A company of wolves: Jason and the Argo crew

1. HEROES OF THE CLASSICAL WORLD
The life of heroes of the classical world, like Achilles and Odysseus, was a lot different to that we imagine. The Mycenean clans in archaic Greece were not warlike, despite what Homer has to say: they were raiders, in values and lifestyle very similar to the Vikings. They fought most ferociously against unarmed victims, many of them terrified women and children. They looted, and burnt what they could not carry away. If they meet armed opposition they engaged in ritual attacks and retreats designed to preserve honour, and cast insults more readily than arrows. It took a major leader on either side, one from a great house and descended from the gods, and whom the soldiers had a superstitious fear of offending, before they would engage in open warfare. Their tales of these battles grew in the telling.

Here’s how Homer presented the battle between Greeks and Trojans (the Iliad, in the translation by Ian Johnston, Book IV, ll.519-548).

When the two armies came to one common ground, 
they smashed into each other—shields, spears, fierce angry men 520
encased in bronze. Studded shields bashed one another. 
A huge din arose—human cries of grief and triumph,  
those killing and those killed. Earth flowed with blood. 
Just as streams swollen with melting snows pour out, 
flow downhill into a pool, and meet some torrent
from a great spring in a hollow gully there,
and the shepherd in the distant hills hears the roar—
so the shouts and turmoil resounded then from warriors,
as they collided. 

 Antilochus was the first to kill a man—
a well-armed Trojan warrior, Echepolus, 530
son of Thalysius, a courageous man, 
who fought in the front ranks. He hit his helmet crest, 
topped with horsehair plumes, spearing his forehead.  
The bronze point smashed straight through the frontal bone.
Darkness hid his eyes and he collapsed, like a tower, 
falling down into that frenzied battle. As he fell, 
powerful Elephenor, son of Chalcodon, 
courageous leader of the Abantes, seized his feet, 
and started pulling him beyond the range of weapons,
eager to strip him of his armour quickly. 540
But Elephenor’s attempt did not go on for long. 
Great-hearted Agenor saw him drag the dead man. 
He stabbed Elephenor with his bronze spear, 
right in his exposed side, where his shield left him 
vulnerable as he bent down. His limbs gave way, 
as his spirit left him. Over his dead body,  
Trojans and Achaeans kept fighting grimly on, 
attacking like wolves, man whirling against man.

This ‘heroic’ account (actually a squabble about plunder) is from a description of what was in reality just a raid by a flotilla of pirates on a wealthy town in Turkey which may have been already weakened by earthquake and famine. The Myceneans were after spoil, and raided Troy as they raided the depleted empire of the Minoans on Crete, and made forays against the Egyptians. But the heroic tradition had made demi-gods of the clans’ ancestors, and they are presented by Homer as giants of valour, protected on the field of battle by divinities from Olympos. The descendants of these heroes were paying to hear praise about their ancestors, and that’s what they got.

The story of Jason, his search for the Golden Fleece and his attempt to carve out a kingdom for himself in Thessaly before he fell foul of the witch Medea, comes from the same period as the tale of Troy, and seems to have been known to Homer. No trace of a comparable epic of Homer’s time, however, has survived. Had it done so, Jason’s voyage would be treated the same way as Homer treats the raids of Agamemnon. Agamemnon made several raids across the north coast of the Aegean Sea on the town of Troy. Jason made a series of raids on settlements around the south coast of the Black Sea. Both men’s exploits would have been similarly ennobled for the honour of their descendants.

We do have a poetic treatment of the story of Jason, by Apollonius, an Egyptian who lived for a time at Rhodes, who is thought to have been Librarian at Alexandria in the second century BC, over 500 years later than the time of Homer. Apollonius’ epic is sentimental, learned, and a bit stodgy, especially when compared to Homer, who seems much more authentic in depicting battle scenes. Apollonius seems to know Homer’s poems quite well, and strives to imitate him. Here is an excerpt from Book II of the Argonautica, the Voyage of the Argo, in the translation by R C Seaton of 1912.

…they donned their armour and raised their hands against them. And with clashing of ashen spears and shields they fell on each other, like the swift rush of fire which falls on dry brushwood and rears its crest; and the din of battle, terrible and furious, fell upon the people of the Doliones. Nor was the king to escape his fate and return home from battle to his bridal chamber and bed. But Aeson’s son leapt upon him as he turned to face him, and smote him in the middle of the breast, and the bone was shattered round the spear; he rolled forward in the sand and filled up the measure of his fate. For that no mortal may escape; but on every side a wide snare encompasses us. And so, when he thought that he had escaped bitter death from the chiefs, fate entangled him that very night in her toils while battling with them; and many champions withal were slain; Heracles killed Telecles and Megabrontes, and Acastus slew Sphodris; and Peleus slew Zelus and Gephyrus swift in war. Telamon of the strong spear slew Basileus. And Idas slew Promeus, and Clytius Hyacinthus, and the two sons of Tyndareus slew Megalossaces and Phlogius. And after them the son of Oeneus slew bold Itomeneus, and Artaceus, leader of men; all of whom the inhabitants still honour with the worship due to heroes. And the rest gave way and fled in terror just as doves fly in terror before swift-winged hawks.

These poetic versions would have born as much relation to the reality they allegedly described as a parade on Remembrance Day does to going into combat under enemy fire. Here is my version of what might have happened on a seafaring raid, as Jason and his men coasted down the Black Sea shores looking for booty and provisions (and bearing in mind I’m not a writer, in any tradition, nor have I experience of seafaring or armed warfare – which puts me in the same category probably as Apollonius). My version has the brutality, sex, violence and wastefulness that war authorises but doesn’t talk about.

The grey dawn muffled the oarstrokes, the mist drawn up from the ocean by the reddening sunrise approaching hid the flash of the water from the oar blades. The heavy slash of waves on shoreside rocks obscured the low slung galley from any viewer on the shore. The boatswain, Acastus, held the drum with his hand behind the head so that the sound was a muted thump only the oarsmen could hear. At the tiller stood Tiphys, eyes squinting at the low setting stars, and Cepheus stood at his side letting out measures on the weighted line, muttering the depth as he recast. The galley slid past the first few hovels which could be seen on shore, where sheep herders slept near their flocks, and soon came in sight of the bay where houses made from gathered rocks from the shoreline were thatched by branches and huddled around the meeting hut and the square before it. One or two ketches stood drawn up on shore. There was a fitful baying as some homeless curs sensed the arrival of strangers. Jason grinned at his sailors, his lips curled back on his teeth. He signed to the oarsmen, and the last dozen strokes were made to a wolflike baying as they crushed the shoreline pebbles and leapt on to land. A dozen men saw to the mooring, unshipped the sail in a few practised movements, and unbound the lances and battle axes tied fast to the sides beneath the oar posts. The rest, no more than 20 men, ran lithely up the beach to the open square around which the houses were huddled, howling their battle cry. A young girl of 12, carrying a broad bowl with grain for the hens balanced on her hip stepped out of a laneway unawares, still yawning. Idmon, howling, swept his sword at her neck, and her head went spinning behind her while her body, spurting blood from every artery, collapsed at his feet. Bashing down the nearest cottage door, Hippalcimus and Leodocus discovered an old woman trying to light a fire in the hearth and as she began to scream Leodocus thrust his sword through her open mouth and silenced her for ever. Throughout the village the raiders ran, slashing at the women who were preparing the houses for the daily routine, breaking into the backroom where most people were still sleeping, cutting down as many as they could, dragging the young people aside from the slaughter. Phalerus had cut away a young girl’s dress, his penis free and erect before him, and plunged it into her, taking pleasure at her screams. Seeing this, and sensing that there was little more to do in killing, Melas ripped a boy’s tunic away, pushed him upon a tabletop, and raped him. Holding him by the shoulders, he thrust again and again, and cried in a great roar as he attained his pleasure. The main body of the raiders had pursued the few able bodied men to offer any resistance, and harried them till they were half a mile away from the shore before returning to the village. By this stage the ones left behind had gone through every hut, cut down the elderly and the babies, herded the young into the great meeting hall, and gathered the little grain and fruit they could find, as well as half a dozen goats. Hylas, being a little more tenacious than anyone else, found a store of wine, a sour draught in a big krater which he rolled along the ground to the others. There were few provisions, for the village was poor, and the harvest had not begun. Jason signalled for the men to drink the wine, as they could not take it with them. As they got drunker the men staggered off to rape the women and boys they had set aside. Most of the men took their pleasure there in the open square before the meeting hall. The sun was still low in the sky when Jason gave the signal to move. At another nod, the men moved among the captive young men and women, cutting throats and piercing breasts, until none were left alive. Reeling from the wine, the men loaded what little provisions they had gathered. Reluctantly they left the goats behind as the next village ahead might well provide more plentiful, and portable, booty. They pushed off, unshipped oars, and to the unmuffled drum, began rowing against the wind, keeping parallel to the shore while Cepheus called the soundings. Jason, eyes shadowed by his hand, was searching for a landmark, a mountain with a distinctive cleft, which overlooked the port of Samsun. 

