Renaissance magic and science
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
Christian legend and myth also found fertile ground in the practices of alchemy. Through
the perfection of metals the alchemists sought their own perfection and, indeed, the salvation of
all matter. The alchemist sought to dissolve and then fuse his own physical matter and spirit with
the prime matter of the universe. These efforts at the reduction into prime matter were thought to
make possible the re-creation of individual and cosmos as a single, pure element. Even the
philosopher’s stone or elixir was reinterpreted so that Christ appeared as the perfect matter
produced by the alchemical process—that is, Christ was the stone of all wisdom and knowledge.
In the alchemist’s spiritual forge, the Stone reemerged from the Matrix, the crucible containing
the so-called Bath of Mary, whose amniotic fluids dissolved all impurities. This dissolution
prepared one for rebirth as a perfect being. All matter was redeemed by immersion in the fluids
of the womb where Jesus assumed the flesh. Mystical union with Christ’s death and physical
regression to that same uterus where God became matter empowered the Christian alchemist to
effect a new fusion of redeemed realities, freed of all impure dross. The alchemical tradition was
secretly continued by a number of scientists, including the foremost pioneers of modern physics
and chemistry: Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, and Sir Isaac Newton.
English Franciscan philosopher Roger BaconEnglish Franciscan philosopher and
educational reformer Roger Bacon in his observatory at the Franciscan monastery, Oxford,
England, engraving c. 1867.
Legends also found their place in the growing science of astronomy. In the Middle Ages it
was learned that conjunctions of planets occur every 20 years on a minor scale and every 960
years on a major scale. This theory, described in the Liber magnarum coniunctionum, was
advocated by Albumazar (787–886), a disciple of al-Kindī (?–c. 870), a Muslim philosopher who
assimilated Greek philosophy to Islam. Roger Bacon used this theory to work out the chronology
of great personalities in history and to map the chronological relationship of true prophets
(Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Mani, and Muhammad), one for every 320 years. Based on
observations of a supernova in 1604, Johannes Kepler calculated the “true date” of the birth of
Jesus. These calculations revitalized an interest in the Magi, who had followed the great star.
Kepler believed that the conjunctions were unnatural events brought about by the miraculous
acts of God, who had decided to lodge the birth of his son between the significant zodiacal signs
of the Fish (Pisces) and the Ram (Aries).
Rosicrucian announcements of the imminent coming of a new world also propagated the
theory that great celestial conjunctions appeared at the births of prophets and saviours. Kepler’s
scientific achievements confirmed the hopes of the Rosicrucians and became a foundation for the
new secret order reputedly founded by Christian Rosenkreuz. The editors of Rosicrucian
publications dated the death of their founder to 1484 and fixed the time of the discovery of his
tomb as 1604 in order to coordinate the events with the last two great conjunctions of stars.
Christian practice in the modern world
The 20th century continued to generate important Christian myths and legend-based
practices, including pilgrimages made on Marian feast days to holy wells and fairy rings outside
the Irish town of Sneem and devotions at the tomb of Christ in Japan, where, according to local
legend, Christ ended the long life of missionary travels he began after his mock death in
Jerusalem. These acts and the explanations that accompany them detail the impact of Christian
salvation on reality in modern times. In all the cultures where Christianity has been propagated,
myth and legend express the fulfillment of the religious desires and hopes that constituted the
religious traditions before contact with Christian revelation. The following examples suggest
their variety and vitality.
The healing of sickness is, as it was in the time of the New Testament, a sign of the coming
of the kingdom of Christ in its fullness. In Africa, for example, many so-called Independent
Churches have reinterpreted disease and rites of cure along Christian lines. In Douala,
Cameroon, during the 1980s, two healing prophets named Mallah and Marie-Lumière divided
their disciples, whom they called the “sick ones of the Father,” into groups named for the
important categories of illness described in the Gospels: the Blind, the Halt, the Lame, the Deaf,
the Epileptic, the Dumb, and the Paralyzed. The disciples evidenced none of these physical
symptoms, but they were asked to identify deep within themselves with the affliction described
in the Gospel, so that salvation might touch them in their inner being. By becoming sick, they
could be healed and thus join the elect. In lengthy sermons the healing prophets reimagined
traditional African religious imagery and refashioned it in the light of Christian belief. The
experience of their peculiar mystical disorders afforded a basis for social regrouping and for
rethinking the past and present.
The Christian expression of sacred music and trance is often grounded in legend or myth.
In Brazil, for example, Macumba, Candomblé, and other Afro-Brazilian cults have roots sunk
deep into the religions of African slaves transplanted to the New World. Afro-Brazilian rites
often centre on possession by a supernatural being, called an orixá. The innumerable orixás are
ranked in hierarchies modeled on the pantheons of the Yoruba people of West Africa, among
others. In Brazil (and in much of Afro-American religious life of the Americas), each orixá is
identified with a specific Christian saint. In the Umbanda cult of Brazil, altars hold small plaster
images of the Christian saints associated with the orixás. Each one of the saints presides over a
domain of human activity or over a disease, social group, geographic area, or craft. For example,
Omolú, the god of smallpox, is identified with St. Lazarus, whose body, in Christian legend, is
pocked with sores and who heals diseases of the skin. Oxossi, the Yoruba god of hunting, is
associated with the bellicose St. George or St. Michael, the slayers of dragons and demons.
Yansan, who ate the “magic” of her husband and now spits up lightning, is associated with St.
