodically drawing up the sums of energy attached to the symbols, lest the symbols sink back into the unconscious.
 

 
. . . the most primitive reflection of serious thought, a slow deposit as it were of people's imaginative insight into life.
 

The purpose of ritual is ritual itself; partaking in its performance is an end itself, and upon the fulfillment of this end, depends the continuity of both the natural and social orders.

The definition of ritual that has been adopted for this discussion

(page 224)

is that made by Nagendra as his concluding theme in The Concept of Ritual in Modem Sociological Theory: ritual is symbolic action - the enactment of the myth. A. K. Coomaraswamy says in Nagendra's book (1971:13):
 

Ritual is the perfect performance of one's task, or conversely, the perfect performance of one's task is the celebration of ritual.
 

Ritual is not a matter of doing specifically sacred things only on particular occasion but of . . . making sacred all we do and all we are, a matter of sanctification of whatever is done naturally by reduction of all activities to their principle.

(page 224)

3.61 Introduction
 

Art is the final product in the parataxic totemization of the traumatic aspects of the numinous element. The trauma first appears in archetypes and dreams which are already totemized to the extent that the experience can appear in consciousness with the ego present, albeit in an altered state (dreaming). Arieti (1967:337) tells us that "the creative process thus consists of an unconscious animation of the archetype."

This animation consists in a transformation of the fearsome aspects of archetype and dream into creative fantasy in the waking world. It is a replacement of prototaxic dread with syntaxic creativity, so that the parataxic represents a transitional mode in which those procedures nearest to the prototaxic show the former characteristics, and that one nearest the syntaxic (art) shows the latter.

As one proceeds through the mode, the totemization continues with consensual validation as seen in myth, for as Abell (1957:145) points out, "The arts are to society as dreams are to the individual."

Abell points out that visual art mirrors the psychic tensions of a culture. Speaking of the gargoyles of medieval art he says (1966:122)
 

The grotesque appears to be a symbol, unconsciously created of collective psychic states that existed in medieval communities, psychic states which in turn owed their nature to the historical circumstances of medieval life.

Abell with psychological accuracy places the inception of demon

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and monster myths in the traumatic reaction of primitive man to aspects of natural phenomena. He says (1966:155):
 

No doubt in other instances ... the objective basis for a particular demon, and especially for its particular location, was a specific, awe-inspiring or fear-inspiring phenomenon of nature.

Afterwards society further totemizes and softens the image by making it explicit in ritual, whence it becomes habitual instead of horrifying (e.g. "Have you drunk the blood of the Lamb?"), and therefore it becomes part of a security-producing reaction formation.

Harding (1965:137) says:

 
These mythologems are the subject of mythology, of legends, of folklore and fairytale, and significantly enough, the same themes repeat themselves in history and are to be met with as well in all significant drama and epic. They also form the theme of fantasy, whether this is the basis of great art or the idle occupation of an empty hour, and they appear in dreams and in the products of active imagination.
 

Art is human activity consisting in this: that one man consciously by means of certain external signs hands on to others feelings that he has lived through, and others are infected by these feelings and also experience them.

Since as Read also points out (1951:260) "The real function of art is to express feeling and transmit understanding (i.o.)," we have come a long way in the parataxic mode from mere panic reaction to a traumatic situation.⁵

Art, therefore, stands at a crossroads in cognitive development. It looks backward to the reaction formation of a traumatic image, and to the myth and ritual which can recapture the ultimate reality, of which that image is the veiled icon. Read, in discussing primitive art, for example, quotes Kuhn in saying (1951:76):

(page 226)
 

Not only (has art) an aesthetic value, but a significance ... in religious ... or magical experience. By the symbolic representation of an event primitive man thinks he can secure the actual occurrence of that event.
 

Collier (1972:109) speculates:
 

. . . genuine, powerful symbols cannot he deliberately or selfconsciously produced; they can only be discovered in the unselfconscious involvement with the developing image. It seems that symbols develop from, and allude back to, those modes of apprehension which we attribute to intuitive or unconscious sources. Consequently, there is a degree of ambiguity or unintelligibility about the more powerful symbols for they are born from the deeper regions of the self, from beyond the fringe of reason. They give intimation of a meaning beyond the level of our present powers of comprehension.

As Harding (1965:218) so well puts it:
 

But a symbol may arise in the dreams and visions of an individual representing a reconciliation of the opposites. Such a symbol is transcendent, usually of a paradoxical nature, and always carries the value of a numinous experience. Symbols of this kind can never be exactly described, nor can the value they represent be definitely stated, because they contain more than conscious man can formulate with his mind.

