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Macrohistory and Acculturation: Between Myth and History in Modern Melanesian

Adjustments and Ancient Gnosticism
Author(s): G. W. Trompf
Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Oct., 1989), pp. 621-648
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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Macrohistory and Acculturation:
Between Myth and History in
Modern Melanesian Adjustments
and Ancient Gnosticism
G. W. TROMPF
University of Sydney
Historical consciousness has not been a prized possession in most human

cultures, and a sense of a time that considers social affairs to have been
developing over several hundreds of years [prior to the present] and by agents
6toovotog ltiv (of essentially the same being as ourselves) is actually a
cultural oddity. Most of the thousands of the world's cultures are discrete
primal societies-many of them small-that constitute the ethnographic pan-
orama of today. They remind us that there once lay hundreds of more region-
ally confined, more homogeneous and tribal-oriented human groupings. For
such a vast array of societies, however, we simply lack long-term histories.
Virtually all known peoples have some short-term accounts of their collec-
tive past. Recent study of oral history in traditional societies-especially in
black Africa and Oceania-reveals that the ability to recall key battles and
exploits and to preserve genealogies and migration stories, extending back to
the last four to ten generations, or as far as memory allows, is critical to both
personal and tribal identity. i Occasionally, a chain of recollection may pene-
trate even further-the royal genealogy of the Bushongo, for instance, enjoys
a depth of fifteen generations and the ancestral lists of the Maori apparently
trace the first arrivals of their deep-sea canoes to the fourteenth century.2
These exceptions only tend to confirm, however, the now well-established
This article considers the interface between cultures possessing a developed historical con-
sciousness and those long imbued with mythic mentalites that are coming to terms with propaga-
tion of historical mindedness. It is in memoriam of Peter Lawrence, a former Professor of
Anthropology at the University of Sydney and an exponent of comparative social study.
I Compare, especially, J. Vansina, De la Tradition orale: essai de methode historique (An-
nales, Musee Royal de I'Afrique Centrale; sciences humaines, no. 36) (Tervuren, 1961), J.
Vansina, "Once Upon a Time: Oral Traditions as History in Africa," Daedalus, 100:2 (1971),
esp. 442ff. D. Denoon and R. Lacey, eds., Oral Traditions in Melanesia (Port Moresby, 1981).
2 Vansina, De la tradition, op. cit., ch. 6, sec. 4(b) (Bushongo); G. W. Trompf, "Kon-Tiki
and the Critics," The Melbourne Historical Jounal, 3:1 (1963), 57f. (literature on Maori Fleet,
although the controversy concerning the interpretation of these Maori traditions persists).
0010-4175/89/4109-9891 $5.00 ? 1989 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History
621
622 G. W. TROMPF
suspicion that what is called myth, not what is called history, has virtually
monopolized all human reflection about former times. Until Western-style
educational systems were foisted on the original inhabitants of the colonized
world (though not forgetting the impressive historiographical traditions of
China and Islam), the nearest equivalent to the school curriculum subject
called history in most of the world's cultures was the relaying of cosmically
significant narratives, sometimes prolonged and intricately elaborated by el-
ders or sacral custodians.
Myths (these cosmically significant narratives) are admittedly not devoid of

historical dimensions. Their contents not only generally conform to a dia-
chronically flowing sequence of events or a semblance of them, but they have
an almost universal tendency to locate the greater part of these events in a
primordiality, a time that precedes and preconditions anything else remem-
bered about human beings or about all men and women whose live and
customs were not intrinsically different from one's own.3 This endows almost
all myths with a pastness. A few expressions of mythic thought carry with
them an extraordinarily sophisticated awareness of vast temporal expanses of
both the past and the future. For Vaishnavite, Jain and Theravada Buddhist,
for example, the kalpas stretching back to the Perfect Age are macro-periods
that would tax anyone's imagination-one kalpa alone being the length of
time that it would take, in Buddhist imagery, for a man to wear down a rocky
mountain with a kasi cloth by stroking its surface once every hundredth year.
Did not Plato envision the emergence and disappearance of thousands of
political societies numerous times in eras long gone, the prediluvial conflict
between the Athenians and Atlantids being but a comparatively recent affair
in an incomprehensible flow of metabolai (changes)?4 Myths are not gener-
ally so purely fictive that we should dismiss them as atemporal and anti-
historical without question-unless perhaps by definition.5 Materials readily
dubbed as mythic may even contain telltale reminiscences of actual (if far
removed) occurrences too often neglected by historians. Although the many
Melanesian songs and stories about the great "falling away of the land" or
"time of darkness" may sound nice in mythologists' notebooks as motifs of
cosmic upheaval, they also seem to be traces of datable earthquakes and
actual volcanic ash-clouds or eclipses.6
3 Eliade, Das Heilige und das Profane (Rowohlts Deutsche Enzyklopddie) (Hamburg, 1957),
Pt. 2; C. Levi-Strauss, La Pensee sauvage (Paris, 1962), especially 313, 348.
4 Samhvuttanikava, 15, i, 5-6, etc., compare, Sarvdrthasisddhi, 418 (Jain); Plato, Leges, III,
676B-C; Critias, 106A ff.
5 Contra H.-C. Puech, "Temps, histoire et mythe dans le christianisme des premiers siecles"
(1951), in his En Quite de la Gnose I: le Gnose et les temps (Paris, 1978), 17 (in which he
criticizes E. O. James and R. Bultmann for analyzing Christianity as a mixture of myth and
history).
6 Thorough exploration of this valuable point has been made by E. Waters in an unpublished
seminar paper ("Oral Tradition as History in Melanesia") at the University of Papua New
MACROHISTORY AND ACCULTURATION 623
Most commentators would agree that the distinctive quality of mythic

modes of thought, however, is its remarkable propensity for telescoping the
ordinary human past. While events of the present and within group memory
may be a real, often absorbing concern, the longer-term past is drawn rather
too quickly into an Urzeit, which is nonetheless fundamentally significant-
archetypally, cosmologically, and normatively-for a given culture. Events
in this primordial time tend to lose historical particularity, since the mythos
usually releases them from the contingencies and sequences commonly recog-
nized in human affairs. Of course, most of these happenings are described as
if they had already occurred; in certain theophanies many of the very same
gods or spirit agents whose doings are recounted in myth can also reappear in
the definite here and now.7 Oral and written texts place the dramatis personae
of myths (or legends) in an interval out of ordinary time, suspended just
enough to seem like eternity or at the very least a comforting super-human
deathlessness. These events are not told after all for an antiquarian's interest
but to explain the composition of the cosmos (whether in terms of its constitu-
ent parts or the behaviour expected within it). The first known manifestation
of some aspect of the cosmos or the first reception of this or that skill rarely
signifies a beginning (Anfange) in an exact chronological sense. Myths are
more of a social recognition that significant parts of the world and its tradi-
tions have had to arise from a period of extraordinary Urspriinge (primordial
arrangements) before they could become as they are.8
The Urzeit, detached from the humdrum and distinctly human exercises of
life that continually transpire before consciousness, is not left to rot as an
easily discarded backdrop to existence, since its coeval quality can be reap-
propriated by reactualization through ritual to enrich and transform the pre-
sent. The dreaming can thus be renewed because myths-and the rhythm and
actions that accompany them-are always available. Other relevant variations
of mythic thought are plentiful and can include suggestions of an eternal
return or universal pulses and periods. Some peoples can even semantically
blur the past and future (as with Fijian muri and liu); others, like the Mayans,
lock both gods and creatures into a calendrical wheel of time from which
neither set of beings can escape their functions as cosmos-changers or sacri-
Guinea, 17 August 1977; compare, M. Reay, "Myth and Tradition as Historical Evidence," in
The Historn of Melanesia, K. Inglis, ed. (Canberra, 1969), 463ff. Regarding traditions about
great volcanic eruptions, I allude here to the work of P. Mai and others on 'The Time of
Darkness" (Long Island, off Papua), J. Guiart (on a lost New Hebridean island), etc.
7 For a famous modem example (1858), see The Gospel of Ramakrishna (New York, 1907),
210-1; compare R. Rolland, The Life of Ramakrishna (Mayavati, 1944), 41. For a vivid ancient
example, Aelius Aristides, Sacred Tales, IV, 11, cf. 1.
8 On myths "explaining why things are as they are," see Trompf, In Search of Origins
(London and New Delhi, 1989), chs. 5-6. On the Anfang-Ursprung distinction, stated as cau-
tiously as possible here, see especially J. Gebser, Ursprung und Gegenwart, 2 vols. (Stuttgart,
1949-53); A. Friedrich, "Das Bewusstein eines Naturvolkes von Haushalt und Ursprung des
Lebens," Paideuma, 6:1 (1955), 53-4.
624 G. W. TROMPF
ficers.9 Yet the essential point stands. Myth is like a Parmenidian plenum
encasing and overshadowing a central core (the human arena) that distracts
mankind from the rich data waiting in potentia to be the object of its historical
consciousness, or else substitutes stability for instability and a distilled truth
for ever increasing complexity in the average memory.
Myth is also distinctive for the characters who play their parts in its multi-
form expressions. These characters are not always monstrous nor exclusively
fabulous, yet even the least divinized or most obviously mortal among them is
rarely quite of the same order as the men or women who celebrate the story.
We recognize the warriors of Homer's Iliad and Hesiod's Age of Heroes as
feuding and negotiating like the very men who read about them in classical
Hellas. The clashing Archeans and Trojans portrayed in such epic poetry,
however, are really stylized forms which stand only on the outermost rim of
concrete actuality. They lack a real psychology, as Auerbach demonstrates in
his brilliant analyses.10 Admittedly, one is quite easily able to identify with
the heroes of myths because of the apparently universal structures of the
human imagination. More young Indian men would prefer to be like a Rama
rather than any other type, for instance, and more young women, like the
vulnerable Sita, but the world of these two-that of the epic Ramdyana-
belongs to quite another order of another avatara. Although it is an order of
the distant past which is also believed to be awaiting reestablishment in the
distant future, it is one in which Hanuman the monkey chief leads his army of
monkeys to slay the evil demon Ravana and therefore is in a theatre of actions
alienus ab nostris temporibus. 1"
Myths-as charters, reminders of obligations, and pointers of morals-
have undoubtedly been important for moulding mores and can also communi-
cate vital messages to the living. Sometimes a myth's setting seems to be at
the very threshold between savagery and social order-between a time when
human beings were wild, beast-like nomad savages and the time when they
settled in hamlets, between a time when food was eaten raw and when it was
cooked over fire, between a time when babes were ripped from their mother's
bellies in order to assure their survival and the time when they were delivered
by the finer arts of midwifery. In these cases the heroes or heroines of the
mythic narrative are bestowers of the skills and customs now accepted as a
specific people's way of life. At other times the liminal situation has to do
9 For Fijian conceptions I rely on the good offices of Sevati Tuwere, Vitu Levu, Suva; on
Maya thought, see especially J. de Alva, "Introduction to Mexican Philosophy" (Ph.D. disser.,
Philosophy Department, California State College [San Jose], Santa Cruz, 1972), chs. 1-3. The
allusions to the Dreaming above, of course, are to Australian aboriginal myth and ritual.
10 E. Auerbach, Mimesis: dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendlindischen Literatur (Bern,
1964), chs. 1-2.
11 For some of these points I am indebted to Prof. R. Goldman, see his translation of The
Ramdayna of Valmiki (New Haven: Princeton Library of Asian Translations 1-2, 1984-6).
with a story about the way in which the earliest humans beings were deprived
of immortality or pristine perfection prior to the onset of the arduous, persist-
ing state of affairs. On still other, less primitive occasions, various rulers and
protagonists of powerful institutions have appealed to a mythic past-es-
pecially to great ancestral decisions and apparently infallible Founding Fa-
thers-to legitimate existing authority.12 That these tales continue to mould
existence for their assenting possessors confirms, however, that the events
described remain removed (whether fractionally and subtly, or highly and
mightily) from the sphere of deeds that continually requires examination,
debate, decision, consensus. This sphere (the contingent, unstable realm,
which attracts the historian, or the historically minded) has been utterly ig-
nored by the vast majority of this planet's inhabitants-until our very own
century.13 Even today, although most individuals may have a passionate, if
natural concern for the recent past and very often a dogmatic opinion about
the origins of this or that feature of social life, only a tiny minority probes
with any attention into the details, into the hidden recesses and forgotten
byways, which can establish the difference between myth and history.
What takes place, then, when the legatees of mythic mentalites collide with
the bearers, especially the evangelists, of historical consciousness? That is the
question addressed by this paper, comme etude preliminaire. Its subject con-
cerns acculturation: the process whereby members of any given society, per-
ceiving their lack of a special and attractive ingredient in another tradition,
attempt to absorb it into their own and make it part and parcel of their own
inheritance. The specific issue is the encounter between a group of people
who cherish their possession of a considerable corpus of historical knowledge
(or of a recorded past clearly outstretching the usual habits of human re-
membrance) and members of a society who own but a fragment of such rare
12 For an excellent example covering the "dichotomy" between savagery and social order,
etc., see M. Tamoane, "Kamoai of Darapap and the Legend of Jari," in Prophets of Melanesia,
Trompf, ed. (Port Moresby, 1981 ed.), 107-21; cf. Levi-Strauss, Le cru et le cuit (Paris, 1964),
esp. Pt. 2; Du miel aux cendres (Paris, 1966), especially 240-2, 404-5. For an older, Western
example, see, for example, B. Phillpotts, Mermaids (London, 1980), 43. On the loss of immor-
tality and original perfection, see, Gen. 2-4; Gilgamesh, xi, especially 280-302, in Ancient Near
Eastern Texts, J. B. Pritchard, ed. (Princeton, 1955 ed.), 37-44ff. Cf. also W. Staudacher, Die
Trennung von Himmel und Erde (Ttibingen: doctoral disser., Theology Department, University
of Tubingen, 1942). On rules and legitimation, A. MacLachlan's forthcoming book on the uses
of history (especially the chapter on Mythic Past, Mythic Present and Mythic Future as Historical
Legitimation) is eagerly awaited.
13 This sphere is not already history, however, prior to any reflection upon it, if I may here
pinpoint the fundamental conceptual error behind M. Godelier's article "Myth et histoire, r6flex-
ions sur les fondements de la pensee sauvage," in Les Annales August, 1971 (special issue),
especially 542-3, 564-6; although note his later qualms in Perspectives in Marxist An-
thropology, R. Brain, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology, no. 18,
1977), 239, n. 4. For a sidelight to my distinction, see, for example, M. Heidegger, Sein undZeit
(Tubingen, 1967), 372ff.
626 G. W. TROMPF
treasures. What intellectual interactions occur? Do myths begin to look more

