The Broken Wineglass (Video Podcast)

The Broken Wineglass--Restoring the Ancient Poetry of Love

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You are granite. I am an empty wineglass. You know what happens when we touch! You laugh like the sun coming up laughs at a star that disappears into it. Love opens my chest, and thought returns to its confines. Patient and rational considerations leave. Only passion stays, whimpering and feverish. Some men fall down in the road like dregs thrown out. Then, totally reckless, the next morning they gallop out with new purposes. Love is the reality, and poetry is the drum that calls us to that. Don’t keep complaining about loneliness! Let the fear-language of that theme crack open and float away. Let the priest come down from his tower, and not go back up!

In this poem by the 13^th century poet and Sufi mystic, Rumi, we are invited to journey into the heart of our humanity, the fragile space between rock and glass, Lover and Beloved, where Love is the reality, and poetry is the drum that calls us.

Similarly, the mythologist, Joseph Campbell describes the call to purpose and meaning in the poetic imagination of myth:

Mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images... Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.

Mythology is the notes between the lines, beneath the surface intellect, where we may find meaning in the images and symbols woven together in the poet’s dream. It invites the priest to come down from his tower, and not go back up.

Elsewhere, Campbell states:

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.

Likewise, it is may also be killed when we rationalize and distort the sacred construct of a myth in order to make it say what we would like it to say. This is the predicament of one of the most profound myths in human history—the myth of love within the universal family painted in the sacred Torah-Gospel mythology. From its inception, it is distorted into various systems of idolatry and social control, symbolized by eating the immature fruit or morality, ultimately becoming the various moralistic traditions of the Abrahamic religions. The myth itself is an invitation to move beyond the fear-based religious systems and hierarchies into the way of love and relationship, of one transcendent family.

The Torah-Gospel myth is wholly and elementally about love. The myth internally contrasts this developmental journey towards love with our need for control, born of fear and doubt. It defines maturity as a prosocial morality of responsibility and love for one another, supporting and nurturing the value and well-being of any and all we encounter on the road of life, regardless of caste, custom, conduct, or creed.

As most have only been exposed to the distorted religious narrative, I shall endeavor to restore the broader themes of this powerful myth of love and relationship bounded by a mythological journey over two millennia. However, I am not prescribing any specific spiritual cosmology regarding the existence or non-existence of any deeper realities. That is the responsibility of the individual traveler to seek out for themselves. But it is important to note that the meaning of the myth is not arbitrary—any inspiration or conclusion that is not founded on the unadulterated narrative of the myth cannot and should not be considered to be founded in that particular mythology.

A myth is by nature sacred—whether one considers its origins divine or by the crucible of time, purified over many generations. If I take a glass of pure water and add anything to it, there is still water in the glass but it will no longer be a glass of water—it is fundamentally changed.

Following is an attempt to go back to examining the glass of water in the written text, albeit, given the brevity of this format, highly condensed. I have explored this myth more deeply, with more pages and bigger words, in the much longer format of my book, Serpent in the Cellar: Love and Death in Life and Myth.

The Torah-Gospel mythology is essentially a moral psychology beginning with the Tree of Morality in the Garden of Eden and taking us on a journey over three elemental eons or ages—Primordial, National, and Universal. Each of these Ages represents a developmental level from juvenile to adolescent and then adult morality. Each level describes a type of relationship and its disintegration.

The Primordial Age is outlined in the first Book of the Torah, Bereshit-Genesis. It lays out the juvenile framework for morality beginning in Eden and ending in Egypt—from Adam to the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It begins with the establishment of a family of Elohim—a term meaning a very great power. It describes an intimate relationship between the Parent Elohim, Yahweh, and the Child Elohim, Eve and Adam, who eventually become the progenitors of all humanity, the universal family of Elohim. The core moral principle is Knowledge developing the central theme of “awakening” beginning with creation, leading to the knowledge of goodness and badness, or morality, and then to the artifice of human civilization with all its strengths and weaknesses.

