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Roderick Peters writes about the history of our discovery of the atom and of the excitement that grew in the collective consciousness of Europe with its twenty-four centuries-long pursuit of the mystery of matter. Ironically, he points out that it was the dread of Hitler that catalysed the last crucial stage of initiation into the nuclear age with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In his discussion of the ‘Sacrifice of Innocence’ now made necessary, he uses the analogy of a child growing up, who can no longer remain guiltless and unknowing. Similarly, global children have reached the stage of developent where they have acquired both the physical capacity for self-destruction and the maturity to weigh the choices. Colossal power has been wrested from the hands of the gods, reminding us of the two myths of the eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and the Promethean theft of fire.
Peters stresses the importance of looking at the history of the psyche in the way that Jung did. During the Renaissance there was a change in man's attitude to Satan and the beginnings of the modern scientific approach where pure intellect separated out from mythic imagination. In the waning of Satan's psychological reality, Peters recognises a Luciferian aspect in modern science, leading us to ignore our humble place in the mythic realm.
He writes that it is in the area of collective fantasy that the most painful of our innocent illusions needs to be sacrificed. There is no doubt that in the encounter between the collective conscious and the collective unconscious, the emergent symbols are to do with the dark aspect of divinity which reflects a widespread theme in mass popular stories. The unconscious is seeking to remind us of the dark side of God. The view that God is all good and that man alone creates evil denies the autonomy of archetypal evil. In order to survive we have to resist the acting out of the ‘power of the dark lord’ and to know ‘that the unlimited powers will be s