#114. Our Paleolithic Roots

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This is the 14th in the series of blog entries I began with #101-- a collection of notes and essays (and book reviews, I'm just realizing) from my files all dealing in one way or another with the emerging new religious consciousness. They are mostly things I've written over the last decade or two to clarify my own thoughts but which I would like to make available for anyone who might be interested.

Post #114 is a collection of notes from late 1995 on books focused in various ways on the Paleolithic roots of religion and spirituality.

If you have questions and think I might be of help, you're welcome to send me a note: sam@macpeno.com

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SACHA RUNA: Ethnicity and Adaptation of Ecudorian Jungle Quichua, by Norman E. Whitten, Jr (U of ILL Press, 1976)

This is written in a heavy and almost unreadable style, with lots of native terms (Spanish, too). It's about peoples who live a bit south of Coca and Sacha Lodge on the Rio Napo where I visited [with the Dodge Foundation rain forest studies group]. Lots of talk of shamans and spirits, but not in a form that makes it useful or even graspable. Too academic, alas.

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The Spirit and the Flesh, Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture by Walter L. Williams. Beacon Press, Boston 1986.

A few years ago, in the summer of ‘92 when I spent some time taking a course in Environmental Chemistry at Bar Harbor, Maine, I came across a book by a Jungian analyst from San Francisco, Robert Hopche. I can’t remember the title, but it dealt with gay culture from a Jungian viewpoint, and was surprisingly helpful for an understanding of the differences between patriarchal and non-patriarchal manhood. It’s interesting that it was that recently that we were still formulating such a distinction!

2012 Note: It's been 20 years now, but it helped me to see that "the masculine" could be expressed in other than the most conventional terms of American culture. I once (in the early 1970s) heard Alan Watts say there were 12 basic sexes, but he didn't expand on it at the time. We've come along way since all that!

This book, The Spirit and the Flesh, is similar in value to Hopche's. It’s about Native American berdaches (Sioux: winkte), as known from past historical documents and contemporary Native Gay movements. The author is an “ethnohistorian” from the University of Southern California. The first several chapters are of great interest. A summary of the things I found most interesting (in no special order).

1. From a native point of view, biologically male persons may have a male spirit, or a female spirit, or a mixture of the two, or a spirit that is neither. (This contrasts greatly with Western Judeo-Christian culture which sees only an either/or possibility.)

2. In terms of this study, berdaches are always male. But their spirit is either male and female together, or something other than either. With very few exceptions, they are known and honored in most native cultures, world-wide.

3. Many myths tell of a time when people existed prior to any sexual differentiation. Berdaches may be embodiments of that pre-differentiation androgyny. They tend to be of great power. Myths characterize them as particularly inventive (creative).

4. Berdaches are not necessarily shamans. Shamans and berdaches have different functions, but there are a number of similarities. For example: a berdache becomes such because he is fated to, “by his nature and his dreams,” usually around age 10-12.

5. One of main functions of berdaches is ceremonial roles, acting out performances; the author notes the cross-cultural tendency of gays toward theater, stage, acting roles.

6. He says shamans do a lot by way of performance too, but they are therapists more than actors. The comment on status is especially interesting: shamanic status in native cultures is determined by how well the individual shaman can relate to the spirit world for the benefit of the community. The author notes that there is still male-male competition, as in “civilized” cultures, but that the content is not concerned with putting others down so much as seeking honor as one who most helps “the people to live”.

7. Although berdaches are not necessarily shamans, most have some shamanic power, a “speciality.” They are often sought after by shamans for advice. One of their major roles is that of naming young boys, with lucky and funny/gross secret names, which confer great future power on the youths. (Alas, no examples are given.)

8. The basic NA attitude towards berdaches is one of respect, as toward any other wakan phenomenon, and there is also a fear of their potentially destructive power. But neither attitude prevents egalitarian joking relationships on the part of relatives. And even though the berdache’s gayness is naturally an object of the jokes, it does not mean any disdain for him for that reason.

9. B’s are often called seers: they can see things from both male and females points of view, and are especially valued for that (just as anything different is valued as wakan in native cultures).

