Hunter, Julie - The Myths That Make Us

The Myths That Make Us

Julie Hunter The Myths That Make Us (Hazard Press 2007)

A review by Greg Spearritt.

(Reviewed November 2007)

In The Myths That Make Us, Julie Hunter contrasts the creation myths of the ancient Sumerian and Hebrew cultures. She contends that had we inherited the Sumerian way of looking at things our thinking and our social structures would be much less male-dominated, conflict-ridden and intolerant than they are.

In ancient Sumerian society, apparently, there was an emphasis on balance and unity. Their ziggurats were replicas of the sacred mountain of their creation myth, representing the meeting/union of the human and the divine (later ridiculed by the Hebrews in the Tower of Babel story). The sky god, An who Hunter suggests is a precursor to Yahweh was an impartial judge (rather than passionately possessive and partisan) and was balanced by the female Earth Mother, Ki. Women in Sumerian society were accorded legal status, able to own property in their own right and to become joint heirs to the family estate with their brothers. Goddesses and priestesses were integral to Sumerian religion.

Hunter goes on to chart how successive civilisations – Babylonian, Persian and Greek – watered down the role of the mother goddess and tipped the balance towards the masculine. In Babylonian myth, for instance, a male warrior god kills the great mother and demands the allegiance of the other gods. In the creation myth of Genesis, however, and in the society it engendered, the Hebrews most pointedly and relentlessly erased any suggestion of feminine power and of a divine-human unity.

In Jesus and in the mystics, Hunter sees a return to the balance which the Church corrupts, transmutes or silences.

All of this is cast by Hunter in a Jungian light. The soul, that seat of dreams and creativity, is female. By repressing it, the Hebrews and ultimately Western Christendom privileged rationality and denied themselves a sense of wholeness. By not acknowledging and respecting “the divinity within” – the soul, the unconscious, the feminine or intuitive side – our lives become arid and we fall ill. The daemon (our soul’s guide and companion) when denied becomes a demon.

Though I am not a Jungian – touchy-feely spirituality and talk of interpreting dreams make my eyes glaze over – I can accept Hunter’s broad brush portrait of western religion and culture as male-dominated, testosterone-charged and exclusive. In 2007, Australian brides are still being ‘given away’ in marriage ceremonies by their fathers; ‘Christian’ and ‘Muslim’ countries consider blowing up each other’s citizens a justified means to an end; and in Oz, the ‘other’, be it Aboriginal, asylum-seeker, gay or Muslim is an object of suspicion and prejudice and subjected to treatment that would be considered outrageous if applied to the denizens of ‘middle Australia’.

Even the notion that we – especially Australian men – might benefit from more respect for intuition and the ‘feminine’ within us is one for which I (reluctantly) have some sympathy.

I don’t see the patriarchal, oppressive nature of our Judaeo-Christian heritage as particularly controversial. But it does, regrettably, still need to be pointed out, and Hunter does us a service there.

I don’t wish to argue with Hunter’s conclusions, with the caveat that I personally find the Jungian ‘divinity within’ stuff a little over the top. It is good to be reminded of the significance of creation myths and of mythology in general. The contrast Hunter presents between the Hebrew myth (where the chief sin is disobedience) and Zoroastrian thinking (where the “prime evil” is about lies and deceit) is instructive, as is her point that the sacred in the Judaeo-Christian scheme of things has been torn from and placed over and against the human and the natural.

There are, however, aspects of Hunter’s argument along the way that fall short of convincing.

My scant layman’s knowledge of ancient civilisations means I cannot properly assess the veracity of Hunter’s portrayal of Sumerian, Babylonian, Persian and Hebrew history. On the face of it, her brief tour of these ancient cultures – from the standpoint of their mythology and its effects on their social structure – is engaging and plausible. I do have some doubts, however.

Hunter’s thesis about the Sumerians smacks a little of ‘golden-age syndrome’: was it really such a peaceable, tolerant, inclusive society? (Sites such as the Washington State University site raise some doubts.) If so, it was indeed a great loss to have it obscured by later developments.

However, I’m wary of the quest for the ‘original’ as the purest and best – the kind of quest which led European Orientalist scholars of the 1800s to privilege a bygone, largely fictional Theravadan era over the supposedly wretched, corrupted examples of Buddhism (and by extension, the wretched, corrupted peoples) they encountered in the Indian colonies.

