The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [541]
7. In January 1991, as the first Gulf War began, I noted as a journalist how the spectacle of allied forces travelling across half the world to confront Saddam Hussein provided a curious echo of the oldest recorded story in the world, the episode in the Epic of Gilgamesh when the heroes set out across the world to confront the monstrous giant Humbaba. It was of course from Mesopotamia, now Iraq, that this ancient story originated. Twelve years later, in 2003, it seemed very possible that the sense of an archetypal pattern having been left incomplete played a significant part in prompting George Bush Jr to invade Iraq, to complete the business left unfinished by his father.
8. This was the point so memorably crystallised in Hans Christian Andersen's fable The Emperor's New Clothes. The `ruling consciousness' is happy to agree that the Emperor is dressed in magnificent clothes. Only the small boy in the crowd, not affected by the collective consciousness, points out that he is naked. The child, `below the fine, represents that minority which is always right.
1. Reznikoff, Iegor, and Dauvois, Michel (1988), Bulletin de In Societe Prehistorique Francaise (85,238246). Their discovery was subsequently confirmed by study of other cave complexes (cf. Devereux, Paul, and Richardson, Tony (2001), Stone Age Soundtracks: The Acoustic Archaeology of Ancient Sites, (Vega)).
2. Although it was long supposed that the chief alignment of Stonehenge was with the rising of the sun at the summer solstice (hence those familiar Druidical and `hippy' gatherings on midsummer morning), this assumption has lately been dramatically challenged by the studies of Professor John North (recorded in Stonehenge. Neolithic Man And The Cosmos, HarperCollins, London, 1997). These convincingly show that the alignment of the stones corresponds not to the summer solstice but much more precisely to the setting of the sun on the year's shortest day. Thus, for its Neolithic architects, the purpose of Stonehenge was to provide their own equivalent of all those familiar archetypal festivals, such as the Roman Saturnalia and our own Christmas, which celebrate that lowest point of the year when nature `dies and is reborn.
3. See The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype by Erich Neumann (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1955), particularly the chapter on `The Primordial Goddess.
4. It was the Sumerian builders of the first cities in Mesopotamia who first gave the names of their gods to the five planets nearest to earth. These were later translated into their Greek and Roman equivalents with the names we still give them today: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The Mesopotamians particularly believed there was an intimate connection between the dispositions of heavenly bodies and events on earth, and that the spirits embodied in planets, stars, comets, sun and moon could not only influence earthly events but foretell what was going to happen in the future. It was they who divided the sky into the 12 signs of the Zodiac, thus establishing that link between the Zodiac and astrology which persists in popular folklore to this day. So preoccupied were they with astronomical observation that it was they who divided the lunar month into four weeks of seven days, each day into 24 hours of 60 minutes, and the circumference of the horizon (or a circle) into 360 degrees.
5. At this stage of human development, the exercise of spiritual and secular power was still very much conjoined. One ritual purpose of the ziggurats, we know from Herodotus and other authors, was to enable a priest-king to engage in sacred sexual intercourse on the top, or a priestess to enact the same.This was the hieros gamos or `holy marriage, symbolising the reunion of heaven and earth, masculine and feminine,