But when it suddenly dawns on us, or is forced to our attention, that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the odor of the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organs of life, woman in particular as the great symbol of life, become intolerable to the pure, the pure, pure soul.
O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
So exclaims the great spokesman of this moment, Hamlet:
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t! ah fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this![35]
The innocent delight of Oedipus in his first possession of the queen turns to an agony of spirit when he learns who the woman is. Like Hamlet, he is beset by the moral image of the father. Like Hamlet, he turns from the fair features of the world to search the darkness for a higher kingdom than this of the incest and adultery ridden, luxurious, and incorrigible mother. The seeker of the life beyond life must press beyond her, surpass the temptations of her call, and soar to the immaculate ether beyond.
For a God called him — called him many times,
From many sides at once: “Ho, Oedipus,
Thou Oedipus, why are we tarrying?
It is full long that thou art stayed for; come!”[36]
Where this Oedipus-Hamlet revulsion remains to beset the soul, there the world, the body, and woman above all become the symbols no longer of victory but of defeat. A monastic-puritanical, world-negating ethical system then radically and immediately transfigures all the images of myth. No longer can the hero rest in innocence with the goddess of the flesh; for she is become the queen of sin.
“So long as a man has any regard for this corpse-like body,” writes the Hindu monk Śaṅkarāchārya,
he is impure, and suffers from his enemies as well as from birth, disease and death; but when he thinks of himself as pure, as the essence of the Good, and the Immovable, he becomes free....Throw far away this limitation of a body which is inert and filthy by nature. Think of it no longer. For a thing that has been vomited (as you should vomit forth your body) can excite only disgust when it is recalled again to mind.[37]
This is a point of view familiar to the West from the lives and writings of the saints.
When Saint Peter observed that his daughter, Petronilla, was too beautiful, he obtained from God the favor that she should fall sick of a fever. Now one day when his disciples were by him, Titus said to him: “You who cure all maladies, why do you not fix it so that Petronilla can get up from her bed?” And Peter replied to him: “Because I am satisfied with her condition as it is.” This was by no means as much as to say he had not the power to cure her; for, immediately, he said to her: “Get up, Petronilla, and make haste to wait on us.” The young girl, cured, got up and came to serve them. But when she had finished, her father said to her: “Petronilla, return to your bed!” She returned, and was straightway taken again with the fever. And later, when she had begun to be perfect in her love of God, her father restored her to perfect health.
At that time a noble gentleman named Flaccus, struck by her beauty, came to bid for her hand in marriage. She replied: “If you wish to marry me, send a group of young girls to conduct me to your home!” But when these had arrived, Petronilla directly set herself to fast and pray. Receiving communion, she lay back in her bed, and after three days rendered her soul up to God.[38]
As a child Saint Bernard of Clairvaux suffered from headaches. A young woman came to visit him one day, to soothe his sufferings with her songs. But the indignant child drove her from the room. And God rewarded him for his zeal; for he got up from his bed immediately, and was cured.
Now the ancient enemy of man, perceiving little Bernard to be of such wholesome disposition, exerted himself to set traps for his chastity. When the child, however, at the instigation of the devil, one day had stood staring at a lady for some time, suddenly he blushed for himself, and entered the icy water of a pond in penance, where he remained until frozen to his bones. Another time, when he was asleep, a young girl came naked to his bed. Bernard, becoming aware of her, yielded in silence the part of the bed in which he lay, and rolling over to the other side returned to sleep. Having stroked and caressed him for some time, the unhappy creature presently was so taken with shame, in spite of her shamelessness, that she got up and fled, full of horror at herself and of admiration for the young man.
Still again, when Bernard together with some friends one time had accepted the hospitality of the home of a certain wealthy lady, she, observing his beauty, was seized with a passion to sleep with him. She arose that night from her bed, and came and placed herself at the side of her guest. But he, the minute he felt someone close to him, began to shout: “Thief! Thief!” Immediately thereupon, the woman scurried away, the entire house was on its feet, lanterns were lit, and everybody hunted around for the burglar. But since none was found, all returned to their beds and to sleep, with the sole exception of this lady, who, unable to close her eyes, again arose and slipped into the bed of her guest. Bernard began to shout: “Thief!” And again the alarms and investigations! After that, even a third time this lady brought herself to be spurned in like fashion; so that finally she gave up her wicked project, out of either fear or discouragement. On the road next day the companions of Bernard asked him why he had had so many dreams about thieves. And he replied to them: “I had really to repel the attacks of a thief; for my hostess tried to rob me of a treasure, which, had I lost it, I should never have been able to regain.”
