Revelations of the Self
I actually think there's a scientific question to be asked about world religions. I've pondered this at some length over the past year, and while I've heard it touched upon in passing, I haven't heard it drawn out at any length. I'm going to take the trouble here to outline the basic question.
In his Myths to Live By, Joseph Campbell relates a story about Cortés's men encountering the Aztecs in Mesoamerica for the first time. Among their pantheon of pagan gods was one deity who was sacrificed, for redemptive purposes, and returned to life. One of the symbols associated with this deity was a cross.
There were enough parallels to the Christianity they were trying to bring to this new world that they didn't think it could be a coincidence. According to Campbell, they devised two explanations: first, they speculated that perhaps St. Thomas, apostle to the Far East, had managed to make his way to where they were, preached the gospel, and what they were seeing was a representation of Christ that had devolved into paganism in the interim. Either that, or they thought that Satan might have planted the deity into the Aztec pantheon to deceive them away from the Truth.
To the latter explanation, I find it a curious proposition that Satan would inject a deity that so resembled Christ into their smörgåsbord of worship; if anything, this seems like it would have the opposite effect than the one Satan is striving for. The former seems unlikely, but this leaves us with a quandary: are the parallels just a coincidence? There are enough similarities between different world mythologies, in terms of symbolisms and motifs used in their narratives, that they cannot all be explained by migration.
Someone asked me recently if I believe in astrology. I replied that I believe in astrology just as much as I believe in Christianity, Homer and Hesiod, and so on. All of these things are different manifestations of the same thing: actualized expressions by human beings of revelations of the archetypal psyche. Anyone who reads my entries with any regularity doesn't need me to elaborate on this point, but in essence the school of psychology that I subscribe to contends that there is a part of our psyche that is common to all of us, much in the way that we each physically have two arms, two legs, and so on. This is a generative machine that gives rise to the same forms repeatedly that we associate with particular meanings.
I'll venture on a brief tangent here: if Christianity and astrology sound unrelated, or it seems a sin to conflate the two of them, I'd refer the reader to the second chapter of Matthew. Nativity scenes abound with portrayals of three wise men; there are not actually three of them, but an unspecified number who bring three gifts to the newborn Christ. More to the point, "wise men" is a modernization of what's actually in the text: they are Magi, who were Persian mystics. The Magi tell King Herod that they saw the star of the newborn king of Israel, and that this is what has brought them from the east to visit Jesus. From this we can deduce that, like so many others of their day, these Magi were practicers of astrology. It should be clear from this passage in the gospel that even as early as the first century Jesus was associated with astrological myths, and that this detail was important enough to include in the holy book.
This past December, a few days before Christmas, there was a great deal of fuss made on social media about an astronomical conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the sky, and that this same event was the bright "star" alluded to in Matthew. There was such a conjunction of these two stars, much in way it happened in December 2020, around 6 B.C. Historians might place the actual birth of Jesus, to the extent it can be placed at all, around this time. It's within the realm of possibility.
Lest I be accused of psychologism, I should clarify that I don't think that mythologies are simply products of the psyche. The psyche only comes to full fruition when it interacts with the outside world, taking in information about the outer world via the senses, filtering out what it doesn't need and retaining what it does, and clusters related bits of information around focal points. Jung called these focal points "archetypes". The Mother archetype tends to draw nurturing associative material around itself. An Oedipus complex, as Freud described it, can loosely be thought of as a Mother archetype that has been corrupted by some kind of psychopathology.
To bring the idea of archetypes back down to earth, much of modern psychology is based around the construct of the "Inner Child". This idea originates, like so many things, with Jung's idea of archetypes. The child motif appears so consistently and pervasively in world mythologies that Jung felt that there must be a child archetype in the human mind as its objective basis.
