Carlo Suarès : La fin du grand mythe IV |
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The end of the great myth IV
(Extract from Carnet No 4. April 1931) The story of the unconscious We have only described the Myth Orient in one of its representations only, the Hindu tradition, but since this is the most austere and the most characteristic of the mythical Character that in general Asia represents, we will stick to it. Our presentation does not pretend to cover the entire history of mankind, but would like to give some indications which illustrate our point of view. This point of view concerns both the human individual and men considered in their mass. The need to constantly draw attention to these two aspects prevents us from emphasizing one too much for fear that we will make an intellectual game of it while forgetting the other. This necessity also obliges us to frequent repetitions, because we are in the position of a hammer which must give a continuous sound by vibrating between two timbres. By placing ourselves in both the historical and psychological aspects of the Myth we said that of all the events in human history the most important is the reconciliation of the two Characters East and West, following a birth, and that the new man is the one who has resolved all the antinomies. We have said that this birth has already taken place. It is this affirmation that we will try to justify, but by using its historical and geographical aspect only to illustrate it, because the true History of the Great Myth is that of the unconscious. We repeat that each individual carries in his unconscious the unresolved theme of the Myth to which he belongs. Myths East and West will therefore last as long as the hypnotic power of the unresolved unconscious is greater than the force of Truth, and this by definition since, as we have already explained, the unconscious it is the time. It is obvious that the passage from the unconscious to the conscious is a purely individual affair, and that from this point of view there one can only consider the collectivity as a meeting of individual entities. Indeed, individuals only belong to a collective entity insofar as they participate in the collective unconscious. As soon as an individual is in some measure conscious, he frees himself from the group to the extent that he has become conscious. It is only when it reaches supreme consciousness that it will be ready to recognize the universal. At that time, its realization will be likely to bring about a trigger and a transformation in the collective unconscious. But this transformation will be very slow, not because of the one who has realized himself, and who has placed himself outside of time, but because of the nature of the unconscious of others, which is essentially to create collective time. Consequently, the transformation will only appear on the world stage with much delay, which does not mean that it did not really take place before becoming historical. The successive passages from the unconscious to the conscious take place in a symbolic and dramatic form, and, through the ages, the individuals who were the bearers of the new symbols have played them, represented them, sometimes even in a very dramatic way. Whether these individuals were legendary or whether they existed in the flesh, whether they actually played the symbol or whether they were given the gestures that identified them with the Myth, it makes no difference. Jesus was crucified at the sixth hour, and the sun was darkened until noon. This is a fact that exists in human consciousness. What really happened? Events but of a nature so particular that it was possible for them to endorse the whole of the mythical representation. If History therefore has to be arranged for the needs of Myth, it is because History is secondary to it: it is a projection of it, but incomplete and distorted, like the illustrations in a book. We prefer to consider as true historical facts all the representations which are transmitted to us, since after all, they have all been lived. A poem has been lived by its author in the same way as everything else, and often has a character of greater reality than so-called real events, and this not only for him, but sometimes for others. If Paul had an hallucination on the road to Damascus this hallucination came to meet the Myth in its representation, and its historical consequences are undeniable. Paul's vision is therefore a historical fact whose value lies entirely in its result. This fact in no way depends on the following problem, incidental and impossible to establish materially: "Did Christ really present himself to him? " All those who demonstrate that such an event which is said to have taken place did not really take place, or that such text on the authenticity of which dogmas are based is in reality apocryphal, engage in work which is useless from the point of view of mythical reality, and the only fruitful basis that we can give to the study of human history is this unconscious mythical reality of which men have until now been only instruments. On the other hand certain undeniable historical facts can seem to have no relation with the other, certain coincidences can have all the appearance of chance, it will not be less true that from the point of view of the Myth these relations and these coincidences, materially undeniable, could assume an absolute real value. For example, the psychological phenomenon which replaced at a given moment "the law by faith" had an unconscious unfolding through approximately a dozen centuries of Christian faith. This phase was born, developed, and