The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [542]
6. Even at the end of the twentieth century an old Kalahari bushman could be filmed for television explaining how ritual dance was so important to his people because `our dancing makes the ancestors happy, which in turn makes God happy. So our dancing makes a link between us, our ancestors and our God'. (Roy Sesana, filmed in 1997, shown in 2002 as part of The Last Dance of the Bushmen, made for the BBC by James Smith).
7. Apollo was also god of music, which unites life-energy and emotion with order; of healing, the restoration to physical health or `wholeness'; and of prophecy and oracles, the means whereby rational consciousness can divine from the irrational `underworld' what is to happen in the future.
8. This is an example of how the meaning of symbolism can sometimes be interpreted only by seeing it in context. The blindness of Polyphemus, after Odysseus has rammed a red-hot stake into his single eye, stands for the opposite of the self-inflicted blindness of Oedipus, when he gouges out his own eyes. Oedipus's outer blindness reflects his attainment of inner vision, in parallel to the blindness of the wise Teiresias. Polyphemus's blindness acts merely to confirm the lack of vision he has already shown in being outwitted by Odysseus.
9. In this way Hermes represented the act or process of intuition, the intuitive `flash' which gives consciousness a glimpse of that which has been unconscious (it was this `quicksilver' property which led the Romans to use their version of his name to describe the metal Mercury). But he did not represent that deeper state of understanding which the intuitive link with the unconscious can lead to. This was reserved for Athene in her role as goddess of wisdom. This is why both of them can appear in the same story, as they do to Perseus and Odysseus, because what they stand for is subtly different.
10. It is no accident that the two gods we see most often in their dark, negative aspects are Hera and Poseidon, because they then represent those key archetypal figures, the `Dark Mother' and the `Dark Father: But of course each can also appear in a light aspect: Hera when she plays a positive role as loving wife and mother; Poseidon when we see him in his `above the line' role as sea god, benignly presiding over `calm seas and prosperous voyages'. It is only when he assumes his `below the surface' role that we see him as the angry `Dark Father, whether he is sending storms at sea or creating monsters.
11. Although even he was part of a trinity, the Supreme Triad. This included his predecessor, the Heavenly Master of the First Origin, and the Heavenly Master of the Dawn of Jade of the Golden Door who would one day succeed him, so that the three gods represented past, present and future.
12. As an expression of this new phase in the evolution of human consciousness, the parallels between east and west are particularly striking since culturally they were wholly independent of each other. To Heraclitus, living in Asia Minor around 500 BC, there was a supreme unity, the One, which he also called `God, but made up from the reconciliation of all opposites. `All things emerge from the One and the One emerges out of all things.' Only `the One' is ultimately real. All oppositions or separate forms of existence to which it gives rise are by definition less real: just as in India at the same time the Hindus were coming to see the world of maya, governed by the interplay of opposites, as illusion. At much the same time, in China, Lao Tzu was writing in similar vein that `the myriad creatures are only alive by virtue of the One'; `all the myriad creatures in the world are born from Something, and Something from Nothing, and `the Tao begets One, one begets two, two begets three; three begets all the myriad creatures'. Lao Tzu also observed the tendency of all imbalances to produce a contrary impulse which eventually leads to an imbalance in the opposite direction, echoing Heraclitus's law of enantiodromia, whereby everything in the created world has a tendency to `run