Dr Greg Jenks, Fellow of the Westar Institute and Executive Trustee of the FaithFutures Foundation, and currently Academic Dean and Lecturer in New Testament at St Francis Theological College in Brisbane, has kindly helped me with specific questions about some of Hunter’s points.

Hunter makes much of the Hebrew patriarch Abraham carrying memories and stories with him from the Sumerian city of Ur as he migrated around 2000 BCE to Canaan. Jenks, however, advises that

No critical scholar of the Hebrew Bible would take Abraham to be an actual person, or even argue that he represents a collective memory of some ancient movement of people from Mesopotamia to Canaan. Abraham is most likely an invention around the middle of the first millennium BCE, and probably reflects the experience of exile and return rather than some ancient migration from Ur of the Chaldees.

But it is in discussing Jesus that Hunter’s argument seems most forced. In her view, Jesus’ “whole ministry was about recognising the divinity within” (69).

The strong possibility that Jesus worked (perhaps as a carpenter) at Sepphoris, a Greek city close to Nazareth, leads Hunter to suggest Jesus may have been taken with the idea of the Greek enthousiasmos, ‘having God within one’: Jesus

could well have been exposed to Greek philosophy, possibly even Philo’s philosophy, found it meant something to him, and then attempted to teach it. If one intelligent Jewish mind, Philo’s, could assimilate ideas of the soul as the divinity within, so could another – that of Jesus. (76)

She finds support for this view in Jesus’ use of terms such as the ‘Kingdom’ of God which she (controversially) suggests has some Zoroastrian influence behind it. The Gospel of Thomas is for Hunter a primary source of evidence for the notion that Jesus was interested in ‘inner divinity’.

Greg Jenks agrees that the notion of kingdom/empire (‘basileia’) was central to the teaching of Jesus, but argues it was not a spiritualised concept. He concurs with the idea that the where the Gospel of Thomas includes sayings also found in the synoptic gospels, the Thomas ones may be earlier forms, but he notes that there are plenty of second-century Gnostic ideas in there too, a distinction Hunter fails to make. She attributes all the ‘divinity within’ bits directly to Jesus.

Indeed, while Hunter cites the placement by the Jesus Seminar scholars of the writing of Thomas at 50-60CE, she makes no acknowledgement of the insistence of those same scholars that there are more and less authentic traditions represented in the text. Quite the reverse: she makes the jaw-dropping statement that

The Thomas gospel appears to be verbatim records of… private sessions [with the disciples], with little or no editing. (79)

From this spectacularly unsupported claim, it’s a short step to adducing later Gnostic ideas (such as those of Monomius), and even mystical ideas of the Middle Ages (e.g. from Meister Eckhart) as part of the argument for ‘inner divinity’ as the core of Jesus’ message.

Further, Jesus’ notion of love for enemies is claimed as of Greek rather than Hebrew origin:

Respect and understanding is the ‘love’ Jesus commended – a recognition that all humanity is the same, with the same inner divinity. This was a Greek idea, the ‘oneness’ of humanity. (82)

The fact that there is very little hard evidence for what Hunter is suggesting about Jesus is clear from her language. Jesus “could well” have been exposed to Greek thought (74 and 76); “It is not difficult to surmise that both Philo and Jesus had mystical experiences…[W]e may also surmise that he knew about inner divinity from first-hand experience” (76); later Gnostic ideas “could well be taken to express Jesus’ beliefs” (80). [My italics.]

Unfortunately, unsupported or weakly-supported speculation takes the place of evidence in much of Hunter’s argument about Jesus.

For all that Hunter tries too hard to make her thesis about influences on and the motives of Jesus fit the facts, her conclusion is consistent with what some Jesus Seminar/Westar scholars say of him. He called for a radical new way of apprehending the world, one in which there were no social boundaries, no brokers or mediators and, in Don Cupitt’s words, one in which “all of life becomes a sacred continuum” (from ‘The Future of Religion’, 2000).

Perhaps these strands cannot be attributed to remnants of Sumerian/Mesopotamian thought with anything like the confidence Hunter would wish to claim. Nevertheless, there are commonalities, and for modern western Christians to be aware of them, and of how they were negated in subsequent Jewish and Christian thought, cannot but be a good thing.

……..

2 comments

Where can I get hold of a copy of this in the UK? I have tried Amazon to no joy...

Posted by Bel January

Try this site, Bel:

http://www.hazardonline.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=&products_id=247&PHPSESSID=8a291e4a34ea52e92fcbb484b5c996cc

Posted by Greg