Sumerian Cosmogony…

  Babylonian Cosmogony…

  Enuma Elish…

Tiamat…Marduk…

     We come now to Mesopotamia, and begin with the cosmogony of Sumeria, the earliest phase of the great civilization that persisted for four millennia in the plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.  Since Sumeria had no single and comprehensive version of the myth of creation, however, its cosmogony must be pieced together from scattered references.

A highly schematic, and admittedly oversimplified, summary might run something like this:  Nammu, the goddess of the primeval sea, gave birth to heaven and earth, the god Anu and the goddess Ki respectively.  From their undifferentiated union issued the god of air and storm, Enlil, who then separated heaven from earth and so brought the universe into its present arrangement in the form of earth below, heaven above, and air in the interval between.

Once again, the primordial element, the cosmogonic sea, is uncreated and eternally pre-existent.  Once again, creation consists in the act of separating the elemental opposites which were originally in a state of chaotic union, in this case (and as usual), the heavenly male principal from the earthly female.

But the more important of the Mesopotamian creation myths, at least for our purposes, is that which has come down to us in a composition of some grandeur, known, from its opening words, as the Enuma Elish (“When on high…”).  Written in a Semitic language, the Enuma Elish dates from around 1500, in the middle, that is, of the second (Akkadian) phase of Mesopotamian civilization.  Its central figure is the god Marduk, the lord of the great city of Babylon, which was at the time the political and cultural centre of a vast empire.

In the pre-Akkadian (i.e., Sumerian) version of the myth (now lost), Marduk’s role was undoubtedly played by Enlil; but the Babylonian god has by now absorbed all of the powers and dignities of this ancient god of storm, notwithstanding that he himself was principally a solar and agricultural deity.  The process, sometimes called “syncretism”, by which later deities subsume the attributes and functions of earlier ones, or the major gods of great imperial powers assimilate those of the indigenous local gods, is a common and never-ending one.  Indeed, when in the first millennium Assyria had become the supreme power between the rivers, Markuk was in turn superseded in the Mesopotamian creation myth by the Assyrian god Assur.

 

Here is the Reader’s Digest summary of the myth:

In the beginning, nothing existed except Apsu, the sweet-water ocean, and Tiamat, the salt-water ocean.

In the text, Apsu is referred to as the “primeval begetter” and Tiamat as “she who gave birth to them all”, including the sky and earth, who as yet “had not even been thought of”, and the gods, who were “hidden within” this primordial pair.  As the text also specifies, the waters of Apsu and Tiamat were originally mingled in an undifferentiated unity.  Once again we have the original watery chaos out of which all things will eventually arise and in which all things are potentially present, but as yet in a state of formless confusion.

Then, from this watery chaos, two deities came into existence, Lahmu and Lahamu, both begotten by Apsu (the sweet waters) upon Tiamat (the maternal sea).

Scholarly consensus interprets Lahmu and Lahamu as personifications of the silt, deposited by the fresh waters of the Tigris and Euphrates into the salt water womb of the Persian Gulf, a process which has been going on since time immemorial and through which the land mass of Mesopotamia has been gradually built up.  But scholarly consensus has of late been rather too smitten with such naturalistic allegories, and it is probably safer to note again nothing more than the repetition in Lahmu and Lahamu of the conjunctio oppositorum of the universal male and female principles.

Then, from Lahmu and Lahamu derived in turn the next divine couple, Anshar and Kishar, the circular horizons of the male heaven and female earth respectively.  Anshar and Kishar thereupon gave birth to Anu, the god of the sky, who engendered from himself Ea (also called Enki) the god of earth and earth’s waters.

Enki will appear throughout Babylonian mythology as a culture hero, the founder of agriculture, and the source of all wisdom.  Anshar is said to have made Anu “in his own likeness” (since the sky resembles the horizon inasmuch as it is round); and Anu is also said to have formed Enki, the earth, “in his own image” (since the earth, in the Mesopotamian imagination, was shaped like a disc).

Egyptian Cosmogony…

The Primeval Hillock…

The Creator God Atum…

The Ogdoad…The Ennead…

Chaos and Order…

Logos and Eros…

     So much for Egyptian cosmology; now to cosmogony.  I’ve mentioned that Nun was the primordial watery abyss out of which the sun was reborn, the life-giving Nile was fed, and the world first emerged–atop, that is, what the Egyptian myths refer to as the “primeval hillock”.

The image of the primeval hillock was undoubtedly suggested by events that recur every year when the flood waters of the Nile begin to recede, bringing into view the first little peaks of mud that have been fecundated by the Nile’s fertile silt.  These peaks, emerging into the warmth of the sun, would have been the first patches of earth to sprout with life in the new year, and indeed modern Egyptians still believe that there is a special life-giving power in this putrefying slime.

