I’ve recently completed a series of articles on the need for a new mythology, a uniting visionary story, a common worldview, which might enable humanity to come together to solve the planet’s problems. (See under Mythology near the bottom of the Blog Index page.) There I outlined what I think would be the appropriate science, the religion and spirituality, and the psychology. The final ingredient would be ancient myths themselves, since they contain many truths and teachings still relevant in modern times. They emerge from a hidden source of wisdom deeper than that of human consciousness. While we are waiting for the new mythological worldview to establish itself, we can therefore immerse ourselves deeply in the old myths. Joseph Campbell spent his life studying them, and his profound writings demonstrate that we should not reject them.

    The myths most obviously relevant are the stories of ancient heroes. In order to confront and deal with the problems facing our planet, we will need many heroes. Campbell’s classic book The Hero with a Thousand Faces¹ discusses this theme in detail. Its cover quotes Time magazine: “A Brilliant Examination, through Ancient Hero Myths, of Man’s Eternal Struggle for Identity”.

    A simple story of a hero figure would be that of Jonah in the Old Testament. He is given a mission by God to confront the city of Nineveh with its wickedness but, presumably motivated by fear, runs away and escapes on a boat. God then causes a mighty storm which threatens to break up the ship. The crew come to understand that Jonah is the problem, and ask him what they should do. He says that they should throw him overboard, and then the sea will quieten.

    Jonah is then swallowed alive by a “large fish”, in modern times interpreted as a whale. He prays and repents, and God causes the fish to spew Jonah “out upon the dry land”. He then goes to Nineveh, and persuades the people and their king to repent from their wickedness, thereby fulfilling his divine task, what we might call his destiny.

    What can we learn from this story in modern times? Jonah is on a mission from God; he has work to do to serve the divine. This is true of all of us. In earlier articles I have quoted George Trevelyan, who says that the soul “incarnates for the purpose of acquiring experience in the density of earth matter”. “What occurs in life is not a sequence of chance mishaps, accidents and misfortunes, but a pattern that is, in some mysterious way, planned… Our higher self has somehow chosen its own destiny”².

    There is therefore a purpose for our incarnation (thus the task that ‘God’ has given us); words like destiny, fate are relevant. We can easily lose our way, however, because the soul forgets the plan for its life during the process of incarnation. It is therefore the task of everyone to gradually reawaken, to remember this plan, and implement it. We can see this theme at work in Jonah’s story, for he has indeed lost his way.

    He is unusual, however; not everyone knows that they are running away, because they remain unconscious. Jonah knows, however; he has been made aware of his mission. He might therefore be committing what Jesus later calls the blasphemy/sin against the Holy Spirit which will not be forgiven³.

    As the text says, however, he had “lain down, and was fast asleep” (1.5). Sleep is one of the most common symbols in myths and fairy-tales, ironically referring to the state of being awake, but nevertheless unconscious, lacking self-awareness, refusing to wake up spiritually. This idea was obviously the inspiration for Bach’s cantata BWV 140, known as Sleepers Awake (Wake up, the voice calls to us — Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme).

    There are probably some Christians who believe that this story actually happened as recorded, since they believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible. It should be obvious to most people, however, that the story as presented is a myth. If there ever was a historical figure Jonah who preached to Nineveh, then his story has been interpreted mythologically.

    In the language of symbolism the sea or waters represent the psyche or, in modern terminology, the Unconscious, and the earth, or dry land, represents the material world. This is apparent in Genesis chapter 1 where God says “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear” (v9), meaning that matter emerges from a less solid, more fluid level of reality. The author of Jonah actually reminds us of that verse of Genesis, for Jonah is made to say: “I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land” (1.9). This tells us that the story is really about the relationship between ego-consciousness, which inhabits the material world, and the unconscious psyche.

    The large fish/whale is therefore a content, or inhabitant, of the collective unconscious. Because it “swallows up” Jonah, it is not hard to recognise this as the archetype of the devouring mother. It is one of the roles of mothers to provide safety, security, complete protection at all times for their children. Because it is the adult hero’s function to be bold, accept difficult and dangerous challenges, in other words to be heroic, the mother’s instincts will react against this and and seek to protect and shelter her child, which prevents him or her from growing up. Although this is well-intentioned, it is ultimately destructive, because the hero is now prevented from fulfilling his or her destiny.

This is how the Jungian writer Erich Neumann describes the phenomenon:

• “There are situations in which the role of the Archetypal Feminine is more actively negative. Then it uses the ‘withdrawal of love’ as an instrument of power, as a means of perpetuating the rule of the Great Mother, of preventing her offspring from achieving independence. At this point, rejection and deprivation change into the clinging and even ensnaring that we have encountered as negative functions of the elementary character”.

• “In the clinging, ensnaring function of the woman we already discern a will to release nothing from her dominion, but in the function of diminution and devouring this will is still stronger and is seen to be aggressively negative”.

• the Terrible Mother’s “devouring-ensnaring function, in which she draws the life of the individual back into herself”⁴.

    Jonah’s refusal through fear to carry out his heroic task shows that he has succumbed to the protecting and consuming influence of the devouring mother. This is still a problem in modern times. Psychotherapists call this a mother complex, a failure to separate in a psychological sense, which often leads to severe mental problems. That is why in various hero-myths the journey begins with the hero leaving the mother, an outstanding example of which would be the story of Theseus. 

    Tribal societies seem to have a deep psychological understanding of this problem, because they have elaborate initiation rites, the purpose of which for boys is to achieve separation from the mother, and attain to psychological manhood. This sometimes requires tests of great bravery, thus heroism. For example, an initiation task in the Masai tribe is to kill a lion with a spear.

    Western societies seem to have lost touch with such ideas; we do not have meaningful initiations in our education systems (and we wonder why so many young people complain of ‘mental health’ issues). If we did, we might be spared problems of the type Jonah encountered. Let us all seek to discover and achieve the mission for which we were incarnated, bring true meaning to our lives, and maybe as a by-product save our civilisation from the disastrous course on which it now seems set.

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Footnotes:

1. Fontana Press, 1993

2.  A Vision of the Aquarian Age: the Emerging Spiritual Worldview, 1977, later edition Gateway Books, 1994, p8, p12–13

3. see Matthew 12.31–32

4. The Great Mother, Routledge, 1996, p68, p69, p71

   This is a summary of the earlier series of articles on the theme of finding a new mythology, a common visionary story, to unite humanity in an attempt to solve the world’s problems. It was quite long, and went into a lot of detail. I therefore thought  that it would be a good idea to do this brief summary, in order to distil the essence of it.

    As well as being collectively true, the new mythological worldview must appeal to each individual at a personal level, must be something that everyone can commit to heart and soul. I hope that the following ideas have that potential.

    Humans are spiritual beings, souls (or other similar term if you prefer) incarnating into bodies. There is a well known saying “the body is a temple”, thus the body temporarily houses the preexisting soul. As the rockstar Sting sang: “We are spirits, in the material world”.

