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 )

Donald E. Brown shows us the universal truths of humanity, and the countless errors of anthropology

Human Universals – Donald E. Brown (1991)

In the course of reading a book, titled The Routledge Companion  to Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World, I saw a footnote referencing a different book titled Human Universals.  I made the request through the Inter-Library Loan Program (ILL) and the book made its way to me.  In less than 160 pages, the author Donald E. Brown presents the many mis-steps, fallacies, and outright obfuscation entered into by anthropologists over the decades since the scientific field of anthropology began.  Specifically, Mr. Brown explains the many ways anthropologists sought to either prove or disprove the idea that certain traits, desires, and thoughts are universally found in all human societies and cultures.

To the everyday layperson, it would appear that there are many aspects of our lives that are universal to all humans, but much of the anthropological research in our collective past began with the assumption that the human mind is a blank slate at birth, and that all culture and society is created or instilled in a human after their birth by those around them.  This drew from psychological ideas which, wholly accepted one hundred years ago, are no longer seen as valid due to the countless years of neurological, genetic, and psychological research that we humans have endeavored upon.  Donald E. Brown spends several chapters discussing exactly how these old assumptions were put to the test, and how they were deemed erroneous.

It is one of the many aspects of anthropology that I found irritating while studying at university, and which I currently find frustrating in many of the “soft sciences.”  The Scientific Method relies on experimentation, rigorous data gathering, and the willingness for the researcher to admit their initial ideas are wrong when faced with evidence to the contrary.  The so-called “soft” sciences, anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc., tend to begin with purely abstract assumptions, and then to seek evidence of these assumptions in the world around us.  Anyone who has studied the ease with which a human being can be deluded or misled by their own strongly-held ideas, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, can understand why Donald E. Brown spends so much time explaining the many fallacies and errors involved in the study of human universals.

There are basic elements of human life and culture that are obviously universal.  We are all born, and we all die.  We must all eat other living things for nourishment (plants are ALIVE, people!), and we must all imbibe water to survive. These, and many others, are universals of the physical, of the traits we all share as humans.  It is easy for anyone to accept these are universal to all human societies.  Apart from these basic things, there are universals that are more abstract.  For example, all humans dream, therefore all human cultures assign some sort of meaning to dreams.  For the most part, every single culture of the world has a taboo on incest.  Even in places like pharaonic Egypt, or in Medieval Europe, where the very top of the society would often marry their siblings, this was not done for sexual or reproductive reasons.  Marrying your sister meant that she would not marry someone from another family, which meant your family’s personal power and wealth would not be diluted.  This was the main reason rulers of Egypt and Europe married siblings.  It helped consolidate power, something the “elites” are always deeply concerned about.  And, yes, the populace found it as gross as we do today.

There are so many other human universals to be studied that it enrages me how ignorant and stuck to their assumptions anthropologists and other such scientists have been, stating with certainty that very few human universals exist.  Sticking to a flawed idea, in the face of overwhelming evidence, is the quickest way to ensure worthless science.  One of the interesting universals that has been found regards poetry.  Every single culture on Earth has had poetry of some sort, but the universality goes deeper than that.  Nearly every culture’s poetry consists of lines lasting three seconds in time.  This may seem arbitrary and weird, but for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, humanity carried its history and stories in our minds and transmitted them orally.  The three second line structure facilitates memorization, for the repetition creates a temporal framework in the mind, allowing for epic poems to be recited and recalled.  Recall how Aristotle railed against teaching people to write because he felt it would dilute their minds and weaken their memorization skills.  (He may have been right. Ha!)

Another human universal is the need for a spiritual connection with the world around us.  This does not mean organized religion, a specific trait of advanced cultures that seek to dominate the collective spiritual thought of the people through dogma and coercion, but instead refers to the inner individual need to attain closeness with Mother Nature, a divinity, or just the soul of the universe.  Even the simplest tribal societies had deep spiritual thoughts, and means by which to enhance and appreciate these experiences.