10. They see themselves as different, too, precisely in that they see things differently from others. (They emphasize that this “difference” is a separate thing from their being attracted to other males.) Their ability to “see” often allows them to be prophetic (in the narrow sense of being able to predict the future).

11. “When nature burdens a man it also gives him a power.” Besides naming and predicting the future, other common powers include having a central role in blessing ceremonies (as for example blessing the tree-pole for a sun dance) and offering spiritual protection. (That last I wasn’t clear about. I hope to go back to it.) (Later: No luck.)

12. In childhood, he experiences himself not so much as feminine as other, unique, more individual in his interests and concerns: more androgynous than feminine.

13. Westerns ask: “How did this kid get that way and what can we do to help him? ” Native peoples ask: “What has this wakan person to offer for the benefit of all of us?”

14. B’s tend to be highly intelligent, make good teachers (of older kids) and good care-givers of adults, the elderly, etc. They are better at most female work roles than woman (stronger, tire less quickly, not interrupted by monthly periods, etc.) Often make very good parents (of adopted children). Not good at early child care.

15. In terms of sexual activity, they always have the role of the “insertee” (rather than the “inserter”); they consider sex with another berdache to be (unacceptable) incest.

16. They are biologically male but female in many non-biological ways. They often emphasize cleanliness, personal looks, quality clothes, and interior decorating, “just like urban gays.” But they do not abandon the male competitive drive for prestige: they just seek it in ways other than hunting and raiding. At death they may be buried in female clothing, but on the male side of the cemetery.

17. Their non-macho form of manhood is greatly honored. They are in fact recognized as a “third gender,” while in our culture it leaves the individual open to tremendous stress. As does-- my whole point-- having a vocation to a shamanic personality.

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The stone age present: how evolution has shaped modern life: from sex, violence, and languages to emotions, morals, and communities / by William F. Allman. (Simon & Schuster, c1994.)

SUBJECTS Genetic psychology. * Behavior evolution. * Human evolution.

This is a popular-audience book by a science writer. A good intro to a lot of important ideas. The section on “evolutionary medicine” is especially interesting.

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The moral animal : evolutionary psychology and everyday life / Robert Wright.

SUBJECTS Sociobiology. * Genetic psychology. * Human behavior. * Behavior * evolution.

This is an extremely interesting set up: Contemporary Darwinian-social biology ideas explained by examples from the life of C. Darwin. I enjoyed this book a lot.

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The evolving self : a psychology for the third millennium / Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. (HarperCollins Publishers, c1993.)

SUBJECTS Genetic psychology. * Behavior evolution. * Social evolution.

Lots of good clear ideas here about memes.

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AUTHOR Lappe, Marc.

TITLE Evolutionary medicine : rethinking the origins of disease PUBLISHER San Francisco : Sierra Club Books, c1994.

SUBJECTS Diseases -- Causes and theories of causation. * Environmentally induced diseases. * Environmental health. * Human evolution.

This is written in unnecessarily clinical/academic-- and unreadable-- style. A big disappointment. Just not fun.

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THE TRANSITION FROM SHAMANISM TO RUSSIAN ORTHODOXY IN ALASKA, by S.A. Mousalimas (Berghahn Books, 1994)

Despite the lack of even the slightest evidence of editorial responsibility on the part of the publishers, and the utterly atrocious style of the author, this is a fascinating book. Indeed, I think it might be said to be an important book.

I know of no other text which has tried to deal with shamanism and Orthodoxy. And beyond that, of no other text which has attempted, as this one has, to set out so explicitly Patristic texts concerning the early (pre-dualistic and Augustinian) Christian perspectives on nature and the created world.

Alas, I can’t tell what the author’s purpose is. I think this is essentially a sociology text, but I’m not really sure. Certainly it is a demonstration of erudition, and I guess we can’t expect much more in terms of reader-friendliness from an Oxford PhD thesis. And the author’s typical Orthodox xenophobic hostility (extended here even to the Orthodox Church in America) is laughable. But there’s gold in this pile of bullshit!

What struck me most was that, with some reference to Jungian perspectives on images and archetypes, the core of this book could be a major contribution to 21st century understanding of religious experience. It could go a long way toward the recovery, both inside and outside the churches, of what once was the experience of “everyone, everywhere.”