Many great writers have recorded what it takes to drive men into battle where they could be the ones to die. It is not heroism, but hysteria, fear that drives everything else out of mind. Emerging alive from a terrifying experience like a battle is such a relief that soldiers tend to exult in their survival, and exaggerate their prowess. The bronze weapons Jason and his crew were armed with were heavy. The armour and shields, the small round ones, were made of leather toughened with sea water, and could only deflect a glancing blow. A direct hit cut through them. The weapons most often cut or maimed limbs, pierced throats, or disembowelled the enemy. The wounded fell screaming, and took hours to die. The best course of action was to attack unexpectedly, and that is what I have imagined Jason doing. The next best course was to run away, and for many soldiers discretion was the best form of valour. As Archilochos says, you lose a spear, but you’re alive to fight another day.

In western Europe the near analog of the Viking pirates of Scandinavia is a convenient way to appreciate the nature of the Mycenean clans of ‘heroic’ Greece. At times when population exceeded food supply, the seaborn warriors of Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland raided the neighbouring countries. They came suddenly and attacked unarmed hamlets for plunder. Eventually they carved out kingdoms in England, France and Sicily. Their battles, conquests and feuds are recorded in the Sagas, some of which, though not historical, are as heroic as Homer ever was.

2. JASON IN SEARCH OF A KINGDOM
The Greek hero Jason has two seemingly separate careers. The first is as an heroic explorer who ventured further than any other Greek sailor before him. The second concerns his entanglement with the magician Medea, a bloody tragedy that left all concerned as dead as the characters in the last act of Hamlet.

The stories of Jason come from Mycenean Greece and the tribal groups that called themselves Achaeans and Danaans, who migrated from the area of the Russian Steppes between the 14th and 12th centuries BC and dominated a Balkans and Aegean Sea area left in a power vacuum by the decline of the Minoan civilisation based in Crete. Jason was a king in Thessaly in northern Greece, a contemporary of Theseus of Athens, Nestor of Pylos, Odysseus of Ithaka, whom he knew as a boy, and Perseus of Mycenae, who was the age of his grandfather. The stories themselves may have been derived from earlier peoples in mainland Greece whom the Myceneans displaced, whom they called Minyans. There are striking similarities between the tales concerning Perseus, Theseus and Jason, and this may reflect a common folk origin, or may be the result of similar cultic ceremonies enacted for the honour of all three heroes. Myths are usually the accompaniment to a cultic act, as is the story of the crucifixion of Jesus to the Mass, and only become mere tales when the cult has been superceded. There are three stages in all these stories: firstly, they are part of a ritual worship, which if  James Frazer in the Golden Bough is correct may have involved the killing of a yearly king; then these stories are absorbed into ancestor worship, part of which involved recitation of ‘lays’ or epic poems for the honour of a clan’s ancestors; and lastly, just visible in Homer, and part of the story of Jason also, there is a trace of something like an anti epic, a kind of debunking of the heroes, similar to the treatment of myth and gods in the plays of Aristophanes, which may have even been a part of ancient worship (a part of which we know nothing, and only a surmise). This progression is a result of the changing ethnic composition, customs and values, over a period of thousands of years, of the groups of peoples we tend to lump together and call “ancient Greeks”.

Jason was son of Aeson, whose kingdom was usurped by his half brother Pelias. Jason was hidden away from Pelias, who wished to murder him, and was bought up in the care of the centaur Chiron. When Jason attempted to reclaim his kingdom Pelias agreed on the condition he first find and bring back the Golden Fleece.

Gathering a crew of famous heroes for the expedition, Jason got as far as Thrace, where he rescued a prophet named Phineas, who was persecuted by supernatural birds called Harpies. Jason drove these away, and in return Phineas told him how to navigate through the Clashing Rocks that marked the entrance to the Black Sea, gigantic cliffs that came together and crushed ships which attempted to pass through. Sailing past Troy, he entered the Black Sea and arrived in Colchis in Georgia. Jason met the king, Aeetes, and his daughter Medea. Medea helped Jason pass the three tests Aeetes required before giving up the Fleece, then fled with Jason, pursued by Aeetes.

The return voyage has been embroidered with tales that see Jason sailing all over the then known world, journeys that would have been outside the capabilities of any real ship, and are probably drawn from a number of tales of other epic voyages in the same way as were the voyages of Sinbad. Jason also paid a visit to Circe, as Odysseus had, and was threatened by the Sirens, also like Odysseus. It is likely these were independent voyage tales which have become attached to the story of both these heroes. Epic poems are thought to have been strung together at recitations from shorter, independent poems.

Having fulfilled the terms set out by Pelias Jason claimed his kingdom but was refused. Medea murdered Pelias, but the couple were expelled from Thessaly by Pelias’ son Acastus and were forced to flee to Corinth. Here Jason abandoned Medea and married Creusa, daughter of Creon king of Corinth. Medea killed Creusa and then Creon and fled for refuge to Athens. Finally Jason succeeded in claiming his kingdom of Iolcus in Thessaly, but died soon afterwards.

Jason is a dispossessed king who must kill the previous king to claim his kingdom. He actually does this three times, each time through the agency of Medea. She first kills Apsyrtus, Aeetes’ son and Medea’s brother, the heir to the kingdom in Colchis. Medea then kills Pelias, king of Iolcus. And finally she kills Creusa and her father Creon, king of Corinth. In all cases the rites are magical, involving homage to Hecate the queen of the underworld, and the gods are not pleased with Jason, who repeatedly fails in his endeavour to obtain a kingdom for himself. This may be a reference to older gods, too weak to stand against the gods of the Myceneans. In this sense Jason is a failed hero, a contrast in every way to Odysseus, who reclaimed his kingdom of Ithika. The story may represent a disestablishment of the original rite whereby a king claimed his kingdom by killing the previous king. Worthy of note is the weak position that Iolcus, and most of Thessaly, subsequently held relative to Tiryns, Argos, Athens and Mycenae in the south. This may be why Jason, despite his exploits, is downvalued in the later traditions.

