Among the most dynamic and influential theological developments of the past several decades has been a growing focus on the complex role of symbol and metaphor in contemporary religious understanding. Among the individuals who have played a key role in this process is the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich. In his book The Dynamics of Faith, Tillich addresses the particular problem posed by the modern tendency to literalize sacred myths. In this regard, he notes, all myths can take one of two forms, forms described by Tillich as either “unbroken” or “broken.” Most importantly, the particular quality that distinguishes one form of myth from the other is the degree to which myth is viewed as literal truth.
According to Tillich, since the peoples of the pre-modern world tended to believe in the literal truths of their myths, for them myth remained “unbroken.” For the vast majority of people living in the modern world, however, such literal belief in myth cannot be sustained without the repressive qualities of some form of fundamentalism. That myth is no longer viewed as literal truth, Tillich argues, does not mean that the need for myth is something that humans have somehow outgrown. Rather than discarding all myth as meaningless or false, he continues, we need instead to reflect consciously on the symbolic and metaphorical significance of myths. According to Tillich, if we are able to do this — recognize and embrace the significance of a myth without any effort to literalize that significance — then that myth can be called a “broken myth’.
While Tillich’s concept of living within an unbroken myth tends to be associated with ancient and indigenous religious traditions, the idea of living within a broken myth is generally associated with a contemporary approach to religious life. Even so, a particularly insightful instance of an indigenous people who understand the gifts and challenges of a non-literal orientation to myth can be found within the religious tradition of the Hopi people of the American Southwest.
This example of consciously breaking a previously unbroken myth concerns a critical stage of the ritual process for initiating Hopi children in adulthood. Central to this ritual process are the kachinas, the pantheon of divine figures central to the Hopi religion. For the Hopi, the kachinas represent the spiritual energy of both ancestral and historical figures, as well as of all of the natural forces and elements of the physical world. In the performing of Hopi rituals, these sacred figures are embodied by masked and costumed dancers.
As Sam D. Gill, a religious studies scholar who has focused on Native American spirituality writes, Hopi children are taught that the kachinas visit the village at specific intervals during the year bearing gifts for them. Until the age of initiation, Hopi children are very carefully protected from seeing either these impersonating kachina figures without their masks or the masks themselves when not being worn. Then, just prior to their initiation in adulthood and their formal participation in adult religious life, adolescents undergo a religious ritual lasting several days. During these initiation rites, while adolescents deepen their study of the role of the kachinas in Hopi religion and learn secret stories about the origin of them, the most lasting impression, Gill observes, is purposely saved for the final night of this ceremony.
That night the youths are taken into to a kiva, an enclosed ritual space dug into earth, to await a particularly important kachina dance. During this stage of the initiatory experience, the adolescents initially hear the kachinas calling out as they approach the kiva. They then witness the invitation extended by the elders from within the kiva for the dancing gods to enter the ritual space. Gill emphasizes that everything in the ritual up to this point is entirely familiar to the initiates. What happens subsequently, however, is totally unexpected because “to the children’s amazement, the kachinas enter without their masks, and for the first time in their lives, the initiates discover that the kachinas are actually members of their own village impersonating the gods.”
Describing the effect of this unprecedented turn of events, Gill observes:
With the unmasking of the kachinas, the naiveté of the children is shattered once and forever. The existence of the kachinas, the nature of their own destiny, the trust in their parents and elders, and the very shape of reality itself are all, in a flash, brought into radical question. The children can either accept the world as bereft of meaning, with the Hopi religion a sham, or find some deeper sense in the ceremonies and objects which had come to mean so much to them.
Commenting further on the effect of this initiation ritual, theologian John Shea observes that for the young Hopi this “experience of disenchantment is the beginning of mature religious consciousness.” For all the years leading up to this ritual, he continues, Hopi children “naively believe the masked dancers are really the Hopi gods.” Living in an unbroken myth, these children assume the symbols of the sacred, namely the masked dancers, are the sacred itself. “The unmasking conclusion shatters this childish faith,” he continues, pushing the initiate “into adult life with a profound religious question.”
Knowing what these young people now know, he suggests, they must ask themselves if the kachinas “are to be left behind with childhood or is there a way of bringing them forward into adult life?” If the latter is the answer, he argues, the kachinas “must be appropriated in a new way.” Now living in world of broken myths, these young people must acknowledge that while the sacred expresses itself though the figures of the kachinas, “any simple identification of symbol and the sacred is naïve” because the sacred “is infinitely more than the masked dancers.”
While this process of “breaking myths” admittedly induces an element of profound uncertainty in us, learning to live with such uncertainty is the only hope we have today for meaningfully connecting to the sacred dimension of existence. Indeed, if we cannot keep our sacred myths mythic by resisting the temptation to either literalize or dismiss them, our only alternatives are a mind-deadening form of religious fundamentalism on the one hand or the soul-deadening perspective of modern secular materialism on the other.