For the past several years, I have been harvesting and planting California Buckeyes during the winter rains. The trees sprout from the buckeye itself, which is about the size of a seven-year-old child's balled-up fist. With the correct amount of rain and sunlight, a taproot breaks out from the body of the nut, extending like a narrow white tail, its knobbly extension dropping straight down. After it has grown several inches, and become convinced it has encountered suitable soil, the base of the root birfurcates in a vivid fuchsia split at the edge of the nut, and the tree's first leaves, and what will become its stalk, and later its trunk, unfurl upward from here. Having done this several times now, I learned this year that the seedlings need to be planted in very deep containers. In the first several months of growth, the taproot drops straight down with the same velocity the leaves and stalk rise up. This is different than many other plants, many other trees, which develop broader spreading root systems. Nourished by the hulking nut, the tree's first year of growth is in hyperdrive. If the container holding the Buckeye is too shallow the taproot smashes into its bottom, get frustrated, circles, coils back on itself. It wants to grow straight down. It is seeking the depths.
When does the modern era begin? What is the dawn of the modern world, the age we know? What are the mental figurations that give rise to it? Humans have been here for at least two hundred thousand years, and yet our recorded history reaches back less than five. Ninety-seven percent of our lineage history is veiled in the shadows of deep time. Yet if we turn toward the origin stories of western civilization, and listen with the ears of trackers, we may yet hear echoes of something older. The stories we have inherited that claim to be 'In the beginning...' aren't nearly ancient enough to be so. Let us pick up the trail, and walk it back, until it dissolves into mist. Possibly, if our senses are sharp enough, our ways of knowing and listening more embodied and nuanced, our sensory radar will penetrate the fog and we will catch a glimpse of the pattern behind the pattern and be able to follow it long after we can see it. I am seeking out the taproot of supremacy. I can see the tree in full form, planted squarely in the psyche of the modern world. I know it came from some seed, some nut: that it grew in us, wasn't always this way.
I assert that we can decolonize the world all we want, but if we don't decolonize people's minds, by which I really mean our hearts, nothing will change. We will simply exchange one set of oppressions for another. From where was it birthed, this taproot of supremacy, and what did it engender? How did things come to be this way? Come, listen in your body with me to the background radiation in the white space behind our origin stories. Let us point our listening at the origin of things.
Some facts that can be set out:
March 30, 2023: the Vatican formally repudiates the Doctrine of Discovery, 571 years after the papal bull Dum Diversas (1452) authorized Alfonso V of Portugal to reduce any “Saracens (Muslims) and pagans and any other unbelievers” to perpetual enslavement. This papal bull, written nearly six hundred years ago, was one of a trio of authorizations granted by the Vatican to Christian kings that gave the Catholic churches the imprimatur to colonize the non-European (non-Christian) world, and established the legal basis for the enslavement of other people, and the concept of terra nullius (empty lands). When I was in elementary school, a mere forty years ago, I was told that Christopher Columbus discovered America. The papal bull Inter Caetara (1493) explicitly grants to the Christian kings land and title to all lands extending in all directions out from Europe not occupied or governed by Christians.
“And, in order that you may enter upon so great an undertaking with greater readiness and heartiness endowed with the benefit of our apostolic favor, we, [the Vatican] of our own accord, not at your instance nor the request of anyone else in your regard, but of our own sole largess and certain knowledge and out of the fullness of our apostolic power, by the authority of Almighty God conferred upon us in blessed Peter and of the vicarship of Jesus Christ, which we hold on earth, do by tenor of these presents, should any of said islands have been found by your envoys and captains, give, grant, and assign to you and your heirs and successors, kings of Castile and Leon, forever, together with all their dominions, cities, camps, places, and villages, and all rights, jurisdictions, and appurtenances, all islands and mainlands found and to be found, discovered and to be discovered towards the west and south, by drawing and establishing a line from the Arctic pole, namely the north, to the Antarctic pole, namely the south, no matter whether the said mainlands and islands are found and to be found in the direction of India or towards any other quarter, the said line to be distant one hundred leagues towards the west and south from any of the islands commonly known as the Azores and Cape Verde.”
-Inter Caetara (1493)
Upon what premise does it exert this 'moral' authority? Non-christians are not fully human. Here is the signature that we are looking for, the stamp of supremacy. The sanctioned church declares: We christians are human, you pagans are not. Pope Francis names it directly: “Never again can the Christian community allow itself to be infected by the idea that one culture is superior to others, or that it is legitimate to employ ways of coercing others.”
I call your attention, here at our beginnings in the present moment to one other place, a photograph in a newspaper article, seemingly unrelated. Here is a white woman in Iowa, in her thirties, who works in a hair salon, speaking about her views of Donald Trump, who has just been indicted. From her own diction, we can infer that she is not highly educated. "There's not enough Republicans supporting him," she says. "He's just very rude. And he doesn't talk like a president is supposed to." I bring your attention to the facial expression. What does supremacy look like?
I am not speaking of white supremacy specifically, because white supremacy is a flavor, a sub-category I would propose to you, of this larger phenomenon of supremacy. Yet supremacy itself, in all its variants, is a form of smugness. A smirk of dismissal. Notice the tilt of the head. The slight uplift of the chin so that she can look down at us. The squint. We are in the realm of archetypes. I mean no disrespect to this particular lady: I am looking through her at the gesture; the place in consciousness from which she addresses us. Now here is the gaze of the man she disdains allegiance for.
Again, notice the gaze, and from where it is directed.
So let us begin with these portraits, the Vatican's repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery, 571 years after they enshrined it in papal authority, and the smirk of a thirty-something woman in Iowa looking down her nose at us. The act and its expression.
