The Golden Door Before Columbus, A Review of Who Discovered America? by Gavin Menzies and Ian Hudson

At the end of her famous sonnet The New Colossus, Emma Lazarus describes the Statue of Liberty as “A mighty woman with a torch”. And it is she that “cries with silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door!””.

For longer than America has been a nation, she has been the recipient of travelers from all over the world. The first to arrive since Columbus set sail from Palos de la Frontera were primarily Europeans. Soon, however, the “open door” would receive peoples from all lands looking for a better life. For many of our ancestors she has always been the “land of opportunity”.

We know this story fairly well. We have been recording it for a long time. Its history is written in diaries, sermons and legal documents that hail from the very earliest European settlements. But America’s history is much older than a few hundred years. And we have learned a great deal about this older history over the last several generations. Much of this knowledge has come from the efforts of anthropologists, archaeologists, epigraphers, and many other interested persons.

Today we are experiencing another enlargement of our understanding. Once considered to be largely a closed book, the stories of America’s ancient founders are slowly coming to light. It has been the work of many decades and we are finding ourselves at the point of a significant synthesis. The veil of genetic relationships is starting to be peeled back just as a generation ago gained tools for dating ancient relics. These advances, together with a greater availability and synthesis of literature regarding artifacts, monuments and glyphs, have made for a shift in our understanding. We are beginning to appreciate just how ancient the “golden door” truly was.

This shift has come primarily from the realization that ancient peoples navigated the oceans to a greater degree than we gave them credit for. In hindsight, it seems rather arrogant of us not to have recognized this before. The evidence hasn’t been entirely lacking. Our problem seems to have been a culturally imposed historical myopia – a myopia that developed with the modern age.

Interest in the scientific study of cultural origins is largely a post-Victorian effort. European imperialism opened our eyes to the diversity of ancient cultures and it did so at a time when the study of origins was sweeping academic halls throughout our Western universities.

We are shocked today at the naiveté of these early evolutionary anthropologists who proposed (and occasionally implemented) eugenic practices. And we recoil at the ideas of cultural evolution that largely justified so many crimes against humanity during the two World Wars. But these errors also manifest themselves in lesser, more subtle ways. In the study of ancient history they have led us to believe ancient cultures were all very primitive and that we moderns have been the only sophisticated ones.

One of these mental errors that we still frequently make is the error referred to as “the single colonization myth”. This is the misguided notion that ancient cultures (usually established across oceans and often facilitated via oceanic navigation) are best explained by single colonization events. Many of these arguments attempt to show the similarities between a New World object, species or trait and an Old World correlate. Because these trans-oceanic arguments have been academically marginalized in the past, most arguments have tended to be conservative and sometimes tentative. And as a result, ancient colonies are explained by single colonization events almost as tacit admissions that they are so uncommon that only a single event makes sense.

But things have changed – at least in our understanding of early America – and we are starting to recognize the cultural diversity that existed here long before 1492. And we are starting to see that America was colonized anciently by more than one group. We will probably never know the precise number but it must certainly be more than just a few.

A good example of this change in understanding is Gavin Menzies’s and Ian Hudson’s recent book Who Discovered America?. This is Menzies’s fourth book dealing with pre-Columbian cultures and colonization. And his primary focus is to show the extent of China’s maritime exploration before Columbus. In his first book 1421, Menzies argued that a Chinese fleet under the direction of Admiral Zheng He sailed from China and discovered many lands, including America several decades before Europeans did so. In Who Discovered America?, the authors continue this argument and bring up several more lines of evidence that have come to their attention since the earlier publication. This evidence is interesting to say the least and the authors are to be congratulated for shedding light on a largely forgotten chapter in the history of exploration.

These books, however, have not freed themselves from the single colonization myth. One gets the sense, after reading them that no influence was of much significance in the New World except that of the ancient Chinese. This is a shame. The authors would stand to gain a great deal from aligning themselves within the larger context of recent research. Instead, they carry on the tradition of so many previous writers that have argued for only a single major influence in the New World. Ultimately, the importance of Menzies’s work will be as a chapter in this larger understanding. While it is true that Chinese artifacts and influences can be seen in ancient America, it is also clear that other influences were present. Let me give an example of what I mean.

The Olmecs of ancient Central America were one of the earliest peoples in the New World to leave behind a significant record in stone – enabling us to get a glimpse of their world. Menzies and Hudson point out the recent findings of Mike Xu that many Olmec glyphs show significant similarities to Shang era characters from China. This is an important finding that needs to be better understood. But it also needs to be clarified that the Olmec connection to Shang, China is not new with Mike Xu, as Menzies and Hudson suggest. Betty Meggers pointed this out several years ago in an article she wrote for the American Anthropologist based on jade artifacts uncovered at La Venta[i].

Unfortunately, one gets the impression in chapters 7 and 8 of Who Discovered America? that the Chinese were the only influence on Olmec civilization. This is the same sort of mistake that earlier authors have made but for different cultural influences. For example Ivan Van Sertima in his book They Came Before Columbus argues that Olmec civilization was a product of African colonization. This makes more immediate sense than does a Chinese colonization if one goes simply on the evidence of stone monuments from Olmec sites (pictures of which are absent in Who Discovered America?). Many of these monuments are clearly African in appearance.

Or consider Geoffrey Ashe’s argument in Land to the West, that Olmec glyphs clearly show a European influence. His evidence is the well-known basalt stele from La Venta (Mexico) showing the “Uncle Sam” profile of a man with a long beard and aquiline nose.

I am not trying to minimize the importance of any of these findings. On the contrary, I find them all very important. My point is that we are building enough evidence now to form a more complete view of ancient America – in this case of Olmec civilization – and that arguments of single colonization events are no longer enough. Menzies and Hudson have popularized research about a Chinese influence. What we need now is a better story about how Africans, Europeans (or perhaps Mediterranean peoples) and Chinese were interacting in the Americas – all in the same area at about the same time. This work has yet to be undertaken.

Another line of evidence used by the authors is DNA, or genetic, evidence. Menzies and Hudson have sifted through a growing body of literature to show that some Native American populations have as much as 40% of their genetic material similar to Asian peoples. The authors suggest in one instance that this similarity may be as high as 96%.

This can be misleading without a little background in genetic evidence. Let me start with the evidence from maternal (mitochondrial) DNA studies. The authors correctly show that both Asians and Native Americans have A, B, C, and D genetic markers (or haplogroups). The temptation when seeing these similarities is to assume a parental relationship. But the similarity of these haplogroups does not establish this. What it suggests is that some of the peoples of Asia and America share a common ancestry. And it suggests that the common ancestry had these same haplogroups.

This, perhaps simple, distinction becomes important when one considers the antiquity of American groups and the realization that early American remains do not fall neatly into established “Asian” and “American” types. The famous Kennewick Man, for example, was an ancient American (uncovered in the Columbia River drainage of the Pacific Northwest) that shows many anatomical features more likely European or Mediterranean than Asian. Did this individual also have A, B, C, and D haplogroups. We will probably never know but it seems likely.

Realistically, the DNA evidence doesn’t really help Menzies’s and Hudson’s argument for a Medieval Chinese discovery of America. The relationships are just as easily explained by the standard argument of contact via the Beringian land bridge. 

There is other conflicting genetic evidence that is only partially mentioned by the authors such as that coming from male (Y chromosome) DNA studies. DNA haplogroup Q does, in fact, show similarities between Asia and America (as mentioned by the authors) but other groups in Greenland and the Middle East do too. The R1 haplogroup (not mentioned by the authors) which shows up frequently in Native Americans from eastern North America also shows up frequently in the Middle East and Europe.

And importantly, a presence of Asian haplogroups in modern Native Americans does not clearly establish what this means demographically. For example, a landing of a few Asian men in a culture with a few nubile girls – assuming reproductive success in their descendants – could easily account for the presence of Asian markers in most of the people making up that culture in later generations, even though only a few Asian immigrants actually settled initially. This sort of thing is what geneticists refer to as a bottleneck and it is a well-established phenomenon. Claims that a high percentage of Asian markers proves an exclusive (or near exclusive) genetic relationship (including many large colonizing fleets) is stretching what we can know from these findings.