In the myth, there is a subtext, later developed in the Mosaic Law, that truthfulness, trustworthiness, respectfulness, and generosity are the basis for relationship. The central theme of Awakening disintegrates into separation and death based on the premise that the consequence of breaking these relational principles breaks a relationship. Rather than some moralistic notion of angering the gods by breaking the rules, dooming humanity to eternal punishment, as traditionally posited, the Exile narrative is simply a core metaphor for the failure of conscience through doubt and false accusations of negative intentions upon another, in this case, the Parent Elohim. The death of intimacy in the Garden of Eden between Parent and Child is portrayed in the myth as wandering in the wilderness East of Eden.

Archetypally, the juvenile morality of the Child-Parent relationship disintegrates into the imbalance of power represented by the Victim-Villain-Victor archetype based on fear and scarcity. As such, Cain, the first born of Adam and Eve, embodies the villain, monster, or perpetrator by killing his brother Abel out of jealousy. He is then cursed to wander in Nod, dispossessed from the land, but still protected by the Parent Elohim. Cain’s offspring develop the hallmarks of human civilization—music, metallurgy, and the herding of cattle—and build the first cities. Rather than some moralistic narrative of good and evil, the myth is more nuanced in representing Cain as the embodiment of the power and pitfalls of humanity based on scarcity and control, or conversely, the failure to love. By the end of the Book of Genesis, Egypt comes to represent the Kingdom of Cain as a great civilization with a powerful king who enslaves his own people and then eventually, enslaves the nascent tribes of Israel.

This leads into the National Age which is covered in the rest of the books of the Torah and the books of History, Prophets, and Poetry, customarily identified as the Tanakh or Old Testament in the Judeochristian traditions. The sacred text covers a mythological description of the nation of Israel’s relationship to the Parent Elohim through about the 5^th century BCE. Additional myth and selective history is described by ancient scholars over the next few centuries, in particular Josephus and then the Gospel mythographers, leading up to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple during the First Jewish Roman War in 70 CE and then the final banishment of the Jews from Palestine after the Third Jewish Roman War in 136 CE, ending the National Age of Israel.

The National Age lays out the adolescent framework for morality. The juvenile Child-Parent relationship of the Primordial Age evolves into the adolescent Servant-Savior relationship. The symbol of the Tree of Morality in the Midst of the Garden develops into the Mosaic Law and the Tabernacle in the Midst of the Israelite people. The core moral principle is “Love” developing the central theme of “obligation” represented by the tenets of the Mosaic Law. The National Age can be divided into three eras—the Kingdom of Cain in Egypt, the Kingdom of Elohim in Israel, and then the Political Kingdoms of Israel.

The National Age begins by establishing the Servant-Savior relationship between Yahweh and the family of Jacob also named Israel through his favored son Joseph in Egypt. After Joseph becomes the second-most powerful man in Egypt during a great famine, Jacob-Israel’s family settles in Goshen in northeast Egypt. However, over generations as the children of Israel grow exponentially, this devolves into slavery to the Egyptians. And archetypally, the Servant-Savior relationship disintegrates into a Slave-Master relationship.

The Servant-Savior relationship is restored through the anointed leader, Moses, who leads the tribes of Israel out of Egypt towards the Promised Land of Canaan, where their forefather Abraham had previously settled centuries before. This begins the second era of the National Age, the Kingdom of Yahweh-Elohim in Israel which lasts another four centuries and represents the height of the mythic relationship between Yahweh and Israel.

Eventually, the Servant-Savior relationship of the Kingdom of Elohim in Israel disintegrates back into the Slave-Master relationship in the next era of the Political Kingdoms of Israel. According to myth and history, the Political Kingdoms of Israel last for another 12 centuries. This era is initiated when the Israelites reject the benevolent rule of Yahweh as their Patriarch, requesting that they put themselves under the authority of a new master, a human King. In the narrative of the Judge Samuel, Yahweh withdraws his direct blessing from Israel warning that they will suffer under their new Regal Masters.

He shall take your menservants, your maidservants and your choice young men, the best ones, and your donkeys, and he will use them for his work. He shall take the tenth of your flock; and you shall become slaves for him. You will cry out on that day because of your king whom you have chosen for yourselves; yet Yahweh shall not answer you on that day.

