O.D.E.

The Sky God and Earth Mother

by Don Erickson (1956)

It seems to me, to make my first extension, that we are not so much in the middle of a social or industrial upheaval as we are in the middle of a great religious revolution. The gods are suffering a change as they did once before in human history, with consequences deeper than it is possible for us to suspect.

It was in that previous religious revolution that drama, as we know it, began. I am referring to the overthrow, in the Eastern Mediterranean lands, of the very ancient earth religions that had dominated Mediterranean mankind since the discovery of agriculture. At that time, too, was a religious revolution but the nature of it is lost in antiquity, when the Stone Age hunters and food gatherers gradually over long stretches of time and only in certain areas ― the Euphrates and the Nile ― became agriculturists. As hunters and food gatherers, the form of their religion we may loosely describe as Mana ― the Mana ― religion. Where all things in nature are imbued with powers which we would call “Supernatural,” where the predominant food supply was the animal, the Mana religion became focused on animals as the most powerful manifestations of Mana. This is seen in the cave paintings at         and elsewhere. These were not decoration. They were religious representations as cross and scepter and cup were to Catholics of the middle Ages.

But where the food supply was less specific, the Mana religion remained more true to itself ― all things were holy and sacred, but especially the big, intense natural manifestation, such as lightning, a particularly high mountain, a large river, and so on.

Then came agriculture and an enormous thing happened. The whole energy of life took on a new direction. Gradually, the Mana-religion became the earth-religion ― the worship of the earth as the great deity in nature. This deity, too, had many forms. In fact, we call it a polytheistic religion, but it was no more polytheistic, really, than Christianity. It worshipped the earth in its different manifestations of spring and summer and autumn and winter or, more specifically, seed-time, harvest-time, and rain-time. It worshipped the corn, the maize etc., also as deities.

Usually the earth was personified as female: maiden and woman and old crone. As woman gave birth to human life, earth brought forth the fruits of the earth, the plants.

The sky’s importance in this religion was vital, but still secondary to that of the earth. The sky was seen as man, as that being that fertilizes the earth by dew, by rain, by sunlight. Therefore, again the sky man was seen in his seasonal aspects of young man, warrior (i.e. protector) of the crops while they mature, and old man.

As we know from Frazer and others, he was the year man, represented in human societies by the King who came to power at the beginning of the year and was killed at the end of the year ― and of course to this day the sky character, especially the solar aspects of kings, are emphasized in the imagery of the coronation.

Though the sky was vital, its function was secondary compared to the earth, which actually brought forth the food which fed people. To humankind, though the sky was awesome, it was also remote, shadowy, uncertain, less immediate to the real needs of humankind, less solid and meaningful in their everyday lives. Above all, it was there to serve the Earth Mother.

It is very difficult today to look back and find direct evidence of this universal religion, and yet it was everywhere. Mother and son/lover are seen in Isis and Osiris/Horus, in       and Tammuz, in Cybele and Adonis, in Demeter and Dionysius. In each case the story woven around this pair is remarkably similar ― in each case it had to do with the mating and then the death of the son/lover, and sometimes with his resurrection.

It was out of this that the seeds of drama first took form ― probably at first a mimetic dance, uttering charms in the sacred circle which represented the turn of the full year. Comedy existed in the incitement to erotic action, and tragedy in the death of the year ― Spirit ― the total story.

But then something happened, from somewhere on the Steppes of Eurasia began the restless search of nomadic tribes for new land. These were a different people altogether and worshipped different gods.

To the nomads, the all important deity was the sky. The earth was unfriendly ― a vast expanse of cruel winters and scorching summers ― which bore ― only reluctantly ― sparse vegetation here and there ― grass for the cattle and sheep. It was the sky which had rained on the earth that was directly responsible for whatever vegetation existed. I think the difference is dramatically revealed by a coast dweller, or someone in the orchard belt of Ontario suddenly transported to the prairies. There, the sky enters one’s life as nowhere else ― it is vast and bright and its sunsets are almost terrifying and its thunderstorms frequent and immense. It is not obscured 50% of the time by rain, fogs, vapors, and clouds which seem to arise from the earth. On the plain, the stars are seldom hidden but stand like signposts in the night, and of course, to the nomads, their only means of navigation was by stars.

