Sacred Narrative
A Sacred Narrative (a.k.a. Sacred Story) is a story that is purported to contain some deep and significant cosmic or spiritual truth. Note, sacred narratives are sacred not necessarily because they actually contain deep and significant truths but because somebody purports, and enough people believe, that they do.
Narrative Types
Narrative > Elite Narrative, Existential Narrative, Functional Narrative, Master Narrative, Mundane Narrative, Sacred Narrative
Syncretic Terms
Related LP Terms
Sacred Narrative > Archetypes, Creation Template
Non-LP Related Terms
Notes
Sacred narratives can be contrasted with Mundane Narratives.
Some examples of sacred stories include
- The "Adam and Ave" story of the Christian Bible
- The "Star Wars" story of modern Hollywood.
- The Masonic "master architect" story.
- The evolutionary story
As noted in The Triumph of Spirit Book Two, sacred narratives are, for better or worse, the vehicles by which old and new energy Archetypes are created.
A sacred narrative is an oft-repeated story that provides explicit or implicit answers to the Big Questions of existence, thereby creating what I call the Creation Template for this planet. Through repetitive telling by traditional storytellers (or Hollywood movie directors), sacred stories embed themselves deeply into the Collective Consciousness of this planet. From there the "metaphoric representations" that are constitutive of the Creation Template then determine, according to principle As above in consciousness, so below in matter, the manifestation of reality on this planet.
By their very nature, sacred stories become powerful stories. Because of their power to create what we might call the creative Meta-Conditions for manifestation of the human world, the form and content of sacred stories is viciously protected by those in control of the human world. Various mechanisms are used to control the shape and form of sacred stories. In medieval Catholic Europe, for example, only hand-selected monks were given the authority to copy sacred texts. Gutenberg complicated control, nevertheless, control was quickly reasserted through simple physical ownership (i.e., eventually only the rich could own printing presses and Hollywood movie studios) and conceptual enclosures (for example teaching that sacred stories were "handed down" from some authoritative spiritual source and therefore above question and modification).
The Internet, coupled with the manifestation of the World Wide Web and the rapid evolution of printing and digital technologies, has (thankfully) made central control and administration of this world's sacred stories impossible and there will be no return to previous spiritual conditions. Extrapolating into the future we see the rapid collapse of this world's "traditional" sacred stories (and the institutions which protect them) and their replacement with heterogeneously expressed, but globally unified, sacred stories wrapped around the core truth of our Shared Divinity.
Footnotes
