My Fall into Knowledge

My Fall into Knowledge

in apparently alive in

causeless a place called

moments, “the world.”

I’m aware

Whereupon

of being –

the though

odd- ever so briefly- alive in a place called “the world.” Whereupon the odd- ness in simultaneously feeling hyperordinary yet cosmic throws me into inter-

rogative mode.

Recently, during just such a moment, and because I’m incorrigibly reli-

gious, I found myself wondering, “Throughout history, just how many creeds have there been? And the god population – how many deities, now or ever?” An accurate inventory would of course be impossible. Not only do eternal truths come and go, some gods take early retirement. Moreover, ancient tribes, whether of prehistoric Greece or North Americas Hopi mesas, occasionally adopted supernatural beings from neighboring peoples into their own cultures. That ecumenical outlook, plus the polytheism factor, means no census could be as simple as one religion, one god. Impossible seemed the right word.

Then, as if with a life of its own, the question kept widening: “How many gods are currently in service throughout this galaxy-rich universe?” And sud-

denly it dawned on me that I’d just invented a new field of study: astrotheol-

ogy. We already have astrobiology, in case some life-harboring, extraterrestrial

planet should be discovered. Sooner or later, where there’s life there will be divinities, a natural offshoot.

However, natural is as natural does. All it takes is a planet whose thinking species, upon looking around at the various life forms, concludes, instead of the usual “Som eone has done this,” that

” Something has done this.” The ultimate

principle of causation on that planet would be considered natural instead of supernatural.

My logic felt rock solid, but hairsplitters may quibble. In any case, future astrotheologians will surely pursue the quasi-infinite possibilities of this new

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10 THE GEORGIA REVIEW

field. Perhaps they will even conjecture a religious war on certain planets, with devotees of Someone-ism righteously deploying fire and sword to destroy for- ever the infidel Something-ists.

Apropos of the Big Questions, doesn’t every child eventually ask, “Mommy, where did I come from?” These days, however, with low-rider jeans, some moth- ers dressing their ten-year-old daughters like French tarts, boy-girl dialogues of

single entendre, and teens copulating as if humans were an endangered species, no parent could invoke the stork and keep a straight face. Is there one mother left who tells her child, “Why, sweetie pie, we found you under a cabbage leaf”?

Way back in the psychedelic sixties, my friend Jo Ann said nothing of the kind. For her five-year-old, Chris, she went into physiologic detail. She didn’t

just refer vaguely to “certain body parts.” She named names. His eyes widened. She implicated his father. Said that she and he had been in cahoots on it. The

boy was stunned, revolted, aghast. These were people he had respected. The

very people who kept telling him to behave himself. Then, remembering he had a younger sister, he cried out in dismay, “You don t mean you did it twice ?”

If ever there were a “fall into knowledge” its that one. It changes the child

by putting him further into the real than he had dreamed or wanted to be – a