historical, or is history secretly mythologized; and what about the comparable
historical contexts in which such an encounter has occurred?
Consider a basic example from modem times. A French missionary arrives
on the Papuan coast. It is 1910. After receiving a three-year orientation with
his confreres of le Sacre Coeur at the Yule Island Mission Station, he decides
to trek inland to the highest mountains, to places where no European has yet
dared tread and where he hopes to bring some light to primitive darkness.
Think of the mental baggage he carries with him. La Sainte Bible in his
horse's knapsack puts him in contact with events that stretch back from the
first Christian century to the time of Abraham in the second millennium B.C.
In the deepening, somewhat frightening shadows of each evening, en route,
he nostalgically recollects his seminary days at Issoudon and perhaps sets
himself in the context of the history of the Catholic Church, piecing together
what he leart from an excursion to Chartres here or a lecture on the (Counter)
Reformation there. The streets of Paris might come alive for him once more,
and the extraordinarily elemental qualities of his new environment force him
to range over the glories of his beloved France: the Arc de Triomphe, the
Reign of Terror, Louis Quartorze, Leonardo on his death bed at Amboise, the
Popes at Avignon, right on down to the solid wooden-wheeled chariots for
long-haired Merovingian kings. His own tribal past is a fairly well docu-
mented thousand-year span away, yet he now transports all this relative spa-
ciousness and depth of intellect to one of the most highly atomized societies
on earth-that of the Fuyughe. These people had bound themselves to sepa-
rated territories; their hamlet clusters were more than often at war with each
other; and they knew no cosmoi bigger than the great mountainous ravines in
which they dwelt. The most informed minds among this people have almost
nothing to tell about noteworthy human deeds beyond the turn into this cen-
tury. Their traditions set priority by the stability of the constant and recogniz-
able round of affairs; they accepted without question the principle inter-
changes that made warfare recurrent and the requirements to organize feasts
around events in the life-cycle: the onset of puberty, the first grey hairs, the
first loosened teeth, and death. To this restricted universe and to this patent
disinterest in the genuine past came the apostle of history and the inconceiva-
bly wider world.
Of course Pere Dubuy, our missionary, had no idea that some fifteen years
after his own death an archaeologist would excavate an important site behind
one of the Mission's churches and discover that there was human habitation in
those same valleys 26,000 years before the present (some 21,000 years before
Abraham); yet that revelation is the privileged insight of white specialists and
has had no relevance to the average Fuyughe. What became known to Dubuy,
however, and is more to the point of our discussion, was that he and other
white newcomers were being branded with the curious tradition title of tidib.
The tidib, significantly, were the culture-bearers of the mythic past. A pecu-
liar super-race, they had once passed through the country, bestowing the skills
of warfare, food production, good custom, and of acquiring wealth, on the
now unremembered early ancestors. After fulfilling their task, they had sim-
ply disappeared. The whites, it was soon obvious, were the tidib returned, and
considering the remarkable new items they introduced-metals, the wheel, a
water-powered saw, permanent buildings, even a Swiss clock in a tower-the
whites were the new culture-bearers. As mysterious as their long-lost prede-
cessors, they bore a whole new range of skills that portended an end to that
hard, lithic, relentless order of existence, that, though none then knew it, had
continued for thousands of years. Thus traditional mythology was rapidly
adapted to meet and validate new conditions.
The process could hardly stop with talk of returning tidib, however, be-
cause the missionary's message had to be deciphered, including his ingenious
picture-shows about such figures as Adam, Noah, Moses, Mary, Jesus, plus
the Deo (God) acclaimed as their guide. Even before the mission station built
by Dubuy was strafed by Japanese fighter planes in 1943, furthermore, some-
thing had to be made of his references to France, Britain, Australia, quite
apart from Yule Island and the "big water." The characteristic village-level
explanation for all this new information was (and largely still remains) that the
whites have their own tidib, powerful heroic super humans distinguished by
their unnervingly superior capacities. The stories from the Bible were full of
their astounding exploits. While the Fuyughe may have presumed at first that
the whites known to them belonged to this same special class of beings, it was
proven to the Fuyughe that whites also could die when another missionary Fr.
Garreau was killed with his horse in a landslide (1938), and Dubuy himself
died beneath the collapsed ruins of his half-built cheese-cellar in 1952.
Though most whites came and went like migrating birds, they could join the
dead and possess ancestors in France, or Germany, or Sydney.
Thus the foundations were laid for a broader vision of both the past and the
world. Of special interest is the development of a macrohistory-from the
first urges to fill in the gaps among the last three generations of Fuyughe
affairs and the beginnings of the whole human story. In the general absence of
literacy and an effective dissemination of accurate information, however, the
inevitable tendency among the Fuyughe has been to mythologize the mac-
roscopic perspective on mankind's past that the missionaries struggled to
convey. Some schematization of this past was both a necessary part of the
Christian catechesis and a basic device used by missionaries to explain them-
selves to the "primitives." The Fuyughe lacked a far-reaching time line in
their consciousness and cultural repertoire to which they could fasten all these
many newly portrayed events. Most of these mysterious happenings were of
course first bundled into a mythic Urzeit. They were given a rough sequential
pattern (Adam first, then Jesus, and France later still) without a precise
628 G. W. TROMPF
location in time or space. Since they were usually related as a reason for
heeding the messages of the whites, versions of Bible stories took on the
charter-like qualities of traditional myth. These earlier shifts were not the last,
and one fascinating task for the oral historian is to plot the curious dynamics
of increasing historical awareness during the interactions between primal
peoples and Western intruders.14
In Melanesia alone the interest in these acculturative processes has been
shown by the profusion of allusions in ethnography to exotic, though appar-
ently confused, pictures of the white man's background, as being the as tru
(pidgin for original principle) behind the differences between black and white
ways of life.15 The character and relative attraction of these narratives of
cognitive adjustment have varied with the nature of the indigenous world
views and the degree of sociocultural disturbance from colonization. As re-
cently as 1952, for example, a very decidedly mythicizing story gained a fair
degree of currency among the Asmat (now southern Irian Jaya), a people who
had only come to know Europeans well-mainly the Dutch-since 1932.
After having brought on a great flood, two women of mythic times visited the dry land
by means of an aeroplane which they had made with their own hands. In the country of
the whites they took the names of Marie and Wireremina (Queen Wilhelmina)16
respectively. From the former there descended Jesus and the mission, from the latter
the Dutch government; these two authorities really had their points of origin, therefore,
in the land of the Asmats. 17
Here newly recounted details and events have been rendered cosmically sig-
nificant, quite naturally in terms of Melanesian presuppositions about the
relatively local beginnings of all things.
In other areas, especially along sections of the more extensively colonized
northern coast of New Guinea (as a whole), indigenous myths of two (or
three) brothers were adapted to the bare outline of Biblical history as it was
filtering down into village consciousness. The late Peter Lawrence wrote up
14 For most of the above (including Dubuy's life story), see Trompf, "'Bilalaf,'" in
Prophets, op. cit., Trompf, ed., 16-17, 30-60; and on archaeology, J. P. White, K. A. W.
Crook, and B. P. Ruxton, "Kosipe: a Late Pleistocene Site in the Papuan Highlands,"
Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, 36 (December, 1970), 152ff. On missionaries as inno-
vators, see especially D. Whiteman, Melanesians and Missionaries (Pasadena, 1983); and for
basic texts on acculturation in anthropological theory, especially R. Thurnwald, "The Psychol-
ogy of Acculturation," American Anthropologist, 34:4 (1932), 557 ff.; M. J. Herskovits,
Acculturation (New York, 1938); J. van Baal, Mensen in Verandering (Amsterdam, 1957), ch. 3.
The term Deo used in the text above is the euphonic mixture of Latin and Romance terms for God
used by Catholic missionaries.
15 For the most detailed overview, see F. Steinbauer, "Die Kargo Kulte als religionsges-
chichtliches und missionstheologisches Problem" (doctoral disser.. Theology Department, Uni-
versity of Erlangen-Nmrnberg, Nurnberg, 1971); cf. also P. Worsley, The Trumpet shall Sound
(London, 1970 ed.). The language in the text is tok pisin.
16 Wilhelmina, Queen of Holland 1890-1948.
17 See H. Nevermann, E.-A. Worms, and H. Petri, Die Religionen der Siidsee und Aus-
traliens (Stuttgart, 1968), 108 (my translation).
quite a variety of such traditional creations, which have had as their local
wellspring the Manup-Kilibob myth cycle around Madang. Traditionally,
Manup and Kilibob were comparable to the Fuyughe tidib, since one or both
of them (depending on the versions) bore the different skills for culture and
bestowed them on the local inhabitants of the Madang area as they sailed
along the coastlines. It was also told that these brothers, earlier estranged, had
been reconciled or would be so in the future.18 Following mission influence,
however, this mythology became thickly laced with Biblical characters, es-
pecially in cargo cult ideologies. In one earlier narrative (pre-1914), for
example, the central protagonists are the three sons of Noah, with Ham being
punished for his stupidity and sent to New Guinea to become the ancestor of
the natives. Unlike the white descendants of the other brothers, the New
Guineans missed out on the cargo19 that Noah had stowed in his European
steamer model of an ark. In later productions, however, Manup and Kilibob
are identified with Jesus, or God, or Satan, yet there is an increasing sense of
time depth. According to Tagarab, a visionary acclaimed for predicting the
bombing of Madang by the Japanese in 1941, Manup was really Satan who
held the local people in his power after his invention of sorcery; Kilibob was
good and possessed an engine-powered steel ship as he sailed down the
coastline, though the Madangs all stupidly preferred traditional artifacts to the
cargo that he carried with him. Kilibob sailed on to Sydney, left his ship, and
from there hid in Jerusalem "for a hundred years or more" where the whites,
who desired to possess his vessel or others like it, could not find him.
Kilibob now decided to become the God of the Europeans. (They called him God but
the natives were to call him Kilibob). God-Kilibob's first act was to appear to Moses in
or as the Burning Bush and give him the Ten Commandments. The people . . . were
to live soberly and amicably together. Moses relayed these instructions to the Euro-
peans, who obeyed them and were accordingly rewarded with gifts of cargo.
Jesus came later. After being sent as God-Kilibob's son, his role was to be
guardian of the spirits of the dead. The New Guineans, for their part, had been
left in Manup-Satan's bondage "for a long time," on account of God-
Kilibob's anger. Now, however, the latter's attitude was changing. He had
sent the missionaries; yet because they failed to tell the truth-that God and
Kilibob were the same-he was now coming in person, in a ship full of
1s Lawrence, Road belong Cargo (Manchester, 1964), 22-3. For the full geographic spread of
the Manup-Kilibob myth cycle, see C. A. Schmitz, Historische Probleme in Nordost Neuguinea
(Huon-Halbinsel) (Wiesbaden, 1960), 319-38, but the nearest Madang components of the cycle
were in the possession of the Sengam, Som, and Yam peoples.
19 We are dealing here with a "cargo cult" ideology. Cargo stands here for significant (if not
unlimited) quantities of (desirable) European-style goods that symbolize European power, and for
which Melanesians hold out hope. In a deeper symbolic sense, then, Cargo (Kago) also stands for
redemption or salvation from the unwanted colonial (or neo-colonial) order. Compare, for exam-
ple, K. Burridge, New Heaven, New Earth; A Study of Millenarian Activities (Oxford, 1969), 4-
8; J. Strelan, Search for Salvation (Adelaide, 1977), especially chs. 3-4.
630 G. W. TROMPF
European-goods and munitions, to "drive out the Europeans, missionaries