then died following a particular biological development. At the time of her death this natural phenomenon happened to this mythical entity: she had the vision of her birth. This is how St. Francis of Assisi represented with unique accuracy in History certain correspondences with Christ, on the faith-love register. This death of pure faith corresponded to a mythical unfolding which we will explain below. But the data of the Intellect-Love myth already allow us to understand that the goal of the two separate characters was to find and unite. This new phase is represented by St. Thomas Aquinas. Now St. Thomas Aquinas was born the year in which St. Francis of Assisi died. It is not a game to see it, but here is a case where History "plays" the Myth in a perfect way. These correspondences are infinitely numerous. Pythagoras and the Buddha were, at the same historical moment, a single ferment which applied to two opposite poles, and which therefore was expressed in two complementary ways: in the metaphysical East the Buddha brought more of love and moral feeling, to the emotional West Pythagoras brought more intelligence. At the time of the advent of the Christian era which destroyed the ancient world, formidable thrusts coming from Central Asia reduced to dust all the Indo-Greek world, without one being able to attribute the same historical cause to these two phenomena, the mythical cause of which is however the same. To return to St. Thomas Aquinas, the encyclical Aeterni Patris of Leo XIII which definitively established the Catholic Church on faith and reason, if it had not come in its time in the mythical unfolding, would have created a Christianity-Catholicism schism. To Christians who said "we have replaced the law with faith", the Catholics replied "we have replaced faith with faith-reason". The stages are similar, the distances are the same. It took seven centuries to establish the Church building on Thomism, but this could only be done at a time when this stage was already passed in mythical consciousness, just as it had to be twelve centuries to Francis of Assisi to establish Christianity on faith, at the precise moment when faith died. Now in the same year 1879 when Leo XIII recommended Thomist philosophy, Ramakrishna in India gathered around him the first disciples of a gospel of passionate love. The West was finally trying to mark the reconciliation of the brain and the heart, at the precise moment when the haughty Hindu intellectual tradition witnessed with Ramakrishna an attempt at reconciliation of the heart and the brain [ 1 ]. On both sides the two complementary traditions had reconciled without knowing it, and, following an unconscious dialogue, had started to represent the last act on the world stage in their own way. This representation immediately degenerated. Catholics only cerebral, not even metaphysicians, launched at full speed in reasoning lose the sense of the human, while innumerable Ramakrishna missions are devoted to good works. These rapid decompositions prove that life is no longer there: the Myth is everywhere like a flood, and no value can no longer represent it. Character of the Western Myth The West-Eve has never relied, like the East, on an unchanging tradition. Its biological curve was the same as that of flesh and bone organisms which follow one another by procreation. The procreation of the flesh indeed symbolizes the feminine material aspect of the Myth, and the Mediterranean and Western civilizations, essentially feminine (compared to Asia), followed one another consequently according to the process which belonged to their nature. There has always been in the West the predominance of a single civilization over others, or formidable struggles to dominate, or the claim to dominate when it was impossible. The West is characterized by this desire for domination and by the impossibility of establishing several civilizations at the same time, while in the East can on the contrary coexist several civilizations. The Equation of Myth At the very beginning of this talk, we established the primordial origin of all human problems, both individual and social, both physical and metaphysical, on the notion of an irreducible incompatibility between the individual "I" and the "that", reduced to the point of being indecomposable, reduced to their principles. This duality, not between man and the outside world, but between a principle inside man and a principle outside him, is, when it expresses itself by creating the unconscious, both the origin of men and the origin of time, it is the initial theme of the Great Myth that all men of all times have played. However, the great cycles that we have called Orient-Occident are characterized at their origin according to the way in which the unconscious lived within this equation. The equation in the form "that-I" is the East; the equation in the form "I-it" is the West. The order in which we write the two terms indicates that the unconscious can establish and center its life on "that more important than me" or on "I more important than that". The term on which it is appropriate for the unconscious to press, we will say of it, for convenience, that it appears to be more real than the other, or, in an even simpler way, that it is real and that the other is unreal, this simply indicating their relationship. In the eastern "it-I" form, the individual "I" disappears, giving way first to "that," to the "non-I-individual" which is the only reality, since the individual "I" is unreal. The "I" has no other resource than to destroy itself for the benefit of what is real. In the western "I-it" form on the contrary, the individual "I" feels real, and whatever it does will refuse to destroy itself. In other words, the individual "I" which in both cases feels the weakest, feels unreal compared to the other term in the Hindu equation, so must be lost in it to be it, while feeling real in the Western equation, he seeks to bring the other term back to himself in order to know it. In one case as in the other, what is unreal or unknown is projected into what is real or known: in the case of "Orient" the individual "I" projects into the real supra-individual principle; in the "West" case the individual "I" projects the object of his research into him, without which there would be no research. We will return later to the masculine and feminine character of these two movements. Let us see what is the common result of the two: we observe a very simple phenomenon, the consequences of which are however incalculable, and which we can call the law of the reversal of reality. Here, taking up the equation, how the law works. 1. of the two terms of the unresolved antinomy "I-it" or "that-I" the one who is unreal rushes into the other in the hope of solving the equation. (The real term cannot do it since it knows that it does not know the other). 2. as soon as arrived inside the other, the unreal term believes to have resolved the antinomy by having united the two terms. 3. on the other hand, the element which feels real has only seen an unreality arrive at it: the antinomy is not resolved, the real element remains unchanged in its ignorance of the other. 4th, fortified by its pseudo-resolution of the equation, the unreal element affirms a final reality which opposes the initial obvious reality, and which ends up dispossessing it. In summary, we can say that the unreal element projects into the other, and therefore tends to become real because it believes to combine the two terms of the opposition. This comedy, this pseudo-solution, is the Myth itself, author, actor and spectator of his own representation, and the subterfuge by means of which, too, he will find the only way out. It is the subterfuge thanks to which the unresolved unconscious calms his terror of living in the unknown. By pretending to have solved the equation, he then establishes the way of life that best adapts to his nature (active or passive) while allaying his fear. So fear is what feeds the Myth. Now it is obvious that the individuals subjected to one of the two Myths did not go so far as to bring the two terms of the equation into contact in their principles, since to put them thus in the presence, completely stripped, is to resolve the equation and get out of the Myth. So since they have not reduced "I" and "that" to their essence they participate roughly in two universes, one is that of the entity that says "I", the other that of "that" which is the outside world. How the equation works In the "Orient" cause, the individual "I" who wishes to live submissive in a rigidly organized world invents everything necessary to satisfy his desire, while giving himself the illusion of starting from a solved equation: the "I" "Unreal projected in the principle" that is supposed to become the impersonal Self, only reality, for which the world is only an illusion, Maya, illusion which must receive from above its organization. The stratagem would be easily dismantled if the unconscious had no interest in being so captivated: it would suffice to say that any organization of an illusion is an illusion. But he instead transfers the illusion to all the objects he does not want to conquer since he wants to live in peace, while the "Maya" is heavier than lead in the form of a "application" of the so-called solved equation: traditional doctrine, caste organization, cosmological, ontological systems, etc which gives peace to the individual in the world he had dreamed of having. In the "West" case, on the other hand, the individual "I" is active and ambitious. He wants both to conquer the world, to live in a state of war, and to appease the terror in which he would be if he felt that the equation was not solved. So he pretends to solve the equation by bringing back to himself the principle "that" which becomes the personal God. Immediately, the individual "I" although feeling only real, attributes reality to objects in order to satisfy its possessive sense and its desire to conquer. This process is identical to itself on all planes, from the crudest, to the extremely subtle plane of theology, which "objectively" releases the being from the object, and for whom knowledge is still a possession , but disguised by intelligence. Here as in the other equation, the unconscious refuses to admit its stratagem, despite the final insufficiency of its philosophy in front of all the so-called "supernatural" mysteries: it has found a way to allay its fear of the unknown using his desire for conquest and possession. The device is too admirable for him to attach himself to it in a way that he would like definitive. We will only come back to this mythical sublimation much later, but we had to locate it in relation to the primitive equation. This in its simplest application makes individuals "creatures of God". God pretends to have solved the equation, and because of this, although it is unreal, he seeks to impose his solution which is only virtual. The "creatures" on the contrary feel completely real, and that is why "God" needs them terribly. They seek to know God, but God seeks to realize themselves in them, which is infinitely more dramatic. From this drama arose the entire Judeo-Christian cycle. Thus men