On another topic, Menzies and Hudson uncover a bit of evidence that is quite interesting. It involves the research of Jerry Warsing on Machado-Joseph disease. This is a congenital disease that exists in Yunnan China as well as among some Native Americans of Eastern North America. Warsing has evidence that the disease existed in America before the Portuguese (having picked it up in China) could have brought it to America. This deserves to be looked at more closely. One possible explanation might be that the Portuguese brought the disease to the Azores from which it was taken to America quite early in the 16^th Century. But it may also be a real bit of evidence of a Chinese presence in pre-Columbian America.

Another interesting part of the book is the travel narratives given by Menzies. These show up in a couple of the chapters and are, in my opinion, the most interesting part of the book. In fact I wish that more time had been spent discussing these trips, especially the museum and archaeological stops in Asia Minor. Some of the conclusions drawn from these trips are difficult to accept outright, but they need further exploration. If Menzies and Hudson are right, it will change a good deal about how we see the ancient world.

For example, one of Menzies’s trips involves the retracing of the Silk Road. He does so in order to discount the importance of this ancient highway connecting Asia and the Middle East. This denial is then used to bolster the importance of Chinese seafaring as an alternative means of exploration and trade. Menzies, after only giving brief details of his various stops, comes to what he calls the end of the Silk Road at a place called Jiayuguan. He then claims that the extension of the ancient Silk Road beyond this point is dubious.

For anyone the least bit interested in the Silk Road, this denial of a complete land route between the Middle East and Asia will come as a bit of a shock. There is a vast literature and substantial archaeological evidence establishing its existence and its extent. That the authors can so summarily dismiss this significant body of evidence is unfortunate.

The authors might instead have looked more closely at the maritime silk route which is becoming better understood in recent decades. This route extends along a handful of coastal cities extending from southern China around India and to Arabia and the Horn of Africa. Menzies is well aware of this route. He has contributed to our understanding of it in his previous books. Significantly, the maritime route is one of the least controversial parts of his Chinese paradigm and it doesn’t need to be bolstered by denying the importance of the overland routes.   

If Menzies has a better argument for downplaying the overland route, I would like to see an enlargement of his claims. Such an effort would need to draw upon the extensive literature already available and include more firsthand knowledge of Asian geography (which he has already started).

More plausible are the arguments Menzies and Hudson make about the importance of early seafaring in the Mediterranean. Here there is a growing body of evidence that aligns nicely with the authors’ claims that ancient seafaring was more widespread than we used to think.

In Chapter 5 (Mastery of the Oceans Before Columbus) the authors reproduce four Minoan seals showing ancient watercraft. Their conclusion is fairly straightforward: this kind of evidence establishes the fact that early man could have ventured into the Ocean. And by extension, the Chinese could subsequently have done so as well.

I would like to add a little bit to this view, however. The Minoan seals do, in fact, establish a very early Mediterranean maritime tradition. But they do more than that. They also suggest that this tradition may have been established in Egypt before it was established in Crete. This is important because there is evidence that ancient Egyptians made it to America before Columbus – and probably before the Chinese.

Menzies and Hudson argue that the Minoan vessels would have been made of cedar and oak. I would argue differently, that they show evidence of being made by reeds – or at least that they are shaped in a way that was established by reed predecessors.

The Minoan seals show a concave shape of the hulls with ropes that extend from the center to the ends of the ship. Thor Heyerdahl argued many years ago that this is the required infrastructure for reed boats. Such watercrafts are made by bundling together hundreds of dried reeds. These bundles are themselves tied together in even larger bundles and secured together to form the base of the boat.

A corollary of this form of vessel is that the ends tend to taper off and are less strong in open seas – tending to fall apart. To avoid this, ancient ship builders devised the method of strengthening the ship ends by securing them to a rope extending from a pole or structure in the middle of the craft. This arrangement also tends to give the vessel a concave shape. This is all quite apparent in these seals. For a full account see Heyerdahl’s book Ancient Man and the Ocean.

In recent years, new evidence has emerged to make this Egyptian presence in America seem likely. Svetla Balabanova discovered a few years ago that New World cocaine and nicotine are present in some Egyptian mummies. And it has been known for some time that interesting similarities exist between Micmac writings, the Davenport Stele, and other New World inscriptions and Egyptian hieroglyphs. So, while I agree with the conclusion dawn by Menzies and Hudson (that the Minoan seals are evidence of early maritime activity) I also think that this evidence should be seen in the larger context of multiple colonization events in Ancient America.  

Finally, I would like to comment briefly on the more controversial pre-Columbian Chinese map that Menzies and Hudson have uncovered showing essentially the entire continent of North America. This map, discovered by a Chinese lawyer Liu Gang (and subsequently named the Liu Gang Map), is a dual hemisphere map showing the Old World in the left hemisphere and the New World in the right.

The map is claimed to have been made in either 1417 or 1418 and shows both North and South America in clear outline with the Mosquito Coast of Honduras and the Panamanian isthmus of Central America also clearly defined. Menzies and Hudson claim that this map is evidence of the large fleets of discovery sent from China in the early 15^th Century, and particularly of the fleet under the leadership of Admiral Zheng He.

Of all the claims in Who Discovered America?, this map has received the sharpest comments from critics.  Important points such as: the lack of a Chinese cartographic tradition of dual-hemisphere maps, apparent copying from earlier maps (for example the copying of California as an island which mistake is hard to see duplicated on a voyage of discovery coming from China), the poor quality of representation of Chinese landmarks, etc.

I am also surprised that North America’s largest river system (the Missouri / Mississippi River) is either missing or shown to empty into the Atlantic Ocean. The Amazon River is also missing from South America, although other details seem to be correct.

Liu Gang says that he bought the map from a Shanghai dealer in 2001 for $500. He is also reported to have understood the importance of the find after learning of Menzies’s book 1421. As things stand now, the map is not being taken seriously by scholars. In a jumble of inconsistent accounts, it is generally dismissed as a forgery.

I think this is a mistake. I do not doubt that it is being unwisely sold as evidence for Zheng He’s “discovery” of America. Yet the map does appear to be fairly old, perhaps made in the 18^th Century. And it still remains to be seen what the story behind its production will turn out to be, if this can ever be known. Perhaps it represents nothing more than an early Chinese interest in global issues during the age of discovery. It would be interesting to find out more about it.

Sadly, though, the sensational claims of Menzies’s books make this unlikely. Critics, it seems, come to the same all-or-nothing conclusions on these issues just as Menzies and Hudson do on the peopling of the New World. If anything is unbelievable then everything must be unbelievable. I would argue that Menzies and Hudson should not be expected to master and fairly evaluate the bulk of accumulating diffusionist evidence. Nor should they be expected to be experts in antique maps. They have never been trained to be (and they never claim that they have).

In fairness, they have popularized something that scholars have guardedly accepted for some time. I mean that there is evidence that the Chinese were present at some level in the New World before Columbus. The correct path forward is to learn just how important this presence actually was. Clearly, many of the claims made by Menzies and Hudson are misplaced. But the fact remains that we don’t know exactly just how extensive the Chinese presence was. And certainly the interested amateur should have a voice in this debate.

I would hope that someone with experience in ancient maps would look more closely at the Liu Gang Map. The first thing we need to know is if its age can be determined by a group of credible labs. It also needs to be looked at by calligraphers. If it isn’t a modern forgery than we need to know why such a map exists – with all its atypical properties. Given the fact that there does seem to have been a Chinese presence in America before Columbus, a better knowledge of what was happening In China at this time would be worthwhile.

Times really are changing in our understanding of the ancient world. Just within the last year we have seen a prominent genetic confirmation, in America’s premier scientific journal (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, and confirmed in the British journal Nature) of the transfer of the sweet potato from the Americas to Oceania before Columbus. And Alan de Queiroz of the University of Nevada, Reno has recently published a book showing (among other things) the importance of trans-oceanic dispersal events in the history of life – even establishing the surprising fact that New World monkeys probably made it across the Atlantic Ocean instead of travelling via the Beringian land bridge as previously thought.

