Hitherto in our historical survey, we have concentrated on the major intellectual, spiritual and social revolutions that forced human beings to revise their mythology. After the Axial Age, there would be no comparable period of change for over a millennium. In spiritual and religious matters, we still rely on the insights of the Axial sages and philosophers, and the status of myth remained basically the same until the sixteenth century CE. In the rest of this history, we shall concentrate on the West, not just because the next period of innovation began there, but also because Western people had already begun to find mythology problematic. We shall also concentrate on the Western religions, because the three monotheistic faiths claim, at least in part, to be historically rather than mythically based. The other major traditions have a less ambivalent attitude to myth. In Hinduism, history is regarded as ephemeral and illusory, and therefore unworthy of spiritual consideration. Hindus feel more at home in the archetypal world of myth. Buddhism is a deeply psychological religion, and finds mythology, an early form of psychology, quite congenial. In Confucianism, ritual has always been more important than mythical narratives. But Jews, Christians and Muslims believe that their god is active in history and can be experienced in actual events in this world. Did these events really happen or are they ‘only’ myths? Because of the uneasy attitude to myth which had entered the Western mind with Plato and Aristotle, monotheists would periodically try to make their religion conform to the rational standards of philosophy, but most would finally conclude that this had been a mistake.
Judaism had a paradoxical attitude towards the mythology of other peoples. It seemed antagonistic towards the myths of other nations, but yet would sometimes draw upon these foreign stories to express the Jewish vision. Furthermore, Judaism continued to inspire more myths. One of these was Christianity. Jesus and his first disciples were Jewish and strongly rooted in Jewish spirituality, as was St Paul, who can be said to have transformed Jesus into a mythical figure. This is not intended to be pejorative. Jesus was a real historical human being, who was executed in about 30 CE by the Romans, and his first disciples certainly thought that he had – in some sense – risen from the dead. But unless a historical event is mythologised, it cannot become a source of religious inspiration. A myth, it will be recalled, is an event that – in some sense – happened once, but which also happens all the time. An occurrence needs to be liberated, as it were, from the confines of a specific period and brought into the lives of contemporary worshippers, or it will remain a unique, unrepeatable incident, or even a historical freak that cannot really touch the lives of others. We do not know what actually happened when the people of Israel escaped from Egypt and crossed the Sea of Reeds, because the story has been written as a myth. The rituals of Passover have for centuries made this tale central to the spiritual lives of Jews, who are told that each one of them must consider himself to be of the generation that escaped from Egypt. A myth cannot be correctly understood without a transformative ritual, which brings it into the lives and hearts of generations of worshippers. A myth demands action: the myth of the Exodus demands that Jews cultivate an appreciation of freedom as a sacred value, and refuse either to be enslaved themselves or to oppress others. By ritual practice and ethical response, the story has ceased to be an event in the distant past, and has become a living reality.
St Paul did the same with Jesus. He was not much interested in Jesus’s teachings, which he rarely quotes, or in the events of his earthly life. ‘Even if we did once know Christ in the flesh,’ he wrote to his Corinthian converts, ‘that is not how we know him now.’94 What was important was the ‘mystery’ (a word which has the same etymological root as the Greek mythos) of his death and resurrection. Paul had transformed Jesus into the timeless, mythical hero who dies and is raised to new life. After his crucifixion, Jesus had been exalted by God to a uniquely high status, had achieved an ‘ascent’ to a higher mode of being.95 But everybody who went through the initiation of baptism (the traditional transformation by immersion) entered into Jesus’s death and would share his new life.96 Jesus was no longer a mere historical figure but a spiritual reality in the lives of Christians by means of ritual and the ethical discipline of living the same selfless life as Jesus himself.97 Christians no longer knew him ‘in the flesh’ but they would encounter him in other human beings, in the study of scripture, and in the Eucharist.98 They knew that this myth was true, not because of the historical evidence, but because they had experienced transformation. Thus the death and ‘raising up’ of Jesus was a myth: it had happened once to Jesus, and was now happening all the time.
Christianity was one latter-day restatement of Axial Age monotheism; the other was Islam. Muslims regard the Prophet Muhammad (c. 570–632 CE) as the successor of the biblical prophets and of Jesus. The Koran, the scripture that he brought to the Arabs, had no problem with myth. Every single one of its verses is called an ayah, a parable. All the stories about the prophets – Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses or Jesus – are ayat, ‘parables, similitudes’, because we can only speak about the divine in terms of signs and symbols. The Arabic word qur’an means ‘recitation’. The scripture is not to be perused privately for information, like a secular manual, but recited in the sacred context of the mosque, and it will not reveal its full significance unless a Muslim lives according to its ethical precepts.
Because of the mythical dimension of these historical religions, Jews, Christians and Muslims continued to use mythology to explain their insights or to respond to a crisis. Their mystics all had recourse to myth. The words mysticism and mystery are both related to the Greek verb meaning ‘to close the eyes or the mouth’. Both refer to experiences that are obscure and ineffable, because they are beyond speech, and relate to the inner rather than the external world. Mystics make a journey into the depths of the psyche by means of the disciplines of concentration that have been developed in all the religious traditions and have become a version of the hero’s mythical quest. Because mythology charts this hidden, interior dimension, it is natural for mystics to describe their experiences in myths that might, at first glance, seem inimical to the orthodoxy of their tradition.
