Myth And Ritual In Christianity Part 13

We adore thy Cross, 0 Lord: and we praise and glorify thy holy Resurrection: for by the wood of the Cross the whole world is filled with joy.

Whereupon there is immediately sung the extraordinary hymn, Crux fidelis, in which the instrument of execution appears as the very Tree of Life: Crux fidelis, inter omnes Arbor una n.o.bilis: Nulla Silva tamen profert Fronde, fore, germine.

Faithful Cross, the one Tree n.o.ble above all: no forest affords the like of this in leaf, or flower, or seed.

r S 8 Myth and Ritual in Christianity De parentis protoplasti Fraude factor condolens, Quando pomi noxialis In necem morsu ruit: Ipse lignum tunc notavit, d.a.m.na ligni ut solveret.

The Creator pitying the sin of our first parent, wherefrom he fell into death by the bite of the poisoned apple, did himself fonhwith signify wood for his healing of the hurts of wood.

It is obvious that the Wood or Tree of the Cross is of the highest mythological significance, and that its relation to the actual stauros (stake) upon which the historical Jesus was hung is relatively small. Many modern Christian historians think it most unlikely that Jesus was actually crucified upon a wooden cross of the type familiar in crucifixes, whether of the Latin t, Greek +, or Egyptian Taufcross T forms. It was more probably a simple stake, such that the actual symbol of the Cross was shaped according to mythological rather than historical considerations. 7As is well known, the Cross and the Sacrificial Tree are symbols far more ancient than Christi, anity, and had a significance of such importance that it is not at all inappropriate for the hymn to say: Sola digna to fuisti Ferre mundi victimam.

Thou alone (the Tree) wert found worthy to bear the Victim of the world.

So many of the hero,G.o.ds and avatars are a.s.sociated with the Tree that the central symbol of Christianity is of a truly universal nature, and by no means a historical abnormality. In the myth of Osiris, "he who springs from the returning waters, the body of the G.o.d-slain by Set the Evil One-is found within a giant tamarisk or pinetree which had been cut down and used for the central pillar of the Palace of Byblos. Attis, son of the virgin Nana, died by self~sacrifice under a pine. Gautama the Buddha, son of Maya, attained his supreme Awakening as he sat in meditation beneath the Bo Tree. Odin learned the wisdom of the runes by immolating himself upon the WorldTree, Yggdrasil, with a spear cut from the same Tree: I know that I hung On a wind.rocked tree Nine whole nights, With a spear wounded, And to Odin offered Myself to myself; On that tree Of which no one knows From what root it springs.'

In like manner, Adonis (=Adonai, the Lord) was born of Myrrha the myrtle, and the Babylonian G.o.d Tammuz was a.s.sociated in his death with the cedar, the tamarisk, and the willow .2 In almost all the mythological traditions this Tree is the Axis Mundi, the Centre of the World, growing in the "navel of the world" as, in mediaeval drawings, the Tree of Jesse is shown growing from the navel of Jesse. In the myth of Eden the Tree stands in the centre of the Garden, at the source of four rivers which "go out to water the garden" .3 For obvious reasons, Christianity regards the Cross as the centre of the Odin's Rune Song, trs. Benjamin Thorpe in The Edda of Saemund the Learned (London, 1866).

2 In the Babylonian hymn called The Lament of the Flutes for Tammuz, a sowcalled "fertility" G.o.d taken to represent the death and resurrection of the crops, he is described as "a tamarisk that in the garden has drunk no water, . . . a willow that rejoiced not by the watercourse."

3 The clear ident.i.ty of the Cross with this central Tree of Eden is shown, not only in the legends of the Holy Rood which a.s.sert that the Cross of Christ r Go Myth and Ritual in Christianity world, and likewise places it upon the altar as the ritual centre of the church. The World/Ash, Yggdrasil, had its roots in NiFlheim, the uttermost depths, and its topmost branch, Lerad, reached to the palace of the Allfather On in heaven. Similarly the world/tree of the Siberian Yakuts grows at "the central point, the World Navel, where the moon does not wane, nor the sun go down."z Conversely, the .Axle-Tree of the Upanishads and the Bbagavad'Gita grows out of Brahma and, like the Sephiroth Tree of the Kabala, has roots above and branches below.

