Part 13 (1/2)

We adore thy Cross, 0 Lord: and we praise and glorify thy holy Resurrection: for by the wood of the Cross the whole world is filled with joy.

Whereupon there is immediately sung the extraordinary hymn, Crux fidelis, in which the instrument of execution appears as the very Tree of Life: Crux fidelis, inter omnes Arbor una n.o.bilis: Nulla Silva tamen profert Fronde, fore, germine.

Faithful Cross, the one Tree n.o.ble above all: no forest affords the like of this in leaf, or flower, or seed.

r S 8 Myth and Ritual in Christianity De parentis protoplasti Fraude factor condolens, Quando pomi noxialis In necem morsu ruit: Ipse lignum tunc notavit, d.a.m.na ligni ut solveret.

The Creator pitying the sin of our first parent, wherefrom he fell into death by the bite of the poisoned apple, did himself fonhwith signify wood for his healing of the hurts of wood.

It is obvious that the Wood or Tree of the Cross is of the highest mythological significance, and that its relation to the actual stauros (stake) upon which the historical Jesus was hung is relatively small. Many modern Christian historians think it most unlikely that Jesus was actually crucified upon a wooden cross of the type familiar in crucifixes, whether of the Latin t, Greek +, or Egyptian Taufcross T forms. It was more probably a simple stake, such that the actual symbol of the Cross was shaped according to mythological rather than historical considerations. 7As is well known, the Cross and the Sacrificial Tree are symbols far more ancient than Christi, anity, and had a significance of such importance that it is not at all inappropriate for the hymn to say: Sola digna to fuisti Ferre mundi victimam.

Thou alone (the Tree) wert found worthy to bear the Victim of the world.

So many of the hero,G.o.ds and avatars are a.s.sociated with the Tree that the central symbol of Christianity is of a truly universal nature, and by no means a historical abnormality. In the myth of Osiris, ”he who springs from the returning waters, the body of the G.o.d-slain by Set the Evil One-is found within a giant tamarisk or pinetree which had been cut down and used for the central pillar of the Palace of Byblos. Attis, son of the virgin Nana, died by self~sacrifice under a pine. Gautama the Buddha, son of Maya, attained his supreme Awakening as he sat in meditation beneath the Bo Tree. Odin learned the wisdom of the runes by immolating himself upon the WorldTree, Yggdrasil, with a spear cut from the same Tree: I know that I hung On a wind.rocked tree Nine whole nights, With a spear wounded, And to Odin offered Myself to myself; On that tree Of which no one knows From what root it springs.'

In like manner, Adonis (=Adonai, the Lord) was born of Myrrha the myrtle, and the Babylonian G.o.d Tammuz was a.s.sociated in his death with the cedar, the tamarisk, and the willow .2 In almost all the mythological traditions this Tree is the Axis Mundi, the Centre of the World, growing in the ”navel of the world” as, in mediaeval drawings, the Tree of Jesse is shown growing from the navel of Jesse. In the myth of Eden the Tree stands in the centre of the Garden, at the source of four rivers which ”go out to water the garden” .3 For obvious reasons, Christianity regards the Cross as the centre of the Odin's Rune Song, trs. Benjamin Thorpe in The Edda of Saemund the Learned (London, 1866).

2 In the Babylonian hymn called The Lament of the Flutes for Tammuz, a sowcalled ”fertility” G.o.d taken to represent the death and resurrection of the crops, he is described as ”a tamarisk that in the garden has drunk no water, . . . a willow that rejoiced not by the watercourse.”

3 The clear ident.i.ty of the Cross with this central Tree of Eden is shown, not only in the legends of the Holy Rood which a.s.sert that the Cross of Christ r Go Myth and Ritual in Christianity world, and likewise places it upon the altar as the ritual centre of the church. The World/Ash, Yggdrasil, had its roots in NiFlheim, the uttermost depths, and its topmost branch, Lerad, reached to the palace of the Allfather On in heaven. Similarly the world/tree of the Siberian Yakuts grows at ”the central point, the World Navel, where the moon does not wane, nor the sun go down.”z Conversely, the .Axle-Tree of the Upanishads and the Bbagavad'Gita grows out of Brahma and, like the Sephiroth Tree of the Kabala, has roots above and branches below.