            Anthropology in the Western world spent way too many decades navel gazing and attempting to study every part of the Earth strictly through the lens of white, European, monotheistic cultures.  They did a great disservice to humanity in doing so, bringing about such stupidity that whole nations used their flawed “science” to justify genocide, imperialism, and the extermination of “undesirable” cultures.  The cost of this stupidity is still being paid.  Genetically, the difference between any two humans, no matter how remote or different they may seem, is miniscule.  It is literally 0.1%.  99.9% of your DNA is exactly the same as Napoleon, Bette Davis, or the ancient poet Rumi.  We are more alike as Homo Sapiens Sapiens than we all care to admit, and until we all choose to see ourselves this way, we will continue to breed hate, animosity, and jingoism in our people.  Donald E. Brown wrote this work in the early 1990’s, and I hope that it leads to a better understanding of the issues and limits inherent in the field of anthropology, especially when it comes to the biases and mental limitations of those doing the research.  While this was a difficult book to read, both due to the subject matter and my rage at anthropologist’s stupidity, I found it inspiring and educational.  I highly recommend it for anyone interested in the technical aspects of studying humanity, and the many properties and traits we all share universally.

(This book can be read here - https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/1991-brown-humanuniversals.pdf )

Early Humans and their Fantastic Art Help Us Understand the Rise of Human Consciousness

 

The Mind In the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art – David Lewis-Williams (2002)

 

            Yet again, my employment and its proximity to amazing books yields delicious fruit.  As a sojourner into the mind and an avid reader of books studying and exploring consciousness, I am always on the look-out for seminal works in this field.  This book is one such tome.  Reading countless references to it in other works spurred me to keep a mental note, should I ever come across this book at a bookstore of library.  I was ecstatic when I saw The Mind in The Cave while perusing the shelves at my workplace.

            I first became fascinated with prehistoric art as an art and art history student.  The images ancient humans drew, painted and etched into the walls of caves are amazing and as beautiful as anything created by us in the past thousand years.  Checking out books on the art found in the caves of Lascaux and Chauvet opened my mind to the vast stretches of pre-history lost to us, and to the inherent artistic sensibilities and beautiful works of our ancient brethren.

            While the actual images and artworks created by early humans are indeed beautiful and moving, David Lewis-Williams’ focus is not on them.  Instead, the author seeks to use these early artworks to explore the how they detail the rise of what we term human consciousness.  By a careful, deliberate, and wide-ranging analysis, Lewis-Williams weaves together the story of how modern humans, Homo sapiens, developed our specific mind/consciousness, and how it differed from our nearest ancestor, Homo neanderthalensis, who co-existed with Homo sapiens for quite some time in what is now Western Europe.

            It may be hard to imagine but the uproar caused by the discovery of ancient human artworks in caves was virulent, and for a time, it stifled the proper scientific and art historical study of the cave art.  In a world where people blindly believed what con-artist priests told them, the idea that the earth was older than 6,000 years old was seen as a blasphemy of the highest order.  Everyone “knew” that god created the world, and everything on it, very recently.  They “knew” this because it was told to them as irrefutable, divinely-inspired fact.  To think this was around one hundred years ago, after Isaac Newton, Galileo and Darwin, baffles me.  The human drive to remain ignorant and accept the simplest explanation, regardless of evidence or counter-evidence, drives me insane.  It took decades for anyone to take the primitive art seriously, for, much like in today’s world, you always have idiots and the willfully ignorant railing against evidence of deep time such as fossils, claiming them to be placed in the earth by their exceedingly stupid and malevolent god to “trick” us and to “test” our faith.  What a hopeless well of stupidity.

            David Lewis-Williams describes the many ways this knowledge was resisted and ignored.  Not only did people think the artwork found in the caves could not be as old as it seemed, but they also did not wish to allow that ancient man was the equal of modern man.  Humans have an innate need to self-aggrandize, and to consider the present day to be a pinnacle of sorts.  Many people still think this way.  They truly believe that the entirety of existence, the billions of years-old Cosmos, and the near infinite expanse of galaxies around us, was created by a god whose sole purpose in doing so was forging the human race in its image. 

