THE ARCHAEOLOGY

OF THE SOUL

“of all the many forms which natural religion has assumed none probably has exerted
so deep and far-reaching an influence on human life as the belief in immortality”

Pete Stewart

“A melancholy monument of fruitless labour and barren ingenuity expended in prying

into that great mystery of which fools proffer their knowledge and wise men
confirm their ignorance”
 PART ONE

EXILE

“Before this World was made

There reigned Arámfè in the realm of Heaven
Amidst his sons.

I will tell you of the days

Of the Descent. How Old Arámfè sent
The Gods from Heaven

Go now,
Call a despairing land to smiling life
Above the jealous sea, and found sure homesteads
For a new race whose destiny is not
The eternal life of Gods.

Here the Beginning was: from Arámfè's vales

Through the desert regions the exiled Gods approached
The edge of Heaven,
For many a day
Across unwatered plains the Great Ones journeyed,
And sandy deserts—for such is the stern bar
Set by Arámfè 'twixt his smiling vales
And the stark cliff's edge which his sons approached
Tremblingly, till from the sandy brink they peered
Down the sheer precipice.
Beneath Hung chaos—dank blackness and the threatening roar
Of untamed waters. Then Odudúwa spoke:
"Orísha, what did we? And what fault was ours?
Outcasts to-day; to-morrow we must seek
Our destiny in dungeons, and beneath
That yawning blackness we must found a city
For unborn men.”
 Of Blue Hexagons and Stone-age Boulders

The body of ideas that underlie any particular culture’s expression, though it
will inevitably have its dissenters, is usually considered to have its origins in the
origins of the culture itself; indeed, it draws its validity from such antiquity. Cultures
adapt themselves to changing demands on their core ideas by subtle adjustments to
these ideas; sometimes the dissenters get the upper hand in the process of adjustment
and the result is revolutionary changes to these ideas. The ideas themselves however,
have a source and this source is usually found to lie in the explanation that a culture
has about how it came to be. Such an explanation is expressed in what are referred to
as ‘Creation Myths’. Called on to justify or explain their behaviour, a people might
say ‘we do it this way because this is the way the Ancestors did it when they were
creating the world”. Thus an American judge called on to adjudicate in a contended
constitutional issue is expected to ask ‘what did the founding fathers intend us to do?”
One might well expect any two bodies of such formative ideas to contain much
common material; a culture is unlikely to harbour ideas that are destructive of its own
interests, and human interests are held in common at the core level. We should not be
surprised therefore if certain basic ideas appear again and again in stories from around
the world that tell of the early days in the history of the world. What is more, such
stories must have been originally formulated by minds physiologically
indistinguishable from ours. Current thinking suggests that a crucial characteristic of
such a mind is what has been described as an ‘Agency detector’; the role of such a
feature is to ascribe the cause of any phenomenon to the actions of an agent. The
ultimate expression of this Agency detector is to assign a ‘Creator’ for the ‘World’.
Similarly, it seems likely that such ideas as an ‘Otherworld’ populated by spirits may
well be the product of the imagery generated by the human neurophysiology while in
an ‘altered state’, that is, in dreams, in drug-induced hallucinations or in trance. It
seems reasonable, since the ‘Creator’ is not visible in this world, to assign him or her
to this ‘Otherworld’.
The detailed generation of these ideas will be considered in the second half of
this book. In this half, I want to consider those aspects of creation stories which
amount to what philosopher Daniel Dennett called ‘Blue Hexagons’:
“Consider the fact that two widely separated cultures both used boats; this is no
evidence at all of a shared cultural heritage. If both cultures were to paint eyes on the
bows of their boats, it would be much more interesting, but still a rather obvious move
in the game of design. If both cultures were to paint, say, blue hexagons on the bows
of their boats, this would be telling indeed’.
Just how blue, how nearly hexagonal do both designs have to be before we have
what amounts to something ‘telling’? It has become almost trivial to point to the more
or less universal story of the cataclysmic flood that destroys most of creation; does
this qualify? It would seem not; a continuous stream of commentators have been able
to point to one natural disaster after another that in their eyes would explain this story.
Nor would the usual explanation for such a catastrophe; once an agent has been made
responsible for creation, it is a simple step to assign that agent a parental role, a role
that naturally involves punishment for disobeying parental instructions.
What, then, about the story that says it was the Gods themselves that disobeyed
their father, were exiled them heaven to create the earth and on completing their task,
returned to their father, having first transformed themselves into elements of the
landscape?
The story at the opening of this section is one such. It comes from an early 20 th
century retelling of the traditions of the Yoruba peoples of West Africa. Here is
another, from the northern tribes of central Australia::
“Atnatu, the primordial being of the Kaitish tribe [is regarded] as preceding the
alcheringa [‘Dreamtime’] times, that is the epoch of the ‘creation’ . . . Because certain
of his sons neglected his sacred services he expelled them from the sky. These came
down to earth and became the ancestors of men.”
These were the Dreamtime Ancestors who, having created the features of the
earth each returned to the sky via one particular spot in the landscape.