Cosmological Solidarity
Regeneration The merging of all forms and the symbolic continuity between regeneration, primeval creation, and fertility, projected in collective behaviour in rites such as the orgy, imply the primordial image of cosmological solidarity, and its inherent attribute of regeneration.
A live and active cosmic unity In the context of chtonian hierophanies, or revelations related with the earth after the appearance of agriculture, ‘the primal intuition of the Earth shows it as the foundation of every expression of existence’ (Eliade, 1971, Patterns in Comparative Religion, London: Sheed and Ward, p. 242), something immediately experienced and accepted, forming a live and active cosmic unity (Eliade, 1971, p. 242), an inexhaustible fount of existences, and of existences that reveal themselves directly to man (Eliade, 1971, p. 243).
Creation and
maternity However, the intuition of the earth is initially a cosmic one:
before the causes of conception were known man had no part in creation and
maternity was believed to result from a direct insertion of the child in the
mother’s womb, in a ‘cosmico-maternal’ life (Eliade, 1971, p. 244). Men were related to each other through the mothers
only, precariously enough, while the feeling of solidarity with the surrounding
microcosm, with the place, was a prevailing one; the precariousness of human
paternity was balanced by the solidarity existing between man and various
protective forces or substances in nature (Eliade, 1971, p. 244).
Sympathetic bond Furthermore, ‘every expression of life is the result of the fertility of the earth’ (Eliade, 1971, p. 254), not only because earth produces living things, but because it regenerates life: ‘everything that comes from the earth is endowed with life, and everything that goes back into earth is given new life’ (Eliade, 1971, p. 253). This regenerative attribute is ‘a magic, sympathetic bond between the earth and the forms it has engendered’, an organic solidarity, a biological unity ‘due to the life which is the same’ in all those forms of existence (Eliade, 1971, p. 255).
Germinal luminosities The primordial image of the flickering widespread nature of consciousness, that of the scintillae, of ‘seeds of light broadcast in the chaos’, rests on the quasi-conscious state of unconscious contents and, notably, brings forward the nature of the archetype itself: bearing a ‘certain effulgence or quasi-consciousness’ that determines its numinosity (Jung, 1990, The basic writings of Carl Gustav Jung. New York: Princeton University Press, p. 62), because the archetype is an attractor of psychic energy that is eventually put forward through primodial images. Therefore, according to Jung, while the light is the lumen naturae, which illuminates consciousness, the scintillae are germinal luminosities shining forth from the darkness of the unconscious (Jung, 1990, p. 64).
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