Which Way To Heaven? | John Michael Greer

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Sept. 25, 2013 (Archdruid Report) -- The religious sensibilities I’ve been discussing in recent posts here on The Archdruid Report have an interesting property: they’re hard to define with any degree of precision, but remarkably easy to recognize in practice.

It’s a little like the old joke about how you know that an elephant’s gotten into your refrigerator; like the telltale footprints in the butter dish, the traces left by a given religious sensibility are hard to miss.

The sensibility that seized the imagination of the western world after 600 BCE, and has begun to lose its grip only in our time, is no exception to this rule. I’ve already talked about its distinctive central theme, the passionate insistence that human beings deserve more than nature, history, and the human condition are prepared to give them, and that there must be some way to escape from the trammels of humanity’s ordinary existence and break free into infinity and eternity. There are plenty of other tracks in the butter dish of western culture, for that matter, but the one I want to discuss this week is as simple as it is revealing: the spatial direction in which, according to the sensibility we’re discussing, the way out of the human condition is most likely to be found.

To the cultures of the modern west, it seems self-evident that the only possible location for heaven is “up there,” and plenty of people assume that that’s universal among human beings. It isn’t, not by a long shot. To the ancient Greeks, for example, the gods and goddesses lived in various corners of the world -- some of them lived on Mount Olympus, a midsized mountain in Thessaly, but Poseidon was normally to be found in the ocean, Pan in the woodlands of Arcadia, Hades in the underworld, and so on; when Zeus wanted to hold a council, he had to send a god or goddess around to summon them all to Olympus. In Shinto, the polytheist religion of Japan, some of the kami -- the divine powers of Shinto -- live in Takama no Hara, the Plain of High Heaven, but others dwell on earth, and every year in the month corresponding to October, they all travel to the Izumo shrine in western Japan and are not to be found elsewhere. The old Irish paradise, Tir na nOg, was on the sea floor of the Atlantic somewhere off west of Ireland -- well, I could go on for quite some time with comparable examples.

Within the sensibility that’s now fading out across the western world, by contrast, the route to heaven was by definition a line pointing straight up from the Earth’s surface. I want to stress here that this is part of the religious sensibility of an age -- that is, a pattern of emotions and images in the collective imagination -- rather than a necessary part of the theist and civil religions that existed in that setting and thus were shaped by that sensibility. It’s not too hard, in fact, to find ways in which the teachings of these religions were manhandled, sometimes very roughly, to make room in them for the images and emotions that the sensibility of the age demanded.

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http://worldnewstrust.com/which-way-to-heaven-john-michael-greer

[PETRUS]

1. Haven't read this (yet) ...

But I'll K&R based on the author.

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2. Thanks for the K&R

Greer is always worth the read. --Tace