The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  My ancestors once worshipped the moon and the sun, and fire, too. Our eyes were blue-gray and cold as the fjords of their Scandinavian homeland. Nearly a thousand years after the crucifixion of Jesus, we wandered south to the coast of France, and we were introduced to the god of war and love, whom we embraced.

  We gave up our heathen names for ones that sounded better to Christian ears. The warrior-wanderer Biorn Dansk—the Danish Bear—became Bernard Danus and, from his hilltop fortress on Mons Gomerici, ruled over vast tracts of Normandy. The Montgomery clan honored the new god by founding the church of Troarn and providing for twelve monks, and that is why we prospered in an era of violence and feudal warfare.

  In 1066, clan patriarch Roger de Montgomery sailed across the English Channel with William the Conqueror under a banner consecrated by the pope himself. Roger marched into the Battle of Hastings at William’s right flank. At the height of the fighting, an English giant led a charge of one hundred men against the invading Normans. That English knight was as strong and swift as a stag. As he ran, he swung his great ax and slew himself a path of dead Normans with his foot-long blade. The Normans were ready to turn back until Roger galloped up on his own horse and drove his lance right through the English giant, knocking him down just as David had knocked down Goliath. Then he cried out: “Frenchmen, strike, the day is ours!” The English armies were humiliated, their king was sent to hell, and the Normans planted their holy flag on the bloodied earth. And so it was that God delivered England to William the Conqueror and to our clan.

  Six hundred years later, after Henry VIII had cleaved the Church of England from the Roman Church, we fought our way into Ireland, where Protestant armies were being handed huge estates for their loyalty to the crown and the Church of England. James Montgomery, an Anglican curate, fought the Irish Catholics with a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other, and he won, because it was the god’s will. We built a grand estate on the Inishowen Peninsula, where to this day a Montgomery collects rent from the Catholics.

  When the British Empire spread to India, we followed, and brought our god with us. As commissioner of Lahore, Robert Montgomery built himself a sprawling stone villa in the Punjab. His servants were Muslim and Hindu. So were his troops, and so were his enemies. When rebellious Indian regiments of the Bengal Army captured Delhi in 1857, Robert tricked tens of thousands of his Indian troops into laying down their arms, then ordered his white officers to hunt down disloyal soldiers and blew them to pieces. The Delhi rebels were chased down and hanged, the white garrisons were saved, and the Punjab became the base for the Britain’s reconquest of northern India.

  “It was not policy, or soldiers, or officers that saved the Indian Empire to England, and saved England to India,” wrote Robert. “The Lord our God, He it was who went before us and gave us the victory of our enemies, when they had well nigh overwhelmed us. To Him who holds all events in His own hand, and has so wondrously over-ruled all to our success, and to His own glory do I desire on behalf of myself and all whom I represent to express my devout and heartfelt thanks.” It was just like the Old Testament. Our god was not detached from politics. The Lord stood for England and vice versa.

  The fan clicked, forcing its way through the heavy air. Night. Cicadas screeching. A scene: A shadowy sitting room behind the stone columns of that Punjabi villa. A palm in the corner, framed portraits of ancestors hanging on the walls. The voice of Mary Jane Dinh echoed in some distant hall, but the sitting room was as tranquil and grave as a church. There, kneeling on a woven carpet, was my great-great-grandfather Robert, and with him his eight-year-old son Henry. They prayed aloud together in the heavy air. Robert asked the god to keep Henry safe. They rose. The boy left the villa with his Muslim manservant, never to return.

  Henry attended Miss Baker’s Preparatory School in Brighton. Miss Baker was a Christian of the most fervent evangelical principles, who was determined to impart on her pupils the lessons of Revelation. The future bishop of Tasmania later noted: “I was brought up on almost undiluted hell fire. On the whole such diet has done me immense good, for it has left behind in me an awful sense of the Holy Will of God. The thunders of Sinai should not be forgotten by any Christian.”

