P.V. Glob shares the life and times of Iron Age Bog-People, and it is awesome.

The Bog People – P.V. Glob / Translated by Rupert Bruce-Midford (1969)

            Thank goodness for peat and peat bogs!  And thank goodness for great translators, as they permit us all to share in the learned literature of all the world’s nations.  This intriguing book by Dr. Peter Vilhelm Glob, translated by Rupert Bruce Midford, himself an eminent scholar of antiquities in the British Museum, explores the fascinating and macabre discoveries made by farmers digging peat used to heat homes and cook food through the long Nordic winters.  As the Director General of Museums and Antiquities in his home of Denmark, Dr. Glob is a perfect guide through the history of the bogs, the people found buried within the bogs, and the many cultural items discovered alongside the bodies.

            This relatively short work (200 pages) takes its impetus from letters received by Dr. Glob written by English schoolgirls intrigued with the tales of the bog-people they read in local newspapers of the time. They reached out to him inquiring about the Tollund Man, a find which had ignited great interest in the world’s media following his 1950 discovery by farmers digging peat.  The idea of a 2,000-year-old human preserved so well that we could see his fingerprints, hair, and skin so clearly seemed an impossibility, but it was very real.  Dr. Glob goes into great detail describing the find itself, the excavation and preservation processes, and the analysis of the Tollund Man’s remains, all in the form of a “long letter” to the schoolgirls whose interest sparked the correspondence.

            Peat bogs are chemical factories, created when thousands of years of vegetal growth sinks into a swamp to be buried under low-oxygen and high-iron content groundwater.  The weight of subsequent plant matter deposits presses down on the material, and the highly acidic water kills and prevents bacteria from decomposing the organic matter.  It also stains skin a dark ebony.  As Dr. Glob relates, farmers digging peat for fuel came across such buried bodies countless times in the previous 400 years, many of which were documented by local priests and officials.  Townspeople saw these bodies as evil, partly because of their dark appearance and partly because they were found 4-8 feet underground, the abode of satan himself.  Because of this, many of the older finds were not studied scientifically, but instead given a proper Christian burial in a local churchyard. 

            Sometime in the 18^th century, people started to analyze these finds, and they realized that most of them were over 2,000 years old, an amazing fact. Bodies from the time of Christ just did not survive.  Even the ancient Egyptian mummies did not keep in such a great state of preservation.  Studies showed that these bog finds, men, women, children, and animals, belonged to early Iron Age societies.  Further study informed scientists as to the nature of these burials.

            Our agrarian ancestors worshipped the very idea of fertility, in the guise of a goddess responsible for the return of life to the Earth following the “death” of life during wintertime.  Many of the people found in these bogs were spring sacrifices to the goddess of fertility, and when the goddess was supplanted by a male fertility god, the sacrifices continued to him.  In the old myths, the figure of the goddess was cared for by her priests, and once a year, a special wagon was outfitted with the carved image of the goddess (usually in wood) and taken around the farmer’s fields in a grand procession involving dancing, song, and prayer.  Much as in other ancient agrarian cultures, the “king” was chosen specifically for this spring sacrifice.  Many of the bog men have ligatures around their neck, and many others have their throats cut.  In this century, scientists were able to analyze the stomach contents of the bog-people, finding that most of them, the ones showing ritual strangulation or ritual throat-cutting and bleeding, were served simple meals of gruel, which, when analyzed, showed a remarkable variety of local grains and seeds, numbering in the high dozens.  It makes sense to include seeds from all the edible grain and grasses if what you want is to make an offering to the fertility goddess thereby propriating a great harvest and lush abundance in the coming year.

