Summary of a Paradigmatic History of Baptism and Universality of Symbolism Group 3: Andrew, Melissa, and Jonathan

This section is an application of the discussion of Aquatic Symbolism that precedes it. In the largely Christianized world, baptism is one of the first concepts of Aquatic Symbolism that comes to mind. Eliade gives a stage by stage means of understanding the sense of the event of baptism. He starts by giving water its credentials through Tertullian. "Water was the first to produce that which had life, that it might be no wonder in baptism if waters knew how to give life" Tertullian claims. By nature of their pre-existence and their already having a hand in the production of life. There is also death in water. As Aquatic Symbolism works as talked about in the previous section. To come out of water is to come to life, but to go into water is to be diluted back into the formless and so die.
      He uses Chrysostom to further provide the understanding of the Christians, "It represents death and burial, life and resurrection....When we plunge our heads into the water as into a sepulcher (tomb), the old man is immersed (killed, diluted into the formless), buried wholly; when we come out of the water, the new man appears at the same time," He quotes from Chrysostom.
     Baptism valorizes the waters through connection to greater myths alive both in Juedo-Christian tradition and in world Mythology at large. Cyril of Jerusalem is cited as citing Job as attributing the Jordan river to be the resting place of the Behemoth (a common part of the chaotic mythos of the region). Therefore when Jesus went down into the water and bound the beast, he both paralleled the binding of the Behemoth and Leviathan by God at creation and set a precedent power in baptism. He further addresses the concept of Jesus as a New Noah (a concept put forth by Justin). "Christ...emerged victorious from the waters to become the head of another race." Christ is further seen as a parallel with Adam, Christ is the first of New Man and regeneration of the sense in man that precedes his shamefulness. And so in Baptism, especially in the ritual of nude baptism, the old person descends into the depths dies and is buried, mirrors the triumphant act of Jesus, is born into the new race born of Jesus's conquest of the Waters of Death, and is born to a people without shame.
     These mythic roots of baptism, Eliade lays, exist in other traditions as well.  The Noah figure, the danger of death, often enough the deluge, even ritual nudity. Defeat of monsters is a fairly common expectation of initiates in religious groups. He clarifies that the mention of these isn't to discredit baptism and these stories, they didn't need to be borrowed, Judaism is flush with these stories and this past.
     He uses our second section as a transition of sorts from the specific power of aquatic symbolism with the focused application through baptism to the more general approach to nature as a whole. He discusses the Church Fathers' trust in the so-called Book of Nature. "For the Christian apologists," he says "symbols were pregnant with messages." The workings of God were evident through out the cosmos. For religious man he states the natural world is always speaking to things of the divine and of the sacred.

Eliade Summary p.144-151

WOMAN, EARTH, AND FECUNDITY

Religious experiences that are connected to fecundity and birth have a cosmic structure.  Womanhood and the ability to give birth are sacred. Symbolically, woman is equated with the earth and childbearing is equated with the fertility of the earth. He gives examples of how women are perceived in different cultures and how the perception is linked to the religious mythology of the past in those areas. For example, in some places, Mother Earth is apparently capable of conceiving without anyone’s help (no sex). In those cultures, we can see a societal structure favoring matriarchy  In other cases, people believe that cosmic creation came to be by the hierogamy between the Sky-God and Mother Earth.  Based on that perception, “human marriage is regarded as an imitation of the cosmic hierogamy,” (p. 145).  Therefore, marriage and conjugal rituals have cosmic structures too.  This link between Mother Earth being sacred and conjugal rituals being sacred is the reason there are orgies for crop production especially at New Year celebrations. Each new year means there will be new creation.   “Here too the orgy is a return to the cosmic night, the preformal, the waters, in order to ensure complete regeneration of life and hence the fertility of the earth and an abundance of crops” (p. 147).

SYMBOLISM OF THE COSMIC TREE AND OF VEGETATION CULTS

Cosmos is a living organism which renews itself periodically.  Thus, the cosmos was imagined in the form of a tree to symbolically express the endless regeneration of the cosmos. He gives many examples of trees as symbols in other cultures and religions as well.  A tree is not the only symbol used to portray religious ideas, but other kinds of vegetation are used to explain other religious ideas too, such as immortality, omniscience, and limitless power.  Eliade talks about fruit being a symbol of power and having the ability to change men to gods when they eat it.  He also points out that only the religious vision of life makes it possible to think of vegetation as symbolic - however, the non-religious still see some significance in the sacredness of nature which is why we have vegetation cults that still celebrate the coming of spring as the “prophetic sign of the cosmic mystery” (p. 151).

