A Short History of Myth (7 page)

But like all Axial teachers, Laozi was not simply concerned with the practicalities of survival, but with finding a source of transcendent peace in the midst of earthly turbulence. He aspires to the ultimate reality, the Dao, which goes beyond the gods, and is the ineffable basis of all existence. It transcends everything we can conceptualise, and yet if we cultivate an inner emptiness, without selfish desire and without greed, and live in a compassionate manner, we will be in harmony with the Dao and thus transformed. When we give up the goal-directed ethos of civilisation, we will be in tune with the Way things ought to be.
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Yet just as Laozi appeals to the
mythical Golden Age of Shen Nong when describing the ideal polity, he also appeals to traditional myths (which may have been current in popular culture) in order to evoke the Dao. The Dao is the Source of Life, the Perfect Ancestor, and also the Mother. Prehistoric human beings had seen the Great Mother as fierce and violent, but in the new Axial spirit, Laozi gives her the attributes of compassion. She is associated with the selflessness that is inseparable from true creativity.
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Prehistoric men and women had sometimes enacted a return to the womb by burrowing through subterranean tunnels. Laozi imagines the Sage, the perfected human being, making this return by conforming to the Way of the universe.

Both Laozi and the Buddha were willing to use old myths to help people to understand the new ideas. Believing that animal sacrifice was not only useless but also cruel, the Buddha attacked Vedic ritualism, but was tolerant of traditional mythology. He no longer believed that the gods were efficacious, but he was able to set them quietly to one side, and felt no need to mount an ideological offensive against
them. He also gave the gods a new, symbolic significance. In some of the stories about his life, gods such as Brahma, the supreme deity, or Mara, lord of death, seem to be reflections of his own inner states, or personifications of conflicting mental forces.
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But the prophets of Israel could not take this relaxed attitude. They felt compelled to fight hard against old myths that they found incompatible with their Axial reform. For centuries, Israelites had enjoyed the ritual and mythical life of the Near East, worshipping Asherah, Baal and Ishtar alongside their own god, Yahweh. But now that Yahweh seemed so distant, prophets such as Hosea, Jeremiah and Ezekiel undertook a radical revision of the old anthropomorphic myths. Because the old stories now seemed empty, they declared them to be false. Their god Yahweh, whose towering transcendence showed the triviality of these old tales, was the
only
god. They mounted a polemic against the old religion. Yahweh himself is depicted as having to make a belligerent bid for the leadership of the Divine Council, pointing out that his fellow-gods are neglecting the Axial virtues of justice and compassion, and will, therefore,
be phased out, dying like mortal men.
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Culture heroes, such as Joshua, David and King Josiah are shown violently suppressing the local pagan cults,
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and the effigies of Baal or Marduk are ridiculed as man-made, consisting entirely of gold and silver, and knocked together by a craftsman in a couple of hours.
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This was, of course, a reductive view of Middle Eastern paganism. But the history of religion shows that, once a myth ceases to give people intimations of transcendence, it becomes abhorrent. Monotheism, the belief in only one god, was initially a struggle. Many of the Israelites still felt the allure of the old myths, and had to fight this attraction. They felt that they were being torn painfully from the mythical world of their neighbours, and were becoming outsiders. We sense this strain in the distress of Jeremiah, who experienced his god as a pain that convulsed his every limb, or in the strange career of Ezekiel, whose life became an icon of radical discontinuity. Ezekiel is commanded by God to eat excrement; he is forbidden to mourn his dead wife; he is overcome with fearful, uncontrollable trembling.
The Axial prophets felt that they were taking their people into an unknown world, where nothing could be taken for granted, and normal responses were denied.

But eventually this distress gave way to serene confidence, and the religion that we now call Judaism came into being.