The symbolism of the Tree is quite clearly that the Tree is the world-Life itself-having its stem rooted in the unknown. Its branches, leaves, flowers, and fruit form the multiplicity of creatures--"I am the vine; ye are the branches"-which blossom from the ever/fertile source of life. The wood of the Tree is matter, prima materia, out of which all things are made, so that it is not unfitting that, in his earthly incarnation, the Son of G.o.d should be also the Son of the Carpenter-Joseph. For this reason the Gnostics distinguished between three types of men, the pneumatic, the psychic, and the hylic-the was made from the wood of that Tree, but also in the famous Great Cross of the Lateran, a mosaic dating, perhaps, from the time of Constantine, and restored by Nicolas IV. It shows an ornate Cross of the Latin form, having at its head the descending Dove of the Holy Spirit. From its foot there flow four rivers named Gihon, Pison, Tigris, and Euphrates, which were the four rivers of Eden. Between these rivers stands the City of G.o.d, guarded by the Archangel Michael, and behind him, in the midst of the Ciry, stands a palm~tree sure mounted by a phoenix. (The phoenix was commonly a.s.sociated with Christ because it was supposed to the eternally from the ashes of the fire in which it perished.) Two stags stand upon either side of the Cross, and at the bottom of the whole mosaic six sheep are standing in the waters of the four rivers. The parallel with Yggdrasil is extraordinary, far its topmost branch, Lerad, bears the falcon Vedfolnir whose piercing eye sees all things in the universe, and the four stags Dain, Dvalin, Duneyr, and Durathor feed upon its leaves. Honey dew drops down from their horns, and supplies water for all the rivers of the earth.

r From Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (New York, 1949), pp. 334-5. y representations of the crucified Christ likewise show the sun and moon on either side of the Cross_ lastnamed being those unfitted for supreme knowledge because of their total involvement in materiality, in byli, which in Greek is wood. Furthermore, the Tree is cruciform because the Cross is the shape of the world", since the earth has four directions or quarters, and the very universe itself-ringed by the Zodiac-has four fixed, four cardinal, and four mutable paints. Christ with his Twelve Apostles is in clear corre spondence with the Sun in its twelve zodiacal signs, and the crucifix is very frequently found with the four fixed signs Taurus, L.eo, Scorpio (interchangeable with the phoenix eagle), and Aquarius at its extremities, standing for the Four Evangelists who, with the Four Archangels, do duty in Christianity for the Four Regents of HindueBuddl.u.s.t mythology-the caryatidal kings who support the dome of heaven.'

To this Tree, image of the finite world, the Son of G.o.d is nailed by his hands and feet, and a spear is thrust in his side. And because the finite world is manifested by the contrast of opposites, lefr and right, high and low, before and behind, day and night, good and evil, the image of the world is cruciform. On the right hand is the sun, and on the left the moon. At the head is the fiery Dove, and at the foot the serpent or the skull-contrasting figures of life and death, liberation and bondage. The whole is, in short, a revelation of what human life is--in so far as our life is the identification of the true Self with time and s.p.a.ce, past and future, pleasure and pain. This identification is the nailing, in consequence of which we are "dead and buried"-absorbed and confused in a past which "is not".

1 Fanciful as these correspondences may seem to the modern mind, we must not forget that the Christian myth was formulated by people for whom they were immensely significant. Christianity was not elaborated from the scriptures by the rational and historical methods of its modern apologists. The tremendous importance of the four directions and of astrological symbolism in general is well treated in Dr. Austin Farrer's study of the Apocalypse ent.i.tled A Rebirth of Images (London, 5949).

