Fair Gods. . .

O'Brien, Terry J. Fair Gods and Feathered Serpents. Bountiful, Horizon Publishers, 1997.

			Terry O'Brien explains in a foreword the genesis of this book: "As a youth, I was intrigued by stories of a mysterious, bearded white visitor who preceded Columbus to the Americas." Brother O'Brien has a Masters in Art from BYU and is a professor emeritus of Art History and Pre-Columbian Art at Cypress College in Southern California. With his background in Pre-Columbian Art, it is certain that Quetzalcoatl will be a major piece in the answer to his youthful question, and indeed the name and the legend surface early. In this Brother O'Brien's book is similar to other books and chapters in books that use the mythological material about Quetzalcoatl to raise questions as to the identity of this culture history. This is actually one of the few points at which this volume does repeat the themes in similar arguments. Brother O'Brien presents a very different approach to the discussion of the "fair gods" legends. The surprises in approach begin early. While Brother O'Brien begins with the Quetzalcoatl material because it is the most extensive, he quickly places his work on a tightrope between prevailing academic positions, and a more expansive view of the material. O'Brien presents the obligatory "foreign" characteristics of Quetzalcoatl; he is "white and bearded,"(p. 21) "a peacemaker, and no god was held in higher esteem," (p. 22), "although Quetzalcoatl had left the land centuries before the Aztec emergence, he promised to return some day and resume possession of his empire" (p.23). These are the standard fodder of all "mysterious foreigner" books, from the early Spaniard's St. Thomas to Van Daniken's spacemen. O'Brien then changes the standard arguments. O'Brien's next argument is to present Quetzalcoatl as a historical person. He uses multiple sources for this, including well-respected names in Mesoamerican studies such as H.B. Nicholson and David Carrasco. He augments these with the standard fallback sources of LDS authors on this subject, Daniel G. Brinton and Hubert H. Bancroft (p. 40-41). The great surprise is that he also presents the generally accepted time-period for this historical character (approximately 1000 AD- p.46). After setting the stage for an identification of a foreigner with the Quetzalcoatl of history, he immediately backs away from that proposition. His point is subtler. There was a historical Quetzalcoatl, but this historical character was only a man who took the name and attributes and legends of the earlier Quetzalcoatl (p.47). O'Brien's take on the "white visitor" legends is that there are so many of them that the very extent of the similar legends (which he traces from Alaska to Argentina, and from West coast to East p. 30) that this alone provides sure evidence that they are all related to a single person - though obviously a very miraculous person, whom he doesn't identify as Jesus Christ until very late in the book (p. 274). In between his original question and his desired conclusion, O'Brien deals quickly with the multiple stories and theories about bearded white visitors. He highlights the various legends without examining them in any real detail, and accepting them at face value. He examines the theories of the identifications of the bearded white visitors from Vikings, Welsh, Irish, to Apostles. He dismisses all as lacking in sufficient evidence to explain the legends. His arguments against these suggestions follows the general line of modern scholarship, but he tempers his dismissal in such a way as to continue to allow for the possibility of culture contact between the Old World and the New. Most surprising of all is O'Brien's reexamination of the Quetzalcoatl material at the end of the book. He specifically notes in regards to Quetzalcoatl's beard: "beards were not especially foreign to native Americans, for contrary to popular belief, Aztec priests reportedly wore full beards, and Montezuma had a sparse one" (p. 266). He follows this amazing admission with an even greater disclosure: "Legends often do not make it clear whether their hero was a white-bearded man or a bearded, white man. White beards represent age, and "white" can also refer to a glowing countenance, not skin color. To many Indian tribes, the work "white" referred to the coming light of dawn with which Quetzalcoatl and other heroes were identified" (p. 277). While his assertion of a confusion between white-bearded and bearded and white is not an accurate depiction of the Quetzalcoatl materials (where he never has a white beard), the surprise is in undermining the two focal points upon which the entire search for an answer is predicated. O'Brien finally ties his thesis together at the end, and makes it clear that what he is examining is not just a specific relationship between Quetzalcoatl myths and similar stories, but with the whole hero-myth genre. On page 230 he presents a characteristics list giving what he supposes to be the common elements of the New World hero myth. All of these appear to match not only the hero, but have obvious or at least suggestive reference to Christ. On page 252 he presents another list that has similar suggestive indications of Christ, and then reveals that this is the hero trait list from the Old World. Even without checking the footnotes and bibliography, it is clear that he is quite impressed with Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces and is attempting to create a corollary work for the New World hero myths. In this aspect, O'Brien's work breaks new ground in LDS exegesis of New World mythology. His ultimate point is that all of these typological heroes on both continents serve as types of Christ. O'Brien's thesis has problems on two fronts, one specific, and one more global. On the specific level O'Brien falls into the same methodological traps in his understanding of the Quetzalcoatl material that are typical of LDS examinations of the material. While he does provide the most balanced discussion of the material (being the only LDS proponent of the Quetzalcoatl as a Christ figure to mention the dark side of the Quetzalcoatl tales) he nevertheless accepts without question the reports of beards, white skins, and long