Within the mind of every person there exists an internal conflict from which no one can escape. It exists as a conflict between two kinds of existential scripts or game plans. The Winnebago Trickster myth of the left arm fighting the right illustrates the nature of this existential struggle. 

 

First, there exists a revealed Divine Script or Plan symbolized by Trickster's left hand.  It is structured in the unconscious mind. Its author is the “One who created man in His  Image.” Secondly, there exists a second script symbolized by Trickster's right hand. It is a script derived from social existence in a particular environment. It belongs to the people. It is  learned.  Its function is to cancel prayer, providence, and Natural Law  and protect a life-way shaped by the "elements of the world and do not accord with Christ" (Col. 2:8).

 

The task of the Divine Script is to inform a society how to live positively in any environment, how to prevent a society from inflicting wounds upon itself.  The function of the people's plan is to inform a society how to survive in a particular environment  apart from God.

 

Each script or game plan was specifically designed to handle the universal problem of existential anxiety. Each plan addresses the problem differently. The Divine Plan rhetorical asks: Just as your heavenly Father provides for the birds of the air, will he not provide for you?  (Matthew 6: 26).  The  people’s plan decrees: The only way to relieve your existential anxieties is to create a cultural operating-system that fits your particular environment. 

 

The specific function of the later, the script or plan created by the people, was to meet the psychological and physical needs of the body aka one’s “corporeal existence.”  The apostle Paul visualized such corporeal needs as a “law in my members” (Rom 7:23).  If the corporeal needs of the body, i.e., food, shelter, safety, and sense of family were to be met, it was the task of each society to create the functional forms, customs, and traditions needed to satisfy their particular psychological and physical needs. 

 

Needless to say, the cultural forms and customs created by sinful people are in fundamental opposition to Divine Game Plan aka “the law of the mind.”  Its principles, values, rules, prohibitions, and ideals which have been structured in the subconscious are from above and are brought to consciousness by being “triggered” in a socio-linguistic environment. 

 

By nature, both scripts or plans, are at war with each other. Together they constitute the general laws of being and human existence.  Now to my surprise, this  spiritual struggle as to how the psychological and physical needs of the body were to be satisfied by the Miccosukee were actually made explicit linguistically in their language. 

 

Linguistic analysis revealed the existence of two kinds of plans, a plan from above and a plan from below, an unlearned plan “written on the heart” and expressed in Miccosukee semantic categories, and a plan which belonged to the Miccosukee people, a plan which, in the words of linguist Kenneth Pike, rejected certain semantic categories, replacing “innate positive universals” with “negative particular actions."

 

The existence of these two plans surfaced the day I asked my Miccosukee informant, "What is your word for 'sing' followed by the word for 'dance'. To my surprise, I discovered they had naturalized singing and dancing. The reductionism manifested itself grammatically.    

 

By linking a particular verb margin, either -ek or -ak,  to the forms called singing and dancing, the speaker could inform his or her  hearers why he or she was singing and dancing.  If it was out of pleasure and joyfulness, the speaker would use the -ek verb margin; if it were out of necessity and self-preservation, the -ak verb margin was used.  

 

The reductionism was a clear manifestation of their rejection of God as Provider. Linguistic analysis revealed the Miccosukee were using the material laws of necessity described by Paul as the "law in my members”  to overthrow the "law of the mind" aka God’s Law "written on the heart."   

 

This they did by reducing singing and dancing, cultural forms expressed in the sphere of culture,  to mechanistic forms expressed in the sphere of necessity. Cancelling Providence, they were using the universal forms of singing and dancing to prod and compel Nature to be their Provider. 

 

This they did by using the physical members of their bodies, their arms, legs, feet, mouth and vocal cords to wage "war" against “the law of God.” To relieve their existential anxieties, they relied on the physical members of their bodies to sing and dance in order to compel the laws of nature to serve their basic needs for self-preservation.

 

This shift from singers and dancers in the sphere of culture to performers of magic in the sphere of nature manifested itself linguistically in a replacement of -ek culture verb margins with -ak nature verb margins. 

 

By reducing transcendent acts in the sphere of culture represented by the syllable -ek to compelled behavior in the sphere of necessity represented by the syllable -ak, the Miccosukee were guilty of replacing Divine Meanings attached to the cultural forms of singing and dancing with meanings which "belonged to the people." The body and its parts were now directed by the "law of sin."  They now served a function.  And that function was magic.

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This shift from acts in CULTURE to compelled behavior in NATURE is illustrated in the chart above where the inherent meanings of singing and dancing are reduced to “[semantic] instruments of unrighteousness" (Romans 7:23 ) which the Miccosukee used to compel the environment to act according to their every desire.

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The replacement an -ek margin with an -ak  margin as illustrated in the above chart immediately informed me that the Miccosukee, like the Hopi and other North American tribes, did not dance for pleasure. Like the Hopi chief who declared, "I knew I was not dancing for pleasure, but to help with the crops,"  the Miccosukee sang and danced, not for pleasure, but because they believed singing and dancing  to be part of a natural order through which their corporeal existence was maintained and enhanced. 

 

Though they no doubt derived pleasure from singing and dancing, their primary functions, as manifested by the -ak verb margin, was to stimulate the elements of nature to satisfy some need like the need for rain and success in hunting.

 

For example, before every hunt they would sing and dance to compel the deer to appear.  Before a ballgame they would sing and dance to make the pitched ball invisible. Then there were songs for success in childbirth and for treating the sick et al.

 

It represented a mechanized version of the Christian concept of prayer. Instead of prayers asking God to intercede on their behalf, there was the magic of singing and dancing to affect existential outcomes, outcomes which they believed could be tilted in their favor

 

Miccosukee singing and dancing must therefore be interpreted as material events in Nature rather than as cultural events in freedom as manifested by the presence of -ak verb margins in the words talw-ak 'dancing' and hopaan-ak ‘singing’. This shift from -ek to -ak provide empirical linguistic evidence that the “naturalization of human actions --the treatment of certain human actions as if they were an integral part of physical determinism” is real.  

 

Convictions

1. The phenomenon of replacing a positive universal with a negative action is called Etic Divergence.  Such a spiritual phenomenon is real. And it has been ignored by both misssiologists and social scientists of every type.

2. If a Bible translator were to translate the word 'sing' in the phrase "one will sing, another will teach, ..." (I Cor. 14:26) as hopaan-ak, rather than as hopaan-ek, the Miccosukee reader would conclude that the apostle Paul was advocating the use of magic rather than prayer because God could not Provide.

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