Another obstacle was that humans always sought a superficial understanding of things, leaving them mostly ignorant.  It is in this way that many humans at the time, and even today, inferred that what Darwin posited when he proposed Natural Selection as the means by which life evolves on Earth was that us humans are the pinnacle of evolution, that the billions of years of preparation and shifting forms of life were all in anticipation of the masterpiece that is the human race.  This is as asinine, destructive, and egotistical an idea as any created by the human race.  It is the sole basis for much of the entrenched racism found in the world, for the ignorant and self-proud racists obviously put themselves at the top of creation, closest to god, while everyone else was “obviously” beneath them.  Seemingly sensible people would expound on how the “natural order” of things meant that anyone not of pale skin was closer to the animals than to divinity.  Even in a document created by enlightened minds, such as the US Constitution, the value of a non-white male was seen as 3/5 of what a white male was.  Systematic and entrenched racism spoils much of scientific discovery and human advancement.

            Having discussed the topic at length, and how the ignorance was overcome, the author explores the differences between the artwork created by Homo neanderthalensis and that created by Homo sapiens, and how this shines a light on the rise of human consciousness.  Using the data gathered by archeologists and anthropologists, Lewis-Williams differentiates between Neanderthal and Human consciousness in a very clear manner.  While the debate concerning whether consciousness is an inherent part of life still rages, it is plain to most humans that the living creatures around us exhibit self-awareness of a sort, and awareness of their environment.  It is clear that other animals plan, strategize, and experience a wide range of emotions, just like humans do.  What is also clear from neurological and neuropathological studies is that the other consciousnesses around us lack something we humans all share.  This is the ability to “see” ourselves in a detached manner, to self-analyze, and to understand that the current moment will, if certain actions are made, lead to specific outcomes in the future.  One of the key pieces of evidence for this is that for over three hundred thousand years, Neanderthals thrived without agriculture.  The sowing, care, and harvest of plants for food and other uses requires the ability to step outside of the immediate moment, and posit a future that exists solely in the imagination.  The seasons must be considered.  The appropriate soil and needs of the crop must be noted and remembered.  This is a purely human characteristic, something lacking in the neanderthal record.  There are very few Neanderthal burials found, and they are rudimentary.  Quite a big difference from the elaborate, and ritualized human burials of early man.  Lewis-Williams posits that early man, able to step outside of his immediate mind-state to experience all the higher-consciousness effects we take for granted, began to understand that life is temporary, that the world existed before, and will continue after, we die.  Neanderthal man did not have this capability, which seems to arise from our specific neuronal structure. 

            Even in the relatively short period where Neanderthal and Homo sapiens lived alongside each other in what is now Europe, a period lasting over 20 thousand years at least, it is evident that Neanderthals did not understand their Homo sapiens neighbors.  Interbreeding happened, as is now evident by the genetic testing showing that most European people have between 1-4% neanderthal DNA in them, something that none of the human populations in Africa have.  What did not happen is the migration of ideas and knowledge.  Neanderthal tools never improved once they mingled with modern humans.  They may have seen the proto-agriculture and animal husbandry practiced by early humans, but they did not assimilate it.  They also would have seen the burial rituals of early Homo sapiens, but they never assimilated the concept.  The author’s claim is that the Neanderthal were physically unable to do so, their brain structure preventing the development of higher consciousness.

            This ability to create metaphor and symbolism led humans to explore deep, dangerous cave systems, and to leave behind the amazing artwork we are in awe of today.  While too many people try to explain and analyze these images through the prism of modern art and art theory, the author instead seeks to understand the mental state of the cave artists themselves.  In this way he explores why the art was made, and how the caves were used for ritual purposes.  One of the enlightening parts describes how the entrances of these caves, the areas that may still get some outdoor natural light, were used communally by ancient man, not as living sites or shelters, but for communal ritual purposes.  The excavation of these caves shows that while they were used repeatedly, they were never a place for habitation, apart from purely temporary use as emergency shelters.  This flies in the face of the accepted and ignorant idea of the “caveman” that suffuses modern thought.  Ancient Homo sapiens built homes and structures, just like modern humans do.  The caves were, from the start, living symbols of the cosmos, the womb of the Earth Mother, and were used by the shamans and shamanistic humans for specific ritual purposes.

