Friday, February 7, 2020

Losing The Great Code.

I call it the King Who? effect, after an incident that happened during my son’s teen years. 

A neighbour wanted to hire him for a few hours of manual labour, and he had to call her.

This was the deep dark ages of  phone books. 


“What was her name? How do you spell that?” 

“David. Like, you know, King David.”

“King WHO?”


At that moment I realised that I had neglected a vital part of my children’s education. 

A  precious baby of cultural tradition had been thrown out with the smelly bathwater of patriarchal religion. 

We had no desire to raise children with the fear of hell and damnation.

Yet in skipping religious indoctrination  we failed to transmit the mythology at the heart of 

our own culture.


Daughter filled those gaps in education when she belonged to a Christian youth group.

Son knew the gods and heroes of various mythologies,  could tell you all about Nanabush 

and Mouse Woman, but knew only vaguely that Easter “had something to do with Christianity”. 

I should have done better.


I have never read “The Great Code”, Northrop Frye’s classic work on the Bible as literary influence. 

But one gets the idea. A living culture needs a shared bank of stories and images to draw from. 


Until recently Western culture’s bank of stories  consisted largely of the Bible, with the addition 

of Greco Roman classics in the more educated. A hunter with a grade 8 education would feel flattered  

if you called him a Nimrod.  Everyone would know why the youngest child was called the Benjamin of the family. 

 

I certainly have no desire to return to religious indoctrination, be it Christian or other. 

More some other time on the need for meaningful shared rituals to bind a society. 

For now, in this time of transition, I feel the loss of the Great Code.





2 comments:

troutbirder said...

Most thoughtful and interesting. The stories and legends we are read to as young children or a bit later read to ourselves are often the most profound influences in our life later on
Ray a. K.

Ien in the Kootenays said...

Thanks for visiting Ray. As the Jesuits would say, “Give me a child till he is seven....”.