The Separation of East and West
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The Four Great Domains
The Dialogue in Myth of East and West
The myth of eternal return, which is still basic to Oriental life, displays an order of fixed forms that appear and reappear through all time. The daily round of the sun, the waning and waxing moon, the cycle of the year, and the rhythm of organic birth, death, and new birth, represent a miracle of continuous arising that is fundamental to the nature of the universe. There never was a time when time was not, and this rhythm is not to cease. The individual is supposed to find his place in this order and submit to it in a conscientious way without resistance. The individual matters no more than a fallen leaf, and the focus of the mind is to be on the everlasting group. In the words of the Indian Bhagavad Gita: “..even as worn out clothes are cast off and others put on that are new, so worn out bodies are cast off by the dweller in the body and others put on that are new.”
For the West, however, the possibility of such an egoless return to a state of soul antecedent to the birth of individuality has long since passed away. The first important stage in the branching off can be seen to have occurred in that very part of the Near East where the earliest god-kings and their courts had been for centuries ritually entombed: namely Sumer. A new sense of the separation of the spheres of god and man began to be represented in myth and ritual about 2350 B.C.. The king, then, was no longer a god, but a servant of the god, his Tenant Farmer, supervisor of the race of human slaves created to serve the gods with unremitting toil. And no longer identity, but relationship, was the paramount concern.
As the centuries went by, the world no longer was to be known as a showing in time of the paradigms of eternity, but as a field of unprecedented cosmic conflict between two powers, one light and one dark. The earliest prophet of this mythology of cosmic restoration was, apparently, the Persian Zoroaster, whose dates, however, have not been securely established. He is in time close to Homer, and - like him – perhaps rather more symbolic of a tradition than specifically one man. Zoroastrian mythology is based on the idea of a conflict between the wise lord Ahura Mazda (first father of the Righteous Order, who gave the sun and stars their path) and an independent evil principle, Angra Mainyu (the Deceiver, principle of the lie, who, when all had been excellently made, entered into it in every particle). The world, consequently, is a compound wherein good and evil, light and dark, wisdom and violence, are contending for a victory. The privilege and duty of everyone is to elect, voluntarily, to engage in the battle in the interest of the light.
It is clear that a potent mythical formula for the reorientation of the human spirit is here supplied, summoning man to an assumption of autonomous responsibility for the renovation of the universe in God’s name, thus moving from a contemplative to an action-oriented political philosophy. The first historic manifestation of the force of this new mythic view was in the Achaemenian empire of Cyrus the Great (died 529 B.C.) and Darius I (reigned 521 – 486 B.C.). The second historic manifestation was in the Hebrew application of its universal message to themselves; the next was in the world mission of Christianity; and the fourth, in that of Islam.
Two completely opposed mythologies of the destiny and virtue of man, therefore, have come together in the modern world. And they are contributing in discord to whatever new society may be in the process of formation. The wise men westward of Iran have partaken of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, whereas those on the other side of that cultural divide, in India and the Far East, have relished the fruit of eternal life.
The Shared Myth of the One That Became Two
The extent to which the mythologies of the Orient and the Occident diverged in the course of the period between the dawn of civilization in the Near East and the present age of mutual rediscovery, appears in their opposed versions of the shared mythological image of the first being, who was originally one but became two. In Indian mythology, as expressed in the Upanishads, the male and female came out of the universal Self who divided itself into two parts. The male part embraced the female, and from that the human race arose. The best known Occidental example of this image is that of the Book of Genesis, where God and man, from the beginning, are distinct.
According to the biblical version of this myth, it was only after creation that man fell, whereas in the Indian version creation itself was a fall – in the sense of the fragmentation of a god. And the god is not condemned; rather, this creation is pouring forth through a multiplication of species – in a metaphysical, symbolical, not literal historical meaning. The fall of Adam and Eve was an event within the already created frame of time and space, an accident that should not have taken place. The Indian point of view is metaphysical and poetical; the biblical is ethical and historical.
