History Unlimited Bookshop: Religion and Myth.

Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy

We leave it for our readers to decide whether religion per se has added to the sum of human happiness; what is beyond doubt is that religious impulses and religious institutions have been responsible for some of the greatest achievements in art and literature. Our selection touches on Judaism, Christianity and Islam, with a slight sideways glance at Buddhism. For light relief and entertainment we have garnered a few titles from the fallow margins of imaginative speculation — life would not be complete without the occasional conspiracy theory!

The Bible as History / Keller
Archaeology has moved on somewhat, but this is a good and readable summary of the state of play and attitudes to Biblical studies at the time of publication.

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The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English / Geza Vermes
The surviving literature of the Qumran community gives insights into pre-Rabbinic Judaism in the years between the 2nd Century BCE and the 1st Century CE. Generally regarded as the remnants of an Essene library, many scholars have looked for comparisons with primitive Christianity. This edition has a good introduction, which includes current thinking and a brief history of the controversy that raged over the publication of the Scrolls.

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The Life and Work of St. Paul / Dean Farrar
A substantial 19th Century biography covering Paul’s mission, travels and conflicts with the Jerusalem Church. A great deal of modern scholarship leans to the view that Paul took a firm hold of a reforming faction within Judaism, popularised it with the addition of familiar elements from the pagan world and mystery cults, and propagated the message through direct appeal to the downtrodden underclasses — plebs, slaves and women — of the non-Jewish Roman world. The result in the long term was, according to Edward Gibbon, the subversion of an empire.

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The Secret Gospel / Morton Smith
In 1958 Professor Morton Smith discovered a copy of a previously unknown letter from Clement of Alexandria in the library of the monastery of Mar Saba in the Judean desert. The letter refers to secret teachings of Jesus and a Secret Gospel of St. Mark. The author describes the discovery and its significance for the study of early Christianity.

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The Confessions of St Augustine / Augustine of Hippo

Autobiographical account of the journey of a libertine through Manichaeism and Neoplatonism, to Roman Christianity under the influence of Bishop Ambrose of Milan. The Confessions were to be a long term influence on the development of Western Christianity, introducing a Platonic strand that was to persist beyond the Protestant Reformation. Augustine was made Bishop of Hippo in 395 and died in 430 during the siege of that city during the Vandal conquest of North Africa under their Arian king Genseric.

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The Life of Muhammad / Ibn Ishaq

The Sira of Ibn Ishaq was an 8th Century account of the life and battles of Muhammad. Professor Guillaume’s translation includes additions, variations and commentaries found in the work of other early authors and for this reason has been discounted as biased or dishonest by some members of the Muslim community. Whatever its faults, this volume represents in English virtually all that is known of the life of the Prophet — The Life of Muhammad should be seen as a work of historical research rather than an exercise in religious orthodoxy.

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The Tibetan Book of the Dead / W Y Evans Wentz

The Evans Wentz edition, first published in 1927, was the first western translation of a Tibetan text, the reading of which was part of the ritual surrounding the dead or dying. The Tibetan Book of the Dead stimulated interest in Tibetan religion and culture and was much sought after in the 1960s and 1970s. It is perhaps worth noting that Sir Francis Younghusband, who accompanied the first British Mission to Lhasa in 1904 and was later an advocate for a World Council of Churches, dismissed Tibetan Lamaism as the most degraded and corrupt form of Buddhism, equating the abbots of the lamaseries with the robber barons of medieval Europe. Often started, seldom finished.

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Sheela-Na-Gigs / Barbara Freitag

Medieval churches throughout the British Isles are littered with enigmatic wood and stone carvings that appear to refer back to pagan beliefs — the best documented and best known are the frequent occurrences of the mysterious Green Man. Sheela-Na-Gigs are more mysterious still, stone images of almost primordial naked female forms, blatantly exposing their genitalia.