All of which convinced Bernard that it was a pretty risky thing to live together with the serpent. So he planned to be quit of the world and enter the monastic order of the Cistercians.[39]
Not even monastery walls, however, not even the remoteness of the desert, can defend against the female presences; for as long as the hermit’s flesh clings to his bones and pulses warm, the images of life are alert to storm his mind. Saint Anthony, practicing his austerities in the Egyptian Thebaid, was troubled by voluptuous hallucinations perpetrated by female devils attracted to his magnetic solitude. Apparitions of this order, with loins of irresistible attraction and breasts bursting to be touched, are known to all the hermit-resorts of history. “Ah! bel ermite! bel ermite!...Si tu posais ton doigt sur mon épaule, ce serait comme une traînée de feu dans tes veines. La possession de la moindre place de mon corps t’emplira d’une joie plus véhémente que la conquête d’un empire. Avance tes lévres....”[40]*
Writes the New Englander Cotton Mather:
The Wilderness through which we are passing to the Promised Land is all filled with Fiery flying serpents. But, blessed be God, none of them have hitherto so fastened upon us as to confound us utterly! All our way to Heaven lies by Dens of Lions and the Mounts of Leopards; there are incredible Droves of Devils in our way....We are poor travellers in a world which is as well the Devil’s Field, as the Devil’s Gaol; a world in which every Nook whereof, the Devil is encamped with Bands of Robbers to pester all that have their faces looking Zionward.[41]
4. Atonement with the Father
“The Bow of God’s Wrath is bent, and the Arrow made ready on the String; and Justice bends the Arrow at your Heart, and strains the Bow; and it is nothing but the mere Pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any Promise or Obligation at all, that keeps the Arrow one Moment from being made drunk with your Blood....”
With these words Jonathan Edwards threatened the hearts of his New England congregation by disclosing to them, unmitigated, the ogre aspect of the father. He riveted them to the pews with images of the mythological ordeal; for though the Puritan prohibited the graven image, yet he allowed h
imself the verbal. “The Wrath,” Jonathan Edwards thundered,
the Wrath of God is like great Waters that are dammed for the present; they increase more and more, and rise higher and higher till an Outlet is given; and the longer the Stream is stopt, the more rapid and mighty is its Course when once it is let loose. ’Tis true, that Judgment against your evil Works has not been executed hitherto; the Floods of God’s Vengeance have been withheld; but your Guilt in the mean Time is constantly increasing, and you are every Day treasuring up more Wrath; the Waters are continually rising, and waxing more and more mighty; and there is nothing but the mere Pleasure of God that holds the Waters back that are unwilling to be stopt, and press hard to go forward; if God should only withdraw his Hand from the Flood-gate, it would immediately fly open, and the fiery Floods of the Fierceness of the Wrath of God would rush forth with inconceivable Fury, and would come upon you with omnipotent Power; and if your Strength were Ten thousand Times greater than it is, yea Ten thousand Times greater than the Strength of the stoutest, sturdiest Devil in Hell, it would be nothing to withstand or endure it....
Having threatened with the element water, Pastor Jonathan next turns to the image of fire.
The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a Spider or some lothsome Insect over the Fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his Wrath towards you burns like Fire; he looks upon you as Worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the Fire; he is of purer Eyes than to bear to have you in his Sight; you are Ten thousand Times so abominable in his Eyes as the most hateful venomous Serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn Rebel did his Prince; and yet ’tis nothing but his Hand that holds you from falling into the Fire every Moment....
O Sinner!...You hang by a slender Thread, with the Flames of Divine Wrath flashing about it, and ready every Moment to singe it, and burn it asunder; and you have no Interest in any Mediator, and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the Flames of Wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one Moment....
But now, at last, the great resolving image of the second birth — only for a moment, however:
Thus are all you that never passed under a great Change of Heart, by the mighty Power of the Spirit of GOD upon your souls, all that were never born again, and made new Creatures, and raised from being dead in Sin, to a State of new, and before altogether unexperienced Light and Life (however you may have reformed your Life in many Things, and may have had religious Affections, and may keep up a Form of Religion in your Families and Closets, and in the House of God, and may be strict in it) you are thus in the Hands of an angry God; ’tis nothing but his mere Pleasure that keeps you from being this Moment swallowed up in everlasting Destruction.[42]
Figure 27. Creation (detail; fresco, Italy, a.d. 1508–1512)
“God’s mere pleasure,” which defends the sinner from the arrow, the flood, and the flames, is termed in the traditional vocabulary of Christianity God’s “mercy”; and “the mighty power of the spirit of God,” by which the heart is changed, that is God’s “grace.” In most mythologies, the images of mercy and grace are rendered as vividly as those of justice and wrath, so that a balance is maintained, and the heart is buoyed rather than scourged along its way. “Fear not!” says the hand gesture of the god Śiva, as he dances before his devotee the dance of the universal destruction. “Fear not, for all rests well in God. The forms that come and go — and of which your body is but one — are the flashes of my dancing limbs. Know Me in all, and of what shall you be afraid?” The magic of the sacraments (made effective through the passion of Jesus Christ, or by virtue of the meditations of the Buddha), the protective power of primitive amulets and charms, and the supernatural helpers of the myths and fairy tales of the world, are mankind’s assurances that the arrow, the flames, and the flood are not as brutal as they seem.
Figure 28. Śiva, Lord of the Cosmic Dance (cast bronze, India, c. tenth–twelfth century a.d.)
