WHAT DOES MEANING MEAN?
By Aubrey Cole Odhner
  (Decoding the "Ancient Style)  

        At a lecture shortly before he died, I heard Samuel Noah Kramer, foremost Sumerologist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, announce in a somewhat whimsical and resigned way, that they had finished gathering together all the Cuneiform tablets from Nineveh; had sorted and pieced them together; had assiduously studied the language and culture; and had, after fifty years finally completed the translations, but, he said, we still do not know what they mean!

        At this point in his work Dr. Kramer had generously invited folklorist Diane Wolkstein to try her hand at weaving some of the fragments of prayers and incantations together into story form. In their book Inanna Queen of Heaven and Earth, Wolkstein describes some of her early visits with Kramer: 1

        "So you love Inanna?" Kramer said, answering the telephone himself. "Well, then come and see me." He was giving a Jayne lecture on Inanna in two days' time at the Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and why didn't I come then?
        I arrived, eager and full of questions:
        "In the first line of "The Descent of Inanna, "From the Great Above she set her mind to the Great Below,' what exactly does 'mind' mean?"
        "Ear," Kramer said.
        "Ear?"
        "Yes, the word for ear and wisdom in Sumerian are the same. But mind is what is meant."
        "But-I could say 'ear'?"
        "Well you could."
        "Is it opened her ear or set her ear?"
        "Set her ear, like a donkey that sets its ear at a particular sound."
        "As Kramer spoke, a shiver ran through me. When taken literally, the text itself announces the story's direction: From the Great Above the goddess opened (set) her ear, her receptor for wisdom, to the Great Below." Later Wolstein describes her thinking:
        "After six months of experimentation with different forms for The Huluppu Tree, it seemed there was some invisible, irreducible essence buried in each Sumerian line. Only by keeping the actual Sumerian verse line could I hope to express the mystery and power that lay within it."
        "For over two years I worked on the texts Kramer gave me. On my visits to Kramer, I asked him: What did this word mean? This sentence? Could he express it in different English words? What did it mean literally in Sumerian? Sometimes he could answer my questions. Other times he'd throw up his hands and say: "No matter how many times you ask me the same question, I still don't know."

        In concluding her introduction Wolkstein leaves further decipherment to us:

"The world's first love story, two thousand years older than the Bible-tender, erotic, shocking and compassionate- is more than momentary entertainment. It is a sacred story that has the intention of bringing its audience to a new spiritual place. With Inanna, we enter the place of exploration: the place where not all energies have been tamed or ordered."
  Inanna's scribe, Samuel Noah Kramer, gave me the words,  I have sung them as best I can. Now, we pass them on to you."2 

            We may find very ancient mss which seem to have come from the Ancient Word, perhaps parts of "the Wars of Jehovah" or "Enunciations;" perhaps we will find the forerunners of the Iliad (about a war) and or the Odyssey (a lenghtthy wandering of a hero) or ancestors of another ancient pair of epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata (two Hindu epics, one  about a war and and the other about a hero journey,) remnants from the Ancient Church, i.e.a duo, depicting wars of temptation and lengthy regeneration stories;  perhaps we will find these mss; then assume that we will be able to translate these very ancient, unknown languages; and after all that will we understand that "ancient style of writing" to which the Writings referr? How should we attack this mission? First let us consider the history of those who tried to understand the meaning of ancient myths.

                          SOME HIGHLIGHTS OF THE SEARCH FOR MEANING IN MYTH

                                                             THE HERMETIC TRADITION

            1. C.800 B.C.  "Homer believed what he said." 3  Before the ancient Greeks had coined the word myth (Muthos), the Egyptians and Sumerians told stories. There is good reason to believe that at the time of Homer and Hesiod (c.800 B.C.) and before, people sincerely believed their sacred stories. How they understood them has preoccupied scholars over two millenia. We do know that Muthos and Logos were used almost interchangeably at that time: the Telling of Truth and Truth Itself.

