The Fairy Tale Sermons: Hermes

I've had most of this particular story written out for over a year now, waiting for the right moment to post it. Given the liminal nature of Hermes, I think posting right as I'm on the verge of moving seems wholly appropriate.

I appeal to the Muses to grant me the eloquence to tell this story true. Do you know the tale of Hermes? In Greek mythology, he was messenger of the gods. With his winged sandals, he was quite literally light on his feet, flying between the heavenly Olympus and the mortal realm below. But if he was quick on his feet, he was quicker with his wits.

There's a story that says he was no more than a few hours old when he snuck out of his cradle and into the pastures where the sun god Apollo kept his cattle. Using a tree branch to cover their tracks, he led the entire herd to a field way up in the mountains.

Now, as you can imagine, Apollo wasn't very happy when, on a break from his godly duties, he checked on his herd to find them all gone with not a trace of where they went. But Apollo was a prescient god, with the power of premonition, able to see things most people couldn't and he knew that Hermes had something to do with his cattle's disappearance. So, with all the wrath of a raging god, he burst into the nursery, demanding the return of his herd.

Ah, but the sly Hermes was prepared for Apollo's eventual arrival.

“What do you mean return your cattle,” he said, “I'm but a newborn babe. How could I steal them?”

Apollo would have none of this.

“I know you have them. Return my herds at once!” thundered the angry Apollo.

“But sweet Apollo, where could I hide all your cattle? Here in my crib? The thought alone is preposterous.”

Undeterred, Apollo replied, “Fine, if you shall not admit to thieving what is rightfully mine, we will have to take this matter before Father Zeus.”

He seized the infant Hermes and carried him all the way before the throne of Zeus, king of the gods.

“Father, this rogue child has made off with my prized cattle and refuses to return to me what is mine!”

Turning to the young child, Zeus asked, “Did you steal Apollo's herd?”

“I do not have Apollo's cattle, oh wise and mighty Zeus, though even in what short time I have been on this earth I have heard of the wondrous size and strength that befits the property of one as glorious as Lord Apollo. I am but a newborn babe, how could I steal from one so honored as he?”

Said Zeus, “You may be but a babe, but never were you innocent, Hermes. Apollo, I am sorry but if you have no further proof beyond your word against his, then I cannot take any further action.”

Just as Apollo began to protest, he stopped and stared at Hermes.

“What is that you have in your hands?”

Hermes held up the instrument in his hands. It was a tortoise shell with strings threaded across its length. He'd been fiddling with it on the floor during the discussion.

“I call it a lyre.”

“Lord Zeus, I will forgive him his trespass and let all be settled with regards to the circumstances of the disappearance of my herd if he gives me this lyre.”

Zeus turned to Hermes.

“Do you assent to this, child?”

“I do.”

The lyre came to be a prominent symbol and representation of Apollo as a god of music.

Hermes, in addition to his roles as messenger of the gods and psychopomp, became patron god of merchants and thieves, of inventors and travelers.

The lesson here is not one against stealing, because Hermes is very clearly rewarded for his trickery.

Instead, this tale suggests acceptance. Not of unacceptable deeds, and I'm very careful here not to use the term bad as a value statement on the act (the taking of another's property without permission) because this narrative has played out many times in reality with no consequence and few if any of us call these actions bad. Colonization is a good example.

No, the acceptance I speak of is an acceptance of change.

Heraclitus is famously attributed as having written that the only constant is change. In this story, Hermes is a manifestation of change. As a liminal god already standing at the brink in-between lives and stories even in his origins, Hermes transitions us from one narrative to another. Quite literally in his role as psychopomp, escorting us to the underworld.

The Fairy Tale Sermons: This too will pass

"This, too, will pass."

Popular accounts give the origins of this aphorism with Sufi writers, a variation of which I've provided with below.

A Story from Attar:

A powerful king, ruler of many domains, was in a position of such magnificence that wise men were his mere employees. And yet one day he felt himself confused and called the sages to him.

He said: 'I do not know the cause, but something impels me to seek a certain ring, one that will enable me to stabilize my state.