For the rest of the mythological history of Israel, Yahweh continually invites the Israelite people back into the Servant-Savior relationship through various prophets, only to time again be rejected for a National Kingdom. Within the mythological framework, this then leads to their dissolution as a nation according to the later prophets and the gospel accounts.

The Era of the Political Kingdoms can be divided into three periods beginning with the Israelite Kingdoms, then the Vassal Kingdoms, and then finally the Messianic Crusades—each demonstrating some aspect of the Slave-Master relationship. During the first period, the initial unified Israelite Kingdoms of Saul, David, and Solomon disintegrate into the Divided Kingdoms of Israel in the north and Judea in the south. After a couple of centuries, the northern Kingdom of Israel is then conquered and forced into captivity by the Neo-Assyrians in 722 BCE leaving only a remnant, which became derisively known by Judeans in later accounts as the Samaritans. A little over a century later Judea is similarly conquered by the Neo-Babylonians in 588 BCE and also forced into captivity. The Judean capital of Jerusalem is destroyed along with their center of worship, the Solomonic Temple, thus ending the Period of the Kingdoms of Israel.

The Vassal Kingdoms arise after the Persians conquer the Babylonians in 516 BCE who then release the captive Judeans from Babylon; allowing them to return to rebuild Jerusalem and a second Temple as vassals of the Persian Empire. The Persians are then conquered by the Greeks under Alexander the Great in 332 BCE who shortly thereafter dies leaving his generals to divide the kingdom locally into the Ptolemaic Dynasty in Egypt and the Seleucid Dynasty in Syria.  The Vassal Kingdom of Judea which sits between these warring dynasties consequently bounced back and forth over the next couple of centuries.

The next period of the Messianic Crusades describes a series of revolts led by messianic leaders intending to reestablish autonomous political rule in Judea. Who and what is the awaited Messiah or Anointed One referred to by the Jewish Prophets is highly contentious throughout this period. But the dominant view is that the Jewish God would send a Warrior-King, a political messiah, to destroy Judea’s enemies, delivering them from oppression, and reestablishing a powerful Jewish Kingdom. The proof whether someone was The Messiah, instead of just a failed or false messiah, tended to be whether the leader succeeded in battle, which didn’t happen very often, or whether they were killed, which did happen very often.

However, the first successful revolt of this period was the Maccabean uprising in 167 BCE against the Hellenistic Jews and the Seleucid Kingdom. The warrior-priest-king Simon Maccabee was a messianic leader that ultimately defeated the Seleucid coalition thus establishing the Hasmonean Dynasty around 140 BCE, gaining greater independence, although not complete autonomy from the Seleucid Kings. This came to an end shortly after the Romans conquered Palestine in 63 BCE who then established their own vassal kingdom in Palestine in 37 BCE under a quasi-Jewish Herodian Dynasty.  

Over the next century, various messianic leaders arose attempting to free Palestine from their Roman masters. Early on, these revolts were mostly minor guerrilla squabbles that were quickly squashed by the Romans. Then in 66 CE a larger revolt arose, known as the First Jewish Roman War, which resulted in the apocalyptic destruction of the city of Jerusalem and the second temple by the Romans in 70 CE. While this cataclysm destroyed the heart of the Jewish political and religious culture, the Jews persisted on for another 66 years through two more wars. In the Third Jewish Roman war, the last political messiah of the Messianic Crusade Period, Simon Bar Kokbah briefly succeeded in establishing a degree of autonomous rule in parts of Judea for a few years before being killed and then the last of the revolt was finally defeated by the Romans in 136 CE. This time the Romans decided to end these messianic revolts once and for all and banished all Jews from Palestine, thus ending the National Age of Israel.

In the midst of the Messianic Crusade against Roman rule in the first century CE, a different kind of Messiah arose, seeking peace not war, declaring the responsibility to love one another, including one’s enemies, thus restoring the Universal Family founded in Eden. In this mythology, the Familial Messiah is the Anointed Son of the Parent Elohim, Yahweh, founded in the ancient poetry of love underlying the Torah-Gospel myth.

