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Zeus was undoubtedly a formidable warrior but he was also a compassionate God prepared to protect strangers. Just who might be an enemy and whom a stranger was probabaly decided on the basis of the character of the individual concerned. Zeus, we know, was also married to the goddes,s Hera, who, legend has it, blinded Tiresias for taking Zeus’s side in an argument about whether the male or the femal experienced more joy in the act of making love. Zeus could not undo his wifes curse but compensated Tiresias by bestowing upon him the gift of prophecy.
Sight is of course connected to the motor function of the will and it naturally introduces natural oppositions into the perceptual field. Having decided to travel up a particular hill leading to a particular professors house is riddled with negation. This hill versus that hill. This house versus all the other houses on the hill, and this Professor rather than the one that lives in the village. Over there is not here and here is not over there. Tiresias’s newly gained prophetic insight reached far beyond the visual arena of opposites and embraced the darkness of existence in itself. The voice must have dominated his oracular existence. All the oracles that followed Tiresias must have, to some extent, sought to imitate the state of this being, who had experienced being both a man and a woman.
In the division of the Universe following the famous victory of Zeus, Hades was given the earth where all the dead dwell; earth, the home of Gaia, the goddess of the earth and to the extent that Eve might have been related to Gaia(one of her daughters perhaps?), Eve becomes the OT mother of all life.Yet it was the warrior culture of death that prevailed over the more tranquill peaceful influence of female goddesses and oracles throughout the ages.
The Medieval Myth of King Arthur and his Round-Table Knights, in the spirit of the warrior went on Crusades determined to kill and conquer the non-believer, the non-Christian stranger (supported by texts from the Bible). Oppositions and negations ruled this era and Divine Commandments, and their sometimes peculiar interpretation, replaced appeal to the principles of everyday communal life. As far as the Ancient Greeks were concerned perception in the field of sensory-motor activity did not supercede the universal forms that appealed to the categories of understanding/judgement and the principles of reason (noncontradiction and sufficient reason). Indeed, for Plato, the sensory world was an inferior mode of Being compared to what was occurring in the realm of thought: a mode that imitated and merely “participated” in the world of thought and reason. For Aristotle, on the other hand, principles were to be found in the sensory-motor world if only one knew how to think and reason about this world.
Jean Piaget, the cognitive psychologist, designated the sensory motor domain as the primary focus for human beings from birth to two years old. Up until the age of 7 years the moral focus for the child was on the consequences of action, and the child at pre-operational stages, according to Piaget, was not capable of discerning intentions as being crucial to the question of whether an act was good and right or not. Once the child at 7 is able to grasp this concept of the Good, they can participate in grasping the principle of the good, which is both good in itself, and good in its consequences: a principle which is crucial for the ideas of duty and responsibility and of critical significance for maintaining order in large communities.
Returning to the example of the natural oppositions and negations we find in the sensory-motor world. If A was the Professors house on the hill and B was the students accommodation down in the village, the straight road leading from A to B could be joined by a straight line, and the distant opposites are thereby connected. For both the Professor and the student, their homes were the categorical centre for their lives, and the concept of “home” joined these seeming opposites into a unified representation which the understanding “thinks”.
In Greek Mythology, the goddesses Demeter, Persephone, and their foster son Triptolemos were jojntly responsible in different ways for the introduction of grain into human civilisation and this can be seen represented in a Mycenaeanean icon displaying Demeter handing a bushel of wheat to Triptolemos, who is holding a plough, making him thus one of the first divinities connected to techné (technology). Whether this is a divine symbol or an omen confirming the Greek oracles proclamation that:
“Everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction.”
will only be determined perhaps hundreds of thousands of years in the future. If the Oracle is correct, the icon will not be a symbol of life, but rather a symbol for death, ruin and destruction: the end of life, the end of the line from Birth (A) to Death (B). This line, then, AB, unites the opposites so poetically represented in the Christian Lamentation:
“Dust thou art, and to dust thou shallt return.”
For Philosophical thinking this line AB ends at B and cannot be extended further to C (the life after death), because the idea of another life after the telos of the end of life, is a contradiction and violates the principle of sufficient reason. The Socratic enigmatic appeal to Asclepius, as his death sentence was about to be executed, is typical of the sceptical Socrates (whom the oracle called the wisest man in all Athens), considering that Socrates believed that thisprophecy applied to him only because, unlike many others, he knew what he did not know, namely, that if there was some kind of spiritual continuance of his life, this could only occur in the mind of the Gods. For Socrates, this idea of the Gods was a given, which is clearly not the case for us moderns, who have been tutored by the logic of Science, Aristotle and Kant. For us the Gods are deus absconditis, and no longer play any role in our technologically costituted lives. The opposites of life and death for us humans are therefore well-represencted by our line AB, and also well expessed in the Christian lamentation referred to earlier.
Grain was a discovery of immense significance and it immediately led to the consequence of larger conglomerations of homes connected by many discoveries and ideas. As Socrates predicted in the Republic, when our communities grew, so did the repertoire of desires, both necessary and unnecessary, both lawful and unlawful. As more and more needs were being met in this large scale project of cooperation, other needs emerged in an uncontrolled manner. Aristotle begins his account of human psuché by characterising it both in terms of being a social animal, and as a rational animal capable of discourse. The former, of course, was an important condition of the latter, and it was these essence specifying characteristics that eventually led to the connurbation of the Polis, which required that strange form of human activity, namely, government.
The Ancient Greeks with their temperate relation to extremes, provided us with a blueprint for Democratic life which will stand forever. Kant put the matter well when he proclaimed man as a being who needs a master, but does not wish to be mastered by anyone else, thereby indicating that his potential for rationality would only be actualised in the far distant future (in one hundred thousand years).