constantly play their roles in overturned situations, and therein lies the hold over them of the unconscious: the Hindus in an objectively real and all-powerful "that", in a formidable tradition which commands their least gestures and which is the total edifice of their whole individual and social life, affirm "that" is an illusion; while the Judeo-Christians in a subjectively real and all-powerful "I", in an entire civilization which is only a formidable affirmation of egotism, affirm the reality of the outside world. These two aspects of the same initial theme reveal to us the fundamental characteristics of the Great Myth in its double eastern and western representation, and give us the common key to the social and individual domains, since, as we have said several times, each the individual carries in his unconscious the unresolved equation of the whole civilization to which he belongs. The whole social and individual question will therefore be resolved by the one who is freed from this equation by resolutely placing himself outside of Myth. This is why we identify the problem of the human race with the individual problem. The fact that the unconscious equation is not solved is called in Hindu terms of "it-I" ignorance, in Christian terms of "I-it", original sin. These two terms ignorance and original sin are the way in which the individual and selfish "I" is stigmatized by the "that". The Hindu "that" which is real reproaches the insufficiently evolved "I" for not knowing it, the Judeo-Christian "that" which is unreal reproaches the "I" for having forgotten it. Hence the idea of fault and punishment, which adapts to the need to dramatize, but which would only have to do in the East where the "I" being unreal cannot be punished, in the Judeo-Christian sense, by an angry Eternal. A dramatic story Civilizations which through the ages have represented the equation in terms of the individual "I" have had all the characteristics of this "I" which is egocentric and therefore essentially feminine. The individual "I" is a succession of states of consciousness. At a given moment there is only one possible state. Hence the Western impossibility of having several civilizations at the same time. The state of consciousness, the state of soul, where the "I" has never been before, where it will never be again, is the result of all past states, the synthesis of their successive deaths. The truth of this myth passes from the unconscious to the conscious by means of revelations, images, movements of the soul, and its symbols establish an emotional psychological contact between the Myth and the individual. The encounter takes on the appearance of a lived drama, of a personal experience, where the central character is the human being. The individual, carried away by prophetic inspiration, or identified as Jesus with the Myth himself, becomes the actor of his own passion, while the historical unfolding represents the other unknown of the equation, the material "that" which encloses and strangles the reality of the "I" in automatisms that strive to last. The individual "I" being by definition a succession of states can only get out of this constraint that duration would like to impose on it by shaking it with all its revolutionary energy. The traditional forces are nothing more than reaction forces which he must destroy in order to fulfill his true tradition, the march forward, the conquest, the progress, the revolution which the primordial equation involves. In its blind force the historical Destiny conforms to the mythical Destiny, so that each stage of the Myth is accompanied by corresponding historical stages, and catastrophic insofar as on the contrary the Myth was accomplished. The end, which must be the glorification of achievement, can only happen historically by the abomination of apocalyptic desolations, ruin, wars, and the collapse of the world. We can see how the history of the "I-it" equation of the Great Myth was necessarily different from the oriental history of the "it-I" during which the "I" submitted, chained, completely deprived of freedom, waited, keeping the absolute eternal intact, for the Western drama to take place. The drama Orient focused on the immutable impersonal, the drama Occident on the personnel in perpetual metamorphosis. One for millennia has not moved, while the other has done all the experiments. But today the whole world is caught in the Apocalypse of the new birth. Westernized Japan had seemed for some years to be an exception in the East. India and China, Islam and Russia, Europe and the Americas, participate today in a single world revolution, at once political, economic, moral, religious, scientific, in short in the total revolution. We will see later what are the new apocalyptic values which one day or the other will be used as a basis for the civilization of the whole human which we said that for him everything that happens inside the Great Myth is not human but subhuman. But we have only put down a few basic facts of the Myth yet. We will not attempt in any way to exhaust an inexhaustible point of view, but it is necessary that we expose some of its possibilities, before going further. Historical origins of the West The origins of the Great Myth are lost by definition in the mists of time. So we won't be able to know where the Myth started. However the equation which we have called the West was already posed in Egypt. As we will see later the Sphinx is the seal of the origin of time, and the indestructible affirmation of the initial theme of the Myth of which our current civilization is only the final expression. The germ of this knowledge is probably of Atlantean origin, as various considerations would tend to prove, among others certain architectural analogies between Egypt and Mexico. This fact, and the irrefutable testimony of the Sphinx would confirm the legend according to which the pharaohs were of divine origin, on condition naturally to give to the divine word its mythical meaning which is this: in ancient Egypt lived people who knew the initial theme of the Myth, however the crowd lived this theme unconsciously. These initiates, probably from Atlantis, gave life to a very important African civilization that we are only discovering today. This discovery moves back at least ten or twelve thousand years the primordial legends and symbols of the West. This African origin of the West would explain the fact that at the time of his death our civilization undergoes so violently the attraction of Negro Art, dances, jazz, sculpture, painting, poetry, etc ... she remembers her childhood. Individuals and Myth When we consciously penetrate inside the bewitchment of the Myth, like Orpheus who enters alive in the Underworld we are struck to see to what point the individuals are only shadows. Now these shadows inside their Myth do not feel hopelessly unhappy for the following reason: their awful individual solitude, which is the very essence of the Myth and its marrow, does not appear to them too much, because the Myth dress, disguise it, transform it into an illusory but assimilable food (traditions, beliefs, religions, philosophies, etc.). In short, because the individual is an illusory shadow, he finds nourishing only an illusory bread. Shadow can only feed on shadows. This situation would be hopeless if the individual himself was not precisely the symbol of his own decline. As a symbol, it is the projection of the Myth, that is to say, of a separation. Now where there is separation, there is research, and where there is search and desire for union, there is Truth in power. Thus the Myth which is a separation and the affirmation of an irreducible duality, has only one goal: it is that this separation ends. And since separation began in time, by creating it, it must end in time, by ceasing to create it. The separation having occurred it is inevitable that one day the reconciliation will be done, but this reconciliation can only be done at a determined time, as the hands of a watch cannot mark the same sign as at the twelfth hour. The race once started, can no longer be stopped, because it caused its own determinism. This determinism, which originally created a civilization, creates progressively its phases (like acts of a drama) new periods of History. When the Total Grand Myth, the Primordial Myth comes to an end, historical determinism also ceases, and the human liberated outside of time, suddenly becomes much greater than God has ever been. An admirable and unique phenomenon in the History of the planet, the total blooming of Life, the human who has nothing more in common with the isolated "I", has become total life completely freed from consciousness. So the shadow individual, inside the Myth, has always been a pseudo-entity subjected to Destiny, an entity struck from its origin with a possibility, but carrying in itself the initial theme of Myth, which is separation primordial, the absolutely painful search within time that this separation has itself created, and the absolutely certain success, the certain triumph, the union promised by time, beyond time. Within time, the temporal individual has virtually the freedom to free himself from the Myth, to be the destroyer of time. We will show how this freedom, he could only exercise it by "representing" the Myth while at the expiration of the Myth man can deliver himself out of time, from God and from all representations. The two poles In order not to give an abstract appearance to what is not abstract, we will immediately give examples of the way in which the Myth transmits its symbols, and of which men are their representations. At the separation, the two elements which become foreign to each other and whose only goal now is to join, take very different aspects and names: they are called Brahma and Maya, Divinity and Creation, Osiris and Isis, Spirit and Matter, God and Adam, Adam and Eve, etc. One of the poles is positive and male, the other is negative and female. Adam is created by God, so he is negative in relation to him, but he is positive in relation to Eve who in turn arises from him. Creature of God, the man is in a way the demiurge of the woman. In their relationships men and women assume these roles in the most unconscious way: from ancient Egypt through the Hebrews and Greece, until today, these roles have been the same, with some variations. These variations have always been determined by the evolution of the myth. That is to say: at the origin, the two poles were completely separated; today they meet. The mores, the customs of a people at a given time represent the distance which at that time separates the two poles. Osiris and Isis were completely separated by an irreducible drama. Osiris was dead, and Isis was looking everywhere for the pieces but couldn't find them all. Isis mourned the death of Osiris and instituted mysteries to revive him: men and women were separated by this same drama. We will follow this thousand-year-old drama in some of its adventures, until the last act which was represented to us, where the woman (or the matter), not fertilized by the man gave birth to the man, and where this one after being crucified rose again. This unfolding of the drama does much more than interest