/lit/ - Literature

>>13803367
To those who followed Columbus and Cortes the New World truly seemed incredible, not only because of what civilization had made of the Old World but because of the natural endowments of the one they now began to enter. The land often announced itself with a heavy scent miles out into the ocean, and the coasting whites with their nostrils full of salt and the sour odors of confinement recorded their delight with the odor of forests and verges in bloom. Giovanni di Verrazano in 1524 smelled the cedars of the East Coast a hundred leagues out. Raleigh's colonists scented what they thought a garden, though they would soon enough make it something else. The men of Henry Hudson's Half Moon, already disposed to hate and fear the natives, were temporarily disarmed by the fragrance of the New Jersey shore, while ships running farther up the coast occasionally swam through large beds of floating flowers.

Wherever they came inland they found that these announcements had been in no way false: the land, wilderness though it was, was a rich riot of color and sound, of game and luxuriant vegetation. Even if some of the most glowing descriptions of the New World were in fact realestate advertisements, given then as now to calculated falsehood, still the theme of beauty in abundance is so pervasive that it transcends any scheme, insisting its truth upon the reluctant and hesitant pens of the white observers. Had they been other than they were, they might have written a new mythology here. As it was, they took inventory, around the margins of which one feels the spectacular presence of America.

Waterfowl took flight under their advances with thunderous wings, and deer in unconcerned droves browsed lush meadowlands. Squirrels and huge turkeys barked and gobbled in the endless forests that stretched all the way from the coast to the huge river that Soto had crossed and recrossed and been buried in. Elsewhere ground fruits lavished themselves on the land: scarlet blankets of strawberries painted the bellies of the horses and the legs of the horsemen who rode through them, and swollen clusters of grapes bowered the streams and rivers.

The religion, then, from its formal announcement here is to be historically rather than mythologically oriented. It describes human existence as moving relentlessly forward to the achievement of a special destiny, and the supplications for renewal that lie close to the heart of archaic myth are now no longer necessary. For, as Pedersen observes:

"Yahweh was outside and above ordinary life, separated from nature, and it was not necessary for him to be radically renewed. Thus the creation in primeval ages does not become the mythical expression of what is annually repeated in the cult, it becomes an event in time, which once took place at its beginning. Herein we find the germ of a change in the old view of time."

True, events repeat themselves, but the repetition is incremental in character and serves mainly to reinforce the sense of historical continuity. In this fundamental way the religion must stand in contrast and antagonism to all natural religions, which, to the extent that they are truly bound to the natural order and rhythm of things, must be deeply repetitive and ahistorical. And so in the course of their history the Israelites were to turn a razor-edged scorn and indeed a sharp sword against all naturebound cults that could neither look back to events that had happened once in historical time nor forward to prophesy those to come. One feels here again the impress of environment and occupation on this antinature, prohistorical bias, since for this people nature was not a power with which they could establish a celebratory, reverential relationship. It was a power, all right, but one they sought deliverance from rather than surrender to. Nature might not be exactly evil, but it did exercise a cruel power over these wanderers, and they sought emancipation from it. The people of the New Testament, far more divorced from myth and nature and lacking even the vital concept of a promised land, went further and sought to suppress the world of nature.