Religions and myth

The core of religion

Relation between myth and religion

Most westerners are accustomed to think that a religion is:

a set of beliefs,

a written revelation,

a list of "do"s and "do not"s enforced by a hierarchical authority,

and that religion has little to do with myth, which is supposed to be only a concocted story, and usually disposed of by "beliefs of retarded people".

A real "religion" is established otherwise. Initially, a medium creates a relationship with the beyond, or rather with those forces or entities of the beyond he can relate to, incorporate, and make available to the local group. A medium is one who is able to void himself of his personal psyche to let a foreign one acts his/her body or mind. Some mediums use this capacity as a super-transference tool to heal people. Others use it to acquire temporarily psychic-like forms of the collective consciousness and make them act or talk for cure, orientation, and initiation[1]. Those forms or forces invade his mind with feelings, words, or images (which amounts to the same, the senses used vary from medium to medium), act his body and/or talk through his mouth. They subsequently may be interpreted as a source of inspiration (extraneous material insuflated in the medium's mind), "spirits" (spiritual world, spirituality), "gods" (possession), ecstasy (out-of-self experiences), mysticism (visions and sensations of the otherworld), oracle (orientation from the divinity), "helpers" or "healers" (life force inducing modifications into the recipient).

When the medium is of high or exceptional quality, the field he radiates when in the mediumnic state are quite strong and the influence and benefit for the group is large. The latter has a tendency to spread by hearsay beyond the local group to distant people. It is thus that a religion is born: it begins with the creation of a link with the beyond through a medium, it irradiates his close followers, and slowly spreads to the close community which may beneficiates from him less directly. Later, if the medium is of high power, the concerned may reach beyond frontiers.

Folks participating in those gatherings are thus confronted to the mystery of mediumnity, of the mystery of the beyond and its entities or forces, and that part of the world which is usually invisible and unattainable, and they may benefit of it. The medium is therefore the door through which the mystery of the world can be approached.

Furthermore, when the medium speaks, or rather when the beyond speaks through him, much material from the collective unconscious comes through, along with information about the functioning of man and the world at large. This material when exposed is then rich of collective unconscious contents. This is the very mechanism of art: art displays the influence of "god" on man and evidences features of the beyond together with personal and collective unconscious material. Depending on the level of mediumship of the intermediary, the collective unconscious or the the spiritual world may appear more or les clearly, interspaced with traces of personal and social features. This is how the myth is constructed: from many isolated revelations through mediumship. That is actually from gnostic mechanisms.

Instituted religions

People having only heard of the mediumnic events do not have the experience of proximity and change of consciousness associated with those gatherings. They take only what they have heard from the reporters, more or less distorted, and with little meaning when out of the original context (the relation between experience and words is broken). This is how dogmas appear. Dogma is the decontextualised copy of those exceptional events meaningful only to those participating, and therefore not really understandable.

Furthermore, the political mind, always present in a people, will soon perceive the advantages of using those dogmas for constraining the people, when not the mass as we see today. Monotheists myths will enforce the ideology of absolute power, hell myths will terrorise, redemption myths will postpone the reward of life for a dubious afterwards. Conversely, the people will project its hopes and dreams on the mythic screen and feed the political dogmas with psychological tones, as for example in the messianic myths.

The occidental myth is shown by sociologists to justify the ruling power by originating it from some supernatural nature, therefore not to be discussed. Monotheists "myths" are supposedly given by God, not to be argued with, and are compulsory models for kingdoms and centralised democracies. It is shown by sociopsychologists to be the materialization at the social level of the desire for domination and absolute power of the individuals multiplied by the effet of the collective mutual transference. Here we have the birth of a church, not a real religion. The church or instituted religion is a set of invented dogmas justifying and enforcing a power on the people. Conversely to a real mediumnic religion, it is not for the benefit of the people but for their detriment and benefit of the rulers.

Monotheism versus polytheism

Is is shown in a variety of works how monotheism is linked with the rise of empires and the justification of absolute monarchs predestined by an absolute out-of-reach and indisputable god. Also, the opposition mono- poly-theism has been widely used politically to discriminate and inferiorize a great number of people and races, unfortunately often more really religious than their oppressors. We shall show that both terms are without real meaning and are used mainly to confuse, reduce, and boost the superiority of the narrator. We have to return to the mediumnic experience to understand what is the case.

The actuality of the mediumnic experience is that one can only incorporate psychic-like forms of the collective consciousness which are close enough to the human realm. Usually, a medium is able to make manifest several of those entities, in one or another manner. Therefore, most religious settings are ridden by a number of forces, irradiating, healing through various means, or orientating through speech. They may be called entities, spirits, gods, divinities, helpers, guides, etc. but they are essentially similar psychic patterns. Western observers, by virtue of their external (eye witness only) and not experiential approach, have interpreted their "observations" by words such as animism, paganism, polytheism, and cults, which distort the truth.

Now, all mediums and their followers know pretty well that other forces exist in the universe, stronger or more organised that the customary ones attainable by trance states, forces they cannot incorporate or link to on the ground that they are much stronger than what the human body or mind can reach or contain. They thus know from the direct experience of trance that beyond all these forces, reachable and unreachable, there is a single or dual principle which encompasses all those and feed them. This upper principle, amounting always to the conjunction of life and order (feminine and masculine, breath and law, etc.) is sometimes named sometimes not, or only by allegory. The world is then experienced as an emanation of higher principles acting through lesser forces or forms related together, of which we can apprehend only those close enough to our human form, either the less complex animal-like or the more complex wise-like or divinity-like forms, but those which are not too far from our human bodily capacities and senses. It is only the discriminative look of westerners on this marvelous assembly of hierarchical forces which created the constructs "polytheism" or "monotheism" which never were in the mind of the real religion followers in the first place.

It is not the experiencer of the trance phenomenon which believes, it is his observer.

Occidental myth

In the page myth and structure, we have shown how the current patriarchal paradigm bothways identifies with our collective psyche and social traits, and displays in its myth the patterns of how we structuralise, how are built our pathologies, and what is the process to recover from them. We refer the reader to this page for further reading.