A Sideways Look at Time

Once Upon a Time, Princess Diana. The myth, the legend, Diana the fairy-tale princess, Diana, Her True Story, Diana, the Grade One Listed Narrative Structure. The Diana-story, like all great stories, was structured in time itself, to make a meaningful pattern out of casual time. Born in full summer, married in full summer, died in full summer. Death-the-storyteller’s ending likes chiaroscuro. The Blonde in the Black Mercedes. As her “candle” shines brightest, phut, blow it out. At the day’s noon, she was on top of the world, more alive than ever, and at its midnight she was dying, underground, in a tunnel. Narrative time was there in all the details; Diana’s secret “last” words; those who allegedly “foresaw” the accident, including Diana herself. She took a secret “to the grave”—was she engaged? Was she leaving England forever? Was she converting to Islam? Was she with child?

Tragic narrative needs a sense of time or mistime; “cover her face; mine eyes dazzle: she died young,” Ferdinand’s reaction to his celebrated dead sister in The Duchess of Malfi. Dying young, Diana died dazzling as much as dazzled, the most photographed woman in the world. Marilyn Monroe was, like Diana, age 36 and the most photographed woman in her world, when she died in 1962, just months after Diana was born. Die young, of course, and stay an icon. They never grow old, forever frozen in time, their candles burning out long before their legends ever will.

The media spoke of Diana’s life with a subtext of time—hers was the wedding of the “century”, a “day” no one would forget, the biggest television event “in history.” She was the spirit of “the times”; ours was the “Age” of Diana; she was the star of “a golden age.” Her death was a “defining moment”; it ushered in the “week” of Diana; it was the “end of a chapter.” Like all myths, she magnified the times, and time was used to magnify her image, even as that image magnified the sales of Time, The Times, the New York Times and the Times of India.

Worldwide, two billion people are said to have watched her funeral. Time was stopped in a two-minute silence; the streets were still and trading ceased, at least in Britain. “NO SHOPS. NO FOOTY. NO LOTTO,” said the Sun newspaper; its front-page usually printed in sunny red, but black for the week of Diana, in a piece of color symbolism—the Sun’s time stopped, a darkness at noon. Mother Teresa of Calcutta called for two days of prayer time and then, with the exquisite timing of complementary opposites, died herself within days.

Like all subjects of great myths and fables, Diana never chose her meaning; she was the silence at her own storytime. Other voices attached meanings; she was Cinderella, the plain little sister who became beautiful. The then-Archbishop of Canterbury called her wedding “the stuff of which fairy tales are made.” She was Sleeping Beauty, kissed by Prince Charles; she was Snow White at her death, surrounded by seven dwarfs (the seven paparazzi) on seven motorbikes as they take their pics. Buried on an island she became the Lady of the Lake. Her story took all forms. One day fairy tale, the next iconography: she was “Madonna,” “Queen of Heaven,” “Saint and Angel,” as the cards written in remembrance read. After iconography, the story became Shakespearean. At her Westminster Abbey funeral, her brother, Earl Spencer, like a Young Pretender arrived on the world stage as if from nowhere, and spoke to the Queen of England, his own god-mother, with furious bitterness over Diana’s dead body, the applauding audience of the world behind him and a monarch at his mercy beneath his feet. Shakespeare, memorialized in stone in the abbey’s vaults below them all, would have died (a second time) for such a plot—a story carved of the very stone of his own dramatic sensibility.

And then again, there were elements of Greek tragedy. The end was bespoken in the very first line of the play: she lived by the image and died by the image. The press—allegedly—gave her her life and took it away. (It spoils the symmetry to deny it; she was actually killed by speed and the car culture, but no matter. The narrative structure, embedded in the human mind, demands that the camera which created her was the camera which killed her. So be it.)

And what of us? The watching world was given something rare—a sense of community in time which myth and ritual have always provided but which modernity usually despises. All radio stations and TV channels, all newspapers and all conversations were in sync, with normal programming suspended. Strangers—thinking about the same thing at the same time—spoke to each other; all the ordinary traffic of life stopped.

That week, the ordinary time of usual life met the extraordinary time of myth. Mythic time, says mythologist and historian of religion Mircea Eliade, “interrupts the succession of ordinary time,” and the mythic moment is where the profane present meets a sacred eternity. (The ancient Greeks referred to ordinary time as Chronos, differentiating it from Aion, a sacred, eternal, extraordinary time.)

Traffic and Business define profane, ordinary time today, and for Diana’s fabled wedding and “sacred” funeral, traffic and business stopped. It was as if people wanted to know that the usual trafficky, businesslike time of historical consecutiveness is not all that there is. The hysteria which accompanied her death was a hunger for mythmaking—of people fed too much ordinary history-time and not enough mythic, extraordinary time. Sober commentators bemoaned it—accurately so—saying she wasn’t mythic, she was human. Quite right. And quite wrong. Diana-the-person and Diana-the-phenomenon were always entirely different: the historic person was, at a guess, manipulative; rather-dim-but-could-be-bright; both kind and unkind; unhappy, full-feeling, and unpredictable; a silly, funny princess of consumerism, plastic as a charge card. That human-sized historic Diana was not wanted; the mythic phenomenon was what people mourned, and they wanted the myth as they implicitly wanted mythic time.

Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, at Diana’s funeral, said: “Of all the ironies about Diana, perhaps the greatest was this: that a girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting was herself the most hunted person of the modern age.” Diana’s very name is mythic, not historic, in vivid contrast to the Royal Family’s names, the Princess Margarets and Annes, the Queen Marys and Victorias, Queen Elizabeths and Queen Annes laced with historicity, while Diana remains pure myth. People wanted the mythic Diana, not the historic royals.

The desire for such a mythic time which stops prosaic time is there in the whole affair of modern stardom, in all modernity’s culture-heroes and mythic people, from popes to Mandelas, from sports stars and war heroes, princesses and film stars, for all of whom traffic, both real and metaphoric, is stopped, and for all of whom people wave flags. Flags are an international index to culture-heroes; people waved flags for Diana’s wedding and halfmasted them for her funeral. Football fans wave them for Cantona, Pelé and Maradona, there are flags on the moon and flags for war heroes and for film stars, flags for all these camouflages of modern mythology.

From Tibet’s mountain passes, where prayer flags show the moment the mortal world meets the eternal, to the sports stadiums of the world, the flag, perhaps alone of emblems, speaks across ages and across cultures to say to the human mind: “You stand in a mythic moment.” In the U.S., “Old Glory flies at half-staff,” wrote the New York Times in the aftermath of September 11. Flags were planted in the smouldering rubble of the World Trade Center. Kmarts and Wal-Marts and hardware stores sold out of flags as Americans mythologized the day.

The Diana-phenomenon illustrated a hunger for myth, and so does the worldwide popularity of cinema, for it performs all the functions of myth. One such function, notes Mircea Eliade, is that myths offer an “opening” into a culture’s “Great Time” (when the mythic culture-heroes lived, when the human world was created) and a way of “escaping” the passage of ordinary time. Films, too, nurture that escapist desire and have their “openings” into “great times.” For practical and psychological reasons, film screenings begin, usually, at dusk, when stories are traditionally told, the lessening daylight making the legendary past lean nearer the ordinary present. Cinema fantasies are projected, by actual projectors of light, and by projections of the psyche, escaping the finite time of the self for the infinite time of myth. This “Great Time,” says Eliade, “is the time that was created and sanctified by the gods at the period of their gesta,” that is, their “actions,” or “carryings on.”