I often hear theories from people about religion, which go something like this: religion was "invented" by the intellect of human beings before they had a modern scientific understanding of the world. Some human being in the distant past saw the opportunity to seize power by creating a series of rules, making up mythologies around them, and that this duped the masses of people into following some set of rules. That the thousands of years' worth of mythology in human history is simply the result of stupidity isn't worth serious consideration; it is only conceit to think that we modern humans are somehow any smarter in our rationality. The important thing I argue here is that religion is not simply a precursor to philosophy, born of the intellect, but an inner psychic experience layered onto outer reality. Perhaps they serve the same function, but they originate from different mental wellsprings.
Here is the reason I'm concerned at all with any of this, which brings me back to the beginning of this post: I think there is a scientific question lurking within world religions, and, since I'm an American, I take particular interest in Christianity. (Whether or not the question can actually be answered, and whether the answer would actually be of any import, are different matters entirely.)
Let's consider evolutionary biology, which is a scientific field that I can only hope not to butcher completely in drawing these parallels, since I am not a scientist. Environments on earth give rise to variations of organisms, with each variation a leaf node in a long line of mutations accrued on a branch of the evolutionary tree of life. Mutations that facilitate the increased survival or reproductive odds of the organism survive, while the less advantageous ones are circumstantially phased out. To determine which organisms have survived and which have gone extinct acts as a kind of proxy to a deeper understanding of the details about the respective environments in which they live and die.
So here is the first basic question: why did Christianity slowly overtake the Roman empire and ultimately survive for 2,000 years, while so many other mythologies of that era have gone the way of the dodo? The fundamentalist will say that this just proves Christianity's veracity; this is a non-answer to my actual question. From that perspective, its survival is based on the divine plan of a creator God, in which case the question is: what did this creator know about the soil of the mind of humankind that made Him plant the seeds that He did, to know in advance that it would successfully sprout and flourish? If not this, then the question is somewhat evolutionary in nature: why did this behaviorial adaptation outcompete those around it?
The first and obvious answer is that Christianity came to have the backing of the Roman government. This started with the conversion of Constantine, which ended the persecution of the Christians, and culminated a half-century later with the faith being ratified as the official church of the empire. While the political backing of the state was certainly a huge factor in its long-term survival, this doesn't happen until the fourth century, and Christianity was gaining adherents at a steady clip in the few hundred years before this.
It's important not to homogenize Christians at any stage of its development. The earliest writings we have about the early church, the epistles of Paul, are written starting 20 years or so after Jesus was killed. They are addressed to various congregations in other regions in which Paul is attempting to settle disputes among the parishioners about the correct way of being a Christian. This clearly indicates that there was most likely never consensus about how to practice the faith, even in the early days.
It's well-known that there are numerous writings about Jesus, discovered from contemporary archeological finds, that did not make it into the New Testament, which ended up ultimately being excluded and suppressed from use when authorities decided that they didn't adhere to accepted orthodoxy. The canonical gospels themselves don't quite agree on everything; the excluded writings differ in their theologies even more starkly from the canonical writings. Every religion is born of its ancestors in a theological tree: Judaism branches from the pagan context in which it arose, and Christianity from one of its Rabbis. Even within Christianity we have a long evolutionary tree of innumerable versions of Christian theology, all of which stem from its root and are mutations of the variations that came just before it. Like the evolutionary tree of life that we know from the biological sciences, the overwhelming majority of these lineages went extinct a long time ago.
Atheists are quick to dismiss all of the Bible because of this. Why should the few writings that survived be of any interest to us if they were just a small handful of all those produced? This position is only valid if you assume that the ones that managed to survived did so for arbitrary reasons, and there's nothing special about the ones that have stood the test of time. I disagree with this.
So, of what use is this survivorship bias? The hypothesis: the versions of Christianity that have persisted to this day, all accruals of centuries of mutations, and none of which resemble their roots of 2,000 years ago, survive to this day because they were generated products of the archetypal psyche that resonated most intensely with the largest number of people. Just as one can compare the biological organisms that survive and those that go extinct, and infer from their differentials information about the dynamics of their environment, I imagine one can compare the religious variants that have survived with those that have not and develop some insight into the environment that conceived them: the human psyche. The part of the mind below consciousness is the bottom of the ocean, understood in any measure by few, and directly explored by far fewer. If you understand why mythologies have cycled in and out over the centuries, you can probably develop some insight into the structure of the mind.
