Nature Before Nature
CAVES CONJURE A SENSE of the profound. The echoing darkness obscures our usual means for estimating distance, summoning awe of the vast. The stillness and constant climate give us little sense of motion, encouraging a feeling of timelessness. The twisting contours of the walls suggest some alien logic of construction, raising suspense and mystery. As well, caves go deep into where we cannot ordinarily go, constituted as we are. Caves confront us with our limits just as they give us access to the unseen foundations of the normal.
Caves are cool.
Or so I found myself thinking the summer of 2011 as I stood in the middle of the hundred-foot high main room of the Ideon Cave, more than five thousand feet above the Mediterranean Sea, set into the face of Mount Ida, or Psiloritis, as the locals call it, the tallest mountain on Crete. A daily stream of visitors makes the dry, rocky hike up Psiloritis, eager like me to exercise their legs and their imaginations. The Ideon Cave has been a religious pilgrimage site for over four thousand years, at least since Minoan times, if not earlier. The path to the Ideon Cave is very deeply worn.
The Minoans lit the first fires of ancient Greek religion. Long before mainland Greeks did, the Minoans divined the existence of Zeus. The Minoans themselves seem to have gotten the idea of Zeus from Proto-Indo-Europeans—peoples known to scholars by the happy acronym PIE—through various cultural pathways now lost to us. The PIE peoples had called their chief god by almost the same name: Dyeus.1 Like Zeus, Dyeus was a male god of sky and thunder.2 The Romans picked up on Dyeus too. The name “Jupiter” came from dyeu-pater, PIE for god-father. Later on, the Romans equated Jupiter with Zeus, a kind of double derivation from Dyeus. The Romans also generalized dyeus into deus, meaning “deity.” The English word “deity” itself derives from dyeus. And so do the English words “theology” and “divinity.”
These are all very old words. People have been thinking about this stuff for a long time.
It was in the Ideon Cave that Dyeus became Zeus. For legend has it that here his mother Rhea hid the baby Zeus from the violent eye of his father, Cronus, who wanted to eat him.3 Rhea was the goddess of motherhood, and Cronus—the Greek equivalent of the Roman god Saturn—was then ruler of the gods. Cronus had earlier overthrown his own father, Uranus, to take the throne. But an oracle said that a son of Rhea would one day overthrow Cronus in turn. So Cronus caught and ate every baby his wife bore. Then Rhea hit on the idea of showing Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes when she next gave birth. Cronus, in his fear and haste, promptly ate the stone. Meanwhile, Rhea hid her new child in the Ideon Cave to protect him until he was strong enough to take on his father.
Everyone worried that Cronus would eventually figure out what had happened. So local men guarded the cave entrance to protect Zeus. The ancient myths call them the curetes, the original inhabitants of Crete, for whom Crete is named. Every time the baby Zeus cried the curetes would dance and bang their shields with their swords, so Cronus wouldn’t hear him. (Cretan men still do this dance at local village festivals.) The nymphs Melissa and Amalthea helped Rhea raise Zeus, feeding him on goat’s milk and honey. And sure enough, when he had grown up, Zeus fulfilled the prophecy. He forced Cronus to disgorge his five brothers and sisters. Together, led by Zeus, the siblings imprisoned Cronus and the other Titans in Tartarus, a dungeon deep below the surface of the Earth. Some say the Titans are there to this day.
It’s quite a tale. So, like me, the curious and faithful have long made the trek up to the very spot where so much of the story takes place, eager to feel the unfelt.4 Archaeologists have recovered thousands of artifacts from the Ideon Cave. Ivory sculptures. Hundreds of clay lamps. Bronze shields such as those Zeus’s guards were supposed to have used in their dances. Outside the cave you can still see a stone altar, carved out of the living rock, where millennia of Zeus’s followers have offered him gifts and implored him for better fortunes for themselves and their loved ones. Plato, Pythagoras, and Epimenides received their initiation into the sacred mysteries of Zeus here.5
It’s not hard to imagine why the Minoans and later Greeks connected this story to this particular place. One’s imagination of the sky god, and chief of the gods, readily accepts an association of him with Psiloritis, the highest mountain in the region—what, for the people who originated this story, was likely the highest mountain that they knew.6 (Psiloritis means “high mountain” in Greek.) It is easy to envision other associations. The howling of the wind around the mountain peaks with the squalling of the baby Zeus. The sounds of thunder with the rattling clatter of the curetes’ shields on high. The goat milk and honey with the delicious foodstuffs that even these arid heights can produce with abundance. The region’s many earthquakes with the bellowing and pounding of Cronus and his fellow Titans, struggling to escape Tartarus, deep in the Earth.
In other words, the story of Zeus in the Ideon Cave is in large part a story about nature—except that nature did not yet exist.
I say “did not exist” because the idea of a nature that we may identify and talk about as a category of thought, as something we can separate out from other matters we might consider, did not exist for the Minoans and other early peoples. Nor does it, as we will see, for some contemporary peoples as well. To be sure, matters that a scientist might refer to with the word “nature” existed as concerns: the sky and the wind, storms and lightening, pastures that yield milk and honey, earthquakes that shatter our lives. But the evidence of stories like Zeus’s upbringing in the mountain caves of Crete suggests that early peoples, like some others today, combined these concerns with the ways of the supernatural and even with the ways of people, such as the curetes. It was not the goddess Rhea and the nymphs Melissa and Amalthea alone who protected the baby Zeus from Cronus. People, goats, and cave worked together with the divine. The story of Zeus’s upbringing presents an entangled vision of nature, supernature, and the human all matted together, rather than seeing nature as a separate matter, worthy of a word that distinguishes it. There was a tangle, not a triangle.
In addition to a vision of entanglement, we should immediately note two other key points about what I will call nature before nature. First is that the characters in these stories are not necessarily good. Cronus is certainly presented as a rather bloodthirsty fellow, and Zeus’s response was not exactly gentle and affectionate. Second is that, although Zeus clearly has far-ranging powers, the story of the Ideon Cave allows one to experience his presence in a very specific spot. Ancient Greek religion emphasized immanence in places, like the Ideon Cave or like Mount Olympus, the home of the gods, over the transcendence so familiar to us in the modern world religions. Many spirits, like nymphs, in fact inhabited only one place—a specific rock, tree, river, or mountain.
And not only in ancient Greece. Thanks to the care of an eighteenth-century Christian friar, Francisco Ximénez, we have a rare record of another entangled vision of nature before nature: the Popol Vuh, one of the few surviving scriptures of ancient Mayan religion.
Christian clergy have not always been respectful and protective of the faith traditions of others, especially Spanish clergy in the centuries following Cortez’s defeat of the Aztecs in 1521. One horrific moment that stands out is the scene at the Franciscan monastery at the town of Maní in the Yucatan on July 12, 1562.7 There, a monk by the name of Diego de Landa ordered the burning of all the scriptures and idols of the Maya. He was able to round up forty Mayan books, as well as reportedly some twenty thousand Mayan religious objects. He forced hundreds of Maya to watch as he commanded the books and objects to be burned, calling them “the deceit of the devil.”8 Other monks followed suit whenever they encountered Mayan books through to 1697 when the last Mayan city was conquered—a place called Tayasal, which held out so long because of its location on an island in a lake in the middle of the Guatemalan jungle.
