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By Root 5334 0

the practice of offering life as a `sacrifice, a `making whole'. In innumerable religions, the lives of animals and humans have been ritually offered to the gods as a way of healing the separation between gods and men. The sacrificial animal, like the scapegoat, was supposed to carry with it all the offences and imperfections of the tribe or the individual, thus leaving those who had offered the sacrifice `cleansed' and restoring the unity which had been broken.17 In taking upon himself the `sin' of all mankind, the story ran, Jesus had `redeemed' the whole world. But this kind of interpretation belongs not so much to the story itself as to what was to be made of it in later years, when the myth of the God who had died and been reborn became the central inspiration for something rather different: the story of the religion known as `Christianity.

Christianity `above the line'

Over the next three centuries, although the story of `the man-God who died and was reborn' spread all over the Roman empire and even to India and China, the religion of those who followed `the Way' remained very much `below the line'. In the catacombs of Rome these new `Christians' literally went underground. During that time the new faith, built on the stories of Jesus's life, gradually built up its own collective consciousness. Paul, a Jew from the heavily Greek-influenced region of Asia Minor, played a key part in shaping the message, emphasising what a break it marked from traditional Judaism, in that its God was equally `father' to every member of the human race, `Jew or Gentile, slave or free'. Its central ritual was formalised round the act of sharing bread and wine, symbolising the coming together of all Christians in the `one-ness' of Christ's `mystical body'. The other supreme Christian symbol was the cross, representing not just the instrument of his `act of atonement' or `at-One-ment' between God and all mankind, but as itself a four-cornered symbol of wholeness; so that, as Christians made the `sign of the cross, they were `centring' themselves in an act which marks a bringing together of the four components of the human personality: body, mind, heart and soul.18

In obvious respects the new religion inherited from Judaism its `masculine' bias, in that it centred on a male trinity of `Father, `Son' and `Holy Spirit', regarded, like other divine trinities elsewhere in the world, as three different aspects of one single God. But behind this, reflecting the central significance of the `feminine' in Christ's own teaching, a fourth figure soon became closely related to the male trinity, Mary, `wife of the Father, `Mother of the Son, representing all the archetypal attributes of an idealised, loving human mother. After the crucifixion itself, no image was to play a more central part in Christian symbolism than the representation of the `Holy Mother and Child'; although, as a virgin, Mary also represents the anima. Equally significant was the enigmatic nature of the third member of the trinity, the Holy Spirit. As its name implies, this mysterious being represents the `spirit of wholeness, all those psychic forces which draw human beings towards integration with the One. In terms of its underlying archetype, the `holy spirit' thus represents the dynamic power of the Self. But since no archetype symbolises this more completely than the anima, as supreme embodiment of the feminine value, the `holy spirit' must by definition include a strong, if disguised, feminine component. This was later to become manifest when individual Christians sought to personify the spiritual power guiding them to wholeness, as when the fourth century writer Boethius imagined the awe-inspiring figure opening his eyes to the `light' of spiritual understanding as `Sophia'. She was as much a feminine embodiment of the spirit of wisdom as Athene had been to the Greeks. And it was apt that the greatest Christian shrine in the Greek world, in that new centre of the Roman empire set up on the banks of the Bosphorus by the emperor Constantine, was to be a cathedral dedicated to