II. Chapter 3. Points of Departure — Metacultures
The structure of Shadanakar (a vast area of investigation that we shall soon enter) will remain unintelligible at the most basic of levels if the meaning of the words “suprapeople”, “metaculture”, and “transmyth” is not firmly grasped beforehand.
The term “suprapeople” refers to a group of nations united by a common, jointly created culture, or to an individual nation, if that nation alone has created a culture that has reached a high level of distinction and maturity. It goes without saying that completely isolated cultures do not exist. Cultures interact with each other. But, on the whole, each culture is entirely unique and, despite the influence it exerts on other cultures, it remains, in all its fullness, the achievement of only one suprapeople which is its creator.
It would not be necessary to introduce “the suprapeople” concept if it did not possess metahistorical, as well as historical, significance. Its metahistorical significance rests in the fact that the distinctiveness of a suprapeople is not limited to its own cultural sphere of influence in Enrof but also affects many variomaterial planes, both of ascent and descent, for certain parts of those planes are subject to the activities of one suprapeople alone. One should bear in mind that the term suprapeople not only includes those individuals, our contemporaries who belong to it now. A great many of those who belonged to it earlier, even at the very dawn of its history, and who afterward, in the afterlife, have acted and act now on transphysical planes linked to that suprapeople. A staircase of planes common to all suprapeoples rises above humanity, but the complexion, landscape, and function of each plane varies above each suprapeople. There are even planes that only exist above a single suprapeople. The exact same is true of the demonic worlds of descent which exist, as it were, beneath suprapeoples. Thus, a significant portion of Shadanakar consists of individual multiplaned segments. In each of those segments the Enrof plane is occupied by only one suprapeople and its culture. Those multiplaned segments of Shadanakar are called metacultures.
Every suprapeople has its own myth which does not take shape in the culture's infant stage alone. As the traditional use of the word “myth” does not match the meaning attached to it here, it is necessary to explain carefully in what sense I use the word.
When we speak of a tightly integrated system of rich symbols that embody some comprehensive international teaching and that find expression in legends and ritual, in theology and philosophy, in monuments of literature and art, and lastly, in a moral code, we are speaking of myths of the great international religions. There are four such myths: Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, and Muslim.
When we speak of a tightly integrated system of rich symbols that define the relationship of one suprapeople to Enrof and to the transphysical and spiritual worlds, a system molded into a definite religion that has played an enormously significant role in the history of the given suprapeople but has rarely spread beyond its boundaries, we are speaking of national religious myths of individual suprapeoples. Such are the Egyptian, ancient Iranian, Jewish, Germanic, Gallic, Aztec, Incan, Japanese, and some other myths.
When we are referring to symbols just as rich and perhaps also tied, although not as closely, to ideas of a religious and moral nature, which, though they have not evolved into a strictly formulated system, reflect, nonetheless, a group of common moral, transphysical, metahistorical, or cosmic truths in connection with the specific nature and role of that culture, we are dealing with shared myths of suprapeoples. Such are the myths of the South-Western (Roman Catholic) suprapeople, the North-Western (Germanic Protestant) suprapeople, or the Russian suprapeople (in some cultures, the Greco-Roman or Babylonian-Canaanite, for example, their myths had already passed the “shared” stage of development but did not take shape in a system strictly formulated enough to allow the Olympic or Babylonian myths to be numbered among the national religious myths of suprapeoples).
Last is the fourth and final group – shared national myths. They are myths of individual ethnic groups within a suprapeople that have created, as a supplement to the shared suprapeople myth, their own particular, very restricted variations of that myth, variations that have not evolved into any strictly formulated system or religion. One could cite as examples the pagan myths of the Slavic tribes, the Finnish tribes, the Turkish tribes, as well as the myths of some isolated and primal tribes in India. Ethnic myths in their embryonic state can be observed among many ethnic groups, but they rarely achieve any clear expression.
We will not use the word myth in reference to any other phenomenon in the history of culture.
The last three groups of myths are concerned with one specific culture. The first group – the myths of international religions – are (with one exception) mystically linked to planes in Shadanakar above those segmented sections called “metacultures”.
It seems to me that the concept of national religious myths can be grasped without too much difficulty. As for the shared myths of suprapeoples, for the sake of clarity, a pair of supplementary definitions are in order.
Defined inductively, the shared myth of a suprapeople is the sum of its beliefs concerning the transphysical cosmos and the part the given culture and each self belonging to that culture play within it (The very concept “given culture” can be no more precisely formulated than it was, for example, by the Greco-Romans that distinguished between themselves and the rest of humanity, whom they lumped together as barbarians).
The culture elaborates these beliefs, molding them into cycles of religio-philosophical ideas, iconography, socio-moral systems, state-political institutions, and cycles of national lifestyle manifested in ritual, daily rounds of life, and tradition.
Defined deductively, the shared myth of a suprapeople is an awakening by the suprapeople, in the person of its most creative representatives, to a second reality above them, of which the suprapeople is a part and in which the direction of its growth and the roots of its fate are hidden. This awakening is made groggy by additives foreign to it issuing from unattuned human nature. We can give that second reality, which serves as the object of transphysical, metahistorical, artistic, and philosophical apprehensions, the provisional name “transmyth”.
