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Tonatiuh, the Aztec Sun god, who wavered upon
his first rising until
bloody sacrifices were made.
From the Codex Telleriano-Remensis (16th
Century). |
If folk memory is anything to go by, global warming in its most dreaded form is a thing of the past.
The universality of flood myths is widely known, but fewer people are
aware that traditions of unbearable heat, often leading to a
devastating
Weltbrand, are just as ubiquitous. Although many
reports do not identify the cause of the steep rise in temperature or
the wildfire associated with the ‘age of myth’, others persistently
attribute it to a group of phenomena we may conveniently call ‘anomalous
suns’.
Generally, the sources trace the erstwhile emission of relentless
heat to four solar properties, singly or combined, all of which seem
equally bizarre when applied to the quotidian sun.
Firstly, many accounts impute a
greater intensity to the
sun’s radiation at this time. The Yao (south of Lake Malawi) told of
such an incident: “The sun gave way to fierceness, and said, ‘Let me
shine and destroy people’.” The Chukchi (northeastern Siberia) told of a
series of violent natural events, in one of which “Sun … scorches the
people.” Referring to a long time ago, the Klallam (Washington State)
said that “the sun … was much hotter then than now. … it has not been so
hot on the earth since.”
According to the Cherokee (originally along
the Tennessee), the sun – traversing the path she follows today – used
to kill many people in spite:
“The Sun lived on the other side of the sky vault, but her daughter
lived in the middle of the sky, directly above the earth … Now, the Sun
hated the people on the earth, because they could never look straight at
her without screwing up their faces. … The Sun was jealous and planned
to kill all the people, so every day when she got near her daughter’s
house she sent down such sultry rays that there was a great fever and
the people died by hundreds, until everyone had lost some friend and
there was fear that no one would be left.”
And as stated by the Huichol (central Mexico), the sun afforded
little pleasure when it was first launched into the sky by “the people”:
“When the Sun radiated his light and heat over the world, all the
nocturnal animals … became very angry, and shot arrows at him. His heat
was great, and his glaring rays blinded the nocturnal animals; and with
eyes closed they retired into caves, water-pools, and trees.”
Some cultures harboured doubt about the identity of the radiant
oppressor, casting it as a false sun or an early form of the sun. The
Okanagon people (British Columbia) related with respect to an early
‘experimental’ sun: “Somebody proposed that Quilquilā́ken, the
red-headed woodpecker, should be put in the heavens for a sun. He was
accordingly put up, but was found to be too hot; and objections being
made, he was taken down again”. And the Quiché Maya (Guatemala)
remembered the unbridled heat of the sun upon its first rising in the
east:
“And then the face of the earth was dried out by the sun. The sun was
like a person when he revealed himself. His face was hot, so he dried
out the face of the earth. … And when the sun had risen just a short
distance he was like a person, and his heat was unbearable. Since he
revealed himself only when he was born, it is only his reflection that
now remains. As they put it in the ancient text, / ‘The visible sun is
not the real one.’”
Secondly, the excessive heat is often attributed to the sun’s markedly
lower position in
the sky, in line with the common belief that the sky as a whole used to
be much lower than it is today. Some societies recalled this condition
wistfully. For example, the Tohono O’odham (southwestern Arizona)
averred with respect to the “primeval days”: “At that time the sun was
nearer to the earth than now, the seasons were equal, and there was no
necessity for clothing to guard against the inclemency of the weather.”
And the Shipibo-Conibo (Peruvian Amazonia) told with respect to the
antediluvian period: ‘The sun stood so close above the earth that one
could cook food by placing it in the sunlight.’
