George Stanley Faber was an obscure English divine, the author of some twenty-seven books, mostly on standard theological subjects, or on such topics as The Revival of the French Emperorship Anticipated from the Necessity of Prophecy, which had five editions in the 1850s. He was also a latter-day Christian mythologer intent upon the old business of explaining away all myths and gods as simply corrupt versions of the Bible. Faber's contributions to the study of myth include Horae Mosaicac; or, a View of the Mosaical Records with respect to their coincidence with Profane Antiquity. and their connection with Christianity, 1801; A Dissertation on the Mysteries of the Cabin; or the Great Gods of Phenicia, Samothrace, Egypt, Troas, Greece, Italy and Crete, 1803, and The Origin of Pagan Idolatry ascertained from historical testimony and circumstantial evidence, 1816.

Faber seems to have been unaware of the growing affirmative revaluation of myth in Germany or England, the new archaeological discoveries, or the new philosophy. In his insular, complacent, and interminable (1658 pages) Origin of Pagan Idolatry, Faber sets out (as had Bochart in the seventeenth century and Newton or Shuckford in the eighteenth) to show how pagan idolatry or mythology is a diffused corruption of patriarchal religion. In particular, he tried to show how all "Great Father" gods are versions of Noah, how all "Great Mother" goddesses are derived from and refer back to the Ark, and how all the triads of Divinities are shadows of the three sons of Noah. Faber's aims are thus very much out of date by 1816, and his methods are woefully behind contemporaneous thought and scholarship. Yet partly for this very reason, and partly because of the methodological excesses Faber whips himself to, his work provides a convenient, oddly lucid and wholly unexpected opportunity to see how the mode of scriptural interpretation called "typology" is essentially similar to and a possible source of the symbol and archetype criticism currently associated with the ideas of Carl Jung and Northrop Frye, to mention only two of the most distinguished of the modern proponents of archetype theory. Typology is the branch of theology that undertakes to show the unity of the Bible by means of the principle that everything in the Old Testament can be explained by reference to the story of Christ in the New. Thus, Isaac is a "type" of the "antitype" (or "antetype" or "prototype" or "archetype" or "original") Christ. Similarly, Christ's crucifixion is the antitype or archetype of which the sacrifice of Isaac is the type. In orthodox Christian typology, one then proceeds to explicate the sacrifice of Isaac as though it were a deliberate historical fore-shadowing of the sacrifice of Christ. Typology was customarily distinguished from allegory (considered as another way to demonstrate the essential harmony and unity of Scripture). Patrick Fairbairn's The Typology of Scripture (1845) claimed that "the typical is not properly a different or higher sense, but a different or higher application of the same sense." Typology accepts the literal level, allegory seeks a level beyond the literal. Thus the type or typical can be distinguished from the symbol because the type is always real; that is to say, it is histoncal, and "not a fictitious or ideal symbol." An example of allegory is Philo's claim that the five cities of the Plain are the five senses; an example of symbol is the born that symbolizes strength in the book of Daniel; and the dove returning to Noah is an example of a type of the descent of the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove to Christ upon his baptism. Typology is as old as the Bible itself and the early Fathers used the technique. It flourished during the Reformation, when allegory and the scholastic fourfold interpretations were abandoned in favor of literalism. Typology has the advantage, for Protestantism, of being a way of reconciling texts without going beyond the literal level. Typology declined during the eighteenth century, then underwent a revival in the nineteenth. Usually confined to the problem of unifying the Bible, typology was boldly applied by Faber to the problem of unifying pagan mythology. As Faber uses it, typology becomes more than a technique for reducing the Old Testament to a series of shadows or types of the archetypal myth of Noah and the Ark. Faber commences with the same problem that has served so often as a starting point for myth investigation: why are there so many resemblances and similarities to be found among the world's far flung mythologies and religions? The of Origin of Pagan Idolatry sets out to show that all the non-biblical gods, demons, and stories are versions of an early religion based on the worship of Noah that rose sometime after the confusion of tongues and the dispersal of the nations at Babel. Faber's principal problem is that much more was known about the world's religions by 1816 than had been known a hundred years before, and Faber had to strain much harder than earlier orthodox Christian mythologers to crowd them all into his monomyth (the story of Noah). In his efforts to do so, he uses Euhemerist ideas and diffusionist ideas; he dabbles in etymology (and invents indigestible jargon like "Noetic," "Naviform," "luniform," and "Magistratual"), and always falls back on the cry of priest-craft. All these approaches are well worn and old fashioned by 1816, and indeed, Faber's main ideas and devices are all derivative. Re draws on Kircher, Bochart, Cudworth, Prideaux, Shuckford, War-burton, Banier, Hurd, Mallet, Moor, Maurice, Bryant, Davies, Volney, Jones, Wilford, and Voss, though most of the last half dozen are taken up only to be refuted. But it is not Faber's main ideas or his principal assumptions that make him of interest; it is rather the style of his interpretation and his application of the hermeneutic technique known as ty-pology that make his work interesting. Faber argues that all the pagan deities were originally deified men, that the men so deified were those of the golden age, and that there were, in effect, two golden ages, one associated with Adam and the other with Noah. The second golden age was thought to be a repetition or a reenactment of the first. Hence Noah was thought to duplicate or re-embody Adam, while Noah's sons were replicas or rein-carnations or types of Adam's sons; and the Ark, from which the earth was repopulated, was thought to be a latter-day version of the Earth, or the Great Mother of all life of Adam's time. (Faber does not explain why neither Eve nor Noah's wife, are even to be considered here.) From the idea of a second golden age duplicating the first came mythologic or false ideas about multiple creations and destructions, and hence about a series or plurality of worlds, and about successive incarnations or metempsychosis. Cyclical ideas about history were another logical extension, and the idea of there being numerous avatars of a given deity comes, Faber argues, from the same source. After seeing Faber uncover so many patterns of repetition in history, the reader is not completely surprised to find Faber arguing next that all male deities (excluding God, of course) are the same deity, are usually symbolized by and associated with the sun, and are at last only versions of the one Great Father, which is Noah, which is Adam. Similarly, all female divinities are the same, are usually symbolized by the moon and by ships, and are only versions of the original Great Mother, which is the Ark, which meant also the Earth. So too all triadic divinities, such as those of the Hindu Trimurti, are to be considered as versions or types of the original (or archetype) of the sons of Noah, who in turn are a type of the sons of Adam. Just how it first happened that men abandoned "true" religion and came to Euhemerize Noah/Adam is explained by Faber as the doing of some wicked Priest-Kings seeking power and dominion. Mistaking inclusiveness for comprehensiveness, Faber labors to include all the gods of Greece, Egypt, India, Persia, Britain, China, America, Scandinavia, and the South Seas in his pattern, arguing that they all fit his scheme. This is made easier since he admits that he looks for similarities, rather than differences. "I have made no distinction between the mythologies of different nations, but have considered them all together as jointly forming a single well-compacted and regular system." The section below on the identity of the Great Goddesses shows the range and style of Faber's application of typology to myth. Faber finds that all the Great Goddesses were associated with earth and the Moon; later he claims that the crescent moon is the Ark and the earth is Mount Ararat; thus all the goddesses are types of the original Great Mother, the Ark itself. The section "On the Origination of Romance from old mythologic Idolatry" is even more interesting in that it shows how a technique once limited to the Bible can be applied not only to other religious stories and scriptures and to other mythologies hut also to works of imaginative literature. Faber considers the archetype of "the entrance of the Great Father into the ship" (Noah boarding the Ark), and traces it through classical literature and Arthurian romance. He takes up archetypes of the sacred lake, of the fairy or female divinity presiding over it, of the wonderful cavern, of the oracular tomb, and so on, and traces them in Hindu legend, in Celtic story, in Ariosto and in Shakespeare. Faber even considers saints' lives as a branch of imaginative literature and finds them conforming to the same patternIn showing that much or even all of imaginative literature depends on and repeats mythic archetypal patterns, Faber thinks to belittle the mythic element in literature. But he is himself susceptible to literature and his very sympathies may suggest how short a step it is from Faber's pious archetype criticism, intended to discredit myth and exalt Scripture, to modern archetype criticism, which finds its archetypes in man's mind instead of in the Bible, and works to exalt the mythic element in literature.

THE KEYS TO ANCIENT HISTORY! FOR GENESIS-10 ETHNOLOGY STUDIES: (Follow the Links!)

HOME