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PARTISAN REVIEW
trous discovery of self. The Golden Age is followed by an advance
in the worldly arts and by the complication of society; aggressive
non-conformists emerge in the shape, for instance, of Frazer's
priest-kings. The priest king is persecuted and often murdered,
says Heard, because of.the group's subconscious hostility to indi–
vidualism; he is paradoxically revered because he is "the passive
incarnation of the group" who has "to suffer that they may live.''
Thus religion becomes the sanctuary of the individual in his flight
from the group; it functions as the social substance. Other (or the
same) individualists become secular leaders when they realize
their selfness and see that there are ways of exalting themselves at
the expense of the group. The rise of priest-kings, dictators and
heroes characterizes the proto-civilized period of balanced con–
sciousness-balanced because religious practices (proto-civilized
yoga and mystic reunion with the group) counteract the disinte·
grating influence of individuals. The beginnings of modern "dis–
ruptive" society appeared when the patriarchal system finally fol·
lowed the matriarchal. For this meant the intensification of the
Oedipus conflict, which produced "algolagniac self-centeredness
and self-projection" and provided man with the repressed energy
necessary for waging wars and building empires. Mankind has
thus lived through a time of trial which is symbolized by the child's
emerging selfconsciousness and the conflict aroused in him when
he becomes aware of the disruptive individuality of the father,
both revered
~nd
hated like the priest-kings. But in this early
epoch society retains its balance as the adolescent successfully
balances the conflicts of bisexuality.
3.
The Epoch of Alternating Consciousness.
This succeeds proto-civilization.
It
is the era of our classical
and modern societies, the era of the gradually losing battle of the
psychic vs. the physical, the religious vs. the secular, the social vs.
the individual. Society is disrupted as the individual is disrupted
by the Oedipus' matured conflict: the recurring mother-urge vs.
conscious self-assertion in the outer world.
These epochs end in "the age of revolutions," which began
with the Thirty Years War, the age of the explosion of society–
since societies "explode" from an excess of individuality rather
than decay like an organism. "The entire process of humanity
is
the breaking up of the mass into individuals and the reintegration
