Vishnu the Preserver

Vishnu and his wife Lakshmi (or Shri) are shown riding on their mount, the celestial bird Garuda. Vishnu, the “wide-strider,” measured out the cosmos in three strides. He is regarded as the protector of the world, and because of his compassion for humankind, descends to earth in various avatar forms, such as Prince Rama, to fight evil. Whenever Vishnu is incarnated, so is Lakshmi, to be his bride. Here, Garuda is taking the loving couple to their own heaven, Vaikuntha.

The Round Table

The Round Table was a gift to King Arthur from his future father-in-law, King Leodegrance, who had received it from Arthur’s father, King Uther Pendragon (see p. 84). Other sources say King Arthur himself had it made to prevent quarrels about seating arrangements. The Round Table had seats for 150 knights, and when a knight proved worthy to sit at it, he found his name set miraculously on his chair in letters of gold by the magic of Merlin the wizard. Only one seat, the so-called Siege Perilous, would remain empty, until either Sir Perceval or Sir Galahad—depending on the source— arrived to claim it. In some versions it is by sitting in this danger seat that the Grail hero dooms the land, thereby requiring the Grail Quest to put things right. This recalls the Welsh story of Pryderi, nephew of Bran, who brings desolation on Dyfed by sitting on a perilous mound after a banquet.

Book Review: The Environment and World History.

Edmund Burke III., Kenneth Pomeranz, eds. The Environment and World History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. 377 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-25687-3; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-520-25688-0.

Reviewed by Matthew Evenden (University of British Columbia)
Published on H-HistGeog (March, 2010)
Commissioned by Arn M. Keeling

World Environmental History and the Developmentalist Project

 

No historical geographer with an interest in world history and its environmental dimensions should miss this book. Edited by Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz, two well-known world historians, the collection seeks to bring the fields of environmental and world history into conversation. Environmental historians, Burke and Pomeranz contend, focus their attention on regional and local studies, while world historians pay surprisingly little attention to the environment. Although these generalizations might be overstated, the book’s ambitions are important. World problems demand an environmental history, and local and regional environmental histories need to be read in the context of wider spatial scales and processes.

The global reach of the collection may best be described as a cumulative accomplishment. Only Pomeranz’s introduction, Burke’s essay on energy transitions, and a republished essay by the late John Richards on property rights develop a global analysis. The remaining seven chapters take up continental and regional problems of several varieties. Burke offers a synoptic environmental history of the Middle East over the very long term; Pomeranz explores the last five hundred years of Chinese environmental history with a particular focus on water; Michael Adas offers a reprise of previous work examining the rice frontiers of Southeast Asia under conditions of colonialism; Mark Cioc offers an essay on the Rhine as a world river; and Douglas Weiner examines the role of the state as a predatory institution in Russian and Soviet environmental history. Beyond these substantive essays, others offer crisp historiographical overviews, including William Beinart on Africa, Mahesh Rangarajan on India, and Lise Sedrez on Latin America. Although the attention devoted to regional explorations would seem to undercut the purpose of the volume, Pomeranz argues persuasively that they provide, rather, crucial underpinnings for studies of state formation and environmental change, long-term understandings of particular regions or places, and examinations of the local instantiations of global patterns and processes. 

While all of the chapters speak to the central problematic of the book linking world and environmental history, the editors propose a wider interpretation centered on the concept of developmentalism. Developmentalism, according to Pomeranz, constitutes a broad social project found in a range of societies in the early modern and modern world defined by processes of state-building, sedentarization, and resource intensification. The term is attractive in allowing analysis to move past previous debates focusing primarily on the development and spread of capitalism, with the inevitable East-West contrasts. By refocusing attention on developmental processes in the state and on the land, new, intriguing comparative problems come into view. Of course, the concept also runs certain risks, such as placing too much weight on the state apparatus as a driver, which might make sense in a case like China, but not in other regions where early modern and precolonial states were diverse in form and relatively weak. The collection’s lack of attention to North America and Europe (beyond Cioc’s elegant essay) also begs the question of how the developmentalist thesis applies in these important and influential cases. Finally, the developmentalist project is so broad in its conception that it is difficult to see why it could not also be applied to various premodern cases. Notably, only Pomeranz and Burke work with the concept, while Richard’s chapter offers complementary cases and evidence for the interpretation. Other contributors focus on different kinds of issues, such as the impact of colonialism, or change and continuity in state forms.

