| November 18, 2007 | Ancient Waymarks For Modern Living Reverend Dr. Phillip Hewett |
I don't usually begin a sermon by saying what I am not going to be talking about, but perhaps that may be appropriate this morning. It has been conventional when talking about religious matters to draw a distinction between “believers” and “unbelievers” . This presupposes that we are dealing with strictly intellectual questions, for believing or not believing is an intellectual exercise, whatever the subject-matter. But if we are going to look at spirituality, which is where religion begins, this is completely misleading.
My favourite illustration of this is to take the first verse of a famous poem, Shelley's To a Skylark.
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
Now suppose this to be taken as a piece of Scripture for some form of religion, treated according to that conventional distinction between believers and unbelievers. The believers would dogmatically assert that the skylark is emphatically not a bird but a spirit, and that it sings from in or near a place called Heaven. The unbelievers would retort that this is just ornithological ignorance, that of course the skylark is a bird, and that there is no such place as Heaven; the skylark is just high up in the air. Both parties, I submit, would be talking complete nonsense, and simply showing that they have no understanding of the nature of poetry.
Traditional theologies follow exactly this pattern, treating religious expressions as though they were scientific or legal statements, to be accepted or rejected in accordance with the disciplines appropriate in those fields. I want to get beneath all this froth and bubble, which sorts people out into contending parties, and to look at what I am calling waymarks, that is, signs to point us in the right direction. They may be expressed in poems or stories; they may be expressed in pictures or visual symbols; or again in music or sculpture or architecture. All of them are capable of moving us in profound ways that were graphically described by a great classicist whom it was my privilege to meet many years ago, when I was a student at Oxford and he was in his nineties: Gilbert Murray. This is what he wrote about such potent themes:
“... they are deeply implanted in the memory of the race, stamped as it were upon our physical organism.... there is that within us which leaps at the sight of them, a cry of the blood that tells us we have known them always.... we have .... a strange unanalysed vibration below the surface, an undercurrent of desires and fears and passions, long slumbering yet eternally familiar, which have for thousands of years lain near the root of our most intimate emotions and been wrought into the fabric of our most magical dreams.”
C.G Jung described these themes as archetypes, or primordial images, which belong to all of us through the collective unconscious upon which we all draw, implanted there by countless experiences of our ancestors and inherited in the structure of the brain. I want to look this morning primarily at three of those archetypes, all of them related, which I have found particularly significant for my own spiritual life. I have put representations of them on the cover of our order of service, so as to minimize the difficult task of translating them into the spoken word.
Let me give a short description of each. The top one is reproduced from one artist's representation of the ancient Norse form of the World-Tree symbol found in one form or another in many different parts of the world. You may have noticed also that this design has an uncanny resemblance to our Unitarian symbol of the flaming chalice! Below it is the centuries-old Transylvanian Unitarian symbol, bringing together four components, all of which occur widely in the world's mythologies: the serpent, the dove, the mountain and the crown. The third symbol is the Green Man, often described in books on church architecture as a 'foliated head'. It is widespread in cathedrals and churches all over Europe, particularly in Britain, France and Germany, and was a favourite subject for medieval carvers and stonemasons.
Let's take a closer look at each of these archetypal symbols and ask what they may have to say to us. We'll start with the World-Tree, as described in the powerful anthem you have just heard. This appeared as a hymn in the blue hymnbook which was the predecessor of our present one, but unhappily it was dropped out of the newer book. Its author, Ridgely Torrence, was inspired by the ancient Norse myth in which the tree was called Yggdrasil. It is the Tree of Existence which sustains not only our world but the heaven above and the underworld beneath – the traditional three-storey universe as depicted in the picture I have reproduced. It is continually menaced by all kinds of life-threatening evils, while at the same time it is sustained by the life-giving streams that flow around its base. The artist includes another version of the symbols you see on the Transylvanian emblem, though you have to look hard to see them on this reduced scale. The tail-swallowing serpent encircles the mountain out of which the crown of the tree, so to speak, arises, and within its branches you can see a resemblance of the fourth Transylvanian symbol, the dove – though I have to admit that in the Norse myth the bird is either a falcon or an eagle. Ridgely Torrence also has worms eating the leaves, while in the ancient story it is stags who are are eating the leaves, while worms devour the roots. But on the other hand the myth tells of three maidens ruling human destiny, called the Norns, who each morning water the leaves of the tree with dew and preserve its life. So the entire picture includes life and death, threat and promise, and its relevance as a waymark from the ancient world for our modern living is made more striking as we listen again to Ridgely Torrence's words:
The sky has gathered the flowers of sunset,
The earth is red with the dew of slaughter.
The shores are ringed with the steel of onset,
And darkness covers the weaponed water.
The world-tree sickens beyond all knowing,
The worm is wasting the leaves that wreath it.
The bough is drying, the sap is slowing ;
For hatreds gnaw in their hells beneath it.
On one sole ground will the world-tree flourish,
On earth unarmoured against its bearing,
Its glories free and its strength to nourish
The worldwide lands in a common sharing.
In kinship only, with all earth gardened,
The ravished leaf may be stayed in thinning,
The stony ground at the root unhardened,
The boughs be green for a new beginning.
That, I think, says just about everything regarding the significance of the World-Tree symbol for our time. We live in that tension between destruction and renewal, apprehension and hope.
