Excerpt from "The Golden Bough" by Sir James G. Frazer

"Hence Odin was called the Lord of the Gallows or the God of the Hanged, and he is represented sitting under a gallows tree. Indeed he is said to have been sacrificed to himself in the ordinary way, as we learn from the weird verses of the Havamal, in which the god describes how he acquired his divine power by learning the magic runes:

'I know that I hung on the windy tree
For nine whole nights,
Wounded with the spear, dedicated to Odin,
Myself to myself.'"

I have been reading some of "The Everlasting Man" by G. K. Chesterton. In the beginning of his book he makes the claim that the similarity other scholastics perceive between all the former and current beliefs of man and Christianity is due only to their own imagination and their inability to secure an impartial perspective, that, in a word, Christianity is of greater inherent property and is unique thus among all other religious, magical, and otherwise superstitious modes of thought:

"Just as the Church seems to grow more remarkable when it is fairly compared with the common religious life of mankind, so mankind itself seems to grow more remarkable when we compare it with the common life of nature. And I have noticed that most modern history is driven to something like sophistry, first to soften the sharp transition from animals to men, and then to soften the sharp transition from heathens to Christians. Now the more we really read in a realistic spirit of those two transitions the sharper we shall find them to be. [...] While we can if we choose see the Church amid a mob of Mithraic or Manichean superstitions squabbling and killing each other at the end of the Empire [...] we shall be the more surprised (and possibly puzzled) if we meet it two thousand years afterwards rushing through the ages as the winged thunderbolt of thought and everlasting enthusiasm; a thing without rival or resemblance; and still as new as it is old."

He goes on to argue his point to some length, but thus far I can only say that, crafty as his rhetoric is, poignant as some of his thoughts are, if they can be perceived only as thoughts separated from the demand of reality, yet not a single one has thus displayed to me the sheer power of the above statement by Frazer. Frazer hardly argues any of his points; he rarely engages in rhetorical devices. And yet, the facts, the evidence that he presents, slowly and relentlessly affirm the presence, the actuality, the existence of something. That thing is the very thing that Chesterton seems so powerless in his text to refute except by unsubstantiated claims. It is the fact that Christianity was born out of myths that long since had inscribed in history all the elements necessary for its construction, that Christianity was an evolution that took centuries to manifest.

Jung in his Answer to Job offers a stunning argument that Christianity, even after its initial conception out of the primordial pool of pagan myth, continued to evolve, to adapt itself to meet the requirements of an archetype of the collective unconscious. Chesterton, who seems to think so highly of criticism of Christianity occurring from a truly external perspective, could have, in my own opinion, done well to learn something from the perspectives afforded by these two texts.