Analogismoi One: Another Note On Shepherds

“I took you from the pasture and from your work as a shepherd to make you leader of my people Israel.”
Samuel 7:8

In the ancient world, as people began to psychologically unify, the image of the shepherd is ubiquitous. For the Zoroastrians it was Mithra in the Avestan texts. In the Gilgamesh, Enkidu is tempered by shepherding. In the first century Celtic world shepherds were becoming common folk legends in The Cattle Raid of Cooley. In the Taoist literature, specifically the Zhuangzi from the third century BC, shepherds are used in parables about detachment and in the ancient Chinese folktales later codified in texts like Classic of Poetry (Shijing) we get the cowherd Niulang who falls in love with a celestial weaver girl named Zhinu.

Meanwhile, in ancient India’s Hindu tradition (Mahabharata, Bhagavata Purana, 4th Century AD) Krishna, an incarnation of Vishnu, is raised among the cowherds in Vrindavan while, in the Vedic texts, shepherds appear in hymns and as the god of death.

The mythical twin founders of Rome, Remus and Romulus, were raised by the shepherds Faustus and Cacus and the fire-breathing giant from Virgil’s Aeneid is seen as the dark side of the shepherd. Before Rome, the Greek myths and literature are filled with shepherds. Paris of Troy from the Homeric tradition is raised as a shepherd after being abandoned at birth. Oedipus, in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, c. 4th century BC, is rescued by a Corinthian shepherd after being abandoned.

In Homer’s Odyssey from the 8th Century BC (with a much older oral tradition behind it), the cyclops Polyphemus is a shepherd and his interaction with Odysseus shows the two fold nature of the gentle and monstrous in the shepherd myth.

Endymion the shepherd, in the Greek tradition, is beloved of Selene the moon goddess while Daphnis (Theocritean Idylls, c. 3rd Century BC) is a legendary shepherd from Sicily and is credited with the invention of pastoral song. The messenger god Hermes (Homeric Myth of Hermes, 6th Century BC) is educated largely by shepherds and in many of the old myths the god Apollo is a shepherd who serves King Admetus, sometimes as a punishment and sometimes as a duty, always reflecting his role as a protector of flocks (e.g., Euripides’ Alcestis 5th Century BC).

In the ancient Hebrew texts which comprise the biblical library we see many shepherds in prominent positions. Adam and Able are both shepherds. Abraham, father of nations, was a shepherd as was his son Issac and Issac’s son Jacob passing the divine covenant and birthright through the Abrahamic line of shepherds. The blessing of Jacob, given to his fourth son Joseph, maintains the continuity of shepherds from Abraham as Joseph was a tender of flocks before his incarceration and later rise to power and prominence in Egypt before his father passed his blessing to onto him.

Moses was a shepherd for Jethro in Midian after his exile from Egypt when he saw the burning bush and David, the young shepherd boy anointed by Samuel, who defeats the giant Goliath, became God’s chosen to lead the

people of Israel. Amos the prophet was a shepherd whose prophecy emphasizes humility and divine selection and the Old Testament theme of “The Good Shepherd” (Psalms, Ezekiel, etc.) would later be fulfilled in the gospels where Jesus reveals himself as the good shepherd.

Prior to the Old Testament, the Egyptian myths are filled with shepherds as well. The god Osiris is linked to the shepherd imagery. He nurtures the land like a flock and his role in The Contendings of Horus and Seth reinforces the life-sustaining and protective roles of the shepherd. Even before this, in the Middle Kingdom, The Tale of Sinuhe (c. 1900 BC) focuses heavily on the importance of shepherds as they symbolize hospitality, simplicity and offer Sinhue nourishments when he is in foreign lands.

Even before the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, the god Dumuzi (Tammuz) in the Sumerian mythology, is a god associated with fertility and is often depicted as a shepherd. In The Descent of Inanna (3rd century BC), he is Inanna’s husband, a shepherd-king whose death and resurrection symbolize the seasonal cycles.

The near ubiquity of shepherds in the ancient world in mythology, theology and folklore from the time of the Sumerians and Babylonians through the time of the New Testament is of the utmost importance. The casual thinkers and rational atheists seem to want to chalk this up to something like shepherd being a good metaphor as it was one of the few professions of the day and the universality of it having to do with early people traveling and sharing their cultures.

