Similar powerful forces were at work in the evolution of the temple, another archetypal Egyptian artefact. The oldest representations of cult buildings show them to have been animal in shape and made from reeds. Once again, the manifestation of divinity in animal form is demonstrated in the shape of the shrine. As Egypt’s temples became ever larger and more complex, the archetypal little reed shrine is still retained in the heart of the temple, enclosed in darkness.
The temple is a microcosm of the world, its roof the sky. The forest of columns which supports the roof are both the pillars which in Egyptian belief support the sky and the primeval grove of trees or the banks of reeds and mangrove in the primeval island from which began the gods’ original journey to found the Dual Kingdom. In the Jungian canon the forest is also a synonym for the unconscious, a quality which is also shared by the temple.31 Within the temple, as in the depths of the unconscious, lie the most obscure but at the same time the most potent symbols. The mystical nature of the temple is revealed by the forest of columns which at once conceals its interior and also draws the hierophant deep into its further recesses, where the most sacred part of the temple is located, the place of the living presence of the god. The officiant, priest or king, goes further and further into the darkening interior as if he were pursuing some ideal form, as it might be of an animal barely glimpsed, into the heart of the temple-forest.
Little is known of the rituals conducted in the temples of the early dynasties but their symbolic character will have been fully apprehended by those who had access to their interiors. In later times, initiations in the higher ranks of the priesthoods were carried out there and their identification with the unconscious and the revelations which it can provide will have been explicit. The Egyptian temple fulfils an archetypal function of much complexity and the fact of its doing so accounts for much of its mysterious and numinous quality.
The original and formative Egyptian experience had been that of the extended group, leavened with the occasional brilliant flash of individual genius. The images which are the common currency of Egyptian art and architecture are archetypes, products of the collective unconscious. The falcon perched on the serekh as the eponym of the royal clan for example, the everlasting symbolism of the crowns, a poetic image such as the two lions joined back to back signifying Yesterday and Tomorrow, are all examples of this phenomenon. Such archetypes are all products of the early Egyptian collective unconscious; it is this which gives them their often mystical, faintly uncanny but hauntingly familiar character.
Egypt’s decline, her gradual descent from the unimaginable heights of the third-millennium experience to the haunted shells of the temples of later times, parallels the individual’s progress towards maturity and beyond. Once maturity was reached the experience comparable with that of individuation was realized. Egypt’s coherence and the integrity of her pristine personality began to fragment, never to be wholly rejoined.
In the time of the early Middle Kingdom kings, whilst the earlier periods were still, as it were, in sight, the principal elements of immemorial Egypt were retained. But soon alien influences virtually swamped the Valley, corrupting for ever the unique experience that was Egypt in its first flowering.
THE ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PSYCHE
Expressing a profound insight, Thomas Mann, a creative genius who himself consciously explored the process of creation throughout his artistic life, observed that ‘the Ego of antiquity and its consciousness of itself was different from our own, less exclusive, less sharply defined’.32 Mann was writing in the context of the work of Sigmund Freud whose theories of psychoanalysis have only a limited relevance to the understanding of the psychology of high antiquity when compared with those of C. G. Jung. But the truth which Mann expressed is fundamental to an understanding of the processes which were at work in the creative output of the men of the earliest high cultures. In particular the lack of exclusiveness of the Ego of which he writes is markedly true of the Egyptian personality in Early Dynastic times. The Egyptian of the early periods is simply less individualized than has come to be expected from someone living in a highly cultured, well structured, and organizationally advanced society. The Egyptian experience of the time is still closer to the collective experience, the experience of the group, almost (though this is patently an overstatement) the experience of the species. Parallel with this collective experience, manifested also by an intense sense of ‘belonging’ and, perhaps paradoxically, of an identity specifically as part of the group, was the developing awareness of the individual and the capability of the individual to express a separate identity. Initially such individuality was yet another prerogative of the king and his closest companions, though doubtless it was not acknowledged in such specific terms. Throughout the later phases of the Old Kingdom, as demonstrated by the increasingly naturalistic art of the tomb reliefs for example, the emergence of the individual was evidently one of the factors which marked the most notable change in the society and which ultimately weakened the fabric of the state.
The momentous events of the last quarter of the fourth millennium when the progress towards the combination of the little principalities which it is presumed then comprised the polity of the Valley really began, led the Egyptians to undertake the creation of a complex political system and to extend it over a large and extended area, embracing several local cultures. The Egyptian collective unconscious must have been dramatically activated by this process, releasing a variety of archetypes even as it released creative initiatives triggered by them. In a small and closely knit community, with fairly immediate communications by means of the river, these could be apprehended rapidly from one end of the Valley to the other. It is a further tribute to the early kings that they realized this to be the case and pursued the unification of Egypt relentlessly, ultimately to achieve it despite many setbacks and frequent disappointments.
Innocence and a sense of collective election are fundamental elements in the ethos of the Egyptians who founded and sustained the Egyptian state in its early centuries. There is thus no sense of sin or guilt in early times, to be experienced by the individual. Such concepts, too, came later, again perhaps creeping in from the desert wastes, to temper the original innocence of the people of the Valley. The power of the original creation may be gauged by the consideration that the history of Egypt after the Pyramid Age is a history of decline. From its highest point, so quickly achieved and maintained with such assurance, Egypt gradually declined, though many of the outward forms remained.
To apply the concept of individuation to the progress of a community, from its earliest expressions of self-awareness to the full engagement of all the complex elements of state politics and management, can provide a frame into which otherwise disparate and apparently inconsequential factors can be associated and made coherent. The concept works precisely because the individual in the society is not yet a personality fully differentiated from his fellows. The beginnings of specific distinctions can however be traced: the emergence of trades and even the specializations of function within the state, though these will operate still to a very limited degree.
The phenomenon of the Divine Kingship itself, the most profound of all Egyptian inspirations, grew out of the same pristine and uncontaminated state which allowed the free flow of so many of those elements which have come to be associated with the process of individuation and which appear in such abundance in the late predynastic and Early Dynastic periods, in the reaches of southern Egypt.
The Divine King is the supreme Egyptian political concept and the product of the unique Egyptian-African psyche. The idea of the Divine King emerged precisely at the point when the society over which he was to be raised was beginning its progress towards the attainment of its own distinct and individual identity. But the king, once he is recognized as such, is fully individuated in name, in function, and in the numinous quality with which he and his office are already invested.
It is in this context, too, that the monumental public works which are so much a feature of the early centuries of the Egyptian state’s existence must be considered. As the process of individuation advanced, and as the king assumed an ever more exalted position, the essential Egyptian spirit began to find expression in massive works which engaged the whole society and absorbed much of its resources. Such resources were not wasted, nor deployed extravagantly; their employment was the inescapable consequence of the burgeoning of the individuality of the Egyptian state. The monuments were, initially, the product of the need to protect and nourish the king’s individuality. Later, as the individual Egyptian begins to take on a more precise outline, the role of the king diminishes, first to that of a god among gods, later still to something like the mediator between gods and men, with what amounts to little more than a sort of honorary divinity. Once again, the decline of Egypt from its pristine greatness can then be seen as part of the process of the state’s realization of its own individuation.
World History
