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The First 'People' in Space
Jul
10, 2009
According to some traditions, in
a previous era, before the flood or
some other global disaster, the
earth was inhabited by a race of
strange creatures exhibiting a
mixture of human and animal traits.
This abstruse tradition once
prevailed in virtually every
culture. Myths and legends
frequently describe these hybrid
beings as ancestors, portrayed as
animals acting in the way of
‘people’. For example, the Kato
people, of Mendocino County,
California, related that the first
people “all had animal names, and
later, when Indians came to live on
this earth, these ‘first people’
were changed into the animals which
bear their names.”
The Huichol, of central Mexico,
concurred: “In the beginning of time
people were mostly animals,
serpents, jaguars, and mountain
lions … – gods, animals, and ancient
people being one”. The Mocoví, of
Argentina, averred: “In primeval
times animals were people and they
spoke. Later they were transformed.”
The Shilluk, of the Upper Nile
region, stated that there was an
early time when “men were
masquerading as animals,” and so on.
Examples can be multiplied ad
infinitum.
Mythologists with a taste for
gene-borne ‘racial memories’ might
lean towards the view that such
traditions commemorate mankind’s
evolutionary kinship with primates
and other mammals. However, this
would violate the integrity of the
mythical theme, for the primordial
race of myth is of a wholly
different order. The creatures are
often depicted as repulsive
monstrosities, far removed from any
biological reality. In western New
Mexico, for instance, the Zuñi
specified a number of amphibian and
reptilian features in the
countenance of these first ‘people’:
“Men and the creatures were nearer
alike then than now: black were our
fathers the late born of creation …
cold and scaly their skins like
those of mud-creatures; goggled
their eyes like those of an owl;
membranous their ears like those of
cave-bats; webbed their feet like
those of walkers in wet and soft
places; and according as they were
elder or younger, they had tails,
longer or shorter. They crouched
when they walked, often indeed,
crawling along the ground like
toads, lizards and newts; like
infants who still fear to walk
straight, they crouched …”
These curious ‘ancestors’ are
frequently accorded the faculty of
great magical power, like that of
gods or mighty shamans. A “very
widespread” tradition among the
tribes of New South Wales,
Australia, was “that the earth was
originally peopled by a race much
more powerful, especially in the
arts magic, than that which now
inhabits it. … The Wathi-wathi call
them Bookoomuri, and say they were
famous for fighting, hunting, &c.,
and were eventually changed into
animals …” Along the Thompson River,
of British Columbia, one used to be
told that, “The beings who inhabited
the world during the mythological
age, until the time of the
transformers, were called spêtā´kL.
They were men with animal
characteristics. They were gifted in
magic, and their children reached
maturity in a few months.”
In comparative mythology,
cross-cultural patterns lead the
way. A vital clue to the nature of
these mystifying – and apparently
radiant – beings is the complete
interchangeability of the first
‘animals’ or ‘people’ with stars.
Practically universal is the
conviction that the ‘stars’,
including the sun and the moon,
dwelled on earth before taking up
residence in the sky. The Makiritare,
of Venezuela, provide an example in
case: “In the beginning, the night
sky was empty, black. The Stars were
people. They lived on the Earth …”
The Chamacoco, of Paraguay, recall
“the time when the sky was near …
There was no sun and no stars; all
these were living among the people.
Sun and Moon lived like human beings
…” “In those days the sun and the
moon and everyone were human beings
and lived on this earth” – add the
Sikuani, of eastern Colombia.
Yet, such stories are neither about
real animals nor about actual
celestial bodies. A Mongolian
variant of a Buddhist creation myth
portrays the first ‘living beings’,
amoeba-like, as luminous floating
entities, blessed with the gift of
longevity, that multiplied through a
simple process of splitting: ‘Though
the people lived on the surface of
the earth, they did not employ feet
when moving about, but floated
through the air. They did not feed
on the impure terrestrial foods, but
on the pure Ssamādhi-food, and they
were not born from the body of a
mother, as there was yet no gender
distinction between male and female,
but through emanation. For seeing
they required neither the sun nor
the moon, as they saw everything by
means of their own radiation. Nor
was the designation ‘human’ used for
them at the time, as their common
name was ‘living beings’.’
Perhaps even more perplexing, though
a crucial piece of the puzzle, is
the widespread tradition that all
forms of life originally jostled for
space on a narrow piece of ‘earth’
dominated by the axis mundi, in its
form as a sky-reaching tree,
mountain, pillar, and so on. The
Waorani, of equatorial Amazonia,
contended that bobehuè or the giant
Ceiba tree (Ceiba pentandra)
“contains all forms of life … All
that was alive dwelled in the giant
tree …” Prominent in the mythology
of Kiribati, Micronesia, was “the
First Tree, the Ancestor Sun, and
ancestors grew from it … these
heroic beings, sprung from the
branches and roots of a single
ancestral tree”. On Sumatra, the
Toba Batak knew a tree of life,
“reaching from the underworld into
the upperworld … and at the same
time we read that all men, animals,
birds, fishes, etc., have originated
from it.” What is more, these
entities derived their sustenance
from the sky column, earning it the
familiar title of ‘tree of life’;
Sikuani storytellers, for instance,
would point out that Kalievírnae,
the tree of life, was once the only
repository of food in the world.
Traditions of this kind, though all
preposterous at first, make sense as
attempts to describe certain curious
plasma forms that appeared on the
screen of the sky at a time when the
earth experienced intense
electromagnetic disturbances. Over
the past decade, scientists at
Russia’s Kurchatov Institute have
made much headway in the modeling of
so-called “self-similar skeletal
structures” that arise in
electrically discharging plasmas in
various fusion devices, in space and
during “severe weather phenomena”.
They defined heteromacs as “strongly
twisted magnetic flux ropes”, almost
closed, that emerge in heterogeneous
magneto-plasma configurations and
turn an initially single filament
into “a fractal, dendritic
structure”. Kukushkin and
Rantsev-Kartinov envisioned the
development of “cellular, and
bubble-like clusters” from these
heteromacs as a possible concomitant
effect of a highly enhanced aurora
such as might have developed during
the Neolithic or the Early Bronze
Age. If true, these forms might be
the bizarre creatures universally
identified in mythology as the
‘ancestors’. The physical attachment
of the heteromacs to the central
z-pinch plasma column strongly
reminds of the universal belief that
the first ‘people’ dwelled in the
direct vicinity of the axis mundi,
while their battle for space
reflects the fractal capacity of
infinite growth. The same disaster
that caused the collapse of the
plasma column also annihilated this
first brand of ‘people’.
Rens Van der Sluijs
www.mythopedia.info
Further Reading:
The Mythology of the World Axis;
Exploring the Role of Plasma in
World Mythology
www.lulu.com/content/1085275
The World Axis as an
Atmospheric Phenomenon
www.lulu.com/content/1305081
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