The Sacred and the Profane (pages 125-132)

"The Religious Experience of Life"

In this section, Eliade demonstrates that, via religious people's growing interest in the day-to-day hierophanies of life, "religious experience becomes more concrete, that is, more intimately connected with life" (126). The religious person begins to focus on the more accessible sacred realities of mundane existence. However, in so giving greater focus to daily life, the religious person "draws away from the celestial and transcendent god" (126).  "In discovering the sacredness of life, man let[s] himself be increasingly carried away by his own discovery; he [gives] himself up to vital hierophanies and [turns] from the sacrality that [transcends] his immediate and daily needs" (128). It is only in times of great cosmic distress that religious peoples turn to their creator gods for help. These are times when the gods and goddesses of daily life are made worthless by their role as "specialists," as those who can only "reproduce" and "augment" life, who are incapable of "saving" the cosmos in times of catastrophe when the "subtler, nobler, more spiritual powers of the Creator Gods" are required.

"Perenniality of Celestial Symbols"

Eliade then discuses the relationship between the sky and its impact on religious life. "In the religious life the sky remains ever present by virtue of its symbolism" (128). It both represents and is "the paradigmatic image of transcendence," and it "in turn infuses and supports a number of rites,...myths,...and legends" (128 & 129). Since for the religious person the cosmos is itself a record and reflection of the sacred reality of the "celestial supreme being," the sky's existence ("verticality" itself) is self-evidently necessitated in that its "dimension alone is enough to evoke transcendence" (129). The sky keeps the memory of the transcendent creator gods alive.



"Structure of Aquatic Symbolism"

According to Eliade, "the symbolism of the waters implies both death and rebirth" (130). Baptism is often a symbolic representation of water's power--its ability to destroy and recreate life. Immersion into water is equivalent to going back to pre-existence, to a time that precedes birth. Emersion from water is equivalent to regeneration, to becoming literally a "new man" (131). "The waters symbolize the universal sum of virtualities;...they precede every form and support every creation" (130). Water is simultaneously the degenerator and regenerator of life. It is formless and thus "the reservoir of all the possibilities of existence" (130).

The Sacred and The Profane 138-144

Terra Mater

      In this section, Eliade describes the mythology of the Terra Mater ("Mother Earth"). Through the stories of the Indian prophet, Smohalla, Eliade describes the rather disseminated belief that humans are "born of the earth" (140) and to the earth they feel a sense of belonging to. Because of this feeling of being born from Mother Earth, human beings also desire to be able to return to her in death.

Humi Posito: Laying the Infant on the Ground

     Eliade continues on to discuss how the human mother (which is only a representation of the Great Mother Earth) has given "birth" to many customs. Of these customs, giving birth  on the ground is seen as necessary in order for Mother Earth to give her "beneficent energies" to the human mother so that the woman can secure her "maternal protection" (142). It is also a ritual in many cultures to place the infant on the ground so that the true Mother can "legitimize it and confer her divine protection on it" (143).This is also done with the ill to be reborn again as new as well as in baptism to signify death and rebirth as a new living being.

The Sacred and the Profane Pages 151-159

Eliade 151-159 Summary

            Eliade claims that both the religious and nonreligious man have a similar experience of nature. A religious man obviously will see nature as more than just the natural world, and as something through which one can experience God. Although the nonreligious man might not use this religious language to describe their own experience of nature, Eliade claims that they also experience nature as something more than just the natural world. Nonreligious man through nature experiences something larger and more paradisal than his own being. Eliade uses the Chinese as an example, talking of how Taoists created "little paradises" which they could use as a visual representation of paradise. They used nature by creating small pots with little trees and similar pieces of nature to represent something much bigger, and much a better, "a world apart," a window to see into paradise. This example is used to illustrate the idea that all people, while some may make nature less, do not seem able to completely desacralize it. According to Eliade nature always points to something bigger.

            Eliade expands his thesis through more examples of the moon and a stone. Eliade claims that through these manifestations of nature something is revealed to man that is bigger than himself. Eliade emphasizes time and time again that complete secularization of nature is a fact or experience that is only true for a very limited amount of people.

Elise Cranston, Max Harris, Shelby Riddle 

The Sacred and the Profane Group 1!

Introduction:
116-118
"in this chapter, we shall try to understand how the world presents itself to religious man..." (117)
God is revealed through creation because we know God created the world, making it have structure and sacrality, not chaos.

The Celestial Sacred and the Urainan gods:
118-121
Many other religions have "sky" gods, which points us upwards. The sky is limitless to the naked eye of humanity. The sky god is generally the one attributed to creating the cosmos. This is because meteorological phenomena show power and might (lightning, thunder, rain, tornadoes, etc.) that are, by nature connecting us to the idea of a heavenly being in the sky.

The Remote God:
121-125
The sky beings mentioned above always seem to be too far out of reach, unless provoked. The god realizes this and leaves behind a lesser god that cares for the followers. This demi-god has a motherly feeling of caring for the humans while the sky god sits apart from them only as something to fear, not someone who is compassionate towards them. People only call out to the sky god only in times of calamity, when all other options have failed.

In the next section, the bloggers will write about the remoteness of the sky god and how it increases interest in the motherly being over the creator god.

Hi y'all,
Thanks for being flexible about this.  Please post your group's summation of the pages assigned to you.  Please read other people's posts!  Learning!