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The Origins and History of Consciousness
Author: Erich Neumann
Publisher: Princeton University Press (1954)
393

The picture we have drawn of our age is not intended as an indictment, much less as a glorification of the 'good old days'; for the phenomena we see around us are symptoms of an upheaval which, taken by and large, is necessary.  The collapse of the old civilization, and its reconstruction on a lower level to begin with, will justify themselves because the new basis will have been immensely broadened.  The civilization that is about to be born will be a human civilization in a far higher sense than any has ever been before, as it will have overcome important social, national, and racial limitations.  These are not fantastic pipe dreams, but hard facts, and their birth pangs will bring infinite suffering upon infinite numbers of men.  Spiritually, politically, and economically our world is an indivisible whole.  By this standard, the Napoleonic wars were minor coups d'état and the world view of that age, in which anything outside Europe had hardly begun to appear, is almost inconceivable to us in its narrowness.



The collapse of the archetypal canon in our culture, which has produced such an extraordinary activation of the collective unconscious - or is perhaps its symptom, manifesting itself in mass movements that have a profound effect upon our personal destinies - is, however, only a passing phenomenon.  Already, at a time when the internecine wars of the old canon are still being waged, we can discern, in single individuals, where the synthetic possibilities of the future lie, and almost how it will look.  The turning of the mind from the conscious to the unconscious, the responsible rapprochement of human consciousness with the powers of the collective psyche, that is the task of the future. No outward tinkerings with the world and no social ameliorations can give the quietus to the daemon, to the gods and devils of the human soul, or prevent them from tearing down again and again what consciousness has built. Unless they are assigned their place in consciousness and culture they will never leave mankind in peace. But the preparation for this rapprochement lies, as always, with the hero, the individual; he and his transformation are the great human prototypes; he is the testing ground of the collective, just as consciousness is the testing ground of the unconscious.


377

The hero is not creative in the sense that he decorates embellishes the existing canon, although his creativeness may also manifest itself in shaping and transforming the archetypal contents of his age.  The true hero is one who brings the new and shatters the fabric of old values, namely the father-dragon which, backed by the whole weight of tradition and the power of the collective, ever strives to obstruct the birth of the new.


136

In the first place it is mankind itself, the collective, to whom the hero, just because he deviates from the human norm, appears as a hero and a divinely begotten being.  Secondly, the idea of the hero's intrinsically dual nature derives from his own experience of himself.  He is a human being like the others, mortal and collective like them, yet at the same time he feels himself a stranger to the community.  He discovers within himself something which, although it 'belongs' to him and is as it were part of him, he can only describe as strange, unusual, god-like.