GOD AND THE GHOST DANCE
The Eternal Return of the Messiah Myth
And almost every one, when age,
Disease, or sorrows strike him,
Inclines to think there is a God,
Or something very like Him.
—Arthur H. Clough, Dipsychus, 1850
In Los Angeles there is a radio station catering largely to an African-American audience—KKBT 92.3 FM, also known as “The Beat”—that features an interesting show called Street Science, hosted by Dominique Diprima. Since I live near Los Angeles I am a periodic guest, the token skeptic when street science veers into pseudoscience. In 1997 they organized a show about UFOs, and the other guests included Don Ecker, publisher of UFO Magazine, and Dwight Schultz, the actor best known as “Barclay” on Star Trek,
The Next Generation. After the usual banter about blurry photographs and government cover-ups, the host opened up the phone lines. Suffice it to say that after years of doing such shows I am not unaccustomed to interviews in which most of the other guests and call-ins are believers in the topic of discussion. But this time was different. It was not just that these callers believed in UFOs. They believed in a particular type of UFO: a messianic “mothership” circling the Earth that in 1999 will release hundreds of smaller ships that will invade targeted cities.
I did not think too much about the first call or two of this nature, but after half a dozen or so I realized what was going on. Announcing themselves as members of the Nation of Islam (NOI), these callers explained that there is no doubt about the existence of UFOs—their leader, the Minister Louis Farrakhan, had himself been to visit the “Mother Plane” in space, described in the NOI’s July 4, 1996, edition of the Final Call newspaper as “a human-built planet, a half mile by a half a mile” carrying “1500 smaller baby planes” with bombs “designed for the destruction of this world.” The “Mother Plane,” the newspaper explained, was visited by Louis Farrakhan himself on September 17, 1985, where he received communication from deceased NOI prophet Elijah Muhammad. For some NOI members, the science fiction film Independence Day was nothing short of a documentary. Final Call, in fact, explained that the hit film’s acronym, ID4, “is a biogenetic reference to a genetic inhibitor which ceases certain procedures in evolution and life, according to researchers at M.I.T.,” the alma mater, it pointed out, of the “Jewish genius” played by Jeff Goldblum in the film. In fact, according to Final Call, the existence of the spacecraft was known to both Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, who met in 1985 to discuss a plan to deal with alien invasion:
Col. Colman S. Vonkeviskzky, MMSE, … a former Hungarian staff major and a military scientist who said he has been engaged over 45 years in dealing with the United Nations about the UFO phenomenon. In a telephone interview, Col. Vonkevickzky said that former President Ronald Reagan and former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev spent five hours in confidential talks during the 1985 Geneva Conference, discussing what military strategies to take in the event of alien attack against earth. All the methods used by the government to harm the real “Mother Plane” have failed, just as their efforts to crush the Nation of Islam have failed … . Frankly, this government needs help—desperately. I think the best thing they can do is consult with Minister Farrakhan.
Several callers made reference to the end coming in 1999 when the “Mother Ship” will descend upon Earth, release its smaller ships to topple the “white government,” and place the black man back in his rightful position of power. The longer I listened the more incredulous I became. Did these callers really believe that the messiah was coming in the form of an alien? Many of them did. But how could Louis Farrakhan, who, regardless of his political beliefs, has always struck me as an intelligent man, believe such nonsense? His message is usually one of this-worldly self-reliance, not otherworldly wishful thinking. Ted Koppel wondered the same thing on the October 15, 1996, episode of Nightline:
| Koppel: | Minister Farrakhan, frequently what you say makes eminently good sense and is extremely lucid, and then—and I’m going to read you this quote because we don’t have it on videotape—you told congregants just before the Million Man March at a Washington church about the “‘Mother Wheel,’ a heavily armed spaceship the size of a city which will rain destruction upon white America but save those who embrace the Nation of Islam” [the New Yorker]. It sounds like gibberish, but maybe you can explain it. |
| Farrakhan: | Well, sir, you can ask President Jimmy Carter if it’s gibberish. You can ask some of the astronauts who went up and saw it if it’s gibberish. On the front page of the Washington Post several years ago, a Japanese pilot was flying across the Bering Strait, and he saw something in his radar that looked like two large aircraft carriers joined together, in terms of size—and an aircraft carrier is 440 yards long—two of them together would be half a mile by a half a mile. This is that wheel that was spoken of in Ezekiel, that has become a reality. It’s over the heads of us in North America, and soon you shall see these wheels over the major cities of America. It is above top-secret by the United States government. |
As I sat in the studio taking this in, it dawned on me that I was hearing a modern iteration of the nineteenth-century Native American Ghost Dance, where the great spirit would descend to displace the white man and allow the Indians to live freely in their aboriginal home. They would defeat the white soldiers because their bodies would be impervious to bullets. The white man would then disappear, the dead would return to life, and buffalo would once again blanket the plains. I began to explain to the radio audience that such mythological motifs are common in history, especially among oppressed peoples, but Diprima interrupted me, proclaiming: “I respect the Ghost Dance. I believe in the Ghost Dance. I don’t want to go down this road. This show is about UFOs, not race.”
