The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [433]
Nothing has fascinated us more about our prehistoric ancestors, as they progressively emerged from the state of unconscious unity with nature, than their more spectacular artefacts. We endlessly speculate, for instance, as to why the ancient Egyptians built their mighty pyramids or why the Neolithic inhabitants of Britain raised up their great stone circles at Stonehenge and Avebury. Certainly these awe-inspiring structures show the organising and ordering function of human consciousness already developed to a very high degree. But what is also obvious about them is that they were designed as symbols. The three pyramids of Giza are based on a combination of those familiar archetypal numbers three and four, four triangles arranged in a quaternity to make a symbolic whole: three becoming four to make one. The stones of Stonehenge, composed in a set of concentric circles, including the tripartite structures known as trilithons, were precisely aligned not with the rising of the sun on midsummer's day, as has been commonly supposed, but with the sun's setting at the winter solstice, on the shortest day of the year.2 What these structures had in common was that, like cave paintings more than 10,000 years earlier, they were designed to give the people who made them a sense of connection with something infinitely greater than themselves. And nothing struck in them a deeper chord of recognition than the patterns they discerned in the movement of those mysterious sources of light wheeling silently through the heavens above them; the life-giving sun defining the lengths of their days and years, the waxing and waning moon defining their months, the constellations of stars progressing with unfailing regularity across the night sky. It was to harmonise their own lives on earth with these indications of heavenly pattern and purpose that those Palaeolithic artists recorded the lunar cycle on their cave walls, that those Neolithic builders designed Stonehenge to accord so precisely with the moment in the annual cycle when the year and nature are `reborn'.
What our prehistoric ancestors were doing was to try to reconnect themselves with that sense of unity from which they had been exiled by the emergence of their new type of consciousness. The structures they created to that end we recognise from storytelling as representations of the archetype of the Self. They stood for that sense of `wholeness' which we derive from the Greek holos, which also gives us `holy and `holiness. In creating these `holy' symbols they were trying to establish a correspondence between their own lives and the totality of the cosmos.
However, in the thousands of years which elapsed between the painting of those cave walls in the Old Stone Age and the raising of these vast monumental structures in the New Stone Age, the consciousness of Homo sapiens had in fact been through a revolution as profound as any in the history of our species.
From Mother Earth to sky gods
The earliest artefacts we recognise as unmistakably religious in purpose were a large number of clay and stone figurines which have been found all across Europe from Spain to Siberia. The late Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers who made them often placed them in caves which seem to have been used as sanctuaries or `holy places'. The word `religion' comes from the Latin ligare, to bind, as in ligature and ligament. The prefix `re-` implies the re-establishing of a connection which has been lost. The vast majority of these statuettes show a woman in all her rounded, nurturing, protective, life-giving female-ness, emphasising the curves of breasts, belly, buttocks and vulva. They