Authors: J.F. Bierlein
Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)
American Protestant theologian.
A vision of the whole is possible only if it is assumed that human history has meaning; and modern empiricism is afraid of that assumption. Meaning can be attributed to history only by a mythology.
—Reflections on the End of an Era
Myth alone is capable of picturing the world as a realm of coherence and meaning without defying the facts of incoherence. Its world is coherent because all facts in it are related to some central source of meaning; but it is not rationally coherent because the myth is not under the abortive necessity of relating all things to each other in terms of immediate rational unity.
—An Interpretation of
Chnstian
Ethics
The essential truth in a great religious myth cannot be gauged by the immediate occasion which prompted it; nor apprehended in its more obvious intent. The story of the Tower of Babel may have been prompted by the fact that an unfinished temple of Marduk in Babylon excited the imagination of the surrounding desert people, who beheld its arrested majesty, to speculate on the reason for its unfinished state. Its immediate purpose may have been to give a mythical account of the origin of the world’s multiplicity of languages and cultures. Neither its doubtful origin nor the fantastic character of its purported history will obscure its essential message to those who are wise enough to discern the permanently valid insights in primitive imagination.
—Beyond Tragedy
Paul Tillich (1886-1965)
German-born American Protestant theologian.
Mythological language seems to be equally old, combining the technical grasp of objects with the religious experience of a quality of the encountered that has highest significance even for daily life, but transcends it in such a way that it demands another language, that of the religious symbols and their combination, the myth. Religious language is symbolic-mythological, even when it interprets facts and events which belong to the realm of the ordinary technical encounter with reality. The contemporary confusion of these two kinds of language is the cause of one of the most serious inhibitions for the understanding of religion, as it was in the prescientific period for the understanding of the ordinarily encountered reality, the object of technical use.
The language of myth, as well as the language of the ordinary
technical encounter with reality, can be translated into other kinds of language, the poetic and the scientific. Like religious language, poetic language lives in symbols, but poetic symbols express another quality of man’s encounter with reality than religious symbols.
The great historical encounters between Europeans and the various peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Americas had many wide-reaching consequences. Perhaps the most interesting—and, to the early explorers, astounding—result was the recognition that cultures vastly separated from them by time and geography had religious practices and myths strikingly similar to their own.
When the Spaniards first arrived in the New World, for example, they were amazed by the many parallels that existed between the indigenous religions and Roman Catholicism. In comparing the faith of Spain with that of the Aztecs of Mexico, the nineteenth-century American historian William Prescott wrote in his book
The Conquest of Mexico:
A
more extraordinary coincidence may be traced with Christian rites, in the ceremony of naming their children. The lips and bosom of the infant was
[sic]
sprinkled with water and “The Lord was implored to permit the holy drops to wash away the sin that was given to it before the foundations of the world; so that the child might be born anew.” We are reminded of Christian morals in more than one of their prayers, in which they used
regular forms. “Wilt thou blot us out 0 Lord forever? Is this punishment intended not for our reformation but for our destruction?” Again, “Impart to us, out of thy great mercy, thy gifts which we are not worthy to receive through our own merits.”… The secrets of the confessional were held inviolate, and penances were imposed of much the same kind as those enjoined in the Roman Catholic Church.
The conquistadores found many parallels to Catholicism among the people of the Inca empire of Peru and Bolivia. This account is from Gerald L. Berry’s
Religions of the World:
Rites of baptism and confession were practiced. Infant sacrifice was replaced by a ritual in which blood was drawn but the life spared (a practice which should be compared to that of circumcision of males). There is a trace in the story of Abraham and Isaac in the Old Testament of the Inca custom of offering a son for the sins of the father. The Incas had a Holy Communion ritual, using a sacred bread called the “sancu” sprinkled with the blood of a sacrificial sheep [Author’s note: the “sheep” was probably a llama].
On the Great Plains of North America, nineteenth-century American artist and traveler George Catlin lived among a number of different tribes, and he found that the rituals of these tribes resembled those of the Jews as given in the Old Testament. The following is from Catlin’s
Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North American Indians:
I am deduced to believe thus from the very many customs which I have witnessed amongst them, that appear to be decidedly Jewish; and many of them so peculiarly so, that it would not be impossible, or at all events, exceedingly improbable that two people in a state of nature should have hit upon them, and practiced them exactly alike.
… The first and most striking fact amongst the North American Indians that refers us to the Jews, is that of worshipping in all parts, the Great Spirit, or Jehovah, as the Hebrews were ordered to do by divine precept. Instead of a plurality of gods, as ancient pagans and heathens did—and their idols of their own
formation. The North American Indians are nowheres idolaters—they appeal at once to the Great Spirit, or Jehovah, and know of no mediator, either personal or symbolical.The Indian tribes are everywhere divided into bands, with chiefs, symbols, badges, etc., and many of their modes of worship I have found exceedingly like those of the Mosaic institution. The Jews had their sanctum sanctorum [the “holy of holies”], and so it may be said that the Indians have, in their council or medicine houses, which are always held as sacred places. Amongst the Indians as amongst the ancient Hebrews, the women are not allowed to worship with the men—and in all cases also, they eat separately.
