One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

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  For my daughters.

  But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god.

  It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

  —Thomas Jefferson

  … the forest is unconverted.

  —Derek Walcott

  INTRODUCTION

  Unearthing History

  In the dry red soil of Chimayo, New Mexico, there is a hole in the ground that some call holy. They intend no pun, no play on words. The hole is a serious matter; the locals who tend to it would no more joke about their humble opening in the earth than they would a hole in the head, or the heart.

  An arm’s length in diameter and just deep enough that the temperature seems to drop when you lean in for a closer look, the hole has been here for centuries. The dirt in this valley has been regarded as sacred since before the birth of the Republic of which it is now a part; it has been revered as the physical nature of the spirit world since before the Spanish missionaries arrived with their own notions of embodied divinity; it was holy even before the first Europeans looked on the people of an unmapped continent and declared that they must know nothing of God.

  Though it has a long and eclectic spiritual history, the hole sits today in the back corner of a Roman Catholic Church, El Santuario de Chimayo, which is among the most frequently visited religious pilgrimage sites in America. Hundreds of thousands of true believers and curious souls visit every year to line up in a small side chapel strewn with pictures of loved ones lost. They crowd into a closet-sized space around the hole, bend at the knees, dip their hands into the cool of the gap below, and pull up big handfuls of dirt. Some of it ends up in Ziploc bags, some in Tupperware tubs to be taken home on airplanes to every corner of this improbable nation. Much of it ends up in the mouths of the faithful. Visitors to Chimayo believe that eating the dirt brings miracles; as evidence they point to the crutches hanging from the walls.

  Some would call this practice folk religion—not the real or legitimate orthopraxy of a Christian church but an indigenous corruption of the sanctioned sacrament of Communion. Others might suggest it is in fact something more complicated: a distinctly American form of religious syncretism, a blending of faith traditions so complete that it is difficult to separate one from the other. Implicit in each of these explanations is a more obvious physical truth. The church at Chimayo was built over a hole in the ground that has history both connected to and independent of the structure around it.

  To extend the metaphor: In thinking about religion in American history, we have too often focused only on the church standing above the hole and not on the hole itself, nor on the people lining up to make the soil within a part of their blood, their bones. The United States is a land shaped and informed by internal religious diversity—some of it obvious, some of it hidden—and yet the history we have all been taught has mostly failed to convey this. We have learned history from the middle rather than the margins, though it is the latter from which so much of our culture has been formed.

  We need only look to the point often seen as the beginning to know this is true. It is the story we memorized in school: In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue… and he did so, we all have been taught, on orders and at the expense of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic monarchs of Spain. The largest of his ships was named for the mother of the Christian savior (its full name was Santa María de la Inmaculada Concepción, Holy Mary of the Immaculate Conception). In his journal, which begins in the form of a prayer, “In the Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” Columbus writes of standards bearing the cross brought onto the lands he was soon to conquer.

  Less well known are the men who sailed with Columbus who did not call this symbol their own. No less than America would be, Europe at the time was a place endlessly conflicted over its multi-religious past. Having shaped so much of Iberian culture, practitioners of Judaism and Islam provided Spain’s Catholics with a daily reminder that their world was not made by the church alone. Whether this reminder was mere embarrassment or existential threat, it was reason enough to force them out. Columbus devotes the first words of his diary to praising Spain for evicting its religious minorities in the same year he began his voyage, and yet his own adventure could not have been accomplished without men drawn from the very peoples he was so pleased to see driven from their homes. It was precisely their connections to exiled faiths that led several of his crewmen to join a mission that was less likely to end in riches than a watery grave.

  Even less well known are the spiritual practices of the Taino Indians who paddled their boats out to greet the newly arrived ships. Columbus declared that the people he encountered could easily be converted to the faith of Christendom because they obviously had none of their own. In fact, they merely had no faith he recognized, and so he was as blind to it as history books have often been.

  The dominance of the Christian narrative of Columbus over the more complicated quilt of beliefs present at the earliest encounter between the places called the Old World and the New illustrates a neglected aspect of the American story. At every major turning point in the nation’s narrative of encounter and expansion, an alternate spiritual history can be told. From a distance it is easy to see only the Christian elements of much of American history. The church stands above—as unavoidable as any twice-told tale—obscuring the more beguiling story within.

