nightshadetwine wrote: ↑Tue Sep 11, 2018 12:55 pm
There seems to be a tradition of 'mother-matter'. The father(god,spirit) impregnates the mother(matter) and she gives birth to the son(spirit-matter).
Yes, but... isn't that tradition inevitable? We see reproduction within nature. Reproduction is a female function, thus "Mother" Nature. It isn't too far then to have the Father as the one sending the rain to fill the rivers and water the ground, and the fruit of nature as the son. See the quote from Plutarch above, where "Father" Osiris is the one to fill the Nile, that 'impregnates' the earth which is "Mother" Isis.
The thing is: the stories that Plutarch is re-interpreting are almost certainly (at least as far as I understand) based on very old myths of an Osiris walking around Egypt, marrying Isis, getting chopped up and thrown in the Nile, etc. It is later writers like Plutarch and other allegorists that derive a cosmic meaning from these old myths. They are re-interpreting these old myths, to find a meaning in their own day, and then seeing that meaning as being there from the very start, when the earthly myths were first created.
We see early Christian writers like Origen doing something along those lines. And that re-interpreting process continues today. IMHO Earl Doherty and our own Giuseppe are modern day Plutarchs and Origens: taking the old stories and finding a cosmic drama within them, of a celestial Jesus crucified by Satan and demons in some larger mythical realm. And then seeing that that meaning was there from the beginning.
Later writers took the myth of Attis doing all kinds of things, and found a more philosophical pleasing interpretation to them. I think the Attis myths were originally meant to be taken at face-value. Re-interpreting them as stories about nature doesn't mean that the newer interpretation was there at the beginning.
Assume for argument's sake that the Gospel of Mark was a simple hagiography about Jesus. No larger meaning intended. You could still go through it and pull out "Mary" as Mother Nature, God or the Holy Spirit as the Father impregnating the Mother, and Jesus as the fruit that nourishes the world. Or whatever you like: the Gospel as a retelling of the Old Testament, or a retelling of the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans. It's not shining a light on the Gospel, but rather on the imagination of the allegorist.
I'd be interested in seeing the argument that the Gospels were in fact originally meant to be allegorical in the first place, as the prerequisite to investigating the allegorical meaning behind them.
(Nightshadetwine, I'll note here that I have no academic qualifications in ancient cultures, no skills in ancient languages. It's just that I've read a lot of primary sources and secondary sources in English translations, and have built up my own 'head space' about what we find in the ancient writings.)