MORE
THAN MERE METAPHORS
An
introduction to the suprahuman
THE
TERROR OF HISTORY
In
Mircea Eliade’s view, ancient peoples
believed their myths to occur in a remote ‘sacred time’. Opposite of this was
the ‘profane time’ of their own, and our, day-to-day lives. Profane time
followed a linear path, accumulating changes and unique events as it went on. Sacred
time had a more limited amount of content, usually a cosmic creation, sagas of
heroes and gods, a final dissolution, and an eventual rebirth. It was sacred
time that was more revered by the ancients. Sacred time was the central point
of the cosmos which our world only imitated. We were the incidental bystanders
to far greater processes.
These cycles may have been natural for the
gods and spirits, but our own lives weren’t as predictable. Seeking to overcome
the uncertainty of our existence, we once tried to link the events of our personal
and communal lives with those of the myths in hopes of gaining a sense of direction
and purpose. Understanding the deeper significance of a creation myth or the trials
of a cultural hero gave us insight into the nature of the world and the values
we should live by. The patterns in the sacred sphere reflected those in the
profane. Achievements of harmony or victory in the heavens gave inspiration to
those below. Likewise, defeats and raptures gave warning that all entities
within the cosmos, the gods included, were bound to certain limits.
Imagining sacred time can be difficult on
the first encounter with the term. It may be helpful to add an additional sense
of space to it, but that may conflate it with some kind of other dimension,
which isn’t quite it either. Sacred time occurred here, in a sense, but not
here in another. No description will be exact and it varies over cultures
and across time. Trying to give sacred time a literal definition is not the
point. The concept exists to explain something that is beyond literal
description. For now, imagine it this way:
You are a member of an impoverished
community. Everyday carries the risk of total ruin. You are surrounded on all
sides by enemies and the land itself can be fickle. Then one day a blueprint
arrives. Perhaps it was dropped from the sky as a gift, perhaps it was stolen
by a cunning individual. The blueprint comes from a far off and greatly revered
people and describes the construction of some immense infrastructure project,
something like a dam or a powerplant. The people from which the plan came were
afflicted by the same threats and now you have one of their secrets to
stability. You’ve heard rumors of these far-off people, some in the community
even claim to have had contact with them at times. It’s not clear if they’re
still around or how powerful they currently are but, in the meantime, you have
this plan that describes what must be built, what kind of jobs must be assigned
in order to build it, and what rules should be in place once the project is
operational. Perhaps what your community builds won’t be as great as the
original, but it will make an incredible difference. And so, you get to work.
Now, the above description is quite
general. It describes the right conduct for a united group of people in order
to replicate something that occurred in sacred time. Other myths may speak to
individuals, some even suggesting the violation of sacred planning. The
takeaway is to understand that the denizens of the sacred and the profane often
dealt with the same issues. The Greek Gods were in constant turmoil with each
other over all sorts of soap-opera drama. The Ancient Egyptian afterlife went
even further with the similarities between the heavenly and earthly. Those who
crossed over to the other side could look forward to more the same: The flow of
an afterlife Nile, irrigating afterlife fields, tended to by afterlife farmers.
THE
ARCHETYPES
Ancient
myths can be further broken down into smaller components. We call these pieces archetypes,
from the Greek ‘arche’ (old) and ‘types’ (image). The word itself can get
confusing because an archetype is not necessarily the literal image itself but
the pattern or purpose behind it. In order to qualify as an archetype, the image has
to be found in all cultures, be present in all eras of human history, and be
able to symbolically represent something. Take the archetype of ‘the mountain’.
It could refer to a literal mountain,
such as Mount Sinai. Or it could refer to any raised, solitary place where a holy
person goes to commune with the divine, such as a stupa. The mountain archetype can also be found in a place like
Sauron’s tower. The tower is still a mountain in that it serves as an
intermediary point between the world and a higher power, but for Middle Earth
it’s understood to be broadcasting something much more malevolent into the
world. And certainly, what’s held to be a holy mountain by one group may be
considered evil by another, but that discussion on relativism is best saved for
another time when it can be given a deeper measure of attention.
Much of the work on archetypes was done by
Carl Gustav Jung. Jung made the
myths and archetypes out to be very personal, inner experiences. They were
psychological phenomenon. The tale of an adventurer who travels out into the
unknown world mirrored the experience of an individual who began an inner
journey into their own mind. All external myths spoke to an internal reflection. Consider what unites these two adventure
stories,
-Odysseus and his crew begin the long
journey home after the sacking of Troy
-Captain Katheryn Janeway brings the
Voyager home after a mishap throws her ship into deep space
Pretty obvious, right? Now try this one,
-After a strange curse befalls her island,
Moana journeys out to restore the heart fire to her people’s Mother Goddess.
There’s a relation between all three. The
first two seem to be fairly literal, heroes trying to come home. The third also
centers around the homecoming of a hero but with the implication that the ‘home’
archetype refers to a broader sense of community, drawing in more psychological
elements. The curse that had fallen over the island resulted from her tribe
having lost a sense of connection to their heritage and therefore displaced them
from their ‘spiritual home’. Much more work on the similarities between myths
has been done by Joseph Campbell.
MODERNITY
AND MASTERY
For
the ancients, the world was a place where events proceeded largely beyond their
control. At its best, this encouraged a sense of accepting the world as it was.
At its worst, it instilled a spirit of fatalism, that nothing could come by
effort if not preordained in the heavens. Either way, the world was an endless
cycle of the same occurrences and so, the myths. The myths and archetypes that
explained what was happening and what we could do to brace ourselves against
the so called terror of history.
Modernity is the counter-swing to this,
and perhaps overreaction. We no longer see ourselves as parts within nature but as parts on top of nature. We believe we’re in
control and if we can just figure out all the little ticks and quirks of the
world around us, it can all be refigured as needed. The once rich spiritual
taxonomies that described us as scaffolded into the rest of existence collapsed
into the two simple categories of human and everything else. We no longer feel any
commonality between the rhythms of the world and the rhythms of our lives. This
changes the esteem we hold for our myths. They are no longer felt to describe
cycles and processes that once begun, carried us along with them to their
natural ends. Myths retreated into our heads where their motifs now connect to
momentary feelings rather than all-encompassing motions.
THE
ETERNAL RETURN
It
should be obvious (I hope) to anyone that either extreme is undesirable. But I
do not think the answer lies in finding some kind of single, balanced point
between the two. Rather, it would be better to imagine our lives as in constant
interval between the two, in need of continuous reappraisal and adjustment. For
now, it is necessary to consider that the integrity of myth was dissolved when
we failed to find humanity beyond humans, but to further recognize this nothing
in that observation prevents the same immense otherness from looking back and
finding only more of itself. To understand that we may not be as free and
autonomous as the last few centuries of development would lead us to believe,
and that we may accept this without giving into fatalism nor the reactionary
impulse to throttle ourselves back into an unreflective and illusory ideal of a
time passed. That the archetypes and myths can neither be discarded as
irrelevant nor serve as an object of self-flagellation for an inheritance lost.
Finally, to consider the paradox of how these suprahuman elements reintegrate
us into a word from which we never fully separated.
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