Joel Alan writes School of Suspicion. The site reads ancient myth for the meaning beneath its surface, and its subject is the claim of divine sonship: the figures across the ancient world who were said to have been fathered by a god on a mortal woman, and what their stories turn out to have in common.
Phaethon demanding that his father prove him. Ion raised in the temple of the god who fathered him. Cassandra given true sight by a god who then arranged that nobody would believe her. A king cutting his own flesh to outweigh a dove. A man killing his brother in a field. Set the stories beside one another and the same scenes keep coming back: the challenge to prove the father, the oath sworn before the asker names his price, the son who shines and then falls.
Two readings, held at once
The first reading is old, and Christian. The Church Fathers held that the seed of the Word had been scattered among the nations, so that people who had never heard of Israel still managed to say true things. Justin Martyr called it the logos spermatikos. Eusebius built the Praeparatio Evangelica on it. C. S. Lewis and Tolkien gave it its modern form, that the myths are good dreams and that one of them became fact. The method that finds Christ in the Angel of the LORD, in Melchizedek and in the burning bush can be turned on Greece, India, Egypt and China as well, and that is what this site does with it.
The second reading is suspicious, and it asks what a story was for. A miracle can cover a crime. An account of slaying giants can be the tidied version of a population that was exterminated, and the word “giant” can be the thing that made the killing sayable. The people who wrote these stories down were generally the people who won. Both readings run through every article here, and they are meant to be held together rather than chosen between.
Where the name comes from
Paul Ricoeur named the hermeneutics of suspicion after Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, the three readers who taught us to distrust the surface of a text. He also insisted that suspicion was only half the work. What is supposed to follow the demolition is what he called the second naïveté, the recovery of the symbol by someone who has already taken it apart and cannot go back to reading it innocently. The site is named for the first half and aims at the whole of it.
Joel Alan writes under his own name. School of Suspicion is also the name of a video channel in preparation, and these articles are where its material gets worked out first. New readers should start with Why do different cultures have similar myths?