Man and the sacred

“MASKS OF ETERNITY”

LESSON 3. The aim of the lesson is to teach you to explain to the learners abstract phenomena as a reflection of man's daily activities.

1. It is reasonable to suppose that man's first thinking was severely practical. Life has to be secure before it can be improved. Food, warmth, shelter from the weather, and a refuge from danger are the first goals of the mind. The world does not always adjust itself to man's needs. The hunting grounds turn out to be bare of game, the weather destroys crops, loved or needed people fall ill and die. In such frustrating circumstances it is natural to think and hope that what we cannot do for ourselves another can do for us. In its primitive beginnings religion must have been as narrowly practical as the rest of man's mental life. Even in its highest developments religion does not wholly lose this connection with instinctive needs. Men fear death, resent the injustices of earthly fortune, demand compensation for their sacrifices. To think of religion in this way is not to depreciate it or dismiss it as an illusion belonging to the youth of mankind. It was the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant - who combined great piety with great sophistication - who saw the doctrines of religion as an answer to the question, "What can I hope for?"

Choose one of the causes that you consider instrumental to the development of religion. Explain its importance in 2-3 sentences.

e.g., "It was fear that caused the development of religion, because man felt helpless in his struggle for survival, ... etc."

2. Primitive social life is permeated with sacredness. Even in everyday social life what is possible for one group in a society is often not permitted to another for religious reasons. One form of this arrangement is totemism. Among the Australian aborigines, for instance, different clans ally themselves with various animals and plants. They are totems. The members of each clan are forbidden to eat their totem species, except on ritual occasions. This practice both protects the species and promotes its fertility. Tribal people believe they are surrounded by unseen forces. These range from "mana" - the impersonal power that pervades all uncanny and dynamic things, as well as animals and persons - to spirits and gods. The idea of "mana" has close links with three features of the primitive outlook. First, "mana" is an aspect of belief in magic. Because "mana" is a hidden force, it can be manipulated, up to a point, in a positive or negative form. A man can use magic to endow things with "mana" to make them fertile or useful, or he may use amulets - objects endowed with "mana" to ward off the dangerous effects of malevolent powers and beings. Secondly, the awe that is aroused by the uncanny - by "mana" - is closely related to the experience of the numinous, an awareness of a divine presence. Thirdly, "mana" reinforces social custom and respect. Chiefs and magicians are hosts to "mana", and are therefore "sacred". Some actions, too, are so extremely potent and dangerous that they must be avoided at almost any cost – they are taboo.

1. Define the underlined terms for an audience of schoolchildren.

2. Retell the text adapting it to the vocabulary and understanding of 13-year-old Russian learners of English (to be done at home!!!).

3. There is no guarantee that prehistoric men had a single set of beliefs & practices in common. For example, the peoples of the Indian subcontinent have believed in reincarnation from earliest historical times, and their prehistoric ancestors may have done so, too; if so, they differed from prehistoric men in China, Egypt, and elsewhere, who practised ancestor worship. Some scholars, seeking a parallel with the evolutionary theory, have looked for a sequence of stages in man's religious development - from belief in mana as an impersonal, sacred force, through the cult of spirits pervading natural objects processes (animism), to belief in many fully personalised gods (polytheism) and culminating in belief in only one god (monotheism). The danger here is that one is tempted to fit the facts into a preconceived plan - a plan that, in effect, says, "this belief is more valuable or rational than that".

Others have tried to explain religion in terms of social needs and individual psychology. But all such theories remain incomplete because social needs and psychological pressures only partly explain why men have a sense of the sacred and why they recognise moral values. In this respect, religion is an aspect of man's creativity; it shows his power to go beyond the immediate circumstances & crises of his life. Whether this creativity is itself divinely inspired or simply a human trait is beside the point. One thing is certain. In the course of time, man's sense of the sacred has developed away from magical and polytheistic belief toward a variety of worldviews in which the quality of sacredness is identified with either a personal God (as in Christianity), or an Absolute (as in some forms of Hinduism and Buddhism), or the human race itself (as in humanism).

a) What are the main differences between western and oriental religions? (Power of Myth. “The Message of the Myth” and “Masks of Eternity”)

b) Explain Joseph Campbell’s statement “I’m radiating God to you, and you are to me.”

c) What do worldview and religion have in common? How does the first reflect the second? How does the second depend upon the first?

4. What can the image of the circle symbolise? What other universal symbols can you think of? How are they interpreted in different religions?

5. What notions does Joseph Campbell define and dwell upon in the program “Masks of Eternity”? Explain their essence and say how they concern your own life.

6. Do you believe that there are more developed religions and more primitive ones? Can one type of religion be regarded as a “ring in the ladder” to a more sophisticated one?

7. Interpret the following verse:

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky.

So was it when my life began,

So is it now I am a man.

So be it when I shall grow old -

Or let me die!

The child is father of the man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

(H.Wordsworth)