1) Wonder & Self-salvation

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[i have omitted copious footnotes; if anyone wants to find a source, email

me and I'll send you the footnote.]

[sending as attachment the illustrations.]

 

The Masks of God, Vol. II: ORIENTAL MYTHOLOGY by Joseph Campbell

 

Chapter 2: THE CITIES OF GOD

 

I. The Age of Wonder

Two mighty motives run through the mythologies and religions of the world.

They are not the same. They have different histories. The first and the

earlier to appear we may term _wonder_ in one or another of its modes, from

mere bewilderment in the contemplation of something inexplicable to arrest

in daemonic dread or mystic awe. The second is _self-salvation_: redemption

or release from a world exhausted of its glow.

Rudolf Otto, in his important work on _The Idea of the Holy_, writes

of a non-rational factor, essential to the religious experience, which

cannot be characterized by any of the terms traditionally applied by

theologians to the deity: Supreme Power, Spirit, Reason, Purpose, Good

Will, Selfhood, Unity, and the rest. Indeed, credos composed of such

rational terms tend rather to preclude than to produce religious

experience; and accordingly, any scientific study of religion or mythology

dealing only with such concepts and their gradual evolution is simply

missing the essence of its topic. "For," as Professor Otto writes,

>if there be any single domain of human experience that presents us with

>something unmistakably specific and unique, peculiar to itself, assuredly

>it is that of the religious life. In truth the enemy has often displayed a

>keener vision in this context than either the champion of religion or the

>neutral and professedly impartial theorist. For the adversaries on their

>side know very well that the entire "mystical unrest" has nothing to do

>with "reason" and "rationality."

> And so it is salutary that we should be moved to notice that

>religion is not exclusively contained and exhaustively comprised in any

>series of "rational" assertions. And it is well worth while to attempt to

>bring clearly before the mind the relation to each other of the different

>"moments" of religion, so that its nature may become more clearly manifest.

 

This statement I shall take as the motto and assignment of our task,

only adding that in the history of the higher cultures, following a period

of common development in the nuclear Near East, the two branches of the

Orient and Occident went apart and the "moments" (or, as I would say,

"psychological stages") of their experiences of the holy also went apart.

Furthermore, following the crucial moment that I shall term _the great

reversal_ - when, for many in the Orient as well as in the West, the sense

of holiness departed from their experience both of the universe and of

their own nature, and a yearning for release from what was felt to be an

insufferable state of sin, exile, or delusion supervened - the ways of

self-salvation that were followed in the two worlds were, in every sense,

distinct. In the West, owing to the emphasis noted in our last chapter on

the man/God dissociation, the agony was read as a divorce from God, largely

in terms of guilt, punishment, and atonement; whereas in the Orient, where

a sense of the immanence of divinity in all things remained, even though

occluded by wrong judgment, the reading was psychological and the ways and

imageries of release there have the character, consequently, rather of

alternative therapies than of the authoritative directives of a

supernatural father. In both spheres, however, the irony of the case lies

in the circumstance that precisely those who desire and strive for

salvation most earnestly are in their zeal bound the more, since it is

exactly their self-seeking that is giving them their pain. We have just

read that when the Buddha extinguished ego in himself, the world burst into

flower. But that, exactly, is the way it has always appeared to those in

whom wonder - and not salvation - is religion.

 

II. Mythogenesis

A galaxy of female figurines that comes to view in the archaeological

strata of the nuclear Near East c. 4500 B.C. provides our first clue to the

focus of wonder of the earliest neolithic farming and pastoral communities.