    George Trevelyan, who was the inspiration for an earlier article, says that the soul “incarnates for the purpose of acquiring experience in the density of earth matter”. “What occurs in life is not a sequence of chance mishaps, accidents and misfortunes, but a pattern that is, in some mysterious way, planned… Our higher self has somehow chosen its own destiny”¹. During the process of incarnation, however, the soul forgets this plan for its life. It is therefore the task of everyone to gradually reawaken, to remember this plan, and implement it. As Joseph Campbell said: “We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us”², that is to say, let go of the plan of the unaware ego, and discover the destiny that was planned by the higher self. Elsewhere he said: “If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living”³.

    There are helpful agencies to assist in this process of reawakening; Trevelyan says: “We may be certain that we have invisible guides and helpers who can lead us through to the light” (p23). Who or what exactly are these guides? Since they are invisible, it is hard to be precise, but words that have been used to describe them are higher self, spirit guides, guardian angels, daemons. This idea will perhaps seem weird to some, but I believe that many people have had experiences of such agencies. We have to be and act in tune with their will.

    In practice this might prove to be difficult and surprising. Dreams, mysterious as they are, seem to be one expression of this higher will. Even though many people may doubt the existence of spirit guides etc., no one can deny the existence of dreams; they are available daily to everyone. I especially like this passage from God Has No Edges, Dreams Have No Boundaries, by Arthur Bernard⁴. In his introduction he calls the book “a wake-up call full of inner surprises”, and “another dimension to personal quests for God”. The book is for “people who are suffering from the spiritual hunger that traditional religion is not feeding”. He then says that dreams “take you into the heart of an inner universe that is pregnant with new potential and possibilities. A great living intelligence dreams inside you, knows who you are, and knows what you need”. This sounds remarkably like one of those higher agencies that Trevelyan refers to.

    Barnard then continues with words even more relevant to my theme: “Dreams are trying to guide the human race into creating a more aware and informed world. You may not realize what a crucial role you play in this drama, but your dreams do”. He further says: “Organized religion claims to have total knowledge of what God wants the individual to do. Its spokesmen declare they know the mind of God and therefore have the right to regulate your sex life, path to heaven, dietary habits, thoughts, marriage responsibilities, etc. These preacher-teachers have imprisoned and impoverished souls rather than liberated and enriched them”. He says that dreams say think again to Christians, Muslims, Jews.

    What might this mean in practice? Suppose, for example, that you are an environmental activist, and have decided to dedicate your life to that cause, and then a dream tells you to give all this up and pursue a career as an actor. Suppose at that point that you realise that this is what you have always secretly wanted to do, but for some reason didn’t have the courage, had doubts. You may still think that the environmental cause is more important; surely we need the planet to continue, in order to be able to be an actor on it. But then the dreams become more and more insistent…

    Any forward-looking worldview must obviously be spiritual in nature and completely reject materialist science, sometimes called ‘Enlightenment’ science, ironically since it has left humanity in a state of total darkness. In the main series I have outlined what I think would be the appropriate science, the religion and spirituality, and the psychology. In future articles I’ll take a look at how these ideas have been expressed in ancient myths. Putting these four ingredients together, this understanding could be the foundation of the new societies and governments emerging. We must resist secularism, any attempt to confine spiritual beliefs to being merely a private matter, since this cannot resolve the difficult issues we are facing. A truly spiritual worldview is the solution to our problems, and has to be at the heart of civilisation. We are engaged in a battle against atheism, scientism, and humanism, what Sri Aurobindo called the “dark forces against efforts to manifest the divine on earth”⁵, which provide their own false mythologies. As Robert Reich, former Harvard Professor and political adviser, said: “The greatest conflict of the 21st century… will be between modern civilization and anti-modernists; between those who believe in the primacy of the individual and those who believe that human beings owe their allegiance and identity to a higher authority…”⁶. One could interpret this as meaning a conflict between Humanists and spiritually oriented people. I do not wish to be accused of taking the quote out of context, however, so I should say that it continues from a conventional Christian perspective. Here, therefore, I have adapted it so that it is closer to my own belief: “…between those who give priority to life in this world and those who believe that there are supernatural realms which have to be taken into account; between those who believe in science, reason, and logic and those who believe that truth is revealed through spiritual teachings”⁷.

    It is therefore time for a new mythology. George Trevelyan talks about a basic transformation of humanity. “For every individual, this must obviously begin with his or her own self. That self is the only piece of the cosmos over which we have direct control and responsibility” (p57). “We are truly working for the future of our own souls and that of the planet as a whole” (p89). He further says: “many of the young in our time are souls who have chosen to be involved with the greatest surge forwards in spiritual evolution that the human race has ever experienced” (p74). Unfortunately, it would seem, many people have been brainwashed by the lies of atheism, scientism, and Humanism. It is time to wake up.

    Trevelyan continues with a long quote from Sri Aurobindo, from which I extract some especially significant lines:

• “Our ideal is a new birth of humanity into the spirit; our life must be a spiritually inspired effort to create a body of action for the great new birth and creation. Our ideal is not the spirituality that withdraws from life but the conquest of life by the power of the spirit…
• (The young) will need to consecrate their lives to an exceeding of their lower self, to the realization of God in themselves and in all human beings and to a whole-hearted and indefatigable labor for the nation and for humanity”.

    We are therefore seeking to bring heaven down to earth, working to transform the material world, not to escape it, as in Buddhism and Hinduism. This is primarily a task for the young, a new generation; they will have the energy and enthusiasm to complete it. They will have to begin to understand that much of what they have been exposed to by society is false. Hopefully they will be prepared to take some words of advice from older people.

    I’ve been trying to come up with a pithy phrase, a slogan to sum all this up. This is a little long, but it’s the best that I’ve come up with so far: seek to become your true self, in all its depths; be guided by your Higher Self and allow yourself to be surprised. Then act upon what you find with all your heart and soul.

    I’m calling this whole series a new mythology, but it is not really new; all the various parts have been expressed before, so I’m not making any special claim for originality. I have tried, however, to bring together all the various elements into a single package. Many people already believe in and are living these ideas, so the real problem is how to get such a spiritual worldview into the education system of increasingly secular societies, how to make this worldview a way of life for everyone.

    One notable predecessor who said something similar was Marilyn Ferguson in The Aquarian Conspiracy⁸. It is now almost 40 years since its first publication, and I’ll be revisiting it soon in a new series of articles. To conclude, here’s a brief taster of what she said (p35–36):

• “Once this journey has begun in earnest, there is nothing that can dissuade. No political movement, no organized religion commands a greater loyalty. This is an engagement with life itself, a second chance at meaning”.
• “If these discoveries of transformation are to become our common heritage for the first time in history, they must be widely communicated. They must become our new consensus, what ‘everybody knows’ ”.
• “The Aquarian Conspiracy is using its widespread outposts of influence to focus on the dangerous myths and mystiques of the old paradigm, to attack obsolete ideas and practices. The conspirators urge us to reclaim the power we long ago surrendered to custom and authority, to discover, under the clutter of all our conditioning, the core of integrity that transcends conventions and codes”.