1 62 Myth and Ritual in Christianity This is why the Son of G.o.d is impaled with Five Wounds, for the world of time and s.p.a.ce with which the Self is identified is based on the five senses-strictly speaking, on the memory of what comes to us through the five senses, for this is the sense of being "stuck or nailed. In reality the past drops away, but in the mind it sticks and so impales us that we are in bondage to the past and to death. By the sticking, the memory, of the five senses we are helplessly attached to a world which we simulf taneously love and hate, which is pain to the degree that it is irresistible pleasure. In the Jatalea Tales the Buddha, as Prince Five Weapons, is found in a similar predicament with the Giant Sticky/Hair--a monstrous ogre whom no man could defeat because all weapons became stuck in the clinging hairs which covered his body. The Prince fared no better than others, for he fought with the giant until he was glued to its hair by both hands, both feet, and even by his head. But just as the giant was about to devour him, the Prince said, "Monster, why should I fear? For in one life one death is quite certain. Moreover, I have in my stomach a thunderbolt-a weapon which you will be unable to digest if you eat me. It will tear your insides to pieces!' At this, Sticky/Hair let go, and the Prince was free.

The thunderbolt, the lightningflash, in the future Buddha's stomach was the vajra, otherwise known as the Diamond Body, which is equivalent to the G.o.dhead in Christ the eternal Self which is never actually in time. So long, then, as man thinks of himself as this "I", he finds that there is absolutely nothing he can do to release himself from the bondage of time; indeed, the more he struggles to be free, to be unselfish, just, and good, the more he is stuck in the entanglements of pride. "I/consciousness is a vicious circle such that every attempt to ' Jataka, 55: '. Cf. A. K. Coomaraswamy, "A Note on the Stickfast Motif", in Journal of American Folklore, vol. 57, pp. 128-3' ('944). This is, of course, a version of the universal motif which appears in American folklore as the Tar/Baby story.

T Pa.s.sion 16 3 FIG. 9 THE CRUCIFIXION.

From a Spanish woodcut in the British Museum, c. isth century. The Virgin

and St. John the Evangelist stand upon either side

stop or escape from it makes it whirl the more. Every move, whether towards selfa.s.sertion or selffdenial, is like the plight of the fly in hang-for one loves oneself only to hate oneself, and then the struggle to be free imprisons every limb. In such an impa.s.se "I" must at last give up.

My G.o.d, my G.o.d, why halt thou forsaken me? Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit. It is finished.

And he gave up the ghost.

This is the universal testimony of the "knowers of G.o.d -that the spiritual life of man dawns in the moment when, in a profound and special sense, he does nothing. "I do nothing of myself. This is no ordinary inactivity, for to be idle with the express intention of attaining sanct.i.ty, as in formal "quietism", is still activity in so far as it is a method, a means to discover G.o.d. But the true state of divine union is "without means", and comes to pa.s.s when man "gives up" not as a means to get, but because he knows with certainty that he has no other alternative. In the ordinary way, such certainty comes only through a struggle to be free by all available means, leading to the conviction of their futility. To put it in another way, the mind does not become free from the illusion of ego by the way of unconsciousness-by any attempted reversion to "nature", or to primitive innocence, and still less by any kind of forgetful inebriation in ecstatic sensations, whether induced by drugs or self/hypnosis. The ego is dissolved only through the way of consciousness, through becoming so conscious of what "I" is that it has no more power to enthrall.

This giving up" is the Sacrifice by which the Cross is transformed from the instrument of torture to the "medicine of the world, so that the Tree of Death becomes the Tree of Life. By the same alchemy the cruciform symbol of the eanh, of conflict and opposition, is also the symbol of the sun, of life/giving radiation.

Fulget crucis mysterium; Qua vita modem peftulit, Et mate vitam protulit.

s.h.i.+nes forth the mystery of the Cross; whereby life suffered death, and by death brought forth life.

For this reason Christian art fas.h.i.+ons the crucifix in two ways-the Cross of Christ suffering and the Cross of Christ in triumph, the latter showing him crowned and vested as King The Pa.s.sion 165 and Priest amid a full aureole radiating from the centre of the Cross. Properly, the first type of crucifix hangs or stands at the Rood Beam above the entrance to the choir or sanctuary, while the second type belongs upon the altar.

