Standing at the edge of Lake Superior at night, with a cold clean wind in your face and billions of stars overhead as the northern lights come up, it’s easy to understand why America’s first aboriginal settlers considered so many of that rocky shoreline’s cliffs sacred places. The view is ravishing, almost dizzying.
And, of course, they knew nothing about solar wind or the Van Allen belts. They did know that effects have causes (set aside quantum physics for the moment), however, and gladly speculated about the cause of that effect. Perhaps the most striking is this story, reminiscent of the Jewish tale about the rainbow:
The Algonquin’s take on the Aurora was that it was created by light from a fire built by Nanahbozho, their creator. They understood the fire to be Nanahbozho’s way of telling his people that he remembered them and was watching over them.
And this:
Just to illustrate how different the legends and myths became, disparate North Americans accepted the lights as anything from ravens to spirit guides holding torches aloft to direct the departed to the next world.
Undoubtedly, the myths were shaped to explain recent and local events. It needs little imagination to suppose that the latter tale originated with the appearance of the lights the night following the death of an important member of the tribe, for example. Similarly, the origin of the rainbow story is surely its appearance following an unusually punishing storm. And the Algonquins probably had cause for gratitude that Nanahbozho had built a fire.
Effects have causes, and a fire in the cosmos must be created by a super-being up there just as a fire on the ground is created by an ordinary being down here. Simple.
But of course — that’s wrong; we know what causes the northern lights just as we know what causes the rainbow, and it has nothing to do with an imaginary friend who lives in the sky. However comforting the myth might have been when first conceived, we do know today that the tale is no more than sometimes charming, and sometimes costly, ignorance.
Or — more precisely, I guess — some of us know; Holy Men get the rest, and we all pay for their resolute ignorance.