Adam’s fall and exile is pictured as an event only in history, or pre-history, of man. This event has been followed throughout the remainder of the book by the record of man’s linkage and failures of linkage back to God – again historically conceived. God himself, at a certain point in time, moved toward man, instituting a new law in the form of a covenant with a certain people. And these became, therewith, a priestly race, unique in the world. God’s reconciliation with man, of whose creation he had repented (Genesis 6:6), was to be achieved only by virtue of this particular community: for in time there should take place the realization of the Lord God’s kingdom on earth, when the heathen monarchies would crumble and Israel be saved. In the Indian view, on the contrary, what is divine here is divine there also; nor has anyone to wait – or even to hope – for a “day of the Lord”. For what has been lost is in each his very self (atman), here and now, requiring only to be sought.
The question arises (again historical) in the world dominated by the Bible, as to the identity of the favored community, and three are well known to have developed claims: the Jewish, the Christian, and the Moslem, each supposing itself to have been authorized by a particular revelation. In the experience and vision of India, on the other hand, although the holy mystery and power have been understood to be indeed transcendent, they are also, at the same time, immanent.
The Two Views of Ego
As long as an illusion of ego is there, the commensurate illusion of a separate deity also will be there; and vice versa, as long as the idea of a separate deity is cherished, an illusion of ego, related to it in love, fear, worship, exile, or atonement, will also be there.
In the beginning, said the Upanishads, there was only the Self. But it said “I” and immediately felt fear and, afterwards, desire. The same two basic motivations are found in the human psyche: aggression and desire. Carl G. Jung wrote of two psychological types: the introvert, harried by fear, and the extrovert, driven by desire. Sigmund Freud wrote of “the death wish” and “the life wish”: on the one hand, the will to violence and the fear of it, and, on the other, the need and desire to love and be loved. Both spring spontaneously from the deep dark source of energies of the psyche – the id – and are governed therefore by the self-centered “pleasure principle”. In Indian myth, the principle of ego, “I”, is identified completely with the pleasure principle. Spiritual maturity, as understood in the modern Occident, requires a differentiation of ego from id, whereas in the Orient (at least from the teachings stemming from India) ego is seen as the principle of libidinous delusion, to be dissolved.
In Buddhism, one seeks that point of balance in the mind from which the universe can be perfectly regarded: the still-standing point of disengagement around which all things turn. The pairs of opposites are all around, and the wheel of the world, the wheel of time, is ever revolving, with our lives engaged in its round. However, there is an all-supporting midpoint, a hub where the opposites come together, like the spokes of a wheel, in emptiness. And it is there, facing east (the world direction of the new day), that Buddha at the foot of the Bodhi-tree is said to have experienced absolute illumination.
In the classic Indian doctrine of the four ends for which men are supposed to live and strive – love and pleasure (kama), power and success (artha), lawful order and moral virtue (dharma), and, finally, release from delusion (moksa) – we note that the first two are manifestations of what Freud termed “the pleasure principle”, primary urges of the natural man, epitomized in the formula “I want”. In the adult, according to the Oriental view, these are to be quelled and checked by the principles of dharma, which in the classic Indian system are impressed upon the individual by the training of his caste. The infantile “I want” is to be subdued by a “thou shalt”, socially applied, which is supposed to be as much a part of the immutable cosmic order as the course of the sun itself. Finally, when the boredom of this horizon of “I want” and “thou shalt” has become insufferable, the fourth and final aim is an extinction of the ego altogether; disengagement or release (moksa) from both “I” and “thou”.
In the West, on the other hand, where the fundamental doctrine of the freedom of the will essentially dissociates each individual from every other, as well as from both the will in nature and the will of God, there is placed upon each the personal responsibility for decisions. We shall search the Orient in vain for anything quite comparable. There, the ideal, on the contrary, has been the quenching, not development of the ego.
