14 The Truth of Mythology

THE TRUTH OF MYTHOLOGY The nub of this whole debate is the failure of modern scholarship to comprehend in full truth the nature and function of the myth. Through stolid inertia of mind and the process of insensible shifts of conception that in time twist the primal sense of words over into some secondary or subordinate aspect of relevance, the modern mind has come to read into this word "myth" the meaning of untruth, something imaginatively conceived, fantastic, bearing no relation to reality. By myth a modern writer now means a story that is not true. This meaning falls so far out of line with the true original connotation that it now stands as the exact opposite of the primal significance. The ancient myth was the truest of all stories. It always carried more truth than history. Modernity worships the barren record of objective history and derogates the myth; the sagacity of the ancient day worshipped the myth and derogated, in fact virtually ignored, the objective history. Being admittedly imaginative and fictional in outward form and content, it made no pretence to factual objectivity. The story, with actors, characters and incidents, never happened as narrated. And nobody was supposed to be so naïve, so stupid as to "believe" it. But into the story the genius of dramatism inwove the design of conceptual structure, the pattern of a truth, the plot of an ideogram, concocting situations that gave the mind a veritable picture of some aspect of truth that history in the large was telling or was destined to unroll. The myth wrapped up in a fiction the meaning, the structure of history that was, is and is to be. It was a brilliantly ingenious methodology of presenting in the frame of a human story the idea-forms which, as Plato shows us, were the grand bases of speculative philosophy in his day, as also in old Egypt, and which he demonstrated to be the thought-forms over the pattern of which the creative Mind of the Logos framed the universe. So the myth, it might be said, was a cosmic ideograph in fictional disguise. Apollo really did not let his son Phaeton drive the chariot of the sun across the sky and scorch the earth; but the conceptual structure dramatized by the story is a truth of vital import. Theseus did not penetrate Minos’ labyrinth, slay the great bull and follow Ariadne’s thread to find his way out. But, at the level of intellectual insight the story tells the great truth that man’s soul must enter an underworld full of devious intricacies, find and slay the fierce and doughty animal nature and by the thin light of a divine intuition make his way back to the light of an upper world. The day in which modern superciliousness bred by the presumption of superior knowledge can belittle and deride the majestic structures of classical mythology is fortunately close to its evening dusk. When we catch enough of the spirit of the ancient mythicists to begin to interpret aright the myths and release the glowing intelligence hidden in those recondite constructions, the world may at last emerge from its "Dark Ages" of religious superstition. When MacCulloch, therefore, contends, as he persists in doing in face of a mountain of research data establishing the contrary thesis, that the descent narrative in early Christian literature is to be accounted for without admitting any derivation from prior Pagan mythology, he is both defying evidence and merely venting the force of an inveterate Christian or modernistic prejudice which has steadily dominated Christian scholarship over the centuries and still obsesses Christian psychology. The theme of the hero descending and freeing souls bound in an underworld limbo comes close to being the central and pivotal feature of ancient religious philosophy. The evidence back of this statement is voluminous and clear. But it has to be examined to be known. No doubt it has all seemed to Christian mentality so bizarre, so childishly grotesque, so unrelated to reality as to be dismissed with contempt. But this is because the Christian mind has been conditioned that all Pagan religion, with all its literature that ran so strongly to mythicism, was nothing better than puerile naïveté of mind, the wild conceptions of child-minded primitive peoples. The myths were condemned as fantastic nonsense and this attitude occluded the possibility of discerning their meaning and their importance.

Finally, that the descent tradition, couched in the language and forms of mythology, was a structure that carried the meaning of not one single man’s descent from the cross of this earth life down into some nameless limbo called Hades, hell, Amenta, Sheol, Tophet, but the descent of hosts of divine soul units, sent out from heaven to be the child-deity that is cradled through infancy, roused or resurrected in his youth to conscious functioning of his divine genius and finally grown to the fulness of the stature of the nature of Christhood within the temple of every mortal’s heart and mind, is as clear to capable scholarship as any such abstrusity can be. It happens to be irrefutably, incontrovertibly true.