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Footnotes:

1. A Vision of the Aquarian Age: the Emerging Spiritual Worldview, 1977, later edition Gateway Books, 1994, p8, p12–13

2. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/19826-we-must-be-willing-to-let-go-of-the-life

3. The Power of Myth, Doubleday, 1988, p91

4. Wheatmark, 2009. The following quotes are on Pxi-xii.

5. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sri-Aurobindo

6. “Bush’s God”, The American Prospect Online, July 17th 2004, 40

7. The original quote was: “…between those who give priority to life in this world and those who believe that human life is mere preparation for an existence beyond life; between those who believe in science, reason, and logic and those who believe that truth is revealed through Scripture and religious dogma”.

8. Granada, 1982

    This article is the latest in a series on the theme of whether we can find a new mythology, a common visionary story, to unite humanity in an attempt to solve the world’s problems (For a guide to the whole series, see under Mythology near the bottom of the Blog Index page.) In the previous article I discussed the relevant forward–looking psychology in general terms, the essential point being that we should be searching for a spiritual psychology, not one derived from scientific materialism. Here I’m going to look at one specific attempt to formulate such a psychology, Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century¹. This is by a team of writers under the general editorship of Edward F. Kelly. It’s a long and dense read, over 600 pages, but well worth the effort, if you have the time.

    Although the book is looking towards the future, it contains some relevant history. It is dedicated to Frederic Myers, described as “a neglected genius of scientific psychology”, and to Ian Stevenson and Michael Murphy, “two modern bearers of his intellectual legacy”².

    Myers was one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in Great Britain. His most famous work is Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death³ which, in the authors’ opinion, summarises “the most systematic, comprehensive, and determined empirical assault on the mind-body problem ever carried out… during the entire long history of psychology”. William James, famous American psychologist, friend and colleague of Myers, said that “through him for the first time, psychologists are in possession of their full material, and mental phenomena are set down in an adequate inventory”. Gardner Murphy praised “the heroic accumulation of data and amazing integration which the work represents”. H. F. Ellenberger described the book as “an unparalleled collection of source material on the topics of somnambulism, hypnosis, hysteria, dual personality, and parapsychological phenomena… containing a complete theory of the unconscious mind, with its regressive, creative, and mythopoetic functions”⁴. All this suggests that the book is well worth reading, and is available free online⁵.

    Kelly’s book continues in the tradition of Myers, James (and also Pierre Janet), opposing scientific materialism: “We also identify a variety of specific empirical phenomena, and a variety of critical aspects of human mental life, that appear to resist or defy understanding in terms of the currently prevailing physicalist conceptual framework” (Pxxix).

    Some of these phenomena are: ESP and parapsychology, hypnosis and Mesmerism, genius, savant syndrome and prodigious memory, memory and consciousness surviving bodily death, reincarnation (and birthmarks and birth defects in relation to this), memory as not being a brain function, secondary centres of consciousness, a deeper self beyond the ego (called by Myers the Subliminal Self), mystical and conversion experiences, near-death and out-of-body experiences, dreams, hallucinations, apparitions and visions, trance, possession, ecstasy, voodoo death, faith healing, placebo and nocebo effects, psychosomatic phenomena, automatic writing, artistic creativity, mediumship, and invisible environments interrelated with the one we know directly.

    The conclusions of the authors, if the evidence is considered objectively and without preconceptions, are that “physicalism must be false” (p37), and that “consciousness (is) somehow at the root of all” (p44, thus adopting the understanding of all religions, and the philosophy of idealism). The book comes as close as it is possible to do to refute scientific materialism. Advocates of the latter tend either to dismiss the above phenomena as illusions, because they consider them to be against the laws of nature or, perhaps more commonly, simply ignore their existence. It should be obvious, however, that “scientific knowledge (will) advance qualitatively only when scientists address all phenomena, and particularly those that do not readily fit into current views” (p63). Myers “believed that the challenge does not end but begins precisely when one comes up against contradictory findings, position, or theories, and that breakthroughs occur when one continues to work with conflicting data and ideas until a new picture emerges that can put conflicts and paradoxes in a new light or a larger perspective” (p64).

    Also worth reading, by the same authors, is Beyond Physicalism: Toward Reconciliation of Science and Spirituality⁶. In my opinion these two books are the Bible of new-paradigm science and psychology, thus essential foundation-stones in a search for a new spiritual mythology.

    This article is the last in the current series, searching for a common worldview (mythology) to unite humanity. So here is a closing thought. The quantum physics revolution is frequently seen as indicating the existence of a hidden reality (or hidden realities) out of which the material world emerges. Myers immediately tuned into this development, and appreciated its significance. I especially like this pithy comment which exposes the contradiction at the heart of scientific materialism: “Science, while perpetually denying an unseen world, is perpetually revealing it” (quoted in Kelly, p69).

    In the next series, I’m going to turn to a study of the old myths, to see whether they can still be relevant to modern life.

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Footnotes:

1. Rowman & Littlefield, 2010

2. Stevenson is well known for his research into children’s memories of past lives, described in Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation and Where Biology and Reincarnation Intersect. I have discussed him in an earlier article. Murphy was a co-founder of the Esalen Institute which, as American readers will know, has been at the forefront of the exploration of progressive psychology for decades.

3. Longmans, Green, & Co., 1903

4. all quotes Kelly, Pxxix

5.https://archive.org/details/humanpersonality01myeruoft/page/n4/mode/2up

6. Rowman & Littlefield, 2015

    (This article follows on from two earlier ones on the theme of the Divine Feminine — click here and here.)

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    Is it not logical that, in any trinitarian understanding of divinity, if one principle is called the Father, and the second the Son, then the third principle must be either the Wife or the Daughter?

    That’s a rhetorical question, because I’m assuming that the answer must be ‘yes’. So the question turns to whether the third principle is the Wife or the Daughter. If the Wife, this would suggest that the Father is not the Ultimate Source of Being, having already separated into two complementary aspects. The Father would not then be ‘God’. I therefore prefer the suggestion that the third principle is the Daughter, and that, even though ‘God’ is called the Father, this entity is actually androgynous, being the source of everything that exists. This was the understanding of various ancient spiritual traditions, as I outlined in the first of the two articles mentioned above.

    If the Logos (‘the Word’ as in the Gospel of John) is the ‘Son’, then the third element of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, must surely be the Daughter, and therefore feminine. Let’s consider the reasons for believing this. Firstly, in the Old Testament the Hebrew word for spirit ruach is of the feminine gender, as noted by various commentators. For example:

• Acharya S, who says that “In many cultures, the Holy Ghost was considered female, as Sophia, Sapientia, or Hokmah — Wisdom…”¹
• Rudolf Steiner, who says that “the cult of the Virgin Mary (was) in the East always somehow connected with the feminine Sophia being in the Old Testament sense of the feminine divine wisdom (ruach — spirit, wind, breath)”²
• T. W. Doane, who adds that the concept of Holy Spirit as father must be Greek or from somewhere else³
• Charles François Dupuis, who adds that the Holy Ghost “was called the mother of the seven houses, signifying… mother of the seven Heavens”⁴.