Thus the Tree standing at the axis, the crossroads of the world, at the central point of time and s.p.a.ce, is at once the Now out of which time and s.p.a.ce, past `and future, are exfoliated to the crucifixion of the Self, and the Now into which the Self "returns" when it "takes up the Cross" and no longer "misses the mark"--the "target" into which the spear of attention is at last thrust, releasing the river of blood and water which cleanses the world.

Spina, clavi, lancea, Mite corpus perforarunt: Unda manat et cruor: Terra, pontus, antra, mundus, Quo lavantur flumine!

Thorns, nails, and spear pierce that gentle Body: water flows forth, and blood: in which stream are cleansed the earth, the ocean, the stars, and the worldly

The Ma.s.s of the Presanctified moves on to its climax with the solemn procession which, after the adoration of the Wood

From the hymn Crux fedelis. Cf. MWralaka Upanishad, ii 2. 3:

"Using for a bow the great weapon of the Upanishad, One should set thereon an arrow made sharp by meditation. Stretching it with a mind pointed to the essence of That, Penetrate as the dark that Imperishable."

Note also that the cra.s.s of the Aztec saviour, Quetzalcoatl, was formed when the hero shot a pochatl tree through with another porhad, used as an arrow. Likewise, Love comes to birth when Cupid penetrates the Hear (of the world) with his dart, which Hear appears in Catholic symbolism as the Sacred Heart of Jesus pierced with a dagger or spear.

of the Cross, brings from the altar of repose-Gethsemane-the Host which was consecrated the previous day.' As the choir sings the Vexilla Regis, the hymn praising the Cross as the triumphal Banner of the King, the Host is brought to the high altar amid lights and incense. It is laid upon the corporal, the small square cloth which is always spread upon the altar for the Holy Sacrament, and solemnly the priest swings the censer of incense thrice around it, and once over it in the form of a cross. He washes his hands, and then, after singing the Pater noster, elevates the Host for the adoration of the people. Silently, he receives it in Communion, and the Ma.s.s ends without another word. All lights are extinguished; the doors of the Tabernacle are unveiled and thrown wide open; the church is deserted.

When Christ had "given up the ghost and the spear had been thrust into his side, his body was taken down from the Cross and taken to the garden of St. Joseph of Arimathaea. Just before sundown, the beginning of the Pa.s.sover Sabbath, it was laid in St. Joseph's tomb to await embalming upon the first day of the week since this was a work which, according to Jewish law, might not be performed on the Sabbath. This was the St. Joseph who, according to the great tradition of Western Christianity, received the Holy Cup of the Last Supper and brought it to the Celtic lands of Western Europe -a tradition which is the legendary basis for the cult of the Holy Graal.

While the Body of Christ remained in the tomb, his soul and spirit descended into Hades or Sheol, the place ofimprisonment

1 Hence the name Ma.s.s of the Presanctified.

2 It is a relatively recent custom to follow the Ma.s.s of the Presanctified with the Tre h.o.r.e, the Three Hour service of meditation upon the Seven Last Words from the Cross, which is more of an instruction than a regular part of the Liturgy.

3 Unfortunately the vast subject of the Graal myths cannot form a part of this book since it is our purpose to confine the subject to the central story of Christianity, excluding the many subsidiary myths which have accrued to it.

Tlx Pa.s.sion 167 of all who had departed this world from Adam until that very day. This tradition is only once mentioned in the canonical scriptures, but is preserved in detail in the apocryphal Acts of John. Catholic an, taking this text as its source, repre, sents Hades or h.e.l.l as a monstrous dragon with a vast mouth lined with terrible teeth. At the approach of Christ, carrying a Cross which is now transformed into a spear and pennant, the dragon of Hades yawns wide to release Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses, Aaron, and Al those who had lived justly under the Old Dispensation of the ages before the Incarnation. After this harrowing of h.e.l.l only those remain in prison who are in the following of Lucifer and his angels---chief among them the traitor Judas who betrayed Christ and then hanged himself-there to stay until the Day of the Last Judgement.

