Joining the End to the Beginning (3/5)

An African (Ashanti) myth records that God separated himself from Mankind after an old woman carelessly injured him [wound motif] with her pestle. In a futile attempt to reunite heaven and earth, the old woman gathered together all her children, and stacking large numbers of mortars, one on top of another, constructed a tall tower.

Only a single mortar was needed to bridge the gap between heaven and earth, but because there were none left, the old woman ordered that the bottommost mortar should be removed and placed at the top. Of course, the tower collapsed and many people lost their lives.

Cernunnos’ Path: Reuniting heaven and earth

First off, the myth bears a resemblance to the Tower of Babel story as found in the book of Genesis. According to the Biblical version, Yahweh came down to put an end to the earthbound dream of a unified humanity and it’s collective desire to reach heavenward: “Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth” (Gen 11:4).

The Babel myth contains many elements comparable to various cosmogonic destruction-creation myths. Rather than the destruction of the tower (That can be understood as a cosmic centre/axis-mundi.), we have the confusion of speech from one primordial language into many languages, mirroring the creation motif of the one that becomes many. In the African myth the tower is a cosmic manifestation that crashes into chaos. And again, of the one (tower) becoming the cosmic many (like the serpent of rebirth shedding its skin of many scales), symbolized by the individual mortars used in it’s doomed construction.

It seems to me that the attempt of unifying God and Humankind, as illustrated in both Biblical and African myths, is doomed to failure, without the aid of the sacred-divine force. Lacking this integral spiritual insight, the old woman and her children, here experiencing a divine divorce, attempt to reach the High God’s realm solely through human effort. The foundational mortar is displaced and transferred to the top (joining the end to the beginning), but without the cohesive force of the sacred inherent in the current cosmic manifestation, the project is doomed to forever fail.

This problem of death, I believe, is further illustrated by Alcmaeon of Croton’s enigmatic saying that;

Men die because they cannot join the end to the beginning.

Alcmaeon of Croton frag.2DK

We find the same basic problem (and the solution) expressed in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, written sometime before the third century A.D.:

The disciples said to Jesus “tell us how our end will come to pass.” and Jesus said, “Then have you laid bare the beginning, so that you are seeking the end? For the end will be where the beginning is. Blessed is the person who stands at rest in the beginning. And that person will be acquainted with the end and will not taste death.”

Gospel of Thomas 18

Here, Jesus is directing his disciples minds towards Eden: the otherworldly realm of the divine presence that transcends and unites the comic opposites, binding and sustaining the universe, through which the sacred principle flows. The divine gift or ambrosial boon/s that can be experienced here and now. Awareness of the divine cosmos and that the divine dwells within, through myth, symbol and the teaching of divine truths can arise that while we cosmically exist in a state of paradoxical union and division with the divine, the remedy is surely the realization that the “the kingdom is within you and it is outside you” (Gospel of Thomas 3).