Worldview and its expressions

We reflected that worldview is like the motherboard of a computer to which elements such as myths, legends, folk tales, beliefs, rituals, religions, archetypes, symbols, norms or rules and values are added. All these components are in some way abstract, virtual and need a physical support to make themselves seen.

We can study the worldview of ancient peoples who no longer exist, their myths and legends, their symbols and beliefs, through the documents they left behind. We know a lot about the worldview, their way of living and thinking, of peoples like the Vikings of northern Europe, the Mayans and the Aztecs of Central America.

To discover the structure of a people's way of thinking, its worldview and the elements that it is made of, such as myths and beliefs, religion, rules and values, we need to study the vehicles where these elements are embodied or expressed. These forms of expression coincide with the seven classical arts. We prefer to divide them into a more anthropomorphic manner, using our five senses: literary, graphic, visual, auditory and audiovisual arts.

VISUAL ARTS: architecture, sculpture
The first things humans made -- stone hammers, axes and chipped stone knives -- were tools that had more to do with science than art. These tools were connected to learning about things and surviving in a hostile world. We are referring to the Stone and Metal Age, therefore thousands of years ago.

Immediately after man left Africa, about 150,000 years ago, the first artistic manifestations, that perhaps also had the practical purpose of teaching hunting techniques, were the cave paintings, related to the graphic arts, since they are in some way the precursor of writing.  

The three oldest buildings of humanity belong to the first human civilization that our planet knew, the Fertile Crescent, known today as the Middle East. They are: Tell Qaramel, built around 11,000 BC in Syria, 25 km north of Aleppo; Göbekli Tepe, built in 9,600 BC in southeastern Turkey, 12 km from the city of Sanliurfa, and the Tower of Jericho, built in 8,000 BC in what is known as the oldest and lowest city in the world.

We can study the different worldviews, from the most ancient to the most modern, by the type of buildings that were created. Ancient peoples did not build sumptuous palaces with swimming pools together with all the luxuries to live in.

They were more concerned with the afterlife than the here and now; this is evident in the pyramids of the Egyptians, the Mayans and the Aztecs to the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, and from the Gothic cathedrals to the Hindu and Buddhist temples, transcendence and religion are the main reason to build, not politics nor the “good life”.

One has to wonder... what does this materialistic, consumeristic, utilitarian, pragmatic, atheistic, agnostic world leave to posterity? Nothing or reflections of its inner emptiness, like the skyscrapers, the so-called modern and contemporary paintings that are no more than four scribbles that even an elementary school child could do. Modern human beings do not create art, so today's tourism lives on the visual arts created by ancient peoples many, many years ago.

GRAPHIC ARTS: painting, drawing, writing
The oldest cave paintings are found in the Iberian Peninsula and France, the oldest being from 62,000 years ago. In the progression from painting to writing, the oldest document in the world comes precisely from the oldest culture as well, the Sumerian of the Fertile Crescent - the cuneiform writing of ancient Mesopotamia, predating the Egyptian hieroglyphics.

The cave paintings illustrate the prehistoric man's worldview, his life, his customs and even his feelings. These carvings or artistic manifestations of the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic periods often depict hunting scenes, but also dances and other scenes from daily life, cosmic phenomena, religious myths, customs, and military campaigns.

Ever since man began to paint, he has never stopped doing so. Much of what we know of the early civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece were transmitted to us by these carvings, images, drawings, graffiti left behind by these civilizations.

The image was the first form of human expression, and it was the evolution of this form of expression through images that led us to the small drawings that translated ideas - the cuneiform writing of Mesopotamia, together with the Egyptian hieroglyphics, which were the predecessors of the Greek and Roman alphabet.

Other languages, like the Chinese, have maintained and still maintain to this day a pictorial form of writing, that is, each letter is a small engraving or drawing that represents a concept, an idea; so, they need thousands of drawings to express themselves. If we consider that human beings began using images 40,000 years ago and that writing was only invented 3,500 years ago, images can be considered as the prehistory of writing.

From the beginning, image was born from communication and for communication; it was born from our need to communicate and as a form of communication. It reached its peak in the second half of the 20th century when photography was invented, that is, the fixation or recording of the image in photographs. In our visual society, we often hear that "a picture is worth a thousand words".