The importance of the "harrowing of h.e.l.l" is that the power of the Incarnation is retroactive or, to put it in another way, timeless. The coming of Christ is not a truly historical event-a step in a temporal process which is effective only for those who follow. It is equally effective for those who came before, and thus the Descent into Hades is a feature of the Christ~story which particularly suggests the timeless and mythological character of the whole. From another point of view, the descent into the depths is almost invariably one of the great tasks of the Hero with a Thousand Faces", of the Christ in his many forms. Hades or h.e.l.l may here be understood as the Valley of the Shadow, the experience of impotence and despair in which "I" die and Christ comes to life. The descent is likewise a figure of the descent of consciousness into the unconscious, of the necessity of knowing one's very depths. For so long as the unconscious remains unexplored it is possible to retain the naive feeling of the insularity and separateness of the conscious ego. Its actions are still taken to be free and spontaneous movements of the "will", and it can congratulate itself upon having motivations which are purely good, unaware of the "dark" and hidden forces of conditioning which actually guide them.''

Down in Hades the work of Christ is to bring Adam through the jaws of the dragon into Paradise. It will be remembered that when Adam was expelled from the Paradise Garden, the way back was guarded by a Cherub with a flaming sword which "turned every way". The gnas.h.i.+ng jaws of the dragon and the whirling sword are forms of the important mytho' logical motif which also appears as Symplegades, the Clas.h.i.+ng Rocks, the task of the hero being to leap through before he is cut or crushed. But this "Active Door" opens and shuts with such incredible rapidity or suddenness that the hero has to get through in "no time at all". His only chance is to leap without hesitation, for the slightest wavering or indecision will be his undoing. Obviously, the Active Door is the same as the "needle's eye" and the "strait and narrow gate", through which one can enter into heaven only on the condition of having become nothing and n.o.body. Adam can pa.s.s through the Jaws of Hades into Paradise because now that he has been "crucified with Christ" who took upon himself the flesh of Adam, he is no more Adam but Christ. He goes forth into Paradise as Christ, as the New Adam. The reason is that Christ is the only one who can pa.s.s through the Active Door, being the Real Man who has no past and does not exist in time. Living entirely in the eternal Moment, it is no problem for him to move between the jaws of past and future where all others are trapped.

In many of the myths of the Active Door, the hero gets ' Jung has admirably demonstrated the compensatory relations.h.i.+p between the conscious and the unconscious, whereby the unconscious is identified with "evil" to the extent that the conscious is identified with "good", and vice versa. In other words, the relations.h.i.+p between good and evil is polar, and the only means of holding to the one and rejecting the other is by unconsciousness-by forgetting the rejected pole. Liberation from this vicious circle is possible only from a standpoint which is "beyond good and evil"-i.e. a standpoint which is strictly nn'sel ish.

The Pa.s.sion 1 69 through at the cost of leaving something behind. A European folk/story tells of the Hare who wrests the Herb of Immortality from the Guardian Dog, leaving, however, his tail in the Dog's jaws. In the Christian version, the one left behind is Lucifer. Obviously, the Hare's tail is his past, that which is behind him, being the only thing which Time the Devourer can actually devour. Similarly, Lucifer is the "dead man", the ego abstracted from memory. So long as the mind is identified with it the gate of heaven is closed. Past and future clash together in a present which is exasperatingly brief, giving the sense that we have "no time" for anything. But when it is seen that the true Self is not the self we remember, the tail is "docked" and the Hare is "through".r In the Old Testament the a.n.a.logous situation is Moses' pa.s.sage of the Red Sea, where the waters roll back to let "Israel" go through but rush together to trap "Egypt" in the flood. Very properly, then, Christ's pa.s.sage through Death and Hades is likened by the Church to the Crossing of the Red Sea, for in the "harrowing of h.e.l.l" the jaws of the dragon yawn wide to give pa.s.sage to those that are "in Christ", but close again upon Lucifer and his hosts. Beyond the rolling waxers, the perilous gates or jaws of h.e.l.l, past and future, goad and evil, life and death, and the whole gamut of opposites wherein man as ego is inescapably trapped, there lies the Risen Life-always open to him who leaps without hesitation, who moves with the Moment and does not linger in the past.

