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The 11th Commandment
by Honora Foah
Co-president & Creative Director
Mythic Imagination Institute
Celebrating and being aware of the wheel of the year is the most grounded thing I know. Myths and folktales arise from the very earth. David Abram likes to talk about this, about how the stories are a mist that rises up from the ground. The earth of the place where we live uses us to give voice to its particularities and peculiarities and indigenous flowers and leopards and people.
Stories also travel on the wind and then root again in a different earth. It was wonderful for me to see the Christianity of the Maya in Guatemala. Traditional Mayan spiritual life honors many powers. When the missionaries came along with Jesus, the Mayans cheerfully made him part of the family. Because they, as with all of the polytheistic traditions I know of, have an acknowledgment and honor of a great spirit, a unifying, undifferentiated force beyond the gods. The issue of how many smaller pieces it is broken into, how many archetypal 'gods' one acknowledges is not a super-big problem. Gods get born, die off or fade. It's a seasonal thing, it's a great cycle thing and few people have such an extraordinary cultural connection to time cycles, as the Maya.
So here we are in the heart of the darkness in the Northern hemisphere, the winter solstice. Some animals choose to sleep through it; some find snow hunting the best of the year. To have no fear at all of the cold and dark would be to have lost all racial memory.
So, the solstice dark comes upon us, and Lo! to us a child of light is born. God is good.
Virtually every tradition celebrates the birth of the light in the heart of the dark. Christmas, Chanukah, Diwali, Yule.
But because we need time to prepare the magazine, as I write this, it is actually All-Soul's, November first and a part of me, as it gazes across the slanting light onto the amber, rust, gold, blood, green and pink of the trees, is slipping into the underworld, and I am thinking today not of the birth, but of the death, of the baby Jesus.
I am thinking of his great descent and his meeting with Satan. I am wondering what it was like. I am thinking about sacrifice. I am thinking about how to keep on when I am very tired, when it is dark and cold and much has failed and died. I am thinking about the purpose and what the life of the light is like, once it has been born.
And so, the baby Jesus was born on the darkest night and a star shone out and it guided the wise men, who told stories about it ever after. And the baby Jesus grew up and many people came to love him and many to hate him, until one day, the strain between the two worlds became too great. And Jesus said, I will bind them together with my body. And so he did. He said, eat my body and drink my blood, and some people even knew he was not advocating cannibalism. Some did not. But he knew that he had to accept, as his greatest sacrifice, that people would always understand imperfectly what he said and what he did. And this was a burden and a horror to him beyond all others--what would transpire in his name.
But still, but still. He died and went into the earth and passed the gates of hell and there was Satan, the great god of the materialism. He was fat and sassy, full and pink and shiny with his own cannibal feast, feeding on the souls of Wall Street fundamentalists and fire-and-brimstone bankers. People like to say that they are set-upon by Satan, but actually, he just sits down there with his mouth open and people throw him their souls voluntarily like peanuts to the elephant. Sometimes folks just leave their souls behind when they are at work or at play, meaning to come back for them when they have time, and the poor lonely souls pine away, becoming so thin that they just slip through the floorboards right onto his outstretched tongue.
Anyway, Jesus was kinda thin and Satan was kinda fat, a Mutt & Jeff kinda look to their partnership. And Jesus said, "Look, they know not what they do. Give them back." Satan said, "Have you no respect for human beings? What are you saying—that they are unconscious morons?"
And Jesus said, "No, or maybe, but they are children—and as you know full well, they are not your children, and they have not been able to understand the stories yet. They listen as children, and you have taken advantage of that. Let them have another shot; let them grow up. Let them experience the world in all of its complex beauty and simple action. Let them have a chance to understand the stories. I am pretty sure, they get the 'not cannibalism' part already! I love them deeply, and I'm asking as a friend."
So Satan agreed, because time wasn't so important to him. He'd known Jesus from way back—they were old school friends, and he didn't think he'd be giving the souls away for good anyway. He was pretty sure they'd never understand the stories. Not really. Not when there were so many advantages not to. He chuckled remembering how Stephen Gaskin used to say that the 11th commandment should be, "AND YOU DO TOO KNOW WHAT I MEAN." They loved that how-many-angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin thing. So much more entertaining than leave all you have and follow me.
So, he agreed. Jesus took his kit full of souls (origin of Santa's sack?), swung it over his back and headed upstairs. But Satan couldn't resist a parting shot. "Speaking of stories, old man—remember that one about Sisyphus?"
Jesus sighed, shifted the sack and waved to his old schoolmate. "Be seeing you," he said.
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