Ilhuitl and Juan, I want to tell you a bit about the changes that are going to occur in our understanding of the human soul over the following five centuries. I am intentionally using the word soul because neither of you will have for a couple of hundred years any comprehension of the human psyche. That's right, the psyche, or what you understand and know as the soul which also includes the mind, the intentions, the emotions, the will, the intellect, the passions, and everything that is not directly related to the body.
In the next four hundred to five hundred years you will see the rise of psychology, or the study of the mind. I will focus on two of the great psychoanalysts of this coming time: Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. I am not an expert testator by the way and the little I will have to tell you will not do great justice to either of these remarkable men. They will arise from what you currently know, Juan, to be the Holy Roman Empire in Central Europe, now the nations of Austria, where Freud lived, and Switzerland, the birthplace of Jung.
Both men believed strongly in the unconscious. This is the huge, hidden and largely unknown area of the human mind from which arise our dreams and irrational impulses and instincts. Freud seemed to see the unconscious as a huge hidden garbage room where the trash was often filtered out through dreams. He believed strongly in the primary impulses of sex and death as the major motivators of human beings, and that our lives were a constant struggle between our inner forces of life and death.
Jung took this a few steps further by recognizing the strong spiritual dimension to the human unconscious, from which we derive our sense of spirituality and religion. To him this was a particularly powerful motivator for good or for ill. He believed in the usefulness of our dreams as roadmaps to our inner lives. He even believed in the unconscious connectedness of all people from all ages, which he called the Collective Unconscious. From the Collective Unconscious were derived the Archetypes, or the original symbols of the many facets of our humanity. It is believed that it is from their Archetypes that your people, Ilhuitl, have really derived your gods. Now, please, don't take offence, this is simply a theory. However, if you were to carefully examine the character and biography of each of the gods of the Mexica you would find their origins in these collective psychic blueprints known as the Archetypes.
For you, Juan, and the Spanish Catholics, Freud would have the greater resonance, given the obsession of your people with sex and death, struggle, bloodshed and this constant necessity of having to somehow reincarnate your civilization, such as it is, in other lands and through other peoples. This is because the Spanish have a neurotic terror of death, whereas the Mexica with their heightened sense of an interconnected spirituality embrace it, and bravely at the altar of sacrifice.
Both models, I would have you know, are equally flawed and equally disastrous. However, in Ilhuitl, and I believe, in many of the Mexica, there is an openness to the spirit that would make him adaptable to living now in the Twenty-First Century, whereas for you, Juan, it would be a living death.
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