Puritans

Puritan psychologies of human extermination trace their preoccupations that Indians were devils and the pawns of devils to similar episodes of the Hebrews in Canaan. There is however one huge exception. The New Testament had no extermination policy. Puritan exterminations had no New Testament approval, so the Puritans had to make them up from the Old. The New Testament church had concluded gentiles could not even be made to be circumcised let alone decapitated. So Puritans sought Old Testament justification of their fear and prejudice. However the Old Testament was not the cause of the Puritan practice either. The cause was the English. This is obvious whenever the English colonists are contrasted with the Germans of Philadelphia, who shared their biblical beliefs, but shunned the English doctrines of extermination and assimilation.

English Only

English Only's progeny was slavery (called freedom), extinction of species (called prosperity) and destruction of the ocean and atmosphere (called dominion). De-constructionalists think the masculine caused extinction, but it was a national ethic of appalling ethnic cruelty: the "theological rigor [that] entered into what now seems an appalling cruelty toward Indians" (Garry Wills. Under God. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1990, 142). Draw a line connecting the behavior of the Puritan against Indians in America to the behavior of the British empire in India. There are endless permutations of the negative effects of English nationhood on native societies. The English transferred it en masse to the Americas, the Americans presumably will transfer it to the Chinese who swallow up all smaller groups in between. Each act of digestion is an acquisition. The domination is justified like this, assimilate or die.

There is a huge effort to defeat the recognition of this pattern among assimilated peoples whichimminently impacts the environment, whose other name is wilderness. The substituted paradigm is that the puritans were afraid of the dark wood and that their defensiveness was so extreme they exterminated the wood and the native out of religious causes and doctrines. But fear made the doctrine, not doctrine the fear. The British were hardwired as a nation to domination and destruction and propagandized the west with such notions even while they colonized the east. Fear and doctrine hand over to America the appalling modern notion that it is England's racist/chauvinist twin of not only national but gender masculine sins.

How can we conduct an inquiry into the spirit of wilderness in this context, when the Azazel  itself, that is, the spirit of wilderness in one guise, to which the Leviticus scapegoat was released, is seen as a manufactured justification, a function of racism, of Hebrew justification of genocide? It is further in our interest to note that now the ice caps have become  the Indians and saline society the dissolution of fresh water and wilderness.

Leviticus

Elaborations of this spirit of wilderness fictionalize the original text in Leviticus 16 where the bare facts express a desire for the clean over the unclean, something that hardly exists outside the orthodox. The point is not that there is a spirit of wilderness, but  that there is sin of every kind causing infection and skin disease, that society is made unclean by exposure, so "keep the Israelites separate from things that make them unclean" (15.31), an early FEMA.

The Tree Became the Goat

Much repetition of the unclean required ceremonial address called the Day of Atonement. In one aspect of this, a goat selected by lot from two, was "used for making atonement by sending it into the desert" (10). It was called "the live goat" because it wasn't killed but escorted out by a keeper and released. Before this however a ceremonial transference occurred where the priest would "lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites-all their sins-and put them on the goat's head" (21). In this way it was released to the spirit of the wilderness as a human medicine. There was a kind of counter play on this by people who had been sacrificing goats in"the open fields" (17.5) to "goat idols," meaning they were expiating their own sins. Whatever reality this speaks of is incomprehensible to the modern, as if we were to lay hands on the head of some scientist who cut the antennae off Monarch butterflies and send him out into the desert.

Spirit of Wilderness

For Barry Lopez the wolverine enlivens the force of natural wilderness as the bear does for Momaday. We know we are less human by the loss of the wilderness contrast. One of four mammals will become extinct.

The Ultimate Potion

Forests of the north, coyote and elk in storm, dead fall fires in yarrow meadows, armed men, dogs, tent, truck, prevent the hunger of the bear. But this is small stuff to the scapegoated  puritan fear of the spirit. Barry Lopez does not mention its name in Leviticus because the names of the gods are politicized depending on who uses them. Once above the outbuildings of a flour mill near ASU was the proud declaration "Ashtaroth" written high above. This was not a misspelling of Ashcroft. The ambiguity of the world of spirits to a people who have no gods is that power and money mix up an argument about consequence and cause and make literature a potion out of it. They are all gone out of the way, there is none that does good. Dominant groups of new pietists, newscasters and reporters,  proclaim a morality of disconnect from the comfort of their desks. They have the compassion of a war reporter living off amputees while pretending to be a conscience, an English puritan living off smallpox, el exterminador, and a monetizer of home mortgages living off public consumption. When these fail they express the greatest compassion for the failed, but it is for themselves. There is therefore a need to revive the custom of the human medicine though some differences may apply. Apply now.

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