In any case, it was crowning this primeval hillock that the Egyptian creator-god first appeared, and his triumphant theophany thereon was duly eternized in the Egyptian psyche.  Just as moments in time–the first day of creation; the nativity of the new year; the birth of the soul—coalesced in the ancient mythic imagination, so too, atop this creative eminence, did discrete locations in space.  In Egypt, accordingly, the high place of every local god was identified with the primeval hillock upon which the creator-god took his stance; so were the pyramids, insofar as they were the birth-chambers of souls about to be delivered into a new eternal order of being.

 

In a passage from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, we read that the creator-god’s name was Atum-Re (Atum when he was alone in Nun, the primordial waters; Re when he began to rule what he had made upon the primeval hillock).  The text then goes on to emphasize that Atum-Re was self-created, and that he proceeded to bring forth the rest of the gods “who are in his following”.

The earliest of these, much earlier than even Geb or Nut, were known as the Ogdoad, the Eight, which emanated from Atum-Re in four symmetrical contra-sexual pairs.  The first was Nun (the primordial watery chaos) and his consort Naunet; then came Huh, the boundless stretches of  primordial formlessness, and his consort Hauhet; then Kuk, “darkness”, and his consort, Kauket; and finally Amon, “the hidden”, representing the indefiniteness of chaos, with his consort Amaunet.

All of which is to say what the priestly author of Genesis would say almost a thousand years later:  that the “earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep”.  I don’t wish to anticipate, but the idea of creation as the imposition of “form” or “order” upon a pre-existent “formless chaos” is a ubiquitous archetype in cosmogony, present even in a biblical creation story that later Jewish and Christian theologians have piously pretended taught a doctrine of creation ex nihilo.

The Ogdoad, in fact, represent both a kind of pre-cosmogonic chaos and the original generation of the gods, just as in the Greek theogony of Hesiod, the monstrous Titans came before the shining and beautiful Olympians of Zeus’ era.  And thus, in due course, after the Eight came the Nine, the Ennead, consisting of Atum and four more contra-sexual pairs who constituted Atum’s governing council.

The Ennead were conceived by and proceeded from Atum; and here again, we observe the transition from chaos to order.  The name Atum itself means “everything”, and like To Apeiron (the Infinite), which was the Pre-Socratic Anaximander’s cosmogonic first principle, Atum is the incohation of the all.

From his universal womb proceeded Shu (air) and his consort Tefnut (moisture), who in turn gave birth to earth and sky, the god Geb and goddess Nut.  Or, in another version, Shu, the air god tore asunder earth and sky who were originally locked in an infertile pre-cosmogonic embrace; thus separated, they re-combined to give birth to the last two divine couples, the god Osiris and his consort Isis, along with their brother Seth and his consort Nephthys.

 

Here again, as we will see in due course, two universal motives present themselves:  the process whereby the contrarian elements (later identified by the Greeks as earth, water, air, and fire, and in Genesis as the “light and darkness”, and the “waters above” and the “waters below”) are originally commingled in an undifferentiated chaos, before they are separated out and set within their proper provinces; and more specifically, a theme which I call the pre-cosmogonic divorce, in which the earth and sky (the opposing male and female principles) have to be sundered before they can come together again in a fecund union.

I’ll leave you to ponder the fundamental human and psychic significances of these processes of separation and recombination, of abstraction and synthesis–the logos and eros of modern psychology–as we encounter them in other examples.

The Mythic Picture of the World…

Egyptian Cosmology…

The World Disk…

Geb…Nut…Shu…

     So, we begin at the beginning, with the creation of the world.

The earliest myths of cosmogony (literally, the generation of the universe), cosmology (the rational order and arrangement of the universe), and theogony (the generation of the gods) come, as one would expect, from Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Though it might seem illogical, I want to deal first with cosmology, since it will be easier for us to understand the myths of creation if we can first form a picture of the universe in mind.

When I say “picture”, I mean this almost literally, because from ancient Egypt through Greece and Rome, and all the way down to the late eighteenth century, poets, philosophers, and theologians clearly held the ordered and hierarchical arrangement of the cosmos to be beautiful, meaningful, and ultimately expressive of the Rational Intelligence of the Godhead.  It is to this once revered “picture” of the universe—so revered, in fact, that poets, artists, and moralists cleaved to it long after it had been scientifically discredited by Copernicus and Galileo—that the great English writer and critic C.S. Lewis referred wistfully in the title of his book, The Discarded Image.

 

The Egyptians called the earth goddess Geb, and conceived of it as a kind of disk or platter with an upturned rim, the flat bottom of which represented the alluvial plain of Egypt, and the narrow rim, the mountainous regions of the rest of the world beyond Egypt’s frontier.  The image reveals Egyptians as hopelessly Egypto-centric, I suppose (just as the famous New Yorker cover revealed the Manhattano-centricity of New Yorkers, showing as it did the streets and skyscrapers of Manhattan in the foreground, New Jersey as a narrow out-of-focus strip of wasteland across the Hudson, and an even narrower band beyond depicting the rest of the world).

