Major 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.