            The author posits that the artwork created in these caves should be seen as the end result of the neuropsychological effects which arise in all humans through either trance, ritual, or psychoactive substances. This hypothesis fits the data we have, and avoids the pre-judged dogma that most archeologists and historians bring to the study of ancient man, which presupposes that the reasons ancient man created the artworks is of the same motivation as that of a modern human creating art.  The fallacy that the author counters forgets that the world we currently live in is an aggregate of the collective human experience, and that the making of images to a current human is filled with suggestion and analogy of which ancient man would have never conceived.  Lewis-Williams explains how the imagery, from dots, dashes, chevrons and lines, to the representations of animals, or animal “spirits,” all arise from the workings of our extremely complex neurological processes. 

For the most part, the individual artworks were created in private and remained private.  Very few humans actually ventured deep into the caves themselves, for they were and are fraught with danger.  In this manner, Lewis-Williams suggests that the creation of art was done by those either designated as or seeking to be, shamans.  The artwork was not on public view, and was never intended to be communicative.  The primitive art, consisting mainly of a specific group of deified animals (bears, bulls, ibex, horses) served the shaman’s purposes, and not the tribes.   Comparing the types of images created by our ancestors with the images seen by those who hallucinate due to mental illness, or the use of psychoactive substances, is where the author truly shines.

It is this skill to imagine form, and find meaning in such forms, that modern Homo sapiens acquired or developed, and which the hominids predating Homo sapiens (Homo neanderthalensis, Homo habilis, Homo erectus) did not.  This innate ability we have, and which we cannot seem to find in any other creature, led us to create Art, and Language, the two greatest and most valuable developments leading to the modern world we all share.  The ability to think symbolically allows for anyone to enjoy art and literature, and for humans to pass on acquired knowledge and wisdom to the subsequent generations.  We all contain the inherent mental hardware which allows such thought, purely because of our shared humanity. The skill to imagine, to hold a thought for longer than the current moment, differentiates us from any preceding creatures, and make us unique.   I am so glad I found this book, and I cannot wait to explore more of our primate ancestry through the beautiful, exquisite artwork they created.

(This book can be purchased here: https://www.thamesandhudsonusa.com/books/mind-in-the-cave-consciousness-and-the-origins-of-art-softcover )

Hermann Kern Takes us Into, and Brings us Back Out of, the Labyrinth

 

Through the Labyrinth: Designs and Meanings Over 5,000 Years – Hermann Kern (1982)

A fascination with the story of Daedalus and his ill-fated son Icarus began early after reading a book on the Greek myths, likely found at the local library (Alief Public Libraries for the WIN!). The idea of a genius engineer forced to create a labyrinth in which to imprison King Minos’ step-son, and the story of what befell him and his son as they tried to escape, struck a nerve. As a youth, the simple lesson that a child must pay heed to his elders, especially his parents, when it comes to dangerous matters of life and death, was what drew attention. This was Icarus’ folly, that of a young man too carefree when he should be careful. It resulted in Daedalus’ tragic loss of his son, all because Icarus did not pay attention.

As an adult, reading more and more on the Greek myths, and about the idea of the labyrinth, the focus turned to the labyrinth itself. An understanding of it as allegory grew. My employment now affords the great pleasure of wandering through labyrinthine shelves (see what I did there?), each stocked with all manner of art books. Upon one of these meanderings this large book called out to me. It may be an innate skill, or perhaps the oft-rumored Library Angels really do exist, but sometimes an amazing tome will just fall in my lap. Such was the case with this book, Hermann Kern’s exhaustive, immersive, and deeply informational masterwork on labyrinths worldwide. It is packed with thousands of illustrations and photographs, and translated into English from the original German. Exceedingly awesome.

 As Hermann Kern carefully explains, over thousands of years the ancient symbol/idea of a labyrinth morphed and degraded into our currently accepted meaning, that of an intricate maze, with endless dead-ends, false passageways, and walls meant to disorient anyone inside. This idea is a disservice to the labyrinth, making it seem more of a trap, or a tool for torture and subjugation, which is evident by the time Plutarch wrote of his story of King Minos and the Minotaur. The original idea of a labyrinth was not a maze of dead ends, but a long, winding, singular path to a center. To exit a labyrinth, one must retrace their steps back through the entire thing. There are no shortcuts, and the journey in and out is where meaning is found. Labyrinths may be one of the oldest meditative tools created by humans.

