Carlo Suarès : La fin du grand mythe V |
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The end of the great myth V
(Extract from Carnet No 5. May 1931) Symbols are everywhere Having established the schematic theme of the great Mediterranean cycle in relation to its complementary, the Asian theme, we can penetrate into the symbolism common to the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Judeo-Christians, whose deep meaning is buried in the unconscious of all individuals who participate in contemporary chaos. We will therefore study some symbols but taking care not to make it a game of the mind. These symbols, in one form or another, are experienced by all. The original duality, and the original position taken by the unconscious in this duality, are the heritage of all those involved in the global crisis. The stories of Adam and Eve or Oedipus and the Sphinx can be considered by many people to be very interesting legends whose interest is however not vital in any way. But these same people struggle in inextricable economic or passionate difficulties, and do not realize that their position inside these dramas has been represented by these "legends" since the beginning of time In truth, all that is not the total synthesis of knowledge-love is part of the same great Myth of "time" from which it is urgent that we get out. The "times" are so over that we no longer have any hope of putting into gestures, ideas, or feelings that participate in the mythical unconscious, even if they were the expression of the most sublime love or of the most admirable intelligence. Nothing is more than enough that remains below a total achievement. The mythical themes that we describe, everyone can transpose them for their own use. The one and only fundamental duality which constitutes the mythical man assumes all possible aspects, and is the basis of all possible problems. It is up to everyone to bring their own inner difficulty back to the original difficulty. As long as he has not encountered it in his nudity, as long as he has not finally abandoned it behind him, he will belong to the Universe of Myth, to the Universe of sub-men. The distinction we made during this presentation between East and West, it is only too clear today that it almost no longer exists. If it served to clarify the origins of the different positions taken by mythical humanity, it is quite obvious today that these positions have come together until they are nothing more than an inextricable and gigantic node of consciousness, common to all men in all Continents. We have given an example or two of how the western "heart" cycle called "reason" and the eastern "intellect" cycle love. This double penetration was first and above all an exchange of the unconscious, so that all the symbols, which originally belonged only to particular groups, are today global, in a confusion of traditions from which we must extract the synthesis. Oedipus today is everywhere, the Apocalypse is no longer a particular phenomenon, and what we will say about the Mediterranean cycle (become European by the Germanic and Slavic contribution), has become true for all. We therefore now abandon the East-West expression of the Great Myth, and we will search through symbols which, although familiar to everyone, have been relegated to the legendary field, their absolutely general, human and current meaning. The man and the woman The human race being, by definition, the state of nature where duality knows itself to be duality, each human individual is the living expression of the effort that this duality makes to resolve itself. The primary duality that human beings encounter is sexual. It is easy to understand how this duality which exists in nature but without conscience, is the first duality which is offered to the conscious and the unconscious of the man and the woman. Around this physical and obvious duality crystallize all the others, first in an extremely confused and unconscious way, then more and more consciously: it is the birth of consciousness. The duality which manifests itself in the form of a psychological antagonism between the "I" and the "that", which we have described in its conscious form, is original for each child, as it is at the origin of human races. It is a heavy and unconscious atmosphere, which clings to the only visible and not psychological duality: the differentiation of the sexes. Hence the clearly sexual character, of which we will give some examples below, of all religions without exception. The two individuals present will therefore assume all the dualities, and "represent" them, as on a theater. Woman and man will associate psychological debate with their physiological natures, unless one prefers to consider the entire psychological and religious debate as a transposition of sexual duality: at the outset both positions are true. The "I-first-and-that-then" or the "that-first-and-I-then", at the origin of the times, for races as for children, are confused. But subconsciously the polarization is already done. The feminine nature is to attract, to absorb, with the aim of internally condensing, around the germ coming from outside its own substance. The movement is made from "that" to "I", from outside to inside, the whole being identifies with "I". Male nature, on the contrary, is to project oneself outside: the movement is opposite, the whole being identifies with "that." Breathing These two movements: from outside to inside, and from inside to outside, complementary like those of breathing, are at the origin of all religions, cosmogonies, metaphysics, mystics. The expiration movement is masculine, it is centrifugal with respect to the individual "I, that is to say that a universe is created inside this "I", but from which the "I" in what it has of absolute dissociates, and it is then the universe which is expired or created; or that an image of the "I" projected outside of it is created outside of the "I", in the "that." The aspiration movement is, on the contrary, feminine. It is centripetal compared to the individual "I", because if a universe is created inside this "I", this one is associated with it, but it is associated as well with a universe created outside of it by bringing it back to you. Note that childbirth does not in any way invalidate this centripetal movement: the flesh becomes at some point another being who is expelled, who demands to live an independent life and on which nevertheless folds the maternal instinct . Thus the two physiological movements are intimately associated with the psychological antinomy "I" and "that" to create metaphysics, cosmogonies, religions and all symbols. These two movements are represented in a fundamental way, as we have seen, by the masculine Orient on the one hand, which is centrifugal in relation to the "I" (the "I" projects in "that") and by the female West, which is centripetal compared to