The images are of bone, clay, stone, or ivory, standing or seated, usually

naked, often pregnant, and sometimes holding or nursing a child. Associated

symbols appear on the painted ceramic wares of the same archaeological

strata; and among these a prominent motif (e.g., in the so-called Halaf

ware of the Syro-Cilician corner) is the head of a bull, seen from before,

with long, curving horns - suggesting that the widely known myth must

already have been developed, of the earth-goddess fertilized by the

moon-bull who dies and is resurrected. Familiar derivatives of this myth

are the Late Classical legends of Europa and the Bull of Zeus, Pasiphae and

the Bull of Poseidon, Io turned into a cow, and the killing of the

Minotaur. Moreover the earliest temple compounds of the Near East - indeed,

the earliest temple compounds in the history of the world - reinforce the

evidence for the bull-god and goddess-cow as leading fertility symbols of

the period. Roughly dated c. 4000-3500 B.C., three such primary

temple compounds have been excavated in the Mesopotamian south, at Obeid,

Uruk, and Eridu; two a little to the north, at Khafajah and Uqair,

respectively north and south of Baghdad; while a sixth, far away, at Tell

Brak, in the Khabur valley of north-eastern Syria, suggests a broad

diffusion of the common form from that Syro-Cilician (so-called Taurean)

corner. Two of these six compounds are known to have been dedicated to

goddesses: that of Obeid to Ninhursag, that of Khafajah to Inanna; the

deities of the others being unknown. And three of the compounds (at Obeid,

Khafalah, and Uqair), each enclosed by two surrounding high walls, were of

an oval form designed, apparently, to suggest the female genitalia (Figure

1). For, like Indian temples of the

mother-goddess, where the innermost shrine has a form symbolic of the

female organ, so were these symbolic of the generative force of nature by

analogy with the bearing and nourishing powers of the female.

The chief building in each compound was placed upon a platform of

packed clay, from ten to twenty feet high and approached by stairs. All

were made of brick, in a trim, boxlike, somewhat "modern" style, corners

oriented to the quarters, and decorated with polychrome tiles and a colored

wash. Other structures within the oval compounds were the residences of

priests, service areas, kitchens, etc., and notably, also, cattle barns.

Polychrome mosaics found among the ruins at Obeid show a company of priests

at their holy task of milking the sacred cows, straining and storing the

milk; and we know from numerous later written documents that the form of

the goddess honored in that temple, Ninhursag, the mother of the universe

and of all men, gods, and beasts, was in particular the patroness and

guardian of kings, whom she nourished with her blessed milk - the actual

milk being that of the animals through which she functioned here on earth.

To this day in India all who visit temples of the goddess are fed a

milk-rice, or other such dairy-made food, which is ritually dispensed as

her "bounty"' (prasad). Furthermore, in South India, in the Nilgiri hills,

there is an enigmatic tribe, the Todas, unrelated racially to its

neighbors, whose little temple compounds are dairies, where they keep

cattle that they worship; and at their chief sacrifice - which is of a

calf, the symbolic son of the mother - they address to their goddess

Togorsh a prayer that includes the word _Ninkurshag_, which they cannot

interpret. There can be no doubt that in the royal cattle barns of the

goddesses Ninhursag of Obeid and Inanna of Khafajah, a full millennium and

a half before the first signs of any agrarian-pastoral civilization

eastward of Iran, we have the prelude to the great ritual symphony of

*bells, waved lights, prayers, hymns, and lowing sacrificial kine, that has

gone up to the goddess in India throughout the ages:

 

O Mother! Cause and Mother of the World!

Thou art the One Primordial Being,

Mother of innumerable creatures,

Creatrix of the very gods: even of Brahma the Creator,

Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer!

O Mother, in hymning Thy praise I purify my speech.

 

As the moon alone delights the white night lotus,

The sun alone the lotus of the day,

As one particular thing alone delights one other thing,

So, dear Mother, dost Thou alone delight the universe

by Thy glances.

 

There is an early Sumerian cylinder seal of c. 3500 B.C. (Uruk period,

phase A: just before the invention of the art of letters) upon which two

mouflon rams are to be seen, confronting each other above a mound of earth,

from the side of which a double-headed serpent arises that appears to be

about to bite them (Figure 2). A flower is above their noses, and clutching

at their rumps,

which come together on the reverse of the cylinder, is an eagle. Professor

Henri Frankfort has observed in his discussion of this piece that every one

of its elements was related in later art and cult to the mythology of the

dead and resurrected god Tammuz (Sumerian Dumuzi), prototype of the

Classical Adonis, who was the consort, as well as son by virgin birth, of

the goddess-mother of many names: Inanna, Ninhursag, Ishtar, Astarte,

Artemis, Demeter, Aphrodite, Venus. Throughout the ancient world, such a

mound of earth as that in the center of this composition was symbolic of

the goddess. It is cognate with the Classical omphalos and the early

Buddhist reliquary mound (stupa). Magnified, it is the mountain of the gods

(Greek Olympos, Indian Meru) with the radiant city of the deities atop, the

watery abyss beneath, and the ranges of life between. The goddess-mother

supports them all. She is recognized in the star-studded firmament as well

as in the sown earth, and in the seal is to be seen not only in the mound,

but also in the plain background as well as upper and lower margins, into

the last of which the mound merges.

