Religions stand before the fact of all this reality and think it wondrous. They find it awesome that it is. And, keeping that in mind, they find each part of reality wondrous in that it is, that it becomes and ceases to be in the same way as the whole. That star is dying, this tree is coming into being, that baby is being formed. Imagine that! (Here again the difference between myth as an expression of religion and cosmology as an expression of science is evident. While they often speak of the same subjects, the focus of myths is on value and meaning; that of science is on facts. Both religion and science speak of moments of universal and particular creation; only religion declares them wondrous and sacred.)
In all of this, myths assert that the Holy is absolutely real and that the world, perceived ungrounded, is only relatively so. But, they argue, if you just understand how the world is grounded in the absolute, how the eternal flow of being and not-being reflects the internal dynamic of the Holy itself, then you will be able to see the absolute dimension of all relative realities. You will be able to understand, too, in what way all relativities have absolute value, are eternal and true and sacred. And this applies to your own being and your own situation, here and now.
It is clear in many of the metaphors myths use to express the essential nature of reality that they recognize no terrible division between spirit and matter, mind and body. The “creation” involves the whole of reality, mental as well as physical, and its absolute dimension is not limited to only one part. The myths’ claim that you have such an absolute dimension, then, is not restricted to your mind or some “spirit” confused with mind. There is no presumption here that mind is “good” and body “evil.” To be sure, when myths try to dramatize the relativity of aspects of reality, they often talk about the temporality of material things. Bodies change, they say, how can you think of them as absolutely real and eternal? How can you take what you know to be only a relative reality so seriously? Look to what is deeper than that, look to something constant that you can really count on. But this “thing” that you can really count on is not antiphysical or antimaterial; it is primal energy, raw, unmanifest stuff, the eternal potentiality of specific beings and material things. Each individual thing—a tree, for instance—comes forth from such stuff and eventually decomposes back into it before being formed into another.
Have you ever seen a tree down in the forest, so old and rotted that it is like an illusion? From one angle you can still discern that it is a tree, while from another, it is indistinguishable from the earth around it. You are seeing the moment when being slides back into non-being, and if you look closer, you will probably also find in that rich and rotting stuff the beginnings of a new tree, a sprout so tiny and fragile, so dependent still on its seed and soil that it can barely be recognized as a sprout. This birth of being from not-being cannot really be perceived without a microscope, but if you look to larger realities days, for instance, or storms, or even buildings you can watch the process with a naked eye. When is it no longer night? Where does the day start? When is a building not just a pile of bricks? What is the moment when being is established over not-being?
Stepping back from relativity much further, creation myths ask the same question of the whole of reality, not just days but light itself, not just storms but weather, not just buildings but the universe. And they proclaim the creation of it all just as wondrous as the creation of any part of it.
If we persist in needing to think of mind separately, ask how ideas are born in consciousness as ideas. What is the moment when they rise from unconsciousness and deeper still from instinct and reflex and body itself to become ideas and grow into theories and attitudes that eventually, in turn, shape other matter? When does consciousness arise from unconsciousness? The myths ask this question, too, and find the source of both, consciousness and unconsciousness, along with that of matter, in the absolute of the Holy, the “mind of God.” The Maori people of New Zealand chant:
From the conception the increase,
From the increase the thought,
From the thought the remembrance,
From the remembrance the consciousness,
From the consciousness the desire.
And from the desire the object of desire: the idea and the reality of the world.
But myths do not find this distinction essential; they do not think of mind ungrounded in matter or body left unknowing and stupid, cut off from spirit. Rather they proclaim first the unity of both in being and second their joint sacrality as a part of the being–not-being duality contained in the larger unity of the Holy. Christianity, for example, tries to make this point when it speaks of the resurrection of the body as well as the spirit. The absolute is a dimension of the whole of reality, not just a part. The merely worldly is disparaged in all religions, rejected for its relativity. But what they mean is only that you should not forget the dependence of our reality and pretend against all evidence of change that it is constant and eternal. Praise of the world, rightly understood as a reflection of the absolute, is just as central to religion.
Myths clarify this distinction between the worldly and the world. Demonstrating how the temporal realm of change and flux reveals the structure and the way of the timeless, myths try to show how everything considered merely profane and ordinary in itself is really sacred and extraordinary. Essentially, they point out structural similarities between the relative and absolute and argue that things in each realm are grounded in the same pattern of relations. This temporal reality (a) stands to that one (b) in the same relation as this eternal reality (A) stands to that (B). A child (a) is to her parent (b) as all reality, all matter (A) is to Chaos or the Holy (B). A husband (a) is in the same relation to his wife (b) as the sky (A) is to the earth (B). This is not to say that myths intend to confuse relative realities with absolute ones. The parent is not the Holy nor is the husband the sky; “a” is not “A.” Such confusion is idolatrous, anathema to genuine religion.
