gstafleu

In another thread Ben C. Smith asked:
Well Ben, be careful what you ask for... . In the following I will try to address a small part of the bit I have bolded in the above quote. After reading it, you should at least be no longer surprised at the variety: I'm going to show you a lot of variety. Or, to put it differently, I will show you something that is "spread out across many lines of tradition."

First a caveat. What I am going to do is show there is a universal theme common to primitive mythology, less primitive mythology and the Eucharist. That does not mean that I'm suggesting that the Eucharist is "just anther version" of these myths. It is not. But the element is there, which may give us some insights into how the Eucharist developed, what went into its construction so to speak.

As a last thing before I start, there is some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that this is necessarily a lengthy posting. The good news is that after reading it you will have some interesting stories to tell your children. After they have grown up, that is.

First I will relate a number of food-plant origin-myths as they are found in various parts of the world. The page numbers with a section refer to pages in "The Masks of God, Vol 1: Primitive Mythology" by Joseph Campbell.



The Maiden Hainuwele (West Ceram, Indonesia)
============================================
pp 173-176

Ameta found a coconut on the tusk of a drowned pig. In a dream he was told to plant the coconut, wound in a cloth with a snake design, otherwise it wouldn't grow. He planted it and three days later there was a tall Palm. He climbed the tree to cut off some blossoms. While doing so he cut himself with his knife and some blood fell on a leaf. Three days later he returned to find that a face had appeared where his blood had mingled with the sap of the leaf. After another three days, a little girl had developed. That night he was told by the man in his dream to take the girl home.

The next day Ameta fetched her and called her Hainuwele, which means "Frond of the Coco palm." Another three days later she had grown up to a nubile maiden. Here I'll cut the legend short and just say she grew up to be very successful and very rich. Hence people were jealous of her and decided to kill her.

During the last night of a nine-night ritual dance festival the jealous people drugged her, threw her into a hole and buried her. Ameta managed to locate the body and dug her up. He cut the body into many pieces and buried these all over the Dancing Ground. The buried parts turned into things that had never existed before, "above all, certain tuberous plants that have been the principal food of the people ever since."

There is a bit more to the myth, an origin myth of various types of animals and some tribal divisions follows, but that doesn't matter for our present purposes.

The important theme here: a being of clearly divine origin gets killed, divided into pieces which get buried and grow into a food plant. The whole thing takes place on divine initiative: the dream figure who tells Ameta what to do. Also notice the recurrence of the number three.


Hina's Adventure (Tuamotua, Polynesia)
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PP 191-195
Hina was the wife of the monster eel Te Tuna (the phallus). She became "restless" and went to look for a new lover. She found him in Maui (wonder worker). People, being people, went and told Te Tuna about this. His initial reaction was basically "who cares," but people kept nagging him. So in the end Te Tuna went after Maui for vengeance.

Maui and Te Tuna have an epic battle and Maui wins. He cuts off Te Tuna's head and, on advice of his mother, buries the head beside a corner post of his house. Out of the head grows the Coconut Palm, an important staple.

You can tell I have significantly shortened the legend, condensing five pages to a couple of paragraphs. For one thing, I have left out a large amount of sexual imagery. Just remember that the Coconut Palm grew from the head of Te Tuna (the phallus) and you'll get the general idea.

We again see our theme here: a divine being gets killed, chopped up (into only two pieces this time), and one of the pieces is buried to produce an important food plant.

There are many variations of this myth in Polynesia. For example in Tonga the eel is born to a human couple (which of course means he is a rather special being). In the end he gets killed and planted, et voila the Coconut Palm. In Mangaia a girl gets seduced by an eel who can morph into a nice looking young man named Tuna. They become lovers, but then Tuna tells her he has to leave her. He tells her he will visit her one more time in the shape of an eel, at which time she should decapitate him and bury his head. You can guess what happens next.


The Legend of Mondawmin, or The Origin of Indian Corn
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pp 216-220

We will now move on to North America. Here we see an interesting mixture of the main theme with the fasting rites of the Native Americans. This rite consists of many days of fasting out in the wilderness in a tiny lodge, with the purpose of contacting one's guardian spirit. Some days into the fasting our hero, Wunz, is visited by a celestial being who challenges him to a wrestling match. Wunz, though weak from famine, wins through his spiritual strength. The next day the being returns and the match is repeated, Wunz again winning. The celestial being returns for the third time, Wunz wins again. The being announces that the next day he will return one more time. He knows that Wunz will win again. He instructs Wunz that as soon as Wunz has won he should strip the celestial visitor of his clothes, prepare a spot of soft earth by removing roots and stones, and bury the being there.