  If the Old Testament taught Henry Montgomery about God’s power and the New Testament taught him about God’s love, then it was a life lived in the Victorian era that taught him that the English were the new chosen people. God clearly favored the British Empire above all others, granting Queen Victoria dominion over lands, seas, and peoples from Africa to the Americas to Australia. The way to repay the favor was to fight the spiritual battle with the same fervor with which England spread its commerce. “The clergy are officers in an imperial army,” he wrote. “The language, indeed, of all the great men of the Old Testament is the true language of our army.”

  When he returned to England from the South Seas in 1901, Henry was named secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. This made him a de facto foreign minister for the archbishop of Canterbury, and thus the most influential Anglican missionary in the world. He fought for years to formally bond the Empire and its church in one common evangelical mission. He failed—at least in the project of building a Christian theocracy—but his church did extend its reach to every continent. Henry served his god well, and his story would not have been complete without the acknowledgment, the personal visitation, the commendation from God and ancestors, that came to him that Easter morning so many years after he left the South Pacific.

  The fan glided to a halt in the dead air of my room. The years converged in the stillness. The climax of my great-grandfather’s story returned to me not as text but as an image so clear it should have been my own memory: A crystalline Irish dawn, a garden above the sparkling waters of Lough Foyle, the appearance of a procession of approving ghosts, then a blinding cloud and a voice pressing through the mist like soft thunder, asking Henry, “Lovest thou me?” so that the believer would know that the God of Love and the God of War were the same, and that He would be manifest to those who were ready, and that this gift of sight would be passed on to one’s descendants.

  7

  The Word and Its Meaning

  Every day, every week, every month, every quarter, the most widely read journals seem just now to vie with each other in telling us that the time for religion is past, that faith is a hallucination or an infantile disease, that the gods have at last been found out and exploded.

  —MAX MULLER, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, 1878

  This being a story about myth, it would be wrong to continue without explaining what I mean when I use that word. Some people say “myth” when they mean fanciful and false. I do not, because I am learning how hard it can be to discern the frontiers between history, propaganda, dreams, and the terrain of miracles. And besides, the power of a myth always has more to do with its function than historic origin.

  Here is my definition.

  Myth: A story, often involving the expression of supernatural power, that explains its believers’ relationship with the world.

  The definition will not alienate anthropologists, mythologists, or mystics because it omits the question about which men have argued since they first gathered to tell stories around campfires: Which myths are historically true?

  When my great-grandfather was sailing through the South Pacific, his countrymen were digesting Sir James G. Frazer’s Golden Bough, in which the Cambridge anthropologist reduced magic, myths, and religion to primitive and futile attempts to control the natural world. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species had already shaken the foundations of nineteenth-century British Christian thought. Now Frazer was taking the quite radical step of placing Christian texts under the same microscope as “primitive” religion. He assured readers that science and technology would inevitably extinguish the superstition inherent in all this mythology.

  Most of the people who have studied and wrote about myth since then have focused on their f
unction and structure, while generally assuming their falsity. Freud gave myths hell. He insisted they were “public dreams”—collective expressions of obsessional neuroses. Psychic baggage.

  The first argument against this theory came from Melanesia. Bronislaw Malinowski, the Polish anthropologist who spent the years of World War I in the Trobriand Islands, concluded that for the communities he studied, myths were essential tools for expressing values and safeguarding morality. They may not have contained historical truths, but they were nonetheless vital ingredients of civilization.

  This might explain why there is a common underlying structure to myths from various corners of the world. Creation stories are a good example. In Genesis, Yahweh shaped man from dust. In Banks Island kastom stories, the ancestor Qat carved man from a hunk of wood. A serpent in the Garden of Eden convinced Adam and Eve to taste the forbidden fruit. A snake did the same thing to the first man and woman in the legends of the Bassari in West Africa. The great flood is the most universal myth of them all: the Greeks and Romans told of a cataclysmic flood that transformed the world, but so did indigenous people on Canada’s west coast. Qat made a deluge, too. It spilled out from the volcano on Santa Maria and carried him away forever.

