The Way, the Truth, and the Myth
“Today the word ‘myth’ is often used to describe something that simply isn’t true. A politician accused of a peccadillo will say it is a ‘myth’, that it never happened. When we hear of gods walking the earth, of dead men striding out of tombs, or of seas miraculously parting to let a favored people escape from their enemies, we dismiss these stories as incredible and demonstrably untrue. Since the eighteenth century, we have developed a scientific view of history; we are concerned above all with what actually happened.
But in the pre-modern world, when people wrote about the past, they were more concerned with what the event had meant. A myth was an event which, in some sense, happened once, but which also happened all the time. Because of our strictly chronological view of history, we have no word for such an occurrence, but mythology is an art form that points beyond history to what is timeless in human existence” (Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth).
Advent begins this Sunday, for the Nativity Fast I have been praying the rosary to draw near to the Theotokos, the queen of heaven, Mary. A couple years ago while I was still practicing ceremonial magic, I wandered coincidentally (no such thing) into an Episcopal church where I saw it in the bookstore, the most beautiful rosary I had ever seen. I brought it home and kept it hidden, practiced it a couple of times and for different reasons lost the practice.
To continue in the spirit of Ecclesia Omnia Benedicat the rosary is intended to bring balance, to re-divinize the feminine, and bring Mary into my life. I would never suggest that the Theotokos is equal to God, but I do share Christian magician Dion Fortune’s sentiment that a religion without the goddess is halfway to atheism. We do not need to make the Theotokos the fourth hypostasis of God, but we do need to position her in her rightful place, as the mother of our God; not simply our lady, but as the new Ark, the Burning Bush, the Theotokos.
Think about that: Mary, a corporeal person like any of us, bore the Incarnation, bringing God into the world, in the flesh.
Jesus is King, and it is really important to make the distinction that Christ holds an eternal moniker, because He is co-eternal with the Father, but more than that it is important for our Christian tradition to see Christ the King brought into the world amongst animals in a manger, because there was no human welcoming; The King comes to us as a child, not with a scepter but wrapped in bands of cloth. A child Who needs to be protected, Who needs to be warmed, and Who needs to be loved. Our access character is the Theotokos, fleeing from Roman authority at nine months pregnant only to be turned away at the inn when her water has broken. Think of the anxiety plaguing Mary and Joseph. This is a dramatic myth, brilliant and exciting.
The myth of our God come to earth as a vulnerable baby, by Mary’s meekness; this meekness I want to integrate through the practice of the rosary.
I say myth on purpose, and it is not to dismiss the Gospel as a fabrication; myth has become a casual pejorative people toss around when talking about Santa Claus (who was real) and the tooth fairy (evidence suggests this a lie). Myth, in a magical sense, is said to mean that something might not have happened while still be true. Again, I am not saying that the Theotokos did not give birth to Christ.
My approach to the Bible is an echo of the author and wizard Alan Moore describing his work: “I traffic in fiction; I tell no lies.”
The myth of Christ’s birth is not supposed to be a prescriptive dogma that, by believing in it, makes one Christian nor is it an intellectual stumbling block that, if one cannot get over it, makes the entire Christian faith obsolete. There is too much emphasis from both sides of the argument, where one side unquestioningly agrees with the dogma and the other has an almost violent need to convince the world Jesus never existed at all (cough cough dogma cough cough). This is too black-and-white and, frankly, it is a really boring mentality to hold on either side.
What is important goes beyond the scope of either of these orientations which make up the horizontal approach, because they miss the point of the story: in the filth it shall be found. Our king, Christ, came to us as a vulnerable child, born in a low place, among lowly animals and the filthy conditions of the manger, swaddled in bands of cloth, surrounded by His parents and shepherds, a cultural outcast of the time. Christ’s birth is pointing more personal, more intimate than all-or-nothing thinking can comprehend: His birth is showing us the Way to God.
When he instructs us to take up our cross and follow Him, He does not mean for us to take walk to a literal Golgotha (the blood of the martyrs notwithstanding). The work is internal. When I started reading the Bible when I was still doing magic, I read it as if every character I came across was me. They were all aspects of myself which gave me the ability to dive deeper into the Scriptures, because I was not reading a religious book as if it were a historic record.
The Bible is a lot of things: history, poetry, magic, letters, and–of course–the Good News. It’s all of these things and more, but ultimately it is a text that is helping guide us personally. “A humble man who lives a spiritual life, when he reads the Holy Scriptures, will relate all things to himself and not to others,” as St. Mark the Ascetic wrote. The Bible is alive, and we are meant to participate in this living myth.
The myth is open to all to participate in it and by following its directives become like Christ, become like Mary; wrestling with all the aspects that are found both in Scripture and within ourselves.
This is why I’ve been praying the rosary, because its Mysteries unfold and beckon us to be with Mary, to be with Christ, and share in their joy, their suffering, and their glory. This practice invites us to visualize and feel. It is a holistic mystical practice involving every part of our corporeal and incorporeal form. Guided by the mysteries we see what comes up for us during our meditations and there the struggle begins, within our hearts. The struggle to recognize our divinity and our humanity, our life and our death, our sadness and our happiness, our maternal and paternal natures.
Here, in the depths of the rosary, we gain access to a fully-embodied self. An entire human being, which is of God. The Way to Him is through our own depths, which emerge during the course of our spiritual work, which are confronted and integrated through the Sacraments, ritual, meditation, and prayer. Christ the King is born in the manger found within us, in the darkness that we once walked in, there we will find a great light: Emmanuel.
This name means God is with us—which is also a directive in that we acknowledge wherever we go within the darkness of our being God is also there, taking steps in communion with Him. The things I do not want to face, nor want to even acknowledge, this is where God is… Not only that, but it is also where I am.
This the power of the rosary: bringing us into relation with Mary in a way that we, too, bear the Incarnation, bringing God into the world via our corporeal forms.
If we assume that myth means really old story that probably didn’t happen then we are uprooting ourselves from our stories, these stories that shape us and we, in turn, shape them through our engagement with them. If we uproot ourselves in this way then we will have nothing grounding us to the present which, in my experience causes an overreliance on nihilism, hedonism, and further isolation from the self.
The rosary is an anchor that sinks deep into our hearts, where our being resides, warts and all, keeping us from becoming untethered from who we are deep down. It rhythmically roots us to the present, among our beloved, beyond the interest of historical fact, in the realm of eternal truth.
Si comprehendis, non est Deus
Witness, NM 