included.' '20
By 1976, 1 found the most prevalent pictures of the past (in cargo cult
circles particularly) were different again. The post-war period for the villagers
around Madang had been dominated by news of the effects of the movement
created by Yali Singina of Sor, a local war hero who fought for the Allies and
who had become the object of expectations about the radical (or magical)
transformation of traditional life styles. Eventually disillusioned with both the
Australian administration and the missionaries (the former's broken promises
and the latter's censures), Yali founded a movement that cut across a goodly
variety of local cultural boundaries. He taught that a return to traditional
practices, along with a few ritual innovations, would bring the wealth (the
money, the iron-roofed houses, the unlimited flow of trade store goods) that
the Madangs so eagerly desired. Yali died in 1975 without the Cargo having
arrived. By the following year his loyal followers, bent on presenting them-
selves as a viable respectable alternative to the Christian denominations, were
playing down the cargo cult image in any case. Out of their reappraisals, what
is more, came the articulation of a special kind of Melanesian
Heilsgeschichte, which had nudged enough away from myth toward history to
constitute a fascinating example of further acculturation.
According to one Beig Wen, who was then emerging as Yali's successor,
there are two histories (stori), one for the whites and one for the blacks,
although each is analogous to the other. The earliest of the whites' periods ran
from Abraham to Moses, and as one who had been a Lutheran Church coun-
cillor, Beig used a variety of phrases to show he was aware that this period-
this taim bipo ("time before")-was hundreds of years ago. Yet the first
period of the blacks could be paralleled to it. It was the ancestral time (taim
bilong tumbuna) of the Madang ancestors, and went back a long, long way
because, after all, the whites had accepted the fact that the blacks had been in
New Guinea for centuries. These two periods were also similar for being
good. The Israelite fathers (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and Moses) were
closer to God, while the Madangs experienced an ordered, untroubled exis-
tence centred on the male cult (haus tambaran). The idyllicization is obvious
but quite understandable. Some of it was apparent in Biblical pictures of
Abraham (for example, Rom. 4:1-25, Gal. 3:9). What could be more appeal-
ing than for a new Madang leader to convey the impression that precolonial
communities were once untrammelled by trouble, even wars, and that there
was indeed only one traditional culture or cult (and not the complex many in
actuality)? As for the second periods, they were bad. Following the Bible
(with some jumps, for Beig is obviously not ready to handle strict chro-
20 Lawrence, op. cit., 76-7, 100-3 (and cf. 101 for the quotation). My italics. The last motif
of great expectation is, of course, a basic ingredient in so-called "millenarian movements," of
which some cargo cults may be considered a subspecies.
nology), this was the time when the people disobeyed God; prophets arose in
anger, trying to set the wrongdoers on the right road. The comparable Madang
period came with the missionaries, who tried to turn the people against their
traditions, and with whites in general, who disturbed the old ways, took the
people's land-to build Madang township for one thing-and forced them to
act against their will. Here, fascinatingly, the parallel has been built up with
the aid of a modem anthropological textbook. The work of Peter Lawrence
called Road belong Cargo was solemnly brought to me from another room
(during one of my interviews), and brought as if I were to be revealed its
marvellous existence for the first time. In this volume, it was avowed, there
were to be found the accounts of the Madang prophets, including Tagarab
(mentioned earlier), who foretold the great disasters ahead for the whites.
The pair of second periods, however, were not thought to have happened at
the same time (because Christ had not yet come to Israel to make Christian
missions possible). This distinction of temporal context also applied, however
roughly, to the pair of third periods, which turn out to be quite good. Why
were they good'? Because each sees the arrival of the hero-Jesus for the
whites and Yali for the blacks-who shows the right road (in a final sense) to
their respective peoples. The whites have their New Testament and their
church; the Madangs have Yali's sayings (collected together in an exercise
book, yet at some undisclosed location) and his organization (wok bilong
Yali). In the end we find a set of fourth periods will emerge in the near yet
unpredictable future. With the accounts of these presaged times we begin to
perceive that each schema of stages is prefaced by a beginning and conclusion
that turn out to be cotemporal. The mythic tendency is satisfied when the
narrative is enclosed at each pole (the distant past and the near future) by a
more distinctly sacral and open-faced Urzeit und Endzeit. For the whites,
Jesus will come back; but for the Madangs the process is made clearly more
symmetrical and deliberately more appealing mythologically, in that the an-
cestors will all return (Yali only being one among them). The original taim
bilong tumbuna is to be restored and in part cataclysmically with the destruc-
tion of Madang township.21
Illustrations of such cognitive acculturation abound elsewhere and con-
stitute a rich field for research. We could trace a comparable pattern of
development, for example, on Malaita in the Solomon Islands. During 1946-
48 members of the Maasina (the Marching Rule protest movement) likened
their struggle to "the third world war . . . to free every country, island and
everybody" after Britain's ownership of the Solomons for ninety-nine years.
Not long after (in 1954), a new Malaitan independent church emerged, pro-
claiming that the island had been visited in Biblical times by a son or descen-
21 Trompf, "The Theology of Beig Wen, the Would-be Successor to Yali," Catalyst, 6:3
(1976), 166ff.; Trompf, "Independent Churches in Melanesia," Oceania, 54:1 (1983). 67-8.
632 G. W. TROMPF
dant of Moses, a figure one might have expected to find in Mormon literature
on ancient America. Called Levi Moses Solomon, he imparted ten command-
ments long since forgotten by the islanders until the missionaries came. Still
more recent is the strange (and evidently first) large-scale monograph by a
Malaitan, a History of South Malaita, Origin of Livings, etc., which makes
the island central to the cosmos and all history.22 Such creative bricolage has
many parallels in Melanesia. It is found in rudimental attempts by the Ka-
paour to trace the blacks, Chinese, and whites to the three sons of the one
ancestor (in Irian Jaya). It is there on a more sophisticated plane in the famous
Paliau Maloat's Longpela stori bilong God ("Long Story of God") from the
Admiralty Islands, a short redoing of the Bible, which among its other idio-
syncrasies identifies Pilate with an Australian Administrator.23 The use of
these processes as a means to grapple with the wider world and its (mac-
ro)history continue on even now to the very cutting edges of modernization.
These persistent mythicizing tendencies in the rural areas are juxtaposed with
new-ranking members of Melanesian dlite who now study history (as part of
the curricula of high schools, seminaries and universities in urban settings),
imbibing theories of progress and socioeconomic development that are so
crucial for nation building in the third world. A few daring minds among them
have sought to develop intellectually respectable frameworks for the under-
standing of world history in general.24
Village-level experimentation in ideas, however, is of the greatest concern
to me here because the results so clearly reflect the meeting of mythic and
historical consciousness. In another place I have considered these intriguing
22 See for example, J. P. Hoka, in Pacific Protest: the Maasina Rule, Solomon Islands, 1944-
52, H. Laracy, ed. (Suva, 1983), 124; Trompf, "Independent Churches, etc.," loc. cit., 62; E.
R. Ouou, History of South Malaita, Origin of Livings, Centre and Diameter of the Universe
(Honiara, 1980), especially ch. 4. On parallels to Levi Moses Solomon in a mythological
macrohistory of the West propagated by the Mormons (or Church of Latter-Day Saints), see
Trompf, "The Cargo and the Millennium on Both Sides of the Pacific," in Cargo Cults and
Millenarian Movements; Transoceanic Comparisons of New Religious Movements (Religion and
Society Ser.), Trompf, ed., (Berlin, 1989), ch. 1. For relevant theoretical reflection on "fresh
mythologies," see G. Durand, "L'exploration de l'imaginaire," in Methodologie de l'imag-
inaire, 1: etudes et recherches sur l'imaginaire, J. Burgos, ed. (Paris, 1969), 17.
23 See H. Nevermann, "Indonesische Einflisse auf Neuguinea," Mitteilungsblatt der
Gesellschaft fur Volkerkunde, 8:1 (1938), 24 (on the Kapaour); T. Schwartz, The Paliau Move-
ment in the Admiralty Islands 1946-1954 (Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of
Natural History, 49:2) (New York, 1962), 252-60; and more recently Paliau Maloat, Kalopeu;
Manus Kastam Kansol; Stori (Lae[?], 1982) on material from the Admiralties. Bricolage is a
technical term made famous by L6vi-Strauss and means artfulness in myth-making and the
adaptation of stories.
24 See John Saunana ("The Relevance of Retaliation for the Black Man," Nilaidat, 1:2
(1972), 19ff.), who has sketched out history as a series of "paybacks" by whites and others
against the oppressed blacks, with the anticipation that blacks will rise to dominance and retaliate
in the future. Despite this futuristic dimension his picture is so much more palpably de-my-
thologized than other black macrohistories which reflect similar hopes, perhaps the most famous
mythological one of all being a black Muslim schema. Cf. P. Goldman, The Death and Life of
Malcolm X (New York, 1965), 38-43, coupling a resume of Malcolm X's Autobiography on the
matter with other information.
creations as mythological macrohistories (efforts at comprehending the course

