geo wrote: I had previously speculated that prehistoric folk would have viewed the world in a more metaphorical—less certain—way. They told stories to explain the workings of the world which is why so many of the old stories end with that's why the cheetah has spots or elephants large ears. The ancient people would not have had the certainty which came later with empirical study. This would also explain why during our polytheistic phase that we could so easily take on more gods or could choose between cults that worshipped specific deities while acknowledging the existence of others.

DWill wrote:I have trouble seeing people sacrificing to, appeasing, praying to, or worshiping a metaphor. There is a true efficacy in the gods for the early societies, so I'd lean toward thinking they see gods less metaphorically than do the citizens of more developed societies. Polytheists may accept other gods readily, but could the reason be that they view them as actually existing?

Robert Tulip wrote:When you read the myths, it is apparent that the gods symbolise their realm, so Poseidon in this sense actually is the sea. Gradually, the personification of the deity separated Poseidon from the sea itself, becoming a transcendental deity who controls the sea. Throughout, there is a tension between a rational scientific mentality that uses language of the gods as metaphor, and a credulous popular mentality that takes the metaphor as literal truth.

tat tvam asi wrote:Campbell never established any point on an historical chart and says, 'literalism all started right here.'

tat tvam asi wrote:The literalism is still difficult to pin down. Freud offers a possible origin explanation in Moses and Monotheism but there's no concrete solution on the table. I don't know how there could be. The way Origen speaks of the creation account it makes me wonder how many of the leaders actually took it completely literal. It's complete nonsense when taken literal and that much was evidence enough even back in Origens day. He believed that a God created the world but he didn't take the myth literally to the letter.

tat tvam asi wrote: Campbell never established any point on an historical chart and says, 'literalism all started right here.' That isn't really what he's talking about anyways. I don't even think that Tulip would make that claim either because there seems to have always been a mix of literalists and non-literalists. But the myth makers who constructed many of these organized sets of symbols obviously knew what they were organizing as they did it. The solar mysteries about the seasonal changes and life cycles are obviously about nature, not literal Gods and God-Men. Did the creators of the Horus myth really believe that a Falcon headed God-Man walked and ruled in Egypt? Not likely. Did common folks think that Horus was really an ancient ruler of Egypt during the Neter reign? Probably so...

"Two mythologies are found in the story of the flood. One is that of the planting culture, the old-city mythology of cyclic karma - of the ages of gold, silver, bronze, iron, during which the worlds moral condition deteriorated. The flood then came and wiped it out to bring about a fresh start. India abounds in flood stories of this kind, for the flood is a basic story associated with this cyclic experience through what we might term a year of years.

The second mythology is that of a God who created people, some of whom misbehave. Then he said, "I regret that I have created these people. Look what I have done! I am going to wipe them all out." That is another God, and certainly not the same God as in the first mythology. I emphasize this observation because two totally different idea of God are involved in the word "God." The latter God is one who creates. One thinks of that God as a fact. That we might say, is the Creator. We conceptualize that God as an IT. On the other hand, in the impersonal dynamism of the cycles of time the gods are simply the agent of the cycle. The Hindu gods are not, therefore, creators in the way that Yahweh is a creator. This Yahweh creator is, one might say, a metaphysical fact. When he makes up his mind to do something, it is promptly accomplished. This one of the mythologies of God in the Bible was brought in by the nomads who, as herding people, had inherited the mythology of the hunting process in which God is considered out there. The planting people have a mythology of God in here as the dynamism that informs all of life.

To give a sense of the real meaning of this agricultural mythology, one must examine the actual number of years it takes for the spring equinox to pass through all of the signs of the zodiac. Called "the precession of the equinoxes," it takes 25,920 years to complete a cycle of the zodiac. Divide 25,920 by 60, and you get 432. This number, as we shall see, provides the link between the agricultural mythology and the actual cycles of time...

