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Doubting Thomas
Just a quick one for you today, mythfans. The picture above is one that I snapped personally on my recent trip to Paris, within Notre Dame cathedral (now that you know the source, the horrendous quality is explained; it’s dim in there, okay?).
Thomas was one of the apostles of Jesus of Nazareth according to the gospel of John in the New Testament. After Jesus’ death by crucifixion, he was believed to have resurrected and briefly returned to visit his buddies. Thomas, being a shrewd man, (by comparison) wasn’t willing to believe just anything. He decided to investigate the situation more closely by putting his fingers in Jesus’ wounds, taking their friendship to a new level.
Upon seeing that the wound was authentic, Thomas put his seal of approval on the resurrection.
What I personally like about this story is skepticism and scrutiny on the part of ol’ Tom. At least for a single moment, he’s one of the only guys willing to use his noggin and raise an eyebrow at the seemingly magical.
In a move of unprecedented hubris, I hereby reblog myself. This aggregious act is not wholly without purpose, however:
I intend to tackle, in post form, many of these magnificent men in the days to come. Prepare yourselves for the might of the Worthies!
Also: feel free encouraged to imagine them as an amazing squad of crime-fighting hero-buddies. I know I will.
The Nine Worthies
The Nine Worthies are nine figures from history/scripture/mythology who were set up in the Middle Ages as archetypal heroes who personified the ideas of chivalry and virtue. All nine were deemed “Princes,” each being leaders in some form or another. In French, they are Les Neuf Preux, meaning “Nine Valiants,” which gives a more particular idea of the sort of virtue and all-around goodness they were meant to embody. The idea of setting up the Nine Worthies was that the study of each of them would form a good education for aspiring princes regarding their chivalry and radness.
The Worthies were first described in 1312 CE by Jacques de Longuyon in his Voeux du Paon. The idea was that good ol’ fashioned Christian virtue predated the coming of Christ, and was present in Pagan and Jewish societies as well. I bet you’re just dying to know who the Worthies were, huh? I don’t blame you. Let’s get to it. They were divided into a triad of triads, as follows.
Pagans:
Hector, the champion of Troy, who fell honourably to the mighty Achilles.
Alexander the Great, who conquered much of the Mediterranean and Persia, spreading the wisdom of the Greeks, as the medieval scholars saw it.
Julius Caesar, who was the progenitor of Rome’s Empire, that would become the bed of Christendom.
Old Testament Jews:
Joshua, who became the leader of the Israelites after Moses, and led the conquest of the holy land, Canaan.
David, the anointed king of the Hebrew people, who slew Goliath and whose line was forever chosen by God (Yahweh) to lead his people.
Judas Maccabeus, who led the revolt against the Seleucid empire, and restored the Jewish faith to the Temple at Jerusalem.
Christians:
King Arthur, who in Christian myth was the idyllic king in pursuit of honour, justice, and the holy grail.
Charlemagne, the King of the Franks who turned his kingdom into an empire that would encompass most of western Europe and be the protector of Catholic Rome for centuries.
Godfrey of Bouillon, a medieval Frankish knight who was a leader of the First Crusade, and became the first ruler of the (short-lived) Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Saint Christopher
Alright, friends: hearken to the tale of Saint Christopher, the patron saint of the traveler! As it happens, I’m heading out on a trip to the UK and France for a few weeks as of tomorrow, and I hereby invoke the power of all mythic figures associated with brave pilgrims such as myself.
Back to Christopher. Born in Canaan (according to Western accounts) in the 3rd century CE, Christopher was a mammoth of a man. Almost 7 feet tall and built like a tank, Christopher served the Caananite King as #1 hired muscle. After seeing the king in a few moments of weakness, Christopher decided that only the greatest king there was was worthy of his services, so he decided to bounce out of Canaan. He found a king who called himself the greatest (unnamed in the story), but this king kept crossing himself out of fear of the Devil.
“Now hold on a second,” Christopher thought aloud, “if you’re afraid of the Devil, that means he’s greater than you! I’m gonna go work for that guy!” And so he set out to give Satan his resume. Eventually Christopher stumbled upon some bandits, and their leader referred to himself as “the Devil.” Not being one worried about checking sources, Christopher took this boast at face value, and took up employment with desert-bandit-satan. The problem with this boss, as it turned out for Christopher, was the he was constantly avoiding any wayside crosses. Since the devil was evidently afraid of Christ, Christopher made the decision to serve the good ol’ King of Kings, Christ himself.
Now, Jesus having died some centuries before, Christopher asked a hermit-priest how he could best serve his Lord. The priest suggested prayer and fasting, which Christopher thought was a lame suggestion and refused to do. Taking note of his immense size and rippling muscles, the priest told Christopher to help the puny people in the area to cross a particularly deep river by carrying them across.
