There are as many gods as there are accounts of divine lives. But they all have one thing in common – childhood.
The God of monotheistic traditions, being absolute and infinite, has no biography. This God has no childhood or adolescence, for he does not exist in time but in eternity. He has no parents on whom his birth depends; he is born of himself. In fact, he has no conceivable body. According to logic, God/the Absolute should not have any individual features, with the exception of abstract attributes such as omniscience, omnipotence, and so on. Sacred Muslim art, the most consistent in this form of depiction, is dominated by near-abstract mosaics, geometric ornaments, and patterns with a beauty not of this world.
But the history of religion is not the history of one God; it abounds with countless gods and goddesses, the stories of whose lives have probably been told across all cultures and times. Divine life was imagined based on a human template, though with some significant amendments. The gods may not have died or been resurrected, but typically they were born at some point, and may have had a childhood that revealed the uniqueness of their fate. This period was usually heroic and full of supernatural achievements. In fact, there is a thin line between a god and a hero. For Homer, Agamemnon was the commander of the Achaean Army; the Spartans worshipped him as Zeus. For some, Jesus is simultaneously himself, God the Father, and the Holy Spirit; for others, he was an ascetic figure who overcame suffering and death. In a sense, every god is a hero, and every hero exceeds ordinary human limitations.
Many researchers have shown that mythologies and legends around the world reveal amazing similarities in the depiction of the history of gods and heroes in different cultures. This suggests that human imagination, across all eras and time periods, may have shown a tendency towards the creation of a similar archetypal biography.
Miraculous conception
Let’s start at the beginning. Jesus was not the only one who was born as the result of a miracle – this is a common phenomenon in traditional stories. Gods and heroes have come into the world in a variety of ways: conception could occur through the mother’s dream; through the mother coming into contact (not necessarily sexual) with an animal or fantasy animal (a modern distinction); washing in the river; contact with a plant or stones; contact with something that symbolized fertility, such as hair or rain; or finally, through contact with another god.
The Buddha was conceived in a dream. One night, at the beginning of spring, his mother Maya dreamed of a milk-white elephant with six tusks, which descended from the sky to her womb; upon waking, she was pregnant. The first Chinese emperor Fu Xi was conceived via a dragon. A tale from the Pueblo tribe tells of a girl who felt something move in her stomach one day; after some time, the virgin gave birth to… a jug for refilling water. Soon the jug burst and a large boy emerged from it: the hero of the rabbit-hunting tribe.
The case of Jesus is not unique, even in Western culture. The Phrygian god Attis was conceived when his mother ate the fruit of the almond tree. Ovid wrote at length about the nymphs seduced by the gods, who took the form of a gust of wind, a bull, a husband. Zeus swallowed Metis, who was pregnant with his child; after some time, he started to suffer from headaches. He asked Hephaestus to hit his skull with a hammer; his head cracked open and the young Athena leapt out.
There is a common theme in sacred stories of unnaturally prolonged or short pregnancies. The Persian mythical hero Rostam stayed in his mother’s womb for so long and grew to such a size that the woman almost died during childbirth. Eurystheus was born very quickly – Hera, driven by political interest, was said to have accelerated the foetal development. Roman bas-reliefs show Mithras, who was born from the rock as an adult, with a dagger, a globe or a lightning bolt in his hand. The act of delivery itself can also be extraordinary: Moses entered the world in silence, because his mother felt no pain while giving birth (meaning the Egyptian persecutors did not catch and kill the baby).
The meaning of the ‘miracle child’ cannot be explained precisely. It is a religious symbol – and thus something inherently untranslatable – which can only be talked about approximately, using other images. Nevertheless, there is a sense that we are dealing here with a conglomerate of meanings such as potentiality, hope, renewal, deliverance, salvation, and a change in the cosmic order. Some religious scholars have suggested that this way of talking about birth could derive from ignorance about the sources of procreation, or from taboos. But both theories are unsatisfactory. The first sins with excessive arrogance, assuming that our ancestors failed to figure out how fertilization occurs for several thousands of years. The other is incomprehensible and seems to project specific Western taboos derived from modern religious traditions onto the past. We needn’t look far: the Greeks had no difficulty talking about their sexuality. Hippocrates advised women to have regular sexual intercourse for health reasons, and masturbation – that ingenious gift of the gods to the poor who could not afford a brothel – was encouraged.
When gods are born
In civilizations that developed in a temperate climate like ours, the birth (or resurrection) of a young god often fell on two dates. One was the winter solstice, when light and life once again began to triumph over darkness and death (as in the case of Mithras, Saturn and Jesus). The other was the arrival of spring, when life could be seen to manifest itself in the form of the blossoming flora. Here, the young man (e.g. Adonis, Attis) or girl (e.g. Persephone) could perform the same function. In both cases, the return, birth or resurrection of young deities was associated with the renewal of the plant world, and thus the world in general, bearing in mind that since the Neolithic Revolution, humanity (organized and settled) has existed almost entirely alongside agriculture and the plant world. In iconography, Persephone was depicted as being born from a womb buried in the earth (similar symbolism was used in the Palaeolithic when the dead were buried in the foetal position to help them be reborn). The existence of a number of wheat deities says a lot about the importance of agriculture in the religious imagination. In his book The Golden Bough, eminent social anthropologist James George Frazer expressed an interesting speculation that Bethlehem could have been an important place for the worship of Adonis, the cyclically dying and resurrecting god of grain. The birthplace of Jesus, therefore, would not be accidental. Let us recall that Jesus spoke of himself as ‘the bread of life’.