The Two Ways of India and the Far East
Turning from India to the Far East, in the Tao Te Ching (“The Book (ching) of the Virtue or Power (te) of the Way (tao)) we read: “Only he that is desireless can discern the secret essences. Unrelieved of desire, we see only shells.” The word tao (the way, the path) is in as much equivalent to dharma as it refers to the law, truth, or order of the universe. Each school of philosophy in the East has had its tao, its doctrine of the way in which life should be ordered. Finally, in a particular school of philosophy whose followers ultimately came to be called Taoists, tao meant “the way the universe works”, and ultimately, something very like God, in the more abstract and philosophical sense of that term. The Sanskrit equivalent, dharma - meaning to hold up, support, carry, bear, sustain, or maintain – is the order that supports the universe, and therewith every being thing within it. What the Tao Te Ching says of the tao, so say the Indians of dharma: its yonder side is beyond definition; its hither side is the mother, the support, and bearer of all things.
The Chinese diagram symbolic of the tao represents geometrically an interplay of two principles: the yang, the light, masculine, active, hot, dry, beneficient, positive principle, and its opposite, the yin, dark, feminine, passive, cold, moist, malignant, and negative. The yin and yang are present in all things. They are not to be separated, nor can they be judged morally as either good or evil. The symbol of the tao provides an image of the dual state of Adam before Eve was separated from his side. However, in contrast to the biblical figure and in harmony with the Indian Self that is split in two, the tao is immanent as well as transcendent: it is the secret essence of all things, yet the darkest mystery.
In the Far East, as well as in India, the art of meditation as a way to recognition of the mystery has been practiced, apparently, from old times.The classical Indian work on the rudiments of yoga is the Yoga Sutra, “Guiding Thread to Yoga”, by the legendary saint and sage Patanjali. It has been variously dated by modern scholarship anywhere from the second century B.C. to the fifth A.D. Since the disciplines that it codifies were known to both the Buddha (563 – 483 B.C.) and the Jain savior Mahavira (died about 485 B.C.) and seem even to have been practiced before the coming of the Aryans, all that can be said is that no matter what the dates of this document may be, both its aims and its means are of indeterminable age. The key to the art is presented in the opening aphorism: “Yoga is the (intentional) stopping of the spontaneous activity of the mind stuff.”
The analogy is given of the surface of a pond blown by a wind. The images reflected on such a surface are broken, fragmentary, and continually flickering. But if the wind should cease and the surface become still – nirvana: “beyond or without (nir-) the wind (vana) – we should behold, not broken images, but the perfectly formed reflection of the whole sky, the trees along the shore, the quiet depths of the pond itself, its lovely sandy bottom, and the fish. Whereas the usual point of view and goal of the Indian has always been typically that of the yogi striving for an experience of the water stilled, the Chinese and Japanese have tended, rather, to rock with the ripple of the waves.
Compared with any of the mind systems of the West, the two views are clearly of a kind. Compared, however, with each other in their own terms, they show a diametric contrast. The Indian, bursting the shell of being, dwells in rapture in the void of eternity, which is at once beyond and within, whereas the Chinese or Japanese, satisfied that the Great Emptiness indeed is the Mover of all things, allows things to move and, neither fearing nor desiring, allowing his life to move with them, participates in the rhythm of the Tao. The two views have been, respectively, “All is illusion, let it go,” and “All is in order: let it come”. In India, enlightenment (samadhi) with the eyes closed; in Japan, enlightenment (satori) with the eyes open. The word moksa, release, has been applied to both, but they are not the same.
