The Story of the Savior/hero as an Allegory
Posted: Fri Sep 21, 2018 2:42 pm
The following quote sums up what this post is about:
A Story of the Soul’s Journey in the Nag Hammadi Library: A Study of Authentikos Logos By Ulla Tervahauta:
A Story of the Soul’s Journey in the Nag Hammadi Library: A Study of Authentikos Logos By Ulla Tervahauta:
Philo, Allegorical Interpretation II, 19:
Philo, On The Posterity Of Cain And His Exile, 61
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_solid:
In the myths of Osiris and Dionysus they are both torn into pieces. Jesus breaks apart bread that he says is his body. I think this is referring to divinity "splitting" when it creates the "lower" or more physical realms. Divinity starts off as one whole and then multiplies itself in order to create everything. You find this concept in ancient Egyptian and Greek religion and philosophy. So when Jesus breaks his body/bread apart to feed the disciples he's feeding his disciples his divinity.
Egyptian Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions of Ancient Egypt by Geraldine Pinch:
Porphyry's Against the Christians: The Literary Remains By R. Joseph Hoffmann:
Dionysos By Richard Seaford:
I think the story of the savior/hero is an allegory for the incarnation of the soul or spirit into matter. In these stories the savior/hero represents the soul or divine part of all humans and it's "struggles" to stay connected to the divine in the realm of matter. In these stories the savior/hero is usually born to a mortal woman who is impregnated by a god, the mortal woman representing matter and the god representing the divine. So human beings were believed to be made up of matter/body and spirit/soul.The stories were devised to convey cosmical history, theogony, anthropogenesis, and finally individual experience of humans in the psycho-physiological development of mortal life. The whole cycle of the history of unfolding divinity in humanity was dramatized for stage enactment in the annual round of Mystery festivals. And portions of this drama have filtered down into the ritualism of practically every religion in the world. The epic of the human soul in earthly embodiment was the theme of every ancient poet and dramatist, and each strove to dress out the elements of the struggle in a new allegorical garb, with a new hero, whether Achilles, Hercules, Horus, Theseus, Aeneas, Orpheus, Jason, Dionysus, Buddha, Ulysses or Jesus, enacting the central role of the divine genius conquering the animal nature...And novelty could be introduced only by the device of depicting the soul’s experiences under a new allegorical situation, symbolizing afresh the old, old story of the immortal spirit’s immersion in the sea of matter. In all, combats with dragons, wrestling with serpents, harassments by brute creatures, enchantments by Sirens, plottings of conspirators, imprisonment in dungeons and struggling through to an ultimate return to the original home of felicity, find their place. In one type of adventure after another the many features of the history of the divine Ego in its progress from earth back to the skies were allegorically portrayed. Every aspect of the experience had its appropriate myth.
A Story of the Soul’s Journey in the Nag Hammadi Library: A Study of Authentikos Logos By Ulla Tervahauta:
Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, 53:Both Plato and Aristotle associate form to father, and matter to mother...The active principle (cause, god, or...) is always present in matter, giving it some quality or another...The active and passive aspects and interaction of cause and matter are rooted in Platonic and Aristotelian traditions...many Platonists identified the mother-principle as and considered it corporeal and fundamentally opposite to the incorporeal God...The Timaeus-based mother-matter image can be encountered in works of several Platonists who were active from the first centuries CE onwards.
Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, 56:For Isis is the Female Principle of Nature, and that which is capable of receiving all generation, in virtue of which she is styled by Plato, "Nurse," and "All-receiving,"...wherewith she rejoices and is glad to be impregnated, and to be filled with births—for birth is an image of existence in Matter...
The savior's life is also threatened when they are a child. I think this is an allegory for the soul being in danger of being "overtaken" by matter or "bodily desires". Often the savior/hero is hidden away in a cave or a place away from danger soon after they are born. I think the cave, or in the case of Jesus "Egypt", represents the physical body or physical realm kind of like Plato's cave. I also think that characters in these stories being imprisoned or going down into the underworld and escaping from prisons and the underworld is an allegory for the incarnation of the soul into the "prison" of matter.Plato calls the Intelligible "Idea," "Model," "Father," and Matter he terms "Mother," "Nurse," the seat and receptacle of generation; and that which results from both he is accustomed to denominate "Issue," and "Birth," and we may conjecture that the Egyptians [reverence] the most beautiful kind of triangle, because they liken it to the nature of the universe... We must therefore compare the line forming the right angle to the male, the base to the female, the hypothenuse to the child of the two; and the one to be Osiris, as the Final Cause; the other, Isis as the recipient; the third, Horus as the result...
A Story of the Soul’s Journey in the Nag Hammadi Library: A Study of Authentikos Logos By Ulla Tervahauta:
Philo, Allegorical Interpretation II, 15:Somewhat later in Phaedo 82E Socrates calls the body akin to a prison or a cage, and in Gorgias 493A and in Cratylus 400B-C the body is the tomb of the soul. In a section starting with Phaedo 82E Socrates explains how the soul must contemplate the realities through the prison of the body...The soul's incarceration is caused by bodily desires, and the prisoner is active in keeping herself imprisoned by submitting herself under the power of these desires...