In the cultural traditions of Mesopotamia and the Levant, a father anointed one of his sons, customarily his first born, to represent his authority and identity in his absence or death. Rarely, the father might spurn a first-born child whom he felt did not represent his authority or identity. In the Torah, this rare occurrence is not so rare, but rather the predominant pattern in the mythology. After Adam’s first-born Cain murders the second-born Abel, the third-born Seth becomes the anointed son to carry the family forward. In the patriarchal narrative, Abraham’s first-born Ishmael is spurned for the second-born Isaac. Isaac’s first-born Esau is spurned for the second-born Jacob. And Jacob’s first-born Rueben is spurned for his eleventh-born Joseph.

Archetypally, in the final plague of the Exodus myth which sets up Israel’s emancipation from slavery in Egypt, the Angel of Death kills the first-born of Egypt and passes over the first-born of Israel that are marked by the lamb’s blood on the doorpost. At the end of the previous Book of Genesis, the Egyptians were identified with the Kingdom of Adam’s first-born Cain as the preeminent archetype of human civilization. In the Passover myth, these archetypal first-born of Adam are symbolically replaced by the subsequently born Israelites as his newly anointed favored nation going forward to represent the Father’s authority and identity.

In the Torah mythology, the authority and identity of Yahweh is represented by his name. Hebrew scholars have often interpreted the name Yahweh to indicate One who has self-referential existence to the tune of “I am that I am,” which connotes that he cannot be defined or represented by another. This is the context for the commandment in the Decalogue to not take Yahweh’s name in vain, that is, to not misrepresent his identity or attempt to illicitly speak on his behalf.

A more developed theory is that the name Yahweh is initially Arabic, a closely related Semitic language to Hebrew. In the Exodus myth, Yahweh reveals his name to Moses at the foot of the sacred Mount of Elohim in the land of the Arabic-speaking Midianites where Moses has lived for the past 40 years after being exiled from Egypt. As such, the name Yahweh invokes the Arabic meaning of One who loves, breathes, or falls, which is more consistent with the fullness of the Parent Elohim’s character throughout the mythology as the Parent who breathes life into his children within the juvenile stage of moral development, then the Savior from whom blessings fall upon his Servants within the adolescent stage, and then finally, the Lover who loves his Beloved within the adult stage.

This is then expanded in the Gospel mythology of the Familial Messiah, wherein the Anointed Son from the tribal lineage of Israel reestablishes the continuity of the Parent Elohim’s authority and identity by archetypally replacing the first-born Elohim, Adam, who had previously failed to represent the truth of the Father’s authority and identity.

In the Gospel mythology, the Anointed Son, or Familial Messiah, is identified as Rabbi Jeshua. His life and ministry are intended to restore the truth of the Father’s identity as “compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding with kindness and truth.”

Rabbi Jeshua identifies the central Gospel message with a passage in the Book of Isaiah stating that his mission, or anointing, is to bear good tidings to the powerless, to bind up the broken-hearted, to herald liberty to captives, sight to the sightless, and emancipation to the bound. In the first part of this passage, the Hebrew word basar is translated as “good tidings” which is elsewhere translated into Greek as evangel and then later into English as the more commonly used religious word “gospel”.

In the Torah-Gospel mythology, Rabbi Jeshua restores the Servant-Savior relationship based on the Torah obligation to love one another that was originally established in the Kingdom of Elohim in Israel which had disintegrated into the Slave-Master relationship of the Political Kingdoms. However, this is only the adolescent stage of moral development. It is not the end of the story. It is intended to develop further into the next stage of morality.

The subsequent and final Universal Age lays out the adult framework for morality. The adolescent Servant-Savior relationship of the National Age is intended to evolve into the mature Lover-Beloved relationship. The symbol of the Tree of Morality in the Midst of the Garden that had developed into the Mosaic Law and the tabernacle in the Midst of the People, finally becomes a mature conscience written in the Sacred Midst of the heart.