The serpent emerging from this hillock appears to be about to bite the

rams; and the rams, in turn, appear to be about to eat the flower. Turning

to the reverse, we see the pouncing bird of prey. A cycle of

life-in-being-through-mutual-killing is indicated. And since all of the

figures represent the power of the same god, the mythological theme

represented is that of the self-consuming, ever-dying, ever-living

generative energy that is the life and death in all things.

In a second Sumerian seal of c. 3500 B.C. a priest perhaps symbolic of

the god is holding the tree to his chest in such a way that its two stems

go in the four directions (Figure 3). The beasts now are clearly browsing

on its blossoms, while on the reverse there is a calf between two tall

bundles of reed such as in this art always represent the gate to the

precincts of a temple of the goddess. The calf is there for sacrifice and

yet, as it were, safely within the womb. In the Christian idea that Christ,

the Sacrificial Lamb, Fruit of the Tree of Jesse, while in the womb of the

Virgin Mother was already virtually the Crucified, we have a comparable

birth-death amalgamation.

Between the period of the earliest female figurines of c. 4500 B.C. and

that of the seals of Figures 2 and 3, a span of a thousand years elapsed,

during which the archaeological signs constantly increase of a cult of the

tilled earth fertilized by that noblest and most powerful beast of the

recently developed holy barnyard, the bull - who not only sired the

milk-yielding cows, but also drew the pIow, which in that early period

simultaneously broke and seeded the earth. Moreover, by analogy, the horned

moon, lord of the rhythm of the womb and of the rains and dews, was equated

with the bull; so that the animal became a cosmological symbol, uniting the

fields and laws of sky and earth. And the whole mystery of being could thus

be poetically illustrated through the metaphor of the cow, the bull, and

their calf, liturgically rendered within the precincts of the early temple

compounds - which were symbolic of the womb of the cosmic goddess Cow

herself.

During the following millennium, however, the basic village culture

flowered and expanded into a civilization of city states, particularly in

lower Mesopotamia; and, as Sir James G. Frazer

has amply shown in _The Golden Bough_, the poetic liturgy of the cosmic

sacrifice now was enacted chiefly upon kings, who were periodically slain,

sometimes together with their courts. For it was the court, not the dairy,

that now represented the latest, most impressive, magnification of life.

The art of writing had been invented c. 3200 B.C. (Uruk period, phase B);

the village was definitively supplanted by the temple-city; and a full-time

professional priestly caste had assumed the guidance of the civilization.

Through astral observations, the five visible planets were identified

(Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), moving in courses along the

ways already marked by the moon and sun among the fixed stars (seven

voyagers in all); a mathematically correct calendar was invented to

regulate the seasons of the temple-city's life according to the celestial

laws so revealed; and, as we know from numerous sources, the concept of the

order of the state was to such a degree identified with those celestial

laws that the death and resurrection of the moon, the cycle of the year,

and the greater cycles of the mathematically forecast cosmic eons, were as

far as possible literally imitated in the ritual patterns of the court, so

that the cosmic and the social orders should be one.

Two Sumerian seals of c. 2300 B.C. will suffice to illustrate the new

order of the symbolic royal courts. The first (Figure 4), from the ruins of

the city of Lagash, shows a naked woman squatting on a man who is Iying on

his back, while a second male, having seized her arm, is threatening with a

staff or dirk. At the proper right of the scene is an inscription of which

the first two lines are damaged. The next line, however, yields the words:

"King of Ghisgalla" - which, as Emest de Sarzec has observed, refers to "a

divinity that is termed in other texts the 'king-god' or 'god-king' of that

locality." There was a temple of the cosmic goddess at Ghisgalla, and what

we seem to have here is a ritual of sacrifice in connubium, wrought upon a

priestess and a king.