            As Jeremiah Curtin puts it: “Logos grew to mean the inward constitution as well as the outward form of thought, and consequently became the expression of exact thought, which is exact because it corresponds to universal and unchanging principles, -and reached its highest exaltation in becoming not only the reason in man, but the reason in the universe,-the Divine Logos, the thought of God, the son of God, God Himself. Thus we have in the Gospel of Saint John,”In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”            Mythos meant, in the widest sense, everything uttered by the mouth of man, -a word, an account of something, a story as understood by thd narrator.”2 A myth, even when it contains a universal principle expresses it in a special form—and the truth goes with it as the soul with the body."4

        2.  Attic, Classical Greeks (c.5th Cent. B.C.) pondered the meaning of myths and began their interpretations. These founders of western civilization questioned, analyzed and laid the groundwork for later studies of Mythology; they moralized against Homer and Hesiod for creating gods who committed horrible crimes and in so doing they nearly destroyed the common beliefs in ancient myth as religion. Countering this, Theogenes of Rhegum  is credited with first putting forth the idea that myths are symbolic  devices of language to describe natural elements expressing ethical principles. Precurser of this allegorical theory was Herodotus (b.485 B.C.) who first suggested that great historical heroes were in time glorified and became gods in the eyes of the people (Euhemeral theory) 55 

    3.  Early Christians  leaders had difficult challenges facing them in regard to spiritual reality and the relatonship of the spiritual with the natural. First was the question of  whether Jesus was God, the Son of God or a mere mortal.They suffered difficult disputes and labored in grand councils seeking to explain the mystery of how God, or His Son, could reveal himself to mankind; at the same time they tried to accommodate, and finally incorporated many of the pagan myths and traditions imported from many lands and held passionately  within the Roman Empire.

They preserved the tradition that there had been a Golden Age far back in ancient times; they adapted Egyptian statuary, such as tranforming the statues of Isis  holding the baby Horus, into the Virgin Mary holding Christ.  The troublesome deification of the Roman emperors was easily down graded as merely human agrandisement, Euhemerism. Allegory was also a ready tool in order to explain contrary beliefs. The Phrygian goddess Cebele had been transmitted to Rome before 200 B.C. Pagan festivals were incorporated into Christian holidays: Later,Christmas was  celebrated on December 25, the birthday of Mithra, the Iranian god of light. Easter was associated with the Jewish Passover, originally celebrated in  621 B.C. in conjunction with the Exodus, which was in turn associated with the much more ancient annual festivals of the ressurection of the Middle Eastern god, Adonis-Attis. The Ascent of Ishtar and the resurrection of Osiris were carried on and later perpetuated in  Northern Europe as a Pagan Harvest Festival,  subsumed by the Church as All Hallows, All Saints Eve, Halloween.!6

 Somewhere between the 1^st and 3^rd Centuries A.D., influential documents appeared in Florence perporting to describe the religion and magic rites of the ancient Egyptians. Most important of these were the Aesclepius and the Corpus Heriticum, treating of the creation of the world, regeneration and the ascent of the soul through the spheres of the seven planets to the Divine.7 These were the mss. which scholars believe began the Hermetic Tradition which, in some forms continues today in New Age and other Occult traditions. In a positive way, it has perpetuated  the belief hat there is a spiritual or inner world above or within the natural world  and steadily supporting the belief in a Word which has an inner meaning, and spiritual levels of reality above the natural. From our perspective this tradition would surely be a revival or a frail remnant belief from the Ancient Church, of another world and a Science of Correspondences, lost in the destruction of that church.

        4.   The Middle Ages. (c.500-1500.) Mystery shrouds meaning throughout the Middle Ages as the "Tradition" gathers momentum. There was Magic, Astrology, Alchemy, Cabalism, Rosacrucianism; the beliefs in the secret virtues of plants, precious metals and stones and in the influence of stars and the belief in the magicians' or priests', such as Druids' or Shamans,' powers to control them; each with a kernal of truth to give  energy.  .

            .         For a time a semi realistic explanation of Northern European gods and the divine powers permeated early medieval Epics in the cloak of Euhemerism: Irish monks, the Dane, Saxo Grammaticus and the Icelander, Snorri Sturlson traced their "divine" origins from heroes of the East, (such were the"Aesa Folk" heroes, Odin and Thor, who were said to have come from "Asia" to rule the lowlier fertility gods of Scandinavia, the "Vanir," like Frey and Freya.) But always parallel to these “ historic” explanations was the underlying feeling that there were hidden and deaper meanings, symbolic and allegoric8

                        A manuscript of Cabalism, the Zohar, had been hidden away during the Dark ages, but was  uncovered in 1270 in Medieval Spain by Moses Deleon of Guadalajara, Spain, igniting the imaginations of such as Roger Bacon, Dr John Dee (1527-1608) the Royal Astrologer to Queen Elisabeth I.   Cabalism had very ancient roots  In essence it was a theosophy based on an esoteric interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures, a mysticism, a way of trying to know God, by using the power found in the various names of God, as well as numbers.9  Some say the first written book on Kaballah, the Book of Formation, was a short work authorized by Abraham four thousand yers ago, containing  all the mysteries of the  universe and later influencing all the great religions since that time. Later, Moses was said to have encoded  the Kaballah wisdom into the Ten Commandments in the Torah. The true secrets were hidden and only passed on by word of mouth to ancient scholars like Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle.