I remember the first time I ever became conscious of social hierarchy. I was seven years old, and had just been displaced from my home, community, and place. I grew up in a small town in New Hampshire, in the Connecticut river valley. My father was a landscape architect, and at this time my mother did not yet work. We lived in a house that was probably 800 square feet, and several hundred years old. The stairs creaked dutifully every time they were ascended or descended. Downstairs was a kitchen with a screened-in porch, and a living room. Upstairs my parents bedroom, my bedroom, and a single bathroom. Outside the house were other colonial homes like it, 250 years young, and a grid of streets that led up into the forested hills. In five minutes I could be out of the neighborhood and into field and forest. Maybe the town consisted of a thousand inhabitants. There was a central square with a cannon that dated back to the Revolutionary war. A bank, a post office, a couple of restaurants including a greek (for some reason) pizza parlor called Athens Pizzeria. A small, out-of-the way New England town. The kind memorialized now in calendars with glossy photographs of covered bridges at peak autumn foliage. No one we knew had any money. No one I knew. But we were rich in belonging, and I was not aware of class, of status.
As an exercise in awareness, I like to attempt to reach back into the heartspace and mindview of our earliest human ancestors, to attempt to place myself at the origin of our species in the Kalahari two hundred thousand years ago. Because some of the culture of the Kalahari is still intact, this exercise is not as fanciful as it seems, as we have experiential contact yet with this source culture.
What we think of as alienation, is, functionally, an absence of belonging. In an existence where we belong to the universe, where we are part of it and viscerally experience our relatedness, our kinship, with all there is, we are woven together with all of Life. Through the lens of this sacred unity, nothing is alien, nothing is untethered. Through the ropes of relating we have access to all the information in the universe: in-formation. Information is energy in formation. Within this mode of belonging, there is no need for the kind of God that monotheism proposes, because God is experienced in everything, including us. This experience of belonging is down beneath language, beneath sensation. It is a visceral immersion in with.
What moderns call God is an artifact of our alienation. The way we think about the creator is confused. Something benign yet not human, unfathomable, accessible possibly through altered states, mediated by trained initiates. It supposes that we are somewhere down here, and there is someone up there running things. The hegemony of European rationalism, so called, which rejects as irrational those things that cannot be explained 'scientifically'–and therefore relegates religion to the realm of the antique–misses the point entirely, which is that religion expresses a yearning. It is right there in the etymology of the word. A yearning to be tied back to the creative wellspring, the Source (re-ligio). What we call God–and assuredly our attempts to illustrate this, constrain it in human form, put a beard on it and paint it on a chapel ceiling are much deeper a reflection of the hall of mirrors of our own narcissism than anything approaching reality–arises from the felt intuition that we have been cut off from the wellspring of reality, and long for a relationship with it. The problem is that we’ve become consumed with what this looks like, and forgotten how it feels.
This yearning for God–and to be crystal clear I heartily endorse as crucial both this yearning, and its consummation–is the yearning to not be alienated, not an orphan of an uncaring universe, but a child of belonging. The yearning for God, its essence, its distillate, is a yearning for belonging, in a cosmic sense. To FEEL part of the divine reality, the divine family, the eternal flux.
I'm driving toward the taproot of Supremacy, and it has brought me here, to this contemplation of the Divine, which is generally clothed in the poor cloth of our own minds, our own gaze, and our own thinking, and has been formalized over millennia into the varied and yet static forms we generally are made aware of by religion. Yet I direct my attention back, further, to tribal wanderings, to the Jews in the desert, ye brethren of mine, ye wandering tribes of Israel. The old testament God, to whom they entrusted worship, the tetragrammaton, is a God to whom they prayed for what? For a good harvest, for peaceful hearts, for a glimpse at the fabric of the real, for harmony in the home and hearth, for blessing. And the common denominator of all these worthy prayers? Belonging.
Jesus has been as intentionally mistranslated as anyone in history. Yet of crucial import to this conversation (I say this based on having studied, through books, the Aramaic language he spoke) is the fact that contrary to both popular conception and to established church doctrine, Jesus did not say, "Pray to me." He said, "Pray as I pray." He was teaching people how to come back into relationship with the cosmos. How to feel kinship. This is not written in some book. Relatedness is not in a text, in a scripture, be it a torah or otherwise.
Seek not the law in your scriptures, for the law is life, whereas the scripture is dead. I tell you truly, Moses received not his laws from God in writing, but through the living word. The law is living word of living God to living prophets for living men.
In everything that is life is the law written. You find it in the grass, in the tree, in the river, in the mountain, in the birds of heaven, in the fishes of the sea; but seek it chiefly in yourselves. For I tell you truly, all living things are nearer to God than the scripture which is without life.
God so made life and all living things that they might by the everlasting word teach the laws of the true God to man. God wrote not the laws in the pages of books, but in your heart and in your spirit. They are in your breath, your blood, your bone; in your flesh, your bowels, your eyes, your ears, and in every little part of your body.
They are present in the air, in the water, in the earth, in the plants, in the sunbeams, in the depths and in the heights. They all speak to you that you may understand the tongue and the will of the living God.
But you shut your eyes that you may not see, and you shut your ears that you may not hear. I tell you truly, that the scripture is the work of man, but life and all its hosts are the work of our God. Wherefore do you not listen to the words of God which are written in His works? And wherefore do you study the dead scriptures which are the work of the hands of men?"
When then, did we lose this experience of relatedness? When did we stop reading the book of life in the Living World, studying this living law, and why? Somewhere between the Original Fire tended by the Black Mother of Us All, the matrilineal line with the circle of the village organized around it, and the ritualized alienation of modernity, there are a series of denaturing catastrophes. What were they?
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