• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 861 0

India is less benign. As recently as 2004, people have been charged with the very rare practice of ritual human sacrifice. The goddess Kali is an ancient Hindu goddess who slays evil but has always been known as a demandingly bloodthirsty deity. Millions of Hindus still travel to temples dedicated to Kali in eastern India. Most buy innocuous souvenirs of plastic swords and postcards featuring Kali’s fearsome images on which she is bedecked with skulls and belts of severed feet. But several disciples of Kali have been accused of ritual murder, a chilling vestige of an ancient past—not at all exclusive to India—when human sacrifice was viewed as a necessary means to please or propitiate the gods. Recent discoveries of Peruvian and Celtic mummies, Egyptian sacrifices, and Mesopotamian mass graves are grim evidence that some of these victims went as willing sacrifices to help their people in this world or their divine leader in the next.

Myths also play a serious role in history. Perhaps the most deadly historical example of the impact of myth comes from World War II, when Adolf Hitler drew upon ancient Germanic myths to help enthrall an entire country. In the classic history of Hitler’s climb to power, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer wrote, “Often a people’s myths are the highest and truest expressions of its spirit and culture, and nowhere is this more true than in Germany.” Shirer recalled Hitler saying, “Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner.” Hitler was deeply taken by Wagner’s operas, which drew vividly on the world of German heroic myths, pagan gods and heroes, demons and dragons. Hitler intrinsically understood the deep emotional power of the symbols of these myths. Massive statues of ancient Germanic gods played a prominent role in the Nazi mass rallies at Nuremberg in the 1930s. Hitler grasped the visceral power, as well as the propaganda value, of a shared Teutonic myth in uniting the German people with a “master race” ideology.

One need only watch Leni Riefenstahl’s famed—or notorious—documentary, The Triumph of the Will, to get a sense of the operatic mythology behind these mass pageants. Hitler deliberately mingled Christian and pagan elements, and when he solemnly marched up to stand before a wreath honoring Germans who had died in battle, he appeared to be playing the role of high priest in what one of his biographers has called a “pagan rite of communion.” There is a scholarly debate as to whether Hitler himself was a true believer in the occult, but Nazi officials certainly set out to find historic and religious symbols and artifacts—apparently, including the Holy Grail—to embellish the Nazi cult of power.

In wartime Japan during the same period, myths were the source of the national Shinto religion, as the Japanese emperor Hirohito was supposedly descended from the Shinto sun goddess, Amaterasu. In the waning days of the war, this devotion to the emperor-god led to the use of the notorious kamikaze* pilots. With the war going against Japan in 1945, young men were recruited and given enough training to fly their dynamite-laden planes in suicide crashes aimed at American warships. While it once might have seemed difficult for modern Westerners to imagine, an ancient myth-religion was used to drive these young fighters—and an entire nation—with fanatical devotion to its emperor. That was barely half a century ago, in a thoroughly modern, industrialized, and well-educated society.

And, of course, it doesn’t end there, as recent history has proved too well. In the past few years, the world has witnessed the combustible mixture of belief and fanatical devotion. “The virgins are calling you,” Mohamed Atta wrote to his fellow hijackers just before 9/11. The notion of dying a martyr’s death and gaining entrance to a paradise with the promise of virgins is clearly a powerful idea that continues to drive the terrorists who strap explosives to their bodies, or drive cars filled with explosives, or fly hijacked jets into buildings. They are motivated by beliefs