Ironically, this new self-assurance came after a great catastrophe. In 586 the Babylonian King Nebuchadrezzar conquered the city of Jerusalem and destroyed the temple of Yahweh. Many of the Israelites were deported to Babylonia, where the exiles were exposed to the towering ziggurats, the rich liturgical life of the city, and the massive temple of Esagila. Yet it was here that paganism lost its attraction. We see the new spirit in the first chapter of Genesis, probably written by a member of the so-called Priestly School, which can be read as a poised, calm polemic against the old belligerent cosmogonies. In calm, ordered prose, this new creation myth looks coolly askance at the Babylonian cosmology. Unlike Marduk, Israel’s god does not have to fight desperate battles to create the world; he brings all
things into existence effortlessly, by a simple command. The sun, moon, stars, sky and earth are not gods in their own right, hostile to Yahweh. They are subservient to him, and created for a purely practical end. The sea-monster is no Tiamat, but is God’s creature and does his bidding. Yahweh’s creative act is so superior to Marduk’s that it never has to be repeated or renewed. Where the Babylonian gods were engaged in an ongoing battle against the forces of chaos, and needed the rituals of the New Year festival to restore their energies, Yahweh can simply rest on the seventh day, his work complete.

But the Israelites were quite happy to use the old Middle Eastern mythology when it suited them. In the book of Exodus, the crossing of the Sea of Reeds is described precisely as a myth.
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Immersion in water was traditionally used as a rite of passage; other gods had split a sea in half when they created the world – though what is being brought into being in the Exodus myth is not a cosmos but a people. The prophet we call Second Isaiah, who was active in Babylon in the middle of the sixth century, articulates a clear, unequivocal monotheism. There is no
stridency; he has no doubt that Yahweh is the only god; the antagonism has gone. Yet he evokes the ancient creation myths that depict Yahweh fighting sea-monsters to bring the world into being, just like any other Middle Eastern deity, equating this victory over the primal Sea with Yahweh’s parting of the Sea of Reeds at the time of the Exodus. Israelites can now expect a similar show of divine strength in their own time, since God is about to reverse the exile and bring them home. The Babylonian author of
The Epic
of Gilgamesh
brought ancient history and mythology together, but Second Isaiah goes further. He links the primordial actions of his god with current events.
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In Greece, the Axial Age was fuelled by
logos
(reason), which operated at a different level of the mind from myth. Where myth requires either emotional participation or some kind of ritual
mimesis
to make any sense at all,
logos
tries to establish the truth by means of careful inquiry in a way that appeals only to the critical intelligence. In the Greek colonies of Ionia, in what is now Turkey, the first physicists tried to find a rational basis for the old cosmological myths. But this scientific enterprise was
still couched in the old mythical and archetypal framework. In a way that was reminiscent of the
Enuma Elish
, they saw the world evolving from some primordial stuff, not because of a divine initiative, but according to the regular laws of the cosmos. For Anaximander (
c
. 611–547), the original
arche
(principle) was quite unlike anything in our human experience. He called it the Infinite; the familiar elements of our world emerged from it in a process governed by alternating heat and cold. Anaximenes (d.
c
. 500) believed that the
arche
was infinite air; while for Heraclitus (fl.
c
. 500) it was fire. These early speculations were as fictional as the old myths, because there was no way they could be verified. The poet Xenophanes (fl. 540–500) realised this and reflected upon the limitations of human thought. He tried to write a rational theology, dismissing the anthropomorphic myths about the gods, and positing a deity who conformed to the science of the
phusikoi
: an abstract, impersonal force, moral but motionless, all-knowing and all-powerful.