Cf. WW'tnen Kwan, x.x.xviii. "A cow pa.s.ses through a gate. Iu head, horns, and the four legs pa.s.s through easily, but only the tail cannot pa.s.s. Why can't it e" For the entire treatment of this motif I am indebted to A. K. Coomaraswamy's essay "Symplegades" in Essays in the History of Science and Learning, ed. M. F. Ashley Montagu (New York, i447), pp. 463-88.

CHAPTER VI.

From Easter to Pentecost DESPITE the greater popularity of Christmas, Easter is the most important feast of the annual cycle. Known in Latin countries as the Pascha, its English name Easter" is said to be derived from an AngloSaxon G.o.ddess of dawn, Eostre, whose rites were celebrated at the Vernal Equinox.' Be this as it may, its importance for the Christian myth is that it represents the fulfilment of the work of Christ-the Resurrection of his Body from death, seen as the very result of his voluntary sacrifice upon the Cross. The myth makes it clear that this is not merely the return of a ghost from the dead, nor even a simple resuscita, don of the corpse. The By which was nailed to the Cross and pierced with the Spear rises again into life, but so trans formed that it can pa.s.s through closed doors, and appear and 1 A folklorist "legend" for which I have been able to find no really sound authority, though one uses it for lack of any good alternative explanation! The original source of this supposition is the Historia Ecclesiastica of the Venerable Bede, and we have it on his authority alone.

170.

disappear out of all conformity to the ordinary physical laws. It can even be touched and handled by the doubting Thomas, but Mary Magdalene is forbidden to cling to it when she recognizes Christ in the garden.z The suess upon bodily resurrection, though problematic for rationalists, is of great mythological importance. For the resurrection of man from death, from selfidentification with the past, involves an utterly different view of what was. .h.i.therto known as the "physical" world and the "material" body. What were formerly "things" are now seen as "That" which neither dies nor is born, neither comes nor goes, and to which it is simply impossible to "cling" with the memory, or to confine within the walls of conventional concepts and caw, gories. From this standpoint bodily existence is no longer felt as an intolerable restriction upon the spirit; on the contrary, the body is "spiritualized"-becoming a member of the Risen Body, of the world as it really is beyond the conventions of time, s.p.a.ce, multiplicity, and duality. Obviously this cannot be described, for that which is described-by the "compa.s.s upon the face of the deep" is of necessity the conventional world. The Risen Body of the Word is no longer bound by its own spell.

In the Church, the rites of the Resurrection began anciently at midnight between Holy Sat.u.r.day and Easter Sunday.2 Because this was also the time of initiation into the Christian Mystery, the candidates (i.e. whiteirobed ones) for Baptism were a.s.sembled in the church before midnight for the final scrutiny, exorcism, and examination of their faith. Just before the midnight hour the church was put into complete darkness, lacking even the light which was left burning at the close of 1 The usual translation of John za: 17 is "Touch me not-Noll me tangere", but the Greek lnrrw has rather the sense of "fasten" or "cling", and sometimes "to embrace carnally".

2 For some centuries now it has been the custom of the Roman Church to observe these rites on the morning of Holy Sat.u.r.day-a concession to secular routine!

Tetu&rae. In the narthex, or porch, at the West Door there gathered the priest or bishop, with his deacon, subdeacon, and attendant acolytes. Equipped with the special ritual objects for these ceremonies-flint and steel, holy water, five grains of incense imbedded in wax nails, a triplercandle shaped like a trident and mounted upon a reed, and the processional cross-they made ready for the rite which announces the first moment of the Resurrection, the Blessing of Fire.

Remaining still in the narthex, the priest strikes a spark from the flint and blows it into a flame upon tinder. Over this newly kindled fire he utters the following prayer:

0 Gad who by thy Son, the Cornerstone, hast bestowed upon the faithful the fire of thy brightness; sanctify this new fire produced from a stone for our use: and grant that, during this Paschal festival, we may be so inflamed with heavenly desires, that with pure minds we may come to the solemnity of eternal glory.'