And it could be invaluable for supplying the foundations of a 21st century environmental spirituality that would be simultaneously both Christian/Patristic and human/paleolithic.

Personally, I especially enjoyed the description of the hunter’s reverence for the bones of the game animals as atonement, “restoring harmony” (pp 120-121). And the author’s quotes: of M. Eliade’s observation that sighing and tears are a central motif of Pascha: “All nature sighs, awaiting the Resurrection;” and of Dostoyevsky’s “all creation, all creatures ... weep to Christ.” (Helps me to make a little better sense of my present calling.)

The author’s mention of English terms used to translate “ecstasy” is enlightening. In Psalm 115, when David exclaims, “I said in my ecstasy...”, the King James bible says “haste,” and the Revised Standard Version uses “consternation.” Both say “madness” in place of ecstasy in translating Zachariah 12:4, and Peter’s ecstasy in Acts 10 and 11 becomes “a trance.” The author does an excellent job in spelling out what ecstasy really means, and does it-- remarkably-- without any reference to Jungian functions of consciousness or intuition. I especially like his definition of shaman as one who is in touch with the powers of the world and so can do extraordinary things.

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AUTHOR Angela, Piero, 1928-

TITLE The extraordinary story of human origins / Piero and Alberto Angela; translated from the Italian by Gabriele Tonne ; illustrations by

       Valter Fogato.

PUBLISHER Buffalo, N.Y. : Prometheus Books, 1993.

SUBJECTS Man -- Origin. * Human evolution.

This contains some neat drawings. I shared them with the HS Science Club.

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The tribal self : an anthropologist reflects on hunting, brain, and behavior / Ron Wallace. University Press of America, 1991.

This is a gem of a book: barely 150 small sized pages, large type, each essay hardly more than three or four pages maximum, each dealing with some aspect of human behavior from the point of view of brain functioning and anthropological data about human evolution. No jargon; just down to earth comments and thoughts.

A few of the ideas that stayed with me:

1. Focusing one’s attention and classifying or categorizing things is a pleasurable, possibly even addictive, behavior. The brain actually releases opiates when we do such things. (Reason seems to be the need for quick attention to calls for scavenging in humanity’s early pre-hunting phase, and competent and quick classification of other creatures also competing for the same scavenging opportunity.)

2. In contrast to feminist views, male are indeed different and in fact fragile (as the more expendable sex, more subject to evolutionary experimentation; thus, for example, there are more male geniuses but also more retarded males, etc.) “Sperm is cheap.”

3. Related: males have been split within themselves for millions of years by the need to be “gentle at home but tough ‘out there.’”

4. Woman tend to fight a lot among themselves, and because they tend to focus on family, even when they have positions of power do not contribute much socially. (Biological reason seems to be that females in hunting cultures-- and earlier anthropoid societies-- come from outside the small hunting band and thus do not instinctively promote the survival of genes found there, other than their own. In contrast, the males in the band have to be biologically related and stay together to know one another well, for success/survival in the hunt.)

5. Clearest description I’ve ever seen of biological cause of gayness. The fetal transformation of the basic female-form into male, which takes place around 6th week of fetal development, and which is determined by presence of male-chromosomes in zygote, is clearly distinguished from the process by which drive for mating with opposite sex is established, around 3rd month of pregnancy. The hormones which affect this instinctive drive are suppressed in fetuses of women exposed to major environmental stresses; the result is a normally care-giving, but non-reproducing male: an evolutionary survival strategy. (The process is verified by animal research, and studies of mothers of gay sons indicate a large proportion indeed claim to have been subject to major stresses during the pregnancy.) Fascinating!

6. Of great personal interest are the author’s comments concerning the shamanic world view. Just as we have the capacity for language wired into our brains, with the details (of given languages) coming from our cultural situation, so he says we also have wired into our brains basic myth patterns, again with the specific forms (particular spirit-powers, gods) coming from our cultural situation. The “patterns” emerge into consciousness during “ceremonies” (specifically via drumming, he notes) and are thus available for healing, etc. He conclusion is amazing: “While all this no doubt really works, we should leave it alone. We should honor it by having nothing to do with it, because it requires a sacred world view, from which we have come too far to go back. We should stick with our sterile secular stethoscopes.” [Note added 2012: What an amazing example of the modern world's fear of the sacred!]

