Poul Anderson, A Midsummer Tempest;
Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: A Misummer Night's Dream;
Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: The Tempest.
"C. S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces is a reinterpretation of the love story of Cupid and Psyche, in which he has treated the myth as freely as Shakespeare treated Holinshed."
-The Times, quoted inside the front cover flap of CS Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (London, 1979).
Poul Anderson's "Star of the Sea" is a fictionalization of the history of Veleda, a pagan prophetess. I was struck by parallels between Lewis' Psyche and Anderson's Veleda. Psyche is a myth whereas Veleda:
"'...bears a myth.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 467-640 AT 11, A.D. 49, p. 564.
Both attract a popular following. In Lewis' works, everything, even a narrative featuring Classical deities, points toward Christ/Maleldil/Aslan whereas, in "Star of the Sea," Veleda's preaching potentially initiates a divergent timeline in which a Northern feminine monotheism would have successfully resisted Christian missionaries.
12 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I am not so sure. If I recall STAR OF THE SEA correctly, Veleda made no attempt at supplanting the other Germanic pagan gods with her goddess. Or try to discourage worship of those gods.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But her movement was growing in that direction. Reread the dialogue that Everard and Floris have with Ulstrup.
Paul.
Yeah, the Nerthus figure was going to overshadow the others -- it wouldn't be -technically- monotheistic, but -effectively- so.
Kaor, to Both!
Granted, effectively at least quasi-monotheistic. But that "technically" by Stirling still makes me wonder how firmly monotheistic it was.
Ad astra! Sean
The main point of this post was a comparison between a work by Lewis and one by Anderson. I can, of course, agree to a more precise use of the term, "monotheism," which would not involve applying it to the system that was emerging from Veleda's preaching.
There are historical parallels for Veleda's revision of ancient Germanic paganism.
Eg., Zoroaster's reworking of ancient Iranian paganism.
Note how some of the deities of the ancient Iranian pantheon become devils in Zoroastrianism, and others more like "angels" of Ahura-Mazda.
Zoroastrianism is therefore "more or less" monotheistic. Well, technically dualistic, but there's only one 'good' deity. The universe is divided between Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman.
The Mosaic and Muslim deities each started out as a local tribal god before being promoted to supra-cosmic status.
Paul: true. Though they're different -generations- of that. And by the time Christianity arose, Judaism itself had (probably) been influenced by Zoroaastrianism.
Despite subsequent editing, the Old Testament still shows signs of Jehovah's evolution -- for example, the Mosaic injunction "you shall have no other Gods before me" doesn't deny the -reality- of other deities, it simply says that Moses' people shall focus exclusively on him.
Conversely, Shintoism (despite influences from Buddhism) maintains the animistic/shamanistic roots of what we think of as standard polytheism rather obviously.
So Omaterasu-Omikami and the kami of a local revered rock are different... but they're different types of the same general phenomenon, the "kami".
This is, I think, probably because Japan was more culturally isolated than most other major cultures, and none of its neighbors was monotheist.
Japan is fascinating as a modernized, industrialized country that remains pagan.
Paul: post-Pagan nowadays, perhaps, the way chunks of the West are post-Christian. That is, both are heavily influenced by the ancestral religion still.
You can tell the Japanese were never Christians to any extent. Their social reflexes are, even now, fairly different (often in subtle ways) from ours.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Mr. Stirling: I agree with your comments about Zoroastrianism, technically dualistic but effectively monotheistic, more so than whatever it was Veleda was preaching. And no Zoroastrian believes the evil god Ahriman should be worshiped!
I recall how, in THE EVER-LASTING MAN, after Judaism and Christianity, Chesterton had the most respect for Zoroastrianism, of all the non-Christian faiths.
Where I differ from you and Paul is that while YHWH may have been THOUGHT of as merely a tribal god by some of His earliest believers, that was simply God slowly and patiently revealing Himself to the Hebrews. It took centuries of effort by prophets, starting with Moses, for the Jews to understand that not only should no other gods be worshiped, those "gods" were not gods at all.
Psalm 82 is one example of how both older religious concepts can be found in the Old Testament and of how they were being purified.
Psalm 82 NEW AMERICAN BIBLE version
A Psalm of Asaph
God rises in the divine council,
gives judgment in the midst of the gods.
"How long will you judge unjustly
and favor the cause of the wicked? [Salah]
Defend the lowly and fatherless;
render justice to the afflicted and need;
Rescue the lowly and ;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.
The gods neither know nor understand,
wandering about in darkness,
and all the world's foundations shake.
I declare: "Gods though you be,
offspring of the Most High all of you,
Yet like any mortal you shall die;
like any prince you shall fall."
Arise, O God, judge the earth,
for yours are all the nations.
The annotator for Psalm 82 commented: "As in Ps 56, the pagan gods are seen as subordinate divine beings to whom Israel's God has delegated oversight of the foreign countries in the beginning (Dt 32, 8-9 LXX). Now God arises in the heavenly assembly (1) to rebuke the unjust "gods" (2-4), who are stripped of divine status and reduced in rank to mortals (5-7). They are accused of misruling the earth by not upholding the poor. A short prayer for universal justice concludes the psalm (8). In addition, the annotation for verse 5 says: "The gods are blind and unable to declare what is right. Their misrule shakes earth's foundations which God made firm in creation [some references to other psalms omitted]."
Given all this, it would not be hard to conclude only the true God, called "YHWH," before the Jews decided that Name was too sacred for common use, is the sole and only God of the universe. We see prophets like Elijah, Elisha, and the writing Prophets, beginning with Amos, fiercely and passionately upholding that revelation against those who would rather Israel compromise with the world.
Ad astra! Sean
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