Recorded 6 February 1973
From the tape in the archives of the CBC, reference no. 730418-2, transcribed by Carrie O’Grady. Dated by Frye’s daybook for 1973. Frye was interviewed by Marjorie Harris, introduced by Warren Davis. The program was broadcast by the CBC in the Concern series on 18 April 1973, and rebroadcast 10 April 1974. Marjorie Harris is an editor and writer, gardening expert, and producer of radio documentaries for the CBC.
DAVIS: We begin with a question to a distinguished Canadian scholar and humanist, Northrop Frye. Why did the life of Christ parallel almost everything we know about the nature of the hero in mythology and literature?
FRYE: There’s a tendency for all religions to develop mythologies, that is, bodies of stories at the centre. The tendency of myth is to stick together to make mythology; the mythology tends to become encyclopedic, to cover the whole range of time and space. One of the things in Christianity that’s important is that it must have hit the people in the Mediterranean world as a complete synthesis of all the other myths that they had heard in various quarters.
HARRIS: What sort of myths were prevalent at that time?
FRYE: There was a religion of Mithras the sun-god, who was born at the winter solstice; and there were the dying and reviving gods, Adonis and Attis, who were hung on trees, then searched for, and then found on the third day; and there were goddess figures like Isis, the star of the sea and the queen of heaven, and so forth—all of these elements come into Christianity in some way or other. The dying-god story was the story of fertility or vegetation, which died in the autumn and revived in the spring, but by the time it got into a religious ritual, it took in most countries the form of a three-day festival. In the cult of Attis, which got to Rome fairly early, you have a god (or his puppet) hung on a tree on the first day, then the next day is the day of wrath where the god has vanished from the earth—that was the great orgy where the priests castrated themselves—and then on the third day there is a procession to a marsh, where the newborn god was found.
HARRIS: Did the Christians just pick up this kind of thing and relate to it?
FRYE: Paganism is never an influence on Christianity. At no point has there ever been a pagan influence on Christianity of any kind. What happens is that Christianity develops out of an Old Testament Judaist religion, and as it spreads over Europe it comes in contact with analogous patterns and to some extent they merge and they mesh. We can see that in the word “Easter” itself, which comes from an ancient British spring goddess. But the festival itself is Christian, and the writers of the Gospels were of course concerned to tell above everything else the story of the Passion and the Resurrection of Christ. But they told it entirely in terms of the Old Testament story of the Passover. When the Israelites were leaving the land of death, there was a plague which killed all the Egyptian first-born. The Israelites smeared the blood of a lamb on their door instead, and so their children escaped. There you have the theme of human sacrifice commuted to animal sacrifice (as in the story of Abraham and Isaac), and you have also the theme of the redeeming lamb. Christianity takes up this theme and makes it a little more primitive by returning to the theme of the human victim who is also the lamb. The reason for the death of the victim is that the redeeming God is redeeming people who live, as the Israelites in Egypt live, symbolically in the land of death. And in order to enter the world of death, he himself has to die. When he rises again he kills death, and of course to kill death is to bring to life.
The story of Jesus is the ruler of divine descent born in secret, whose life is threatened at birth by a massacre from which he escapes; he wanders in the wilderness, he gathers a band of followers, he appears in his messianic guise once or twice, and then he goes through the ritual pattern of death and resurrection, and later ascent to heaven. The story develops from a story thousands of years old, where the protagonist is the dying and reviving cycle of nature: it’s either the sun that goes down out of the West and comes up again in the East, or the life that disappears in the winter and revives in the spring.
HARRIS: Could it have happened at any other time? Would it have been possible?
FRYE: Christianity was surprisingly loose about its actual dates; it didn’t seem to give a damn when Christ was born. They seem to have taken over the winter solstice festival. I think actually they got it from the Jewish dedication of the Temple, but certainly they did adopt the winter solstice festival which was held in the north and called “Yule.” They do, on the other hand, very carefully put the death and resurrection of Christ against the Jewish Passover, so that coincidence was clearly important to them. There were disputes between the Eastern and Western churches and then later between the Roman and Irish churches about what the proper date for Easter was, and it finally settled on the Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox, I think it is.
HARRIS: When did they decide that they would follow the moon?
