On Sacred Texts in Polytheism

[causticus]

The following is from one of Galina Krasskova's blog posts. I found this quite insightful on how to interpret polytheist myths and how to avoid the pitfalls of both literal reading and trying to extract concrete morality from these texts.

When reading a sacred text, there are numerous ways that one can approach the text: literally, allegorically, anagogically, tropologically. I would add onto that mystically. What does all that mean? Well, while we don’t have something holding the authority of “scripture” in the way that the bible might be positioned for Jews and Christians, we have texts that are maps to the holy. Not holy in themselves, they provide keys, windows, and doorways to Mystery. Mysteries seem to be wellsprings of unending depth and we can return to a story again and again finding new meaning, new ways to construct our world, new insights into our Gods, our cosmology, and our devotion. That’s why these stories are so powerful. That’s why any religious text is so powerful: it teaches us how to navigate our world.

One can read a text literally, taking everything as a literal, even historical account (I don’t recommend this. It flattens out the texts, the religion, and the mysteries therein and often leads to very black and white morality). In an allegorical interpretation, we look for hidden meanings, for mystery. Likewise with a mystical interpretation, we filter our understanding of a particular story through the lens of the God we are venerating. Anagogical interpretations tend to utilize a text to refer to or interpret future events (often there is a sense of foreboding, foreseeing, prophesy, or eschatology here). A tropological reading looks for the lesson, the moral of the text and seeks to apply that to our current behavior. I tend to be hesitant about indulging in this type of reading too much with polytheistic texts because religion – however much devotion may have shaped our ancestors’ morality—was not the proper locus of morality and virtue development for ancient polytheists, not generally. Rather, they would have looked to philosophy, to their culture, their family, civic awareness, and their laws and customs for this. At least, they didn’t enshrine a moral code into their cosmological stories in the way that the Bible seeks to do (and really, either one is ok but it’s important to realize the work that these texts are doing within the religious communities that use them. We have a lot of converts still who may instinctively want the lore to do the work that the bible does, but, at least where morality is concerned, it just doesn’t and was never meant to do so).

I think that second bolded passage is crucial. Old polytheist societies derived their morality from philosophy and their tribal/national customs, not directly from their myths and other sacred texts. 1500+ years of monotheism and ideologies derived from that paradigm has trained us collectively to read a sacred text as a law code. It will take much work to wean ourselves out of these old habits.

Comments

[jprussell]

Thanks for sharing this! I've found Krasskova a very helpful resource, and I appreciate the devotional perspective she brings to polytheism. I've given some thought to related questions, and I sometimes catch myself wishing that polytheistic texts had the same deep interlinkedness that the Bible has and/or the same depth in the culture (common phrases, references in literature, the assumption that everybody is at least a little familiar with the episodes, and so forth).

That being said, this is a helpful reminder. Two things have really helped me both get far more out of polytheist sacred texts and learn not to read them as the one and only wellspring of morality: 1) looking at them "descriptively" rather than "prescriptively" and 2) discursive meditation.

Contrasting "descriptive" and "prescriptive" is terminology I picked up studying linguistics in college. "Prescriptive grammar" is what we all learn in school: the rules of what makes "good" or "correct" language. "Descriptive grammar", on the other hand, is what linguists use to analyze language. For example, there are parts of the US where the phrase "I used to could read Latin, but now I've forgotten it" would be entirely normal and understandable, and there are unconscious rules about how you do and don't use the phrase "used to could", even though English teachers would just say "that's not correct".

Anyhow, I picked up a similar idea for approaching sacred texts from Jordan Peterson and applied that language to it. He talks about how a lot of how God appears in the Old Testament doesn't really make sense if you look at it as "here is a perfect person you should totally emulate", but a lot of it makes pretty good sense if you instead say "this is a representation of how the world works in practice, better get used to it". Now, whether or not that's true of the Old Testament and its God I won't take a stance on here, but the notion that myth can be usefully viewed as a description of the way things are, rather than a prescription of what would be best, is a helpful one, I think.

For 2), I doubt that discursive meditation needs much elaboration here, but I'll just say it has really added a lot of richness and depth to my engagement with myths, and often helps reveal ways that 1) applies. For me, the myth of the binding of Fenris has yielded a lot to putting together the descriptive approach and discursive meditation.

Lastly, I thought I'd add one way that I do see polytheistic religion having an indirect impact on morality. For myself, at least, religious practice and belief has helped with the "so what?" or life - a sense of meaning and fulfillment and so forth. Having that need addressed has taken a lot of the burden away from social, cultural, and philosophical strictures of morality, which actually makes them easier to follow.

