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July 2009 
Jesus, Quetzalcoatl, Dionysos - Archetypal Yearning
Posted on Dec 27th, 2007
by 
Julian
Julian
This is a brief summary of a talk I gave in 2006 as part of a yoga and mythology workshop series. It being the holidays and all I though I might share the main points. I hope it is interesting to some readers:
In Southern and Central America there is a mythic figure common to several cultures. He is born of a virgin, ascends into the sky at the end of his time on Earth, promises to return and his symbol is the cross. His name is Quetzalcoatl, which literally translates to "feathered serpent," and when the Spanish conquistadors landed, the natives thought they might be his second coming, what with how they occasionally represented him with fair hair and beard! The Spaniards for their part noticed that the local religion had striking similarities to their own, but not being well versed in symbols and archetypes their interpretation was that the devil had implanted a perverted version of Christianity there to try and drive the conquering sons crazy and lead them from the Lord...
quetzalcoatl13
In Ancient Greece we find the story of Dionysos, born of the congress of horny god Zeus and a mortal woman - one version of the story has Zeus kill her and sew the fetus into his thigh until it is ready to be born. Horny and murderous! Dionysos is the god of wheat and wine and he is killed only to rise again from the dead. his followers perform a ritual of bread and wine to remember him.
Dionysos 640x480
Death and resurrection is not an uncommon theme in world mythology. It is most often associated with agrarian societies whose lives are tied to the cycles of the earth and who made sacrifices to the earth to ensure the resurrection of Spring after the death of Winter. The spilling of blood upon the land and in the temples went on even into the time of Jesus and there is a way that the evolving archetypal symbolism that he carries represents a once-and-for-all uber sacrifice to end all sacrifices.
Mythology scholar Joseph Campbell tells us that the earliest evidence we have of ritual and myth comes from the Alpine caves about 110 000 years ago in which a cult of the Great Bear existed. As human beings became more empathic and self-reflective we felt terrible anxiety and dread over the fact of our killing in order to live and began to enact rituals and construct myths as containers for this conflict.
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Perhaps if we do a ritual honoring the Great Bear god he won't be angry that we kill his children, perhaps he will still send us more so that we can survive. One version of this hunting mythology says that the gods come to visit us in animal bodies but then can't escape to go home. When we kill the animal we set the god free and they are happy...
As agrarian societies developed the emphasis shifted from hunting myths and rituals to fertility myths and rituals and it is in these sacrificial cults that we find the roots of the archetypal constellations that will later give rise to Qutzalcoatl, Dionysos and then Jesus.
What Joseph Campbell calls "the mask of god" keeps evolving and taking on the clothing and the meaning structures of the societies it serves. In one of my favorite quotes from him he says "We wonder what is wrong with our society when we are trying to live by a myth that is 2000 years old from the Middle East ..." Campbell suggested in the early seventies that perhaps a contemporary world-centric mythology could have as it's central symbol the famous "Earthrise" photograph taken by the astronauts who landed on the moon.
earthrise
Elsewhere he asks:
"What is mythology?
Other people's religion.
What then is religion?
Misunderstood mythology."
The earliest mythic symbols are the sun and the moon, the earth and the sky.
The moon dies every month and after three days is resurrected. The moon is often linked with the snake who sheds it's skin and is likewise reborn. The sun often associated with the antelope or bull that has a crescent moon in it's horns.
In stories of gods fathering children with mortals we see the yearning for the marriage of the earth and the sky and perhaps the intuition of a next stage of our own evolution.
I find it interesting that in the yogic Chakra system the heart center is called "Anahata" which means "unstruck." I think of an unstruck drum - that beats of it's own accord. Interestingly, the image we know as the Star of David is also found at the heart center, representing upward flowing and downward flowing sky and earth energy. The horizontal and vertical lines of the cross also meet in the heart.
This leads me to an association on a "virgin birth" - an unstruck drum, a birth that is not preceded by the sex act, also the birth of the Buddha, whose myth says that he is born (after another mysterious spirit-impregnation) from his mother's right side at the level of the heart. Compassion strikes me as an emotion that has no ulterior motive and hence arises in this same mysterious way as these symbols...
mayasdream sm
Perhaps that is the yearning expressed in this collectively dreamed up poetry of the inner life - a yearning for compassionate awakening and altruistic self-actualization. A death and rebirth in the heart of hearts. The divine child of the Winter Solstice born from the womb of one's psyche.
May we keep learning to read the symbols and see them as signposts toward an inner life in healthy, integrated relationship to outer reality....
Access: PublicTagged with: julian walker, ken wilber, joseph campbell, religion, mythology, christams, dionysos, christ, quetzalcoatl
Hey, Julian, cool reflections. The process of the internalization of outer forms, symbols, and ritual acts of early religion is something that can be observed in the evolution of many traditions. The following example from ancient India may be of interest to your readers. I quote it from a book on yoga by Doug Keller:
“The early Vedas came to assume a sharp division, a huge gap between human and Divine that established a fundamental dualism in the early Vedas. This gap allows no easy merging of the many back into the One - instead the divide between man and God is to be bridged only through sacrifice.
