There is a built-in resistance to myth among many students of the Bible and Theology. This is because they have not been taught, or had not taken in, the importance of myth in the literature of a civilization. No doubt they have in mind the creation myths in the book of Genesis, and probably the best way to demolish this particular ‘language block’ is to embark upon a short course of study about the myths of the world, both ancient and modern. These stories offer diverse ways of approaching fundamental issues at so many different levels; allegorical, symbolic, representational, satirical and literal. They have been used to come to terms with, explain and convey information about all aspects of life. Some deal with the great mysteries of the universe, the origins of life and death; some teach about the natural world, the environment and the animal kingdom; many examine the world of mankind, reflecting different cultures, histories, beliefs and customs but ultimately centring on many of the same basic concerns about human experiences, relationships, aspirations and defects. They can teach students of all ages to respect and appreciate differences between cultures at the same time as developing an understanding of how much is common to all mankind.

Many older students reject these stories as childish fairy tales or treat them as ‘fake’ history, primitive chronicles of real happenings. But this is to miss the true significance of myths. They are not legends like the tales of King Arthur and Robin Hood, though these may contain mythological elements. The subject of the great myths of the world is always a fundamental and intractable human problem. The stories deal with the most fundamental questions of morality and conscience because they work indirectly, rather than through direct confrontation. The myth is a distinct form of literature, which states and analyses that problem not by means of a philosophical or ethical argument, but in the form of a story which captures the reader’s imagination and stimulates their emotions. As Margaret Leona and Margaret Marshall have written, respectively, they speak to our feeling in an unforgettable way; they evoke response, recognition, identification. They enable us to enter a process of self-discovery.

It is significant that many of the finest myths are concerned with the problem of power; the peril of allowing all power to be gathered into one man’s hands. Daedalus and Icarus and the myth of Faust in its various forms are two examples. J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, though not perhaps a myth in the technical sense, is also about the problem of power. Before the film versions of these stories, they were beloved by a small group of readers who were fascinated by Tolkien’s mythology more than by their dramatic effect. Many others regarded the stories as childish nonsense or denigrated Tolkien’s literary style as too descriptive, using too many adjectives. Nevertheless, the mythological element of The Return of the King, with its echo of the Arthurian legends has continued to illuminate Lord Acton’s phrase, Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. 

The myth of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden seems to have had several interpretations put upon it in the course of its literary history. One of these meanings, perhaps the original one, is precisely the danger of unrestricted power. Eat of the fruit of the forbidden tree and your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil (Gen. 3: 5). It is the temptation to seize the power which rightly belongs only to deity.

There is a modern version of the myth of Eden in William Golding’s well-known story, The Lord of the Flies which, as it happens, my fifteen-year-old son is reading at the moment. It tells of a number of schoolboys who, being evacuated by air in a future war, find themselves on an uninhabited island after their plane crashes. The only survivors, the boys assemble on the beach and wait to be rescued. By day they inhabit a land of bright fantastic birds and dark blue seas, but at night their dreams are haunted by the image of a terrifying beast. As the boys’ delicate sense of order fades, so their childish dreams are transformed into something more primitive, and their behaviour starts to take on a murderous, savage significance.

The story revolves around the struggle for leadership between two of the boys. One is Ralph, twelve years old, strongly built, with a mildness about his mouth and eyes that proclaimed no devil. The other is Jack, a boy with hunter’s instincts, and eyes turning, or ready to turn, to anger. The parallels between the myth of Eden and The Lord of the Flies Jack’s gang sets fire to the island by mistake as they try to smoke Ralph out of his hiding place: when Adam and Eve are driven from the garden, cherubim with flaming swords guard the way to the tree of life.

In his introduction to the ‘Golding Centenary’ (2011) edition of the book (originally published in 1954), the New England novelist Stephen King quotes Golding’s introduction to his own reading on the audio version of the book:

One day I was sitting one side of the fireplace, and my wife was sitting on the other, and I suddenly said to her, “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to write a story about some boys on an island, showing how they would really behave, being boys, and not little saints as they usually are in children’s books.” And she said, “That’s a first-class idea! You write it!” So I went ahead and wrote it. 

Stephen King commented that he was unprepared for what he had found between the covers of the copy of Lord of the Flies he borrowed from the ‘Adult Fiction’ section of the mobile library in the 1960s:

… a perfect understanding of the sort of beings I and my friends were at twelve or thirteen, untouched by the usual soft soap and deodorant. Could we be good? Yes. Could we be kind? Yes again. Could we, at the turn of a moment, become little monsters? Indeed we could. And did. At least twice a day and far more frequently on summer vacations, when we were left to our own devices.

