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THE ARCHAEOLOGY

OF THE SOUL

of all the many forms which natural religion has assumed none probably has exerted

so deep and far-reaching an influence on human life as the belief in immortality

Pete Stewart

A melancholy monument of fruitless labour and barren ingenuity expended in prying

into that great mystery of which fools proffer their knowledge and wise men

confirm their ignorance

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PART ONE

EXILE

Before this World was madeThere reigned Armf in the realm of Heaven

Amidst his sons.

I will tell you of the days

Of the Descent. How Old Armf sent

The Gods from Heaven

Go now,

Call a despairing land to smiling life

Above the jealous sea, and found sure homesteads

For a new race whose destiny is notThe eternal life of Gods.

Here the Beginning was: from Armf's vales

Through the desert regions the exiled Gods approached

The edge of Heaven,

For many a day

Across unwatered plains the Great Ones journeyed,

And sandy desertsfor such is the stern bar

Set by Armf 'twixt his smiling vales

And the stark cliff's edge which his sons approached

Tremblingly, till from the sandy brink they peered

Down the sheer precipice.

Beneath Hung chaosdank blackness and the threatening roar

Of untamed waters. Then Odudwa spoke:

"Orsha, what did we? And what fault was ours?

Outcasts to-day; to-morrow we must seek

Our destiny in dungeons, and beneath

That yawning blackness we must found a city

For unborn men.

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Of Blue Hexagons and Stone-age Boulders

The body of ideas that underlie any particular cultures expression, though it

will inevitably have its dissenters, is usually considered to have its origins in the

origins of the culture itself; indeed, it draws its validity from such antiquity. Cultures

adapt themselves to changing demands on their core ideas by subtle adjustments to

these ideas; sometimes the dissenters get the upper hand in the process of adjustment

and the result is revolutionary changes to these ideas. The ideas themselves however,

have a source and this source is usually found to lie in the explanation that a culture

has about how it came to be. Such an explanation is expressed in what are referred toas Creation Myths. Called on to justify or explain their behaviour, a people might

say we do it this way because this is the way the Ancestors did it when they were

creating the world. Thus an American judge called on to adjudicate in a contended

constitutional issue is expected to ask what did the founding fathers intend us to do?

One might well expect any two bodies of such formative ideas to contain much

common material; a culture is unlikely to harbour ideas that are destructive of its own

interests, and human interests are held in common at the core level. We should not be

surprised therefore if certain basic ideas appear again and again in stories from around

the world that tell of the early days in the history of the world. What is more, such

stories must have been originally formulated by minds physiologically

indistinguishable from ours. Current thinking suggests that a crucial characteristic ofsuch a mind is what has been described as an Agency detector; the role of such a

feature is to ascribe the cause of any phenomenon to the actions of an agent. The

ultimate expression of this Agency detector is to assign a Creator for the World.

Similarly, it seems likely that such ideas as an Otherworld populated by spirits may

well be the product of the imagery generated by the human neurophysiology while in

an altered state, that is, in dreams, in drug-induced hallucinations or in trance. It

seems reasonable, since the Creator is not visible in this world, to assign him or her

to this Otherworld.

The detailed generation of these ideas will be considered in the second half of

this book. In this half, I want to consider those aspects of creation stories which

amount to what philosopher Daniel Dennett called Blue Hexagons:Consider the fact that two widely separated cultures both used boats; this is no

evidence at all of a shared cultural heritage. If both cultures were to paint eyes on the

bows of their boats, it would be much more interesting, but still a rather obvious move

in the game of design. If both cultures were to paint, say, blue hexagons on the bows

of their boats, this would be telling indeed.

Just how blue, how nearly hexagonal do both designs have to be before we have

what amounts to something telling? It has become almost trivial to point to the more

or less universal story of the cataclysmic flood that destroys most of creation; does

this qualify? It would seem not; a continuous stream of commentators have been able

to point to one natural disaster after another that in their eyes would explain this story.Nor would the usual explanation for such a catastrophe; once an agent has been made

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responsible for creation, it is a simple step to assign that agent a parental role, a role

that naturally involves punishment for disobeying parental instructions.

What, then, about the story that says it was the Gods themselves that disobeyed

their father, were exiled them heaven to create the earth and on completing their task,

returned to their father, having first transformed themselves into elements of the

landscape?The story at the opening of this section is one such. It comes from an early 20 th

century retelling of the traditions of the Yoruba peoples of West Africa. Here is

another, from the northern tribes of central Australia::

Atnatu, the primordial being of the Kaitish tribe [is regarded] as preceding the

alcheringa [Dreamtime] times, that is the epoch of the creation . . . Because certain

of his sons neglected his sacred services he expelled them from the sky. These came

down to earth and became the ancestors of men.

These were the Dreamtime Ancestors who, having created the features of the

earth each returned to the sky via one particular spot in the landscape.