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#60. Symbol, Myth & Meaning

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This is the second of several posts dealing with an understanding of religious ritual in the context of cosmic evolution.

I'm aware that the very idea that there might be a connection between religious ritual and the evolution of the universe sounds strange to many readers, so it's important that we keep in mind that humanity is in the midst of an Immense Transition-- from a static to a dynamic worldview-- and that we are now at a new religious moment in the history of the world.

I see giving our attention, at this time, to the place of religious ritual in the evolutionary worldview as a creative activity on the growing edge of the immense Transition.

My main point is that religious ritual is how we humans plug into the energy of the cosmos; it's the means by which we are empowered to participate in the evolution of the universe.

A major problem in talking about all this is that most of the words we have available only have meanings left over from the static worldview. 

In post #59, I listed six of them.

Three are familiar: symbol, myth and meaning. I'm sharing my thoughts about them in this post. The other three-- wisdom, cosmology and creativity-- are much less familiar and I plan to talk about them in the next post.

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One of the main difficulties with all this is that the more familiar terms are often used in less than precise ways in everyday life. And the first two ("symbol" and "myth") are commonly used with meanings which are the very opposite of the ways we need to understand them in order to make sense of the links between cosmic evolution and religious ritual.

An added difficulty is that all three terms are frequently used in confusing pairs; examples include "myth and symbol," "symbolic ritual" and "meaningful symbols." And Myth and Meaning is the title of one of the most significant books for contemporary religious studies.

Of that first group, the word "meaning" offers a special challenge. I think it's the key to sorting out all the other words. My experience has been that it's only when we're comfortable with what "meaning" means that "myth," "symbol" and "ritual" make good sense.

So I'm going to tackle the meaning of "meaning" first.

But a caution: It's important not to get lost in words here. My intention is not philosophical or linguistic analysis, but simply to clarify the meanings of these words in order to share my thoughts about the connections between religious ritual and cosmic evolution.

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MEANING. As I said in the previous post, "Of course, we know what 'meaning' means. At least we feel that we do." In that post I asked readers to think about how they would describe the meaning of "meaning" for an intelligent high school student. (I received one anonymous comment in response that was quite good.)

The best understanding I have of "meaning" comes from Claude Levi-Strauss, the "father of modern anthropology" and author of the book Myth and Meaning I mentioned above. His name is familiar even to many who've no idea what he may have been saying. (He died only recently, in October, 2009, at age 101. The New York Times has a good obituary.)

Essentially, Levi-Strauss says that what we mean by "meaning" is how we understand anything-- that the meaning of something is our understanding of it.

At first hearing, this sounds simplistic-- or maybe even incomprehensible. But the more we think about it, the more good sense it makes.

Whether we're talking about a physical object, an event, or a story, what makes something important to us is the depth of our understanding of it.

Note that what's being said here is that things do not have meaning in themselves. We tend to think they do, but when we reflect on it we can see that it's our understanding of something, not the thing in itself, which gives us its meaning. And we can also see, then, that the more ways we understand anything, the more "meaningful" it becomes for us.

The classic example is a wedding ring. It's not the gold or silver but our understanding that makes a wedding ring meaningful. In our rationalist patriarchal culture-- still preoccupied with money and afraid of relationships-- the best we can do in expressing "meaning" in this case is to say that the wedding ring has "sentimental value." It's almost a dismissal.

Patriarchal cultural does a bit better with its use of the term "significant other." What makes a person "significant" is our depth of understanding of them. Although you won't find CEOs and politicians talking about relationships with "significant others," it is precisely our understanding of our relationships which makes persons "meaningful" or "significant" for us.

Both tribal peoples and traditional religious language offer some good terms for expressing the meaning of "meaning." Plains Indians use the word "wakan," for example, to say that the buffalo is of great significance to them. And in English we have familiar religious words like "sacred" or "holy" to say the same thing.