'I must have such a ring. And this ring must be one which, when I am unhappy, will make me joyful. At the same time, if I am happy and look upon it, I must be made sad.'

The wise men consulted one another, and threw themselves into deep contemplation, and finally they came to a decision as to the character of this ring which would suit their king.

The ring which they devised was one upon which was inscribed the legend:

THIS, TOO, WILL PASS



This is more a fable than a fairy tale and it very clearly serves as a reminder of the impermanence of all conditions, so I wanted to take a moment and relate this to my personal experience.

The other day I was asked what I was afraid of. I couldn't really give an answer, which isn't to say I’m not afraid of things or that I don't experience fear, but I try very hard not to let one bad experience prevent me from attempting the same action again. You learn from your mistakes and your victories, but I do not believe learning should ever stop you.

Learning is adjustment to the actions, it is changing your perceptions and your approach, which does not necessarily change the goals. A bee stings you once or a spider bites you, so you learn to treat these creatures with respect, but fear, or at least rational fear, is temporary. It is grounded in the immediate world that faces us, a situational comedy of uptight clowns if you will.

Temporary shares the same root origins as tempo. We keep time to this pulsing beat, the up and down wave-forms of life. This is why nothing captures my attention; it is the perfect combination of the is and the is not.

Nothing, as an idea, carries its own weight because it is constantly negating and creating simultaneously. It may be a simple matter of wordplay and inflections, but nothing could be simpler. Nothing but nothing captures the immediacy of the temporary and translates it into a broader state of being.

The vacuum, the emptiness that nothing embodies is temporary. It gets filled, but ultimately what fills it is nothing, or at least inconsequential things. I'm not afraid of the temporary because I know this, too, will pass. They come, they go and everything returns somewhere else. You can rely on this, it is the nature of change.

There's a word for this in the body: homeostasis. Even if we disrupt the system, if we cause the heartbeat to palpitate, it finds a new equilibrium. The norms adjust. Societally, perhaps this is scary.

God is supposed to have a plan for us, right? That's part of the basis of so many faiths, trusting in the divine plan and it's hard to maintain that kind of faith sometimes when you can't see the big picture. I don't see the big picture, but I trust that it's there and that as a total it makes sense in the grand equation. All these cardiogram blips are insignificant compared to the line we begin with and the line we end with.

http://www.crestock.com/images/2130000-2139999/2130259-xs.jpg

Life. This, too, will pass. Enjoy it while it's here for both its good and its bad.

The Fairy Tale Sermons: Monkey King and the Five Pillars

From Lucifer Issue 75

The Monkey King is your classic trickster god-fool, resident of China. As a hero, he entertained the masses, but to the gods, and especially the Jade Emperor, ruler of heaven, he was nothing but trouble.

Perhaps the best known telling of his adventures comes from Wu Cheng'en's 16th century epic, Journey to the West.

As the story goes, the Jade Emperor with all his armies and powerful generals was not able to placate the passionate and ambitions Monkey and so, reaching higher even than powers of the kingdom of heaven, sought the help of the Enlightened.

Buddha met with Monkey at the gates to the heavenly palace, where he waited admittance to the halls of the gods as an equal. Catching the interloper in his hand, he issued a challenge. If you can jump out of my hand, you can claim right to the throne of the Jade Emperor.

Unable to resist the temptation of such an offer, Monkey leaped and twirled through the air, flying on a cloud as he'd learned from a Taoist monk, flying far, flying wide, flying to the ends of the very Universe. He flew until he came upon five great pillars that held up the sky itself.

Proud Monkey thought to himself, aha, I have surely won this bet, but to be sure, I shall leave my mark upon these pillars. So we find the mythological Chinese equivalent of "Monkey was here" graffiti tagged on the middle pillar. And to further prove his point, Monkey pissed at the base of the first pillar.

Then he returned to Buddha, boasting of his great achievement, of how far he'd gone, but Buddha informed him he had never left the Buddha's hand. Shocked and angry, Monkey King could only look on as Buddha raised his hand and there, inscribed on his middle finger was Monkey's handwriting and the faint but clear smell of urine from the base of his smallest finger.

