How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [111]
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,