What the myths do is to assert that the structure of the absolute pervades the relative: the Holy is the ground of being. And further they argue that the ways of the absolute are appropriate models for the relative: they are eternal, abundantly powerful and vital, endlessly productive of being, existence, and life. Not only are these ways the ground of all being, definitions of what we essentially are, but they should also be understood as the goal of being, indications of what we should become. Live as the world lives, the myths advise; be as God is.
This proclamation of the Holy as the goal of being presumes that we have lost touch with it as the ground. After all, if the Holy is the ground of being, we already are absolute. Why do we need all this direction? Because we have forgotten it, we have become confused and overwhelmed by relative and dependent realities, we have become mistakenly attached to the temporal and created world in its worldly aspects. In short, and in religious language, we have “fallen.” Most religions talk about this “fall” in some way or other. Some consider it less central to the human condition than others and do not mention it in their creation myths, waiting until later myths of conquest or adventure to describe it. What is interesting, however, is how many cultures think of the fall as so defining of people that they discuss it right along with the creation.
In the West, we are quite familiar with the fall as dramatized in the myth of Adam and Eve. There it seems a matter of acquiring false knowledge of opposites as real. The duality of good and evil, their polar opposition, becomes the central focus and any notion of the unifying sacrality of Being-Itself is lost. Similar explanations for the fall are given in other traditions. African myths, which, more than any others, stress this loss of absoluteness, speak of the fall as the result of man’s distinguishing himself from the rest of nature. He rises above the animals and out of the harmony of the natural world to impose his own temporal and essentially evil order on it. Doing so, he forgets the harmony of the divine order and, as the myths put it symbolically, drives God away from the earth.
Some myths tem
poralize the fall from absoluteness and speak of various ages of man, descending in power and virtue until they devolve into the present lot. Hesiod’s Five Ages of Man, the Hopi Indians’ myth of four worlds, and the Laws of Manu from India are only three examples of this universal theme. Other myths imagine a sort of spatial hierarchy with the relative below on earth and the absolute above in heaven (a wonderfully appropriate symbol in that the sky is both transcendent and immanent, and is also the domain of the sun, moon, and stars, whose regular movements so impress people). In this case, the two are connected by an axis mundi, a huge pole, rope or pillar that stretches from one realm to the other. After the fall, this axis mundi is destroyed, and the traffic between the worlds comes to a halt. Now all attempts to reach the absolute realm, like the Old Testament’s Tower of Babel or, in the Eskimo creation myth, Raven’s feeble efforts to fly upward, are thwarted.
What happens as a result of this fall is crushing: people perceive themselves as only relative, dependent, and conditioned—as beings under the constant threat of not-being and consequent meaninglessness. They are cut off from any recognition of themselves as participants in the Holy, which transcends the created opposition of being and not-being. And the world is understood similarly. Uprooted from its absolute ground, the world waits for its destruction as societies wait for revolution and individuals for death. Everything is meaningless and vacuous and essentially unreal. “God,” as the current expression goes, “is dead.”
The myths attempt to correct this misperception. They serve as a response to the “fall” and urge their followers to stand again on firmer ground, on the absolute which was and is always present, which they have temporarily forgotten. And it is not only individuals that the myths seek to sanctify but the whole of reality—physical, social, and cultural. The point is made clearly by another myth that speaks of creation in terms of sacrifice. In this hymn from the Rig-Veda (c. 1200 B.C.), one quarter of the holy Chaos dies to static not-being and is born as the dynamic and manifest world of being:
From this sacrifice completely offered
Were born the Rig- and Sama-Vedas;
From this were born the metres,
From this was the Yajur-Veda born….
The Brahman was his mouth,
The arms were made the Prince,
His thighs the common people,
And from his feet the serf was born.
From his mind the moon was born,
And from his eye the sun,
From his mouth Indra and the fire,
And from his breath the wind was born.
From his navel arose the atmosphere,
From his head the sky evolved,
From his feet the earth, and from his ear
The cardinal points of the compass:
So did they fashion forth these worlds…
With sacrifice the gods
Made sacrifice to sacrifice.
All the social classes (Brahman priests, warrior princes, common people, and serfs); all the forces and powers of nature, some of which are deified; and all of culture and religion, symbolized by the sacred books of the Vedas—the world in all its aspects is born from this great sacrifice. All its parts are essentially holy, and all exhibit the same structure as the absolute itself.
