Myths of Origin
Posted in Articles on January 16, 2012 by thehawksflightHow sad that our word ‘myth’ has accrued this most commonly heard, present-day meaning: ‘No, no,’ says Joe, ‘that’s just plain wrong; that’s a myth’. Every time I hear this I am saddened, not because I resent language change (you might as well resent the slow erosion of sea-rock, or the infinitesimal shifting of the stars), but because I can’t help but sense in this a sneering contempt for something else: stories and the art of storytelling. For myths are stories. I find etymology to be a useful guide, and here it tells us simply enough that the word ‘myth’ comes from the Greek μῦειν (myein) – to tell a story. Nowadays we tend to situate our stories within one of two main categories, ‘fiction’ or ‘non-fiction’. We judge the former on how closely it corresponds to the latter: that which we exclusively label reality. Strangely enough, neither myths nor stories have ever had anything much to do with the sphere of fact and non-fact. They exist entirely outside of it. To speak of a ‘myth’ as something ’false’, ‘untrue’ or ‘wrong’ is to invite the bespectacled nose of scientific rationalism into those realms of culture where it can offer nothing more than a fatal reductionism, and where it does not, perhaps, usefully belong at all.
A myth is a special kind of story. One might write pages trying to encapsulate what a myth is and still come no closer to explaining it; a case of the wily butterfly that slips the bug-catcher’s net. I find it much simpler to state the one thing that I’m sure that a myth is not. A myth is not a ‘primitive’ explanation for something people just haven’t quite figured out rationally yet. Whoever says that the Greeks invented Zeus to rationalise their fear of thunder is a cultural vandal. Myths simply do not take place in that same ‘everyday time’ which fact and non-fact inhabit, where such words as ‘prove’ and ‘disprove’ have weight and meaning. Indeed, as Karl Kerényi, that great student of myths, points out, all myths take place within another time, within ‘primordial time…a unity fusing in itself all the contradictions of [its] nature and life to be’. In one sense, this is the same ‘once upon a time in a land far, far away‘, with which we are all so familiar. And yet it is not ‘far away’; it is within, and at the root of, all that is.
Myths of origin speak of how certain phenomena have come (and continue to come) into being. Many of these centre on the world of plants. The best-known of this kind that I can think of is the story of Daphne, a nymph who in her flight from an amorous Apollo is transformed into the laurel-tree. Another Greek myth tells of how the youth Kyparissos, the lover of Apollo, kills his beloved stag by mistake, and is transformed by his grief into the cypress-tree. In an apocryphal Christian myth, the flowers of the rosemary-bush are stained blue by the folds of Mary’s mantle. The NSW Royal Botanical Gardens Trust narrates this myth about the Sydney flannel-flower, from the Bodkin/Andrews clan of the D’harawal People.
Myths do not recount; they do not describe finished acts, but an ongoing creation. Persephone returns to her mother from the underworld every Spring; every Easter brings the death, and rebirth, of the Christ-figure: Dionysus, Adonis, John Barleycorn. What is it about all such myths of origin that remains so perennially needful? For one thing, they speak of relationships, kinship, an ecosystem. They join humankind to an immanent, sacred reality; they remind us that we are no greater or lesser than the order of root and leaf; that we are, at core, a part. When I watch the leaves of the laurel-tree unfurl, I watch the transformation of Daphne. When I see the rosemary flowering, I see the flowers stained anew, now and again.
An Earthly Paradise?
Posted in Articles on June 8, 2011 by thehawksflight
ardeners, like poets and artists, are a materialistic lot. The pure sensuality of gardening supplies motivation enough for our habit (think of the joy of muddied hands, the scent of the rain-washed soil; the brilliance of a jonquil-flower; the gnarled filigree of tree-bark). It comes as no surprise then that a poet, Robert Frost, should conjure this gardener’s sensibility best. In Putting in the Seed, the poet confesses himself ‘slave to a Springtime passion for the earth’:
How Love burns through the Putting in the Seed
On through the watching for that early birth
When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed,
The sturdy seedling with arched body comes
Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.