of world events as a whole through the lenses of prevenient mythic modes of
thought). Not only Melanesia but other colonial contexts, including those of
south Asia and equatorial Africa, yield adjustment phenomena similar to
those just discussed.25 Of prime importance is understanding that these at-
tempts are usually the responses by primal people to finding their culture
infiltrated by imperialists who are immeasurably more militarily and tech-
nologically powerful. Their efforts are also an index to the still more sobering
reality that almost every corer of the earth has at last been opened up to the
behemoth of internationalism and that time has been standardized through
newspaper culture and history-oriented propaganda (whether sacred or secu-
lar, papal or Marxist). In the light of this global transformation, macrohistory
has become virtually endemic to humanity. However questionable, vague, and
elusive their expressions might be, macrohistorical ideas have been hauled out
of lingering archaicisms by rapid social and technological change. Even the
warrior who suspiciously watches the transformations from the edge of the
primeval forest, pondering the bulldozers and concrete pylons, harbours some
fledging general view of the human past and its possible future. For the
Amazonian, the shy pygmy, as for the plumed New Guinea highlander, the
eschatological effect of severe intrusion and modernization requires that history
must begin, whether from the time of the first missionary or explorer or from
some vividly remembered pre-contact event.
No one can deny the remarkable pull of myth that in itself acts as an inbuilt
defence mechanism against a fragmented, muddled, perplexing, even com-
fortless background to one's personal or tribal existence. Myth can so warmly
enshroud, indeed, that it assures those left deeply uncertain about change of a
return to stability ahead. Who will dispute, on the other hand, that, with every
textbook on the history of the Soviet Union poured over by Siberian adoles-
cents at Lake Baikal and with every homileticist's attempts to place Abraham,
Moses, David, Jesus, Mohammed, St. Francis, or al-Ghazali in the chrono-
logical scheme of things (B.C./A.D. or B.H./A.H.), the ramparts of the
ahistorical are being undermined. The histories peddled in small cultures by
outside educators, moreover, are ostensibly less parochial than tribal myth.
When a people slowly discovers its cosmos is after all so tiny and its past only
one small segment of the whole world's past, its members tend to clutch at the
newly introduced events that appear more significant for placing their own
achievements and human adventure in an adjusted, more appropriate context.
In Oceania, for example, as previously indicated, the Christian missionary,
whose training generally forces him to consider a great span of historical data
from Abraham to Queen Victoria, so often plays a vital role in cultural
innovation. Even when secular school programmes in history are instituted, it
is not the thousands of antiquarian fascinations of history in general, nor even
25 Trompf, "The Future of Macro-Historical Ideas," Soundings, 62:1 (1979), 70.
634 G. W. TROMPF
the many pieces of information about the world's more recent political
changes so relevant to an explanation of colonialism, but usually the leading
characters of the Bible who are seized upon as the crucial reference-points to
allow an isolated society to feel part of the global culture. This is to be
expected; it does not (nor need not) take long for the colonized to discern what
is regarded as sacred in the introduced repertoire and what bears the equiv-
alent status of indigenous tradition and myth. The Peloponnesian War and
Napoleon's retreat from Russia after all are not easily grasped as universally
significant events.26
We have been discussing the making of mythological macrohistories, but is
there any macrohistory which is not, at least to some extent, mythological?
One could offer an endless chain of arguments about whether or not the
various schematizations of history brought by Jewish, Christian, and even
Muslim proselytisers to apparently ahistorical cultures (from the third century
B.C. onward) have all been heavily laden with myth. Just think of the myths of
Creation and Eschaton, the myths of Paradise, the Fall, the first Murder, and
the Flood; and consider also what are at least the sagas of the Patriarchs along
with the historically dubious accounts of the plagues of Egypt and the Ex-
odus.27 Might not the idea of Providence in past events be deemed a myth?
What about the notion of a divine plan to bring the Gospel to every ethnos? Is
it not being too kind to Hegel to talk of his metahistory rather than his
mythological macrohistory, and might not all the apostles of historical pro-
gress-Marx and Spencer and the rest-have subscribed to a comforting,
(even illusory) mythos about the grandest prospects for the human species?28
Might it not be feasible to argue that any version of history affected by myth
(which is most) or even by historians inevitably acting as "arbiters of mean-
ing," is not history after all but a hybridization (that is, unless one wields a
veritable axe of discrimination, declaring this history and that myth, with
never the twain being said to meet)?29
To these queries I must first answer that no history (understood as any
attempt to reconstruct or recapitulate past events) is ever purely historical (in
the sense of being unprovisional, unimpeachable statements about any past
26 See, for example, Trompf, 'Secularization for Melanesia?" in Point, 1:1 (1977). 215-6.
27 See, for example, G. von Rad, Genesis (Alte Testament Deutsch, Z:4) (G6ttingen, 1956),
Introd.; M. Noth, Exodus (Ser. Idem.) (Gottingen, 1959), 45-65. I have placed the movement of
proselytization earlier than some might have expected, yet compare D. Dalbert, Die Theologie
der hellenistisch-jiidischen Missionsliteratur untur Ausschluss von Philo und Josephus (The-
ologische Forschung, no. 4) (Hamburg, 1954), Pt. I.
28 For background to these points, see D. B. Barrett, ed., Encvcl. cit. (Nairobi, 1982); H.
White, Metahistor,, The Historical Imagination of Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore,
1973); R. Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (London, 1980); R. Hofstadter, Social Dar-
winism in American Thought, 1860-1915 (New York, 1944); R. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in
Karl Marx (Cambridge, 1972).
29 Cf. P. Ricoeur, The Reality of the Historical Past (The Aquinas Lecture 1984), (Mil-
waukee, 1984), 21 (for quotation and pertinent discussion).
state of affairs or change), and sphectral myths ever lurk at the study door of
Dr. Faustus as historian. We are dealing with ephemeral relatives. It is all
very well for some to talk glibly about the historicity of Western conscious-
ness and to illustrate the genuine problem of separating historical from mythic
thinking, yet I have personally conversed with hundreds of so-called Western-
ers who either cannot tolerate history as a subject of interest, finding them-
selves all at sea when they try to place occurrences, texts, or monuments in
general chronological contexts. I have also debated with many researchers
who will simply not budge from particular ideological orientations toward the
past, refusing to shatter the spell-dare I say the mythic authority?-of a self-
(or group-) justifying position by an alternative interpretation.
With the admission of these caveats, however, it will still be found that the
relativities, after all, do count and that the gulf between the relatively more
historical and more mythical modes of consciousness can be as sharp as two
packs of ice receding from one another in an Arctic summer. Between some
packs one can step across with ease, of course, and others remain quite
hardened together; but among others jumping again becomes a risk. This
coincides with the argument that we should know or learn how to distinguish
between the two modes; yet it counts against the simplistic solution that we
will always be able to spot their differences. My first examples of macrohisto-
ry in the making, for instance, were chosen to illustrate the processes of
acculturation. It is highly probable that most learned commentators will con-
cur in passing off the earlier efforts at cognitive adjustment to be palpably
mythic-old Asmats never going to Holland and the Madang god Kilibob not
hiding in Jerusalem. The further that the acculturative and educative processes
proceed, however, the more likely that we will find ourselves surprised and
the game of discrimination gets harder. On the one hand we could take Beig
Wen, who has schematized world history both because he needed to (and he
has made quite an impressive job of it by the rough standards of cross-cultural
popular, unlearned macrohistory) and because he simply lacked a lot of de-
tails. On the other hand, we could reflect on Pere Dubuy, who was trained to
know a good deal about history but was not much of a higher critic when
explaining scriptural narratives, and who probably accepted-like other
members of his French order at the time-hard-to-believe accounts of vision-
ary manifestations of Jesus's sacred heart or stories about archangel Michael's
special protection of France and its dominions.30 Such tendencies and beliefs
in this Westerner were bound to affect his understanding of Biblical and
French history. The problems are definitely there to be resolved. Considering
the respective backgrounds of these two men, however, we should not miss
the glaring differences in their consciousness. On the one side, the Melane-
sian, much more decidedly the inheritor of the mythic mentalite, hears about
30 For background, see V. Alet, La France et le Sacre Coeur (Paris, 1889 ed).
636 G. W. TROMPF
and discovers history and feels he has to do something with it. He is obviously
very much more in danger of mythicizing it or of remythicizing his own
traditions with the trappings of, and allusions to, great happenings outside his
archaic world. On the other side, the trained evangelist of history has had the
opportunity to plumb the depths of time, perhaps knowingly stroke the rele-
vant archaeological monuments themselves. The greater danger for him
would be the tendency to tilt a much harder core of long-recorded events to
suit his own special (always partly mythical) outlook. The differences are
surely significant enough.
It is well worth illustrating these very same issues, I believe, from a variety
of other historical contexts. Good scholarship has by this time been dis-
charged for example on earlier European colonial experiences (more particu-
larly on the development of myth-historical themes in the Aztec or mestizo
writing of Mexico) and on the interaction between popular and elite cultures
more generally.31 Of greater interest, however, is the potential of the aforego-
ing materials and analysis for reconsidering some very well known develop-
ments in late antiquity and early medieval times, developments crucial for the
subsequent history of the world. I refer to the early expansion of humanity's
most predominating religions-Christianity and Islam. The paradigm of the
encounter between the intruding evangelists of history and myth-
dominated tribal societies, in fact, might be usefully if cautiously applied to
the time when ancient Christian perspectives on the past began to be aired
outside the Jewish cultural ambience, and when the messages of the Qur'an
were first recited to Arabian clans barely exposed to talk of Moses or the
Nazarene. Consider, for instance, the very skeletal pictures of world history
found circulating in Europe in late ancient and early medieval times, more
particularly the notion that all events fall into the pattern of a Great Week (as
expounded at the turn of the fifth century by Augustine of Hippo). These
provided handy catechetical tools for introducing tribal people (the ancestors
of most of the people likely to read this article) to an elaborated past they had
never been educated to envisage. In some dense, all too cryptic passages in
the Qur'an, furthermore, Muhammad struggles to encapsulate the past that
matters with a grand sweep. Although envisioning without that mastery of
genealogical comprehension so natural to the Jews and projecting a squeezed
history as any Arab of his time well might, his actual efforts are fascinating in
themselves as evidences of an attempt at acculturation.32
31 On Mexico, see especially B. Keen, The Aztec Image in Western Thought (New Brunswick,
1971), 198-9, 240, 304 ff.; R. Muchembled, Culture populaire et culture des elites (Paris,
1978), 83-4.
32 On the western medieval authors, see especially Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence
in Western Thought (Berkeley, 1979), 1:207-14, 217-22. On Muhammad, see Sura 2:208-11
(my commentary on this remains as yet in a mimeograph form but is intended to be part of a
future publication), cf. also 7, 10:20if., 37, 38, etc.
Among all the areas of investigation, the so-called Gnostic movement of