This changing academic environment is opening up a whole new perspective on pre-Columbian cultural exchanges. And it is worthwhile reading Who Discovered America? within this broader context. It is easy enough to find implausible arguments in a popular book like this. We would do better to see what more might be added to, or subtracted from, the authors’ arguments and find out where they just might be right.

References

The phrase “The Single Colonization Myth”  is introduced in my article from the Winter 2012 issue of the NEARA Journal “Bearded Polynesians and the Single Colonization Myth”, Volume 46(2): 4-9. Gavin Menzies and Ian Hudson. 2013, Who Discovered America? The Untold History of the Peopling of the Americas. William Morrow, 308 pp. Menzies’s three previous books include: 1421, The Year China Discovered America (William Morrow, 2002); 1434, The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance (William Morrow, 2008); and The Lost Empire of Atlantis (William Morrow, 2011).  On the Chinese influence in La Venta, see Xu, H. Mike. 1996. Origin of the Olmec Civilization. Edmond: University of Central Oklahoma Press. Betty Meggers’s research, The Transpacific origin of Mesoamerican Civilization: A Preliminary Review of the Evidence and Its Theoretical Implications, was published in  American Anthropologist 77: 1-27 (1975).  On the African presence in La Venta see Ivan Van Sertima. 1976. They Came Before Columbus, The African Presence in Ancient America. Random House, New York. On the European presence, see  Geoffrey Ashe’s book Land to the West, St. Brendan’s Voyage to America. The Viking Press, New York (1962). See page 222 for the discussion of the Olmec stele – which is figured opposite of page 209. See Ancient Encounters, Kennewick Man and the First Americans by James C. Chatters published by Simon and Schuster in 2001 for information on Kennewick Man. The Y Chromosome Consortium’s 2002 article A Nomenclature System for the Tree of Human Y-Chromosomal Binary Haplogroups.  Genome Research 12 (2): 339–348, is my source of male inheritance. For a beginning list of important references on the Silk Road see the Wikipedia article, Silk Rode (Accessed 2/28/14).  Heyerdahl, Thor (1979) Early Man and the Ocean. Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, points out the sea-worthy nature of early Egyptian reed boats. Wells, Samuel A. 2000. American drugs in Egyptian mummies: a review of the evidence. http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~legneref/ethnic/mummy.htm. (Accessed 3/4/14.) is my review of the Balabanova research. See Geoff Wade’s challenge to the Liu Gang map at www.1421exposed.com/html/wade_challenge.html for an earlier critique. (Accessed 3/4/14.) See also Stefan Lovgren’s article “Chinese Columbus” Map Likely Fake, Experts Say, in the January 23, 2006 post on nationalgeographicnews.com. (Accessed 3/4/14.) On the recent sweet potato findings see Roullier, Caroline et al. (2013). Historic collections reveal patterns of diffusion of sweet potato in Oceania obscured by modern plant movements and recombination. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Vol. 110(6): 2205-2210.  And on the recent changes in animal dispersal attitudes see De Queiroz, Alan (2014) The Monkey’s Voyage, How Improbable Journeys Shaped the History of Life. Basic Books, New York.

The Liu Gang map was kindly provided by Ian Hudson and is used here by permission.

Voyaging

Sometimes you have to gather

Truth in fairy nets

That swing through windless

Fathoms of the brain

Or catch a dream with

Feathers on a string

To quench our willful

Heritage of pain

But then there comes

A time to start again,

To act upon those

Windows of the deep

However far the flotsam

May remain

And fix the stranded

Wreckage of our keep

Faith and the Duke Experiments in ESP

Many of us occasionally intuit things that our normal senses fail to register. My first guess that this was a real possibility came when I was in junior high school. I was at that awkward stage in life when I started noticing girls and feeling very self-conscious. It was also a time that I became aware of many things I had ignored before.

One behavioral change that was quite common among my peers was the game of sneaking looks at cute girls. This was a game that I was too shy to participate in for the most part, although privately I did notice a couple of girls that I secretly liked.

It was at this impressionable time that I developed the odd notion that some of these girls could tell when I was looking at them even when it seemed that they couldn’t see me. I decided that they must have better peripheral vision than I had, although this didn’t explain the cases that involved looking completely in the opposite direction. I found it a bit ironic when, a few years later, a girl named Lisa (whom I admired) was in charge of testing peripheral vision and blind spots for a driver education class. I unreasonably assumed she had been given the job because of her feminine expertise.

I’m still a bit undecided on this issue. But I’m half convinced that women do have a better sense of being watched than men do. I hear them commenting on such things occasionally. Men almost never do. Of course such ability, if it is real, would be classified as paranormal. And in recent decades, the paranormal has been pretty much banished from serious discourse.

This is too bad. Some varieties of what has been called extra-sensory perception (or ESP) have been fairly convincingly established – like the ability to sense the image on a card without seeing it (sometimes called clairvoyance) or of the ability to detect what someone else is thinking or concentrating on (sometimes called telepathy). Other claims are a bit more sensational and not well established – like the ability to predict the stock market. Overall, it’s a shame that we aren’t paying more academic attention to these sorts of things. They used to be a lot more popular.

Both the US and Soviet military spent resources on paranormal studies – as did the Nazis. And between the two World Wars, it actually became somewhat respectable for universities to support these kinds of studies too.

Perhaps the most famous were the Duke Experiments conducted by Joseph Banks (J.B.) Rhine, a botanist who took up paranormal studies at Duke University. He became interested in the possibility of measuring paranormal activity after being impressed by comments made by Arthur Conan Doyle. Rhine ended up spending several years and much of his career studying clairvoyance. He categorized his area of study as a branch of abnormal psychology.

Based on his findings, Rhine claimed that 1 person in 5 had some extra-sensory ability. Sometimes gifted persons were aware of their abilities. Very often, however, they were not. Sometimes students would come to his lab to be tested and discover their ability for the first time using a simple card test that Rhine had developed. It was a fairly straightforward test using a deck of 25 cards. These cards consisted of 5 cards each of 5 different shapes (star, plus sign, square, circle, and wavy lines). Subjects were then asked to intuit the face of the card without seeing it. A purely random score would be 5 correct out of the 25 cards (a score that could be easily made if someone chose the same shape all 25 times, for example). Rhine then calculated the significance of the scores based on the number correct above 5 and the number of tests conducted for each subject.

Over the period of several years, Rhine studied hundreds of subjects. A handful of these were particularly gifted and averaged scores well above 5. In some cases correct runs of over 10 in a row were recorded. On three occasions, scores of 25 correct (out of 25) were reported – representing odds astronomically improbable.

Rhine’s recounting of these studies makes for fascinating reading. And for me, with an abiding interest in the religious principle of faith, I find a couple of things similar between them – I mean that faith and ESP have some things in common. I also see a couple of things that are quite (and importantly) different between them.

The first and most obvious similarity between ESP and faith is the importance of optimism. This is what Rhine has to say on the matter: “The better the investigator can communicate a wholehearted enthusiasm, confidence, and encouragement to the subjects, the better are his chances of success.”

Very often Rhine would test a subject who would record high scores at first and then, as the tedium of the studies wore on, would eventually record scores no better than random hits (close to a score of an even 5). Very few subjects could maintain high scores over the period of months and years. It wasn’t always easy to keep a subject’s confidence up. I am reminded of Peter’s initial effort at walking on water towards Jesus. Astonishingly, he succeeded at first and then he sank.

I believe that this principle of optimism, or confidence, also held true for the evaluators – even true for Rhine himself. This is suggested by the fact that these Duke studies often yielded successful results that other institutions were unable to duplicate. Over time this changed and Rhine’s successes were achieved by many other institutions and individuals. But among those that were successful there seems to have been an element of optimism in the validity of the studies.