Rather than some oblique goal of attaining moral perfection as proposed by the various moralistic religions, the core moral principle is “Goodness” supporting the central theme of “restoration” governed by the dynamics of compassion and empathy—thus, actively seeking to maintain intimacy within community by being ready to restore any value taken or lost in offense of a relationship, to embody the experience of love for one another.

The Universal Age can be divided into two eras—the Lower Kingdom of Elohim on Earth and the Upper Kingdom of Yahweh Elohim in the Sky, beyond life and death. The Lower Kingdom is foreshadowed by Rabbi Jeshua in the Gospel accounts equating his own death with the eventual destruction of the Temple. Thus, Jeshua’s resurrection from death symbolically ushers in a new age of love, truth, and healing after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, beginning the Universal Age.

It is important to re-note here that Myth is poetry not history. It may however be a selective interpretation of history in support of a specified storyline. Poetry is built from the flow of meaning. The poetry of the Torah-Gospel myth is focused on moral development leading to loving relationships.

It is at this point that we, in the here and now, become myth. We inhabit the Lower Kingdom of Elohim on Earth that Rabbi Jeshua invoked in the Gospel Accounts. We are the Elohim in the Kingdom of Elohim—the Great Powers in the Kingdom of Great Power. In this living myth, it has become our responsibility to embody the poetry of love, the heart of Yahweh, to build a society, a universal family, based on compassion and empathy. In the arc of the mythology, the poetry of love gives us all we need to become mature adult Elohim, great powers formed in the image of the Parent Elohim. We have the power to choose to be compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and truth.

The Upper Kingdom in the mythology is a symbol of hope. It invokes a more powerful realm of love and intimacy between the Lover and Beloved beyond life and death. Other than that, this Kingdom beyond life and death is an article of faith for the traveler to explore as a part of their own spiritual cosmology.

However, it is important to note that the Universal Age is not some utopian cosmology as often portrayed in the moralistic Religions. The adult Lover-Beloved relationship may still deteriorate into a Rival-Adversary relationship motivated by domination and control. Over the first two millennia of the Universal Age, the Poetry of Love has been continuously mixed with a miasma of institutional religious and political power.

Historically, Rabbinic Judaism is, of course, the earliest institutional branch of the Abrahamic traditions coming into the Universal Age. After the destruction of the temple cult, the Jewish tradition that espoused the centrality of the Temple sacrifice ceased to have any relevance. The local Synagogue became the primary foundation for Jewish religious life.

Over the centuries, Rabbinic Judaism has continued to deepen the racial theology of God’s chosen people, while searching for a political messiah to establish an ethno-theocratic nation in Palestine based on the religion of Judaism. Eventually, in the mid twentieth century, in large part as a response to the suffering of the Holocaust caused by the Nazi’s attempt to expel the Jews from Europe (mostly by murdering them), the Zionists stopped waiting for a messiah and took up arms to forcibly expel the modern inhabitants of Palestine from the lands that the Jews had been expelled from nearly two millennia before. Thus a new nation of Israel was born in 1949—although 70 years later, it continues to be at war with the local Palestinians who were inconveniently expelled from their homes.

Theologically, from the first century through modernity, new prophets have arisen claiming an entirely new vision of the Abrahamic tradition. The earliest prophet at the transition from the National Age to the Universal Age was the neo-Apostle Paul who became the Father of Christianity. Paul declares a new moralistic gospel that Jesus died for your sins to save you from the judgment of the Angry God—in other words, paradoxically, the Christian God must save humanity from himself.  In his letter to the Galatians written around 50 CE Paul claims that his new gospel of sin and salvation was received from a prophetic vision separate from the Gospel accounts and teachings of Rabbi Jeshua as understood by his students, stating:

I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.

This new prophetic gospel soon overtakes the original Isaiah Gospel message of love, freedom, and safety proclaimed by Rabbi Jeshua. By the second century it becomes firmly established as the basis for the new religion of Christianity based on Paul’s prophetic epistles.

The next major prophet to come out of the Abrahamic tradition in the Universal Age is Mohammed who, in the early 7^th century, becomes the Father of Islam after the angel Gabriel reveals a new message from God. Islam develops as a mixture of selective interpretations of the Torah-Gospel mythology along with these new prophetic revelations as written in the Quran.

