God Withdrew

TL;DR

• Peoples from Sierra Leone to the Upper Zambezi, and on to the Andaman Islands, say God once lived close by and talked with people, then left. Mary Kingsley in 1897 said that “almost all” West African traditions hold such a time.
• The causes are few and they repeat: people copied him (Lozi, Zambia), struck him with a pestle or hoe (Ashanti, Ghana; Dinka, South Sudan), asked too much of him (Mende, Sierra Leone), climbed toward him (Bubi, Equatorial Guinea), plotted against him (Andamanese, India) or looked at him (Efe, DR Congo).
• Often a woman’s act is the trigger, and death, toil and hunger follow the god out the door.
• Genesis 3:22, “the man is become as one of us”, tells the same moment from God’s side.
• In the Eve Theory of Consciousness the god leaves when people become selves. Read through Julian Jaynes, the god’s voice falls silent once people hear it as their own.

And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden. — Genesis 3:22–23 (KJV)

A god who used to live next door #

Mary Kingsley, who travelled the Gabon and Cameroon coast in the 1890s, made a broad claim about West African religion. “In almost all the series of native tradition there,” she wrote, “you will find accounts of a time when there was direct intercourse between the gods or spirits that live in the sky, and men. That intercourse is always said to have been cut off by some human error” (Kingsley 1897, p. 507).

Students of religion call the god left behind the deus otiosus, the idle god: a creator people swear by and name in proverbs, while daily cult goes to ancestors and lesser spirits. The people who keep him explain his idleness with a story, and the story is specific. The god was close and he spoke. Then somebody did something, and he went away. The same few acts come up again and again. Someone copies him. Someone sees him. Someone climbs toward him. Very often the someone is a woman.

Genesis tells this moment from the other side. Adam and Eve eat, their eyes open, and God says to his council that “the man is become as one of us”. The garden closes behind them. The tales below tell it from the human side, as a memory of a neighbour who moved away. Read together, they fit the Eve Theory of Consciousness closely. The god leaves at the moment people become selves: when they imitate him, look at him, or reach for his place.

The cases at a glance #

He fled from imitation: the Lozi of Zambia #

The Swiss missionary Édouard Jacottet recorded the Lozi tales on the Upper Zambezi, in what is now western Zambia, in 1901. Nyambe, the Lozi creator, whom they identify with the sun, used to live on earth with his wife Nasilele:

Nyambe retired to heaven from fear of men. Whenever he carved wood, men carved it also; when he made a wooden plate, so did they. — Frazer, Folk-Lore in the Old Testament, I:57, after Jacottet

The Luyi is brief: Ab’a na ku ta ku wilu, ni mu tjila anu, “When he went up to the sky, it was from fear of men” (Jacottet 1901, p. 116).

The god is afraid of people because they do what he does. He carves a plate and they carve a plate. Jacottet noted that here Nyambe “aurait été l’initiateur de la civilisation humaine”, the initiator of human civilisation (p. 116 n. 2). In the tale that follows, Nyambe is called simply “the husband”, and in the Luyi version “l’identité de Nyambe et du premier homme est bien plus clairement exprimée”, the identity of Nyambe and the first man is much more clearly expressed (p. 117 n. 1). The god is the first man, and humans are his copies.

This is Genesis 3:22 from the outside, put in the language of craft. The man is become as one of us: people can make what God makes, so God moves out.

A second Luyi text shows what came next. Nyambe climbed to the sky on a spider’s web and called down, “Worship me.” Frazer’s translation continues:

But men said, “Come, let us kill Nyambe.” Alarmed at this impious threat, the deity fled to the sky, from which it would seem that he had temporarily descended. So men said, “Come, let us make masts to reach up to heaven.” — Frazer, I:377, after Jacottet 1901, p. 118

The masts fall and everyone on them dies: Babel, told on the Zambezi.

The pestle that pushed God away: the Ashanti of Ghana #

The best-known withdrawn-god story in Africa belongs to the Ashanti, the Akan people of central Ghana. The missionary Edmond Perregaux recorded it in 1906:

The Ashantees say that long ago men were happy, for God dwelt among them and talked with them face to face. … One unlucky day it chanced that some women were pounding a mash with pestles in a mortar, while God stood by looking on. … they beat him with their pestles. In a great huff God retired altogether from the world and left it to the direction of the fetishes; and still to this day people say, “Ah, if it had not been for that old woman, how happy we should be!” — Frazer, I:59–60, after Perregaux 1906, pp. 198 f.

