Nothing New Under the Sun

Note: The following is an essay originally written for Professor Michael Pasquier's Reli 3010 (Religion in the Americas) class during the Spring 2010 semester. Date of creation: March 12, 2010. If referring to this essay academically, please remember to make the appropriate citations so as to avoid running afoul of your institution's plagiarism policy.


Ecclesiastes 1:9 - "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun."

There are many aspects of the folk religious tales of Southern, rural African Americans of the early 20th Century that are similar to the beliefs and preoccupations of the apocalypse-obsessed Puritans of the New World colonies in the 17th Century, while there are other aspects which are wholly different. What is most interesting about the ties between these two Christian but sharply dissimilar worldviews (for instance, the Puritans were highly concerned with meteorological issues and not only the bearing that they had on earthly affairs, but what was occurring on the invisible plane that caused such manifestations), however, is that both contain aspects of much older belief systems. While the layman's conception of a Puritan is likely to invoke images of anti-mystic hysteria and lives of quiet solemnity, neither view is entirely true or untrue. In fact, there was often condemnation of the occult, while the same sources refer to "mystic forces emanating from the stars and planets" (Hackett 31) as inerrable founts of knowledge, and "no one viewed these systems as in contradiction with each other" (35). Inextricably linked to their understanding of the universe: the chaos of the outer world was a result of man's sinfulness, and the movement of the cosmos was a reflection of that same imperfection, and the outer world as the manifestation of a (usually) invisible battle between good and evil. These beliefs are nominally linked to a Hellenic or Hellenic-derived worldview, particularly the parable of the Platonic Cave. Strangely lacking in these narratives, however, is the mortal link to the divine; while there were circulating stories of horrific creatures and monster births, the players in them are not the archetypical heroes of the Greco-Roman mythos, but merely reactors and faceless fodder for the projections of horrified Puritans. This absence is not found in the narratives of the descendants of slaves; if they are not of the mold of Rudyard Kipling's "Just So" stories, i.e., they explain why some natural, usually fauna related, phenomena exists, then they involve the interaction of an archetypical hero with, if not the divine, usually the supernatural or unusual. In this way, African American narratives reflect a very African origin, while inheriting from the Christian lens through which it is viewed the archetypical heroes exemplified by Mediterranean mythologies.

John (occasionally Jack) is an archetypical folk hero, "the first colored man what was brought to dis country" (Hurston 79). This immediately shows us that the past is mutable in folk religion, as it is an astronomical unlikelihood that there were unbaptized Africans unexposed to Christianity named for saints. Further, John is the "pet" of his owner, Ole Massa, romanticizing the relationship between slave and slaveholder, as John "thought Ole Massa was made outa gold" (131). Here, we see the focal point of a slave descendant's Ole Massa is not a name; it is a position in the life of a slave. Ole Massa is not defined by his position in society as a whole, but merely in the relationship he maintains with John, as he is the viewpoint character of the story. It did not matter to which master a slave belonged, the interactions between master and slave were so uniform across the board that all tales of Ole Massa have, if not universal applicability, universal familiarity. Meanwhile, in these myths, the archetypical foolish slave is never John, as demonstrated by Black Baby: "'[D]at wasn't John de white folks was foolin' wid. John was too smart for Ole Massa. He never got no beatin'!'" (79). In contrast, the foolish slave is rarely named, and is merely a cipher.

Furthermore, depictions of the Devil are widely varied; in African American folklore, he is a trickster who, like Ole Massa, seems to be a softened version of what they actually represented. While slave owners had virtually unlimited control over the lives of their sentient property, mythologized, Ole Massa is bumbling, ineffectual, and easily fooled by folk hero John. Likewise, the Devil, despite being an archetypical trickster, proves himself insufficiently clever against John when the two measure their strength, as John inexplicably demonstrates feats of superhuman ability (lifting a mule, breaking the line of an anchor) but ultimately causing "Old Scratch" to back out of the contest when John implies he is able to throw a hammer as high as Heaven (155). The Devil of the Puritans is far more insidious; the trickster Devil is content to wander the earth and wrestle men or challenge them to contests of brawn, while the Puritan Devil actively works to make it seem that not only is he not real, so as to allow him more freedom to sow chaos and temptation, but to undermine the faith of his enemies by insinuating there is likewise neither a Heaven nor a God (Hackett 41).