[causticus]

I really do find Jordan Peterson's practical interpretations of the bible to be quite an interesting approach. And from what I've read, it's encouraged a lot of younger people to take a second look at religion/spirituality and move away from the hardline secularism and materialism they were raised on by pop culture.

And yes I do agree polytheistic religion can and should have an impact on morality. After all, gaining some insight into the nature of the Gods can make for a huge impact on how we conduct ourselves.

Lastly, I really do need to kick myself into getting serious about discursive meditation. Sitting still for more than 30 seconds is a problem enough for me.

[neptunesdolphins]

Myths present the reality of the cosmos and are a worldview. I see them as more than law codes or morals. The people telling the myth and the people hearing the myth are participating in a sacred moment.

[causticus]

Yes, exactly. Myths are so much more than something than be distilled into some concrete set of rules, moral precepts, or conduct guidelines. The phrase "profaning the mysteries" comes to mind whenever there's an attempt to mix moral philosophy and myth. Funnily enough, this practice is something Plato strongly encouraged in some of his works, most notably Laws. And now we've had more than 2000 years to see how that experiment has turned out.

[jprussell]

Hmmm, so this line of comments has me thinking about a book I read right before the new year called Sand Talk, which I found from this review on the Nordic Animism channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48SJ4fuwO2E

Among many interesting and useful concepts, the author Yunkaporta talks about different "minds" - Ancestor Mind, Mythic Mind, Pattern Mind, and so forth. He gives examples of how you can derive different lessons from the same symbolism and myth depending on which mind you engage with it, but also that it's an important notion that they're still linked, and the thing you're engaging with is bigger than each mind's takeaway, or even the sum of all of those.

It also puts me in mind of some of Deloria's arguments in God is Red, which I read right after that (more on this in the "fanaticism" post, I think!). He says that the West got screwed up by allowing its religion to be subordinate to its culture. In other words, whatever the times were in favor of, somehow doing that became what a good Christian would do, whether that was spying on your potentially heretical neighbors or welcoming all denominations in universalist brotherhood.

Now, in some ways, Deloria's argument sounds like the opposite of "myths/sacred texts shouldn't be treated as law codes", and maybe it is. I'm still thinking through this one. But he also had a very specific idea of what functional religion looked like, which was deeply based on place and the continuity of a people's relationship with that place - not exactly the same thing as "the text is the 'real' heart of the religion, everything that matters can be derived from it."

[causticus]

Interesting stuff.

On allowing religion to be subordinate to its culture, I think this is a reflection of the practice of "placing the profane above the sacred" I spoke of in another comment. This really is a problem with the West in general and goes very far back into history, as far back as the Bronze Age Collapse, I would wager. The current manifestation of this I think this goes back at least to the Protestant Reformation, which itself is rooted in the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church. I could take this back further but it would run on for too many paragraphs, haha.

On that last part, I think we could say that myths/sacred texts shouldn't be treated as law codes in any kind of profane way. An initiated priesthood of course can be equipped to distill first principles from the myths and devise law codes based on these insights which are suitable for their people of their own place and time. Perhaps I need to reread Krasskova's theory here. I'm not sure it's applicable to every single ancient polytheist culture. In societies (like Greece and Rome) that had Civic rather than Sacral priesthoods, the laws would have been certainly more secular and philosophical than directly based on religion. Contrast this though with soceities of the latter type like the Celts who had their Druids, the Indo-Aryans and their Brahmins, the Persians and their Magi, ect. I think we might start to see a different picture unfold here. She might be blanketly applying the Civic model to everything.

[jprussell]

Hmmmmm, 2 fairly distinct questions/thoughts come to mind in response:

1) I would be fascinated to hear your take on the role of placing the profane above the sacred" in the Bronze Age Collapse, as that's been a particular interest of mine ever since I learned about it in college (but that is perhaps off-topic if it doesn't have to do with sacred texts per se).

2) Your mention of an initiated priesthood reminds me of JMG's comment somewhere I read recently about how "ages of reason" tend to pretty reliably follow when literacy escapes from a priestly minority into the wider population. Such ages follow a predictable trajectory of beginning with stunning insights and growth in understanding, adding cruft and growing more abstract through time, until the intellectual systems of the age become hollow shells for manipulating abstractions that have lost their link to reality.