The world-disk floated upon the primeval ocean, called by the Egyptians Nun. Nun was the chaotic waters out of which all of creation and life had first emerged, and at the same time the underworld waters into which the setting sun descended every evening from the western sky, and out of whose eastern waters the sun re-emerged every morning.

I need hardly mention that the daily setting and rising of the sun from Nun’s watery underworld womb was conceived by the Egyptians as the sun-god’s death, descent into the underworld, and rebirth; but this is a theme we’ll have to return to when we discuss Egyptian and other solar and redeemer myths.  At this point, I only wish to draw your attention to the way in which the creation of the world, the rising of the sun, and the birth of the human person, are conceived as concentric acts of generation and renewal by the Egyptians, each a phase of the same creative process.  Indeed, in some ancient cultures, these occur at the same pregnant moment, so that the birth of the world, the birth of the sun on the winter solstice (when the days begin to lengthen, and the sun’s light begins to overcome winter’s darkness), and the birth of the individual soul are conflated as contemporaneous events.

Since the Nile was the preeminent source of agricultural bounty in Egyptian consciousness, it too was represented as having issued from deep sluices in the earth reaching down into the primeval ocean.  Finally, in addition to being the waters below, Nun was also the waters encircling the planetary disk, the Okeanos, as Homer would later call it, in Greek cosmology.

Above the earth was the inverted platter of the sky, paradoxically conceived as a goddess, Nut, the weight of her heavenly vault being carried by four posts rising from the outermost corners of the earth at the four points of the compass.  But not entirely trusting this arrangement, the Egyptians provided other means of support in the person of the air-god Shu, who stood on the earth upholding the weight of Nut with his extended arms.  And in an early example of engineering triple redundancy, or else a Yoga pose, the sky goddess Nut is herself typically depicted as bending over the earth, with her fingers and toes in contact with the ground, and her belly adorned with the sun, moon, and stars, and the whole circuit of heaven.

But since consistency is never a concern of the mythic imagination, in other depictions, the vault of heaven might be represented as the under-belly of a great celestial cow, studded with the stars of the Milky Way along which the celestial barque of the sun made its course through the sky from east to west.

Gravity in Ovid’s Metamorphoses…

In Plato’s Phaedrus…

In The Blues Brothers…

 And its Moral and Spiritual (i.e. Mythical) Signification…

     Before we quite leave the earth’s gravitational orbit (figuratively, but also literally, as we’ll see momentarily), let me draw your attention to two other ancient mythic expressions of the same physical reality, and one modern one, all fecund with the kind of meaning that is entirely beyond the scope and capacity of empirical science.

My first example comes from Ovid, one of the most sophisticated writers who ever held a pen. Ovid’s cosmogony at the beginning of The Metamorphoses remains a seminal text, without the reading of which no one escapes my classroom.

It is utterly traditional in describing the creation of the world as the ordering by God of a pre-existent material chaos in which the elemental opposites have invaded each other’s proper territory, and are in a more or less permanent state of war.  God, or Nature, Ovid writes, composes this strife, separating the aggressors, assigning each of them to its own province, and binding them fast “in harmony”.

This is how the Roman poet describes this ordering process:

The fiery weightless element that forms heaven’s vault leaped up and made place for itself upon the topmost height.  Next came the air in lightness and in place.  The earth was heavier than all, and, drawing with it the grosser elements, sank to the very bottom of the universe by its own weight.  The streaming water took its place last, and held the solid land confined in its embrace.

I’ll come back to this passage shortly, but clearly Ovid knows a thing or two about the modern theory of gravitation.

My second example comes, somewhat paradoxically, from Plato.  Paradoxically, because in The Republic, as you know, Plato affects to be a strict constructionist of philosophical truth, and therefore banishes the lying poets from his ideal city.  What rather mitigates Plato’s criticism of poetry, allegory, and myth, however, is his own penchant for quoting Homer, and his prolific imagination, which confabulates innumerable allegorical myths as a means of explaining the invisible, incorporeal realities (God, the Ideas, the Soul) which apparently could not otherwise be explained than in those ostensibly false, and so forbidden, sensual images in which poetry traffics.

Plato’s ubiquitous reliance upon poetic figure, myth, and allegory (e.g., the allegory of the cave and the myth of Er in the very Republic from which he banishes the poets; the figure of the charioteer in the Phaedrus, to name only a few) suggests that his antipathy to the supposed falsity and sensuality of poetry is hardly to be taken literally.  (But then the opposition between philosophical truth and poetic fiction, science and myth, is a conventional and continuous topos in Western literature, discussion of which will have to be postponed for another course.)