Walter Abell (1957) traced this progression magnificently in chapters 7-10 of his book The Collective Dream in Art,and we owe much

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of the development in this and the two previous sections to his genius. The evolution of psychic tension into art passes through a number of successive phases each more ameliorating than the previous. This growth and change is seen not only in developmental process in the individual artist but also in the transformation from myth into art in a culture. First comes the raw prototaxic stimulus. Then comes the initial traumatic response, - that of shock and complete or nearly complete repression of the memory of the experience from ego consciousness, although often expressed in various defense mechanisms. Repression sets up psychic tensions which seek to work their way out into consciousness, first through archetypes and dreams in an altered state, then with images that are menacing but difficult to interpret cognitively. Later these tensions may find consensual validation through myth and ritual, with a final explication in art forms. It is almost as if the numinous element which is responsible for the initial prototaxic trauma continually presses for higher and more conscious representations of itself in the parataxic (and later in the syntaxic) mode.

These successive concepts of the numinous element in the emerging consciousness of man start with horrifying conflicts with demons and dragons, who are first seen as all-powerful, and then begin to lose some of their superordinate advantage and dreadful malignancy. Successively the numinous is apprehended under the guise of a supernatural animal, a genie or fairy, and finally a talisman, growing in potentiality for beneficence as it decreases in dread. At the same time the human mind becomes more and more able to see itself as a possible victor in these encounters. Myth and ritual ameliorate these psychic tensions and offer further social sanctions by institutionalizing the traumatic element into a form which becomes commonplace and therefore comforting. Finally, the process of totemization is completed in art. This, then is the function of the parataxic mode, to humanize and gentle the raw prototaxic response to the numinous, so that it may be received without trauma or excursus, socially validated and institutionalized, and finally expressed in creative production in art.

To deal with art as the final parataxic juncture between the ego and the veiled numinous element requires discussion of the following aspects: art as image-magic, art as a representation of the numinous, metaphysical art, art and creativity, followed by a summary of the procedure. To this task we now turn.

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3.62 Image-Magic

The parataxic mode is characterized by the production of images. These images first served the objective of magic elements (symbols). This indeed was the origin of visual art. They then served as signs (as in icons); finally as pictures, as in modern art.

Arnheim (1969:135) distinguished between three functions of images: (1) pictures, (2) symbols, and (3) signs. He says: (Ibid:137) "Images are pictures to the extent to which they portray things located at a lower level of abstractness than they are themselves." Similarly (Ibid:138) they are symbols when portraying a higher level of abstractness. Finally (Ibid:136)"the image serves merely as a sign to the extent to which it stands for a particular content without reflecting its characteristics visually."

Arieti (1967:61) defines image as "a memory trace which assumes the form of a representation." He says (1966:62) "It is an inner object." Arieti (1967:68) defines a paleosymbol as a "cognitive construct standing for extended reality with private symbolic value which cannot be shared" (and hence is parataxic).

Arieti (1967:80) points out that:
 

A homonid arrested at the phantasmic level would have great difficulty in distinguishing images, dreams, and paleosymbols from external reality.

He goes on to point out that such an individual "cannot ask himself why certain things occur." Calling this "acausalism," he points out that when the phantasmic level is too difficult to bear the child "may escape" into the outer world or become hyperkinetic. This developmental recapitulation of evolution continues into the next stage, as Arieti (1967:121) tells:

 
Whereas the phantasmic world is mainly visual and is populated by images and ghosts, the paleologic world is predominantly auditory. Language makes its entrance at this point.

The dimensions of this primitive world are different from ours. Collier (1972:169) tells us:
 

Drawing practiced in this way, for these ends, thus becomes a kind of wizardry. It is the magic ritual by which spirit forces become perceptible and subject to the will and control of man. One important result of such image-making rites is that it allowed early man to participate in the workings of nature's mysterious forces. Henceforth, he could feel less alienated, believing that through his magic he had some influence in the animal world and so could control his own destiny - he could modify natural events to his own advantage - particularly in the all-important matter of success in the hunt.
 

Collier (1972:169) adds:
 

The important thing to stress is that these early drawings or paintings were not made for aesthetic reasons - they were not intended as decoration or to give pleasure by virtue of their formal beauty. In the cave complexes of western Europe the images are found in the more remote caverns and corridors, not in the places used for domestic purposes. And in many instances these more remote areas would have been difficult to access. All of which tends to confirm that these "art galleries" were private places where special rituals were practiced. The use of such secret places for the performance of ritual or magic is prevalent in many cultures throughout history, suggesting that an archetype is at work here also.

