Cultural Mythology: Myth, culture, and consciousness

Bo tree in the backyard

"It is a weakening and discoloring idea that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time but that it is too late for us. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less. There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha's bo tree."--- Annie Dillard, For the Time Being

 

Salvation and truth and certainty

If someone says, “To be enlightened you must       

fast and pray all night.”

Have dinner and go to bed.

If you see a sign, “This way to salvation,”

run the other way.

If someone says, “This book is the truth,

you can buy it from me.”

Take your money and buy grapes and roses.

If someone says, “He’s talking tonight,

thousands will be saved.”

 

Go for a walk…listen to the birds

and watch the clouds, and leave

your backpack, your Bible and your Buddha

under a tree and hope

they will be gone when you return.

Where we are going you can’t carry anything,

not even your name.

If there is logic in the above,

be afraid, it’s a lie.

 

But if you feel something in your chest

as beautiful as the grass beneath your feet,

be grateful…open your arms

and forget everything

you ever thought you knew.

by John Squadra . Many thanks to Larry for sharing this great poem with me. I don't know Squadra's title for this piece. I think it is included in his book of poetry, This Ecstasy. Some lovely excerpts from this book are available at Heron Dance.

10 Spiritually transmitted diseases

I came across this post by Mariana Caplan on Huffington Post and although I am feeling a bit guilty for not posting much original writing here of late (the book is underway, more on that latter), she is so right on about the various ways that we can delude ourselves about our character and spiritual capacity that I have to share the link.

10 Spiritually transmitted diseases

Joseph Campbell lectures available on itunes

The Joseph Campbell Foundation is making a large number of Campbell's popular lectures available through itunes. While I haven't listened to all of these, I have heard enough of Campbell on tape to assure you that he is interesting, informed, and entertaining. Here is a link to the series Confrontation of East and West in Religion.  Derek Beres, the religion blogger on Huffington Post, recently commented on material from #7, "Martin Buber: An Anecdote." Read Beres, The Everyday Religion of Joseph Campbell, here.

Just a few interesting ideas about the location of the divine, to contemplate alongside the myths of Niobe and Actaeon, god(s) and transformation.

Ovid's version of Niobe's myth

Some people are critical of mythology and myth studies of the sort that I pursue because they equate mythology with ideology. Mythology, in this instance, is the favored narrative of the powerful, the dogma of the dominant paradigm. Marxists, for example, often fall into this camp, as do some critics of Christianity and organized religion more generally. It’s not hard to see why, given the common confusion about metaphors and metaphorical truth. If one reads a myth literally and assumes that there is only one accurate version, one correct interpretation, and one appropriate use for the story, then you do end up with a fixed meaning in service to some power structure. This has happened and is still happening. A lot. I get it. I am interested in myths as metaphorical narratives about the unknown because, paradoxically (?), myth as metaphor appears to be a solution to the myth as literal, dogma problem, and our literal dogmas are (literally) killing us.

(If the relationship between myth and dogma and dominant paradigms interests you, also check out my paper "Moral of the Story." ) (right sidebar).

We need to claim our myths, but our institutions (read: holders of power) are not going to facilitate this grand awakening and expansion of consciousness. We are, by understanding that we make myths and think metaphorically, and by looking for our myths, waking up to our assumptions.This includes considering the sources of our information, even the ancient or well established, and being alert to moral judgments. The myth of Niobe is one illustration.

The Greek myth of Niobe is a simple albeit puzzling story that is repeated by various Greek chroniclers: Apollodorus, Pausanias, Herodotus, Homer, and Hesiod. They don’t all provide the exact same details. The names of the children and their number, for example, varies from source to source. Apollodorus said there were fourteen kids. Homer, who included his version of the story in the Iliad, refers to twelve children, six boys and six girls. Hesiod reported twenty, ten of each sex, and Herodotus counted only four. The identity of the survivors is also unclear. Apollodorus refers to the surviving son as Amphion, Pausanias mentions Amyclas who, quick to pray to Leto for forgiveness and mercy, was spared. Apollodorus names the eldest daughter, Chloris, who also made successful, last minute prayers to Leto, as a survivor. Pausanias says that the surviving daughter's given name was Meliboia, but she was later known as Chloris because she stayed pale with fear and grief over the murder of her siblings. In Homer’s version of the myth, there are no survivors.

Why the inconsistencies? They’re probably the result of the oral story moving to different regions at different times, but it’s reasonable to say, don’t you think, that the exact number of Niobe’s children doesn’t matter all that much?