In the Phaedrus, Plato compares the human soul to a pair of winged horses driven by a charioteer.  In its perfect, pre-lapsarian state, he says, the soul soars freely amongst the heavens, the habitation of the Ideas and the gods, borne upward upon wings that are the element within man most akin to the immortal divine.  In the supernal regions, the wings of the soul are nourished upon the eternal and incorporeal Ideas, but when the soul conceives a foul affection for the material and transitory goods and pleasures of this world, and when she gives in to these lower passions, her wings begin to waste away, and she droops in flight.  In due course, after her wings have thus completely atrophied, she at last settles on the solid earth, and finding a home there, contentedly receives an earthly body.

 

The first thing one notices about both Ovid’s and Plato’s mythic narratives is that the empirical fact of gravity can only be described by them in expressly moral and religious language. Ovid characterizes the earth (the heaviest of the four elements) as “foul” (sordidus) and “gross” (densus).   It is, in Hamlet’s later description of the earthly element in man, “O…too, too solid/sullied”.

Under its own weight, the Earth sinks to the very bottom of the universe, the farthest, that is, from the lucid and weightless heavens, and functions there as a sort of cosmic dust bin, catching all the flotsam and jetsam that drains into it.  This is not an auspicious habitat for man.

Ovidian man, in fact, is an exile, a “stranger and pilgrim” on the earth, to use the language of Paul’s letter to the Hebrews, always “mindful of” and seeking the “better, that is, the heavenly country” whence he came.  For Ovid, that which is essential and original in man’s nature, the “true man”, as Plato called it, is the incorporeal soul.

In his account of man’s creation (to which we will return in greater detail later), Ovid conceives of the human soul as a displaced fragment or spark of the Divine Fire, first stolen by Prometheus from heaven, and then breathed into the inanimate lump of clay that had been shaped by this arch-sculptor into the human body.  That body is thus the human correlative of the cosmic prima materia: it is a formless chaos until it is animated by the Soul of God, just as the cosmos is a formless chaos until Nature or God informs it with order.

Man walks erect, as Ovid goes on to explain—and we note that homo erectus is another important datum of modern evolutionary science, pre-empted by the mythic imagination—because his re-ascent to his heavenly home depends upon his morally and intellectually fixing his gaze, throughout his earthly sojourn, upon the divine region of his birth.

Which leads me, finally, to my modern example of a myth about gravity and how to defy it.  It comes from an intermittently inspired piece of cinematic art, the 1970s film starring John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd entitled The Blues Brothers.

At the beginning of the scene in question, Jake (the Belushi character) is standing reluctantly in the narthex of a church, having just been collected from the prison gate in the new Bluesmobile by brother Ellwood, who has shepherded him there for his reformation.  Suddenly, Jake’s body is bathed in, transfigured by, the celestial Light of Revelation.  “I have seen the light; I have seen the light”, he proclaims, somewhat redundantly.

The light he has seen is the idea to get the band back together, and to earn thereby the money necessary to pay the back-taxes on the orphanage where the brothers were raised.  Meanwhile, in the church itself, a prayer service is being led in the style of an old Negro revival meeting, by James Brown.

Preacher Brown and the choir are singin’ and gyratin’ to the exuberant praises of the Lord, and the infection is soon caught by the congregation.  They begin dancing in the aisles, and soon in the rafters, to which they have been propelled by the energy of the indwelling Spirit.

In mid-air, they perform long and lazy somersaults and other acrobatic maneuvers, as if they had broken completely free of the earth’s gravitational orbit.  And indeed they have.  Filled with the Holy Spirit, they are enjoying the state of enthousiasmos (to use the language of the ancient pagan mystery cults); they are entheoi, possessed by God.

In the more appropriate Christian language of St. Paul, they have “put off mortality” and “put on immortality”; they have become no longer earthly and carnal creatures, but new spiritual and heavenly beings, for whom gravity and the other laws of nature no longer apply.  And though Belushi and Ackroyd are sending up–sorry, another gravitational pun–a certain kind of modern American religion, be assured that its roots go back to the mists of pre-history, when human consciousness meant mythic consciousness.

Myth as Meaning…

Myth vs. History…

vs. Science…

Mythic Universality and Recurrence…

     For the ancients, then, mystery and myth always lay just beneath the surface of the visible order. This is to say that it was in the subterranean stratum of mystery and myth that the hidden intelligible meaning of natural phenomena and historical events—actualities that were, in themselves, meaningless—was found.

This is one reason why Aristotle wrote (in the ninth book of his Poetics) that myth is a somewhat more “philosophical” genre than history.   History records, as Aristotle explains, what actually happened to this or that particular person, in this or that place and time, once and for all.  Myth, on the other hand, is the record of what happens in all times and places, recurrently, everywhere, and always.