Here Frost likens gardening to sex; or rather, sex to gardening. The ‘white/soft petals fallen from the apple tree’, which the poet desires so ardently to bury, are, after all, ‘not so barren quite/mingled with these smooth bean and wrinkled pea’. Frost’s ‘sturdy seedling with arched body’, alluding as much to a child as to a sapling, represents the consummation of this sensual contact with the earth. It is a material, present, corporeal being; but it is also something more, something entirely beyond the gardener, beyond itself; something whole and fulfilled. Is this wholeness what we gardeners have been yearning for? what we’ve been seeking through our very own ‘Putting in the Seed’? It’s certainly no new yearning. As a matter of fact, it’s a very old one. And it’s not confined to gardeners.
Romanian anthropologist and historian of religion Mircea Eliade has said much about this yearning. To quote his 1965 Mephistopheles and the Androgyne:
Man feels himself torn and separate. He often finds it difficult properly to explain to himself the nature of this separation, for sometimes he feels himself to be cut off from “something” powerful, “something” utterly other than himself, and at other times from an indefinable, timeless “state”, of which he has no precise memory, but which he does however remember in the depths of his being: a primordial state which he enjoyed before Time, before History.
Variations of this theme of the Fall of Man have cropped up within myths and religions the world over, from the Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece to the Dreamtime stories of Indigenous Australia. In the West, the same theme has for some time inhabited the boundaries of a garden: Eden. Indeed, the notion of ‘garden’ and the notion of ‘paradise’ are synonymous; the latter word having stemmed from the Persian pairidaeza, signifying a walled garden. Moving from Persian to Greek, the word became παράδεισος (paradeisos), whence came Latin paradisus and English paradise.
Genesis 2:8-10 describes Eden thus: ‘and the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden…And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became four heads’. Medieval thinkers speculated much about the location of this Biblical Eden. In On Man’s Abode, Which Is Paradise, the thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas discusses his predecessors varying opinions of the whereabouts of the paradisaical dwelling. He quotes St. Isidore: ‘[paradise] is a place situated in the east, its name being the Greek for garden’; the Venerable Bede: ‘paradise reaches to the lunar circle’; and Augustine: ‘some understand [paradise to be] a place merely corporeal, others a place entirely spiritual, while others… hold that paradise was both corporeal and spiritual’.
As Augustine has said, the notion of a bipartite paradise, possessing at once an earthly and a heavenly manifestation, had no little parlance throughout the Middle Ages. Dante’s fourteenth-century Divine Comedy draws upon this very notion. At the end of the second book, the ‘Purgatorio’, Dante and Virgil ascend to the peak of Mount Purgatory, upon whose summit they discover the ‘Earthly Paradise’. Here Dante meets the figure of Beatrice, embodying his feminine muse, who draws him further; guiding him and Virgil up through the nine spheres of the ‘Celestial Paradise’.
The association of an allegorical, feminine figure with the locus of the paradise-garden did not begin with Dante; the hortus conclusus, or enclosed garden, had long been associated with the virginity of Mary. ‘Entering the garden’ could thus draw out some rather ribald connotations, as was certainly the case within many a dirty troubadour lyric. In (somewhat) more respectable circles, the garden had also become a central trope of the Courtly Love tradition, exemplified by Guillaume de Lorris’s long thirteenth-century poem, the Roman de la Rose. The whole episode of the poem takes place within a high-walled garden, wherein the protagonist discovers his ‘dame’-his lady-the ‘Rose’ herself.
A sensual as well as a spiritual place, the garden could suggest sexual consummation and virginity at once. Within the Christian Neoplatonism of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, these two states were not unreconcilable. The third-century neoplatonist and theologian Origen posited that the figure of Adam, signifying humanity before the Fall, was without gender; a being of essentially androgynous character. The Fall of Man, the expulsion from Eden, brought about not only the division of Adam itself, creating woman and man; but also the division of all creation: earth from sky, light from dark, good from evil. For the neoplatonist, sexual consummation was the symbolic rememberment of creation. That deep sensual joy, to be sought within the walls of the flowering and many-treed hortus, could thus become the reclamation of a lost Adamic wholeness, opening the gateway to the primordial garden-the Earthly Paradise.
