Archaic Man
“Primitive man’s belief in arbitrary power does not arise out of thin air, as was always supposed, but is grounded in experience. What we have always called his superstition is justified by the grouping of chance occurrences. There is a real measure of probability that unusual events will coincide in time and place.”
C G Jung, 1933
In his essay on ArchaIc Man (Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 1933), Jung is at pains to point to the presuppositions of jungle-dwelling humans, not their logical or ethical judgments, as setting them apart from civilization. Civilization is a picture worthy of rational consciousness modern man has constructed for himself; archaic man uses no such picture.
Civilized man resents the idea of invisible and arbitrary forces, for it is from these he has worked meticulously to escape the frightening world of dreams and superstition that lie at the root of human and cosmic consciousness. Civilized man is now surrounded by a world obedient to rational laws from which he is scrupulous to exclude arbitrary power. But mental illness and its terrible frights do indeed break through the veneer of this world from time to time. Occasionally it seems to the disinterested observer them civilized world may really be underwritten in large part by mental illness.
For primitive man, the explanation for the out-of-the ordinary is always magic. The explanation is not chance, as rationalism would have it, but intent. Infallibly, behind the upsetting disruption of the calm natural order, the devouring of a woman at the river by a crocodile for example, works the intentionality of a sorcerer. Very often these unnatural disruptions concatenate to gesture toward a superordinate cosmic order. Jung cites an old professor of psychiatry at Wurzburg on a rare clinical case: “Gentlemen, this is an absolutely unique case; tomorrow we shall have another just like it.” Jung noticed such coincidences and analogies in his own clinical practice at an eight-year apprenticeship at an insane asylum.
The world of archaic man and his magic has not gone away. It has merely been systematically suppressed. Intriguingly, a world of high magic may lie in civilized man’s future. The Urantia Book, which needs to be accounted for, seems to represent a pre-existing possibility for the future evolution of human civilization and human society:
“The kingdom of heaven is neither a social nor an economic order; it is an exclusively spiritual brotherhood of God-knowing individuals. True, such a brotherhood is in itself a new and amazing social phenomenon attended by astounding political and economic repercussions.”
