Archaic Religion: Symbol and Myth

It is one thing to sense or seek the realm of the sacred; it is quite another to find and describe it. Although archaic peoples, like any others, attempt to express

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their longings and beliefs, the very nature of the sacred, which is something utterly different from the profane, would seem to make this impossible. How can one describe that which is “wholly other” than anything in normal experience? The answer, Eliade explains, lies in indirect expression: The language of the sacred is to be found in symbols and in myth.

In observing how symbols work, says Eliade, the first thing to notice is that just about anything we encounter in the world can serve as a symbol. Most of the things that make up ordinary life are profane; they are just themselves, nothing more. But at the right moment anything profane can be transformed into something more than itself—a marker or sign of that which is sacred. A tool, an animal, a river, a raging fire, a star or stone, a cave, a blossoming flower, or a human being—anything can become a sign of the sacred if people so discover or decide. Once recognized as such, moreover, all symbolic objects acquire a double character: though in one sense they remain what they always were, they also become something new, something other than themselves. In the shrine known as Kaaba, for example, Muslims revere a sacred black stone. Though on one level that object remains to this day just a stone, no faithful follower of Muhammad would ever recognize it as that. From the instant of

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hierophany—from the moment, that is, when Muslims saw it as something touched by the sacred—this profane object was transformed; it became no longer a mere stone but a holy object, an imposing package, we might say, that carries the sacred within. Eliade calls this infusion of the supernatural into natural objects the “dialectic of the sacred.” Though concrete, limited in shape, and perhaps even movable from place to place, a sacred stone can—through another of its qualities, its solidity—convey to the eyes of a believer features of the sacred that are precisely the opposite of its limitations; it can suggest, as the sacred stone of the Kaaba does for Muslims, a God who is immovable and beyond change, the almighty, infinite, and absolute Creator of the world. In common logic, of course, such a combination of opposites strikes us as irrational. If the profane is truly opposed to the sacred, how can it become its precise opposite? How can the natural also be the supernatural? It can do so, says Eliade, because in such matters human reason is not in charge of the transaction. Symbol and myth make their appeal to the imagination, which often thrives on the idea of contradiction. They grip the complete person, the emotions, the will, and even subconscious aspects of personality. And just as in the personality all sorts of colliding impulses are joined, just as in dreams and fantasies all sorts of illogical things can happen, so in religious experience opposites like the sacred and profane do converge. In an intuitive burst of discovery, the religious imagination sees things otherwise ordinary and profane as more than themselves and turns them into the sacred. The natural becomes supernatural.

Over the centuries, of course, human beings have generated countless new myths, symbols, and variations of both. No scholar could hope to find them all. Nor is it necessary to try. Eliade thinks a great deal can be learned just

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from the major symbolic patterns and systems, which are the only ones he chooses to trace out in detail. It will repay our effort to notice a few of them.

One of the most common elements of archaic cultures is belief in sky gods, divinities whose character is suggested by the very nature of the wide heaven above the earth. The sky conveys a sense of transcendence, of a span raised high above us, something infinite, sovereign, and eternal—full of authority and reality. Fittingly, the sky god is often imagined in just this fashion. Like the god Iho among the Maoris, he is “raised up”; like Olorun among the African Yoruba tribes, he is “owner of the sky”; like the great god Ahura-Mazda in early Iran, he is the giver of all laws and enforcer of moral order in the world. Because the heavens are high, these gods are, in fact, often portrayed as almost too elevated and distant, too far away to care about mere human beings. Australian myths tell the story of the withdrawal of the sky god, while in other primitive societies as well, the god of the sky seems so far beyond human reach that other religious conceptions must come in to replace him. Often these new conceptions are gods of the rain and storm, deities who are more concrete and personal, more directly involved in human life because they specialize in one task. Here the early Hindu god Rudra is an example. Virile and violent, surging with life, he was for the villagers of ancient India the bringer of rain as well as the source of sexual energy. He and others like him had female partners or entered sacred marriages; they stood at the center of lavish ceremonies, which often included bloody sacrifices and orgies. Their imagery is exceedingly powerful and their influence extremely widespread. In fact, says Eliade, in words that remind us of Frazer, “this structure made up of the rainy sky, bull, and Great Goddess was one of the elements that united all the protohistoric religions of Europe.”¹¹

It is not hard to guess why such a change from sky to storm gods may have taken place. Eliade explains that the appeal of rain and fertility gods was closely linked to one of the most important events in all of early civilization —the discovery of agriculture. Plowing the soil, planting seeds, and harvesting crops—all of these activities brought a new pattern of life, and with it an occasion for new hierophanies and symbols of different kinds. In an agrarian world, the great “fecundators,” the gods of storm and sex, conveyed the sacred with greater power and more vivid appearance than the distant god of the sky.