Parallel to the development of Cabbalism was the revival of interest in Hermeticim in Florence .

   5.The Renaissance (c.1350 to 1600.) Just before his death in 1464, Cosimo de Medici commanded his translator, Ficinio to cease translating Plato in order to focus on the newly discovered 42 books of Hermes Trismagistos. Cosimo was familiar with the Latin Aesclapius, but insisted that the Corpus Hermeticum be finished before he died. The belief was at that time that the further away and older a ms. was the .closer it was to the Truth. In the preface to Ficinio's translation, the Pimander, he verified the geneological proof of the descent of this revelation from Thoth/Hermes through Orpheus and Pythagoras and Theodorus, the teacher of Plato! This became one of the main sources of Neo Platonism. The Pimander was printed first in 1471 and went through 16 editions by the end of the 15th Century” :”The allegorical expounding of the hieroglyphics spread all over Europe and made its influence felt as an often concealed, but always fertile and inspiring force in almost all departments of culture."10. 

             Renaissance scholars such as  Pico della Mirandola added  ideas from Cabalism to the ideas of natural magic of the Renaisssance. The  idea of  spiritual magic tapped the powers of angels and higher spiritual beings.. Pico believed  that the Cabalist studies led him to a fuller understading of Christianity, certifying the truth of the divinity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity. “Cabalist  conclusions are introduced as confirming the Christian religion from the foundations of Hebrew wisdom.”11

            Colorful scholars like the Swiss alchemist Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, more commonly known as Paracelsus,(1493-1541) added their own mystical flavor to the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. The Hermetic science par excellence is Alchemy  and Paracelsus' Emerald Tablet is the bible of alchemists; it was attributed to Hermes Trismagistus and gives in a mysteriously compact form the philosophy of "the All and the One" which states :"That which is above is like that which is below." It is related to the concepton of the Logos, or the Word, as found in the Corpus Hermeticum and also toCabalistic imterpretatons of the Word. He was much influenced by Ficinio and Ficinian magic. Such a doctor operated on his patient's body but also on his imagination.11

            Francesco Giorgo(1525), a Franciscan Friar of Venice.developed to the full a theme which is implicit in all types of the Hermetic-Cabalist tradition, namely the theme of universal harmony, of harmonious relatonships between man, the microcosm and the greater world of the universe, the macrocosm. Much of this came from Hermes Trismagistus in Ficinio's translation but was much more fully developed in Renaissance thought.

            Numbers as the key to universl thought leads us to mathematicians and Astronomers like Kepler, their thinking tracing back to Pythagorus by means of Hermes Trismagistus and the Gospel of John.! 13 There  were seamless connections with the beginnings of modern science and philosophy, with Leibniz and Newton, for instance, who were certainly interested in Cabalism.   I was intrigued when I found this note in a recent book on Kabalism. "In fact Leibnitz, one of the supreme intellects of the 17th century, told Swedish scholar, Erik Benzelius about 'his plans for a learned society which would combine Kabalah, Calculus, Mysticism and mechanics.""14

               6.   Swedenborg and the Enlightenment. So much can be learned of Swedenborg's natural background as preparation for his reception of Revelation. As a product of the late Renaissance he was well aware of many mystical traditions. No doubt his beloved brother in law and mentor, the librarian, Erik Benzelius, was very instrumental in introducing him to much of Renaissance thought.which contained ancient remnant  truths of the Ancient Church.But also in his preparation he was disciplined by the beginning scientific and analytical skills of the Enligtenment. Trained and educated as he was he had the knowledge and mental capacity to recognize and clarify for our understanding the truths of the spiritual levels of reality and ttheir relationship with the natural. 

        .  Son of the 18th Century classical world of reason, Swedenborg describes the reality of a spiritual world, a world aove and within, a world of causes and of meanings whose relation with the outer world is by means of correspondence. He describes a governing God of Love as well as of Reason. He restores the faint memory and connection with that real world with a full description of a science of correspondences. He revives the hope and idealism of a discouraged race and inspires with beautul description the love of loves,Conjugial Love, which fulfills the relationship of men and women. He plumbs the depth of individual and racial human psycnology. He inspires with hope and aids with tools the personal journey of rebirth, regeneration;he strengthens the faith in an ideal goal, a heaven of the human race.

             Beginning with  Voltaire and Johann Gottfried Herder, a great shift seems to have taken place in the minds of poets and philosopohers.. Herder was a giant of an intellectual leader as he tried to trace the spiritual development of mankind "thereby affirming the religious significance  and above all the intrinsic worth of myth."15 The Brothers Grimm  and the linguist Max Muller awakened  scholars to the magnificent Germanic linguistic and mythologic heritage.Goethe and  Schiller ignited imaginations in poetry; Beethoven and Wagner celebrated  the triumphant return of romantic joy, as a return of  life and vigpr colored the new romantic movement. 

            We can trace  the effect of a renewed optimism as  Swedenborg's tremendous and comprehensive system o f correspondences flooded the  minds and hearts of 19th Century  English literarary figures such as Blake,Wordsworth ("My heart leaps up-"), Coleridge, Carlyle16 Burns, Scot Byron ,Keats Shelley, et al. The triumph of substance over form, of subjectivity and imagination, of the human spirit set free. We see the glorious celebration of the freeing of the symbol, the power of life bursting forth from  the ultimate  entombment in nature. The distant memories of Long Ago and Faraway are brought close to home by the painter's brush and the poignant touch of the poet's pen. Immediate experiences of individuals resonate and capture the rhythms of universal spheres.

        Kant and Goethe began the dialogue involving the distinction which tended to separate and elevate the idea of symbol above allegory. The symbol became the representative of the ineffable, the Idea at its heart, an embodiment of the whole rather than a concept approached by the Reason, represented by the allegory, but separate from it. Coleridge vehemently attacks the allegory as a 'counterfeit product of the mechanical understanding."17 wheras the symbol is one with the whole, the translucence of the eternal through the temporal.

         H.  Comparative Philology/Mythology. Sir James Frazer's twelve volume tome, the Golden Bough, was more than a fruitful branch that budded and blossomed in the latter part of the 19th Century. It was an enormous tangle of widespread roots searching out rituals and origins of customs throughout the world. The title was based on an ancient and intriguing deterministic ritual which involved the reanactment of an exhausted king perpetually circling and guarding the tree upon which hung the coveted Golden Bough. Slain in his exhaustion by his successor who is the new king he repeats the endless custom forever. A myriad of ramifications from around the world and from ancient times suggest themselves in customs, rituals and childish games: "The king is dead, long live the king;" "I'm the king of the castle and you're the dirty rascal"; some traceable on the surface, some seemingly instinctive.

        From around the world Fraser traced and collected accounts of ancient and primitive folk customs: homeopathic magic, scape goat ceremonies, seed planting and harvest festivals and seemingly simple games with deep and traceable roots.

        I.   Growing out of Fraser's magnificent tree, his colleagues of the Myth and Ritual school saw the origens of myths and legends as the onetime spoken or sung parts of ancient ceremonies. Jane Harrison saw in a clay seal from Crete what looked like a bull mask which she pictured worn by king Minos involving the story of Theseus and the Mnitaur. The "devoured men and maidens" may have been the tumblers on the backs of bulls depicted on the walls of the Palace of Knossos, participating in ritual games, true captives, never to return to Athens. Sacred bull games are traceable around the Mediterranean and up into modern Spain and Mexico, while the now separated songs and bull myths can be found as far North as Ireland.1918

        Jessie Weston traced what she described as a vast underground stream of myth connected with ritual from its source in the Ancient Near East into Celtic Myths and legends separted out from their ceremonies. She saw Percival's vision of the Grail procession as a remnant of a fertility rite. Again, the Dying  177 King is carried on a bier, mourned by veiled ladies. The Bloody Lance, the overflowing Cup of abundance, the perception that the wasteland will not be fertile unless the wounded king is restored. Intertwined is the idea of the Eternal Return of nature, the Death and return of Arthur, the ancient prophecies of the Crucifixion and the return of the Lord.