Geographers will ask whether this work of world environmental history engages geographical scholarship, and the answer is, rarely. Although many of the problems at the center of the developmentalist concept and of comparative and global analysis address questions of scale, none of the authors engage the theoretical literature in human geography on scale and multi-scalar processes. This is not a great shortcoming, in my view, but it does suggest the disciplinary walls that still separate historical geography and environmental history on certain problems and approaches. The greater deficiency from a geographical perspective is the rather modest use of maps. There are only two locational maps in the entire book. Several of these chapters would have been greatly enhanced by maps charting not only locations but also processes of change, linkage, and transformation. 

Reservations aside, this is a remarkable book, with no weak sections. It originated in a special seminar sponsored by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities Institute for College Teachers. This fact may help to explain its scope and accessibility. I would not hesitate to assign it to upper-level undergraduates and would recommend it to others seeking a good introduction to area studies approaches to environmental history as well as the emerging confluence between world and environmental historiography. 

BC Worlds

Contemporary Mystery Schools and Reincarnation

Since the earliest days of organized religious expression there have always been those who preferred seeking the individual mystical experience as their personal doorway to other dimensions of reality and the world beyond death. These mystics found the doctrines and dogmas of structured religion to be too inhibiting, too restrictive, and not at all conducive to the kind of personal relationship with the holy which they so desperately sought. Regardless of the religion or the culture from which they sprang, all mystics have as their goal the transcendence of the earthly self and union with the Absolute.

 While the ancient mystery schools were built upon the worship of a particular god or goddess, the contemporary mystery schools have been built around the charisma and the spiritual teachings of a psychic sensitive, a medium, or a prophet. Since the latter part of the nineteenth century, in Europe, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States, the men and women who are most often attracted to the modern mystery schools are those who have grown dissatisfied with the teachings of Christianity and what they consider to be its restrictive religious doctrines concerning the afterlife and rebirth. Each of the contemporary mystery schools examined in this section— Anthroposophy, the Association for Research and Enlightenment, and Theosophy— accept the concept of reincarnation and blend many of the beliefs of Christianity and Judaism with traditional teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism.

In his classic work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James (1842–1910) has this to say regarding the oneness and unity of the mystical traditions: “This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of climate or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism… we find the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity…perpetually telling of the unity of man with God.”

Many scholars of the early Christian church believed strongly that the various church councils had erred in removing reincarnation from official doctrine. The Gnostics, who strongly influenced early Christian doctrine, believed in reincarnation, and when the teachings of Origen (185 C.E.–254 C.E.), who championed preexistence, was anathematized in 553, they, along with other believers in reincarnation, were condemned as heretics. In later centuries, those who held Gnostic views were forced to remain silent regarding their beliefs in reincarnation, so they very often formed their own sects and schools of thought, such as the Cathars, the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, and the Albigenses.

Because many serious-minded Christians believe that there is evidence in the gospels that Jesus (c. 6 B.C.E.–30 C.E.) himself believed in reincarnation, they are comfortable with Hindu and Buddhist concepts of past lives and karma and see no conflict with their traditional belief in Christianity. Dr. Gladys McGarey is a member of the Association for Research and Enlightenment, the contemporary mystery school based on the medical and past-life readings of Edgar Cayce (1877–1945). The daughter of Christian missionaries and a medical doctor who employs the concepts of past lives in her practice, McGarey has expressed her belief that Jesus came to offer humankind the law of grace to supersede the law of karma.

“I believe sincerely that when Jesus said that he came to fulfill the law and not destroy it, he was referring to the law of karma, the law of cause and effect, which is superseded by the law of grace,” she said. “If we are functioning under the law of karma, it is as if we are walking away from the Sun and walking into our own shadow—which means we are walking into darkness. But if we turn around and walk toward the Sun, then we are walking toward the Light, and that is great. To me, the light of the Sun—whether you spell it son or sun is a symbol of moving in the law of grace. The law of grace does not take away the karmic pattern, it just makes it so I don’t have to hurt myself as I move through the karma that I have created.”