  For another example, look no further than the well-known drama of the separatist Christians who left England to practice what they considered a purified version of the Protestant faith. Their establishment of a theocracy in New England intended as a “city upon a hill” usually serves as the Exodus story within the scripture of American history: England as Egypt; the ocean as desert; Massachusetts as the promised land. Mostly forgotten is that within a single generation, heterodoxy rather than uniformity of spiritual purpose became the rule. Banishments from the heavenly cities established in Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay began almost as soon as the passengers of the Mayflower and the Arabella came ashore. As for those not forced into exile to brave the supposedly godless wilderness, colonists in both New England and Virginia made desperate attempts to maintain religious order by imposing harsh punishments on anyone who posed a threat to divinely ordained authority. Death sentences were threatened for the first offense of church robbing, as well as for the third offense of blasphemy. Though history is quick to identify this entire era as “Puritan,” the more persuasive ideologies of the time may have been antipathy or indifference to the religious baggage that had come with muskets across the sea. The American experiment was frequently shaped by a rejection of old ways and openness to the new. In religious terms, this rejection created over time a nation unique in its ability to absorb and be built by those of different beliefs; people who believed there were many gods, or none at all.

  To be sure, the American talent for the absorption of faiths and cultures has rarely resulted in the kind of peaceful pluralism most hope for today. The story of how a global array of beliefs came to occupy the same ocean-locked piece of land is more often one of violence than of toleration. There can be no clearer illustration of this than what occurred d
uring the three centuries of slavery, which gave the nation its most enduring spiritual wounds. Twenty percent of the U.S. population was enslaved at the Republic’s inception, and few were Christians when they arrived. Most were born of religious histories as rich and complex as Christendom—followers of Islam, Yoruba, and a dozen other lesser-known faiths. During this era, there was a forced transplantation of African beliefs and practices into the growing body of American religion. Yet the loss of such ancient traditions is often overlooked in the discussion of what was wrought by that painful period in our history. So too is the question of whether these traditions were truly lost at all: Much as the “secret Jews” Christianized by the Spanish Inquisition came to influence Catholicism in the Old World, the newly converted men and women held in bondage dramatically changed the faith into which they were forced. Beliefs driven underground have a way of maintaining their power; they rise again in myriad guises, known to the faithful even when the faith is called by different names.

  The story of so many minority religious traditions living in the shadow of a single dominant creed may seem an epic only of repression and subjugation. However, it is in that tension—between the marginal and the mainstream—that the nation so many faiths have come to call home has forged its commitment, clear on paper if not always in practice, to become a place where, paradoxically, belief matters both very much and not at all, because we have the right to believe as we please.

  As Walt Whitman famously wrote, “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” Though no corner of America is so tidy as a line of verse, no single life or community is so well-ordered as any metered rhythm, no alliances are so secure that they can be thought an enduring rhyme, his meaning nonetheless rings true when surveying the vast landscape of faiths that together comprise the nation. In the century and a half since Whitman offered that reflection, the American poem has only grown in character and complexity. We might now think of the United States less as a poem than as a massive multigenerational novel. The plot of this novel, and so the plot of this book, is how the repeated collision of conflicting systems of belief, followed frequently by ugly and violent conflict, has somehow arrived, again and again, not merely at peaceful coexistence but at striking moments of inter-influence.

  These moments come along unexpectedly, often imperceptibly, to those involved. Some can be recognized only at a distance of centuries. Considering them now, we might view them as reminders that the process by which many peoples become one, E pluribus unum, is not merely the gathering of populations or regions within one border. It is the many living among and learning from each other. It is every strident orthodoxy making room for strange ways and exotic creeds. It is the recognition that, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, those who believe in one God, those who believe in twenty gods, and those who believe in no God, are bound together by something more significant than their own individual beliefs.

  The Burning of Hatuey by the Spaniards at Yara, Cuba, on February 2, 1512. Engraving by Théodore de Bry, 1664.

  CHAPTER 1

  A Meeting of the Gods

  1492–1512

  They carved their scriptures from the world around them. With conch shells, mangrove trees, coral rock, true believers in a faith now forgotten made images of the gods who lived in the sky. There were among the people men called behiques whose role it was to determine if a branch of wood, a block of stone, or a mound of clay had sufficient power to serve this vital purpose. If satisfied, the behique would then coax a human form or sacred shape from the abode of spirits to the physical realm, inviting ever more deities to serve and protect the 400,000 men, women, and children who knew themselves as the Taino, original inhabitants of the islands that would become stepping-stones to the place now called America.

  It pleased the gods to be among them. In gratitude for their creation, these small statues—called zemies—were believed to speak to their makers, teaching them to find order in the chaos of life just as they had found form in the formless materials of the earth. The zemies told the Taino their history: that people, too, had once been gods. In stories passed from one generation to the next, their Eden was a cave at the center of the island later called Hispaniola, where in bygone days they had lived together with the spirits they now revered.

  Like the men in ships they would soon encounter, their myth of origins was one of exile. It was said that long ago the gods had ventured from their cave only under cover of darkness to eat from the limbs of the jobo tree. One night a few of their number found the fruit too sweet to turn from as dawn approached. They kept eating until morning and when the sun shone on their skin they became human, made mortal by their desire.