The dominant sentiment was negative, however. The Cherokee stated:
“When the earth was dry and the animals came down, it was still dark, so
they got the sun and set it in a track to go every day across the
island from east to west, just overhead. It was too hot this way”. The
Diné (Four Corners Region) relay that the first “people” created the sun
with a crystal that “lighted into a blaze”: “The people retreated far
back on account of the great heat, which continued increasing. The men
from the four points found the heat so intense that they arose, but they
could hardly stand, as the heavens were so close to them.” When
Atseatsine “elevated the sun a short distance it tipped a little and
burned vegetation and scorched the people, for it was still too near. …
it continued to burn everything. … the people are suffering and all is
burning”. The Keres (Santa Ana and Santo Domingo, New Mexico) and Hopi
(northeastern Arizona) passed on the following tradition: “When Sun was
first placed in the sky, he came too close to the earth and scorched
it”. And the Ute (primarily Utah and Colorado) remembered a time of
erratic daylight before the institution of the day and night, the
seasons and the years, when Ta-vi, “the sun-god”, was fickle: “In that
long ago, … the sun roamed the earth at will. When he came too near with
his fierce heat the people were scorched …”
Thirdly, the torridity may sometimes be blamed on the sun remaining
stationary in
the sky. For example, according to the indigenous people of the Andaman
Islands the first people had “uninterruptedly enjoyed … the privilege
of daylight”, but “the sun, one day, burned so fiercely as to cause
great distress”.
And fourthly,
multiple simultaneous suns, including the
present sun, were often held accountable for the discomfort, culminating
in a world-embracing blaze. The Yaghan (Tierra del Fuego, South
America) believed that the current sun is the benevolent son of a former
one, “the senior sun-man, who was a truculent old man and who caused
the first world conflagration by making the ocean boil and by setting
the world ablaze in a primordial fire.” According to a variant account,
“powerful Táruwalem appeared quite suddenly in the east and set fire to
the entire region. … At that time the whole world burned up all at once,
and later everything cooled off again.” Again, the Ngarinyin
(Kimberleys, northwest Australia) informed that, before “the little sun
has made her journey from the east to the west to give the world day and
night”, this one and her larger mother used to dwell permanently in the
east, causing excessive heat:
“Long, long ago, in the East, behind the world, there lived two suns.
A big fat mother sun and a little daughter sun. They lived in hollow
logs. They came out to give the world light, but they shone so fiercely
and for so long that everything began to burn up. The ground became
scorched. The rivers dried up … The animals began to die of thirst.”
Providing yet another twist in the bewildering kaleidoscope of myth,
one of the suns was often thought to have been or become the moon. For
example, legends of the Bunun (originally of central Taiwan) “say that
there were once two suns in the sky. The heat was unbearable” and one of
the two was subsequently turned into the moon. Among the Atayal
(northern Taiwan), too, it “was believed that in the ancient time, two
suns circled around in the sky, and there was no separation between day
and night. One of the suns was much larger than the one we see today,
and it caused the weather to be extremely hot. … the plants started to
shrivel and the rivers started to dry up which made agricultural crops
impossible to grow. The people on earth suffered greatly.” Eventually,
the “bigger sun” was changed into the moon. And the Twana (Washington
State) blamed a past lethal outburst of heat on the moon, which had been
intended by the creator, Dokibatt, “to be the sun”:
“In the morning it rose, but it shone too hot and caused the water to
boil, killing the fish and also many animals on land, and did much
damage generally, so then he made the sun as it now is to rule the day,
and condemned the moon to shine at night.”
Still other traditions feature a larger number of torches or ‘suns’
striking the world. A well-known Chinese myth, for instance, has it that
ten suns used to take turns to travel across the sky, while the others
rested on a cosmic tree; yet on one fateful day during the reign of
emperor Yáo (fl. 23rd century BCE), all ten appeared at once, thereby
causing a drought and threatening all life upon the earth. A parallel
tradition circulated in Mongolia: “Once upon a time there rose seven
suns in the universe, and it was exposed to a burning drought. The earth
was heated fiercely, the streams and rivers evaporated, the plants and
trees were parched. People and living beings suffered from intolerable
heat, and horses and animals were tormented by painful thirst. It was
dreadfully difficult to live or even survive.” The Batak (Sumatra)
similarly commemorated the appearance of eight suns, which partly dried
up the sea.