            One of the details I found most intriguing is the way that the peat bog’s chemical nature preserved textiles.  Amazing examples of woven fabrics and leathers show just how advanced and creative the humans we call “ancient” and “primitive” were.  Human ingenuity brought us out of the wild, and only the truly ignorant or vain assume that intelligence is a hallmark of modern man, and not of humanity in general.  Examples of trade and commerce between ancient people always fascinate me, and one of the greatest bog finds is the Gundestrup Cauldron, a masterpiece of silversmithing which was broken into pieces and placed as an offering within the peat bog.  The beautiful images of the goddess, and of the ritual lives of the people, sculpted into the silver cauldron transport us back into antiquity.  As Dr. Glob details it, the amount of silver used to create this massive cauldron likely represented much of the actual wealth and riches of the local people and their leaders, as most of the silver they had arrived from far-off lands, and would never have been broken into pieces and buried as an offering if the times were not critically dire.  Ancient man did everything with purpose, even if today those purposes are forgotten, or seen as inconsequential.  It is a great example of how everything we value today will be either forgotten, ignored, or supplanted by new things and new ideas, just as modern man dismisses the ideals, beliefs, and religions of ancient man.

            The last section of the book describes the many carved wooden gods found in the bogs.  These carvings, usually abstracted and taking advantage of the natural shapes and forms of the wood used, were found in all ancient human cultures that worshipped the great goddess of fertility.  It was these carved gods which were cared for and protected by the god’s priests, and which, in a wholesale act of evil, were ordered destroyed or burned by the early roman catholic church (always ready to exterminate humans, ideas, and religions they saw as counter to their fascistic fake-ass christianity.)  The patriarchal roman catholic church feared the power of women and of the Great Goddess, and they still do, seeking to subjugate half the population into subservience towards the male half.  So dumb.  The attempted erasure of our collective human past and human mythology is among the worst, along with the wholesale slaughter of “heathen” humans that religions love to engage in frequently. There is nothing capable of more evil than a religious zealot. History shows it again and again. And again.

            Two thousand years is not a long time.  Modern humans, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, have been around for just over 60,000 years.  The Homo family, our human ancestors such as Homo Habilis, Neanderthal man, and such, have been around for around a quarter of a million years.  This is but a drop in the bucket compared to the dinosaurs, who flourished on Earth for hundreds of millions of years, or green plants which have populated our planet for over two billion years, a ridiculous amount of time.  I bring this up because the humans that started what we call civilization did so very recently, cosmically speaking.  We are more similar in our day-to-day lives to the ancient Scandinavians working the old peat bogs that we care to admit.  Our collective humanity has learned more, and forgotten more, than we can ever imagine, and it is great books such as this one that help us keep the awareness of deep time in mind.  Reading about the bog-people and their culture keeps us grounded, aware that the concerns of humanity have always been the same.  The need for family, food, shelter, and spiritual connection is found in all human cultures.  I hope more people read this great book and open their minds to the infinite variety of human existence.

(This great book can be purchased here: https://www.nyrb.com/products/the-bog-people )

It appears that humanity has always ridden the Mindway in search of wisdom, insight, and community

 

The Routledge Companion to Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World – Diana Stein, Sarah Kielt Costello, Karen Polinger Foster, Editors (2022)

 

            While I treasure and adore all books, it is books such as this one that thrill me the most because of the amazing amount of information included within.  Having read books on shamanism, ancient humans, and myth creation recently, I was thrilled when this book appeared in my hands while browsing the stacks.  The editors of this work, Diana Stein, Sarah Kielt Costello, and Karen Polinger Foster have provided the world with a magnificent resource exploring a seldom-analyzed part of our collective human past, that being the use and exploitation of what the writers term “Altered States of Consciousness,” ASC for short.  For far too long archeologists and anthropologists saw ancient man through our own modern “enlightenment” principles, ignoring all “subjective” experience such as trance, spirit possession, hallucinations, etc., in favor of empirically verifiable data.  This created a vast chasm of ignorance regarding the spiritual and mental lives of our ancestors.  It is the aim of this work to rectify that and to help guide the exploration of our distant human past towards a better understanding of the role ecstatic experiences had in the shaping of our species.  It is an impressive achievement.