the early Christian centuries is, however, the most prominent to our discus-
sion. The apparent ahistorical mythicizing of certain Gnostic responses to
primitive Christian teaching provides a locus classicus for the study of early
relationships between acculturative process and experimental macrohistory.
In view of the immense literature now proliferating on this subject, I intend to
develop a comparative dimension to the previous analysis with a discussion of
this Christian/Gnostic encounter alone, so valuable are its lessons. The phe-
nomenon of Gnosticism, advisedly, as a general movement of belief and
practice that gained popularity in Egypt, the rest of the Near East, and some
parts of the Mediterranean during the second and third centuries A.D., requires
some background. I will provide this with four basic sets of observations; and
these points, though selective, will expedite getting to the complex matter at
hand.
First, it is well worth remembering that probably the world's first pro-
gramme in general public education (at least for virtually all the males of a
society) was initiated in the Israel of the Second Commonwealth, under the
sponsorship of the pre-Herodian, pre-Roman ruler Queen Salome Alexandra
(circa 75 B.C.), and at the hands of her highly enthusiastic supporters, the
Pharisees.33 This educational experiment meant that almost every Israelite
male child, including Jesus, who was to benefit from the system eighty years
later, was exposed to the contents of the scrolls known as the Torah and
Nebi'im ("the Law and the Prophets"). In other words, young people were
not only presented with a broad conception of Israel's traditions but nearly a
millennium of sacred history (all of Genesis, the first twenty chapters of
Exodus, the historical books from Joshua to II or IV Kings). Relatively
speaking, although they were massively ethnocentric and mostly disinterested
in the Gentile past, Jewish consciousness was conspicuously historical, even
apocalyptic. A newer genre of creative literature that was popular in some
Pharisaic circles corroborates this datum. In the absence of detailed informa-
tion about the history of foreigners and despite their infusion of visionary and
mythological motifs (possibly a means of playing safe with a type of anti-
colonial, underground literature), Jewish apocalypticists typically sche-
matized world history into ages, dispensations, and imperial periods.34
Second, the vast majority of the non-Jewish inhabitants of the Mediterra-
nean and Near Eastern areas were never taught the history of their regions, let
33 Josephus, Antiq., XIII:320, 405-32. XX:242, cf. Bell. lud., 1:76-77, 85, 107-9. On
Alexandra as sister to the influential rabbi Simeon ben Shetah, see especially 5.15 ket. viii, 1
(reproduced in J. Bowker, Jesus and the Pharisees [Cambridge, 1973], 160). Concerning Sim-
eon's decree about bet sepher (elementary schooling), see Aboth, 1:8-9, Sanhedrin 6:4, Shab-
bath 1:3, Kiddushin, 4:13, Vay R., xxxv, 10.
34 See esp. D. S. Russell, The Method and Message of Jewish Apocalyptic, 200 B.C. -A.D. 100
(London, 1964), ch. 8.
638 G. W. TROMPF
alone of the wider oixouvitEV (the known world). Even under the extraordi-
nary cultural efflorescences of Romano-Hellenistic times (from the fourth
centuries B.C./A.D.), the teaching and writing of history never attained a
separate status among the seven liberal arts, and the very costly formal
schooling was enjoyed by no more than a few tiny elites. Literate Athenians
or Roman patricians may have possessed acquaintance with the highlights and
perhaps some of the more edifying or militarily inspiring incidents in their
traditions, yet to imagine the sociology of knowledge as such that most people
knew of Thucydides' Peloponnesian War or engaged at least in an occasional
browse in Alexandria's great libraries, is to misapprehend the harsher realities
of ancient societies. As the village- (or nome-) based correspondence on
Egyptian papyri suggest (though dry Egypt, yielding so many treasures, pro-
vides us with only one section of a giant jigsaw puzzle), the more reflective
side of the average householder's life was given over to resolving present
anxieties, a pressure that the myth and ritual of the mystery religions or famed
Egyptian centres of magic helped alleviate.35 If this was true of Egypt, which
has always been considered as a great age by Graeco-Roman authors and has
been given the longest king-list of all by the indigenous priest Manetho, how
much less likely are we to find a popular historical consciousness in other
Gentile quarters.
Third, too often we neglect the truth that the New Testament documents,
appearing in somewhat of a flurry over a mere half-century, bore much more
of a grassroots character than virtually all the extant literature of its time or of
times prior to it. Presented in a lingua franca, some of its component books
being in an angular and unpolished koine (or more simply, coined Greek), the
New Testament canon hardly compares well as a literary achievement with
the greatest of Israel's books (as accepted into authoritative positions over
hundreds of years) nor with those by a Sophocles or Virgil. The earliest
Christian documents, therefore, were in a form that would capture a wider,
relatively less elitist audience than most endeavours by known classical au-
thors. One suspects the latter spent much more time revising and refining their
creations, although there appear to have been large numbers of popular tracts
on magic, demonology, mythology, and romance competing with the New
Testament for popular attention. What one tends to overlook, however, is that
the earliest Christians regarded the undisputed Hebrew scriptures or else the
Septuagint as constituting the Bible or sacred writings, and it is not likely that
the authors of the Gospels and Epistles regarded their energetic bursts of
writing as the production of a supplement or second set of volumes to the Old
Testament.36 More significantly, the writers who created what came to be
35 Cf. especially, E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge, 1965),
ch. 2.
36 Cf. especially R. M. Grant, The Formation of the New Testament (London, 1965), ch. 1.
called the New Testament bequeathed an extraordinarily rich selection of

