Atlantis now lies crushed beneath great tidal waves. Renata and I are now finding that we have squeezed each other until the self-hate that is stored in the heart of the world is being coughed up through live volcanoes.
As we recognize these outlines of the Sunken Atlantis that lie down there under the ground, we begin to recognize that we are fighting because the ancient wisdom has been trampled by a chronically unhappy people who sailed in to bring us their curse, and call it salvation.
These chronically unhappy people, brought up in subtle Hells of capitalist economics and repressively fundamentalist myth, were tricked into buying the Pure Land. Oh the Pure Land was there – the trick was in the bag of the God who was convincing them that they could buy and sell the Pure Land in the market-place.
When he walked among the British colonists and their American children, this Real Estate God gave himself the dignified name of Manifest Destiny. The Native Ancestors whose voices are heard in the thunders which roll across the Sangre de Cristo Mountains remember that when he sent his emissaries to their tribal councils, he was known by a different name.
The women warned the warriors of this Pirate God, who rewards his followers by giving to them prizes that he does not own. A God the elder women recognized too well, who had been exiled from the sacred places because he had convinced his followers to deliver Conscience to the Moon. A God who had laughed when the Peacemaker’s spokesmen had arrived in a battered birchbark canoe. This God of the Left-Handed Heart had done the Peacemaker one better. He brought in the Black Ships, the smallpox and the guns, and little brown friars who taught us to bow to the Crucified Serpent, even while their countrymen are sacrificing everyone to the Gods of Rapine and Plunder.