In Greek ontological terms, then, history belongs to the mutable and particular sphere of existence (which Plato and his followers regarded as an inferior or spurious order of being), whereas myth refers to a universal, eternally recurrent, and therefore unchanging Reality.  The historian Herodotus might thus chronicle the rise and fall of Croesus’ Lydia, or of the Persian Empire; a Thucydides, the rise and fall of Sparta; a Livy, Carthage; a Gibbons, Rome.  But as soon as one speaks of a king’s or nation’s “rise and fall”, one is using the language of myth, not history.  One is observing one of history’s universally and eternally recurrent patterns, on the model of the mythic journey of the Sun, or the pitiless rotation of Fortune’s Wheel.

Historical events can be observed and natural phenomena measured, but Meaning, of course, is an entirely incorporeal and invisible entity.  To search for it beneath the visible currents of history or sensible things is thus to take a great leap of faith, whether in the name of religion or science.

Like the religious postulate of the Divine, the quest for meaning at any level involves the projection of the interpreter’s own Intelligence into an inanimate and therefore unintelligent world. The only difference is that, where the pre-modern imagination used to call that Intelligence “God”, the scientific imagination now depersonalizes it as the Laws of Motion, or of Thermodynamics, or Gravitation, or Relativity, or String Theory.

But it is, all the same, a projection and a leap of faith.

 

I know nothing, of course, about physics, but my ignorance at least allows me to observe that the modern scientific theories of magnetism and gravity are, whether actually true or not, re-assertions of the ancient mythic representation of God as (in Aristotle’s famous designation) an “Unmoved Mover”.  God, according to this ancient mythic image, is the stationary lodestone, the unmoving Centre, that draws everything in the cosmos back to Himself, maintains all things in their obedient orbit, and prevents them from flying off under their own eccentric energies into space.

As for String Theory, I recall that it was Pythagoras who first noted that the universe pulsates with a certain mystical music, caused by the silent vibration of invisible strings, whose division according to certain ratios holds the key to the secret mathematical structure of the cosmos.

Of course, I recognize the superior practical utility of science to myth.  Newton’s law of gravitation enables us to predict and therefore to control nature.  If we know the weight of a circus acrobat and the height from which he jumps onto a teeter-totter below, and we know the weight of the person standing on the other end, we can calculate how fast and how high the latter will be propelled into the air.  This is useful–indeed, life-saving–information, at least for the acrobat who needs to be assured that his landing platform is set at the right height.

But utility aside, the law of gravitation is ultimately unsatisfying.  For starters, it is hardly as beautiful as the profoundly paradoxical idea of God as an Unmoved and Unmoving Mover, nor does it really explain any better what this thing called “gravity” is, why it is a necessary condition of our universe, or how its necessity came about.  In that regard, the mythic mystery of the Immutable Divine Centre is infinitely more provocative and meaningful.

Myth and Mystery…

The De-mythologizing and De-mystifying Valency of Science…

     In our own time, Joseph Campbell has eloquently restated the problem, and the paradox, of myth:

The forms of sensibility and the categories of human thought…so confine the mind that it is normally impossible, not only to see, but even to conceive, beyond the colorful, fluid, infinitely various and bewildering phenomenal spectacle.

Yet, as Campbell continues,

The function of ritual and myth is to make possible, and then to facilitate, the jump–by analogy.  Forms and conceptions that the mind and its senses can comprehend are presented and arranged in such a way as to suggest a truth or openness beyond.  And then, the conditions for meditation having been provided, the individual is left alone.  Myth is but the penultimate; the ultimate is openness–that void, or being, beyond the categories–into which the mind must plunge alone and be dissolved.  Therefore, God and the gods are only convenient means–themselves of the nature of the world of names and forms, though eloquent of, and ultimately, conducive to, the ineffable.  They are mere symbols to move and awaken the mind, and to call it past themselves.

Myths are self-transcending fictions; by means of provisional, approximative, and manifestly inadequate symbols and images, they point beyond themselves to a transcendent, divine order which, as Plato described it in the Timaeus, is “impossible to know or express”.

For such reasons, the ancients described the myths as “mysteries”.  We are all familiar with the popular meaning of that word:  something difficult or impossible to understand or explain, because it is unusual, paradoxical, or even miraculous.  But in antiquity and the Middle Ages, the noun mysterium was rather more exalted in meaning than in its current pauperized usage.

The festival of Christmas, for instance–or what the de-mythologizing and demystifying fanatics of political correctness insist on calling the Holiday Season—was conventionally understood as the celebration of the first of the two central “mysteries” upon which the Christian religion is founded:  the Incarnation, i.e., the descent of the eternal, incorporeal, and invisible God into the flesh and the world of space and time.

