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By Root 5621 0

He was followed in stupidity by his son Bart, whose bright younger sister Lisa was so much more on the ball (as even, on occasion, was his dummy-sucking baby sister Maggie). The long-suffering mother of the family, Marge, was invariably shown as most sensible of all. But it would be a mistake to see these characterisations as simply reflecting post-feminist political correctness. In archetypal terms, The Simpsons could scarcely have been more traditional. The role of the obsessively self-deceiving father, as a representation of the deluded ruling consciousness, has been basic to Comedy back to the time of Aristophanes, The son, Bart, represented a lesser version of the blindness of ego-centred masculinity. The female members of the family represented that wider `feminine' vision which we invariably see in stories emanating from `below the line', centred particularly (as in, say, A Winter's Tale or The Marriage of Figaro) on the bright Daughter/Princess and the put-upon but emotionally wise Mother/Queen.17

In this respect The Simpsons took its place in the mainstream of a tradition of storytelling which could be traced back through more than two and a half thou sand years. But the very fact that probably not one of the countless millions of people watching the series were aware of this (any more, one suspects, than were its authors) was in itself a measure of just how unconscious is the process whereby human beings are carried along by a story. We can follow hundreds of different versions of the same archetypal plot, each reflecting something profoundly significant about how our own psyche works. Yet so beguiled are we by the magic of storytelling that we do not even notice that fundamentally they are all telling us the same story.

If the evolution of human consciousness is really concerned with developing a clearer understanding of how we and the world work, perhaps the time has come when we should begin to appreciate what this astonishing faculty we each possess is really about: this mystery so close beneath our noses that we do not even recognise it to be a mystery at all.

The story of mankind

The fact that, as the year 2000 began, almost the entire human race celebrated the start of a new millennium, was itself a tribute to the power of a story. Even though Christianity was still, statistically, the world's leading religion, it had retreated a long way from the overwhelming dominance it once exercised over the individual and collective life of the inhabitants of a mainly European `Christendom'. For most people in the Europe of the early twenty-first century, the nearest they still came to observing Christian rituals was the continuing, largely secularised role played by the celebration of Christmas (although this too reflected the archetypal hold over the human imagination of a story). As Lao Tsu had put it, when `rectitude' was lost, all that was left were those outward `rites' which mark `the wearing thin of loyalty and good faith and the beginning of disorder'.

Quite apart from religion itself, however, all across the world the traditional frameworks of belief and symbolism designed to integrate human beings with the idea of the Self had long been in retreat against the advancing forces of secularism, the primary psychological effect of which was to promote the power and influence of the ego. Yet at the same time, the very fact that even those parts of the world which had never been predominantly Christian joined in marking the onset of the new millennium reflected the extraordinary speed with which in recent years the human world had seemed to shrink. What had brought it together as never before were the innovations in technology. Not only had the increased speed and ease of physical travel now made it possible for people to move around the globe in unprecedented numbers. Even more dramatic was the way in which satellite communications, global television coverage and the Internet had transformed it into what Marshall McLuhan called `the electronic village: Much more obviously than ever before, the entire human