FRYE: I remember that there were early Christians who had been brought up Jews who wanted Easter to be celebrated on the fourteenth or the fifteenth of the month to correspond to the Passover, and there were others who were more anxious to get the day of the Crucifixion on a Friday, and the day of the Resurrection on a Sunday. They were the ones that won out. And then there was a later dispute between a fixed Easter and a movable Easter; the Roman movable Easter won out because the Roman organization was stronger; it would have been much more sensible to have had a fixed Easter. What happens on Easter Sunday is so closely connected with Good Friday that it’s much more difficult to sentimentalize, whereas Christmas (which has never been a fully Christian festival anyway) has simply reverted to its normal pagan origins.
HARRIS: What were they going through at that time?
FRYE: Well, most Mediterranean countries observed some kind of festival of death and rebirth in the spring. It was usually connected with a mother-goddess, who had a rather different relationship to the dying god than the Virgin Mary has to Christ; still, there is an analogy. What they were concerned with above all was to provide the sense of continuity in time: that life might disappear but new life would come. That was their particular anxiety. And that of course makes it quite different from Christianity, because rebirth and resurrection are not at all the same thing. Rebirth is the return of life in time, and resurrection is the lifting from one plane of existence to another.
HARRIS: What about the kinds of symbols that surround Easter?
FRYE: Easter, like Christmas, contains a number of what for lack of a better term you might call pagan elements, rebirth elements—all the sort of bunnies-and-eggs aspect of Easter belongs to that. That is, the renewal of life brings the prolific rabbit too. The Christian theme of it is the dramatic pattern of the God who dies, who then disappears, and during his disappearance is torn to pieces and disappears into the bodies of his worship-pers—as in T.S. Eliot’s Gerontion—and the third day rises with the body in a new phase of existence. The story of the death and the rebirth of the God is of course connected with the death and rebirth of vegetation, so it’s not unnatural that a central symbol should be a dead tree which becomes the tree of life. That is a very ancient element in it; I think it was in the Egyptian ritual of setting up a wooden pillar. Things like the maypole are survivals of it too, in medieval England.
The Last Supper feast is a very important one, certainly, and it’s introduced in the New Testament; the earliest, and the clearest and simplest description of it is in Paul. He speaks of it as instituting the period of history in which Christ is eaten and drunk by his worshippers, in the bread and the wine which are the body and blood. That becomes in its turn a prototype of the consummation of all things, the final harvest and vintage in the book of Revelation.
[Warren Davis reads Revelation 14–20, a vision of the reaping of the earth and casting of it into the great winepress of the wrath of God.]
HARRIS: Why is it necessary to eat and drink the blood?
FRYE: Originally, you have a central figure in the community who is regarded as sacred, that is, who is regarded as a god-man. If his strength fails, then obviously he’s dangerous and he has to be put to death, but there’s no sense letting all that strength go to waste. And so, for the primitive mentality, the way to acquire it is to eat it.
The need for betrayal is connected with the fact that the moral significance of Christ’s life is not his sinlessness or moral perfection, but the fact that he was the one man in history that nobody could stand, that everybody agreed had to be got rid of. The figure of the betrayer turns up accordingly. The traitor and the thirty pieces of silver [Matthew 26:15, 27:9] come from one of the Old Testament prophets, Zechariah [11:12–13]; you don’t really need a betrayer in the sense of somebody to tell the Romans where he was, because as he says before Pilate, “in secret have I said nothing” [John 18:20]. He never at any time tried to conceal himself—he didn’t need to be betrayed in that sense.
HARRIS: What was Judas’s function?
FRYE: Judas’s function is to stand for the human race, all of whom have betrayed Christ.
HARRIS: That’s a very violent image.
FRYE: Well, yes. But until that violent image—that everybody is a murderer and a traitor—is an image confronting one, it’s rather difficult to think seriously about the Passion story.