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The Holy Blood & The Holy Grail / Baigent / Leigh / Lincoln
The seminal work in English that was responsible for a subsequent outpouring of dross (and a massive boom in the Languedoc tourism industry). An overarching conspiracy theory that encompasses the Crucifixion, the Frankish Merovingian dynasty, the Crusades and Knights Templar, Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade, and virtually every major event in European history down to the 20th century. It now appears that the whole thing started with a surrealist hoax — the perpetrator would have been delighted with the result. Highly selective in its use of sources, heavy on speculation and speculation morphing into fact, but well worth reading for its entertainment value. Glorious and gripping nonsense! Fictional treatments of the theme include the intelligent and witty Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco and the vastly overrated and dumbed-down The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. The last title seems to be regarded currently as originating the theories that appeared twenty years before in HB&HG, but pales in comparison with the original ‘source’.

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The Marian Conspiracy / Graham Phillips
A work of historical detection which purports to follow clues left by the Vatican archaeologist who was charged with investigating the authenticity of two rival tombs of the Virgin Mary. The author claims that the archaeologist found a third, forgotten, site, but that his findings were suppressed after Pope Pius XII pronounced the Assumption as official dogma.

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In God’s Name / David Yallop

A melange of research, conspiracy theory and speculation that postulates that Pope John Paul I was murdered to protect a complicated international financial racket involving such institutions as the Vatican Bank, the Masonic Lodge P2 and Alberto Calvi’s Banco Ambrosiano. You might think that this book provided the basis for The Godfather Part III (1990), available from our Film Store. We couldn’t possibly comment.

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The Classical World and the Atlantic Fringe

The regions of the central Atlantic zone were at the furthest reach of the cultural diffusion that spread northwards and westwards from the Mediterranean. The peoples of the far west lived in their own mythic worlds of custom, superstition and story that had their roots in the Bronze Age and even earlier: many of the themes and archetypes that flicker through the surviving tales seem to hark back to the arrival of Neolithic agriculturalism, or the beginnings of metallurgy, or the traumatic transition from Bronze Age to Iron Age. Folk memories of technological and social revolutions perhaps explain the magical and often amoral content of ‘Celtic’ legend. In Britain and Ireland the body of myth and oral history was adapted by priesthoods and court remembrancers to underpin the status and legitimacy of their aristocratic clients. Patronage generated spurious genealogies and converted history into epic: Druids and bards were the PR men and spin doctors of their day.

Western systems of belief were diluted by the incursions of Rome, and even more by the advent of Christianity. Literacy eroded the mnemonic discipline of oral transmission. Monastic scribes, the conservators of Classical tradition through the so-called ‘Dark Ages’, cast out much of the western paganism that was antipathetic to Christian ideals and distorted what was left to serve their own purposes. Later, medieval, monkish redactions were drained of cohesion and given a Christian and moralistic edge; the consequence was a fantastic and magical gloaming, verging on fairytale.

But long before the medieval, British mythic material had migrated to the continent, through centuries-old networks of cultural exchange or with refugees fleeing to Brittany from the Irish invaders of southern Wales. The magical elements and characters of British mythology were, in the 12th and 13th Centuries, merged with continental heroic conventions of honour and duty. French court poets drew on Arthurian and Grail myths, on the legends of the Paladins of Charlemagne, and on narratives of Crusader knights to create a body of literature that celebrated the chivalric ideal and courtly love. Some authors have speculated that the Arthurian ‘Matter of Britain’ was re-imported by Breton knights who arrived in Britain after the Norman Conquest; this might explain the intertwining of Norman and Welsh aristocracies, on the grounds of cultural affinity.

The Greek Myths Vol I / Robert Graves
The Greek Myths Vol II / Robert Graves
Robert Graves’s epic collection. The tales are well told, the interpretations often questionable — but the work would be the poorer without them.

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The Golden Bough / Sir James Frazer
Ground-breaking study of comparative religion, superstition, mythology and primitive custom that takes as its starting point the ‘strange and recurring tragedy’ that determined the succession of the priesthood of Diana on the shore of the lake of Nemi.

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Celtic Mythology / Ward Rutherford
An in-depth investigation into British and Irish myths and mythic themes, from Druids to King Arthur, and their influence on historical writing and literature.

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The Mabinogion / Jeffrey Gantz
A masterpiece of Welsh medieval literature. Comprises the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, Four Native Tales, The Dream of Rhonabwy and three Romances. Culhwch and Olwen was the first Arthurian tale in Welsh.