quotations from Israelite holy writ, along with allusions and the evocations of
an Old Testament atmosphere (through Septuagintalisms or appeals to the
style of the famous Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible). The hundreds of
usages are derived from the whole range of the Law, the Prophets and the
Writings; the authors of these works were thus immersed in Israel's tradition
and evidently hoped their readers would be sensitized to her long-term history
that reaches back to past Abraham.
We come to the fourth and last point introducing our discussion of Gnosti-
cism. Certain mythic components in New Testament pictures of macrohistory
can be isolated. Note the schematic division of world history into this eon and
the next (which takes a leaf out of apocalyptic works), the paralleling of the
Flood, and also the fiery destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, with the total
transformation of the Earth by the Eschaton, which compares interestingly
with the catastrophe theory of Stoic philosophers.37 On the other hand, once
the various other elements of both mythos and Judaeo-centric preoccupation
are taken into account,38 few would be so foolish as to pretend that New
Testament attitudes to the broad scope of the past suffer from a lack of
acculturation in traditional Jewish historicity. What we do find elsewhere
before the emergence of full-blown Gnosticism in the second century, how-
ever, are certain tendencies to oversimplify, and I would also say mythicize,
sacred history on the geo-cultural fringes of Pharisee-dominated Judaism.
One important test case is Samaria, a region bordering areas more influ-
enced by this mainstream Judaism both to the north and south, and an area
evidently considered of such mixed ethnic background and tradition by the
earliest Christians that it was treated, unlike Judaea and even Galilee, as a
very special (non-Gentile!) mission field. Unfortunately an unresolvable de-
bate surrounds the provenance of many relevant ideas, located as they were in
a subsequent, primarily medieval, Samaritan textual collection. While consid-
ering the possibility of late antique origins, though, and also recognizing that
a later placement does not affect the general thrust of the arguments that
follow, I shall briefly comment on the tendencies of Samaritan thought as a
preface to my particular analysis of Gnosticism.39
The Samaritans significantly retained a version of the Pentateuch but did
not recognize the divine inspiration of the historical books (in the Prophets
and the Writings), presumably since the schism of the fourth('?)-century B.C.
37 Trompf. Recurrence, op. cit., 1:175-7.

38 For central issues, R. Bultmann, Jesus Christus and die Mythologie (Stunderbuch, no. 47),
(Hamburg, 1967); Bultmann, Geschichte der svnoptischen Tradition (Gittingen 1958).
39 On the debate, cf. especially the recent work by the Norwegian scholar: J.E. Fossum, The
Name of the God and the Angel of the Lord. Origins of the Idea of Intermediation in Gnosticism
(Utrecht: doctoral disser., Church History Department, Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht, 1982), esp. ch.
2; yet, compare H.G. Kippenburg's (somewhat strained) review of Fossum's work in Nederlands
Theologisch Tijdschrift, 38 (1984), 73-4.
640 G. W. TROMPF
This people bore an apparently complete distrust toward Jewish narratives

covering post-Possession events, for the obvious reason that these records
were written from the viewpoint of a pro-Southerner (Judaean), anti-North-
erner. One side effect of these understandably antipathetical tendencies was to
impose noticeable limitations on the historical awareness of the Samaritans.
They focussed almost all of their attention on Moses and a few antecedent
figures, as well as on the rationale they provided for locating God's holy site
on Gerizim rather than Zion, while subsequent Biblical affairs were left
virtually without consideration. So unattended were these affairs that, when
the Samaritan chronicles that we possess were beginning to come into being,
probably after Baba Rabbah's reforms during Constantine's reign, their au-
thors could only draw on the most legendary of materials (the disdain for
Jewish historiographical materials still persisting).40 The Samaritans did man-
age to preserve a recognition of time-depth, largely through the consecration
of the lists of their high priests since Moses' time. Their chronicles allude to
segments of time such as the 299-year period of God's favour or Rah'utah
toward them, that covered hundreds of years. Having acknowledged this,
however, one might fairly infer their collective sense of the past during the
centuries after the Maccabees had absorbed their land under the Second Jew-
ish Commonwealth, was a very partial or limited acculturation as opposed to
the much more entrenched Jewish historical-mindedness.
I consider acculturation here only in terms of historicity and remain cog-
nizant of the fact that both Judaism and Samaritanism can and have been
considered as traditions reflecting varying degrees of acculturation within the
expanding processes of Hellenization.41 However, quite apart from the ideo-
logical background of the Samaritan separatism in the fourth-century B.C. (if
we analyze what we can of the complex (multi-)cultural milieu called Samaria
during later Antiquity, at the time Jewish and Christian pressures were felt
more keenly), we find traces of mythicizing tendencies and of a significant
forgetfulness toward events between the present and the grandeur of the
Urzeit. The (relatively mythicized) time of foundation was encapsulated and
40 Compare especially J. Bowman, trans. and ed., Samaritan Documents Relating to Their
History, Religion and Life (Pittsburgh Original Texts and Translation Series 2), (Pittsburgh,
1977), 46, 49, 61-2, 88, 91-103, 117 (although a redaction history is not attempted). On Baba
Rabbah, see J. M. Cohen, A Samaritan Chronicler; A Source-Critical Analysis of the Life and
Times of the Great Samaritan Reformer Baba Rabbah (Studia Post-Biblica, no. 30), (Leiden,
1981), 224ff. (cf. esp. p. 75, sect. 10.II.1-10 for the events well before Baba). See also P.
Stenhouse, "Samaritan Chronicles", in A. D. Crown, ed., The Samaritans (Tubingen, 1989),
ch. 4, for some of these issues.
41 For the Time of Favour (as against the subsequent time of God turning away), see J.
McDonald Samaritan Chronicle 2 (Beihefte zur alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 107) (Berlin,
1969), 69. Cf. Tolidah (fourteenth century) on the 3,500-year period between Adam and the time
the Lord visits his Tabernacle (see also Bowman, op. cit., 49). On the discussion of Jewish and
early Christian acculturation vis-a-vis Hellenization, see especially F. Sierksma, Een nieuwe
Hemel en een nieuwe Aarde (Groningen, 1978), 280ff.
simplified into a successive chain (shalshaloth) of God's luminaries, passing

from Adam to Seth, Seth to Enoch, Enoch to Noah, and thence to other
saints-Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Moses and Aaron, Eleazer and Phineas-
and is the cosmically distinct time closest to the divine acts of Creation.42 By
then, Moses, so special as the giver of the law, was beginning to be trans-
formed into a special distillation (later tephah) of the divine primordial light,
even if he was not at this (pre-medieval) stage believed to have pre-existed
creation itself and to have had the world fashioned for his sake long before his
incarnation as the offspring of Amram and Jochebed. Almost certainly during
intertestamental and early Christian years, however, the mythicizing that
surrounded this primal time of foundation connected as many sacred moments
of the primary saints as possible with Gerizim, which was both extolled as
God's most special place of attention on earth (instead of Jerusalem) and as
the navel (tabbur) of the universe. Thus it was on this mount that Adam was
created, that Abel built the first altar, that Noah sacrificed after the Flood, that
Abraham encountered Melchizedek (at Salim) and took Isaac to the heights
for sacrifice; and it was there that Jacob experienced his dream and Israel
erected twelve stones on its accession to the Promised Land.43 Inherent in
Samaritanism by the time of the first Christian evangelists of history, then,
was a natural tendency for the events of the most sacred (that is, Pentateuchal)
texts to acquire-subtly, perhaps unconsciously-the character of a primor-
dium, in the hinterland between myth and history.
Having completed the background, we begin our consideration of Gnosti-
cism by noting that the alleged founder of the so-called Gnostic heresy was,
according to early Christian tradition, a thaumaturge from Samaria. It is
admittedly doubtful that Simon Magus should seemingly be the father-figure
of at least fifteen distinct Gnostic systems with an intellectual trajectory partly
comprising important pre-Christian elements, but some credence should be
granted to the Samaritan-Gnostic connection if only because classic Gnosti-
cism(s) extended the mythicization of Bible history still further. Even if the
causal link can be disputed, the comparisons remain highly instructive. Al-
though we do not have the advantage of a step-by-step ethnohistorical analy-
sis, it is fair to presume that most of the Gnostic clientele did not originate
42 See esp. the Samaritan tract Memar Marqah, I, 9 (fourth century), cf. The Samaritan
Liturgy, A. E. Cowley, ed. (Oxford, 1909), 42, 11. 10 ff.; etc. Later lists single out Kenan,
Mahalel, Jared, Methuselah, and Lamech as well (for example, Tolidah, Bowman, op. cit., 46),
and another again adds Joshua, Caleb and the Seventy Elders, cf. T. H. Gaster, "Samaritans," in
Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible (New York, 1962) IV: 193. Some might also argue that there
are tendencies in intertestamental Judaism toward an (over-) preoccupation with pre-Possession
events; see A. Bohlig, Mysterion und Wahrheit (Arbeiten zur Geschichte des spdteren Judentums
und des Urchristentums, no. 6) (Leiden, 1968), chs. 1-4.
43 On shifts towards the glorification of Moses in earlier texts, see Memar Marqah, 11: 12, V:3,
VI:4, 8 (MacDonald's interpretation on these last passages in The Theology of the Samaritans
[London, 1964], 168, cf. 135f., 158f, etc. being too incautious; so Fossum, op. cit., ch. 3, n.
36). On Gerizim, see Memar Marqah, especially 1I:10, cf. IV:9-10, etc.
642 G. W. TROMPF
from cultural contexts in which a basic knowledge of at least a millennium of