In his Myths to Live By, Joseph Campbell relates a story about Cortés's men encountering the Aztecs in Mesoamerica for the first time. Among their pantheon of pagan gods was one deity who was sacrificed, for redemptive purposes, and returned to life. One of the symbols associated with this deity was a cross.
There were enough parallels to the Christianity they were trying to bring to this new world that they didn't think it could be a coincidence. According to Campbell, they devised two explanations: first, they speculated that perhaps St. Thomas, apostle to the Far East, had managed to make his way to where they were, preached the gospel, and what they were seeing was a representation of Christ that had devolved into paganism in the interim. Either that, or they thought that Satan might have planted the deity into the Aztec pantheon to deceive them away from the Truth.
To the latter explanation, I find it a curious proposition that Satan would inject a deity that so resembled Christ into their smörgåsbord of worship; if anything, this seems like it would have the opposite effect than the one Satan is striving for. The former seems unlikely, but this leaves us with a quandary: are the parallels just a coincidence? There are enough similarities between different world mythologies, in terms of symbolisms and motifs used in their narratives, that they cannot all be explained by migration.
Someone asked me recently if I believe in astrology. I replied that I believe in astrology just as much as I believe in Christianity, Homer and Hesiod, and so on. All of these things are different manifestations of the same thing: actualized expressions by human beings of revelations of the archetypal psyche. Anyone who reads my entries with any regularity doesn't need me to elaborate on this point, but in essence the school of psychology that I subscribe to contends that there is a part of our psyche that is common to all of us, much in the way that we each physically have two arms, two legs, and so on. This is a generative machine that gives rise to the same forms repeatedly that we associate with particular meanings.
I'll venture on a brief tangent here: if Christianity and astrology sound unrelated, or it seems a sin to conflate the two of them, I'd refer the reader to the second chapter of Matthew. Nativity scenes abound with portrayals of three wise men; there are not actually three of them, but an unspecified number who bring three gifts to the newborn Christ. More to the point, "wise men" is a modernization of what's actually in the text: they are Magi, who were Persian mystics. The Magi tell King Herod that they saw the star of the newborn king of Israel, and that this is what has brought them from the east to visit Jesus. From this we can deduce that, like so many others of their day, these Magi were practicers of astrology. It should be clear from this passage in the gospel that even as early as the first century Jesus was associated with astrological myths, and that this detail was important enough to include in the holy book.
This past December, a few days before Christmas, there was a great deal of fuss made on social media about an astronomical conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the sky, and that this same event was the bright "star" alluded to in Matthew. There was such a conjunction of these two stars, much in way it happened in December 2020, around 6 B.C. Historians might place the actual birth of Jesus, to the extent it can be placed at all, around this time. It's within the realm of possibility.
Lest I be accused of psychologism, I should clarify that I don't think that mythologies are simply products of the psyche. The psyche only comes to full fruition when it interacts with the outside world, taking in information about the outer world via the senses, filtering out what it doesn't need and retaining what it does, and clusters related bits of information around focal points. Jung called these focal points "archetypes". The Mother archetype tends to draw nurturing associative material around itself. An Oedipus complex, as Freud described it, can loosely be thought of as a Mother archetype that has been corrupted by some kind of psychopathology.
To bring the idea of archetypes back down to earth, much of modern psychology is based around the construct of the "Inner Child". This idea originates, like so many things, with Jung's idea of archetypes. The child motif appears so consistently and pervasively in world mythologies that Jung felt that there must be a child archetype in the human mind as its objective basis.
I often hear theories from people about religion, which go something like this: religion was "invented" by the intellect of human beings before they had a modern scientific understanding of the world. Some human being in the distant past saw the opportunity to seize power by creating a series of rules, making up mythologies around them, and that this duped the masses of people into following some set of rules. That the thousands of years' worth of mythology in human history is simply the result of stupidity isn't worth serious consideration; it is only conceit to think that we modern humans are somehow any smarter in our rationality. The important thing I argue here is that religion is not simply a precursor to philosophy, born of the intellect, but an inner psychic experience layered onto outer reality. Perhaps they serve the same function, but they originate from different mental wellsprings.