There are some interesting parallels with other heroes of this culture and time. Of Perseus, son of Danae and Zeus, it was foretold he would kill his father, and to avoid this he was set adrift in the ocean in a wooden chest like Moses and Osiris before him. Perseus survived, rescued Andromeda from the dragon from the sea (Jason also did battle with a dragon in Colchis), and slew the gorgon Medusa, who glance turned men to stone. From Medusa’s blood sprang the winged steed Pegasus. Perseus finally claimed his kingdom, and was the founder of a line of kings both at Tiryns and Mycenae. Perseus’ grandson was Herakles, who sailed with Jason.

Bellerophon came to Argos and accidentally killed the king, and was under a curse. To expiate it, Bellerophon tamed the winged horse Pegasus, and fought and killed the Chimera, a part dragon, part goat, part lion, who breathed fire and terrorised the region.

Theseus was the son of the king of Athens, whose death he caused before inheriting the kingdom. He had to pass a trial to show himself worthy. Firstly he had to remove the sword beneath the stone (generations before King Arthur), then fight and kill bandits who terrorised the region and whose lairs were thought to be entrances to the underworld. Finally he fought and killed the Minotaur in the Labyrinth. Theseus was a participant in the rite that called for the killing of the year’s king by his successor, but supplanted it by a more permanent kingship. This was the theory of the novelist Mary Renault, whose first book on Theseus was called The King Must Die.

3. A CREW OF HEROES
The crew of the Argo included many famous warriors. The prospects of plunder must have been inviting to have attracted so many. Tales of prospectors for alluvial gold harvested by sifting gold ore bearing streams through sheep’s fleece may have grown into a tale of El Dorado.

Most notable of the Argo’s crew was Orpheus, the Thracian seer and musician who was thought to have founded the mystery religion of ancient Greece concerned with chthonic, underworld, deities such as Hecate and Demeter, and which promised initiates eternal life, as the grain goddess Demeter bought life each Spring to the earth. Orpheus’ wife Eurydice was taken to Hades, and Orpheus rescued her, but lost her at the last minute by looking back at her before they were both free of the underworld. He is thus a god who has experienced the human fate of mortality, as did Inanna in Sumeria and other near eastern gods, and the Greek Adonis, husband of Aphrodite. Orpheus died by being dismembered by initiates of Dionysios, a fate that recalls the various victims of Medea, whom she sliced in pieces in a rite designed to give immortality. Is it fanciful to see traces of the origin of the Christian Last Supper in these stories, which may have once been religious rites?

Other heroes mentioned with the Argo were Bellerophon, of Chimera fame, and Theseus, yet to slay the Minotaur. Greater even than these two, at least in one tradition, was Herakles, grandson of Perseus and son of Zeus and Alcmene (genealogies of heroes were not meant to be realistic). Herakles was an overcomer of obstacles, as in the stories of his ‘labours’, a man of extraordinary strength, a great lover who fathered 100 children by 30 wives, one who travelled to the underworld and returned triumphant, a member of the council of gods on Olympos: and a buffoon who was mocked for his lack of intelligence.

Castor and Pollux, sons of Leda and brothers to Helen (of Troy) and Clytemnestra wife of Agamemnon, were also on the voyage, great horsemen and warriors who shared immortality as gods, as only Pollux was immortal, his brother mortal (Helen, in the same way, was a goddess, though her sister Clytemnestra was mortal).

A famous story was told of Admetus, King of Pherae in Thessaly, another Argonaut. He was granted life if someone would consent to die in his stead. Nobody would promise to be his ransom on the day of his death with the exception of Alcestis, his wife. The story is the subject of a penetrating study of selfishness in a play by Euripides. Also on board was Autolycus, son of the god Hermes who gave him the gift of being such a skilful thief that he could not be caught.

Other crew included Deucalion, son of Minos and Pasiphae, father of Idomeneus 1, king of Crete at the time of the Trojan War, later slain by Theseus; Laertes the father of Odysseus; and Nestor, king of Pylos, the oldest and wisest of the commanders at the siege of that town. Many of these men also participated in the hunt for the Caledonian Boar, a pestilence sent by Artemis on the district of Aetolia, as did Meleager and Atalanta, two other famous Argonauts. It is likely that the Hunt, like the voyage of Argo, was the subject of ancient song cycles which have not survived. Both cycles apparently were known to Homer.

Over 80 heroes are mentioned as crewmen, though it is thought the Argo’s crew could not have been more than 40. Either the crew list has grown in the retelling, or perhaps the numbers signify a small flotilla of ships alongside the Argo on the voyage for plunder.

4. THE VOYAGE OF THE ARGO
The actual voyage of Jason is the part of the story which has received most attention from later generations. We know something of the extent of ancient voyages, undertaken in small ships powered by sail and oarsmen and reliant on dead reckoning and written accounts of tides, winds and coastal hazards. The southern Mediterranean was discovered by the Phoenicians, who traded with towns in Egypt, Crete, north Africa, Spain, and perhaps circumnavigated Africa if one of Herodotus’ tales is to be accepted. By the 7th century BC Greek settlers had founded Marseilles and developed a tin route to Britain, sent colonies to Italy and Sicily, the Black Sea’s southern coast and the entire coastline of Asia Minor. Although Jason’s voyage was a raid for plunder, he travelled the same route that later sailors did, and with much the same technology to help him. The conjectured route of Jason around the south coast of the Black Sea was later a network of poleis which supplied Aegean Greeks with grain. “Greece” in ancient times, despite the awareness we have of Athens, had most of its population in the Crimea and Black Sea shore, Sicily and Italy, and Turkey, and only a remnant in the Aegean.

Archaeologist and historian of exploration Tim Severin designed and built a replica of a bronze age Greek galley of 20 oars and in the summer of 1984 set out to sail from Volos in northern Greece to Poti in Georgia, retracing the generally accepted route of Jason according to most scholars, and in a vessel authentically modelled on those of Jason’s time. If Severin and his crew could make the trip, then so could have Jason. The results of his venture are recorded in The Jason Voyage (Hutchinson 1985), a follow up to his The Brendan Voyage and The Sindbad Voyage, and a precursor to his The Ulysses Voyage.

Severin, perhaps as a result of his close physical involvement with the voyage at all levels, has many insights on Jason’s voyage not noticed by others. First of all he notes that 1500 kilometres away from Colchis, separated by several intervening nations and speaking another language, the Greeks of Iolchis had heard of and were even familiar with the Golden Fleece. Their knowledge might not have been precise, but they knew there was gold, and people travel a long way to get gold. Then, as the voyage progressed, Severin discovered that a galley fully manned cannot row into a headwind, so it was likely that Jason’s progress was dictated by wind and tide to a far greater extent than modern sailors are used to. Jason would have needed to pull ashore whenever the wind was against him.

