Eostre, the Goddess of the Dawn

At Eastertime my thoughts always turn to matters spiritual and religious. Not that they often have far to go. But I make a point of reading at least one spiritual or religious tome every year, usually around this time.

This year's selection is by Tom Harpur, a Canadian ordained minister and theologian who reminds me very much of my Grade 13 Classics teacher, Rev. Roger McCombe. Harpur is one of the more liberal Christians you'll ever run across. Indeed, the book I'm reading--Water Into Wine--goes out of its way in the very first chapter to brashly assert that there is no credible historical evidence for the existence of Jesus.

One would think it impossible to maintain any semblance of a Christian faith if one doesn't believe in a historical Jesus. Strangely, or not so strangely once you understand where Harpur's coming from, his faith is both wide and deep.

Harpur believes, as did Rev. McCombe, in the power of myth. The working definition of a myth, according to Joseph Campbell, is "something that never was, but always is." (Rev. McCombe set aside an entire week of classes for us to view Campbell's The Power of Myth. The series seemed to go right through me at the time, but it imprinted itself quite strongly.)

Supposing Christ to be a myth doesn't make the Christ story any less true. In fact, in anything other than a purely literal sense, a myth is more true than truth: people across many cultures may dispute each other's truths, even violently, while believing implicitly and unquestioningly in the same underlying mythology.

Harpur and Campbell all argue, as did McCombe, that the underlying mythology is about a "hero journey" resulting in a change in consciousness: the recognition of the spirit, or Spirit, within--in common Christian parlance, "the indwelling Christ". Such a recognition requires, demands, a death of sorts. Not literal, but symbolic...mythological. You must cast away your dependance on the material to come into your own as a being of spirit.

Harpur deconstructs the miracles of Christ, noting at every turn the appearance of symbolic numbers and mythic language and concluding that the miracles are in fact shorthand for the shift in consciousness that begets a spiritual being. "Man does not live by bread alone" is as true now as ever.

The Passion is also viewed through a mythic lens, and here I will quote the review linked above at length:

For Harpur, the Passion’s true meaning is found in its mythological reading, a reading that illuminates the nature of incarnation. Sages of the ancient world believed that incarnation was the process by which the eternal and infinite One becomes the temporal and finite many. In this way, the cosmos in its totality achieves expression through its particular components. When human beings developed self-reflective consciousness, it marked a new phase of incarnation, a phase in which the incarnate could perceive, however crudely, the eternal ground of their being. This development is Biblically symbolized by Adam and Eve’s eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

The ancients portrayed the emergence of self-reflective consciousness as an act of divine mercy, an “emptying out” of the divine into mortal form. But, as Harpur writes, “this act of divine compassion and self-giving was and is in philosophical or theological terms enormously costly—hence the allegory of mutilation of some kind or of violent death, often by crucifixion. The fate of Prometheus, who brought down fire and paid a price, is a case in point. The Cross, then, is seen in its true luminosity only when it is understood as the sign and symbol of this gift of Incarnation. The vertical of God’s love plunges into and through the horizontal dimension of matter—our bodies.” Incarnation subjects us to all the miseries of mortality, but even in their greatest anguish the incarnate are never separated from the One. This paradox finds symbolic expression in mutilated or crucified saviors like Jesus, Horus, Attis, Orpheus, Adonis, and Tammuz, but its living expression is found in you and me and everyone else: each of us is the One incarnate, each of us is the One crucified.

It's fair to say that Harpur detests the literalists that have, according to him, distorted Christianity down the ages almost beyond recognition. It is an interesting exercise to read the Gospels mythologically, and for me, at least, it led me to that 'still small voice' that speaks of truths beyond truth.

Happy Easter, everyone. Namaste.