            Formatted much like a textbook, each section presents a case for the omnipresence and importance of ecstatic experience in understanding the cultures of our ancient past.  The first section of three chapters, titled “Setting the Stage,” explores the history of ASC dismissal by biased researchers and explorers of our past, providing a firm foundation upon which to expand the explorations each writer takes in turn, and showing how universal these ecstatic experiences were.  These chapters also expand on what used to be the definition of “ecstasy” to include all types of societal, spiritual, and shamanic altered states of consciousness.  The third chapter of the first section aims to provide empirical models to define ritual practices and ecstatic experiences, from ancient man to today’s modern world.  It helps place these studies, and ASC’s themselves, within the greater study of humanity and its development, something which mainstream archeology and anthropology has dismissed for centuries.

            The second section seeks to elucidate the evidence we have for the various types of psychoactive compounds, plants, and substances used by our ancestors to achieve ASC states.  Evidence from archeological digs, mass-spectrometry, and other modern tools is given to show the wide variety of ingestible, smokable, or otherwise applied natural materials used in ecstatic rituals.  The full gamut of intoxicants is analyzed, from botanical specimens and residue found within sealed jars, to the early use of fermentation to create drinkable alcohol, to the various mind-altering plants used by the Babylonians, Hittites and early Egyptians, all recorded in their language and art.  To emphasize the communal use of these substances, the final chapter of section 2 discusses a type of ceramic container found throughout ancient sites.  The Ring-Kernoi is a device consisting of a ceramic tube, shaped into a donut, with four to five adorned containers attached to the ring.  Looking at these artifacts through the lens of ASC experience, the author describes their use in ritual communion.  Each adorned section contained wither a different psychoactive compound, whether opium, cannabis, mandrake, etc., meant to be smoked in sequence and passed around, or they contained different liquid substances which, when mixed up in the Ring-Kernoi, created an intoxicating brew capable of easing the passage into ecstasy.  For our ancestors, the divine, experienced through ecstatic states, was a communal activity, a very important way to define their culture and self-identity as individual groups. 

            The third section of this awesome book goes into detail exploring the numinous world of ecstatic experiences, as described by ancient humans in their own words.  Starting with a dive into the most ancient archeological sites we have found, such as Çatalhöyük, and the discovery of a communal imbibing of alcohol, whether plain or adulterated with other psychotropic substances, which took place in massive megalithic spaces, many of them underground or only accessible through narrow openings.  These are the first evidence for the types of communal, spiritual experiences out of which the human need for religious communion arose.  Delving into ancient rituals for the goddess Ishtar, the writings concerning the dead from Egypt, and the ASC’s described by the ancient residents of Crete and the Minoan civilization that followed, helps us grasp the constant flow of ideas and wisdom that propelled our humanity forward.  From these ancient civilizations we then move onto ritual experience in ancient Greece, and the various cults and oracles which took advantage of ASC’s to promote their ideology.  Ecstatic experiences were a critical part of many cults, including those of the healer Asclepius, and the gods Apollo and Dionysius. As with all roads, the section ends with an analysis of the ecstatic funeral processions recorded from ancient Rome.  These chapters help bridge the gap between our assumed knowledge of the ancients towards a more factual and historical basis, drawing from the many written records we have of Greece, Rome and their neighbors at the time.

            The final section of this great work focuses on the evidence we have from our collective past pointing to, or describing, the experiences of the “Ecstatic” mind.  This section builds on all the previous ones and shares great insights into such topics as spirit possession and prophetic ecstasy as described in Mesopotamian texts, the psychedelic art from the Aegean, and the progression from personal or communal ecstatic experience to that of rigorous, sacerdotally-dictated ASC’s utilized by the very powerful in all societies to control the masses (think of a modern Catholic service, with its rituals, chants, music, incense, and repetition, intended to draw the congregation together into a shared experience).  The insights found in these final chapters help us understand the evolution and propagation of personal ecstatic experiences into the collective religions we see all around us in our “modern” world.