  Carl Jung carried these stories into the realm of social psychology. He argued that myths represented the wisdom the human species had gathered over the millennia. They contained essential truths that the “collective unconscious” had carried for generations and that science should never be allowed to displace. Some of these truths were straightforward: Thou shalt not kill. Honor thy father and thy mother. Marry someone other than your sister. Some were more abstract, and concerned the nature of the soul and its relationship with the universe. The Garden of Eden, according to Jungian sympathizer Joseph Campbell, was not a lush corner of Mesopotamia so much as it was a description of the geography of the human heart. It is the place of innocence that lies within all of us, the place we cannot return to because we have tasted the knowledge of good and evil.

  If you subscribe to these theories, then you cannot say the Christian faith in an intervening god is any more or less valid than Melanesians’ traditional belief in spirits, stones, and sorcery. If the god-ancestor Qat is a mythical character, then so is Jesus, and so are Bernard the Dane, John Frum, and John Coleridge Patteson, because regardless of their histories, they have been kept alive in stories in order to perform certain mythic functions. They represent ideals. They inspire. They offer their believers clues about the nature of the universe.

  But these theories mortally wound myths, because even as they value them, they defang them with deconstruction. A myth without believers is a fairy tale. It is fantasy, fiction, stripped of sacredness. It is mere entertainment. It is a loss, perhaps, of something unfathomable.

  Consider this: After decades studying the tribes of southern Sudan, the pioneering social anthropologist Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard returned to Oxford in the 1960s and announced that nonbelievers would never come close to understanding religion and myth as well as believers. Nonbelievers tended to try to explain religion away as illusion, using sociological, psychological, existential, or biological theories. (It’s exactly what most anthropologists had been doing for decades, despite the fact that, in the absence of historical evidence, they had absolutely no way of knowing whether the spiritual beings of primitive religions existed or not.) Believers, on the other hand, explained religion in terms of how people conceived and related to reality. Since believers have an inward experience of religion, they understand it better than nonbelievers. According to Evans-Pritchard, even a missionary would make a better anthropologist among pagans than an atheist; while the atheist might find Jungian allegories or codes for living, the believer experiences epiphanies, tendrils of some divine thread.

  I was discovering this in Melanesia. As soon as you stand apart from myths, divorce them from faith, pick apart their function and their origins, you become like an anthropologist, like Frazer peering through his ancient texts. You may be fascinated and amused, but you will never see a ghost, or magic, or the hand of God, because you have stepped outside the realm of faith. People say that religious fanatics are blinded by their faith. Evans-Pritchard asserted that there is something just as blinding in rationalism. You must make room for mystery before you can reach for it.

  My journey in the Hotel Santo should have ended with that vision of my great-grandfather collapsed beneath the blinding cloud of his god; hearing, knowing, certain. It did not. I had my own memory of that place, and it was too strong to erase. I had flown to Ireland long before I hit the South Pacific. I had driven up the Inishowen Peninsula, along the darkened Lough Foyle past the villages of Muff, Carrowkeel, Drung, and Moville. I had found what remained of Henry Montgomery’s garden on a knoll above the lough.

  The family manor was boarded up and surrounded on all sides by “heritage-style” vacation homes. The garden was a shambles. The roses were gone. I tromped through the ivy where our ancestors appeared to Henry as ghosts. I forced open the door of the moldering stone church where the god cloud had shone and had asked Henry, “Lovest thou me?” It was cold in there, and empty. I spent an afternoon lingering beneath the granite cross that marked my great-grandfather’s grave, challenging the old man to appear, to speak, to offer a sign, anything. I did pray. I did promise to be open to the divine. I waited hours, willing him into being. If there was ever a time for a ghost to make himself known, this was it. All that came was a bitter wind that shook the oaks and ripped the slate tiles from the roof of the church. A storm rolled over the moors. A single patch of sunlight raced across the lough and was gone.