Art preserves some aspect of its magic origin. Collier (1972:174) says:
 

The magic of art was that it represented a re-creation of the visible world as man gave form to his own vision of reality. The psychological effect of such an act must have been profound. When man creates his own reality - be it only in images - external nature loses her omnipotence, for man feels his power to modify and even transform her. Man is no longer nature's creature in the sense that he accepts the world and her authority unquestioningly and blindly. It is in the creative act, in the construction of images whether they be of science or art, that he gains his independence, sense of purpose, and ability to live with uncertainty and fear. In reading the words of so many contemporary artists I am struck, over and over again, by the relevance of their statements to the ancient understanding of art as therapeutical magic. Pablo Picasso has probably expressed this attitude most strongly. In the following statement attributed to him, he refers to his reactions on seeing the first exhibition of African art in Paris: "Men had made those masks and other objects for a sacred purpose, a magic purpose, as a kind of mediation between themselves and the unknown hostile forces that surrounded them, in order to overcome their fear and horror by giving it a form and an image. At that moment I realized that this was what painting was all about. Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange, hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires. When I came to that realization, I knew I had found my way (Gilot, 1964)." 1 think that these

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words would have made a great deal of sense to the animal cave painters of Lascaux. But the intriguing thing is that a great twentieth-century painter will make a statement of this sort.

Speaking of art as magic, Bradley (1973:5) says:

 
Belief in this ability to control in some way unknown forces which have affected his life has been an integral part of his art production. Power, control, and influence over these aspects of life which directly affect existence has motivated man to produce unusual expressions that communicate the most inarticulate of these freely - which are often by definition the most profound.
 

3.63 Art as a Representation of the Numinous⁹

Art is more than the mere visual description of nature; it represents some aspect of nature transformed. It is more than photography; it is impressionistic; it is more than naturalism, for it continually reminds us of the numinous. While nature, therefore, is most often the "trigger" for great art (as it is most often the trigger for a mystical experience), great art brings us in contact not just with nature but with the presence behind nature; this presence may be veiled, clothed, housed, and panoplied, but it is there, and all great art is aware of it. And this is the meaning of transcendence.

This ability of the artist to transcend nature and "see beauty bare" does not come without hard discipline. It requires (as noted by Myerson

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1970) the perception and expression of reality through choice, extraction, transposition, and transmutation. The search of the impressionists for a method of indicating on canvas the impact of sunlight on scenery is an example, and the works of Monet, Seurat, Dufy, and Villon are illustrations. Huxley (1947:117) puts it this way:
 

It is by long obedience and hard work that the artist comes to unforced spontaneity and consummate mastery. Knowing that he can never create anything on his own account, out of the top layers, so to speak, of his personal consciousness, he submits obediently to the workings of "inspiration"; and knowing that the medium in which he works has its own self-nature, which must not be ignored or violently overridden, he makes himself its patient servant and, in this way, achieves perfect freedom of expression.
 

People who are attracted to the beauties of sense on the one hand and the mysteries of God on the other are inevitably confronted with a tantalizing situation. For it is evident that between the two experiences there is both an immense gulf and a remarkable similarity.
 

The goal of religion must always be some kind of union with the divine. But if this is the terminus ad quem,⁶ what is its terminus a quo?⁷We take the view that it lies in aesthetic experience.
 

The unconscious may be likened to a ready-made storeroom and powerhouse combined. When the artist is affected by the current from this source the rational consciousness retreats. . . . Further, the artist cannot control the mechanism by which these primary deposits of imaginative experience move into consciousness. It is not possible for him to will (i.o.) these elemental things to come . . .

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Collier (1972:51-2) feels that at times the artist "shapes collective experience" and becomes a "channel through which unconscious, universal life forces are expressed and shaped."

The function of art as the highest manifestation of the parataxic mode is to present the numinous element veiled and totemized in beauty and utility in a public (rather than a private) explication of image. In accomplishing this aesthetic miracle the various art forms allow for, prefigure, and illustrate, the partial suspension of time, place, and ego-activity. We see this in the performing arts in the dramatic unities of time, place, and ego-action. We see it in the lyric poetry of Keats "Ode to a Grecian Urn," and Eliot's "Burnt Norton;" in the music of Beethoven and Mozart; and also in modern art from the impressionists to metaphysical art.

Brelet (Langer, 1961:104) notes the parataxic time-transcendence of music: "And transcending that actual time form in which it takes its flight in time, music escapes from time, for the very nature of music is to be forever contemporaneous with those moments during which its performance makes it actual." Again he remarks (Ibid:108) "Musical time transcends the moments of actual tone experience, and takes shape in a silent and spiritual now." His views are echoed by de Selencourt (Langer, 1961:153) who states:

"Music in reducing the passage of time to an irrelevance gives an analogy or foretaste of the experience of eternity." And again, "for music suspends ordinary time, and offers itself as a substitute."

Bayer (Langer, 1961:190, 193) says it this way: "Phenomena of the aesthetic order are all characterized by a certain constancy; and this constancy is revealed to us by a study of rhythms.... Rhythm is thus the essence of art."