The history of religion includes an almost uncountable number of vegetation and solar deities. Perhaps one of these deities was a divine child from 6000-5800 years ago, discovered at the archaeological site of Çatalhöyük – the oldest of the archaic images that have been found by researchers in various parts of the globe showing a mother holding or breastfeeding a divine infant. Seemingly, this image has stimulated the human mind since time immemorial; it is universal, encountered not only in the Christian worship of the Madonna.
Heroic beginnings
Let us return to the childhoods of gods and heroes. As I mentioned, these childhoods are marked by heroic feats. As a baby, Hercules strangled two snakes that were sent to his bedroom to kill him. The infant Krishna defeated a demon that took the form of a young woman with poison-smeared breasts; the Indian hero not only avoided being poisoned, but also sucked out all the life juices from the demon. Zeus was saved from his child-devouring father Cronus and hidden in a cave; when he grew older, he brought his siblings back to life with a clever trick (by giving Cronus an emetic), and together they overthrew their father.
The childhood of mythological characters is marked by exclusion: they were often condemned to exile (a necessary obstacle so that they could prove their heroism). Another common theme is a prophecy about the birth of a hero, which evokes the fear of an evil ruler, who then orders the slaughter of all babies (Moses, Jesus, Krishna, Oedipus – if we can call Oedipus a hero). In this scenario, the future heroes leave their conventional place in society, in order to return and bring about change at a later date.
One form of exclusion is orphanhood; sometimes, these orphans are raised by animals. Romulus and Remus are the most famous example of humans being suckled by wolves. Sauuaj, from Ossetian mythology, bit his mother’s breast, for which his father abandoned him in a glacial crevasse. He also survived thanks to the intervention of wolves. Telephus, son of Heracles, was abandoned by his mother; he was suckled by a doe or lioness. Paris was suckled by a bear; the Lithuanian priest Lizdeika by an eagle; the Iranian Fereydun by a magical cow. Here we encounter the subject of double abandonment: by parents, and by the human world in general.
This logic of miraculous birth, unique origin and departing from the standard order of social life also occurs in the construction of the characters of contemporary literature and cinema. Harry Potter, the son of extremely talented wizards, defeats the greatest wizard as an infant. For his own safety, he is banished from the wizarding world and enters the world of the Muggles. Frodo from The Lord of the Rings also has no parents and is forced to leave the idyllic Shire to achieve the greatest feat in the history of his world. Then there’s the orphaned Bruce Wayne, who is destined to become Batman; of course, James Bond also grew up in an orphanage. The list goes on and on.
Another fascinating motif is the disturbing or dark origins of the hero. The legends of Pope Gregory I claim that he was the child of twins who committed incest. The great wizard Merlin was said to be the son of a demon, but thanks to his baptism, he began to do good. Harry Potter had a fragment of Voldemort’s soul in him; Luke Skywalker was the son of Darth Vader.
To sum up, there are two possibilities: there is no god, goddess, hero or heroine unless either a unique, supernatural physical feat or a great spiritual achievement occurs in their childhood. A monster must be defeated, either literally or symbolically.
Mythologizing childhood
In the Western world, mythology is no longer a decisive, essential reference point in thinking about the world. The history of Western imagination – and in some sense, all history – can be roughly divided into the following epochs: 1) the period when we were fascinated by the animal world, onto which we projected our psychic content and with which we identified; 2) fascination with the plant world and its discovery (the Neolithic Revolution); 3) the heavens and the world of stars and planets (until modern times); 4) the contemporary era in which the only secret remaining is man and the world of his psyche.
Psychoanalysis led to the domination of childhood in self-reflection. This is like a new variation on the mythology of the golden age – the period in which the most important events, the most decisive for our lives, took place; all that remains is to work on them, to utilize creative reflection. Just as the uniqueness of heroes was once heralded by their childhood, so our uniqueness is explained by the distinctiveness of the events of our early years. However, our heroic feat is to defeat the monsters that we have carried within us from an early age.
There has emerged in certain psychological trends a metaphor of the internal child whose needs must be taken care of. Furthermore, on the recommendation of many therapy books and clinics, the ideal for which we should strive is a ‘second childhood’ – in other words, a return to spontaneity, the child’s freedom and ability to experience the world. It is assumed here that the world of adults is a world of stiffening conventions, the normalization of an experience which is really a forgotten, hidden miracle.
However, these ideas also have their major prefiguration in the history of religion. Jesus commanded us to be like children. Similarly, the poetry of the semi-legendary creator of Taoism, Lao Tzu, underlines that rigidity and old age equate to death, while youth and softness are life. Lao Tzu and the propagator of his ideas Zhuangzi compared themselves to unworried (since they had no unnecessary intellectual knowledge) children who walked alone on the streets looking for their mother. In Zen Buddhism – at least, in the interpretation of its most famous popularizer in the West, D. T. Suzuki – there is also a metaphor for returning to childhood – not infantile, but perfected, purged of fear and egoism. The main expected value here is the ability to experience the mysterious miracle of existence. One of the most important steps for the Zen student is to discover the ‘baby Buddha’ within.
In each of the discussed perspectives, childhood is an accumulation of life energy and potentiality. In mythological stories, it is a determinant of future greatness; in today’s mythology, a private golden age; in both, a condensed destiny.
Translated from the Polish by Kate Webster
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