On the fourth day things proceed as planned. After winning Wunz finds the being dead and buries him as instructed. Throughout the spring Wunz visits the grave, weeds it and keeps the ground soft. In the end Mondawmin (maize or corn) grows from the grave.

We have a slight variation on the theme here. Things don't happen at warp speed as with Hainuwele, but rather at natural speed. And the body is planed as a whole, not in bits. But the main idea is there: a celestial being is killed, with clear overtones of self-sacrifice in this case, and from the remains of the being grows a food plant. It should be noted here that gods are seen as very powerful beings, so an element of self-sacrifice in their deaths is not all that far away. Also compare the Mangaia version of the eel story, where the eel tells the girl to decapitate him.


An Aztec Rite
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pp 222-224

Next hold on to your hats, the following is not for the weak of stomach. This time it is not a myth but a rite, that is a myth incarnate. In September the Aztecs had a festival for the maize goddess Chicomecohuatl. A young slave girl, twelve or thirteen years old, the prettiest they could find is sanctified to represent the goddess. She is dressed up with a miter on her head, maize cobs around her neck and a green feather on to of her head to represent a corn plant. All kinds of festivities then follow, of which the girl is the center. At on point they cut off her hair and the green feather and offer it to a statue of the goddess in thanks for the abundant season.

She is then carried around in a procession. After the procession people kneel before her and offer her saucers of dried blood which they had collected from cuts in their ears during seven days of fasting. The blood is offered in return for the benefits which she, as the goddess, had bestowed onto the people. After this ceremony there is a big all-night party. After the party and a bit of rest, everyone returns refreshed to the Temple for the end of the festival. "The multitude being assembled, the priests solemnly incensed the girl who personated the goddess; then they threw her on her back on a heap of corn and seeds, cut off her head, caught the gushing blood in a tub, and sprinkled the blood on the wooden image of the goddess, the walls of the chamber, and the offerings of corn, peppers, pumpkins, seeds, and vegetables which cumbered the floor. After that they flayed the headless trunk, and one of the priests made shift to squeeze himself into the bloody skin. Having done so they clad him in all the robes the girl had worn; they put the mitre on his head, the necklace of golden maize-cobs around his neck, the maize-cobs of feathers and gold in his hands; and thus arrayed they let him forth in public, all of them dancing to the tuck of a drum, while he acted as fugleman, skipping and posturing at the head of the procession as briskly as he could be expected to do, incommoded as he was by her clothes, which must have been much too small for a grown man."

An interesting variation on the Eucharist, you will have to admit. Remember this is a rite, so it repeats elements of the myth. We have a sacrifice of (the representative of) the goddess and a resurrection (the priest in the girl's skin and clothes). The whole is done as a thanks giving for the maize crop.

Isis and Osiris
===============

Those who have read the thread about the significance of the Didache will by now recognize elements of the Isis and Osiris myth. Again a god (Osiris) is killed (in two stages, compare Hainuwele), chopped into bits and "sown" (dispersed across the land). The myth does not directly mention the growth of the food plant, but Osiris is the god of grain. To quote from the Wikipedia page on Osiris
Notice the similarities with the Aztec rite: "The first phase of the festival was a public drama depicting the murder and dismemberment of Osiris."


The Eucharist
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After all this my suggestion is that in the Eucharist we find traces of the main theme described above. Again a god is killed, self-sacrificed. The god resurrects and the symbols of his resurrection in the thanks giving rites are food and drink: bread and wine. Now the element of the food-plant origin-myth is by no means the only element of Christian mythology: don't think I'm saying that Christianity is "just another food origin myth." I'm not saying that. But I am saying that we see the universal theme of the food origin myth as one element of Christianity. The element has no doubt lost much of its original meaning. But the symbolism of food as a representation of the body of a killed, self-sacrificed, resurrected god is too strong to ignore.

There are many more elements to Christianity than just this, which makes it a complex story. But that complexity should not mean we should not recognize the individual elements where we can.

Gerard Stafleu

Clivedurdle

Hmmm, plants in the new testament - I can't remember a mention of coconuts but interesting things happen to figs!

http://muse.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/access.c...4shoulson.html

Gamera

Pattern recognition at work. I bet I could find structural elements in an Ikea catalog that parallel the Eucharist. It's all how you characterize the details.

gstafleu

That seems a rather weird comment. Are you saying that human beings are good at pattern recognition (agree) and that hence we should distrust the patterns recognized? That is a bit like installing a burglar alarm and then saying since it was designed to detect intrusions we should obviously ignore any intrusions it detects.

