Religious Place Names of Canada
A sampling of Canadian map names shows how eager we have been to assign place names of celestial omen to the lands and waters of home. As several residents will tell you, Heaven is in Ontario—in the form of Blue Heaven Lake and Little Heaven Island. A Canadian conversation about heaven that I particularly cherish occurs in Sleeping Island:The Story of One Man’s Travels in the Great Barren Lands of the Canadian North, written by P. G. Downes and published in 1942. I happened upon this passage first while browsing through Columbo’s Canadian Quotations. It is part of an interchange between a man of the Dogrib people and a Catholic missionary: “Tell me, Father, what is the white man’s Heaven?” “It is the most beautiful place in the world.” “Tell me, Father, is it like the land of the little trees when the ice has left the lakes? Are the great musk oxen there? Are the hills covered with flowers? There will I see the caribou every- where I look? Are the lakes blue with the sky of summer? Is every net full of great, fat whitefish? “Is there room for me in this land, like our land, the Barrens? Can I camp anywhere and not find that someone else has camped? Can I feel the wind and be like the wind? Father, if your Heaven is not all these, leave me alone in my land, the land of the little sticks.”
God Names The Almighty gets short shrift in our place names, due to a too dainty and fastidious piety, although, God knows, there’s plenty of loud piety in Canada. Divine indeed is the love that dare speak its name from every smarmy-voiced, granny-squeezing, religious broadcast that ever wheedled a “love donation” from the puckered purse of a lonely widow. And viewers may rest confident that every penny of such a tele-tithe will go toward that important missionary work in Antarctica—among those heathen penguins. As far as names of the diety go, there is the village of God’s River on the God’s River emptying into God’s Lake in Manitoba which may well mean ‘straits of the Great Spirit’. Nor is the quality of the Bay of God’s Mercie strained, lying as it does at the arctic end of Hudson Bay. That’s pretty well all she wrote for the G-word. Nova Scotia has Main-à-Dieu on Cape Breton Island. It looks like ‘the hand of God’ , but is Mi’-Kmaq as mangled by French settlers, for the word manitou or spirit (evil in this case). Plus ça change, plus c’est le même Mi’Kmaq!
Casselman’s Devout Travel Service informs all wayfarers that Paradise is a few miles east of Bridgetown, Nova Scotia. If it’s booked full, try Paradise, Newfoundland, just west of St. John’s. Or the Paradise, Newfoundland, that’s north of Grand Falls. The more adventurous pilgrim can stop at the community of Paradise River, about 120 miles from Happy Valley, Labrador. There are dozens of place-names using the word spread across Canada. Etymology of the Word Paradise Our modern form of the word is from Anglo-Norman paradis < post-classical Latin paradisus < ancient Greek paradeisos. The Greek historian Xenophon used the word to signify a Persian walled garden or pleasure ground. By the time of the Attic koine or ‘standard Greek’ of the New Testament, paradise referred to the Garden of Eden, then abode of the blessed, then heaven. It is a Persian word. In its Avestan form, the Old Iranian roots are pari ‘around’ (compare Greek peri ‘around’) + daiz Old Iranian ‘to heap up, to build.’ My First Paradise My own amblings ‘midst the ferny dells and leafy boscage of Ma Nature began at Cootes Paradise, a marshy Ontario ramble under the excellent supervision of Hamilton’s Royal Botanical Gardens. This paradise is named after Thomas Coote, an ardent hunter of wild fowl who as a British officer was garrisoned nearby in the 1780s. Theodor de Bry’s drawing of the biblical Garden of Eden, published in Thomas Hariot’s 1588 book A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. Gone to the Sand Hills Sand Hills is literally a bit of heaven in Alberta. To the local Blood Indians, the sandy hill country south of Lethbridge is their happy hunting grounds, where the spirits of their warriors go after death. And in popular speech, some Albertans use “gone to the sand-hills” as a synonym for dead.