“Son” gods, like Dionysos in Greece and Osiris in Egypt, also made their appearance in the age of agriculture. Like storm gods, they were dynamic, but not in quite the same way. Their role was rather to suffer and die. The

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so-called mystery religions, which were enormously popular in the ancient Mediterranean world, centered especially on these deities, which in name were vegetation gods but figured more prominently as dramatic, divine saviors. In these gods especially, Eliade discerns an important psychological aspect of religious symbols. They not only tell us about the world and the sacred but also show “the continuity between the structures of human existence and cosmic structures.”¹² Their myths do not just reflect the cycles of life and death in nature; they reenact as well the great personal struggle that takes place in the life of each human individual: the drama of birth, life, and death as well as the hope of rebirth or redemption. Eliade tells us that no symbol manages to bring divine life so near to human as the figure of the savior-god, the divinity who “even shared mankind’s sufferings, died and rose from the dead to redeem them.” Precisely because of his marked “humanity,” this type of god plays a crucial role in the history of religion.¹³

Eliade notes that sun worship, which some earlier theorists (especially Max Müller) thought the center of all mythology, is in fact very rare.¹⁴ Much more prominent and widespread are myths and symbols associated with the everchanging moon. The moon moves through cycles; it grows, becomes full, then for a time completely disappears. Its phases connect readily to other events, such as the ebb and flow of the ocean tides, the coming and going of the rains, and, through these, to the growth of plants and the fertility of the earth. Since it always returns to its beginnings, the moon furnishes the archetypal image of ceaseless renewal. Eliade states that its dominant theme is “one of rhythm carried out by a succession of contraries, of ‘becoming’ through a succession of opposing modalities. It is a becoming … that cannot take place without drama.”¹⁵

Lunar symbolism also shows a remarkable power of expansion; it keeps reaching out to make new connections. Besides waters and vegetation, the moon is often linked to death, the last phase of life; to the snake, which regenerates itself by shedding its skin; and to woman, whose power to renew life by giving birth arises from the “lunar” phases of the menstrual cycle. In fact, “the intuition of the moon as the measure of rhythms, as the source of energy, of life, and of rebirth, has woven a sort of web between the various levels of the universe, producing parallels, similarities, and unities among vastly differing kinds of phenomena.”¹⁶ Because of a long linkage that takes the form moon-rain-fertility-woman-serpent-death-periodic regeneration, a person can tap into the lunar network at any one of its points. A simple rain ritual, for instance, or a serpent charm worn on the wrist, can engage this entire system

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Like the “son” gods, the moon has both a cosmic and a personal dimension. On the one level, it is treasured “in what it reveals of the sacred, that is, in the power centred in it, in the inexhaustible life and reality that it manifests.”¹⁷ On the other, it reminds us psychologically of the double nature of our human condition: rooted in the realm of the profane, the place of shadows and death, we nonetheless long for the sacred, the sphere of those things real and undying. In earlier ages, amid disease and death, the hopes of archaic peoples for their own personal renewal and immortality “gained confirmation from the fact of there being always a new moon.”¹⁸ The moon is in one sense a display of dualisms: light and dark, full and empty, old and new, birth and death, male and female. Yet by its alternations and changes, it also suggests the over coming of all dualisms, a key theme also in many symbolisms of the sacred. Eliade here points to myths of androgyny, which suggest that the first human beings, who lived close to the gods, were neither male nor female but a unity of both sexes. This theme, moreover, is just one in a whole family of myths of reintegration. Common throughout the human race, these stories express a powerful hope for the end of all opposites, the dissolution of all separations, the return to the original unity of the sacred.

In addition to great symbols like those of the sky and moon, the world of archaic peoples is rich as well in lesser signs and images, which often link up with the more dominant ones. Water, for example, everywhere expresses the shapeless, unformed nature of things before they were ordered into a world by the gods. It starts the process of renewal. Neither the world nor the human self can be reborn until each has first returned to chaos by plunging into the watery depths, thence to emerge as a new creation. In ritual initiations and in most rites of purification, water is the agent that cleanses and erases all, taking us back to the unformed, the primeval, the “clean slate,” where a new beginning can be made.