Is there a connection transversing the century between these two beliefs? There is. In fact, it turns out that there are many Ghost Dance–like myths across time and cultures. The belief in a savior or messiah that, if the proper ritual is performed, will rescue us from our oppression and deliver redemption, fits the classic pattern of myth, in particular, what might be called the oppression-redemption myth, or, simply, the messiah myth.
One of my most striking memories of this radio program was the host’s comment that she “believes in the Ghost Dance.” What did it mean for a twentieth-century African-American woman to believe in a nineteenth-century Native American story? It meant that the story is a myth, an enduring narrative with deep personal meaning and social context. The Ghost Dance in particular, and the messiah myth in general, represent a commingling of eschatological, messianic, and millenarian motifs, with an outer shell of representational rebirth and renewal. The reason this Native American myth was appealing to an African-American woman is because of the common elements of oppression and redemption. For over four centuries both Native Americans and African Americans were conquered, enslaved, and killed in large numbers. In the case of Native Americans, the process involved the dissolution of nearly 500 nations and the elimination of approximately 90 percent of the population (mostly by European diseases for which they had no immunity); in the case of African Americans, the process involved the confiscation of approximately twenty million Africans and the enslavement of the half who survived the journey to the New World. The learned helplessness that comes with such long-term oppression lends itself to the mythos of supernatural intervention.
Suffice it to say that the probability of aliens unfettering African Americans from their perceived oppressors is coequal to the belief on the part of Native Americans that they would become impervious to bullets. Myths, however, even though fictitious, can be a powerful source of fuel to the belief engine that drives our perceptions of the world. In the four centuries from 1492 to 1890, one nation conquered 500 nations, one civilization destroyed 500 civilizations, one culture subsumed 500 cultures. As the sun set on a 13,000-year-old people, the circumstances were ripe for twilight dream time—a slip into the sacred, the numina of the otherworld where messiahs reside and the rebirth of a new age awaits.
On January 1, 1889, a total eclipse of the sun projected a black disk that streaked across the North American continent. In its path in Nevada was a Paiute Indian named Wovoka (“The Cutter”), known to whites as Jack Wilson. Wovoka was the son of Tavibo, a Paiute from Walker Valley, just south of Virginia City, Nevada. It was in 1870, almost twenty years earlier, that Tavibo and another Paiute named Wodziwob started the first Ghost Dance movement, on the heels of a devastating drought and an epidemic of typhoid and measles that wiped out a tenth of the Paiute population. Tavibo prophesied that a great earthquake would swallow both Indians and whites, but after three days (note the Christian influence) the Indians alone would return, along with fish, game, and plants. Tavibo created a counterclockwise circular dance around a fire that would bring back the dead, and this evolved (with as many variations as there were groups who adopted it) into the Ghost Dance of 1890. But times were not quite right for the messianic rebirth myth to take off, and the influence of Wodziwob and Tavibo soon faded after 1870. (The Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876, in which General Custer and his soldiers were thoroughly quashed in one of the few major victories for the natives, brought hope that perhaps the tide could be reversed by more earthly means.) Shortly thereafter Tavibo left his family and community, abandoning his teenage son Wovoka to a white rancher named David Wilson, who renamed him Jack. Wovoka/Jack grew up in a deeply Christian family that included daily prayers and readings from the Bible. At the age of twenty he married a Paiute woman, and as a young adult began to pursue the interests of his biological father, including reviving the circular dance that was said to open the Paiute soul to greater spirituality. Between dances he preached an amalgam of Native American Christianity, celebrating faith, Jesus, and the monotheistic God, along with traditional beliefs in the spirits of the mountains, clouds, snow, stars, trees, and antelope.