    Secondly, the idea of the Holy Spirit as feminine was suppressed with the rise of patriarchal societies:

• Acharya S follows the quote above with “…but the patriarchy masculinized it”.
• J. M. Robertson says: “The Samaritans seem to have conceived of a female Holy Spirit, symbolized… by a dove… (It was rather the Jews who) were so anxious to avoid goddess-worship…”⁵. He later says: “The original feminine ‘Holy Spirit’ had been kept very much in the background, perhaps in fear of contamination by a Goddess worship which symbolized sexuality and fecundity by the dove” (p61). And: “The male Spirit has always remained an extremely dim conception, and there are many grounds for regarding the female Sophia as more suitable. She would have supplied the normal demand for a Mother-goddess. But asceticism was in the ascendant when the doctrine of the Trinity was formulated. This vetoed the admission of a goddess…” (p62). It is stating the obvious to say that conventional Christianity is an offspring of Judaism, and has inherited its traditions.

    Has the Holy Spirit always been considered masculine in Christian theology? According to John Ivey: “ ‘Divine Breath’ later became known as the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Christian Trinity from the fifth century AD and, prior to this, the female consort of the Aeon Christ in the Valentinian Gnosis”⁶, (thus feminine in Gnostic Christianity).

    Hopefully what follows will not seem too esoteric, but Ivey is interested in Gematria, described as “the correspondence between letter and number inherent in the Greek language”. He says that in this system 1746 “is the number of the perfect fusion between male and female elements, from which all things spring… It is the addition of 666: The Number of the Sun (the Male Principle) + 1080: The Holy Spirit (the Female Principle, the moon) = 1746”⁷ . This fusion of male and female is called The Grain of Mustard Seed. (As far as I can understand, this is so called because, in the system of Gematria, the adding together of the associated numbers of the Greek KOKKOΣ ΣINAΠEΩΣ gives the answer 1746.)

    Christians will know that Jesus likens the Kingdom of God to a grain of mustard seed (Mark 4:31). We are then immediately advised: “With many such parables he spoke the word to them… He did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples (v33–34). If Ivey’s analysis is correct, we can assume that Jesus’s private teaching included an understanding of the Holy Spirit as feminine.

    It is an open question whether the ancient conceptions of spirit — Hebrew ruach, Sophia, Wisdom, Hokmah — is what the New Testament means by the Holy Spirit. It is also an interesting question whether the later Catholic Church understood what the writers included in the New Testament meant by it. We must therefore consider what we should understand in a cosmological sense by the term. Given its presence in the Divine Trinity, it must have profound cosmic significance. It seems to me therefore that there are two credible possibilities.

1. The Holy Spirit is the driving force behind creation. Genesis 1.2, for example, says that “the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters”. Thus it was not God, the Ultimate, which swept over the waters, rather its spirit, thus one aspect of the Ultimate, believed to be feminine. In The Secret History of the World, which describes the worldview of Mystery traditions and secret societies down the ages, Jonathan Black, interpreting the early verses of Genesis, says: “In the beginning there precipitated out of the void matter that was finer and more subtle than light. Then came an exceptionally fine gas… (which) was the Mother of All Living, carrying everything needed for the creation of life. The Mother Goddess, as she was sometimes also called, will… assume many different forms, many different names, but in the beginning ‘the earth was without form and void’ ”⁸.

2. The Holy Spirit is the principle of change in the universe, the driving force behind evolution. This is not necessarily different from the first possibility, and may be complementary to it. In the first of the two articles mentioned above I suggested that one reason why God is considered to be masculine is that in a theological system that considers God to be both transcendent and immanent, Being and Becoming, the transcendent aspect (the Ultimate Spirit) is considered masculine, and the immanent aspect (the material universe) feminine. The Holy Spirit may therefore be this evolutionary Becoming aspect, what in Taoism is called “the immutable, eternal law at work in all change… the course of things, the principle of the one in the many”⁹.

    Interestingly, John Ivey offers both alternatives: “Associating it (the female consort) with prime substance suggests that it was the flow of spirit, either passing through a pre-existent matter, or else actually causing the formation of matter”. “Prime substance in whatever sense was always regarded as female…” (p52, p53).

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    Click here for the next article, regarding Psychology and the New Mythology.

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Footnotes:

1. The Christ Conspiracy, Adventures Unlimited Press, 1999, p223

2. The Enigma of Canon XI: The ‘Abolition of the Spirit — The Year 869 and Its Significance in the Destiny of Europe. http://www.monju32.webspace.virginmedia.com/Council%20of%20869.htm

3. Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions, Kessinger, 1882, p134

4. The Origin of All Religious Worship, The Michigan Historical Reprint Series, p274

5. Pagan Christs, Barnes & Noble, 1993, p22

6. The Promethean Fire, Able Publishing, 1998, p52

7. ibid., p60. Acharya S says the same: “As Christ was the sun, the Holy ghost was also the moon, which was often considered female” (as footnote 1, also p223).

8. Quercus, 2010, p62–63

9. Richard Wilhelm, Introduction to the I Ching, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968, P lv

    “And to all this man is drawn by the power of his own soul, by the powers that are dimly sensed when he passes through the inner portals of the soul, when he seeks for that divine voice within calling him to the union of the ‘eternal masculine’, — the universe, with the ‘eternal feminine’, — consciousness”¹.

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    This article is the latest in a series on the theme of whether we can find a new mythology, a common visionary story, to unite humanity in an attempt to solve the world’s problems. (For a guide to the whole series, see under Mythology near the bottom of the Blog Index page.)

    In the previous article I tried to establish the Divine Feminine as a cosmic principle, and therefore an essential ingredient in any new mythology. It is, however, also an aspect of masculine psychology, an essential stage of a man’s spiritual journey.

    In Jungian psychology, which has much to teach humanity, the goal of the individuation process (spiritual journey and psychological transformation) is the Self, the God-image in the human psyche. If God is androgynous, as I argued in the previous article, it is logical that the purified masculine ego should have to unite in marriage with the Divine Feminine, in order to achieve this goal. This sacred marriage is called the hieros gamos. Pictures depicting it can be found in many medieval alchemical texts.

Depiction of the fermentatio stage as hieros gamos, woodcut from the 16th century Rosary of the Philosophers

    That the Divine Feminine is the key to a man’s spiritual development is clear in some famous literary texts, which we can describe as quasi-mythological, since great literature sometimes elevates itself almost to the status of mythology. The final line, thus the climax, of Goethe’s Faust is “The Eternal Feminine draws us above”². A statement by Sarah Colvin, professor of German at Edinburgh University, demonstrates the success of the patriarchal religions in almost completely obliterating all notion of the Divine Feminine from modern consciousness. She said: “Faust is saved at the end by a figure of the eternal feminine, which has caused havoc in scholarship, because people don’t know quite what it means. And it’s sometimes been taken to mean the rather clichéd notion of the ideal woman, who lets men off the hook of behaving well, because she’s doing it for them. But on the other hand you could also see the Eternal Feminine as a great kind of opposite pole, again to male politics, masculine discourse, male rhetoric, and a space of aesthetic education”³. Neither of these alternatives does justice to the true meaning of the Divine (Eternal) Feminine as a religious concept, which is what it actually is.