Now you may say that the parallel here is with false alarms. Fine, but usually one then checks to make sure the alarm is in fact false. One doesn't just dismiss it out of hand. So why do you think this similarity between mythological themes is a false alarm?

Now as for your Ikea catalog, first of all let me point out that I am comparing themes from similar stories: mythologies (unless you want to assign Christianity some privileged position as being the only non-mythological mythology). Second, what I am comparing are not random structural elements from wildly different genres (a mythology and an Ikea catalog) in the hope I find some that match. Rather I am comparing the essential elements of stories within one genre: mythology. Dismissing that from 30,000 feet as a false alarm without addressing the details of the argument is just plain silly.

You might have a case if I was looking at something unrelated to the mythologies in question, like paragraph structure, or how many times the letter "a" appears in the names of the people and places. If I did that I would be open to accusations of fishing for patterns until I found a similarity. But looking for similarities in the things that matter is quite legitimate. In fact it is how all science and scholarship proceeds.

Given that you mention pattern recognition I take it you are familiar with one of the fundamental theorems of that field: Watanabe's Ugly Duckling theorem? It is about the very problem you are trying to address. To summarize, I can establish any desired degree of similarity between any two objects by choosing my similarity criteria appropriately (the theorem states this in mathematical terms).

Anyone who actually does pattern recognition knows this theorem and also knows what it means: pattern recognition only works when you choose relevant criteria. Which of course is exactly what I was doing when comparing the various mythologies above: I compared their central themes.

So, rather than being dismissive with an unfocused broadside I suggest you address what I actually wrote.

Gerard Stafleu

gstafleu

I'm sure they do, but I can't see how that is relevant to what I was talking about. Care to elucidate? Anyway, I wasn't talking about plants in the NT, I was talking about a theme from food-plant origin-myths. In other words I was talking about mythology, not plants.

Gerard Stafleu

Clivedurdle

Agreed - I was wondering if certain stories about fig trees are actually examples from the NT of plant myths, and therefore it is worth looking for more, like ears of corn on sabbath, many of the parables, and possibly a few meat ones as well, lambs and shepherds for example!

Is xianity actually a pagan tale of the bringing together of the veggie and meat eating gods?

Clivedurdle

Are there possibly other stories in the gospels? Is it not an assumption to take them at face value? What if they are stories to teach - what - with a hero figure as a plot device?

Why these parables, these incidents? Do they point somewhere else entirely?

mountainman

One element related to food and "religious orders of antiquity" was
the value placed by various traditions on "the abstinence of animal
foods" (ie: in today's terminology, vegetarianism).

Notably "the tribe of pythagoreans". By this I mean the neopythagoreans
and neoplatonists, and stoic philosophers of the first three centuries
whom it is recorded specifically valued vegetarianism. This is evident
in Apollonius of Tyana, and in the extant works of Porphyry.

Jesus however is purported to have specifically eaten meat,
and had a beer after work (or was it wine?), and so was
cast (for some reason) in a different category of exemplars.

Limbo

Absolutely true. Elementary ideas, common themes & motifs permeate world-mythology, to such a degree that it's staggering.

There are basically two theories to account for this, that I know of. a) cross-cultural influence or b) the manifestation of universal psychological archetypes. It's probably a little of both.

There is only one consistent way to read myth and symbol - psychologically. That means digging past the local symbol or ritual to it's universal meaning and comparing those meanings across the board. There is only one way to do that - comparative mythology.

Once done, there is little doubt that myths play the same song over and over, but they use different instruments.

I think many of you reading this thread may be interested in downloading these highly relevant and very rare lectures on comparative mythology by the late great Joseph Campbell:

http://www.4shared.com/dir/1501043/a...f/sharing.html

gstafleu

I'm not sure... You'd have to adduce a common theme from for example myths about the origin, or significance, of meat in order to make a start with that. Not only that, in order to be convincing the theme should be fairly central to both the bible version and the other myths. It is something to keep in mind, but until you have such parallels with other myths the hypothesis has to wait.

I suspect that goes to far. It is more likely that it contains elements from previous myths that have been put to a different use. Plus, don't forget that the plant myths also had quite a bit of blood in them. Now agriculture is, I think, seen as a successor stage to hunting. It is not all that unlikely that the human fascination with blood started with hunting, which is more bloody than harvesting. Having said that, blood is the vital fluid for human life, and as such could easily be seen as vital for plant life as well.

Gerard Stafleu