Atavistic Cthonic and Christian Neolithic Archetypes

Curious to relate, it was my participation in DO IT AGAIN group, rereading Iliad, which led me to purchase "Greek Religion" by Walter Burkert, a German scholar (in English translation.) Burkert's book occasionally describes somethings as "atavistic"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atavism

while others are "chthonic"

http://www.answers.com/topic/chthonic

Occasionally Berkert mentions findings from the Neolithic and Bronze ages which shed some light upon Homeric religion and which blow me away with the awareness brought of the vast antiquity of origins in the mists of human prehistory. Disputes have arisen as to whether it is meaningful to speak of "sacrificial atonement" with regard to Patroclus, and then Hector, donning Achilles armor. Personally, I cannot help but suspect that aspects of Christianity must have lain hidden, nascent, inchoate, in the language and myths of ancient Greece.

http://www.terrapsych.com/jungdefs.html

Archetype: (from St. Augustine and Jacob Burkhardt's "primordial image"; also, a version of Levy-Bruhl's "representations collectives"): a constitutive prototype or form or Gestalt within the collective unconscious; a ruling "organ" of the psyche and Platonic blueprint for its activity. Complexes of the collective unconscious. Images and emotions (both must be present). The psychic form of preformed mechanism for the development of consciousness by ordering the chaos of perceptions into meaningful patterns. Instinctive behavior pattern grounded in the fundamental structure of living matter. Archetypes organize our perceptions, collect images, regulate, modify, motivate, and even develop conscious contents, plot the course of developments in advance, set up bridges between the ego and its instinctive and collective roots, lead the channeling and conversion of instinctual energy, and "represent the authentic element of spirit" and a "spiritual goal."