Every so often, but not often enough, I come across a book that is satisfying on all levels and so appreciate that a great writer has managed to produce a work of art that teaches me a lot. I want to recommend Eliot Pattison to anyone who has yet to read his work. His latest book, “Prayer of the Dragon” is everything I would ever want in a story. He combines anthropology, sociology, and theology into one spell-binding book that teaches you more than you could learn in several college courses of the same level.
Eliot reportedly lives in Pennsylvania and is a lawyer and world traveler, but best of all is that he won the coveted “Edgar Award” for best mystery for a book I am definitely going to read now.
I am going to quote from Author’s Note rather than the book because I would not know where to start there. Here is what he says:
The notion that two peoples separated by more than ten thousand miles and easily as many years could share common roots may at first seem but a romantic fancy, but the evidence has given pause to more than a few experts.
The common elements between the Tibetans and the Navajo-Dine peoples set forth in these pages are, like all the themes in my books, based upon fact. Long before I considered weaving them into one of my mysteries I had been fascinated not just by the physical similarities between Tibetans and the native peoples of the American Southwest but also by the many common cultural and religious aspects appearing in such disparate geographies. Sandpaintings, thunder gods, and religious swastikas are only some of the more readily apparent indicators of possible links. Whether your particular interests lean toward linguistics, medicine, ice age geology, genetics, cosmology, or earwax, you can find fragments of evidence supporting an ancient connection.
While it seems unlikely that such fragments from conventional science will ever combine for unequivocal proof, I side with my ever-intuitive characters in concluding that the most compelling similarities have not so much to do with the artifacts of everyday existence but the overlapping remnants of the spiritual life of the two peoples. Over fifth years ago anthropologist Frank Waters, in his book “The Masked Gods,” noted the parallels between the death rituals of Tibetans and the Navajo and Pueblo Indians. More recently anthropologist Peter Gold expanded this premise in his fascinating book “Navajo and Tibetan Sacred Wisdom,” which masterfully proves parallels in the inner teachings of both peoples. As the debate over both ethereal and empirical evidence continues, the Tibetans and Southwestern Indians have dealt something of a preemptive strike: with the expansion of the modernday Tibetan diaspora, the traditional homeland of those Indians is becoming significant relocation site for dispossessed Tibetan families.
Ultimately the real reward of the riddles about Tibetans and the peoples of the American Southwest may lie in the telling, not in the answering. The most important lessons emerging from this exercise perhaps are not about whom they may be but whom the rest of us are. Years ago I hung over my desk Carl Jung’s epitaph for contemporary man. Modern humanity, Jung wrote, “has sold its soul for a mass of disconnected facts.” If we want to glimpse the way things might have been before we struck this hollow bargain we have but to look to the traditional Tibetans and Navajo, who, as they have for centuries, live lives of deep purpose, closely connected to the primal world.
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