Gimli: Next Door to Heaven? The first Icelanders came to Canada in 1873 after several natural disasters on the island of Iceland, including the eruption of the Hecla volcano. Their main permanent settlement on Lake Winnipeg began in 1875. But Gimli is not the home of the Norse gods, as W.B. Hamilton states in The MacMillan Book of Canadian Place Names. The chief Norse deity, Odin, dwelt in Asgard, where he very kindly set aside certain large mead-halls for selected humans. These banquet chambers included Valhalla, hall of the slain, where warriors who fell in battle could feast and fight again for all eternity. Now among the nearby buildings was a great hall with a golden roof called Gimli, and here, after their earthly journey was complete, Odin welcomed men who had been particularly righteous during their lives.
Utopias, Dystopias & Made-Up Heavens How about artificial heavens? “Aren’t they all!” is my humanist reply. Kosekin is one of the first utopias created by a Canadian fiction writer. James de Mille was a professor at Acadia and Dalhousie universities who wrote Victorian potboilers on the side. Nowadays such enterprise is likely to cost an academic his tenure. But not in 1888 when he penned A Strange Manuscript Found In a Copper Cylinder. Kosekin is an imaginary country located under Antarctica where everything is topsy-turvy. Darkness is better than light; poverty beats wealth. Perhaps it is better to call it a dystopia. De Mille is worth reading still, for his adventurous debunking of Christianity, British mannerisms, and, just to balance the satire, he takes a few potshots at the evolutionary theories of Darwin too. Nirvana in Canada When the Buddhist term nirvana became popular in English during the mid-19th century, it almost immediately became a slangy synonym for heaven, and so a verbal candidate for use as a place-name by immigrants looking for a wondrous new home. Thus Canada sports Lac Nirvana in Québec, Mount Nirvana in the Northwest Territories, and Nirvana Pass in British Columbia’s Pantheon Range. The word is a past participle in Sanskrit, an ancient language of India, directly related to most of the languages of Europe as a member of the huge Indo-European linguistic family. Nirvana means ‘blown out like a candle’. Nirva- is a Sanskrit verbal root that signifies ‘be extinguished’, and its components are nis ‘out’ + va ‘blow’.
In Buddhism, nirvana is the release from earthly troubles that comes when a knowing Buddhist dies. The state may also be attained by a living person who has succeeded through meditation in achieving enlightenment. In Hinduism and Jainism, nirvana can mean the spiritual bliss of reunion with Brahma after death, after the blowing out of the candle of life, but not of course the flame of being. Of course. My skepticism in the face of the spiritual elegance of nirvana as a concept was shared by European intellectuals like Freud, who understood nirvana but could only equate it with his death-wish. He coined a technical term in psychoanalysis, the nirvana principle—and like all such terms it is metaphorical and poetic, not scientific. Freud’s current enemies seem blind to the fact that he was a poet of the psyche, and no mere clumsy prober. Sigmund’s hypothetical constructs are only McLuhanesque prickings of some of the balloons that obscure our true being. Freud’s nirvana principle described the mind’s tendency to keep psychic tension to a minimum. But such a passive state was abhorrent to European thought, and Freud could only equate this yearning for psychic entropy to the action of the death instinct, the pining of living things for a return to the peaceful stasis of inorganic things, a notion that modern biology tells us is pure hooey, flapdoodle and twaddle. My Humanist Envoi Human beings have dreamed more heavens than a sky can hold, and conjured more vindictive hells than a Jerry Falwell could assign us damned to. As architects of the hereafter, most fundamentalist religions build the shabbiest of paradises. Their teeny-weeny cubicles of eternal salvation have room only for themselves. The narrow meanness of many contemporary religions would, it seems to me, deeply offend their founders. Reading the New Testament, how can one imagine Jesus flinging shut the gates of heaven on troubled women who have had abortions, on gay people, on those who pray to gods not stamped with the right-wing Christian seal of approval? Nor are we sucked in by that current excuse for hatred: “Hate the sin, not the sinner.” Oh, but they do hate—and kill. How tawdry the devotion that congratulates and defines itself by the number of human beings it can loathe! copyright 2012 © William Gordon Casselman
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