As someone who still has a lot of internalized "reason and literacy good! progress!" this is sometimes hard to swallow, but it makes a certain amount of sense that if you want laws/rules derived from the sacred, they might best be handled by folks who actually have some experience of the sacred. It also strikes me that oral cultures would miss out on the "ups" of the early phases of ages of reason, but would likely also miss the lows of the later phases.

[causticus]

1. This will have to be a whole separate post, yes.

2. Yes, wisdom tends to become profaned quite a lot during ages of reason.

I firmly believe that any sane/healthy society is one which has class (or college/guild structure) of well-trained religious, spiritual, and philosophical specialists (all one in the same AFAIC). And that the profane classes generally defer to these specialists on matters of a
sacred or metaphysical nature. (Of course this can become rather corrupted, though that's another topic for another day). Sorry if this might come off sounding adjacent to managerial elitism, haha. Our own PMC class though is basically a profane class pretending their are the priests. Pretender Priests are a whole special category of evil, IMO.

[jprussell]

1. Fair enough, I look forward to it!

2. Yeah, not a simple problem at all, and one that goes directly to the heart of my fairly libertarian leanings, though over the past several years, those have been getting a bit of a rethink, and adding in a religious dimension has further complicated matters. That being said, one possibly interesting model is what we know about the Icelandic godhar (chieftains with religious responsibilities/powers). Basically, being a godhi meant that you had responsibility for maintaining the communal feasting hall for religious feasts and leading the rituals at such feasts. Presumably, some amount of traditional lore (at least how to do the ceremonies right) was transmitted when you got the position, but they almost certainly were not ever full-time religious specialists. Two things are interesting about the godhi position: 1) the title was held as fully transferrable property, and 2) the "congregants" could choose any godhi within a convenient distance to reach for holy days.

This combination of the role being tied to a respected individual in the community (rather than an organization or institution), along with the ability of the folks being served to "vote with their feet" strikes me as potentially a very reasonable starting place for thinking about how to have less-readily corruptible religious specialists.

[hwistle]

I've been trying to remember where I read something along these lines, of various interpretations/approaches to myths... and I've remembered! Sallustius' On the Gods and the World gives 5 approaches to myths (fables in Thomas Taylor's translation) using the example of Cronus, mainly:

1. Theological: "speculate the very essences of the gods; such as the fable which asserts that Saturn devoured his children: for it obscurely intimates the nature of an intellectual god, since every intellect returns into itself"

2. Physical: "concerning the energies of the gods about the world; as when considering Saturn the same as Time, and calling the parts of time the children of the universe, we assert that the children are devoured by their parents"

3. Animastic (Related to Soul): "we contemplate the energies of the soul; because the intellections of our souls, though by a discursive energy they proceed into other things, yet abide in their parents"

4. Material: "considering and calling corporeal natures divinities; such as Isis, earth; Osiris, humidity; Typhon, heat: or again, denominating Saturn, water; Adonis, fruits; and Bacchus, wine."

5. Mixed: "as in the fable which relates, that Discord at a banquet of the gods threw a golden apple, and that a dispute about it arising among the goddesses, they were sent by Jupiter to take the judgement of Paris, who,charmed with the beauty of Venus, gave her the apple in preference to the rest. For in this fable the banquet denotes the supermundane powers of the gods; and on this account they subsist in conjunction with each other: but the golden apple denotes the world, which, on account of its composition from contrary natures, is not improperly said to be thrown by Discord, or strife. But again, since different gifts are imparted to the world by different gods, they appear to contest with each other for the apple. And a soul living according to sense, (for this is Paris) not perceiving other powers in the universe, asserts that the contended apple subsists alone through the beauty of Venus"

[sdi]

This is from chapter IV of Sallustius. I've lately been running a weekly discussion of On the Gods and the World over on my Dreamwidth blog, and chapter III and chapter IV both discuss myths.

They were what came to mind when I saw this post, too! But I haven't yet gotten around to reading Krasskova, so I had been holding off...

[jprussell]

Wow, thanks to you both for pointing out this resource! I have only started learning much of anything about the neo-Platonists.

sdi, that discussion thread looks tremendously useful, and I'm going to try to squeeze it into my possibly over-full reading list - thanks very much for hosting it.

[sdi]

You're welcome! Feel free to jump in, in either present or past posts, or not!

[hwistle]

Thanks for that! I echo jprussell's sentiment and wish I had more time to follow your posts on Sallustius! I find Neoplatonism fascinating and illuminating, though intellectually highly demanding, certainly not prone to skim-reading!

[sdi]

You're welcome! I agree completely, despite being a short work, it's extremely difficult.

[causticus]

These are great. I've been following those posts for quite awhile.