It is precisely this compartmentalism, this disentanglement of what belongs together, the untwining of yarns, that Jung laments in modern man. “…[C]ivilized consciousness has steadily separated itself from the basic instincts,” he says. “Modern man protects himself against seeing his own split state by a system of compartments.”
The universe, to western man, is divided up into private and public spaces, conscious and unconscious spheres, “…kept, as it were, in separate drawers and are never confronted with one another” (Jung, ed., 1968 at 72).
The first encounters between the Spanish and the Maya of Central America resulted in an all too familiar pattern of death and depopulation that decimated indigenous peoples. On the eve of Spanish conquest, the native population of Central America stood at some 25 million persons. By 1620, just a century later, and nearly a half millennium after Hanab Pakal’s remains were placed at the base of the Temple of the Inscriptions at Palenque, the indigenous population of Central America numbered under two million people.
While traditional Maya medicine was unable to stem the rapidly rising tide of death and destruction that struck after Spanish discovery, exploration and conquest of the New World, traditional Maya art forms and cultural rituals have been retained---both intact and changed---and passed onto the descendants of the Hero Twins: the modern Maya (D.J. Boorstin and B.M. Kelley, A History of the United States, 1996 at 18).
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