The sky dominated ― and the sky worshippers were on the move, pressing outwards to China, down into India and Persia and the Middle East, westwards across Europe, and finally down into Greece.

These were the Indo-Europeans ― their languages had a common base, and their God was one supreme God ― Dio, Dyaus, Pitar, Zeus. They were warriors because nomads have always had to fight for their grazing lands, had to eke out their precious existences by raids on other peoples. Their God was Warrior ― the Thunderer, the Storm God, He who brought rain ― the Mountain God because often the high mountains seem to be the locale of clouds, the source of rain; the Bull, leader and father of the herd, the Bull who bellows, or the Ram, likewise leader of the herd.

It is probable that these peoples came in several successive waves down into the nascent agricultural communities, and that each wave was the cause of a new upheaval and a new order of civilization.

With the first wave old Egypt and Sumeria (Samaria?) came into being; with the next, Babylonia and the middle kingdom of Egypt; and then Greece and the lands of Persia, and so on. Undoubtedly the Assyrians, the Hyksos, the Achaeans were all originally of these nomadic peoples and in each society they overthrew the existing earth religions and attempted to replace them by the Sky religion which they revered.

But, of course, this was not done easily, or without endless struggle. In fact nowhere was the older religion entirely obliterated. In Egypt we can trace this struggle through the priestly institution of Amon-Ra, Sun God, against the more popular Isis/Horus, Osiris/Het Set religion.

In Babylonia the great epic of Gilgamesh is the story of this religious struggle; how Thiamat, the woman monster, was slain by the Sun God, Marduk. But in these conflicts Ishtar, Astarte, Goddesses of love and much else, remained the most popular deities.

In each case the official, priestly, King’s religion, was set up against the traditional religion of the people and never totally conquered.

Most important to us is what happened in Greece, which was inhabited in the few fertile valleys by earth worshipping communities and invaded by the nomadic Zeus-worshipping Achaeans, and then Dorians. Greek vases tell the story of the older culture more clearly than words, particularly in Mycenaean and Minoan representations of the Priestess and her helpers officiating at the religious rites before the altar (usually in combination with a sacred tree) with serpents or maze symbols, and so on. Then, in the next phase, appear the marching warriors (sometimes on horseback), bearded, rougher looking and with spears and bows and arrows. Then come the battles against these strangers, battles in which foremost fight armed women led by priestesses shouting encouragement (later these women become relegated to the epithet, Amazons). They are fighting not only for their lives, but for their religion, the breath of their lives. The vases show numberless women prostrated, cut down, speared, and finally show them serving this new kind of man who sits on a throne triumphantly, but also a trifle uneasily, looking over his shoulder. You know that wonderful statuary, the Pergamus sculptures in Berlin. This again is a representation of the religious war; already the old religion is equated with giants, serpents, earth creatures, half man and half serpent, while Mother Earth, Rhea, pleads for the lives of her monstrous progeny. But Zeus, Pallas Athene, Ares, God of War, cut away heedlessly.

Something in us answers to this, doesn’t it? There is a wrench and one trembles a little to think of it. No wonder this particular sculpture holds such power, no wonder one feels uneasy, for what happened was the birth of modern humanity, the destruction, or the effort to destroy, the people of the earth, to set them free. We have been involved in this act and the consequences of it ever since to our utmost sorrow and misery and terror, but it has been a magnificent adventure.

The Greeks (Achaeans) did not succeed in destroying the old religion. Greece was a mirror of the two and the golden age of Pericles the fulfillment of that merger. So we have the entangled romances of Zeus himself, his spiteful wife Hera, his arrogant Hellenized daughter Athene, and his trysts with numberless forms of the old Goddesses. Isn’t it all political? Zeus rules in Olympus, it is true, but his is a bickering, divided household, and the warrior priestess is given special rank as she who protects the new mixed society. She and Apollo. Apollo is the strangest of all the Greek gods — musing, detached, shrewd, prudent — but whatever else he is the image of the new mixed man, the nomadic warrior civilized and settled down, the father of science and the arts, for the warrior with nothing to do but keep peace in his household and run his estates will emerge as the Thinker, the Artist, the Philosopher, the Lawgiver, and finally, the City Councilor. He is lord and master, but his role is a difficult and complex one. He sits on the throne uneasily, a man of power who took what he has by force and knows it, knows that his life is precarious and his reign dependent on constant vigilance, because the old Gods are far from dead and will never admit the right of the new Gods to rule and the old wisdom and need of the earth that had dominated the life of man lost some of its power and some of its prestige — officiously and consciously — but only a fool would deny the unknown, incalculable sway of the earth.