            This book is a masterpiece of research and science.  I hope to see it used as a foundational text, allowing younger researchers to continue down the same path of exploration, and guiding the elders in these fields towards new ideas and possibilities for scholarship.  When we as a culture disdain “unsavory” aspects of our past, dismissing wholesale anything to do with mysticism, or our long-standing use of chemicals, fauna, trance, song, or rhythms to achieve altered states of consciousness, we negate aspects of ourselves that help us understand each other.  It creates divisiveness where these old rituals and experiences sought to create inclusivity.  It is such a shame that our modern world sees everything we do as the pinnacle of human achievement, all the while forgetting that for most of our human existence we have all had the capability of communing with the divine, of understanding ourselves and our place in the world around us, and of accepting that reality is far greater than the basic facts we all choose to agree upon.  This book is a great step in the right direction, and worthwhile reading for anyone interested in humanity’s psychological and spiritual development.

(This great resource can be purchased here: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Ecstatic-Experience-in-the-Ancient-World/Stein-KieltCostello-PolingerFoster/p/book/9781032108483 )

Mircea Eliade Guides Us Through Humanity's Use of Initiations' Rites and Symbols

 

Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth – Mircea Eliade (1958)

 

            Sometimes the smallest books can be the most gratifying and educational.  This slim, 136-page volume (not counting the large Notes and Index sections) is loaded with extra jelly. Translated from the original French by one Willard R. Trask, Mircea Eliade’s writing shines as it explores and compiles our knowledge of Initiations, and the various rites and symbols used by all of humanity for this purpose.  It is an amazing piece of writing by the man who was Chairman of the Department of the History of Religion at the University of Chicago.

            As Eliade differentiates at the start of this book, there are essentially two types of initiations.  Both seek to “kill” the previous version of the initiate, in order to rebuild, teach, and create a new human being. The most primordial type is the “puberty” initiation.  In this type of initiation, whether for a male or a female child, the purpose is to end the period of childhood, with its lack of responsibility and participation in adult society, and to “create” a full adult, capable of participating and perpetuating the sociocultural knowledge of the tribe.

            Male and female children are removed from their families for an extended period of time, ranging from several days to over a year in some tribes.  The earliest, simplest initiation rituals for boys consist of the separation from the mothers, whose children are then led away from the tribe by the shaman and elders.  The children are symbolically “buried” under branches and blankets, where they must sit and wait.  This is the time of symbolic death.  All around them, their male elders dance, ritualistically, and through the songs and dances teach the children what is happening.  They are experiencing a death, the death of their carefree childhoods.  They learn that in this death they are taken up to the abode of the gods, and private, secret knowledge is given to them.  This knowledge is what makes them new men in the eyes of their tribe, giving them a cosmology and reason for existence.  After a period of time, they are released from their “grave” and return to the world of their people, assuming the full role of an adult male in the tribe. Their mothers mourn them as if they truly died, for they no longer reside with their moms and aunts and cousins and sisters.  Instead, they now belong to the men of the tribe, until such a time as they themselves marry.  Most simple initiations function in this manner, with the exact details of the instruction and lessons given changing depending on the tribe.

            The more complex puberty initiations of men take on far more danger and pain.  There is the addition of deprivation, such as long days spent in the wild without clothing, or without fire or food.  There is the use of pain, or ritualistic surgeries, such as circumcision and scarification, or even the risk of death against animals or the elements themselves.  Whereas the simpler initiations explain the cosmology of the respective tribe involved, the more complex ones seek to recreate the cosmology, with the initiates taking the place of the initial hero who, through either the will of the gods or his own human intelligence, attains wisdom and knowledge equal to the gods and shares it with his fellow men.  These initiations help the men inculcate the new generation with the history and ancient truths of their tribe.  The young men who return from initiation are reborn as full humans, ready to participate in the world around them.

