The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [409]
Similarly a woman's personality needs the balance of the `inner masculine: Unless a woman's femininity is given positive balance by the strength of her animus, she remains weak, irrational and disorganised. But again, a woman whose femininity becomes overridden by her inner masculinity becomes hard, assertive and domineering. Taken over by her `negative animus, she becomes, as we say, a virago. Quick to find fault or to take offence, eager to pick a quarrel, her negative animus speaks in a parody of masculine rationality while talking irrational nonsense.
What all these permutations on the disintegrated psyche have in common is that they are centred on the inability of the ego properly to integrate with the selfless level of the unconscious. They are all therefore different manifestations of immaturity; and certainly nothing provides a clearer mirror than the world of stories to all the ways in which human beings can fall short of that state of integration. But what they also present us with is a model of what is required for any human being to achieve maturity. This means that he or she must consciously have reached a state of harmony with the unconscious. They must have achieved a balance between the masculine and feminine elements in their personality: between body and mind, heart and soul. Only through bringing all these together can anyone rise above the limitations of the ego to become identified with their inmost Self. And to show how this state can be achieved (and how and why human beings fall short of achieving it) is the central purpose of storytelling.
Patterns for life
When an acorn falls onto the ground, it contains all the genetic information it needs to grow up into a perfect, fully developed oak tree. When a human baby is born, it contains all the genetic programming it needs to develop physically into a fully grown man or woman. What it does not have is the instinctive programming to ensure that it will eventually grow up psychologically into a fully mature human being. It is precisely this lack for which the archetypal patterns which underlie storytelling have emerged through evolution to compensate.
To just what extent these unconscious patterns can be said to be part of the common genetic inheritance of mankind may call for qualification. Almost all the individual stories we have been looking at in this book have been drawn only from one cultural tradition, that of our own Western civilisation, even though this includes by far the most richly developed complex of storytelling in the world and can trace its roots, via Greek and Middle Eastern mythology, far back into pre-history. Some of the story-forms which have evolved within that tradition, such as Comedy, are rarely found outside it. But even when we look outside our own tradition to, say, the mythology and folk tales of the indigenous peoples of Africa or the Americas, we still find that same core of symbolism which forms the basis of all storytelling.
A story told by the tribes who once roamed the Great Plains of the American Middle-West is the tale we know in its Cheyenne form as Jumping Mouse. There was once a little mouse, living busily in a forest with all the other mice around him, who one day heard a strange, faint roaring noise, seemingly coming from far away. None of the other mice could hear it, but when it persisted, he eventually set off on his own to see what it was. He runs into a raccoon (in some versions a fox) who guides him nearer and nearer to the source of the roaring, until the little mouse finds himself looking at a mighty river. Here a frog tells him to jump up in the air. When the mouse does so, he falls into the water and gets horribly wet. But while jumping, the mouse has glimpsed far off the most beautiful sight he has ever seen: the `Sacred Mountains' (in some versions, just one mountain). The frog tells him he has now