Maps of Meaning

To understand how the human brain responds to unknown stimulus, learning about how the brain’s functions—and what constitutes good and bad stimulus—is important. What constitutes good or bad for an individual at any point is highly subjective and depends on their circumstances, worldview, history, temperament, and many other things. For instance, psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor E. Frankl describes how a group of his co-travelers rejoiced when they landed at a concentration camp that had no electric crematorium, implying that their execution wouldn’t be immediate, even though the camp’s conditions were subhuman. Thus, given the context, the categories of pleasant and unpleasant change. Because the human mind faces so much diverse, contradictory, and subjective information—as well as the constant threat of the unknown—humans are “intrinsically prone to intrapsychic conflict and associated affective (emotional) dysregulation” (39).

At the base of the nervous system are the brain’s phylogenetically oldest parts, or parts that evolved first. These include the medulla (brainstem) and the amygdala (reptilian brain), which have subsystems hard-wired for many basic physiological functions. However, just because these sub-systems are hard-wired doesn’t mean that human behavior is determined. The sub-systems each have an ideal goal, which changes depending on individual context. Conflict often arises when fulfilment of one biological goal interferes with another. What if one is simultaneously hungry and cold? What if, to feed one’s hunger, one must steal food from someone weaker? The brain resolves these complex questions by engaging its higher, or phylogenetically newer, parts—such as the cerebral and frontal cortex, which govern judgment and executive decision-making. Thus, judgment and decision are essential functions of the human brain. For decision, the brain must attach value to stimuli and objects. However, the brain sometimes cannot easily gauge the value it should attach to stimuli. Often, the brain cannot outwit its biology or the individual’s belief systems. For instance, even though someone dealing with an eating disorder may rationally know food is good for them, their psychological condition prevents them from consuming food. Psychologist Richard Davidson theorizes that the human brain’s left and right hemispheres are designed to deal with stability and the unknown, respectively. The right hemisphere—which engages with uncertainty—is also associated with the limbic system, or the brain’s phylogenetically older systems.

Therefore, the human mind needs a stable framework of shared values to make judgments, as well as an adaptive individual mindset to deal with unexpected occurrences and changes. The capability to create novel behavior in response to unexpected changes is a primary hallmark of human consciousness. To coherently process the world’s known and unknown aspects, the brain creates stories, or “a map of meaning” (72). Often, these stories are based in memories. Neuroscience shows that the brain stores different information in different centers. For example, the cerebellum and prefrontal cortex store procedural memory (how to do things). Procedural memory is implicit, in that once individuals learn a skill, they don’t have to think about how to perform it. In contrast, declarative memory is explicit and subjective; it includes episodic memories (personal recollections) and semantic memories (long-term shared and general knowledge). The hippocampus and other areas, meanwhile, store semantic memories, which may include myth-fragments.

Humans use the elements of play and abstraction to make stories from these memory systems. Stories “nest” within each other in ways that depend on what’s important to an individual. Most of these stories are bound by the spatial-temporal (space and time) confines of human experience. However, some “higher-level” stories have a greater spatial and temporal (long-term) reach. Myths accommodate these stories.

Since the times of Scottish anthropologist James George Frazier, author of the seminal myth-studies book The Golden Bough (1890), prominent thinkers have held that disseminated myths still share many common features. An analysis of world myths reveals that experience and action have three constituent elements and follow a fourth realm. Myths show that the precursory state is pre-cosmogonic chaos, out of which appear the Great Father (the realm of the known; culture and tradition), the Great Mother (the unknown; creative and destructive nature), and the Divine Son (the archetypal hero; the “word,” or the process of exploration). World myths show that the precursory chaos often takes the form of uroboros, or the Egyptian symbol of a serpent eating its tail. As Egyptian, Sumerian, and other world myths show, some seven archetypes across most mythologies symbolize these four realms. The first of these archetypes is uroboros, symbolically the source of all latent information, which parses into the domains of the known, the unknown, and the exploring and experiencing subject. The second and third archetypes are aspects the bivalent Great Mother, “the source of all new things, the benevolent bearer and lover of the hero; the destructive forces of the unknown, the source of fear itself, constantly conspiring to destroy life” (90). The fourth and fifth archetypes express the hero, the explorer, the knight, the messianic son of the divine mother, and his “sworn adversary, arrogant and deceitful” (80). The sixth and seventh archetypes are aspects of the Divine Father—king, tyrant, wise protector—as well as the cruel dictator, the Kronos-like creature who eats his own offspring.

These archetypes exist in the Mesopotamian creation myths of the Enuma Elish (the title of which derives from the myths’ opening words, which mean “when in the heights”). These myths feature four main sets of characters: Tiamat, the great dragon, symbolizing the Great Mother of archetype and conflating, as is often the case, with uroboros; Apsu, Tiamat’s consort; the children of Tiamat and Apsu; and Marduk, the sun god. The sexual or creative union of Tiamat and Apsu gives rise to the Mesopotamian “world of gods” (112). These “elder gods” are in effect equivalents of Roman and Greek gods such as Pan or Ares/Mars, “embodiments of the archaic transpersonal intrapsychic phenomena that give rise to human motivation” (112). They are that which precedes the birth of a heroic consciousness, as Marduk embodies, the descendant of Tiamat and Apsu. When the destructive, decadent actions of her children—the elder and secondary Gods, Marduk’s forebears—unsettle Tiamat, she decides to raze the known patriarchal order and rear an army of monsters. Marduk chooses to fight with Tiamat and destroys her, going on to build a new world order.

As myths from the world show, the Great Father symbolizes the old world, the known and safe zone, while the Great Mother is unknown, unexplored territory. Across cultures, the Great Mother exists in a hidden fashion, because the unknown is by nature hypothetical. When she manifests, she often takes the form of uroboros, or chaos. Though the Great Mother has a benevolent aspect, she becomes identified with the serpent of chaos, since the human mind cannot distinguish between creative and destructive chaos. Consequently, the Great Mother is often associated with darkness, “the chaos of the night, the insect, ophidian and reptilian worlds” (157). She was the skull-adorned Aztec Coatlicue and continues to inspire worship in Bali and India as Kali, the Hindu goddess of creative destruction, who pictures often show bare-chested and with a terrifying aspect.

The Great Father may initially keep one safe, but soon devolves into tyranny and control, driving the Great Mother to take matters into her own hands. However, because the Great Mother abhors structure and humans cannot live without structure, the Sun-God or the hero creates order from stability. The true order that the hero creates always leaves room for novel exploration.