Gedanken am frühen Morgen
Gedanken am späten Morgen
Thoughts of early Morning
Thoughts of late  Morning
Pensées du premier  matin
Pensées en fin de matinée

Werner Jaeger liked to tell his students that the early Christian missionaries to the Greeks tried to convert their congregants by explaining that Jesus was like Hercules, since both were sons of a divine father and a human mother.  As I consider the analogy this morning, I reflect on the differences.

The myth of Jesus is the classical story of the son of the single mother, who lacked a father; but the myth of Hercules is the classical story of the son of the single father, who lacked a mother.  The myth of Jesus' life and death is well known.  The myth of Hercules' conception is recorded in Kleist's drama Amphytrion.  The story of Hercules' infancy is an account of cosmology ignored by astrologers and misunderstood by astronomers as being beneath contempt.
 
Jesus was rejected by his divine father Jehovah.  Jehovah did not devour his son, as did Kronos.  Instead Jehovah expressed his hostility and rejection of Jesus by arranging to have his son crucified.  The extravagant praise lavished on Jehovah as a loving god by Christians and Christianity is falsehood masquerading as truth such as is characteristic of ancient as well as contemporary propaganda.  Such propaganda relies on the assertion that the word has the power to create reality.  In some respects it does, and in other respects it does not.

Jesus more than compensated for his rejection by his father Jehovah; he avenged himself on Jehovah by subverting divinity and becoming an anti-god both human and divine who asserted immortality by rising from the dead and who asserted divinity by claiming his place on a throne at the right hand of Jehovah, thereby extinguishing the previously existing divine monoply.  Thus Jesus fulfilled the aspirations of his older brother Adam, where Adam had been prevented from becoming godlike by Father Jehovah's expelling him from Eden before Adam could consummate his desire to eat the fruits of the tree of life.

Hercules, by way of analogy and contrast, was deprived not of his divine father but of his natural mother Alcmene.  This deprivation was not the consequence of any hostility on the part of his cuckolded step-father Amphytrion who was well disposed to Hercules. It was Hera, Jupiter's angry wife who hounded Hercules and his mother Alcmene, even though he had been given the Name Heracles to propitiate Hera. It was perhaps out of desperation that Hercules then spent his life performing deeds of great valor, to demonstrate his divinity or his virility or both.

The myths of Hercules include the account that father Zeus, concerned that his illegitimate offspring Hercules should not be deprived of the benefits of divine lactation, surreptitiously placed the hungry infant at the breasts of Hera when she was asleep in singularity.  Upon awakening and finding the infant she was nursing not her own, there occurred a big bang, and Hera exploded with rage so enormous that in casting the bastard Hercules out of her sight, she splattered her milk across the sky, where as unfading cosmogonic evidence, it can be recognized every cloudless night as the Milky Way.  

The astronomers demonstrate their illiteracy and intellectual incompetence by presuming a conclusive dichotomy between true and false.  They dispose of the Hercules myth by labeling it false and tossing it into the academic trash bin, before having understood its meaning.  That meaning, as I construe it, is the circumstance that the thinking of each of us is constrained by his subjectivity, by who he is and who he knows himself to be, by his own experience, durch alles was er erlebt, und was er erlebt hat.  One myth describes the origin of the Milky Way as a consequence of the wrath of a woman betrayed and then deceived by her husband.

When I look at the stars, I construe  what I see, the stars themselves and the patterns of their appearance, as configurations engendered by my own mind, whether that mind is molded by the linguistic myths of Zeus, Hera and Heracles, or by the academic myths of the standard model of cosmology, of set theory, of Hilbert space, quantum mechanics or relativity.

I consider myself incapable of a satisfactory explanation for the singularity, for the big bang, or for the continuing timeless expansion of the "universe" at the speed of light. Instead I set myself the task of integrating the standard models of cosmology, quantum mechanics, relativity theory, into a standard model of scientific myth, and in turn integrating this standard model of scientific myth into a standard model of a subjectivity peculiarly my own, a standard model which turns out to be the summary of my life, of all that I have lived. (erlebt)