Myths are often about the beginnings of worlds, paradise being one of the commonest such myths of genesis. Similarly the film Cinema Paradiso mythologizes the genesis of cinema, the ancestors of the genre as mythic and as primary as Adam and Eve or the Egyptians’ gods of the “First Time.” In Aboriginal Australian belief, the stars recall stories of the Sky Heroes of the Dreamtime, the first creation. Many cultures pay homage to the totemic First Creatures in the First Times, and so it is that cinema pays homage to its totems from the Classic Age of Film. The totem of the Director’s Chair is a chair from that Classic Age, the totemic Camera is never a contemporary film-camera, and the Totemic Typewriter is a Remington.

Myth and cinema both refer to another time, one which is at once true and yet unreal. Supreme illusions both, which spill the present into eternity, their illusions—plays of light across the silver screen—are perceived by the story-making mind as allusions to another, Silvered time. Silver is the color of Mercury, the mythical messenger and teller of tales, and silver is the color of the myths of the night, playing silver star of eternity to the everyday sky. Diana had that silver quality—some called her “radiant,” others “dazzling”; to some she “blazed like a meteor” and she was, said a friend, “mercurial.”

As the silver screen must not be touched by muddy fingers, likewise the stars of the silver screen are bewitchingly untouchable. Greta Garbo famously wanted to be alone, not to let the muddy finger of ordinary time touch her, for stars, like mythic heroes, are required to remain immortally, iconically The Divine by freezing time in silver. Or freezing it in the silver of death itself, with Diana, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Buddy Holly and Princess Grace.

In New Guinea, there is a story about the moon which goes like this. An old woman hid the moon in a pitcher. Some boys noticed it. They crept up stealthily, and opened the pitcher. The moon began to spill out, which scared the boys so they grabbed at it, with grubby hands, struggling to hold it back, but the moon just slid serenely up the sky, though from that day to this, the moon is spotted with the boys’ grubby fingerprints. Myths and fairy tales often say: “Look, but don’t touch.” Touch is the earthiest—most timeful—of senses. Sight is the starriest, and most timeless. Princess Diana’s mythic namesake was goddess of the moon, a virgin huntress, worshipped by women; Princess Diana, icon of women, was so famously the virgin bride and, like the goddess, elicited a desire to touch.

Back to the moon; untouched by the fingers of little boys and the hands of men, it was part of mythic eternity. From that exact moment of its being touched, by American astronaut Neil Armstrong, its time was tied to man’s. And “Armstrong,” what a name with which to make such a momentous touch. The moon’s timeless integrity (etymologically “integrity” means untouchedness) was lost like the virginity it so symbolizes at the moment it was touched. People called the moon-landing a historic moment, and it was indeed historic; at that moment, the moon ceased to be mythic, for myth is an opposite of history.

The Ancestors—such as the Frilled Lizard Man, Little Wallaby Man and Emu Woman—created the dawning world in the Dreamtime. Emerging from underground, they sang their way across the land, creating its features where they kicked up dust, slept, ate or urinated, then they “went back in” to the land, and became djang or energy. Singing those stories is not memory of time-past, but participation in a diffuse, metaphoric, depth of time-present, for the Dreamtime merges past, present and future, as dreams can make past, present and future lap at each other. The Western mind sees either past or present or future; it only sees the wallaby at the waterhole now, this Wednesday or last Wednesday or next Wednesday. But the Aboriginal now is porous to the Dreamtime Forever, seeing when the totemic Wallaby will be and was and is, at the totemic Waterhole, in the Dreamtime Wednesday. The Dreamtime or Alcheringa is a sacred time, a Great Time, qualitatively different from ordinary time; and while the Dreamtime sustains the present, the present, in turn, sustains the Dreamtime through myth. The Dreamtime is always immanent in the land, which is why mining these lands is a desecration of the Dreamtime.

For the Colombian Pirá-paraná Indians, the ancestral past, similarly, envelops the present. Rather than being cut off from it, the past is an alternative aspect of the present, approached through shamanism and ritual. The Koyukon (of northwestern Alaska) believe in the “Distant Time”—again, not time long ago in history, but time as another dimension of the present. (The timing of the Distant Time stories is also important, for, like most indigenous peoples of North America, they tell their most sacred stories only at night and only during the winter, partly to influence nature’s time—to quicken up winter, for instance, so a Koyukon Distant Time story may end with the words: “I thought that winter had just begun, but now I have chewed off part of it.”)

Myths and stories across the world have a profound relationship to time. They enchant time, they represent its ambiguity and enigma. As Western folktales begin “Once upon a time,” so Aboriginal Australian myths begin with a nod at time, thus: “In the Dreamtime when the earth was young . . . ,” “In the time when the dreaming began, a time when there was neither birth nor death,” or “In the earliest days when time began.” Among the Iraqw of Tanzania, there are many “once upon a time” openings for stories, often beginning bal geera which literally means “first days.” In Navajo myth and ritual, past, present and future are interchangeable. The Achuar, a tribe of the Jivaro peoples in Ecuador, start their myths thus: “A long time ago, a long, long time ago . . . ,” and tell their stories in the imperfect rather than in the cutoff past tense, ending the story in “now.” Again, there is no absolute and simple break between now and then. There is a blurred border like a frayed cloud, not a separation of time but the difference of two modalities.

Storyteller Michael Meade begins an Irish myth thus: “Once upon a time, or below a time, in the time that was no time, that is our time, or not, there was in Ireland a king named Conn Mor . . .” Another begins: “There are five directions. East, where the sun rises. North, where there is trouble. South, where you may find a friend. West, where all that begins, ends. And the fifth direction; the place where stories come from and where they say Once Upon a Time.” (This chapter, incidentally, doesn’t make much of a distinction between myths and folktales, because they share the same characteristics with respect to time.) In Mexico, Emiliano Zapata has become an almost mythic culture hero, able to trounce time. Not only are his exploits still sung, but his eventual return is taken for granted by landless peasants in Southern Mexico.

Mythic stories talk time out of mind, charm time and trick time, clogging it or stretching it: fables make time fabulously paradoxical, a stubborn blot on the face of clock-time but true to the time of the psyche, where past, present and future are kaleidoscoped. Time can run counterclockwise so the youngest child succeeds where the oldest fails, the dawn can be wiser than the dusk and birds can tell the future. Certain periods of time—three days, a year and a day, seven years and a hundred years—are enchanted. In these archetypal tales all over the world, “sensible” time disappears into a wrinkle; a person dips into a fairy hill or disappears for a night with dwarfs, but on their return he finds that, Rip van Winklish, a hundred ordinary years have passed. The dwarfish figures which inhabit so many tales are themselves like squashed time, at once close to children, but yet grumpy old men; close to the underground past, but able to offer clues to the future; compressed and animated, like cartoons of time.

The Inuit tell tales which begin: “Long ago, in the future” which is a beautiful expression of mythic time playing trickster to linear, logical conceptions. But folktales frequently play with time. The Arakmbut of Peru have no stories for the beginning of the world; it’s as if they always existed. There are only stories for moments of difficulty in the culture of the Arakmbut, i.e., when a sort of history began; only then does the world “begin,” but it “begins” with the end of the world. So their stories start: “In the end of the world there was . . .” European folktales play with time from “Once upon a time” to “lived happily ever after.” “Once” tells of a past eternal, but the eternity it refers to is also a charmed present, just at one remove from “now.” Spanish folktales begin: “Once there was . . .” leading the reader into an eternal-present tense, an enchanted present-continuous, a time in the past which still exists. The present, “now and ever after,” is the present continuing, life everlasting and even though the individual action is narrated and completed—“that’s all folks”—life goes on, ever after, back in the now.

