Erich Neumann, The Roots of Jewish Consciousness, Introduction, The Work

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Erich Neumann, The Roots of Jewish Consciousness, Introduction, The Work

Erich Neumann – The discovery of mythical prehistory

The revolution that has transformed the mental situation of the western world in the past 150 years1 has assigned to human beings a surprising new position in the cosmos, utterly unlike any they have occupied so far.

What we are talking about can be summed up as the emergence, in all areas of life, of a tremendous prehistoric and primordial world, which places the individual within an infinitely ramified context.

In this context, human history represents only one part of the evolution of living beings, this evolution is only one part of the history of the earth, and the earth itself represents only one part of the history of the cosmos.

This process signifies much more than a development in natural science, although science has played a considerable role in remaking the world edifice.

We must remember that the past 150 years have bestowed on human beings a iological relationship with the animal kingdom, thus restoring humanity to the lineage of natural creatures.

By contrast, medieval people, as lonely sons and daughters of God, were cast out into an alien and hostile world of temptation.

But also, during these last 150 years, a human consciousness, as the selfconsciousness of the human species, has actually begun to form for the first time.

Earlier human groups, unlike modern ones, were isolated and unaware of each other’s existence.

Based on their unconscious assumptions, they each considered themselves the center of the world.

The first Indian text came to the western world at the end of the eighteenth century; and Japan emerged into world history at the end of the nineteenth.

By now, we’ve surely reached a point in the history of ideas where humanity as a subject2 encompasses western people and Asians, primitive people3 and primordial humans, as branches of one large tribe.

In the various cultural orientations of all these groups, the expression of a great development may be seen: the developing consciousness of the human species.

The positive meaning of this fact remains unaffected by the political landslides engulfing peoples and nations.

These upheavals are ephemeral symptoms of a major historical transformation, in which for the first time the subject of humanity is starting to emerge as a reality.

This was the unrecognized meaning signaled by the French Revolution.

Nations, as specific configurations of the human race, can now claim for themselves only relative importance.

The nationalist obsessions of our time are, in part, an understandable reaction to this relentless development.

The justification for this temporary nationalization, or renationalization, is that, with the emergence of the perspective of humanity, every people must reflect upon its own voice, which it is destined to play in the human orchestra.

The western world, having been determined essentially by Christianity and antiquity, is just now beginning to relativize its own standpoint by learning about the rest of the world—for instance, Asia. Quite independent of this development, the mergence of classical studies means that the prehistory of the western world is now also starting to be discovered.

This involves, first, the study of pre-Hellenic antiquity, which teaches one to recognize and understand the rise of Greece as the end point of both a larger context and a longer historical process, and, second, the discovery of pre-Christian and pre-Jewish antiquity.

Knowledge of the ancient Orient, biblical criticism, and comparative
religious studies, taken together, undermine the singular, pivotal status held by Christianity during the Middle Ages.

Christianity now coexists with Asian religions, and also with Islam and other world religions, past and present, all of which have their particular strengths and weaknesses.

The history of religion provides evidence for the close interrelationships of various religions, where one developed in the seedbed of another.

Also increasingly obvious, as an eye-opening phenomenon, is the way that seemingly theoretical scientific discoveries in linguistics and classics are awakening previously unknown connections.

For instance, the Indo-Aryan Renaissance suddenly establishes completely different interrelationships than those previously at work in history. Christianity, as a transnational religious entity, is undermined by nationalist4 connections, which are thought to link the Germanic-Christian peoples to Indo-Brahman and Buddhist ones.

All these developments are contingent on contemporary history, and so far no homogeneous lines of spiritual reorientation have emerged.

Nevertheless, the rediscovery of the mythical world is crucially important for the history of ideas, from Romanticism through to the present.

The discovery of the mythical and later of the primitive world provided material for a fundamental adjustment in human consciousness, creating a new familiarity with the preconscious world, that is, the world of the unconscious, which precedes that of consciousness.

The history of human evolution, as a sequence of developmental stages, does not necessarily result in greater consciousness.

Only by considering all cultures and all peoples can we gain an overall view.

Such a perspective enables us to recognize what human consciousness has achieved for itself so far.

Over time, individual groups of the human species have specialized, so that each group attained particular achievements.

Western humanity, for instance, turned its consciousness more toward the outer world, whereas eastern humanity turned more toward the inner world.

Taken together, they reveal the actual scope already attained by human consciousness.

Neither group, however, can claim the entire scope of the conscious world as its own.

In cultures shaped by specific human groups, we find extremely diverse stages of consciousness and varied forms of unconscious reality, such that the history of humanity could be said to constitute the development of human consciousness.

In Asia or Europe, America or Africa, a particular group unknowingly took the lead, only to relinquish its leadership, still unknowingly.

Then this hidden leadership passed to another group, again without its knowledge.

The past 150 years have taught western humanity and western Christian culture that any standpoint is relative, and that knowledge is contingent on the personal equation of each group.

This insight also underlies, as effect or cause, the fact that today there is one world, with one monetary policy, one world economy, and one world war. ~Erich Neuman, The Roots of Jewish Consciousness, Introduction, The Work, Page 56-59

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