The Word: Religion and Literature

From the earliest times mankind's religious nature has been reflected in literature. The beginnings of literature in cultures around the world have become known to us as myths. Today we often speak of myth as an untruth, a truly unfortunate connotation for the word. Myths in the truest sense are truth. They reveal to us the nature of the archetypal realm.

Archeologists find that life in earliest civilizations centered around the religious; it was not separated into religious and secular. As our prehistoric forefathers and mothers dealt with the task of survival and sought to explain those things which had crucial effects upon their existence, they put into words and art their understanding of their relationship to the natural world. Today, largely because of the relatively recent advent of science and reason in Western culture, we look at those early explanations of the nature of things as erroneous. We also see that cultures outgrew their myths as belief systems. That does not mean, however, that myths are totally invalid and worthless.

If we look at ancient myths and religions, we see that they reveal a mankind more connected to the earth on which he lives and the natural elements around him. The gods he worshipped and sought to propitiate were those who helped him survive. Yet, the awe of the numinosum was present in everyday struggles to survive. Perhaps at that stage mankind worshipped the gods more from instinct than from consciousness. Thus it is that myths are more closely connected to the archetypal realm.

And what value do those old, old stories have for us today in the era of the "big bang" theory where we seem to work out our survival more by intellect than instinct? As the poet Wordsworth said nearly two centuries ago, "The world is too much with us." We have lost our connections with nature and are so consumed with the materialist and capitalistic ventures of our lives that we fail, in the poet's words, "to see Proteus rising from the sea / and hear old Neptune blow his wreathed horn." Even though some of our current religious systems echo the old myths in certain beliefs, such as the dying and resurrecting god, we sometimes lose the connection with the numinosum and with the archetypal realm that comes to us from ancient mythology. It has become more a matter of dogma to be debated and believed in an intellectual or a faith way than an experience. Our ancient ancestors experienced the changing cycles of nature and saw in them the death and resurrection of Osiris or the descent of Persephone to the underworld and her return for half the year. They experienced the mystical at the very core of life.

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