The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [397]
Then the most startling development of all takes place, the coming not of Light but Life. The first amino-acids are formed, the first self-replicating molecules emerge: and the story of life then becomes rather like a Rags to Riches story, or rather a succession of them, each evolving out of the last. Our hero is originally a little one-celled creature who reveals the potential to multiply and become a multi-celled creature. Later he is a water creature who reveals the potential to rise from a `lower' state to a `higher, by becoming a land creature. At each stage the hero is revealing a 'higher Self' emerging from within his previous, more limited `inferior Self'. And of course at each stage he is getting nearer to something we can recognise as ourselves.
There is one particularly dramatic episode in the story, in the Mesozoic, when we see a duality emerging between `the Monster', the slow-witted, cold-blooded dinosaurs, and a new hero, the first little warm-blooded mammals, who rush about like so many Davids in the presence of Goliath: outwardly, physically so much less impressive, but like little David endowed with vastly superior brainpower and ultimately destined to succeed to the kingdom, when the monsters of this mythology, such as Tyrannosaurus rex, its Tyrant King, have been mysteriously overthrown.
Finally comes the moment when another hero emerges from the shadow of shambling apes and other mammalian monsters: the first hominids who, after a time of struggling with mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers and other `dark' figures of our immediate prehistory, turn unto the ultimate hero of the whole story, Homo sapiens, ourselves.
Scarcely has the hero emerged from the shadows into his full glorious identity, however, than we find ourselves being drawn into another plot to explain why we have not yet reached the full happy ending.
The Fall: Ego and imagination
Although every culture in the world has its myths to explain the creation of the universe, there is a second very important type of story which is only found much more rarely. This is the myth which tells how, in the earliest stages of man's arrival in the world, an extraordinary event took place which was to separate him from the rest of creation as being fundamentally different from any other animal.
Again, the version of this story of the `Fall of Man' with which we are most familiar is that recounted in the book of Genesis. This shows us the first man and the first woman, Adam and Eve, originally living in a garden called `Paradise' (from the old Persian `pardis, `a garden'), in a state of happy and unbroken unity with nature. Everything necessary for their life is available to them. All is well, until they succumb to the temptation of the Serpent and eat of the fruit of the `Tree of Knowledge'. At this point, several specific things happen to them, transforming their lives. In attaining this mysterious `knowledge, they realise that what has happened to them is partly a blessing and partly a curse. They are expelled from Paradise. They become aware of a distinction between `Good and Evil'. They are now superior to all other forms of life, but their existence is filled with new troubles. They have become self-conscious; they are ashamed of their nakedness, and conceal their reproductive organs. Finally they know, for the first time, they are going to die.
Another familiar version of this story is that contained in the complex of Greek myths centred on the figures of Prometheus (`forethought'); his brother Epimetheus (`afterthought'); and the latter's wife Pandora ('giver of all things'). Pandora is given by the gods a mysterious vessel, which she is told on no account to open, just as Eve is told not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. She does so and out into the human