The men of power, the Nomads, the horsemen of the North, had their way — but at the price of peace forever — peace for them and peace for their subjects. We cannot help but admire their qualities, can we? Often they were cruel and stupid and arrogant and vicious, but at their best what wonderful qualities the strain of their usurped position called up: knavery, cunning, intelligence, generosity, and a grand open manner among themselves, devotion to comrade. These are precisely what we now call the heroic qualities — and so began the Heroic Age, and by way of the Heroic Age — the birth of modern man — because the ethic of these war chieftains was the ethic of every man for himself — men fighting for their lives, for power, for honour. They were adventurers every one of them, loving and living in a world in which they did not really belong, smashing the old temples for gold and slaves, fearful of what they had done, making offerings to the very gods they have trampled on, either magnificent or miserable, both traders and pirates, uprooted — and Homer does not fail to make clear both their barbarity and their splendour. They fascinate him as men, this new breed, and what finally fascinates is that they are doomed and know it. Most of them will perish miserably, but out of their short, nasty, brutish lives they made magnificence. They lived in defiance of their destinies, of the old earth, the old laws. It is man alone with a sword, relying ultimately on no one but himself, facing his own death, singing and playing his harp in the pit full of serpents as Ammar did in the Sigurd legend, and this image becomes an ethic, a philosophy and it needs only one thing to make it into a religion: the concept of one God which the warrior Semites will invent.

In the old religions a man was important and knew himself only as a member of a tribe, a clan, a totem. Now he is alone. The Odyssey is how a man must survive alone, retaining his aloneness, fighting off the temptation to peace and love and submission which the earth requires — thus the Sirens, Calypso — and how is he to deal with life other than by this self denial? Courage, yes, cunning, yes, but what does cunning mean? It means how to take the utmost personal advantage of every situation, which means the ability to judge, to measure, and this can only be done if one looks at things objectively, as they are in terms of their relationship to you in what they portend. Something of the saying that a man can judge his enemies far better than he can his friends when it is a matter of life and death to judge a situation correctly. Because life is a gamble they looked on it with a cool eye, waiting the main chance, alert for tricks — and without this attitude made into a heroic virtue, made into a creed, there would be no modern civilization. This is the germ on which science is built. This is objectivity.

The traditionally bound man would give a traditional answer to the phenomena of nature because the image of nature is transformed for him by the all powerful image of his society, his tradition, but Thales will be told by a fellow Greek that the Ursus Major constellation is lower down in the sky in Egypt than it is in Greece; therefore, he will conclude that the world must be spherical, a fact that will astound and anger the man whose tradition sees it as flat.

Where is the beginning of philosophy? Ionia, the Greek settled islands closest to the old earth worshipping people of Phrygia, which only by the most desperate efforts can retain their Hellenism, their freedom. They see themselves as fighting something dark, inhuman, and irrational. The very ideas of the human and the rational begin among these Hellenes. Because they can look at the world and men objectively, they have discovered themselves. They see that nature and man are quite different, which seems obvious to us, but it is a new thought, a fantastic discovery. The non-Hellene living in a tribal ethos does not think this way. Man and nature merge, are one. Man is simply another animal. In fact, animals were envied for superior qualities. The Indians of this coast, for example, spoke of the bear people and the raven people, etc. and readily transformed themselves from man to salmon to eagle and back to man again. But to the Hellene man was distinguished from all else, and what distinguished him, posited these philosophers, was mind. So they discovered the independent existence of the mind, which all the civilizations of Egypt and Crete and Babylonia had never come upon.

Mind and body: the dualism of the universe. And if the mind is independent, then it can deduce. It can create a world of the mind, behaviour of the mind, morality and order of the mind, and starting with one fact can work to a logical conclusion without reference to nature. Such a thing had never been dreamed of before. Egyptians had developed practical mathematics but never mathematics of deduction. Euclid, Archimedes, Pythagoras, Thales to Aristotle — theses are the logical descendents of the Achaean warrior chiefs, the nomads of the north, the sharp traders, freebooters and adventurers of the Illiad and Odyssey.

