Virgin Births
This
motif occurs in all the mythologies of the world.
Consequently, it cannot have referred originally to one extraordinary event that
occurred at a certain time and place in Israel. What it
refers to in its inward, mystical sense is the birth in the awakened mind and
heart of a realization of the Kingdom of the Father. The
first birth of man, as a physical creature motivated by the animal energies of
the body, is biological. Man’s second, properly human birth,
is spiritual, of the heart and mind – or, as represented in the Indian symbolic
science of the kundalini, of
the heart – a lotus opening to the radiant sound
AUM that is the divine
creative energy resounding through all things.
Teachers of the ways to such a spiritual realization are commonly, in the
myths of the world, represented as themselves born of the awakening, since the
meaning of their lives and messages to humankind – or to their various tribes –
is of this knowledge, not of the “once-born” biological ends of survival,
reproduction, and conquest. Demythologizing a symbol such as
the Virgin Birth and reading it as referring to a unique, induplicable
historical event of the past, impossible to attain ourselves, deprives it of its
psychological force, externalizing its message as institutional of some social
establishment, upon which, then, our spiritual life depends.
The mythologies of India abound in incarnations, with the implication always
that we are to become such beings ourselves. And in the
Celtic legends also, whether pagan or Christian – of Bran and Brendan, or of
Galahad and
Parzival, the heroes of the Grail – the accent of the symbolization
is typically on the hero life as exceptional indeed, yet paradigmatic of ways to
realization that are open to us all. RG 81
(It)
presents a biological, medical problem, far indeed from anything that might
properly be regarded as of spiritual interest. It cannot have
referred originally to any specific historical event because we find it in
mythologies throughout the world. It is a prominent motif in
the mythologies of mankind, and many examples antedate by millennia that of the
Christian legend. The symbology of religion is, in many of
its most essential elements, common to the whole of the human race; so that, no
matter to what religion you may turn, you will – if you look long enough – find
a precise and often illuminating counterpart to whatever motif of your own
tradition you may wish to have explained. TMD 198
It
is my thought that Christianity is far more Greek than Hebrew.
The whole theme of the virgin birth is alien to traditional Judaism; it
is absolutely native to the Classical tradition. G 255
Virgin births may be common among snakes