The Origins and History of Consciousness, by Erich Neumann
Tackling Jordan Peterson’s Reading List
In this series I discuss the books on Jordan Peterson’s Great Book List in no particular order. My hope is to help those interested understand what they’re getting into and choose which books they decide to take on.
This particular text is one that should be at the very least understood by all people responsible for educating humans in the liberal arts. Its review of the output of humanity across endless cultures and times presents a rich picture of our psychic evolution that should be considered fundamental.
Much like an archeologist sifts through the levels of Earth’s strata revealing clues of our ancestors’ physical and cultural development, Erich Neumann sifts through ancient symbols produced by the human psyche, revealing signs of psychic evolution. In reviewing this text I found it difficult to parse it down into a summary as there is so much information Neumann reviews in making the case for this view of humanity’s psyche. The level of depth to which he has researched the evidence via the human expression of art, artifact and language is immense. The book is full of illustrations of many of these artifacts as well.
Almost every page has something revelatory as evidenced by my copy’s numerous…