And we have gone no further. We have only applied what was discovered then: human uniqueness, the individual; the mind as a reasoning instrument. The ethos of the Achaean warrior sprang into such flower? Yes. For the sky conquered the earth. There was the primitive dualism that became human mind and body and the very language of learning and thought is filled with the images of the sky. Freedom, independence, exaltation, heavenly, to fly to freedom. The very word freedom proclaims it: free from doom. But doom meant something different. Doom was destiny, fate. Mother Earth’s ancient and unspeakable law.

But Agamemnon and Ulysses, and Nesta and Menelaus came back to the homes they had taken by the sword, their adventure ended, and while they had been away the earth religion had again become powerful. They must cut it down to reestablish their supremacy and maintain it by force, by tyranny. Ulysses must return to greater slaughter and by killing make himself master of his household. Agamemnon is too trustful, unwary for a moment, and that is his end and it will be many years before the kingship is restored. Tyranny born of original force is all that can prevail.

The leader. The King. Lonely and terrible. From Agamemnon to Henry Bolingbroke to Hitler.

 

Look, there he is now, look:
There is no interrogation in his eyes or
in the hands, quiet over the horse’s neck,
and the eyes watchful, waiting, perceiving,
indifferent.

 

The master, who will try again to make himself divine but can only exist by inhumanity, by an unnatural artificial imposition, for he has planted the earth and to return means for him death.

This is what he hero literally becomes, and it is this conflict, this burden of guilt, that is the literal, actual, historical basis, in my estimation, of the beginning of drama.

Aeschylus and Prometheus who defy destiny.

Agamemnon destroyed by the earth priestess he had bowed to his will.

Oedipus, the image of the unnatural great man carrying a huge burden of unseen crime within him, and for all his might and craft, destroyed. Here is the image of the truly great man and king, who has overthrown the old periodic kingship, who has made himself supreme. He is the image of the Achaean King, the Hero King. Is there any doubt that the ancient religion of Thebe had been that of the Earth Goddess (the Sphinx)?

 

You saved us
from the Sphinx, that
and the tribute
we paid to her so long.

 

In depicting the rule of the Sphinx and the cult of priestesses headed by Iocaste, Oedipus had set himself against the ritual religion of the earth worshippers, against the rise and fall of good fortune with the seasons, against the tyranny of time and the earth:

 

Think how all men call you Liberator
for your triumph long ago.

Ah, when your years of kingship are remembered
let them not say we rose, but later fell.

 

Plague is on the city and Creon cures with the word of the oracle (Priestess) at Delphi (taken over by Apollo but originally possessed by Gaia, Earth Goddess) that Thebes must rid itself of a defilement.

 

Oedipus:         What defilement? How shall we rid

ourselves of it?

Creon:         By exile or death, blood for blood… It

was murder that brought the plague-wind on the
city.

Oedipus:         Murder of whom? Surely the God has named him.

Creon:         My Lord, long ago Laios was our King.

Before you came to govern us.

Oedipus:         I know;

I learned of him from others — I never saw him.

Creon:         He was murdered.

 

What does this dialogue reveal? Oedipus does not wait for the answer to “What defilement” because he knows the answer. The thrill of anticipation, horror surges through this scene. “Murder of whom?” and he knows the answer to this, also. But his worst fears must be confirmed, and Creon, who is no secondary character, but has blood in his eyes, does not answer directly. He answers ironically: “My Lord…” because he knows that Oedipus knows that the net is being prepared for him — there must be a new king. That is the answer to “What defilement”: the new king, and Creon is he.

“Long ago Laios was our King” the pause before the further surge, “before you came to govern us,” reminding us of the age old rhythm. And Oedipus, “I never saw him. He was murdered.”

It is still like some roaming in the dark, getting to know a hidden well, and the two men emerge now, the king business-like and Creon impersonal. Then Oedipus asks why they did not immediately hunt the killer of the king and there is the answer:

 

Creon:         The riddling Sphinx’s song

made us deaf to all mysteries
but her own.

 

Because this murder was as it should be, according to the rules of the earth religion, there was no crime until the new king, the season, began to fail — ran out its term.

