“The latent ego is in complete identification with the Self (the god, the archetype of the Whole personality). The Self is born, but the ego is made; and in the beginning all is Self.
This condition is described by Neumann as uroboros (the tail-eating serpent).
Since the Self is the center and totality of being, the ego, totally identified with the Self, experiences itself as a deity.
We can put it in these terms retrospectively although, of course, the infant does not think in this way.
He cannot yet think at all, but his total being and experience are ordered around the a priori assumption of deity.
This is the original state of unconscious wholeness and perfection which is responsible for the nostalgia we all have toward our origins, both personal and historical.
Many myths depict the original state of man as a state of roundness, wholeness, perfection, or paradise.
Edward F. Edinger, Ego and Archetype, Page 7-8