For a while Christopher worked as the ferryman-hulk, and then a little child asked him for passage across the river. As soon as the kid clambered up on his back, Christopher almost buckled under his deceptively crushing mass. Staggering to stand with the child on his back, Christopher slowly grunted to the river, and made his way across the water, his muscles screaming the whole way. As the infinitely heavy child dismounted, Christopher said “You almost killed me with your girth, kid. Not cool.” The child replied “You had on your shoulders not only the whole world but Him who made it. I am Christ your king, whom you are serving by this work.” The magic baby then disappeared in a flash, and Christopher was left with the greatest bar story to tell his friends in the history of the universe.
A little later, a king ordered him to be killed for not shutting up about it. Bad luck for river-hulk.
The Children of Lir
An Irish Legend
There once was a man called Lir, who was happily married with three children. The eldest a girl and the two youngest boys. He loved his family with all his heart until one day, his wife passed away. Horrified at the thought of his children living without a mother, Lir married a beautiful woman named Aoife.
Aoife was terribly jealous of her new husband’s love for his children as he adored them far more than he did her. Consumed by jealousy, she ordered one of the servants to kill the children. When he refused, she used her magic instead to turn them into swans.
The children were doomed to wander until the spell could be broken if they were blessed by a monk. To stay together, their father fashioned a gold chain to fit around all three of their necks so they would not be tossed apart on the raging waters. They spent 300 years on Lough Derravaragh, 300 years in the Sea of Moyle and 300 years in Irrus Domnann Erris.
Eventually, the swans were found by monks belonging to a monastery on an island. They blessed the swans and they changed back into humans, but being 900 years old, they were withered and ancient. They three were buried together, the gold chain still linking their necks.
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The Demiurge
When we’re talking about the Gnostics, all the rules change for what you know about Christianity. Well, not all the rules, but the big ones. The Demiurge was the name for the Gnostic deity who jealously guarded and reigned over the world, lost in a fog of its own ignorance. In the Gnostic view, this was the god of the Bible (at that time, this would be referring to the Hebrew Bible, as the New Testament was still in the process of being assembled and standardized).
Right off the bat— that definition of the Demiurge is a simplified one. The Gnostic view, one developed through decades of philosophical and theological debate, was that Wisdom, known as Sophia, was the true creator of the world, and her child was the Demiurge. The Demiurge was born into a cloud of its own ignorance, and remained unaware of Sophia’s existence above itself; it thus assumed that it was the greatest force in the universe, the creator of our world, and our natural ruler. The goal of the Gnostic movement was to reunite the spirit with the divine spark of Sophia through thought, prayer, and internal discovery.
To sum up, the Gnostics thought of the Hebrew/Christian God as a pouty infant with both hands on the wheel of a speeding universe. This high-speed baby they named the Demiurge.
One last thing— while this is what the Gnostic view of the Demiurge consisted of, there was also the idea of the Demiurge developed by Plato, centuries earlier, which referred to a more benevolent artisan of the universe. Be aware of the difference, for as you know: knowledge is power. While that thought may be laughably cliché, I use it in a form as un-ironic as possible.
Unless I’m just being really ironic.
Enoch and the Watchers: Part Two
Even though the Watchers, with their angelic know-how, taught their human charges a great deal–-they showed them how to make weapons, cosmetics, mirrors, and to use sorcery—God couldn’t abide the existence of the Nephilim, fruit of those who’d betrayed his trust and fled from his service. Semyaza, the leader of the Watchers, earned a great deal of God’s wrath by being the principal tutor of humanity in ways that were beyond them at the time, and by inciting the Watchers to rebel in the first place.
God decided that the Watchers and the Nephilim had to be taken care of. With his buddy, Enoch, acting as chief administrator, he organized a worldwide flood, that would end all life on Earth, thus washing clean the perceived stain of the Nephilim with the rest of humanity. This was put into effect in the time of Noah, the great-grandson of Enoch, and from there the familiar deluge story of Genesis would kick in.
It’s a sad story, in a lot of ways. The great crime of the Watchers was caring too deeply for the humans, those they were charged to care for. The book sets the familiar tone of raising the idea of humanity, with all its faults, as the greatest gift that heaven could bestow; even the immortal, ancient, powerful angels envied the lives of humans, and for that envy, their children were washed away, and the Watchers themselves were bound in the valleys of the earth, to wait there until Judgment Day.
Enoch and the Watchers: Part One
Christian/Jewish scripture rarely maintains a consensus, and when it comes to angels, everything’s up in the air. When we talk about the Watchers, we’re delving deep into Christian and Jewish apocrypha— specifically, the Book of Enoch. The writings attributed to Enoch were seen as real scripture by many Christian authorities writing in the first and second centuries CE, and may have been similarly important to Jewish groups about this time. However, the Book of Enoch was removed from canon in the years to come, except for in the Ethiopian Christian Church, where it remained a fundamental part of scripture.