        J.  The Psychological Theory: The "discovery" of the unconscious mind takes a giant step in mankind's search for meaning. This awakening centers around Sigmund Freud and his colleagues as the meaning of the Oedipus story opened itself up to him. Karl Abraham had described the myth as the dream of the race. Otto Rank, in 1912, sees  remarkable parallels in the events of both legendary and historical Birth of a Hero:Moses, Sargon II, Perseus. Lord Raglan and Joseph Campbell provide massive statistical data which compared and confirmed that these were the patterns of human behavior; mental characteristics in common as sure as the physical features we all have in common: the single Hero had a Thousand Faces. Karl Jung expanded exponentially the insights into the Collective Unconscious. He describes the vast and mysterious world of causes peopled with archetypes having explosive sources of energy available for healing and providing depths of positive meaning for the human condition.

        K.  The  Structural-Linguistic School can be seen in marked contrast to that of the depth psychologists. The Structuralist School attempts to discover meaning by means of an excruciatingly technical analysis of the external form of the myth. Like that of the musical score or the algebraic equation, with the parsing of phrases and sentences, and the assigning of functions to subjects and objects, the noting of catagories of polar opposites in all myths, like life and death, they see the purpose of myth as providing mediation between opposites, a third element to resove all life's problems. Levi-Strauss says all versions of a myth should be compared, placed on a grid for the purpose of supplying a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction; for him, the structure of the myth permits us to organize it in such a way that the meaning "seeps to the surface" through the repetive process.

        Stith Thompson and the Copenhagen Center for Folk Studies have provided us with an encyclopedic Motiff Index, numbering and classifying the thousands of themes and symbols collected and computerized through out the spread of the Indo European language groups and beyond: three golden apples, animals in disguise, the prince marries the princess. Masses of scholarship available for our own use in our own quest for Meaning.

        7.  The "New Age" culture is not new! A cauldron of truths mixed with magic, it continues the maelstrom of the Hermetic Tradition. Hopefully, together with the disciplines of modern science it will have preserved some of the instinctive perception of the reality of the spiritual world and help balance materialism, together serving as a new receptical for the New Revelation.

       

 III Using the Tools. Enlarging our capacity to understand "the ancient style of writing"

            A. Kramer's frustration at not knowing what ancient myths mean, even when retrieved from their ancient buriel places and then faithfully  translated, points up our teaching that it is not the words themselves, but the understanding of the truth which makes the doctrine ! It is good that we search for the Ancient Word: "Search for it in Great Tartary and per chance you will find it among the Chinese." Hopefully we will find ancient mss. of ancient origen which answer to the descriptions found in the Writings, but the mss. would only be the literal sense of that Word, written in correspondences, in "the ancient style,"not the Word Itself, not the Logos, the Truth Itself. After arduous searching, after tedious translating ancient scripts and ancient pictographs and words and phrases, will we say with Dr. Kramer, "we have finally finished translating them , but we don't know what it means!!"

            So let us heed the words of Kramer's assistant:"We have given you the tools; now use them."

            What are some of the  decoding tools we might use?

                        1. Becoming familiar with ancient use of Allegory

                                2. Reading studies by scholars like Lord Raglan and earlier Euhemerists who recognized the                                                       mythologizing of historical heroes and conversely the "real" heroes based merely upon legend

                        3. Studying the  history of mysticism, the Hermetic Tradition.

                        4. Appreciating the function of fairy tales and the belief in reincarnation and homeopathic magic in keeping alive the                        belief that there is a higher level, a spiritual level of reality.

                        5. Becoming familiar with  Myth and Ritual  studies relating cult  enactments  with recitations;

                        6. Immersing ourselves in  the glories of 19th Century poetry with its insights into symboliic meanng, including such                 references as Cirlot's Dictionary of Symbolism

                        7. Appreciating the scholarship of depth Psychologists and their ability to translate random data into meaningful                                patterns.          

                        8. Learning to appreciate the  work of the modern Structuralists as they  wrestle with technical, mathmatical patterns                                and their seemingly obscure results.

             

            And finally what we know as the vast treasure house containing the greatest tools of all, the Writings: the Science of Correspondences and  Discrete Degrees of inner meanings; essential, universal  patterns which are the spiritual roots of ontological and phylogenenetic relationships, that is the pattern of  "the History of the Churches" relating to individual  physiological evolution; deep elucidation of ancient allegorical texts, especially that of Genesis.

            B. Some Examples Ccombining the Tools:

            Symbols  The Writings say that everything in the universe relates to good and truth, but specifically each and everything corresponds according to its use., i.e. the use on the spiritual plane corresponds to the use on the natural plane.. An example of this is that a sword, a rock and water all correspond to truth, but each according to its use: the rock is used for building foundations and fortresses therefore basic fortifying truth; , the sword is used for defense and  protection, therefore corresponds or represents defensive and protective truth; water is used for cleansing and drinking, therefore it represents cleansing truth and circulating and sustaining truth; in the reverse, flooding and destructive waters represent drowning under waves of falsity.