One of the benefits of using Rhine’s ESP cards is that it is not an all-or-nothing test of clairvoyance. Subjects can score a card incorrectly and still get an indication of extra-sensory ability from the overall score. And as each subject is not told of the correctness of her “guesses” until the end of each run, there is little pressure in having to establish or maintain a sensational effort.

That said, there were only a few cases recorded where subjects were able to record more than just 5 or 6 correct in a row. It is easy to see why if you look at the odds. If a subject has a 1 in 5 chance of scoring each card correct (since there are 5 shapes to choose from), then the odds of getting 5 right in a row is a simple calculation of 1 in 5 multiplied 5 times. Or in other words the odds are 1 in 3,625 of getting a run of 5 in a row correct due just to chance. Or put another way, a subject without ESP ability would be expected to get 5 correct in a row only once every 3,625 tries.

Getting a run correct beyond this becomes exponentially less likely for every try. Even so, it wasn’t rare for a gifted subject to get a spectacular run on occasion – even a nearly impossible run. Yet, no matter how gifted the subject was, these unusual events could never be predicted or controlled.

For someone with a religious frame of mind, it’s easy to see the similarities between this truth and the principle of faith in the efficacy of prayer. Many people, like me, have great faith in prayer even though we don’t always see the hand of God in our lives. Sometimes our Heavenly Father seems to want us to handle things the best we can on our own. At other times, answers come in remarkable ways.

Just recently I found myself confronted with a small crisis in one of my research projects at work. I wanted to see if a molecule extracted from a particular bacterium could protect a plant from pests. Unfortunately, the day was windy and I was having trouble getting the solution where I needed it to be on the plants. So I decided I needed a bit of help from Mother Nature’s boss, and I said a prayer. Needless to say, the wind stopped and I was able to conduct my experiment.

These kinds of answers to prayers are not uncommon for me. As I look back on them, I realize that they are fairly insignificant from a certain historic or global perspective, but they are definitely important to me. And yet, it often happens that my prayers for much bigger issues seem to go unresolved.

Through the years, Kathy and I have often prayed for our handicapped daughter Alicia. Over time, though, our prayers have changed. We used to ask for her epilepsy and mental handicap to be fixed. Yet we never saw any significant change because of these prayers. We now pray for Alicia’s general well-being and for our own personal strength to help her. These prayers have a much higher success rate.  It is clear to us, that we can’t control how our prayers are answered any more than we can guarantee a successful “guess” in an ESP experiment. It seems clear that there are some things that we are not made (or meant) to understand with precision.

Another image stuck me as quite interesting in Rhine’s story. It involved research by Hans Bender at the University of Bonn in 1933. Dr. Bender had discovered a young woman (a graduate student) with extra-sensory gifts and he subjected her to several tests. Bender used different methods than Rhine. His cards consisted of letters instead of shapes. This woman also showed an ability to draw shapes of objects she could not see – shapes that an observer had identified. Her drawings were not always exactly like the image, but the overall similarities were unmistakable.

This study is quite similar to a series of studies that the American author Upton Sinclair did with his wife back in the 1920’s. Sinclair’s wife was known to have telepathic abilities and would frequently demonstrate them to her husband who ended up writing a book about their experiments together. This book Mental Radio is full of the drawings of these experiments which consisted primarily of Sinclair drawing a random object (often something that he would find in a magazine or around the house) that he would then concentrate on. His wife, in another room, would then try to draw the same object by concentrating on what she thought Sinclair had in mind.

According to their own calculation, about a fourth of the attempts were quite good and impressively accurate. Several of them are illustrated in the book – including a six pointed star, a kitchen fork, a bird’s nest, etc. About half of the attempts were not extremely clear but similarities were noticeable – for example a shrub would have lines and circles similar to branches and leaves. And about a fourth of the attempts showed no similarity at all.

Sinclair did not know how to statistically evaluate the probabilities of these similarities. In fact, I’m not sure that statisticians today would be up to the task. How do you calculate the odds of drawing a random object out of countless possibilities? Clearly the odds of drawing a fourth of the objects correctly are extremely low and not due to chance.

But what about the many drawings that are only somewhat alike? Dr. Bender described some of these efforts as similar to object that you or I might see through dim light. There is a shadowy kind of similarity but crisp details and outlines are missing.

Consider this finding with the words of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians, “For now we see through a glass, darkly…” This remarkable image is the Apostle’s description of how we perceive Heavenly things in a fallen and imperfect world. It comes at the end of his magisterial treatment of charity and the gifts of the spirit. It comes just before his statement that, “now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three…”

Faith isn’t a perfect knowledge of things. Sometimes we only get a glimpse, or a hint, or a suspicion. The outlines aren’t clear and yet we proceed. We were made to live much of our lives this way. We are not mere calculating machines that have to mechanically estimate probabilities or be completely convinced by logical certainty. We are beings that make many of our decisions on imperfect information. We make our best guess. We are forced to “see through a glass darkly”.

What makes this image particularly arresting is that in all probability, Paul is referring here to an early Jewish equivalent of a crystal ball or magic mirror. I know this may sound sacrilegious to some Christians but let me explain.

An important element among those that have extra-sensory gifts is the ability to dilute the sensory overload that normally exists all around us. The sights, sounds, odors, etc. that fill our world keep us focused on our immediate surroundings. Individuals that claim to be able to access things beyond these senses very often have to put themselves in a trance-like state to be more effective.

Various ways have been devised by mystics through the years to do this. Sometimes random ink blots on paper have been used. Sometimes gazing into an opaque glass or a crystal ball has been effective. At other times, forms of mirrors have been used.

These sorts of things, oddly enough, do show up in the Bible. Saul is known to have visited a type of soothsayer and the Book of Revelation contains references to magical stones and seals, etc. For our purposes, two Biblical references are particularly noteworthy. In the 44^th chapter of Genesis, Joseph has a favorite (and presumably expensive) cup secretly placed in his brother Benjamin’s bag. He does this in order to accuse him later of theft which will enable him to stay longer with Joseph who at this point has not revealed his own true identity. The account indicates that this cup is used by Joseph for drinking and for divining. And in fact it is an example of a well-known type of vision aid with ties to magic mirrors. In this case a silver cup is filled with water which acts as a kind of mirror.

Another reference is our account of Paul in his letter to the Corinthians. His statement of “seeing through a glass darkly,” is very likely a reference to gazing at various forms of glass as a visionary aid. This is what Professor Tenhaeff from the State University of Utrecht wrote about some of these kinds of attempts by clairvoyants to reduce sensory inputs: “Some subjects attempt to achieve a lowered level of consciousness by means of a crystal ball or a piece of glass… The use of the magic mirror to achieve a state of diminishing inhibitions and to stimulate the manifestation of paragnostic powers is mentioned repeatedly, not only in the ethnological literature but also by classical authors and those of the Middle Ages.”

Not only is Paul’s image of darkened glass appropriate as a metaphor for life and faith, it is likely a description of how he knew others to be looking for answers. I find this to be an impressive truth. To this day, over eight decades since the Duke Experiments have been conducted, the results of Dr. Rhine’s experiments are essentially ignored by the academy. And yet the best criticisms never take his rigorous testing methods seriously. For those of us (perhaps the 1 in 5) that have experienced paranormal things, this is unfortunate. It is also unfortunate that the very fundamental principle of religious faith is also questioned by the same academy.

I don’t mean that every associate professor lacks faith or never succumbs to mystical hunches now and then. But the fact remains, that we cannot manipulate or control either faith or extra-sensory perception. And because of this, very few scholars are willing to bet their careers on such things.

Among religious believers, too, there is a hesitancy to acknowledge the existence of ESP. Part of this hesitancy may be due to ignorance of its similarities to faith. Other reasons are, I think, a little more fundamental. In particular, the historic relationship between organized religion (specifically Christianity) and the paranormal has often been strained.

This Christian history extends back to the very beginning when many of the Roman mystery religions practiced mystical rituals that were unacceptable to the early followers of Jesus. Later in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, it was the purveyors of the magic world view that often found them at odds with the established church.