            The initiations of females differ from the initiations of males, both in method and purpose.  Females have a special clock which dictates their maturity, unlike men.  This clock being the initial start of menstruation.  Female initiations are even more secretive and esoteric than the male ones, for it was the ability of the females of any species to perpetuate life that provided humanity with its first taste of the infinite.  Women and their bodies were the initial symbols used to explain the world around us.  The world of women required a separate initiation. 

            The initiations of young women do not revolve around death and rebirth, but instead focus on attainment.  The onset of maturity is a time for celebration, and the young women are gathered together within a space reserved solely for females.  One of the greatest taboos in the world of tribal humans is that of a man entering the sacred spaces of a woman.  The punishments are severe and swift.  In many tribes, if a man interferes with the initiations of the women, the women have the right to kill that man in order to protect their secrets. 

            The young women are taught about their cosmology and how the universe/earth is a womb, producing the life seen all around.  They are taught to understand that the process of life is universal, which is evident after studying the animals and plants around them.  The initiates learn of their cosmic role in the process of life, and how to care for each other.  These initiations also helped bond all of the tribe’s women together, helping foster mutual altruism.  Women likely held the secret of biological procreation for centuries before males found out.

            One of the critical ideas that Eliade brings is that the rituals and symbols used during these initiations were not just mimics of the initial creation process, but were intended to manifest the sacred and allow the initiate to recreate the very events that created the world around them.  Each initiation is a recreation, literally, of the initial birth of our universe.

            The other type of initiation is that of the shaman.  There are three ways to become a shaman.  The first is when the elders or elder shamans choose an individual child (usually male, and the offspring of a shaman) to be taught and trained.  Another is when a child actively seeks to learn the ways and wisdom of the shamans, as if born to do so.  The third method is when the child’s mental state, attitude, and behavior is so erratic and bizarre that they are then pushed to shamanism so that they may learn to control their minds.  This last method is tribal human’s way of dealing with the mentally ill or unstable among them, allowing that person to have a place in their society, even if it is one removed from the day-to-day world of the tribe, such as the shaman’s.

            Most cultures keep their shaman separate.  They live in privation, do not take part in hunts, and rarely interact with the rest of the tribe.  The shaman’s life is spent fine-tuning their connection to the divine, whether through prayer, fasting, drug use, chanting, or any other such method.  It is this rigor which allows them to commune with the spirit world, detect malicious entities causing harm or illness among the tribe, see the far past and the far future, and travel out of their bodies to what mystics refer to as the Astral Plane.  The shaman is feared as much as he is needed.  Their respective initiation ceremonies shed light on this.

            Whereas in puberty initiations the initiate spiritually “dies” and is “reborn,” the shamanistic initiate is instead fully recreated.  The shamans speak of how, during their initiation, their skin, muscle, and sinew are stripped away, leaving just a skeleton, which their god then re-creates, adding new material until the shaman is reconstituted as a new type of being, one capable of existing in the profane, material world (symbolized by his keeping his initial skeleton), and in the supernatural divine world (symbolized by the new organs, muscle, and skin grafted onto him by the gods).  Once recast as a shaman, they climb the World Tree, the Axis Mundi, and have access to the upper worlds of the gods and the lower worlds of demons and spirits.  Shamanistic initiation is mentally traumatic, and some initiates do not make it back from their foray into the divine.  Recreating the mythical death and rebirth of their god’s/universe’s creation has that effect on some people.

            I found this book fascinating, and resonant to my previous readings on the topic.  By focusing solely on initiations, Mircea Eliade avoids discussions of theology, allowing the reader to think about initiations as a continuing human endeavor.  Eliade describes how, even after the advent of revelatory religion, and monotheism, initiations for other organizations/groups continued to use the framework described above, that of a symbolic death, and a rebirth into a new state of being, a more truly “human” state.  Anyone with knowledge of the Masonic initiations into their 3^rd degree will see the correlations.  Books such as this provide us with knowledge that expands our minds, and helps us understand that human consciousness is an ongoing process, constantly drawing from the deep wells of our past shared humanity, and providing deeper and richer meaning for our lives.