This is especially clear in the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition. We have seen that the biblical writers were hostile to Babylonian or Syrian mythology. But Kabbalists imagined a process of divine evolution that is not dissimilar to the gradualist theogony described in the Enuma Elish. From the inscrutable and unknowable godhead, which mystics called En ‘Sof ’ (‘Without End’), ten divine sefirot (‘numerations’) emerged, ten emanations that represent the process whereby En ‘Sof ’ descended from Its lonely solitude and made Itself known to human beings.99 Each sefirah is a stage in this unfolding revelation, and has its own symbolic name. Each makes the mystery of the godhead more accessible to the limited human mind. Each is a Word of God, and also the means by which God created the world. The last sefirah was called the Shekhinah, the divine presence of God on earth. The Shekhinah was often imagined as a woman, as the female aspect of God. Some Kabbalists even imagined the male and female elements of the divinity engaged in sexual congress, an image of wholeness and reintegration. In some forms of Kabbalah, the Shekhinah wanders through the world, a bride who is lost and alienated from the godhead, in exile from the divine realm, and yearning to return to her source. By careful observance of the Law of Moses, Kabbalists can end the exile of the Shekhinah and restore the world to God. In biblical times, Jews hated the local cult of such goddesses as Anat, who had wandered through the world in search of her divine spouse and celebrated her sexual reunion with Baal. But when Jews tried to find a way to express their mystical apprehension of the divine, this reviled, pagan myth was given tacit Jewish endorsement.
Kabbalah seemed to have no biblical warrant, but before the modern period it was generally taken for granted that there was no ‘official’ version of a myth. People had always felt free to develop a new myth or a radical interpretation of an old mythical narrative. Kabbalists did not read the
Bible in a literal way; they developed an exegesis that made every single word of the biblical text refer to one or other of the sefirot. Each verse of, for example, the first chapter of Genesis described an event that had its counterpart in the hidden life of God. Kabbalists even felt free to devise a new creation myth that bore no resemblance to the Genesis account. After the Jews were deported from Spain by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, many could no longer relate to the calm orderly creation myth in Genesis I, so the Kabbalist Isaac Luria (1534–72) told an entirely different creation story, full of false starts, divine mistakes, explosions, violent reversals and disasters, which resulted in a flawed creation, where everything was in the wrong place. Far from shocking the Jewish people by its unorthodox departure from the biblical story, Lurianic Kabbalah became a Jewish mass-movement. It reflected the tragic experience of sixteenth-century Jews, but the myth did not stand alone. Luria devised special rituals, methods of meditation and ethical disciplines that gave life to the myth and made it a spiritual reality in the lives of Jews all over the world.
There are similar examples in Christian and Muslim history. When the Roman Empire fell in the West, St Augustine (354–430), bishop of Hippo in North Africa, reinterpreted the myth of Adam and Eve and developed the myth of Original Sin. Because of Adam’s disobedience, God had condemned the entire human race to eternal damnation (another idea that has no biblical foundation). The inherited guilt was passed on to all Adam’s descendants through the sexual act, which was polluted by ‘concupiscence’, the irrational desire to take pleasure in mere creatures rather than in God, a permanent effect of the first sin. Concupiscence was most fully evident in the sexual act, when God is quite forgotten and creatures revel shamelessly in one another. This vision of reason dragged down by a chaos of sensations and lawless passion was disturbingly similar to the spectacle of Rome, source of rationality, law and order in the West, brought low by the barbarian tribes. Western Christians often regard the myth of Original Sin as essential to their faith, but the Greek Orthodox of Byzantium, where Rome did not fall, have never fully endorsed this doctrine, do not believe that Jesus died to save us from the effects of the Original Sin, and have asserted that God would have become human even if Adam had not sinned.
In Islam, mystics also evolved myths of separation and return to God. It was said that the Prophet Muhammad had made a mystical ascent to the Throne of God from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This myth has become the archetype of Muslim spirituality, and the Sufis use this mythical journey to symbolise the Prophet’s perfect act of islam or ‘surrender’ to God. Shii Muslims developed a mythical view of the Prophet’s male descendants, who were their imams (‘leaders’). Each Imam was an incarnation of the divine ilm (‘knowledge’). When the line died out, they said that the last Imam had gone into a state of ‘occultation’, and that one day he would return to inaugurate an era of justice and peace. At this point, Shiism was primarily a mystical movement and, without special disciplines of meditation and spiritual exegesis, this myth made no sense. Shiis certainly did not intend their myths to be interpreted literally. The myth of the Imamate, which might seem to flout Muslim orthodoxy, was a symbolic way of expressing the mystics’ sense of a sacred presence, immanent and accessible in a turbulent and dangerous world. The Hidden Imam had become a myth; by his removal from normal history, he had been liberated from the confines of space and time, and, paradoxically, had become a more vivid presence in the lives of Shiis than when he had lived under house arrest, by order of the Abbasid Caliph. The story expresses our sense of the sacred as elusive and tantalisingly absent, in the world but not of it.
