"I shall never forget the Pitjentara children, who, at the age of eight or ten, went roaming about the desert and were practically self-supporting. A boy, with his keen eyes and his spear, can catch what needs in small fry and keep going from morning until evening. Even an adult male cannot do very much more. The outstanding characteristic of primitive economies is the absence of a true differentiation of labor. An incipient or rudimentary division of labor may exist along sexual or age lines, and there may be some incipient and part-time specialization in matters of ritual and magic. But true specialization is lacking. This means that every individual is technically a master of the whole culture or, where certain qualifications are necessary, of almost the whole culture. In other words each individual is really self-reliant and grown up.

"We however do not grow up as simply as that. If the testimony of anthropology indicates anything, it shows that primitive man is free, untrammeled, in comparison with Medieval or Modern man."[39] It was this remark of Dr. Róheim's that seemed to offer me the clue to the sudden appearance of the mandala, and of other geometrical organizations of enclosed fields, after the passing of the hunting age with the development of the agricultural. For, whereas in the camps of the hunters the community was constituted of a group of practically equivalent individuals, each in adequate control of the whole inheritance, in the larger more differentiated communities that developed when agriculture and stock breeding had made for a settled, more richly articulated social structure, adulthood consisted in acquiring, first, a special art or skill, and then, the ability to support or sustain the resultant tension – a psychological and sociological tension – between oneself (as merely a fraction of a larger whole) and others of totally different training, powers and ideals, who constituted the other necessary organs of the body social. The problem of existing as a mere fraction instead of as a whole imposes certain stresses on the psyche which no primitive hunter ever had to endure, and consequently the symbols giving structure and support to the primitive hunter's psychological balance were radically different from those that arose in settled villages, in the Basal and High Neolithic, and which have been inherited from that age and continued into the present by all the high civilizations of the world.

[39.] Géza Róheim and Muensterberger Warner Muensterberger. "Magic and Schizophrenia." (International Universities Press, 1962) p. 50. Source: Campbell, Joseph. "The flight of the wild gander: explorations in the mythological dimension." (New World Library, 2002) p. 113-114.