The end of stories, the wind-down tenses, the implied-imperfect tenses (giving the narration the atmosphere of slow sunsets and long shadows), return the listener to the normal present of an implied-imperfect world, just like the rolling titles at a film’s end return you to your ordinary life. In their endings, Western folktales finish “happily ever after”; so in Dreamtime myths, there is a return to the present, and stories may end with the words, “and so it has been ever since” or “and the spirits of the good men still live in the sacred pool” or “and even today the story is repeated around campfires and all know what the Great Rainbow Snake said and did in the Dreamtime.” (Spanish folktales can end with a formulaic ending: “They married and lived happily and tossed the bones of their wedding feast at our noses,” done perhaps to shock the listeners back to reality, while triggering an immediate connection between the story and real life.)

The human requirement for the cock of life to shake its tail-feathers at death—to transcend mortality—was, mythologists say, the first great impulse towards myth-making. The earliest evidence of myth-thinking concerns burial, and “gardens of immortality” come in spadefuls all across the world. Mythic stories face death, time’s most ferociously fearful aspect, and charm the sting out of it, for this reason: the individual tale ends, myths imply, so the individual life story must end in death, but the life of the species lives from ever-before to ever-after. The consolation of life’s continuing is most explicit in this end of a Dreamtime myth: “And so death comes, but life always returns.” Their transcendence of death is achieved in part by the archetypal nature of the characters of myth and folktales; the totemic Dreamtime figures, the Jack and the Jill of folktales, even the Everyman of morality plays.

Further, the tales themselves become “immortal,” living stories retold from generation to generation in an oral culture, from ceilidh to corroboree. Children hate it if the familiar words of a folktale are altered, it disconcerts them because it robs them of the security of eternity; if the story was there before the child, it will be there after the child, is the comforting reasoning.

The reproduction of the story implies the repetition of life itself, repeated through generations, as the generations themselves reproduce. Sex is at the heart of it. Folktales are often deeply sexual, transcending mortality by being rudely, sexually, alive. Cinderella’s “slipper” has a sexual interpretation and both the Sleeping Beauty and Snow White are “aroused” by the kiss of a prince. The animal-groom cycle of stories (where an animal becomes a husband, such as the Beast in “Beauty and the Beast” or the Frog Prince), as Bruno Bettelheim shows, represents the altering of attitudes towards the sexual male, so at the beginning, the beast or frog is repulsive to the presexual girl, as the sexuality of the adult is disgusting to the small child, but as she matures, her perceptions of it alter until she can see it as attractive. When she kisses one, it turns into a prince.

In Indian mythology, the lingam, phallic symbol of creativity, and the female yoni are longingly worshipped. From the seventh to thirteenth century C.E., Tantric philosophy was emerging in India, finding probably its finest sculptural representation in the Konark Sun Temple in Orissa, which was built over twelve years in the mid-thirteenth century. It explodes with sexual sculptures, figures in curling intimacy, dizzy with passion, hot with the heavy perfervid veering sun before monsoon. The whole temple is built as the chariot of the sun god, the sun seen as the originator of time, and the chariot’s wheels are a frequent motif. The temple’s erotic sculptures, based on the Kama Sutra, illustrate the sexuality which makes the wheel of life turn.

In many world myths, sex is at the heart of creation. The Dreamtime is the time of making and creating, overwhelmingly on the fertile side of life. To the Romans, Ceres, goddess of crops, was an emblem of fertility, time sexual, begetting the crops of the world, begetting Persephone. She is not alone. In myth, there is a lot of loosening of circlets, a ludic losing of days in foreplay. Roman gods are gap-toothed goatherds, galvanized into guttural rutting. Sex is everywhere, vulvae wet and wilful; “hymen,” nothing like as shy as now, was a god.

Over time, the folktale unfolds its depths of meanings, different to different people and even different to the same person at different times. In contrast, the computer game’s repetitive sameness leaves the player stale with its flat numerical rewards, not the fuller emotional rewards of folktales. The folktale speaks uniquely to each child whereas the computer game is identical to every player, its narrative cannot have more than one meaning and remains unchanging over time. Folktales are rich in language, appealing to children of an age to find it magical that one sound can have several meanings; consider a child’s swimmy delight in working out which witch is which. Computer games are designed to be totally unambiguous in their language. (They know thirteen but not a baker’s dozen, and you cannot read between the lines in a computer game.)

Folktales educate children (from the Latin educere, to lead out), leading them into the world and into “real time” where children learn that they can gradually—and psychologically—change into an adult. Computer games enclose the child in their own world, airless, stagnant and antisocial, shut them into “synthetic time.” Snow White’s stepmother is punished for her wickedness by being forced to dance forever in burning red-hot slippers; children are educated into a moral sense. In computer games, people are often punished not for wickedness, but just for being—which can only deaden and dull a child’s moral sense.

The folktale curse is that your wishes will come true, its insight is that you must learn responsibility for your desires, that wants can bring complications and that instant gratification is not necessarily wise or satisfying. Computer games—Battle Zone, Mortal Kombat, Die Hard—say “kill or be killed,” offering a squalid headrush of instant gratification, equating destruction with a sort of febrile success.

Computer games use the binary pattern: wrong or right, stop or go. Folktales use the triad pattern: the third try, the beginning of plurality. The third attempt is the moment of chance or mischance, of opportunity and possibility, it is unpreprogrammed and unscripted and its pattern of “Fail, Fail, Think, Succeed” is a lesson in perseverance and is the time-structure of hope. Computer games’ “Succeed or Fail,” by habitual motor response, is the time-structure of despair. In folktales, time, sweet unlimited, is on your side. Slowness enhances the telling and no protagonist is punished for taking time; success indeed depends on the sensitivity and even the slowness of their psychological response. The computer game depends simply on the speed of the physical response: time, limited, is your opponent, you must beat the clock.

“In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected,” said Charles Dickens. In a fascist age, they can be expropriated: in Nazi Germany, folklore was used to justify both persecution and war. Anti-Semitic sayings of the Middle Ages were used to ignite hatred. Chinese Nationalists and Italian Fascists also used folklore for agitation.

Archbishop James Ussher, plump with rhomboid certainty, wrote in the Annals of the World (1650): “The World was created on 22 October, 4004 BC at six o’clock in the evening.” Dr. John Lightfoot, Expert-Anorak of the Victorian era, declared in 1859 that “man was created on 23 October 4004 BC at nine o’clock in the morning.” Newton clung rigidly to Ussher’s chronology and sought to use science to prove the Creation myth in Genesis.

Other cultures do not see the past as the Christianized West does. India has its “vessel above time,” always full to overflowing, a notion of eternity transcending any temporality. From the Dakota peoples of North America to Aboriginal Australians and Tikopia peoples in Polynesia, mythic time is circular, and is often pictured as the circle of a coiled snake—whether the Norse Midgard serpent; the tail-eating serpent, Ouroboros, in ancient Greece; the Egyptian belief that each person was protected by a “lifetime snake” symbolizing survival after death; or the Rainbow Snake of the Aboriginal Australians which is the source of life. Among the Dani of West Papua the ancestors are considered to be “snake people,” able to shed their skins and recover their youth. The Desana people of the Colombian Amazon say that in the beginning of time their ancestors arrived in canoes shaped like huge serpents. They consider the cosmic anaconda as creator of life. Serpent-shaped boats considered as vessels of life at time’s beginning are common to mythologies of the Peruvian and Colombian Amazon. Anthropologist Jeremy Narby, in his fascinating The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, comments that creator gods in the form of cosmic serpents recur throughout the myths of not just Amazonia, but Mexico, Australia, Sumer, Egypt, Persia, India, the Pacific, Crete, Greece and Scandinavia.