us intellectually: when all of a sudden we completely tear ourselves away from its grip, we realize with amazement, with terror, that almost every gesture of those around us is commanded, determined by him. We realize that we are caught in a civilization whose foundations are in Myth, and which embraces us: everything is mythical, up to the roles of men or women that we play (because the Truth, we repeat, n 'has no sex), until the need to have money to live (because the Truth has no possession). We usually want to study Myth as we would study the history of religions, in a theoretical way. But when it comes to finding that all pseudo-existence is mythical and that myth is the very root of what we call our being, we refuse to go so far in the game: we no longer believe in it . The Myth Kills To assess the homicidal power of the Myth, it is not necessary to look in the distant past for examples of ritual assassinations. The sacrifice of the absolute kings, who, a few years after their advent to the throne, were massacred without forgiveness, the assassination that certain priests of Diana had to commit to take the place of those they had murdered, the Hindu custom which formerly constrained the widowed to be burned with the corpse of her husband, all these extremely realistic representations of the Myth marked such a hypnotic power of the roles that individuals died there most easily in the world. But if prehistory and history are full of examples of this spell, as we get closer to our time we see that the spell spreads to increasingly huge masses. The ritual assassination took on increasingly greater proportions, next to which the Crusades and the Inquisition were nothing more than children's games, and it went so far as to destroy the entire mythical civilization in the biggest massacre the world has ever seen. In 1914 the filthy western female, through compulsory service, began to ritual massacre all the males she was able to massacre, which pleased God greatly, as evidenced by her blessings and her Te Deum. No one knows why this massacre was ordered, nobody except the Myth which has become the irreconcilable enemy of the human, which pushes today to new massacres, which will massacre all the human race, which will accumulate ruins on ruins, which will destroy the world, unless the human in turn wakes up to kill the Myth. For the moment, full of blood, has he not offered to all the national devotions of the West the symbol of this unknown corpse, of this dead man that no one knows, of this dead man who does not know why he is dead, this dead who, unlike all the Gods, was massacred without any hope of resurrection? Like these female insects which devour their males, the Dying Myth has devoured millions of human lives, for questions of money, possessions, paper money, for questions of belly. Perhaps, at the beginning of the Myth, men were right to submit to it, but today the human revolts, he smells of fraud. The innumerable artificial flowers that puppets in official costumes hypocritically place on the grave of this dead man who we know can no longer howl with rage, and all the diplomatic compromises of capitalist and religious selfishness will do nothing: Myth today prevents us from living, and the crowds, although unconscious, will one day refuse to commit homicide to obey orders they do not understand. Oedipus and the Sphinx Each of us carries the unresolved themes of the Myth deep down, like a seed carries the germ of the species. To leave the Myth is to destroy in ourselves, internally, this unconscious. We have no other work to do than this individual interior work. Oedipus, whose legend we trace in Africa as far as it is possible to go back in time, Oedipus is indeed this first man, whom we carry within us, before whom the original separation had presented itself for the first time under its most tragic and fatal form. He had really snatched his secret from the Sphinx, a secret that only today we can know consciously, and which until today, remained in the unconscious, has ruled us tyrannically for millennia by imposing our Destiny on us. The Sphinx is the moment when Duality manifests itself. But at the point of departure, already the arrival is fatal. The Sphinx, because it is the beginning also knows the end, just as we do, because we are the end, we also understand the beginning. The Sphinx is therefore eternal. It is the precise point where man and nature separate. He is a man by the head, by understanding, at the moment when the "I" separates from the universe. His body is that of the king of animals, of the lion, so he embodies the spirit. The prisoner spirit in the lion is aware of itself: it is human. This symbolism is found in the most distant eras. An African legend as old as humanity, whose origins cannot be traced, tells us of a king who was transformed into a lion when he entered a lake, and which only his sister and wife were able to draw from there, this who restored his human entity to him. However, water is a symbol of woman and matter. This legend is that of the descent of the spirit and its resurrection. The spirit is resurrected in the Sphinx by the same symbol: the lion is transformed into a man. The "beginning of time" is the precise moment when the metamorphosis takes place. The Sphinx had to wait patiently until the "end of time", keeping his secret that Oedipus had snatched up in vain. Here is the secret that Oedipus snatched from the Sphinx: "Man," said the Sphinx to him, "you are the son of the duality that arose from me." You are made up of its two irreducible germs and you carry the two enemies deep within