As the text of the Christmas motet begins, “O magnum mysterium, et admirabile sacramentum” (O great mystery, and wondrous sacrament).  The text is instructive:  its more or less synonymous conjunction of the words “mystery” and “sacrament” tells us something rather important for our present purposes.

In popular modern usage, as I’ve said, one might call any phenomenon that is difficult to comprehend or explain a mystery:  for instance, the mystery of flight (as folks at the beginning of the last century used quaintly to refer to that cutting-edge technology), or of calculus, or (to continue to list things I’ll never understand), the mystery of the golf swing, or the mystery of the popularity of the Liberal Party in Canada.

But in the pre-modern imagination, the word “mystery” was reserved for an entity or event that was not merely incomprehensible but also experienced as sacred, as a sacramentum; and indeed the mystery—the incomprehensibility and wonder—of it was inseparable from its sacredness. Everything that is mysterious is sacred:  ordained by God, a manifestation of God, or a concealment of God; and everything that is sacred is by necessity mysterious.

 

That mystery is rooted in the Divine was the universal attitude of the pre-modern.  As modern anthropologists have defined it, the mark of the primitive psyche is to invest with—to project upon—everything in nature that is inexplicable to it, a consciousness and a will, indeed, a personality very much like its own (only rather more powerful and therefore more dangerous).  Every important event in the life of the tribesman or the  history of the tribe, every anomaly in the natural order (earthquake, flood, birth, an unexpectedly bountiful harvest) was conceived as the effect of God’s inscrutable and capricious beneficence or displeasure.

When what we call “Science” finally intervened to explain these events, it could only do so, of course, by ascribing them to purely physical causes, that is,  by de-mystifying them.  Science, in due course, expunged from the universe every trace of Soul or Mind or God.  The inscrutable living Spirit that was formerly and from time immemorial thought to reside at the centre of, to animate and govern everything that exists and occurs in the world, was pronounced dead, and the de-spirited carcass of the cosmos assumed thereafter to be moved by the cold hand of mechanical law.

Here, again, is one of the most obvious differences between the modern and pre-modern outlooks.  If the ancient reflex was to multiply and aggrandize mystery, the modern project is to diminish and ultimately abolish it.

From the end of the eighteenth century to the present, nonetheless, Science, and scientific criticism, have tended to pronounce the death of mystery and God with a dogmatic excess of certitude and materialistic zeal.  “Scientific” critics of the Bible, for instance, have told us, with overweening confidence, that the parting of the waters of the Red Sea during the Exodus was the result of no miraculous intervention by God, but is merely the dim folk memory of a freak drought or unusually low tide, abetted perhaps by a sudden windstorm.  This is a nice bit of modern rationalization, but as such it is of course wholly beside the point.  To reduce a religious mystery to a meteorological event, and explain that event in accordance with the principles of natural causation, is to completely misapprehend it.

As any student of mythology knows, the parting of the Red Sea didn’t happen, at least not in the sensible world of space and time; it is poetry, not history, symbol not fact.  The very point of the story is mythic and symbolic:  to demonstrate the majestic power of the God of Israel, who with a “mighty hand and an outstretched arm” (in the words the writer of Exodus) shepherded his people out of bondage in Egypt and into the Promised Land, just as he would later liberate them from captivity in Babylon and greater Persia; as he would be beseeched to liberate them again from the Empires of Greece and Rome; and as eventually he would release all mankind from bondage to Satan, sin, and death.

The Israelites’ passing over dry-shod of the Red Sea is, beyond that, an only subtly veiled historical transcription of the ancient mythologem of the nocturnal death and matutinal resurrection of the Ancient Near Eastern sun-god, who every night set in the western sky and descended into the waters of the underworld sea, there to encounter the chaos-dragon Tiamat, or Apophis, or Rahab, or Leviathan (all historicized by the Hebrew biblical authors as the evil Pharaoh), to conquer him and deliver from his belly the captive dead into the light of salvation.

This, as we will see, is one of the foundational and recurrent myths that govern the whole course of the so-called “history” of the Judaeo-Christian Bible.

Mythic Archetypes…

The Philosophers’ Critique of Myth…

     What I’ve said about the great cycle of mythology known as the Matter of Troy can be said about most of the other mythic cycles or archetypes, which inspired elaboration after elaboration down the centuries.  There are, of course, any number of explicitly mythological poems, such as Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, or Dryden’s Fables.  But even more characteristic of the pre-modern imagination is the velleity to translate non-mythological subjects into mythopoetic idioms.  In his famous poem Lycidas, for example, an elegy written to commemorate the drowning death of Milton’s friend Edward King, the poet identifies King with the ancient dying and reviving gods Thammuz, Osiris, Dionysos, Orpheus, and Christ, thereby eternizing and universalizing what would otherwise have been an affecting, but merely personal, narrative.