    So even educated scholars are clueless about the Divine Feminine, Western culture having been indoctrinated by the male monotheism of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Other well known literary examples are:

• Penelope, who represents the Divine Feminine of Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. His long journey is an obvious symbol of the arduous spiritual path of return to his home, and his wanderings can be seen as a development of the Feminine within his psyche, as he encounters Calypso, Nausicaa, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, and eventually his wife Penelope.
• Beatrice, in Dante’s Divine Comedy, who replaces the Roman poet Virgil, his guide for the earlier stages of his journey, at the threshold of Paradise, since she is able to lead him to a vision of God. She is a clear example of a female figure leading the searching soul onwards and upwards, as explained by brittanica.com: “Dante is met by Beatrice, embodying the knowledge of divine mysteries bestowed by Grace, who leads him through the successive ascending levels of heaven to the Empyrean, where he is allowed to glimpse, for a moment, the glory of God”⁴.
• Miranda in The Tempest, with whom the spiritual aspirant Ferdinand unites in marriage as the culmination of his inner transformation. Shakespeare insists on the divine nature of this marriage by having the goddesses Juno and Ceres attend.

    The Odyssey demonstrates that the idea of union with the Divine Feminine goes back over 2,500 years. Perhaps our poets and playwrights know better than our scholars and theologians.

    Click here for the next article in the series, discussing The Holy Spirit as Feminine.

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Footnotes:

1. https://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA022/English/APC1925/GA022_c01.html

2. in the original “Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan”.

3. Appearing on In Our Time, BBC Radio4, April 6th 2006, which discussed the work of Goethe.

4. https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Divine-Comedy

    Joseph Campbell often asked: “what will be the myth of the future and he expressed his hope that it would involve overcoming fragmentation and creating a planetary civilization, where people would live in harmony with others and with nature, benefiting from the astonishing discoveries of science and technology, but using them with wisdom coming from a deep spiritual place. Achievement of this goal would also involve psychospiritual rebirth and liberation and return of the feminine”¹.

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    This article is the latest in a series on the theme of whether we can find a new mythology, a common visionary story, to unite humanity in an attempt to solve the world’s problems. (For a guide to the series so far, see under Mythology near the bottom of the Blog Index page.)

    In the previous three articles I have discussed how the Perennial Philosophy, Western spiritual traditions, and Christianity might be relevant. Another essential ingredient of the new mythology should be the recognition of the Divine Feminine. This does not mean rejecting and replacing the idea of God the Father — the Divine masculine principle — but accepting that the Divine Feminine is equally important, and a counterbalance.

    A long time ago belief in the Divine Feminine (the Mother Goddess) was the norm, and widespread around the globe. Then followed its repression in Judaism and Christianity, and their suppression of other traditions. This has been documented in Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade², Acharya S’s The Christ Conspiracy³, and David Elkington’s In the Name of the Gods⁴. On Medium.com Elizabeth Childs Kelly is also writing on this theme⁵.

    Feminists may attribute the denial of the Divine Feminine to the rise of patriarchal societies. The problem may not be quite so simple as that, however; there may be other theological reasons lying behind it, which I’ll explore in this article. (In what follows it is important to understand that, even though some people see the divinities as male and female beings, in reality they are cosmic processes.)

    Here are some examples of ancient belief in the Divine Feminine. Perhaps the most significant was Christian Gnosticism, whose texts emerged at approximately the same time as those in the New Testament, and which was ruthlessly suppressed by the Catholic Church, as it asserted its supremacy.

    In The Promethean Fire⁶ John Ivey mentions three such Gnostic traditions:

• “Marcion’s God of Light — the true God — was androgynous” (p20).
• Simon Magus “taught a self division of the Divine Unity into male and female pairs, or principles, an idea not unlike the much older religious system of Heliopolis in Egypt” (p21).
• “In the Valentinian system… (the unknowable God) was by definition male and paired with the eternal female principle called The Ennoia, or Grace. The alien god thus effectively had a male and female component and could be regarded as androgynous” (p24).

    Further references to the Divine Feminine in Gnostic traditions are mentioned below. Here are some other random examples:

• Robert Graves mentions the view of the Greeks that “god without goddess is spiritual insufficiency”⁷.
• In the Egyptian religion, “although texts often refer to Atum as male, he was actually bisexual, ‘the great He/She.’ Masculine and feminine aspects emerged only later when he created his son, Shu, and daughter, Tefnut”⁸.
• The mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, author of The True Christian Religion, believed in divine bisexuality⁹.

    David Elkington, referring to ancient traditions, notes: “The goddess is seen as a creatrix, a force, one of the two prime interacting aspects (male and female) of the Absolute. In native myths of the dreamtime, all life, all humanity, inhabited the womb of the goddess in an ever-present state of wonder and totality. The goddess was what science would call ‘causality’; from her came everything… Thus in ancient societies, embedded deep within their mythos is the identity of the goddess as creatrix of all”¹⁰. (Interestingly, this follows on immediately from a passage in which he discusses the role of Mary, Mother of God in the Catholic Church: “the Vatican Office has described her as the primordial being, ‘created from the beginning and before the centuries’ ”. So notions of the Divine Feminine sometimes find their way even into Catholicism!)

    The basic issue to be addressed is why ‘God’ is so often identified as male, even though this is probably inaccurate, since the ultimate source of everything must contain both female and male. The first chapter of Genesis frequently uses the word ‘created’, which can easily be misunderstood, since it offers the possibility of a creator being separate and different from its creation. This understanding has dominated Judaism and Christianity. However, in other spiritual traditions the Supreme Consciousness did not create everything that is, but is rather the source of everything that is. If this is true, the nature of that Being must contain the nature of everything that is, therefore the Absolute Oneness must have female aspects. As John Ivey says: “We are accustomed to think of God the Father rather than God the Mother, although any concept of God must be androgynous”¹¹. Emanation would therefore be a more accurate word to describe the process, rather than ‘creation’.

    Perhaps the clearest expression of this idea exists in Taoism, in which the Supreme Ultimate Principle, the T’ai-chi T’u, separates into Yang (masculine) and Yin (feminine), which are complementary and equal.

    This is similar to the example from Egyptian religion quoted above, the Divine Oneness separating into the male and female principles.

    Thus everything that exists is derived from this ultimate source. Therefore the creative spirit and the resulting material universe are both aspects of the Divine Consciousness; in theological language God is both transcendent and immanent. The philosophical term for this is evolutionary panentheism. If the transcendent aspect (the creative spirit) is considered masculine, and the immanent aspect (the material universe) feminine, then it is easy to see how some people have concluded that God is male, and why the Divine Feminine has been excluded. However, both the spirit and the material universe are aspects of the Divine. Some examples of those who have understood this are:

• Helena Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society: “Among all the peoples of the highest antiquity, the most natural conception of the First Cause manifesting itself in its creatures, and… to this they could not but ascribe the creation of all, was that of an androgyne deity; that the male principle was considered the vivifying invisible spirit, and the female, mother nature”¹².
• the Gnostic thinker Simon Magus, quoted in the works of the Church Fathers: “Of the universal Aeons there are two shoots… one is manifested from above, which is the Great Power, the Universal Mind ordering all things, male, and the other from below, the Great Thought, female, producing all things”¹³.
• the Mandaeans who believed that “the earth is like a woman and the sky like a man, for it makes the earth fecund”¹⁴.
• the Renaissance philosopher Plutarch who said that “Heaven appeared to mankind as if it was exercising the functions of father, and the Earth that of mother”¹⁵.
• Freemasonry, following on from Egyptian religion, in which Osiris and Isis represent the Supreme Being and Universal Nature¹⁶.