Time historian G.J. Whitrow comments on the widespread images of snakes: “This symbolism is similar to that found in many ancient cultures, including those of Mesoamerica, in which the serpent represents cycles of endless time, perhaps suggested by the fact that the snake periodically sheds and renews its skin.” Whereas mythic cycles mean regeneration and renewal: in the linear historicism of Judeo-Christianity, time is irreversible, ineluctably deathward bound. Radically opposed to the idea of cyclical time, it is no surprise that followers of the Judaeo-Christian tradition are great snake-haters, maintaining that the destroyer of the first paradise was the serpent in Eden. Narby comments that the Judeo-Christian story of Genesis contains features common to many creation myths: the serpent, the tree and twin beings, but, for the first time, the serpent is the villain of the piece.

The idea that history is somehow true and therefore superior to myth which is, supposedly, untrue is highly ideological—and a very self-interested proposition, best suiting those of the Christianized West who invented it. It is an idea which has had its critics, perhaps most succinctly Jean Cocteau: “History is the truth that in the long run becomes a lie, whereas myth is a lie that in the long run becomes the truth.”

But mythic time is radically different from historical time and the difference—pace Cocteau—does not reside in any distinction between “truth” and “untruth,” but in a difference of quality. Mythic past is diffuse and ambiguous, its meanings too numinous to mention. Its quality of immanence makes it open to anyone’s interpretation, as Diana was, so mythic time has a fundamental democracy, the democracy of dreams, of folktales, of memory; the time of the mind. Anybody’s mind. Diana-as-myth was “the people’s princess,” for “the people” did not want the historical—undemocratic—Royals. (And princesses in folktales and myth are utterly democratic for, as every child knows, and every too politically correct adult forgets, the royalty is in the child; every child is the princess, every child’s surroundings her kingdom.) The Western idea of history, by contrast, is undemocratic, not only, famously, written by the victors, but taught by the experts, non-negotiable. In folktales, every child is the expert, as they know in glorious self-righteousness, correcting adults for mistelling a story. They know how it goes. It goes today like it went yesterday. Exactly like it went yesterday.

Myth, in its etymology, means speech; it—democratically—allies itself with spoken culture and is committed to memory (in Roman mythology, memory is elevated above all muses). The Western idea of history, by contrast, is committed to writing, commits itself to paper and is committed to experts. (It is interesting to see in passing how oral cultures tend to use the clock of “social time,” i.e., measuring time by events or by nature, and how the shift from an oral culture to a written culture seems to parallel the shift from that “social time” to “clock-time,” i.e., using the abstract, notational description of time.)

One of the distinctions between mythic and historic time could be seen as a difference of gender. Historic time, promulgated by patriarchal Judeo-Christianity, favored by patriarchies since, uses the linear shape, phallic and male, rather than the elastic and ambiguous time of myth which seems female. The Dreamtime “envelops” the present and Aboriginal Ancestors emerge and return through life-giving moist round places in mother earth. Mythic time is slippery of meaning. Historic time is cut and dried, dry as the papyrus and paper it is written on. History depends on the explicit and visible nature of written language. Myth allies itself with the implicit and invisible. Western historicist cultures and the written tradition use straight-line language, avoiding repetition of words or ideas; myth is transmitted through oral speech which uses cyclic language, repeating itself, winding itself back to its beginnings. Similarly, the snakelike mythic “language” of the DNA helix, endlessly repeating itself, twists back to the earliest beginnings of life.

The Arakmbut draw no firm line between history and myth; both are termed “embachapak”—stor ytelling . . . Both consist of a dialogue with another world (the spirit world and the past respectively) . . . Myth endows history with a powerful position in the collective memory by providing it with a timeless framework of meaning which itself is constantly changed by reinterpretation according to historical circumstances . . . The relationship between myth and history is not “either/or” but “both/and.” The more mythological a story becomes, the more heavily the meaning weighs on the Arakmbut.

Myth is more democratic than history and it is also more democratic with respect to species; its vision is ecocratic, giving animals roles and powers, motives and stories, from Aesop to Aboriginal Australians. Everywhere animals, in myth, are considered the old-timers on earth and are often said to be the ancestors of humans, which, of course, proves to be an instinctive understanding of how species, including humans, evolved. The eastern Tukanoan Indians of Colombia say their ancestors are tapirs; the Makuna Indians of southeastern Colombia that theirs were fish people who emerged as anacondas from the Water Doorway to the East of the Ordinary. (And today’s largest European tribes believe their ancestors were apes.) The mythic world crawls with animals, teems with coyote-tricksters (the Navajo); with the Badger, the Kingfisher (of the Arikawa); or the Great Turtle and Little Turtle (of the Iroquois); Pegasus-like flying horses; or Ganesh, the Elephant-god associated with time, god of ends and of beginnings. One Dreamtime ancestor is the blue-tongue lizard. Lizards get everywhere in myth, a whole mythology in motion; they are wee dinosaurs, living detail left behind from prehistoric times. Lizards leave their tails behind, as the past leaves its tales behind, as myths leave echoes of their details, a lizardly-like leaving of a tale-tail in your fingers while the rest trails away like a half-heard voice in the night.

Animals are often credited with primal wisdom, perceiving what humans cannot: Native Americans believed that wolves could hear the clouds passing. Time after time (in this time before time) myths say “it was the animals that taught us this.” In the folktale “The Three Languages,” the so-called “foolish” third son cannot learn from books—that is, from written, historicized and human-centric language—he only takes his education from the three languages of Birdsong, Dogbark and Frogburp. But the moral is that these languages have a wisdom which surpasses solely human thinking.

Across the Northern hemisphere, the bear was once mightily significant to the very passing of time itself, was thought to control the seasons and the destiny of the dead. But this great bear majesty is tweetified today, its animated grandeur reduced to cartoon-time animations; the singing bear Baloo, or Goldilocks and the Three Reductios ad Absurdum. In children’s time, animals may “live”—though often only in a wrung-out way, as pets or Tom and Jerry cartoons—but meanwhile, “adult” time is writing an all-too-real history of extinction for animals, birds and fish. (Children, who care so much about extinction, are made custodians of animals, as of myths, while the adults, who would render both extinct, have the audacity to call such wise respect “infantilism.”)

You could touch down, peckish, at Newark International Airport and fill up your belly with Shiva chocolates, fill up your Mercury car with Shiva Gasoline, check your Midas Muffler, scoot off to New York City, buy a suitcase (a replacement for the one your airline mistakenly re-routed to Dubai, the suitcase’s “manifest destiny” according to your airline) from Hercules Luggage, go to the Olympic Deli, spill hummus and retsina on your favorite shirt, try to use Saturn Telecommunication to see whether Aphrodite French Cleaners can clean it, spend some time in Bacchus Greek Taverna reading Men Are from Mars, Women blah blah, buy a swimsuit from Athena Swimwear, swim in a Poseidon Pool, visit Chronos Piano Studios ( just to hear the piano seller’s perfect pitch), go on your way, dazzled outside Krishna Jewelers, and perhaps find yourself gravely leaning on the Atlas fence at the Valhalla Burial Park, Staten Island.