the "I" (the world is brought back to him). Let us observe in passing that the external activity which the Westerners call masculine is on the contrary feminine because it emanates from an "I" rooted in itself, while the "I" which comes out of itself in a male centrifugal movement is passive only in the material world of women. This distinction is very important, and we will come back to this later. Let us repeat for the defenders of the East who despise the West, and for those of the West who despise the East, that one of these two functions is no better or worse than the other. They are different in nature and essential to each other. They maintained their characters for centuries until the completion of the Myth, until the union of the two aspects in a human common to both, which is neither spirit, nor intellect, nor love, nor Orient, nor West, but both at the same time. Those who, in a childish debate, take a stand against or for the machine, or the mind, or the matter, or the analysis, or the synthesis, are victims of the past, of which the present can take no account. Separation in separation Tracing the development of the primitive equation in history, we find that the Asian male theme was naturally very simple: men, in a male myth, subjugate the woman, and that's it. In the Western female myth, on the contrary, the man is first drawn by it, then must learn to dominate it, so that it gradually changes in nature by opposing itself (this theme is given with incredible violence by the Eternal God to the woman and the serpent, as we will see later). Man, then, must bring himself to become "celestial", to, finally, marry him. This love drama, the grandest we can imagine, has been played for centuries. It is the drama of all revolts and all passions, where the tiny and gigantic man opposed the whole of nature to dominate it, then to unite with it in eternity. As well, all the stages of this enormous metaphysical Comedy were marked by words which the woman pronounced. The few words pronounced by Eve are decisive, without them nothing could be done, and a few unforgettable words from the "Virgin" Mary decided the fate of the world. When through the Books we manage to read this authentic and flawless story from one end to the other, we are seized with vertigo thinking that in a few very simple words that could have gone unnoticed indefinitely, it is all human history which has been scrupulously noted, as it developed. It is this story that we are going to read, first locating the man in the feminine theme "I-it". The western demiurgic "I" The "I" of man, setting out to discover and conquer an external universe, of an "that" which is less true than him (Western myth) unconsciously resolves his psychological problem in the most simple: "that" is what must be dominated, it is matter, it is what is palpable, the earth, her body, the woman, and all sensitive objects; by contrast, "I" is the whole of what does not fall under the senses: thoughts, emotions, feeling of being. In all his creative acts, whatever they are, his "I" is absorbed, feels himself dying, dies to fertilize the matter which will then give birth to another "like him", to himself who must animate his prison for get out. It is the origin of all the Gods who die to resuscitate, like Osiris, and like Christ who because he is not the son of a man is the son of man. In the outside world, by analogy, the "I" of man projected into "that" becomes all that of "that" is invisible and unknown: both the cause that created "that" and the unpredictable effects of this hidden cause which wants to manifest itself. This transposition, we have seen that it serves the unconscious to resolve the antinomy "I-it", and that its effect is to bring back "I" which was only real, to a purely subjective reality: the demiurge is a prisoner in the universe he created, and it is from this universe, and not from himself that the final synthesis will spring. The male Judeo-Christian God is both omnipotent and needs his creature The position of man vis-a-vis his "I" who projected the universe into him is twofold: his individual "I" imagines to be a fragment of this personal "I" become cosmic for having absorbed the world, while his body belongs to "that", to the earth. Thus is born the conflict between spirit and flesh, which can never be resolved by morals, theologies or philosophies based on their own mythical data. To eliminate religious problems, it is necessary, from the start, to dissociate yourself from this entirely mythical game from its first datum. Apart from the chessboard there is no problem of chess, these problems have no absolute existence; but in the special universe created by the chessboard the problems are authentic. It is the same with conflicts within myth, where one can at leisure discuss the conflicts of mind and matter, and all the problems. They are all based on the primordial datum of the game: the imperfection of each human individual, that is to say, his unconscious. In summary, the Western myth based on the reality of the individual "I" is feminine because it is the woman, and not the man who identifies with an individual and physiological "I", and who brings everything back to himself in a centripetal movement. Taken inside this general feminine modality, the men of the Western Myth no longer have the possibility of saying that matter is "Maya": they are there, they must get out. And compared to this feminine modality, those who belong to the oriental masculine modality can no longer ignore that "Maya" is no longer an illusion, and that it gave birth. The female If the human race tired of making female nature in all its primordial force, life would be organized around the digestive and reproductive functions, as do the female republics of bees and termites where the male is always absent because he is killed as soon as it has fulfilled its fertilizing function, reduced in an impressive manner to its strictest minimum. We can say that bees and termites have thus resolved the conflict of spirit and flesh, by the final triumph of the latter. In a 100% female organization the "son of the Termite", the one who corresponds to the "son of Man" (we understand here the metaphysical meaning of this name that Jesus gave himself) is crucified like him, but in his procreative function, and without even, like Oedipus, knowledge, that is to say that it is defeated and dominated definitively, without hope of resurrection, by the female, in a universe of "production", of "overproduction", of "standardization," of "taylorization", rigid, inexorable, the whole function of which is to destroy the very germ of its redemption. Wife The whole Western Myth aims to bring the woman to be no longer the female, but the Celestial Bride. The progressive, egocentric "I" must stop giving birth indefinitely during the separation, it must purify itself in order to marry