Say my name in the bushes and I will stand here again.
- promise of the Peacemaker
The shining one comes from a land across the water, from the True North. He does not enter this world in an ordinary way. He comes through a young woman who has never known the touch of a man. She has been chosen by an extraterrestrial god as the landing place for an envoy who is being sent to save humans from themselves. His human grandmother dreams his identity and his mission.
He comes from his Earth-in-the-Sky in a time of terror when the minds of men are darkened and confused . An immense power if darkness has occupied the twisted body and diseased mind of a sorcerer-tyrant called Thadodaho, the Entangled One, and his hydra-shadow falls everywhere across the land. Humans have fallen lower than any beast, killing and raping and eating one another.
The god-man grows up fast. Fast is essential, because he is needed urgently. He flies into the killing fields across an inland sea in a vehicle humans cannot understand. He spreads the good word that we are all related and should treat one another as kin. He announces himself as the Peacemaker. His first apostle is a fallen woman who feeds and fucks with the killers but is transformed by the shining one's radiant light, weeping tears of cleansing joy and recognition.
But the Peacemaker is hard for most people to understand. He needs a Speaker. he goes to the house of a fallen man who has lost every vestige of his once-noble self and now devours his own kind. The Peacemaker shows the cannibal his own shining face in a mirror. The fallen man becomes Hiawatha, the Awakened One.
Together, Hiawatha and the Peacemaker survive many ordeals and spread the word that we are all kin. They gather a gentle host, and bird-men fly ahead, scouting the way. They confront the dark sorcerer and break his power. Instead of killing the Entangled One, they cleanse and renew his mind, and raise him up to be the first of the men of good minds, the lords of the new-born Confederacy. The chiefs are crowned with deer antlers by the woman who has become the Mother of Nations, the Queen of Peace.
One of the world's greatest experiments in enlightened government and federation has begun. It will shame and awe divided American colonists into dreaming up their own plan that evolves into the Constitution of the United States. But the story is bigger. It teaches us that psychic forces are at the root of hatred and violence, and that resolving our conflicts requires us to reach out to cleanse and heal those whose minds have become darkened and confused. It reminds us that, even in the darkest moments of human history, there are saving powers that seek to rescue us from ourselves and recall us to the soul's purpose.
The Peacemaker's mission is for all people, and it is for now as well as then. There is still a Hiawatha in the roll call of the chiefs of the Six Nations. Though the Peacemaker returned to the Real World above the sky when his work in the Shadow World was done, he promised us that he will return when he is called by people of good minds. "Say my name in the bushes, and I will stand here again,"
Graphic: Hiawatha confronts Thadodaho. Drawing by Seth Eastman after an Iroquois original, in Henry Schoolcraft, Historical and Statistical Information respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States (6 vols., 1851-7). Photo (c) Robert Moss
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