How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [114]
THE ETERNAL, RETURN OF THE GHOST DANCE
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