How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [109]
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.
THE GHOST DANCE AS MYTHMAKING
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