Aldrich (Langer, 1961:6) points out that in contemplation of the visual and auditory "feel" of the art object one "gets lost," that is "the sense for the physical location of both object and percipient vanishes at once." This parataxic space-transcendence is also matched by parataxic ego transcendence for "in such moments one's own feelings appear as the aesthetic quality of a thing of beauty." This possibility indicates the falsity of the notion "of the self or ego as something cramped within the limits of the native organism."

Indeed Baensch (Langer, 1961:23) asks the prime parataxic question:
 

How can we capture, keep, and fix feelings so that their content may be presented to our consciousness with universal validity without their being known in the strict sense - i.e by means of concepts? The answer is we do it by creating objects ... called "works of art". . . .

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Banesch (Langer, 1961:25) asks the question "what is the principle of form for the work of art?" and answer it in one word: "rhythm."

The same principle holds true in verbal artistry. For example, Morgan (Langer, 1961:93) speaks of this genius of drama in saying:
 

Every playgoer has been made aware of the existence in the theatre of a supreme unity, a mysterious power, a transcendent and urgent illusion ... endowing (the spectator) with a vision, a sense of translation and ecstasy, alien to his common knowledge.
 

Of all secular men, the artist is most in touch with these numinous elements in his inner life. Stang (1965:175) quotes Gustave Vigeland, the great Norwegian sculptor as saying:
 

I never had a chance. I was a sculptor before I was born. I was driven and lashed onwards by powerful forces outside myself. ... I am convinced that there are strong forces outside us which we have no control over. . . .

Again, speaking to Dedekan in 1921 about the unconscious, he remarked:

It is divine.... It is not controlled by will. The imagination functions by itself. Creating works of art is no game; it is agony. All true artists are humble because they do not know when the gift will be taken away.

Indeed, many artists find themselves astride two realities at the same time. It is not only the poet to whom
 

"They flash upon the inward eye
which is the bliss of solitude."

Consider this quotation from de Chirico given by Goldwater and Trevas (1945:440):

Everything has two aspects; the current aspect which we see nearly always and which ordinary men see, and the ghostly and metaphysical aspect which only rare individuals may see.
 

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forms. Stang (1965:83) describes Vigeland's concept:
 

The two wingless figures which carry Abel on his flight were termed genii by Vigeland. This vague concept, these genii, occurs constantly in the artist's works - only occasionally in the finished work, more frequently in the studies in the round, and repeatedly in the drawings. As a rule these genii are symbols of poetic inspiration, sometimes of germination and growth, and occasionally of ideas themselves.

Oliver Wendell Holmes in a Phi Beta Kappa paper at Harvard⁸ said in part:

 
"The more we examine the mechanism of thought, the more we shall see that the automatic, unconscious action of the mind enters largely into all its processes. Our definite ideas are stepping stones: how we get from one to the other, we do not know: something carries us; we do not take the step. A creating and informing spirit which is with us, and not of us, is recognized everywhere in real and in storied life. It is the Zeus that kindled the rage of Achilles: it is the muse of Homer; it is the Daimon of Socrates. . . . it shaped the forms that filled the soul of Michelangelo when he saw the figure of the great Lawgiver in the yet unhewn marble. . . . it comes to the least of us as a voice that will be heard; it tells us what we must believe; it frames our sentences; it lends a sudden gleam of sense or eloquence . . . so that . . . we wonder at ourselves, or rather not at ourselves, but at this divine visitor who chooses our brain as his dwelling place, and invests our naked thought with the purple of the kings of speech of song."

Because creative art is an upwelling from the preconscious (the other) the artist is sometimes as much in awe of it as the spectator. Collier (1872:40), a noted artist himself, has this to say about this phenomenon:
 

Speaking from personal experience, I would have to agree that at times an unconscious factor does take over. After completing their best works, many artists have been unable to understand how or why the image has taken on a particular form or quality. On some occasions it seems that from the first, the emerging image has dictated the nature of its own genesis and development.

There is often an element of surprise present in the accomplishment of truly creative acts - a standing back by the artist and a silent exclamation: "How on earth did I do that!" To lose one's self-awareness in the making of a work of art is to become tuned

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in to a guiding and controlling force not present in the routine operations of consciousness.

The difference in submission of the ego to the numinous in the prototaxic mode and the disciplined skill of the artist in taming the numinous in a kind of parataxic symbiosis is great. This intuitive relationship is a prelude to the greater cognitive control of the syntaxic mode. Collier (1972:72) makes this point plain:
 

There is a widespread belief that inspiration absolves the artist from using his reason, from the demands of normal mental deliberation. While this may be true to some, it does not appear to be the case for others. Eugene Delacroix, for example, inspired to paint the large Massacre at Chios by the powerful feelings this contemporary event generated, made many deliberate changes as the work progressed. For him, the initial experience of vision was not lost because he exercised a conscious control as the image developed. Although the passionate intensity of the first urges to paint remained, the developing image itself demanded modification as it materialized. He was constantly appraising; re-painting the background one day, re-drawing a figure another, until the work was "right" and he knew it to be finished: it was a case of intense and inspired feeling uniting with a controlling aesthetic intelligence.