Our ancestors living at this time made a real distinction between dark magic and white magic. The former was of the Devil. The latter included things like angels, deceased saints and miracles. But the distinction between dark and white magic was not always clear. There was a broad area of overlap that included such things as talismans, fortune-telling, dowsing, etc., Many Christians – especially rural congregations – lived in this area of overlap. These Christians were very often comfortable with ideas such as hunches and dreams – experiences that they were familiar with and that wouldn’t have been too different from certain kinds of clairvoyance and telepathy.

Today most Christians live in a scientifically informed culture that leaves us suspicious of both black and white magic. Not only do we wink at the thought of devils and angels but we dismiss the more commonly experienced manifestations of ESP. It isn’t scientifically or religiously acknowledged.

This is in a way a limiting development. It puts us outside of our heritage.We are no longer shackled by credulity and are not nearly as gullible as our ancestors must have been. Or so we imagine. 

And in at least one sense, we are probably more grounded doctrinally too. ESP is not a principle that leads anyone necessarily to God. Rhine worked at a respected institution founded by Methodists and Quakers (Duke University) but he became interested in clairvoyance from Arthur Conan Doyle. And Doyle was known to have often been critical of organized religion and of religious faith.

During recent decades, if you were to have patronized bookstores with large New Age holdings (a common occurrence, I might add), you would have noticed that titles dealing with ESP were stacked right next to titles dealing with black magic. This is fairly revealing. The people buying books on ESP were more likely to be interested in witches than in a Heavenly Father.

If former Christians would have been comfortable discussing telepathy and dreams after church – or buying a related book at their local Christian bookstore – modern Christians prefer talking about technology while leaving anything smacking of mysticism to the cultural underground. And while it might be doctrinally safer to separate these two worlds, it is also true that we are probably missing out on a very human – and a very Christian – part of our natures.   

There is no need to be ashamed of this. We were made to exercise faith and to act on hunches – even, dare I say it, on dreams. Of course we make mistakes while we’re at it. But if J.B. Rhine was even partially right – and I’m convinced that he was – than acting on these “extra” senses might not always be a bad idea. We might be right more often than we might think. 

References

For a fascinating account of the Duke experiments see J.B. Rhine’s New Frontiers of the Mind, published by Farrar & Rinehart, in 1937. Upton Sinclair’s book Mental Radio was published by Albert and Charles Boni in 1930. The quotes of Paul come from 1 Corinthians 15: 12-13. Tenhaeff’s quote comes from page 38 of Telepathy and Clairvoyance, Views of Some Little Investigated Capabilities of Man, published in 1972 by Charles C. Thomas, Publisher. 

The Mormon Legend of Bigfoot

Many years ago, during a break in our regular class schedule at Orem High School, I attended the movie/documentary Sasquatch, The Legend of Bigfoot. The large enigmatic ape was popular at that time in Utah and the school auditorium was nearly full. We watched as an expedition outfitted by Chuck Evans trekked for several weeks into the northern wilderness of Canada’s British Colombia in the area of the Peckatoe River.

The film contained impressive footage of wildlife: black bears, a cougar attack, otters sliding down snowfields for fun, a food-stealing badger, and two grizzlies fighting each other. The expedition did not see a Bigfoot, however, but it claimed to have seen their footprints (that it filmed and took casts of), smelled their foul odor and heard their legendary scream.

Most impressive to me were the scenes of many live conifers that had been snapped in two with the top piece being turned upside down and repositioned on top of the broken trunk. I realize now that the trees we actually saw in the film were probably staged. But at the time I was duly impressed – as I am now as I consider such a possibility. It made enough of an impression that I still remember it over 30 years later.

As I look back on the film, I am surprised at how popular it was in our community. I have travelled around a good deal since then and have enrolled by children in many school districts across the country (in six states). And I find it unusual that the public high school in a conservative Mormon community would make such a film available on its own campus.

But, in fact, there is a lingering interest among Mormons regarding these creatures. I don’t mean that every member of the Mormon Church buys into the stories. But in scout camps, on hunting trips and at summer barbeques throughout the Intermountain West, Bigfoot stories abound. And I believe that there are a couple of reasons why.

Sightings of large hairy men have been reported by a couple of credible Mormon leaders. These occurred some time ago, but the stories are well-enough documented that credibility still surrounds them.

The best known account comes from a well-read book written by former Mormon president Spencer W. Kimball entitled, The Miracle of Forgiveness. He cites the biography of former apostle David W. Patten (written by Lycurgus A. Wilson) wherein Patten confronts a being that he calls Cain:

“As I was riding along the road on my mule I suddenly noticed a very strange personage walking beside me … His head was about even with my shoulders as I sat in my saddle. He wore no clothing, but was covered with hair. His skin was very dark. I asked him where he dwelt and he replied that he had no home, that he was a wanderer in the earth and travelled to and fro. He said he was a very miserable creature, that he had earnestly sought death during his sojourn upon the earth but that he could not die, and his mission was to destroy the souls of men. About the time he expressed himself thus, I rebuked him in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by virtue of the Holy Priesthood, and commanded him to go hence, and he immediately departed out of my sight…”

Another account, though much less known, is of the encounter that President E. Wesley Smith (then president of the Hawaiian Mission) had with a creature similar to that reported by Patten. Wesley Smith was the brother of Mormon president Joseph F. Smith and served in Hawaii in the early 20^th Century. My account of the incident is not dated but comes from a woman who served as Wesley Smith’s secretary in the mission home.

Chloe Hodge was the first Mormon missionary to serve from North Carolina. I met Chloe when she was in her 90’s and confined to a rest home. She was part of our faith community and every Sunday after our block of meetings I would visit her with a couple of teenage boys. I got to know Chloe quite well over a period of 3 years and enjoyed our visits together a great deal.

Early on, I learned that she had started to write a personal history but had stopped when she lost the manuscript. I encouraged her to start again, and eventually she agreed to do so with my help. She would hand-write a page every week and I would pick it up on Sunday and type it up before our next visit. In this way she wrote nearly 150 paragraph/chapters of her life’s story. One Sunday she handed me the story of Wesley Smith’s encounter with the hairy man and I was quite surprised and interested. This was all new to me. I would only learn later that the story, in abbreviated form, was already available on the internet.

The story of Wesley Smith’s encounter comes on pages 83-84 as part of Chloe’s mission account. It is tucked away as an interesting story, but is in no way highlighted. Chloe recounted the story just like she recounted the many other stories of her long and eventful life. Her mind was clear and active right up to the time of her death. Her account of the incident seems to me a bit more valuable than other versions (which are often third-hand). Chloe heard the story directly from Wesley Smith with whom she worked closely. And her account is not my interpretation of what she said. It is copied directly (and exactly) from her written account.

           “On one trip out to the temple President Smith told us of an earlier event in his life when he was serving in Hawaii.  He had served there as a young missionary and now he was back in his late 30’s as a Mission President. 

            This was at the time when plans were going forward to erect the temple.  He had become aware of a sense of unrest and contention among the members at a time when there should be great joy and harmony at the promises of a temple coming soon.

            President Smith was sitting in the far corner of his living room pondering these conditions and came to an understanding that the spirit of discontent and discord among the members was the work of Satan trying to prevent the building of the temple.

            Just as this realization came to him, he heard a noise and looked up to see a huge black man about eight feet tall entering the door.  His body was very hairy and he had large protuberant eyes – and he was coming toward President Smith with his arms outstretched as though to seize him.  President Smith threw up his hand instinctively, and as he did so, a light about the size and shape of a small dagger appeared in his right hand.  A voice said to him, “this represents your priesthood.  Use it.”  Immediately he mustered up the courage to command the personage to depart in the name of Jesus Christ; whereupon, the person stopped, backed out of the door, and was gone.  President Smith jumped up and ran to the door and looked out.  There was no one to be seen.