Golding harnessed his unsentimental view of boyhood to a story of adventure and swiftly mounting suspense. To the twelve-year-old boy I was, the idea of roaming an uninhabited tropical island without parental supervision at first seemed liberating, almost heavenly. By the time the boy with the birthmark on his face (the first little un to raise the possibility of a beast on the island) disappeared, my sense of liberation had become tinged with unease. And by the time the badly ill – and perhaps visionary – Simon confronts the severed and fly blown head of the sow, which has been stuck on a pole, I was in terror. ‘The half-shut eyes were dim with the infinite cynicism of adult life,’ Golding writes … That line resonated with me then, and continues to resonate all these years later…

By the time I reached the last seventy pages … I understood not only that some of the boys might die, but some would die. It was inevitable. I only hoped it wouldn’t be Ralph, with whom I identified so passionately that I was in a cold sweat as I turned the pages. No teacher needed to tell me that Ralph embodied the values of civilization and that Jack’s embrace of savagery and sacrifice represented the ease with which those values could be swept away; it was evident even to a child. Especially to a child, who had witnessed (and participated in) many acts of casual schoolyard bully-ragging…

If the novel is strictly about emotion and imagination … then analysis is swept away … I agree that ‘This blew me away’ is pretty much a non-starter when it comes to class discussion of a novel (or a short story, or a poem), but I would argue it’s still the beating heart of fiction … Nor does a visceral, emotional reaction to a novel preclude analysis. I finished the last half of ‘Lord of the Flies’ in a single afternoon, … not thinking. But I’ve been thinking about it ever since, for fifty years and more. …

What I keep coming back to is Golding saying, “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to write a story about some boys … showing how they would really behave.”

It was a good idea. A very good idea that produced a very good novel, one as exciting, relevant and thought-provoking now as it was when Golding published it in 1954.

I was a similar age to my son when I first read the book, aged fifteen. I think it was a set text for my English Literature ‘O’ Level in 1973. I remember it making a similar impact on me, and reading the second half rapidly. But then I had to analyse it, and I remember that I had been baptised the year before in my father’s Baptist Church. So I got the references to the Garden of Eden Myth and Golding’s belief in original sin. This theme was also a dominant element in another of Golding’s novels, The Spire, which I studied for ‘A’ Level two years later. It is based ‘loosely’ on the building of Salisbury Cathedral’s spire. In the story, Dean Jocelin has a vision: that God has chosen him to erect a great spire on his cathedral. His mason anxiously advises against it, for the old cathedral was built without foundations. Nevertheless, the spire rises octagon upon octagon, pinnacle by pinnacle, until the stone pillars shriek and the ground beneath it swims. Its shadow falls ever darker on the world below, and on Dean Jocelin in particular. These stories and themes have stayed with me over the last five decades in a way which much of the theology studied since has not. That is because Golding’s re-telling of the Eden Myth connects immediately with the emotions, challenging the intellect and convicting the soul.

Sources:

William Golding (1954, 2011), Lord of the Flies. London: Faber & Faber.

Robert C Walton (1970), A Source Book of the Bible for Teachers. London: SCM Press.     

      

 

Slemish, mountain in County Antrim where St Patrick is reputed to have shepherded as a slave (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Saint Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland.  He lived in ‘the dark ages’ of the fourth century, so there are conflicting accounts of his life and a great number of legends about him. It is claimed that he wrote two documents, The Confession and The Letter to Coroticus. The first gives an account of his life, and the other tells us something of his style, personality and methods in urging Christian subjects to stand up against pagan leaders. In today’s increasingly secular society, the latter takes on fresh meaning.

He was born about 389 A.D., the son of a small landowner from Banwen in post-Roman Glamorgan (Morgannwg in Welsh), who brought him up as a Christian. When he was sixteen he was captured by ‘pirates’, who took him to Ireland as a slave. He was a shepherd on the estate of a chieftain in County Antrim, in the north of Ireland. During the six years of his captivity he resolved to give his life to the service of the gospel. He escaped to Wicklow, to the south of Dublin, and boarded a ship engaged in the trade of wolf-dogs. He was put off on the coast of Gaul and became a monk in the monastery at Lerins. In those days, the western sea routes around Britain and France were the chief means of transport around the various Celtic territiories, since the overland routes were slow, difficult and treacherous, even where the Romans had left roads.

After returning to his home in Britain, he conceived the idea of a Christian mission to Ireland, describing how, in a dream he saw a man named ‘Victorious’ holding letters from Ireland, one of which he gave to Patrick to read. The words in the letter began with ‘The Voice of the Irish’ which called upon him ‘to come again and walk among us as before’. He first returned to Gaul, where he was ordained by Bishop Amator, and for fourteen years he prepared for his vocation as a missionary.