Barbara, whose father was struck by lightning when he tried to force her to give up her Christian
faith. In the worship site each orixá has its own stone, which is peculiarly shaped, coloured, or
textured; arranged in a distinctive position on the altar; and identified as the cross of Christ. A
single saint may be identified with several orixás or vice versa. Regions vary the saintly
identifications, and some designations shift over time. Each orixá has its own musical rhythms
and sounds. When called by drums, dance, and music, the supernatural being may take over the
possessed medium, reveal valued information, and carry out effective symbolic acts on behalf of
the community.
European communities in the 20th century remained fascinated with the rigorous
asceticism of St. Anthony of Egypt, who repulsed the assaults of wild beasts, reptiles, and
demons and remained steadfast in the faith. He is considered the patron of domestic animals, and
in many parts of Italy, the drama of the feast of St. Anthony, historically associated with the
winter solstice, rivals any other feast day of the Christian calendar. To celebrate his feast, the
people of Fara Filiorum Petri, a town in the Abruzzi region of Italy, ignite enormous bonfires on
the night of January 16. Each of the 12 outlying hamlets brings into the main town’s square a
bundle (farchia) of long poles. Set on end, the bundles are lashed together to form a single tall
mass, an act that commemorates the historical union of the mountain settlements as one bonded
community. Then the bundles of farchie, 15 or more feet high, are set ablaze. The fire is believed
to cleanse the community and hold at bay the evil forces of sickness and death. As the fire dies
down, young men jump through the purifying flames. Spectators carry remnants of the blessed
fire back to their homes, spreading the ashes in their stalls and on their fields.
The birth of Christ was still a focus in the 20th century for traditional legends and myths
that had developed outside ecclesiastical institutions. In rural Romania, for instance, on
Christmas Eve groups of young carolers would (colindatori) proceed from house to house in the
village, singing and collecting gifts of food. Often these carolers impersonated the saints,
especially Saints John, Peter, George, and Nicholas. The words of their songs (colinde) described
legendary heroes who carry the sun and wear the moon on their clothes. They live in paradisal
worlds and subdue monstrous animals in order to leave the world free from harm and ready to
renew itself in the fertile acts of spring.
The symbolic reenactments of legend often experiment with alternative social orders and
criticize or reverse existing divisions of labour and prestige. In Sicilian American communities
of Texas, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere, the female head of the household dedicates and
displays an altar to St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, and thus fulfills a promise made in a
moment of need. She prepares fruit, hard-boiled eggs, cakes, fig-filled pastries, pies, and special
breads and uses them to decorate a series of tiers stretching from floor to ceiling. She also
arranges on this festival altar the figurines of saints, the Virgin Mary, and the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. The construction of this panorama takes nine days, a period that constitutes a ritual novena
of prayer and devout action. Representatives who act in the accompanying ceremony play the
roles of the Holy Family and other saints important to the altar display. Re-creating the Holy
Family’s search for room in a Bethlehem inn on the night of the Nativity, the ritual drama builds
toward the moment when the altar-giver opens her home to Joseph and Mary. As Mother Mary
prepares to give birth to Jesus, the hostess readies her home, heart, and community so that they
may become fit dwelling places for the sacred being. The presiding women play the roles of
Magi-Kings bearing gifts of food and hospitality to the Holy Family and their entourage, which
includes most of the neighbouring community. A single family can host from 500 to 1,000
people in the feast that terminates the celebration.
Sometimes the new Christian mythologies function as counter-theologies or theologies of
resistance to the impositions of Christian culture. They criticize the Christian missionary
enterprise even while they embrace aspects of the new religion. In the 20th century, for instance,
biblical and Christian themes occupied a large part of the mythology of the Makiritare Indians in
the upper Orinoco River region of Venezuela. For them, Wanadi was the Supreme Being of great
light and, although one being, he exists in three distinct persons (damodede, “spirit-doubles”).
Over the course of creation and human history, Wanadi has sent his three incarnations to earth in
order to create human beings and redeem them from the darkness into which they have fallen. In
the end, Wanadi, the god incarnate who comes to save humankind, is crucified by mythical
monsters called Fañurus (from the Spanish españoles: “Spaniards”), at the instigation of an evil
being called Fadre (from the Spanish padre: “father” or “priest”). To all appearances, Wanadi
was slain by the Fañurus, but, in fact, he cut his own insides out and allowed his inner spirit
(akato) to dance free of his dead, cast-off body. Before his spirit ascends into heaven, Wanadi
gathers his 12 disciples together and promises to return in a new and glorious body to destroy the
evil world and create a new earth.
Unlike the orthodox canon of Christian scripture, which was inscribed and closed in the
first centuries, Christian myth and legend have arisen anew throughout all of Christian history. It
offers a record of the spread of Christianity—through the Mediterranean, eastern and western
Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—and highlights the diversity of cultures
brought into contact with the Christian message of salvation. The diverse religious hopes, heroes,
and rites of these cultures continue to shape reinterpretations of the life of Christ and his saintly
followers.
Legend and myth constitute a record of critical reflection on Christian reality in all its
dimensions—social, political, economic, doctrinal, and scriptural. No social class or geographic
region can lay exclusive claim to Christian myth and legend; they fill the stanzas of royally
sponsored poets, the visions of utopian philosophers, and the folklore of rural populations.
Indeed, many ideas widely held about the workings of salvation (especially regarding the saints,
angels, the devil, and the powers of nature) find their origin in legendary episodes rather than
biblical text. Through myth and legend, communities across the globe have absorbed into their
rich religious histories the message of Christian salvation and, through the same fabulous means,
they have evaluated the impact of Christian temporal power on their world.