Now, Enoch was the great-grandfather of Noah, and was elected by God as his all-around favourite guy, and was essentially named “greatest dude on the planet.” He was plucked from the mortal world, and raised to the level of Metatron: in some canon, he is seen as the voice of god, and was “promoted” to angelhood. He was also seen as the inventor of reading and writing, and was in charge of doing all of the big guy’s dirty work on Earth— like dealing with those pesky rebel Watchers.
The Watchers, y’see, were a group of angels who had been charged with watching over humanity. They just watched a little too closely, if you catch my meaning; they became deeply enamoured with the lives of men, and with the lovely wiggle ‘n shake of human women. They gave up their duties, descended down to Earth, and began to procreate with undoubtedly surprised people. The result of this interesting and as yet unseen union were the Nephilim— in the book of Genesis, they were described as “warriors of renown,” which you’d expect from Angelic stock. In the Book of Enoch, however, they were giants that would bring ruin on the world, and were the cause of everything bad.
St. Peter’s Basilica is a Late Renaissance church located within the Vatican City and it has the largest interior of any Christian church in the world. One author wrote: “Only gradually does it dawn upon us – as we watch people draw near to this or that monument, strangely they appear to shrink; they are, of course, dwarfed by the scale of everything in the building. This in its turn overwhelms us.”
Around the inside of the dome is written, in letters 2 metres (6.6 ft) high:
TV ES PETRVS ET SVPER HANC PETRAM AEDIFICABO ECCLESIAM MEAM. TIBI DABO CLAVES REGNI CAELORVM
(“…you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church. … I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven…” Vulgate, Matthew 16:18–19
The American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson described St Peter’s as “an ornament of the earth ….the sublime of the beautiful.”
Image by Giovanni Paolo Pannini
Virtues
Continuing with the hierarchy of Angels in Christian mythology, we arrive at the choir of the Virtues. Beneath the First Sphere (containing Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones) is the Second Sphere of Angelic Choirs, functioning as celestial government. While the Dominions (the chiefs of this sphere) act as lords over the lower angels, the Virtues supervise the movements of heavenly bodies themselves, ensuring that the cosmos stays on track and keeps on… cosmosing. They’re credited with the ability to control the elements, and keep the planets and stars on their appointed routes.
Dionysius the Areopagite believed that the Virtues were constantly channeling the divine power and energy of God into the universe itself, and into humankind, giving them a tiny taste of the “source of virtue.”
Virtues, like Thrones, are a strange bunch. It seems that by the virtue of their very existence they keep the universe working the way the Christian God/Yahweh planned it (Note: we link to Yahweh, the original conception of the Hebrew monotheistic God, though the God of the Christians and the New Testament certainly has notable differences in temperament, attitude, worship criteria). Some texts believe that Virtues and Thrones were originally the same divine beings, though later deuterocanonical texts desired nine tidy choirs.
We don’t know what the Virtues look like, exactly, but there’s a chance that they look like their brothers in the higher sphere, the Thrones, whirling wheels of fire and eyeballs. There’s also the chance that they’re the most formless and metaphysical of all the Angels, existing in the Aether beyond even the sight of their brethren. Some more recent Catholic sources state that each choir takes the form of a beautiful, winged, humanlike creature, (the picture of angels we’re used to) with accessories and gear befitting their choir.
Dominions
And so, after a long delay, we return to the Hierarchy of Angels (the Christian version). Remember, way back in the day, when we discussed the 9 Choirs of Angels, divided into 3 spheres? Well, the first and most powerful/holy sphere of angels contains the Choirs of Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones.
The second sphere functions as heavenly government, and begins with the Dominions, ranked 4th among all the choirs. The Dominions (translated from the Greek term kyriotites) act as lords over the lower choirs of angels, regulating their divine duties. Dominions are said to rarely make themselves physically known to humans, but instead send the Angels, Archangels and Principalities (all from the third and lowest sphere) to do their divine work on Earth. The work of the Dominions, of course, would be the work of God; orders come down from the top, as usual.
Dominions are also the angels that preside over specific nations. This suggests that each Dominion would have his own specific territory to concern himself with. I wonder if they go by current political borders, or strictly biblical… I guess the Pope could probably answer that.
The Dominions, though rarely seen, look like divinely beautiful humans, glowing with light, bearing a pair of majestic, feathered wings. I know, I know, that just sounds like a particularly nice ‘n clean version of any “angel.” To distinguish themselves, they also carry a sceptre with a shining orb of light fastened to the head, or a jewelled sword with an orb of light on the pommel.
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