Bullet Ant Glove

Deep in the jungles of the Brazilian Amazon in the remote villbullet1.jpgage of Injuve lives the Satere-Mawe tribe. Several times a year, the Satere-Mawe Indians hold a painful 11-hour ritual in which boys as young as 12 must stick their hands in a specially-made pair of gloves, each one infested with a swarm of angry, stinging giant tropical bullet ants. No initiate can be considered a true Indian, a warrior, until he has worn the gloves not once, but 20 times. Said to be the most painful sting on earth, a stab from the bullet ant’s abdominal spear is 30 times worse than a bee sting. The tribe’s medicine man drugs the ants by soaking them in an herbal solution. Their stupor will only last long enough for them to be thrust one by one, stinger first, into the gloves. According to Satere-Mawe legend, these menaces provide the perfect test of one’s worthiness to take on adult roles. In less than an hour, the ants are awake. Trapped in the woven mitt, they writhe in angry desperation. They’re ready to be inserted in the ceremonial gloves. One by one, each young man steps up to the sacred pole, and submits his hands to the swarm. To help distract them from their blinding pain, the medicine man leads the young men in a dance around the sacred pole. To be seen as a true tribal warrior, each man must endure the punishment for more than ten minutes. With each sting, the bullet ant’s neurotoxin attacks the nerves, causing paralysis and terrible pain. Once the gloves are off, the stinging and burning will only grow more excruciating, though it is discouraged to display any signs of pain. It takes 24 hours for the toxins to dissipate completely. As the chief sees it, the ritual not only marks the initiates’ entrance into adulthood, it makes them better men. As they see it, if you live your life without any pain or suffering, it won’t be worth anything to you.

The Importance of Storytelling

Storytellers have played an integral role throughout the course of history, though their importance is often overlooked. As the picture above shows, I recently shared Scientology's creation story with my four room mates (who were, as you can tell, very enthralled with the tale). My telling and retelling of this story not only strengthens my understanding and memorization thereof, it also leaves an impression on my audience regarding a story they had likely never heard, or even considered before. It is by means of the Storyteller that we are able to fill the void between raw data and understanding. Such information must be presented in a way people both enjoy and understand. The Storyteller strives to share his tales in a way most memorable so as to achieve his ultimate goal: the recurrent sharing of his story with others by members of audiences past.

Scott's Potawatomi Creation Myth

These were the materials Scott brought in to illustrate the creation myth of the people of the Potawatomi tribe. Theirs is an earth-diver creation myth, telling of a pair of muskrats, the first trees, and a creator's three attempts at making people in a hearth. The underdone person came out white, the overdone person came out black, and the red person was juuuuuust right.

Tree-Hugger

Several Asian cultures believe humanity emerged from a bamboo stem.

"In Philippine mythology, one of the more famous creation accounts tells of the first man, Malakás ("Strong"), and the first woman, Maganda ("Beautiful"), each emerged from one half of a split bamboo stem on an island formed after the battle between Sky and Ocean. In Malaysia, a similar story includes a man who dreams of a beautiful woman while sleeping under a bamboo plant; he wakes up and breaks the bamboo stem, discovering the woman inside. The Japanese folktale "Tale of the Bamboo Cutter" (Taketori Monogatari) tells of a princess from the Moon emerging from a shining bamboo section. Hawaiian bamboo ('ohe) is a kinolau or body form of the Polynesian creator god Kāne."

^^Taken from Wikipedia^^

Needless to say, trees are important in all of mythology, whether you realize it or not. It is hard to escape the image of a tree when reading almost any myth. Be it the story of Daphne and Apollo, the story of Tree of Life, or even stories about the Dryads (Oak tree nymphs in Greek mythology), trees are constantly bewitching us and filling us with wonderment.

Scientology and its creation story

Our story begins 75 million years ago. There existed a galactic federation ruled by an alien overlord by the name of Xenu. Xenu let his federation get a little out of hand, and each planet in his care had reached a population of around 178 billion! When he heard he was to be deposed from power, Xenu knew he had to do something drastic. He devised a plan to gather billions of people together under the ruse of income tax inspections, and froze them all! He and his henchmen loaded the people into his fleet of space ships and flew them to a plan among the confederation known as Teegeeack. We now know this planet as Earth. Xenu placed all of the billions of frozen bodies around the base of every active volcano on Teegeeack and lowered hydrogen bombs into each of the volcanoes and detonated them simultaneously. This created a worldwide disaster and killed all but a few of the people instantly. The souls, then having been released of their bodies, floated upwards. Xenu foresaw this, however, and essentially created a giant soul-sucking vacuum cleaner to capture them all. He took the souls to a couple of cinemas - one in the Virgin Islands, one in Hawaii. Here, they forced them to watch "various misleading data" for 36 days straight. These souls, now having been turned evil, are the source of our everyday bad thoughts and feelings. The people who somehow survived the volcanic eruptions are the descendants of modern humans. True story!

As it was in the beginning... whatever that means.

As we discussed in class, humankind is overly worried about events yet-to-be and what exactly may come after life. Some people make it their goal to figure out the mystery of what, if anything, comes after this nearly century-long roller-coaster ride. Many people are so sure (blindly, I might add) of what comes after death that they are willing to execute people who disagree with them. What comes next? Is there an afterlife in which we are judged to be good or evil? Do we reincarnate as another life form? Or do we simply turn into earthworm food after our soul dies with our body? These are questions to which we may never know the answers. However, is it so far-fetched to wonder instead what may have come before life rather than after? People can be so preoccupied with the future they completely disregard the past. The answers may be in front of us, simply hiding in our unconscious. Maybe rather than trying to unveil the future, we should simply sharpen the memories of our pre-existential past.