Famous atheists like Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great) talk about the psychological need to posit a protective father figure, an idea Dawkins took from Freud and which Jung tears apart as shallow, or the ancient authors looking for justification for social control over a flock respectively. Sam Harris, the neuroscientist author of The End of Faith emphasizes psychological and social functions of religious imagery and views the shepherd motif as a way to pass along a trust in authority.

Daniel Dennett, slightly less superficial than his colleagues in his thinking, argues, in his his  book Breaking the Spell, that shepherd images from Dumuzi to David are a meme which becomes popular due to its blending of the lowly status of the shepherd and the authority of control over a flock making it ideal for moral instruction. This is what Dennet calls a “sticky” cultural idea which persists because it’s “easy to transmit and hard to forget.” Not withstanding Dennet’s incorrect identification of an effect as a cause he appears, at least, to be taking the question seriously.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think we can do a lot better than the ideas of the secular and scientific atheists who clearly are not willing or able to truly engage in the bigger questions with any real seriousness. People like Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris as well as ones like Dennet who, despite their rigorous scientific training, appear to bring the conclusion with them to the question.  They forced themselves into a corner where they must discard the material in order to make their conclusions. I do not wish to belabor the point, I will just say that I find these explanations more than unsatisfying but boring and trite.

Let’s go back to the basics about ancient shepherding and see if we can’t do better. The first thing to know about shepherds is that they are generally younger sons (younger sons being an important biblical motif in and of itself. Able, Seth, Abraham, Issac, Jacob, Joseph, Benjamin, Ephraim, Moses, David, Solomon and Timothy are all younger sons and one can consider Jesus as the younger son of God with Adam being the first born). In the Old Testament, God’s favoritism towards younger sons would have been conspicuous to the late Bronze Age reader and shows a biblical insistence on the constant reinvigoration of the social order.

So what is with all the younger sons becoming shepherds?

In the ancient world inheritance was primogeniture. The reason for this was simple. Let’s say a man has enough land and wealth to comfortably raise a family. If he has five sons and they each have five sons it will take two generations to reduce that which is passed on to roughly the size of a studio apartment. As such, it was understood that the eldest son would inherit that which belonged to the father in its entirety. Because he would hold land, he would be more inclined to till the land rather than tend to the flocks. Shepherds moved their flocks from place to place while first born inheritors maintained a homestead.

This may seem generally unfair, but if you have been laboring under the misconception that the ancient world was fair and that what their gods were up to was a fair distribution of fate, I would suggest you immediately disabuse yourself of that notion — both for the ancient and modern world.

The older son was given the favoritism of the birthright which meant he had a vested interest in the maintenance of the social order. The younger son, who was not so fortunate, needed to create a life for himself. You can think of this as the eternal struggle between those who wish to hold on to the past and those who wish to innovate the future. Innovation offends the older son as the innovation is a change to the social structure which has blessed him just as the conservation of the old order offends the younger son as it was the older order which bestowed its blessings on someone else.

This struggle between the younger and older sons is something played out in every religion and myth for the entirety of recoded history and which Jung calls the ‘hostile brother motif.’ Jung explained it as an archetypal conflict pattern where two opposing forces or figures, often within one’s own psyche, are in constant struggle. Examples of the hostile brother motif are everywhere: Batman and the Joker, Superman and Lex Luthor, Cain and Able, Thor and Loki, Duane and Greg Allman.

Whether if it was younger son Marduk defeating Tiamat and creating the world with her remains or Osiris, the king of the Egyptian gods, becoming old and willfully blind and his brother Seth stealing his crown or if it is Moses, forced into exile as a shepherd and returning to his older brother Aaron who is still a slave of Egypt to free the people of Israel, this motif is constant.

If you strip away the religious connotation and just look at it anthropologically it makes sense all on its own. The older, established brother tries to hold onto the conservative order of the world which has blessed and enslaved him while the younger son with no birthright of his own seeks to reinvigorate the world in such a way that he creates something new. The conservative and natal forces working together in harmony is something akin to “walking with God.”

