Morris Berman Wandering God

A Study in Nomadic Spirituality New York 2000 pg.140 The Axial Age The term "Axial Age" was coined by the Swiss-German philosopher Karl Jaspers years ago to denote the period and events of the first millennium BC. During this time, a number of civilizations arose or were transformed along the lines of a sharp vertical split between heaven and earth; what the Israeli sociologist S. N. Eisenstadt calls the "transcendental" and "mundane" orders. This included ancient Israel, Greece, Iran, China, and the cultures of Hinduism and Buddhism. If we extend this backward in time to include the emergence of the mystery cults and the breakdown of bicamerality, and forward in time to include Islam, the Axial Age is really something like 1800 b.c. to 700 A.D., about twenty-five-hundred years. Yet the most turbulent period, as Jaspers said, does remain the one thousand years preceding the birth of Christ. The idea, then, is that of an ordinary or secular world "down here," and a perfect or divine world "up there." As this is vertical sacrality, the trademark of the Neolithic, it would seem that noth-ing new is really going on. This is the SAC of Egypt, Mesopofamia, and the other early states and chiefdoms, no? Well, say Jaspers, Eisenstadt, and other Axial scholars, not quite.  In the pre-Axial civi-lizations, they maintain, the two orders of the mundane and the su-pernatural are homologous. That is to say, the higher world is structured symbolically along the same lines as the lower one. The two realms are parallel and even embedded in one another. Thus, the gods in these cultures quarrel, fight, experience jealousy, deceive each other, go hungry, and even die, as we do here on earth. The powers of the gods were limited. In Egypt, Osiris was slain, and Ra grew decrepit (he was even tormented by a snake bite).  In the Axial civilizations, something else has happened. If nothing else, the up-per world has become transcendent; it is the realm of eternity, and the gods live forever. Once this disjunction got institutionalized, the question arose of how to bridge the gap between the two worlds; and with this came the problem of salvation.  Again, note the difference from the pre--Axial mentality. In the pre-Axial civilizations, there was no salvation as such—redemption of the soul, continuity of the spirit, and so on. The focus was on physical continuity into the next world, which is why, for example, Egyptians embalmed the dead and buried them with food (especially bread and beer), toilet articles, and weapons.  In the mystery cults of ancient Greece, or the oracular prophecy of late Mesopotamia, something else is going on. Continulty can (and should) occur, but it is now based on the reconstruction of the personality. We are at the edge of Gnosticism here: the mundane world is regarded as inferior, and human beings, via certain kinds of oc-cult practices, can become like gods. And by the process of such reconstruction, the mundane world can perhaps be remade on the basis of the transcendent one. This shows up in Plato and in Jung and is the "ascent" tradition of later agricultural civilization. The Goddess is not merely a ritual or ceremonial figure any more; she is "Diotima" (in Plato's Dialogues), or the Great Mother archetype, into which consciousness is dissolved and with whom fusion of psyche and divine is made possible. Julian Jaynes comments on this era: The collective cognitive imperative becomes weaker (that is, the general population tends towards skepticism about the archaic authorization), [and] we find a rising emphasis on and complication of the [trance] induction procedures, as well as the trance state itself becoming more profound. What starts to occur now is ascent experience and oracular prophecy, which show up as early as 1800 B.C. at Mari, in Assyria (modem Tell Hariri, in the middle Euphrates area), and continue to gain momentum. Letters in the Mari archives (Archives royales de Mari) refer to oracular messages given through a mahhum, or "frenzied person." They report that someone prophesied or was in an ecstatic state (immahu). In five or six cases, this occurred in a temple context, although noncultic individuals also could obtain divine messages while in ecstasy. However, all of this is very early. It is only with the clear breakdown of bicamerality, well into the Axial Age, that we have unequivocal evidence of organized cult praclice of an ecstatic nature. Thus, by the seventh century B.C. we have female prophets, or raggintus (literally, "those who cry out"), "channeling" the voice of the goddess Ishtar—a development that had no