            In his Morphology of the Folk Tale, Vladimir Propp, prominant Structuralist, sees consistant parallel patterns in all folk tales comparing, not the character or object by name or type but by function.

            The Writings always describe symbols or correspondences according to use. The horse, for instance, does not correspond to the Understanding because a horse is clever and smart; in fact, we know horses have small brains, and are not very intelligent. The Horse represents the Understanding because of its use, it can carry us swiftly from our rooted place to distant realms, can rise up like the winged horse Pegasus, beyond our limiting self centered will.

            The gems stones of the Old Testament do not correspond because of the chemical substances of their make up but because of their color. The ancients were not aware of chemistry, but apparently the variety of colors affected them in a variety of meaningful ways.

            When we see pictures of Osiris in the famous jugment scene do we reflect on why he is depicted holding across his breast a whip, a staff and a shepherd's crook? C. Th. Odhner, in his voluminous studies of ancient symbols clarifies immediately what we only vaguely perceive: these are the symbols of the functions and activities of a Priest/king, judgment, discipline, and the kindly guidance of a shepherd.

            Vestigial remnants of the flying creatures, the birds, abound in ancient Egypt. feathers remind us of birds and cause us to reflect upon what  birds do and what feathers are used for. Birds  fly about freely, sometimes in formations, like thoughts put together to make ideas, like words written with a feather pen. CThO. says the god Thoth, again a character famous in the Judgment scene, is a bird himself, an Ibis, and records the status of the heart weighed against the feather of truth (the kneeling Maat, with a feather crown) Thoth writes with a feather pen. Ttradition has it that Thoth invented the Heiroglyphics. Thoth surely represents the Ancient Word. Carrying the symbol to Greece, we see Hermes, the Messenger between the gods and man, with wings in his cap and on his sandals and on his caduceus, again, a symbol of the Word. We trace the feathers further to the Roman Mercury and to the Norse God Odin. Caesar wrote that Odin is our Mercury. And what do we see, but feathers on Odin's helmet, birds on either shoulder who fly around the world each day and bring back information. Together with the stories of Odin's giving up an eye to Mimir's Well in exchange for Wisdom,  we see that Voila!  Odhin invented the Runes!, clearly the reprentation of the Lord in the Word is carried over by means of the symbols.

            Think of all we know from all our boxes of tools about the symbolism of the Serpent, the Lance and the Arrow! the Thorn and the Spindle.  What do they do?! They can pierce, they poison, they kill. Picture their parallel course as they fly to harm the hero. The serpent, like the heel, reprents the vulnerability of the Sensual degree in man, the lowest degree which can turn either way, the upper degrees preserved by the Lord as invulnerable.the foot contacts the earth, the serpent crawls on his belly on the earth. This is described within the earliest chapters of Genesis, identified as having been taken from the Ancient Word. In the story of Orpheus, Eurydice is bitten in the heel by a serpent and sent headlong to Hades. Achiles' only vulnerable spot was his heel by which his mother held him as she dipped him into the protective waters (baptism?) of the River Styx. He was shot in the heel with an arrow. Sigfried bathed in the dragon's blood (blood, wine water) and was invulnerable except where a Linden leaf had stuck to his shoulder. He was slain in the shoulder by a lance. A lance is said to have slain the Lord on the cross. Baldur the Beautiful , the glorious Baldur was invulnerable as everything on earth promised not to injure Baldur except the tiny mistletoe, a thorn on the top of the oak tree. Baldur is slain but there is a promise that he will return if all things on earth will weep for him. Nothing can hurt Beauty but the spindle way up in the tower. But the Lord mercifully modifies the curse of eternal damnation here by changing the sentence to a hundred yearsof sleep rather than death..

 MOTIFS, CLUSTERS of symbols:

            Certain symbols are found clustering together as if gathered together by some unseen magnetic force, as with patterns made by iron filings following the motion of a magnate held beneath a paper. The appearance is similar to the encredibly beautiful variations of the unseen patterns in the turning of a  keleidescope; an unseen structure orders the random, formerly detached and chaotic bits or facts. Karl Jung talks of the Archytype, unknowable but present in the Collective Unconscious. He describes its ever active, ever changing, vital activity like that of the formation of a crystal , in constant creative activity, with life settling on  what appears to be a  hard and dead surface. He helps us to understand the nature of what the Writings describe as correspondences, not symbols on the spiritual plane equaling symbol on the natural plane, but the Lord's perpetual creation ultimating itself through the human mind.

