Trilliums in Northern Ontario
Northern Ontario
 


 


 


Major Acid's E-RagMajor Acid's E-Rag

It Strikes Me...

That a New Mythology is Stalking the World

Recently I was chastised on-line for my obviously pig-headed refusal to buy into the currently hot conspiracy theory that claims that no plane hit the Pentagon on 9/11. The plane, you see, was shot down over the ocean, and some DNA material retrieved from it so it could be �found� in the wreckage of the Pentagon, and the wreckage itself was created by an American military missile, previously planted explosives, or both. This is tied to my also pig-headed refusal to buy into the theory that Bush and his cohort of neocons planned and executed all the 9/11 attacks themselves while Bin Laden dreamed his vengeance away in some mountain cave.

Many apparently well-educated people who quite stridently demand acceptance of these conspiracies are uniform in only one thing � their hatred, which is not too strong a word, for Bush 2 and his administration.

What really annoys and confounds these theorists is that nearly half of the American voting public is inclined to vote for Bush a second time. The particular on-line forum I was chastised on says this pro-Bush group is in the grip of a �group fantasy� and just won�t wake up. This may be a valid observation, although waking up is not necessarily the same as suddenly voting against Bush, a fact that escapes the theorists.

My response to all of this is that the theorists are creating, before our (or my) very eyes, a new mythology to explain events that otherwise seem inexplicable. How much easier it is to believe that America�s own leaders � considered by this group to be hateful, spiteful, right-wing, despotic politicians � could kill thousands of their own citizens in order to justify a war than it is to believe that Bin Laden and similar enemies could actually strike the heart of America.

Mythmaking, of course, is not new, and that point has been brought home to me with force recently by my exposure to two of the West�s most potent mythical figures: Jesus and King Arthur.

I suspect that most in the West believe absolutely that there was a living, breathing, historical Jesus. Even those who believe Jesus was just a man, a prophet who hit the big time, likely believe that was a real man behind the myth. Tom Harpur begs to differ.

Harpur is currently flogging his new book, The Pagan Christ. In the book, he claims, with some significant scholarly back up, that the imagery, the miracles, even the name Christ, come from earlier and especially Egyptian mythologies. Not surprisingly, this doesn�t sit well with many people, especially those who have invested their lives in the literal faith, ministers, for example. Yet Harpur is such himself, a one-time Anglican priest.

I suppose this makes Harpur an apostate, despite his protestations to the contrary. He claims a deeper, more spiritual, more real (Christian) faith as a result. Religions, at least the Abrahamic ones, don�t like apostates. There is an historical tendency, and in some places a contemporary tendency, to kill apostates. However, in Harpur�s case, the reference to the term comes in handy � by labeling Harpur an apostate, or at least considering him one, there is no need to answer his charges, and the religious powers that be have been resolutely silent on his new book.

The critical point, however, is that the Christian story banged into so many of our heads when we were child captives in a socially sanctioned brainwashing practice called �Sunday school,� is largely an exercise in myth making gone bad. Gone bad because of the demand that the myth be rooted in some historical reality.

Christians demand that the gospels, the foundational books of the New Testament, be considered books of history, never mind that they were chosen selectively, and largely written decades if not centuries after that supposed facts. Never mind the inconsistencies in them. (Harpur mentions, among many, the resurrection of Lazarus, an event mentioned in only one of the gospels, he notes.)

I�m no biblical scholar, but Harpur is, and the inconsistencies and outright omissions bother him. As a non-believer, though, I�m fascinated by the on-going, almost pathological hunt for historical evidence � any evidence at all � that could give reality to the Christian myth. The so-called James ossuary is a case in point.

An ossuary is a box designed to hold bones that time and natural processes have stripped of flesh. No bones were found in the James ossuary, but an inscription was chiseled on the outside of the box: James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.

The ossuary was sensational, seized upon by those rabid for �proof� of their religion. Proof, after all, had been hard to come by. When the box surfaced in 2002, the Institute for Creation Research: A Christ-Focused Creation Ministry published this on their website:

Skeptics have often pointed out that no archeological evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ has been discovered. And they are correct, at least perhaps until the present. A recent incredible discovery may put to rest that criticism. (Morris, 2002)

The discovery was the ossuary, and despite a claim in the same article that the ossuary and inscription were provably genuine, such was not, finally, the case. The box itself seems physically of the time, but the inscription is at best questionable. This won�t stop believers from hanging onto it as real, of course. They want something, anything, which can be twisted so that it grounds their faith in reality.

The urge to mythologize, then to twist mythology into reality, is not restricted to religion by any means. Consider the newest film take on Arthurian legend, King Arthur, which gives us a Roman officer, Lucius Artorius Castus as the historical reality behind the Arthurian legend. The connection rests on the similarity of the names Arthur and Artorius, and the slim but compelling archeological evidence (Malcor, 1999) that Artorius was actually in Britain sometime close to the time of the events surrounding the mythological Arthur.