eternity. The eternal then springs from the progressive, the being springs from becoming, because the eternal being has fertilized progressive becoming. After these spiritual weddings, here is the new birth. The new child is no longer like the mythical child, a mixture of his father and his mother, but something else, ineffable: the Truth which cannot be said to be both being and becoming, and which we cannot say is not. It is indeed a metaphysical Comedy which constrained throughout History men and women to play roles, these roles which we spoke at the beginning of this talk, whose historical adventures are purely and simply theatrical and symbolic representations of the History of the unconscious. These roles require that all the dummies necessary for the unfolding of the drama be played, and that the accessory symbols, Fire, Water, Air, Earth, Blood, Flesh, Metals, Wine, Bread, etc., be used in their original sense, male or female. Thus nature becomes aware of itself, or, if you prefer, gives birth to consciousness. Sexual duality in nature has no other reason than to be this double goal, the poles of which are contradictory: indefinite duration, indefinite evolution of species in time by means of a duality; and the awareness of this duality, born of the conflict itself, which, by means of the human race, tends to reduce the "two" in the non-duality of universal Life. So we can say that the whole sexual conflict in nature is only an illustration of a metaphysical conflict, and that men, while being the supreme terrestrial outcome of Nature, oppose it by means of their individual consciences, whose state of loneliness amid inextricable antinomies is only the very first glimmer of a consciousness which is being born, and whose sole aim is to put an end to this original metaphysical conflict. Overturning The real man, the awakened man, as we defined it at the beginning of this talk, is the total consciousness of Nature in the terrestrial globe, therefore also in the entire Universe, since the supreme outcome of whatever consciousness is universal. But if individuals play roles with the aim of transforming the unconscious into conscious (in other words to give birth to the conscious), it is obvious that as soon as this goal is achieved they must immediately stop playing these roles, otherwise they turn against what they gave birth to, perpetuating gestures that have suddenly become fatal. So the gestures that were true at one time suddenly become not only false, but the relentless enemies of Truth, and that, without having changed. Human sacrifices, then the Great Mysteries, then, today, all religious rituals have successively served first Truth and then lies. - "So what has changed in the dogmas or in the ritual and how, if nothing is changed, what was" for "the Truth becomes" against "? Ask those who do not see that precisely the simulacra have not changed, while the Myth was evolving. To use other mythical terms: those who worked for the "white forces" suddenly start to work for the "black forces", making the same gestures, but for the simple reason that a new hour, calling to her the need for new gestures has struck the clock of consciousness. The gestures that were true become automatic, without any hope of rehabilitation, because "new wine cannot be put in old bottles". The truth will not submit to these former cadres; she will have to destroy them. This is because all gestures today have become false, from those of religious political and social rituals, to those that must be done to earn money, to find accommodation, to eat, to love , to learn, and it is because the Life, which is the Truth, demands new gestures beyond which all happiness is illusory, that we will retrace in its broad outlines the mythical drama through History. Perhaps then, when looking at themselves for the first time, some people will realize that they have so far been only shadows of the past, and they will finally want to reject the whole myth to go towards the life. The Child Having located the fundamental problem on its simplest and most reduced basis, we see the mythical man-woman theme developing with the third character: the child. Let us not forget that this character is the contemporary of the first two: our mythical history has not yet appeared in the chronology, we are at the origin of times, collective times and individual times. For the child the demiurgic position that the father has already assumed in relation to him, is accepted very exactly. Because if the mother is the nourishing substance, the whole universe on which the child rests, the father is only connected to him by very mysterious, elusive and external ties. But whatever these relations, each human individual carries within himself the two germs. It is in truth only the conjunction and not the fusion of the two male and female poles, it is absolutely only that, and it is here that is the center of the human drama in its totality, which we have already seen an episode with Oedipus. These two irreconcilable elements form a torn individual, tortured by definition, vitiated from its origin, since the origin of man is, as we have seen, the birth of the consciousness of dualities. In the Mediterranean Myth whose theme, as we have seen, focused on the individual "I" of the two children, the son has a preponderant, formidable role, while the daughter is only one extras. The son, with Christianity, ends up assuming a much greater importance than that of the father while the daughter retires behind the scenes, and that the mother, following glorious metamorphoses, becomes as immense as him. Tens of thousands of years of history and prehistory, and even the convulsions that this civilization will still have tomorrow, are only variations on this single theme. The girl At first, if the daughter has a role, it is only in her capacity as the son's sister. She marries Pharaoh her brother, who is the son of divinity, therefore divine, just as the religious "sister" today mystically marries the son in his new aspect. She declares herself her sister, so she espouses her cause. Although the dummy has changed, the situation is much the same. The daughter has very little contact with the father. The first woman, although from Adam, is in no way his daughter, but his wife, and seems to have been made in the image of anyone, having almost no parents, to be nobody's daughter, so to speak. The most important thing regarding the girl seems to be, in all civilizations, her virginity. Apart from this crucial point (to which we will return many times) the Myth does not deal much with it, except to deny it, through the centuries, to its very soul. It is that the girl represents the danger of falling back into the termite hill unless she arms herself with her virginity, or that she marries the son by submitting to him. The sacrificed virgin, the warrior virgin, or the celestial virgin (the Walkyria) will only come later, in the "distribution of roles". We will talk about it again. The son This character dominates the whole Mediterranean Myth, from Oedipus to Christ, because he is in an extraordinary situation. Indeed, every human individual in the world, regardless of the group to which he belongs, is a selfish being. Even if he wants, it happens, as in India, that his selfish and transitory "I" disappears to give way to the cosmic "self", he is caught in a pseudo entity made up of a succession of states of consciousness, who strives, through his selfishness, to bring the universe to herself, in a female centripetal movement. Consequently the man participates by his desires and his emotions in the centripetal female nature. Yet his desires take him outside in a centrifugal movement. His body is male, but of flesh, therefore feminine compared to his intellect. The latter, although essentially masculine and centrifugal, lets itself constantly be drawn to turn on itself in an analytical movement which is reasoning. This impossible situation is at the very origin of his "son" nature. Everything is double in him, inextricably mixed, each element is masculine on one side, feminine on the other. It is more than steeped in dualities it is duality itself. His situation dramatized in Mediterranean civilizations because of their feminine equation, which did not allow him the haughty "I no longer play" metaphysics, but which dragged him into the representation of his passion. There more than elsewhere the son at the outset took up the cause for his mother, his irreducible enemy, by marrying his own flesh and his individual "I". It is the initial triumph of the belly, of this belly whose whole fertility tends to suffocate it, IT, for the benefit of a female republic of termites. The son, for having killed his father, was taken, made himself the worker of his own death, the slave of the prolific belly, whereas on the contrary, his role was to fight him and to defeat him. The Myth begins with the darkest despair! The prolific "I" The individual "I" creates in the succession of times an indefinite succession of "I"; each "I" at a given moment is the son of the preceding "I" and the mother of the following "I". Thus, in the interminable analytical unfolding of the states of individual consciousness, the son becomes the mother, to give birth to the son who becomes the mother again, and so on indefinitely until the end of time. The secret of the Sphinx, Oedipus did much more than shout it out to everyone: he played it so that everyone would know it. But it was too easy, too simple, too bright: the unconscious for millennia threw the veils of its spell on it, so that what was most apparent was hidden. The original sin The son caught in the procreative vortex of the mother-female indefinitely generates flesh and successive "I" s. He who should remember to overcome, he who will later dominate as "son of man", here he is drawn into the abyss of an adventure where he loses light. Original sin is nothing other than this "forgetting", so dramatically played by Oedipus, so that we can say that original sin is nothing other than the Oedipus complex. It's always the same adventure. If we have not yet traced it in the book of Genesis, it is because it appears there, although in very simple words, with such a formidable complexity, that even arrived at this point of our presentation we can only approach it very gradually. Adam, in the image of God, gives birth to woman, her rib, her flesh, therefore both animates her flesh, and finds that she is separated from him. We see immediately in this striking image, several depths. Then the man marries his flesh, which is "played" by the woman, and the latter trains her to know the science of good and evil (dualities), because of the serpent from the bowels of the earth (the earth is still the woman), and which, moreover, is very similar to living entrails. The knowledge of dualities is opposed to the knowledge of non-duality, which is the tree of life (we will see later that since there are two trees it is already a duality, inside which is the other ..., etc ...). The fruit is eaten, it is done, the long, long journey through time has begun. But the woman will give birth. What will it bring about in pain, and how will this adventure end? Cain and Abel She begins by giving birth to Cain, then she gives birth to Abel who is killed by Cain. The Lord, in fact, could not be satisfied with the "fruits of the earth" that Cain offered him, however what Abel did was well done. Abel, by sacrificing animal flesh, submitted to the Myth. Cain, by offering the fruits of the earth was not doing enough. Abel had acted in accordance with the Myth created by Eve, in the feminine cycle , while Cain had not submitted. Cain did not know, did not want to know why the flesh had to be sacrificed, and since it had to be sacrificed, since it pleased the Lord that we sacrificed the flesh he killed his brother. By examining this myth carefully we will discover later that it expresses the separation of the two myths East and West. Cain will indeed be driven to the East of Eden, and the Mediterranean Myth will resume with a third son, Seth, who will come to replace Abel. The Myth Orient, Cain, is the older brother. Seth associates with Adam and Eve, and the first curse of original sin falls on him thereby; Cain who dissociates himself from this Myth receives another curse: "you will be wandering and vagabond on the earth", but at the same time, and it is very significant, he receives the most formal assurance of being protected by the Lord. To the concerns of Cain the Eternal protects him by marking him with the sign of immortality so that Cain takes with him what the Eternal has most precious: eternity, non-submission to the female branch of Myth, the original male branch, the eldest son very dreadful, absolutely dreaded, since "whoever kills him, says the Lord, Cain will be avenged seven times". Why does the Lord so vehemently defend Cain's cause until he threatens to avenge him seven times? This is what we will try to explain. By this protection the Eternal although he will often act as a demiurge in the female myth, although he will often prove to be desperately slave of the unfolding of the Myth, places himself beyond this particular myth, at the very root of the Great Myth human. Cain and Abel are present today We must never forget that all these mythical stories belong to the present, even if they tell of past events. If they related to very distant legends or if they symbolized only past things they would interest us only as distractions, while they touch on the most essential roots of our unconscious. The words father, mother, son, wife, etc ... whatever the "characters" who occupy the scene, always touch the same unconscious knots, the same resonances. We have often said that the entire