            What for instance is the connection between the sword and the stone? Between defensive and foundation truth? In the story of Arthur we are impressed with the mysterious significance of the sword in the stone which can only be withdrawn by the rightful heir. In the story of Theseus, the king-father breaks his sword to pieces and places them under a stone which can only be reassembled and used by the rightful son. A shattered sword and its reunion establishing the  legitimacy of the rightful heir plays a promimnent part in the Volsunga Saga. Does this relate somehow to the Stone that the builders rejected, to the reunion of the Divine and the Human? 

            The Forbidden Fruit Motif , so important in Genesis. In the story of Persephone and Pluto, the eating of the pomegranate seeds seems to cluster in with the Journey to the Underworld, relating symbolically with the Seasons of the Year. How do these clusters cluster with each other?

PATTERNS AND THEMES:

            Mythologists today are busy working with the pattern of the journey of the hero, recently popularized by Joseph Campbell, in his      Hero with a Thousand Faces but having its earlier roots planted by Otto Rank and Lord Raglan. Otto rank was a colleague of Freud; in his Birth of a Hero he noted the similarities in the events surrounding the births of Sargon II, Moses, Perseus and others: "My mother was a vestal, my father I knew not-In a hidden place she . She laid me in a vessel made of reeds, closed my door with pitch. - and dropped me down into the river. "  Perseus was put into a box and surrendered to the water. (My husband noted the parallel of the race, surrendered to the water in an ark)

            Lord Raglan, in his Hero, illustrated his thesis that much of what we think to be history has been mythologized, products of the human imagination, thence to cult ceremonies then to history, super imposing the psychological hero pattern by means of closing the Gestalt circle onto an historic character who may have lived out only a few events of the heroic pattern, like a martyrs's death. Lincoln and Kennedy are good examples  showing the mixture and confusion between history and legend. By making a systematic comparison of thirty events in the lives of  thought -to be-historic heroes with those of mythical and legendary heroes Raglan shows how the events of the real hero match exactly the events of the  pattern of the typical hero. His typical hero was born of a virgin, father unknown but said to be a faraway king or god. Because of a threat to his life he is whisked away, (Merlin takes Arthur) brought up by simple folk (Fishermen, seven dwarves) Nothing is known of his childhood, but he makes one appearance at puberty where, for inswtance, Arthur pulls the sword from the stone. The typical hero returns to fight major battles to save his people at about age thirty, dies a hero's death on a mountain, and promises to return. Yes, this is obviously the Lord's story, not mentioned by Raglan, perhaps out of deference (?) We see an interesting reversal of the usual theme with Moses. He was born of lesser parents but was brought up by a princess. Joseph Campbell gathered volumes of evidence to demonstrate that there was only one Hero, again not naming Him, but with a Thousand Faces.

            Mythical patterns abound: The Journey to the Underworld and the Return, Odysseus, Persephone, Cupid and Psyche, Inanna; Hubris, don't dare to love a goddess or fly too close  to the Sun. There are actually only a few patterns  but  with endless variations. But why do human beings remember and repeat,  love certain symbols, (the full moon, the rainbow), and patterns: the walled Garden, the search for the Holy Grail, the mystery story? and great themes: the Fall, the Flood, the Journey, Marriage, Heaven.? The answer is clear; they are important for our lives.:

A.C. 3386: "And because a like event took place on three occasions, and also these are recorded in the Word, it is clear that it holds arcanum of SUPREME IMPORTANCE  within which it cannot possible be known to anyone except from the internal sense."

 

Alfred Lord, in Singer of Tales p.221: "It is of the necessary nature of tradition that it seek and maintain stability, that it preserve itself. And this tenacity springs neither from perverseness, nor from an abstract principle of absolute art, BUT FROM A DESPERATELY COMPELLIING CONVICTION THAT WHAT THE TRADITION IS PRESERVING IS THE VERY MEANS OF ATTAINING LIFE AND HAPPINESS. tHE TRADITIONAL ORAL EPIC SINGER IS NOT AN ARTIST; HE IS A SEER. tHE PATTERNS OF THOUGHT THAT HE HAS INHERITED CAME INTO BEINB TO SERVE NOT ART BUT RELIGION IN ITS MOST BASIC SENSE. hIS BALANCES, HIS ANTITHESE, HIS SIMILES AND METAPHOR, HIS REPETITIONS, AND HIS SOMETIMES SEEMINGLY WILL FUL PLAYING WITH WORDS, WITH MORPHOLOGY, AND WITH PHONOLOGY WERE NOT INTENDED TO BE DEVICES AND CONVENTIONS OF pARNASSUS, BUT WERE TECHNIQUES FOR EMPHASIS OF THE POTENT SYMBOL." 