Hop over the Atlantic, take a short urban Odyssey in London. Visit Bacchus’s Bins, wine-merchants, and drink until dawn rises rather rosy-nosed as it rose rosy-fingered for Homer of old. Hire a car from the Hercules Car Service, drive past the Olympic Hotel, grabbing a Mars bar on the way, from the Europa Food-shop sandwiched between the Icarus footwear company and Narcissus Ltd., fashion designers. For lunch, try battered cod at the Poseidon Fish Bar, Poseidon’s trident spearheading the cod wars, as Trident spearheaded the Cold War. Buy postcards from the Athene postcard shop near the Calypso Voice Agency. Stop at the Valhalla restaurant for an espresso from the Mythos coffee machine, buy a paper from the Krishna, Ganesha or Shiva news-agents. Make a phone call via Mercury Communications. Take a bath and clean it after you with Ajax powder, the myth of old reduced to this, the bathos of bathroom cleaners.

Modern communications are all but instantaneous, leaving winged Mercury grounded in a lay-by, unsuccessfully thumbing a lift in an old, old rain. Bill Gates is not as rich as Croesus, he’s far richer (as he demonstrated by having a portrait of himself “made” of money; in a photomosaic, his face was depicted by hundreds of bank notes). The Pegasus rocket launcher quite puts the mythic Pegasus out to pasture. As a result of fertility treatment, one Ms. Chukwu of Houston, an Artemis of Texas, becomes pregnant with eight babies. The mythical figure of fertility, Artemis of Ephesus, is also represented sheltering eight babies.

When Neil Armstrong—he of the mythic, Herculean name—touched the moon, and left the mythic marker of a flag, it was “a different night from all other nights of the world,” said Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti. Snaring the moon and stopping the sun are ideas common to myths from Tobago to Timbuktu, but modernity has made it come true—stopping the sun with cloning and snaring the moon with the American flag.

Myth is full of transformings, from Proteus to Cerridwen and Taliesin, but now chemicals transform fish into hermaphrodites (combining in name two mythic beings, Hermes and Aphrodite). Mythology, made redundant by fact, has gawn fishin’ in a high mandarin sulk, but at the seaside, our rising sea levels could leave all Flood myths high and dry. When biblical myths mustered their meanest might, they promised plagues, deaths and a few thousand locusts, but nowhere in myth is there weather as cruel and frightening as the skies raining acid rain on us. Global warming and the hole in the ozone layer is myth made fact—according to the myth of the Kadimakara at Cullymurra in Australia, there were once monsters who “overconsumed” water and food and destroyed the canopy of trees, until there was one continuous “Great Hole” of blue sky and the monsters then died as a result of the relentless sun. Modernity offers Bhopal, Chernobyl, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hell’s fire on earth and nuclear warfare that will melt your eyes in their sockets, make your skin slip off like loose, wet gloves and, if you are wearing a flowery dress, will print the flowers on what’s left of your body.

Historians say that an idea of history can be a symptom of cultural insecurity: heritage becomes important when cultures in turmoils of change are losing their traditions. (Take the Romans: a desire for fixity coincided with cultural collapse; the last emperors began calling themselves aeternitas just when their civilizations were falling apart, they called themselves eternal just when they weren’t.)

It was only after the Renaissance that history was regarded as dead, buried, cut off from the present—and post-Renaissance societies have tried ever harder to dig it up again. For too much change, too much discontinuity from the past makes cultures nervous, increasingly keen to find past foundations to support the present. This is revealed in today’s tensely protective attitudes to historical objects. To this end, the laudable Conservationist, diligently repairing the past to a perfection it never knew in its own time. To this end the bony Archeologist, all dust and knuckle, fingering artifacts.

But there is another equally compelling reason, say professors of Heritage Studies. Profit. No one, says the ex-head of the U.K.’s National Trust, protects history for its own sake: in principle it is perfectly proper to profit from the past. Heritage is the biggest growth industry of our time. Ninety-five percent of today’s museums were set up after the Second World War, heritage towns are springing up like mushrooms. Nostalgia (that anaesthetized form of memory) is everywhere. Ancestors are—metaphorically—“dug up,” antiques are rooted out and souvenirs truffled. It fits, for this is an age of commodification, of the past, as of princesses. And this explains why modernity protects certain selected lines of history but not others. Artifact History above all, commodifiable, is preserved. Others, Ritual History, for example, less easily commodified, are nothing like so protected.

Come to Stonehenge at the summer solstice and see a king arrested. King Arthur Pendragon (a living national treasure, one-time caravan dweller, all-time cider-drinker and Excalibur-wielding road protester) believes he was Arthur, the once and future king, in a once and former life and tries annually to reach the Stones to worship at the solstice, keeping Ritual History alive. “We should protect traditions and the root emotions behind them,” he barks. “These are important, not the artifacts. The people who built Stonehenge didn’t build it for commercial intent but as a place of reverence.” (He is annually arrested, in an annual Police Ritual.)

Artifact History is also perhaps valued because it is visible—you can “see” the past, while the audible past is less privileged. The human voice is dateless, so in spoken ritual and in language one can “hear” the past—and can preserve it only by usage. Latin, which is arguably not a dead language at all, but rather in the third stage of its life (Classical, Medieval, New), is unparalleled for authority, quod erat demonstrandum (as has been shown), unequalled for the majesty of grief, lacrimae rerum (the tears of things), and unsurpassed for the grand shudder, horresco referens (I tremble to tell of it). But the present age is unhappily likely to see the last formal protection of spoken Latin dismantled. The oral traditions of storytelling in practice are similarly neglected, while the written versions of myths and, of course, the written texts of history are assiduously preserved.

A snapshot from Bhutan, where Lopon Pemala, a cleric who is overseeing the building of a Buddhist monastery, comments:

Because we believe in reincarnation, our view of history, of the individual, is different. And so is our view of the modern world. Modernity has only one dimension. Museums are institutions of modernity. The past is imprisoned there. In Tibet, the Chinese have made our temples into museums. We do not want that to happen here.

Temples in Bhutan have sometimes burnt to the ground, in fires thought to have begun by butter lamps left burning. Gone are ancient buildings, silk hangings and religious art. But, since here the traditions are “alive” and ritual history never died, its destruction is not so serious. It can be recreated, all of it.

“There is an American penchant to disregard the pertinence of the past,” comments Stephen J. Whitfield. He quotes Henry Ford’s famous glib remark, “History is bunk,” and Huckleberry Finn, archetypal American boy, saying that Moses “had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn’t care no more about him; because I don’t take no stock in dead people” and suggests that as far as the past is concerned, Americans live “between amnesia and nostalgia.” Whitfield also notes the drop in the number of students majoring in history. “If there is an American amnesia, however, it is undoubtedly connected to the national penchant for zippetty-doo-dah optimism . . . which can transform itself into the politics of hope. Lincoln Steffens’s famous line about the Bolshevik Revolution—‘I have been over into the future, and it works’—encapsulates the national trait of putting faith in the future rather than revering the past.”

French film-director Jean-Luc Godard believes that France is enduring an American cultural occupation as significant as the German occupation during the Second World War, and one crucial result of this is what he perceives as the loss of the past, the failure of cultural memory. As a corrective, he recommends that television should show “only the past, nothing of the present, not even the weather. They should give the weather from twenty years ago. Tennis matches from twenty years ago, not today. But what’s happening today, well, our children will see in twenty years. There’s no hurry—twenty years.”

The American attitude to the past combines a disregard for the past per se with a desire to commodify history, and to customize it. Umberto Eco comments on the American taste for preserving the past in authentic—life-size—duplications: this Artifact-recreation of the past somehow denies the life of the “real” past by making the present “fake” duplication more prominent, more “real.” (The commodification of history can be funny: I once had a query, on a matter of New York’s history, to put to the Museum of the City of New York. When I telephoned, the switchboard operator said “I’ll put you through to the gift shop: they know everything.” They didn’t.) Americans lead the world in genealogy research, the epitome of customized-past, history-as-solipsism. On the Internet, the web’s “largest online genealogy search” advertises itself thus: “Find Ancestors and Create a Family.” Scientists are also working on so-called immortality chips, so that people will be able to record their lives, allowing them to relive their own and other people’s memories. Considering how countries of the West conveniently seem to forget their genocidal histories (more later), it is rum to imagine such care being taken to preserve the “holiday snaps” of an individual life.

