Religion final paper

All religions have at least one foundational myth as well as an actual history. The myth is not historically true, but instead transmits some of the spiritual values on which the religion is based. The history is true in fact, but, as history, cannot convey values. All human beings, as children, believe that the foundational myth of their religion is actual history. Many people in late adolescence realize that the myth is not true as history, and begin to search for the factual history of their faith. Some of these, as mature adults, realize that the myth and the history convey different types of truth. They learn to live with the tension between the two (Ellwood: 87).

So long as a person believes that the foundational myth is historical, and does not know what the actual history is, he or she will reduce the meaning of the myth to historical terms, and therefore will not understand the spiritual values that the myth was intended to convey by its creators (Bromley, Jeffrey: 19). I believe that if we learn the actual history of modern Witchcraft as accurately as possible, doing so can liberate the foundational myths of the Craft to reveal their more profound meanings.

The Craft was founded as a distinct religion in the 1930s. Like all new religions, it was created from pre-existing raw materials that were combined in new ways and into a new overall structure. Since its elements are old, but its structure is new, it is neither entirely a survival from the past nor entirely a modern creation. Modern Witchcraft is based squarely on magical and occult traditions that go back at least to Hellenistic Alexandria, and yet it has transformed the elements from those traditions in new and often surprising ways. In explaining the origins of the Craft movement, I trace the sources of its elements in the older traditions and the ways in which the Craft does something new with each element (Bellah: 121).

In emphasizing that the Craft is a new religion, I am insisting on its ontological equality with every other religion, because all religions begin as new religions, which then survive only because they continue to evolve and adapt themselves to changing circumstances. For Islam and Buddhism, their origin as new religions is obvious. Hinduism as we now have it is a sibling of Buddhism, since it resulted from an acceptance of some, though not all, of the Buddha's reforms. Judaism as the state religion of Judah dates from 621 B.C.E (Glock & Robert: 14).

The confusion arises from the fact that these elements of the past are invariably understood in terms of the new religion's foundational myth, which is the story that states in some way (often quite symbolically or parabolically) the values that are central to this new religion. As Robert Ellwood observed, “In modern cults the functional myth is generally the story of the experience of the founder which establishes his ecstatic (shamanistic) capacity and his access to a new means ...