This is a P.S. to my post two weeks ago about African-American UFOlogy. It’s inspired by Michael Lieb’s discussion of Ezekiel’s wheel in the African-American folk music tradition, in his extraordinary 1998 book, Children of Ezekiel: Aliens, UFOs, the Crisis of Race, and the Advent of End Time.
Most of us have heard at least the chorus. We’re probably more familiar with Ezekiel’s wheel from this spiritual than from the Biblical chapter on which it’s based.
“Ezekiel saw de wheel,
‘Way up in de middle ob de air,
Ezekiel saw de wheel,
‘Way up in de middle ob de air,
An’ de little wheel run by faith,
An’ de big wheel run by de grace ob God.
‘Tis a wheel in a wheel,
‘Way in de middle ob de air.”
(All lyrics in this post thanks to mudcat.org.)
If you haven’t heard it sung, there’s a very fine choral rendition, filmed in 1937, on the criticalpast.com website.
The rest of the song moves away from Ezekiel to topics nearer home:
“Some go to church for to sing an’ shout,
‘Way in de middle ob de air,
Befo’ six months dey are all turned out,
‘Way in de middle ob de air.
Let me tell you what a hypocrite’ll do,
‘Way in de middle ob de air,
He’ll talk ’bout me an’ he’ll talk ’bout you,
‘Way in de middle ob de air.
One o’ dese days, ’bout twelve o’clock,
‘Way in de middle ob de air,
Dis ole worl’ gwine to reel an’ rock,
‘Way in de middle ob de air.”
But of course there’s more than one version. At least one of the alternates explores the symbolism of the wheel.
“‘Zekiel saw de wheel of time,
Wheel in de middle of a wheel,
Ev’ry spoke was human kind,
Wheel in de middle of a wheel.”
Another song, apparently sung to a different tune, envisions the “Zekus wheel” as something that human beings can hope to ride.
“There’s ‘ligion in the wheel,
Oh, my soul!
There’s ‘ligion in the wheel,
Oh, my soul!
‘Ligion in the wheel,
Oh, my soul!
Le’s take a ride on-a ‘Zekus’ wheel.”
The later stanzas replace “religion” with “moaning,” “praying,” “shouting,” “crying,” “laughing.”
So what does all this tell us that we don’t already know from the first chapter of the Book of Ezekiel, on which these spirituals are based? Just this: that in Ezekiel 1:15-21 the wheels are only one feature of the vision, reasonably prominent but no more so than the four “living creatures” (1:5-14) or the enthroned entity on top of the “firmament” over the heads of the living creatures (1:22-28). 1:15 speaks of “one wheel”–“upon the earth,” not “in the middle of the air”–but it quickly multiplies into four. The spirituals focus all their attention on that single wheel that’s itself a “wheel in the middle of a wheel” (1:16). The rest of the vision might as well not exist.
The result: Ezekiel’s wheel is transformed in the spirituals into something far more UFO-like than it was in the Bible. These songs were collected, as you can see from the source attributions in mudcat.org, in the 1920s and 30s, well before the flying saucers they foreshadowed put in their appearance.
To put it differently, the numinous image of the flying disk was something long present in the African-American collective consciousness (or collective unconscious), ready to merge when the time was ripe with the UFOs seen by white Americans.
Which may put the UFO itself into new perspective.
by David Halperin
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