To the Achaean audience of the fifth century, Oedipus is revealing an unconscious memory, an ancient law (the king is condemned to death after a period of rule and another takes his place) that had been replaced centuries before by the Achaean invaders.

No wonder Oedipus son wrangles bitterly with Creon and then Iocaste enters to support, not Oedipus, but Creon.

 

Choragus:         Open your mind to her, my Lord. Be

ruled by her. I beg you!

Oedipus:         What would you have me do?

Choragus:         Respect Creon’s word. He has never

spoken like a fool and now he has sworn
an oath.

Oedipus:         You know what you ask.

Choragus:         I do.

Oedipus:         Speak on, then.

Choragus:         A friend so sworn should not be

baited so, in blind malice and without
final proof.

Oedipus:         You are aware, I hope, that what you

say means death for me, or exile
at the least.

Choragus:         No, I swear by Helios, first in

Heaven! May I die friendless and
accurst, the worst of deaths if ever
I meant that!
It is the withering fields that hurt
my sick heart.

 

What they are, indeed, asking Oedipus to do is accept his own death. But he is an Achaean. He has set up the new kind of kingship and he cannot turn back to the ancient religion. Typically as the new independent man would, he sees it all as a plot on the part of Creon. But it is not. Creon has been chosen for King as Oedipus himself was once chosen: by the Sphinx and Iocaste, the Queen and Priestess of her mysteries. But Oedipus will not even admit her equality in power.

 

Creon:         And you rule the Kingdom equally with her?

Oedipus:         Everything that she wants she has from me.

 

The chorus waits. This same chorus, remember, was once the group of dancers who interpreted the year cycle in the chorus for months, and they did so when an old king was deposed and a new king put in his place. They sang the lament of the old and the welcome of the new. But this king refuses to play the game, as though he did not know what was going on.

 

Though he may roam the forest shade
like a bull gone wild from pasture
to rage through glooms of stone, doom
comes down on him.

 

There is no escape for the king, for escape could mean doom to the city, just as there is no escape for the bull, for escape would mean certain death to the herd. The theme of Oedipus Rex is that a man, a king, must accept his responsibility, which is to die.

And Creon leaves Oedipus, saying, “You do not know me; but the city knows me.”

This is a play filled with difficulty and subtlety for us because it abounds with layers of meaning like an archeological excavation.

For example, there is the obvious story of the destruction of a great man by a crime which he could not avoid, and over which everyone laments, the city, the chorus, Iocaste, even Creon in his way. And the crime is the double one of parricide and incest, to the total revelation of which that action moves with resistless force. On the revelation, Iocaste kills herself, Oedipus blinds and banishes himself.

But as we go deeper into this layer we find contradictions and difficulties that may be brushed aside as unimportant, irrelevant, or minor weaknesses, but this will not satisfy a fully developed artistic conscience.

Here is another interpretation. Iocaste was the Queen-Priestess whose husbands were chosen to reign by her side for one year and then were killed. In some cases the new king was the one to kill the old king, and in some cases not, but in any case, he was the scapegoat. Oedipus, who had killed the old king by trickery and force, overthrew the ancient practice, dominated the Queen and expected to die of old age. Then a plague occurred, or else people wanted to return to the old ways, and Oedipus was killed or banished and the Queen’s brother, Creon, more likely was not her brother.

This, we will say, was the original story which in garbled form came down to Sophocles, who wrote it for his Athenian audience.

The Dorians, marching into Greece, found there conflict of the Achaeans with the old religion, and to them it was both fascinating and terrible. To the nomads of the north, to kill a king or chieftain was not only regicide, but parricide. (Remember that among the nomads, the chief is also, literally, father of dozens of his subjects and grandfather to hundreds.) Therefore, his wife is mother to the tribe, which also conforms to the earth religion’s belief that the Queen-Priestess is the living embodiment of the Mother of All.

It is quite clear, so far as Sophocles was concerned, that the crime of Oedipus was not against the mother but against the father, for Oedipus had killed his father and taken his father’s wife. His crime was usurpation. He had killed the rightful king.

But that was the Dorian point of view.

From the point of view of the older religion, his crime was that he would not submit to its precepts. He would change the order of things. He would dominate the Queen. He would rule beyond his term and he would resist his own sacrifice.