  It’s reasonable to demand proof if you are going to let miracles flood your dreams and guide your life. Isn’t it? Proof. That’s what should guide you. But now the certainty, the solidity, of memories were mingling with the fantastical inside the blurred walls of my fever. I rolled and sweated, clear and then unclear, fighting and then not fighting the incandescent visions, the tingle of closeness to something else, the immeasurable longing for the glowing cloud that would descend on me when I reached my myth island, Nukapu, to ask the question and then answer it.

  On the fifth morning I awoke to dry sheets, my fever gone.

  8

  The Island of Magic and Fear

  And, behold, the Lord passed by,

  and a great and strong wind rent

  the mountains, and brake in pieces

  the rocks before the Lord;

  but the Lord was not in the wind:

  and after the wind an earthquake;

  but the Lord was not in the earthquake:

  and after the earthquake a fire; but the

  Lord was not in the fire: and after

  the fire a still small voice.

  —I Kings 19:11–12

  I found Mary Jane taking coffee on the veranda with her rumpled Australians. She wore a full-length silk gown.

  “I need a ship,” I said.

  I had awoken clear-headed, and feeling a new vigor for my path, which led north to the Banks and Torres islands—the stronghold of Anglicanism during my great-grandfather’s time—and then beyond to the Solomons. According to my maps, it would only be a few days’ sail from the last of the Torres to Nukapu. I wanted to get closer to the old stories. It was time to see the proof behind all the magic talk.

  “No ships, my dear,” said Mary Jane.

  “No ships,” agreed the ranchers.

  What captain would bother sailing to the northern islands? There was no cargo to carry, other than the odd bag of low-grade copra, the kiln-dried coconut flesh that once fueled the South Pacific economy. There was, however, a weekly mail plane that left Santo and zigzagged its way north between a network of grass airstrips.

  At Pekoa, the last of Santo’s World War II airfields, I climbed inside a scuffed de Havilland Twin Otter along with a dozen other passengers, a clutch of grass mats, and twenty sacks of rice. We bounced off the tarmac, and the plane’s shadow d
anced away between the tidy rows of coconut palms, through a herd of cattle, over a dusty road, and into a powder blue bay. We glided over a coral reef that stretched like a pink stain along the coast, over the rust-red skeletons of wrecked ships and over the open sea, which was rippling and empty and expectant.

  My first stop would be Maewo, a thirty-mile-long spine of uplifted coral rock just south of the Banks Islands. I had been assured that Maewo magic was even stronger than Ambrym magic. Maewo didn’t have Ambrym’s volcanoes, but its mountains squeezed torrential rains from every storm that came Vanuatu’s way. Hundreds of fast-running streams tumbled down its flanks, and those streams gave Maewo magicians their power. This was water magic, not fire magic. Everyone knew that water magic could extinguish fire magic. Back in Port Vila I had been assured that if I was ever the victim of an Ambrymese curse, I should go straight to Maewo and seek a cure from a kleva, a kastom medicine man.

  Another thing. My great-grandfather had felt Maewo’s mana. The mission had established seven schools on the north coast by the time he arrived in 1892. The Southern Cross stopped in to fill its water tanks at a cascade on the coast. Henry Montgomery observed that the people, once “wild and cannibal,” had largely been pacified, but supernatural power was being manifested in a new and wondrous manner. “Two women had gone into the church after dark for prayer. There was no lamp there, but over the Lord’s Table they saw a bright shining light, which remained there while they prayed and knelt. That same appearance was mentioned as having occurred at another school. There can be no doubt at all events of the simple and real faith of these people.” The light was similar to the one Henry would see in his garden decades later. It was clearly proof of the catalyzing power of faith. I figured there was no better place than Maewo to launch my challenge to those who claimed to control or witness supernatural power.