Here is the reason I'm concerned at all with any of this, which brings me back to the beginning of this post: I think there is a scientific question lurking within world religions, and, since I'm an American, I take particular interest in Christianity. (Whether or not the question can actually be answered, and whether the answer would actually be of any import, are different matters entirely.)
Let's consider evolutionary biology, which is a scientific field that I can only hope not to butcher completely in drawing these parallels, since I am not a scientist. Environments on earth give rise to variations of organisms, with each variation a leaf node in a long line of mutations accrued on a branch of the evolutionary tree of life. Mutations that facilitate the increased survival or reproductive odds of the organism survive, while the less advantageous ones are circumstantially phased out. To determine which organisms have survived and which have gone extinct acts as a kind of proxy to a deeper understanding of the details about the respective environments in which they live and die.
So here is the first basic question: why did Christianity slowly overtake the Roman empire and ultimately survive for 2,000 years, while so many other mythologies of that era have gone the way of the dodo? The fundamentalist will say that this just proves Christianity's veracity; this is a non-answer to my actual question. From that perspective, its survival is based on the divine plan of a creator God, in which case the question is: what did this creator know about the soil of the mind of humankind that made Him plant the seeds that He did, to know in advance that it would successfully sprout and flourish? If not this, then the question is somewhat evolutionary in nature: why did this behaviorial adaptation outcompete those around it?
The first and obvious answer is that Christianity came to have the backing of the Roman government. This started with the conversion of Constantine, which ended the persecution of the Christians, and culminated a half-century later with the faith being ratified as the official church of the empire. While the political backing of the state was certainly a huge factor in its long-term survival, this doesn't happen until the fourth century, and Christianity was gaining adherents at a steady clip in the few hundred years before this.
It's important not to homogenize Christians at any stage of its development. The earliest writings we have about the early church, the epistles of Paul, are written starting 20 years or so after Jesus was killed. They are addressed to various congregations in other regions in which Paul is attempting to settle disputes among the parishioners about the correct way of being a Christian. This clearly indicates that there was most likely never consensus about how to practice the faith, even in the early days.
It's well-known that there are numerous writings about Jesus, discovered from contemporary archeological finds, that did not make it into the New Testament, which ended up ultimately being excluded and suppressed from use when authorities decided that they didn't adhere to accepted orthodoxy. The canonical gospels themselves don't quite agree on everything; the excluded writings differ in their theologies even more starkly from the canonical writings. Every religion is born of its ancestors in a theological tree: Judaism branches from the pagan context in which it arose, and Christianity from one of its Rabbis. Even within Christianity we have a long evolutionary tree of innumerable versions of Christian theology, all of which stem from its root and are mutations of the variations that came just before it. Like the evolutionary tree of life that we know from the biological sciences, the overwhelming majority of these lineages went extinct a long time ago.
Atheists are quick to dismiss all of the Bible because of this. Why should the few writings that survived be of any interest to us if they were just a small handful of all those produced? This position is only valid if you assume that the ones that managed to survived did so for arbitrary reasons, and there's nothing special about the ones that have stood the test of time. I disagree with this.
So, of what use is this survivorship bias? The hypothesis: the versions of Christianity that have persisted to this day, all accruals of centuries of mutations, and none of which resemble their roots of 2,000 years ago, survive to this day because they were generated products of the archetypal psyche that resonated most intensely with the largest number of people. Just as one can compare the biological organisms that survive and those that go extinct, and infer from their differentials information about the dynamics of their environment, I imagine one can compare the religious variants that have survived with those that have not and develop some insight into the environment that conceived them: the human psyche. The part of the mind below consciousness is the bottom of the ocean, understood in any measure by few, and directly explored by far fewer. If you understand why mythologies have cycled in and out over the centuries, you can probably develop some insight into the structure of the mind.