Primitive energetics is a term aptly coined by Lovejoy, which may be understood as follows:
There are so-called dynamistic religions whose sole and determining thought is that there exists a universal magical power about which everything revolves. Tylor, the well-known English investigator, and Frazer likewise, misunderstood this idea as animism
CW7 ¶ 108In reality primitives do not mean, by their power-concept, souls or spirits at all, but something which the American investigator Lovejoy has appropriately termed “primitive energetics” ( Lovejoy, “The Fundamental Concept of the Primitive Philosophy,” p. 361 )
CW7 ¶ 108This concept is equivalent to the idea of soul, spirit, God, health, bodily strength, fertility, magic, influence, power, prestige, medicine, as well as certain states of feeling which are characterized by the release of affects
CW7 ¶ 108Among certain Polynesians mulunguthis same primitive power-conceptmeans spirit, soul, daemonism, magic, prestige; and when anything astonishing happens, the people cry out “Mulungu!”
CW7 ¶ 108This power-concept is also the earliest from of a concept of God among primitives, and is an image which has undergone countless variations in the course of history
CW7 ¶ 108In the Old Testament the magic power glows in the burning bush and in the countenance of Moses; in the Gospels it descends with the Holy Ghost in the form of fiery tongues from heaven. In Heraclitus it appears as world energy, as “ever-living fire”; among the Persians it is the fiery glow of haoma, divine grace; among the Stoics it is the original heat, the power of fate
CW7 ¶ 108Again, in medieval legend it appears as the aura or halo, and it flares up like a flame from the roof of the hut in which the saint lies in ecstasy. In their visions the saints behold the sun of this power, the plenitude of its light
CW7 ¶ 108According to the old view, the soul itself is this power; in the idea of the soul's immortality there is implicit its conservation, and in the Buddhist and primitive notion of metempsychosistransmigration of soulsis implicit its unlimited changeability together with its constant preservation
CW7 ¶ 108So this idea has been stamped on the human brain for aeons. That is why it lies ready to hand in the unconscious of every man. Only, certain conditions are needed to cause it to appear. These conditions were evidently fulfilled in the case of Robert Mayer. The greatest and best thoughts of man shape themselves upon these primordial images as upon a blueprint
CW7 ¶ 109I have often been asked where the archetypes or primordial images come from. It seems to me that their origin can only be explained by assuming them to be deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity
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