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By Root 5379 0

building the first temples. The great goddess Isis, his wife and sister, represented the feminine principle. She brought them all the arts of home-making, nurturing children, spinning, weaving, and grinding corn. She was also the goddess of wisdom. The son-god Horus was born as their Eternal Child. And as a shadowy fourth came Osiris's brother Set, who was jealous, twisted and dark. It was the treacherous Set who eventually slew Osiris, cutting him into 14 pieces, twice the magical number seven. It was the wise and loving Isis who brought them together again and miraculously reimbued them with life. It was Horus, the redeeming Child, who finally avenged his father by slaying Set. This myth provides the earliest example we know of the God who dies and is reborn. And although its cycle of death and rebirth was associated with similar patterns in nature, such as the nightly death and rebirth of the sun or the yearly alternation of drought and flood which restored life-giving fertility to the valley of the Nile, there can be no mistaking that the cause of Osiris's death was that dark power in human nature which it was the purpose of Set to personify.

The archetype of the city

No creations marking this dawn of human civilisation were more spectacular than the first cities. It was Lewis Mumford in The History of the City who first observed that there seems to be a universal archetype behind the idea of the city. Wherever we look in the world at the remains of the earliest cities, in the plains of Mesopotamia or the jungles of central America, we see them exhibiting certain common characteristics. They are laid out according to geometric, formal patterns, often clearly marked off from the surrounding countryside, as by walls. And they are centred on symbolic monumental structures which represent a combination of spiritual and earthly power: such as the temple-palaces of Babylon, Nineveh, Nippur and Ur, with their ziggurats, or stepped pyramid-like towers made from sun-baked brick, soaring over the rooftops of the city to bring its priest-kings closer to the heavens.5 By definition a city stands for the foursided totality of human functioning. It represents the masculine principles of power and order, both of which have been required to build such a monumental creation in the first place. But these are made life-giving by the feminine way it provides nurture for the citizens under its protection, and feeds their spiritual life as a storehouse of their collective wisdom and as a symbol of totality. A city implies a complete hierarchy of social organisation, made up of all the classes and groups whose contribution is necessary to keep its complex life functioning, from those `above the line' who represent its ruling consciousness down to the helot class `below the line' at the bottom who help maintain it with their physical labour. As we say of a city, `all human life is there'. All those who belong to a city are potentially enlarged by the sense of being part of a mighty organism much greater than any of its constituent parts. In this sense it is not surprising that all the way through the history of storytelling we see the city itself symbolising the archetype of the Self, as `the centre; the place where heroes and heroines can realise their full human potential (unless like Chekhov's three sisters they cannot get there). Something else we soon recognise when we study the earliest cities, like those of Mesopotamia, Egypt or Greece, is how each had its own story, to explain its origins; and how each had its tutelary deity or deities in whose honour those great central symbolic structures were raised to the sky. But there was one thing above all which distinguished these heavenly beings from the human beings who viewed them with such awe. The gods were immortal. Mankind was not.

The hunger for eternal life

There was a second obvious purpose for which our prehistoric ancestors created imposing symbolic structures. This was to house the remains of their dead. What all these burial places had in common, from the royal tombs of the