The symbolism of stones, by contrast, suggests the opposite. Unlike water, the substance of stones is hard, rugged, and unchanging. To the primitive person, “rock shows … something that transcends the precariousness of his humanity; an absolute mode of being. Its strength, its motionlessness, its size … indicate the presence of something that fascinates, terrifies, attracts, and threatens, all at once.”¹⁹ If we put these words into the Latin fascinans and tremendum, we actually have Rudolf Otto’s very words for the sacred. A normal stone would hardly attract our notice; a sacred stone generates awe and fear.

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The symbolisms of life, growth, and fertility have played a very large role in the religion of archaic peoples, both before and after the dawn of agriculture. Of the many patterns Eliade considers at length in this category, we can notice just a few.

A very early image is that of the earth as sacred mother, the source of all living things. The sacred marriage of the divine sky father and earth mother is found in many mythologies, from the South Pacific to Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Americas. The sky fertilizes the earth with rain, and the earth produces grains and grass. With the coming of agriculture and closer human involvement in cultivation of plants and grains, the earlier symbol of the earth as mother is often overlaid by that of the great goddess—once again, a more dynamic, emotional divinity who, like the “son” gods considered above, personally lives out the fate of the crops in her own life cycle of birth, sexual encounter, fertility, and death.

More widespread than that of either the earth mother or the goddess, however, is the symbolism of trees. Sacred trees can be found “in the history of every religion, in popular tradition the world over, in primitive metaphysics and mysticism, to say nothing of iconography and popular art.”²⁰ Some, like the cosmic tree Yggdrasil in Norse mythology, combine the symbolism of the axis mundi, the world’s centerpost, with a second theme, the tree as the sacred source of life. As great vertical objects that are also alive, such trees represent “the very life of the entire world as it endlessly renews itself.” Further, since trees live a long time, the life within them is considered inexhaustible; they become a focus of human hopes for immortality. Frazer, we should remember, found the soul, the source of life, to be closely associated with both the mistletoe and tree worship in northern Europe. And in the many ancient myths of a tree of life, we read of a hero who must pass a test, much as Adam and Eve faced and failed the divine test of the forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden. By defeating a dragon or resisting temptation, the great man wins the prize of immortality. Trees tell us that the sacred is the fount of all life, the one true reality, and to those who can pass the test, the giver of immortality.

Eliade reminds us that to appreciate vegetation myths we must recall how primitive people lived in ongoing fear that at some point the powers of the natural world would weaken and begin to run out. For the archaic mind, all things—whether plant, animal, or human—are energized through “the same closed circuit of the substance of life,” which passes from one level or creature to another.²¹ When planted, the grains that die at harvest give their life to the next year’s crop. When harvested, ground into flour, and baked, they transfer their life to humanity, for they then become the force of life in the bread that

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From fertility and vegetation Eliade turns next to the symbolisms of space and of time. The first of these we have already noted above, and the second will come our way shortly. So we can pass over them here to observe something else. Although most of the discussion in Patterns is taken up with individual symbols and myths from around the world, Eliade takes time along the way to consider two broad features of all symbolic thinking. One is the structural, or systemlike, character of most symbolism and mythology; the other is the matter of ranking symbols—placing some above others in value.

Throughout his discussion, Eliade explains that symbols and myths rarely exist in isolation. It is their nature always to be part of larger symbol systems; they “connect up” with other images, or other myths, to form a pattern. The thought world of archaic peoples is thus filled with associations, linkages, and repetitions that keep extending the sense of the sacred, if possible, to almost every dimension of life—from the noblest occasions and ceremonies to the simplest daily task. A pair of examples may help to illustrate this process. In a first appearance of the sacred—an original hierophany—a religious person finds, let us say, a vision of the one true God in the sun, as did the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaton. (Freud, we may recall, thought Akhenaton was the religious genius who inspired Jewish monotheism.) Soon the round solar disk is declared the symbol of the divine. It is carved into walls, worn as jewelry, and required on flags at palace ceremonies. These gestures naturally expand

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Another vivid example of this systematic extension is the cycle of lunar myths and symbols noted above. From its center in the phases of the moon, this symbolic system continually spreads out its net to convey a sense of the sacred to many other dimensions of life: the waters and rains, fertility and woman, serpents and human redemption, even shells and spirals and bolts of lightning. There may be no formal rule of logic that compels people to connect lunar phases with spiral shells; yet intuitively and imaginatively, there is a certain “logic of symbols” that makes the connections. Symbols always lead naturally to other symbols and to myths in such a way as to create a framework, a world that is a complete, connected system, rather than a chaotic jumble.

