Looking at Schlain's timeline yesterday in class, I started to wonder how we, as humans, even reached the stage of being able to have an Oral Tradition. Did it start because one person was more intelligent than the rest of the humans alive at that time or did orality somehow start because of an unconscious collective? The same question then later applies to the written tradition. These questions bothered me so much that paying attention in my later classes of the afternoon was probably one of the hardest things I have done in a long while. 
    When I was finally able to start actively pursuing the answers to these questions, I wondered where to start. As a frame of reference, I started writing up the questions, that I would like to be able to answer about the origins of the oral and literary traditions. Once I got started, my list of questions just kept growing exponentially and it is still continuing to grow. My first and most obvious question was "How is the collective unconscious related to the oral tradition?" which then led to "If the oral tradition was brought about by the collective unconscious, how do both of them relate to mythology?" and when I think of the mythology, archetypes immediately come to my mind. Just from those three questions, I found my starting places: Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Northrop Frye, & Erich Neuman. Immediately I started collecting and reading books by all of these brilliant men. 
    After about 6 hours of reading, the point I am at is that there is a distinct and compelling connection between the origins of the oral tradition, the origins of the literary traditions, the collective unconscious, and the roles that archetypal mythology in the collective and personal unconsciousness. 
    As most of us already know, Jung is the father of the collective unconscious. He is the man that coined the term and brought about its presence into the conscious minds of scholars worldwide. As was discussed yesterday in class, the woman creates which is right-brained function thus making it of the oral tradition. The right-brained function is connected to the mythos while the left-brained functions are more in tune with logos. As Schlain said, the mythos era was the era of the matriarchal mythologies leading me back to the idea of the Earth Goddess. I will expand even more on this aspect in later blogs. Women, especially those of the matriarchal mythos, are associated with serpents. Serpents are in turn related to Ouroboros, which represents renewal of life and the cycles of life (Earth Goddess). The matriarchal mythos, right-brain functions, and ouroboros are all connected to the ideas of Jung, which revolves around the concept of the collective unconscious in the personal and the intrapersonal sense. Matriarchal mythos leads me to Frye and Campbell because who else has studied the archetypes of the mythology more the Northrop Frye and Joseph Campbell? Thus I will be sifting through their work for the foreseeable future to find all of the archetypes of matriarchal mythos that I can find, even though I will probably spend the most time on the archetype of the Earth Goddess, specifically when in relation to Deo and Kore and the Eleusinian Mysteries. 
    On the opposite end of the spectrum of the matriarchal mythos is the logos or logical. Logos is represented by the Freudian concepts of the patriarchal mythos which lead to or was brought around by the literary culture. "Man speaks and it is done" conceptualizes perfectly the culture of the literary world. I have not yet read the Goddess and the Alphabet but from what I have gathered from Dr. S., I think that it will further my thesis that the oral tradition and the literary tradition have been personified into the psychological concepts of Freud and Jung. Their different approaches on how the human psyche is structured looks directly into the points of how the human cultures shifted from oral to literary. Which supports Ong's hypothesis that literature did restructure the human brain and even, and more importantly, the human pysche or soul.
    What truly interests me however, is the collective unconscious and its primary role in the oral tradition. Obviously I like the literary tradition or else I would not be able to tell you or let alone think through these thoughts that have been going through my mind like crazy. But that is a periphery concept for me at this point. The primary concepts that I wish to explore is a conundrum to which I hope to find an answer but one may not exist. Did the oral tradition lead to the collective unconscious, which is basically a library of mythological archetypes or did the collective unconscious somehow form then open up the world of oral communication with the mythological archetypes already formed? I do not know the answer to this question as I see it sort of like which came first the chicken or the egg. But either direction that my research leads towards, I know that it will somehow involve the Earth Goddess as she is the main matriarchal mythos figure that represents ouroboros. 
   This is the point that I have been able to coherently form all of my thoughts on my search. The rest of my ideas are still forming but I have no doubt that as I read further into Jung, Campbell, Ong, Schlain, and Frye that the roles of the collective unconscious and matriarchal mythos archetypes will become even more apparent in the oral tradition and how it structured the human psyche for thousands of years.