In a dualistic religious context, such words are usually reserved for "spiritual" (non-material) things; but most people probably wouldn't give you an argument if you referred to something as sacred as a photo of your long-dead mother as a "holy" picture.

In any case, we need to keep in mind that whether we say "holy," "sacred," "wakan," or use a less religious-sounding term such as "important" or "significant," the "meaning" of something isn't in the thing itself but in our understanding of it.

It's this thought that we need if we are to make good sense of the terms "symbol" and "myth," and-- eventually-- of the connections between religious ritual and cosmic evolution.

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MYTH. In the fitness center where I attend tai chi classes several times a week, a large poster recently appeared advertising a "Workshop on Cardiac Myths." It wasn't necessary to explain that the topic was "commonly held but incorrect ideas about heart-related exercise."

We need a more positive understanding of "myth" if we are to make sense of religious ritual and its connections with cosmic evolution.

While most of us are familiar with the classical Greek myths (stories about Zeus and Athena, for example), many of us are only vaguely aware that every cultural group-- from the tribal peoples of Tierra del Fuego to 21st-century North Americans-- has such stories.

One of the best known myth-stories, found throughout all the world's cultures, is that of a Great Flood. In the western world we know it, of course, as the story of Noah and the Ark; it is included in the sacred scriptures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

When early anthropologists first began to study mythology back in the 1800s, they made several unconscious assumptions about the stories of the tribal peoples they were studying.

One assumption was that the myth-stories of these "primitive" peoples were attempts at what today we would call "scientific" explanations of the workings of the world. These 19th-century scientists assumed that tribal myths are descriptions of the behavior of stars and planets and especially of the animal herds on which the people's lives depended.

They also presumed-- in their rationalist arrogance-- that they were superior to the primitive peoples they were studying. As typical products of their time, the early anthropologists saw tribal stories as attempts at primitive science on the part of people who lacked the skills, talents and superior intelligence which those 19th-century scientists assumed they had.

Today, we know better. For a start, we know that "primitive" people weren't all that primitive: we know that human beings who lived five or ten thousand years ago had exactly the same kind of bodies, brains and mental ability we do today. We also know, now, that their attempts to make sense of the world by way of stories wasn't so far off the track.

While tribal myths are indeed about the behavior of stars, planets and game animals, we can see much better today that humanity's myth-stories are also-- and primarily-- about the workings of the human mind. 

Their central concern is psychology and social life.

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If you are interested in these ideas, you might like to read Levi-Strauss' Myth and Meaning. It's readily available in libraries, short (only 50 pages!) and quite easy to follow.

It's comes from a series of radio talks he gave for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the 1970s. In them he expresses such a wonderfully broad, human, concerned viewpoint and depth of understanding that he leaves most talk along those lines-- from church people and politicians, for example-- in the dust.

It's so impressive to see a person like this actually talking to real people. 

He is able to be not only clear but quite precise about the results of our attempts at understanding ourselves and the world. I can promise that if you're interested in religion or science, you'll like this book.

For a more difficult challenge, there's Levi-Strauss's earlier 1958 work, Structural Anthropology. If nothing else, I urge you to look at the Wikipedia article about his significance with regard to those perspectives in the human sciences known as structuralism.

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Structuralism is defined as "the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity." Levi-Strauss was one of the first to see that humanity's mythical stories have an underlying structure that in fact makes good sense, even though that underlying structure isn't obvious on the surface. It's that underlying structure that we understand.

The Biogenetic Structuralism perspective I've mentioned many times in these posts is a similar structuralist understanding, but it's a further advance, in that its context is the neurologically-informed evolutionary worldview that was not yet available to Levi-Strauss.

When we see ourselves as part of the naturally evolving world, we can see that even our minds are a part of the cosmic process, so that our myths are not just stories about our understanding of the workings of the world but also about our understanding of ourselves.

It's easy to lose track of the main points here, simply because most of these thoughts are so unfamiliar. For the record: my main point is that the world's myth-stories are precisely about meaning. Myths are the expressions of global humanity's self-understanding.

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In the New Cosmology's dynamic-evolutionary context, that self-understanding is quite rich! When we ask, What is the cosmic process about? ("What is the Universe Doing?" as I put it in post #17), we can see that the universe is making persons. We know ourselves as nothing less than personal and unique expressions of the universe become conscious of itself.