Wovoka’s influence and following grew, and by the 1880s real-world hope for the survival of Native American culture was fading fast. In 1881 their great leader Sitting Bull surrendered after a long and bitter struggle. Where the plains were once covered with the herds of 60 million buffalo, by 1883 a scientific expedition counted a mere 200 head. Finally, any possibility of peaceful coexistence of whites and Indians was greatly inhibited by the government’s bureaucratic and military actions, driven by the administration’s Indian policy, succinctly summarized by President Benjamin Harrison:
First, the anomalous position heretofore occupied by the Indians in this country can no longer be maintained.Second, the logic of events demands the absorption of the Indians into our national life not as Indians but as American citizens.Third, as soon as wise conservation will permit it, the relations of the Indians to the government must rest solely upon the recognitian of their individuality [they had to become legal citizens of the United States and not members of an Indian tribe or nation].Fourth, the individual must conform to the white man’s ways, peaceably if they will, forcibly if they must.Fifth, compulsory education.Sixth, tribal relationship should be broken.
Part of the “absorption” process included forcing the Indians to abandon hunting and take up farming. Unfortunately a drought struck the West in the spring and summer of 1890. forcing many of the reservations to go on starvation rations. Some Native Americans tried to return to the ways of their ancestors by “hunting” the cattle rationed to them by the government, but in July this was prohibited by Harrison’s new Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Thomas J. Morgan, who declared it a savage holdover from a now-banned primitive way of life. By January 1889, the Indians were essentially finished, and the Ghost Dance was becoming more appealing by the day.
Quite by chance on that first day of January 1889, Wovoka was ill with fever when the solar eclipse approached. As the shadow engulfed him he fell into a hallucination in which he envisioned himself taken to heaven where he could see and speak with God. The Smithsonian anthropologist James Mooney, who documented the Ghost Dance, explains what happened next:
He saw God, with all the people who had died long ago engaged in their old-time sports and occupations, all happy and forever young. It was a pleasant land and full of game. After showing him all, God told him he must go back and tell his people they must be good and love one another, have no quarreling, and live in peace with the whites; that they must work, and not lie or steal; that they must put away all the old practices that savored of war; that if they faithfully obeyed his instructions they would at last be reunited with their friends in this other world, where there would be no more death or sickness or old age. He was then given the dance which he was commanded to bring back to his people. By performing this dance at intervals, for five consecutive days each time, they would secure this happiness to themselves and hasten the event.
The umbra of the eclipse receded and the light of day illuminated Wovoka’s prophetic mission. The more he spoke, the more his people listened. Indians from districts far and wide came to sit at his feet. Mormons debated whether Wovoka could be the fulfillment of Joseph Smith’s prophecy that the Messiah would appear in 1890 (many Mormons believed that Indians were descendants of one of the “Ten Lost Tribes” of the Hebrews). His confidence growing by the week, Wovoka even dictated a letter to President Harrison, explaining that if he would be allowed to deliver God’s message to the people of Nevada and the rest of the country he could control the weather, in particular making it rain whenever he wanted (recall this was a drought year). The letter was never delivered.
While Wovoka called himself a messiah who was like Jesus, he never said he was the Christ. Despite this disclaimer, many (both whites and Indians) referred to him as such, and this started a long process that would cascade into tragedy twelve months later at a creek whose name has become synonymous with the Ghost Dance. As Wovoka’s fame grew and Indian delegates from dozens of nations came to listen, white settlers became concerned that something more than a peaceful dance was taking place. The Indian delegates took home with them blessed tokens of Wovoka’s power (red ocher, magpie feathers, pine nuts, robes of rabbit fur), and there launched their own Ghost Dance ceremonies. Wovoka instructed them as follows:
Grandfather said when he die never no cry. no hurt anybody. no fight, good behave always, it will give you satisfaction, this young man, he is a good Father and mother, don’t tell no white man. Jesus was on ground, he just like cloud. Everybody is alive agin, I don’t know when they will here, may be this fall or in spring.You make dance for six weeks night, and put you foot [food?] in dance to eat for every body and wash in the water. that is all to tell, I am in to you. and you will received a good words from him some time.
The continual and repetitive motion of the dance, conducted for hours on end, produced profound emotional experiences for the dancers. Some went into a trance, others collapsed and writhed on the ground. It was a spiritual journey from the profane to the sacred. Within months the new religion was taken up by the Utes, Shoshoni, and Washo in Nevada; the Mohave, Cohonino, and Pai in Arizona; and the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Assiniboin, Mandan, Arikara, Caddo, Kichai, Kiowa, Pawnee, Wichita, Comanche, Delaware, Oto, and Sioux in scattered regions throughout the west from California to Oklahoma, and from Texas to Canada. While the ceremony had the common theme of messianic rebirth, the dances varied in detail and were given different names, including “dance in a circle,” “the Father’s Dance,” “dance with clasped hands,” and “spirit dance.”