The term “suprapeople” refers to a group of nations united by a common, jointly created culture, or to an individual nation, if that nation alone has created a culture that has reached a high level of distinction and maturity. It goes without saying that completely isolated cultures do not exist. Cultures interact with each other. But, on the whole, each culture is entirely unique and, despite the influence it exerts on other cultures, it remains, in all its fullness, the achievement of only one suprapeople which is its creator.
It would not be necessary to introduce “the suprapeople” concept if it did not possess metahistorical, as well as historical, significance. Its metahistorical significance rests in the fact that the distinctiveness of a suprapeople is not limited to its own cultural sphere of influence in Enrof but also affects many variomaterial planes, both of ascent and descent, for certain parts of those planes are subject to the activities of one suprapeople alone. One should bear in mind that the term suprapeople not only includes those individuals, our contemporaries who belong to it now. A great many of those who belonged to it earlier, even at the very dawn of its history, and who afterward, in the afterlife, have acted and act now on transphysical planes linked to that suprapeople. A staircase of planes common to all suprapeoples rises above humanity, but the complexion, landscape, and function of each plane varies above each suprapeople. There are even planes that only exist above a single suprapeople. The exact same is true of the demonic worlds of descent which exist, as it were, beneath suprapeoples. Thus, a significant portion of Shadanakar consists of individual multiplaned segments. In each of those segments the Enrof plane is occupied by only one suprapeople and its culture. Those multiplaned segments of Shadanakar are called metacultures.
Every suprapeople has its own myth which does not take shape in the culture's infant stage alone. As the traditional use of the word “myth” does not match the meaning attached to it here, it is necessary to explain carefully in what sense I use the word.
When we speak of a tightly integrated system of rich symbols that embody some comprehensive international teaching and that find expression in legends and ritual, in theology and philosophy, in monuments of literature and art, and lastly, in a moral code, we are speaking of myths of the great international religions. There are four such myths: Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, and Muslim.
When we speak of a tightly integrated system of rich symbols that define the relationship of one suprapeople to Enrof and to the transphysical and spiritual worlds, a system molded into a definite religion that has played an enormously significant role in the history of the given suprapeople but has rarely spread beyond its boundaries, we are speaking of national religious myths of individual suprapeoples. Such are the Egyptian, ancient Iranian, Jewish, Germanic, Gallic, Aztec, Incan, Japanese, and some other myths.
When we are referring to symbols just as rich and perhaps also tied, although not as closely, to ideas of a religious and moral nature, which, though they have not evolved into a strictly formulated system, reflect, nonetheless, a group of common moral, transphysical, metahistorical, or cosmic truths in connection with the specific nature and role of that culture, we are dealing with shared myths of suprapeoples. Such are the myths of the South-Western (Roman Catholic) suprapeople, the North-Western (Germanic Protestant) suprapeople, or the Russian suprapeople (in some cultures, the Greco-Roman or Babylonian-Canaanite, for example, their myths had already passed the “shared” stage of development but did not take shape in a system strictly formulated enough to allow the Olympic or Babylonian myths to be numbered among the national religious myths of suprapeoples).
Last is the fourth and final group – shared national myths. They are myths of individual ethnic groups within a suprapeople that have created, as a supplement to the shared suprapeople myth, their own particular, very restricted variations of that myth, variations that have not evolved into any strictly formulated system or religion. One could cite as examples the pagan myths of the Slavic tribes, the Finnish tribes, the Turkish tribes, as well as the myths of some isolated and primal tribes in India. Ethnic myths in their embryonic state can be observed among many ethnic groups, but they rarely achieve any clear expression.
We will not use the word myth in reference to any other phenomenon in the history of culture.
The last three groups of myths are concerned with one specific culture. The first group – the myths of international religions – are (with one exception) mystically linked to planes in Shadanakar above those segmented sections called “metacultures”.
It seems to me that the concept of national religious myths can be grasped without too much difficulty. As for the shared myths of suprapeoples, for the sake of clarity, a pair of supplementary definitions are in order.
Defined inductively, the shared myth of a suprapeople is the sum of its beliefs concerning the transphysical cosmos and the part the given culture and each self belonging to that culture play within it (The very concept “given culture” can be no more precisely formulated than it was, for example, by the Greco-Romans that distinguished between themselves and the rest of humanity, whom they lumped together as barbarians).
The culture elaborates these beliefs, molding them into cycles of religio-philosophical ideas, iconography, socio-moral systems, state-political institutions, and cycles of national lifestyle manifested in ritual, daily rounds of life, and tradition.
Defined deductively, the shared myth of a suprapeople is an awakening by the suprapeople, in the person of its most creative representatives, to a second reality above them, of which the suprapeople is a part and in which the direction of its growth and the roots of its fate are hidden. This awakening is made groggy by additives foreign to it issuing from unattuned human nature. We can give that second reality, which serves as the object of transphysical, metahistorical, artistic, and philosophical apprehensions, the provisional name “transmyth”.