Read (1960:51) sums up the relation of art to the numinous element in concluding:
 

Images totally distinct from words or any signs used in discursive reasoning, assume an autonomous activity . . . and produce an effect . . . which may be personal . . . and beautiful, or may be supra-personal, and will then convey what Goethe calls "the deepest secrets of creation" or what Dr. Erich Neumann has called "die Gefuhlsqualitat des Numinosen".
 

Beginning with the impressionists, the recent history of modern art can be interpreted as a parataxic and perhaps abortive prefiguration of the ecstasies of syntaxic graces. The impressionists, particularly Manet, Renoir, and Sisley started the movement with their rediscovering through light the numinous qualities inherent in nature - in other words, the parataxic explication of a nature mystic experience (see section 4.71). The post-impressionists extended this intuitive relationship to the next level of the Adamic ecstasy with its time distortion. One can sense the numinous in the work of Munch, Radon, and Nolda. Metaphysical art, especially that of de Chirico and Carra with its

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perspective distortion and empty squares prefigures the knowledge-ecstasy (section 4.73) in which space is transcended. Then came the surrealists, with Dali, Tanguy, and Tlitichew, who began the dismantling of personality as required in the knowledge-contact-ecstasies (section 4.74). This procedure was continued by the abstractionists, the geometric art (reminding one of the yantras), the illusionists, in which there is further depersonalization corresponding to the higher knowledge-contact states (section 4.75). Prominent in these endeavors were Klee, Mondrain, Max Ernst, and others.

What we are witnessing here, therefore, is a kind of historical dumbshow preceding the play, in which through the evolution of art, the liberation of man from the triple prison of time, space, and personality is prefigured. We shall further explicate this deliverance in chapter 4.

It is this new quality of a higher relationship to the numinous which gave such scope and vigor to impressionism, and it is characteristic that the central issue should be the explication of light on natural objects in a new manner. Collier (1972:109) grasps this point well when he says:
 

The often-quoted phrase "to clothe the idea in perceptible form," was the proclaimed gospel of the Symbolist movement, and we can use it as a clue to distinguish between expressive and symbolic transformation. At the risk of oversimplifying the problem I would suggest that a predominantly expressive work arouses our feelings - our sympathy or revulsion, fear, anger, desire, and so on. Yet an image that is strong in symbolic allusion does more than awaken feeling. It involves us in speculation. We find ourselves wondering about things; about abstract principles and concepts such as those that occupied van Gogh when he pondered on the essence of human love or on the validity of hope ... on the idea of a thing in the mind rather than on the thing itself. In our response to symbolic art we are generally led through feeling to thought. But we respond to expressive art much more simply and directly because our feelings can take us over, without benefit or need of meditation.

Schopenhauer (Carra, 1971:9) is quoted as saying:
 

To have original, extraordinary, and perhaps even immortal ideas, one has but to isolate oneself from the world for a few minutes so completely that the most commonplace happenings appear to be new and unfamiliar, and in this way reveal their true essence.

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de Chirico (Carra, 1971:15) tells of his own artistic revelation in the Villa Borghese, "In the gallery I beheld tongues of flame ... I received the revelation of what a great painting is."

Carra (1971:20) tells us that de Chirico set out to find the daemon in everything, the daemon being the numinous element concealed behind every appearance. de Chirico is quoted as saying: "The fearful void discovered in this way is itself the inanimate and calm beauty of matter." The act capturing this element is magical.

M. Carra (1971:23) quotes Cardo Carra as saying: "Ordinary things reveal those forms of simplicity which tell us of a higher state of being which constitutes all the richness of the secret of art."

Speaking of another metaphysical artist, Savinio, Carra (1971:26) says: "His metaphysical inclination was directed instinctively toward the interpretation of images representing the links between yesterday, today, and tomorrow, in which the phantasms of the subconscious, evoked by the intelligence, are the sole actors in an interior world." It would be hard to compress the expression of action of the preconscious in art into a clearer statement.

Carra (1971:155) quotes Savinio as saying: "We live in a phantasmic world with which we are gradually becoming familiar .... Phantasmic meaning incipient phenomenon of representation ... the initial state of the moment of discovery when man found himself in the presence of a reality hitherto unknown to him."