 

wicklow mountains (Photo credit: lalui)

He returned to Ireland in 432 and probably landed again in Wicklow and began his mission in the kingdom of Ulidea in East Ulster. He needed the protection of the tribal kings and clan chieftains and succeeded in converting one of them, Dichu, who gave him a site on which to establish a place of worship, a wooden barn, or ‘saball’ in Irish, which became known as ‘Saul’. The most powerful chief, the High King of Tara, had ruled that every fire in Ireland must be put out at Easter and relighted from a fire in his castle, those disobeying being put to death. When Patrick was brought before the King for deliberately lighting his own fire on a hill opposite the castle, he said that he had done so as a sign that Christ, who had risen from the dead, was the Light of the World. He was set free, which reveals not just the strength of his faith, but also the growing strength of the faithful Christians. He then travelled throughout the country, founding communities, including the church and monastery at Armagh. He died in A.D. 461, supposedly on March 17th,  and was probably buried at Saul.

 

Probably the most famous legend about him is his use of the shamrock to illustrate the doctrine of the Trinity, the mystery of the three-in-one. The shamrock thus became one of the national emblems of the Irish, the other being the harp (see the picture above). Perhaps the most significant legend, however, is that connecting Patrick with Joseph of Arimathea, which tells of Joseph visiting western Britain following the death of Jesus, bringing with him the Sangreal, or dish used at the Last Supper. This gave rise to the Arthurian legends of the Holy Grail. Joseph was said to have built a little chapel at Glastonbury, which was replaced by the Abbey, the ruins of which are a place of pilgrimage to this day. Patrick is said to have founded the monastic community there, at a time when the Tor would still have been part of the island of Afalon, easily reachable by ship from the western coasts of Britain and the eastern coasts of Ireland.

There is also a story from Glyn Rhosyn in Pembrokeshire that Patrick settled there, but was told by an angel, in a dream, to move on, since the place was being reserved for St David, who became the patron saint of ‘Y Cymru ‘, the Welsh. Another legend places him in the Celtic Kingdom of Strathclyde, at Dumbarton.

 

St Patrick Northern Ireland Flag (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The flag of St Patrick, a diagonal red cross on a white background, became part of the Union Flag when Ireland became part of the United Kingdom in 1801, joining the cross of St Andrew, for Scotland, and St George, for England. It remains on the flag to this day, although only Northern Ireland remains part of the United Kingdom. St Patrick’s Day is celebrated North and South of the border, and is a public holiday in both the Republic and ‘the Province’, which is appropriate, since there was no border in Patrick’s day and much of his ministry was conducted in the north of the island. The flag of St David is not (yet) part of the UK flag, nor, of course, is the Red Dragon (Y Ddraig Goch), the national emblem of ‘the Principality’. Patrick also has a hymn named after him:

Saint Patrick’s Breastplate

I bind unto myself today

The Power of God to hold and lead,

His eye to watch, His might to stay,

His ear to hearken to my need,

The wisdom of my God to teach,

His hand to guide, His shield to ward,

The word of God to give me speech,

His heavenly host to be my guard.

 

Statue of St. Patrick in Aughagower, County Mayo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The hymn is traditionally attributed to Patrick himself, and it certainly shows very clearly the blending of pagan mythology with Christian teaching in the early Celtic Church. It combines the functions of incantation, war-song and redal statement. The whole poem is given a tremendous force and unity by the notion of binding, so characteristic in Celtic art with its intricate knots and never-ending interlacing patterns, such as in the Book of Kells (see the picture above). The original Gaelic poem is known as ‘St Patrick’s Lorica’ . A ‘lorica’ was a spiritual coat or breastplate which not only charmed away disease or danger, but also secured a place in heaven for those who wore it day and night. The word became applied to spiritual poems which characteristically had three distinct parts: the invocation of the Trinity and the angels; the enumeration of various parts of the body to be protected; and a list of dangers from which immunity was being sought. The second of these elements is there in verse 8, where Christ’s presence in every part of the body is carefully invoked.

Legend has it that Patrick composed his lorica shortly after landing in Ireland on his mission, in 432, and to have used it in his defence before the pagan high king at Tara. Whether or not Patrick himself wrote the lorica, it is a supreme expression of the holiness and wholeness that marks Celtic Christianity, and which is summed up in another statement attributed to him:

Our God is the God of Heaven and Earth, of sea and river, sun and moon and stars, of the lofty mountain and lowly valley’

These words, and the words of the hymn itself, take on a new relevance for us, in our return to the ecological consciousness which Patrick himself epitomised in his ministry and teaching. The translation of Patrick’s lorica into the hymn was done by Cecil Frances Alexander (1818-95), the author of All Things Bright and Beautiful, Once in Royal David’s City and many other hymns, many especially written for children. It was written for St Patrick’s Day, 1889, set to the traditional Irish medley, St Patrick, by Stanford (1852-1924), with the eighth verse ‘Christ be with me’ sung to one of three other Irish melodies. It is also considered an appropriate hymn to be sung on Easter Eve, or Holy Saturday, associated in the early church with baptism, so it helps to direct our thoughts on this St Patrick’s Day towards the coming of Holy Week.

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