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Myths may have told stories about the gods, but they were really focused on the more elusive, puzzling, and tragic aspects of the human predicament that lay outside the remit of logos.
Kiekegaard's suspension of the ethical
A myth was never intended as an accurate account of a historical event; it was something that had in some sense happened once but that also happens all the time.
make the “truth” of the myth a reality in your own life.
scholarly debate which came first: the mythical story or the rites attached to it.5 Without ritual, myths made no sense and would remain as opaque as a musical score, which is impenetrable to most of us until interpreted instrumentally.
Religion is a practical discipline that teaches us to discover new capacities of mind and heart.
religion as a “knack”
A late Beethoven quartet does not represent sorrow but elicits it in hearer and player alike, and yet it is emphatically not a sad experience.
“It is decisively the fact that language does have frontiers,” explains the British critic George Steiner, “that gives proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the world.
“what lies beyond man’s word is eloquent of God.”
This rationalized interpretation of religion has resulted in two distinctively modern phenomena: fundamentalism and atheism.
Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not
exist and that there is “nothing” out there; in making these assertions, their aim was not to deny the reality of God but to safeguard God’s transcendence.
If a conventional idea of God inspires empathy and respect for all others, it is doing its job.
It is now generally agreed that these labyrinths were sacred places for the performance of some kind of ritual.
Fifty-five similar images in the other caves and three more Palaeolithic rock drawings in Africa have been found, all showing men confronting animals in a state of trance with upraised arms.
A tribesman has to remain with his victim, crying when it cries and participating symbolically in its death throes.
religious life was rooted in acknowledgment of the tragic fact that life depends upon the destruction of other creatures.
It sees every single person, object, or experience as a replica of a reality in a sacred world that is more effective and enduring than our own.
Like art, religion is an attempt to construct meaning in the face of the relentless pain and injustice of life.
As meaning-seeking creatures, men and women fall very easily into despair. They have created religions and works of art to help them find value in their lives, despite all the dispiriting evidence to the contrary.
Religion is hard work. Its insights are not self-evident and have to be cultivated in the same way as an appreciation of art, music, or poetry must be developed.
These rituals were not the expression of a “belief” that had to be accepted in blind faith. As the German scholar Walter Burkert explains, it is pointless to look for an idea or doctrine behind a rite.
these ideas were the product of ritual.25
The desire to cultivate a sense of the transcendent may be the defining human characteristic.
religion require the disciplined cultivation of a different mode of consciousness.
Human beings are so constituted that periodically they seek out ekstasis, a “stepping outside” the norm. Today people who no longer find it in a religious setting resort to other outlets: music, dance, art, sex, drugs, or sport. We make a point of seeking
out these experiences that touch us deeply within and lift us momentarily beyond ourselves. At such times, we feel that we inhabit our humanity more fully than usual and experience an enhancement of being.
an entirely different kind of religiosity emerged in the West during the seventeenth century.
Ancient hunters revered a goddess known as the Great Mother.
There was, therefore, no belief in a single supreme being in the ancient world.
The ultimate reality was not a personalized god, therefore, but a transcendent mystery that could never be plumbed.
The chief characteristic of this “divinity” was ellu (“holiness”), a word that had connotations of “brightness,” “purity,” and “luminosity.” The gods were called the “holy ones” because their symbolic stories, effigies, and cults evoked the radiance of ellu within their worshippers.
The people of Israel called their patronal deity, the “holy one” of Israel, Elohim, a Hebrew variant on ellu that summed up everything that the divine could mean for human beings.
they imagined a Divine Assembly, a council of gods of many different ranks, who worked together to sustain the cosmos and expressed the multifaceted complexity of the sacred.
This brings us to the second principle of premodern religion. Religious discourse was not intended to be understood literally because it was only possible to speak about a reality that transcended language in symbolic terms.
In most mythologies, the High God is often depicted as a passive, helpless figure; unable to control events, he retreats to the periphery of the pantheon and finally fades away.
In our own day, the God of the monotheistic tradition has often degenerated into a High God. The rites and practices that once made him a persuasive symbol of the sacred are no longer effective, and people have stopped participating in them.
Nietzsche - "God is dead!" Thus Spoke Zarathustra
A creation story was primarily therapeutic.
The cosmology was not influenced by current scientific speculation because it was exploring the interior rather than the external world.
The Israelites also told stories of their god Yahweh slaying sea monsters to order the cosmos.48
Here the great sage Uddalaka Aruni slowly and patiently brings this saving insight to birth within his son Shvetaketu, and has him perform a series of tasks. In the most famous of these experiments, Shvetaketu had to leave a lump of salt in a beaker of water overnight and found, of course, that even though the salt had dissolved, the water still tasted salty. “You, of course, did not see it there, son,” Uddalaka pointed out, “yet it was always right there.”
The truths of religion are accessible only when you are prepared to get rid of the selfishness, greed, and self-preoccupation that, perhaps inevitably, are ingrained in our thoughts and behavior but are also the source of so much of our pain. The Greeks would call this process kenosis, “emptying.” Once you gave up the nervous craving to promote yourself, denigrate others, draw attention to your unique and special qualities, and ensure that you were first in the pecking order, you experienced an immense peace.
the numinous acknowledgment that the ultimate reality was beyond the competence of language.
Religion was not a notional matter. The Buddha, for example, had little time for theological speculation.
The Buddha told him that he was like a man who had been shot with a poisoned arrow and refused medical treatment until he had discovered the name of his assailant and what village he came from. He would die before he got this perfectly useless information. What difference would it make to discover that a god had created the world? Pain, hatred, grief, and sorrow would still exist. These issues were fascinating, but the Buddha refused to discuss them because they were irrelevant: “My disciples, they will not help you, they are not useful in the quest for holiness; they do not lead to peace and
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The Buddha had no time for abstract doctrinal formulations divorced from action. Indeed, to accept a dogma on somebody else’s authority was what he called “unskillful” or “unhelpful” (akusala). It could not lead to enlightenment because it amounted to an abdication of personal responsibility.
In the eighth century BCE, the people of Israel were about to attempt something unusual in the ancient world. They would try to make Yahweh, the “holy one
of Israel,” the only symbol of ultimate transcendence.
The Eden story is not a historical account; it is rather a description of a ritual experience. It expresses what scholars have called the coincidentia oppositorum in which, during a heightened encounter with the sacred, things that normally seem opposed coincide to reveal an underlying unity.
A close examination of the text shows, for example, that J saw Abraham, a man of the south, as the prime hero of Israel and had little time for Moses, who was far more popular in the north and one of the leading protagonists of E’s narrative.17