            President Smith wrote to his brother, Joseph Fielding Smith, who was then Church Historian.  He wrote back and said that he had undoubtedly had a visitation from Cain and enclosed a pamphlet which told of Apostle David Patton of the First Quorum of the Twelve who was riding his horse one night, along a country road, when suddenly just such a person as President Smith had described appeared walking alongside him, so tall that his head was about level with Elder Patton’s head as he sat astride his horse.  After going a little way in silence and being very afraid, Brother Patton asked, “who are you?” and the person answered, “I am Cain, of all men most miserable.”  Then he disappeared.  Brother Patton was later murdered by a mob, becoming the first martyr of the church.”

I was duly impressed with the story and I have given much thought to it since then. Chloe made no reference to Bigfoot, or to the possibility that this creature might be an unknown ape. Her story and the story of David Patten are completely independent of Bigfoot legends. How they became connected is still not clear to me. I believe they became part of Mormon Bigfoot lore as a natural extension of the Bigfoot accounts that became more frequent later in the 20^th century.

David Daegling, in his account of the social significance of Bigfoot, identifies 1958 as a watershed year in the creature’s popularity. This was the year that a wire service picked up the story of large footprints around a road construction site in Northern California. Casts were taken of the prints and pictures of the casts were broadcast around the country.

After this exposure, accounts of Bigfoot sightings (and footprints) became much more common. Just a couple of years later, Ivan Sanderson’s popular book Abominable Snowman: Legend comes to Life was published which told stories of large ape-men from all around the world. By this time, Bigfoot was a well-known entity in America. My guess is that the conflation of the large hairy man of Mormon legend with Bigfoot happened around this time (although this is just speculation).

I don’t mean to imply that stories of Bigfoot started in 1958. This is hardly the case. In fact there seems to be a higher proportion of credible accounts before that time. And most of them are from the Pacific Northwest where the famous Patterson-Gimlin film was taken. Two stories that have been told several times include accounts by Teddy Roosevelt and Albert Ostman.

Teddy Roosevelt’s telling (second hand) of an encounter in the Bitterroot Mountains was narrated in his 1893 book Wilderness Hunter (vol.2). The incident involved two trappers (one ended up being killed) and probably took place in the late 19^th Century.

The less credible account (at least to me) of Albert Ostman tells of a presumed encounter that happened in 1924. Ostman had been camping and noticed that some of this things were being taken at night from his pack in a tidier manner than a bear, or other known mammal, would have managed. Then one night while sleeping, a large hairy beast carried him away while he was still in his sleeping bag. He was taken to a place where he was held captive by the creature and its presumed family. Ostman claimed to have escaped when the animal got sick from eating his chewing tobacco.  

Other accounts have been uncovered including one of a miner that shot a large ape-man near Mount Saint Helens (also in 1924). Another story told of a juvenile great ape being shot in British Columbia in 1884. It isn’t clear to me, however, that any of these stories ever made it to Utah, or were known to Mormons generally.

However it happened, these stories are now part of a larger Mormon conception of Bigfoot that includes the Biblical murderer Cain. As a result, Mormons often tell stories that are similar to other versions, but also unique. If Bigfoot is Cain, then it is only expected that a single being exists. If Bigfoot is, instead, the Sasquatch of Native American tradition, then it is to be expected that an entire population (perhaps several populations) exist as a valid un-described species. This distinction is usually not made. And the possibility that Bigfoot, as a species; and Cain, as a wondering hairy man, remain two independent phenomena also remains an infrequent supposition in Mormon culture.

Recently I decided to make a trip to Bigfoot country in order to experience the area and the culture for myself. My nephew Jon came with me. “Bigfoot country”, of course, is a pretty ambiguous term. Sightings have been made of the legendary creature all over North America. Nonetheless, the Pacific Northwest (ranging from northern California to Southern British Columbia) has long been recognized as the oldest and most likely place to hear about Bigfoot. As a biologist, I also find this region more satisfying as it can be fairly well defined and represents a particular kind of ecosystem. Many other creatures also live exclusively in this area. The Pacific Northwest is a moist forest ecosystem – a rainforest in essence. It is a place with such a profusion of plant life that an unknown creature might feasibly remain undetected within its dense canopies. It is one of only a couple of places in North America like this.

Jon and I wanted to see Bluff Creek where the Patterson-Gimlin film was taken and to visit the town of Willow Creek on the Bigfoot Highway where the Bigfoot museum is located (as it turned out, it was closed for the season). Before we got there, we passed through the town of Weaverville (west of Redding) and stopped at the Forest Service office there. I needed a couple of maps but I also wanted to talk to a ranger about Bigfoot sightings.

This first stop in the area proved to be quite enlightening. I had expected to find a good deal of cynicism among the locals – especially when talking with outsiders like us. Accordingly, I had decided to be coy about my Bigfoot interest and present myself as a naturalist looking for good camping and hiking sites – all of which was true. In short, I wanted to have a meaningful conversation and not be snickered at.

But when I asked about wildlife, the gentleman in the office assumed that we wanted to see Bigfoot. I hesitated at this presumption and said we just wanted to know if there were any interesting animals around. Eventually we were directed to a woman with more knowledge of the area. She was helpful but merely professional until I stated bluntly that we would like to know of any sightings by locals.

I was surprised at the change in the woman’s attitude. She became more solicitously helpful and told us that, in fact, a sighting had been made recently near the Swift Creek campground above Trinity Lake. She was very willing to tell us about Bigfoot as soon as she could tell that we were respectfully interested.

Over the next couple of days, Jon and I would talk with a couple more rangers, with people along the side of the road, with the owner of Bigfoot Books (a used bookstore just south of Willow Creek), and with a backpacker that was out looking for Bigfoot. In each case, we were treated with the same casual regard that you might expect if you were asking for directions to a gas station.

And in fact we were told about several Bigfoot encounters made by people in town through the years. But we were never given names. I was told by the ranger at the Willow Creek office that people were hesitant to divulge their identities because of a historic disrespect from enquiring writers and publicists. The people of Willow Creek were not out on a campaign to confirm the reality of Bigfoot. But the creatures’ existence was taken for granted and people were very willing to talk with someone they could trust.

  

As our conversations proceeded, it was surprising to us how many stories there were. Recently a Forest service employee on his way to work had seen a Bigfoot looking into a river. Our backpacker friend had been recently spooked by a Bigfoot in the area near Bluff Creek. I was particularly interested in the story of a child that had seen one at fairly close range for several moments and had pointed it out to her father who couldn’t make it out. Later, there were footprints located in the spot identified by the child.

I was particularly interested in this child’s story because of its numinous implications. The more I have thought on the Mormon Bigfoot legend, the more I see the similarities between them and the mystical elements surrounding many of the Bigfoot stories. Daegling’s seemingly fair yet skeptical study of Bigfoot culture comes to the conclusion that whether or not Bigfoot turns out to be real, it certainly has become part of American mythology in a real way.

The two Mormon accounts of the large hairy wildman (the only two that I know of) fall neatly into Daegling’s categorization. This categorization is comprised of two parts - it includes a belief in a real creature but is often alluded to in religious contexts or in some other form of transcendent experience. In both Mormon accounts the man identified as Cain is thwarted by priesthood power. Yet he is always considered a real being.

What light this sheds, if any, on the legend of Bigfoot is not clear to me. For sure it places the Mormon stories in line with the traditions of many cultures that tell of wildmen. I don’t think, however, that these stories generate more interest in the broader Mormon community than do Bigfoot stories in American culture in general.

At the beginning of the 21^st century, Mormons do not seem to be overly concerned about them. My experience is that these stories rarely come up in religious classes or formal worship services. And the growing Mormon Church is full of members that have never even heard of them. Nor does it appear that Utah, with its predominant Mormon population, has any more Bigfoot sightings than would be expected by its location.

You can find a listing of reported Bigfoot sightings by state at The Bigfoot Field Research Organization website. I have calculated the number of sightings by state population to determine which states have the most sightings per capita. Here are my rough calculations (rounded to the nearest 10, out of a standardized 100,000 persons) for the NW states (and a few other random states for comparison): Washington, 80; Oregon, 60; Wyoming, 50; Idaho, 40; Alaska, 30; Utah, 20; Colorado, 20; California, 10; Arizona, 10; Kansas, 10; Florida, 10; New York, 5; Nevada, 3; Connecticut, 2.