We can also recognize that there is much in us that has not yet become conscious. While we can "phenomenologically apprehend" many of the patterns of the way the world works-- in terms of cause and effect, as Dr. Jakob Wolf, whose ideas I discussed in post #53 (Bridging the Gap), helps us so well to understand-- it is also the case that many of those patterns of the world's workings remain unconscious to us.

What psychologists call the "unconscious psyche" is nothing less than the entire universe other than our conscious awareness. C. G. Jung says that the unconscious world within us is even bigger than the physical world outside us.

Jung and Freud were the first in modern times to recognize that the cosmic process shows itself in our dreams and unconscious waking behavior-- that the patterns of the way the world works seep out, even if barely, into conscious expression-- and that that is where our myth-stories come from.

Far from being "commonly held but incorrect ideas," humanity's myths are meaningful-- important, significant, sacred-- because they are expressions of the underlying patterns of the way our minds work. And it's because our myth-stories allow us to understand ourselves as unique expressions of the evolution of the universe that "myth" and "meaning" go together.

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SYMBOL. The word "symbol," too, is often paired with "meaning" (as in "symbolic meaning" or "meaningful symbol"), so that at first glance there seems to be little difference between myth and symbol. It's confusing because we have two different kinds of things we call "symbols." Some occur in nature, while others are the inventions of human culture.

Culturally invented symbols are like myths in that their meaning is our understanding of them. The arbitrary arrangement of letters and numbers in the symbol "H₂0" is a good example. We culturally agree to understand it as standing for water, just as we do with the sequence of the five letters w, a, t, e, and r.

But water itself-- the stuff that falls from the sky, that we swim in, wash ourselves with and drink-- can also be a symbol. So can food. So can fire.

It's these naturally occurring symbols that we need to understand if we are to make sense of ritual. What's so special about things like water, food and fire is that they grab our attention.

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People have known for many thousands of years that naturally occurring symbols like food, fire and water are "attention-grabbers." But it's only in modern times-- thanks to our understanding of natural selection at the primate level-- that we know how they work.

We know today that the minds and brains of our animal ancestors evolved to continually scan their environment; their very survival-- both as individuals and as a species-- depended on their finding food and water and avoiding danger.

We are not the descendents of those animals who, for some genetic reason, lacked that scanning ability; they didn't live long enough to pass on their genes to us. We are the descendents of the ones who survived because their attention shifted every few seconds.

We know from experience that our attention, too, is constantly shifting from one thing to another-- just like that of our primate ancestors. We also know that we can help ourselves stay focused-- to be "mindful," as Buddhists say-- by practicing meditation exercises.

Those things in nature which powerfully grab our attention also make it easier for us to be mindful. Think of how water in almost any form-- a heavy rain, a stream, a river, a lake, a pond, or the ocean--holds our attention. And how we are fascinated by flames and fire-- from the smallest birthday candle to a burning building or a glorious sunset.

Note that such natural symbols are different from myths as well as from the kind of symbols we use in math and science: while myths are expressions of our understanding of ourselves, these natural symbols are tools which help us to focus on our self-understanding.

In religious ritual we use the psychological, attention-grabbing power of natural symbols to counteract our brains' constant scanning activity. 

Calling them "tools" doesn't demean them. The reverse is true: they help us to consciously enter into the very meaning of our existence.

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If you're thinking that none of this sounds much like the religious rituals you have recently experienced, you're right. Ours is still a patriarchal culture-- alienated from the world and seeking escape from it-- so most of our conventional religious rituals involve only minimal use of these powerful natural symbols, and some church services omit them totally.

But we are now at a new religious moment in the history of the world: we're coming to see ourselves as belonging to the evolutionary universe and called to creatively contribute to it.

That's why creativity and cosmology are the topics of my next post. They are as essential as symbol, myth and meaning for understanding the relationship between evolution and ritual.

Meanwhile, you might like to share how you feel about what I've had to say in this post.

Do these thoughts about symbol, myth and meaning make much sense? Any at all?

Send me a note!

sam@macspeno.com

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