historical history of men is only the projection onto the world stage of the history of Myth, that is to say, the relationships between the unconscious and the conscious, relationships of which we found the origin at the origin of times, in a two-term equation. Now it is obvious that only a perfectly conscious conscience manages to identify very exactly the human character, whatever it is, in any of its roles (of father, mother, son), with this mythical role itself, as Jesus did. What always happens on the contrary is that the mythical character becomes an entity independent of the human being, an entity whose name begins with a capital letter, and where the human character, struck by unconsciousness, does not recognize itself. He does not know that Oedipus is him, that what Oedipus did he does at every moment of his life, no more than he knows that Christ is him, that the Mother, the Father , that everyone, all the family, all the actors, it is still, and always him, in his different roles. The result is a very natural phenomenon that we have already studied: a reversal of roles, which is very exactly represented by the projection of the image in water (water being always, let us not forget, matter in which the "I" is individualized). This projection which is found everywhere and always in authentic texts must be considered as a psychological phenomenon which exactly defines the unconscious. Here is an example, about Cain and Abel. The Judeo-Christian theme is distributed on Seth who replaced Abel, that is to say on Abel, with the following fact: the one who submitted to the myth, Abel, was killed by his brother. So each man, inside this myth, represents the one who, because he submits to the myth must be killed by his brother. He plays and must play this role because he is Abel and not Cain. He must be killed? No, he is killed in advance. He is killed by definition, he is only there to replace the dead, to pretend to be him. He is the simulacrum of the dead, he is the dead in his role of death. The Lord does not protect Abel. Abel died, for doing something pleasing to the Lord, and without the Lord protecting him in any way for it. On the contrary, it is the murderer of his brother who is protected by a formidable sign. If the Lord can so easily protect Cain, why does he not protect Abel instead of giving him a "favorable look", which on the contrary loses Abel, irritating his brother? Not only does he not protect him, but why, by a strange duplicity, does he give him this "favorable look" which must be fatal to him? Isn't he therefore able to give him a slightly less "favorable" look? a little less compromising? ... Or rather does he not do it on purpose to have him killed? Isn't the real killer him? And does not his convoluted little speech to Cain before the murder already carry within him the innuendo of the crime, does he not suggest it a little? And does he not say (without almost saying it) that Cain can dominate desires and sin, therefore that he is the strongest, and that in short all this will be settled? "Why are you irritated?" ask the Lord to Cain, and why is your face cut down? Certainly, if you act well, you will raise your face, and if you act badly, sin lies at your door, and his desires are directed towards you: but you, dominate over hi m What to understand? The Eternal Rewards Cain In reality, this scene, like all authentic descriptions of the relationships between the unconscious and the conscious, contains, in its reversal of values, both the image and its reflection, the primordial contradiction, just like the previous scene in the Garden of Eden, where the Lord God said: Behold, man has become like one of us (note the plural), for the knowledge of good and evil. Let us now prevent him from advancing his hand, from taking the tree of life, from eating it, and from living eternall etc, and where he places the East of the Garden of Eden of the Cherubim with swords flamboyant to keep the tree of life. Now it is precisely to this East that Cain goes, after the crime, and after having expressed his fear of being killed, and after the Lord had put a sign on Cain so that whoever found him would not kill him! It cannot be said more clearly that the tree of life was offered to Cain, that eternal life was given to him because he knew how to understand that he had to kill, and because, dominating his desire not to kill, he killed . So, because of the end of this story, the little ambiguous discourse that the Lord gave him becomes very clear: he wanted Cain to kill. And if the discourse was ambiguous, it is because it was impossible that it was not: the Myth always presents itself under a double aspect which must be understood. Reflections If we look at the Myth by placing ourselves on the side of the reflection, we take it upside down, believing it to be taken upside down, but it is still correct since the place of the reflection is upside down. Only those who are on the side of the truth can take it directly from the place; but if unfortunately those who are on the side of the reflection dare to take the myth backwards by thinking thus to restore it, then everything would be horribly blurred. This is the origin of all "satanism". It is more than obvious (and it would not even be worth saying it if the point of view of Truth always aroused very violent reactions) that the texts can only be restored from the point of view of the grains which are already dead, which we purposely emphasized so much at the start of our talk. Without this purification, without this total conversion, one can only distort the point of view of the truth by noting, for example, this monstrosity: that it is necessary to kill your brother to gain eternal life. But before explaining this mystery we must analyze the main characters of the drama, who are much more numerous in the scene of the murder than one would believe if we only knew in certain accounts of the Scriptures each word has a very significant meaning. specifies which, like a magic key, can suddenly open a universe. Let us note in passing that the mythical tales have the astonishing fact that once opened, so to speak, they become so violently luminous that the one who reads them in their truth suddenly finds it very difficult to explain things that are too simple. in too complicated terms. This is because symbols suddenly identify with fundamental truths, which, because they are fundamental, are found all over the world. A story becomes the story of the whole universe, which too long explanations can reproduce only vaguely, and which very succinct explanations do not reproduce at all. God Of all the characters in the Mythical Comedy the father is the one whose character so far is the least clear. Indeed, his role in the scene of Abel's murder was unexpected. So the real assassin was him, but so cleverly concealed that without the reward granted to Cain we could always have put him out of the question. There is a mystery there that we will try to clear up thanks to the knowledge that we now have of the general theme of the play. To attempt an analysis of the father's character, we would have to take him on his first appearance on the scene, in cosmogony. But let's not forget the metaphysical and psychological origin of Comedy: cosmogonies, although they always take place by definition, by virtue of an obvious logic, at the raising of the curtain, are never more than consequences, the consequences of the cause for which it is necessary that the cosmogony begins in time. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, that does not say why there is this beginning, what it is that this beginning, and who is this first character God, whose intervention is enough to make mysterious something that could not to be. Indeed, if the sentence was the beginning created the heavens and the earth, it would sufficiently express the necessary presence of duality at the birth of time, or the necessity of the time modality at the appearance of duality. This double beginning is nothing other than the definition of man, the birth of man in nature, as we have studied it, or in other words the simultaneous birth of time consciousness (the origin of time), of isolated consciousness (in individual fragments), and of the notion of antinomies. Thus, the beginning created the heavens and the earth would mean the beginning created the antinomies. But instead of trying to describe the mystery of the "beginning of beginnings", the first chapter of Genesis, with God in the foreground, this inexplicable God-character, completes the cosmogony without revealing anything about the cause of this adventure. If we know that man is created in the image of this mysterious character, we do not know the reason for the metaphysical Comedy, we know nothing. Cosmogony is therefore not the beginning of beginnings, the nature of the character God, prior to the universe, not revealing itself there. In the second chapter of Genesis, however, everything changes. It is the formation of man and woman, that is to say, conscious duality. And when everything was already created, we return to creation, but this time immediately in another register, metaphysical. God who had already created the entire universe, including man and woman as beings participating in nature, God who had already done everything, suddenly changes his name: he is called the Eternal God, while throughout cosmogony he had not once been called anything other than God. This change of name in the second chapter of Genesis is a true revelation of the nature of the characters, because if God created "in the beginning" the whole universe, the Eternal has absolutely nothing to do with it, the Eternal has no relation to what was created in time since the Lord neither begins nor finishes any creation. The Eternal God We are obliged to mark the entry on the scene of a second character where at the beginning there was only one. Eternal is in no way an adjective, it is not a quality that we attribute to the character God, it is a name, a name that the God of cosmogony had at no time. A name, that is to say the symbol of another character who comes to be superimposed on the first [ 1 ]. For some time (exactly during the second and third chapter of Genesis), there are on the scene the two characters, God and the Eternal, in a single disguise. It is an inexhaustible source of misunderstandings, which transforms the drama, when the characters are unmasked, into an admirable farce, which takes place until the birth of Cain. At this precise moment the substitution is made, it is no longer the Eternal God who is on the scene, but this time the Eternal. As always, as in the Christian myth later, this formidable event can only take place, thanks to a sentence said by the woman: she conceived and she gave birth to Cain, and she said: "I formed a man with help of the Lord. Unheard phrase of the woman, who for the first time decides the fate of the World, phrase which is the keystone of the whole mythical edifice, which is the culmination of the myth, phrase which the female character will have to get to know even in his entrails, to the immaculate conception, and which immediately pronounced allows the Lord to act, for he awaited him. He could do nothing without these few words, these few very simple words, as simple as those that Marie will pronounce at the wedding of Cana, and which will again decide the fate of the world by bringing the possibility of finally finishing the immemorial Myth. The eternal The second character "father" the Eternal this time, is the one who leads the whole Cain-Abel scene in an unexpected and sublime way. It is no longer God, for the Lord takes his place. But before disappearing it is God, who curses Cain, it is God who intervenes in the scene between Cain and the Eternal, to be the spokesman of the enemy of the Eternal. Here is the exact way in which each character intervenes (just read the text, this is not a comment, because in the text each character is called by name, without possible error): sacrifices are made to the Lord; the latter accepts Abel's sacrifice and not that of Cain; however, he incited Cain to kill Abel; after the murder he asks him "where is your brother? But Cain does not know it any more than he does: neither one knows where Abel is; then God intervenes who says "what have you done?" The voice of your brother's blood cries out from the earth to me etc, then the curse. Cain believes that this cry of horror and this curse was uttered by the Lord; he did not notice the substitution; then he despairs because he cannot live without the Lord. Wasn't he his arm? Is he not the one and only son of the Lord? Didn't his mother testify to it? Isn't it the Truth? But God transmitted to him the curse of the earth: "you will be wandering and vagabond on the earth", etc ... Here already that the son of the man does not have where to rest his head, and that the Truth is crucified. Then, from Cain's mouth comes the most painful of lamentations, as later on the Cross, this pathetic cry from the son of the Lord to his father from whom he believes he is abandoned .. But this time it is the Lord who answers. He is filled with anger at the earth that cursed Cain, but he cannot erase the anathema. Since the drama must be played out in spite of himself, here he will protect his son; not only will he avenge him each time he is killed, but he marks him with a sign so that we cannot kill him, which means that with each of his deaths he will be resurrected. So Cain goes to the East where the tree of Life is. But this extraordinary story does not end there: "Adam still knew his wife; she gave birth to a son, and called him by the name of Seth, because, she says, "God gave me another son in place of Abel, whom Cain killed" Here is