My world atlas lists forty place names in the U.S. beginning with New, from New Albany and New Bedford to New Ulm and New York. Look up Old and the list is a paltry five. (Five nice names, though, including Old Baldy Park and Old Speck Mountain.) The U.S. is indeed the New World by its own definition: Britain the Old. But for indigenous peoples of the Americas, the true Old World was the life they had before the white colonizers came. Tarzan, in his nineties now, an elder of the Arakmbut in Peru, explains. “Antiguamente,” he says, anciently, in the old world, life was better. “Antiguamente, todo era bonito.” In the old world, everything was good. “Before the contact we lived strong, ate well, went around singing and wearing feathers. We were painted and singing. Yes it was better.” Then came the missionaries and colonizers who gave them plagues and sicknesses. Thousands died. (This happened only eleven years before I was born.)

With piebald motives and varying success, what humans have created in the past is often protected. (Heritage, like all historicity, is anthropocentric.) Nature—with the ecocratic ambience of myth as opposed to history—is often less lucky, provoking the question: how well would nature be looked after if it had been built by humans, if we could see our own signature on it? Road protesters have cherished Tree History, famously Julia “Butterfly” Hill, living in the canopy of a 200-foot ancient redwood in Stafford County, northern California, to prevent it from being cut down. Her tree, “Luna,” is a thousand years old.

In the U.K., Prince Philip recently decreed an annus horribilis for oak trees in Windsor Great Park; some were to be felled. (Though planted in rigidly straight lines, the older ones had gone in for some gnarly rebellion, and had become “untidy.”) This decision was later reversed, but the very attempt was revealing. Windsor Castle was being lovingly and expensively restored after a destructive fire. Of course. It is Artifact History. The castle matters. Whereas the oaks (called, incidentally, “kings of the forest”), in the third stage of life, did not matter.

But oaks in that third stage are of most value to other life forms, offering a habitat to bats and owls, for instance, and a myriad of microorganisms. Dr. Oliver Rackham, woodland ecologist at Cambridge University, comments that trees develop individuality and distinctiveness after middle age. (Don’t we all.) Decay, he says, is not a disease or a defect, but a way of recycling minerals in the wood. The Chinese proverb “Leaf rots to root” expresses the importance of the decaying—the underground—stage of life in nourishing the next, but this, like all “circularity,” is not welcome to tidy straight-line thinking.

And King Arthur, in royal tradition, was not amused. “In a clash between the Oaks and the King, I support the Oaks. It was well out of order for him even to try.” He would speak for the trees which can’t speak for themselves, though the oaks already felled remain a mute accusation from the past. If oaks could speak, they’d speak in the tone of betrayed majesty. If oaks could speak, they’d speak Latin. If the third stager, Prince Philip, scampus maximus , were one of his own oak trees, he would have been cut down.

This difference between attitudes to Artifact History and to Natural History can be applied to modern family relations in the West where dead ancestors are often sought out, in the form of the Artifact Ancestor, the written paper record. This is cherished. Framed. Kept by the family hearth. The Natural Ancestor, the still-living relation (the spittooning great aunt, the completely barking grandfather) is banished from the family hearth, and left to the barley-sugared etiolation of life in Sunset Homes.

Diverse cultures have always had different attitudes towards the past. In the Holocaust, as well as the infamous and hideous experience of Jews, some 500,000 Gypsies were killed in what they call Porramous, the devouring. After the Holocaust, the Jews built cities of memory, memorializing their losses in stone, while Gypsies refuse to remember or discuss it. The Truk islanders of Micronesia in the Pacific Ocean have a culture which means they forget nothing—so they accumulate wrongs; their loyalties and their promises last forever but, equally, so do their grievances and vendettas. The Truk islanders remember everything. The Achuar (of Ecuador) forget everything. They hate and fear the dead. They try to forget their ancestors’ names and to lose the memory of the last places where they lived. Stories and dreams are valuable—they live by their dreams, making decisions accordingly, inclining to the future—but memory is feared so that each morning they take a feather and tickle their tonsils, making themselves sick in order to “purge” themselves of the past, in a physical act of forgetting. The Yanesha people of eastern Peru use selective memory when it comes to their culture’s past. They remember what makes them different from “others” but refuse to remember any times when those others were more powerful than themselves. Rather than historical facts, what the Yanesha remember are emotions, feelings and moods resulting from their relationships with others, as Fernando Santos-Granero comments. “They obliterate power differences that place them in a subordinate position.” They operate a state-of-the-art forgetting in order to de-empower others. They also “sing” their history, one person being the custodian of a certain song. “The transmission and learning of songs establishes a link between past, present and future custodians” while “by transmitting it, the custodian protects the song from oblivion.”

One of Europe’s special places for preserving history is the British Library, with its experts, authorities, and its authoritative texts. One spring day I visited the historic old Reading Room, with Sure-yani Poroso, of the Leco people. “The West keeps its past written in books,” he says. “For us, we don’t write our history but we dance it.” He is on his feet in a flash to illustrate it. “The dance is a rich literature. We dance how we defeated the Incas and the Spanish and we dance to remember the apocalypse of the rubber era.” At our shoulders are books on indigenous peoples of the Americas in a series entitled Discoveries. The inappropriateness of the term is not lost on Sure-yani. “History is never the story told from the point of view of those annihilated and exterminated. Our history is silenced.”

The recording of the past is a political act, and the discourse of history is a form of domination. Perhaps this has never been truer than in the treatment of the history of indigenous peoples, through what the West chooses to remember and what it elects to forget. Sure-yani, and indigenous people all over the Amazon, remembers the genocide where his people were enslaved, raped, tortured, murdered in their thousands, the rubber barons hunting them down with Winchester rifles and hunting dogs, until all Leco people in Peru and many in Bolivia were exterminated. They remember the barracas, the concentration camps which very few people ever survived. Native Americans remember the slaughter which reduced their population from approximately five million in 1492 to 237,000 by 1900. In the continent as a whole, writes Jeremy Narby, the most conservative estimate is that 40 million indigenous people died from Alaska to Patagonia—the figure could easily reach 70 million, the worst genocide in human history. They remember.

The Chase Manhattan Bank chooses to forget. Just above us in a small gallery of the British Museum, the Chase Manhattan Bank sponsors an exhibition of Native Americans: dress, artifacts, photos of smiling natives on reserves weaving baskets, happily coinhabiting the continent. History, today, is financed by the victors. The exhibition does make tiny references to isolated “persecutions” but only as if they were sporadic and occasional, rather than widespread and deliberate. It refers to the forced deportations on the Cherokee “Trail of Tears” but without actually mentioning that thousands died. It does note policies of “pacification and assimilation” but without explaining the ethnocidal results of these honeyed terms. It does note that buffalo were exterminated and slaughtered but in so doing it manages to describe the experience of buffalo more honestly than it describes the experience of Native Americans. The notes mention, as a sad aside, that the Europeans brought diseases to which native peoples had no resistance and that several million died. They note this as if it were all an unfortunate accident, as if blankets were not stuffed with the smallpox virus and as if it were not an intentional slaughter, as if native people were not hunted and murdered, as if they were not victims of a deliberate and vicious genocide.