place in traditional Mesopotamian life. Linked to this search for salvation, moreover, was the drive for utopia; the two are part of the same impulse. As a result, the Axial civilizations developed the notion of an Event (e.g., the coming of the Messiah) that would come along and close the gap between the mundane and the transcendent once and for all. In effect, the mundane order will be destroyed; a notion not present in pre-Axial civilizations. All of this millenarianism had a lot of proselytizing zeal at-tached to it and, along with this, an intolerance for other modes of salvation. This intolerance was rooted in the uncertainties generated by the two-world split itself. So you get the emergence of orthodox-ies, which in turn generate challenges to themselves, and the challengers are typically as intolerant as the establishment. Axial civilizations share a totalistic view of change; there is always the attempt to remake the world according to the prevailing transcendent vision. For Eisenstadt, then, the Axial Age marks the birth of ideology. With the exception of desultory references to mysticism and eso-teric practice in the Western Axial civilizations, the literature on the Axial Age fails to make the crux of the change explicit: what was going on in the search for salvation and the reconstruction of per-sonality was initiation involving unitive trance practice, the oblitera-tion of personal history by means of the dissolution of consciousness. This apparently occurred in the second millennium in Minoan Crete and was in particular the province of the mystery cults, cults that were clearly tied to agriculture and a goddess figure. As the SAC of the pre-Axial civilizations begins to split into two separate realms, and self-conscious awareness (interiority) begins to dominate the mental arena, unitive trance (fusion with the godhead) steps in to sew the two realms together and to reembed the individual in the cosmic order. If sacred authority provided certainty before, trance practice created an ideological zeal that would tolerate no other versions of truth. The last piece of this puzzle, then, lies in the mys-tery cults that arose during the Axial Age.   The Mystery Cults The earliest organized mystery cult was probably the one located at Eleusis, fourteen miles west of Athens. The earliest actual building we have associated with the Eleusinian mysteries dates from the second half of the second millennium; but, in fact, excavations at Eleusis have provided no evidence that the mysteries can actually be dated to the Mycenaean period. Although it might seem logical that Demeter's role as corn goddess would derive from the indigenous religion, most of the evidence suggests discontinuity, making the mysteries a much more recent phenomenon.  There is, for example, no evidence of Minoan influence; a fall one thousand years separate Minoan and Eleusinian artifacts. Mycenaean tablets mention the names of various deities, but Demeter and her daughter Persephone are not among them. And while the mysteries are, as in the older cult practices, directed toward agrarian prosperity, the emphasis eventually shifted to a new goal, namely, giving the initiate a better lot in the afterlife.  The innovation of the mysteries was the enactment of a divine drama as the central feature, involving psychic death and rebirth. In nonecstatic terms, however, the ancestry of the mystery cults goes back much further, to the ritual relationship between agriculture and goddess worship, as existed in Minoan and Mycenaean religions, and in Mesopotamia as well. All this is part of the SAC. As Joan Engelsman puts it, "there is a strong agrarian element in the mysteries."  At Eleusis, the goddess Demeter is an earth mother figure, celebrated as the giver of grain and the goddess of vegeta-tion. Kore, her daughter, became Persephone, who had to live in the underworld for two-thirds of the year, but she was reunited with her mother for the other four months, during which time crops flourished. Hence, we have a clear association between agricultural rites and the theme of death and resurrection; although, as we shall see, the notion of salvation was added sometime after 650 B.C.  In gen-eral, the historical pattern of the mysteries is one of original wor-ship of a vegetation deity, onto which was subsequently grafted "the worship of a spirit of intoxication." In either context, however, Demeter was seen as the goddess who bestowed grain as the basis of civilized life. In fact, one disclosure of the Eleusinian mysteries by an initiate was that as part of the sacred rites, he was shown an ear of grain.   