But it turned out the monks didn’t quite burn them all. Over the next couple of hundred years, three ancient Mayan books turned up in Europe, and part of a fourth in Mexico. Intrigued by the artistry and exoticness of the hieroglyphics, travelers brought three home to Europe as souvenirs. The fragment of a fourth showed up in the 1960s on the black market, apparently looted from a cave in Chiapas.9
Plus the text of one more ancient Mayan book of scriptures has also turned up, albeit not the original and without any hieroglyphics. But it is perhaps the most important ancient Mayan book of all: the Popol Vuh, a striking work of nature before nature. The name Popol Vuh translates as the “Book of the People” or the “Book of the Community.” Some now call it the “Mayan Bible.” It recounts Mayan history—or, more specifically, the history of the Quiché branch of the Maya—from creation up to the time of the Spanish conquest. What has come down to us is a transliteration of the original Mayan into Roman letters, and a translation of the transliteration into Spanish, made by an obscure friar named Francisco Ximénez, who made the transliteration and translation sometime between 1700 and 1715.10 It lay moldering in his papers for a century and a half before it finally came to light.
We know very little about Friar Ximénez and how he learned the Popol Vuh, aside from a few brief references in his writings. Some scholars think that a Mayan priest—or perhaps several Mayan priests—must have trusted him enough to give him a private recitation of the Popol Vuh, likely over the course of several days, and slowly enough that Ximénez could transcribe it as a transliteration and later translate it. Probably the hieroglyphic version was already lost, and the recitation was from memory. Another theory is that a native Quiché speaker who knew Latin characters made the transliteration, which Ximénez later translated.11 However it happened, the intent of local people seems to have been to preserve the Popol Vuh before it was lost entirely. The Preamble states that “we shall bring it to light because now the Popol Vuh, as it is called, cannot be seen any more…. The original book, written long ago, existed, but its sight is hidden to the searcher and to the thinker.”12
What follows is a wild, oftentimes perplexing story, full of politics and violent conflict—a description that could also apply to many sections of the Bible (for reasons I’ll come to a couple of chapters hence). Also like the Bible, the Popol Vuh begins by recounting the creation of the world through to the development of human society, including the founding of cities and the genealogy of kings.13 Along the way, it tells the story of the heroic twins, Xbalanqué and Hunahpú, sons of the corn god, and how they revenge their father’s death.14 The lords of Xibalba, the Mayan name for the underworld, kill the twins’ father. But the twins defeat the lords of Xibalba and resurrect their father. In a series of adventures, they also kill many divine trouble makers—a bird monster, a volcano monster, a monster who produces earthquakes, as well as the lords of Xibalba—before rising into the sky to become the sun and the moon.15
A number of the stories resonate closely with biblical accounts, particularly in the early part of the Popol Vuh. The world is created from nothing by “the word.”16 The gods send a massive flood to wipe out an early version of humans because “they no longer remembered the Heart of Heaven.”17 And the mother of the heroic twins becomes pregnant with them through a form of immaculate conception (albeit from spittle that dripped from the skull of their father, the corn god, who was then still dead).18 These stories may be original to the Quiché Maya. Yet by the time Ximénez recorded the Popol Vuh, the Maya were already strongly influenced by Christianity. Many had converted, or had at least professed conversion. (After all, Ximénez had come there to encourage them to become Christians.) So there is reason to suspect some blending of traditions. But there is also much that is strikingly Mayan.
For one thing, the story of the Popol Vuh is in large measure the story of corn. The famed Mayan archaeologist Michael Coe interprets the Popol Vuh as “fundamentally agricultural, relating to the annual planting and harvest cycle of maize [corn], the Maya staff of life.”19 The resurrection of the corn god from the underworld is the resurrection of the plant from the kernel out of the dark and mysterious depths of the soil.
For another, nature does not exist in the Popol Vuh—at least not nature in the sense of a category, realm, or power separate from humans and the divine.20 There is a great deal of ecology in its stories, however. One passage explains the origin of what Western ecologists today would call “food chains” and “trophic levels.” The grandmother of the heroic twins tries to send them a secret message, hidden in the stomach of a louse. But before the message gets to the twins, the louse is swallowed by a toad. The toad is swallowed by a snake, which is in turn swallowed by a hawk. The twins don’t know any of this, and for amusement they shoot the hawk in the eye with a blowgun. Annoyed, the hawk refuses to give them the message unless they fix its eye, which the twins do. Then the hawk vomits out the snake, which vomits out the toad—which tries but fails to vomit out the louse. It fails because the louse tricked the toad when it was first swallowed and stayed stuck to the toad’s teeth, to prevent being fully eaten. The twins get the louse out of the toad’s mouth anyway, and receive their grandmother’s message. “From then on this was the food of snakes,” the Popol Vuh recounts, “who still today swallow toads.” And “from that time, this has been the food of hawks, who devour snakes in the fields.” But because “the toad was tricked … the kind of food to give it is not known,” evidently reporting on the state of ecological knowledge at the time and place of the Popol Vuh’s composition.21
These are not the kinds of stories Western parents would likely read in the evening to gentle a child to sleep—even though the swallowing, vomiting, and shooting of the hawk in the eye are fairly mild violence compared with many other stories in the Popol Vuh. The gods are fierce, the animals are fierce, and the human heroes are fierce. There is much pain and gore. This is not a world of goodness, mildness, and mercy.
But another feature of the state of ecological knowledge in the Popol Vuh is that the divine is inseparably entangled with ecology—the gods with corn and with creating the foods of animals—as are, heroically, people themselves.
Many indigenous peoples still profess an entangled view. In the mid-1970s, I had the chance to experience such an understanding among the Cabécar of Costa Rica. At the time, I was working as a field geologist for a US mineral exploration company, interested in mining copper in Costa Rica’s Talamanca Mountains. It would have been a terrible thing to do to the region’s inhabitants, human and nonhuman alike. The kind of copper we were looking for is called “porphyry copper,” a massive but low-grade type of deposit. You basically need a whole mountain of the stuff to make it worth mining. Plus, once the ore has been dug out and crushed and the copper removed, you wind up with about twice the volume in waste rock. So you also need a couple of adjacent valleys to fill in. And you need a rail line and a port facility to get the copper to the coast and into boats to ship around the world. It would have been a mess of imperialist proportions. But I was only nineteen, ignorant of the implications and the politics, and eager for a semester of adventure to escape from college and a strong case of sophomore slump.
These mountains are high—the highest in Central America—and quite remote. The area where we were working was a two-day walk from the nearest road. The forestry companies hadn’t been there yet, and may never, because it is now a United Nations Biosphere Reserve, as well as a reserve for native peoples. They say that the biodiversity is as great as anywhere in the world. I remember being told it was possible to encounter over two hundred different species of trees on a single hectare.
In order to explore for copper in high mountains covered by dense rainforest, where the rocks usually aren’t visible because of all the vegetation, you must walk up and down streams, collect little sample bags of sand, send them off to a laboratory, and watch for spikes in metal content in the lab reports.22 Since the sand must have come from upstream of the sample location, you can pin down the source well enough for the exploratory phase of copper mining. So that’s what I did, along with a couple of Costa Rican coworkers. I walked up and down mountain streams in rubber boots and filled bags with sand. A helicopter would drop us off in a natural clearing, generally on the stony banks of a river that was not flowing at full volume, this being the dry season (really, the less rainy season). We would set up camp in the rain forest, slinging hammocks and mosquito netting between trees, with tarps above, and moving every few days as we finished sampling an area. Sample bags of sand weigh your pack down pretty quickly, though. We sometimes found ourselves hauling fifty or sixty pounds of sand each, in addition to our camping gear. So the helicopter would come back once a week or so to take our filled sample bags and give us more food.
It was tough going. One time I lost my footing fording a swift river, and was swept toward a waterfall that poured into the entrance of a steep canyon. It was an Indiana Jones moment, but it was fully real. Fortunately (or I wouldn’t be writing this sentence right now), I was able to direct myself enough to land—yes!—feet first on a boulder at the top of the waterfall that split the current more or less in two. One of my colleagues tied a rope around his middle, while the other tied the other end around his own waist. Then he waded out as far as he could stand in the river, and tossed me the end of a second rope. It was pretty risky. The far end of the first rope should have been tied around a tree, not to a person, in case one of my colleagues stumbled and they both wound up being swept down the river too. But we didn’t have a choice. The ropes weren’t long enough to do it any other way. And after a few tosses, it worked.
After this incident, we decided it would be a good idea, where possible, to hire one of the local native folk to guide us. In this way, I got to know a Cabécar man we knew only as Frederico, and his wife Ismarelda. (Their given names were in Cabécar, but they assumed Spanish names when dealing with outsiders.) As is characteristic of the Cabécar, Frederico and Ismarelda lived alone in a grass-roofed homestead with a small farm carved out of the rainforest, miles from anyone else, rather than in a village or kin group. Frederico worked with us for a week, bringing us to trails local people had already cut, and bringing us to river crossing points where one could safely wade across or where the local people had stashed a balsa-log raft. One night he had us sleep in one of the huts made of bent branches that local people use as a kind of traditional motel for when one can’t make it back home before dark. That evening we feasted on sweet potatoes, which the Cabécar plant near these huts so wayfarers have something to eat.
Frederico, I came to understand, led an entangled life of people, nature, and the divine. He had amazing skills in jungle-craft. Once when we were walking through some woods on a floodplain, an animal called a tepisquintle—a forty-pound rodent that, I discovered, tastes a lot like lamb—crossed our path. I was “el jefe” in that situation, so Frederico looked to me for permission (which felt strange, as he was probably more than twice my age). I nodded. Frederico had three of his dogs along. He pointed into the woods in the direction the tepisquintle had gone, and off the dogs went. Apparently, when chased, tepisquintle head for water, as they are excellent swimmers. The job of the dogs was partly to let Frederico know, through their barking, where the tepisquintle would emerge from the forest and try to dive into the river. And it was partly to drive the animal to Frederico, when it did emerge. They did their job perfectly. We raced behind Frederico, crashing through the undergrowth, and were able to watch as the tepisquintle shot out of the forest and ran right toward Frederico, who was standing in about a foot of water with his machete raised. One chop and we had fresh meat.
On our last day in Frederico’s area, after a week together, we had to cross a high mountain pass. At the top of the pass, we came across a small lake, one of the very few lakes in the region. It may have had a glacial origin for, hot as Costa Rica is today, the Talamanca Mountains had active glaciers during the height of the Ice Age. However the lake came to be there, Frederico stopped us and said, “there is a song for this place.” First starting quietly, then swelling in volume, and then ending quietly, he sang a chant-like melody in Cabécar. I don’t know what the song was about, at least not specifically. He never said. Probably neither he nor I had good enough Spanish for him to communicate its precise meaning. But in one sense, I knew very much what the song was about: the presence of the divine, which he felt tangled there in that lake, and that I too was able to feel a bit through the tangle of my relationship with him.
An entangled view of people, the divine, and what we now often call nature—experienced with great specificity in places local to our lives, and by no means always kind and good—remains common, despite the worldwide spread of modernism. Frederico first introduced me to contemporary entangled views, but I have experienced them most deeply in the South Africa village of KuManzimdaka, guided by a remarkable man from the region, Mpumelelo Ncwadi, now one of my closest friends. Mpumelelo and I have been working together since 2009, along with an ever-widening group of colleagues, students, and villagers, on an agroecological and participatory approach to livelihood.23 He’s taught me a lot, as have the local community members.
KuManzimdaka is a village of the amaQwathi, a small subnation of the amaXhosa in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province, one of the country’s poorest regions in wealth and health, home to some eight million amaXhosa.24 Legal apartheid may be over, but economic and social apartheid continues for most of those living on these grassy plateaus, rolling up from the Indian Ocean to a height of five thousand feet.25 The Drakensberg Mountains loom behind, part of a long wall of basalt known as the Great Escarpment, reaching to over eleven thousand feet. Given the inaccessibility and challenging topography, the environment itself serves as a means of the continued apartheid local people must contend with.26
Still, the area is rich in tradition, community, and a beautiful and potentially productive landscape. Most local people live in scattered settlements based on customary land rights, with no deed other than a verbal agreement with the local chief, granted to one’s family through tribal membership. These rights can be pretty secure, though—in many ways more secure than land with a deed that one can buy and sell, and thus may lose when a hard period leaves one little alternative but to sell, perhaps because one does not even have enough cash to pay the taxes on the land. There are no taxes with customary land rights. Community has its benefits.27
Mpumelelo isn’t amaQwathi, but was raised in the Eastern Cape countryside and is a member of another amaXhosa subgroup. His parents were illiterate but understood the importance of school—something at which Mpumelelo excelled, despite the ten-mile walk each way. He went on to earn a certificate in mining engineering from Witwatersrand University, a bachelor’s in engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, a master’s in sustainable engineering from Cambridge, and an MBA from the University of Cape Town. He had been doing consulting work on sustainable development all across Africa, but decided he needed to change his focus to the Eastern Cape, giving back to the community that launched him into such success. He saw my name on a website and sent me an email, looking for partners. I was intrigued, having once visited the region many years ago.28 We call the collaboration that developed the LAND Project, for Livelihood, Agroecology, Nutrition, and Development.29
Religion is central to community strength for most people in the area. Almost 90 percent of people in the Eastern Cape reported a religious affiliation on the 2001 South African census.30 The religion they reported was almost uniformly Christian. Only 1.1 percent indicated a religious affiliation other than Christianity, with Islam being the largest sub-fraction at 0.3 percent of Eastern Cape residents. Only 0.1 percent reported “African traditional belief.” But anyone with much experience among the people of the Eastern Cape knows this to be a vast underestimate. Most people in the area practice both Christianity and traditional beliefs, to varying degrees, depending on the need and context.
I first encountered traditional beliefs when one day I noticed off in the countryside a group of young men whose skin had been splotched with white clay. Mpumelelo explained that this was part of their initiation into manhood, a ritual that includes circumcision. Most amaXhosa men from rural areas continue this traditional practice, generally in their late teens.31 Most amaXhosa women also go through an initiation ritual in their teens (but which does not include female circumcision, as is practiced in some areas in Africa to the north, mainly in the countries ringing the Sahara). By these measures alone, the vast majority of Eastern Cape residents continue to practice traditional beliefs.
Ancestor veneration gives spirit to those practices. Everyday speech often uses the phrase “ancestor worship,” but many scholars balk at that terminology because the amaXhosa do not regard their ancestors as actually taking on the status of gods. However, the amaXhosa do see their ancestors as able to intercede in the affairs of the living, for both good and ill. So the difference between “veneration” and “worship” is perhaps a matter of degree, rather than a sharp line.
The amaXhosa can be quite private about ancestor veneration. A traditional healer called an igqirha usually leads the rituals, which often include divination by the throwing of bones, reading the desires of the ancestors from how the bones scatter. It is not the kind of thing Westerners typically give much respect, so the amaXhosa don’t advertise it much. And aside from a few quick explanations when we were working in the countryside with villagers, Mpumelelo and I hadn’t talked about it.
Ancestor veneration sometimes involves agricultural concerns, particularly around livestock health, crop disease, bad weather, and other matters that we often put in the category “nature.” I didn’t want to intrude, but it seemed important for our work on the LAND Project. I took out some books and crawled around the web a bit. The information I found was contradictory and fragmentary. I sat there wavering. “Okay, I’m just going to call Mpumelelo,” I finally decided, and I used the computer to dial his number from my home in Madison, Wisconsin.
“Hey, Mpumi,” which is his nickname, “I’ve been reading and trying to understand about ancestor worship”—I didn’t use the word “veneration”—“in the Eastern Cape. How much of it still goes on?”
I was a bit nervous and felt I had put the question awkwardly. But Mpumelelo laughed, and the line crackled. “Yes, sure. We slaughter for our ancestors.”
“Really?” which was a dumb thing to say. But Mpumelelo was tolerant of my clumsiness. “When? Like, at what seasons or occasions?”
“Well, sometimes we do it if someone has a dream they’re worried about. Or when someone is born, or for initiation,” meaning a teenager’s initiation into adulthood. Bad dreams can indicate to the amaXhosa that the ancestors feel they aren’t being remembered enough, and it is similarly important to honor them at important events in the lives of the living. “Other times too. Usually we slaughter a goat. But sometimes we slaughter male cattle, what you would call an ox.” He hesitated a moment. “I do it.”
“You do?” I blurted, instantly regretting my tone, and hoping it didn’t sound disapproving. I didn’t mean to be. This was an important moment between us, and here I was still being awkward. “Wow, awesome, that’s great,” I followed up, maybe a little too enthusiastically. “Um, when was the last time you did it?”
“Earlier this year,” said Mpumelelo, taking it all in stride. “I’ll have to do it again [in a few years] when my son is ready for initiation. And I had to do it when he was born, and when my daughters were born, and for their initiations too. Actually, when my son goes for initiation, I’ll have to slaughter two goats. One for my son, and one for my great-grandfather.”
I’ve visited Mpumelelo’s home. He lives in a lovely suburban neighborhood of Cape Town, with tidy yards and spacious, well-maintained houses. I was trying to imagine where the slaughtering would happen. “Where do you do it? Not inside Cape Town, do you?”
He laughed again. “No, no, not in Cape Town. I’ll go to Grahamstown to my mother’s place.” Grahamstown is a medium-sized city at the southern end of the Eastern Cape Province. His mother lives in the countryside a few miles outside. “We do it at my mother’s kraal,” he continued, using the Afrikaans word for corral, as is commonly done in South Africa, even when speaking English. Most amaXhosa rural homesteads in the Eastern Cape have a small kraal to keep livestock safe at night. “You have to do it at the kraal. And then we hang the horns of the goat on the gate of the kraal.”
I’d read something about this the previous day, how the sacrifices take place in the family homestead in your home village, where your ancestors’ spirits are strongest. Another widespread custom is burying a newborn baby’s umbilical cord in the fireplace of the hut where she or he was born, with a special ceremony. When first getting to know each other, a common question one amaXhosa person asks another, with a bit of a smile, is “where is your navel buried?” instead of “where are you from?”
But I remembered that Mpumelelo’s mother didn’t live in his home village. Mpumelelo’s parents moved the family when Mpumelelo was seven, in part so he and his sister could more easily get to school.32 “But your mother has moved,” I said. “Don’t you have to do the slaughtering where you were born, where your navel is buried?”
He chuckled at my use of the phrase. “If I wasn’t born where I do the sacrifice, then I round up all the old people from my home village who share my lineage,” he explained. “They come and they bless the spot to reinstall the spirit of my ancestors there. They’ve done that for my mother’s kraal where she is living now. They called my great-grandfather’s spirit to there. They came and blessed that spot, that kraal, because we all of us share a bit of that spirit.”
I was struck by how locally specific the installation of spirit was, and the special rituals required to transfer it to another location. To the extent that they follow traditional beliefs, every amaXhosa person who moves away to the city therefore needs that rural connection back to the precise spot of the family kraal—or ubuhlanti, to use the isiXhosa word, which Mpumelelo taught me some time later—even those with a globalized life course. Like Mpumelelo. Through it, Mpumelelo and other amaXhosa gain a deep and unshakeable sense of home. I felt a bit envious, I came to realize afterward.
We also talked about a number of other aspects of amaXhosa ancestor veneration. The discomfort many amaXhosa feminists feel about the patrilineal character of the tradition. Ways a person can stay connected to the ancestors other than through a sacrifice at the family kraal. The tensions between Christianity and slaughtering for one’s ancestors. How all the leading South Africa politicians with tribal heritage—Mbeki, Zuma, and Mandela (who was still alive at the time)—slaughter for their ancestors.
But what really stands out to me is what Mpumelelo said when I asked him, “So, are the spirits of one’s ancestors always nice? Or do they get angry if you don’t do a sacrifice?”
“Yes, yes!” he excitedly replied. “You have to sacrifice! Like people often say, if you get a family that is falling apart, it’s because they don’t slaughter for their ancestors. Or if you have young people that are behaving badly and getting into trouble, we say it’s because they are not slaughtering for their ancestors.”
To the sociologist, the wisdom here is sound. Holding a sacrifice also holds a community together. People assemble for the ritual, enjoy the feast that follows, and reinforce their fellow-feeling. When a family is not well integrated with the local community, I can well believe that both the adults and the children have more difficulties, both economically and psychologically. I’ve seen as much in my own local community. It takes a village to raise a child, of course, but also to raise adults back up if they fall into hard times. The spirit of community has its benefits too.
Ancestor veneration entangles humans with the land and the divine. The ancestors with their special powers are themselves human, and through them, humans become tightly bound to place. Perhaps we might best regard venerated ancestors as semidivine, blurring the usually sharp categorical line modern culture draws between humans and gods.
Other cultures of nature before nature experience entanglement in other ways. Consider a powerful but long-forgotten story that came to light in Iraq the evening of December 23, 1853.33 Aided by torches, a group of rough men were digging into a fifty-foot high mound a mile long, across the Tigris River from the city of Mosul. They were not grave robbers, at least not in the conventional sense of the phrase. They were in the employ of an archaeologist from the British Museum, one Hormuzd Rassam, who had hired them to dig in the ruins of the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh. But Rassam didn’t actually have permission to dig at this mound. Those rights (such as they were) belonged to the French and the Louvre—which is why Rassam and his men were digging at night.34
The third night of the dig the workers’ shovels banged into one of the most spectacular archaeological discoveries of the nineteenth century: the Palace of Ashurbanipal, the last great king of Assyria, who ruled from 668 BCE to 627 BCE. In the middle of the palace was a large room, fifty feet by fifteen feet.35 The walls were covered with carved panels of King Ashurbanipal hunting lions (which, incidentally, are now extinct in the region). On the floor scattered thousands of pieces of cuneiform tablets, baked hard by the fire that burned Ashurbanipal’s palace during the sacking of Nineveh in 612 BCE. Like most nineteenth-century archaeologists working for imperial powers, Rassam’s main object was showy pieces like Ashurbanipal’s lions. (Room 10a in the British Museum still displays the panels.) At the time, no one could read more than a few characters of this kind of cuneiform anyway.36 Thankfully, Rassam didn’t just chuck it all. When the shovels turned up bits of clay tablet, he had workers toss them into a few wooden crates, jumbling the pieces together. Eventually, the crates made it onto a boat back to the British Museum, along with the panels of lions.
Twenty years later one George Smith, a volunteer research assistant at the British Museum, figured out that there was something extraordinary to be read in these crates of fragments. Among the shards were some shattered tablets recounting part of an astonishing tale: the Epic of Gilgamesh. Much of the story was missing, so Smith went back to Nineveh a couple of times to find more. A few bits of other copies later turned up elsewhere.37 We now have most of it.
This now world-famous saga recounts the adventures of Gilgamesh, king of “great-walled Uruk,” an ancient Sumerian city-state in southern Iraq from which the name Iraq descends. There is a fair chance there really was a King Gilgamesh. At least the Sumerian King List—an enumeration that archaeologists have found half a dozen times or so—records a King Gilgamesh who reigned around 2600 BCE.38 Archaeologists have also found the ruins of Uruk, which was indeed surrounded by great walls. Its main temple was dedicated to Ishtar, the goddess of love, who often appears in the epic.39 So there is some real history in the Epic. There is also much real humanity, entangled with nature and the divine. Here’s a digest.40
Gilgamesh is the fantastically strong King of Uruk, son of King Lugalbanda (the principal character in several other Sumerian myths). He is also the son of the goddess Ninsun, daughter of Anu, one of the Sumerian trinity of chief gods. Gilgamesh, then, is a human-god hybrid—a kind of demigod. But Gilgamesh is a bad king. He forces the young men of the city to fight him, even though they are sure to lose. And he forces the young women of the city to have sex with him. The people cry out to the gods for help.
Anu hears their plea. He asks Aruru, the goddess of creation, to create a companion for Gilgamesh who is equal to him in strength and can balance him. So Aruru creates Enkidu, a fierce wild man. Enkidu grows up alone, far from the city, with only animals for companionship. He defends wild animals from hunters, freeing them from traps and filling in hunters’ pits. Hunters in the area worry about losing their livelihood, so they send word about Enkidu to Gilgamesh.
Gilgamesh agrees that Enkidu must be tamed. He sends Shamhat, a priestess at the Temple of Ishtar, to use sex to lure Enkidu into human society. In a remarkable passage for a religious myth—remarkable at least in comparison to widespread contemporary understandings of religion—they have sex continuously for a week.41 It works. Tamed by sex, Enkidu agrees to join human society. Enkidu comes to Uruk and challenges Gilgamesh to a wrestling match. The fight shakes the very walls of the city. Gilgamesh eventually wins. However, as a result, Gilgamesh and Enkidu become the closest of companions, and set out on a series of adventures together.
In their first adventure, the two friends attack the monster Humbaba, guardian of the cedar forest that lies at the base of Cedar Mountain, dwelling place of the gods. Shamash, god of justice and the sun and one of the two friends’ patron deities, sends a big wind that pins Humbaba down. The monster curses them and says the gods will be angry if they kill him—especially Enlil, another of the trinity of chief gods, who ordained Humbaba to guard the forest:
If you kill me, you will call down the gods’
wrath, and their judgment will be severe …
I curse you both. Because you have done this,
May Enkidu die, may he die in great pain,
May Gilgamesh be inconsolable,
may his merciless heart be crushed with grief.42
The two friends don’t listen. After all, Shamash is helping them. Gilgamesh cuts off the monster’s head, and Enkidu and Gilgamesh promptly chop down the entire cedar forest.
The goddess Ishtar is very impressed with their deeds—so impressed she asks Gilgamesh to marry her. He refuses, noting that Ishtar has mistreated many of her former husbands and lovers. Ishtar is furious at this insult. She gets Anu, who is her father, to send the Bull of Heaven to punish Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the Bull of Heaven instead, and offer its heart to Shamash. Enkidu rips off the bull’s hind quarter and flings it at Ishtar’s face.
This is too much for the gods. Gilgamesh and Enkidu have killed both Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven, and they have insulted the goddess Ishtar. Anu and Enlil hold a council of the gods and determine that one of the two friends has to die. They settle on Enkidu. After a series of vivid and scary dreams, punctuated by Gilgamesh’s efforts to console him, Enkidu does indeed die, as the gods have ordained, mollifying Ishtar and fulfilling Humbaba’s curse. Gilgamesh is devastated, both at the loss of his closest friend and at the recognition that he too one day must die. For although he is a grandson of Anu, Gilgamesh is ultimately human and a mortal.
The final tablets of the epic recount Gilgamesh’s search for the secret of immortality. Many incidents later he finds Utnapishtim and his wife, the only humans ever to be granted immortality. Utnapishtim explains how they gained this boon.
Long ago, led by Enlil, the gods sent a flood to cover the world and wash away its evils. But Ea, the third of the trinity of chief gods, secretly asked Utnapishtim to build a huge boat and to put his family and representatives of all the animals on board. Utnapishtim did, and waited for the flood waters to recede. He sent out first a dove, then a swallow, and then finally a raven, to look to see if there was any dry land yet. The raven found a branch, showing that land had indeed reemerged. Utnapishtim then set loose all the animals and his family. (It was the discovery of this Noah-like figure that first attracted George Smith’s interest in the Epic of Gilgamesh.)43 Enlil was furious, but Ea convinced Enlil that he had overreached a bit, and that Utnapishtim should be rewarded for saving life on Earth. So Enlil granted Utnapishtim and his wife immortality.
Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh he will grant him immortality in turn—but only if he can stay awake six days and seven nights. Gilgamesh, exhausted by his travels, instantly falls asleep for the entire six days and seven nights. Nonetheless, at his wife’s suggestion, Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh how to acquire a plant that grants perpetual youth. Gilgamesh gets the plant. But before he can eat it, a serpent steals the plant, leaving behind its newly shed skin. Gilgamesh weeps because he has lost this last chance for immortality.
The epic ends with Gilgamesh’s return to “great-walled Uruk,” and his recognition that its marvels are the true source of any immortality he may attain.
The ancient Greeks and Mayans would have loved the Epic of Gilgamesh, for it shows a similarly immanent sensibility of humans entangled with natural and supernatural actors who are not necessarily good. I imagine the amaQwathi of KuManzimdaka would too, if they heard it. (Maybe one day I’ll try it out with some of my friends there.) The two human heroes, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, are constantly in direct interaction with the gods. Although they are human, both are the offspring of the divine: Gilgamesh through his mother, the goddess Ninsun, and Enkidu through the goddess Aruru, who created him. Gilgamesh and Enkidu are also constantly implicated in various ambitions of the gods, such as Ishtar’s insatiable love.
They are also entangled with nature. For example, they do battle with Humbaba, the guardian of the cedar forest, and with the Bull of Heaven. Gilgamesh loses his final chance at immortality when a snake eats the plant that will give him immortality. (In the full story, there are many more examples—a few of which I’ll get to shortly.)
Plus it would be hard to consider the actions of nature and the divine in the story as wholly benign and good, at least from a human perspective. Humbaba curses Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and Ishtar furiously determines that they must be punished. The Bull of Heaven attacks Gilgamesh and Enkidu. The gods decide to kill Enkidu. We learn that earlier the gods had tried to wipe out all life on Earth with a huge flood.
And in all of this, we see a divine that is immanent in nature, embodying it and acting through it. Enlil is the god of the wind. Ea is the god of water. Anu is god of the sky.44 This divine immanence in nature (which is equally a natural immanence in the divine) besets humans with floods and winds and vicious animals, often with reference to specific places such as Cedar Mountain, the home of the gods.
Entangled, immanent, and not necessarily good: these common nature before nature features interconnect with many others. In my reading, I’ve noted eleven more that follow on from these three. I’ll describe them below, drawing on the extended examples of nature before nature traditions that I’ve given already, with some brief references from other ones around the world.
First, I am always struck by the exuberant pluralism in all these traditions. We have a long-held intellectual habit of calling them “polytheistic,” in contrast to the monotheism characteristic of world religions of more recent origin. I don’t think that is the best term. Shortly I’ll explain what I think is a better term. But for now, I’ll just observe that it would be more accurate to refer to them as based on poly-divinity, not polytheism. Not all the divine agents in these traditions are understood to be full gods. Venerable ancestors, the curetes, the heroic twins, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and perhaps the spirit of that lake high in the Talamancas: these are divine figures, but not gods on the level of Zeus, Ishtar, Anu, and the Mayan corn god. Nature before nature is filled with demigods, as well as (depending on the tradition) sprites, fairies, genies, nymphs, imps, elves, specters, phantoms, ghosts, wraiths, demons, monsters, and more.
Second, the divinities in these traditions are active and engaged with the world, sometimes wildly so. They have personalities and moods. They are busy about their days, full of intentions and projects. They are not abstract and distant. They are not consistent and predictable.
Third, this active, plural divine almost always has form, generally based on humans and animals or their combination, allowing for interactiveness with humans. In some tales, we also hear of the spirits of plants and rocks and objects normally considered inanimate today.45 Such a world is deeply alive. These visions of divine form and pervasiveness of spirit resonate with a sensibility of interchange and unboundedness. The natural, the supernatural, and the human all tumble together into one entangled community, or one entangled community of communities, with all the tensions between chaos and order, conflict and cooperation, and anger and love that we know from community life.
Which leads to a fourth observation: the poly-divinities of nature before nature usually manifest not only ecological features of “nature” but also its relevance for the means of human sustenance: for hunting, for gathering, for agriculture. Divine agents often represent the forces and factors of provisioning. The Maya focused much of their worship on the corn god. Ishtar is the Assyrian goddess of fertility, including agricultural fertility, as well as of love. Demeter is the Greek goddess of the harvest. Diana is the Roman goddess of the hunt.
Fifth, in nature before nature, humans—especially heroic and divine humans—may influence the jumbled course of an entangled life. Hunahpú and Xbalanqué overcome the lords of the Mayan underworld. Local villagers help guard the baby Zeus by disguising the sound of his wailing so his father, Cronus, can’t hear it. The amaXhosa ancestors shape the fortunes of weather, disease, and economy. Gilgamesh and Enkidu are able to kill the Bull of Heaven. True, the gods have the last word, as in when they condemn Enkidu to death and deny Gilgamesh immortality, indicating the limits of human power and the importance of caution in disputing the will of the gods. This last word often takes natural form through floods, earthquakes, diseases, and other ecological calamities. But humans have some power to dispute and subvert the will of the gods. Gilgamesh refuses Ishtar’s request that he marry her, speaking to her forthrightly on the matter. She gets mad, and things turn out badly for Gilgamesh in the end, and especially for Enkidu, but that’s because they take things too far by killing the Bull of Heaven and throwing one of its haunches in Ishtar’s face. Humans have to exercise caution in disputing the gods. Still, they often get away with it—especially with the help of other gods. Indeed, Utnapishtim got away with it spectacularly when he subverted the will of Enlil and saved representatives of all creatures from the flood, which later led to Utnapishtim and his wife being granted immortality with the help of the god Ea.
Sixth, Ishtar’s desire for Gilgamesh professes a very intimate entanglement of humans and the divine. That basic passion of ecology, sex, is part of the divine in nature before nature. In addition to sex between gods, the gods can show sexual desire for humans. Sometimes they even consummate this desire. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, we are given a vivid and frank description of Ishtar’s seduction of the gardener Ishullanu, one of her previous human loves. Mitchell perhaps takes a bit of license in his version of this passage from Tablet VI:
“Sweet Ishullanu, let me suck your rod,
touch my vagina, caress my jewel.”46
But the more literal version we have from Andrew George’s translation is still pretty explicit:
“O my Ishullanu, let us taste your vigor,
reach out your ‘hand’ and stroke my quim.”47
Other traditions also speak of gods having desire for humans. Zeus has a very active sex life with humans. He partners with both women and men, including Danae, Leda, Eurymedousa, Semele, Callisto, Europa, Phthia, Thyia, Elare, and Ganymede, a beautiful prince of Troy. One accounting finds twenty-three different human sex partners of Zeus, across various Greek myths.48 Stories of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, record her as having sex with several humans as well, including Phaeton, Anchises, and Butes.
These are not all tender and loving encounters. Zeus rapes most of the humans he has sex with. Enlil rapes the demigoddess Mullitu. Aphrodite tricks Anchises into having sex with her, and Ishtar is not gentle in seeking Gilgamesh’s love. I do not wish to portray these traditions as imagining a utopian state of happy unity between humans, ecology, and the divine. There is power. There is violence. There is loss. There is injustice. There is much that is ugly and horrible in this entangled cosmology. Indeed, this is one of the main points such a cosmology makes about the world.
Seventh, humans are not mere sexual pawns and victims. Humans can show their own sexual desire for the gods. Humans can even commit sexual violence against the gods. In another myth of Ishtar—or, more exactly, a myth of Inanna, her Sumerian name—she falls asleep in a garden and is raped by Shukaletuda, the gardener, a mortal human. But, as I say, countering the will of the gods and goddesses is hazardous. Inanna is furious when she wakes up and discovers that Shukaletuda has violated her. She searches him out and kills him.
Eighth, these stories tell of more than human intimacy with the supernatural. Humans have sexual encounters with nature, as much as with supernature—or, again, with the kinds of entities that we typically regard today as nature. Zeus seduces Leda in the form of a white swan and Eurymedousa in the form of an ant. Often this intimacy is violent. Zeus rapes Europa in the form of a white bull and Ganymede in the form of an eagle. A violent intimacy of the natural also follows from Inanna’s reaction to Shukaletuda. Before she kills him, in her anger she turns water to blood, conjures damaging storms, and unleashes devastating plagues, which indiscriminately besiege the countryside. The sexual fury of the supernatural is a sexual fury of the natural as well. The lines between nature and supernature are as tangled as those between humans and supernature.
Ninth, the feminine divine rings out strongly in nature before nature.49 A great many nature before nature divinities are female, in contrast to contemporary world religions like Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism in which the divine is overwhelmingly male. Moreover, in nature before nature, religious leaders are often female. Among the amaXhosa, amagqirha (the plural of igqirha, the ritual diviner I mentioned earlier) are usually women. In Gilgamesh, we learn of the priestess Shamhat in a strikingly sexual situation: her weeklong intimate encounter with Enkidu. But what needs equal underlining here is that Shamhat was a priestess at an important temple. Back on Crete, archaeological evidence from the famous Minoan “palaces”—which were as much religious as administrative—show that the Minoans accorded great authority to women in their worship. Some scholars of Minoan life suggest that, in fact, the head of the Minoan religion was a woman, and possibly the head of state was also often a woman.50 Images of priestesses show up on Minoan frescoes and pottery far more commonly than images of priests. And women were often accorded great power in later Greek religion, as in the Oracles at Delphi and the priestesses of Athena at her temple in Athens.
Tenth, these traditions eroticize both the masculine and the feminine divine, not only the feminine divine. True, the Minoans and later Greeks often sexed up the images they made of goddesses and priestesses. Perhaps most striking are the open bodices and Barbie-doll figures of Minoan priestesses and goddesses, as in the famous statue of the “snake goddess” (who many scholars now think is probably actually a priestess). But, then, there are also sexed up religious images of Minoan men, such as the famous “Prince of the Lillies” fresco at Knossos, with his codpiece, bare chest, and Ken-doll figure (and which is probably actually an image of a priest or a priest-king).51 The later Greeks and Romans also sexed up their portrayals of the male divine, as in the many man-hunk statues of Zeus or the eroticism of statues of Apollo. In Gilgamesh, we encounter both the eroticized femininity of Shamhat and Ishtar and the eroticized masculinity, including homoeroticism, of Gilgamesh and Enkidu.
And eleventh, the gendered associations of the divine in nature before nature often surprise, given contemporary Western perspectives. Yes, many ancient goddesses had attributes that fit modern stereotypes of femininity, such as goddesses of the hearth, health, home, childbirth, love, and fertility. But many of the attributes of ancient goddesses do not fit our stereotypes. Toward the end of Gilgamesh, we meet Shiduri, goddess of fermentation and tavern keeper at the Garden of the Gods. (I’ll have more to say about her later.) Ishtar is Assyrian goddess of fertility, love, and sex, but she is also the goddess of war, as is her Sumerian counterpart, Inanna. In ancient Greece, Athena is also a goddess of war, as well as goddess of wisdom. Other Greek goddesses have associations that do not easily fit Western gender dichotomies: Demeter, the goddess of the harvest; Artemis, the goddess of the hunt; Eos, the goddess of the dawn; Nike, the goddess of victory; and Themis, the goddess of justice. And take Gaia, goddess of the Earth. Her association with the Earth does indeed match the conventional Western designation of the female as below, in contrast to Zeus, god of the sky, and Apollo, god of the sun, up above. But in some cultures of nature before nature, the deity of the Earth is male, not female, as in Geb, the ancient Egyptian god of the Earth. And the divine up above can be female, as in Nut, Geb’s wife, goddess of the sky, and Amaterasu, the Shinto goddess of the sun.
Male and female, humans and divinities, and ecological associations all mix together in nature before nature, with muted segregations of position, power, and attribute.
It would not be an uncommon reaction to regard these visions of nature before nature as untrue—as mere myth, unsophisticated and unscientific, or even as heresy and blasphemy. True or not, there is a striking realism in their acceptance of the materialism, desire, strife, and imperfections of daily life.
This realist acceptance does not necessarily indicate approval of these troubles and the motivations behind them.52 Rather, it represents a reckoning with the inevitable and unpredictable, and with outcomes we may influence but likely cannot fully avert. Sex happens, for good and for ill, in pleasure and in pain, as a surrender of power and as a route to power. Disorder and calamity happen too. There is much about the world that is good, but much that is not. Try as we might, pray and sacrifice as much as we might, the gods are not fully in control of the world, of each other, or of their own selves. Besides, even if you have done the right thing, quite possibly someone else in your group has not—the gardener Shukaletuda, perhaps—and the fury of divine response catches you in the bloody froth of the elements unleashed.
The divine in nature before nature is not perfect. There is conflict. There is confusion. There is unpredictability. Nor are the gods all powerful. Not only do humans not always get what they want, the gods don’t either. Ishtar doesn’t. Nor does Zeus. Even he cannot enforce and predict every outcome. Other gods aren’t as pliable as that, and neither are ecology and the will of humans. Take this passage in the Iliad, commenting on how Zeus’s jealous wife Hera once tricked him into oppressing his son by a human mother, Hercules (Herakles in Greek): “Even Zeus once fell into disastrous folly, he who they say is best among men and gods.”53 There is a plurality of powers in the jumbled community of humans, gods, and nature—a realist acknowledgment of limits central to what I have been calling an entangled view of existence, a view that does not recognize or even need a concept of nature.
The gods in nature before nature can be funny too. You can tell jokes about them and laugh at them. Much of this humor is sexual, like much of all humor. Because the gods have desires just as humans do, we can laugh at our own frustrations by laughing at theirs. Desire is not a sin in nature before nature’s realist view. Rather, Ishtar’s insatiable craving in Gilgamesh makes her a clown figure in the story. Ancient Assyrians must also have had many a good laugh hearing about Enkidu being lured into human society by sex. Or take Priapus, a Roman fertility god and protector of gardens, fruit, and livestock. Statues of Priapus, with a huge erect penis, sometimes half the size of the rest of his body, were common in Roman gardens, and he was often painted in frescoes. Yes, Priapus had an instrumental role in protecting crops from insects and livestock from disease, but he was also supposed to make you laugh. It is a challenge even today to look at a statue or fresco of Priapus and not chuckle.54 We laugh because we are trying to deal with the real.
This realist grasp also gains hold through the concrete experience of place. In nature before nature, the interactiveness of humans with the divine is immanent, as I have mentioned, in the touchable of the here and now, not remote or diffuse. Heroes can have direct interaction with the gods and their ecological attributes, and ordinary people can encounter a god in the special place of that divinity or semidivinity. Pilgrims and tourists gain a sense of the presence of Zeus by visiting the Ideon Cave. Frederico experienced a specific presence in that lake in the Talamancas, and I think I felt it too, through him. My friend Mpumelelo needs to do his sacrifices at the kraal of his mother, now that his close relatives have installed his great-grandfather’s spirit there. No other spot will do.
Through these real specificities of place, people also connect to specific communities of place: the family, the kin group, the tribe, the nation to whom the place properly belongs because of members’ connections to its spirits.55 Our spirits, our communities, our places. It would be an odd thing for me to visit Mpumelelo’s mother’s kraal and sacrifice to his ancestors—or to sacrifice to my own. It would not be my place to do so, pun intended. Only specific people in specific spots possessed by specific spirits can have these experiences. As well, a local kin group is highly real and present, right there, in your face, for they are the folks you meet with regularly and depend upon for daily needs. They are not abstract and distant, an “imagined community,” in Benedict Anderson’s memorable phrase (except to the extent that all human relations are imagined across a reach of space and time, however short).56
And there is deep realism in the acceptance of the political character of the world. In traditions of nature before nature, both ancient and contemporary, the gods and their ecological associations are full of politics, from petty peeves and wild mood swings to out and out warfare among each other. Humans often get caught in the divine fray. Moreover, these divine politics mix the good and the bad together. Like everyday human life, good intentions and bad intentions are often inextricably intertwined, even becoming one and the same, present in the same individual or force in our lives. Characters usually have mixed moralities—not a pure goodness or a pure badness. Early in Gilgamesh, Anu, the father of the gods, is in a helpful mood, and instructs Aruru to make Enkidu, so as to tame Gilgamesh. But later in the epic, Anu is in a vindictive mood, and orders that either Gilgamesh or Enkidu must die for killing Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven. Ishtar’s swings are the most violent of all. She plots the downfall of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, but also professes admiration of them and even love. And the gods do not necessarily agree with each other. Although the god Enlil set Humbaba to guard the cedar forest, the god Shamash helps Gilgamesh and Enkidu by sending strong winds to control the monster Humbaba. Politics is like that, full of contradiction and confused morality, with uncertain outcomes.
Political realism likewise infuses the Popol Vuh. The lords of the underworld Xibalba are evil and the heroic twins and their corn god father are good, all mixed together in the same divine politics. But this is not a politics with a straight duality of good and evil. There is complexity. The twins, for all their valor, do some rather unpleasant things too. We have heard already about how they shot a hawk in the eye with their blow gun for amusement, and helped the hawk recover only when the hawk otherwise refused to deliver the message he had for them. But also, in one of their first acts, the twins turn their two older brothers into monkeys because their brothers were acting a bit jealous of them. The twins talk their brothers into climbing a tree and into loosening their breechclouts, “leaving the long ends hanging … from behind” like tails. Then they use magic to turn the dangling breechclout ends into monkey tails and to give the rest of their brothers’ bodies the appearance of monkeys.57 The twins thus are “trickster” figures as well as heroes, a kind of moral complexity of the political, common in cultures of nature before nature.58
Nature before nature also places great emphasis on the trickiest politics of all: family life. Its stories typically describe the active agents of the world as having important family and kin relations, whether those agents are human or nonhuman, divine or semidivine. Zeus has a father and a mother, brothers and sisters. He has aunts and uncles too: the Titans he and his siblings lock up in Tartarus along with his father. He has a wife, Hera, and many sons and daughters. Most of the other gods are also his relations. His days are largely taken up in dealing with all the squabbles among them. Gilgamesh is the child of Lugalbanda and Ninsun, and Ninsun is the daughter of Anu, one of the trinity of chief gods. But Ishtar is also Anu’s daughter. Thus when Ishtar falls in love with Gilgamesh, she is falling in love with her nephew. And when Ishtar asks her father Anu to punish Gilgamesh with the Bull of Heaven, she is asking him to punish his own grandson. The Epic of Gilgamesh is not only an adventure story; it’s a soap opera, full of family dynamics and the complexities and conflicts of interpersonal relationships. The Popol Vuh is pretty soapy too. The heroic twins are brothers, and they free their father and trick their other brothers. We also hear about the twins’ mother and grandmother. Like Zeus, Hera, Gilgamesh, Anu, and Ishtar, the twins’ motives are largely those of family.
Mpumelelo told me the same about his ancestors. They can be tricksters, with important implications for the micro-politics of relationships. “Sometimes they’re good, and sometimes they’re not,” he said on a later phone call. “But either way, they are still your ancestors, and you have to deal with that.” The confused politics of the personal: sounds like family to me.
Mpumelelo also made a request, after he had read an early version of this chapter.
“If there’s one thing you can communicate, Mike, it would be great. That worshipping ancestors is not evil. It gives me a religion I can relate to. I can relate to my grandfather and great-grandfather. How can I relate to a god that I’ve never met?”
The divinity of relationality: that sounds like family to me too.
When we reflect on the beliefs people have about such fundamental matters, we should also consider the context of those beliefs. We need to think about the manners of living for which such accounts make sense. For we do not all live the same way and face the same dilemmas with the world and its contentions.
There is a word that has long been associated with these ways of looking at experience, a word that has not always been kindly meant. That word is pagan, which has often been intended to mark these ways as backward, delusional, improper, and immoral, identifying the holder of them as being in need of punishment, edification, or exclusion. Sometimes even death. Take the joint decree of November 14, 435, from Roman emperors Theodosius II and Valentinian III, who each controlled half the Roman Empire at the time. Not only did the decree ban the ritual practices of “all persons of pagan criminal mind” and order the destruction of “all their fanes, temples, and shrines.” It also proclaimed that “all men shall know that if it should appear, by suitable proof before a competent judge, that any person has mocked this law, he shall be punished with death.”59
But as a sociologist, I find the term “pagan” apt and descriptive, as I mentioned in the first chapter, with no necessary moral judgment. The English word “pagan” derives from the Latin paganus, which the Oxford English Dictionary translates as meaning “of or belonging to a country community, civilian, also as noun, inhabitant of a country community, civilian.”60 The origin of paganus probably dates from the early fourth century, a century or so before Theodosius II and Valentinian wrote their joint decree. Paganus itself derived from the earlier Latin word pagus, meaning “country district,” which in turn derived from pangere, meaning “to fasten” or “to plant something in the ground.” Pangere also led to the English word “peasant” by way of the French for country and country person, as in pays and paysan.61 Other European languages have similar terms and phrases that use rural and agricultural metonyms to reference holders of religious beliefs not accepted by Christianity and other world religions. And it is contextually accurate that they do. The kinds of orientations I have been describing originate in rural and agricultural lives—an empirical observation evidently made by the Romans long ago, even if their intent was not benign.
Those living in the countryside and trying to wrest a living directly from the ground are well aware that much happens in our ecological relations that we cannot control or anticipate. In Gilgamesh, we get an explanation: the politics of the gods are to blame. When Anu grants Ishtar the Bull of Heaven to punish Gilgamesh, he tells her, “But if I give you the Bull of Heaven, Uruk will have famine for seven long years.”62 And then when the Bull of Heaven descends, we hear this: “Ishtar led the Bull down to the earth, it entered and bellowed, the whole land shook, the streams and marshes dried up, the Euphrates’ water level dropped by ten feet.” The politics of ecology and the divine are densely entangled, and we with them, in nature before nature. What the gods are doing is what ecology does, what ecology does is what the gods are doing, and what they do together we humans must contend with.
The pagan, rural orientation of nature before nature traditions also manifests in its commonly agricultural imagery. Bulls are an especially popular theme, found in the faiths of cattle-rearing, agricultural peoples across the globe. There is the Bull of Heaven in Gilgamesh. The bull was also central to Minoan religion, from the myth of the Minotaur—the half-bull, half-human monster that lurked in the Labyrinth at the palace of Knossos—to a ritual that apparently involved doing a summersault over a charging bull.63 Although the ancient Greeks saw Zeus as a sky god, he could also take the form of a bull, as he did in his rape of Europa. These divine ecologies are chaotic, unpredictable, powerful, a struggle to comprehend and control—like bulls themselves.
Cattle are not indigenous to the New World. Corn (maize) is the common agricultural theme of the original cultures from there. Many of these cultures utterly relied on corn (which, of course, originated in the New World). As with all crops, some years corn does well, and some years it doesn’t. Big swings in corn yield still occur from year to year, even in the US corn belt.64 Without today’s mediating technologies and wider array of crops, groups like the ancient Maya no doubt saw even wider swings, with far less margin for adjustment. We see the concern and doubt about the corn crop in the Popol Vuh, as I noted earlier. The heroic twins are able to bring corn back to life from the depths of Xibalba only through trickery in the face of a precarious ecology, with its bird monsters, volcanoes, earthquakes, and fierce gods of the lower realms. Agriculture as trickery: many a farmer or gardener today would agree.
If this is your context of life—if your ways are pagan ways, closely dependent upon kin, immersed in the rhythms and needs of cultivation, securing a livelihood directly from a resistant ecology—you must hope that the heroic twins (or your own cultural parallel) win this uncertain fight every year, and that therefore the community does too. You must hope that the gods will be nice to people. You must hope that we land on the upside of the outcome of their moods, plots, and squabbles. You must hope that we make the right allies in the divine politics of the disputatious family that is the Earth.
But that context was beginning to change for the people of Great-Walled Uruk. A substantial portion of the local population now lived in the city, engaging in urban pursuits. Pursuits like collecting taxes for the state. Serving as record keepers to keep track of the taxes. Going to school and running schools so there would be record keepers. Building public works like roads and canals to grow the economy enough to yield sufficient taxes to support institutions like schools. Serving as soldiers to protect public works and the economic gains people had made, lest another state decide to try a faster route to building a tax base: war. Or declaring a war of your own.65 Cities were growing, the state was growing, and the careers and ambitions they served were growing. Daily life seemed less bound by place and the local specificities of family and kin ties. It was a more transcendent, less immanent, time.
And as the context of people’s lives changed, so did the questions they asked about their lives. Reading Gilgamesh today, one gets the feeling that people were in growing doubt about those questions. Should we venerate our ancestors? Gilgamesh seems to say, well, sort of: not your ancestor, but venerate the great king Gilgamesh, the ancestor of your king today. Should we continue to show our primary allegiance to our kin group? Again, Gilgamesh seems to say, well, sort of: consider your kin group the city-state of Uruk, with its heroic ancestor, Gilgamesh. Is our newfound ecological power, which is capable of wiping out the cedar forest and killing its guardian, good and wise? Gilgamesh seems to say such acts are glorious but dangerously contrary to the will of some of the gods. Should we pursue the life of glory in the first place, exercising our ambition, doing great deeds in faraway places, and gaining the immortality of notoriety? Gilgamesh clearly delights in Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s transcendent accomplishments on their travels, but at the end of the story Gilgamesh realizes that Uruk is his home and that the true basis of contentment lies in immanence. As Shiduri, goddess of drink and the divine tavern keeper, counsels him near the end of the epic:
Humans are born, they live, then they die,
this is the order that the gods have decreed.
But until the end comes, enjoy your life,
spend it in happiness, not despair.
Savor your food, make each of your days
a delight, bathe and anoint yourself,
wear bright clothes that are sparkling clean,
let music and dancing fill your house,
love the child who holds your hand,
and give your wife pleasure in your embrace.
That is the best way for a man to live.66
Surer solutions to these new questions—although perhaps not better solutions—would soon arise.