So he was an usurper from this point of view, too.

I think this is possibly the hidden meaning behind the double crime. Surely it is the double meaning woven throughout the play: he has sinned against earth and he has sinned against heaven. He was a usurper in terms of the patriarchal society of the Dorians (he had come from Corinth) and the matriarchal society of the pre-Greeks.

But though the conscious action of the play is Dorian, and addresses the Gods Zeus and Apollo, the unconscious pre-Greek meaning prevails!

Let’s ask again, what is his crime? Pride, and the chorus calls it again and again. This is his sin, not the one of which he was unaware. Pride of manliness, majesty of kingliness, pride of the Achaean war hero, the pride of Achilles and Ajax and Hercules. Pride of accomplishment. Pride of ambition. And this is what blinds him to the crimes of parricide and incest. Because the proud Achaean-man cannot properly rule. He usurps the role of the sacred king who ruled by right of the earth’s needs and the sway of the seasons on which the agricultural life was based. He rules only by right of his strong arm and his quick brain; he is a tyrant.

But it is a great tragedy because the image of man as hero — which brought about, in fact, the birth of our modern western world — is called to task, is found to be magnificent and nothing. It is all in the fourth ode.

I think this is the basis of drama, with the coming of the Achaean man who started to set himself against nature, to seriously and consciously put his humanness against mortality. He had discovered himself and desired to enlarge himself but to do so was engaged in an endless conflict with the natural order of things.

This struggle is the basis of all western drama, including comedy, the purpose of which is to make fun of the hero, and is centred on the person of the king, for he is both the hero and the usurper.

Surely Shakespeare’s historical plays centre on the problem of kingship and the right to rule. Shakespeare consciously supports the hero image, the man of power, in these plays and builds up an image of the ideal king. Then the ancient pattern emerges. Something terrible, dark, faceless shadows the bright image of Henry V.

Look at Hamlet. Something paralyzes the will of this ideal prince — ideal because moderate, intelligent, courteous, manly. His duty is to kill his stepfather the king, and become king himself. It is not only his duty. To kill the king and marry the queen is to kill his father and marry his mother. This is what he desires to do, and it is his very desire that paralyzes him. It is as though the ancient monsters had arisen in him, the ancient agricultural pattern, the one basis upon which kingship could be sacred, and it appalls him because he is the ideal man and prince. So consciously the play is a play of frustration and inaction: a man driven mad by the need of the earth becomes, instead of the Prince of Light, the Prince of Darkness and Death, capable despite all his potential of nothing but destruction.

So much concerning the mythological and religious basis of the Hamlet play is to be found in Gilbert Murray’s essay on Hamlet and Orestes, that it would be superfluous to say anything more about it, except that I cannot altogether agree that it is the mythological content that is the hidden vibration and tension making for these great dramas. Drama is not myth, nor is it religion. Given the unconscious in us which responds to the primitive religious story, the Oedipus complex, it is not this that makes drama. I claim that drama is a specific art, growing out of a specific historical situation, and not universal to mankind. I do not think drama existed previous to the coming of the tribesmen into Greece. I think it came mainly with the development of the hero made into a conscious man of power and action and that it will die when the conditions that brought it into being no longer exist. Drama is a western, European art form. Neither dance, mime, song, Noh play, nor any other form of theatre can take its place. I think drama is bases on one situation and one only: man’s effort to conquer nature. This is a very specific effort though it has become universalized, projected onto a way of life of action on the part of the modern nation, which is the reason why drama had to become realistic in order to remain true to its origins.

Anyway, it is the conscious hero, the man of power and action against the behest of nature, which makes the excitement and tension of drama.

The greatness of Oedipus and Hamlet is that they are both potentially great heroes (having the attributes that make for conquest) and they fight the primitive destiny that makes them no more than sun-heroes, doomed after a moment of victory. They cannot beat time and nature. The consciousness of man fights for independent existence to make its own life equal with the moon and stars and he does not succeed. It is the struggle of modern man.

 

Let us not go back again.

 

Though Greece is the source of so much that is essential in our western society, it was another people who shaped its specific religious ethos, and in fact deepened the forces of conflict irreparably.

The religious conflict which took place in Greece resulted in temporary and at least conscious assimilation or fusion, and the conflict was forced underground to be expressed in the split between the conscious and unconscious in every person.