Such mythic transpositions and displacements are too numerous to list, so I’ll give you only three more examples.  The Egyptian and Babylonian myth of the killing of the maritime dragon recrudesces, as we’ll see, in the biblical account of creation, informs the entire Judaeo-Christian salvation history, is the central narrative of the Christian sacrament of baptism, and is given new life by Melville in his novel Moby Dick.  The ancient mythologem of the Golden Age informs every page of  Thomas More’s Utopia, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and  Rousseau’s and Margaret Mead’s risible fantasies about “noble savages”.  Everything from the Grail legend, to the medieval romance of Gawain and the Green Knight, to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, to  Eliot’s Wasteland, bears the imprint of the myths of the Ancient Near Eastern and classical dying and reviving gods of the seasons and the vegetation.  And even our fashionable hysteria about the obliteration of the planet as a consequence of “global warming” is an unconscious re-assertion of the ancient Stoic eschatological myth about the destruction of the world in a universal conflagration.

 

Jung has called the archetypes of myth “controlling images”, and indeed, the human psyche does seem to be predisposed to organize and represent the raw data of existence according to these primordial mythic paradigms and categories.  But that is a subject for another course, and even if one is not persuaded by Jung, there are other, simpler explanations of why myth is the default mode of the human imagination.

Since what I have called the human conversation has always revolved around the permanent questions about existence and reality, the resort to myth, as we’ll see in a moment, is practically inevitable.

Does God exist?  Where does he come from?  What is his nature?  What does he want?

Does the soul exist?  Is it created, or has it transmigrated, with Shirley McLaine, from some other realm?  What is its nature?  What does it want?

What is birth, death, rebirth?  Is there an afterlife?

What is the nature of the world?  How has it come into being?  Or has it always existed?  How will it end?  Or will it infinitely endure?

What is the nature of man?  Where did he come from?  Where is he going to?  What are good and evil?  Why does evil exist?  What is the purpose and meaning of life?

These perennial metaphysical questions and their solutions are ultimately beyond direct human experience, comprehension, or expression; and this is, paradoxically, why they must be posited and posed by the mythic psyche.

As a prisoner of time and space, man’s imagination is constrained by the sensual and finite framework of his worldly and corporeal existence, through which he is constrained to conceive of and represent such transcendent realities– God, the soul, the afterlife–as are by definition beyond sense and time.   Myth and poetry are, of course, just such sensual and limited categories– so rankly sensual, in fact, that Plato banished the poets from his enlightened Republic.

When he did so, the criticism of poetry and myth on those grounds was already a century old.  The Pre-Socratic philosophers Heracleitus and Xenophanes had indignantly accused the poets in general, and Homer in particular, of having insulted the dignity of the ineffable Godhead in their absurd depictions of the Olympian deities in the corporeal habit and with all of the moral and psychological fallibilities of men.

Such crude anthropomorphisms suggested to them that myth was the least likely modality through which the human imagination could possibly transcend its own existential limitations.

The Matter of Troy…

 The Obligation of the Poet to “hand the matter on”…

     I’ve called this course “The Vocabulary of Myth”, and grandly described its purpose in the Calendar of Priceton University as to furnish the basic “grammar” of the human imagination down to the eighteenth century.  I must leave aside the question of why the eighteenth century sounded the death-knell of man’s mythic consciousness—my chronology is arbitrary, in any case–on the assumption that forty-eight centuries out of fifty of civilized man’s pre-occupation with mythological forms of expression represents something enduring and significant, and not to be discounted or discarded on the basis of a mere two-century-long cultural anomaly.  So, I return, unapologetically, to my description.

In this context, words such as “vocabulary” and “grammar” are metaphors, of course, poetic figures—myths, in fact, since for the Greeks poesis and mythos were synonyms—by means of which I am attempting to express the idea that mythology has always been the principal well-spring from which the basic themes of the human conversation have  bubbled up.  Let me try to prove to you that that is true, and more than merely figuratively so.  I’ll start with what is dismissed by the modern mind—at least that of my undergraduates–as the least consequential aspect of civilization, poetry, and move on to religion, philosophy, and science.

As a matter of both tradition and empirical fact, there are two grand themes, two great bodies of stories, that have been subject to endless restatement and elaboration throughout the centuries of Western literature and art from antiquity right down to our own time.  The first of these is the salvation history of the Judaeo-Christian Bible, a body of narrative whose relationship to myth will be discussed in what follows, and whose centrality to the Western Tradition requires no proof.

The second is “the Matter of Troy” (as it was called in the Middle Ages):  the story of the Trojan War and its aftermath, including the maritime adventures and homecomings (nostoi) of the Greek heroes Odysseus, Agamemnon, and Menelaus, but more generally including the entire cycle of Greek mythology whose great fountainhead was Homer’s two epic poems, the Iliad, or story of Troy (Ilion in Greek), and the Odyssey, which records the wanderings of Odysseus.  The Odyssey was thus the first successful sequel in the history of popular fiction, and its continuing influence illustrates Northrop Frye’s abiding principle about the genesis of  literature:  that it is simply made out of other literature.