On the north coast of Turkey the ancient peoples whom Jason encountered were known as Kaskas. These are thought to have been allied to the Hittite empire further south. If so, and if that empire was breaking down in the 12th century BC as scholars think, then the Myceneans were harrying the empire on its outskirts, a usual tactic of raiders, attacking from the west, at Troy, and from the north, along the Black Sea coast. Leaving the Marmara, Severin and his crew attempted to row against the current and the wind through the Bosphorus and into the Black Sea, which the Greeks knew as the Inhospitable Sea. Here they thought they had found a natural explanation of the Clashing Rocks which guarded access to the Sea. Severin found that powerful currents took his boat out of control, and threatened to dash it first on one shore, then on the other, each coastline seeming to move threateningly towards him. Only by exerting all his rowing power, and by skillful navigation, was his ship able to pass into the Black Sea. Encountering choppy weather Severin found that an ancient galley had lots of disadvantages compared to modern craft. It was low on the water, and so visibility was limited; constant care needed to be taken to avoid shoreline hazards, and at the same time the craft had to be handled so as to avoid shipping water from heavy seas which could have swamped her.

Finally, after successfully arriving at Poti, in the mountains of Georgia Severin saw gold prospectors at work, using a method in use according to tradition for thousands of years. Sheepskins were placed in swiftly running streams, and in the fleece were trapped alluvial gold washed from lodes in the mountains by winter rains. A sheepskin left for a time in a gold rich area would become literally golden. The sheepskins in ancient times were then, archaeologists think, kept for safekeeping in a temple. The Great Mother cult prevalent in the area has, in common with the cult practice in Syria and other parts of Asia, and ancient Crete of the time of King Minos, rituals involving the sacrifice of a sacred bull, and divination through the medium of serpents. These sacred animals would have lived in temple precincts, and also served to guard the golden fleece. The Mycenean raiding party under Jason’s leadership arrived in Colchis, attacked the temple, slaughtered the sacred animals, and stole the fleece and returned to Greece. That may well have actually happened, and formed the origin of a legend. At the least Severin had proved it was all possible. He also proved that the return journey told in the myths was not possible, except in fantasy. The journey to Poti all but exhausted Severin’s crew and ship; they did not attempt the return journey by their Argo. Had Jason gone to Colchis and back the same way he would have barely made it, with a depleted crew and an unseaworthy ship. True it was that many voyages were made by ancient ships blown of course or swept into foreign waters by currents and tides that they could not control, as the story of Odysseus shows, but the usual end of these journeys was on the sea bed.

5. THE OLD RITES OF THE EARTH
The Mycenean tribes that came to Greece, and earlier to both Persia and India, were a nomadic people. They were horsemen, and later charioteers, wielders of bronze weapons, and they survived by looting settlements of more sedentary peoples. They were like the Huns and the Moguls of later times. Their gods were the gods of the air, of thunder like the king Zeus, of the arrow of pestilence like Apollo, of the hunt like Artemis. As they settled in the region of Greece they met another king of the gods, Poseidon, ruler of the sea. These gods represented space, sight, distance, mighty powers which could be seen, feared and adored: earthquake, tidal wave, lightning, the sun. Variants of the names of these gods have survived on Mycenean clay tablets.

The peoples they conquered in Greece, the small, dark so-called Minyans or Pelasgians, worshipped different kinds of gods. The grain god Cybele or Demeter or Persephone; the caster of spells Hecate, god of the full moon; the orgiastic god of frenzy and intoxication Dionysios and his mystical persona/priest Orpheus, who offered rites giving eternal life. These gods came from the north, from Thrace, from the east, Asia Minor and Syria, as did the voluptuous and terrifying god of love, Aphrodite. We know them only under the names they had in later Greek culture. These gods were gods of inner forces beyond men’s control; passion, anger, fear and other emotions which could be destructive. Many of them were worshipped in secret rites, and demanded human sacrifice. To Hecate the life of a baby was offered, its throat cut at a place where three roads met, under the light of a full moon. The person sacrificed at these rites was assured of eternal life with the gods. The Mycenean people were never comfortable with these hidden gods. In Jason’s story he is punished by the gods of Olympos for participating in what his contemporaries thought “barbarian” rites.

In the country of the Doliones, at Erdek, Jason fought a battle by mistake with his hosts, and the Argonauts killed many of them, another example of Jason’s propensity to make mistakes. In reparation Jason made sacrifice to the Great Goddess, the earth god whose worship was prevalent in his time through most of Asia Minor.

It seems likely from Jason’s story that Medea was a priestess of one of these chthonic cults, and that her powers impressed Jason. Medea has been romanticised by all Greek and subsequent traditions. She has become a monster who murdered her own children, a woman scorned and dangerous, a witch with supernatural powers. In Georgia where Medea was born the Great Mother was most likely the primary cult during the Bronze Age period, when Jason’s raiders came looking for plunder. There is another religious tradition in these areas though, that of the shaman. In a trance that can last for days, the shaman can visit the underworld, risking the existence of his or her soul. There he or she can command spirits to do their bidding, and can return bringing death and disease to enemies, and riches and good fortune to allies. It seems more likely that Medea was a shaman to whom Jason appealed for help, the more likely in that women in the Bronze Age had an important religious role which they lost in the subsequent period. A similar tale was told of Ariadne and Theseus. These stories probably represent the usurpation of religious power held by priestesses serving the Great Goddess and other underworld gods by kings who worshipped the Olympian deities of the invading Mycenean tribes.

Hecate is a mysterious deity associated with rites of the earth and the underworld, and Medea at one point during his stay in Colchis persuades Jason to sacrifice to her. Hecate is the god of boundaries, crossroads, and the entrance to Hades. Her beast is the dog, most notably Cerberus who guarded the gateway to Hades. Some think that Jason was a Minyan or Pelasgian, a pre-Greek, because of his involvement with these non Olympian deities. Yet Jason’s crew have direct links with the subsequent Trojan War, and much of the mythical stories of the Mycenean and later Greek culture. The fact is that the old gods of the earth lingered on, that despite the prevalence of the Olympians in the religious life of the poleis, Greeks of Jason’s time and much later were willing to sacrifice a dog to Hecate, to purchase an amulet, a love potion or procure a curse from a witch. Medea was the priestess who protected Jason against the anger of the gods, for he had committed sacrilege in the course of stealing the Golden Fleece. But the power of the Goddess and her priestesses was waning. Jason lost favour with both gods and men for relying on such protection.

6. SOME VIEWS OF JASON’S QUEST
There are three parts to Jason’s story: 1. His search for his kingdom, during which he supplants a king who must die; 2. His quest for treasure to prove him worthy of kingship, during which he must pass trials and tests, defeat enemies and monsters; 3. His fatal involvement with Medea and the old chthonic worship doomed to pass away in his lifetime, replaced with that of the Olympians.

The earliest versions of these themes must have been purely religious, stories accompanying the rites of his cult.

Tales would later have been told of his exploits, repeated by the nobles who claimed him as an ancestor, the subject of epic.

The earliest surviving document we have is the Medea of Euripides of 431 BC, produced almost a thousand years after the events it described. Euripides is interested in the conflict within a very human Medea between love and resentment. He invented the detail of her murder of her children.

The Argonautica of 246 BC is the only surviving extended treatment of Jason’s story, a kind of amalgamation of Homer and Euripides. The cultic aspects of Jason’s story have gone, and he is seen as part hero, part dominated by the sorceress Medea, not a very convincing mixture.

Most subsequent treatments have looked on Jason as a heroic voyager, a kind of classical Captain Cook. There has been much interest in the monsters he encountered, especially the humanoid ones.