Now, of course Monkey protested. He screamed and raged and was just about to jump and flee when Buddha pushed him out of the Gate of Heaven and he fell all the way down to earth. Buddha then changed his fingers into the five elements of metal, wood, water, fire and earth. These became a five-peaked mountain that trapped Monkey, holding all but his upper half with its weight.  Struggle as he may, Monkey King was not able to move.

Returning to the heavenly palace, Buddha told the Jade Emperor that Monkey King was well and truly taken care of and that he would remain trapped beneath the mountain for some hundreds of years until he had truly learned humility, whereby a travelling monk would come and unleash him.

Hubris, ladies and gentlemen, was a common theme amongst all the pantheons. Some upstart immortal (or mortal) would challenge the god/s with per feats of creativity or strength that were so beyond any other mortal man and boast of their achievements until it was heard all the way up in heaven. And inevitably they rain down with their subtle tricks or angry fire and they punish you.

In many ways, it's a commentary on social mobility. You do not rise above your station. A shepherd does not become a king. A spider does not become the creator. Dwarves do not stand with giants. Not unless it has been ordained by the gods, not unless you have truly earned it.

But what is it to be humble? What is modesty? Both of these prerequisite a conscious acknowledgement of one's own shortcomings, an acceptance of faults and station. Where humble denotes the absence of pride, modesty is the absence of pretension and boastfulness.

But like Desire's fickle relationship to Enlightenment, these are not things to strive for because in a way, to strive for them, to seek to be more humble and modest for humility and modesty's sake defeats the purpose. So then, what is one to do?

To seek modesty and humility is to self-deprecate almost to the point of losing self-respect. It is the inverse of pride and boastfulness to a fault. Rather than seeing how great you are, you project how horrible you are, how low you are. It's groveling at the feet of nobody.

While Monkey represents one extreme, the base, earthly desire, and Buddha clearly the opposite, the most divine, we as people stand somewhere in-between. Freud recognized some good tropes floating around when he talked about the id, ego and superego.

But as any good literary critic could tell you, even with the superseding ego to balance the two polar extremes, this still  reinforces the binary system. If you have two things that are opposite, adding a third between them does not remove them, it does not displace them. It provides a fulcrum from which to balance them, a match point where they can coexist, but they are still separate.

It seems, always, that to unite two opposites will result in annihilation. What I see in this is the existence of not two, but one. Opposites are the same thing in that they require the other to define themselves. It is this modality that makes them so hard to see. Take for instance that memorable scene from Alan Moore's Swamp Thing where the universal force of darkness faces the universal force of light and rather than an explosion that destroys the universe, they instead shake hands and seem to come to an agreement.

Yin and Yang, the opposing intertwined. This is why Buddha doesn't kill Monkey King. Monkey King cannot be killed because his function as opposite of heaven is vital, but also because there is possibility for change. One can be more humble, more modest, but it isn't a matter of seeking to be so as much as it is a matter of simply being so.

The Fairy Tale Sermons: Little Red

This is the first in a series of blogs titled "The Fairy Tale Sermons" wherein I take the stories both familiar and strange of childhoods past and write sermons on them much like your Sunday school teacher would do with Scripture. I invite, no, I request that you question the morals I set forth in these sermons and consider for yourself what these tales mean to you.

There was once a little girl, loved by one and all, but especially her grandmother. When she was small, her grandmother gave her a red velvet cloak. She liked it so much that she refused to wear anything else…

Here we find the picture of innocence robed in the passion of fresh blood, a foreboding sign if ever there was one. I'm sure most of you are familiar with this tale in many of its macabre and watered down forms, Little Red Riding Hood, popularized by those brothers Grimm, so I'll spare you too many of the details.

One day her mother called to Little Red, asking her to take a cake and bottle of wine to her grandmother. "She is weak and ill, and they will do her good. Go quick, but don’t run for you might break the bottle and dear grandmother will get no wine. When you get there, don't forget to say, 'Good morning," without being a nosy little ragamuffin."

Nowadays, Red would probably be sent along with some kind of locally grown, organic, whole food veggie loaf and a bottle of medicine to make dear grandmother better. She would probably prefer the wine.