This was not so among another brand of the Indo-Europeans who moved down into the ancient Middle East with a Sky God called Jehovah. They were wandering nomads and in these ancient lands from Babylonia to Egypt they discovered a mixed worship of sky and earth gods brought about by earlier immigrations. But the Hebrews never settled down and were able to fight off temptations to the debasement of their Jehovah. They could do so only by strengthening the exclusiveness of their Sky God, and making him into something entirely different from the other gods encountered. They purified their manner of religious expression, meaning that they refused all material representation of the god, increased their taboos and developed a unique system of laws and rites to govern their daily lives.

When they found it impossible to live with other peoples in unity, they carved out a kingdom for themselves. Even then the terrible temptations consequent upon settling down which had overtaken other sky worshipping peoples proved almost too much for them. Their religion became influenced by older religions, and this brought about a religious revolution within their society. It is all in the Prophets, Isaiah 55:

 

Saith the Lord, “As the heavens are
higher than the earth, so are my ways
higher than your ways, and thoughts than your
thoughts. For as the rain cometh down, and the
snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but
watereth the earth, and make it bring forth the
seed, that it may give seed to the mower and
bread to the earth —

So shall my word be that going forth
out of my mouth; shall not return unto its void
but it shall accomplish that which I please, and
it shall prosper in the thing whereto I send it.

But draw near hither, ye sons of the
sorceress, the seed of the                   and the whore,
against whom do ye sport yourselves?
Against whom make ye a wide mouth, and draw out
the tongue? Are ye not children of transgression?
A seed of falsehoods, enflaming yourselves with idols
under every green tree?

 

Or read Jeremiah 44 or Ezekiel 8. Surely the whole of the Old Testament is a story of a great religious struggle out of which was founded the Law of Jehovah, the greatest of the patriarchal gods of history. It was bitter and it was never ending, and it still continues.

Jahweh merged into the Father-God of the Christians, but with a difference. He was not exclusive and his character was altogether changed. This was the work of Jesus Christ.

But the only means by which the Father God could win was to make himself absolute, transcendental, ruling over but utterly separate from the earth and its children, and completely non-material, invisible. Also he was good, and anything weakening him was accounted evil. Thus the religious conflict which resulted in an uneasy and unstable fusion of earth and sky religion in Greece — and remained their subjective (until Christianity came along) — was externalized in the religion of the patriarchal nomadic Hebrews. There were the believers and the non-believers, the Good and the Bad, eternally opposed. It was war, not family bickering, in Heaven and on earth.

This is a much easier religion, in one sense, than that of internal strain that resulted in the great drama of Greece, but it was not to remain so for long.

Despite all the fierceness and terror of original Judaism, the old matriarchal religion of the Middle East was resourceful enough to create a religion which, if it could not destroy the Father religion, would soften it and give it meaning in terms of human behaviour and the earth’s needs.

This was Christianity. Was not Christ another earth god born, however, under the full glare of the patriarchal religion? Born to a priestess of the earth religion, claimed to be given to her by the Father God. Born during the ancient festival of the New Year, which was heralded by a star (I don’t know which one) entering a certain meridian. Recognized as a god by the Kingdom of the East, that is, those still worshipping the earth goddess. It is three wise men, three kings, three shepherds, always reflecting the ancient triple character of the goddess. He is born humbly, of the earth. His young wisdom confounds the elders. He rides an ass, which was a sacred animal to the earth goddess, and his philosophy, his creed — are these the words of a patriarchal nomad? — are words of pacifism, gentleness, and humility except to the representatives of the Judaic religion, the scribes and Pharisees. But he is different. He is Thammuz and Adonis purified, almost in one sense eunichoid, in another simply ascetic (possibly connected to the Essene communities of the Dead Sea, but this is doubtful). His formal address is still to the Father God; at one point he repudiates his own mother. On the other hand, he honours Mary Magdalene, who has been described as a temple prostitute, that is, a devotee of the earth goddess.