The Maya II

The Great Plaza in Tikal was surrounded by grand palaces and temples. This is Temple I.

Peeling Back the Jungle

By the time the Spanish conquered Honduras in the 1520s, Copán had long been overgrown by rainforest. Several explorers visited it in the early 19th century and wrote about the barely visible ruins. In 1839, explorer and travel writer John Lloyd Stephens (1805–1852) paid a Maya guide to lead him to the site. In Stephens’s book Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, he offers this riveting account of how the jungle was stripped away to rediscover the ruins.

It is impossible to describe the interest with which I explored these ruins. The ground was entirely new; there were no guide-books or guides; the whole was virgin soil. We could not see 10 yards before us, and never knew what we should stumble upon next. At one time we stopped to cut away branches and vines which concealed the face of a monument, and then to dig around and bring to light a fragment, a sculptured corner of which protruded from the earth. I leaned over with breathless anxiety while the Indians worked, and an eye, an ear, a foot, or a hand was disentombed. When the machete rang against the chiseled stone, I pushed the Indians away, and cleared out the loose earth with my hands. The beauty of the sculpture, the solemn stillness of the woods, disturbed only by the scrambling of monkeys and chattering of parrots, the desolation of the city, and the mystery that hung over it, all created an interest higher, if possible, than I had ever felt among the ruins of the Old World.

The Maya I

The Maya were master pyramid builders, but their magnificent cities were buried by the jungle until the late 1800s and early 1900s. This is a pyramid in Chichén Itzá, a great Maya city of the Postclassic Era.

Palenque was one of the great cities of the Classic Era. These ruins were once the temple complex.

Volcano peaks pierce the blanket of cool mist that hangs above the forest canopy. Ghostly howler monkeys scream, unseen, as if the ruined temples were part of a scene in an unearthly horror movie. For some, the sounds create the illusion that the lost city of Copán is haunted by tortured souls wailing deep within the stone pyramids. Only the occasional rustle of a tree branch reveals that the monkeys are the true source of the screams. They scramble across a platform where priests once addressed thousands of people. The platform is now buried in vines, and moss, and jungle growth. The remains of Copán, one of the richest centers of Maya civilization, lie deep in the tropical forest of modern Honduras. Copán became wealthy because of its rich soil and the Copán River’s annual flood. Each year, the river overflowed and the water left behind a new layer of rich, fertile soil. The huge quantity of precious jade found in the tombs of Copán’s kings is evidence of how wealthy they were.

Classifying Maya history

Archaeologists divide pre-Columbian (the time before Columbus arrived in the Americas in 1492 c.e. Maya history into three major time periods: Preclassic, Classic, and Postclassic. During the Preclassic Era, from about 1200 b.c.e. to 250 c.e., settled farming communities grew into complex societies. Many Maya kingdoms experienced rapid growth in this era. They built monumental structures, established long-distance trade routes, and developed governing systems. In the later part of the Preclassic Era, some kingdoms were enjoying their peak while others had already faded away.

The Classic Era was between about 250 and 900. From southeastern Mexico to upper Central America, this varied landscape supported millions of people in Classic times. During the height of Maya civilization in the eighth century, as many as 60 independent kingdoms dotted the Maya area, as well as hundreds of smaller towns and villages.

Unlike the Aztec people, their neighbors to the north, the Maya never unified into a single empire. Instead, they built commerce centers that grew into city-states (cities that function as separate kingdoms or nations) ruled by kings. These kingdoms formed alliances with one another one day, only to turn into sworn enemies the next.

Robert J. Sharer wrote in The Ancient Maya that the capitals of independent kingdoms were “interconnected by commerce, alliances, and rivalries that often led to war.” By the end of the Classic Era, the southern lowland capitals had collapsed, leaving modern scholars to wonder what catastrophe forced the Maya to abandon their cities.

The northern lowlands kingdoms rose and fell during the Postclassic Era, from 900 to 1524. Some kingdoms flowered dramatically, but probably did not reach the heights of the kingdoms from previous eras. It was in the Postclassic Era that kings lost their grip on centralized power and nobles greedily stepped in to break the kingdoms up into smaller pieces.

The Postclassic Era ended with the arrival of the Spaniards, who found that most Maya were living in medium-sized kingdoms and groups of allied cities throughout the Maya area.