LITERARY ARTS: literature, proverbs, humanities
If human beings were solitary beings like the tigers, they would never have developed a language. Language was born within society, within community, as a way for humans to communicate with each other. This need happened when humans became bipeds and were able to look at each other in the eye.

It probably started by expressing needs, like when we travel to a foreign country whose language we do not speak, and we try to communicate our needs by sounds and gestures. At a later stage, human beings expressed emotions, feelings, and later thoughts.

What really makes a people or a nation is its literary work. You cannot think of a nation like the Jewish people without the Torah, without the books of the law and the prophets. What defines and characterizes the Greek people are Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; the ex libris of the Italian people is the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri; what defines the character of the Spanish people is Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha; the Russian soul is found in Dostoyevsky’s book, The Brothers Karamazov. The Portuguese or Lusitanian soul is in Camões’ Lusíadas.

For our first King, Afonso Henriques, Portugal was his land, his domain. It was Camões, however, who created Portugal’s nationality; it was him who gave the Portuguese a prehistory, the deeds of the Lusitanians, and carved the Portuguese character and history in the course of the nation’s great epic, the discovery of the sea route to India. He was faithful to the roots of the Portuguese language, writing in verses in the style of the medieval songs of platonic love, the cradle of the Portuguese language.

The proverb is certainly the literary genre that has the highest concentration of culture, idiosyncrasy and worldview in the fewest words. Easy to remember because it rhymes, it often uses a metaphor or comparison, that is, it never uses abstract language, but one that is narrative and metaphorical. The proverb passes from generation to generation more readily than any other form of culture because it is easy to remember; people use it in their daily lives as advice and to justify and encourage specific behaviors.

AUDITORY ARTS: music, oratory
The word music is of Greek origin and it means the "art of the muses". It consists of an association of sounds interspersed with pauses or short periods of silence over a given time. Music is, in fact, the art of combining sounds with silence. The history of music goes hand in hand with the development of human intelligence, language and culture. There are also those who think that music predates humanity, if we consider the melodious singing of some birds.

It is likely that in the human species, music appeared 40,000 years ago, judging by the dance scenes that appear in some cave paintings suggesting a probable musical accompaniment. Over time, primitive flutes and other instruments, such as the xylophone, emerged. Musical instruments are divided into three types: percussion, strings and wind. The human voice is the most complex musical instrument, since it is at the same time a string and a wind instrument.

Word communicates thought, music communicates feeling, emotion. In this sense, music is the universal language of communication, used to raise awareness for a cause, for religious purposes, to protest, to accompany movies and to intensify a message or emotion. Think of a horror movie without the type of music that usually accompanies it, it would not be so scary. Like language, it is part of the idiosyncrasies of a people and speaks of its culture – for this reason there is the so-called popular music. It translates attitudes, feelings and cultural values of a people.

Oratory is the art of speaking in public communicating ideas, ideologies and thoughts with eloquence, articulation and clarity, to teach or persuade listeners and motivate them to a certain action. It is a very important weapon in politics and in religion, for good and for evil. Both great politicians and philosophers as well as prophets were good public speakers, like Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Ghandhi, Martin Luther King. However, the great dictators also had the same power to convince, like Hitler and Stalin.

Oratory has the gift of uniting different and dispersed wills into one, it turns many heads into one head; it transforms individuals into a community or a mass, a flock, both for good and for evil.  

AUDIOVISUAL ARTS: theatre, cinema, dance
Audiovisual arts combine sound and image. That is why they have more power than sound and image separately. Theatre, cinema and dance are some of the most important arts that move crowds and also the economy.

In the old days, the great film actors began their careers in the theater, and cinema at that time was much like theater. Skills such as expressiveness, both linguistic and corporal, diction, the tone of voice were favored. Today, cinema is more about action than dialogue, so the skills of the stage actor are reserved more for theater and less for cinema. Theater is in clear decline if we compare it with cinema.

Initially, cinema was intended to communicate values, within the hero/villain binomial, where the hero always won. Modern cinema, however, is no longer used for pedagogical purposes, but rather to show reality as it is; therefore, we often see injustice triumph over justice, lies over truth and crime over law and order. This situation is dangerous, because those who watch these films without a critical conscience, especially the younger generations, can develop the conviction that what we are and what we should be are the same thing, have the same value, and that in life anything goes... anything is proper…

Dance has always been a very important cultural manifestation. Culturally, very little can be said of ballet or classical dance; but the tango says a lot about the Argentinian culture, the pasodoble says a lot about Spanish culture, and the samba represents well the Brazilian culture. All peoples have their own way of dancing. If whoever sings prays twice, then whoever dances prays three times.

