The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [434]
By the time we arrive at the height of the `New Stone Age' or Neolithic period, between 4000 and 2500 BC, which created the great stone monuments of Egypt, Britain and elsewhere, a psychological earthquake has taken place. As men have further emerged from their original state of nature, they are no longer dependent on hunting wild animals for their survival. They have become herdsmen and cultivators of the soil. They are no longer so directly dependent on Mother Nature, as something of which they are still unconsciously a part. They are now much more consciously separated from nature. They have developed a degree of conscious control over the natural world around them. And to match this mighty advance in consciousness, they are now looking upwards to the sky, the source of light. The Greek and Latin words for `god, theos and deus, derive from the same Sanskrit root dyaus from which we get the word `day. Originally this meant simply `that which shines': that from which light comes. Certainly it was from the sky that light came, not least in the life-giving warmth of the sun. It was also the sky which provided life-giving rain. As men now planted seeds in the earth, which the powers of sun and rain would assist to grow, the relationship of man to nature had become more like that of a marriage, with the earth as the unconscious female partner, fertilised by a masculine alliance between human consciousness and those powers deriving from the sky above.
In fact, as we can see from various cosmologies of that period, the more advanced agricultural peoples had come to see the world as divided into three levels. In the middle was the mundane, earthly level on which they lived their lives. But above them now was the sky, the heavens, the source of light, corresponding to a higher state of consciousness; while below them, corresponding to the dark unconscious, was a shadowy underworld. And in the way that is natural to the human unconscious, as it reveals its workings to the conscious mind through symbolism, they had come to see each of these levels peopled with mysterious supernatural beings, personifying the forces which shaped their lives.4
These powers came under two main headings. On one hand they represented external, natural forces, such as the Sun, the Moon, air, wind, fire, water, thunder, lightning. On the other they were projections of those internal psychic forces and states which govern human emotions and actions, such as love, justice, war, wisdom. Each of these powers was personified in its own way by its own `god, `goddess' or spirit. Because what these figures represented were the forces which dominate human life they took on a numinous power, that which pertains to a `god'. It was natural that they should be treated with awe and reverence and that efforts should be made to harmonise with the forces they represented or to placate them by ritual acts of worship and sacrifice. What they also had in common was that woven around them was a great web of myth. For our prehistoric ancestors, the most profound way in which they could express their sense of how they should relate to these mysterious powers governing their lives was through their ability to imagine stories.
One of the earliest cosmologies we know was that of the civilisation of ancient Egypt, which teemed with more than 700 separate divinities. Increasingly, however, these came to be dominated by a central quartet of figures. The great god Osiris represented the masculine principle. It was he, according to the myth, who had originally brought order and civilisation to the Egyptian people, instructing them in law and justice, teaching them the arts of fishing and agriculture, introducing them to religion,