The Myth of the Great Ending obviously bears strong relation to the concept of linear time; but a personal death like Lear’s, extrapolated to a global scale, does not explain it. Something else must account for the shift from time as circular to time as linear, and Felser considers several alternative theories. One possibility is Zoroastrianism’s pattern of creation, fall, and atonement, which Aristotle secularized into the theory that a tragedy must have a beginning, middle, and end. Felser’s treatment of the Poetics would be more effective if he had noted that it also stated that a tragedy is “an imitation . . . of a complete action” that should take place within “a single revolution of the sun” (Aristotle, trans. 1961). Whether or not Aristotle secularized Zoroaster, the theatrical use of beginning, middle, and end fostered verisimilitude Next Page 12 TMI JOURNAL 2012 and may have arisen from simple practicality. Another possibility that Felser has considered is Joseph Campbell’s “Great Reversal,” a transformation in which the circle, a symbol of joy and harmony with inner and outer nature, becomes linked to destruction through the image of chariot wheels. But Felser has suggested a more fundamental
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cause than technology, Zoroaster, or Aristotle—namely, the Agricultural Revolution 10,000 years ago, which sparked human beings’ exile from nature. Thus “the Myth of the Great Ending . . . is but the psychological residue of the unresolved trauma left by our creation of linear civilization and our rejection of nature’s circular rhythms” (p. 77). Over the last 2,000 years, religious and secular belief systems have developed to shore up our species’ separation from nature. Felser mentioned St. Augustine, Martin Luther, and Jerry Falwell as proponents of the religious idea that the human mind and imagination are fallen and untrustworthy, and secular writers like René Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Carl Sagan as advocates of reason, knowledge-as-power, and the denial of intuitive/unconscious resources. The key religious observation—that human consciousness is imperfect and untrustworthy because of the Fall—led to the most beautiful sentence in the entire book: “We are mental and moral prisoners of sin, captivated by bizarre fun- house mirrors of self-deception in a charnel house of terror and lies” (p. 107). Unfortunately, in addressing the way in which religion and science challenge nature, Felser painted with too broad a brush in stating, “All our mainstream religions and philosophies are rusty, worn-out buckets. They are outdated containers of antiquated ideas about reality.
. . . All are cultural vessels that are sinking fast . . . [they are] useless . . . [and even] dangerous . . . ” (p. 79). Religion gets hit particularly hard because it “represents a false reunification predicated on an illusion of separation” (p. 81). Though not without some merit, these criticisms are overgeneralizations that participate in the dualism that the author criticizes elsewhere. Like the idea that the “imperialist rational ego” separates us from others and from nature, much of Felser’s argument is Jungian. One notes much common ground: discussion of the collective unconscious; interest in Tao; the unus mundus, the one world, or what Felser has called a “connection to all things” (p. 66); analysis of archaic or original cultures; experience of unity consciousness with nature; emphasis on dreams as what Jung’s protégé, Marie-Louise von Franz, called “‘the voice of nature within us’” (p. 67); and the realization of the unconscious mind’s temporal relativity. In two places, however, the Jungian connection needs to be straightened out. The main one is where Felser erroneously defined myths as “archetypes of the collective unconscious” (p. 18). Jung (1968) stated that archetypes are not “inherited ideas . . . but inherited possibilities of ideas” (p. 66), which means that they represent merely the potential for representation. As D. Sharp stated, “Archetypes are irrepresentable in themselves but their effects are discernible in archetypal images and