Fantasy as Antifantasy: 6 Pan-religion and Peter continued

In this way, Peter’s existence was like a labyrinthine box full of secrets, full of troublesome attributes besides those inexplicable milk teeth that women could see at a glance and be caught in blind love. At this point, it is necessary to check from the beginning what kind of characteristics the character of Peter actually has been depicted to have, in Peter and Wendy.
The name Peter first appears in the story when Mrs. Darling is “tidying up her children’s minds” in her daily routine.

Occasionally in her travels through her children’s minds Mrs. Darling found things she could not understand, and of these quite the most perplexing was the word Peter. She knew of no Peter, and yet he was here and there in John and Michael’s minds, while Wendy’s began to be scrawled all over with him. The name stood out in bolder letters than any of the other words, and as Mrs. Darling gazed she felt that it had an oddly cocky appearance.


The name Peter was hidden in the depths of the children’s hearts. Peter is similar to Neverland in that he is not a being in existential external world, but something that lies in the inner world deep in consciousness. And it is because Mrs. Darling’s mental world and the children’s mental world are connected in the depths that she is able to “tidy up her children’s minds”. This point will provide an important momentum for the development of the argument later in this chapter. At first, Mrs. Darling doesn’t recognize the name Peter, and bewildered, but when she looks back on her own childhood, she finally remembers Peter.

At first Mrs. Darling did not know, but after thinking back into her childhood she just remembered a Peter Pan who was said to live with the fairies. There were odd stories about him as that when children dies he went part of the way with them, so that they should not be frightened. She had believed in him at the time. But now that she was married and full of sense she quite doubted whether there was any such person.


There are two important things. One is that Peter was said to live with the fairies. The other is that he will accompany the children halfway so that they don’t have to be scared when they die.
Peter is said to be a friend of the fairies. Then, what kind of existence were fairies? Needless to say, fairies are nothing but altered forms of ancient gods that were worshipped by people in various countries before the invasion of Christianity. Christianity, an exclusive religion that refuses to acknowledge the existence of any other deity, has degraded the indigenous gods who had hitherto been worshipped in the regions into evil spirits where it expanded its propagation. However, Christianity, which was institutionalized by the church and bound people’s hearts with the doctrines of atonement and covenant, was an extremely pessimistic religion that foreshadowed the destruction of the world, premised on the idea of the primordial sin committed by mankind. This obstinate new regime will cause unspeakable friction for the people who live daily with the surrounding nature and the indigenous spirits who are one with it. They ended up living a life of faith with a dual structure, one of dark devotion to the one recognized God, and a bright coexistence with the many unofficial supernatural beings, the spirits. However, with the development of the rational scientific discernment of the modern era after the Renaissance, the contradictions in the fundamental parts of the doctrines imposed by this religion were gradually exposed. Needless to say, the decisive blow was the theory of evolution presented in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. It is worth noting, however, that even before the Origin of Species was published, such outstanding scientific and rational minds as Emanuel Swedenborg, attempted to re-examine the world-building system of existing religions, and already explored the possibility of establishing what could be called a transcendental religion or a pan-religion.
Swedenborg reinterpreted the principle of the creation of the world, expressed in the framework of Christianity, from the standpoint of what can be called “biblical psychology.” This task of re-reading the book of Genesis was an attempt to retranslate the relationship between reality and transcendent beings in a completely different standpoint from the medieval system of metaphors under Christian domination.

note:
For a re-evaluation of Swedenborg in this sense, see Kazuo Takahashi, Swedenborg’s Thought; Kodansha-Gendai Shinsho, (1995).

This approach is very close to that of Carl Gustav Jung, who later examined the alchemy of Paracelsus as an analysis of psychology using the methodology of modern science. Jung re-evaluated alchemy, which had been labeled as a medieval delusion, as a dynamic attempt at mental reflection to repair the relationship between reality and spirit and to orient the world correctly, and in the process, he was keenly aware of a cosmology that was completely different from that of the conventional Christian system.

note:
Ref. C. G. Jung, Paracelsus; translated by Shinkichi Enomoto, Misuzu Shobo, (1992).

It was the discovery of “individuality” as something that can be sustained in the oneness of the whole universe. He found a model of life that aims to overcome the constraints of traditional “reason” and restore the correct rules of operation of the universe by releasing the power of intuition hidden in the unconscious, through a new solution to the seemingly logical contradiction of the description of the attributes of beings that can be at the same time both all and individual, and also individual and all.

note:
The ancient idea was revived in an interesting correspondence with the various achievements of quantum mechanics, commonly known as “New Science” in the 20th century, some examples of which were introduced by David J. Bohm, with the idea of “the totality of the universe”, by John Stewart Bell, with the discovery of the theorem that “events act non-locally in the universe,” and by Karl Pribram, with his model of “holography,” in which the entire universe is included inside the individual human brain. Needless to say, the transformation of the perception of reality brought about by these findings was one of the causes of the revival of fantasy literature in the late 20th century.
For example, quantum multiverse theory, which assumes multiple layers deployed in space units corresponding to the probability fluctuation values of individual elementary particles, and presupposes the manifestation of countless possible worlds corresponding to the superposition of all combinational permutation, is also understood as one of the variations of the idea of shadow mechanism, such as George McDonald envisioned in the idea of sublime totality of the world in terms of the complementary relationship between the fairy world and the human world, that is also shown in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno, or as a superposition of the dimensions of matter and spirituality, which was introduced using the terms “corporeal” and “astral” as adopted by Theosophy and other thoughts looking back Plato’s idea; in that it is in line with theories that grasp the entire structure of the world, including both the external and internal, in a kind of holistic world formula.