Ten years later R. S. Rattray, a British district commissioner, found it “universally known among the older people”. In his telling the god is Onyankopon:

Long, long ago Onyankopon lived on earth, or at least was very near to us. Now there was a certain old woman who used to pound her fufu (mashed yams, &c.) and the pestle (lit. the child of the mortar, as the Ashanti word means) used to constantly knock up against Onyankopon (who was not then high up in the sky). So Onyankopon said to the old woman, “Why do you always do so to me? Because of what you are doing I am going to take myself away up in the sky”. And of a truth he did so. — Rattray, Ashanti Proverbs (1916), p. 20

Then comes the tower. “Since people could no longer approach near to Onyankopon,” the same old woman had her children pile up every mortar they could find, “till they reached to where Onyankopon was.” They ran one mortar short. She told them to take one from the bottom and put it on top, “and all rolled and fell to the ground, causing the death of many people” (Rattray, p. 21). Perregaux’s version uses pestles instead of mortars and ends the same way: “the communication with heaven was not completed, and men were never able to ascend up to God” (Frazer, I:378).

So one old woman both drives God off and leads the first attempt to climb back to him. The second half is the Tower of Babel, and the fit is exact.

The hoe and the severed rope: the Dinka of South Sudan #

The fullest version of the pestle story was recorded far to the east, among the cattle-keeping Dinka of South Sudan. Godfrey Lienhardt, an Oxford anthropologist, recorded it among the Rek Dinka (1961). The Dinka god is Nhialic, “Divinity”. The myth, Lienhardt writes, “tells how Divinity (and the sky) and men (and the earth) were originally contiguous” (p. 33). A rope joined them:

By means of this rope men could clamber at will to Divinity. At this time there was no death. Divinity granted one grain of millet a day to the first man and woman, and this satisfied their needs. They were forbidden to grow or pound more. — Lienhardt 1961, p. 33

The first people, “usually called Garang and Abuk”, had to take care “lest a hoe or a pestle should strike Divinity”. Then Abuk, the woman, decided to plant or pound more than her grain:

In order to do so she took one of the long-handled hoes (or pestles) which the Dinka now use. In raising this pole to pound or cultivate, she struck Divinity who withdrew, offended, to his present great distance from the earth, and sent a small blue bird (the colour of the sky) called atoc to sever the rope which had previously given men access to the sky and to him. — Lienhardt, pp. 33–34

Since then “men have to labour for the food they need, and are often hungry. They can no longer as before freely reach Divinity, and they suffer sickness and death” (p. 34). Lienhardt adds that “all Dinka” he knew had the notion of an original joining of earth and sky, and “all I know are acquainted with” the rope version (p. 35).

The Dinka story carries the whole Genesis package: a single food rule, a woman who breaks it, the god’s withdrawal, then labour, hunger, sickness and death. Lienhardt read the story as a portrait of the human condition, and his summary describes the self:

Men now are—as the first man and woman then became—active, self-assertive, inquiring, acquisitive. Yet they are also subject to suffering and death, ineffective, ignorant, and poor. — Lienhardt, p. 53

And on freedom: “There were thus no independently human affairs until Man had ‘come out’, or become separated from Divinity. But freedom then brought with it toil, suffering, and death which he had not previously known” (p. 37).

An Agar Dinka version puts the change in terms of sight. In the dark at the beginning, Divinity made a man, Aruu Pabek, and “gave him eyes so that he could see that he was in darkness”. Aruu asked for one more thing: “My father, if there is a little chink to see through, that is what I would like.” Refused, he took an axe and struck the earth, “And a part went above and a part below, and the earth lit up.” Divinity was angry and seized him by the neck: “Why are you like a man?” (pp. 34–35). The first gift is the ability to see one’s own condition; the first act with it splits the world and sets the man apart from God.

Too many requests: the Mende of Sierra Leone #

The Mende version carries no blow and no pestle, only constant asking. W. T. Harris, a Methodist missionary, recorded it in Sierra Leone (1950). People kept going to Ngewo, the creator, asking him to “give us that”, and he always answered Iŋ ngee, “yes, take it”, so they called him “Grandfather take it”:

They came to him so frequently that he said to himself: “If I stay near these people they will wear me out with their requests; I will make another living-place for myself far, far above them.” The people slept. In the morning they woke up, they looked about but could not see him. They lifted up their heads and saw him ngawongo wa, ‘spread out very big’. — Harris, in Smith (ed.) 1950, p. 278

After a last warning, “he went to his own place. From that time they called him Leve, ‘up’, ‘high’” (p. 279). The god’s name records the withdrawal. While he lived nearby, every need went straight to him. Once people wanted more than he would give, he left.

Climbing to heaven: the Bubi, the Andamanese and Babel #

The third trigger is reaching for God’s place, and it is the one Genesis tells twice.