  According to legends recorded later, the zemies informed the Taino not only of the beginning but also of the coming end. A tale was told of two chiefs, called caciques, who fasted for fifteen days in order to win sufficient favor with the gods that they might learn something of the future. Under the guidance of a behique shaman, the caciques inhaled sacred powder ground from the seeds of the jobo tree. Growing as tall as sixty feet, with pale yellow flowers and thorny bark, the jobo, also called cohoba, is a powerful entheogen—from the Greek, meaning something that “creates God within”—and it was at the center of Taino religious practice.

  Following a ritual in which one chief blew the powder into the nose of the other, the caciques soon had visions in which the zemies told them that the world as they knew it would not last much longer. The prophecy the chiefs reported when their trance had ended was that the time of the Taino living in peace, with only the drama of the jobo ceremony to disrupt their days, soon would pass. A description of the Taino prophecy can be found in the 1511 chronicle of Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, an Italian-born historian of the Spanish explorations of the New World. “Within a few years,” the chiefs told their people, “a race of men wearing clothes would land on the island and would overthrow their religious rites and ceremonies, massacre their children, and make them slaves.”

  For a time, the Taino believed this revelation referred to the torments they suffered at the hands of the Caribs, a rival tribe that made occasional raids from neighboring islands. So feared were these warriors that they had found a place in the bogeyman stories Taino parents told their children. Unlike the Taino, who had spears of crudely sharpened cane used only for hunting, the Caribs carried long-handled, hatchet-like clubs they used, as one account put it, “to trample the head of their enemies,” and wielded bows with arrows made lethal by the toxic sap of the manchineel tree, also known as “the death apple.” They were the worst demons the Taino could imagine, the only fitting denizens of their visions of apocalypse—at least, until the ships arrived.

  The year 1492 was one of endings as well as beginnings. While the Taino mystics took their communion of cohoba powder and beseeched the zemies for a vision of what would come next through the door of the future, another set of doors was closing on the other side of the world.

  The gates of the great palace of Alhambra, the “red fortress” of the Moors, were last shut to their makers as the banner of the cross was raised overhead. After centuries of hostility, the Roman Catholic rulers of Spain had successfully forced the final emir of the Islamic Nasrid dynasty from his seat of power in Granada, on the southern coast of the Iberian Peninsula. With the seizure of Alhambra, the five-hundred-year campaign known as the Reconquista, the reversion of Spain from Islamic dominance to Christian control, was complete. That this would have anything to do with a people four thousand miles away, who had yet to hear the names of either Jesus or Muhammad, seems as unlikely as the proverbial flap of a butterfly’s wings changing the weather. Yet such is the religious history of the world: As the author of the Gospel of John said, spirits blow where they will; when beliefs are suppressed, the ripples can often be felt to the ends of the earth.

  In January of 1492, an ambitious forty-one-year-old weaver’s son known to the Spanish as Cristóbal Colón was present as King Ferdinand and Queen
Isabella watched Sultan Abu ’abd-Allah Muhammad XII abandon his palace, the crowning achievement of Moorish culture, for exile in Africa. As he departed, the sultan paused to breathe an anguished cry of regret, the infamous “Moor’s last sigh,” for the loss of Europe’s only Muslim kingdom.

  Colón, whom we know as Christopher Columbus, was certainly in a better mood. Islam’s loss would be Christendom’s gain, and it might be his as well. The Catholic Monarchs, as King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella are often called, were aware of Columbus’s ambitions to sail west to reach the East. At a time that can be seen as the beginning of the phenomenon we now call globalization, when control over global trade routes was key to a kingdom’s fortunes, Columbus proposed replacing the dangerous overland route to Asia with a supposedly placid trip across the sea. Six years earlier, the Spanish Crown had turned down his request for financing—as had the Portuguese, the English, the Venetians, and the Genoese. The reasons they had given were that the trip would be prohibitively expensive and that it would be almost guaranteed to fail. Court-appointed experts insisted that Columbus had miscalculated the distance between Europe and the Orient, and thus any trip he might take would far exceed his proposed budget.

  At the time, no one among the educated classes doubted that circumnavigation of the earth was possible. It was only later mythmaking (not least of all by the American folk writer Washington Irving) that created the impression of Columbus as a geographic visionary, rare in his possession of the knowledge that the world was round. Yet still the royals ruled Columbus’s adventure unworthy of the cost at a time when the kingdom was stretched thin by its ongoing conflict with the Moors.

  It was logical, then, that Columbus would look upon the Catholic acquisition of the riches of Alhambra as a first step toward turning the monarchs’ no to a yes. That same month—January 1492—he revisited the idea with the king and queen, providing them with information concerning, as he later wrote, “the countries of India and of a Prince, called Great Khan, which in our language signifies King of Kings, how, at many times he and his predecessors had sent to Rome soliciting instructors who might teach him our holy faith, and the holy Father had never granted his request, whereby great numbers of people were lost, believing in idolatry and doctrines of perdition.”