robes - though as noted he does appear to back away from that at the end of the book. Each of the elements he uses to support the idea of a New World monomyth are questionable elements of the Pre-Columbian Quetzalcoatl material (and in the work I have done on the subject, demonstrably absent in that pre-contact material). Thus the very aspects of the New World myths which he uses to create the "wow, what a coincidence" logic that becomes the basis of the argument is a flawed foundation. In the Quetzalcoatl specific material, they can be shown to be later Spanish emendations to the myth, and I have suggested that the pattern of embellishments witnessed in the Quetzalcoatl myths serves as a model and a type for similar tales. This concept and issue leads to the second problem in O'Brien's analysis. The idea of a heroic monomyth is certainly not new to Joseph Campbell, though that is the only proponent of the concept that O'Brien lists in his bibliography. The idea is traceable to Edward Tylor in 1871 and independently discussed by Johann Georg von Hahn in 1876 and Otto Rank in 1909. Prior to Campbell's discussion, the most famous exposition of the Old World hero myth was Lord Raglan's "The Hero of Tradition: in 1934. Campbell follows this line in 1956 (see Robert A. Segal "Introduction: In Quest of the Hero" in In Quest of the Hero. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press 1990, ppvii-xxiii). Specifically analyzing Campbell's contribution, Alan Dundes notes: "Joseph Campbell in his 1956 work The Hero with a Thousand Faces tries to delineate a "monomyth" which might apply to heroes from all cultures. However, Campbell's pattern is a synthetic, artificial composite which he fails to apply in toto to any one single hero. Campbell's hero pattern, unlike the ones formulated by von Hahn, Rank, and Raglan, is not empirically verifiable, e.g., by means of inductively extrapolating the incidents from any one given hero's biography." (Alan Dundes "The Hero Pattern in the Life of Jesus" in In Quest of the Hero p. 187-8). Von Hahn, Rank, Raglan, and Campbell all supply characteristic lists of the hero, though no two lists are identical (see a comparison of von Hahn, Rank, and Raglan in Alan Dundes "The Hero Pattern in the Life of Jesus" in In Quest of the Hero p. 188-189). What is more, in none of the analyses presented do all of the traits appear in all of the tales. This is a structural reconstruction of typical elements, in some cases made to be similar by the nature of the reduction of the tale to a statement of a structural element. In spite of all of this, there is a noticeable pattern that has repeatable elements, and the conjunction of similarities is enough to raise questions. As O'Brien has related these hero myths to Christ, it is instructive to examine the work of a noted folklorist who approached that very subject. Alan Dundes notes: "Lord Raglan in his fascinating delineation of the hero pattern was perfectly willing to take three examples from the Old Testament - Joseph, Moses, and Elijah - but he does not so much as mention Jesus, despite the fact that the life of Jesus is demonstrably as similar to Raglan's twenty-two incident hero pattern as the lives of the three Old Testament heroes he does cite" (Dundes, 1990, p. 179.) He does note that Lord Raglan was aware of this blatant omission, and did so to avoid the possible problems such an identification might have raised (Dundes, 1990, p. 180). Jesus fits the twenty-two point list as well as any other person from history or legend, and better than most. The real question is what does this mean? Dundes makes his case for the meaning of the patterns by noting a particular study of the hero myth: "Utley applied the pattern somewhat tongue-in-cheek to the biography of Abraham Lincoln and found that Lincoln scores no less that the full twenty-two points [BG note - this is a higher score than even Jesus Christ]. The significance of Utley's essay is that it underscores the distinction between the individual and his biography with respect to historicity it suggests rather that the folk repeatedly insist upon making their versions of the lives of heroes follow the lines of a specific series of incidents." (Dundes, 1990, p. 190). Under this concept, the folk constructs of the hero pattern become an accepted model for the presentation of historical or legendary material, and even known historical material can be reported in such a way that it follows this nearly subconscious structural model. Thus the pattern has importance and relevance above and beyond historicity, and is separate from the events upon which it imposes its structure. Applying that understanding to the material O'Brien discusses we find an entirely different way to analyze the "wow, what a coincidence" evidence he presents. Both in the original relation by the various authors, and in O'Brien's digest of those reports, there are other structural models being applied which create order out of chaos, and the commonality of the ordering pattern creates a potentially erroneous idea of uniformity. This is most easily demonstrable in the Quetzalcoatl material where the Spanish structural models very clearly have altered the way we understand the native material, and have resulted in some pictures of the "native" Quetzalcoatl as a monk complete with habit and tonsure (as occurred with Torquemada in the 1700's). O'Brien's book takes a familiar theme into unfamiliar territory, but unfortunately provides no solid comparisons or analysis that delves into the real questions. O'Brien does note the difficulty in accepting on face value miraculous correspondences: "An example of this confusion comes from a Peruvian chronicler, Cieza de Leon, who upon hearing that a statue of Viracocha closely resembled a Christian saint, went to see the figure for himself. He concluded "only a blind man could believe that it bore any relationship to one of Jesus' apostles" (O'Brien, p. 280-281). Unfortunately, O'Brien did not use this information as a wake up call to examine carefully the sources of his material, and he ultimately falls into the trap of believing the reports in cases where "only a blind man" could believe the coincidental reports.
			by Brant Gardner. Copyright 1998