On Bioko, the island the British called Fernando Po, now part of Equatorial Guinea, the Bubi told Mary Kingsley that a ladder once ran from earth to heaven, “made like the one you get palm-nuts with, ‘only long, long’”, so that the gods could come down “and attend personally to mundane affairs”:

But one day a cripple boy started to go up the ladder, and he had got a long way up when his mother saw him, and went up in pursuit. The gods, horrified at the prospect of having boys and women invading heaven, threw down the ladder, and have since left humanity severely alone. — Kingsley 1897, p. 507; Frazer, II:52

Kingsley thought this one “fairly pure African” (p. 508). Again a mother and child are the ones who go too far.

In the Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal, E. H. Man, a British officer there, recorded the story of Puluga, the creator. Puluga lived at Saddle Peak and, “being so near, used often to pay them a visit” (Man, p. 97 n.). After he destroyed disobedient humanity with a flood, the four survivors “determined to kill him”, but he told them he “was as hard as wood and could not be injured by their arrows” (p. 99). Then he left:

This is said to be the last occasion on which Puluga rendered himself visible, or held any communication with them, but the warning he then gave them has not been forgotten, and the islanders are to this day strict in their observance of his commands. — Man, On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, p. 99

In Frazer’s words, “That was the last time that the Creator ever appeared to men and conversed with them face to face” (I:234).

Babel itself is the master version. People who share one language build a tower “whose top may reach unto heaven”. God comes down to look and says, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do: and now nothing will be withholden from them, which they purpose to do” (Genesis 11:6, in Frazer, I:363). It is the worry of Genesis 3:22 again, and the Lozi masts, the Ashanti mortars and the Bubi ladder are all versions of this tower.

Frazer summed up the Eden version bluntly: God “feared that if man got one or both of them [knowledge and immortality], he would be the equal of his maker” (I:49).

She saw his arm: the Efe of the Ituri #

The sharpest version of all, the subject of Pygmy Eve Peeps God, comes from the Efe of the Ituri forest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Paul Schebesta, a Catholic missionary-ethnographer, heard it from an Efe man at the Apare camp (1936). The creator Masupa “communicated with His people, spoke with them as with His own children, but never showed Himself to them”, and gave one command: “they must never seek Him out” (p. 177). His daughter set his water-pot at the door each evening:

She hid herself behind a post so that she would at least see the arm of her father when he took in the water-pot. And she did. God stretched forth His arm, which was well covered with brass rings, outside His abode to take in the pot. She had seen it—the richly adorned arm of God. — Schebesta 1936, p. 178

God announced “that henceforth they must live without Him and that he would withdraw Himself from them.” He “left His children secretly, and disappeared downstream along the banks of the river. Since then no one has seen Him” (p. 178). With him went the free abundance of the forest. Then death came “with the first child born of woman”, a child its mother named Kukua kendi, “Death is coming” (p. 179).

The Efe tale strips the pattern to its core. God is a voice. People hear him and are cared for, but they may not look. A woman sees the speaker, and the voice goes.

Reading the pattern #

Set side by side, the triggers fall into three groups, and all three are things a self does.

Imitation. The Lozi carve as Nyambe carves. To copy someone you have to model them: to see their act as an act, and to see yourself as an agent who could do it too. This is theory of mind turned into craft. Genesis says it directly: the man is become as one of us.

Seeing. The Efe daughter looks at the arm. The Dinka Aruu is given eyes to see his own darkness and asks for a chink. The Andamanese never see Puluga again. Someone looks where they were meant only to listen, or looks at their own state.

Reaching. Ladders, ropes, masts, mortars, a tower of brick. People decide they can go up to where God is. This is agency, and in the Dinka, Mende and Ashanti tales it shows up as wanting more than the god gave: one more grain of millet, one more request, one more mortar.

Behind all three, very often, is a woman: the Ashanti old woman, Abuk with her long hoe, the Bubi mother on the ladder, the Efe daughter behind the post. This is the pattern the Eve Theory of Consciousness predicts. On its account women had an early advantage in self-awareness, and the old stories keep the event from the side of those who came second. Eve eats first and hands the fruit to Adam. The same sequence runs through these tales, told as a complaint by the men: “Ah, if it had not been for that old woman, how happy we should be!”

What follows the god’s departure is the Genesis package: death and toil (Efe, Dinka), sickness (Dinka), scattered languages (Andaman, Babel). The god’s nearness and the absence of death are one condition, and they end together.

A Jaynesian reading #

These tales also fit Julian Jaynes. In his model of the bicameral mind, people once heard their own planning and judgement as voices from outside, and took those voices for gods. Consciousness, for Jaynes, began when people recognised the voice as their own, and the gods fell silent.

