The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [410]
So obsessed has Jumping Mouse become with his Sacred Mountains, however, that he sets off on a long, lonely journey to reach them. He eventually emerges from the forest to the edge of a great open plain, stretching as far as the eye can see. Wheeling in the sky above it are eagles, which would like nothing more than to catch a mouse for their dinner. But he then encounters a bison which has lost its sight. The bison says it has been told that, if only it could be given the eye of a mouse, it would regain its sight. Jumping Mouse hands over one of his eyes and the bison, now able to see, carries him safely over the plain to the foothills of the Sacred Mountains. Here the bison can go no further, but the mouse then runs into a wolf (in some versions a bear) which has also been struck blind. The mouse surrenders its second eye, the wolf regains its sight and carries the mouse, now itself blind, up into the mountains until they reach the shore of a sacred lake, where the wolf leaves the mouse all alone.
As the mouse is abandoned, weak and defenceless, it is not long before a mighty eagle swoops down to attack him. As its talons strike, the mouse feels the shock of death. But he finds himself being carried up into the air and, as he soars up into the heavens, he finds his sight and strength miraculously returning. `Mouse, the story ends, `has become Eagle'.
Although this story comes from a cultural tradition which could scarcely be more remote from our own, there is nothing about its fundamental message we cannot immediately recognise. It begins with the group of mice all preoccupied with their busy, mundane, ego-centred existence. Only one has an intuitive apprehension that, somewhere, there is something far more important to life than just this limited little view of the world, and sets out on his long, hazardous Quest to reach it. We recognise the way the hero only makes progress towards his distant goal by self-sacrificing acts of generosity to other animals, who then become his helpers. And obviously the story's main theme, as it describes how an initially ordinary little figure finds himself eventually transformed into something immeasurably greater, is entirely familiar: even if he only becomes at one with the power of the universal life-force at the moment when his separate ego-identity finally dissolves in death.
The essential message of storytelling all over the world is that there are two centres to human nature: and that to become reunited with the totality of life it is necessary to make the long and difficult transition from one to the other. From our earliest years, the first point the unconscious tries to make through stories is that the greatest danger to the human race is its own capacity to think and to act egocentrically. This is why those first properly-formed stories which make sense to us as a child tend to show a little hero or heroine, much like ourselves, venturing out into a mysterious outside world, such as a great forest, where they encounter some terrifying dark figure: a witch, a giant, a wolf or some other monster. The purpose of this is to introduce the child to a personification of that dark power of egotism which it must learn to recognise as its most deadly enemy.
Initially this enemy is shown as something wholly external; and the point of such stories, as we saw, is simply to awaken the child's subconscious awareness to the fact that, in this strange new world it is entering, such a deadly power exists. But progressively, as we grow older, the message is filled out, as it conveys to us with greater subtlety and depth those qualities the hero or heroine must develop for them to reach the complete happy ending; not least when we come to those types of story which show the hero or heroine having to wrestle with that same dark power in themselves.
So, whether we respond to it or not, does the constant feeding of our imagination