There are two patterns in the life of Christ: there’s a pattern in which he descends from the sky to the earth, and then goes back to the sky in the Ascension; then there’s the other one, in the three-day rhythm, where he disappears from the surface of the ground to the underworld and then comes back in the Resurrection. And the Resurrection is certainly pretty important to the Gospels, but the rest of the story is extra-Biblical. It comes in later with an apocryphal work called the Gospel of Nicodemus.1 There are only a few hints of the descent into hell in the New Testament, and those only from the latest and most dubious books.2
The accounts of the life of Jesus in the Gospels are put into the form which makes Christ the history of Israel in an individual form: a people chosen for a certain purpose, who go into exile and bondage, and then are restored at the end. And the period of exile and bondage, which in the second part of Isaiah is personified as the suffering servant [chap.53], is identified by Christianity with the suffering of Christ. Parallels in the Resurrection are largely with the references in the Old Testament, in some of the Psalms, for example. There’s one passage which is an aria in Handel’s Messiah, where the Psalmist says that God will not permit his Holy One to see corruption [49:9]. The implication that the chosen servant of God may die, but even in death he is restored to life, is one of the things that the penitential Psalms are all about.
In the relating of the New Testament story to the Old Testament, there is a very early Christian hymn, by Venantius Fortunatus in the sixth century I think, where he speaks of the Resurrection as the deliverance of Israel from the army of Pharaoh on the Red Sea.3 That means that one of the Old Testament prototypes of the Resurrection is the deliverance of Israel from a sea in which the Egyptians are drowned. That connects again with the story of St. George and the dragon, where the dragon in the Christian myth is death and hell; for the hero to kill him, he has to enter the place where the dragon is. In other words he has to go down his throat and into his belly, as Jonah does. Then the deliverance of his people is from a world which is symbolically under water. That’s one reason why there’s so much about fishing in the Gospels.
HARRIS: How have writers used it—specifically the earlier writers?
FRYE: When they first dramatized the story, they were particularly interested in the descent to hell and the harrowing of hell. That, as I say, is not very clearly set out in the New Testament; it comes mainly from the later work. But some of the most vivid and striking scenes in the medieval plays are of Christ’s battering down the door, which is also the open mouth of the monster, and going in: the hero by himself, in solitude, contending with a whole army of darkness and then coming out again with the body of his redeemed people behind him. That was the dramatic element that the medieval playwrights fastened on.
HARRIS: Sounds very psychological, the fact that we obviously need this event in our lives.
FRYE: Psychologists have thought a good deal about the psychological meaning of this descent myth. I think it’s important that in the medieval myth of the harrowing of hell, apart from John the Baptist (who has a special place), the first people to be redeemed from the lower world are Adam and Eve, in other words father and mother. This descent to the lower world in quest of one’s parents, and then the return from there, is something which is I suppose reduplicated in almost every psychological analysis. At least there’s an attempt at it.
Wallace Stevens says, “On Easter, the great ghost of what we call the next world invades and vivifies this present world, so that Easter seems like a day of two lights: one the sunlight of the bare and physical end of winter, the other the double light.”4 I think it goes back to what I said earlier, that resurrection is really the opposite of rebirth. Continuity in time is all very well, and so is the promise of new life, but of course all the eggs and the bunnies, just as the ecologists tell us, mean more pollution. What one needs, I think, is rather a dialectical sense of the heave from one world to another: from the world of time to a world which has entered time but is not in time—is not imprisoned in time. It’s the whole paradox of the power which is above time, which has entered time but has refused to be imprisoned with us in time and which therefore has to go back again, has to disappear from us, and yet at the same time it’s still here with us. It’s a paradox in which the “here” and the “there” are the same place, and the same thing.
I think that naturally when one is faced with something which has a pretty powerful imaginative force, one wants to explain it. The fact that you’re confronted with something which completely transcends explanation doesn’t mean that you have to be uncritical or make a sacrifice of the intellect to understand it. It merely marks the limits of a certain kind of mental process. To understand the meaning behind a story is fundamentally wrong; in other words, the way to understand the meaning of a story is to listen to the story. We’re accustomed to think of words as describing things, as describing bodies or phenomena or processes out there. Every once in a while we begin to realize that the descriptive capacity of words is really very limited—that that’s only a secondary and subordinate thing that words can do. What words primarily exist to do is to express metaphors and build up myths. Those are the things that are true because they are impossible to understand.
What is terrifying about Easter is the fact that the existentialists say that consciousness is primarily consciousness of death, and that in Easter what we’re conscious of is renewed life, yet that goes along with the feeling that renewed life is just an extension of death.