The Crucifix and the Stone — The Cicatrix and the Stone — Part Two

I ended last week’s blog with the self-coined term “religious neoteny”.

Neoteny is the retention of juvenile characteristics in an adult animal. Strictly speaking this only refers to physiological development, but I find the imaginative combination of neoteny with “religion” or “culture” informative. It implies that, as adults, our religious or cultural views are adolescent in nature; not yet fully mature or wise.

Fundamentalists — whether Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or New Age cults — take story telling literally and, therefore, ruin the intention of the myth maker.

Not only ruin, but prevent us from unifying the advances of science with the sacredness and wonderment of all life.

Twice as old as the Biblical story of the creation of Adam and Eve, the carving of the Goddess of Laussel dates from 22,000–18,000 BC. This was in the Palaeolithic age when our ancestors worshiped her as the source of life and where the cave “represented” the womb of the Mother Goddess.

“The Palaeolithic cave seems to be the most sacred place, the sanctuary of the Goddess and the source of her regenerative power. Entering one of these caves is like making a journey into another world, one which is “inside” the body of the goddess. To those who would have lived in a sacred world, the actual hollowed shape would have symbolized her all-containing womb, which brought forth the living and took back the dead. The cave as the place of transformation was the binding link between the past and future of the men and women who lived in the forefront of it and held their religious rites deep in its interior sanctuary. Inside the cave were placed the stones that represented the souls of the dead who would be reborn from her womb.”

Baring and Cashford, ‘The Myth of the Goddess’, p. 18.

Jesus was symbolically “re-born” from the cave; the stone removed from the entrance.

If we want “literal”, it is only from the womb of the human female that we have all entered this world. This would also include the radical social activist Jesus who, as an unfertilized egg in Mary, was fertilized by Joseph.

Above, Leonardo da Vinci drew the inner child. Below, the last half of a poem by Billy Collins speaks clearly about understanding our lineage and temporary place in the long evolutionary cyclical path that goes from birth to death to birth to death, ad infinitum.

“And while I am at it,
thanks to everyone who happened to die
on the same day that I was born.

Thank you for stepping aside to make room for me,
for giving up your seat,
getting out of the way, to be blunt.

I waited until almost midnight
on that day in March before I appeared,
all slimy and squinting, in order to leave time

for enough of the living
to drive off a bridge or collapse in a hallway
so that I could enter without causing a stir.

So I am writing now to thank everyone
who drifted off that day
like smoke from a row of blown-out-candles —
for giving up your only flame.

One day, I will follow your example
and step politely out of the path
of an oncoming infant, but not right now

with the subtropical sun warming this page
and the wind stirring the fronds of the palmettos,

and me about to begin another note
on my very best stationery
to the ones who are making room today

for the daily host of babies,
descending like bees with their wings and stingers,
ready to get busy with all their earthly joys and tasks.

Billy Collins, from “Thank-You Notes”

The intention of myth is to take the stories of the human race and dream them onwards. According to Jung, our role today is “to dream the dream onwards and give it a modern dress”.

— continued next week