    We can find the idea of nature as feminine expressed by:

• certain Native Americans: “The Kagaba Indians describe a female Supreme Deity: ‘the mother of our songs, the mother of all our seed, bore us in the beginning of things… She is the mother of the thunder, the mother of the streams, the mother of trees and of all things”¹⁷.
• the Romantic philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who said in the novel Sartor Resartus of his hero Teufelsdröckh: “Never till this hour had he known Nature, that she was One, that she was his Mother and divine… He felt as if the Earth were not dead, as if the Spirit of the Earth had its throne in that splendour, and his own spirit were therewith holding communion”.

    Let us not forget that, even in the age of the ‘Enlightenment’, we still talk about Mother Nature.

    David Elkington elaborates on this point in greater depth: “The Aramaic word for earth is arha, and its Hebrew roots carry the meaning of all nature, all gatherings of mass and form produced by universal force. The ancient traditions associate this force with the feminine. ‘Mother’ and ‘earth’… have the same connotations and share the same essence. Thus we follow the feminine path from microcosm to macrocosm: earth is the firmament on which we live, in turn the earth lives within the cosmos, which lives through the universal force, which, as the ultimate Mother, gives births to all, and, as the ultimate firmament, nurtures all. This firmament is the substratum, the primal substance that upholds all…

“How does the Mother give birth to all? Through the Father, the movement, the lifestream, equated with that oft-used term ‘spirit’. It is this that is the essence of the myth of Isis and her search for Osiris, the lifestream that arises within the djed (the enduring one, everlasting, immortal — thus the Divine [masculine] spirit), within all living things. Isis and Osiris, the two together as substance and spirit, bring about life” (p387–8).

    It would seem that belief in the Divine Feminine is widespread, even universal, except in Christianity and its predecessor Judaism. I said in the previous article that, if Christianity is to be included in a new mythology, then it would have to reintegrate belief in the Divine Feminine. Let’s hope that this Reformation can begin soon.

    There is a further article on the Divine Feminine as an aspect of masculine psychology.

    For further reflections on the Holy Spirit as Feminine, see this article.

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Footnotes:

1. Stanislav Grof, paper available online Archetypes, Mythic Imagination, and Modern Society, p18

2. HarperSanFrancisco, 1987

3. Adventures Unlimited, 1999

4. Green Man Press, 2001

5. see, for example, https://humanparts.medium.com/when-god-was-a-woman-3725fb8ad32e

6. Able Publishing, 1998

7. King Jesus, Cassell, 1946, chapter 1, (quoted in Elkington, p274)

8. Paul LaViolette, Beyond the Big Bang, Park Street Press, p104

9. source, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon, Peter Washington, Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd., 1993, p18

10. as footnote 6, p82

11. as footnote 4, p184–5

12. Isis Unveiled, volume II Theology, Bernard Quaritch, 1877, p299

13. Lynn Picknett/Clive Prince, Templar Revelation, Corgi, 1998, p421

14. ibid., p431

15. The Origin of All Religious Worship, Charles François Dupuis, Michigan Historical Reprint Series

16. Graham Hancock/Robert Bauval, Talisman, Penguin, 2004, p20, p452

17. The Sacred Depths of Nature, Ursula Goodenough, Oxford University Press, 1998, p17

    This article is the latest in a series on the theme of whether we can find a new mythology, a common visionary story, to unite humanity in an attempt to solve the world’s problems. (For a guide to the whole series, see under Mythology near the bottom of the Blog Index page.)

    In the two most recent I described the spirituality of the Perennial Philosophy, which had its origins in Eastern religions, and Western spiritual traditions. Now I’m going to turn my attention to Christianity.

    Where does Christianity stand in relation to the new mythology? It is, after all, the dominant religion in Western society, and one of the most significant in the world. It is interesting to note, therefore, that in The Tao of Physics Fritjof Capra, when comparing the findings of modern physics to ancient religions, found no need to include Christianity, whereas Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen all had chapters. Christianity, believing itself to be superior, the true religion, tends to reject and denounce the Eastern religions. The findings of quantum physics suggest that this rejection is unwarranted, and that these religions, on the contrary, have much to offer as we try to understand the nature of the universe.

    If Christianity is to find a place in the new mythology, therefore, it could not be Christianity as we know it. It would have to be a completely revised version — we are in need of a new Reformation. This is a massive topic, and cannot be gone into more detail here; it will require a whole new series¹.

    One person who has advocated such a revolution is Bishop John Shelby Spong, whose most relevant books on that theme are Why Christianity Must Change or Die², and A New Christianity for a New World ³. In them he presents his own vision, and there is much that I would agree with.

    One obvious general point is that Christianity would have to stop considering itself superior to other religions, the ‘true’ religion, and accept rather that it is one branch of the tree of the Perennial Philosophy, the idea that at their core all religions are saying the same thing. We have much to learn from other religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Islam (specifically its mystical tradition, Sufism), the Native Americans, and ancient mythologies.

    A second general point is that Christianity would have to be in agreement with the best of modern science, what we might call new paradigm science — not the Enlightenment science of Steven Pinker, and those like him.

    I believe that two specific points which Christianity would have to accept are reincarnation — I have addressed this briefly in an earlier article — and the reality of the Divine Feminine, which I’ll discuss in my next article (click here).

    Another way of saying all this is that we would need to have a deeper, more esoteric understanding of what Christianity is really about, not what has been offered to us by the Churches down the years. As George Trevelyan said: “The ageless wisdom (i.e. the Perennial Philosophy), lighting up in esoteric Christianity, runs like a golden thread through Western history, appearing in a guise appropriate for each successive age. We are now experiencing a new manifestation of it, uniquely suited to our own epoch”⁴.

    He is probably talking about this new mythology that I am seeking.

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Footnotes:

1. I’ve made some preliminary observations on this theme in an earlier article, click here.

2. HarperSanFrancisco, 1998

3. HarperSanFrancisco, 2001

4. A Vision of the Aquarian Age: The Emerging Spiritual Worldview, 1977, later edition Gateway Books, 1994, p26–27

    This article is the latest in a series on the theme of whether we can find a new mythology, a common visionary story, to unite humanity in an attempt to solve the world’s problems. (For a guide to the whole series, see under Mythology near the bottom of the Blog Index page.)

    In the most recent article I described the spirituality of the Perennial Philosophy, which had its origins in Eastern religions. I discussed the possibility that this philosophy may need to be developed, that the material level of the universe is something to work on, rather than something to be escaped, as taught by Hinduism and Buddhism. This article will continue that discussion, the topic being Western spirituality, which also has much to teach us. A spokesman for this point of view is the late George Trevelyan, whose book A Vision of the Aquarian Age: the Emerging Spiritual Worldview¹ is my main source for what follows. (Other important Western spiritual traditions are Theosophy, inspired by Helena Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, and the teachings of George Gurdjieff. Less well known, but I believe equally significant, are the writings of Raynor C. Johnson. These are not distinct from each other, but contain much overlapping material.)

    If it is going to unite humanity, the most important ingredient in any new mythology must be the recognition that we humans are one family working together for a common goal. This must be true if the Earth is a living superorganism, which I believe it is, of which humanity is an integral part. On this point Trevelyan says: “We as human beings are intimately and inextricably part of the whole of nature. In this way, we proceed to discover that Planet Earth is truly alive, a sentient creature with her own breathing, bloodstream, glands and consciousness. We human beings are integrally part of this organism, like blood corpuscles in a body. We are, moreover, points of consciousness for the Earth Being” (p15).

    He endorses the specific points that I emphasised in my article on the new mythology and science. He would also be in agreement with the Perennial Philosophy’s understanding of the cosmos, that there are other non-material levels to the universe, and that nothing exists except consciousness. He says that “everything is ultimately spirit, in different conditions of density” (p101), and that there are “different levels of consciousness — of which earth is the lowest and densest” (p11). It follows that “the whole is alive and is the work of Mind, of some Intelligence” (p7), what we might call the Divine Mind.

    As well as being collectively true, the new mythology must appeal to each individual at a personal level, must be something that everyone can commit to heart and soul. I believe that the following ideas have that potential.

    Humans are spiritual beings, souls (other similar terms are essences, monads) incarnating into bodies. There is a well known saying “the body is a temple”, thus the body temporarily houses the preexisting soul. As the rockstar Sting sang: “We are spirits, in the material world”.

    Trevelyan says that the soul “incarnates for the purpose of acquiring experience in the density of earth matter”(p8). “What occurs in life is not a sequence of chance mishaps, accidents and misfortunes, but a pattern that is, in some mysterious way, planned… Our higher self has somehow chosen its own destiny” (p12–13). “Preexistence implies that a soul chooses voluntarily to incarnate. At the same time, the spiritual guides and the Higher Self help us in the period before birth to find the right access into earth life. And this would entail, among other things, choosing our parents” (p42).

    During the process of incarnation, however, the soul forgets this plan for its life — the ancient Greeks spoke of it being immersed in Lethe, the river of oblivion. It is therefore the task of life to gradually reawaken, to remember this plan. As Joseph Campbell said: “We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us”, that is to say, let go of the plan of the unaware ego, and discover the destiny that was planned by the higher self. Elsewhere he said: “If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living”².

    There are helpful agencies to assist in this process of reawakening; as Trevelyan says: “We may be certain that we have invisible guides and helpers who can lead us through to the light” (p23). Who or what exactly are these guides? Since they are invisible, it is hard to be precise, but words that have been used to describe them are higher self, spirit guides, guardian angels, daemons.

    The best method of which I am aware for reconnecting with the higher self is dream interpretation. It may not be true of all dreams, but some ‘Big’ dreams are beyond doubt communications from the higher self, offering guidance, even instructions, for living, albeit expressed in symbolic language.

    We should be prepared for the possibility that this guidance will come as a shock. We may be deeply enmeshed in a way of life, or a particular worldview, whether religious, philosophical or scientific. In such cases, as Arthur Bernard says in his excellent book God Has No Edges, Dreams Have No Boundaries, “dreams say think again”. Directly relevant to my theme of a unifying mythology, he also says: “Dreams are trying to guide the human race into creating a more aware and informed world. You may not realize what a crucial role you play in this drama, but your dreams do”³.

    Inner dialogue or meditation may also be helpful. Other possibilities are divinatory practices, including I Ching consultations and Tarot readings. Synchronistic events, in the Jungian sense, can also suggest directions for one’s life. As Trevelyan says: “Most of us have experienced events which appear to have been strangely and ingeniously planned, and which cannot, we feel, be explained away by coincidence. These events can be ascribed to our spiritual guides, and, if we admit their existence in our own lives, we must acknowledge it in everyone else’s. If a pattern reveals itself in small happenings, there must be a great web of direction influencing all lives, and national evolution as well” (p152).

    Life is not purposeless, not meaningless. We are born for a reason. Let us connect with this great web of direction which is trying to organise our lives, both individually and collectively. It is positive, wants the world to be a better place. I like to call this the Holy Spirit.

    Click here for the next article in the series, about Christianity and the New Mythology.

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Footnotes:

1. 1977, later edition Gateway Books, 1994

2. The Power of Myth, Doubleday, 1988, p91

3. Wheatmark, 2009, both quotes Pxii

    This article is the latest in a series on the theme of whether we can find a new mythology, a common visionary story, to unite humanity in an attempt to solve the world’s problems. (For a guide to the whole series, see under Mythology near the bottom of the Blog Index Page.) In the most recent article I discussed the relevant science. Now I’ll be turning to the religion and spirituality.

    I suggested earlier that this would be the Perennial Philosophy, the essential idea of which is that all the world’s religions, despite their apparent differences, and the resulting conflicts, at their heart are saying the same thing¹. At the very least this would provide inspiration. A new mythology, therefore, has the possibility of reunifying the various religions, making the underlying core of the Perennial Philosophy more obvious. On this theme the Jungian analyst Edward Edinger says: “A notable feature of the new myth is its capacity to unify the various current religions of the world… The new myth will not be one more religious myth in competition with all the others for man’s allegiance; rather, it will elucidate and verify every functioning religion by giving more conscious and comprehensive expression to its essential meaning…

    “For the first time in history we now have an understanding of man so comprehensive and fundamental that it can be the basis for a unification of the world — first religiously and culturally and, in time, politically. When enough individuals are carriers of the ‘consciousness of wholeness’, the world itself will become whole”².

    This last paragraph is especially important, since the scientists I have discussed in earlier articles claim that their ‘scientific’ worldview (based on materialism and atheism) provides a comprehensive and fundamental understanding of the universe and humanity, so that they can provide a new mythology to replace the old ones. Edinger is here implicitly rejecting this assumption, saying that only a truly religious foundation can provide a unifying mythology. Like me, he also thinks that this can be the basis for a new politics.

    But is the Perennial Philosophy enough? There is an interesting discussion of this question in Keiron Le Grice’s excellent book The Archetypal Cosmos, beginning: “As science approaches the threshold of what can be known with certainty, scientific accounts of the nature of reality are coming to bear a striking resemblance to descriptions of the nature of reality found in the mystical literature of the perennial philosophy”³. Here he is echoing the thoughts of Fritjof Capra in his well-known book The Tao of Physics⁴, the subtitle of which was An exploration of the parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism.

    This may not be the final word on the matter, however, for Le Grice suggests that “certain important modifications and qualifications” might be necessary. He refers to “the application of modern evolutionary thinking to the timeless wisdom of the mystical teachings, promoting the view that humanity’s spiritual odyssey is taking place within a universe that is itself creatively evolving and continually complexifying into different forms”. He continues: “For some thinkers, such as Hegel and Teilhard de Chardin, reflecting on the direction of the evolutionary process has revealed the reality of a grand spiritual culmination of evolution, an Omega Point or Absolute drawing the universe towards itself in a unifying mega-synthesis of the multiplicity and diversity of all things”.