Along the way to grandmothers house in the wood, Little Red Riding Hood came upon a wolf who asked her where she was going. Not knowing the danger those wolves represented to the isolated, Germanic, village-person, answered truthfully.

The wolf, knowing full well the potential treat in store for him if he played his cards right, distracted Little Red with some flowers and ran ahead to grandmother's where the greedy lump swallowed her up in one gulp.

Little Red Riding Hood wandered in soon enough with a fresh bouquet in addition to grandmother's wine and cake. Then of course comes the familiar bit with the Oh what big ears, eyes, hands and teeth you have before Red, too, finds her way down the wolf's gullet.

Enter the kindly woodsman, passing by, who steps in to check in on the kindly old woman living by herself out in the middle of the woods. He cuts open the wolf, freeing Little Red Riding Hood and grandmother who "came out, alive, but hardly able to breath."

Little Red then fills the wolf with heavy stones so that when he wakes and tries to spring away, he falls down dead from their weight. Woodsman gets a wolf pelt; grandmother gets her wine and cake; and Little Red Riding Hood gets a lesson. "I will never again wander into the forest as long as I live, if my mother forbids it."

At first glance, we learn from this story not to disobey our mothers and perhaps if we paid attention closely, not to trust strangers. Which are good morals, sure, but it would be limiting to leave it at that. Fairy tales are not parables, they do not contain but one lesson.

Within the framework of the story, we never question why it is that Red's mother sends her daughter alone into the woods to grandmother's house. The story after all suggests that Little Red is still quite little, perhaps as young as the 6 or 7 year-old audience is when we first start introducing our children to the story.

We identify with our heroine because we remember being vulnerable and innocent. Before they became big, bad wolves, they were just funny looking dogs.

It's this very naiveté that makes Red perfect host to this mission. She delivers because she doesn't know better not to. She's not some teenager who's going to sneak into the wine along the way, topping off the bottle with water from the stream and she's not some incompetent little toddler barely able to walk.

So Red's mother is right to trust her, though perhaps too irresponsible or busy to simply do it herself.

Within feminist literature, I'm sure, Little Red Riding Hood gets a bad rap because the women are helpless. Red is deceived by the clearly masculine wolf and she and grandmother need to be saved from the belly of the beast by the woodsMAN at the end of the story. The sexism is an inherent crossover from a time when the patriarchal society in charge told the stories.

But what is interesting about Little Red Riding Hood is the lack of male figures. I know, it's hard to imagine a lack when there are only five characters to begin with. But for a moment, let's take stock. We have Mother, Red, Grandmother, Wolf and Woodsman.

Or to put it in other terms, we have the innocent maid, working woman and old crone, plus the polar male opposites of the Man and Beast. Three women, like that other holy trinity, the Fates: Moerae, Parcae, the Norns. As much as Wolf and Woodsman may have played their parts as archetypal Tempter and Redeemer, it was the ladies in this story who sealed their fate, so to speak.

It was they who set this story in motion, who sent Little Red on her mission to begin with. The Woodsman may have cut the wolf open, but it was the actions of Little Red Riding Hood in filling his now-empty belly with stones that caused his death and it is the at the end of the story that we find ourselves once again returned to that essential three. The wolf is dead, the woodsman gone home, but the three remain.

Perhaps the warning is not for Red after all, but for the Wolf whose folly was his attempt to deny his fate. In impersonating kindly, old grandmother, he defied the natural order, and as much as Fairy Tales are about the fantastical, the talking animals, witches and fairies, et al, there are some things that don't get messed with.

So there's another lesson in Little Red Riding Hood, one of consigning yourself to your fate, which is all well and good for the medieval peasantry of its original audience, where social ostracism could quite literally mean the difference between life and death, but to the modern -- though perhaps by that I should mean postmodern -- reader of fairy tales the lesson is moot. In the American dream culture of anyone can do anything if they work hard enough, the wolf can be the grandmother. There are no explicit boundaries keeping you from that kind of success.

Fate has been overtaken by free will and Little Red has strayed from the path.