The second seal (Figure 5) is of similar theme, with the female again

above the male. It represents, in the words of Professor Henri Frankfort,

>the ritual marriage, which, according to various texts, was consummated by

>the god and goddess during the New Year's Festival and immediately

>followed by a feast in which the whole population enjoyed the abundance

>now ensured by the completion of the rites.... The couch supporting the

>two figures has animal-shaped legs, either bull's hoofs or lion's claws.

>The scorpion beneath it may symbolize Ishara, the goddess of love, and the

>figure at the foot of the couch ... the officiating priest who is said in

>the description of the ceremony in the time of Idin Dagan [king of Isin,

>c. 1916-1896 B.C.) to purify the god and the goddess before their

>connubium....

> The scene ... formed part of [a] ritual, which we know was enacted by

>the king or his substitute and a priestess. It represents the death of the

>god and his resurrection, followed by reunion with the goddess. It is said

>in Gudea's description of this festival that after the completion of the

>marriage a feast took place in which the gods, the ruler and the

>population of the city partook together; [and in the seal, proper left] a

>jar with projecting drinking tubes indeed stands near the couch upon which

>the ritual marriage is consummated.

 

A great many seals depict this banquet scene. "The participants in the

feast - often a man and woman - face each other on either side of a large

jar from which they imbibe through tubes, and this seems to have been the

usual manner of enjoying beer in the Ancient Near East." Many such seals

were found among the skeletons of the royal tombs of Ur, where proof enough

appears of the realization of the ritual love-death in the period

represented by Figures 4 and 5. The account of these amazing tombs given in

my earlier volume I need not review, but only note, in summary, that within

the temple compound of that city of the moon-god, Sir Leonard Woolley, in

the early twenties, unearthed a series of some sixteen burials of what

appeared to be entire royal courts. The most impressive was the dual

entombment of a lady named Shub-ad and her lord A-bar-gi, wherein the

death-pit of the latter, which contained some sixty-five attendants and two

wagons drawn by three oxen each, lay beneath that of the heavily ornamented

queen or priestess, who, with an entourage of only twenty-five and a sledge

drawn by two asses, had followed her lord into the netherworld -

fulfilling, thereby, the myth of the goddess who followed the dead god

Dumuzi into the netherworld to effect his resurrection.

The skeleton of Shub-ad lay on a wooden bier in a vaulted tomb chamber

of brick, with a gold cup at hand from which her potion of death may have

been drunk. And there was a diadem nearby of a strip of soft white leather

worked with lapis-lazuli beads, against which were set a row of exquisitely

fashioned animals of gold: stags, gazelles, bulls, and goats, with between

them clusters of three pomegranates, fruit-bearing branches of some other

tree, and at intervals gold rosettes. The analogy with the seal of Figure 2

is evident. The head of a cow in silver lay on

the floor; while among the bones of the girl musicians in attendance on her

lord in the pit beneath were two beautiful harps, each ornamented with the

head of a bull: one of copper, the other of gold, with lapis-lazuli

horn-tips, eyes, and beard.

The silver cow in the chamber of Shub-ad and the golden bearded bull in

the burial pit of A-bar-gi point backward a full two thousand years to the

dairy temples of the cosmic goddess Cow, the early female figurines, and

the painted ceramic wares showing the head of the mythological lunar bull

with long curving horns. Professor Anton Moortgat in his survey of these

same two thousand years of the birth of civilization remarks that "the

mother-goddess and sacred bull - the earliest tangible, significant,

spiritual expressions of farming village culture - represent thoughts that

were to retain their form in the Near East through millenniums." And not

alone, we can add, in the Near East. For the motifs pictorially announced

in these earliest symbols of the focus of wonder of the creators of

civilization survive, in some measure, even in the latest theologies of the

modern East and West. In fact, we shall hear echoes of their song

throughout the mythological past of what has now become the one great

province of our dawning world civilization. Aithough announced very simply

in these earliest neolithic forms, their music swelled to a great and rich

fortissimo, c. 500-1500 A.D., in a full concert of cathedral and temple

art, from Ireland to Japan.

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