We Are Living in the Supernatural

The word is Latin. Super above. Natura the born world, the grown world, the visible order of things. What stands above the visible and moves it.

…

N. Scott Momaday tells a story about a man who runs in the desert.

He runs every morning into the foothills. Long shadows in his way. The skyline a silhouette. He calls the running a religious experience. A holy thing.

One morning he finds a bundle of branches across the road. He removes it. The next morning the bundle is back. He removes it again. Every day it is there. Every day he removes it.

In Momaday's telling, the runner admits to himself that the barrier is his. Placed for him there - to deter, impede, irritate, and finally to infuriate.

The runner works it out alone. His antagonist is an elderly Indian man who lives nearby. The old man has no deed. He holds the land by right of possession. His father held it before him. His father's father before that. He has centered his whole life on the land.

In the old man's eyes the runner is a pest. A vagrant. More dangerous than most because the runner has set up a continuum of intrusion. A persistent encroachment upon his domain, spiritual and physical.

The runner never sees the old man. The old man never sees the runner. We were engaged in a skirmish of the soul.

On Christmas morning the runner brings a bottle of wine. He removes the barrier his adversary has laid in his way one more time. He leaves the bottle in its place.

The barrier never returns.

The runner says the fee was reasonable. A token. A handkerchief or a robin's egg or a sack of tobacco would have done. The important thing is that I acknowledged the old man's possession of the land. That's all he wanted.

A symbol moves between two men who never meet. The bundle, the wine, the road itself, carrying what the men cannot say to each other directly and what neither can step out of. The language is fluent in both of them.

...

We are symbolic beings as much as biological ones. Blood runs in a body and meaning runs in something older than the body. Every ritual we perform and every gift we leave on the road moves through both at once.

Cormac McCarthy writes in The Crossing that the shape of the road is the road. There is not some other road that wears that shape but only the one. The shape and the thing are the same thing. A ceremony is how that sameness becomes briefly visible.

...

There is another story about two brothers.

A banking family had come up in Hamburg, with roots in European finance going back three centuries. By the late nineteenth century the family was one of the principal banking houses of Germany, advising sovereigns, financing industry, extending credit across the continent.

Two of the brothers became the central figures in what followed.

The older brother stayed in Hamburg and ran the family bank. He became the personal financial adviser to Kaiser Wilhelm II. The younger brother emigrated to America in 1902 and became the chief architect of the Federal Reserve, chartered in 1913 with the authority to issue currency and extend credit to the United States government.

When the war came, the older brother's bank issued the credit financing Germany's side. The younger brother's bank financed America's entry into the same war. American sons and German sons died in trenches killing each other while the bonds moved between the two brothers, drawing interest.

At the war's end, the older brother represented Germany at the Versailles negotiations. The younger brother represented the United States. The family had been on both sides of the war and was now on both sides of the treaty that ended it.

The family carried on through the decades that followed and the system the family was part of grew. After the second world war, the architecture of central banking extended into every government on earth.

...

The elements.

A symbol is a thing in the visible world that carries meaning across a threshold the visible cannot cross. A bundle of branches in a road carries a claim from the old man's life into the runner's morning. A signature on a loan carries the relation between sovereign and lender into a form that can be enforced. The thing is plain, the carried meaning is not.

A ritual is a sequence of symbols that enacts what cannot otherwise come into being. The funeral seats the dead among the dead and releases the living to their grief. A wedding makes a marriage where two single lives had been. The coronation crowns the king.

Symbols carry and rituals enact. The performer chooses the direction. A sweat lodge and a central bank are both rituals.

Every symbol and every ritual sits inside a larger ceremony. The runner's morning run sits inside the ceremony of settlement on the continent. The brothers' signatures sat inside the ceremony of European finance reaching across three centuries into the present.

To read the supernatural is to learn the elements. Symbol, ritual, ceremony, direction, and performer.