The Two Loyalties of Europe and the Levant
In the West, as well as in the Levant, the separation between man and God is in contrast to the Orient, where divinity is immanent and transcendent. The preparation for this breach may already be seen in a variant of the mythological image of the first being that became two: the version in the Symposium of Plato, attributed to Aristophanes, of the earliest human beings, who, in the beginning, were each as large as two are now. They had four hands and feet, back and sides forming a circle, one head with two faces, two privy members, and the rest to correspond. The gods Zeus and Apollo, fearful of their strength, cut them in two, like apples halved for pickling. Those divided parts, each desiring the other, came together and embraced, and would have perished of hunger had the gods not set them far apart. The lesson reads that “human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love….And If we are friends of God and reconciled to him, we shall find our true loves, which rarely happens in this world…..if we are not obedient to the gods there is a danger that we shall be split up again and go about in basso-relievo.”
From this version of the myth presented in the Symposium we learn that the gods were afraid of the first men. And those gods were in confusion; for if they annihilated the men with thunderbolts, there would be an end of sacrifice and the gods themselves would expire for lack of worship. This notion of the mutual dependency of God and man seems not to have been acknowledged in the Levant. God in the Levant, whether conceived as Ahura Mazda, Yahweh, the Trinity, or Allah, has always been supposed to be absolute, and the one right God for all. Whatever conflicts of values might arise between the inhuman cosmic forces symbolized in the figures of the gods and the highest principles of humanity represented in their heroes, the loyalty and sympathy of the Greeks, typically, were on the side of man. In the Levant, the sorely beaten Job may be taken to represent the pious, submissive, priestly ideal of all the great religions of that zone.
The orthodox Occidental mythological structure is thus divided, on the one hand, between the Levantine God who is great and – by the intermediary of the priests – requires total submission by man, and, on the other, the titanic builder of the City of Man (Prometheus) who has stolen heavenly fire, and willing to bring upon himself the responsibility of his own decisions.
Thus we have into the Middle Ages seen develop four great domains, civilizations, with their own mythological structures: Europe, the Levant, India and the Far East. Their four representatives illustrated by human rationality and the responsible individual (Prometheus), supernatural revelation and the one true community under God (Job), yogic arrest in the immanent great void (the seated Buddha), and the wandering sage, eyes open (Tao).
The myth of eternal return, which is still basic to Oriental life, displays an order of fixed forms that appear and reappear through all time. The daily round of the sun, the waning and waxing moon, the cycle of the year, and the rhythm of organic birth, death, and new birth, represent a miracle of continuous arising that is fundamental to the nature of the universe. There never was a time when time was not, and this rhythm is not to cease. The individual is supposed to find his place in this order and submit to it in a conscientious way without resistance. The individual matters no more than a fallen leaf, and the focus of the mind is to be on the everlasting group. In the words of the Indian Bhagavad Gita: “..even as worn out clothes are cast off and others put on that are new, so worn out bodies are cast off by the dweller in the body and others put on that are new.”
For the West, however, the possibility of such an egoless return to a state of soul antecedent to the birth of individuality has long since passed away. The first important stage in the branching off can be seen to have occurred in that very part of the Near East where the earliest god-kings and their courts had been for centuries ritually entombed: namely Sumer. A new sense of the separation of the spheres of god and man began to be represented in myth and ritual about 2350 B.C.. The king, then, was no longer a god, but a servant of the god, his Tenant Farmer, supervisor of the race of human slaves created to serve the gods with unremitting toil. And no longer identity, but relationship, was the paramount concern.
As the centuries went by, the world no longer was to be known as a showing in time of the paradigms of eternity, but as a field of unprecedented cosmic conflict between two powers, one light and one dark. The earliest prophet of this mythology of cosmic restoration was, apparently, the Persian Zoroaster, whose dates, however, have not been securely established. He is in time close to Homer, and - like him – perhaps rather more symbolic of a tradition than specifically one man. Zoroastrian mythology is based on the idea of a conflict between the wise lord Ahura Mazda (first father of the Righteous Order, who gave the sun and stars their path) and an independent evil principle, Angra Mainyu (the Deceiver, principle of the lie, who, when all had been excellently made, entered into it in every particle). The world, consequently, is a compound wherein good and evil, light and dark, wisdom and violence, are contending for a victory. The privilege and duty of everyone is to elect, voluntarily, to engage in the battle in the interest of the light.