"Ars lunga vita brevis", art is eternal, life is brief. By cultivating an art, the individual enters into a symbiotic relationship with it. He gives it his temporality, elevating this art to a new height or record; it in turn gives him its eternity, both in the mind of the human community, humanizing him, and like in the mind of God, making him his child.

Conclusion: "Ars lunga vita brevis" - “Arts are eternal, life is short”. Therefore, use your lifetime to cultivate arts and human values and you will be eternal, you will live forever in God and in the memory humanity.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

The Worldview and Its Components

I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me, and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.  John 15:5

“In him we live and move and have our being” … Acts 17:28

For a Christian, Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life; he is the vine to which all branches are connected in order to receive the sap of life. Disconnected from him, we wither, dry up and die. As branches grafted onto Christ (Romans 11:11-24), it is in him that we live, move and exist; without him we can do nothing, since from him we receive our life, our salvation. Christ is for Christians the motherboard, the foundation, the bedrock on which their lives rest, the cornerstone that keeps them standing (Ephesians 2:20-22).

Worldview, the motherboard of our mind
The motherboard of a computer is a board, usually made of hard green plastic, with an electrical circuit imprinted in copper or aluminum that allows us to connect all the components of a computer - the processor, the memory, the CPU, the video card, the network card, the audio card, the computer’s communication ports to the outside that allow it to be connected to other devices.

The motherboard of a computer serves us perfectly as an allegory or metaphor of what a worldview is and how it is composed of elements that are individually different from each other, each with a different function, but which sit on the same board, on the basis of which they interact harmoniously. Let us see what these elements are and what their individual function or contribution to the worldview is.

Worldview, as a system or foundation of our thinking and our life, is an ordered collection of many elements. Just as our DNA or genetic code is composed of many genes, so a worldview is composed of many elements. Some of these elements are:

Myth
In today’s language, most of the time when we hear the word "myth", it is in reference to something that is not true. When we say or hear "this is a myth”, it means nowadays, "this is false”. In reality, a myth may or may not be true, that is to say, it is never historical, but it is never false either. Historical and true are not always synonymous. Historical means that it happened; myths are accounts that describe realities and as such never happened; however, what they say of these realities is completely true in the times and societies where they were born.

Within the context of cultural anthropology, myth is a pre-scientific explanation of reality, a fantastic and phantasmagorical account of oral tradition, usually involving gods who embody and represent the forces of nature as well as general aspects of the human condition.

Within cultural anthropology, myths belong to a discipline called cosmogony, which consists of accounts about the origin, nature and function of everything that exists and that human beings do not understand. As a collection of myths, mythology is a way of making sense of human existence. Its various stories were born to satisfy human curiosity about fundamental questions such as "Where do we come from?", "Where are we going?" or "Why is it raining one day and sunny the next?".

Examples of Myths
The myth of Cronos – Cronos was the god of time, hence the words chronology, chronometer, to measure time. In ancient Greece, the reality of time was explained by the existence of a god who was the lord of time; this lord bore children and after birthing them, ate them. Of course, this is not historical, but it is true.

That is, within a primitive mentality it serves perfectly well to explain the concept of time. Every day that I wake up and get up because I am alive, I have one more day in my existence, one day to live; at the end of it, when I go to bed, I have one day eaten up, consummated, and consumed, one day less in my existence.

The myth of Androgyny – In the Greek tradition, Zeus, the king of the gods, created a being that possessed both genders; like a man and a woman glued together back-to-back. Later, Zeus became afraid of his creature, just like the human being is afraid of so many things he invents, like the atomic bomb, and used the usual weapon, division: "divide and conquer" and divided the androgynous being into two, thus creating the male and the female.

This is how the reality of romantic love was created; since they were initially united, the tendency is to reunite; hence the sexual attraction. The two, man and woman, spend half their lives looking for their significant half or their soulmate, as they still say today.

The myth of Adam and Eve – The Bible says in three mythological accounts of the creation of human beings what Greek mythology says in one.

In Genesis 1:27 – So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. We are told that the man and the woman, both created in the image and likeness of God, are equal in dignity.

In Genesis 2:7 – The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. We are told that the human being is connected to all that exists, almost alluding to the fact that he is the result of a long evolution.