Carra (1971:181) quotes Rathke as saying about the "metaphysical" artists:
 

What they all have in common is the endeavor to transform the pictorial representation of reality in such a way as to make visible the concealed reality that lies beyond.

An example is Max Beckmann's The Night. Carra (1971:182): "The cramped attic room in which the scene is set symbolizes the prison in which man is confined."

Carra (1971:87) quotes de Chirico on metaphysical art as stating that "we should keep control of all the images which present themselves . . . in wakefulness ... and ... in dreams. . . ." He rejects drug-induced dreams as a stimuli to creativity, but "to discover the mysterious aspects of objects" can be accomplished by "an individual gifted with creative talent." He defines art as the "net which catches these strange moments."

Abell (1966:331) senses this concept when he reports:

 
"Fill your mind with the ideas of your century" said Goethe to the young poets of his time, "and the ideas will come." That is the essential creative principle of psycho-historical thought. . . .
 

What the creative artist needs is intuitive access to the accumulating pool of collective feeling which has not yet been channeled, or has been only channeled into either intellectual or artistic conceptions. . . . His task is not so much to reflect the ideas of his century, as to help find and formulate them; not so much to fill his mind with the ideas of his time, as to help fill his time with the ideas implicit in its cultural destiny.

Creative activity, thus conceived, extends the energies of the artist in two dimensions, one inward, and the other outward. Inwardly he must in some sense be a mystic, seeking to establish communications with the obscure depths of the conscious and unconscious psyche; sinking his consciousness into the collective unconsciousness in order that the accumulating collective charges may reach him and use him as a conductor. Like Dante he must have experience which will enable him to give a first-hand account of the negative and positive reaches of psychic reality during this epoch. Otherwise his work cannot participate in the destiny of his epoch.

3.65 Art as Creativity

It should be obvious now that we have come to parataxic creativity, or to the creative process with images in a non-verbal mode. We shall see that this procedure extends into the syntaxic mode with verbal creativity, but for the time being let us examine the first surfacing of the phenomenon in the arts. It may be noted that the performing arts come to the left of the visual arts, which come to the left of compositions in mathematics and music (in the syntaxic mode) which come to the left of verbal creativity.

Despite the fact that the parataxic nature of visual art makes for some difficulties in investigating the psychology of artistic creativity, there have been some explorations recently. We note a few representative studies under four headings: theory, factor analysis, measurement, and training.

Theory: Hammer (1968) devised a projective technique which yielded fourteen hypotheses differentiating the truly creative art student from the merely facile one. Flannery (1969) studies the interplay between the intellect and imagination in artistic creation. Sechi (1970) connected art, language, and creativity in an Existential framework. Billig (1972) examined the relationship between creativity and psychosis in reference to schizophrenic art. Csikszentmihalyi and Getzels (1971) found a positive relationship between discovery-oriented behavior and originality in art students. Noy (1973) viewed art as belonging with dreams and fantasy to the primary process ego functions.

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Factor Analysis: Trowbridge and Charles (1967) found that technical art competence increased with age, while creativity remained relatively constant. Schnitzer and Stewart (1969) using fifty high school art students found significant relationship between many of the personality measures, but none between personality and originality. Popperove (1970) analyzed psychic qualities of creative artists in terms of SOI factors, relation of creativity to intelligence, motivational aspects, and creative activity survey. Blottenberg (1973) using the Graves and Meier extracted three factors from a 20 x 20 matrix: art-diagnostic tests, art interests, and art ability. McWhinnie (1973) measured correlations between the Welsh Figure Preference Test and the Embedded Figure Test.

Measurement: Dudek (1967) examined creativity in art and Rorschach movement responses in doctoral research. Rawls and Boone (1967) in a similar study found "whole" responses predominated among creative artists. Pang and Shillinger (1968) used the Barron-Welsh Art Scale on prison inmates, finding first offenders higher than habituals. Laynor (1968) compared the Torrance Tests with artwork judgment and teacher choice. Ford (1968) studied socio-economic status with reference to artistic creativity. Rawls and Slack (1968) compared artists with non-artists on the Rorschach. Dawson and Bailer (1973) conducting a twelve-year follow-up of elderly persons, the experimentals of whom took a course in oil painting and the controls of whom did not, found two-thirds of the experimentals still alive versus three-eighths of the controls.

Training: O'Toole (1967) examined the effects of massed and spaced practice on artistic creativity. Berkowitz and Avril (1969) found no relationship between short-term sensory enrichment and creativity in art. Brittain and Beittel (1969) analyzed levels of creative performance in the visual arts. Vetlugma (1970) discussed art instruction for creativity. Carter and Miller (1971) found that group creative art activities enhanced visual-perceptual abilities in brain-injured children. Slapo (1971) studied how to help sixth-grade children incorporate more original ideas into their art production in an effort to free children from responses similar to teacher's directions. McWhinnie (1971) studied perceptual behavior in sixth-graders in relation to their art, especially perceptual field independence, and level of differentiation of figure drawing, and found that there were discrete areas of perceptual behavior.

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3.66 Art: Conclusion

A great work of art is the vestigial and durative trace of an aesthetic mystical experience. Pollock (O'Hara, 1959) called this a "total engagement of the spirit in the expression of meaning," and said that it was agonizing to achieve and harrowing to maintain. Collier (1972:71) points out that this is the same state described by Mondrian as "pure thought," by Malevich as "nonobjective feeling," by Kandinsky as "secretly implanted vision," by Klee as "subconscious creativity," and by Michelangelo as the "eye of the soul." The parataxic analogue of prototaxic trance and syntaxic mystic ecstasy or samadhi is the altered state of consciousness which produces great art.

In this transformation, the artist experiences "prathahara" or the withdrawal of the sense organs from the percepts of the physical world. Malevich said: "the contours of the objective world fade more and more." And under the spell of inspiration the artist experiences a release from clock time, and an escape into the "Eternal Now," for as Collier remarks (1972:71): "Common to all inspired creative acts is a change in the artist's sense of the duration of time."

The poet James Baldwin describes the poet as a "witness-bearer" to the transfiguring force inside man, the same phrase used by Gurdieff with regard to mystical experience. Collier (1972:113) quotes the artist Bacon as saying, "I would like to trap a moment of life in its full beauty. That would be the ultimate painting." Collier notes that poets also express a similar feeling and gives Keat's Ode to a Grecian Urn as an example:

 
Thou still unravished bride of quietness
Thou fosterchild of Silence and slow Time. ..
Bold lover, never can'st thou kiss
Though winning near the goal - yet do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss
For ever wilt thou love and she be fair. . . .
Though silent form does tease us out of thought
As doth eternity. Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st
Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Collier (Ibid: 114) concludes that "to be immortalized is to be removed from time and desire" and so the chase is never completed. But if duration is, in Collier's words (1972:115), "the quantitative aspect of art" he finds (1972(114): "the artist stands out of time wherein all events must be consummated." He does this by transcending time through entry into the "Eternal Now" in his aesthetic experience, for as Collier (1972:1116) remarks: "The ability to control time seems

(page 241)

to depend... upon an expansion of consciousness in which the rational processes no longer play a dominant part."

The artist in his aesthetic ASC simulates intuitively and parataxically the shedding of the three great illusions which must be cognitively faced in the syntaxic mode. (1) He is no longer bound by the sensory percepts of the physical world; (2) He transcends time, and (3) He loses a sense of separateness, and moving beyond self becomes at one with universal forces of the cosmos.

Because art, through contact with the numinous, gets us outside of time and space, it predicts the future:
 

Wassily Kandinsky puts it another way. He talks about "a prophetic power" possessed by works of true vision:

There is another ... which also springs from contemporary feeling. Not only is it simultaneously its echo and mirror but it possesses also an awakening prophetic power which can have far-reaching and profound effect.

The spiritual life to which art belongs, and of which it is one of the mightiest of agents, is a complex but definite movement above and beyond.... Although it may take different forms, it holds basically to the same internal meaning and purpose.
 

But, as usual, the Greeks have the last word; all this was known long ago:

 
For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him; when he has not attained to this state he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles.

3.7 PARATAXIC MODE
CONCLUSION

We are now at the end of the middle mode which is characterized by the veiling and totemization of the numinous element through
five procedures: archetype, dreams, myth, ritual, and art. What is there to conclude?

1. The first virtue of the parataxic state is that, in whichever

(page 242)

procedure, it offers, through the medium of images to the average sensual man, a method higher than that of trance, yet easier than that of regeneration, of interacting with the veiled numinous element so as at least in part to transcend time, and thereby escape from the first dimension of the triple prison of our existence. We have variously glimpsed this time transcendence as The Great Time, primordial time, mythical time, The Spacious Present, the durative topocosm, all seen in myth and ritual, experienced in archetypes and dreams, and finally explicated in art. Whether in the performing arts in the time of the play, or in the time suspension which music evokes, or in the plastic arts, such as the durative topocosm of Shelley's "Grecian Urn" or de Chirico's empty squares, there is transcendence of clock time to a wider purview. It is this aspect of the parataxic which is so freeing, for it allows iconic representation of reality outside time without forcing man to the cognitive implication of that fact (which involves mystic redemption).¹³

2. A second virtue of the parataxic estate is the production and distribution of sounds and images. These sounds and images are appreciated as having meaning within themselves, apart from and anterior to their cognitive meaning. They stand for a higher order of abstraction, at present unrealized, but none the less powerful. Because of their veiled numinous qualities, sounds and images act as generating entities, or archetypes, being revealed only in their products as art. As prototypes of these presentations, from archetype to art, from myth to mandala, they embody basic motifs of existence.

