control lightning. Lightning no longer terrifies the city dweller, who no longer craves
Course Overview
a benign storm
as the only sou
rce of water.
He has his water supply, and
the lightning serp
ent is diverted
straight to the ground by a lightning conductor. Scientific explanation has disposed of mythological causation. We know that the serpent is an animal that must succumb, if humanity wills it to. The replacement of mythological causation by the technological removes the fears felt by primitive humanity. Whether this liberation from the mythological world view is of genuine help in providing adequate
answers to the
enigmas of existence is quite another matter. The American government, like the Catholic Church before it, has brought modern schooling to the Indians with remarkable energy. Its intellectual optimism has resulted in the fact that the Indian children go to school in comely suits and pinafores and no longer believe in pagan demons. That also applies to the majority of educational goals. It may well d
ess. But I woul
Law enforcement officers assigned to patrol duties, their immediate supervisors, and administrators.
to assert tha
t it does justice to the Indians who think in images and to their, let us say, mythologically anchored souls. I once invited the children of such a school to illustrate the German fairy
tale of "Johnny-Head-in-the-Air" (Hans-Guck-in-die-Luft), which they did not know, because a storm is refe
- rred to and I wanted to see if the children would draw the lightning realistically or in the form of the
- serpent. Of the fourteen drawings, all very lively but also under the influence of the American school, twelve were drawn realist
two of them depicted indeed
- the indestructible symbol of the arrowtongued serpent, as it
- is found in the kiva (Figure 29).
- We, however, do not want our imagina
- tion to fall under the spell of the serp
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- ent image, which leads to the primitive bein
- gs of the underworld. W
- e want to ascend to the roof of the worldhouse,
our heads perched upwards in recollection of
