I've been thinking about mythology and how it defines a race - or at least the group that believes in it. I'm not an expert in any wide-ranging sense, but want to touch on a few of the ones I do know.
At the beginning of written history, we have the Babylonian myth of the sky god Marduk defeating the earth goddess Tiamat. This myth was retold through many cultures of that time and has a great influence on people's thought in so many ways: the victory of the sky gods, the fact that divine help comes from the outside and wears a male face, the belief that victory comes through force, and so on. We see a version of the myth, changed by the lens of a different culture in the Bible's Garden of Eden story - though the story itself has a different focus. Walter Wink in The Powers That Be argues that this Babylonian myth underlies our whole American frame of thought today, with our heroes being those who overcome the bad guys by force - like Superman.
Moving forward in time we have the story of the Exodus from Egypt - a slave people freed because their god defeated the Egyptian gods. Though modern archeology throws doubt on the historicity of the story, it underlies and indeed underpins Jewish identity. Being God's chosen people through the promise made to Abraham, and the rescue from Egypt defines a people.
Moving farther forward, we have the Christmas story. Though Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan point out in The First Christmas that this was fashioned to be a Christian version of the myths created around the birth of Caesar Augustus, it has a profound meaning for Christians, many (most?) of whom believe it is a factual story. The idea of the sky god becoming human to save his people, because they are incapable of saving themselves, is the Christian version of the Exodus story. The belief that the founder of the tradition was God himself is incredibly powerful, and has led to both the best and worst in Christian history.
There are so many more - the Roman belief that their empire was founded by a man raised by a wolf, the Greeks praising Odysseus, who won over others by cleverness, the trickster myths of Native American cultures, our American myth of manifest destiny and the rugged individualist - we all have our myths to look back on and we respond to the culture they have created - whether that's absorbing it without thought, or rejecting it.
I think our part as mature adults is to recognize our myths and understand the attitudes they have taught us, so that we can intelligibly accept the parts that are helpful and reject those parts that are not.
It's good to have wonder at Christmas time - people have been celebrating Yule for longer than anyone can count - but not to let our own mythology blind us to the wider world. Let's take the good parts of our stories. For me that means that Jesus reached out to all in need, that he teaches us to live with compassion, to search for truth, to respect even our enemies as human beings, to live without fear, and not to make ourselves insular. Let us once again remember that facts and truth are not synonymous and look past the particular stories to the meaning beneath.
Let's keep the wonder of this time of year and lose the pettiness and greed and selfishness and parochialism. Let's move past our tribal identities and into a wider world of the acceptance that we are all brothers and sisters, each with our unique stories and traditions, but family underneath it all.
Well, you know, as human beings we cannot help but tell stories to make sense of our world and our lives. Things do not just happen to us--they happen, we interpret, and we move on from there. So it makes sense that people would create goddesses and gods and then build up various myths around them. They can be used to empower people or to oppress them. And always they will be a reflection of the culture in which they exist. If there's something in the myth that doesn't fit the culture, then you have to reinterpret the myth. I find it almost comical (or I would if it didn't have such far reaching and seriously damaging consequences) that people keep going on about the US being a "Christian nation." They have had to do some serious mental gymnastics in order to twist the message of Jesus as it appears in the stories of the Bible into something that fits a capitalist system in ehich the gap between the rich and poor continues to grow, in which the people who scream the loudest about being good Christians want to protect the health insurance cartel over the health of people, and who are willing to allow poeple to live and die in poverty in order to make a few more bucks. Not sure where that part is in the Bible these people say they believe in. I think we should be honest and replace this talk of being Christian with all the iconography and just put up large statues of dollar bills, then build houses of dollar worship. At least that would be honest! But they would have to make these strange and wild claims about Christianity if they want to live under the illusion they are both good USians and good Christians, because the stories do not fit the culture and if they really were living by the stories, this country would be a far different place. I have been noticing lately some similarities between some manifestations of "Christianity" in the US and Melanesian cargo cults as well. I also think that we can tell that the stories as a group may not be as useful to people as they once were. Increasing numbers of people are claiming no religious affiliation, and yet there is a huge market out there for spiritual books and materials of many different kinds. New myths are in the process of being developed as people take from various sources to create stories that are more meaningful in their lives today. As an aside, I am always curious about why there are not more people writing about what seems to me to be very clearly great similarities between Christianity and Zoroastrianism. Is this because the writers of the books in the Bible didn't know about it, or because people just don't like to think about the idea that so much of their belief system came out of what is today Iran? Do you have any thoughts on this?
ReplyDeleteI really don't know much of anything about Zoroastrianism, but I'll do some reading and let you know what I think.
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