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The White Goddess / Robert Graves
A poet’s interpretation of the symbolism and ciphers contained in Welsh bardic literature, notably in the Romance of Taliesin. Graves ranges widely across the classical world, British and Irish myth and the Bible, and intrudes greatly on the territory of The Golden Bough (qv).

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Gods and Fighting Men / Lady Augusta Gregory
From firbolgs and the Tuatha de Danaan, through the coming of the Gael and the exploits of Finn and the Fiannna, to the arrival of St. Patrick. Lady Gregory presents an Homeric celebration of Irish mythology.

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Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland / Lady Augusta Gregory
One of the great collectors of the oral traditions of the west of Ireland, Lady Gregory records this catalogue of the supernatural in the speech patterns of the local peasantry. An influence on the work of JM Synge and WB Yeats.

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King Arthur: The True Story / Graham Phillips & Martin Keatman
The volumes that claim to have identified the historical King Arthur are several. This is more plausible than most and is based on an analysis of Welsh genealogies. But one wonders why no other researcher has stumbled to the same conclusion. One for the beach.

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The Northern Tradition

The northern regions of Europe that came late to Christianity had produced a corpus of historical legend that was enthusiastically gathered and preserved by medieval poets.

With less dilution and interference by monkish redactors the Icelandic, Norse and German sagas survived in more complete forms, demonstrated more coherence and continuity and sketched out the social, moral and legal structures that permeated the communities of the north. In the best example Icelandic, Scandinavian and German authors drew on material dating back to the Burgundian and Merovingian Dark Age to produce a body of work that revolved around the Volsungs, the hero Siegfried and the Ring of the Nibelungs.

The romanticism and budding nationalism of the 19th Century produced a new enthusiasm for folk legends that could justify and bolster perceptions of national and racial identity. Alongside valuable research and literary and artistic inspiration, there emerged a twilit underworld of strange societies and cults. Not all were harmless. In a Germany heading for self-determination under Prussian leadership, the fascination with an imagined past was to be perpetuated into the 20th Century as a potent tool of the Nationalist Socialist Party. If one thing above all else ensured its survival it was the music of Richard Wagner, who drew on a High Medieval poetic legacy to create intoxicating extravaganzas that merged musical, narrative and scenic devices in a way that would not be seen again until the advent of cinema. Wagner looked in part to the Arthurian and Grail romances for his material, but his acknowledged masterpiece was the cycle of operas based on the legends of the Ring of the Nibelungs. The Ring became the symbol of a belief system that elevated Aryan culture and race above all others. Wagner’s operas, his nationalist credentials and his concomitant anti-Semitism, were absorbed wholesale by Adolf Hitler and his cronies, who fused debased concepts of heroic tradition and knightly virtue with pseudo-mysticism and delusions of racial superiority to manufacture the full perverted machinery of the Third Reich.

The Nibelungenlied / A T Hatto
Pre-eminent German heroic saga, composed around 1200, that tells the tale of Siegfried and Gunther, and the quarrel of their wives — the queens Kriemhild and Brunnhilde. This epic was the earliest of the background sources for Wagner’s Ring cycle, particularly for Gotterdammerung.

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The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson
The work of an Icelandic writer of the 12th Century with an especial interest in pre-Christian poetry. The content was re-fashioned by Wagner for the main action of Das Rheingold.

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The Saga of the Volsungs / Jesse Bayock
Composed by an anonymous author, probably Icelandic, around the middle of the 12th Century. A compilation of many stories and poems translated into a continuous narrative which is the fullest version of the Ring legends.

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Poems of the Elder Edda / P Terry
Collection of Icelandic poems dating to around 1270, containing source material used by Wagner for Die Walkurie.

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The Saga of Thidreck of Bern / R Haymes
Written in Norway but belonging to the German tradition, the main focus is the life of Thidreck (Theodoric) the Ostrogothic king who established his base at Bern (Verona). The material on the youthful Siegfried was extracted by Wagner, and the otherworldly ambience of much of the Thidreck Saga permeates the Ring.

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