Wovoka, a Paiute Indian and self-proclaimed messiah who spread the salvation of the Ghost Dance.
Unfortunately for the Native Americans, Indian delegates from the other nations were not the only ones aware of the Ghost Dance. White settlers grew wary, concerned about what the dance might do to stir up trouble, stimulating officials in government to look into the matter. Wovoka’s peaceful dance of renewal began to escalate into a war dance when his disciples (as most disciples are wont to do) added their own components to the religion. By the spring of 1890 the Lakota Sioux leader Kicking Bear, not content to give his fate over to the gods, introduced special clothing into the ceremony, declaring “the bullets will not go through these shirts and dresses, so they all have these dresses for war.” Wovoka never said anything about war—just the opposite—but Kicking Bear was not about to go peacefully into the closing of the American West.
Someone on the Pine Ridge Reservation told a local resident named Charles L. Hyde about this new development, and on May 29 he wrote to the Secretary of the Interior that he heard the Sioux were plotting a rebellion. Hyde’s letter was passed along to the Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, who in turn sent copies to the agents of the various Sioux reservations. They were to check it out and report back to Washington. Talk of bulletproof vests and the disappearance of whites did not sound like peaceful absorption to white bureaucrats.
Ghost dancers (photographed by anthropologist James Mooney).
Arguably the most famous Indian of the time was Sitting Bull, associated with the massacre of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry and later a star in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. The government asked Sitting Bull (through an agent named James McLaughlin) to persuade his people to stop the Ghost Dance. He agreed to try if McLaughlin would accompany him to see Wovoka first to determine if there was really anything to fear. McLaughlin declined to go, and on top of that on November 19 he asked permission to withhold all food rations from Indians in Sitting Bull’s village. Tensions were mounting. Virtually all activities on the Sioux reservations ceased with the exception of the Ghost Dance. At the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota the newly appointed (and now frightened) agent sent a telegram of alarm to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, dated October 30:
Your Department has been informed of the damage resulting from these dances and of the danger attending them of the crazy Indians doing serious damage to others … . The only remedy for this matter is the use of military and until this is done you need not expect any progress from these people on the other hand you will be made to realize that they are tearing down more in a day than the Government can build in a month.
Two weeks later President Harrison ordered the Secretary of War to suppress “any threatened outbreak.” Word spread around the country that the Indians were planning one final apocalyptic war against the whites. On October 28, the Chicago Tribune ran this headline:
TO WIPE OUT THE WHITES
WHAT THE INDIANS EXPECT OF THE COMING MESSIAH
FEARS OF AN OUTBREAK
OLD SITTING BULL STIRRING UP THE EXCITED REDSKINS
The Chicago Herald, Harper’s Weekly, and the Illustrated American all sent correspondents to cover the event. The renowned painter of the West, Frederic Remington, was sent to provide images. When facts were lacking, rumors filled the journalists’ columns. General Nelson Miles, for example, reported to the Washington press corp that “it is a more comprehensive plot than anything ever inspired by Tecumseh, or even Pontiac.” By December thousands of army troops moved onto the Sioux Reservation, including a new Seventh Cavalry. Between the starving, messiah-seeking Indians and the trigger-happy soldiers, something was bound to give. It did on December 15, 1890, when Indian policemen were ordered to arrest Sitting Bull, the man they feared would lead the Indians into war.
The Indian police, now under McLaughlin’s command, broke into Sitting Bull’s cabin, ordered him to awake, dress, and come with them. There was tragic irony in this situation. Many of the arresting officers had ridden with Sitting Bull and stood by his side through the dog days of the 1870s. But Sitting Bull was an old man now, impotent against the white onslaught, biding his time to the end. As he awaited the saddling of his horse, his remaining loyal followers gathered about him, determined not to let him go. It was a situation that could not end peacefully. At that moment a lieutenant named Bullhead moved in to grab Sitting Bull. A warrior named Catch the Bear pulled out his rifle and shot Bullhead in the side, who, as he twirled and fell shot Sitting Bull in the chest. Gunfire rang out on both sides, and a bullet found its mark in Sitting Bull’s head. He died on the spot. Bizarrely, Sitting Bull’s horse had been given to him by Buffalo Bill Cody, who had trained the horse to “dance” in his Wild West Show whenever it heard gunfire. As it was being led to its master’s cabin gunshots broke out and it began to dance. The horse, said the Indians in a final defiance of the white’s prohibition against their new religion, was itself doing the Ghost Dance.
The other Indian leader of great import was the Sioux Chief Big Foot. Following the Sitting Bull debacle, Big Foot was ordered to come to Pine Ridge to help negotiate a peace settlement. On his way he passed near the encampment of Kicking Bear, the Lakota Sioux who introduced the “bulletproof vest” into the Ghost Dance. General Nelson Miles, looking for a fight, saw this as a potentially hostile action on Big Foot’s part and moved in to investigate. The commanding major encountered the now sick (with pneumonia) Big Foot and his small, travel-weary band, and ordered them to camp at a creek near the Pine Ridge agency, called Wounded Knee.
On December 28, 1890, 120 men and 230 women and children set up their tepees for the night. Surrounding them were over 500 heavily armed U.S. cavalry troops, Indian scouts working for the Army, and four Hotchkiss artillery cannons. The next morning Big Foot’s people were ordered to relinquish all weapons. Some guns were surrendered, but not all. The soldiers went into the tepees to look for more. Meanwhile, Yellow Bird, Big Foot’s holy man, launched into the Ghost Dance, reminding his men that the shirts they wore would be impenetrable by the soldiers’ bullets. The officers ordered the Indians to strip, hoping to reveal hidden weapons. It was a freezing December winter day. Some of the men refused to obey. The soldiers moved in to frisk them. One spirited young Indian named Black Coyote pulled out a new rifle he had recently purchased, announcing he would not give it up. Two soldiers rushed him from behind and grabbed the rifle. At that moment the Ghost Dancing Yellow Bird threw a handful of dirt into the air, declaring that this was a symbol of the renewal of the Earth promised by their Messiah.
What happened next was much less symbolic. White officers thought it was a signal for the Indians to attack. By chance Black Coyote’s gun discharged harmlessly into the air, but it triggered Sioux and soldiers to open fire upon one another. Stray bullets found women, children, and Big Foot in their tepees. Those who managed to make a dash from the camp were cut down by the artillery cannons, firing exploding shells one per second. When it was all over 250 Sioux men, women, and children were dead.
Two weeks after Wounded Knee the last of the Ghost Dancers came out of the Badlands and capitulated to the United States Army. On January 15, 1891, the defiant Kicking Bear gave up his rifle to General Miles at the Pine Ridge agency, and his cause to all eternity. The Ghost Dance was over—it was not the beginning of the end of the Indians, it was the end of the end. The bullets found their mark and the Messiah never came.
If we do not “believe in” the Ghost Dance, we can nevertheless understand it as an eternally returning cultural phenomenon of oppressed peoples—one version of the messiah myth. Anthropologist James Mooney certainly understood it this way, in the introduction to his great work on the Ghost Dance:
The, lost paradise is the world’s dreamland of youth. What tribe or people has not had its golden age, before Pandora’s box was loosed, when women were nymphs and dryads and men were gods and heroes? And when the race lies crushed and groaning beneath an alien yoke, how natural is the dream of a redeemer, an Arthur, who shall return from exile or awake from some long sleep to drive out the usurper and win back for his people what they have lost. The hope becomes a faith and the faith becomes the creed of priests and prophets, until the hero is a god and the dream a religion, looking to some great miracle of nature for its culmination and accomplishment. The doctrines of the Hindu avatar, the Hebrew Messiah, the Christian millennium, and the Hesunanin of the Indian Ghost dance are essentially the same, and have their origin in a hope and longing common to all humanity.
If the Ghost Dance of 1990’s African Americans shares commonalities with that of 1890’s Native Americans, and if Mooney is right about the Hindus, Jews, and Christians from centuries past, might this indeed be the result of something deep within our common evolutionary and cultural humanity? Are there other examples of Ghost Dances around the world and across the ages against which we may test this hypothesis? There are.
In his comprehensive anthropological study on the origins of religion, Weston La Barre has carefully documented many such Ghost Dances. In May 1856, for example, during colonial domination of parts of Africa by the English, a South Xhosa girl encountered spirit entities while obtaining water at a nearby stream. She told her uncle, who in turn spoke to the deities who informed him that they would help the Xhosa drive the English from the country. In this version the ritual ceremony that would trigger the English departure was the slaughter of cattle. The girl’s uncle, Umhlakaza, ordered his tribesmen to destroy all of their herds as well as the granaries of corn. If this rite was properly carried out, the dead would be resurrected, the old would become young again, illnesses would disappear, herds of fattened cattle would rise from the Earth, and ready-for-harvest millet fields would suddenly appear. It was to be paradise on Earth. What actually happened is that following the mass butchering of some 2,000 head of cattle a famine decimated the Xhosa tribe, nearly driving it into extinction.
A similar story took place in a Maori village in New Zealand at the end of August 1934, when a visionary member of the tribe had a dream in which an angel told him that a Holy Ghost would deliver his people from the whites and return their confiscated lands to them. For days following the dream the Maori fasted, chanted, danced, and waited for the day of deliverance. Then, as some members of millennial cults do today, Maori villagers gave away their belongings (who needs material goods in the next life?). White administrators got wind of the ceremonies and came to investigate. Finding starving children and deprivation-crazed adults, they declared the visionary insane and shipped him off to a mental hospital, thus ending the Maori Ghost Dance.
Searching the globe La Barre finds another example from a Siberian village in July 1904, when an Altai Turk named Chot Chelpan had a vision of a spirit who told him that the land of his people would be returned. Russian Orthodox Church missionaries had discovered that Altai grazing lands were better for farming (for the missionaries, that is!), so they confiscated them from the native peoples. Chot’s prayer to the spirits was the Ghost Dance revisited: “Thou art my Burkhan dwelling on high, thou my Oirot descending below, deliver me from the Russians, preserve me from their bullets.” Chot instructed his people in an elaborate ceremony that included killing pets, sprinkling milk to the four cardinal compass points, and a number of other rituals, then told the Altains: “Soon their end will come, the land will not accept them, the earth will open up and they will be cast under the earth.” Chot’s end came in 1905 when he was captured, terminating the Siberian Ghost Dance.
One of the more curious versions of the Ghost Dance can be found in the Cargo Cults of the South Pacific. According to anthropologist Marvin Harris, Cargo Cults began centuries ago with Pacific islanders scanning the horizon for phantom canoes delivering goods. As the times changed so did the ersatz delivery mechanisms. In the eighteenth century they watched for the sails of sailing vessels, in the nineteenth century they searched for smoke from steamships, and in the twentieth century, particularly after World War II, they scouted for airplanes. The phantom cargo has evolved along with the delivery mechanisms. First it was matches and steel tools, then shoes, sacks of rice, canned meat, knives, rifles, ammunition, and tobacco, and finally it became automobiles, radios, and modern appliances. To the Pacific islanders who only ever saw, heard, or fantasized about the end product of a manufacturing process in some far-off land, the origin of the cargo was a great mystery. With no apparent cause, the airplane arrived with finished products. “The great wealth and power of the whites is a mystery to Melanesians,” La Barre concludes. “As far as they could see, whites did no work at all and made no artifacts, and yet got great stores of goods merely by sending out bits of paper, though meanwhile blacks must labor to produce gold and copra. The cargo ships were their link to that mysterious country and the obvious secret of their power.”
The Ghost Dance leitmotif intertwined with the Cargo Cults in places like New Guinea where the natives built a thatch-roofed hanger, a bamboo beacon tower, an airstrip manned twenty-four-hours a day by natives wearing simulated uniforms, and even an airplane made out of sticks and leaves. Long dominated by whites who seemed to possess the mysterious powers of the cargo, the natives envisioned the day when their ancestors would return with cargo for them. When that day comes, Harris notes, the natives believed there would be “the downfall of the wicked, justice for the poor, the end of misery and suffering, reunion with the dead, and a whole new divine kingdom.”
A wooden representation of a cargo plane sits next to a cross and a messianic John Frum, said to be a pidgin shortening of the phrase “John from America”—the carrier of cargo goods according to the Melanesian cargo cult.
Sociologist Peter Worsley, in his classic 1958 study of Cargo Cults in Melanesia, The Trumpet Shall Sound, points out that such movements are “by no means peculiar to that part of the world” and that there is in fact evidence that similar phenomena have developed “in most parts of the globe, even in some of the earliest records of civilization.” The reason this is important, Worsley adds, is that “the history of apocalyptic religions and of messianism is of special interest to people whose culture has included a central belief in One whom they believed to be the Messiah, who died for mankind and with whom they hoped to be reunited in Paradise.” He is speaking of Jesus, of course, pointing out that “this messiah, however, has not been the only messiah,” and that in addition to multiple Melanesian culture-heroes, spirits, and messiahs, “similar cults have occurred to a greater or lesser extent in other major regions of Oceania,” and that “Africa, North and South America, China, Burma, Indonesia and Siberia have also had their share of cults, and the history of Europe provides numerous examples.” Does the story of Jesus as the savior fit into this genre of messiah myths?
Cargo Cults are not unlike Messiah Cults, including a first-century one that arose in an eastern province of the Mediterranean surrounding a man who was said to have the power to heal the sick, raise the dead, and preached love, forgiveness, and the worship of the one true God. Roman authorities, fearing that his expanding fellowship might pose a social or political threat, arrested him and had him put to death. Following his execution, his disciples said he rose from the dead, appeared to them to deliver a message, and then ascended to heaven. The messiah was Apollonius of Tyana, who was killed in A.D. 98, six decades after his more famous predecessor, Jesus of Nazareth. As Randel Helms notes: “Readers … may be forgiven their error [confusing Apollonius and Jesus] if they will reflect how readily the human imagination embroiders the careers of notable figures of the past with common mythical and fictional embellishments.”
The common mythical embellishment of the Jesus legend, like that of the Ghost Dance and Cargo Cults, is the now-familiar oppression-redemption or messiah myth. By the first century A.D. the Jews were engulfed within the Roman empire and feared for their very existence as a people. The regions around and including Nazareth were ruled by King Herod, who endured and responded with violence to numerous Jewish revolts against the Romans. By A.D. 6 Judea was under direct Roman rule. A youthful Jesus, who was now ten years old (probably born in 4 B.C.), must have been painfully aware of the tensions between his people and their oppressors, as well as the biblical promise of a Messiah who would drive out the Romans and reestablish the kingdom of God on Earth. By the time of his three-year ministry from A.D. 27 to 30, Jesus had codified a new theology and an ethical system to sustain his followers until the Second Coming. It was a unique theology, as theologian Burton Mack has noted in his identification of three interconnected ideas that arose in the 30s and 40s following Jesus’ death:
1. One was the vague notion of a perfect society conceptualized as a kingdom. The Jesus people latched onto this idea and acted as if the kingdom they imagined was a real possibility despite the Romans. They called it the kingdom of God.2. A second idea was that any individual, no matter of what extraction, status, or innate capacity, was fit for this kingdom and could act accordingly if only one would.3 … . the novel notion that a mixture of people was exactly what the kingdom of God should look like.
Mack also observes that belief in a Messiah that would redeem an oppressed people was certainly not unique to first-century Jews: “This was a notion that many groups had used to imagine a better way to live than suffering under the Romans.” Peter Worsley points out that “Christianity itself, of course, as recent interpretations of the Dead Sea scrolls emphasize, originally derived its élan from the millenarist traditions of the Essenes and similar sectaries at the beginning of the Christian era. These people looked for the establishment of an actual earthly Kingdom of the Lord which would free the Jews from Roman oppression. Later this doctrine commended itself as a message of hope to the downtrodden of the Roman Empire.”
Did Jesus and his followers think he was the Messiah? When Jesus asked his disciples “Who do men say that I am?” he was given the answer: “Thou art the Christ” (Matthew 16:15, 16; christos, Greek for messias, from masiah, Hebrew for Messiah). To many early Christians, the Hebrew Bible spoke to them of a returning Messiah: “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth.” “And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots … . But with righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth: and he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked” (Isaiah 11:1, 4). “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6). (See The Oxford Companion to the Bible, The Interpreter’s Bible, and The New Oxford Annotated Bible for additional messianic passages and their meanings.)
Such prophecies must have been especially reassuring to a people under the yoke. Indeed, Christianity’s founding father, Paul, told the Colossians: “In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins” (1:14). To the Hebrews, Paul said: “Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered at once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us” (9:12). Redemption was not only for individuals, but for all of Israel, as Luke (24:19–21) notes: “Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, which was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people. And how the chief priests and our rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death, and have crucified him. But we trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel.” Here we see the foundation of the Christian oppression–redemption myth.
Jesus himself made it clear that ultimate redemption would come within the lifetime of his contemporaries: “Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom” (Matthew 16:28). Two thousand years later over one billion people profess Jesus to be the Messiah who not only redeemed Jews from their Roman oppressors, but who will deliver us from ours. (Such is the power of belief systems to rationalize all discrepancies—one being that this is the Kingdom of God on Earth.) A particularly striking example comes from the Los Angeles Times on the morning of October 8, 1997. In the Sports section, no less, appeared a six-inch by ten-inch advertisement placed by a Bloomington, Indiana–based group called Christ’s Soon Return, announcing:
8 COMPELLING REASONS WHY:
CHRIST IS COMING “VERY, VERY SOON”
HOW TO BE PREPARED FOR HISTORY’S GREATEST EVENT
The evidence for the return of the Messiah, we are told, “is overwhelming. It could be any moment.” Citing a single “scholar” (who goes unnamed) the advertisement explains that there are no less than 167 “converging clues” that the end is nigh. The ad offers eight: 1. Israel’s rebirth. 2. Plummeting morality. 3. Famines, violence and wars. 4. Increasing earthquakes. 5. Explosion of travel and education. 6. Explosion of cults and the occult. 7. The New World Order. 8. Increase in both apostasy and faith. A bonus “clue” is the “Angel Factor,” where “As an angel announced Christ’s First Coming, there have been recently reported visits from angels saying, ‘He is coming very, very soon.’” Why is Christ coming? “Christ will soon come and rescue His people from the approaching ‘Great Tribulation’. He will later rule and bring peace on earth—after he judges the world and every person.” To avoid our fate and “escape God’s judgment, we each must receive His free gift of forgiveness and love.” There is no Ghost Dance involved in the redemption (in this case the tyrants from whom we are to be rescued are ourselves, our sinful nature, and a morally moribund world), but one must pray for forgiveness and accept Christ as the Messiah: “Lord Jesus, I believe you are the Son of God and that you died on the cross for my sins to save me from eternal death. I open the door of my life and receive you as my Savior and Lord. I give you my life. Help me to be what you want me to be. Amen.”
The ultimate extreme expression of such modern millennial beliefs was the Heaven’s Gate calamity of March 27, 1997, when thirty-nine (now forty) members of an end-times cult committed suicide. Instead of the spirit world coming to life and the oppressors disappearing, the members of the Heaven’s Gate cult (also called the “Higher Source”) would escape the tyranny of their bodies and the immorality of the world by becoming spirits in the next stage of history. Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles convinced their followers that they were going to TELAH—The Evolutionary Level Above Humans.
Just as Wovoka mixed Native American and Christian motifs into a single Ghost Dance myth, the Heaven’s Gate belief system was a peculiar mixture of evolution, creationism, reincarnation, and UFO-logy (recall the “spaceship” accompanying comet Hale-Bopp). Before they could attain a spiritual state, members had to enter a gender-free stage—no sexual identity and no sex. In preparation they cropped their hair, abstained from sex, and wore androgynous clothing. According to Applewhite (from his Web page): “They are perfectly beautiful bodies—neither male nor female. They don’t have hair that needs to be cut, they don’t need to have curlers. They don’t need to use makeup. It’s a body that exists for the most part, in a nondestructive environment, except when it has to go to a place like planet Earth. So it’s potentially an eternal body—an everlasting body.” Oppression on Earth, redemption in TELAH
Why, it seems reasonable to ask, would these similar myths recycle through dissimilar cultures and distinct ages? Cultural diffusion may explain some thematic similarities, but a broader hypothesis is that there are a limited number of responses to perceived oppression and the general hardships of the human condition, and the belief in a returning Messiah who will deliver redemption is one of the most common. The specifics vary with varying cultures, but the general theme returns again and again. Why?
History is an exquisite blend of the specific and the general, the unique and the universal. The past is neither one damn thing after another (Heraclitus’ river), nor is it the same damn thing over and over (Spengler’s life cycles). Rather, it is a series of generally repeating patterns, each one of which retains a unique structure and set of circumstances. History is uniquely cyclical. Wars and battles, witch crazes and social movements, holocausts and genocides, all recycle through history with remarkable periodicity. The reason is that while there are an infinite number of combinations of specific details, there are a limited number of general rules that channel those details into similar grooves. Every historical event is unique, but not randomly so. They are all restricted by the parameters of the system. Such events recycle because the conditions of these parameters periodically come together in parallel fashion.
When social conditions include oppression of a people, there is a good chance that the response will be the belief in a rescuing messiah delivering redemption. The messiah myth, like all myths, may be a fictitious narrative, but it represents something deeply nonfictional about human nature and human history. To this extent it is an important component in answer to the question of how we believe.