These numbers are certainly not exact. They only represent the number of sightings officially reported. I know of several sighting from Utah from a couple of decades ago that are not on the list – they just weren’t reported. That said, the rough numbers do show that there is a real concentration in the Pacific Northwest with numbers diminishing with distance from this area. The number for California might seem low. This is, after all, the state from which the famous Patterson-Gimlin film was taken. If you look on the map, though, you discover quickly that Bluff Creek (in Humboldt County where the footage was taken) in not far from Oregon. In fact the habitat of the area is much more like that of Oregon and Washington than it is of the rest of the state of California. California’s high population comes from the San Francisco and Los Angeles urban centers which are a long way from Bluff Creek.

Utah doesn’t stand out as any more remarkable than any other nearby state. In this sense a predisposed credulity doesn’t seem to be at issue here. That said, however, Mormon interest in the large hairy wildman continues at multiple levels. It is perceived as a curiosity, as a legend, and also as a scriptural apology. It brings the ancient stories of the Old Testament to our times and gives them a contemporary relevance. And in a community with sacred traditions extending back to Adam and Eve, Bigfoot seems to have found a guarded acceptance.     

References

The Bigfoot Field Research Organization website is www.bfro.net/. The reference in The Miracle of Forgiveness comes from Chapter 9 (Point of No Return, pages 127-128 in my 1969 edition from Bookcraft). The autobiography of Chloe Hodge was privately published in 2008 as A Whale of a Tale, My Life Story by Chloe Belle Hodge. Daegling’s The Social History of Bigfoot is Chapter 3 in his Bigfoot Exposed (published in 2004 by Altamira Press). See also Chapter 11, the Phenomenon.

Mother Nature's Medicine

Mother Nature is one of the greatest healers the world has ever known. Her work can be found in the pharmacy, the examination table and the recovery room. It fills the aisles of health food stores and grocery chains. More immediately, it dwells in a lonely garden path, within a fragrant orange grove, on a fallen-needle path of pines.

Ironically, Mother Nature is both the purveyor of health and the cause and deliverer of decay. She is constrained by the laws of death, but confirmed as the harbinger of life. She is, so very often, the prescription of Heaven. 

This is not a political truth or an advocate’s plea. It is a reality that most of us have recognized at some point in our lives. And yet, with only a few exceptions, we as Christians clearly draw the distinction between valuing the Creation and worshiping it.

Our sacred history is celebrated mostly in church and temple. Of course it also includes many exceptions – in garden, mountain and grove. But for some reason we become wary of those who take their religion to the wilderness.

So it is with a bit of suspicion or with an inherent hesitation that some of us admit how much we need the natural world for our own peace of mind. We shouldn’t need to feel this way. Admitting that we love to walk in the woods shouldn’t make us feel like we’re admitting a sin.

Take the masculine hobby of hunting as an example. It is filled with men that love being outdoors. It is also filled with men that have learned that it isn’t polite, in mixed company, to brag about their trophies. Neither do you hear these men talk about how much they love the wind in their hair, a beautiful sunset, or the honking of geese. Yet these are all very common feelings of most hunters.

I have felt, on a number of times, like I had to explain my political position at church or in a social gathering after being caught enthusing over a trip into the wild. Just recently I had an influential member of my community come up to me at church with surprise written all over his face. He had just learned how conservative I am on many issues. “Sam,” he said, “all this time I thought you were a tree-hugger.”

Because this sort of thing happens often enough, I have learned to boil my feelings down to a couple of simple points. I seek out nature because of a real curiosity about the created world. But I also seek out nature because of its profound ability to heal.

I recognize that other people do not share my fascination with animals and plants. Try as I might to convey my enthusiasm for beetles, these people only recoil at the sight of long antennae and stout mandibles. These individuals seem to survive happily behind manicured lawns in town.

Yet in spite of differences in our individual preferences, Mother Nature remains one of the greatest healers of all of us. This is just as true for the committed urbanite as it is for an aboriginal shaman. And no matter how blind we are to anything that isn’t man-made we can fix our lives and our relationships more often than we realize if we would just let go of the control we impose upon the world and let the natural rhythms of nature teach us a thing or two.

There are several extreme examples of this in a little book by Diane Ackerman entitled A Slender Thread.  This is a book about the author’s thoughts and phone conversations while volunteering at a suicide prevention center. As this fascinating book unfolds, it becomes clear that psychological health is a fragile thing indeed.

Ackerman shows that one of the best ways to help someone experiencing a deep suicidal depression is to get them out in the natural world. Dealing with these cases on an individual basis becomes very situational, but there is no doubt about the benefits of the real world.  

This can be frustrating to many people used to our world of quick fixes – to a world that has come to rely on modern medicine and a pharmaceutical solutions. Unfortunately mental and emotional angst is not always so easily cured and sometimes Mother Nature is a tremendous help.

On one occasion a woman, that Ackerman refers to as Louise, calls and admits that her life is in ruins and she is ready to end the suffering. Ackerman listens to her problems, coaches her and then listens some more. She tries appealing to Louise’s need to care for her teenage daughter. This doesn’t work. Then she asks the woman if she happens to be outside. As it turns out, she is.

“Look up,” she tells Louise, who laughs just a little at the beautiful cloudy sky. The conversation then turns to other natural things. Louise mentions a tree. “What kind is it,” asks Ackerman.

“It’s a gingko, it has fan-shaped leaves,” answers Louise. The conversation then turns more directly to botany and the disaster is averted, at least for the time being. For some reason (deeply embedded in human nature) the sky and a tree were capable of grounding this troubled woman.

The most obvious reason for this is that we are natural beings ourselves. It is true that sacred literature teaches us of our unique position in the world. Clearly we are different than other beings. And yet we are still created from the dust of the earth. Physiologically and anatomically we belong to this earth just like the squirrel outside the window or the dogwood blooming in the spring.

And so it should not be a surprise that we respond to the ways of nature. And it shouldn’t surprise us either that our manmade world – a world that takes us away from nature – might just be the cause of many of our ailments.

This was brought home to me a few years ago in a conversation I had with Reese Nelson, Professor of Horticulture at BYU – Idaho. Reese had grown up in the rural town of Grantsville, Utah amid old poplars and sagebrush and had learned to appreciate the rhythms of rural life.

During his graduate work at Idaho State University, he came up with a plan to see if he could measure the benefits of nature on a group of college students in a fairly stressful situation. He decided to create an area on one side of the university’s testing center with an abundance of ornamental plants. Then he arranged for the testing center to randomly assign some of the students taking a math exam to this area.

Reese’s design was straightforward and yet fairly convincing. He was able to show that students taking the exam near the plants were both calmer and scored higher than students that took the exam away from the plants. The differences were not enormous but they were real (and they were conducted on enough students to be scientifically valid).

After thinking about this study I realized that I already believed its basic conclusions. The natural world can calm us down and help us regain peace of mind. One particularly telling example of this happened at the time I lost my job a number of years ago. This was a very stressful time and for years, even after finding other employment, I was anxious much of the time. The experience had left me quite vulnerable and numb, both mentally and emotionally.

Fortunately, I was able to escape to wild places often and this helped a great deal. I also learned that a bracing bath in a cold stream (or in a cold shower) did wonders. The sudden (and uncomfortable) sensation of the frigid water left me wide awake and acutely aware of the moment. During the time of the bath or shower, and for over an hour afterwards, I felt very much alive.

I became convinced over the years that mental, physical and emotional health all require that we interact with the natural world. When we fail to do this, we build instead a wall of unnatural barriers between us and the way we were meant to live.

Consider all the things that fill our lives today that were not part of the world our ancestors lived in – not part, that is, of the world in which we were created. We live in buildings that are kept at constant comfortable temperatures. We only walk a fraction of what we used to. And when we do, it is in shoes that keep us from strengthening our feet. We travel at speeds and at heights that our bodies do not understand completely – not to mention the shock of changing time zones so suddenly.