For us, the tale of Gilgamesh, and his journey across the river of death to find “the plant of immortality at the bottom of the cosmic sea” (Page 91,) is as strange as the idea of a dead Socrates communing in heaven with the inhabitants of the “afterlife” in the realm of the Forms. The Gilgamesh tale ends with a serpent stealing the plant from Gilgamesh and becoming the cursed one, but simultaneously reviving the symbol of the Goddess. The tale of Gilgamesh does not resonate with us moderns, as much as it did, perhaps, in ancient times during the period prior to the Age of Heroes (1500-500BC) (Page 95).
Campbell argues insightfully, at the beginning of Chapter 3, that all the Origin Myths are in fact false, but there were also traditional books with historical intentions that could validate:
“the customs, systems of sentiments, and political aims of their respective local groups.”(Page 95)
But insofar these historcal intentions may also have been embedded in the poetic art, one cannot read these traditional books in the same way one does, our more modern History books. Such is the case with the OT. Moreover, some books of the OT have been rewritten over the ages, e.g. Exodus, Leviticus, Number, Deutoronomy and perhaps many others. This undoubtedly casts a shadow over the legitimacy of many books, and this shadow extends as far as the central figure of Moses (A fact Freud fixated upon in his work “Moses and Monotheism”). The Book of the Law of Moses, according to Campbell, came to light ca 621 BC in the reign of Josiah, and:
“no one had ever heard of this book of the Law of Moses and all had been worshipping false gods. Moreover, the God of Israel, now would punish them terribly–as he did indeed, within thirty-five years, when their holy-city was taken, its temple demolished, the people carried into exile, and another people put in their place.”(Page 97)
The above threat was reported to Josiah who purged the land of all idols, deposed idolatrous priests, destroyed houses of cult prostitution, destroyed the alter at Bethel, and removed mediums, wizards and shamans. Prior to 621 BC, the Law of Moses had been ignored by the Kings of many Cities and their peoples. Campbell notes, however, that the 4 Kings following Josiah did not subscribe to the Law of Moses. Moses, we ought to recall, called upon those following him to the promised land, to cast aside all graven images of animals, and embrace Yahweh’s written commandments as the only true articles of faith. That obviously did not happen, and it is uncomfortable facts such as this, which confirm Cambell’s scepticism concerning the perspectivalism of the worship of local divinities that have obviously been created by the imagination of man and then inflated into universal beings commanding the entire unverse.
Both Adam and Eve from the OT were cursed for their disobedience, but produced two children, Cain, the farmer, and Abel, the shepherd. The animal sacrificial offerings of Abel were more appreciated by Yahweh than Cain’s fruits of the soil, and in a fit of jealousy, Cain killed Abel, thus justifying the curse placed upon Adam. Cain was forced into exile to the land of Nod. These post-Eden events appeared to justify the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden, and this sequence of events was also used to justify the thesis of Original Sin in the Garden, and the fallibility of man. The bipolar opposites of the Holy and Evil are obviously the driving forces of many Biblical narratives, and this is aided and abetted by the idea of the separation of the Creator from his Creation, which is a state of affairs we do not encounter in Ancient Greek Mythology. On the contrary, for the Ancient Greeks there is an innate human dignity in being human, a dignity that is to be respected by men and gods alike, and Creation is left to ancient forces such as the anonymous demiurge, thus preserving the realms of divinity and humanity under the Form of the principle of The Good.
In Oriental Mythologies and Religions, we and the divinities are separate aspects of the identical universal. We, and the divinities partake of being in spite of the fact that we are different forms of Being. The OT Yahweh, on the other hand, transcends all physical things and stands to living beings in the relation of being their separate creator. If A is Yahweh and B humanity, then no straight line connects these two forms of Being. We saw what fate befell Jesus for insisting that he is the son of God, for trying to draw a straight line between himself (A) and a God, point B.
The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil are also separated entities in the OT narrative:
“whereas in other mythologies, both of Europe and the Orient, the Tree of Knowledge is itself the Tree of Immortal Life, and , moreover, still accessible to man.” (Page 106)
Campbell also points out the possible reason for the separation of entities these other mythologies regard as inseparable:
“our notion of religion is based on the recognition of a Creator distinct from his Creation, is fundamentally threatened by any recognition of divinity, not simply as present in the world but as inherent in its substance.” (Page 107)
Campbell elaborates upon this issue further:
“”A is not in any sense B. There can, therefore be no question, in either Jewish, Christian, or Islamic orthodoxy, of seeking God and finding God, either in the world or in oneself.”(Page 108)
Indeed, in our Christian religion, historically arguing that A is B, has been considered heretical, and perhaps typical of primitive religions of the primitive world. This absolute transcendence principle was also present in Platonic Philosophy, where the forms were also absolutely transcendent and enjoyed a different kind of existence to entities existing in the physical world. Aristotle, we know, disagreed with Plato on this issue, insisting that the forms could be found in the external world if one knew how to think and reason methodically. Spinoza carried this Aristotleian message further with his monistic account of Substance, and Kant further elaborated upon this Metaphysical view of Mind in relation to the laws of Morality.
There is one obvious danger in claiming that A is transcendentally identical with B, and that is the danger of narcissistically inflating ones worth to such an extent that one believes not as Aristotle did, that the divine dwells within our minds but rather “I am the divine”. Perhaps Freud’s patient Schreber displayed traces of such narcissism when he psychotically came to believe that his body was being diluted in the universe. Perhaps for ourTranscendent God, this form of Psychosis is the ultimate form of Original Sin that the Garden of Eden allegorises.