Ballot Publishing-demo

Preface

In the beginning, only water lay beneath the sky. There being no solid place to dwell upon, the first people lived in the heavens. One day the chief's daughter fell ill and he could find no cure. An elder told the people to dig up a tree and lay the girl beside it. As the people dug, the tree suddenly fell through the hole and dragged the chief's daughter with it. Two swans, swimming on the water below, heard a clap of thunder and looked up to see the sky open and the tree and the girl fall into the water. The swans swam to the girl and supported her, and took her to the Great Turtle, master of all the animals. The Great Turtle called a council. He told the animals that Woman Fallen from the Sky presaged good fortune. He commanded them to find the tree that had fallen and bring up earth from its roots so that they could build an island on his back for the woman to live upon. The swans led the animals to the place the tree had fallen and Otter, then Muskrat, and then Beaver dived into the depths. But the dive was so deep that they returned to the surface utterly exhausted, and rolled over and died. Many others tried but they too succumbed. Finally old lady Toad took her turn. She was gone so long everyone thought she was lost forever when suddenly she emerged and before she too died she spat a mouthful of earth onto the back of the Great Turtle. The earth was magical and began to grow. When it was large enough, the animals set the girl down upon it. Still it grew, until it became the great earth island we live upon today .

A true story? Or mere fable? A myth certainly, but myths can be true or false. This particular one was truth to the Iroquois people of eastern North America. It was their idea of how the earth was formed and how people came upon it. It was their creation myth. To a modern society such as ours, skeptical and replete with hard-won scientific knowledge about the planet and its inhabitants, it is nothing more than an invented, if delightful, little story. Entertaining as it may be, it is nonetheless naught but a child of ignorance and superstition. Yet even today, in our high-tech, sophisticated world, millions of people insist on believing that the earth and everything on it was created by a single omniscient and omnipotent being on Sunday, October 23rd, 4004 BC, a story deduced by one James Usher, Archbishop of Armagh, in 1650, a tale hardly less fabulous than that of Woman Fallen from the Sky.

Myths exert a powerful grip, and they are loath to let go even in the face of fact. Just as millions of benighted folk refuse to abandon Bishop Usher's creation fable, it took generations for civilization to come to terms with myth-busting concepts like heliocentricity and evolution. Not a few among us still have great difficult with the latter.

Our modern, democratic, capitalist society is replete with myths, not just in matters of faith but in matters of economics, politics and morality. Many are so intricately built into the social fabric their mythical nature goes entirely unnoticed and un-remarked upon, even though their influence may be considerable. One of the most popular is the "no free lunch" myth. This myth, in itself based on myths of independence and self-reliance, would have it that no one gets anything for nothing that there is always a price to be paid, that everything of material value must be earned. A true story? Or mere fable?

We shall see…