Read that way, these myths are the bicameral breakdown remembered from inside. The god lives close and talks with people “face to face”, in both the Ashanti and the Andamanese tellings. He supplies everything and decides everything. Then someone becomes aware of the arrangement. She copies the speaker, or looks for him, or asks one question too many, or reaches for his place. Once she does, the voice is no longer an outside authority, and in the language of myth that means the god has moved far away. As I put it in the Efe essay: “God had to leave when directly perceived; the gig was up.”

The Andaman ending fits this especially well. After Puluga’s last appearance the islanders still keep “his commands”. The voice is gone, the rules remain, and they are kept “with fear and trembling” (Frazer, I:234). A conscience is just this: commands that persist once nobody is heard speaking them.

Even the history of the Hebrew text tracks the change. Frazer contrasts the two creation accounts in Genesis. The earlier writer pictures God “acting and speaking like a man”, “walking in [the garden] at the cool of the day, calling to the man and woman”; the later, priestly writer “conceives God in an abstract form as withdrawn from human sight” (I:4–5). The god who walked and talked in Eden is, a few centuries later, a voice from far off.

The Eve Theory differs from Jaynes in date and mechanism. Jaynes put the breakdown in the late second millennium BCE in the Near East. The Eve Theory puts the arrival of the “I” much earlier, spreads it first by teaching, and reads Genesis as set at the agricultural transition. The myths agree with that dating in one telling detail. The offence in the Dinka and Ashanti stories is committed with a pestle or a long hoe, while pounding or planting grain. The god leaves at the mortar and the millet field.

One story, carried far #

The tellers speak Bantu, Kwa, Mande and Nilotic languages, and the motif runs from the Atlantic coast to the Nile, then on across the Indian Ocean to the Andamans. The details that repeat are oddly particular: a pestle or hoe striking a low sky (Ghana, South Sudan), a tower of household tools piled up to reach God (Ghana, Zambia), and almost everywhere a woman’s act as the trigger.

Frazer himself, no friend of grand diffusion, allowed that “many of these resemblances are to be explained by simple transmission, with more or less of modification, from people to people” (I:106–107). A story about the moment people became too like their god travelled with whatever else travelled, and each people retold it in the furniture of its own life: a carved plate on the Zambezi, a fufu pestle in Ashanti, a millet hoe on the Nile, a water-pot in the Ituri, a palm-nut ladder on Bioko. Genesis is one more retelling, written down by the people who happened to keep the best archive.

That also explains the idle god. People kept his name, his proverbs and his commands, and stopped expecting him to speak. They remember the leaving, and they say it was their own fault: they copied him, they saw him, they reached for him. In the language of the Eve Theory, they became selves, and a self has no room for a god who talks to you face to face.

Related posts #

• Pygmy Eve Peeps God
• Eve Theory of Consciousness v3.0
• It’s Hard to Be God
• Consequences of Conscience
• Sub-Saharan Creation Myths and the Eve Theory of Consciousness.
• Old Woman and the Origin of Death.

Sources #

1. Frazer, James George. Folk-Lore in the Old Testament: Studies in Comparative Religion, Legend and Law. 3 vols. London: Macmillan, 1918 (1919 reprint). Vol. I, vol. II. Cited by volume and page: I:4–5, 49, 57, 59–60, 106–107, 233–234, 363, 377–378; II:52.
2. Jacottet, Édouard. Études sur les langues du Haut-Zambèze, troisième partie: Textes Louyi. Publications de l’École des Lettres d’Alger, Bulletin de correspondance africaine 16. Paris: Leroux, 1901, pp. 116–118.
3. Perregaux, Edmond. Chez les Achanti. Neuchâtel, 1906, pp. 198–200. Read here through Frazer’s translation.
4. Rattray, R. Sutherland. Ashanti Proverbs (The Primitive Ethics of a Savage People). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916, pp. 20–21.
5. Lienhardt, Godfrey. Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961 (linked copy is the 1987 reprint), pp. 33–37, 53.
6. Harris, W. T. “The Idea of God among the Mende.” In Edwin W. Smith, ed., African Ideas of God: A Symposium. London: Edinburgh House Press, 1950, pp. 278–279.
7. Kingsley, Mary H. Travels in West Africa: Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons. London: Macmillan, 1897, pp. 507–508.
8. Man, Edward Horace. On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands. First published 1883; linked copy is the Royal Anthropological Institute reissue, pp. 97–99.
9. Schebesta, Paul. Revisiting My Pygmy Hosts. London: Hutchinson, 1936, pp. 177–179.
10. The Holy Bible, Authorized (King James) Version. Genesis 3:22–23; Genesis 11:1–9.
11. Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976.