The End of the Old Order Blood, Death and the End of the Old Order: The Mystery Religion as a Vehicle for Consciousness Transition M. Sophia Compton
This paper explores consciousness evolution, particularly in terms of the ancient Greek world. Though not actually an examination of cultural evolution, it is worth a moment to gain a long overview of cultural development. In the Lower Paleolithic, humans were primarily food collectors and hunters of small game; in the Upper Paleolithic, hunting advanced and men began to hunt in teams. Women were primarily the food gatherers. What is a marked difference in these two stages of development, however, was that in the earlier stage there were cult or social festivities, but no blood sacrifice and no form of priesthood. In the latter stage there was animal (blood) sacrifice and mediators between the clan and the local deity (such as a shaman) began to appear. In the Neolithic period (6,000 BCE), humans began to settle down and cultivate the soil. This is when we begin to see a clear emergence of the importance of earth mother deities, to whom many sacrifices were offered. In terms of religious consciousness, no one would argue that the experience of reality of the magical rituals of the Stone Age was qualitatively different from the experiences of the hunters and gathers with their totems, or the Greeks with their highly stratified mythological hierarchy of gods and goddesses, or the eventual concept of monotheism which developed in most of the world’s great religious traditions. From the point of view of the development of human consciousness, these differences point to definite ages, to times when the structures of consciousness were mutating and evolving, hence suffering the concomitant upheaval which marks the demarcation of any significant shift in conscious evolution. According to Gebser, Wilber, and others (1), these stages of consciousness are: 1 .archaic-uroboric, the ‘dawning’ period of human consciousness wherein humans had no notion of anything beyond immediate experience. In Gebser’s words, “It is akin, if not identical, to the original state of biblical paradise: a time when the soul is yet dormant, a time of complete non-differentiation of man and the universe.” (2) 2. magical, which may have begun around 200,000 years ago and which included early stages of symbolic thinking and a rudimentary sense of self, but which was dominated by an intimate connection to the horde or clan. This can be compared to a very small child who is still intimately bonded to the parental figure and who has no understanding of the sharp line between reality and imagination. Hence, the world is an extension of the self, which attempts to ‘magically’ interact with it through psychic connectedness, sympathetic magic, etc: i.e., an elaborate system of associations, wherein “all things and persons are interrelated...a world of pure but meaningful
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