The symbolism of the Tree is quite clearly that the Tree is the world-Life itself-having its stem rooted in the unknown. Its branches, leaves, flowers, and fruit form the multiplicity of creatures--”I am the vine; ye are the branches”-which blossom from the ever/fertile source of life. The wood of the Tree is matter, prima materia, out of which all things are made, so that it is not unfitting that, in his earthly incarnation, the Son of G.o.d should be also the Son of the Carpenter-Joseph. For this reason the Gnostics distinguished between three types of men, the pneumatic, the psychic, and the hylic-the was made from the wood of that Tree, but also in the famous Great Cross of the Lateran, a mosaic dating, perhaps, from the time of Constantine, and restored by Nicolas IV. It shows an ornate Cross of the Latin form, having at its head the descending Dove of the Holy Spirit. From its foot there flow four rivers named Gihon, Pison, Tigris, and Euphrates, which were the four rivers of Eden. Between these rivers stands the City of G.o.d, guarded by the Archangel Michael, and behind him, in the midst of the Ciry, stands a palm~tree sure mounted by a phoenix. (The phoenix was commonly a.s.sociated with Christ because it was supposed to the eternally from the ashes of the fire in which it perished.) Two stags stand upon either side of the Cross, and at the bottom of the whole mosaic six sheep are standing in the waters of the four rivers. The parallel with Yggdrasil is extraordinary, far its topmost branch, Lerad, bears the falcon Vedfolnir whose piercing eye sees all things in the universe, and the four stags Dain, Dvalin, Duneyr, and Durathor feed upon its leaves. Honey dew drops down from their horns, and supplies water for all the rivers of the earth.

r From Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (New York, 1949), pp. 334-5. y representations of the crucified Christ likewise show the sun and moon on either side of the Cross_ lastnamed being those unfitted for supreme knowledge because of their total involvement in materiality, in byli, which in Greek is wood. Furthermore, the Tree is cruciform because the Cross is the shape of the world”, since the earth has four directions or quarters, and the very universe itself-ringed by the Zodiac-has four fixed, four cardinal, and four mutable paints. Christ with his Twelve Apostles is in clear corre spondence with the Sun in its twelve zodiacal signs, and the crucifix is very frequently found with the four fixed signs Taurus, L.eo, Scorpio (interchangeable with the phoenix eagle), and Aquarius at its extremities, standing for the Four Evangelists who, with the Four Archangels, do duty in Christianity for the Four Regents of HindueBuddl.u.s.t mythology-the caryatidal kings who support the dome of heaven.'

To this Tree, image of the finite world, the Son of G.o.d is nailed by his hands and feet, and a spear is thrust in his side. And because the finite world is manifested by the contrast of opposites, lefr and right, high and low, before and behind, day and night, good and evil, the image of the world is cruciform. On the right hand is the sun, and on the left the moon. At the head is the fiery Dove, and at the foot the serpent or the skull-contrasting figures of life and death, liberation and bondage. The whole is, in short, a revelation of what human life is--in so far as our life is the identification of the true Self with time and s.p.a.ce, past and future, pleasure and pain. This identification is the nailing, in consequence of which we are ”dead and buried”-absorbed and confused in a past which ”is not”.

1 Fanciful as these correspondences may seem to the modern mind, we must not forget that the Christian myth was formulated by people for whom they were immensely significant. Christianity was not elaborated from the scriptures by the rational and historical methods of its modern apologists. The tremendous importance of the four directions and of astrological symbolism in general is well treated in Dr. Austin Farrer's study of the Apocalypse ent.i.tled A Rebirth of Images (London, 5949).

1 62 Myth and Ritual in Christianity This is why the Son of G.o.d is impaled with Five Wounds, for the world of time and s.p.a.ce with which the Self is identified is based on the five senses-strictly speaking, on the memory of what comes to us through the five senses, for this is the sense of being ”stuck or nailed. In reality the past drops away, but in the mind it sticks and so impales us that we are in bondage to the past and to death. By the sticking, the memory, of the five senses we are helplessly attached to a world which we simulf taneously love and hate, which is pain to the degree that it is irresistible pleasure. In the Jatalea Tales the Buddha, as Prince Five Weapons, is found in a similar predicament with the Giant Sticky/Hair--a monstrous ogre whom no man could defeat because all weapons became stuck in the clinging hairs which covered his body. The Prince fared no better than others, for he fought with the giant until he was glued to its hair by both hands, both feet, and even by his head. But just as the giant was about to devour him, the Prince said, ”Monster, why should I fear? For in one life one death is quite certain. Moreover, I have in my stomach a thunderbolt-a weapon which you will be unable to digest if you eat me. It will tear your insides to pieces!' At this, Sticky/Hair let go, and the Prince was free.

The thunderbolt, the lightningflash, in the future Buddha's stomach was the vajra, otherwise known as the Diamond Body, which is equivalent to the G.o.dhead in Christ the eternal Self which is never actually in time. So long, then, as man thinks of himself as this ”I”, he finds that there is absolutely nothing he can do to release himself from the bondage of time; indeed, the more he struggles to be free, to be unselfish, just, and good, the more he is stuck in the entanglements of pride. ”I/consciousness is a vicious circle such that every attempt to ' Jataka, 55: '. Cf. A. K. Coomaraswamy, ”A Note on the Stickfast Motif”, in Journal of American Folklore, vol. 57, pp. 128-3' ('944). This is, of course, a version of the universal motif which appears in American folklore as the Tar/Baby story.

T Pa.s.sion 16 3 FIG. 9 THE CRUCIFIXION.

From a Spanish woodcut in the British Museum, c. isth century. The Virgin

and St. John the Evangelist stand upon either side

stop or escape from it makes it whirl the more. Every move, whether towards selfa.s.sertion or selffdenial, is like the plight of the fly in hang-for one loves oneself only to hate oneself, and then the struggle to be free imprisons every limb. In such an impa.s.se ”I” must at last give up.

My G.o.d, my G.o.d, why halt thou forsaken me? Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit. It is finished.

And he gave up the ghost.

This is the universal testimony of the ”knowers of G.o.d -that the spiritual life of man dawns in the moment when, in a profound and special sense, he does nothing. ”I do nothing of myself. This is no ordinary inactivity, for to be idle with the express intention of attaining sanct.i.ty, as in formal ”quietism”, is still activity in so far as it is a method, a means to discover G.o.d. But the true state of divine union is ”without means”, and comes to pa.s.s when man ”gives up” not as a means to get, but because he knows with certainty that he has no other alternative. In the ordinary way, such certainty comes only through a struggle to be free by all available means, leading to the conviction of their futility. To put it in another way, the mind does not become free from the illusion of ego by the way of unconsciousness-by any attempted reversion to ”nature”, or to primitive innocence, and still less by any kind of forgetful inebriation in ecstatic sensations, whether induced by drugs or self/hypnosis. The ego is dissolved only through the way of consciousness, through becoming so conscious of what ”I” is that it has no more power to enthrall.

This giving up” is the Sacrifice by which the Cross is transformed from the instrument of torture to the ”medicine of the world, so that the Tree of Death becomes the Tree of Life. By the same alchemy the cruciform symbol of the eanh, of conflict and opposition, is also the symbol of the sun, of life/giving radiation.

Fulget crucis mysterium; Qua vita modem peftulit, Et mate vitam protulit.

s.h.i.+nes forth the mystery of the Cross; whereby life suffered death, and by death brought forth life.

For this reason Christian art fas.h.i.+ons the crucifix in two ways-the Cross of Christ suffering and the Cross of Christ in triumph, the latter showing him crowned and vested as King The Pa.s.sion 165 and Priest amid a full aureole radiating from the centre of the Cross. Properly, the first type of crucifix hangs or stands at the Rood Beam above the entrance to the choir or sanctuary, while the second type belongs upon the altar.

Thus the Tree standing at the axis, the crossroads of the world, at the central point of time and s.p.a.ce, is at once the Now out of which time and s.p.a.ce, past `and future, are exfoliated to the crucifixion of the Self, and the Now into which the Self ”returns” when it ”takes up the Cross” and no longer ”misses the mark”--the ”target” into which the spear of attention is at last thrust, releasing the river of blood and water which cleanses the world.