As another eminent literary critic, C.S. Lewis, has characterized them, writers before the modern age were “bookish”; they felt no compunction about, indeed, only felt justified in, recapitulating the narrative themes and traditions of the great auctores who lived before them, and whose auctoritas they revered and borrowed.  As they themselves saw it, their principal vocation was to “hand the matter on” (in Lewis’ formulation), the “matter” being whatever narrative theme or tradition they had inherited gratefully from their ancient “authors”.  (Here, notably, the Christian writers of the Middle Ages and thereafter showed no diminution of reverence because those authors were pagan).   Once in the possession of a great theme, it would never have occurred to them to invent something out of whole cloth; indeed, they would have regarded the modern artistic fetish for “originality” as the symptom of a profound cultural poverty.

 

The Odyssey itself thus unleashed a deluge of imitations, extrapolations, and continuations, right down to James Joyce’s Ulysses in the early part of the twentieth century.  The first of such were the anonymous “Trojan Cycle”, or “Homerica”, as they were called, that anthology of five or six minor epics written by the “Homeridae” (figurative “sons of Homer”) from the seventh through the fifth centuries B.C., with the ostensible purpose of filling in the gaps in the record of the Trojan war and the journeys and adventures of the returning Greek heroes that their adoptive literary father, the great bard, might have left out.

Greek drama was similarly a gap-filling child of Homer:  the first Greek trilogy, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, tells the tragic story of the murder of Agamemnon upon his return from Troy at the hands of his treacherous wife Clytemnestra and her paramour Aegisthus, Agamemnon’s own brother (with the Homeric theme–comic, in the ancient sense of the word–of Odysseus’ happy return to the side of his ever faithful Penelope in mind).  It then records the tormented resolve of Agamemnon’s young son Orestes to avenge his father’s death.  (Shakespeare’s Hamlet borrows heavily from it.)

Following the Trojan Cycle and the Greek drama, the next and by far the most important Homeric continuation was Virgil’s epic the Aeneid, which recounts the escape of the Trojan prince Aeneas from the burning city of Troy, and his wanderings and adventures at sea, where he encounters, by no mere coincidence, many of the same mythological monsters and temptresses from whom Homer’s Odysseus had escaped.  In book VI of Virgil’s epic, Aeneas descends into the underworld, just as Homer’s hero had done in book XI of the Odyssey, and navigates an already familiar infernal landscape.  Landing finally on the western shores of Italy, he launches a protracted siege against the local inhabitants that follows all of the stages of the Greek campaign against Troy, until he emerges victorious and founds there the city of Rome.

The Aeneid was written in the last decades before Christ to provide the civilization of Rome, and the incipient Empire inaugurated by Caesar Augustus (under whom the poem was penned), with an appropriately grand mythological pre-history and divine pedigree.   Such is the authority of the Homeric mythological tradition that from then on it became de rigeur for every people and nation to trace its ancestry, as did Virgil’s Romans, to one or other of the escaping heroes of Troy.

Thus, according to the twelfth-century historian Geoffrey of Monmouth, the island of Britain was discovered by an eponymous founder named Brutus, another Trojan prince who (though wholly unmentioned by either Homer or Virgil) spent many years lost at sea before finally finding safe harbour on another western shore and founding there a new nation by divine destiny.  In due course, within a half century or so, two Welsh poets, Wace and Layamon, composed (one in Latin, the other in Welsh) consecutive epics about Brutus’ wanderings and fathering of the British people, both separately entitled Brut.  (But besides the epic “Bruts”, several other poems were written in the Christian Middle Ages under the apparently pressing moral and artistic obligation to hand on the matter of Troy:  the French Roman de Troie of one Benoit of St. Maur, for example, and another anonymous French Roman d’Aeneas.) 

Everyone knows the next and most important of the medieval poems in debt to Homer and his literary progeny:  Dante’s Divine Comedy.  It is, of course, the shade of Virgil himself who acts as Dante’s guide through the underworld, a descent that is explicitly modeled on that of Aeneas into Hades in Aeneid VI, which was modeled on that of Odysseus in Odyssey XI.

One could adduce any number of other examples of works by medieval sons of Homer.  In the late-fourteenth century, Chaucer wrote his romantic epic Troilus and Criseyde, Troilus being another Prince of Troy belatedly thrust into the limelight, though scarcely mentioned by Homer or Virgil.  Chaucer’s story of Troilus was, in turn, handed on to Shakespeare, who made a splendid tragedy of it, and so it went, on and on.