The name of this new myth, the myth that has gripped the imagination of Europe and Yankeedom over the last 300 years, is "progress". Unlike people in societies that accepted myths, the Jews, Christians and the European intelligencia would see mythic narratives as nothing but illusions. but prosaics imagine themselves free from the myth and creatures of prosaic facts. However, the idea of superceding myth for history was part of another myth, the myth of progress. According to Greer, (162) progress came from two events, staggering, but temporary:
- European people discovered three continents previously unknown to them - North America, South America, and Australia. These continents were subjected to ruthless economic exploitation.
- Deposits of coal and oil buried withing the earth in the prehistoric past were also discovered and exploited.
Greer calls the result the "Age of Exuberance" - a boom that lasted 300 years. Today all the factors that gave rise to this age of exuberance are waning or gone. If you are one of those people who deny this you will feel the power as a living myth in your very denial of it. In fact, the extent to which myth is conscious in the minds of the West's allegoricalinterpretations of myths are offered. The problem with allegories is they tend to assume that it's the human dimension that is primary, not the whole natural world.
Polytheist myths do not suffer from such limitations. These myths are wiser and much closer to the cycles of history. First there is triumphant success, then overweening pride and folly, followed by a humiliating defeat. These myths are very common to human social and individual lives. If we use them we face the world with a wider range of interpretation patterns than those raised only on the myth of progress.
In the pagan hermeneutics of myth, according to Greer, it could be said that ecology provides he scientific, experimental, and quantitative dimension of pagan myth. Pagan myth can be said to provide the narrative, spiritual and humanistic dimension of ecology
Time and eschatology
For monotheists, the evidence supporting eschatological prophesy consists of visionary experience of guided by accepted authority such as seers and prophets and followed by passages of sacred writings. For monotheist perennialists, attempts to reconcile different prophesies with a lowest common denominator leaves it with super-thin universals.
The apocalyptic claims of monotheists presuppose that one God is able to cause spectacular violations of natural law. For example, the authors of Genesis mistakenly turned a local event in West Asia and Europe into a global catastrophe (the Flood).
For polytheists, matters are quite different. Greer says in Greece:
"The word "eschatology" means last or furthest. In Greece the "eschattai" were areas near the borders of each city-state, regions of mountain, forest, seacoast where culture gave way to nature and Pan, the goat god of herding folk and hunters and was a much closer presence than the gods of Olympus" (178)
In the pagan myth of Ragnarà ¶k is the Old Norse twilight of the gods. Ragnarà ¶k is not the end of everything. In Irish texts like Lebor Gabala, the book of invasions traces the world through a succession of ages, each ruled by its own gods, which came to power at one age, then are replaced by new gods in the next. Remove Ragnarà ¶k from Old Norse mythology and it looses some of its best literature and it takes away hope in adversity.
Likewise In Greece, Hesiod tells us of 3 generations of gods:
- Primal gods ruled by Ouranos
- Titan gods ruling by Kronos
- Olympian gods ruled by Zeus
Monotheists have unrealistic miracles combined with apocalyptic endings at the end of time. Polytheists claim, following Stephen Jay Gould, that besides gradual change there is punctuated equilibrium where there are qualitative leaps which explain disasters. For polytheists there is no beginning or end to nature. After a disaster there is a new cycle in which there is a new configuration of gods and goddesses.
Conclusion
To review, monotheism is a religion which consists at the extremes ends of fundamentalism on the conservative side and perennialism on the liberal side. Since few are perennialists outside of intellectual circles, I will concentrate on the more popular form of monotheism. Monotheists are people who are less likely to take personal and social responsibility for the world we actually live in. Instead, they project an infantile picture of an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving God who lives in a far-away place but who benevolently will take care of everything. Nevertheless, This God barks out orders and demands worship and obedience. In reaction, humans offer appeasement and renunciation of the senses. Nature is not a closed, self-regulating system, but a means to an end: to know God in a transcendental world in the hereafter, in exchange for being taken care of in this one.
In his extreme claims about his God the monotheist gets trapped by atheists who point out contradictions based on known science. This includes the existence of evil, an afterlife, strong miracles, and apocalyptic endings. Further, insistence on a single God who rules everywhere for all time is a kind of religious imperialism, which runs roughshod over the variety of religions and the varieties of religious experience that actually exist in this world.
Polytheism also consists of various types. "Hard polytheists" are of those who believe in the ontological existence of goddesses and gods. Then there are soft polytheists who believe the deities are socio-historicalstructures which are the product of human societies. Lastly, there are Jungians who believe the gods and goddesses are psychological inventions of human beings, a collective unconscious which, when put to use, will create a more structured, hopeful life.
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