In Genesis 2:22 – And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.  We are told that the two are flesh of the same flesh and belong to each other.

The myth of the origin of evil – Both the Greek and the Hebrew mythology blame the woman for the origin of evil. Just as they attribute to her the "scientific" curiosity for knowing and comprehending and discovering the reason for things. In Greek mythology, Pandora was the wife of Zeus who out of curiosity opened the box that contained all evils; upon discovering it, Zeus came running to close it, but many evils had already escaped and soon reproduced in many others, in a sequence of cause and effect. In Hebrew mythology, Eve ate and fed Adam the forbidden fruit.

The myth about love and death – Orpheus, a musician and singer to whom his father Apollo had given a lyre, fell madly in love with Eurydice with whom he was going to marry. However, before the wedding, Eurydice was bitten by a snake while fleeing from an admirer and died; inconsolable, Orpheus descended into the world of the dead and asked Hades to return his beloved to him. Hades accepted on the condition that when he left the underworld with her, he would not look back. Distrustful, Orpheus, as always happens with romantic love, looked back and lost Eurydice again. Immersed in a deep sadness, he would not eat or drink or respond to the seduction of other women, so they decided to kill him; through death, he was finally reunited with his beloved.

The myth of Narcissus – Narcissus, son of the river god, Cephisus, possessed a stunning beauty that aroused the love of many nymphs, including Echo. However, self-absorbed, Narcissus was arrogant and proud, and in love with his own image, he spent his time gazing into the placid waters of the river at his own reflection. One day, while engrossed in his own reflection, he fell into the river and drowned.

In psychology, narcissism is the term given to a concept developed by Sigmund Freud that determines the exacerbated love of an individual for himself; synonymous to selfishness, a self-centered person who denies the social dimension of the human person.

Legends and Folk Tales
The protagonists of mythological narratives are always gods; those of legends are always humans, heroes of antiquity at a certain historical moment who stand out for their contribution to humanity. For this same reason, myth is historically timeless, legend is historical, although it exaggerates the facts, distorting them, giving them a fantastic and excessive air to increase the fame of someone important from the past.

They are the characters of human imagination, half historical and half fictional, that captivate the human mind because each of them reflects a facet of our personality, like King Solomon, Pericles, Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Spartacus, Charlemagne, Godfrey of Bullion, Joan of Arc, Marco Polo, Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus, Robin Hood, etc...

Characters like Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver, Tarzan; Superman, Spider-Man, Snow White, Cinderella... are fictional characters that belong to another literary genre similar to that of legend: folk tale. The only difference is that a legend starts from a historical character and magnifies him beyond reality, while a folk tale is timeless because it always starts with "once upon the time, in a distant country"; it never places us in time or space, but within the human psyche, revealing aspects of it.

Beliefs
Much of what we said about myth applies to belief. Because every myth is a belief, but not all beliefs are myths. Belief is more generic, that is, many of our beliefs are also myths. Myth belongs to the realm of philosophy, cultural anthropology or cosmogony; belief belongs more to the realm of psychology, religion and spirituality, because it is an inner conviction about an aspect of reality that is beyond the five senses and all empirical verification.

Belief is the mental acceptance or conviction of a "truth", idea or theory with or without empirical evidence. It is to hold something as true that cannot be proven or dis-proven by science. In this sense, it enters the field of intuitive knowledge so it does not belong to the logic-deductive knowledge of science.

Belief can be irrational, that is, superstitious or it can be reasonable. The First Vatican Council defines Faith as a reasonable belief. Witchcraft, magic, conferring on a material object, like a key, a horseshoe, a horn, spiritual value or power is an irrational belief and therefore a superstition, a return to the time when animals spoke and things had souls: to animism.

There are beliefs in modern life demonstrably false, and yet they continue to exist because they fulfill a positive function. Even children know that Santa Claus does not exist; however, in the collective conscious or unconscious imagination, he represents, personifies the love, kindness and generosity of a father, of a mother, of God as our Father.

Rituals
Because myths are narratives that explain the “why” of many human and nature realities, rite or ritual is to put into practice, acting out, expressing, or applying the myth or belief in real life. The purpose of the acting out or expression of the myth through ritual is to reinforce the belief in the myth.