    This can be described as the process of the Divine Spirit transforming itself, a philosophical term for which would be evolutionary panentheism, the transcendent dimension of spirit and the immanence of spirit in nature, being and becoming.

    Joseph Campbell seemed to be thinking on similar lines when he wrote of “the unity of the race of man, not only in its biology but also in its spiritual history, which has everywhere unfolded in the manner of a single symphony, with its themes announced, developed, amplified, and turned about, distorted, reasserted, and, today, in a grand fortissimo of all sections sounding together, irresistibly advancing to some kind of mighty climax, out of which the next great movement will emerge”⁵.

    Le Grice concludes that “there are still unfolding and newly emergent forms of disclosure of the mystery of being”, that although “the different religions… have each in their own way given expression to different aspects of the divine mystery underlying all forms… this mystery is surely not to be reduced to any single interpretation of universal truth or any single path, not even to the perennial philosophy”.

    If the Perennial Philosophy in its original form is indeed not adequate to completely express the modern viewpoint, then such ideas as these must obviously become part of the new mythology.

    What, if anything, is wrong with the Perennial Philosophy? Both Hinduism and Buddhism describe the material universe as maya, illusion. Their driving motivation is the desire to escape human existence, thus the need for reincarnation, expressed as the liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth. Buddhism believes that life is suffering, and that this liberation is the solution. Hinduism perceives the material universe to be lila, a word often translated as divine play or sport. These systems therefore seem to denigrate the importance of the material universe.

    In line with Le Grice’s viewpoint, however, the material level is important — another translation of lila is drama. It is the Divine spirit transforming itself for a purpose not always easily understood by humans. It should be our task, therefore, to try to understand this Divine purpose, and seek to participate, thus cooperating with it. We exist to serve the Divine.

    The figure from the Hindu tradition most in tune with this alternative understanding would seem to be Sri Aurobindo. According to Britannica.com: “Rejecting the traditional Indian approach of striving for moksha (liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth, or samsara) as a means of reaching happier, transcendental planes of existence, Aurobindo held that terrestrial life itself, in its higher evolutionary stages, is the real goal of creation. He believed that the basic principles of matter, life, and mind would be succeeded through terrestrial evolution by the principle of supermind as an intermediate power between the two spheres of the infinite and the finite. Such a future consciousness would help to create a joyful life in keeping with the highest goal of creation, expressing values such as love, harmony, unity and knowledge and successfully overcoming the age-old resistance of dark forces against efforts to manifest the divine on earth”⁶.

    In the next article, I discuss the relevance of Western spirituality to the new mythology. Click here.

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Footnotes:

1. Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy is the best known book on the subject. See also Frithjof Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions.

2. The Creation of Consciousness, Inner City Books, 1984, p32

3. Floris Books, 2010, all quotes p37

4. 1976, 3rd edition Flamingo, 1992

5. Occidental Mythology, Penguin, 1991, p1

6. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sri-Aurobindo

    This article is the latest in a series on the theme of whether we can find a new mythology, a common visionary story, to unite humanity in an attempt to solve the world’s problems. To put what follows into context, please see the previous article. (For a guide to the whole series, see under Mythology near the bottom of the Blog Index page.)

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    The science of the new mythology should be based upon the worldview of quantum physics which, in the words of Keiron Le Grice, “paved the way for the emergence of the new paradigm sciences emphasizing holism, organicism, complex causality, field theories, nonlocal connections…”¹.

    Some specific scientific ingredients, which are merely catching up with the standpoint of longstanding spiritual traditions, would therefore be:

• The Universe is not a machine, as perceived by ‘Enlightenment’ scientists, rather a living organism. On this point I can do no better than quote D. H. Lawrence: “We and the cosmos are one. The cosmos is a vast living body, of which we are still parts… Now all this is literally true, as men knew in the great past, and as they will know again”². One obvious consequence of this viewpoint is that the universe is not pitilessly indifferent to humans, as claimed by Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker. How can the universe be indifferent to us if it is an organism of which we are a part?
• Our home, planet Earth, is therefore also a living organism, usually known as Gaia, the Greek goddess. James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis would therefore become a scientific cornerstone of the new mythology³.
• The Interconnectedness or the Oneness of Life — also a consequence of the first point, since the Universe is one great superorganism. This has been recognised by quantum physics. Fritjof Capra talks about “a perception of reality that goes beyond the scientific framework to an awareness of the oneness of all life, the interdependence of its multiple manifestations, and its cycles of change and transformation”⁴.

    All this suggests the need for a revival of the worldview of animism, which has been rejected by Enlightenment science. There is an interesting book, available free online, called Towards an Animistic Science of the Earth by Stephan Harding, who says in his introduction: “If we are to have any chance of surviving the looming catastrophe that science and technology have inadvertently helped to create we will need more wisdom, not more analytical capacity… We now urgently need to develop a new approach in science that integrates analysis with wisdom, fact with value, and nature with culture… by replacing our demonstrably unwise (and until recently, unconscious) assumption that the world is an inert machine with the arguably wiser and more accurate metaphor that the world is a vast animate (and hence ‘sentient’) being”.

    Quantum physics has inspired the new worldview outlined above. One problem that we currently face, therefore, is that the quantum revolution has not yet sufficiently penetrated the public consciousness. As Deepak Chopra said in a recent article on Medium.com⁵:

• “Quantum mechanics is considered the most successful scientific theory of all time, but its effect on everyday life — or at least everyday thought — has been marginal”.
• “The general public has a vague acquaintance that quantum physics changed how science views space, time, matter, and energy. What escapes general notice, however, is the revolution that followed the quantum revolution”.

    According to Chopra, the essence of this revolution is contained within the world wholeness: “The answer advanced by more and more scientists is ‘wholeness’. Since space, time, matter, energy, and everyday logic aren’t truly fundamental, it makes sense that whatever controls space, time, matter, and energy must be the universe’s overriding reality. Wholeness exerts a force, call it ‘the power of one’, that goes beyond physical forces. Or to put it another way, no combination of physical forces can be used to explain how the whole maintains and organizes itself”.

    The quantum revolution is therefore suggesting some transcendent organizing power, which is interesting from a spiritual point of view. The new mythology needs to stress and promote this quantum understanding, to help bring it more to public attention.

    Some specific claims of materialist science that the new mythology should reject are:

• that matter is the fundamental reality
• that the brain generates consciousness
• that the self is an illusion
• that the universe is completely comprehensible through the laws of chemistry and physics
• that the evolution of life can be explained by nothing more than natural selection acting upon random genetic mutations
• that the Big Bang is indisputably the explanation for the beginning of the universe.

(I have already written several articles on these themes. See the Articles Index and Blog Index pages.)

    Click here for the next article in the series.

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Footnotes:

1. The Archetypal Cosmos, Floris Books, 2010, p36

2. Apocalypse, Martin Secker, 1932, p45

3. See Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, 1979, revised edition 1995, OUP

4. Tao of Physics, Flamingo, 1992, p358

5. The Power of One https://medium.com/@DeepakChopra/the-power-of-one-251d0792efcc