Description
How did humans develop the capacity for symbolic imagination?
In this ground-breaking book, Warren Colman provides a reformulation of archetypal symbols as emergent from humans’ embodied and affective engagement with their social and material environment. Beginning with the oldest known figurative image in the world, the 40,000-year-old Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel in Germany, he traces the emergence of symbolic imagination through the origins of language, the growth of human sociality and co-operation, and the creative use of material objects, from the earliest stone tools through the cave paintings and figures of Upper Paleolithic Europe and beyond. This leads to a consideration of how the imaginal world of the spirit may have come into being, not as separate from the material world but through active participation within a world alive with meaning.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements. Introduction. Prologue. The Archetypal Hypothesis. Expanding the Mind. From Ape to Human I. From Ape to Human II. Constitutive Symbols and the Imaginal Realm. The Emergence of the Spirit World. Two Kinds of Thinking. Participation Mystique Revisited.