(This book can be downloaded and read here: https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.6032/page/n9/mode/2up )

Terence McKenna explores Mind-Expansion and the Human Condition

Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution – Terence McKenna (1992)

            I first read this book when it came out in 1992, around my sophomore year in college.  Much of the insight of this book was lost on me, as I had not yet had time to understand the very far-reaching socio-historical implications of Terence McKenna’s scholarship.  Picking it up again, after 25 years of growth and reading and experience, only served to impress me even more.  This is a highly important book, and should become a foundation for the changes that humanity must make as a whole in order to thrive, and in order to better live in harmony with the life-world that we take for granted.

            One of the most intriguing questions regarding the development of our species is when and how the roaming primates developed a higher level of consciousness from the other primates on Earth.  There are many proposed ideas, most of them based on theology/mythology and not actual grounded empirical knowledge.  Terence McKenna was one of the very first to propose that the naturally occurring hallucinogenic plants and fungi helped expand the minds of the hominids, who would ingest these items in their search for food.  In a sense, he proposes that these hallucinogenic properties created the first “shamans” who then had to figure out a way to explore the rich world that natural plant hallucinogens open up.  He has much evidence for this, and it does help explain the sudden rise of what we call modern humans (Homo Sapiens Sapiens) around 100,000-250,000 years ago, and their/our amazing ability to process information and solve problems.

            After discussing the origins of the human exploration of mind-altering substances, Terence McKenna goes into a very depressing but integral analysis of the role that substance addiction and use affected our human culture.  After the matriarchal, communal, tribal stages of life, where the shamans (initially female, as they were the ones gathering plants and mushrooms and testing them as food, and then both female and male) would open up their minds with these natural compounds, to better understand the needs of the tribe or the patient.  After several millennia, humanity began to live in larger aggregations, in locations that were fixed, and the access to the natural hallucinogens waned.  In this time, the fermented juices and grains began to be used for intoxication as wine and beers.  This new substance was then used much as the old hallucinogens were.

            Once humans managed to distill alcohol, to get purity and strength, it all went to shit.  The problems we face today of alcoholism, rage, violence, and neglect have been around ever since humans distilled the “spirit” of the wine into a potent and toxic drug.  The next drugs to overtake all of humanity, and to continue helping in the degradation of the tribal units, were caffeine, sugar, and tobacco.  Tea initially carried the caffeine addiction but it was not until the spread of coffee, and of the mass manufacture of refined sugar, that caffeine addiction and abuse became a very real thing, and just as deadly as any other drug out there.  Combine this with tobacco, and you have a large amount of the population living constantly in an “altered consciousness” state.  The high from sugar is just as euphoric and the crash just as brutal, as tobacco or caffeine.  The massive and mind boggling extent of the human slave trade was a direct result of the addiction to sugar and the rum that can be created from it.  The Dutch and the British set up a very neat system.  They would gather up slaves in Africa, sell them in the New World to coffee, sugar, and tobacco plantations, buy vast amounts of rum, sugar, and tobacco, sell it all for a massive profit in the UK and Europe, and then go right back to buying humans and selling them off.  This lasted for HUNDREDS of years.

            Once these substances were in use, the state and the merchants combined forces to create vast networks of distribution for these substances.  The British government controlled the tea trade much like drug cartels do so today.  They then decided to get into the opium trade, purposefully flooding China with opium in an effort to make a nation of subservient addicts.  They almost succeeded.  At every step of the way, these drugs were refined and made even more potent and deadly.  Opium was refined to morphine, and thought to be a cure for opium addiction.  Heroin was refined from morphine, and likewise was supposed to combat morphine addiction.  The power of heroin to destabilize and subsume a population is evident when McKenna describes the purposeful distribution by the CIA of an exceedingly pure heroin brought in from Vietnam and surrounding areas.  It was called China White and was released to only the black neighborhoods, creating generations of junkies, unable to stand up for their rights.  Our government and in fact, most governments, use these drug cartels to their own ends.  Most of them are propped up by our support.  Pathetic.

