The Grand Canyon
A walk down the Bright Angel trail in the Grand Canyon takes you through the Kaibab Limestone, the Toroweap Formation, the Coconino Sandstone, the Hermit Shale, the Esplanade Sandstone and the rest of the Supai Group, the Red Wall Limestone, the Muav Limestone, the Bright Angel Shale, the Tapeats Sandstone, going ever lower and back in time all the way down, skipping through the Precambrian Proterozoic to the crystalline basement — the Vishnu Schist.
Your descent takes you a mile down in space and two billion years back in time, from just before the Permian's Great Dying to long before the evolution of multicellular life. You traverse the script of a sacred play, one with the most ancient of characters — the land and the sea.
The drama is written in the rocks of the canyon; the strata laid one on top of another are its pages, depicting the struggle of those old antagonists over hundreds of millions of years. And those pages have been turned and revealed one after the other by the Colorado River as it has flowed, scoured, and sliced its way ever deeper through Earth’s history. The limestones were laid down in deep water when the sea had advanced and swept over the land, the sandstones were laid down when the land struggled back and the sea retreated, and the shales and siltstones were laid down in muddy estuaries when the land and sea wrestled to a draw.
It is an origin story much more complex than the tidy sequence of Genesis in which Elohim dispassionately divides light from darkness, waters from waters, and heaven from earth. Instead, it is more like the Babylonian creation myth, Enûma Elish, which recounts the chaoskampf of the culture hero Marduk (𒀭𒀫𒌓) against the primordial sea goddess Tiamat (𒀭𒋾𒊩𒆳). Both are narratives of struggle. The Babylonian saga begins with the mating of Tiamat, goddess of the salt sea with Abzû, god of fresh groundwater. When he is overthrown by their offspring, she retaliates by unleashing a horde of monsters against them. (There is an echo of this in the Greek creation myths of the overthrow of Uranus by his son Cronus and of Cronus by his son Zeus.) It ends with Marduk's butchering of Tiamat, fashioning the vault of heaven and earth from her ribs, the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates from her weeping eyes, and the Milky Way from her tail. The Grand Canyon's story does not begin at the beginning; instead, it starts 12 billion years after the origin of the universe and 3 billion years after the formation of the Earth. Unlike the Babylonian epic, it lacks a fixed beginning or a final chapter but continues to be written. And instead of being inscribed on clay tablets by ancient Mesopotamians, it is written in stone by Nature herself.
Some pages of the Canyon's text have been lost through erosion; we call these elisions unconformities, the greatest of these found by Powell in 1869. That Great Unconformity was part of a loss of more than a billion years of history across the continent as Proterozoic strata were eroded and weathered away, a process ended only by the submerging of most of Laurentia in the late Cambrian. It was one of the sea's transient triumphs.
And there at the bottom lies the Vishnu Schist, forged from marine sediments and lava flows that were pulled deep into the bosom of the earth, heated and squeezed by the crushing weight of 15 miles of crust, only to come out transformed, metamorphosed, the whole fabric of its being changed by the Earth’s hot embrace, just as humans can be in each other's clasp.
It's no wonder that Clarence Dutton, the geologist who accompanied Powell, was god-smacked by the vistas. He recognized the canyon as sacred space and initiated the practice of naming the points and buttes after deities encountered all over the planet: Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, Krishna, Rama, Deva, Manu, Buddha, Ra, Isis, Osiris, Set, Horus, Thor, Wotan, Freya, Jupiter, Juno, Vulcan, Venus, Vesta, Diana, and Apollo. Sages, scientists, and god-mad saints also get their due; there are features named after Zoroaster, Solomon, Confucius, Mencius, Newton, Darwin, and Huxley
It's clear that as Dutton studied the geology of the canyon, he recognized that he was reading a divine drama, one that gave him a glimpse of the sacred and a glance at the divine spark, and that the text written in the stone was holy scripture.