Let's turn now to the Transylvanian emblem. A simplified version of its significance that has often been given is that it represents the warning given by Jesus as he
commissioned his twelve followers to carry the message they had learned from him to a largely hostile world. “Look”, he said, “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves, so be as wily as serpents and as non-violent as doves.” (Matthew, 10:16) That would have had particular meaning for the Transylvanian Unitarians, who for most of their history have had to live like sheep among wolves, though it's the serpent and the dove that figure on their emblem. But there is much more to the symbolism than this. The serpent swallowing its own tail in the form of a circle is a very widespread symbol occurring independently in many different parts of the world, and is generally called the Ouroboros. It is usually interpreted as standing for eternity transcending time, in which life goes on and on, and may have originally been inspired by the snake's ability to slough off its skin each spring and thereby put on the appearance of being reborn.
Serpents have traditionally been viewed with a mixture of fear and awe. At times they are seen as evil; at times they are seen as sacred; according to Bible scholars the Seraphim surrounding the Supreme Being on the heavenly throne as described in the vision of the prophet Isaiah had the form of serpents.The dove stands erect and watchful on the summit of a mountain, often depicted as a more rugged peak than it appears in the representation we have here. Mountains have played a great role in religious thinking and mythology – once again, a universal symbolism. And the dove is of course the traditional symbol of peace, which was perhaps originally suggested as people listened to its soft and soothing call. But it is also the traditional symbol in Christian mythology of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, and appears as such in statues of the Trinity in many places in Europe, particularly in Austria. If you have visited Vienna, you will have seen it at the top of the great Plague Monument in the Graben. In these statues it has its wings outspread, and rays of light emanating from its body. There is a centuries-old tomb in Lichfield Cathedral in England which has it in this form surrounded by the Ouroboros.
You may perhaps have noticed that the three symbols of which I have just been speaking – the serpent, the mountain and the dove are, just like those in the World-tree, drawn directly from the world of Nature. What may not be so obvious is that the same is true of the fourth symbol in the Transylvanian emblem, only a little less directly. If you look carefully at the crown, you will see that it is surmounted by leaf-patterns, perhaps also flowers and fruit. One Transylvanian interpreter sees pears there, and he calls the whole design a 'foliate crown'. So here too is a natural symbol, and more obviously including the human dimension too, for of course a crown is made for the sole purpose of being placed upon human brows. In ancient Greece and Rome it was the practice to make crowns of foliage, usually laurel or olive or oak, to place on the brows of heroes.
This seems an appropriate point at which to move on to the third picture, the Green Man who, as I said, is carved in many of the ancient churches and cathedrals in Europe. He goes one stage beyond the foliate crown, and has been described as a 'foliate head', for the vegetation issues directly out of his face. The original carvers from centuries ago, like the artists who put the Transylvanian emblem together, left no record of what they had in mind as they worked. The Green Man was left to speak for himself, but those who in recent times have seen him as the archetype of our place as an integral part of the world of nature seem to have it right. That, at any rate, is how I see him, and I had a great deal of enjoyment last summer in pursuing him, particularly in the cathedrals at Exeter and Winchester.
Although there are thousands of these carvings of the Green Man, most of them in churches and cathedrals, it's only in recent years that people have begun to give them serious attention. Perhaps that's because there are so many other grotesque figures and gargoyles on those medieval buildings that they didn't stand out. You don't notice something until you are psychologically ready to do so. I used to pass them every day during my years in Oxford, and never paid them much attention. But now we are more ready. Clive Hicks, who has photographed hundreds of Green Men, wrote in a book that appeared at the beginning of the present century:
“Ten years ago ... one might have been excused for thinking that the idea of the Green Man had all but vanished from the public imagination ... But the idea was quietly waking up ... The public imagination of the western world was uneasy about environmental trends that were, and are, causing real damage to the world, and uneasy about ideas of human domination of nature. It was ready to accept a sign that would symbolize human connection with nature. The idea of the Green Man has provided that symbol, a figurehead for the regeneration of nature and the western mentality. There is every sign that the idea is gaining greater and greater relevance and importance.”
Last Wednesday I spent the day at a conference of community leaders from many walks of life to wrestle with the question of what we in this province are going to do to deal with the crisis of climate change. Political leaders from both the major parties stressed that this time we have to move in short order beyond rhetoric to meaningful action, and we tried to deploy whatever expertise we could bring to bear on the effort to achieve this. Those of us from the faith communities agreed that we could bring depth of meaning to the process, but that this was not going to be done by way of divisive theological concepts.
It's just here, I think, that these archetypal symbols of which I have been speaking can be a guide and support. The First Nations representatives at the conference had their own traditional symbols that can do this, and the rest of us can gain much by immersing ourselves as well in those. But we can also gain by reclaiming the ancient archetypes we have inherited from a European ancestry. The Green Man is an obvious one, not simply in the carved form I have been describing, but in the ancient dances and rituals in which people decked themselves in foliage from head to foot or danced around the symbolic tree of the Maypole. I remember that there was a time during my ministry when we actually put up a Maypole in the Vancouver church and used it in May Day celebrations. That was back before the appearance of Earth Day.
But it's not just the Green Man. All three of these archetypes speak powerfully to us of our indissoluble connection with “the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part”. They are all waymarks pointing us in the right direction as we face the challenge of our times. We will need the dedication of the Norns in providing the life-giving waters to the World-Tree so that the boughs will be green for a new beginning. We will need the wiles of the serpent and the non-violence of the dove as a part of our survival skills. We do have a mountain to climb before we can enjoy the splendours of the scene that can be set before us. We do have to strive to earn that crown of laurels.
Let me conclude with words of William Anderson, from whose poem on the Green Man I read earlier in the service:
Our remote ancestors said to their mother Earth: 'We are yours'.
Modern humanity has said to Nature: 'you are mine'.
The Green Man has returned to the living face of the whole earthso that through his mouth we may say to the universe: 'We are one'. So be it.
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