It is of course a truism to say that history is written by the victors. Alter the stress, though, and the phrase is more telling. History is written by the victors. A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, in the mid-twentieth century, promulgated what he considered to be the proper concept of history: the pursuit of institutional origins through the use of written documents. Many indigenous societies (“preliterate” as they were called) were at a stroke considered to be “without history”—simply because it was transmitted in other ways. Spoken, sung or danced history has no validity either intellectually, politically or legally to Western eyes. (The Tlingit people of British Columbia and Alaska also danced their history.) “Our dances contain more knowledge than a mountain of books,” says Sure-yani. “However, the Catholic church said it was a dance of savages. No one has given any importance to the wisdom we were transmitting, no one, no anthropologist, no missionary.” He also describes how the practice of head-shrinking among his people was anything but the grisly, gory phenomenon which Westerners have portrayed. It was a somber, weighty act, done in order to preserve their history, to keep vividly in mind the events of the past when they had been attacked. “A shrunk head was a book of history. We shrank the heads of Spanish people who came seeking El Dorado. The grandfathers would say ‘This is the head of Diego Gomez, one of the Spanish conquistadors, and this war drum is made of his skin.’ That way our children would remember our history.” This way of keeping history was not respected any more than the dances: “The priests came and said we were worshipping fetishes of monkey heads, so the priests burned them.”

The clash between two ways of speaking the past, written text versus oral culture, was painfully illustrated in southern Australia, where the Aboriginal Ngarrindjeri women have been campaigning against development of their tribal land (by a development company called—of all things—the Binalong company), arguing that it was sacred to them in oral history passed down only by spoken communication and only through women. They were not believed because the state authorities could find no written text and no “experts” to support it. “The white government doesn’t believe blackfellas until they see things written down by whitefellas,” says Aboriginal historian Doreen Kartinyeri.

Western “rules” of history demand rigid chronology, and treat many types of text as inadmissible. Though academically dominant, a need for strict chronology is an uncommon attitude. Anthropologists’ texts describe a myriad of ways of speaking the past. Anna Tsing writes of the history of the world as told by Uma Adang, a Meratus shaman of the Meratus Mountains in Borneo. She delivers history, throwing together many kinds of time, including “folktales, genealogies, and religious tracts, along with imperial and secular chronologies. They fit together awkwardly, challenging one another’s assumptions . . . [She] confuses chronology and structure. Her history moves, but it does not go in only one direction. She plays with metaphors of descent and ascent, so that one is never sure whether either metaphor takes one closer to the present.”

Hugh Brody in The Other Side of Eden writes of Canada’s Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in the 1990s, and describes the attempt to encourage the Commission to accept a new form of history which would incorporate the oral history and “stories” and “myths” of First Nations: “a different historical idiom.” In particular, this idiom would be used for land rights. (The Royal Commission did not agree to design and fund such a project.) Brody also writes of the longest court case in North American legal history (Delgamuukw v. the Queen) in the 1980s where chiefs of two Native communities of British Columbia challenged the right of the state to jurisdiction over their lands. Their history was oral so they gave oral evidence of their claims; “In the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en systems, inheritance of land, and inheritance of the stories that establish rights to the land, are inseparable.” One chief, Mary Johnson, in her eighties at the time, sang their history to the court. “I am asking the witness to sing the song as part of the history, because the song itself invokes the history,” said their lawyer. The judge ruled all oral evidence inadmissible; these people, he said, lacked all “the badges of civilization . . . had no written language, no horses or wheeled vehicles.” (My italics.) His ruling was later overturned wholesale.

Eric Wolf describes the political advantage of privileging white, written history and denying the validity of other kinds of history: “The tacit anthropological supposition that [indigenous peoples] are people without history amounts to the erasure of 500 years of confrontation, killing, resurrection, and accommodation.” Sure-yani, in the Reading Room, describes how this “blanking out” has made him want to make a representation to Goodyear and Dunlop, the companies which gained their fortunes by exterminating his peoples.

In the occidental view, the past can be discussed as an abstraction. All over the world, indigenous peoples see the past as inextricably identified with—and embedded in—the land. “Land is history for us. It is our past, our present and our future,” says Sure-yani. We look at one of the books on the Incas, and there is a photograph of an Inca road, coming to an abrupt end. His grandfather had taken him to exactly such a place in Leco territory, where Leco people had defeated the Incas so they came no further. “My grandfather told me to look at this carefully. ‘Here is your history,’ he said.” Leco territory used to be marked on maps of Bolivia, but it was wiped off the map after 1920, “erasing our memory, our history and our land together.”

In Peru, the land-management organization Instituto del Bien Comun maps land physically and culturally, and various mountains in indigenous territory are marked tiene canción—it has a song; landscape sings its history. The Quechua concept “Pacha” meanwhile means both “land” and “time” (tiempo y tierra), explains Peruvian anthropologist Fernando Santos-Granero. The Arakmbut people in the Peruvian Amazon say, “Without the knowledge of history, the land has no meaning and without the land neither the Arakmbut history nor the culture has any meaning.” You find this view around the world. Renato Rosaldo writes of Ilongot headhunters in the Philippines describing the flight from Japanese troops in 1945: “People were moved to tears as they recited place name after place name—every rock, hill, and stream where they ate, rested or slept.” Their history, represented by landscape, could be evoked simply by the power of naming the places in which it occurred. Tribal Filipino Edtami Mansayagan, describing the pain of witnessing the destruction of rivers, valleys, meadows and hill-sides of his people’s mountain home, says: “these are the living pages of our unwritten history,” as Alan Thein Durning reports. In a fascinating article on western Apache landscape, Keith Basso notes that certain land features are a mnemonic peg for myths and stories with a moral point to make. (One story would be related as happening at one particular place, so whenever a person saw that place, they would remember that story, and would immediately feel guilty if they themselves had acted in the way described in the tale.) Time and place are fused so “Apaches view the landscape as a repository of distilled wisdom, a stern but benevolent keeper of tradition.”

The indigenous view of the past, then, is different from the Western in representation, in shape, character, significance—and in vitality. This is perhaps the most chasmic difference between the Western idea of the past and the indigenous view: the occidental view sees the past as “dead,” while the indigenous view sees the past as profoundly “alive.” The Australian Aboriginal Ancestors “live” in spite of death: they disappeared, but did not die. They left “indefinite records of themselves” and “images of permanency.” They did not “become nothing” but “became the country,” as N.D. Munn comments. The past is immanent in the land. “History,” says Aboriginal Australian writer Herb Wharton, “comes up from the land.” The land is animated with the past, and the past still exists—a different modality of time and one which has a reciprocal relationship with the present. The Dreamtime is opaquely present, inherent and sacred in earth. Sure-yani comments on something similar among his people: “Time is not inert. We live with the past and present together. The past lives in present spiritual values. There is an interrelation between the past and the future, no divorce.” Interestingly, many areas rich in myth and indigenous history are shown to be places of high biodiversity; spirited history, life at its liveliest. Both past and present equally vivacious, in a vital land.

The uniqueness of the modern Western sense of the past does not come from any simple distinction between remembering or forgetting, but from a matrix of attitudes; from a distinction between exploitation and integrity, between the factual and the symbolic, between the material and the numinous, between the amoral and the moral, between the profitable and the subtle. Above all, it is in this unique way we have of seeing the past as a dead thing. Cut off. Discontinuous. Dead and For Sale. Other cultures let the past be a continuous surround to the present, a modality of time where life permeates even death itself, life runs its courses underground.

But there’s more. The inherently differing notions of the past have direct—and contemporary—political consequences. If the underground past is a source of sacred energy to indigenous people, it is merely a source of literal energy, fuel, to the occidental mind. Mining companies devastate sacred Leco territory in Bolivia. “The land is linked to memory, so you can’t take out the gold and minerals. They are part of the body of mother earth. We protest against companies destroying our lands for gold and silver; this is a polemic of memory,” says Sure-yani.

Diamonds Are Forever. Made out of the forever-past, they are nature’s memory, and to express the fidelity and the beauty of the past, nature says it with diamonds. To express the value of the past, nature has its oils, millennia in the making. As the location of the past is always underground: people “dig up” their family ancestry, looking to “unearth” their “roots”; burials are underground; past memories, too, are “buried”; and with its unerring sense of narrative symbolism, the story of Diana ended with her death underground; so there are worldwide connections between “mining” and the past. Heritage-tourism mines the past for profit. Historians refer to “quarrying” the past, instinctively connecting mining—underground—with digging up history. Freud explicitly compared psychoanalysis and archeology in that both concern the recovery of what is buried.

And to intrude into this underground place is to court trouble. In psychoanalytical terms, it is painful to disturb buried memories. Miners and blacksmiths, using the products of this underground world, are, in many societies, marginalized, geographically and socially—they “do everyone’s dirty work” and are blamed accordingly. Blacksmiths (with shamans) are the loners of West African Dogon society. In many cultures, blacksmiths live on the outskirts of towns. George Monbiot, in his book No Man’s Land, describes the Nkunono, the ostracized “abominated blacksmith clan” of the Samburu tribe in Kenya. The Nkunono, like many blacksmiths throughout Africa, are said to be polluted, having malevolent supernatural powers. Archeological evidence, comments Monbiot, suggests that European blacksmiths may similarly have been physically and culturally ostracized and equated with evil. Iron Age forges appear to have been built outside other human settlements.

In myths, mining, mineral extraction and metalwork are considered tainted occupations so Hephaestus, the spiteful blacksmith, is lame and mocked. Monbiot draws parallels between Hephaestus and the northern European Wayland, the “divine but evil smith tutored by the trolls and maimed and imprisoned,” and suggests that the medieval vision of Hell represents the smith in his forge. (In pre-Disney folklore, isn’t the subconscious suspicion about subterranean work reflected in the subnormal height of the seven dwarfs, miners all? And in the Diana-myth, the seven dwarfs of the seven paparazzi were called what? Goldminers.)

Today, in this supramythic age, where myths become reality, so these age-old suspicions are amply borne out in fact. Miners mine the—literal—underground past for profit. In Botswana, some of the last of the San tribes may be evicted from the desert lands theirs since time immemorial, to make way for what? For luxury tourism and diamond mining. Across the world, the first and often devastating contact made with an indigenous people has often been for the sake of gold and silver mining. In 1864, thousands of Navajo died, on what is now known as the “Long March,” when U.S. government agents forced them to relocate to Fort Sumner, New Mexico, so that miners could search for gold and other precious metals on their lands. The Navajo, who returned to Big Mountain four years after the “Long March,” were again evicted from their lands in 1974 when Peabody Coal Company arrived to dig for coal. As Peabody strip-mines in the Black Mesa, and as a century-old dispute between the Navajo and the Hopi continues, Native American Daniel Zapata concentrates on the land itself and the sacred past it represents: “The prophecy rock of the Hopi people is down below, right on a vein they want to seam. How would British people feel if someone came and dug up King Henry the Eighth’s tomb? Why is it always us?” And the corporations’ answer? A merciless manifestation of “mined” over matter—we don’t mind and you don’t matter. For Roberta Blackgoat, an elfish elder of the Navajo, the past is embodied in the land’s song, sung by the ancestors. The coal company is “digging the Mother Earth’s liver. The sacred song is going and they’re digging, digging, digging . . . My great-great-great-ancestors have been buried here . . . Their prayer is still here, their holy song is still here.”

The Mirrar Aborigines of Australia’s Northern Territory are fighting the development of the Jabiluka uranium mine, controlled by British mining company Rio Tinto. A government quango notes that there is no effective cultural mapping of sacred sites in this area, apparently due to reluctance on the part of the Mirrar people. Arguably, this is because, to a dualist cartographer in the Western tradition, to name one site sacred is to name another profane . . . and therefore suitable for “development.”

Uranium was also quarried in Noonkanbah, Western Australia, numinous site of the Aboriginal Goanna Dreaming (home to the mythic original monitor lizard). The uranium, left where it was, was a source of life to the people of the land; it energized the earth, they said, with djang—incipient power, the same power which the Dreamtime heroes poured into the land—and taking it out leaves the land lifeless. (A double lifelessness, for the uranium is used to fuel the death industries of nuclear power.) This djang stands for both sacred past and a force of life, a belief found among indigenous people everywhere.

In southern Montana, permission has been given for a test well in “Weatherman Draw”—a site sacred to Native Americans in their oral histories: a place for sweat ceremonies and “vision quests.” Howard Boggess, local historian and member of the Crow tribe, last Native American “owners” of the site, said: “To us this is a church. In the Native American religion we do not build churches—anytime our feet touch the earth and we can see the sky, we are in our church.” Also, there are pictographs on the site which are up to 1,000 years old. The drilling which threatens this history will provide less than a day’s worth of current U.S. energy demands.

“We the Guaraní people have our own law of the Mother. The state has environmental and land laws but they seem to count for nothing in the face of the Hydrocarbon Law that is stronger. In January 1999, it was that law that established a petroleum concession in our sacred territory called Jaar where no one is permitted to enter. It is a sacred place,” says Bonifacio Barrientos, speaking for the Guaraní in Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

The U’wa people in Colombia consider the “past” of nature in the oil reserves underground as the “blood of the earth” and say that their land is “alive” with oil, coursing like blood in the veins. It is sacred and must be left undisturbed. To take out the oil is to kill the land and themselves, for without the land, they say, they “are not.” They say they will commit collective suicide if the plans to extract oil from their territories go ahead. The oil from U’wa lands would, it was thought, sustain global energy demands for a maximum of three months: thousands of years of sacred indigenous past gone to fuel ninety days of the Western present. Occidental epistemology gives rise to occidental exploitation and the U’wa lands have been threatened by the all too aptly named “Occidental” U.S. oil corporation.

Diana’s myth, with its dazzling sense of the apposite, included her campaign against mines of another sort—landmines, where the life-giving earth is used as a weapon of death. As Dianabilia becomes a heritage industry in its own right, those who profit from “mining” it are reviled, even while their quarried goods are bought—which precisely reflects modernity’s schizophrenic attitudes to miners, we wanted the photos, but hated the goldmining paparazzi. We want the coal and blame the miners with a deep cultural guilt. We want the oil for which the U’wa may die. Conveniently, we can blame those who mine it for us.

It’s mine, say the miners—on our behalf. Modernity believes that the underground past is a resource to be exploited, in mining, as in heritage-tourism. The past, being dead, doesn’t matter, for its own sake, least of all nature’s past, be it old oaks or Goanna Dreamings. To Daniel Zapata, the past is full of life. “From the ancestral past comes life in every sense. When I’m here, I’m flanked by all my ancestors. We’re all here, looking at you.” An ancient Chinese poem offers a similar sense of the past as alive:

Buddhists of Bhutan, rebuilding their temples, have living traditions. The past is not dead. Indigenous Australians of Noonkanbah expressed the living-past thus: “The sacred goannas have been living there under the ground since the Dreamtime. If the drill goes down and kills the goanna it will kill the spirits of the dead.” To them, death, if undisturbed, is not dead, because out of death comes life again.