Mr. Kern starts with, and reiterates throughout, the essential feature of a Labyrinth as opposed to a maze or spiral. As stated above, a labyrinth is a single path, convoluted and winding, leading to a central area within it. This is the center of the labyrinth. Once at the center, there is nothing to do but turn around and retrace your steps back through until you reach the initial entrance. This differs greatly from mazes, which may or may not have centers, and which feature countless wrong turns, dead-ends, and misleading paths. One can get lost in a maze. One cannot get lost in a labyrinth. It is this specific trait that makes the labyrinth so useful as a tool of introspection, initiation, and ritual.

The origins of the labyrinth are lost to time. What is known, and what Mr. Kern describes so well, is that the initial labyrinth was of a very specific form, what is now referred to as a Cretan Labyrinth. This very specific shape, carved in stone, has been found in many places, but is associated with Crete due to the Greek Myth discussed above. A critical aspect of the labyrinth, and its use, is called the “Thread of Ariadne.”  The Greek myth tells of how the hero Theseus entered the labyrinth, faced and killed the dreaded Minotaur, and escaped with his life. He did so by using a fine thread given to him by the Cretan princess Ariadne, which he unspooled as he entered the labyrinth and which he spooled back up as he found his way out of the labyrinth. The Greek myth tells of how Theseus then rescued Ariadne and took her away from Crete. This is a retcon of a sort, as the initial “thread” of Ariadne was simply the path taken by the labyrinth itself. Many of the oldest labyrinth images show a red line, the symbolic thread, coursing its way through the bends and twists until it arrives at the center. As a true labyrinth has no dead-ends, or meanders, there is no need for a literal thread, as told in the story of Theseus.

In the shamanic/mystical sense, the thread of Ariadne is the same thread woven by the fates when a human is born. This thread tells the story of one’s life, which lasts just as long as the Fates allow, one of them tasked with cutting off the thread marking our point of death in this world. In a labyrinth, this thread of life symbolizes the return to the womb, to the primordial beginnings, and then the return trip back to our experiential world. To walk into a labyrinth is to retrace your steps back to your creation, and to leave the labyrinth is to be re-born. The human exiting the labyrinth is not the same human that entered it. This is a deep philosophical point made visible and interactive by means of the labyrinth, which is why many of the old sanctuaries and cathedrals of Europe contain labyrinths inside. They wanted the parishioners to reflect on the journey to Christ and the rebirth afterwards, as they walked the path of the labyrinth to the center (Jesus) and back.

Apart from their mystery, meaning, and use, labyrinths themselves are just beautiful. Many of the great cathedrals contain exquisite labyrinths, tiled as perfectly as any Roman mosaic. Hermann Kern’s exhaustive search also includes many proto-labyrinth carvings whose creators are lost to us. It also includes images related to labyrinths, such as the cup and ring marks, or the many spirals, found throughout paleolithic locations. Kern differentiates between these seemingly related symbols and those of a true labyrinth, providing details and historical context for everything. Because of his rigor in collecting the data, this book has become the seminal resource for those seeking to study the history and purpose of these designs. I am very thankful that it was translated into English, and would love to find a copy of this magnificent reference work for my own personal library. Thank Mario that my workplace affords me access to such wonderful books. I have been fortunate to visit a couple of labyrinths located in my home of Houston, Texas, USA.  More will be sought and I will walk the Thread of Ariadne again.

May the Mother Goddess Forgive Us All, For We Know Not What We Do

 

The Once and Future Goddess: A Symbol for Our Time – Elinor W. Gadon (1989)

            I love deep reading.  If interested in a topic, I seek to understand it, and to explore the books written on that subject.  Invariably, the books will mention a previous work, whether for inspiration or for reference’s sake.  Once I run into several of these, I must go find the book in question.  Sometimes that is a difficult proposition.  The Once and Future Goddess was one of those sought-after tomes.  Thank Mario for my library employment, and the discovery that we have a copy of it in our collections. INSTANT CHECK-OUT!

            This book is an exploration of our shared human history, especially the early spiritual life of prehistoric humans.  Homo Sapiens have been around for over one million years, per the latest scientific estimations.  Our specific human species, Homo sapiens sapiens, the only branch of Homo sapiens still existing, has been around for over one hundred thousand years.  For most of our existence on this beautiful planet, we humans understood the interconnectedness of the vital forces we refer to as “life.”  The entirety of the Earth was known and respected as life-giving, much in the way that women carry life within them, and there was no division between the fecundity of the soil, the seasonal rutting and birthing of the animals around them, and the cycles of the flora they witnessed yearly.  It was self-evident that “life” was a universal feature of our world, and our ancestors behaved accordingly.  It was also self-evident that the creative, primal, life-giving force resided in the females.  By extension, our Earth was seen as female, and worshipped accordingly, for it is the cradle of all life, plant and animal.  This power is what the author refers to as the Mother Goddess.

            Elinor W. Gadon does a masterful job of gathering observations and data from our collective pre-history.  The bibliography at the back of the book is extensive.  As our earliest ancestors left no written record that we know of, we must recreate their world from what remains.  Frankly, it is amazing what has lasted until our modern times.  Burial sites, art pieces, religious centers, and entire communities have been excavated in the last century, and the collective knowledge gathered from these artifacts is what points to a complex belief system, seemingly shared by all humans throughout our planet.  The aspect that ties all of these disparate sites together is that they were all created at a time when human and world spirituality was immanent, meaning the divine creative spark of life was to be found in anything and in all things. 

            The very earliest examples of art we have are the small figures dubbed “Venuses” by archeologists.  These are symbolic, carved images of exaggerated female forms, with the emphasis placed on the outward signs of a pregnant woman, the large abdomen, full breasts and thighs, and prominent vulva.  Many of these figures lack the unnecessary features, such as feet, hands, or facial features.  Our ancestors knew the power inherent in women’s bodies and celebrated it openly.  The germ of life existed in the soil, in the water, and in women’s bodies.  Before the advent of agricultural society, our ancestors existed in balance with the changing seasons, animal migrations, and flow of nature. 

            This state of communal coexistence lasted for millennia, until the advent of agriculture and animal husbandry.  The Mother Goddess morphed into the Grain Goddess, responsible for the yearly harvests.  Humans experience with their domesticated animals showed them the importance of the male of the species, for new life, while immanent in females, could not grow without the initial impetus from the male.  These humans were unaware of the cellular nature of spermatozoa and ovum, but they understood innately that life arises from this special combination.  The Goddess was given a consort, a “king” fit for a goddess.  This “king” was initially a yearly choice, and would be either ritually or symbolically “sacrificed” after fulfilling their duty.  Our ancestors saw life and death as two sides of the same coin.  For life to flourish it must also die.  For death to exist, life must first exist. The death of crops and plants and the barrenness of wintertime was always followed by the warmth of Spring and the flowering of the earth.  Humans understood the menstrual cycles as tying women into the greater life force of the universe, the Mother Goddess. 

            The menstrual blood itself was seen as a life force, and women’s lives were shaped by their temporal state.  It was observed that the life of a woman flows in three stages.  Youth, followed by sexual maturity, was then followed by old age. These ages of woman were codified into the idea of the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone, all different aspects of the same fertile spirit alive in women.  The Maiden was the promise of life, the bounty of possibility.  The Mother was the eternal mother, evident in all life around us, and responsible for each and every living thing us humans understood at the time.  Once a woman reached what is now called menopause (the pause of menses), it was believed she became even more powerful, for instead of losing the holy menstrual blood monthly, it was assumed she kept it inside, absorbed as part of herself.  This placed a great responsibility on the older women, who were responsible for the communal knowledge, whether of food gathering, care of children, manufacture of household goods, and whose wisdom helped protect the entire tribe or village.

            Society in our early days was communal, and female-centric, in terms of spirituality and divinity.  It was NOT a “matriarchy,” a society ruled by women, where men were seen as secondary. That misconception arises from seeing the past as a mirror of our present.  Humans have lived under strict patriarchy, where men rule and decide, and women are nothing more than property for breeding, for thousands of years, so we assume that before, it was the opposite.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Gadon masterfully details how the cyclical Goddess cultures were overrun by invaders from lands whose people worshipped sky gods, gods detached from the everyday existence of life on earth.  Invariably, their gods were male-focused, and everywhere they went they helped to erase or alter the native goddess worship.

