The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [469]
In psychological terms these tales provide as perfect a reflection of the underlying archetypes of storytelling as anything we find in more self-consciously sophisticated forms of literature, which is why in this book we have returned to such examples as Cinderella or Jack and the Beanstalk again and again. There is nothing overtly religious or `Christian' about these stories (indeed variations of them are found in cultures all over the world). But they can be seen to reflect the same fundamental picture of human nature as that which underlies Christianity or other religions, because they spring so directly from the same archetypal roots. Just as surely as we see expressed through the religious impulse in mankind, they reflect the patterns whereby humanity can transcend the limitations of the ego to make contact with the Self. In that respect the folk tales which were so important to the `below the line' culture of mediaeval and post-mediaeval Europe were as much part of the psychological framework which helped connect people to the values of the Self as religion itself.
In the centuries following the Middle Ages, as European civilisation began to discover a quite different basis on which to look at the world, the imaginative and cultural framework created to provide this sense of unity in people's lives had begun subtly to disintegrate. For a long time the outward signs of this might not have seemed too obvious. But towards the end of the eighteenth century three developments coincided which were to mark the onset of a wholly new phase in the psychic development of mankind.
The first stemmed from all those advances in scientific knowledge and technological skill which were bringing about the industrial revolution. It is hard to exaggerate the psychological impact of the change this was to bring about in Western civilisation, as it began to become ever more dependent on the machine. The new machines, combining unprecedented power with the rigid repetitive patterns of mechanical order, helped to reinforce the masculine element in the collective psyche like nothing in human experience. They provided the means whereby civilisation could amass unheard of new wealth, reshaping the world with great new cities, joined together by such triumphs of nineteenth-century engineering as the railways, steam trains, steamships, great metal bridges. The effect of all this was immense, not least because it created the sense that men were now as never before emerging from their old dependence on nature to become masters of the world around them, controlling it to their own purposes. This was reinforced by that radical new mind-picture, first put forward by Erasmus Darwin and others before the end of the eighteenth century, which showed how life on earth had evolved over millions of years, from lower forms of life to higher, until it culminated in Homo sapiens. All this helped build up what over the next 100 years was, `above the line, to be seen as the new `religion of progress, portraying the entire history of the world as a long and painful upward climb from darkness into light, of which nineteenth-century man, with all his newfound power and mental ingenuity, was the crowning achievement.
But `below the line' this triumphant onward march of human consciousness cast a long shadow. As people were drawn off the land in their millions to crowd into the cities and factories, many were forced to live out their lives in surroundings more oppressive and dehumanised than anything experienced by human beings before. They were becoming cut off from the living rhythms of nature in a way that was entirely new. And that ingenuity which was creating