Seasons in the Sun
Text by Drew Gowing | November 2011
He was so magnificent and so noble. The ancient sun god, Ra, ruler of the sun, sky and earth, appeared during Egypt’s Second Dynasty and some 3000 years before the birth of Christ to proffer rain and flood the riverbanks of the Nile. The subsequent harvest of wheat and flax was a staple of the famine starved Middle East, and ultimately the commodity sustaining Egypt’s economy at home and abroad. That he provided reasons for feast and famines was, well, sort of the business of being a god. But how he gathered communities with hopes and dreams was really his currency.
Conjuring up Ra’s inclination to actually deliver, however, required some real shenanigans. Like the proverbial “rain dance” performed by our Native American ancestors, Ra too had a couple of conditions for which he’d flood the Nile. Spells, incantations, potions and the like were sewn into the fabric of everyday life in such a way that gave rise to an unquestionable belief in a superhuman controlling power. And like all super-humans, Ra asked only for honor, glory, and a sack of flax in return. Until, that is, in or about the Fourth Dynasty, when the Egyptians discovered irrigation! The science behind the artificial application of water to land put Man in control of his own crops for the first time in civilization. Egypt’s creation of the “dyke” and concurrently the “reservoir” made calling upon Ra for rain seem silly, and, passing the torch to a political savvy pharaoh, they ultimately retired their beloved sun god to the annals of mythology.
Along the timeline of human existence there are notable others, too. Allah, Mohammed, Buddha and God each provide answers to questions that begin with words like “why” and “when” while Science does its part and tries to explain “how.” But despite which side of the equation you fall, both faith and reason speak to man’s need to create meaning from chaos, control and explain his environment, and finally to believe and hope in something greater than himself. That’s why of the roughly 6 billion people who inhabit our planet: 2 billion are Christian, 2 billion are Muslim, a conjoined 1 billion are Buddhist, Taoist, Jew and Hindu, which leaves a cool 1 billion skeptics in the world today. And as the Internet, multinational corporations and our merging economies homogenize us into one big Powerball, its important to note that 1 billion is in fact the largest number of Agnostics ever recorded in human history.
A common dialogue, language, set of discourse and rules are randomly colliding. Oh, sure. We’re getting linked in. Following each other. Becoming friends, even. But the media is now the new pulpit. Google searches have become our new gods. But whichever set of factoids technology may lead you to, they will never replace the resplendent and symbiotic relationship between faith and reason. For herein lies the dialogue between man’s physical and spiritual self, and the exquisite if extraordinary promissory note between the two. And if and when “science” ever replaces “faith” again, I can assure you that we’ll simply create yet another Change Agent in which to facilitate our free will and shape our future.
Until then, of course, we’ll just have to pray for the rain.
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