In the Babylonian Temple Program the connection between the temporal reign of the king and the absolute one of the god Marduk is equally clear. Standing in the same relation to his kingdom as Marduk does to nature, the king reaffirms his understanding of himself in this context and proclaims anew that his realm of the state will be ruled on the absolute principles evident in nature. Similarly, in another Babylonian myth (“When Anu Had Created the Heavens”), the structural resemblance of the temple to the universe is underscored. Here the gods of sky and water fashion the earth and man and then make all the lesser deities of carpentry, smithing, engraving, and the like, just as people building the temple construct it and use equivalent, temporal craftsmen. Myths all over the world reformulate this perception as gods and heroes of all sorts descend into time and space to instruct people in the way of proper, absolute being: “Walk this way! Speak this way! Multiply in this manner! Organize yourselves in this way! Be like this!” From Babylonian to Chuckchi Eskimo myths, the gods reveal that the appropriate ways of personal and social being are the same as nature’s. Just as various aspects of nature relate to each other harmoniously and fruitfully, so should aspects of society and aspects of the self. As Lao Tzu announces in the Tao Te Ching (c. 600 B.C.?):
Man models himself on earth,
Earth on heaven,
Heaven on the way,
And the way on that which is naturally so.
If the myths in themselves do not make clear this proclamation of an absolute pattern present in all aspects of relativity, it is often obvious in their use in rituals. Ritual is the other half of the mythic statement: when myths speak only of the absolute reality, rituals ground it in the relative. The Bushman myth of Cagn, for instance, describes the many adventures of that ambiguous character: it tells how he ordered the world, slew the monsters of chaos, died and was miraculously reborn. So far all that is revealed is the Bushmen’s understanding of that great force of being that brought order out of chaos and thereby created the world. To understand how such a philosophical viewpoint is relevant to ordinary people living in an ordinary world, it becomes very important to recognize that this myth was told during the initiation rites of young men. A living existential metaphor, a metaphor of the flesh was established by this use of the myth. The young men hearing it came to perceive themselves in the same way as they did Cagn: they, too, were to die to their youths and be reborn as responsible members of the seemingly eternal group: they, too, were to slay monsters of chaos wherever they encountered them and to establish a meaningful order.
Or consider the ritual use of the “Outbursters,” the creation myth of the Yami, an Indonesian people living on the island of Batel-Tobago off the coast of Formosa. The myth describes the creation of islands and men, and tells how the first people learned to make sturdy canoes and become great fishermen. Every year at the time of the Flying Fish Festival, the Yami call the fish as their divine ancestors did, repeating their song:
From Ipaptok, the place of the outbursting of man,
The first one descended to the plain of the sea.
He performed the fish-calling rite;
The torch was lighted: and the fish
Were dazzled by the flames.
In repeating the creation myth at this time, in lighting their torches and calling the fish, and in singing the song of their culture heroes, the Yami are not just trying to influence the gods magically and to win favor. Rather, they do these things so that they can act as heroes themselves. They do them so that they will be conscious of themselves as formally connected (through the repetition of similar acts and the assumption of similar roles) and materially connected (through history, through the generations) with their primal heroes. They perform the ritual and tell the myth so they can remind themselves of their own eternality realized within the moment, always and now on this night when the fish are dazzled by the flames.
The purpose of such ritual myths is sometimes misperceived as an attempt to escape the moment, to refuse history and pretend that temporal existence is as timeless as the static dimension of the absolute, the “realm of the gods.” How pleasant to dream of heavens and deities when the “real” world of politics and economics is so painfully imperfect and changing! And to be sure, some people in all cultures misuse religion as such an escape. But this is not religion’s purpose; this is not what the myths intend. On the contrary, people such as the Yami or Bushmen (or the Jews when they repeat the Passover story, or the Christians when they tell the Easter story) are not trying to escape the temporal but are taking it seriously, trying to understand it in its depths as an expression of eternality. They are trying to ground the momentary in time itself and to understand how the immanence of now express
es the transcendent reality of always.
In comparing a great number and wide variety of creation myths, it becomes clear that the origins of which they speak are important not for their historical and prototypical value alone but for their religious and archetypical value as well. The difference is subtle but crucial. Prototypes are acts or events that happen in time and are effective through history. They are so formative that they change people’s lives and continue to influence subsequent generations. When the acts involved in them are repeated, it is because they were effective once and people hope they will be so again. And when their anniversaries are celebrated, it is because, in nostalgia, people remember and honor that which changed their condition. Prototypes are relevant only for the direct inheritors of the world that they effected. Archetypes, on the other hand, have universal application. And, whether or not they took place in time, it is not their historicity but their timelessness that people value. Archetypes reveal and define form, showing how a truth of the moment has the same structure and meaning as an absolute and eternal one. Prototypes were true once and may still be so; archetypes are true always.
Primal Myths Page 5