Again, as in the Oedipus story, here is a coming together of two great traditions, a merging of the earth and sky traditions. The symbolic content is the story of his life, is that of a revived and purified Thammuz, a sacred king who knows that he will be sacrificed, and is sacrificed in accordance, not with a preconceived plan, but with an ancient religion. And his appeal is to the humble, the meek, the downtrodden — that is, those who have been downtrodden, supplanted by the patriarchal religion of the scribes and Pharisees. Furthermore, God the Lord and master has become God the Father, a family father accompanied by the Son and Holy Ghost (which in the old Greek text had a feminine gender). He is accompanied by twelve disciples, like the                            of the Greek chorus.

But he speaks of a personal transformation into the way of the one God, the Father who is in Heaven. There are so many mysteries within mystery of the Christian story because in this religion was a merging of the two great religions of the world — the only two — of earth and sky we say in plain words signifying something which these words can more than suggest. It is for this reason that Christian religion is endlessly a mystery, endlessly rich, endlessly undiscovered, and endlessly unstable like life itself. No more so than Hinduism, of course, where we find even more bewildering, contradictory, all embracing merging of the two traditions. But the terrible dualism which in India became dispersed over hundreds of cults and in hundreds of religions, in the west under the influence of Hellenism became subjectified, universalized, internalized. To be a Hindu in practice might mean any of a number of worships — in one village the worship was of Vishnu, in another of Siva, in another of Brahma — and the caste system furthered this stratification of worship under the societal name of Hinduism (notice the parallels, however: the Hindu European coming in with their thunder and the great Vedic heroic age, the merging of the old earth religions of India with the sky religion, that is, Siva-Siva and other hermaphroditic gods).

In China the dualism was sanctified under a non-personal way, the Tao, of which the ying and the yang were the opposite poles of night and day, moist and dry, cold and hot, female and male.

But it was not so in the west, although nearly so, for some centuries. When the ascetic Christian community of Rome became institutionalized under Roman Catholicism, then with its Mary worship, its deified Saints, its church rites both profane and sacred, its relics, its pilgrimages, a fusion of the old earth and sky religions very nearly succeeded. Yet, Christianity being what it was, the supposed fusion was a confusion and dismay and conflict within the church itself. Finally they church could not contain the dualism of Earth and Sky, and so came the Reformation and the Counter Reformation and the religious wars that rent the medieval unity to create the national states of modern Europe.

Why could the church not contain this dualism as Hinduism managed to do, and Taoism? Because, on the one hand, out of Old Testament Christianity: there is only one God, one Law, one Judgment, and you must worship the one God and obey his law and respect his judgment, none other. On the other hand it said in the New Testament: worship this God, obey him, and respect his judgment, but it is not enough to honour him, observe him, and pray to him. You must give yourself wholly to him, change your life, be reborn — in other words, you are the sacrifice.

It is the Sky God who is put on the cross and sacrificed, purified, spiritualized, made transcendental, etherealized out of existence, but winning, by this sacrifice, the absolute power he craves.

And he promised not to come again until the Last Judgment, the end of the world.

In another manner of speaking, it is the Sky God in each of us, that which aspires, that which would elevate us, enlarge us, make us bigger than we are, lead us in the way of exclusive ambition and power, that which serves the hunger of the ego of man.

You will say: but this is not Christ; he was never a man of ego.

How small we are, and our tears!

How we live in a tiny meadow with tinkling streams!

How history, religion, and life itself hides and wraps and cloaks reality!

The tenderness, the meekness, the sternness, the strength are gone. But naked man crucified between Heaven and Earth. Forsaken — the Earth Mother cannot help him, and the Sky Father, for whatever reason, does not. He has become a stranger to them both. Man alone. Utterly alone in the universe, and there is no help for him. Man realizing only himself, and therefore annihilated.

Turning from the Earth which had reality, giving his allegiance to the Sky God which had none except in relation to the earth, he found himself stretched above the firmament, alone.

A cold wind swept Golgotha that night, put out the soldier’s fires, and thunder raged in the distant hills.

Something had indeed gone out of life, or let us say the possibility of something, or let us say it was the beginning of consciousness, not mind, but the consciousness of self not just as the Greeks realized, but the frailty of human life deified, made incarnate, and crucified.

Here is the terrible change still sweeping through our lives. In it is the renunciation of Earth and Sky, the renunciation of Life, in the name of an extraordinary aspiration, in the name of a future fusion, in the name of a future hope.

Can we grasp this fact? Life offered in the name of a hope?