We eat foods that are saturated with refined sugars and carbohydrates that our ancestors often considered to be rare delicacies. We sit around most of the day in postures that don’t match our bodies’ needs. We breathe a myriad of chemicals that have completely unknown effects on our bodies. And we fill our heads with an almost constant stream of noise and visual stimuli that are quite unnatural. Is it any wonder that so many of us struggle?

The reality is that our many technologies, for all of their conveniences, almost never reach us at a visceral level. And if we never allow the natural world into our lives; then, by definition, we are living unnatural lives. 

My favorite example of the healing power of nature is the classic children’s story The Secret Garden written by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The story is about three children that circumstances bring together in a setting of Victorian gardens.

Mary Lennox is a spoiled and petulant girl who loses both of her parents in a cholera epidemic in India. Because there is nobody left in the household to take care of her, she is sent to England to live at Misselthwaite Manor in the home of her uncle Archibald Craven.

Mary hardly ever sees her uncle who travels a great deal after having lost his wife. And Mary’s sour disposition doesn’t win her many friends in her new home. Even so, Mary becomes captivated by a young boy named Dickon who loves being outside and who has a patient way with animals and plants. When Mary discovers that Dickon feeds and plays with animals, she is so fascinated that she manages to stop being mean and the two children become friends.

After arriving in Misselthwaite, Mary begins hearing cries coming from someplace within the large house. Despite warnings that she is never to venture into unbidden rooms, Mary sneaks around searching for the source of the sounds. As it turns out, the cries have been coming from Mr. Craven’s invalid son Colin, who is confined to his room and almost never leaves his bed.

Colin is a very spoiled boy who insists on getting his own way. He is not expected to live very long and the household has been instructed by Mr. Craven to humor the boy until he dies.

When Colin meets Mary for the first time, he is both frustrated and pleased that she is not afraid of him and will not be intimidated by his domineering ways. The two children become friends and Mary tells Colin of all the wonderful adventures that she is having outside with Dickon.

Eventually Mary tells Colin about a great secret. It is a hidden garden that she has discovered outside the manor. This garden was the former treasure of Colin’s mother, but after her death it had been closed. His wife’s death, in fact, had been such a blow to Mr. Craven that the garden was abandoned and the key was thrown away.

Through the passing years, the outside door to the garden had become hidden in vegetation and nearly forgotten. It was only by chance (and the instincts of a robin) that Mary found the key and the door. Then, together with Dickon and the forbearance of the gardener, the two children set to work rehabilitating the long abandoned wonderland.

When Colin was finally trusted enough to secretly join Mary and Dickon in the garden, his spirits greatly improved and he began to heal. But this was all kept highly confidential among the three children. Finally, at the end of the story, the family learns that Colin has been sneaking outside and has been healed in the secret garden. He can stand up and walk and his complexion is ruddy and full of health. He is no longer expected to die. In fact he stands to inherit Misselthwaite Manor.

My wife, Kathy, and I read this wonderful book together some time ago. And as it happened, we finished it on Easter morning. We couldn’t help but notice the impressive moral implications. The theme of renewal and healing was so obviously and effectively portrayed that the connection between nature and Christianity seemed the most natural thing in the world.

And in fact most of us already believe this to be true. But the relationship between Christianity and nature is a complicated one. We see it tangentially in Christian romantics like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In America’s Christian culture we have the examples of William Bartram, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman and John Muir. Each of these nature writers drew heavily from their Christian heritage.

Yet, even as Christianity has been the vantage point from which much of our natural interest derives, we don’t often find the likes of a Saint Francis who was as clearly passionate about the Creation as he was about the Creator. And even though Jesus Himself clearly loved sparrows and the lilies of the field, we find little of this dual appreciation throughout Christian history.

Part of the reason is clear enough. Christianity has a long and complicated history associated with nature religions. In the beginning of the Christian Era, the Roman Empire’s religious diversity included several cults and religious groups that worshipped some aspect of the natural world. Magic and pagan worship such as the Bacchanalia (celebrating the wine god Bacchus) were practiced along with the more popular Olympian deities imported from ancient Greece.

Much of the natural world – including trees, mountains and springs – was worshipped by these non-Christian groups. Yet in spite of this perceived (and undoubtedly real) threat, these early Christians refused to distance themselves from the same natural objects that their pagan rivals worshipped. Springs were particularly important to both groups – with references to springs in the Bible having particular sway among the Christians.

Robert Bartlett points out in his recent history of saints and martyrs that these early Christians often built churches over sacred wells. Bartlett makes the ironic observation that, “despite all this evidence for saints as opponents of and substitutes for the holy springs, the saints left their deepest mark on the landscape through their association with wells and springs.”

This complicated Christian relationship with nature and pagan nature worship continues to our day. The religious scholar Peter Beyer, in an attempt to get a handle on what he considers to be an abstract mix of religious practices, places several groups in the broader category of “Nature Religion”. These groups mostly tend to be critical of Christianity and it is easy to see that there still exists a substantial divide. These groups include modern witchcraft (Wicca), Neo-paganism, aboriginal spirituality, portions of some environmental groups, and even some feminist and New Age groups.

This tension is not going to disappear anytime soon. But, in fact, neither will the Christian love of nature or the very real healing power of the natural world. Our Christian heritage and belief in the importance of the Creation are more venerable and real today than are its rivals.

I think this is abundantly clear not only in our history but also in our literature. The Canadian novelist Lucy Maud Montgomery put it quite simply and elegantly in her classic story Anne of Green Gables. You will recall that Anne was an orphan who came to the town of Avonlea by mistake. Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert had originally asked for a boy that could help with the chores.

Anne was about to be sent back to the orphanage but Matthew had sympathy on her and persuaded Marilla to keep the young (and at times exasperating) girl. Anne loved Avonlea, with its woods, flowers, lakes and meadows. Through the years she became the pride of both Marilla and Matthew. But she always had a special place in her heart for Matthew. And when he died, it nearly broke her heart.

A few days after the funeral, Anne found herself talking with Mrs. Allen, the minister’s wife. She was concerned that she was beginning to enjoy nature again and wondered if this didn’t imply disrespect for Matthew. Mrs. Allen assured Anne that, on the contrary, Matthew would want Anne to continue enjoying the beauties of the natural world. “I am sure,” she told Anne, “we should not shut our hearts against the healing influences that nature offers us.”

Perhaps no better call to nature exists than this simple line form a classic Christian story. The beauty of it stems from its universal truth and applicability – no matter what our heritage and faith may be. Mrs. Allen knew it. Anne knew it. And so do most of the rest of us. God’s creation – fallen and imperfectly understood as it is – can make all of us feel a lot better.

References. Diane Ackerman’s book A Slender Thread, Rediscovering Hope at the Heart of Crisis was published by Random house in 1997. A good reference dealing with the health needs of our ancestors is John Durant’s book The Paleo Manifesto, Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health published by Harmony Books in 2013. My copy of The Secret Garden was published by the Folio Society in 2006. Reese Nelson’s work on restorative environments can be found in his dissertation: Mitigating Stress in College Students by Enhancing Testing Center Environments through Passive Interaction with Plants. Idaho State University, 2006. Peter Beyer’s article, Globalization and the Religion of Nature can be found in Nature Religion Today: Paganism in the Modern World (compiled by Pearson, Roberts and Samuel in 1998, and published by Edinburgh University Press). For a summary of the early Christian perception of nature see Chapter 15 of Jim Bartlett’s Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things, Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (published by Princeton University Press, 2013). Anne’s conversation with Mrs. Allen in Anne of Green Gables is found in Chapter 37 (The Reaper Whose name is Death).

Master Gardener

The world is gifted with amounts

Of wind and snow and rain

Sometimes they come and stay awhile

Then disappear again

No sooner do they leave behind

A path of wetted earth

Than seedlings and dark dormant buds

Elaborate in girth

Who organizes all of this,

The seasons and the living things

That know just what to do

It’s almost as if every place

Were gardened by a certain grace

That it already knew