Just like the global deluge, the sweltering heat and the flames seem
to have resulted in mass deaths, driving many a species to extinction.
In Berossus’ rendition of the Babylonian creation myth, the heroic god
Marduk, hailed as “the sun, the sunlight of the gods”, separated heaven
and earth. The primordial “monsters”, “wondrous beings with peculiar
forms”, “could not endure the strength of the light and were destroyed.”
The Quiché reflected: “Perhaps we would have no relief from the
voracious animals today – the puma, jaguar, rattlesnake, fer-de-lance –
and perhaps it wouldn’t even be our day today, if the original animals
hadn’t been turned to stone by the sun when he came up.” The Shuswap
(Kamloops area, British Columbia) claimed that the period when “the
earth was very cold” and “people suffered much, and constantly shivered”
ended when the Chinook wind was released from “a large round bag
hanging on a post” in the land of the sun in the south: “At last the
heat became so intense that the country took fire … Thus the earth
burned up for a long distance north, and many trees and people were
destroyed. … soon the Chinook wind commenced to blow, and, the snow and
ice melting under its influence, the people felt the cold no more.” And,
as shown in the above survey, the proto-sun killed “many animals on
land” (Twana), “planned to kill all the people” (Cherokee), angered “all
the nocturnal animals” (Huichol), made many “animals … die of thirst”
(Ngarinyin), and “tormented by painful thirst” all “living beings”
(Mongolia).
The crisis ended in sundry manners, varying from tale to tale.
Whereas in some the combustion of the world simply ran its course,
others relate that the intensity, the proximity, the inertia or the
multiplicity of the luminary was remedied by the
shooting of superfluous suns, snaring the sun, putting it into motion, driving it away or launching a replacement.
These densely interlocking traditions present a daunting intellectual
challenge. The actual sun may once have shone too fiercely for human
comfort, but can hardly account for memories of a sun that was much too
close, multiple suns, a motionless sun and other events preceding the
institution of day and night, or the shooting and noosing of suns.
Exploding and possibly impacting fireballs are likely behind some of the
myths, but only in cases where the event is short-lived, no celestial
lights remain stationary and the cycle of day and night is already in
place. Where the scorching heat is produced during a period of primaeval
darkness or erratic intervals of light for a time exceeding hours,
perhaps by a fixed object perceived as an early avatar of the modern
sun, the reference may have been to a different light source altogether.
Anthony Peratt’s hypothesis of an intense-auroral z-pinch features a
set of ‘plasmoids’ contained within the hollow sheaths of a sustained
plasma column, which emitted exceedingly bright synchrotron radiation
light. Although only one, two or three of these were generally observed
at a time, a full set of nine may in rare instances have been made out.
The stack of plasmoids would typically remain stationary relative to the
earth’s surface.
Empirical support for such a scenario may come in the form of
geophysical and palaeontological evidence for intense, but localised
wildfires with significant increases in biomass burning, episodes of
mass extinction and radioactive hotspots. As it happens, all three are
characteristic for the tail end of the Pleistocene epoch, especially
during and towards the end of the Allerød climatic oscillation.
Scientists sustain a heated debate on the possible causes of these
events. Exploding bolides or impacts are among the contenders, but have
come under fire. An alternative, Paul LaViolette’s scenario of a series
of energetic solar proton events, remains viable and resonates with
Peratt’s postulate of an intense solar outburst as the mechanism that
provoked the ‘intense aurora’. Perhaps the sun was responsible for this
prehistoric spell of cosmogenic global warming after all – albeit
through the medium of transient atmospheric plasmoids. Playing with
fire? Or nothing to make light of?
Rens Van Der Sluijs
CLICK HERE FOR THE SPANISH TRANSLATION
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
and:
The Mythology of the World Axis
The World Axis as an Atmospheric Phenomenon