The savior/hero also performs miracles like raising people from the dead and healing the sick. I think the raising of the dead and healing the blind and sick may be referring to the "spiritually" dead, blind, and sick. The divine/higher soul of a person raises them from death in matter, it's what gives them "life". The goal is for the divine nature to "raise up" the lower nature. The savior/hero also usually has to battle monsters or demons which I think represent the lower or physical nature of a person, the side of a person that looses it's connection with the divine/god because it becomes too attached to the physical realm....and as for Isaac, he indeed was not stripped, but was at all times naked and incorporeal; for a commandment was given to him not to go down into Egypt, {16}{#ge 26:2.} that is to say, into the body.
Philo, Allegorical Interpretation II, 19:
Finally, the savior/hero dies and resurrects and ascends to heaven which represents the death or sacrifice of the soul when it partakes in the physical realm and it's resurrection back to it's divine status. If a person reconnects to the divine/god the higher/divine element of them has been "reborn" or "resurrected". So the crucifixion of Jesus is an allegory for the crucifixion of the soul/divinity to the cross of matter or the physical body.On this account, too, that part in us which is analogous to the people, and which acts the part of a multitude, when it seeks "the houses in Egypt,"{22}{#nu 21:5.} that is to say, in its corporeal habitation, becomes entangled in pleasures which bring on death; not that death which is a separation of soul and body, but that which is the destruction of the soul by vice.
Philo, On The Posterity Of Cain And His Exile, 61
--Plato, Phaedo, 362That the body must be thought akin to the souls that love the body, and that external good things must be exceedingly admired by them, and all the souls which have this kind of disposition depend on dead things, and, like persons who are crucified, are attached to corruptible matter till the day of their death.
Another interesting thing related to the crucifixion is that Plato associated the physical realm with a cube....because each pleasure and pain is a sort of nail which nails and rivets the soul to the body...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_solid:
If you unfold a cube it forms a cross or crucifix:Plato wrote about them in the dialogue Timaeus c. 360 B.C. in which he associated each of the four classical elements (earth, air, water, and fire) with a regular solid. Earth was associated with the cube...
In the myths of Osiris and Dionysus they are both torn into pieces. Jesus breaks apart bread that he says is his body. I think this is referring to divinity "splitting" when it creates the "lower" or more physical realms. Divinity starts off as one whole and then multiplies itself in order to create everything. You find this concept in ancient Egyptian and Greek religion and philosophy. So when Jesus breaks his body/bread apart to feed the disciples he's feeding his disciples his divinity.
Egyptian Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions of Ancient Egypt by Geraldine Pinch:
Idea into image by Erik Hornung:The creator was sometimes referred to as "the One Who Made Himself into Millions" or "He Who Made Himself into Millions of Gods." Creation could be seen as a process of differentiation, in which one original force was gradually divided (without necessarily diminishing itself) into the diverse elements that made up the universe...New Kingdom hymns, such as those preserved in Papyrus Leiden I 350, Explore the idea that all deities are aspects of the creator. They speculate on the miraculous process by which the one creator, usually named as Amun-Ra, was able to divide himself into many...In many Egyptian sources the creation of life involves three elements: the creation of a body, the transfer to that body of some part of the divine essence of the creator, and the animation of the body by the breath of life...The second element, the transfer of the divine essence, eventually led to the concept that all deities,or even all living beings, were not just made by a transcendent creator but were in some sense forms of the creator.
The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt by Richard H. Wilkinson:In sum, the monotheism of the Egyptians consists in the belief that in the beginning the divine was one, and that in the cosmogony that was the work of the one, the one became many.
Tracing Orpheus: Studies of Orphic Fragments edited by Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui, Ana Isabel Jiménez San Cristóbal, Eugenio R. Luján Martínez, Raquel Martín Hernández, Marco Antonio Santamaría Álvarez, Sofía Torallas Tovar:The polyvalent logic of Egyptian thought could easily allow an appreciation of the underlying oneness of god to coexist with traditional Egyptian polytheism. He suggests, in fact, that the best evidence for this is actually the phenomenon of syncretism which 'unites the view of god as simultaneously Many and One'.
Part of this concept is the multiple returning back to the whole or one. This is what happens when people became initiated into the cults of Dionysus, Osiris, and Jesus. The members made up the body of the the savior and became "one".The Orphic version that we find in this fragment and in column XIII of the Derveni Papyrus reconciles the monist theory with a religious vision, postulating a personal monism. At a culminating point of the cosmogonic process, Zeus appears as only god, and the only existing thing. The whole universe, which he would recreate himself further on, albeit in order, stemming from himself, is absorbed in him. Zeus is, therefore, an immanent divinity. The formulation of a personalized First Principle, of a god who is at the same time the only god and the only existing reality from whom all others stem, responds to a vision in the macrocosm of the problem of the One and the multiple that Milesians took into consideration and aimed at resolving in the microcosm, proposing a single original matter...One of the common threads between Orphism and Pre-Socratic philosophers, whose relation has been long studied and substantiated by many scholars, is the tendency to explain multiplicity from unity...
