/tag/golden%20age

2 quotes tagged 'golden age'

The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Author: Julian Jaynes
Publisher: University of Toronto Press (1978)
433

The very notion of truth is a culturally given direction, a part of the pervasive nostalgia for an earlier certainty. The very idea of a universal stability, an eternal firmness of principle out there that can be sought for through the world as might an Arthurian knight for the Grail, is, in the morphology of history, a direct outgrowth of the search for lost gods in the first two millennia after the decline of the bicameral mind. What was then an augury for direction of action among the ruins of an archaic mentality is now the search for an innocence of certainty among the mythologies of facts.


The Origins and History of Consciousness
Author: Erich Neumann
Publisher: Princeton University Press (1954)
114

Through the heroic act of world creation and division of opposites, the ego steps forth from the creative magic circle of the uroboros and finds itself in a state of loneliness and discord.  With the emergence of the fully fledged ego, the paradisal situation is abolished; the infantile condition, in which life was regulated by something ampler and more embracing, is at an end, and with it the natural dependence on that ample embrace.  We may think of this paradisal situation in terms of religion, and say that everything was controlled by God; or we may formulate it ethically, and say that everything was still good and that evil had not yet come into the world.  Other myths dwell on the 'effortlessness' of the Golden Age, when nature was bountiful, and toil, suffering, and pain did not exist; others stress the 'everlastingness,' the deathlessness, of such an existence.