These numbers, anchored in the Sumerian discovery that the order of the universe can be discovered mathematically, are found almost everywhere. In the Hindu sacred epics, the number of years calculated to the present cycle of time, the Kali Yuga as it is known, is 432,000, the number of the "great cycle" (mahayuga) being 4,320,000. In the Icelandic Eddas, one reads of the 540 doors in Othin's (Wotan's) hall, through which, at the end of the current cycle of time, 800 divine warriors would pass to battle the antigods in that "Day of the Wolf" to mutual annihilation. Multiplying 540 by 800 equals 432,000. An early Babylonian account, translated into Greek by a Babylonian priest named Berossos in 280 B.C., tells us that 432,000 years passed between the time of the rise of the city Kish and the coming of the mythological flood (the biblical story derives from this earlier source). In a famous paper on "Dates in Genesis," the Jewish Assyriologist Julius Oppert, in 1887, showed that in the 1,656 years from the creation to the Flood, 86,400 years had passed. Divided by two, that again produces 43,200.

That is a hint, buried in Genesis, that two notions of God are to be found in the pages. The first was the willful, personal creator who greived at the wickedness of his creatures and vowed to wipe them out. The other God, in complete contrast, is found hidden in that disguised number, 86,400. a veiled reference to the Gentile, Sumero-Babylonian, mathematical cosmology of cycles, ever recurring, of impersonal time. During this cycle, kingdoms and peoples arise and recede in seasons of the mulitple of 43,200. We recall that the Jewish people were exiles in Babylon for half a century and could, indeed, have absorbed these notions that, exquisitely hidden, provide a subtext of recurring cycle of time in their scriptures.

The mysterious procession of the night sky, then, with the soundless movement of planetary lights through the fixed stars, had provided the fundamental revelation, when mathematically charted, of a cosmic order. The human imagination reacted from its core, and a vast concept took form: The universe as a living being in the image of a great mother, within whose womb all the worlds, both of life and death, had their existence... ...The old mythologies, then, put the society in accord with nature. Their festivals were correlated with the cycles of the seasons. That also put the individual in accord with the society and through that in harmony with nature. There is no sense of tension between individual and society in such a mythological world....

Genesis

It is very interesting to note, in chapters five and six of Genesis, how the priests worked out the relationship between the Mesopotamina Kings, who lived for that period 43,200 years, and the ten Jewish patriarchs. They thereby united the two mythologies of Yahweh and of the mathematically worked out cycles of time.

The first part of the book of Genesis is sheer mythology, and it is largely that of the Mesopotamian people. Here we have the Garden of Eden, for this si the mythological age in which we enter a mythological garden. The story of not eating the apple of the forbidden tree is an old folklore motif, that is called "the one forbidden thing." Do not open this door, do not look over here, do not eat this food. If you want to understand why God would have doen a thing like that, all you need do is tell somebody, "Don't do this." Human nature will do the rest...."

DWill wrote: The flexibility regarding the historical question is helpful. Probably today we still have roughly the same proportion of those who head for the exoteric content vs. the esoteric. Exoteric=popular, I would think is a fair generalization. I also see the value in flexibility about whether texts have primarily an eso- or exoteric thrust. Again, there is likely to be a mixture, especially for writings like the Gospels, whose authors didn't exercise strong authorial control over the contents. They apparently tried to summarize both the events and the theology rather than injecting novel content. Of course their own perspectives played some role in what they emphasized. For me, the exoteric purpose of the gospels stands out as the reason they were written in the first place. I can't see these narratives being written as allegories of ancient symbolism, though that may be seen as a constituent in them. There is too much that relates to the situation, socially and religiously, that the writers looked out on. The Gospels as well as Acts are propaganda, if I can use that word without the highly negative meaning it usually has. The exoteric nature of the Gospels could be what recommended them to the church fathers compiling the Bible in the 4th Century, as opposed to the gnostic books. So considering every text individually seems to be the best approach.