Call It Holy
By: Eileen Elizabeth
Tags: California, Grief, Nature, Covid 19, Religion

CULT OF JUMBO ROCKS

Jen and I drive into Joshua Tree National Park, our white-and-blue surgical masks dangling from the rearview mirror like air fresheners in a rental car, or some other fitting symbol of temporariness. A year deep into the pandemic, we crave a break from the insidious mundane, the apocalyptic new normal.

The wilderness unfolds around us as we get out of the car and begin to make our way through the park: a rugged expanse of sand and soil, brush and rock. The land meets the sky in an uninterrupted line, brown brushing indigo, and I watch the Joshua trees bent in reverence, back to the earth, as if in prayer.

“I would start a religion around these rocks,” Jen says to me and I can see her smiling, maskless. Around her are ancient, massive boulders piled onto the desert like melted wax, which makes me wonder who put them there. “At the very least, a cult.”

I bask in the intimacy of seeing her bare face, a naked moon. We’re alone in the Mojave, however far away we are from anyone else as we begin our climb, scaling the boulders that reach to the sky. Another prayer.

A couple hundred miles west in Los Angeles, the crematoriums continue to burn our pandemic dead, and their ash fills the sky over the city. But here, the air is so clear it tastes like rain.

MOTH & MYTH

For more than 40 million years, the Joshua tree and the yucca moth have been intrinsically connected through an insect-plant mutualism, a coevolutionary symbiosis. One could not live without the other. The female yucca moth the only pollinator of the Joshua tree. The Joshua tree the only food source for the moth.

It isn’t as easy as asking What came first, the moth or the tree, but between the moth and the myth, isn’t that a different story? Existentially, between asking and answering a question, one isn’t always easier than the other, though of course the origin of creation myths and rituals the world over have been debated for centuries.

Two rivaling ideologies — the primacy of ritual hypothesis and the animism-based hypothesis — attempt to explain the origins of myth and ritual. First claimed by scholar William Robertson Smith, the primacy of ritual hypothesis supposes that every religion arose from mythmaking, that myth is derived from ritual practice. Another argument, the animism-based hypothesis proposed by anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, considers that myths were also made to spiritualize the mundane, that myth results from ritual.

Narratives are created to make sense of our universe; rituals are created to engage with narrative. Perhaps we will never know which came before the other. Perhaps it is enough to know that one could not exist without the other.

SONGLINES

What myths arose from the desert?

In the western Australian outback, terrain not dissimilar from the Mojave desert, the First Nations People of Australia walk songlines to remember the myths embedded within the contours of their landscape.

Remembered through dance, song, and navigation, songlines are the convergence of myth and ritual, pathways recorded from the Dreaming, the ancient time of creation for the Aboriginal people. Songlines are a sacred journey through landscape and time.

For the Aboriginal people, oral tradition is passed along in song cycles. For the Serrano of Joshua Tree, creation myths are remembered through song too.

The desert is home to the sacred, a caretaker of its people.

CARETAKERS OF THE DESERT

A common theme in Southern California oral literature is that of catastrophe.

Situated at the confluence of the Mojave and Sonoran deserts, the woodland desert of what is contemporarily known as Joshua Tree, California, was a rich region of cultural and material trade between Indigenous tribes. Before the European colonizers brought catastrophe, the original caretakers of this sacred land were the Serrano, Cahuilla, Chemehuevi, and Mojave.

Serrano elder Dorothy Ramon describes how the Serrano came to the oasis of Mara near Joshua Tree:

Indians apparently used to live somewhere else. They were living on some planet similar to this one. The Serrano Indians came to a new world. Their Lord brought them. There were too many people: they did not fit any more on their home planet. This is why he brought them here, to settle here for good. This was to become the new planet. It was a very beautiful world. The Serrano people lived here. Coming from that other planet they started over at Maara’ (Twentynine Palms). They had been living on their lands for many years. This is in their songs.