the second time that the woman explains, here is the second time that she testifies. And what does it say? that Cain is the son of the Lord, but that Abel and Seth are the sons of God. It is essentially different, and essentially important. And, as soon as the Abel race continues, that is to say as soon as Seth has a son, it is then, says the text, that people began to invoke the name of the Lord. It was invoked because it is no longer there, and from then on it becomes the God: the two characters tend to join together, and to mingle again for reasons that we will say later. East-West The Lord was no longer of this world, Cain had hidden, and the Lord, disappeared, invisible, could only be summoned. It is obscuration, it is the beginning of religion. The sons of Cain, of the eternal metaphysics hidden in the East, had on the contrary no need for religion. Religion can only exist when the Lord is absent, when we can only invoke him. This is why only the Judeo-Christian branch of this double myth can really be called religious. The tradition of the Lord cannot in any way be called a religion. This distinction was already made by Mr. Rene Guinon in his " General introduction to the study of Hindu doctrines ", which we cited while studying the theme of the Eastern Myth. But if it is true that Cain, the son of the Lord, is the elder brother, it follows however from the analysis of the first four pages of Genesis that they start from a primordial Myth, prior to the 'tree of knowledge of good and evil (that of the Myth of the West, or Abel) and the tree of life (that of Cain), since we are witnessing the formation of these two trees. This amounts to saying what we already said about the Hindu metaphysical non-duality, that this is not the whole, since it already exists within a duality. We will examine later, after the presentation of the Cain-Abel "affair", the second and third chapters of Genesis, which indicate the birth of the primordial Myth. The two sacrifices Cain and Abel are therefore only half-brothers. They give us the following theme: the son of the Lord must kill the son of God, in order to remain eternal. It is enough to have established the exact kinship of these two sons, so that the fathers give us not only their metaphysical secret, but also the historical determinism of the two enemy branches in their relations between them. As the son of God, the demiurgic character of Genesis, who creates in time and space, Abel can, according to the Myth, only sacrifice flesh and fat to the Lord. But as the son of the Lord, also caught in the Myth, Cain has no right to ignore the Myth, to sacrifice to the Lord what he would normally have sacrificed to him outside of the Myth: the fruits of Earth. He has no right to ignore that the Myth is there, he cannot escape the adventure by saying "Am I therefore the guardian of my brother?" He cannot find deliverance outside of the "Maya", by abandoning the earth, by not fertilizing it. The sacrifice before "sin", before ignorance, is no longer worth anything when it is done: the woman, the earth, gave birth to a man with the help of the Lord, she said so , she knows it. The fruits of the earth are no longer worth anything, these vegetable fruits that Cain insists on sacrificing, Cain who wants to ignore the adventure, Cain son of the Lord, who wants to blind himself in his vegetable serenity, who is irritated when the Lord demands that the earth be fertilized with blood. Cain wants to live in peace, blood disgusts him, he does not want his mother to know that he is a son of the Lord. Impossible desire! The two half-brothers are linked to each other by a fatality from which they cannot escape; one must kill the other. The son of god In fact, the son of the creator God in time and space is none other than the character that we have already called the progressive "I", the one who dies incessantly so that another "replaces him" is born again and again. : Abel's death succeeds Seth indefinitely who replaces him. Carnal son of man and woman, he is spiritually son of God, that is to say that the primordial equation is posed to him in the "I-it" form of the Judeo-Christian Myth, and that his "I" far from seeking to dissolve, seeks to amplify, and to resolve in his own way the antinomy, by pretending to create the "that", to be the demiurge. The characters of this theme that we studied above have not changed but are now called God and son of God (or given by God). Abel is in the position of the creature which does not know its creator, but which believes to have one, and which carries out a ritual in conformity with the Myth. This ritual has only a mythical value, but it is necessary, since the Myth is started. The sacrifice of flesh and fat is the consequence of the submission of the feminine element, submission which was expressed by the sentence of Eve at the birth of Cain "I formed a man with the help of the Lord". Flesh and blood The flesh is feminine since it is produced by the woman, but the blood is masculine, since it is for the woman the period when her flesh is not fertilized. This means that there is an antagonism between the blood and the flesh, since when there is blood there can be no proliferation. This opposition takes on the most dramatic aspect in the Judeo-Christian myth. It attaches itself to the Jewish people with the most vehement ban on feeding on blood: flesh smothered with its blood can in no case be eaten, but the beast must be bled. Blood is the living fire, the symbol of the Lord, the element that must fertilize the female earth. He opposes procreation, but without him procreation would be inanimate, without him the flesh is a dead thing. Blood is still the object of worship for millions of people. The blood of Christ is in the unconscious of an entire civilization; Abel's blood has been in the unconscious of all men since the beginning of time. The "sacred" blood, the "impure" blood of enemies, the blood always and everywhere, the attraction of blood, the intoxication of blood, the physical repulsion that it can inspire, all these aspects, all these roles, have originated from the mythical antagonism of blood and flesh. If one does not understand the profound role that blood plays in the mythical unconscious one cannot understand the scope of the murder committed by Cain at the behest of the Lord. The murder of Cain It is through symbols that the metaphysical Comedy projects itself into History. We constantly see all human individuals manipulating symbols they do not understand and of which they are the hypnotized slaves. Over the centuries the symbols end up modifying the unconscious by dint of being repeated, and in turn the unconscious modifies these symbols, and so on. Cain has no special reason to kill Abel. He does not kill him until the Lord his father tells him that his true nature is to kill him. He is the son given to the woman by the