But because of the division between mythos and logos experienced by the Greeks, some Jews, Christians and Muslims became uneasy about the rich mythical vein in their traditions. When Plato and Aristotle were translated into Arabic during the eighth and ninth centuries, some Muslims tried to make the religion of the Koran a religion of logos. They evolved ‘proofs’ for the existence of Allah, modelled on Aristotle’s demonstration of the First Cause. These Faylasufs, as they were called, wanted to purge Islam of what they regarded as primitive, mythical elements. They had a difficult task, since the god of the philosophers took no notice of mundane events, did not reveal himself in history, had not created the world, and did not even know that human beings existed. Nevertheless the Faylasufs did some interesting work, together with the Jews in the Islamic empire who set about the task of rationalising the religion of the Bible. Nevertheless, Falsafah remained a minority pursuit, confined to a small intellectual elite. The First Cause might be more logical than the god of the Bible and the Koran, but it is hard for most people to work up any interest in a deity who is so uninterested in them.
Significantly, the Greek Orthodox Christians despised this rational project. They knew their own Hellenic tradition and knew only too well that logos and mythos could not, as Plato had explained, prove the existence of the Good. In their view, the study of theology could not be a rational exercise. Using reason to discuss the sacred was about as pointless as trying to eat soup with a fork. Theology was only valid if pursued together with prayer and liturgy. Muslims and Jews eventually reached the same conclusion. By the eleventh century, Muslims had decided that philosophy must be wedded with spirituality, ritual and prayer, and the mythical, mystical religion of the Sufis became the normative form of Islam until the end of the nineteenth century. Similarly, Jews discovered that when they were afflicted by such tragedies as their expulsion from Spain, the rational religion of their philosophers could not help them, and they turned instead to the myths of the Kabbalah, which reached through the cerebral level of the mind and touched the inner source of their anguish and yearning. They had all returned to the old view of the complementarity of mythology and reason. Logos was indispensable in the realm of medicine, mathematics and natural science – in which Muslims in particular excelled. But when they wanted to find ultimate meaning and significance in their lives, when they sought to alleviate their despair, or wished to explore the inner regions of their personality, they had entered the domain of myth.
But in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Christians in Western Europe rediscovered the works of Plato and Aristotle that had been lost to them during the Dark Age that had followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. Just at the moment when Jews and Muslims were beginning to retreat from the attempt to rationalise their mythology, Western Christians seized on the project with an enthusiasm that they would never entirely lose. They had started to lose touch with the meaning of myth. Perhaps it was not surprising, therefore, that the next great transformation in human history, which would make it very difficult for people to think mythically, had its origins in Western Europe.
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The Great Western Transformation (c. 1500 to 2000)
During the sixteenth century, almost by trial and error, the people of Europe and, later, in what would become the United States of America, had begun to create a civilisation that was without precedent in world history, and during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it would spread to other parts of the globe. This was the last of the great revolutions in human experience. Like the discovery of agriculture or the invention of the city, it would have a profound impact, whose effect we are only now beginning to appreciate. Life would never be the same again, and perhaps the most significant – and potentially disastrous – result of this new experiment was the death of mythology.
Western modernity was the child of logos. It was founded on a different economic basis. Instead of relying on a surplus of agricultural produce, like all pre-modern civilisations, the new Western societies were founded on the technological replication of resources and the constant reinvestment of capital. This freed modern society from many of the constraints of traditional cultures, whose agrarian base had inevitably been precarious. Hitherto an invention or an idea that required too much capital outlay was likely to be shelved, because no society before our own could afford the ce
aseless replication of the infrastructure that we now take for granted. Agrarian societies were vulnerable because they depended upon such variables as harvests and soil erosion. An empire would expand and increase its commitments and, inevitably, outrun its financial base. But the West developed an economy that seemed, potentially, to be indefinitely renewable. Instead of looking back to the past and conserving what had been achieved, as had been the habit of the premodern civilisations, Western people began to look forward. The long process of modernisation, which took Europe some three centuries, involved a series of profound changes: industrialisation, the transformation of agriculture, political and social revolutions to reorganise society to meet the new conditions, and an intellectual ‘enlightenment’ that denigrated myth as useless, false and outmoded.
The Western achievement relied on the triumph of the pragmatic, scientific spirit. Efficiency was the new watchword. Everything had to work. A new idea or an invention had to be capable of rational proof and be shown to conform to the external world. Unlike myth, logos must correspond to facts; it is essentially practical; it is the mode of thought we use when we want to get something done; it constantly looks ahead to achieve a greater control over our environment or to discover something fresh. The new hero of Western society was henceforth the scientist or the inventor, who was venturing into uncharted realms for the sake of his society. He would often have to overthrow old sanctities – just as the Axial sages had done. But the heroes of Western modernity would be technological or scientific geniuses of logos, not the spiritual geniuses inspired by mythos. This meant that intuitive, mythical modes of thought would be neglected in favour of the more pragmatic, logical spirit of scientific rationality. Because most Western people did not use myth, many would lose all sense of what it was.
A Short History of Myth Page 7