            Terence McKenna continues on to describe his plan for the elimination of what he calls “the Dominator Culture” that we all live in today.  Instead of human unity, our culture pushes and prizes division.  Instead of legalizing natural substances capable of helping people deal with addictions, trauma, and which open the mind to possibilities unknown, our Dominator Culture sets hallucinogens as CLASS 1 drugs, meaning they have absolutely no medicinal, social, scientific value, which is a flat out lie.  It is solely a means by which to control those who would study these amazing plants and fungi.  However, they easily allow the deadliest and most addictive of drugs to be widely marketed and sold in every corner.  Alcohol, tobacco, and sugar products are what keep people subservient, diseased, and mentally dull.  It suits their interests.  It does not suit our own individual rights.  This is why there was such a crackdown on the hippies.  Their drug taking did not lead to subservience and a drone-like ability to do meaningless 9-5 jobs.  They had to be broken and humiliated.  We must all remain robots.  That is what they want and they are succeeding.

(This book can be read here:  https://archive.org/stream/TerenceMckenna-FoodOfTheGods.pdf/TerenceMckenna-FoodOfTheGods_djvu.txt )

(This book can be purchased here:  AMAZON  )

Are you looking for the motherload? This is the motherload.

The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion – James George Frazer (1890)

            There are very few books that truly qualify as seminal works.  These are books where the content is so original, insightful, and fresh that they create whole worlds of study and exploration in their wake.  Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species (1859) is one.  Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687) is another.  In the former, Charles Darwin proposed such well-reasoned and evidenced ideas that 150 years later they still scare the crap out of people whose world-view is barely above a fanciful children’s fable, even though most of the world has accepted Darwin’s conclusions.  The latter book shattered hundreds of years worth of stagnant thought about the nature of our Universe and allowed the development of our modern sciences and society, providing the mathematical tools to greatly expand humanity’s ability to understand and explain the physical nature of our existence.  James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) is of an equal importance, but in the world of comparative religion/mythology and anthropology.  This one book is the main reason that that these fields of study exist.  Without The Golden Bough our modern world would be a very different place. 

            Because of its deep primacy as a source text, The Golden Bough is a book I have seen and read referenced more times than I can imagine as I have read through the works of Joseph Campbell, Robert Anton Wilson, and the like.  In fact, any work of comparative mythology draws from the Golden Bough, if only to try and refute it.  Frazer originally published a one volume edition of this work, only to expand it to two volumes in a second printing a few years later.  For the third printing, Frazer went ahead and included as much of his anthropological and ethnographic research as he could, expanding the whole work to twelve volumes, creating the mother-load for any and all folklorists, mythologists, and comparative religion researchers to draw from.

The book was an immediate success, in part because it scandalized so many “learned” people in England due to its inclusion of the Christian church’s myths and rites and the parallels and origins of these rites that Frazer saw reflected worldwide in nearly every culture he researched.  Even though Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism, and Judaism is a codification of Semitic nomad culture’s folklore and beliefs, the “true believers” cannot accept that their holy church is anything other than a brand new revelation, with no parallels or precursors in human history.  This led to The Golden Bough becoming the kind of book that one read and shared in secret, for the power of the church to destroy those it deemed heretics was still strong at the end of the 19^th century.  The devout cannot handle their belief system being called a “myth” for they believe their myths are factual truths.  This has been the truth as long as humans have deluded themselves into believing the lies religions feed them.  However, taking a step back and seeing how one’s beliefs share a common intellectual and “spiritual” thread with beliefs from around the world should in fact do the opposite, at least in an open mind.  It is nothing if not amazing how similar the paths of mythological thought and beliefs are for all people.  We are all one human race after all, regardless of the level of sophistication our culture may be at.