I see him as a kind of buccaneer, like all his tribesmen. A cult was founded in his name, and stories told of his exploits, as they were of Theseus and Odysseus. But as Thessaly became a backwater in the politics of Greece Jason’s involvement with chthonic rites and with Medea robbed him of all his prestige. It was later, very different cultures, with very different values, that gave rise to his career as an argonaut.

©2011 Original material copyright Phillip Kay. Images and other material courtesy Creative Commons. Please inform post author of any violation.

Travelers

The shape of the world we live in is determined by the extent we explore it. We can explore it in many ways, through speculation, artistic creation and scientific experiment, but most of all by traveling to unfamiliar regions.

Humans and their ancestor species have been doing this for six million years, but for most of this time such exploration has been confined to searching for food and water, avoiding predators and finding prey. It was only when humans had settled in cities that they were able to objectify other places, only when they had created a culture they could identify others as ‘foreign’.

The world has taken on many shapes in the last 2,000 years. In the late sixth century BC a geographer belonging to one of the schools of Pythagoras in southern Italy conceived of the world as a sphere, one of 10 such bodies rotating around the sun, a fire which existed in space, and which included the planets and a counter earth which was invisible to our observation (John Parker’s Discovery, quoted in Peter Watson’s Ideas). This was pure theory, but accepted by Plato, and verified by Eratosthenes and Hipparchus at Alexandria in the second century BC at least as far as the shape and size of the earth was concerned. By the sixth century AD the monk Cosmas, by referring exclusively to the Bible, which he saw as the only true source of knowledge, thought of the earth as a rectangle, shaped like a tabernacle, as revealed in the Book of Exodus. This flat earth was joined to heaven at its rim. To the east was Paradise, and the holy city of Jerusalem was at the centre (Watson p.426). Concepts like these were tried and tested by humans who walked, sailed or rode great distances, bringing back travelers’ tales to make men wonder.

The earliest travelers were explorers of the psyche who travelled vast distances in search of answers to the mysteries of life and death. Heroes and gods, like Gilgamesh, Atthis, Osiris and Orpheus, trod the psychic pattern we all must tread, and tried to return some answer to the question we all must ask, the question “why?”

The first and greatest of all travelers who explored the lands about him lived about the twelfth century BC: Odysseus. His journey must have seemed a great one to his contemporaries, though not to us, who fly great distances shielded by inflight video and land in places pretty similar to that where we embarked. Travelers like Odysseus experienced the world through their senses, they felt it, at great risk to their lives. The world was dangerous, and full of wonders. The ancient Greeks possessed a rare gift of wonder, in both meanings of the word: they marvelled at what they saw, and speculated why it was so, often at the same time. I’m convinced by Tim Severin’s book The Ulysses Voyage that Odysseus travelled around the north coast of the Aegean from Troy and was swept southwards at Cape Sounion past Crete and Malta to the coast of Egypt before beating a northern passage back to Ithika. On the way he spent a year with Kirke (falcon), (the sister of Pasiphae, Minos’ wife, and of Aeetes, keeper of the Golden Fleece). Another goddess, Calypso, kept him seven years and offered him immortality. He heard the song the Sirens sang and escaped their lure, outwitted the giant Polyphemus, survived the land of the Lotus Eaters and came home at last to tell his tale to Homer. Homer would also have sung the tale of Jason (healer), Odysseus’ contemporary, whose Argosy covered the northern Aegean, then crossed the Sea of Marmara, and coasted the southern shores of the Black Sea as far as Poti in Georgia (Tim Severin’s The Jason Voyage), an area where as many Greeks settled as at Magna Graeca in Italy, both far more fertile areas than the Balkan mountain slopes. Fascinating to see the faint traces of pre-Hellenic religious rites left behind in both stories, which have become fairy stories for the later cultures who have heard them. Nothing has survived of the tales of great voyages the Greeks made to found Marseilles, or of the stories the Phoenicians told of the settling of Carthage and the journey past the Pillars of Herakles into the Atlantic.

One ancient traveler who did venture into the Atlantic was Pytheas, who lived about 350 BC and whose narrative, The Voyage, survived until the time of Pliny but is now lost. From remarks and quotations from later authors we can gather that Pytheas travelled from Marseilles through the Pillars of Herakles, along the coast of Portugal and France, crossed over to Lands End, sailed along the entire coast of Great Britain, to the Orkneys and across to Norway. He was looking for a source of tin, known to come from Britain. Along the way he entered the Arctic Circle, observed the fact that the sun did not set, that the ocean was frozen, saw icebergs, found a source of amber, and noticed the tides were influenced by the moon. Pytheas apparently observed much about the ancient Britons (a word he first used of these people) including what could be the first description of Stonehenge. Like most travelers much scorn was cast on some of his stories. Although trade was his avowed reason for the journey it is doubtful if it was the main reason, as a trading depot at Lands End or in Brittany would have sufficed for this purpose. Though winds may have blown him off course and ignorance of tides and currents taken him out of his way, the indication is that Pytheas was curious, that he travelled to explore, to find out.

About the same time as Pytheas another famous explorer, Alexander III of Macedon, was setting out on his incredible career. Although I am doubtful his military prowess is more than a much loved myth – his army and power base was created by his father Philip II, and the Persian empire was disintegrating under the incompetent reign of the usurper Darius before Alexander arrived from Macedon (and in any case the process of ‘conquering’ other peoples has never had the slightest effect on their historical development) – Alexander’s journey to India was the stuff of myth and entered the folklore of many cultures. Following his walkover victories in Persia, Bactria and Afghanistan, Alexander entered the Punjab, and encountered real opposition, virtually for the first time in his career. He won his battles with hill tribes, and with Porus, king of a Punjabi empire, but with great loss of life, and serious personal injuries. When he discovered there were several strong and militant kingdoms further to the east, Alexander was forced to turn back by his rebellious troops. It is usual to credit Alexander with the development of Hellenistic civilization through this exploit, but trade between Persia and Greece had been going on since the sixth century BC, and had already profoundly influenced the development of both cultures.

As the Graeco-Roman culture declined, the empire of Islam expanded with sudden vigour from the seventh century AD, and Muslim traders advanced down the east coast of Africa, and sent ships on trading expeditions throughout south east Asia. The sultan Haroun al-Rashid (763-809) is associated with an equally famous traveler, Sindbad the sailor. Although the story of the seven voyages (and shipwrecks) is thought to have an Indian and Persian origin, and incorporates episodes that seem taken from the Odyssey, it was the knowledge of true exploits of Muslim sailors that gave the tales their great popularity in Arabic culture.

One of the most extraordinary travelers of all time was ibn Battuta (1304-77), who travelled 75,000 miles over the Islamic world, from North Africa, West Africa, Southern Europe and Eastern Europe in the West, to the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and China in the East. He described his journeys in the Rihla (The Voyage). Ibn Battuta first travelled from Morocco to Alexandria, Damascus and Syria to Mecca, on hajj. But a spirit of wanderlust affected him, for he then detoured, first to Iraq, then Persia. He witnessed the devastation the Mongols had caused in Bagdad, then returned to Mecca for a second hajj. He moved restlessly on, to Aden, Somalia, the Swahili coast, Mombasa and Tanzania, before returning to Mecca for a third hajj. From there ibn Battuta travelled to Turkey and the Black Sea. He made his way to Constantinople in 1332, then on to Bukhara and Samarkand, Afghanistan, then India. After imbroilment in local politics, shipwreck and imprisonment, ibn Battuta ended up in Sri Lanka. Further travels took him to Sumatra, Vietnam, the Philippines and China. Another hajj, then ibn Battuta moved on to Spain, Morocco, then south to Mali and then Timbuktu. Before he died ibn Battuta dictated an account of what he had seen on his travels. He had seen virtually the whole known world of his time, most of it Muslim.