            When Goddess worship was an integral part of daily life, everyone understood that the spark or life, of divinity, was found in us and the world around us.  This meant we lived in admiration and respect for the world, and there was no division between “natural” and “supernatural.”  Once the invaders brought their male sky gods, all of this began to shift.  If the gods lived above, separate from us and from the nature around us, then it was surmised that divinity and holiness existed apart from the natural world we inhabit.  This schism is what we are all currently living with, the idea that the natural world is soiled, unholy, and base, and that goodness and divinity only exist in an “afterlife”, where we go to join the male gods in their sky domains.  To make this shift happen, everything feminine was debased, deemed unimportant, and unnecessary.  Once agriculture brought certain stabilities and built up more permanent communities, the male humans began to conceive of private ownership.  Whereas, for tens of thousands of years, humanity considered everything to belong to everybody, much like Native American tribes describe, the idea of personal ownership, and the power and influence assigned to those who happen to “own” more than others grew and grew, until they believed this was the way to be.  They altered and created religion to suit their greed and power-hungry ways.  The divine was purely a means by which to enforce their male domination.

            The symbols of the Great Goddess, symbols of regeneration and plenitude, such as the snake who sheds its skin and is “reborn,” the tree or carved pillars representing the cycle of life itself, and the wildness of nature, were all subverted and perverted. Gadon describes this process, and explains it well.  Consider the story of Genesis, altered countless times by males seeking to denigrate the female and to assign divine importance to being male.  The symbols of the Goddess, the Tree of Life and the snake, become the Tree of knowledge of life and death, which, after the snake seduces the woman, she eats the fruit thereof, and “convinces” the man to do the same, causing all humanity to suffer forever more because woman misled man. Instead of the menstrual cycle, conception, and birth being seen as divine, they were now to be seen as punishments from a male god for disobeying him.  These few passages are to blame for the myriad of horrors suffered by women in the past 3-4 thousand years.  Death is woman’s fault.  Pain is woman’s fault. Shame and degradation are woman’s fault.  It is the single greatest program of propaganda ever foisted on the human race, all to benefit a few powerful males wishing to control the entire population.

It makes me sick, and goddamn it I was raging while reading this book.   Countless examples of the pure misogyny brought forth by the stupids seeking to invalidate the power of women infuriated me.  Instead of a Maiden, Mother, and Crone, we are now expected to believe life stems from a Father, a Son, and some sort of Holy Spirit, who is probably also male, although how deities and spirits can have genitalia and sexual reproductive organs I will never understand.  Even the one named Emmanuel, Jesus the Christ, could not be tainted by a female.  The idiot church “leaders” decided that Mary was a virgin (based on a very stupid mistranslation), and because of that, they reasoned that Jesus was born without the “sinful” method of carnal copulation.  To further their stupid reasoning, they then decided, centuries later, that Mary was also born from a virgin, which rationalized their view of her as a non-erotic, non-sensual, container for Jesus.  Never mind that after Jesus was born the Bible talks of his brothers, children of Joseph and Mary. (The church is always GREAT at telling you what the Bible says and means, without actually letting you read it yourself.  Bunch of assholes.  What a blight on humanity. They claim we are all too stupid to understand without their interpretations, and we believe it because they have “authority.”)

Gadon details the vast disintegration of Goddess worship at the hands of those pushing their self-created sky gods.  The Goddess was reduced from the center of divinity to an afterthought by those who wished to maintain their hold on humanity.  The Christian church either destroyed the ancient places of worship, or, more frequently, just built their own churches atop the old sacred sites.  A cheap ploy which works every time.  This helped fan the lie that there are no holy places on Earth except those built by man and dedicated to their male god.  I could write ten books about how fucked this shit is and has been, and how much I HATE IT ALL.