history was integral to their traditions.44 In fact, while the diversity of schools
reflected by the not long discovered Nag Hammadi codices has undermined
many old generalizations and now makes it difficult for scholars to write of
Gnosticism as a single relatively consolidated movement, one palpable state
of consciousness dominates classic Gnostic literature as a whole: a disinterest
in events which lay between mythic primordiality and the recent advent of
Jesus (great interest in whom clearly marks off most Gnostic tractates as
Christian or sub-Christian works).
The typical explanation for this lack of interest has been that Gnostics quite
self-consciously maintained that all time and contingent events were a
pseudos.45 In this characterization, the true God is the true home of the
spiritual elite (pneumatikoi) and remains utterly removed from the evil matter
in which humans are entrapped. This visible world and its imperfections,
indeed, including mutability and transitoriness, are the products of a cosmic
incompetent sometimes called Sophia, sometimes the Demiurge or Creator,
and at other times Yaldaboath, who belonged to the lowliest echelons of
archontic forces in the universe. Even before Marcion (flourished, A.D. 230)
some Gnostics apparently identified this deus errorum with the God of the
Old Testament. That was enough to account for the fact, so the argument
goes, that Gnostics ceased paying any serious attention to Israel's history, the
outline of which formed part of the orthodox catechesis, and the twisting of
the standard version of Creation, Paradise and Fall (found in the Septuagint or
Massoretic texts) into an entirely new mould (the serpent being treated as the
true God in disguise, for instance, in works of the Ophite School).46
However helpful this line of interpretation may be, it barely explains the
precise delimitations of Gnostic approaches to the past. After all, it is not as if
there are not any narratives in the Nag Hammadi treatises and while some of
the materials on Jesus and his disciples simply present logia without specify-
ing space and time (as in the renowned Gospel of Thomas), others relate the
odd miracle story and mention occurrences in specific places.47 The middle
part of the past, however, between the Urzeit and the Jesus phenomenon, is
glaringly underdone in such a way as to indicate a telescoping and thus is a
mistaken contraction of history rather than a sophisticated negation of earthly
44 For an attempt to analyze the social background of Gnostic groups, especially Kippenburg,
in the most recent number of Numen (as yet unavailable to me), see below.
45 Puech, loc. cit., 20.
46 For a sound overview (helpful in filling out qualifications space does not allow here), R.
van den Broek, "The Present State of Gnostic Studies," Vigiliae Christianae, 37:1 (1983), 49-
61, especially on Ophism. On Marcion's teacher Cerdo, see Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, I,
xxxvii, 1.
47 Nag Hammadi Codices (hereafter NAC) II, 2; II, 3:63, 66; II, 7:138; III, 5:120; etc.; yet see
I, 2:16.
transience. There is obviously evidence of a somewhat eclectic philosophical

bent in many of these tracts, but there is no reason to romanticise the intellec-
tualism reflected by most of them. Special exceptions aside (particularly the
Tripartite Tractate), it is inadvisable to claim that their authors' quests for a
(self-)knowledge of their ontic status in the cosmos was a provably high-brow
philosophic enterprise rather than the work of a somewhat amateurish yet
literate Hellenistic theosophical society that was likely to (and did) draw the
ire of more trained philosophical minds.48 The intellectual excitations propel-
ling these thinkers into organized coteries, cults, and schools devolved around
the newly introduced figure of Jesus, in responses that used terms of the
highly permeable, syncretizing Hellenistic culture to which the Christian mes-
sages came. Without denying the special flair, let alone psychoanalytic in-
sights of the known conglomerate of Gnostic texts, and also acknowledging
the danger of stressing apparent confusion and contradiction in Coptic works
that might all be (quite appalling) translations of Greek originals, we have to
account for the likelihood that these books were the products of minds ill-
acquainted with the difficult-to-absorb Israelite historical background of the
recently acclaimed soter (savior) called Christ.49
The problem had previously arisen in the Pauline correspondence in the
middle of the first century as to where Christ was supposed to be located in
locally pictured cosmoses full of celestial principalities, and as to his role
among cultures in which there were sympathetic, astrological connections
between humanity and the cosmic forces or in which both "myths and endless
[cosmic] genealogies" had been the prevalent themes (especially, Col. 2:8-15;
1 Tim. 1:4, 4:7).50 The orthodox believers had to do the best they could to
replace these popular ahistorical proclivities; their enthusiastic appeal to the
praeparationes evangelicae in both Israel and, to a lesser degree, pagan
traditions, as well as their production of the well-known monuments of eccle-
siastical historiography from Luke to Theodoret and Orosuis, are testimony
enough to their impressive labours in the Mediterranean region up to the sixth
century.5' The popularization of historical consciousness or the instilling
of a non-elitist, time-stretched macrohistorical perspective could hardly be
48 The significant attacks against the Gnostics by Plotinus, and Porphyry help bear this out;
e.g., for Plotinus, see Paideia Anti-Gnostica, V. Cliento, ed. (Florence, 1971), cf. T. G.
Sinnige, Plotinus; Over Schouwing, en Tegen de Gnostici (Antwerp, 1981); Porphyry, Vita
Plotini, 16. Here I value comments by Prof. G. Quispel, in discussion, 18 May, 1984.
49 Note that one of the Nag Hammadi texts is a quite appalling translation of Plato's Republic
588B-589B. Other allusions and quotations to koine Greek and Aramaic (such as lingua franca)
sources have to be reckoned with, although it bears acknowledging that the case for the non-
Coptic origin of most of the Nag Hammadi texts has still not been clinched.
50 For background, see W. Knox, St. Paul and the Church of the Gentiles (Cambridge, 1961),
cf. 1.
51 See, for example, L. G. Patterson, God and History in Early Christian Thought (Studies in
Patristic Thought) (London, 1967).
644 G. W. TROMPF
achieved overnight. As the entire history of Christian (and Islamic) proselytism

also testifies, it is a process with no foreseeable end even now and one not even
fully individuated by many of the more learned protagonists of these two
constantly expanding faiths.
In Gnosticism(s) we see some of the real problems for this process. There
were doubtless many orthodox efforts at the simplification of Israelite history
for non-Jews, as found for example in Acts 7:2-53, 13:16-41). There was
also the effort to convey the general background of the Christ event to all
people in linguae francae (Koine, Aramaic-Syriac) or in the vernacular (for
example, Coptic), as can be roughly paralleled, for instance, in the contempo-
rary Melanesian mission fields. One should anticipate, however, that this
work of dissemination has usually found itself caught between fascination and
the feeling of threat among its hearers. On the one hand, the basic teachings of
Jesus and the kerygmatic claims about his stupendous significance were ob-
viously not without their tremendous attraction; this is obvious when one
quickly reflects on the rapid spread of Christianity, which was taken up by
almost half the population of the Roman Empire before the accession of
Constantine as Augustus in 306.52 This says nothing, however, about the
terms in which it could be accepted; Christ could be honoured as just one
among a range of spirit-powers and teachers, even if he seemed to gain some
special pride of place. Did not the emperor Severus Alexander, for example,
later (in the third century), have a personal preference for Jesus, albeit to-
gether with Apollonius of Tyana, Abraham, and Orpheus?53 Thus there was a
real possibility that Christianity would be a threat to holders of preexisting
world-views, if it were going to force an alien time-frame and a mass of
irrelevant Semitic stories either on communities proud of their own traditions
or on coteries attempting to synthesize regional and popular beliefs under the
Roman Empire. Christianity was far less likely to receive acceptance in Egypt
and the non-Jewish Near East if it made no provision for the regionally known
deities and spirit-powers that were showing signs of resilience against Ro-
mano-Hellenistic cultural imperialism;54 and Christianity was in trouble if it
could not adapt to the new wealth of cosmopolitanism and the wider circula-
tion of such Greek abstract concepts as nous (mind), psyche (soul), pronoia
(providence).
52 Estimates of the Christian population vary from 35 to 75 percent of the Roman Empire's
inhabitants at Constantine's time. See A. von Harnack, Mission und Ausbreitung des Christen-
tums (Leipzig, 1924 ed.), II:946ff.
53 See L. Jerphagron, "La Culture philosophique des empereurs de Rome et leur action
politique," in Reason, Action and Experience (R. Klibansky Festschrift), H. Kohlenberger, ed.
(Hamburg, 1979), 149.
54 Note for example, R. E. WITT, Isis in the Graeco-Roman World (London, 1971), 46ff; G.
Sanders, "Kybele und Attis," in Die orientalischen Religionen im Rommerreich, M. N. Ver-
maseran, ed. (Etudes Preliminaires aux Religions Orientales dans l'Empire Romaine, no. 83),
(Leiden 1981), 275ff.
The Gnostics, I therefore argue, produced the kind of mythological mac-

rohistories that square with what one should expect of the slow, somewhat
uneven twists and turs of acculturation during the first three centuries of the
Christian experiment. And, with exceptions and variant tendencies taken into
account, the general results included an intense preoccupation with both the
primaevum and the present (as newly informed by the coming of Christ or the
Son), but with the striking collapse of history between these eras and with
barely an indication that Gnostic authors knew of any interim developments.
Over and above the highly elaborate descriptions of the seminations and
sequences of the eonic powers, narratives deriving from the Old Testament
are usually confined to Genesis 1-11.55 In only one Nag Hammadi writing is
Moses given the appropriate historical context by being connected with the
Exodus, while in The Second Treatise of the Great Seth he is curiously placed
second to last in a chain of figures from Adam to John the Baptist (the link
involving Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, David, Solomon, and the Twelve
Prophets [Coptic: mentsno'ous prophetes]. The general paltriness of allusions
to Abraham (thrice), Isaac and Jacob (once each), David (twice), Solomon
(thrice), Elijah (once),56 with only one Nag Hammadi tractate (The Exegesis
of the Soul) extensively quoting Old Testament passages, has as much to do
with not seeing the point of sacred history's connective tissue as with not
wanting to see the point of it. It is a defensible view, in fact, that the mass of
Old Testament narratives, simply of no cultural relevance, did not invite
patient examination and were even forbidding enough to make one fear one's
own ignorance (just as in the case of many Christians through the ages). In
any case copies of the Greek versions of the Old Testament were probably far
less accessible than New Testament or related tracts, making it likely that
most Gnostic authors wrote of events recorded in the former out of hearsay or
memory rather than textual study. The Old Testament was not forgotten,
however, for these writers did make some effort to give it a place (that is an
important datum of acculturation), and what they could make of its contents
was obviously intriguing (and probably confusing) enough to merit the task of
identifying and reflecting on the significance of some of the obvious land-
marks.57 The cultural conditioning of mythic predispositions had its effect,
however, just as it has in contemporary primal contexts, and a lopsidedness
does not come so unexpectedly from groups that probably emerged as inno-
55 See NAC, I, S: especially 51-105; II, 1:4-30; V, 5:78f. (Kingdoms become aeons). See
Irenaeus, Adv. I: iff. (P.G., vol. 7, cols. 458ff., etc.) (eonic seminations) and I, 5:118ff. (by
implication); II, 1:15 andff., III, 2:60 and f.; VII.2:53, etc. (Genesis). For the special intellec-
tual qualities of the Tripartite Tractate, see Quispel, "Gnosis", in Vermaseran, op. cit., 431.
56 NAC, IX, 3:48 (Exodus); NAC, VII, 2:62-3 (chain). The Coptic text quoted has a numer-
ical anagram for twelve, and an apparently ungrammatical ending to the substantive, which could
mean that a single figure, the eleventh prophet, is being referred to; see the Facsimile edition,
(Leiden, 1972), Codex VII, 69.
57 NAC, II, 6:129ff., see also II, 1, 29; V, 5:64ff. (allusions).
646 G. W. TROMPF
vative interpreters of Christianity on the periphery or away from the main