Something more significant accurs when Ovid rewrites Niobe’s story for his collection of tales, The Metamorphoses (Roman, 8 CE). Ovid's version of the story is the longest and most colorful, and the one that is most often told. In the Sixth Book, Ovid tells the tale of a foolishly proud Niobe, who recklessly invites the destruction of her family and even persists in taunting the goddess after her sons are massacred. In the ancient Greek versions, identifying the good guys and the bad guys is tough, but Ovid squarely places Niobe in the tradition of inflated, arrogant mortals who are brought low by the gods.

The earlier Greek sources provide no details regarding how and when Niobe issued her fateful challenge. The queen's words could have been a casual slip, a private comment made to her husband or even herself. Ovid however, describes Niobe’s appearance at Laton’s (Leto’s) annual festival, and the manner in which she disrupts the proceedings with claims that she, with her many children, is more worthy of veneration. Niobe gets on Leto’s home turf so to speak, and outlines her own noble parentage, her physical beauty and grace, and the riches of the kingdom under the command of her husband, concluding her list of goddess-like qualifications with mention of her seven sons and seven daughters, and the many children that they, in their turn, will produce…

This is arrogant if not downright stupid, but Ovid’s Niobe then goes one step further and challenges the goddess. She believes so firmly that her abundant children are her creation, her accomplishment, her deserved reward, that she dares Latona (Leto) to try to reduce her position be taking them all. “I could lode a couple of them," she says, "and still have plenty." Niobe’s disrespect shocks and frightens her community. The gentle goddess Leto cannot tolerate this affront or allow Niobe’s challenge to go unanswered. She calls on Apollo and Artemis and they are quick to jump to her defense. Ovid says that Apollo doesn’t even wait to hear all of the details of the story, “long complaint is nothing but delay”(6. 273) and he vividly describes the bloody hunt on Mount Citharion and the death of each son; the chase, the cries they utter, and where Apollo’s arrows struck.

When word of the massacre reaches Niobe, she is full of indignation as well as grief, and defiantly calls out to Leto again; “As wretched as my case doth seeme, yet have I left me mo Than thou for all thy happiness canst of thine owne account. Even after all these corses yet I still doe thee surmount” (6. 358-360). In other words, I still have six daughters and you’re still the mother of only two.Then Artemis strikes, shooting dead six of the daughters, who had come with Niobe to view their dead brothers. Now Niobe, stunned and frightened, prays for the life of the last, her youngest, but to no avail. All of her children are killed. Her husband Amphion commits suicide. Overcome by grief, Niobe sits by the dead bodies to weep and slowly turns to stone. A tremendous wind carries the rocky Niobe away to her native land of Phyrgia, were she remains to this day. Ovid does not mention Zeus in connection with Niobe’s transformation.

Is this the same story? Which version do you prefer...?

           

Greek myth of Niobe

According to Greek mythology, there once was a woman named Niobe. She was the daughter of Tantalos, and as wife of Amphion, the queen of Thebes. Niobe was beautiful, rich, and fertile. The couple had seven boys and seven girls.

Niobe seems to have had all that mortal life could offer. One day she claimed to be “better blessed” than the goddess Leto, because she had many more children. Leto only had two children, the twins Artemis and Apollo. Angered by Niobe’s claims, Leto appealed to Artemis and Apollo to protect her honor. The twins were both well known for their skill with the bow and arrow. Apollo shot and killed all but one of the sons while they were out hunting on Mt. Citharion. That same day Artemis killed six of Niobe’s daughters.

Amphion, the luckless husband and father, killed himself. Niobe, stricken with grief, fled to her father’s house at Mount Sipylus. There she prayed to Zeus for relief, and he turned her into a stone that shed tears day and night. Later, the Greek historian Pausanias visited Mount Sipylus and claimed to have seen the transformed Niobe in the shape of a rocky peak. According to his account, “When you are near it is a beetling crag, with not the slightest resemblance to a woman, mourning or otherwise; but if you go further away you will think you see a woman in tears, with head bowed down” (1.21.3).

The Greek poet Sappho, provides an interesting twist on Niobe’s story:                        

Before they were mothers                        

Leto and Niobe                        

had been the most

devoted of friends (Poem 85).

Belief, truth, and transformation

In my experience, religious people tend to get upset when you call their belief system a myth. I think the myth designation is kind of a promotion (in addition to being more accurate); a "myth" deals with fundamental questions of meaning, origin, and relationship, and human beings can't live without them. But people usually get insulted because they think myth means untrue means bullshit. (Religious people aren't alone in this regard, they just tend to be the ones most often talking about "belief." But we can all get touchy when someone challenges the veracity of something we "know" is "true").