It is clear that a potent mythical formula for the reorientation of the human spirit is here supplied, summoning man to an assumption of autonomous responsibility for the renovation of the universe in God’s name, thus moving from a contemplative to an action-oriented political philosophy. The first historic manifestation of the force of this new mythic view was in the Achaemenian empire of Cyrus the Great (died 529 B.C.) and Darius I (reigned 521 – 486 B.C.). The second historic manifestation was in the Hebrew application of its universal message to themselves; the next was in the world mission of Christianity; and the fourth, in that of Islam.
Two completely opposed mythologies of the destiny and virtue of man, therefore, have come together in the modern world. And they are contributing in discord to whatever new society may be in the process of formation. The wise men westward of Iran have partaken of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, whereas those on the other side of that cultural divide, in India and the Far East, have relished the fruit of eternal life.
The Shared Myth of the One That Became Two
The extent to which the mythologies of the Orient and the Occident diverged in the course of the period between the dawn of civilization in the Near East and the present age of mutual rediscovery, appears in their opposed versions of the shared mythological image of the first being, who was originally one but became two. In Indian mythology, as expressed in the Upanishads, the male and female came out of the universal Self who divided itself into two parts. The male part embraced the female, and from that the human race arose. The best known Occidental example of this image is that of the Book of Genesis, where God and man, from the beginning, are distinct.
According to the biblical version of this myth, it was only after creation that man fell, whereas in the Indian version creation itself was a fall – in the sense of the fragmentation of a god. And the god is not condemned; rather, this creation is pouring forth through a multiplication of species – in a metaphysical, symbolical, not literal historical meaning. The fall of Adam and Eve was an event within the already created frame of time and space, an accident that should not have taken place. The Indian point of view is metaphysical and poetical; the biblical is ethical and historical.
Adam’s fall and exile is pictured as an event only in history, or pre-history, of man. This event has been followed throughout the remainder of the book by the record of man’s linkage and failures of linkage back to God – again historically conceived. God himself, at a certain point in time, moved toward man, instituting a new law in the form of a covenant with a certain people. And these became, therewith, a priestly race, unique in the world. God’s reconciliation with man, of whose creation he had repented (Genesis 6:6), was to be achieved only by virtue of this particular community: for in time there should take place the realization of the Lord God’s kingdom on earth, when the heathen monarchies would crumble and Israel be saved. In the Indian view, on the contrary, what is divine here is divine there also; nor has anyone to wait – or even to hope – for a “day of the Lord”. For what has been lost is in each his very self (atman), here and now, requiring only to be sought.
The question arises (again historical) in the world dominated by the Bible, as to the identity of the favored community, and three are well known to have developed claims: the Jewish, the Christian, and the Moslem, each supposing itself to have been authorized by a particular revelation. In the experience and vision of India, on the other hand, although the holy mystery and power have been understood to be indeed transcendent, they are also, at the same time, immanent.
The Two Views of Ego
As long as an illusion of ego is there, the commensurate illusion of a separate deity also will be there; and vice versa, as long as the idea of a separate deity is cherished, an illusion of ego, related to it in love, fear, worship, exile, or atonement, will also be there.
In the beginning, said the Upanishads, there was only the Self. But it said “I” and immediately felt fear and, afterwards, desire. The same two basic motivations are found in the human psyche: aggression and desire. Carl G. Jung wrote of two psychological types: the introvert, harried by fear, and the extrovert, driven by desire. Sigmund Freud wrote of “the death wish” and “the life wish”: on the one hand, the will to violence and the fear of it, and, on the other, the need and desire to love and be loved. Both spring spontaneously from the deep dark source of energies of the psyche – the id – and are governed therefore by the self-centered “pleasure principle”. In Indian myth, the principle of ego, “I”, is identified completely with the pleasure principle. Spiritual maturity, as understood in the modern Occident, requires a differentiation of ego from id, whereas in the Orient (at least from the teachings stemming from India) ego is seen as the principle of libidinous delusion, to be dissolved.