Very few people were interested in Ionian physics, the first manifestation of the Axial spirit in Greece.
Before the passion for philosophy took strong root in the fourth century, the Athenians had developed a new type of ritual, the
mimesis
of tragedy, which solemnly reenacted the ancient myths in the context of a religious festival, but at the same time subjected them to close scrutiny. Aeschylus (
c
. 525–456), Sophocles (
c
. 496–405) and Euripedes (480–406) all put the gods on trial, with the audience as the judging tribunal. Myth does not question itself; it demands a degree of self-identification. Tragedy, however, put some distance between itself and the traditional mythology, and queried some of the most fundamental Greek values. Were the gods really fair and just? What was the value of heroism, of Greekness, or democracy? Tragedy came to the fore in a time of transition, a period when the old myths were beginning to lose touch with the new political realities of the city-states. A hero such as Oedipus is still committed to traditional mythical ideals, but they do not help him to solve his dilemma. Where the mythical hero could fight his way through to victory or, at least, to some degree of resolution, there are no such solutions for the tragic hero.
Enmeshed in pain and perplexity, the hero must make conscious choices and accept their consequences.

Yet for all its iconoclasm, tragedy was cast in traditional ritual form. Like any religious rite, it represented a movement from isolated sorrow to communal sharing, but for the first time the inner life was involved in the religious life of the
polis
. The dramas were performed during the festival of Dionysos, the god of transformation, and may have played an important role in the initiation of Athenian youths and their attainment of full citizenship. Like any initiation, tragedy forced the audience to face the unspeakable, and to experience extremity. It is close to the ideology of sacrifice, because it leads to
katharsis
, an interior purification resulting from the violent invasion of heart and mind by the emotions of pity and terror. But this new form of sacrifice was imbued with Axial compassion, because the audience learned to feel the pain of another person as though it were their own, thereby enlarging the scope of their sympathy and humanity.

Plato disliked tragedy, because it was too emotional; he believed that it fed the irrational part
of the soul, and that humans could only achieve their full potential through
logos
.
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He compared myths to old wives’ tales. Only logical, rational discourse brings true understanding.
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Plato’s theory of the Eternal Ideas can be seen as a philosophical version of the ancient myth of the divine archetypes, of which mundane things are the merest shadow. But, for Plato, the Ideas of Love, Beauty, Justice and the Good cannot be intuited or apprehended through the insights of myth or ritual, but only through the reasoning powers of the mind. Aristotle was in agreement with Plato. He found the old myths incomprehensible: ‘For they make the first principles gods or generated from gods, and they say that whatever did not taste of the nectar and ambrosia became mortal … but as regards the actual application of these causes, their statements are beyond our comprehension.’ Aristotle was reading myth as though it were a philosophical text. From a scientific perspective, these myths are nonsense, and a serious seeker after truth should ‘turn rather to those who reason by means of demonstration’.
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It seemed that the study of philosophy had caused a
rift between
mythos
and
logos
, which had hitherto been complementary.

Yet this was not the whole story. For all his impatience with myth, Plato allowed it an important role in the exploration of ideas that lie
beyond
the scope of philosophical language. We cannot speak of the Good in terms of
logos
, because it is not
a
being but the source of both Being and Knowledge. There are other matters, such as the origin of the cosmos or the birth of the gods, that seem subject to blind causality and so contaminated by the irrational that they cannot be expressed in coherent arguments. So when the subject matter falls
below
philosophical discourse, we must be content with a plausible fable.
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When he writes of the soul, for example, Plato falls back on the old oriental myth of reincarnation.
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Aristotle agrees that, while some of the myths about the gods are clearly absurd, the basis of this tradition – ‘that all the first substances were gods’ – is ‘truly divine’.
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There was, therefore, a contradiction in Western thought. Greek
logos
seemed to oppose mythology, but philosophers continued to use myth, either
seeing it as the primitive forerunner of rational thought or regarding it as indispensable to religious discourse. And indeed, despite the monumental achievements of Greek rationalism during the Axial Age, it had no effect on Greek religion. Greeks continued to sacrifice to the gods, take part in the Eleusinian mysteries, and celebrate their festivals until the sixth century of the Common Era, when this pagan religion was forcibly suppressed by the Emperor Justinian, and replaced by the
mythos
of Christianity.

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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.