3. A third virtue of the parataxic estate is that through the veiling of the stark numinous there emerges the conception and expression of beauty and utility. The prototaxic numinous element, which is a dreadful mysterium tremendum, is transformed by the process of totemization and gradually refined through five procedures into a thing of grace and beauty, and this beauty has immediate face validity as in art or music. It is as Emerson said, "Its own excuse for being." The transformation of the dread and horror of the primitive numinous to a manifestation of beauty seems a magical process. No one explicated this better than Shakespeare in the magic of Ariel's song:
 

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones is coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell;
Hark, I hear them, Ding, Dong, Bell.

(page 243)

Here Ariel, the fairy of Prospero, the wise magician, tells of the transmutation of a cadaver, a most horrible object into a thing of beauty.

4. A fourth virtue of the parataxic estate is that it leads by degrees to non-verbal creativity. This path proceeds from the rather reactive reception of images as archetypes in the preconscious, to their elucidation in dreams, their explication in myth and ritual, and their culmination in art. This unfoldment of the creative process in the individual (which simply represents better cognition of the numinous) not only prepares him for the higher creativity of the syntaxic mode but improves his mental health by putting him more in touch and congruent with the preconscious. It gives the ego a working relationship with the numinous which enables him to draw on this source, and will later develop into further cognitive control in the syntaxic procedures. It is therefore heuristic and developmental.

5. A final virtue of the parataxic estate is that, unlike the prototaxic mode which emphasizes man's animality, and the syntaxic mode which emphasizes man's divinity, the parataxic mode emphasizes man's humanity. Though this vision of the numinous is only partial, it is within the purview of everyman. For the parataxic is the exemplification of the "I-it" relationship, as the syntaxic is for the "I thou." This "I-it" encounter is best seen in the impress of the craftsman upon his material, in which, through mastery of his particular medium, he transcends his discipline and in doing so approaches the Tao. Though the artist may be "in the world, he is not of it." And as such examples as Rembrandt or Hans Sachs indicate, in the perfect execution of craftsmanship, though resting upon psychomotor skills, there is a foretaste of liberation.

In our next (and final) chapter on the syntaxic mode, the full cognitive liberation occurs in gradually ascending levels of mind expansion whose glories were long ago foretold by Popol Vuh:
 

Let there be light!
Let the dawn rise over heavens and earth!
There can be no glory, no splendor
Until the humanistic being exists,
The fully developed man.

FOOTNOTES

1. Some of the material in this section is taken from the M.A. thesis of the author's sponsee, Deborah Zeff.

(page 244)

2. For the remainder of this quote as applied to dreams of scientists, see 4.354.

3. Compare St John Perse: "The worst catastrophes of history are but seasonal rhythms in a vaster cycle of repetitions and renewals.

4. The remainder of this section is from the M.A. thesis of Deborah Zeff, a sponsee of the author.

5. Read (1960:37) also note that: (art) "is a unique mode of discourse, giving access to areas of knowledge closed to other types."

6. Literally the "term to which," i.e., the destination.

7. Literally the "term from which" i.e. the point of departure.

8.... as quoted by Whyte, L. L. The Unconscious Before Freud. New York: Basic Books, (1962:163).

9. Novelist John Gardner glimpses the relationship between art and the numinous in The Resurrection (1966:200-202).

10. The relativistic aspect of our clock time is also shown in the similar hypothetical experience of a space voyager who, traveling near the speed of light, finds that his clock has run slow compared with the passage of time on earth.

11. Inspection of Table VI, page 183 will reveal that the basic myths grow straight out of the basic archetypes.

12. Compare this with the developmental system of ethics proposed by W. G. Perry, Forms of Intellectual and Moral Development, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968.

13. Note the similar symbolism indicated by the melting clock faces in Salvador Dali's art.

14. Let us suppose that an artist receives a parataxic (pictorial) comprehension of the triple illusion (of time, space, and personality) and tries to express this psychic tension through his art. How will he do it? He will portray some example of clock time being transcended, as above. He will illustrate some distortion of space as in perspective changes or emptiness. Finally he will indicate depersonalization and abstraction in outlining the human face and figure. But these developments are precisely those of modern surrealistic and abstract art.

15. See note 28, page 173. The uruboros represents primeval unity of sub-human man and nature in which he was "innocent" because not yet self-conscious; (our OSC had not yet evolved). In trance and schizophrenia we may see regression to this primitive undifferentiated state in which the ancient archaic vestige may erupt when the ego defenses which keep it in its place are removed.
 
 
 
 
 
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