A New Awakening, Part 10

In this ongoing series, I've been considering how a "new awakening" of spirituality that is more aware of the wisdom of myth can benefit us today. I've been mentioning some of the problems we seem to be facing now, and then trying to show how a more myth-aware spirituality might help.

One of the leading problems today is climate change, a.k.a. global warming. Unlike problems such as sexual assault in the military or rising suicide rates among older age groups, climate change doesn't threaten us as individuals. It threatens us as communities, the whole world round. What can myth-aware spirituality say to us about such worries?

In "The Power of Myth," Joseph Campbell tells Bill Moyers that “there are two totally different orders of mythology. There is the mythology that relates you to your nature and to the natural world, of which you’re a part. And there is the mythology that is strictly sociological, linking you to a particular society. You are not simply a natural man, you are a member of a particular group.”

Our biblical traditions bequeath us a "strictly sociological" version of mythic awareness, not one that "relates you to your nature and to the natural world." Campbell says, “Usually the socially oriented system is of a nomadic people who are moving around, so you learn that’s where your center is, in that group.” The ancient Semites out of whose culture the Hebrews/Israelites emerged were nomads from the Arabian peninsula.

An artist's conception of
the Jewish patriarch Abraham

On the other hand, “The nature-oriented mythology would be of an earth-cultivating people.” The Semitic nomads conquered the earth-cultivating people in the Fertile Crescent to their north. Eventually the original Jewish patriarch Abram, who became Abraham, came out of that conquering culture. As a result, Campbell says that “the biblical tradition is a socially oriented mythology. Nature is condemned.”

Those of us whose heritage is European find, if we look back far enough into European prehistory, that nomads from the Asian steppes conquered the earth-cultivating peoples of the Mediterranean world. So later on, when biblical religion came to Europe, Europeans ultimately were (after centuries of resistance) receptive.

All that doesn't bode well for our times, given that we who are Jews, Christians, or Muslims today inherit that biblical, socially oriented mythology that thrived in the Middle East, in Europe, and in the Arab world.

We have tried to control nature during our history in Europe and on the North American continent. Our economic progress has depended on that effort. Campbell tells Moyers, “Nature religions are not attempts to control nature but to help you put yourself in accord with it. But when nature is thought of as evil, you don’t put yourself in accord with it, you control it, or try to, and hence the tension, the anxiety, the cutting down of forests, the annihilation of native people. And the accent here separates us from nature.”

So it would seem that any real attempt to deal with climate change will demand that we switch to the kind of mythological awareness that, in Campbell's words, "relates you to your nature and to the natural world."

A Japanese garden

Campbell contrasts the traditional Japanese nature religion, Shinto, with our biblical orientation. He says, “One of the Shinto texts says that the processes of nature cannot be evil. Every natural impulse is not to be corrected but to be sublimated, to be beautified.” That, he says, is why Japanese gardens are so lovely. “But in the Bible,” Campbell, says, “eternity withdraws, and nature is corrupt, nature has fallen. In biblical thinking, we live in exile.”

“We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet,” Campbell says about what is required now. Equivalently, we need new gods. “A god is a personification,” says Campbell, “of a motivating power or a value system that functions in human life and in the universe—the powers of your own body and of nature. The myths are metaphorical of spiritual potentiality in the human being, and the same powers that animate our life animate the life of the world.”

That's a different view of things than we are used to today. If the myths we need today are representative of potentialities that exist within us naturally, and if the gods we need personify nature's and our own human motivating powers, what happens to our traditional idea that we need to remain true to our God whom we picture as "out there" somwhere, sitting in judgment on us?