In their bathing and ablutions, at all seasons of the year, as a part of their religious observances—having separate places for the men and women to perform these immersions, they resemble again [the Jews]. And the custom amongst the women, of absenting themselves during the lunar influences [menstruation] is exactly consonant to Mosaic law…. After this season of separation, purification in running water, and anointing, precisely in accordance with the Jewish command, is requisite before she can enter the family lodge. Such is one of the extraordinary observances amongst these people in their wild state….
In their feasts, fastings and sacrifices, they are exceedingly like those ancient people. Many of them have a feast closely resembling the Jewish Passover; and amongst others an occasion much like the Israelitish feast of the Tabernacles, which lasted eight days (when history tells us they carried willow boughs, and fasted several days and nights) making sacrifices of the first fruits and best of everything, closely resembling the sin-offerings and peace-offerings of the Hebrews.
Catlin was careful to point out that he did not necessarily accept the then-popular theory, which is embodied in the Mormon religion today, that the Indians were descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel, who vanished after the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel; nor did he propose any theory of contact with the ancient Jewish people. But, writing long before the advent of psychiatry or modern anthropology, he did express his astonishment at the similarities between the two.
The German existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers, as part of his theory of the “axial period” of history (which will be discussed in depth later in this chapter), made note of the amazement of the first Jesuit missionaries in Japan at finding a Japanese Buddhist sect that seemed remarkably like European Lutheranism. This sect, which we now know as “Pure Land” Buddhism, explicitly states its belief in “salvation by grace through faith,” in this case, in Amida Buddha. The sinner, in the doctrine of the “Pure Land” sect, is absolutely helpless and has no chance of salvation through his or her own merits, but must trust in the grace of Amida Buddha to be “reborn in the Pure Land,” analogous to the Protestant “salvation by grace through faith in Christ.”
The European colonists and missionaries developed some curious, even bizarre, theories to explain this phenomenon of parallel beliefs. One common view, especially among the Spanish missionaries in Mexico, was that non-European religions were “satanic” imitations of the “true faith.” Another theory, which is not all that far from the psychological theories we are about to consider, is that these beliefs are mainifestations of a once universally received and understood Divine revelation that had become corrupted over time. My personal favorite explanation offered for the similarities between Roman Catholicism and the Peruvian religion was the view that Saint Thomas traveled to Peru via India during the first century
A.D
.
*
The nearly identical practices between the Old World and the New became a public obsession during the 19th century, the heyday of the “Lost Tribes of Israel” theory, which was taken very seriously right up until the American Civil War.
By the year 1900, however, serious scholarship had been applied to comparative religion and mythology. This led to two basic approaches to the parallels between the myths of vastly separated cultures. The first approach is that of
diffusion
, which held that the
myths were produced in a few myth-creating areas, such as India, and thence passed through contact between cultures during the earliest times. The second is a
psychological
view, whereby the core elements of myth are products of the human psyche and thus universal to all human beings. Today both points of view, as well as a mixture of the two, vie for acceptance.
It is generally agreed that myth is largely the product of oral history, passed down from generation to generation. As myth begins with the creation of the world, it is truly “a history of prehistory.” Two scholars on the subject, nineteenth-century Swiss classicist Johann Jakob Bachofen and twentieth-century British writer Robert Graves, found within many Greek myths a record—at times thickly veiled, at other times obvious—of a prehistorical battle between a matriarchy (society ruled by women) and the emerging patriarchy (society ruled by men) that supplanted it. For Bachofen and Graves, this is the record of one of the pivotal moments in ancient European history.
As one reads the myths today, one is often struck by both lofty philosophical content and a brutally cruel attitude toward women within the text.
Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815-1887)
Bachofen, a native of Basel, Switzerland, studied law but pursued a career in archaeology and was a scholar of the Greek classics. He was fascinated by mythology, and tried to sift through it for clues to the earliest history of Europe. Bachofen came to the conclusion that there were three clear stages in early European culture. The first was a barbaric stage; this was followed by a matriarchy that, in turn, was supplanted by patriarchy.
In his view, the history of this struggle, subsequent relapses into
the earlier phases of development, and the eventual victory of patriarchy, are all fairly clearly chronicled in many of the myths.
Bachofen called the barbaric stage “hetairism,” from the Greek
hetero
, meaning “both.” In this earliest stage, neither males nor females were dominant in society. This was a period of widespread sexual promiscuity when children did not know their fathers, women were defenseless, rape took the place of marriage, and family life was virtually nonexistent. The characteristic goddess in Greek mythology during this period, according to Bachofen, was Aphrodite, the goddess of love, with no aspect of order or morality.
Next, women banded together for their own defense, leading to the development of a matriarchal society that replaced the chaos of hetairism. This phase saw the first blossom of civilization, laws, agriculture, and the arts. Love of the mother and worship of a mother goddess were characteristic of this age, which was symbolized for Bachofen by Demeter, the goddess of the crops. In an important Greek myth, Demeter’s daughter Kore (or Persephone) is seized by force from her mother by Hades, the lord of the Underworld. According to Bachofen, the Greek myths of fierce female warriors, the Amazons, are an ancestral memory of women banding together for protection.
He interpreted the myth of Oedipus as the depiction of the three phases of this struggle. Oedipus kills the Sphinx, symbol of the old hetairistic age (the Sphinx was hermaphroditic, having both male and female genitalia). Oedipus then marries his own mother, who is the ruler of Thebes. The tragic events describing her downfall were interpreted thus as a thinly veiled account of the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy.