God is Red

Suppose Immanuel Velikovsky is correct? Suppose that instead of the Exodus accounts being a poetic elaboration of religious doctrine of a later time, they are fairly well-remembered accounts of the phenomena encountered by the Hebrews as they left Egypt. How then do we approach religious writings? Are they to be understood as actual events, and do we take all religious stories as having been real events at some time and someplace in man’s experience? It would seem that we have a major task of discovering to what extent we can accept the historical veracity of any story of ancient times. That Velikovsky’s projections about the nature of the physical world continue to produce startling verifications would tend to make us hesitate, reflect, and take another look at religious doctrines, symbolism, and beliefs.

The assumption made by theologians when discussing religious writings and their symbols and images is that world events have followed a fairly homogeneous pattern and that no particular event has happened that we cannot observe in similar pattern today. Using this assumption the Exodus does become simply another political revolt, which in later years had the fortune to be accepted as illustrating religious beliefs. But if we make this assumption, we are almost immediately faced with a more fundamental question about the origin of the religious beliefs illustrated in the stories that are found in religious traditions.

The Western conception of a homogeneous time experience apparently has many roots. Certainly one influence can be said to have been Greek philosophy and its insistence on the uniform operation of nature. This idea surfaces continually in Western thought, and it continually intrudes into theological doctrines about religion and the nature of God. So strong has this idea been that natural events have been forced into this interpretive pattern, even when the facts warranted otherwise.

For many centuries peoples of Western Europe believed that the heavens, being made by God at creation, were constant. The appearance of meteors and comets was thus a great embarrassment because these phenomena seemed to indicate that the heavens were not all that stable. Was this possible in a divinely constructed universe? Present-day astronomers are searching the records of other societies for evidence of a supernova that occurred on July 4, 1054. It was one of the spectacular events of celestial history, and it apparently lasted some three weeks and was clearly observable at various parts of the planet because it appeared quite close to the moon in its crescent phase.l

In at least one cave in California and on rock carvings and paintings in Arizona and New Mexico, there are representations of a crescent moon with a bright object quite near it. There are speculations that the early peoples of North America saw the supernova and made these records to verify for subsequent generations that such a thing had happened. There are very few references to this event in Europe where the social science of history was fairly advanced. The reason that there are very few records in Europe is that everyone believed that the heavens were constant. Thus people did not really see what they were seeing.

In view of this startling victory of faith over experience, is it any wonder that contemporary theories of the nature of the Exodus fall apart whenever they are examined? If people become so blinded to their observations that their beliefs override their actual experiences, would it not seem possible that the whole method of interpreting events needs drastic revision?

In another day, perhaps, the rock paintings in the American Southwest would be taken as a primitive form of religious poetry. Theologians, historians of religion, psychoanalysts, and other wise people would pour forth books about the primitive ideas of the natives who could not know that no extremely bright star exists beside the moon at its crescent. Fortunately, today we have sufficient fragmentation of knowledge so that astronomers can use Indian rock paintings as verifications that the supernova was observed.

Because it is possible, indeed highly probable, that American Indians observed and faithfully recorded a celestial event while their supposedly more civilized neighbors in Europe were gritting their teeth, reaffirming their faith in the Christian religion, and refusing to see the supernova, the whole question of the interpretation of religious symbols, doctrines, and beliefs should be reexamined. Suppose we find in the tribal traditions a memory that is not only more correct in many aspects than that of the Western religions, but suppose that we find in them the longer and more extensive history of humankind. That prospect has not been considered by Westerners. Yet it is precisely the consideration that must be made if Western societies are to be released from their religiously ethnocentric universe.

It is with this consideration in mind that we have postponed any discussion of American Indian tribal stories about creation. In the Western tradition we have been taught to regard all stories about beginnings as primitive efforts to understand how the world began. The obvious use of linear time as a determining factor in making sense of legends is so dominant in Western and Christian thought that it prevents legends being accepted on other terms.

We cannot necessarily project the thought that the early peoples in North America were any more concerned to describe the creation as an event than they were to explain any other facet of their experience as an event. The absence of a theological interpretation of history should be sufficient evidence of the Indians’ refusal to use time as the determining factor when trying to understand their experiences. Where we do have legends describing world conditions, the existence of other worlds, or the existence of catastrophic conditions caused by certain factors, we cannot assume that the people are concerned primarily with the sequence of events. They might much more be concerned with describing the actual life conditions, and the apparent sequence of activity in the legends might be a fairly accurate description of what actually took place rather than a poetic elaboration of events for theological purposes.

In short, what we have previously been pleased to call creation stories might not be such at all. They might be simply the collective memories of a great and catastrophic event through which people came to understand themselves and the universe they inhabited. Creation stories may simply be the survivors’ memories of reasonably large and destructive events.

The tribal religion of the Hopi Indians of Arizona is a case in point. The legends of the Hopi relate that the world as they have known it has been destroyed three times and that our present world is now reaching a time of impending destruction. This religious tradition, which has tribal variations, appears as a spiral of religious insight rather than a rigid temporal or a totally spatial understanding. The existence of the Hopi in all worlds is predicated on a particular land being given to them over which they assume a custodial function; in any specific world it involves deliberate spatial considerations. The collective memory inherent in the traditions combines time and space in a comprehensible manner, however, and one that we may be working toward today.2

The first Hopi world was called Topka, and it was characterized as a world of endless space. Topka was considered to be the original world, and the basic themes that are found in some of the tribal legends about the nature of creation are found in descriptions of this world. The direction of this world, according to the Hopi, was west. The living things of the creation were congenial and lived without strife. Eventually people became convinced that real differences existed between the various life forms, and men became increasingly wicked toward other species. This wickedness was erased when the world was destroyed by a rain of fire.

The Hopi survived the end of this world by living underground with the ants. As the world cooled and people were able to emerge, they discovered that the world had been rearranged. Water now existed where land had formerly been. Land stood where there had been waters. The direction of the world was west, and it was called “dark midnight.”

In the second world the people and animals were not allowed to live together, so they lived separate lives. The fear that the problems of the old world would return to plague them caused this separation. Humans came to learn the arts of trade and commerce, but they used these talents to accumulate more material goods than were needed. This greed eventually led to the downfall of the second world. Earth’s axis tilted, and the world spun around rapidly, destroying the natural features of the landscape. The world was stabilized only by passing through an extremely cold part of space that froze the waters into solid ice.

Everything was lifeless, and to survive the people lived underground once again. Then earth’s axis changed again, and it resumed a more normal orbit of rotation around the sun. Revolution on nearly the same axis was eventually restored and the ice began to melt. The surface of the planet regained its original ability to sustain life. People emerged once again. This third world was known to the Hopi as Kuskura, and its direction was east. The new world was the scene of much activity. People had not forgotten the trade and commerce they had learned in the previous world, and substantial technology was developed. Men learned to fly through the air in patuwvotas, or shields, made from hide propelled by some unidentified power.

Using these flying shields, the various nations warred against one another. The warfare grew so intense that the third world was destroyed. Warned ahead of time that the world would be flooded, the Hopis constructed special cylinders of hollow reeds that floated on the flood waters. The descriptions of the flood bear close similarities with the flood stories of other nations. As the waters began to subside, the people sent out birds to find any lands remaining above the waters. Eventually the waters receded, and the various nations were assigned lands for themselves. The fourth world, the one in which we are presently living, began.

Could such a sequence of worlds have been made up in the imagination, no matter how religious that imagination, of a primitive mind that has been otherwise classified as relatively uninformed about the physical forces of the natural world? Could people have conceived the changing of directions of the world and made such a conception a primary part of their religious belief without something having happened that would justify such a belief? By direction of the world, we are basically talking about the rising and setting of the sun. In translating the meaning of the four Hopi worlds, we have the first two worlds in which the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, and the last two in which it rises in the east and sets in the west. All that is necessary to account for the difference in phenomena is a rotational change in direction.

Suppose that we break into this sequence and suggest that a nation of people comes into existence in one of the worlds. It begins to recognize itself as a people distinct from the other groups inhabiting the planet. A language comes into being that is relatively distinct from other languages. A religion comes into being that attempts to account for the creation of the world as the people either know it or can remember it from earlier legends. Their creation story involves the fact that the world was originally a cold and icy one. Gradually its rotation was changed, possibly by the assistance of hero figures, and the world began to warm. Eventually it warmed sufficiently to support life, and the various life forms came into being.

One day these people encounter a people who speak to them of two worlds. They are incredulous. Everyone knows that there is only one world and that it was created by changing the axis of the world, so that the ice, the original substance of the universe, gradually melted to produce their present world. When they hear stories of how the first world was destroyed by rains of fire, they are livid. Pagans, they scream. The stories of the first world are interpreted as merely childish wish projections of a people refusing to believe that the ultimate nature of the world is ice. Steps are taken to be sure that the people who believe in the first world are converted to the belief that the stories of the world’s origin as a large block of ice are the absolute truth as revealed by God Himself.

That is the precise position into which non-Christians are placed when the Christian religion insists that its story of creation is descriptive of the original creation event and that their stories are superstitions that have arisen because of a great psychological need which can be filled by accepting the Christian version. Forcing the consideration of creation to be examined as if it were a specific event destroys the possibility of knowing the nature of the world with any certainty. It also presumes that the Christian account of the creation is poetic ideology typical of a certain kind of people and that this kind of people is by definition the most ancient vintage. Such conclusions are not necessarily correct. That a religious tradition may contain references to more than one type of world should indicate that the tradition is at least older than traditions speaking of only one world.

Near Eastern religions, for example, appear to have only one recallable beginning. Both Genesis and the Enuma Elish of the Babylonian records indicate a beginning in a world of waters. Do these records extend only to the third world of the Hopi? Were there societies capable of passing on a longer history of humankind in the Near East, or were they destroyed by one of the earlier catastrophes visited on the planet? The basis of perpetuating religious knowledge would appear to be a spectacular event experienced by a people who subsequently survive sufficiently long enough to pass on the tradition. In the Near East we may have peoples surviving in an area where a catastrophe did not wreak total destruction.

The Enuma Elish begins with the following description of the universe:

When a sky above had not (yet even) been mentioned

(And) the name of firm ground below had not (yet even) been thought of;

(When) only primeval Apsu, their begetter,

And Mummu and Ti’amat—she who gave birth to them all—

Were mingling their waters in one;

When no bog had formed (and) no island could be found;

When no god whosoever had appeared,

Had been named, had been determined as to (his) lot,

Then were gods formed within them.3

The Enuma Elish has sometimes been regarded as the prototype of the Genesis story, sometimes as a parallel description of the creation as handed down in the Hebrew tradition. That it closely follows between Babylonian and Hebrew traditions is significant. Genesis appears to be concerned with much the same phenomena:

In the beginning God created the heaven and earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and the

darkness was upon the face of the deep. And

the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And God said, Let there be light; and there was

light.

And God saw the light, that it was good: and God

divided the light from the darkness.

And God called the light Day, and the darkness he

called Night. And the evening and the morning

were the first day.4

If we closely examine these two traditions in a spatial sense rather than as a primeval event, we find that they rather specifically describe a particular condition in which there is extreme darkness. From our knowledge of the world in which we live, it would indicate extensive cloud cover. The concern of both stories would appear to be the separation of the waters so that the gods can determine and name the sky and the ground. When we understand that Genesis projects a much longer sequence of appearances and if we understand the sequence as taking place in a particular place although not necessarily limited to seven days or extended for millions of years, we face a new sense of reality.

On the second day in Genesis the waters are divided between heaven and earth. The third day plant life is created. It is not until the fifth day that animal and fish life emerge, but on the fourth day the stars, the sun, and moon are created. Clarence Darrow is supposed to have made William Jennings Bryan look foolish by asking him how the morning and evening of the first day could occur when the sun, moon, and stars were not created until the fourth day. If we view the emergence of each form mentioned in Genesis as the sequence in which things could be distinguished one from another following a monstrous flood with attendant cloud cover of unimaginable magnitude, the appearance of the sun, moon, and stars at that point at which the water vapor has allowed their light to be seen appears eminently reasonable.

The noteworthy factors in the Genesis account are that the sequence of action is not incompatible with the phenomena that would be expected in a catastrophe of major importance. Plant life, for example, develops prior to the creation of the heavens. We know that plant life would have an extremely difficult time originating without the conditions allowing photosynthesis being initiated before the origination of plants. But plants could survive for some time between periods of ordinary sunlight, if they were already in existence. While light itself is apparently present in the Genesis account prior to plant life, distinguishing the source of light comes after the emergence of plant life. We could find no better description of a planet emerging from a catastrophic event than to find light diffused in its atmosphere and people, unable to identify the source of light, still being able to recognize that somehow light and darkness had been separated.

We have an option that will apparently never be settled:is the Genesis account a refined and somehow more sublime religious statement of creation that is secondary and derivative from the Enuma Elish? Or are they really two accounts of two distinct peoples, bearing similarity to one another because of their geographic proximity to the event? Many scholars have simply foreclosed the second option, believing that the accounts are poetic attempts to describe the original creation event, instead of asking themselves whether these accounts are simply memories of one specific event in world history.

When we turn to American Indian tribal religions, we find a number of similarities also forming a pattern of interpretation. The Navajo legends begin with an account of the emergence of the Navajos or First People from the underworlds: “The first three worlds were neither good nor healthful. They moved all the time and made the people dizzy. Upon ascending into this world, the Navajo found only darkness, and they said we must have light.”5 The Navajos then separate light into constituent colors of white, blue, yellow, and black representing the colors of the sky during the twenty-four-hour period of rotation.

The Pawnees and Arickara also speak of ancient people emerging from the darkness into a lighted world. The Pueblos are led by Mother Corn (plant life) into the new world of light from the world of darkness. The Mandans climb a vine rope from the underground until a large woman proves to be too heavy for the rope and breaks it, leaving some of the people remaining under the earth. Other tribes have had variations of this general theme of emerging from the underground, where they had survived a great catastrophe or at least begun their existence in this present world as a people. There would appear to be no good reason for a number of tribes to share this story, unless there was some event behind it, even though the event was very dimly recalled in tribal memory. Perhaps the disaster of which the Near East spoke did not affect the peoples of North America, who had prepared an underground shelter for themselves in anticipation of the event. At the least we can suggest that some common experience must be shared by some of the tribes, as emergence legends among other peoples of the globe appear to be rather sparse.

The tribal religions would serve to remind us that the scope of human history cannot be encompassed within a linear time sequence running from a creation event to the present-day world. The strong possibility that different societies recall in their religious traditions various geographical histories of the planet can lead us to remember the neglected dimension of religion that has appeared in nearly every religious tradition. If we recall the thrust of Jewish history and its eschatology in the time of Jesus, we come to recognize that land, the promised land, has remained as a constant and tangible element of religious experiences of societies.

While the theology of the Old Testament appears to focus on the promised land as early as the time of Abraham, it is with the emergence of the Hebrews as a migrating nation into Canaan that the community and the land merge into a psychic and religious unity. From that time on the people orient themselves around the idea that God has given them this particular piece of land. Even those people in Jesus’ time who sought the return of the Son of Man as the Jewish Messiah looked for a military hero to restore their land ownership. The translation by Christians of the fanaticism of the Jewish resistance to the Romans in the days of Jesus into a “misunderstanding” by the Jews of the nature of the Messiah has always been a difficult interpretation for the Christians to make. By substituting heaven for the tangible restoration of Palestine to the Jews by driving the Romans out, Christians eliminated the dimension of land from religion, and necessarily their theology had to change Hebrew tribal memories of a particular land into a generalized statement about the origin of the world. Without the particularity of land on which it was intended that a particular people live, creation had to become an event of the beginnings of the world.

It is quite possible, therefore, that as we look for the origin of peoples, we must discover religious experiences; as we look for the origins of religions, we must discover nations of people, and whichever way we look, it is to the lands on which the people reside and in which the religions arise that is important. This possibility is what has dominated the concerns of American Indian’s peoples from the very beginnings. The chance that lands would be lost meant that religious communities would be destroyed and individual identities forsaken. As sacred mountains became secularized, as tribal burial grounds became cornfields, as tribes no longer lived on the dust of their ancestors’ bones, the people knew that they could not survive.

This feeling of the importance of land is also present in Western countries, but it has undergone a radical change. It has transformed itself into patriotism on the one hand and religious nationalism on the other. With this transformation, the whole nature of religion and land has been lost. Land is no longer a major element in Western religion but forms a tangential influence often manifesting itself whether or not the Christian religion intends that it do so.

The early Church centered itself in Italy in the city of Rome as surely as did the Hebrews center themselves in Jerusalem after they had conquered Canaan. Where the Jewish religion was and is centered in the Holy Land as the specific land of the religion, one cannot help but conclude that Rome is and has become the center of Christendom. With the Reformation the growth of national churches simply meant that each interpretation of the Christian religion had to find a home for itself and the doctrines and devotional emphases followed ethnic preferences. The peculiarites of all European theology can be understood more easily by reference to countries than by comparison of abstract creedal statements and doctrines.

With the movement of Christianity to the North American continent, and the subsequent freedom to develop religious expressions offered by this land, the possibility of constituting a Christian culture or unity vanished. Christianity shattered on the shores of this continent, producing hundreds of sects in the same manner that the tribes continually subdivided in an effort to relate to the rhythms of the land. It is probably in the nature of this continent that divisiveness is one of its greatest characteristics, a virtually uncontrollable freedom of the spirit.

The land dimension of religion must inevitably wear itself out in the respective religious traditions as they mature. What would be the nature of a religious tradition that has grown old and sophisticated on a land? The puzzlement of modern Europe would seem to indicate that the religious dimension of land is a factor that cannot be neglected. Germany was the scene of the Protestant Reformation in its most profound sense, for it was the home of Martin Luther who claimed a doctrinal superiority to everything that had preceded him. If there were to be any land, therefore, in which Christianity could have entrenched itself outside of Italy, it would probably be Germany.

Heinrich Heine in Religion and Philosophy in Germany, originally published in 1835, may have clearly foreseen the nature of the catastrophe that occurs when a religion grows thin on a land to which it has become a stranger.

Christianity—and this is the fairest merit—subdued to a certain extent the brutal warrior ardor of the Germans, but it could not entirely quench it; and when the Cross, that restraining talisman, falls to pieces, then will break forth again the ferocity of the old combatants, the frantic Berserker rage whereof Northern Poets have said and sung so much. The talisman has become rotten, and the day will surely come when it will pitifully crumble to dust. The old stone gods will arise then from the forgotten ruins and wipe from their eyes the dust of centuries, and Thor with his giant hammer will arise again, and he will shatter the Gothic cathedrals.6

Many people have remarked that the rise of National Socialism and its attendant sense of religious fervor fulfilled Heine’s vision of a Christianity that was no longer able to contain the ancient Teutonic gods.

Carl Jung suggested the existence of a collective unconscious in which the archetypes and symbols of universal human experience were to be found. In his analysis of the nature of human spiritual problems, Jung suggested that the unconscious acted to structure solutions by presenting via dreams the archetypes representing familiar facets of our life in a type of dreams of which we became aware. His system was based on the interpretation of the dream symbols and the story in which they were found in dreams. In the period before the rise of National Socialism, Jung said that he could see in the psychological problems of his German patients the symbols of the old Germanic religious myths that were to later mark part of the development of Nazi fanaticism among the young.7 Do we attribute the ability of young Germans to dream in ancient religious symbols to a desire to escape from Christian rigidity or perhaps to a residual power in the land itself to produce certain religious mythologies and figures?

Additional pondering on this matter brings little relief. In England there appears to be the phenomenon of ghosts. It is estimated that some ten thousand ghosts inhabit the British islands, and it is a poor castle, manor house, or moor that does not have a full complement of ghosts. Germany has a proliferation of poltergeists. How are we to account for the renewal of Druidism in England and the northern parts of France? Some people may deny that contemporary concern with witches and Druid religious practices does not conform with descriptions by scholars for ancient times. We must remember that scholars’ descriptions of ancient times are primarily figments of their imaginations rather than accounts of reality.

How are we to catalog the existence of shrines of all faiths? The Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe Hildalgo, for example, rests on a spot already the site of ancient Indian religious practices centuries before the Christian missionaries appeared on the scene. Why is there an absence of miracles and revelations in North America when other parts of the Christian world seem to have a plentitude of religious sites? Are Fatima and Lourdes uniquely Christian, or do they represent a religious site hoary with antiquity, whose earlier religions are unknown to us today?

Students of religion have failed to recognize the unique nature of religious symbolism, its apparent correspondence with land masses, its vibrant ability to reassert itself in times of spiritual crisis, and the lack of a universal symbol system of religious experience. Perhaps the conflict of competing religions on lands has led to much of our social, political, and military conflict among peoples. It is difficult, therefore, simply to classify the cultural competition and distinctions in community values as differentials on a time scale of social evolution. Rather careful examination should be given to the nature of cultural and social disagreements and the origin of these differences in both the religious and geographical dimensions of people’s lives.

If the old Germanic myths of Wotan can reassert themselves in a modern industrial state, which Carl Jung believed he could document in the rise of National Socialism in Germany, and if the practical political program of the Nazis was the conquest of additional lands for “living space” and the genetic reunification of Germanic peoples, we cannot avoid an examination of the relationship between lands, spiritual energies, and peoples. Land must somehow have an unsuspected spiritual energy or identity that shapes and directs human activities. Religions must not be simple expressions of ethical and moral codes as we have been taught. They must be more complicated manifestations of the living earth itself and this aspect of religion is something that American Indians of all the peoples on earth represented.

Popular anthologies of Indian speeches contain two basic themes: the earth is alive and everything related to it is also alive, and land consecrates human activities and makes them something more than we have power to produce. In 1912, Curley, a Crow Indian chief, refused to sell any more of his land to the federal government when it proposed another land cession. He rejected the government’s offer.

The soil you see is not ordinary soil—it is the dust of the blood, the flesh, and the bones of our ancestors. We fought and bled and died to keep other Indians from taking it, and we fought and bled and died helping the Whites.

You will have to dig down through the surface before you can find nature’s earth, as the upper portion is Crow.

The land as it is, is my blood and my dead; it is consecrated; and I do not want to give up any portion of it.8

This sentiment is considerably greater than a simple allegiance to abstract religious principles, even to principles that purport to give instructions in cosmic salvation. It speaks of an identity so strong as to be virtually indistinguishable from the earth itself, the human being, as it were, completely in harmony with the Mother Earth and inseparable in every way. Nowhere else on this plant do we find this attitude and it bears further examination.