But ibn Battuta had little influence on Western concepts of the world. That world was significantly expanded by the travels of two Italians. Marco Polo travelled with his father and uncle from Venice to the court of Kublai Khan, where they were valued as the first European visitors. His stories were retailed to a cellmate during his brief imprisonment on his return to Italy, and gave birth to the legend of the fabulous wealth of Xanadu. Stories of Chinese inventions such as paper money, the printing press and gunpowder began to circulate. The stories strongly influenced another Italian, the Genoese Cristoforo Colombo (1451-1506), who owned a heavily annotated edition of Marco Polo’s book. Both Polo and Colombo were strongly motivated by the profit motive, and were looking for routes to the eastern spice markets, where fortunes could be made at that time. Colombo, with a significantly imprecise map of the world, succeeded in reaching some of the islands off the east coast of central America, the Bahamas, Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Trinidad, but was convinced these were the islands of Japan, and that the nearby landmass was China, or perhaps India, the sources of spices. His discoveries led to the Spanish kingdom’s colonisation of America and the consequent destruction of native American cultures by disease, the sword and Christianity. It also led to a wealth drain which Spain used to bolster its European empire and which resulted in bankruptcy for Spain and the disintegration of that empire.

An even greater achievement than Colombo’s was that of the Portuguese Ferdinand Magellan, Colombo’s younger contemporary. He and his successor in command, the Basque Juan Sebastian Elcano, succeeded in circumnavigating the globe, an incredible achievement for the time and the state of navigation. The 18 survivors were able to note they had “lost” a day when sailing against the earth’s rotation. Magellan’s voyage stimulated cartographers, and led, together with the explorations of the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci, to the systematic colonisation of the Americas, which would prove a significant power shift in world politics over the next 200 years.

A man of genius associated with this colonisation was Sir Walter Raleigh (1554-1618), poet, historian, scientist, politician, soldier, explorer and courtier. He helped form two prevalent concepts connected with America. The first arose from the failed colonisation of Virginia at Roanoke Island of 1584 and 1587, underresourced and beseiged by native Americans, which had disappeard by 1590 when further colonists arrived on the spot. This was a basic plot in many subsequent ‘western’ books and movies. Later in the decade, in 1594/5, Raleigh went looking for the Golden City, the legend of El Dorado of the Chibcha people, and was as unsuccessful in finding it as the obsessive conquistadors who came after him.

The heroic voyagers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries helped create the modern world, and their epitome was Captain James Cook (1728-1779) whom Benjamin Franklin so admired, and who explored the Pacific and Antarctic area through voyages which are a model of careful planning, precise navigation and logging and humane treatment of crew. But the greatest traveller of this era rivals Odysseus. Another shipwrecked mariner: Robinson Crusoe.

Robinson Crusoe was first published in 1719 and has been ever since one of the most popular and influential books ever published. Setting aside any examination of the facts or fictions which form its narrative structure, this popularity exists because the book is essentially truthful to a picture of human nature we need to relate to. Crusoe is a trader who makes money, a shipwrecked mariner as unlucky as Sindbad, a traveler over most of Europe (Part II) and a devotedly religious man (Part III). His adventures answer an important question. Can a man survive when he loses everything? Crusoe does. He does it the same way we do today, living one day at a time, drawing up his lists of good and bad things. Confined to a narrow space, Crusoe travels vast distances in time, re-inventing human culture through his intelligence, resourcefulness and persistence. A savage, he invents agriculture, clothing, society and warfare before leaving the island, and with no resources but his brain and his hands.

The world was almost in the shape we know it today. Little was left unexplored except Africa, and that was where travelers went in the nineteenth century. The traveler par excellence of this period was Sir Richard Burton (1821-90), a linguist who mastered 25 languages and as many dialects, a scholar in many cultures, familiar with many exotic societies but at home in none, whose journey to find the source of the Nile in 1858 was truly an epic. I have written on Burton here: http://phillipkay.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/so-far-from-home-richard-francis-burton/.

By the start of the twentieth century travelers began to look inward. Bram Stoker’s Dracula of 1897 explores the mysterious terrain of Romania, but most successfully its history and mythology. Once again we are on psychic terrain, where the dead come to life and attack the living, where the undead have no mirror reflection, and crawl like bats across castle walls. This is the same world collected in the tales of the Grimm brothers. Dracula is an evil spirit which a shaman might encounter in one of his journeys. He is a defiant proof that despite scientific explanations of the world, there is still mystery and danger there. The basic dilemma of making our way in the world is independent of any knowledge we have, as Kafka’s character K found out: there are demands made on us we cannot understand, and procedures at work around us we only vaguely understand, which make any journey difficult.

To complicate matters even more, around 1900-1913 an Austrian doctor called Sigmund Freud intuitively discovered what he called the subconscious, an infinite space within each human mind where primal forces compel each of us to create the self we are and the world we live in. This was based largely on an examination of his own mind. A rigorous scientist with the mind of a poet, Freud has been attacked by many people, during his lifetime and up to the present, for the many scientific errors he made despite his efforts to be objective, yet he is easily the most influential writer of the twentieth century, someone who can be ranked with Plato in his capacity to change the way people think and act in the world. The space we travel in dreams, the ground we mark out with compulsions, has been forever changed because of Sigmund Freud.

About the same time as Freud a German theoretical physicist, Albert Einstein, developed a number of theories, intuition-based ‘thought experiments’, which later scientists were able to verify. As well as virtually founding quantum mechanics, Einstein suggested that space and time were a continuum, and that there were conditions under which time and matter would become aspects of each other. Quantum mechanics were developed partly by Heisenberg, whose famous uncertainty principle suggested quantifiable limits to the practice of exact scientific observation, to the point where only inexact results could be ‘proved’. This led to the introduction of subjectivity in science. The world which had been charted, mapped and explored, settled, exploited and damaged ecologically has now become far less certain than it once was. Freud and Einstein between them have expanded our universe considerably, giving us the freedom to travel anywhere.

In July 1969 Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. His remark “that’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” hasn’t been listened to by any subsequent human government, who have all preferred to squander fossil fuels in futile battles to gain more fossil fuels, destroying thousands of lives and threatening the environment with total destruction. A reminder that we don’t have to travel anywhere: we can remain stationary.

Two observations come to mind. Tobias Smollett’s 1766 Travels notes that many people travel merely to confirm that the world they are familiar with is preferable, that other societies, in so far as they are different, are wrong. These people move from place to place, but they don’t travel. The other observation is made by Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote in an essay I awoke from school daze to hear and remember, “to travel in expectation is better than to arrive”. The author of the immortal Kidnapped, Treasure Island and Weir of Hermiston is right (probably, and relatively).

©2010 Original material copyright Phillip Kay. Images and other material courtesy Creative Commons. Thanks to Wikipedia. Please inform post author of any violation.

