| “The arcana of the ancient Mysteries were never revealed to the profane except through the media of symbols. Symbolism fulfilled the dual office of concealing the sacred truths from the uninitiated and revealing them to those qualified to understand the symbols.“ (Manly P. Hall - The Secret Teachings of all Ages) “Blessed be the mythmakers, for they hath concealed the mysteries behind holy doors of Swiss cheese.” (Joshua V. Bempechat) Chapter 3: The Secret Symbolism of Mythology The Purpose of Myth Mythology provides the visual landscape and framework for social structures to be handed down generation after generation, while remaining wholly intact. Myth allows us to see things conceptually, or in some ways allows us to view the “bigger picture.” Myth engages the intellect and the imagination, or the left brain and the right brain to work together to form patterns of emotional and sensory awareness and they also help us to understand the machinations or inner workings of energies since we can watch them play out in full drama in our mind’s eye. Carl Jung writes: “Myth is the primordial language natural to these psychic processes, and no intellectual formulation comes anywhere near the richness and expressiveness of mythical imagery. Such processes deal with the primordial images, and these are best and most succinctly reproduced with figurative speech.” (1) Mehmet Ates, in Mythology and Symbols of the Mother Goddess writes: “For tens of thousands of years, humanity has been transferring all knowledge to next generations through symbols, without use of letters. The knowledge had already spread itself all over the world by the time writing was invented, and the keys to it were hidden in iconographies. As the mythological cultures surfaced in the Middle East once again with the rise of Sumerians, writing had already appeared on the stage of history, making it possible to record the mythological stories on clay tablets. Owing to this, we are able to see the relations between the mythological stories about animals and plants, and the symbolic images of these. When Sumerians were vanquished in their wars against the Semite people, the newcomers adopted the cuneiform, adapted it to write in their own language (the Akkadian language), which had no similarity at all to the Sumerian language and gave Babylonian and Assyrian names to the Sumerian gods.” (2) John Allegro was a linguistic scholar and bible expert, hired to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls when they were first discovered in Qumran between the years 1946 and 1956. Allegro lead a team of researchers and in the end published his personal final conclusions in his book in 1970, in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. Regarding myth, Allegro writes: “The means of conveying the information were at hand and had been for thousands of years. The folk-tales of |
the ancients had from the earliest times contained myths based upon the personification of plants and trees. They were invested with human faculties and qualities and their names and physical characteristics were applied to the heroes and heroines of the stories. Some of these were just tales spun for entertainment, others were political parables like Jotham’s fable about the trees in the Old Testament, while others were means of remembering and transmitting therapeutic folk-lore. The names of the plants were spun out to make the basis of the stories whereby the creatures of fantasy were identified, dressed, and made to enact their parts.” Allegro goes on to say: “When around, 2500 BC, the first great religious poems and epics of the Near East came to be written down, they had behind them already a long history of oral transmission. The fundamental religious conceptions they express go back thousands of years. Yet there were still another fifteen hundred years to go before the earliest text of the Old Testament was composed. It is not, therefore, sufficient to look for the origins of Christianity only within the previous thousand years of Old Testament writing, nor to start the history of Judaism with a supposed dating of the patriarchs around 1750 BC. The origins of both cults go back into Near Eastern prehistory.” (3) When mythologists (shaman poets) write the material of classic tales they sometimes create a dual persona of themselves as having received the information from someone far older, more advanced and knowledgeable than themselves. This can be a tribe or race of monopods, as in the case of India, or the Telchines of ancient Greek lore, or it can be a persona similar in name to themselves. O hOgain, author of Myth, Legend and Romance writes about the dual persona: “When ritually understood, this meant a great individual seer seeking out a wise predecessor, and there are several indications that this was expressed in a narrative concerning a wise youth called Find communicating with an old and dead namesake, in other words with a variant of himself. It is likely that a direct survival of the designation for this namesake is found in Fionntan, the antediluvian seer of medieval literature.” (4) For the seer or shaman, reality is taking place on various levels at once and one of his jobs is to integrate them all into a coherent, cohesive reality to be imbibed by his tribe in the most beneficial way. Story telling is a large part of this, through poetry and myth. When the poet talks about changes that take place like a metamorphosis, a being changing into another, this represents the shaman transforming his state of mind into that of another. It also represents his journey out of this “natural” world into a much stranger one, of the “supernatural.” (1) The Great Mother, p. 15; Psychology and Alchemy, p. 25 (2) Mythology and Symbols of the Mother Goddess, p. 240-41; S.H. Hooke, "Orta Dogu Mitolojisi" Ank. 1991, p. 39 (3) The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, John Allegro, 1970, 2009 Gnostic Media Edition, p. 2-4 Intro (4) Myth, Legend and Romance, An Encyclopedia of the Irish Folk Tradition, Dr. Daith O HOgain, page 209 |