The symbolism of this eloquent image has been well expounded by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy,[43] and by Heinrich Zimmer.[44] Briefly: the extended right hand holds the drum, the beat of which is the beat of time, time being the first principle of creation; the extended left holds the flame, which is the flame of the destruction of the created world; the second right hand is held in the gesture of “fear not,” while the second left, pointing to the lifted left foot, is held in a position symbolizing “elephant” (the elephant is the “breaker of the way through the jungle of the world,” i.e., the divine guide); the right foot is planted on the back of a dwarf, the demon “Non-knowing,” which signifies the passage of souls from God into matter, but the left is lifted, showing the release of the soul: the left is the foot to which the “elephant-hand” is pointing and supplies the reason for the assurance, “Fear not.” The God’s head is balanced, serene and still, in the midst of the dynamism of creation and destruction which is symbolized by the rocking arms and the rhythm of the slowly stamping right heel. This means that at the center all is still. Śiva’s right earring is a man’s, his left, woman’s; for the God includes and is beyond the pairs of opposites. Śiva’s facial expression is neither sorrowful nor joyous, but is the visage of the Unmoved Mover, beyond, yet present within, the world’s bliss and pain. The wildly streaming locks represent the long-untended hair of the Indian yogi, now flying in the dance of life; for the presence known in the joys and sorrows of life, and that found through withdrawn meditation, are but two aspects of the same, universal, non-dual, Being-Consciousness-Bliss (sat-cit-ānanda). Śiva’s bracelets, arm bands, ankle rings, and brahminical thread,[45] are living serpents. This means that he is made beautiful by the Serpent Power — the mysterious Creative Energy of God, which is the material and the formal cause of his own self-manifestation in, and as, the universe with all its beings. In Śiva’s hair may be seen a skull, symbolic of death, the forehead ornament of the Lord of Destruction, as well as a crescent moon, symbolic of birth and increase, which are his other boons to the world. Also, there is in his hair the flower of a datura — from which plant an intoxicant is prepared (compare the wine of Dionysos and the wine of the Mass). A little image of the goddess Ganges is hidden in his locks; for it is he who receives on his head the impact of the descent of the divine Ganges from heaven, letting the life- and salvation-bestowing waters then flow gently to the earth for the physical and spiritual refreshment of mankind. The dance posture of the God may be visualized as the symbolic syllable AUM (or ) which is the verbal equivalent of the four states of consciousness and their fields of experience. (A: waking consciousness; U: dream consciousness; M: dreamless sleep; the silence around the sacred syllable is the Unmanifest Transcendent.[46]) The God is thus within the worshiper as well as without.
Such a figure illustrates the function and value of a graven image, and shows why long sermons are unnecessary among idol-worshipers. The devotee is permitted to soak in the meaning of the divine symbol in deep silence and in his own good time. Furthermore, just as the god wears arm bands and ankle rings, so does the devotee; and these mean what the god’s mean. They are made of gold instead of serpents, gold (the metal that does not corrode) symbolizing immortality; i.e., immortality is the mysterious creative energy of God, which is the beauty of the body.
Many other details of life and local custom are similarly duplicated, interpreted, and thus validated, in the details of the anthropomorphic idols. In this way, the whole of life is made into a support for meditation. One lives in the midst of a silent sermon all the time.
For the ogre aspect of the father is a reflex of the victim’s own ego — derived from the sensational nursery scene that has been left behind, but projected before; and the fixating idolatry of that pedagogical nonthing is itself the fault that keeps one steeped in a sense of sin, sealing the potentially adult spirit from a better balanced, more realistic view of the father, and therewith of the world. At
onement (at-one-ment) consists in no more than the abandonment of that self-generated double monster — the dragon thought to be God (superego)* and the dragon thought to be Sin (repressed id). But this requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself; and that is what is difficult. One must have a faith that the father is merciful, and then a reliance on that mercy. Therewith, the center of belief is transferred outside of the bedeviling god’s tight scaly ring, and the dreadful ogres dissolve.
It is in this ordeal that the hero may derive hope and assurance from the helpful female figure, by whose magic (pollen charms or power of intercession) he is protected through all the frightening experiences of the father’s ego-shattering initiation. For if it is impossible to trust the terrifying father-face, then one’s faith must be centered elsewhere (Spider Woman, Blessed Mother); and with that reliance for support, one endures the crisis — only to find, in the end, that the father and mother reflect each other, and are in essence the same.
When the Twin Warriors of the Navaho, having departed from Spider Woman with her advice and protective charms, had made their perilous way between the rocks that crush, through the reeds that cut to pieces, and the cactus plants that tear to pieces, and then across the boiling sands, they came at last to the house of the Sun, their father. The door was guarded by two bears. These arose and growled; but the words that Spider Woman had taught the boys made the animals crouch down again. After the bears, there threatened a pair of serpents, then winds, then lightnings: the guardians of the ultimate threshold.* All were readily appeased, however, with the words of the prayer.
Built of turquoise, the house of the Sun was great and square, and it stood on the shore of a mighty water. The boys entered it, and they beheld a woman sitting in the west, two handsome young men in the south, two handsome young women in the north. The young women stood up without a word, wrapped the newcomers in four sky-coverings, and placed them on a shelf. The boys lay quietly. Presently a rattle hanging over the door shook four times and one of the young women said, “Our father is coming.”
The Hero with a Thousand Faces Page 14