you so as to reduce them. But you identified with one of them, your Mother, after having smothered the other, your Father. You have therefore condemned yourself to indefinitely kill your father first and to marry your mother, until the end of time." If we remember that for the Mediterranean the duality of which he is the son is under the equation "I-it", and that it has from its origin, identified with the "I" individual, feminine, egocentric, by killing the male Eternal in him, one will understand what the Sphinx meant. The human individual does not have his own reality, but he is only the symbolic representation of an extremely simple initial theme, which he is obliged to "play" on the scene of the world until the end of the "time" that the theme itself created. So the human character, the actor of his own Myth, Oedipus went to his Destiny. He really killed his father, and truly married his mother, because in all reality, from the beginning of time his father plays the role of the eternal and his mother plays the role of the material which procreates. Since then, each human being is a character whose role he plays by identifying himself with him so that he does not have the notion of his own identity. No secret is so well kept that when we carry it within us in our unconscious: for thousands of years that men and women have been playing their mythical roles, it has only been "revealed" to anyone that the secret of Sphinx is precisely the theme that Oedipus plays and that everyone plays. Thus unravel all the Mysteries: when the last veil of Isis falls there is, and that's all, the total consciousness, invisible, present, gestures that we have always made. But the individual through the ages has been caught in the "time" that separation creates. He was therefore forced to represent his own drama. This constraint was Destiny. Oedipus was not free. We would not understand its history so well today if psychoanalysis had not revealed to us that the children who are born in the Myth carry within them the Oedipus complex. They were not free to choose because those who are born in the Myth carry the germ within them. It is from this unconscious germ that we must free ourselves today. Psychoanalysis has discovered the distribution in the family of different roles; but these roles are mythical and have a meaning in relation to the primordial equation of the human race. Psychoanalysis could not discover this equation, so that it saw the father, the mother, the son only in their capacity as actors in a metaphysically unknown drama. The diagram of the piece "Occident" This drama, whose initial theme is extremely simple, since it is reduced to two elements, "I" and "that", ended up being extraordinarily complex. The equation has worked towards its solution for millennia. The history of men is nothing other than this unfolding. The two separate elements must come together, and indeed come closer. We will see them further on under their names God, Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, etc ... then under other names again, and others, indefinitely. We only chose the Oedipus symbol because it is, so to speak, in one dimension, which can already give us the key to Western drama in its most simplified form: the son after killing in him the eternal masculine his father, and married matter his mother, will no longer be able to abandon matter, to consider it as an illusion, since he associated himself with it by identifying with his individual "I". He must therefore fertilize it indefinitely, die indefinitely in it, and resuscitate indefinitely (son or Christ theme). The matter fertilized by him, gradually will give it back birth until it is completely "spiritualized", until it becomes virgin again (mother theme which becomes virgin and then becomes the apocalyptic celestial wife). The father is the Eternal, eternally absent, who can only be represented by this son who killed him, incites him to go to the end of his adventure. Once the "matter", fertilized by "the Spirit" has given birth to the son of "Man" (of the Lord) it is purified and therefore is prepared for "Spiritual Weddings". The fruit of these "Weddings" is the definitive human synthesis. The whole Greco-Judeo-Christian drama is the symbolic representation of this female transmutation. This transmutation takes place by means of a clear and rigorous plan, where each individual has his role to play. Each victory is marked with a sign, each sign marks a phase of civilization, and the human relationship between man and woman changes in accordance with the new situation where the two characters are one in relation to the other. To give just one example, we see that after the spiritual birth of the Christian act, the woman is purified and becomes, for the first time in history, the Lady who inspires and exalts all chivalry. This Christian "representation" is only the slow development of the mythical theme, in the time created in the dream by the multiplicity of characters. But if we consider the Myth only on one dimension we will not be able to tear off all the roots. It would be relatively easy to make it into a kind of novel. But then everyone, for whatever reason, would put themselves out of the question, and would not want to admit that they are only one of the puppets of this novel. He would like to get out of the game, him with his family, his money, his intelligence, his philosophical systems, his divinity, his art, and all that he believes to be. We will therefore try to see how primitive duality metamorphoses until it is sometimes unrecognizable. Gestures of the past Those who, within