Crossing the divide

I WATCHED A BBC/TimeLife series recently called Ancient Voices. The 11 episodes presented what was then (the series dates from 1995) up-to-date research which attempted to give new light on ancient societies. On the whole it succeeded admirably, although two episodes presented gross simplifications worthy of Indiana Jones. One episode in particular caught my imagination, and engendered quite a bit of thought, no doubt much of it commonplace, for I tend not to be an original thinker.

Belief and faith
The episode in question was on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Because the subject I am going to discuss is also a matter of faith to many religious people I had better make it clear that I, like the series itself, am talking about ancient societies and their ideas, as far as we can know what those were. George Orwell, in his novel A Clergyman’s Daughter, makes a useful distinction between belief and faith. The ability to believe is an inherent function of human beings, and those who abandon it on rational grounds do themselves harm. The subject of this belief is a matter of faith, and faith, though we don’t want to admit it, is variable.  The ability to believe is a vital, enriching function of the imagination. The subject of belief, the faith, can be at times profound, as when St Francis of Assisi saw himself in relation to the whole created world and could speak of Brother Sun and Sister Moon, but at other times, such as the controversy that animated fourth century Christianity, the Filioque controversy, it can seem sterile.

That controversy was over the perhaps heretical addition of a phrase to the Nicene Creed which described how the Holy Spirit ‘proceeded’ from both the Father and the Son within the Holy Trinity. Many felt the Holy Spirit ‘proceeded’ only from the Father, and battles were fought and people killed to determine which belief was correct. Never mind that nobody knew, or knows, what ‘proceeded’ meant in this context, let alone what the nature of the Holy Trinity was. What seems to have happened is a political matter of orthodoxy was here masquerading as a matter of faith. Similarly when people argue for admission of women to the priesthood or ministry they confuse politics and faith. In my opinion I think that if a faith causes you to speak or act in an inhumane way it had better be abandoned. If you believe otherwise I will of course support your right to do so.

The Dead Sea Scrolls
The Dead Sea Scrolls must have alarmed nearly all Christian believers when they saw the light of day again. They had been known about for centuries, a good fuel source that lit many Arab camp fires. But when the locals realised they were a commodity of value to Europeans they were hoarded and released in tiny sections at the best possible price. Confused accounts of the assembly and deciphering of these fragments caused a panic among the faithful. There were allegations of a cover up, that the Catholic Church was concealing fragments that ‘disproved’ their version of Christian history.

The Scrolls revealed something of the fervid nature of first century Judaism. Scholars realised there was quite a lot of fragmentation into different sects, and that the End of Days was the big news that animated almost all of them. There would be a great confrontation, and the Kingdom of David would come again. Leading the struggle would be the Messiah, the anointed king of the Jews, himself descended from the house of David.

The Jews throughout their history have been non-assimilators. When they trekked from Egypt to Canaan their charismatic leader Moses could only keep them together by making a covenant with God himself. It took a while for this idea to take root, but when it did the tribes went on a rampage throughout the land, exterminating nation after nation. It makes parts of the Old Testament sickening reading. If their success, at first under a series of ‘judges’ then under the military leader David and the politician Solomon meant they were the Chosen People, then their failure, crushed under the military might of first the Assyrians and then the Babylonians, meant they had sinned, and must atone. At no time could they assimilate, negotiate. The ten tribes dispersed throughout Babylonia were lost to Judaism, but the remnant would concede nothing. When the kingdom was fragmented, the fanatically faithful reviled the Samaritans and pursued their isolationist course. When Rome became dominant in the area the Jews repudiated the Graeco-Roman way of life, the only ancient people known to have done so. They planned and executed a series of minor revolts against the Romans which had as much effect as a flea bite on an elephant, yet they would not desist. They were the children of God. This blind fanaticism also produced some of the most beautiful and profound poetry ever written, as it also did in the closely related religion of Islam. Under the desert sun, it would seem, God would speak.

Fanaticism simplifies things. There is no subtleties of human behaviour, no finely graded variation of moods, thoughts and emotions; no need for political negotiation or strategies; no need even for planning. There are just two things. Good and Evil, and Good will prevail. It’s a reversion to a childhood state. But not everyone was equally fanatical at that time. The Sadducees, the descendants of Aaron the brother of Moses, had a vested interest in the Temple and its rites, which involved a huge and continuous animal sacrifice to God which went on day and night and must have made part of the premises seem like an abattoirs. They wanted to conciliate the Romans, at least for a while, but were dragged into the eventual revolt, which destroyed both the Temple and their sect. The right wing of this sect, the militant Zealots, wanted to defend the Temple by throwing the Romans out. They practised guerrilla warfare, sabotage, and wanted a military confrontation, led of course by the Messiah. It is thought that some of the followers of Jesus, and perhaps Jesus himself at first, were Zealots. They had no idea of the resources of the Roman Army, the most efficient military machine ever invented, save the Mongol army.

The other sects were more concerned to preserve what was good of past traditions by study of the writings contained in the scriptures. Although the kingdom of God on earth was the ultimate aim of the Pharisees as it was of the Sadducees and the Zealots, they placed more emphasis on being ready for that time by studying the word of God. Among this group were those who withdrew from the political interpretation of the coming of the kingdom, and imagined a literal coming of the end of the world, when God would judge men, and men must be ready. Some of these groups were followers of the Baptist, who bathed converts in Jordan water, and dared to rebuke Herod. Jesus was probably one of his converts. Some of these groups went by the name of Essenes, and it is thought these groups produced what we know as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The canon of the books of the Old Testament has been set for so long it is easy to forget that in the first century it didn’t exist. That canon in fact was made necessary by the destruction of the temple and the dispersion of Jews throughout the world after 70 AD. The Dead Sea Scrolls therefore contains some books of the Old Testament as we know them, but also some contemporary writings not in our canon. One of the things that dismayed the first decipherers was the sayings of someone called the Teacher of Righteousness. He seemed to be saying much the same things as the New Testament puts into the mouth of Jesus. Yet he lived, it is estimated, about 100 BC, one hundred years before the time of Christ. Was Jesus merely quoting another, earlier teacher, was he not original, not the founder of a great faith but the echo of an old one? The crisis was a real one and was dramatised by Philip K Dick in his last published novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

Society and faith
When reading documents written in ancient times we cannot tell what really happened from what was believed to have happened. The same, after all, is true of much of the news we watch every day. Joshua (Aramaic Jeshua, Latin Jesus) the Jewish king (Messiah, annointed one, Christos) doesn’t sound like a religious founder. But neither does the Pharisee Jesus who so impressed his elders in the Temple through his knowledge of scripture and who speaks throughout the New Testament largely in quotation from that scripture. The Jesus of Saint Paul is different again, the dying God who saves his followers to eternal life. It is possible of course that Jesus was all these things, Zealot, Pharisee and apocalyptic preacher, at different times or even at the same time. But we also have to accept that a faith is not the same as a fact. Faith is the product of an environment, of a particular time and place, and sometimes of an inspired person’s vision. For a time there were as many Christianities as there were places where there were followers of Jesus. Orthodoxy is one of the last developments in a religion.

In actuality there were only two major types of society where Christianity flourished: Jewish and Graeco-Roman. In Jewish centres Jesus lived and died an orthodox Jew. He could do nothing else, a Jew never abhorred his faith. It was a world with an accepted vocabulary, where ‘son of God’ meant holy man, ‘son of man’ meant human being, ‘forty days and forty nights’ was a metaphorical way of describing a lengthy time, ‘my father’ was all men’s father or God; where Saint Matthew could find hundreds of parallels between the words of the prophets and the words and deeds of Jesus and expect them to be understood; where Saint Peter could be scandalised at the teaching of Saint Paul that Jesus was the son of God who died for our sins: in the Jewish world there was a scapegoat, a ritual animal who took on the people’s sins but was a figure of contempt. Here Jesus was a charismatic Rabbi who taught the people, and was prepared to break rules of ritual purity to do so, who spoke in pithy and wise aphorisms as his contemporary Hillel did, and even quoted Hillel on occasion.

By contrast there was the Graeco-Roman world. Here there were many gods, many of whom seduced human women and produced divine sons. It was a world where heroes were known by miraculous birth signs, where wonder workers like the Pythagorean philosopher Apollonius of Tyana, a contemporary of Jesus, raised the dead, cured the sick and ascended to heaven. The most prevalent religion was the Mystery religion of Eleusis and the otherworldly one of Orpheus where worshippers partook of the flesh and blood of the gods and were born to immortal life; where Oriental deities such as Isis and Osiris, Astarte and Atthis experienced death and were reborn. Everywhere the Roman army went they took the worship of Mithras, whose feast day was 25 December. Mithras was the god of the rising sun, and his followers were baptised into his cult and celebrated at a communal meal.

When Saint Paul took the gospel to the gentiles he entered this world, and his brand of Christianity was affected by its prevalent ideas. Saint Paul himself was torn between the two worlds. A Jew and a Pharisee of Tarsus, he was born and lived in the biggest city of Asia Minor where the Graeco-Roman culture was more prevalent than the Jewish one. He spoke Greek and Latin and was automatically a Roman citizen. The humiliation of Jesus’ death was very real to him, the degrading one of a traitor, and Christians were simply followers of a bad Jew to him until his awareness of Jesus was infused by his knowledge of Greek mystery cult. What had been a tragedy to the Jewish Christians, that a good and wise Rabbi had been mistaken by the Romans for a Zealot and crucified, assumed in Paul’s view of things a new, transcendent significance. It was not a popular view in Jerusalem, being in defiance of the first three commandments given to Moses. But in 70 AD the whole game changed. The Romans destroyed Jerusalem, more than likely wiping out the Jewish Christians and the surviving disciples of Jesus. Paul’s Christianity was the surviving one, but it was not uniform. At each centre where he taught variations of his teaching flourished. Gospels were written at each centre, each with its own emphasis and character. It took Paul the rest of his life, and the Church till the fourth century before some kind of uniform faith had been worked out.

This brings me back to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Here is a version of Isaiah 7:14 which is prior to the Septuagint and which reads in Hebrew : “Behold a young woman will conceive a child…”. As always, Matthew seeks to unify traditions by quoting from scripture. In Greek that became: “Behold a virgin will conceive a child…”. Here is a crucial difference in the two cultures in a nutshell. In the Jewish tradition the natural order is celebrated. The young girl is of course a virgin before marriage, she becomes nubile and marries, and in due course bears a son. The words for virgin and for young wife are related, they refer to the same person, and they are natural progressions in her life. Nothing could be more normal. In the Greek context all this is different, even though only one word is changed. The virgin birth is a sign, a prodigy, signifying the birth of a hero or a god. The Rabbi, in defiance of Jewish tradition, has become divine.

This is not the only occasion when a word acquires a whole new dimension when crossing the cultural divide. Another word so transformed is ‘prophet’. In Jewish culture the prophets recalled the people to their covenant with God. This covenant was the overriding event in Jewish history, and when things went wrong, as during the captivity in Babylon, it had to be explained in terms of the covenant. The prophets were not rabbis: some of them were ordinary Jews, with a trade and a family. They saw that something was wrong, and to them it was an overwhelming tragedy that inspired language the equal of Aeschylus’. They tried to express what was wrong, the loss of god, in language as inspiring, as stirring and as disturbing, as has ever been written.

In the Greek world, by contrast, there were prophets, augurs who foretold the future: Apollo’s oracle at Delphi was only the most prominent. And when inhabitants of the Graeco-Roman world of the first century went looking for traces of Jesus Christ to supplement their faith, they found in the Old Testament ‘prophets’ whom they interpreted in the Greek sense, as sages who had foretold the future, and pointed to the coming of Jesus. This Greek interpretation of Jewish scripture led to much of what was believed of the life of Jesus, as metaphors used by the prophets were examined as factual statements of the events in the life of Jesus made by writers inspired by god to foretell the future.

Belief and heresy
This is a sign indeed, a sign of how cultures can cross-fertilise each other to create something new and wonderful. The battle for orthodoxy has entailed much bloodshed to ensue that all believers believed alike, that all tenets of belief were consistent and unified, in the belief that this unity itself testifies to the truth of what is believed in. But belief does not need testimony. If you need to prove something then you must have doubts. If the ability to believe is a vibrant part of human nature, then faith, what is believed, is a fruitful part of the society in which it is produced. The faithful are strong in their faith, the doubtful fear heresy.

All this seems quite different from the emphasis we place on the ‘book’. All religions revere a founder, and preserve some of his precepts and stories about him (and it’s usually a him). This is given even more emphasis in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, where a book of holy writings preserves the words of God himself. But it’s not quite as simple as that. Books are written and passed on by people, and people are fallible, imperfect beings. There are editions of the Bible in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, German and English (many other languages as well of course) which have been influential. But they differ from each other in subtle ways because they have been written for different audiences. Before Gutenberg every single copy of a book was transcribed from another, word by word, often by scribes who did not understand the language they were copying or who were illiterate. Often the original was defective or incomplete and some matter was invented to fill the gap. ‘Inspired’ people might insert matter in the text to justify a doctrinal stance. All ancient manuscripts are of unknown provenance, that is, we do not know the copier nor how competent they were, whether they were a forger, how reliable their source was. Although it is the word of God, people have choices and can choose between a virgin giving birth or a young wife, between a camel passing through the eye of a needle or a thread. And when some religious people prefer just one version, say the King James translation of the Bible into English, written in archaic language, based on deficient original text and outmoded scholarship, then they are limiting themselves unduly. It’s beautiful, but not the whole story.

The truth we are searching for is not as arid as accuracy but as nourishing as the joy and comfort it gives us. And because we have made it it is as messy and confused as we are, with its roots in many traditions. Try telling a believer that you can’t follow a moving star, that the Roman Emperor couldn’t have sent all his millions of subjects back to their home towns for a census because there wasn’t a transportation system to move a fraction of them, that the three wise men were originally magi, Persian followers of Zarathustra who saw in the star not only earthly knowledge but the presence of Zarathustra himself in a spiritual sense. It shouldn’t make any difference if their faith is a nourishing faith. A true believer can examine the facts of which his faith is made in a detached manner precisely because his faith sustains him. But beware of the bigot, who is not quite sure of his faith.

And so I meandered on after I watched the episode, until I had reached the ancient Egyptians and was in the bark of Osiris, trying to remember, not the Book of the Dead but Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings. To put an end to my journey I thought of the healing power of belief, and that if what we believe is important, then how we believe is even more important. Above all, where we believe has an immense influence on the nature of those beliefs.

©2010 Original material copyright Phillip Kay. Images and other material courtesy Creative Commons. Please inform post author of any violation.