It is surprising that we live thinking the way we do at all. We have in our history events – really big events, not finding a penny on the sidewalk when we are thinking of money – that defy our current world view. The list of such events is large, but here I want to focus on the fulfillment of myth. This list, too, is large, but I have four, or maybe five, that come immediately to mind. I have mentioned most or all of them before in these pages, but I have never brought them together, and I am called to do so because of a realization I had yesterday, which I will explain towards the end.
First: the legend of Quetzalcoatl. This became better known to the general public when the Aztec calendar came to the end of its cycle in (our calendar year) 2012. Chances are that the reader has forgotten about this, as I did until now, but it briefly was a big deal among some New Agers as signifying the End Times, which was a focus of great mirth in the standard news media, to which cynicism is a state of grace. Anyway, as we can see, the end of the world did not happen (which was not prophesized by the calendar; rather, it spoke of the ending of the old era and the beginning of a new, coinciding with the time line given by the Old World astrologers) but we were entreated to the Aztec legend of Quetzalcoatl along with it. “Q” was the major god of knowledge and enlightenment who was represented by the winged or feathered serpent. He gave culture to the Aztecs and then left over the seas to the East. He was to return some day, with white skin and a beard, and would come in the year I Reed. In 1509, the sister of the emperor of the Aztecs, Montezuma, fell ill and was entombed on her supposed death. She did not die, however, and was removed from the tomb after again showing signs of life. It was then that she told the lords of her dream during the coma: that many ships would come from the east bearing black crosses. The men in them would conquer the Aztecs. This was all as it came to pass when Cortes and his caravels landed at what is now Vera Cruz (True Cross) with about six hundred men on Good Thursday 1519, in the Aztec year I Reed, the masts of the boats forming large black crosses against the white sails.
They conquered a nation of about 8 million people with less than a thousand men and the help of about 100,000 conquered subjects of the Aztecs. Some modern revisionist scholars conjecture that much of this legend was made up – which I think only shows their hostility to non-material reality – but even so, the triumph of the Conquest was nothing short of miraculous, and some of the elements of the legend, such as the date of return and the white skin and beard of Q, are still chiseled in the old stone of the Aztec empire. Myth come true.
Another myth that became known to us anthropologist through another anthropologist is a doozy: the myth of the return of Lono, another culture god, but this time of the Hawaiians. He, too, was to come again and circle the islands from (I think) right to left, stopping at certain points along the way. After the circumnavigation, he was to be sacrificed by the chiefs, his blood and death signifying the beginning of a new era. When Captain Cook arrived there as the first European, he circumnavigated in the right direction and stopped at the right places. They gave him and his men great feasts, and the women swarmed the boats to give them the pleasures they desired. This was all in line with how they should behave with the return of Lono - as was the murder of Captain Cook, as the sacrificed Lono, when he finally arrived at the right place at the right time. Subsequently, the Hawaiian chiefs quickly lost power to the whalers and new European settlers, the islands as a whole becoming, in a matter of decades, a part of an entirely different culture. Prophecy fulfilled.
I do not have the book with me on this one, but the outline as I remember it is this:
Towards the end of WWII, a US Airforce transport from Australia carrying several civilian personnel crashed in the interior highlands of New Guinea. There, several tribes lived in a large valley unaware of Europeans and almost unaware of anyone else even in New Guinea. They, too, had a culture god who left them, this time to the sky, who would someday return from the clouds, with the god and his divine people shimmying down on vines. They would bring marvelous new magic and cause the end of the old culture and the beginning of a new. Thus, when the plane came down, the villages, all at war or in alliance with each other, attempted to hold the survivors in their own camp to gain power. I forget much of the rest, but when the Airforce finally arrived with the rescuers – coming down on “vines attached to clouds”- parachutes – a new era began for those people. Myth fulfilled.
There are many other myths of a similar nature, so many that even the materialist revisionists would have a hard time proving them all made-up, but I do want to mention one that radiates sadness: the Ghost Dance revival of the Plains Indians. Here, many of the tribes of the American Plains, on their last legs in the late 1870’s and early 1880’s, fashioned a magical dance calling forth the appearance of the White Buffalo. This was to bring back all the herds and send the white (and black) people back to somewhere else, leaving the Indians with their old culture and lands intact once more. It did come about that a white buffalo was born somewhere, sometime in the 1990’s (as I recall), but not only are white and black people still here, but so is everyone else from every corner of the globe. This prophecy was not one from old times, but one made on the spot to bring hope to a subjugated people. It did not come to pass. It probably will never come to pass. I believe that it was made from wishful thinking, born out of pain and need rather than from real prophecy. In any case: prophecy unfulfilled.
All these came to mind the other day while in a class studying one of the works of Luke the Apostle, in his “Acts of the Apostles” in the New Testament. Luke was a Greek physician who came into the Apostle crowd after the Resurrection – that is, he was not one of the 12 Apostles (or one of the other 500 people) mentioned in the Bible who saw the risen Christ. However, he became Paul’s steadfast companion shortly after the Resurrection, and, to be honest, he is the best writer in the New Testament. His account of the days after the death of Jesus are fascinating. According to his testimony, Jesus came back from death to give witness to his divinity and to continue his teachings. He ascended into heaven after 40 days (a magic number in the Bible), telling them to stay in Jerusalem to be baptized by the Holy Spirit. On the Feast of Pentecost (50 days after the Resurrection), the spirit came to them ‘as a roaring wind and descended upon them as tongues of fire’ (my abbreviation of the quote), and they got the power: the power to speak in tongues, to heal, to prophesy, and to preach. They were, Luke says, to spread the news unto the entire world, for this would be the course that God would take, or command, to obtain for Israel the long-promised New Jerusalem. Luke reiterates Genesis 26: 4 when he says “In your offspring, all the families of the earth shall be blessed,” (Acts 3:25). As was said, again, in the Old Testament (Habakkuk, 2:14), “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the water covers the sea.”
And so it was. From the beginning - since the time of Abraham, the founding father of Israel, some 1800 years BC – the one god of the Jews promised that His (God’s) kingdom would spread throughout the world via the Jews. What this kingdom was to be was naturally misconstrued, for to the Jews, the promise could only be kept if Israel were to become the dominant nation among the world. Christ told them otherwise, although they would not believe it until after Pentecost, when, as Luke recalls, the Holy Spirit descended on Cornelius and his retinue, who were Gentiles (Acts, 10 – 11). Thus Paul was later able to state, “…that the Gentles are coheirs, members of the same body…” (Eph. 3: 6) That is, that all of humankind could now become an heir of Abraham through the Holy Spirit. Now, the world can clearly see that the message (the Promise) of Jehovah to Abraham has come through the promised one, Jesus Christ: the Word is in all the nations, as “the water covers the sea.”
This is not fudging, as it might seem, making of the promised Kingdom an abstract thing so that it might look true. The Apostles found that the Holy Spirit was intended for everyone shortly after the death of Christ, when He had only a few hundred true followers, led by the Twelve (Apostles). There was no way that any of the authors of the New Testament, written in the first century, should believe that a universal church would arise from Christ and spread throughout the world. In those times they were not only few in number, but persecuted by the Romans, the Jews, or both at once. It would not have looked promising to a modern PR man. Yet, the Holy Spirit insisted and the Twelve believed. And so it came to be. Myth fulfilled.
That is, almost. I will add here, as an aside, that the other myths of a coming new age were ultimately predicated on the ascendency of Christianity in Europe. Colonialization did not always look pretty, but the Word was spread and the other cultures did irrevocably change. We could say that the other myths were subsumed by the Christian myth (with the exception of the Ghost Dance, at least as far as we now know, but that, as explained, was a cult of desperation rather than a myth from old). But the Christian myth has not been fully fulfilled. As Luke reported in Acts, after Christ suddenly ascended into heaven, two men dressed in white came to stand beside them. “‘Men of Galilee,’ they said, ‘why do you stand here looking up at the skies? This Jesus who has been taken from you will return, just as you saw him go up into heaven.’ ” (Acts 1:10-11) Jesus, says the Christian myth, will return again. (As usual, I use the word “myth” objectively, not derisively. Myths are, simply, cultural stories that explain that which cannot be explained through ordinary means. This might run the gamut from ‘how the leopard got its spots’ to how and why the world and humans were created.) Nothing says this more than the final book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, but it, too, is inherent in the Old Testament: not only can we now go to Heaven thanks to the forgiveness of sins, as the New Testament says, but also, as the Old Testament says, there will come a day when Jehovah will rule the earth as well – that is, that Heaven will come to us.
We all know of the prophecy, but here’s the thing: the other myths of old have come true, including the impossible promise made by Jehovah to Abraham nearly 4, 000 years ago, that the God of the Jews would be set before the entire world – as it has, literally. So what of the New Age, of the Millennium of Christ’s rule on earth, as many Protestant denominations interpret the return of Christ (or of the Parousia, or eternal rule of Christ on earth, as the Catholics would have it)? If the other myths defied our common laws of cause and effect and told of great, even impossible, happenings of the future that came true, why not Revelation? We do not, as usual with all the myths, know the time, but what of the new age predicted by the Aztecs? What of the new age, Aquarius, predicted by both the ancient old world seers as well as the medieval alchemists? Isn’t it likely that they speak of one and the same thing, which would now be at its beginning?
I don’t know – I am not a prophet, which is a good thing, because bad things often happen to prophets. But these things, these strange things…sometimes the “holy spirit” comes upon one person or a group and things impossible to predict are revealed, and what is revealed comes true. What we can say with a fair degree of circumstantial certainty is this: the human race is destined by forces beyond our comprehension. We may tuck those forces (or force) into the subconscious or some other social science construct, but these never adequately explain how such things can happen. Instead, the source – what the myth-makers say, as maddeningly incomprehensible as that may be – is probably the truest account.
Which should give us pause, to say the least. I would lay odds against that “final coming” coming in my life time or in yours, as it has not yet come during other lives over the last two thousand years, but we should keep in mind what began this essay: that we should not believe in the way we ordinarily think if we wish to understand the big picture. The way of Truth must be told necessarily in another way. The second coming, or the beginning of a radically different reality, has been foretold in this 'other way' by the prophets. As Peter told the Jews in the Temple after he cured the cripple by calling down the name of Jesus, “Fellow Israelites, why does this surprise you? Why do you stare at us as if we had made this man walk by some power of holiness of our own?” (Acts 3:12) He tells them that all of this, this power of the Son of Man that was promised to Abraham, has already come to them in the man named Jesus. It had been prophesied. Why do you wonder?
Because, of course, our thinking is limited and flawed. But we have been warned. When the prophecy is fulfilled, we should not, as Peter admonishes, be surprised.
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