sources of the Christian tradition.
The crucial parts of the Old Testament, whether or not Gnostic schools
required their modification, were clearly its manageable opening chapters,
particularly because they formed the last episodes of the Urzeit, on the thresh-
old between mythic solidarity and the meaningless sea of untidy, hopelessly
unmanageable human change. According to the Apocalypse of Adam, the
earth is divided into kingdoms and the primal union between God and the
idealized figures of Adam, Eve, Seth, Noah and his sons ceases to be after
Noah and his three sons have lived a golden "six hundred years in a knowl-
edge of imperishability."58 Why do we need to pretend that Gnostics chose
not to look any further through the records of Israel's career on principle? It is
more likely that they (or at least their literary protagonists) were simply not in
a state of cultural preparation to appropriate an historical consciousness, let
alone the history of an alien people traditionally considered by many to be
inferior or eccentric.
Adam in this body of literature was, of course, an important object of

fascination that throws Gnostic mythologization into the boldest relief. He
tends to lose his simple, relatively concrete location in a garden for a much
more insubstantial (pre-) existence among the aeonic powers. In one unnamed
tract, in fact, Adam is threefold (the pneumatic, psychic, and terrestrial) and
in conflict between factious archons and the true God (the First Father); the
former being deceived into defiling their own bodies by casting their seed on
the terrestrial Adam, with the true Eve and the pneumatic celestial Adam
making their escape.59 It is in this crit sans titre above all that one finds the
expected Hellenistic difficulty of accepting the sharp Hebraic distinction be-
tween the divine and primal human-Abel and his brothers apparently being
held to be the progeny of the not-too-human true Eve and other celestial
principalities.
Jesus typically fits this sort of framework, therefore, not as the consumma-
tion of the special task of God's select people, as it was played out through the
drawn-out, unremembered complexity of human affairs, but as a heavenly
soter out of the belly of the mythos itself, out of the highest order of aions
(cosmic powers or principalities) or from beyond the premundane pleroma
(body of cosmic principalities). The Gnostic Christ is sent to deliver at least
the spiritual elite (the pneumatikoi) from the consequences of super-human,
archonic mistakes and conflict-from "the disturbing of the dishes" of the
universe, as it is written in the Valentinian Gospel of Truth-and he is bearer
58 NAC, V:5:72. The more limited supply of Septuagint or other Greek translations of Old
Testament texts can only be inferred on the basis of bulk and on the smaller number of manu-
scripts referred to by text collectors such as Origen in the relevant area (especially Egypt).
59 NAC, II, 5: especially 115-118, cf. M. Tardieu, Trois mythes gnostiques; Adam, Eros et
les animaux d'Egypte dans un ecrit de Nag Hammadi (II, 5) (Paris, 1974), 100-4, 119-22.
of a teaching that confirmed his role of bringing liberation from the sordid
enslavement of matter-bound existence.60 Christ arrives as deus ex machina
rather than Messiah and is more usually the monophysitic heavenly being
among mankind than one who is genuinely 6toovotog l'tiv (essentially the
same as us). He is, however, considered crucial-such was the impact and
continuing pull of the new missionary message. His first coming was, as it
were, sufficiently eschatological in itself for reappropriating the Original
Perfection into the present, making the best of the Urzeit a realizable Endzeit,
and bringing to a rounded end, at least for the chosen, the inexorable rounds,
fate-filled vicissitudes and impenetrability of humanity's (ordinary) past.61
In all, the Gnostic mythicizing and telescoping of history is symptomatic of
a struggle between an apparently more natural (dare I say endemic?) and more
studied mode of consciousness. It is a struggle from which few can now
escape and which has been cumulatively manifesting itself in human thought
at multiform times and places, whenever the evangelists of history-the
carriers of the Heilsplan, or of the long story of God from Adam to the
wandering Apostles and beyond-have unleashed their torrents of ancient,
chronologic narratives upon the world. We are justified in viewing early
Gnosticisms, then, particularly from the viewpoint of historical awareness, as
instances of limited (some might say erring) acculturation.62 Orthodoxy and
Gnosis, when one surveys the differing intellectual temperaments involved,
came into conflict as much for this reason as any, and orthodoxy represents
the safeguarding of historical-mindedness as much as any unwillingness to
abandon certain doctrinal stances.63 We are still dealing, mind you, with
ephemeral relatives; for might one not insist that much in patristic and early
orthodox Christian thought (considering for example the typological and fig-
urative hermeneutics of the early Jewish Christian, Alexandrian, and Anti-
ochene schools) and much in medieval theology (through the anagogical
metamorphoses of events and the liturgicalization of time)64 is only relatively
acculturated by rigorous standards of historical sensitivity? But the dif-
ferences (between so-called orthodoxy and Gnosticism), to recall our earlier
phrase, are significant enough. For this reason it is highly valuable for com-
t) NAC 1, 3:26 (Grant's translation), see especially II, 1:27-8 on the importance of ideas and
suggestions about fate in Gnostic literature.
61 For myth as ' rounding" beginnings and ends, Levi-Strauss, Du miel aux cendres, op. cit.,
especially 7, 201, 216. Comparisons with Hindu-Jain-Buddhist Kalpa theory are ready to be
drawn here.
62 Van Baal, "Erring Acculturation," America Anthropologist, 62:1 (1960), 108ff
63 As a sidelight to these points, note E. Jiingel, "Die Wirksamkeit des Entzogenen. Zum
Vorgang geschichtlichen Verstehen als Einfuhrung in die Christologie," in Gnosis (Jonas Fest-
schrift) B. Aland, ed. (Gottingen, 1978), 70f.
64 See Trompf, Historical Recurrence, op. cit., I, especially p. 184, J. Danielou, Histoire des
doctrines chretiennes avant Nicde (Toumai, 1958); R. P. C. Hanson Allegory and Event
(London, 1959), Pt. 3; R. L. Wilken, Judaism and the Early Christian Mind (Yale, 1971), 93-
161; B. Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1952), 83ff., 196ff.
648 G. W. TROMPF
parative purposes to draw on the kinds of latter-day anthropological and

proselytical materials that have informed a large and earlier section of this
paper, and it would be instructive indeed to look at many other contexts, from
antiquity to contemporary times, in which a vision of macrohistory (history
broadly conceived) has threatened to transmute some sylphic dusk into the
dawn of modernity.
A comparative study of Melanesian and ancient Egyptian responses to the
propagation of historical-mindedness turns out to be highly profitable. How-
ever far-flung in time, space, and circumstance the two examples of ac-
culturative processes might be, they are both attended by significant and
creative efforts to envisage the past as a whole. Rather than incorporating
historical details, however, or taking on the biblical baggage of protracted
narration from Genesis to Acts, these attempts are noted for their telescoping
of time, their radical simplification of event sequences, their disinterest in or
displacement of historical context, and thus their apparent remythicization of
the history that missionaries intended to locate more clearly in the realm of
human affairs. Intriguingly it was the prior possession of myth that led those
responding to the evangelists of history to encapsulate the past in a distinct
and cosmic whole. Myth was their anchorage and frame of reference for
remaking the world of meaning about the sacral past. That has obvious cultur-
al significance, not only for the responses to historicity we have documented
here, but to virtually all enterprises in macrohistory, both formal and infor-
mal. Identifying the mythos that informs or is reflected in any one of these
enterprises will thus be the fundamental first act of a hermeneutic. That,
however, takes us to a wider study of macrohistory and raises other questions
as to whether the very early practice of history (in ancient Israelite, Greek,
and Chinese historiography) was originally only possible because of myth and
as to whether history can only be abandoned for myth and no other surrogate;
but these are queries that await answers in other contexts.

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Macrohistory and Acculturation: Between Myth and History in Modern Melanesian

Historical consciousness has not been a prized possession in most human

Myths (these cosmically significant narratives) are admittedly not devoid of

Most commentators would agree that the distinctive quality of mythic

treasures. What intellectual interactions occur? Do myths begin to look more

European-goods and munitions, to "drive out the Europeans, missionaries

creations as mythological macrohistories (efforts at comprehending the course

25 Trompf, "The Future of Macro-Historical Ideas," Soundings, 62:1 (1979), 70.

Among all the areas of investigation, the so-called Gnostic movement of

called the New Testament bequeathed an extraordinarily rich selection of

37 Trompf. Recurrence, op. cit., 1:175-7.

This people bore an apparently complete distrust toward Jewish narratives

simplified into a successive chain (shalshaloth) of God's luminaries, passing

from cultural contexts in which a basic knowledge of at least a millennium of

transience. There is obviously evidence of a somewhat eclectic philosophical

achieved overnight. As the entire history of Christian (and Islamic) proselytism

The Gnostics, I therefore argue, produced the kind of mythological mac-

vative interpreters of Christianity on the periphery or away from the main

Adam in this body of literature was, of course, an important object of

parative purposes to draw on the kinds of latter-day anthropological and

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