Generally, when one recalls folk tales involving anthropomorphic animals, one thinks of Aesop's Fables, placing these moral tales in a Greco-Roman context. Instead, of the two groups being considered here, the lore which traces its roots to that era, 17th Century Puritanism, instead focuses on the aspects of apocalypticism, meteorology, and astrology from that mythos (34). Conversely, the inherent folk nature of Hurston's subjects orients their mythos towards not only a more African worldview, but a more American one as well. For instance, one tale that ostensibly is passed down from the antebellum era involves the trickery of a lion, an animal that is entirely unknown to the New World, and considering that the importation of new slaves was outlawed in 1808, the next generation would have been born solely in the Western Hemisphere, and likely have no conception of what a lion actually was. On the other hand, the phenomena such as swamp gas, while not unknown in the Eastern Hemisphere, particularly in the British Isles, was not a feature of the African landscape, and the Irish folk tale of the will 'o' the wisp is adopted and assimilated into the larger framework of the black mythos: it is the wandering soul of a man who defeated the Devil, and was thus denied entrance to Heaven or Hell due to fear on both sides. African American folk religion, like that of the Greeks, was concerned with explaining the apparently incomprehensible aspects of nature as the result of the supernatural, if not the outright divine. Thus, we get explanations as to why woodpeckers have red heads (Hurston 102), why the possum has a hairless tail (103), why the alligator has no tongue (104), most involving trickery of one animal by another. Running parallel to these tales are similar folk tales involving animals, but which take place not in a vague and undefined era and independently of the divine; for instance, one such tale explains why mocking-birds are apparently never seen on Friday, as they are attempting to ferry sand to quench the fires of Hell and ease the suffering of a wicked man who happened to be kind to them. Because of this, the absence of such phenomena in the Puritan community is rather glaring, especially considering the importance of (usually mangled) animals in their soothsaying. Interestingly, talking animals, and especially talking mules, have canonical precedent in the Christian religion, as Numbers 2:22-29 involves a man named Balaam receiving prophecy via his donkey.

Complicating issues is the manner in which these stories have survived into the 21st century: text concerning specters of armed men appearing in the clear sky over 1600s Puritan villages are still extant, and exist side by side with personal journals with professedly relate firsthand accounts of the miraculous occurring, such as those by John Hull of Massachusetts and his son-in-law Samuel Sewall, who painstakingly recorded every change in the weather as a portent of looming doom (Hackett 40). Alternatively, the folk narratives collected in Mules and Men, being part of an oral tradition and therefore having the potential to become lost or altered over time, might very well have died before the current era, were it not for Zora Neale Hurston's anthropological and historical preservations; ironically, this ties them even further into the Greco-Roman tradition, with folk tales being handed down generationally and orally. The mystery tales of the Puritans crossed class boundaries, appearing in public places to be seen by the rich and poor alike, and the content of one-sided handbills bore little difference from the innards of works such as Thomas Beard's The Theatre of God's Judgments and Stephen Batman's 1581 classic The Doome warning all men to Judgmente: Wherein are contayned for the most parte all the straunge Prodigies hapned in the Worlde. Much more is made of men being consumed by evil, and the works are inarguably jeremiads (48). In these stories, there are human interactions with the unusual, but they are almost always second hand accounts, and herein lies the greatest difference between the two ideologies. The folklore of the rural South exists on multiple levels: even when a story, such as "Why the Gator is So Ugly," even though presented as a straightforward account of why that animal is aesthetically displeasing it contains a larger message applicable to a greater dimension. This is logical, as early on, primary reasons for the indoctrination of Christianity into slaves included giving them the hope of an afterlife and ensuring obedience, which involved teaching that scripture was applicable to life on literal and metaphorical levels (200). Puritanism of the 17th century had not yet realized that it had this capability, instead teaching the scriptures solely as literal events, creating a worldview which was ultimately, while twisted, rather unimaginative, or, at the very least, unoriginal.

Perhaps this is best demonstrated by the folk tale found on page 29 of Mules and Men, where it is revealed that the denominating of Christianity can be attributed to the literal rock upon which the church was founded, being composed of multiple rocks which do not necessarily fit together seamlessly. The folk tales of black, rural, southern America leave wiggle room for denominations that do not completely conform to their worldview; in fact, the schisming, and by extension, differences of opinion and belief, are natural and to be expected. The Puritans had no such ideology, as those who lay on the other side of the theological divide were to be morally opposed, with deadly force, if necessary. And that is the most important difference between the two.


Works Cited:"(Multiple Essays)." Religion and American Culture. ed. David G. Hackett. Routledge, 1995. Print. Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. 12th ed. Harper Perennial, 1990. Print.