|
Contributor
Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: London UK
Posts: 16,024
|
Ritual Myth and Drama in the Near east
http://phoenixandturtle.net/excerptmill/gaster.htm
Quote:
Gaster, Theodore, Thespis: Ritual, Myth, and Drama in the Ancient Near East. Forward Gilbert Murray. New and Revised. Garden City: Anchor, 1961.
(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)
FOREWORD
9
In an Excursus to the late Jane Harrison’s Themis … I pointed out the recurrence in several Greek tragedies of a regular Dionysiac ritual, closely similar, , as Herodotus says (ii, 42), to that of the Egyptian Osiris. It comprises a Conflict between the god and his enemy; a Death of [sic] Disaster, which often takes the form of a Sparagmos or Tearing-in-Pieces; a Narrative by a Messenger; a Lamentation, and finally an Anagnorisis or Discovery, and a Theophany bringing comfort. This closely resembles the ritual of Osiris as a wheat god; his fight with his enemy Set; the sparagmos of the wheat sheaf; the lamentation; the discovery of the new shoots of wheat growing, and the birth of a new god. Moreover, similar rites obtained elsewhere in connection with Linos (the flax), Attis (the pine), Dionysus (the vine or fruit tree), Tammuz and other vegetation gods.
But this was by no means the only form of the rebirth ritual. Most often , perhaps it was not the same god who was reborn, but a Son of the god, who took his throne and his place. There is, for example, the sequence in Hesiod of Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus to be followed in turn by the unknown Son of Zeus, greater than his father.
10
There is likewise Dionysus, the “New Zeus”…
Yet another form of the pattern may be recognized in the plot of several ancient Greek tragedies: a god loves a mortal woman; their offspring, a so or a pair of twins, is discovered and cast out to die, while the mother is imprisoned and otherwise punished—a true mater dolorosa—until eventually the son is rediscovered, found to be of divine birth, and established as king. The symbolism is clear: the sun- or sky-god descends to fructify the frozen earth in rain and lightning; there is a long period of waiting; then the Young God is discovered in the first bloom of spring. This form was reproduced in almost sardonic fashion in the Ion of Euripides, but it lived on, reduced from divine to human terms, in the New Comedy.
“of course I am anxious,” said she, “for if Christ does not rise tomorrow, we shall have no corn this year” (Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion …).
…Hellenic drama has been shown by the late Francis Cornford in his work, The Origins of Attic Comedy … Moreover, Cornford has pointed out that the same method may be applied even to the poems of Hesiod and that, if these be regarded as relics of ritual drama, many of the incongruities which now appear in them at once become intelligible.
11
… The Elder Edda and Ancient Scandinavian Drama … Bertha S. Pillpotts as demonstrated how much of earliest and greatest Norse poetry, which has own to us in the form of narrative or song, must in its original form have been ritual drama dealing with the seasonal death and rebirth of the fruitful world.....
|
These three themes, ritual, myth and drama are very clearly central to xianity - the eucharist, the messiah, the dramatic elements of the gospels. These have been accepted by academia in reference to all other religions - including judaism for getting on for a hundred and fifty years!
We might get somewhere with Jesus myth if we stop looking at in isolation from the rituals of xianity - Baptism, Eucharist etc, and the clear dramatic themes all over the place, like in the Passion.
|
06-18-2006, 04:23 PM