In Buddhism, one seeks that point of balance in the mind from which the universe can be perfectly regarded: the still-standing point of disengagement around which all things turn. The pairs of opposites are all around, and the wheel of the world, the wheel of time, is ever revolving, with our lives engaged in its round. However, there is an all-supporting midpoint, a hub where the opposites come together, like the spokes of a wheel, in emptiness. And it is there, facing east (the world direction of the new day), that Buddha at the foot of the Bodhi-tree is said to have experienced absolute illumination.
In the classic Indian doctrine of the four ends for which men are supposed to live and strive – love and pleasure (kama), power and success (artha), lawful order and moral virtue (dharma), and, finally, release from delusion (moksa) – we note that the first two are manifestations of what Freud termed “the pleasure principle”, primary urges of the natural man, epitomized in the formula “I want”. In the adult, according to the Oriental view, these are to be quelled and checked by the principles of dharma, which in the classic Indian system are impressed upon the individual by the training of his caste. The infantile “I want” is to be subdued by a “thou shalt”, socially applied, which is supposed to be as much a part of the immutable cosmic order as the course of the sun itself. Finally, when the boredom of this horizon of “I want” and “thou shalt” has become insufferable, the fourth and final aim is an extinction of the ego altogether; disengagement or release (moksa) from both “I” and “thou”.
In the West, on the other hand, where the fundamental doctrine of the freedom of the will essentially dissociates each individual from every other, as well as from both the will in nature and the will of God, there is placed upon each the personal responsibility for decisions. We shall search the Orient in vain for anything quite comparable. There, the ideal, on the contrary, has been the quenching, not development of the ego.
The Two Ways of India and the Far East
Turning from India to the Far East, in the Tao Te Ching (“The Book (ching) of the Virtue or Power (te) of the Way (tao)) we read: “Only he that is desireless can discern the secret essences. Unrelieved of desire, we see only shells.” The word tao (the way, the path) is in as much equivalent to dharma as it refers to the law, truth, or order of the universe. Each school of philosophy in the East has had its tao, its doctrine of the way in which life should be ordered. Finally, in a particular school of philosophy whose followers ultimately came to be called Taoists, tao meant “the way the universe works”, and ultimately, something very like God, in the more abstract and philosophical sense of that term. The Sanskrit equivalent, dharma - meaning to hold up, support, carry, bear, sustain, or maintain – is the order that supports the universe, and therewith every being thing within it. What the Tao Te Ching says of the tao, so say the Indians of dharma: its yonder side is beyond definition; its hither side is the mother, the support, and bearer of all things.
The Chinese diagram symbolic of the tao represents geometrically an interplay of two principles: the yang, the light, masculine, active, hot, dry, beneficient, positive principle, and its opposite, the yin, dark, feminine, passive, cold, moist, malignant, and negative. The yin and yang are present in all things. They are not to be separated, nor can they be judged morally as either good or evil. The symbol of the tao provides an image of the dual state of Adam before Eve was separated from his side. However, in contrast to the biblical figure and in harmony with the Indian Self that is split in two, the tao is immanent as well as transcendent: it is the secret essence of all things, yet the darkest mystery.
In the Far East, as well as in India, the art of meditation as a way to recognition of the mystery has been practiced, apparently, from old times.The classical Indian work on the rudiments of yoga is the Yoga Sutra, “Guiding Thread to Yoga”, by the legendary saint and sage Patanjali. It has been variously dated by modern scholarship anywhere from the second century B.C. to the fifth A.D. Since the disciplines that it codifies were known to both the Buddha (563 – 483 B.C.) and the Jain savior Mahavira (died about 485 B.C.) and seem even to have been practiced before the coming of the Aryans, all that can be said is that no matter what the dates of this document may be, both its aims and its means are of indeterminable age. The key to the art is presented in the opening aphorism: “Yoga is the (intentional) stopping of the spontaneous activity of the mind stuff.”
The analogy is given of the surface of a pond blown by a wind. The images reflected on such a surface are broken, fragmentary, and continually flickering. But if the wind should cease and the surface become still – nirvana: “beyond or without (nir-) the wind (vana) – we should behold, not broken images, but the perfectly formed reflection of the whole sky, the trees along the shore, the quiet depths of the pond itself, its lovely sandy bottom, and the fish. Whereas the usual point of view and goal of the Indian has always been typically that of the yogi striving for an experience of the water stilled, the Chinese and Japanese have tended, rather, to rock with the ripple of the waves.
Compared with any of the mind systems of the West, the two views are clearly of a kind. Compared, however, with each other in their own terms, they show a diametric contrast. The Indian, bursting the shell of being, dwells in rapture in the void of eternity, which is at once beyond and within, whereas the Chinese or Japanese, satisfied that the Great Emptiness indeed is the Mover of all things, allows things to move and, neither fearing nor desiring, allowing his life to move with them, participates in the rhythm of the Tao. The two views have been, respectively, “All is illusion, let it go,” and “All is in order: let it come”. In India, enlightenment (samadhi) with the eyes closed; in Japan, enlightenment (satori) with the eyes open. The word moksa, release, has been applied to both, but they are not the same.
The Two Loyalties of Europe and the Levant
In the West, as well as in the Levant, the separation between man and God is in contrast to the Orient, where divinity is immanent and transcendent. The preparation for this breach may already be seen in a variant of the mythological image of the first being that became two: the version in the Symposium of Plato, attributed to Aristophanes, of the earliest human beings, who, in the beginning, were each as large as two are now. They had four hands and feet, back and sides forming a circle, one head with two faces, two privy members, and the rest to correspond. The gods Zeus and Apollo, fearful of their strength, cut them in two, like apples halved for pickling. Those divided parts, each desiring the other, came together and embraced, and would have perished of hunger had the gods not set them far apart. The lesson reads that “human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love….And If we are friends of God and reconciled to him, we shall find our true loves, which rarely happens in this world…..if we are not obedient to the gods there is a danger that we shall be split up again and go about in basso-relievo.”
From this version of the myth presented in the Symposium we learn that the gods were afraid of the first men. And those gods were in confusion; for if they annihilated the men with thunderbolts, there would be an end of sacrifice and the gods themselves would expire for lack of worship. This notion of the mutual dependency of God and man seems not to have been acknowledged in the Levant. God in the Levant, whether conceived as Ahura Mazda, Yahweh, the Trinity, or Allah, has always been supposed to be absolute, and the one right God for all. Whatever conflicts of values might arise between the inhuman cosmic forces symbolized in the figures of the gods and the highest principles of humanity represented in their heroes, the loyalty and sympathy of the Greeks, typically, were on the side of man. In the Levant, the sorely beaten Job may be taken to represent the pious, submissive, priestly ideal of all the great religions of that zone.
The orthodox Occidental mythological structure is thus divided, on the one hand, between the Levantine God who is great and – by the intermediary of the priests – requires total submission by man, and, on the other, the titanic builder of the City of Man (Prometheus) who has stolen heavenly fire, and willing to bring upon himself the responsibility of his own decisions.
Thus we have into the Middle Ages seen develop four great domains, civilizations, with their own mythological structures: Europe, the Levant, India and the Far East. Their four representatives illustrated by human rationality and the responsible individual (Prometheus), supernatural revelation and the one true community under God (Job), yogic arrest in the immanent great void (the seated Buddha), and the wandering sage, eyes open (Tao).