I’m of the Indiana Jones generation. I must have seen Raiders of the Lost Ark twenty times growing up. The discovery of the lost Ark in the movie was searing in my imagination as a child. Knowing that it was a depiction of a biblical reference to a legendary artifact, was thrilling to me.
From eight to thirteen I was fascinated with unsolved mysteries. I’d walk to the library once a week with a plastic grocery bag and fill it with books, often reading on the walk home.
What happened to Flight 19 in the Bermuda Triangle? Who were the people of Easter Island? and “what happened to the Inca? Central to many of these stories was the insinuation of an unexplainable force, a layer of causality we don’t perceive or understand. Intimations of magical, the supernatural and the religious.
I never grew out of this curiosity to be truthful, I just evolved my ability to ask questions and to make better sense of the mysteries if that’s possible. Instead of becoming an archeologist or big-foot hunter when I grew up, I developed a deep interest in mythology, religion and wisdom tradition. I learned critical thinking skills along with a greater vocabulary and broader language for analyzing and describing the mysteries of the world and followed the mysteries into questions on the nature of the soul, the Self and archetypes of the unconscious..
Along the way, after studying Jung and being confounded by my early readings, I came to understand that symbols and archetypes are languages we’ve forgotten how to speak. Archetypes are patterns that play out in the background of our lives that once formed part of our epistemic commons - and we know many of them as mythic personalities and gods of various pantheons.
This way of understanding he world was once central our lives and our languages regardless of our cultural backgrounds. On would say casually, that the god Eros (Cupid) had pricked a teen with his arrow when the teen developed a lust or an infatuation and not question the statement. Today of course we would give a biological explanation, but the symptoms of puberty and dawning sexual desire are the same whether we ascribe supernatural causality or biological ones. Many cultures in the world still observe these ways of being and means of interpreting and explaining our human experiences.
It’s useful to think of concepts like Cupid’s arrow as having the same symbolic structure as the legends of the Ark of the Covenant. The ark was the vessel that carried the ten commandments of Moses, and it was said that all armies fell before the one that carried the ark. But what does this mean?
The ten commandments were a psychotechnology. They were a set of agreed upon rules that were revolutionary in history. Any culture that adopted those commands and lived by these sets of rules had an adaptive advantage. They became more stable and more successful than ones who didn’t. So why wouldn’t people fall to this technology? It made life better in many ways.
The Analects of Confucius performed the same function, the Hammurabi Code and the edicts of Ashoka of India. More than a thousand years later than any of these came the Magna Carta, a cultural artifact, that further outlined rules for getting along in society. One of the symbolic message of the ark: civility is better than barbarism.
These bodies of knowledge, these quanta of psychotechnology, are sense-making artifacts from before the information age. They helped us communicate life’s complexities in shorthand. They helped us create more stable societies, and informed humanity in times of crisis for thousands of years. They provide paths to wisdom vs what we substitute these for in the information age, by taking in more-and-more data about people, events and agendas.
These are found in all cultures and at higher levels of sophistication, these Epistemic Artifacts center us in character and values, and orients us as individuals and as societies within a stable epistemic field. We loosely call these artifacts "Religions" but in many cases this is a poor description. They are integrated narratives of social coherence. "Some might call them mythologies.
One of the basic principles common to these cultural artifacts is that we understand the world as we understand ourselves. The unconscious creates mirrors and projections of ourselves in the world and what we see is a reflection of our owns self and self-understanding. The Golden Rule is an expression of this. In some ways it is an edict, a type of command: Thou Shalt love thy neighbor as thyself; but is is also an observation. We love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Or to flip the coin, “we treat others according to our self-conception.”
People who have self-respect, respect other people. People who lie tend to not trust others. Jung observed that we tend to project our shadows on others, and we accuse others often of that which we are guilty of doing. ‘Remove the moat from your own eye, before you concern yourself with the speck in your neighbor’s eye.”
These are artifacts, and contrary to our images of dusty, decrepit and useless pieces that belong in some museum, they are worth exploring, contemplating and practicing.
I see myself as driven by curiosity, an Indiana Jones of cultural artefacts and archetypes, and I wish all people were as curious as I was about these ideas as I am. Now after decades of meditation on these artifacts, I’m examining these relics as lost psychotechnologies that if more widely understood, could form some of the basis for dealing with the meaning crisis we’re in.