Eternal, that is to say that he is the "that-I", in which "I" submitted to the eternal. Consequently, any contact between this real "I" and Abel's progressive, demiurgic "I" can only kill the latter, quite simply because the latter is unreal. Thus by its only contact reality kills the unreal. But the Myth intervenes with its symbols to transpose this metaphysical assassination on the stage of the world. When it comes to "the voice of Abel's blood" it is God this time, from within this Myth, who speaks: (the murder was committed in the fields, that is to say in the earth contact) "What did you do? (says God to Cain). The voice of your brother's blood cries out from the earth to me. Now you will be cursed with the earth which opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand. When you cultivate the soil it will no longer give you its wealth. You will be wandering and wandering on the earth. The earth opened its mouth to drink the blood of Abel son of God, to be nourished, but it curses the hand which nourished it, it drives out Cain, and denies him its material wealth. She refuses to feed and shelter it. Here we find, again, always, the same theme, this theme which remained in the Judeo-Christian unconscious for millennia, and which was literally "played" only at the beginning of the Christian era. The periods of "great revelations", or "divine intervention" are nothing other than periods when the Myth whose theme was told in the past enters the present of daily consciousness. But we do not want to anticipate too much here on facts to which we will return. There is identity between the theme Cain-Abel and the theme Christ, not only by the characters, but by what is accomplished there, with this only difference that the scene Cain-Abel is at the first act of the Comedy, and that the scene Christ is at the last act. Between the two acts, human individuals will do whatever it takes for the Comedy to take place. God's speech to Cain explains why the Lord did not accept his sacrifice: the earth (the woman) waited for the blood (the man) to feed on it and to be fertilized spiritually. Being in antagonism with material wealth, the blood in turn demands that the earth denies it its harvests and its refuges. The son's blood does not want to fertilize the mother carnally and materially, but he wants to bring the mother to him until one day making her his apocalyptic wife. This is what his son Cain, the LORD, asked of his son, instead of his sacrifices of the fruits of the earth, of the material fruits of the earth. He asked her but without ordering: leaving him free to understand. Later, in a single character, Christ, the son of Man, orders that we kill Jesus the son of God, and is glorified: Jesus Christ = Abel + Cain. Historical consequences The civilizations built around the Abel psychological knot are demolished in turn by the eternal, by the sense of eternity that comes from the East, just as the individual "I" is constantly killed in order to be reborn. The priests of the "I first" myth sacrifice to the Lord, because the priests are struck down in advance. These priests, all the priests of the "I-it" were in turn overthrown because they had died before being born. The High Priests of Ammon have been defeated by Moses, the priests of Israel by Christ, and those of Christ are routed at the first historical signs of the Apocalypse, in the USSR The fate of the sons of Abel is to found churches on the fast waters of time, unreal images which the Myth itself demands that they be destroyed so that their blood fertilizes the earth. The High Priests of Israel and of Christ play Abel's sacrifice so well that they transform the metaphysical Myth into a carnal Myth. Here they are spontaneously allied in advance to all the kings of the earth, to the political kings first in whom they recognize divine right, then to the kings of finance. The "I-first" Myth truly sacrifices the flesh and fat of the best of the flock, while Cain, the eternal vigilante of the Lord, is struck down by all these mighty men of the earth. Thus defends the unconscious through the ages, by erecting civilizations around its terror. The individual "I" dead before being born, only aspires to last, only to defend itself against the eternal who slays its throat, against the Truth which, for its part, can only be revolutionary for it. Whatever forms God takes, Myth has only one biological process. The Myth erected the Treaty of Versailles on the "I first" as well by multiplying the border walls to infinity, as it erected denominational barriers. It is he who splits up and kills Europe by stiffening the borders, by tightening all the human problems which aspire, on the contrary, to widen. By an admirable fatality this Myth can accomplish nothing by building, but it is accomplished by its own collapse, and what it builds is precisely what calls for its destruction, as Abel's sacrifice attracts the "favorable gaze" which get him killed. This process is absolutely inherent in the Myth. Each new phase completes all those that precede it, and opposes them while containing them. Thus Christianity was established on the ruins of Jerusalem, thus collapsed Christian civilization on all that preceded it. Christianity is struck dead, it died in advance like everything that has always expressed the Myth. If we can understand that to die means "to nourish the earth" ( drink and eat) we will see that all the Abels should rejoice in their own collapse. But because of the overthrow of the values of the Myth, which we have already talked about, they can only bring their death by becoming the real killers of their brothers, that is to say that they can only kill themselves killing themselves in their brothers. So wars are waged. All wars are Crusades wanted by the pontiffs of Myth, priests, capitalists, emperors or politicians. One could really not ask the pope to close shop "due to voluntary liquidation". In the same year when we announce the end of the Great Myth, on the contrary, he reinstalls his temporal power and starts to mint money again. These new Pope gold coins will remain as witness. Their vintage will mark the date on which the end of the Great Myth projected the death of the Church into the papal unconscious. Inner Gold, the most sublime symbol of transmutation, for the Vatican as for the rest of the world is nothing more than a currency. And on this money vomited by the Spirit, the admirable Myth wants today that the effigy of Jesus Christ, of Jesus Christ disguised by his vicar as "king of this world", be prostituted. "Jesus Christ" takes precedence over the dollar: his vicar sold it by making a very good deal. 1 We do not purposely give in this account the names of the mythical characters in Hebrew. It would take us too far and could make the reader lose sight of our immediate goal. La fin du grand mythe V at a par Carlo Suarhs - 3e millinaire |