The relationship between "myth" and "truth" is nuanced and murky and boy oh boy, the impulse to know THE (absolute, singular) truth is strong. But there are actually a lot of different kinds of "truth." The ancient Greek philosophers tried to figure out how one arrived at various forms of truth, which kind was most reliable, etc. and in many ways we are carrying on the same debates around those same questions. The problem I think (and this is one reason I am a mythologist) is that most of us don't even know that there is a debate! The relationships between faith and belief and fact and "Truth" are hyper-contentious because we (our culture generally) have such a hard time understanding our reliance on metaphor to bridge the many gaps between what we know, and what we don't know. What we don't know makes us nervous, and we like to pretend that the unknown is a very small category. (In The Black Swan , Taleb talks about "epistemological hubris." I love the phrase even though his book bugged me).

Certainty makes us feel secure. But if you are looking for truth in addition to comfort, and/or if fundamentalism frightens you, beware of anyone who has too much certainty, especially about metaphysical mysteries. An excess of metaphysical certainty is one of the big problems with the super popular, metaphysical self-help about laws of attraction and powers of intention, the type that says being positive can bring you everything that you want because obviously (is it obvious?) the universe naturally (by whose definition?) works that way and wants us to have abundance (hmm, really?) I put these claims firmly in the "who knows" category. But I will be posting more about this (what I call the myth of unlimited potential) in the future.

Right now, take this as an introduction to the next couple of Greek myths about people who are tragically (so it seems) transformed by the gods. What kind of god does these things? Do the people "deserve" it? Does that question matter? Does your concept of the cosmos embrace divine actions like these or not? What can your reaction to these myths tell you about your beliefs? I find this material interesting and challenging myself, and even if you do not officially "believe" in god per se, you can see other beliefs (in justice, for example) and your emotional machinations (problem with ambiguity maybe, or other questions you ask of the myth) in play.

Coming up, the myth of Niobe and the myth of Actaeon.

The Particle Rancher

My favorite research projects are like the Easter egg hunts that my folks used to orchestrate for me and my brother: a string of enigmatic clues nestled in plastic eggs that leads you from the known and familiar (the kitchen table perhaps) to a series of unlikely spots before returning you, in theory if not in space, back where you started (the desired basket). In the course of my recent research into Joseph Campbell, I opened one such egg and found Sam Keen. Keen and Campbell met when he interviewed Campbell for Psychology Today and the two did a series of workshops together at Esalen about living your myth. I've listened to some of the tapes at Opus Archives. Good stuff.

Keen went to Harvard Divinity School which doesn't automatically make him right or smart but suggests he's serious about understanding the deeper mysteries of life. I'm always on the look-out for people who are in love with the mystery and reject fundamentalism and dogma of any variety, including the currently popular atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. Whatever it is that encompasses the cosmos and human life, it's got to be beyond book-length human explanations, right?

In a visit to Sam Keen's blog I found a question-answer piece on the topic of religion and excerpted this little piece to share with you. 

A. To transform religion we need to recover its mystical element. Learn to be silent. Refrain from using the tired, old language and explore new metaphors, symbols and poetic ways of expressing what it means to dwell in the presence of the sacred. We need to take religion away from the clergy and the theologian and give it back to the singers and poets. End the pious arrogance of claiming to know the unknowable.

Q. Give me an example of some new metaphors.

A. Instead of God: The Ground of Being. The G-d Beyond God. (Tillich). The Self Surpassing Surpasser of All (Hartshorne)  The Cosmic DNA. The Big Bang and Blossoming. The Particle Rancher and Wave Rider. The Lord of Fractals. The Universal Unknown Subject of our Insatiable Longing. Central Casting. Etc

Keen's latest book is In the Absence of God: Dwelling in the Presence of the Sacred.If you've got any other great metaphors for The Universal Unknown, please post a comment!

The speck and the log in your eye

In the minds of many Americans, the recent election is a rebuff of the conservative movement and a setback for the religious right. In his victory speech, Obama spoke directly to non-supporters and said that he would work to be their president too, a pledge that has been met with skepticism and outright hostility in some Christian circles. Rush Limbaugh for example, says this is time to rebuild the conservative movement and that Obama must be met with "principled opposition."

In his post-election analysis, Limbaugh says, "I started laughing uncontrollably during the "yes, we can" stuff last night.  I was having a great time last night.  I actually was having a great time watching all this.  I just flipped around various channels to watch the coverage and I was just laughing.  Can we oppose the belief that one's earnings must be redistributed for the false promise of fairness?  Yes, we can." The rest of this transcript is available here 

If you have a strong enough stomach for Limbaugh's website, you will also find t-shirts that read "Rush Runs America" for sale. Hmm, who has the Messiah complex here, I wonder?

