Your Fate Is Sealed

"Ignorance of the law is no excuse."  This is not just a folk aphorism.  It is a correct statement of the common law.  If you drive to Kentucky and find yourself in a town where the speed limit is 15 mph unless otherwise posted, you can get bagged even though you think, reasonably, that the default limit must be 25 or 30 mph.

On the other hand, you cannot be convicted of a crime if the statute books don't put you on notice as to what conduct is prohibited.  If the governor of Kentucky signed a law imposing a fine of up to $5000 for behavior that is deemed to be "unseemly," any conviction under such statute would be overturned as violative of the Due Process Clause of the US Constitution.

At St. Ignatius School in Columbus in the 1960s, my cousin Angela instinctively appreciated this due process constraint even though she had never heard of it!  One day, in fifth grade, her teacher Sister Agatha was explaining, for the umpteenth time, the difference between mortal and venial sin, and the difference between the punishments inflicted for each.  She raised her hand, tentatively.  She asked the good sister to give an example of a mortal and of a venial sin, and, specifically, to pick examples that were as close as possible to each other, so that Angela could better understand exactly where that line was situated in order especially to conform her behavior to the prohibition against mortal sin.

Sister Agatha's first impulse after hearing her question was to chastise Angela in front of her friends and classmates for insolence.  But she held her breath and her tongue, reminding herself that Angela was a good and serious girl, and also noticing that the other children in the class seemed very sympathetic to the question.  She fell back instead on the line that only God, in His Perfection, could know precisely where the line was, and that it was presumptuous of us to try to know His mind in that respect or any other.  Rather, we had to trust Him completely and without question.  It was "fitting indeed and just, right and proper for salvation" so to trust Him.

In the moment, Angela accepted this explanation, but over time she came to see it as nonsense.

Twenty-three years later, Angela submitted her dissertation in anthropology for review at Kent State University.  It was called "Reason and Responsibility Among the Ituapu of the Peruvian Lowlands."  She had spent six months the year before embedded with the Ituapu tribe together with a close colleague, Dr. Gustavo Mendez of Peru.  Angela acquired a serviceable ability to speak the Ituapu language; Gustavo was nearly fluent in it, and to a certain extent culturally fluent as well, to a much greater extent at least than Angela was.

The primary source for Angela and Gustavo in the village where they were living was the village shaman, whose name was Tekapuro.  They asked him and others many questions designed to unearth the moral, spiritual and cultural rules governing the people of the village.  And of course as anthropologists they tried to infer such rules simply by observation of the behavior of the villagers.

Tekapuro told them that if you eat the heart of a warrior/victim, you will absorb his courage into your being.  He said that if a person wanders alone into the rain forest at night, the Spirit of the Jaguar, which rules the forest, will often steal him or her away, for good.  He said that barren women can be transformed into a certain kind of tree by the Spirits, but that there are herbal potions that can protect against that outcome.

What he did not say was how to live one's life in order to be right with the Gods.  One day, acting on impulse, Angela asked him what he thought would happen to him when he died.  At that Tekapuro broke into hysterical laughter.  He walked a few yards to a large, porous-looking mound.  He grabbed a stick and fractured the crown of the mound.  Hundreds, maybe thousands, of panicked fire ants poured out of it.  Tekapuro laughed again.

Nevertheless, Angela told me later that she had learned more about "reason and responsibility" from the Ituapu than she had from the nuns at St. Ignatius.  I asked her how so.  She said "your fate is sealed, for example, but by that I don't mean that it is predetermined and immutable, but rather that it is hidden from you and from everyone else, by design."