A ceremony ritual, sacred or non-sacred, is an act that is always performed in the same way and celebrates a belief or myth that is important in the context of a culture or religion. The performance or celebration of rituals has a very important psychological and spiritual function; it relieves stress and anxiety, increases self-confidence, and reinforces faith or belief. Rituals remind us of what is most important in life and keep us united to the vital source; they give us a sense of stability and continuity in our lives.

We perform many rituals, even in our modern lives, and we do not even realize that we are doing them. But the fact that we do so proves their importance and function in our emotional and rational balance. The entry into adulthood, the bachelor parties, the ribbon cutting at an inauguration, tossing of the hat on graduation day, the bride tossing her bouquet to unmarried women during the wedding reception, the birthday celebration, the blowing out of one candle for each year.

Our Christian life is full of rites. All the sacraments have a belief and a ceremonial act behind them. The imposition of hands, the blessing, the baptism, are the gateway to the community – in fact, the priest comes to the door of the church to receive the neophyte. The Eucharist is the reconstitution of Christ's life, doctrine, his passion and death, for we do it in memory of him and it keeps us united as a community. Confession is a liberating catharsis from the negative actions of our lives; when we hear "I absolve you" ("ego te absolvo" in Latin) we feel cleansed, willing to start over. The anointing of the sick is a refreshment in our pain.

Religion
As we said before, it is itself a worldview, because it answers the questions "where we come from" and "where are we going", as well as it gives meaning, reason and purpose to everything that exists, structuring not only nature, but also the life of men in relation to themselves, to God and to nature. Among many things, religion encompasses beliefs, myths and rituals.

Archetype
It is an element of Greek philosophy, especially neoplatonic, which designates ideas, models, primigens or prototypes, paradigms of human behavior that reside in the collective unconscious of humanity, as demonstrated by Carl Jung, Freud's disciple. For Plato, archetypes are mental forms, primordial ideas imprinted in the soul before it takes on a body.

Jung discovered in our collective unconscious 12 paradigms, models or patterns of behavior that may or may not coincide with the functions of individuals in society or professions, but they also configure a way of being and behaving towards oneself and others. These are: the Sage, the Innocent, the Explorer, the Ruler, the Creator, the Caretaker, the Magician, the Hero, the Villain, the Lover, the Fool, the Orphan. The list could go on and on, even in relation to significant characters who shape standardized models of behavior.

In addition to these that are restricted to forms of behavior, there are other paradigms imprinted in our collective unconscious, which refer more to society and the way it operates. For example, I have as a paradigm or archetype of process: Egypt - Desert - Promised Land. Karl Marx, despite being an avowed atheist, consciously or unconsciously followed this archetype in his historical materialism. For him, Egypt was capitalism, the desert was the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Promised Land was communism or a classless society.

Recovery from an addiction also follows this archetype. Egypt is the addiction that has taken away your freedom and the control of your life; the desert is the price to erase or the purification of the body and mind from the toxins that enslave you; in the desert you feel the urge to go back, like the Jewish people after they escaped Egypt, or the withdrawal syndrome for the one struggling with an addiction, and finally, the Promised Land when you are completely free from this addiction.

Symbols
Emblems, shapes or signs that contain a powerful meaning within the culture, representing its model of life or its ancestral tradition, or some element considered iconic or totemic and identifying it, such as, for example, the cross for Christianity.

Norms, Rules and Laws
Every worldview also contains a code of laws, norms or rules of conduct to harmonize the coexistence among individuals, to determine the rights and duties in the relationship of individuals with each other and with the community at large. A regulation by which companies choose to govern themselves, either explicitly (legal format), through a protocol or subjectively.

Not all laws are spoken or written in stone. There are unwritten laws or norms, and yet everyone observes them. The way we dress often obeys an unwritten norm; similarly, opening the door for someone and letting them pass first, not picking your nose in public, and so many other little things we obey that are not written anywhere or obey any code of conduct.

Values
They are more inherent to human nature in general than to a particular worldview. Values such as freedom, equality, justice, truth, honesty, love, fidelity, are invariable in time and space. Duty, commitment, shape human life and are invariables from culture to culture or from time to time. A given worldview may have a slightly different interpretation of them, without varying the fundamental. 

Conclusion – Inserted in the motherboard of a computer are all the components that make it work as a harmonious whole, likewise, a worldview is composed of myths, rites, beliefs, norms, symbols, archetypes, and values that give meaning and shape to our lives.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC