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Global distribution of cultures with traditions of a ‘low sky’.
Additional examples continue to be registered.
© Marinus Anthony van der
Sluijs |
Touching Ground
Aug 5, 2013 | Thunderbolts.info | Rens Van Der Sluijs
Feb 13, 2013
Most researchers address ‘known’ questions, such as ‘what causes ice
ages?’, ‘how far is the moon?’ or ‘where did the ancestors of the human
species live?’. Comparative mythologists face the double challenge of
seeking answers to problems which most people are unfamiliar with in the
first place. Greek mythology provides a touchstone for almost anyone’s
grasp of mythology as a whole, but is really atypical and
unrepresentative in many respects.
A cross-cultural study of so-called ‘creation myths’ identifies
hundreds of ‘archetypes’, often bewildering, which have not even been
acknowledged, let alone explained. Among the most widespread of these is
the curious motif of the ‘low sky’ – an intellectual puzzle hardly
anyone has even heard of.
That the ‘sky’ used to rest much lower above the earth than it does
today, inconveniencing people, is a refrain encountered in spades, in
almost every creation myth. Whereas the Greek myth of Ouranos’ former
penetration of Gaia at best preserved a vestige, hardly any cultures
suppressed the idea. The following random selection of examples barely
scratches the surface, but gives a flavour of the material, stopping
just short of nausea:
The Khasi (Meghalaya, northeast India) related: “In olden days, when
the earth was very young, they say that heaven and earth were very near
to one another …” As for “the origin of the sky”, the Mantra, a Jakun
group (Malay Peninsula), “believe that at first it was very low and
close to the earth, so much so that Blo, one of the first men, bumped
against it”. The Ngaju Dayak (east Kalimantan) believed that ‘The sky
was … in the beginning close above the earth; it consists of an edible,
oily substance and served the people for food.’ On Sumatra, the Batak
stated: “Formerly heaven was nearer the earth …” The Manóbo (Mindanao),
as well as people in northern Luzon, both in the Philippines, sustained
“the belief that the sky was once very near the earth …” The Tagálog
(originally southern Luzon) stated:
“In former times the sky was very low and could be touched with the
hand; when men were playing, they would strike their heads against it
whenever they jumped upward.”
The natives of Tahiti concurred that “at first the heavens joined the
earth …” On Tuamotu, the narrative of creation began with a time when
“mankind … was confined in narrow spaces” and “when the sky hung low
over earth and sea”. On Manihiki (Northern Cook Islands), “The heavens
and the earth were supposed to have been at one time united.” Members of
the Mandalbingu group (northern Arnhem Land, Australia) reported that
“long, long ago, the sky was so close to the earth”. The Wotjobaluk
(central-western Victoria, Australia) “account for the space between the
earth and the sky by saying that at one time they touched each other,
that is to say, the sky lay on the earth”. Again, a tribe of the
Wiradjuri from the headwaters of the Murrumbidgee River (central New
South Wales, Australia) held that …
“… the sky at one time in the ages ago was not up high where it now
is. It was down so low to the ground that a man could not walk upright.
Then no living thing stood erect. … the sky was so low that a man could
not stand upright, but was stooped as low as a wombat … the sky … was
only a foot or two …”
Similarly, in Benin it “is said that in early times the sky was quite
close, only about two meters from the earth …” The Nuba (southern
Sudan) agreed that “in the beginning the sky was low down and close to
the earth, in fact it was so near that man could touch it.” The Yagua
(northeastern Perú) contended:
‘Before the birth of the sun, the sky was low, low, almost caressing
the earth. The worlds almost touched each other. It was, therefore, very
easy to pass from one cosmic zone to another.’
Members of the Sikuani nation (the Orinoco river basin, Colombia)
recalled a time when “the sky was rather low”, “the firmament was low”,
“the sky still hung low”, and “the sky was not as it is now”, for
“previously it had been very low”. The Nuu-chah-nulth (west coast of
Vancouver Island, British Columbia) recalled the time when ‘the sky was
still near the earth’. And the Hopi of Oraibi (Navajo County, Arizona)
claimed that, at the beginning of creation, “the people … found the
firmament, the ceiling of this world, low down upon the earth – the
floor of this world.”
The excessively low height specified in many of these accounts is
striking, bordering on the absurd. Yet the theme is solidly embedded in a
web of internally consistent ideas. The concept of the proximate sky as
a low-hanging ‘ceiling’ morphs into another staple of traditional
cosmologies – the notion that the sky used to be a solid ‘firmament’. As
the natives of Kiribati (Micronesia) had it:
“… heaven … was like hard rock that stuck to the earth. And heaven
and earth were called the Darkness and the Cleaving Together. … the
heavens were not yet high … In the beginning Heaven and Earth clove
together. … Heaven was a rock lying over Earth and rooted in the deep
places of the Sea.”
The transition of this to the present condition is related in the
ubiquitous tales of the ‘lifting of the sky’ or the ‘separation of sky
and earth’, often by means of the
axis mundi or world axis.
The phenomenology of the polar aurora may help to build a new
hypothesis from the ground up. Lay observers have often likened
contemporary aurorae to domes, tents, canopies, ceilings or floors,
suggestive of a lowered ‘sky’. For example, a Herbert Choate of Drexel,
Nebraska, reported as follows on the great aurora of 14 May 1921:
“At 11 p. m. the heavens appeared like the roof of an immense
gold-lined cave with stalactites (curtains) of light extending toward
the earth. Streamers of delicately tinted light shot up from every part
of the horizon. One Omaha newspaper likened the aurora to ‘a great tent
of light that completely covered the city’.”
At Springfield, Illinois, the same aurora was described as “a huge
dome or canopy over the earth”. And an “unmarried shaman” from Ikogmut
(lower Yukon, Alaska) experienced a cosmological vision in which he was
not taken up into the sky, as one would expect, but the “sky” came down
towards him – in what was doubtless an auroral display:
“As night came on he fell asleep, and as he slept he saw the air
filled with falling stars, and then that the sky was sinking toward him
until finally it rested upon the hilltop so close that he had barely
enough room to move about below it.”
Of course, such incidental reports cannot do justice to the mythology
proper of the ‘low sky’, which referred to a prolonged condition
prevailing during a distinct ‘age of myth’. Even so, they do provide an
important pointer to a promising solution. As a low-down, geomagnetic
reversals and excursions are events during which the earth’s magnetic
dipole field collapses and the magnetosphere contracts; whether the one
causes the other or
vice versa is a chicken-and-egg problem. At
any rate, the magnetopause is compressed onto the ionosphere, driving
the aurora down to lower altitudes. Because the enfeebled magnetosphere
is less efficient in deflecting in-flowing particles from the solar wind
from the earth’s atmosphere, the intensity of auroral activity
increases. And as the magnetic poles drift towards the equator and minor
dip poles gain strength, the outcome is a dramatically enhanced,
low-altitude aurora manifesting on a global scale – lasting perhaps as
long as the geomagnetic disturbance. Presumably, the eventual recovery
of the magnetosphere and the dipole field would give the impression of a
‘heaving heaven’, just as creation myths worldwide attest to.
Extracting historical information from myth is a touchy undertaking,
but with such consistent testimony as outlined above it is simply
incumbent on unbiased scholars to investigate the nexus of folk ideas
concerning the former adjacency of the sky to the earth. Geomagnetic
excursions are known to have happened within the past 15,000 years and
seem to provide a down-to-earth solution to the enigma of the oppressive
sky.
Rens Van Der Sluijs
Mythopedia.info
Books by Rens Van Der Sluijs:
Traditional Cosmology: The Global Mythology of Cosmic Creation and Destruction
Volume One: Preliminaries Formation
Volume Two: Functions
Volume Three: Differentiation
Volume Four: Disintegration
The Mythology of the World Axis
The World Axis as an Atmospheric Phenomenon