How does sacrifice work? It is actually a form of imitation of Prajapati's original act of self-sacrifice, and so the sacrifices made by man carry magical properties because these acts are like the acts of God - and so they are divine by association. This most exalted of human activities is to “do what the gods did in the beginning,” which is to offer up the fruits of our labors for the sake of the whole of the universal order. The magic of sacrifice was this: in order to offer a physical object such as a pot to the Divine, it must be broken here in the earthly realm; a pot broken in this world in sacrifice will be transported and appear as a whole pot in the world of the gods5; so too with grains, oils and perfumes offered to the fire in the yajna or fire ceremony. Sacrifice formed the bridge between man and God, and fire was most often the vehicle of communication.
This dynamic of sacrifice and its internalization carries over through the centuries into the practice of hatha yoga. The sacrificial fire became tapas, the inner heat of the practice, and the offering became oneself on every level. When engaging in the practice, we find opposed but complementary qualities on all levels that demand reintegration. Just as the dynamic of health, strength and vitality in the body rests on the balanced opposition of forces in the physical body such as we find in the work of hatha yoga, so too we find even in our complex hearts a dualistic opposition of qualities and virtues that we work to resolve and express through our practice as an offering, as well as in our lives.
The dualistic relationship between the human and the divine order, then, is of mutual benefit: each nourishes the other, but they always remain ‘other.' There was little suggestion in this account that we might merge back into, become, or ‘realize' the Divine - we just come up with and maintain a really good business model. Yet the heroes of the Vedic people were not the priests who conducted the rituals or ran the business of sacrifice, but the sages or seers (rishis) who “saw” the truth beyond the veil of the manifest world, and spoke it in the form of the poetry and symbolism of the Vedas themselves. The sages were the reason why the deeper message of the Vedas would not be lost in the stagnant dualism of traditional ritual. The sages had more to say because they saw beyond the appearances of the chasm between the human and divine order. These seers were the revealers of the Truth and were on the path to the Truth. They won their sacred visions by their own hard inner work - their austerities and devotion to spiritual enlightenment. They saw themselves as the “children of light” (Rig Veda 9.38.5) and were devoted to reaching the “heavenly light” or ultimate Being in the form of Light (Rig Veda 10.36.3).6 This was the message of the Vedas that continued to inspire, and was later brought to the fore in the Upanishads, the works that followed after the Vedas”.
nice riff back balder!
Thanks Julian and Balder…enjoyed both.
Great blog Julian. I'd like to read the rest because the summary is a wonderful tease.
The cross may come from an earlier symbol which is a circle with horizontal and vertical bisecting (quadsecting?) lines which may be simplified symbols for zodiacs, the first representations of astronomy.
The caudecus and flying serpents such as dragons and Quetzalcoatl may be similiar to chakra symbolism with masculine and feminine energies ascending through an opened (awakened?) heart and crowned with a connection to the heaven. The wings may symbolize ascention.
How relevent are the time frames of these myths and that they predate written language?
Gotta run…hope to revisit
yes good associating elementstew!
again we have winged serpents everywhere - the caduceus is the symbol of the healer, shaman, american medical association, ancient alchemy and yup it shows up as ida and pingala in the chakra symbology.
i also have written at length here (if you are interested)about the serpentine symbolism with regard to the somatopsychic wave process of dural/energetic unwinding that i think was part of many healing modalities and secret ritual experiences in the ancient world… and is still innate to human beings today - showing up in multiple contexts and disciplines.
happy new year!
Interesting timing… I just finished watching this movie at http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com It has three parts, one on Christian symbolism, religion, etc. (The others are on conspiracy theories concerning 9/11 and the federal reserve, etc.) It's sort of a synthesis of a lot of those types of movies that have been put out in the last few years. But part one was fascinating for me in that it covered a lot of the sources of religious myth and tied them back to astrological symbolism. Part I is worth the 30+ minutes if you are into that type of stuff.
yes aeryk that is probably the most well done and interesting segment of zeitgeist, but still rife with problems as i discuss here.
happy new year!
Wow, not sure how I missed that discussion. I don't want to hijack this post to discuss it further (plenty on that post) other than to say I agree with most everything you say, though I didn't see the elevation of or defense of astrology that you seem to have seen. There wasn't any kind of discussion or desire to “go back” that I saw in the film. Just showing that religion was a repackaging of older astrological beliefs. Not that the misguided romantic pull isn't rampant in the same circles that put out this stuff. Anyway, glad to see you'd already covered it. I enjoy your posts immensely. Thanks…
thanks aeryk - yea fair comment - i was lumping the astrological piece in with the worldview that usually goes along with it…
This was a wonderful talk when you gave it back in 06. I enjoyed having a chance to read it this time.
Interesting to read it now, almost 2 years later, and feel how it resonates. Much has changed and grown within me in that time.
The holiday season was a good time to drop it back in.
Hi Julian,
Have you seen Briane Swimme's The New Story series on YouTube? He gives a great explanation of the value of myth and how they are important to human beings, and he offers probably the best one for our times: the evolution story, the universe story. The first three episodes in the series at least are really cool.
Best.
David
thanks david i will check it out!