And a more recent prophet of the Universal Age is Joseph Smith who, in the early 19^th century, became the Father of Mormonism after an angel visited him and gave him several golden plates inscribed with esoteric Judeochristian history which was then translated and published as the Book of Mormon.

Beyond these Founding Fathers of new religious traditions, there have also been innumerable Master Teachers that have expanded the interpretations of these new religious mythologies to create countless new sects within the Abrahamic religions. Rabbinic Judaism has developed various sects based on differing interpretations of the Talmudic commentary on the Mosaic Law and ritual practices. Within the Christian tradition, it has been estimated that there have been over thirty thousand sects over the past two millennia based on the various teachings of those claiming to be Master Teachers. And Islam, a name which ironically means “peace,” has been in a perpetual war between the followers of its main Master Teachers for centuries.

Whereas religious authority was forbidden by Rabbi Jeshua, this has been politely put aside by necessity of the political nature of the institutional church. From the high church Popes, Cardinals, and Bishops to an army of Pastors, Priests, Deacons, and Church Leaders spread across the globe, these religious officials enforce the authority of each denomination’s political claim to power.

So from the beginning of the Universal Age, the Isaiah Gospel message of love, freedom, and safety quickly became suffused with various additive theologies starting with Paul’s prophetic gospel of salvation from sin a decade or so after the crucifixion of Rabbi Jeshua. Soon after, Hellenistic Gnosticism was fused with the gospel framework to create Christian Gnosticism inspiring a plethora of new Gnostic gospel writings over the course of the next few centuries. In early Christianity, aspects of Hellenistic Mystery Religions and Neo-Platonism were infused into the gospel framework of mainstream institutional Christian theology by way of the Early Church Fathers.

Politically, in mainstream Christianity, the institutional church is formalized under the Council of Nicaea as mandated by the Roman Emperor Constantine in 325 CE—establishing a universal church dogma canonizing Paul’s moralistic gospel.  A few decades later, in 380 CE, Christianity becomes the official state religion of the Roman Empire under the Edict of Thessalonica by the Roman Emperor Theodosius I.

These are just a few highlights. The pattern of hierarchical power and control continues throughout history up to and including today as each generation invokes a new political messiah for their time and purpose.

Ultimately, we have the power to choose Love over Control. However, as we have seen, the outcome is not preordained. The myth merely provides a moral framework of possibilities. In the Gospel accounts, Rabbi Jeshua forbids his followers from taking on the principal roles of Master Teacher, Hallowed Father, or Religious Authority—emphasizing that we are all brothers and sister of one family and that he is our one and only Master Teacher and authority, and that Yahweh is our one and only Father.

He then tells his students that power is found in service to others which he demonstrates by getting down on his knees and washing their filthy feet after a long day on the road. And when asked by his students who of them will be the greatest, he states that the first must be last, that they must become open and uninhibited like little children. He emphasizes that the Kingdom of Elohim will not be found in any institution or system, rather it is in their hearts. The Torah-Gospel mythology is radically, diametrically opposed to any canonical religion, systemic authority, or hierarchic order—and cannot coexist with the worship of wealth or power.

Fundamentally, the poetry of love, founded in the Torah-Gospel mythology, is a moral psychology, a way of living that happens in any mundane moment we instinctually reach out in kindness and generosity towards another human being in need. It is motivated by a mature conscience, symbolized as the Sacred Spirit or Breath, and founded on the essential value of all within the universal family as brothers and sisters. It comes to life when we embody our responsibility to proactively and prosocially respond to the needs of others, to build a society and community based on love.

Ergo, as a wineglasses emptied by the struggles of life, we may then be broken by the granitic reality of the poetry of love—as Lover meets Beloved. Only passion stays, whimpering and feverish, like stars consumed by the morning sun. Love becomes reality, the drumbeat that calls us to a new purpose beyond loneliness and fear. As Love opens up our chest, thought returns to its confines, patient and rational considerations leave, the priest may then come down from his tower, never to return.