In the final analysis, too much reluctance and refusal to change on the part of the older son/monarch leads to tyranny. By the same token, too much disregard for tradition and insistence on progress untethered to custom leads to anarchy. You can think of this in terms of the Exodus story (or in our modern cultural debates). The promised land exists, but when one escapes the tyranny they escape into the anarchy of the desert not into the promised land. The promise land needs to be strived for, it is not merely a consequence of leaving tyranny. It is in harmony between the two that paradise is found.

It is of importance to note that the word paradise, from the Greek paradeisos (Gr.παράδεισος) is adapted from the ancient Persian pairidaeza (I do not know the ancient Persian characters) which translates to “enclosed garden.” The walls of the enclosure being culture and the garden being nature, each being tempered by the other and finding their balance rather than one side becoming pathelogical. This is paradise. Keep this in mind especially as we get to the biblical stories in both Old and New Testament. The ancient biblical authors knew what paradise meant, we should too.

So what is going on here?

We see in the image of the shepherd the notion of bringing the multiplicity of the various sheep into the unity of the flock. We see in the image of the shepherd, dispossessed by the authoritarianism of tradition, the person who comes forth and by his will creates a new world. This image begins cropping up in myths, religion, philosophy, drama and art during the six thousand year period between the Mesopotamian Empire and the first century Gospels.

In the fourteen thousand years from the last ice age to the first century we see the move from individuals to families to tribes to kingdoms to empires. We see in literature the stories which are just tales of deeds becoming the stories of the minds of the people acting. We see in multiple religions the concept of the gods ceasing to just be local nature deities, but forming a divine hierarchy with a king of the gods at its pinnacle. We see the multitude of polytheism becoming the unity of monotheism. We see city states coming together as nations. We see rational philosophy turning its focus on a single underlying principle of the universe. In philosophy, poetry, drama, art, myths and theology as well as in the very nature of societies going from a plurality to a unity. We see this on all of these different levels occurring simultaneously in a world where the image of the shepherd is finding its way into every aspect of life.

We are fortunate in that we have such a large span of time as an experimental sandbox to study and analyze. In every aspect of life, from the kings to the poets, from the craftsmen to the priests, from the soldiers to the farmers and everyone in-between we see multiplicities coming together as unities and, through this evolutionary stage the motif of note is the shepherd…the one who takes many sheep and makes a single flock.

You may think that it is sheep that are a precondition for a flock. It is a sensible enough idea. After all, you can’t have a flock without sheep. But the world is waking up (removing the scales from its eyes) and understanding that sheep have always been around but it is not until the shepherd that we have flocks. A simple group of sheep is no more a flock than a group of people constitutes an empire.

A shepherd is required.

The divine shepherd was and remains the projected image of what is happening on the individual, familial and social levels simultaneously reflected in art and philosophy. The divine shepherd remains the projected image of that which unifies. Unity, wholeness and oneness are taking shape in our cultural artifacts as well as on a personal level for people — a unity and wholeness which has once again been fractured and we are seeing a collapse in terms of what people today are calling a “crisis of meaning” but what is, in actuality, the current epistemological epoch’s absolute reliance on scientism as the sole valid frame of reference contradicting their native cognitive framework which is not in the equation, but in the narrative.

The shepherd unified society through narrative. The scientific revolution dispensed with that shepherd and now, five hundred years later, the flock is falling apart. The sheep, once unified both psychologically and socially through subordination to the shepherd, after having celebrated their freedom in the wilderness, have found themselves without purpose.

This is the image of the shepherd. The shepherd is the arche. The shepherd is the logos. If this project has a protagonist, like so many other projects over the last ten thousand years or so, that protagonist is the shepherd. The uninspired dead views of the rationalist which glances over that which is most significant so that the world can fit his formula can no longer be taken seriously as a standalone principle.

The cosmic unifying force that we represent as a shepherd is an active force and our view from the parapet of history makes his importance and impact clear to any who have eyes to see. The only way that Dawkins, Harris and company make any sense is if you are willing to say everyone in the world was a moron until 17th century. For the purposes of the project at hand, let’s not go with that assumption.