MacCulloch assumes to conclude his case with the statement that the Christian movement did not pick up the descent tradition from Pagan mythology; they could and presumably did devise their own myths. How devastatingly true that statement is our author could hardly have guessed or believed. The ancients devised their great myths, every feature of which betokened some facet of sublime truth. The Christians, in the form of their weird misinterpretation of these creations, or out of their own misguided conceptual efforts, also devised the "myths" that, parading in the false disguise of truth, have derationalized and enslaved the Western mind. The tragic word that has to be spoken in the summary of this theme is that these concretions of the Christian mind that constitute Christian theology are myths in the bad modern sense, things fantastically untrue. It has to be said that they do not dramatize truth, but wildly caricature it. The true myth has two aspects, literal falsity (that deceives nobody) and inner subjective truth. Paganism kept the two phases entirely distinct; but Christianity confused the two, mistaking the outer falsity for truth. Therefore its presentation of these ancient formulations has been untrue and harmfully deceptive. The affirmation of their literal-historical truth, which at once becomes untruth, practically kills the power of their inward verity. By obsessing the believer’s consciousness with such a story, for instance, as that of the bodily crucifixion of one man on a wooden cross, and offering this as the Creator’s device for the salvation of his earthly children, the Christian system of pious faith has so enfeebled the message of man’s true spiritual regeneration as to have reduced it almost to a moral and intellectual nullity. In persuading the West’s millions for centuries that thrice dousing the head with water, along with the recital of the names of the triune deity, will insure the individual’s sanctification in perpetuity, the Church of Christ again robs the devotee of the dynamic knowledge that the immersion of the unit of his soul power in the water of the body will give it the experience required to consummate a truly deific beatification. And by the inculcation in generation after generation of the belief that in partaking of the bread and wine in the physical celebration of the Eucharist, the member partakes magically of the actual body and blood of the man of Galilee, the psychological forces that might enrich the spirit are dissipated out in an empty fancy. Without exception every doctrine of this folly-ridden system has thus been distorted from truth and illuminating power into palsying falsity of alleged history.

Almost every traditional faith of peoples the world over rests on a central story of the son of a heavenly King going down into a dark lower world, there suffering, dying and rising again and returning to its native upper world. The failure of Christian intelligence to see that their basic theology is just a gross stolid literalization, and then the conjured historization of this universal legend in the hypostatized biography of just one of the many dramatic type-figures, who was no more a living man than some thirty to fifty others similarly delineated - and all antecedent to him in time - must be seen ere long in its true light, as the most colossal demonstration of intellectual ineptitude in all history. As has had so often to be said in the treatment of this chapter of religious development, it has held the mind of Western humanity under the spell of a hallucination that has strewn the path of Occidental history with the sad wreckage of life and happiness. It is by no means an overstretching of the truth to assert that it has hypnotized the Western mentality.

It can almost certainly be said, and with truth, that no religion in the world has ever put forth the belief that the demise of the physical body has ended the existence of the soul that animated that body. Likewise no religion has ever taught or conceived - except in the grossest mental depravity - that the decaying cadaver of the deceased human is reassembled after corruption, reintegrated and restored to former physical existence. Therefore the Christian linking of the resurrection doctrine with the death and restoration of their hero’s physical body wrecked the doctrine utterly. The death that was overcome on Easter morn is soul’s "death" and that not of one man’s soul, but the souls of all men that live, which "he" typified. And finally, that the traditional allegory of the Christ-soul’s descent from heaven into a dark nether region to awaken the hosts of the earth’s former dead could ever have been sanely made relevant to any other locality than our good earth itself, is again the incredible miscarriage of Western intelligence. When this benighted condition can be ended by the dawn of understanding, when it is known in what we call the scientific manner that every intimation of the allegories has immediate pertinence to our own life in this dark underworld, and that the Scriptures are all sheer poetic dramatization of the deep ignorance we yet struggle through toward the day of our glorious transfiguration into sons of God, then will our sacred Scriptures become once again shining lamps lighting our path up the heights of wondrous being.

Then can the truth and the beauty of the resurrection ritual enlighten our reason and truly sanctify our spiritual minds as we hear the thrilling strains of the Easter choral.