Porphyry's Against the Christians: The Literary Remains By R. Joseph Hoffmann:
The Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook by Meyer, Marvin:...Paul's use of body imagery in his first letter to the Corinthians and the theme of spiritual communion through the incorporation into "the body of Christ"(1 Cor. 12.27f.) is familiar from the language of the Dionysiac mysteries: "Blessed is he who hallows his life in the worship of God, he whom the spirit of God possessth, who is one with those who belong to the holy body of God"(Euripides, Bacchae 73-75). Pagan critics of the early movement pointed to the fact that Christians addressed Jesus in terms equivalent to those used by the bacchantes(Dionysus' worshipers). Jesus was kyrios(lord) and lysios, redeemer. In the Dionysiac cult, the god redeemed adherents from a world of darkness and death by revealing himself in ecstatic visions and providing glimpses of a world-to-come.
Dining with John by Esther Kobel:The worshipers of Dionysus acknowledged his presence in the raw flesh of wild beasts as well as the goblet of wine.
Osiris: Death and Afterlife of a God By Bojana Mojsov:By consuming the animal's raw flesh along with wine, both of which represent the deity, followers shared in the vital forces of their god. They substantially ingested the god...Reading John 6:56-58, which contains strikingly peculiar and graphic vocabulary, in light of these traditions proves to be allusive of these motifs. Whoever chews Jesus's flesh and drinks his blood and therein demonstrates belief in Jesus, is said to attain eternal life...The allusions of theophagy as known from Dionysian tradition may well function as a means of reasserting to believers that Jesus is present among them, even within them, and provides life for them even after his own death.
Following Osiris: Perspectives on the Osirian Afterlife from Four Millennia By Mark Smith:All justified souls were admitted to the community of gods and spirits, modeled after the pattern of earthly society. The giving of the bread and beer that issue from Osiris was not unlike the Christian bread and wine offered at the mass of the Eucharist. Osiris, the Good Being, gave sustenance to the righteous and pointed the way to immortality with the shepherd's crook.
So the story of the dying and resurrecting savior is a story telling what the initiates into these cults experienced. It's an allegory for the ritual that is performed by the initiate and also for the incarnation of the soul or the divine into the body or physical realm and it's rebirth or resurrection when reconnecting to the divine source or becoming initiated. This is why the initiate identifies with the savior god during the initiation ritual.The title of this spell is 'Entering in front and going out behind in the midst of those who eat the bread of Osiris'...that of Spell 228 states that when someone who knows the spell proceeds to the god's domain he will eat bread at the side of Osiris, while that of spell 339 promises that knowing the utterance means eating bread in the house of Osiris. The colophon of Spell 1079 states that anyone who knows the names of a group of kneeling deities will be with Osiris for ever and will never perish.
Dionysos By Richard Seaford:
The Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His Mysteries By Manfred Clauss:Given the sentient psyche[soul] in Homer belongs to the next world, and that mystic initiation was a rehearsal of transition to the next world, I suggest that mystery-cult was an important context for the development of the awareness of the sentient psyche in the still-living person. The psyche on the point of death is compared, in a passage of Plutarch, to the experience of mystic initiation (Chapter 5). Mystic initiation, because it was a pre-enactment of death, is experienced by the part of us that survives death, namely the psyche...On another gold leaf, of the mid-fourth century BC, it is the psyche that 'leaves the light of the sun' and--it seems--'became a god'.
Reading Dionysus: Euripides’ Bacchae and the Cultural Contestations of Greeks, Jews, Romans, and Christians by Courtney Friesen:The mystery-cults shared the conviction that deliverance and salvation are the aim of all human existence on earth, and that they are to be attained by ceremonial replication of the god's experience.
The Greco-Roman World of the New Testament Era: Exploring the Background of Early Christianity By James S. JeffersNot only does Paul employ language that reflects mystery cults in several places, his Christian community resembles them in various ways.They met in secret or exclusive groups, employed esoteric symbols, and practiced initiations, which involved identification with the god’s suffering and rebirth.
Following Osiris: Perspectives on the Osirian Afterlife from Four Millennia By Mark Smith:The initiates also learned the central secret of the group, typically involving how to achieve union with the cult's deity. Another common element of mystery religions was a myth telling how the deity had either defeated his or her enemies or returned to life after death. As the cult member shared in the god's triumph, he or she was redeemed from the earthly and temporal.
But the crucial significance of Osiris for them lay in what he personally had experienced. His life, death, and resurrection were perceived to be particularly momentous in relation to their own fates, and thus they figure more prominently in the textual record than do accounts of the exploits of other divinities. Moreover, because so much importance was invested in the fact that these were events actually experienced by a real individual, and not merely abstractions, personal detail was essential in recounting them.