Analogismoi Seven: Dragons, Death and Heroes

Earlier this week we spoke about the pattern that God sets at the beginning of time in the opening lines of Genesis. I want to spend a little more time talking about this pattern as it is absolutely crucial going forward.

The first two lines of Genesis are

In the Beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. (Gen. 1:1-2)

In the post on the Main Project this week we broke down the language and explained how the deep, tehom, and its characteristic formlessness and void (tohu va-bohu) were a call back to an earlier Babylonian creation myth presented in the earliest known written story, the Enuma Elis. Genesis, as well as the earlier source material, shows God facing what is, for all intents and purposes, a dragon and creating habitable order out of it using the word.

Whether or not you have seen it in the light of the first lines of Genesis, you have seen this pattern repeated constantly. Everything is fine. Chaos emerges. A hero arises who willingly confronts the chaos. With courage and

truthful articulation the hero confronts and defeats chaos. The hero, having defeated chaos establishes an ordered world. By overcoming the chaos and establishing a new and healthy order for people to live in he proves himself as a suitable partner for reproduction. This is the pattern man acted out on the Levant when he stumbled away from the tree, into the dark and returned with a fresh kill or, better yet, knowledge of where food was to be found in plenty. He revivifies the community by enlarging the known area to encompass and incorporate a new boundary which now contains, instead of chaotic potential, resources which save the community. By doing this he reaches the top of the authority hierarchy and in doing so nearly assures the propagation of his genetic makeup. After acting it out it was drawn on cave walls. It was told as stories. It was written in the Enuma Elis as the battle between Marduk and Tiamat. It makes its way to Genesis where God overcomes the void and primes the universe for an ordered creation. It is the Ghostbusters destroying the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man returning order to New York City where a parade is thrown and Dana Barrett, now rescued, falls in love with Peter and has his child. It is the foundational activity of man which then became the foundational representation by man which became the foundational story man shared. It is the low resolution version of just about every story mankind has ever told.

Unless you believe that stories are just merely entertainment, and I would argue that that is a painfully insufficient

way to see stories — especially ones that are based on a pattern as old as time itself, its impossible not to notice that there is something in these stories, something to this pattern which is eternal and real.  Further, you will see this pattern replicate in your own life.

So who is the dragon of chaos? Who is Tiamat? What is the deep which is without form and void? It is everything and anything that presents itself into a stable world and destabilizes it. It is the exile from paradise.

The human mind is a miraculous thing. Through the process of habituation as well as through procedural memory we are able to ignore most of the world. The floor we have walked across a million times isn’t something we actively are concerned about as we walk over it again. Its stability, through habituation and procedural memory, is assumed and thus ignored. If we had to pay attention to the infinite amount of facts presented at every moment we would not be able to do or think anything. Our ability to ignore that which is stable is as much a precondition to consciousness as anything.

So much of life is like this. We get in our car and start it. It starts. That is an assumption, it isn’t like we marvel at the technology every single time. Background humming, where our bath towel is when we have soap in our eyes, our relationships with our friends, our family and our lovers. All of it, with time, becomes habituated and ignored as stable so that our more active parts of the brain can deal with other issues. We do not need to actively consider whether or not letting go of a rock will result in it falling.

The dragon of chaos appears when we start our car and nothing happens, when people we know well behave in altogether mysterious ways, when you think you are doing fine at work and you get fired. You have a world which you participated in creating and which is stable every day. On occasion that stability is threatened. When the stability of your world is threatened you are faced with choices. Like Harry Potter and the Basilisk, like Perseus and Medusa, like any of the myths of petrification, when the structure of the world is threatened you freeze. Then what?

In every story we have the answer is the same. When the dragon appears the mode of being the hero adopts is to voluntarily confront the dragon forthrightly, attentively and honestly which leads to victory at which point the hero generously shares the dragon’s treasure, restores order to the city and is seen as viable for reproduction from the valued feminine. This is why we admire the hero. Do not take mankind’s innate proclivity for admiration for granted. There is a reason we admire people who participate in this pattern and it is as ancient as humanity itself.

So if all of the aberrations to stability are dragons, what is the meta-dragon. What is the final boss. The ultimate dragon of which all other dragons are merely an image of, a representation of? The biblical stories tell us that the cataclysm at the end of paradise, the fall, leads to the knowledge of mortality. Death is the ultimate dragon for humans. The question of what we are supposed to do about death is the principle question of mankind and has been since the beginning of time. The answer, in its lowest resolution form, is to act like God at the beginning of time. To confront the chaos with truth and overcome it and create a habitable order. That pattern is refined with the life, ministry and death of Christ.

Christ’s story is what Jung would call an archetype. It is the absolute limit. It is the worst possible thing to happen to the least deserving person. It is being betrayed by your own people whom you are there to help. Turned over to a foreign occupier to be tortured and then murdered in the cruelest way possible. It comes about through betrayal by one of your closest friends. It happens in front of your mother and is cheered by those who you championed. All of this despite being innocent and having both your betrayers and your condemners know you are innocent. It is the absolute limit of the story of bad things happening to people who least deserve it condensed into the life of Jesus.

Christ, like Marduk and like God at the beginning of time, has an infinite panoply of tools at his disposal to deal with this dragon. The tools he choses are truthful articulation and courage — not power, not dominance, not even wisdom. Because of this he triumphs over death, returns to paradise, ends the tyranny, destroys the hypocrisy of his people and creates a new world. He is the ultimate triumphant hero as his dragon is the ultimate dragon of mankind, death, and using the pattern set by God at the beginning of time he conquers it and shares its treasure with the world.

This is why the pattern, in its lowest resolution form at the start of Genesis, is so important for us to spend time on. We will all fight a myriad of dragons. Each of them will present a different level of difficulty. It may be a break up or it may be a firing or it may be stickup or it may be tying your tie in the morning and having it come out all wrong. It could be as benign as your check engine light or as serious as a heart attack. This is why the low resolution version is right at the start of our story. From here on in, the biblical library — written by dozens of people, edited by dozens of groups of other people all over a vast stretch of time — will be showing us this pattern in action, refined, at higher resolutions all the way through to the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.