UNIVERSAL COMPREHENSIVE THEMES WHICH SUBSUME PATTERNS AND SYMBOLS:

The History of the Churches, times of day and year, ages of man.

            The universal theme which seems to subsume all patterns and symbols appears to be illustrated by the History of the Churches, the four eras which have hitherto existed on the earth, to be crowned by the last and final church. The Churches themselves described for us in the context of Time,  falls  into Morning, Noon, Evening and Night and the changes of state within each church are similarly described:. East, South, West and Norths: times of day and directions, distinguished for the sake of clarity, are actually somewhat non specific...

            Assuming the truth is to be found in some of the ancient Myths which were compiled from correspondence of the A.C. I decided to use the tools I had to break open the meaning of one beloved myth, that of Baucis and Philemon. It had always puzzled me that  this beautiful myth which was a favorite of my students because of the obvious archetypal elements -should only be told by Ovid, a Roman of the first century-and yet we were all sure that it must have come from the Ancient Word.

            (copy the story)

            This was called a Greek Flood story and I happened to have a set of tapes from a Conference of scholars on Flood stories held at Stamford University. The simple definition by structuralists of a flood story is that the evil are destroyed and one good and just man and his family survive to establish a new civilization. Professor Fontenrose of            wrote a definitive paper comparing the Lot story where the wicked of Sodom were destroyed by fire, with the Noah story  and the Baucis and Philemon story-the latter two involving destruction by water. Scholars seem to consider destruction by fire and destruction by water as the same thing. Interestingly the Writings are much more specific:where they distinguish the destruction of far involving the destruction of evil as in Sodom , marking the end of the Ancient Church in Canaan, and , ex;the drowning of the Egyptians in the Red Sea as the destruction of Falsity, the end of the Ancient Church in Egypt; the former having been the good perverted and the latter knowledges perverted.

            Fontenrose confirmed our perceptions as he traced our Greek story back five generations to a flood story which antedated the Genesis version, byond even the most ancient estant version, the Mesopotamian story from the Gilgamesh Epic to an assumed version.----------.diagram.    

            Further to confirm that  this was indeed a significant Flood story early from the Ancient Word, I continued to test it according to symbols and clusters described in the Writings evidencing the NOAH.

            spurred on by advice given me by Professor Russo of Haverford in attempting to interpret the meaning of myths, I recall him say " always note the time of day." The two men(angels) came to Lot in the evening, the end of an age,.Jehovah had  come to Abraham in the oak Groves of Mamre appearing as three men/angelsas the sun was reaching its zenith.Gen 18. Here the Arcana gives us a thrilling indicaiton of the importance of these two stories: At Noon we see the Three Aspects of the Lord, in our evening decline we have lost the vision of the Lord's essence and see the two Aspects, the Existere and the Procedere.

            The confirming elements simply poured out of the story of Baucis and Philemon. Jupiter and Mercury came in DISGUISE.  -appearances. The perpetual pot of food, eternal  goodness so prevalent in myths and legends, even to the sometimes  form of the Holy Grail. But the clincher came when I searched for evidence of  an evning state before the Flood: no exact mention of time of evening, but everything indicated the end of life, the old couple, the rundown hut, the three legged stool. I searced the Latin Ovid for the word evening, and suddenly noticed the translaters note:"requiem petentes,literally "seeking rest", could be translated "evening.".

            As I ponder as to why the Flood Story is so  importanct to us that it is so oft repeated, the greatest schism in the History of the Churches, the separation of will and understanding?, of  the shunning of evils, first in time?, seemingly dreary and negative events , I am comforted by the,Rainbow's promise at Flood's end, and the reason why my girls and I loved this story so much that we were determined pursue the Journey, to search out its significance: The good old couple loved each other so much that there only wish was to serve the gods   here on earth and that they should never be separted when they died. So they hugged each other and the two trees were forever entwined and are still there in Phrygia-Conjugial Love restored.! .