This book starts out as an exploration of a specific myth which relates the story of the King of the Wood, who was tasked with protecting a grove of trees sacred to the goddess Diana near the town of Nemi.  The folklore states that this King of the Wood was chosen to serve for a set amount of time, after which he was sacrificed to the goddess and a new King chosen.  This evolved over the decades and centuries to a situation where the King of the Wood had to fight off challengers to his position at a set time every year or two.  Frazer explores the origins of this myth and then realizes that throughout the cultures of the world similar rites have developed, and that they all draw from even more ancient myths and beliefs, all the way back to a pre-agricultural nomadic human existence.  Primitive man, and indeed many currently tribal peoples, worshipped the animals and vegetables as gods in their own right.  Over the centuries the idea that everything on Earth had its own spiritual existence evolved to where every similar thing was ruled by a specific god external to the object being worshipped.  All corn was ruled by the corn goddess.  All deer existed due to the whims of the deer god.  All of these gods had to be appeased.  Because of this, specific rites relating to life, death, and rebirth were crafted and utilized.  These rituals gave order to the cosmos, allowing man to think he could control the weather, the crop yields, or the bounty of wildlife purposefully through his actions and prayers (magic).  They were all self-consistent.  Eventually, after millennia, the idea developed that the gods were wholly separate from the matter of reality, and that their whims could not be directly controlled by human ritual and magic, but instead the gods must be supplicated and appeased so that they may bestow their favor upon the most worthy.  Once this became the norm humanity created a specific class of human that could intervene with the gods on behalf of the rest of us.  This became the shaman/priest class, and it was them that began codifying their culture’s belief systems.  This is the start of religion as opposed to magic.  Magic was understandable by all, and usable by all.  Religion is not usable by all, and definitely not understood by all, for the very shaman priests designated to aid instead made it more difficult for the individual to have a full picture of their own personal myths.  The “truth” had to be explained by the priest class.  This exists to this very day in all the churches of the world.

          For example, the idea of sacrifice, whether human, animal or plant, arose as a direct response to seeing the world’s vegetation and animals seemingly die every winter and be reborn every spring.  Death brings life.  All life survives by killing.  This was self-evident to primitive man.  Even before the use of agriculture humanity sacrificed to the spirits of nature for a return of the bounty of spring.  Once humanity developed agriculture, the seasonal sacrifices became ever more crucial to ensure that next year there would be rains and a proper harvest.  The rituals of sacrifice from around the world and throughout history share such common features that it is plainly obvious they share a common ground in the human mind.  After sacrificing virgins, first-born sons, captives, and animals, humanity started sacrificing the children of their kings, and their kings themselves.  What would please a god more than the soul of a lofty individual after all?  Frazer goes into great detail about all of this and it is amazing to see the parallels to the sacrifice of Jesus in the Bible.  For most, the sacrifice was the personification of their god.  Many cultures ate of the being they sacrificed in a ritual communion much like Christians eat what they are taught to believe is the actual blood and flesh of Jesus Christ every Sunday at communion.  Nearly all ancient civilizations had religions that spoke of a redeemer god, who died and was resurrected, who was the son of a virgin and who by his sacrifice saved humanity.  Old ritual magic is transformed over time into codified religion, and most of the followers have no idea this is the case. 

          I have wanted to read this book for nearly twenty years, but I was intimidated.  Only after exploring the world of folklore and mythology have I been able to fully absorb what Mr. Frazer is writing about.  One of my goals is purchasing the full twelve volume set of The Golden Bough for my own personal library. For many people who benefit from keeping masses of us ignorant and devout, this book is still very dangerous.  It challenges their right to lord their beliefs over us, and to force us to comply.  There is so much insight and information in The Golden Bough that I know I will enjoy revisiting this book in the future.  Sometimes supposedly seminal works are disappointing, but not this time.  What an amazing piece of intellectual work this is.

(To download or read this book in .PDF format, click here: 
www.templeofearth.com/books/goldenbough.pdf )

(This book can be purchased here:  AMAZON  )