The Roman Artorius, happily for believers in a �real� Arthur, was a cavalryman. This fits nicely with the medieval picture of Arthur as a knight, and it gives the film lots of thundering horse hooves to play with. Aside from the horse, of course, there wasn�t much in common between an armour encased medieval knight and a Roman cavalry officer, but if the saddle fits.

People want to believe there was a real Arthur, an heroic knight who saved Britons in their darkest days (ironically, the days of the decline of the Roman Empire), who sat at a round table showing his democratic impulses, who gave England a period of peace and justice for all.

Arthurian myth is not specifically religious; Arthur did not die and then get up again, but the tales end with the thought that Arthur is only sleeping, and in some future, distant and dark day will rise again to save the land. In this way, along with all the fruitless searching for the Holy Grail, Arthur is connected with the second coming of Christ.

The film, King Arthur, focusing on the Roman officer, is a celluloid version of the James ossuary � an attempt to place an historical stamp on a mythical world.

The urge to make myth is all around us. In political science it rests within the term �chosen trauma,� an event of such emotional resonance that it takes on mythical proportions. Once this happens, the persistence of the myth is remarkable, and whatever the truth of the initial event, the meaning of that event takes on a power and a meaning beyond all reason. The further back in time this event recedes, the more mythical the event becomes.

In Australia, for example, the alleged genocide of Aborigines persists even if that persistence has to rely on post-modern history, where facts are irrelevant, and the myth itself is seen as important. This belief in the mythology is present in any number of movies made in or set in Australia, including Tom Selleck�s Aussie cowboy flick, Quigley Down Under, which featured dozens of Aborigines being flung to their deaths off a cliff. Some of what little emotional resonance exists in the film comes from that scene, used to show just how bad the bad guy was. Today, an academic battle is raging in Australia over the historical reality of what has become for many an article of faith.

For Americans, Pearl Harbor has taken on similar mythic status. The event is seen as the archetypal sneak attack, mass murder by any other name, the stamp that marks forever the perpetrators as evil. That mythology was dragged directly into the American consciousness immediately after 9/11, this American generation�s Pearl Harbor.

Intriguingly, a new aspect of the Pearl Harbor myth is also being used to make the 9/11 events more mythical in their power � the complicity of America�s own political leaders. Conspiracy theorists have pronounced that Roosevelt himself orchestrated Pearl Harbor as an excuse to go to war against the Japanese based largely on something called the McCollum Memo, written in 1940 (McCollum Memo, 2003). Such a memo does exist, but what it actually signifies is arguable, to be kind. (Trulock, 2003)

There may be reason to believe that Roosevelt knew what he was doing when he put the economic screws to Japan in 1941, although it�s doubtful he really knew Pearl Harbor itself would be the target. He was, it seems, betting on an attack in the Philippines.

Yet there is enough uncertainty there to twist the event into a grand conspiracy, and from there it is only a small step to suspect Bush and his administration would behave so similarly. Bush needed a good excuse to let slip his dogs of war, and a paltry 21 or so dead in say, the attack on the USS Cole, is simply not enough. He didn�t want to be in the same position for which he had belittled Clinton, futilely lobbing a few cruise missiles up the butts of a few goats in the mountains of Afghanistan. The twisting of the mythical Pearl Harbor gives resonance to the myth that Bush and friends orchestrated 9/11.

We like to believe our myths. Sometimes we want so much to believe them we twist history out of all reality to force ourselves, and others, to concede them as real.

Happily, we don�t have to yield to myth, not 2000 year-old myth, nor any created by today�s rabid conspiracy theorists. Something ripped a hole in the Pentagon on 9/11, and unleashed fiery death on those unlucky enough to be at their desks that morning. But I don�t believe it was a missile fired on the orders or George Bush and some demonic neocon cabal; the �evidence� for that myth is not truly compelling.

And no amount of calling me pig-headed because I refuse to buy into the newest myth can change that.



References

Bruckheimer, Jerry (Producer) and Fuquha, Antoine (Director). (2004). King Arthur.
Touchstone Pictures.

Harpur, Tom. (2004). The Pagan Christ. Toronto: Thomas Allen.

Malcor, Linda A. (1999). Lucius Artorius Castus. Downloaded 30 July
2004, from The Heroic Age website: www.mun.ca/mst/heroicage/issues/1/halac.htm

McCollum Memo, The. (n.d.) Downloaded 2 August 2004 from the What Really
Happened website: http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/McCollum/index.html

Morris, John D. (2002, December). Has Archeological Evidence for Jesus Been
Discovered? Downloaded on 30 July 2004, from the Institute for Creation
Research website: www.icr.org/pubs/btb-g/btg-168b.htm

Trulock, Notra. (2003, December 4). Unfinished Pearl Harbor Business. Downloaded
on 2 August 2004 from the Accuracy in Media website:
http://www.aim.org/publications/weekly_column/2003/12/04.html

Wincer, Simon (Director). (1990). Quigley Down Under. MGM Pictures.

 

| Join No.org | About No.org | Using No.org & Privacy Policy | Homepage |
 

 

Thanks to the team at  Simaltech.com for the building and hosting of this website.