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Comparing the primitive with late-modern societies, despite a change of technology, way of life, etc., primal archetypes remain. Archetype being a basic fundamental form which reappears again and again. Hence how two very different cultures separated by distance and time have developed nearly the same imagery and beliefs about life.
"They are expressions of the structure of the human psyche." Of what is inside us and the need to understand, or, "reflections of spiritual and depth potentialities of every one of us."
Jung says:
>"The circle is one of the great primordial images of mankind, that in considering the symbol of the circle, we are analyzing the self."
The chief of a Pawnee tribe:
>"When we pitch camp, we pitch the camp in a circle. When we looked at the horizon, the horizon was in a circle. When the eagle builds a nest, the nest is in circle."
Plato describes the soul as a circle. Joseph Campbell supposes it represents totality:
>Within the circle is one thing, it is encircled, it's enframed. That would be the spatial aspect, but the temporal aspect of the circle is, you leave, go somewhere and come back, the alpha and omega. God is the alpha and omega, the source and the end. Somehow the circle suggests immediately a completed totality, whether in time or in space."
We're reminded of this when looking at an analog clock and see the cycle of time. Continuing with the mandala and for the Navajo the Pollen Path.
Campbell continues: "in working out a mandala for oneself, what one does is draw a circle and then think of the different impulse systems in your life, the different value systems in your life, and try then to compose them and find what the center is. It’s kind of discipline for pulling all those scattered aspects of your life together, finding a center and ordering yourself to it. So you’re trying to coordinate your circle with the universal circle."
"[..] So the little cosmos of one’s own life and the macrocosm of the world’s life are in some way to be coordinated. Well, for instance, among the Navaho Indians, healing ceremonies were conducted by way of sand paintings, which were mostly mandalas, on the ground and then the person who is to be treated moves into the mandala. There will be a mythological context that he will be identifying with, and he identifies himself with that power. And this idea of sand painting with mandalas and used for meditation purposes appears also in Tibet in the great Tantric monasteries outside of Lhasa. For instance, Rgyud Stod, they practiced sand painting, cosmic images and so forth indicating the forces of the spiritual powers that operate in our lives."
http://billmoyers.com/content/ep-6-joseph-campbell-and-the-power-of-myth-masks-of-eternity-audio/
Everything will never make sense because of life's ever-changing complexities, but some things remain the same. Through symbols and belief we order ourselves in relation to our society, to nature, Earth, and the universe. |