a tradition, have reached a certain spiritual realization, are those who will have the most difficulty bartering their mythical victory against the Truth which in appearance is nothing. It is because in their thirst to deliver themselves they will have already conformed to modalities belonging to the past, without understanding that these modalities at a given time, were in conformity with the mythical situation occupied by the characters of Myth at that time . Thus, to "play" the transmutation of women (matter, flesh, etc.) by spiritual (or divine) fertilization or, in other words, the "penetration of God in the flesh", the chosen people is circumcised and Christ has given himself to eat. These gestures (which we will study below in detail) corresponded in their time to phases of the mythical unfolding, while at the end of the Myth these gestures, circumcision or communion, become as useless as the Mysteries of Osiris, as the prehistoric sacrifices of absolute kings, or that the gesture of Oedipus to puncture their eyes. We will see that all these gestures mark, through history, a progression, a step towards accomplishment, towards the final scene. But if they have marked real deliverances, it is useless, when we have arrived at the last act of the play, to play "the great scene of the first", and even more useless when the play is finished, to want to prolong it behind the curtain. Myth commands gesture Oedipus at the beginning of the Myth, although knowing the Myth, could only play it by killing his father and marrying his mother, he then burst his eyes so as not to see what was inevitable, then he wandered on earth by being led by his daughter (his work). Thus is admirably completed the symbol of his liberation. Likewise the absolute kings of African civilizations who represented the Spirit and identified with the Myth to the point of being massacred, thus played their deliverance because of this identification. And Jesus, who also identified with the Myth, was crucified for the same reason. They are in truth the same mythical characters who successively played different roles in a drama always the same, but which required as it unfolded that the roles be transformed. The liberation of the individual is the gesture that identifies him at the time he is at. Oedipus at the midnight of humanity is as "divine" when it is parricidal, incest, and when it is blind, as are "divine" Moses and Jesus in their hours. The difference between total knowledge and approximate knowledge is that the former gives the exact gesture of the exact time, and that the latter repeats, when the time has passed, gestures from the past. Liberation in the Myth We will therefore see throughout history occur a phenomenon which has the whole aspect of a law: when at a given time an individual has freed himself, that is to say, freed himself from the 'Unconscious', the way he freed himself was the exact representation of the position where the characters of the Myth were at that time. The Myth, as we have already seen, takes place in time, in the time that separation continually creates, and it is transmitted to normal consciousness by means of symbols. Thus the different phases of the research are like a succession of dramatic acts of which the whole constitutes the representation. At the end of a specific act, some individuals see, as a change of scenery, the new symbol emerge from which all the following act will flow. But for this new act to take place, time must pass and precisely the time that the whole unconscious crowd literally makes up because it is unconscious. For example, the Apocalypse was seen two thousand years ago, and only appears today on the historical scene, as we will see later. Human individuals who see and express the new symbol are aware of it. This symbol is for them like a window that tears the veil of time. These individuals are truly mediators between the unconscious and the conscious, between time and eternity. Both "human" and "divine" these individuals are, in History, those who founded the Great Mysteries and religions, or rather those who despite themselves were the starting point of religions and mysteries. Just as a vertical trajectory which springs from a moving train is not really vertical, but is animated in spite of itself by the horizontal speed of the train, the Mediators arisen from the Myth are only completely freed by representing the march of the Myth. After they have seen and represented a new symbol, the whole life of the dream (that of men and women) is organized around this representation in order to "digest" the symbol. Like cells which vibrate under the influence of an electric current, individuals begin to vibrate; in other words, they imitate and distort; they conform to this new life to the extent that their mass allows them, that is to say by resisting it. Once this symbol is completely assimilated, the unconscious transmits a new symbol to a new Initiate whose liberation it is. And it will still take centuries of "collective time" for this symbol to be assimilated in turn, and so on, until "the end of time". This "end of time", we repeat, has arrived, so that for the first time since the Myth exists man can free himself without the slightest representation. The Myth having stopped creating collective time no longer has any speed in any way, so that the vertical which springs from this train at the end of its course is very truly a vertical. 1 The primordial role played by "the Mother" for Ramakrishna shows very clearly the advent of this feminine aspect. La fin du grand mythe IV at a par Carlo Suarés - 3e millinaire |