Of course Limbaugh is not the majority view, in attitude, content, or tactics, and the political strategy that he advocates, along with the somewhat gentler James Dobson (Focus on the Family) and others, is being questioned. There are Christian leaders, evangelical and otherwise, who argue that the pursuit of political power corrupts spiritual values. Phil Johnson, for example, believes that the image many people have of Christian conservatives, as "the angry face of Jesus" is proof of their failure to positively impact the culture and develop Christian community. Johnson and others point to the dismal example of Ted Haggard, the former president of the National Association of Evangelicals who was exposed as a meth addict with a penchant for male prostitutes, as proof that Christians have the wrong standards for their leadership. They point to the teachings of Jesus, who preached a practice of moral example, not force--political or otherwise--, and consistently cautioned his followers not to overestimate their own moral goodness. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says "Or how can you say to your neighbor, 'Friend, let me take out the speck in your eye,' when you yourself do not see the log in your own eye?" (Luke 6:42)

Read Phil Johnson here

Moral decisions are tricky, or they should be, and history illustrates the atrocities committed by people who claimed to know the mind or plan of God. I think the big question facing Americans today, is what, if anything, we can agree to accept as the basis for a shared moral system. We need to understand religiosity and the longing for spiritual connection as human impulses that are active regardless of conscious religious affiliation. We need to unearth the shared mythologies that give rise to ideologies and dogmas; we need to confront the many faces of our god(s). In short, the relationship between morality and government, between spiritual duties and civic participation, concern us all, and not just because many of us on both sides of the "Christian" and the "conservative" lines feel persecuted (irony of irony).

I feel the temptation to leave the conservative Christians to their debates, to simply continue to oppose their legislative attempts to marry church and state with my money and my vote, and avoid, as much as possible, exposure to the rhetoric of hate and bloody bigotry by folks like Limbaugh. But that is not the smart or enlightened path. We are all vulnerable to fanaticism and self-righteousness. And in the specific context of the religious right and their agenda, we have a model for the marriage of secular and spiritual life---Islam.

I've no interest in bashing Islam or Muslims. I do think that the historical and doctrinal parallels between Islam and Christianity are beautiful and terrifying, and I think the history of intolerance exemplified by extreme elements in both are instructive. I offer this as food for thought and future discussion, and some (very modest) edification.

According to Islamic doctrine, the Qu'ran (which means "guidance") is the final piece in the Abrahamic lineage and is the perfection of the Torah and the Gospels. One of the "mistakes" corrected by the revelation of the Qu'ran is the union of religious and secular life. Islamic law, the Shari'ah, governs almost everything in life, and is divided into five categories: duty, recommended, acceptable, disapproved, and prohibited. The great prophet Mohammad, who was granted moral perfection by God, was also a general. The early Islamic community was repeatedly attacked by non-Muslims and the physical security of the community was a major concern. The need for security, and the need to secure traditional institutions that provide societal stability, have been arguments for contemporary Muslim fundamentalist movements and echo arguments advanced by the religious right in this country.

I will post more as I continue to ponder. In the meantime, I recommend the website of Oxford Islamic Studies. Here is an article about the Islamic state.

Finally, my current mantra: "Tyranny is the absence of complexity."--Andre Gide

Karen Armstrong on Belief

Karen Armstrong is author of The Battle for God (which is on my reading list), Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet, A Short History of Myth, and other titles. Armstrong is an intelligent and thoughtful commentator on the state of religion today. A friend recently turned me on to an interview of Karen Armstrong conducted by Alan Jones, in which they discuss the relationship between mainstream religious belief and mythology.

According to Armstrong, the need for certainty compels many of us to read mythology (which includes religion) as history, to debate the rather paltry fruits of a literal, factual truth and overlook the metaphorical and psychological, which is the realm of meaning. I generally agree with Armstrong and especially appreciate her insights about the changing purpose and meaning of belief in contemporary society. For example, Armstrong explains that the word “believe” changed meaning in the 17th century. For Chaucer and Shakespeare the word “believe,” meant to love, to prize, or to commit to, not “I accept certain propositions,” as it does now. “We call religious people believers now,” Armstrong remarks, “as if that is the main thing that they do.”

And, I might add, the religious life is more and more a matter of what one is willing to believe—that dinosaurs roamed the earth three thousand years ago, for example-- than what one does.

Which leads me to another valuable insight by Armstrong—to live a spiritual or religious life, it is not necessary to believe first, to erase all doubts. Instead, practice.

To listen to the full interview click here