Of course, there were a number of mysteries, and in general they were centered around earth goddesses and female deities: Demeter and Kore at Eleusis, a series of goddesses (including Gaia) at Delphi (despite the centrality of Apollo there), Cybele in Phrygia (and later in Rome), and so on.  As far as the Eleusinian mysteries go, they in-volved a procession from Athens to Eleusis and an offering of the first crops of the harvest. The initiate drank the akeon, a soup consisting of meal, water, and mint, and handled certain sacred objects.  In Alexandrian days, a winnowing fan, symbolic of agriculture, was also employed. The agriculture/female connection was almost always in evidence, both before and after the cultic shift to salvation and redemption. Dionysus' mother, for example, was Semele, an ancient Thracian earth goddess, and Plutarch commented that Dionysus and the cult of Demeter embodied the life of nature witnessed by agriculture. Dionysus is described as being followed around by worshipping women, and the instruments of his cult were supposedly his mother's. "The Mother and the Son," writes Jane Harrison, "were together from the beginning." According to Harrison, the "spirit of intoxication," the enthousiasmos that got grafted onto the old vegetation worship, was a missionary faith of Thracian origin. This cult of Dionysus held the belief that through physical intoxication, and later (historically), spiritual ecstasy, a person could be transformed from the human to the divine. Not much later, the Orphic religion added to this the possibility of complete fusion with the godhead, taking Eros and Dionysus as its two divinities. Much the same thing happened to the Isis cult of Egypt. Isis was a very old goddess, but it was not until about 300 B.C., in the Roman empire, that her worship took the form of a mystery reli-gion. What emerged was a closed society of adherents who cel-ebrated sacred and secret rites, info which one could be initiated to obtain the wisdom made possible by the goddess and to attain re-demption and salvation. Apuleius, in The Golden Ass (see below), wrote that she had the power to let a person be reborn and attain immortality. The timing of all this—generally from the seventh century B.C. On—is significant, for it corresponds to Jaynes' notion of the break-down of bicamerality and to Bruno Snell's assertion (The Discovery of Mind) of the discovery of the individual around this time. Walter Burkert thus emphasizes the role of private initiative in the mystery religions, the voluntary decision to undergo a change of personality through the experience of the sacred.  One of the few descriptions we have from an Eleusinian initiate is something along the lines of, "I felt like a stranger to myself." In the Phaedrus, Plato uses details from the Eleusinian mysteries to create a picture of the soul ascend-ing to heaven and undergoing a purification that allows new pow-ers to enter it. The theme of death and rebirth is a constant one. Let us take a closer look at the nature of the initiation process. Ecstasy and temporary "insanity" are the crucial features. Edith Weigert-Vorwinkel, in her essay on the Great Mother, points out that the word "fanatic" is derived from the mysteries, inasmuch as the Latin word fanum means "sanctuary," the place where the initiation  was carried out. Hence, the followers of the Phryglan goddess Cybele  (Magna Mater in Rome) were called fanatici. Those who wished to become priests in her cult, the Galli or Galloi (Corybantes in Greece),  used dance and music to enter ecstatic states.  As Lucretius described it (first century B.C.), this was accompanied by self-flagellation. At the peak of their frenzy, the initiated castrated themselves. Their geni-tals and clothing were then carried into the fanum, or inner shrine (also called the "bridal chamber of Cybele"). After that' the Galli wore women's clothing, wandering the countryside, performing ecstatic dances and breaking into prophecy. "To be filled with the Great Mother, to be possessed by her, was the only form of life they desired." All of this is corroborated by contemporary sources. Plutarch (first century A.D.) gives a description of the cult practice of Isis; Apuleius gives us the fullest description of initiation into her cult, in which ecstasy and fusion with the goddess are clearly implied. After a ten-day fasting period, Lucius, the initiate, says: I drew near to the confusion of death, treading the very threshold of Proserpina [i.e., Persephone, Demeter's daughter] At the dead of night, I saw the sun shining brightly. I approached the gods above and the gods below, and worshipped them face to face. A "Hymn to Isis" written during the time of Hadrian (117-138 A.D.) refers to an underground marriage, the "birth of plants," an "unspeakable fire," and "the birth of the liffle child."  Once again, the timing of this with the "discovery of the individual" is noteworthy. E. O. James writes (The Cult of the Mother Goddess) that the Eleusinian mysteries acquired a personal dimension—bliss and immortality for the individual—only after the union of Athens and Eleusis that occurred between 650 and 600 B.C.  The mysteries, he says, then "acquired an urban character and a more profound sacramental significance, giving to those who underwent the experience a new philosophy of life that transcended the things of time and space." The original agricultural rites had been transformed into a ritual of death and resurrection, centered in the pledge of immortality. According to Walter Burkert (Ancient Mystery Cults), the mysteries offered a chance to escape from a barren and predictable world, to create a sense of meaning in a banal life, by means of an experience of a great rhythm, in which the individual psyche could be integrated through a large, sympathetic event. No doubt.  But what if life were not barren and banal? What if the environment were not experienced as adverse? What if, in short, one were a hunter-gatherer? Would one then be impelled to die, be reborn, become a hero? The Axial Age is a desperate one, and we are, effectively, still living within it. Ascent is a recent phenomenon; for the most part, it is rooted in alienation, in not finding this world as enough. In their article "Deprogramming," Thomas Robbins and Dick Anthony argue that spiritual ecstasy is "hostile to mankind's deepest aspirations." This is an intriguing statement, sure to send many spiritual devo-tees into a fury of ecstatic rage. The interesting thing here is that it is untrue, in the sense that if your life is barren, perhaps a good dose of "God-realization" is just what you need to glimpse the larger possibilities. To know the possibilities of boundary loss can be a good thing; fusion does contain a certain type of truth, in that the primordial connection to the mother is part of our biological heritage. But the statement is true in that (a) human life should not be barren, and if it is, something has seriously gone awry, and (b) if we get hooked on ecstasy and heroic "rebirth," there is the likelihood that we shall never get down to the deeper layer of paradox. As I said earlier, it becomes a way of getting trapped in a world view and thus ultimately prevents us from finding the world. The Axial Way of Life With the rise of the mystery cults, and the institutionalization of unitive trance, the SAC is taken to its apogee. Apparently, it took a higher degree of sedentism and urbanization to do this, though like Jaynes and Eisenstadt, I have no clear answer as to why such a profound shift occurred. But its preparation goes back, in any case, to the changes of the early Neolithic. Women's political and economic power declines. Birth spacing decreases. Mothering, once a part of female life, now becomes the focus of that life. Multiple mothering and diffuse energy patterns are weakened, and the child basks in the "hallowed pres-ence" of the mother's aura and attention.  If it is a male child, he will now get the message that his job is, in some way, to serve his mother and "save" her; to give her, through heroic acts, the life she can lead only vicariously. He will search for charismatic energy everywhere, saying, "This is real." He will (in Mesopotamia) worship Inanna, god-dess of sexual love and war combined.  War, romantic love, the SAC, and finally unitive trance will all go together, "make sense" on an energetic level. ("Love and War are the same thing," wrote Cervantes in Don Quixote.) He will be "steep-gradient," in Philip Slater's charac-terization, and vertical power structures will come naturally to him. ("It Doesn't Take a Hero," wrote General Norman Schwartzkopf, meaning just the opposite.) The mythic properties of the mother in the nursery that Dinnerstein talks about will, not coincidentally, show up in his goddesses and their mythologies of sexualized mother/son relationships. On a visceral level, goddess cults and initiation rites will ring true for him. At one extreme, literally then and symbolically now, he will castrate himself, wear women's clothing, dissolve into the Great Mother. At the other extreme, he will become a conqueror of men and his own feminine impulses. He will enjoy war and the energetic rush it provides. War, sacrifice, death, charisma, heroism, love, and Arthurian legends—all of this will (strangely) be what life is about. He will extol warriors and the "warrior archetype." He will love women, but he will resent them as well. He will, as Paul Shepard says, remain a permanent adolescent and feel, on some level, brittle, perhaps even a bit haunted. So this is the link to our previous chapter. The force of the Great Mother image derives from unconscious memories in infancy; this is what makes mothering and issues of gender equality so significant for culture at large. A possessive goddess is quite con-gruent with an infantile society; and the link with agriculture is, as we noted in chapter 3, one of obedience as a lifestyle. Jaynes had to posit auditory hallucinations as the controlling agent here, but in fact, nothing so exotic is required. If you are trained from infancy into the SAC, you'll do what you're told. You will also get enchanted by ideologies of various sorts, tend to swallow things whole, and call your beliefs certainties. Existen-tial and psychological certainty will be, on an urconscious level, your number one concern. This is strongly connected to the oral dependency of agricultural society and Great Mother culture.  In his book, Ego, Hunger and Aggression, the gestalt therapist Fritz Perls introduced the notion of "introjection"—not quite the Freudian version of this, but more along the lines of an infant, who doesn't discriminate and swallows everything whole. This is, in fact, how children get enculturated or learn language.  But adulthood involves a healthy balance between suspicion and trust, and balance is not what agri-cultural civilization or Great Mother worship is about. Consider, then, the accumulated historical sources of "certainty" and ideology in sed-entary and urban cultures: o delayed-return economy and accompanying insecurity o sacred authority complex; unitive trance o One-on-one dyadic mothering ("hallowed presence") o female agricultural deities o oral dependency o gender inequality o search for salvation and rebirth; heroism o increasing population density and narrow birth spacing o fear of death (etc.) The result of all this is what Roy Rappaport, referring to social structure, calls "hypercoherence"; but it seems clear enough that this applies to group behavior and individual personality as well. Surely, ideology is a major part of hypercoherence, and paradox in such cultures is a long-lost possibility, a dim mewory at best. Hypercoherent societies are rigid: everything is predictable; all the options are foreclosed. As Walter Truett Anderson points out, it takes virtually no time in our culture for an idea to become a religion, and he cites as evidence the latest manifestation of Great Mother worship, namely, James Lovelock's "Gaia" hypothesis, as an example. Anderson says that while the theory does have a real scientific core to it, the popular Gaia bandwagon could care less about such things.  Instead, a collection of myths and metaphors of the earth as alive, as a goddess, as having a mind of its own—these "are the turn-ons, and they are what is being transformed info a new faith, a kitsch ecotheology, complete with its doctrines and its priests and priestesses." This is Perls' "introjection" to the nth degree, the cognitive/ emotional process of an infant. As Perls himself put it, "Hunger for mental and emotional food behaves like physical hunger. . . [This structure of impatience] is responsible more than anything else for the excessive stupidity we find in the world.''    We only think we are thinking; the truth is that we spend most of our time organiz-ing our lives around mental theme parks, going from one "para-digm" to the next and congratulating ourselves on our insight. There's gotta be a better way. Put it all together, then, and you get a pattern of rigidity in civilization that operates on both a socioeconomic level as well as a psychological or philosophical one. It is all too cloying, and the desire to break out of that shows up in the modern world, for example, in things such as paramilitary organizations and rodeo/rancher culture—which are pathologies of another sort. Historically, the SAC and the totality of urban/sedentary/agricultural life, with the Great Mother thrown in later, provoked a response, an experiment designed, by means of physical movement, to do two very important things: to reject the suffocating totality and ideological "certainty" of agricultural civilization, and to restore paradox to the center of hu-man consciousness. This was the phenomenon of nomadism.

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