In addition to noticing their systemic character, a second general issue Eliade alludes to is that of comparing symbols and myths. Are some symbols perhaps better in character than others? Can we rank myths on a scale of value? And if so, what standard would we use? In Patterns, he does not address these questions as directly as one would like, but it is plain that he does in fact feel some images and myths to be superior to others. The main standard he applies seems to be that of their scale or size. The “bigger” the symbol, the more complete and universal it is, the better it conveys the true nature of the sacred. Here again, a specific example may help. If the people of a primitive village encounter something supernatural in a nearby tree, that can be called a hierophany; the tree manifests the sacred. If, in the course of time, however, the council of elders should rethink this symbolism and decide that this sacred tree is in fact the cosmic tree, the center of the world, that too is a hierophany, but of a higher order. It is a better representation of the sacred because it is wider in extent, grander in scale than the original sacred tree. By means of the elders’ decision, then, the first sighting of the sacred in the local tree is “revalorized” (as Eliade likes to say) into a far more impressive image of the sacred than it originally was. The new symbolism of the world tree surpasses the old symbol of the simple village hierophany.

Again, one type of hierophany is a theophany (from the Greek theos, “deity”): the appearance of a god. A theophany can occur in something as simple as

a stone. At the same time, drawing on his own tradition of Romanian Orthodoxy, Eliade points out that Christianity finds God to be incarnate in the man Jesus of Nazareth. This human theophany is superior to the stone theophany, not—as missionaries once would have said—because Christianity is true and other religions false, but because a human person, possessing intelligence and emotions, is by nature a richer, fuller being than an animal or stone. Thus, as a symbol, the figure of Christ, the God-man, captures more of the fullness and reality of the sacred. In addition, Christians make universal claims about the incarnation; they say that never has there been or will there be a theophany as final or as world-embracing. Christ is to other theophanies as the great cosmic tree is to the village tree—a wider, grander, and consequently better image of the divine. As the human form of the all-powerful Creator, he better conveys the full extent of the sacred than, say, the Greek god Pan, who is pictured only as god of the pastures and forests.

These concepts of replacement and “revalorization” of symbols play an important role in Eliade’s theory. They show that he is interested in examining not just the timeless forms of religion but also their historical changes. In his view, human beings throughout time have been continually at work restating their perceptions of the sacred in original ways, fashioning new myths, discovering fresh symbols, and rearranging them into wider or different systems. Accordingly, the mission of the “history” of religions is first to discover symbols, myths, rituals, and their systems, then to trace them through the human past as they have been changed and interchanged from one age or place to the next. After that—and just as importantly—the more phenomenological side enters in. The historian seeks to compare and contrast these materials to determine their different levels and types of significance as carriers of the sacred. And he observes how, in different ages and places, symbols, myths, and rituals are perpetually subject to change. Through history, they are constantly being created, revised, discarded, and created again. Were he an evolutionary thinker, we might find Eliade claiming that all these changes are improvements, that each new myth or symbol is progressively better than the last. But that is not really his view. He believes the natural logic of symbols and myths pushes them always to become more universal, to shed the particulars of a single time and place and approximate ever more closely to a universal archetype, as when a local goddess acquires more and more of the features of the archetypal great goddess of fertility. In the actual circumstances of human experience, symbols decay and degenerate as well. History presents occasions when cultures move counter to the logic of the sacred—say, by losing or corrupting a great world creation myth or by replacing more universal symbols with less universal ones, as when the smaller storm god replaces the earlier sovereign sky god. When that happens, certain new dimensions of the sacred

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Throughout the ages, then, archaic and other peoples have enjoyed a certain freedom of imagination in selecting sacred symbols and myths. Eliade notes that there seems scarcely a single natural object that has not at some time or other become a symbol or figured in a myth. And yet, for all of this creativity, religious imagery has never been purely random or chaotic. The point of Patterns is to show just the opposite: that regardless of place, time, or culture, archaic peoples have shown a remarkable constancy in returning to the same types of symbol, the same themes in their myths, and the same universalizing logic in both. The closer we look at the historical specifies of religion, the more clearly we see its ever-recurring, ever-expanding patterns.