The author spends the last section of this book detailing the work of contemporary female artists whose work tries to reclaim and renew the idea of female divinity, and of the goddess herself.  In doing so she presents a hope that we may all soon return to an understanding of the universality of divinity in our world, and of the critical role that women have in restoring a sense of equality and fairness to humanity’s religious beliefs.  Should that day ever come, I will be first in line to celebrate it, but my cynicism and world-weariness tells me there is very little that can be done to combat the current state of things, without scrapping the whole thing and starting fresh.  We are all fooled by the endless conditioning we experience, where young girls are taught repeatedly that their role is to be subservient to a man, whether it is their father or husband, and that they are merely baby making machines, male babies preferable.  Us males are conditioned to believe in our inherent superiority, and of the woman’s inherent subservience.  It is the single greatest stupidity ever foisted on us by our so-called spiritual leaders.  May their end be swift and thorough, and may we eventually return to a state where life itself is seen as divine and worthy of respect, whether male, female, animal, or plant.  There is no way to return to the past, but we may yet build an equitable future, worthy of our promise as sentient beings and our duty as caretakers of our world.

African Civilizations Reached the Americas Before Columbus, Thank Goodness

 

They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America – Ivan Van Sertima (1976)

           

            I come from a small island named Puerto Rico.  The people of Puerto Rico are a magnificent blend of native Taíno peoples, Spanish conquistadors, Africans, both slave and free, and a mish-mash of many other people who made their way to my little island.  I grew up my whole life with family and friends whose skin-tones ranged from the darkest browns to the palest of peach-pink, yet all were Puerto Rican.  While it is impossible to say that racism does not exist on my island, it is not the entrenched endemic racism found in Europe or the United States.  My people come in all colors.

            I say this because when my family moved to the USA in 1981 I began to read and study American schoolbooks.  In those texts, it was a given that the superior European (i.e. White) brought civilization, culture, science, and art to the New World, a land supposedly filled with backwards savages that could barely subsist, much less create amazing civilizations and engage in worldwide trade.  I found this so stupid, ignorant, and patently absurd.   Consider the fact that millions upon millions of humans lived throughout the Caribbean and the Americas for tens of thousands of years, with various high civilizations matching or dwarfing the achievements of contemporary cultures in Africa, Europe, and Asia.  For a textbook to say a small group of Spanish and Portuguese mercenary seamen led by a syphilitic and deeply ignorant Columbus “discovered” the entirety of the New World is plain false.  It aggrandizes a grade-A asshole and diminishes the soul and genius of everyone in the New World.

            Some of the greatest anthropological discoveries made in the New World seem to point to an influence from outside the New World centuries and even millennia before the travels of Columbus.  One would think that such finds would resonate in the literature of world history as examples of the ingenuity and resilience of the human spirit.  There is one problem, however.  The peoples that made contact with the New World between 600 BC and 1400 AD were Africans, dark-skinned people, and most of the researchers and historians, themselves raised under the blanket racist idea that white Europeans created all that is civilization and science and art in the world, could not bring themselves to accept that Africans could cross the Atlantic Ocean safely.  Africa not only fostered civilizations the magnitude of anything in Europe, they essentially created everything we hold to be the modern world.  Our civil and religious systems, our science and technology, our knowledge of animal husbandry, our ability to create agriculture, and so much more came directly from the heart of Africa.  Only the blind idiot racism of European historians could deceive them from these facts.  Not only were African’s contributions to the world dismissed as accidental, many of their achievements were, instead, assigned to later, whiter civilizations, as if Africa was not the mother of all humanity.

            Into this world, in 1976, Ivan Van Sertima released this amazing book, They Came Before Columbus.  From what I have read of its reception by academia, many established historians were deeply butt-hurt!  They could not imagine that Africans had the ability, much less the organization, to engage in trans-Atlantic travel.  Much of the contemporary criticism of this book sought to dismiss it entirely based on one or two small and quite meaningless points of contention.  Imagine you drawing a huge map of the continental United States using all your available research and someone shoots it all down because you failed to include some minor river or village.  Ridiculous.  However, this is exactly what Mr. Van Sertima experienced.  Non-white people of the world are used to being dismissed based on superficial bullshit.  Shit don’t change.

            Based on countless archeological, ethnographic, agricultural, and historical examples, Van Sertima shows that there were at least 2 periods where Africans came to the Americas, either as castaways on the trans-Atlantic current, or as members of large expeditionary forces sent by great African kings.  The oldest of these took place around 600BC, and coincided with the rise of the Olmec culture, from which most of the later native civilizations sprang.  Everyone is familiar with the giant Olmec heads, carved in basalt, which seem to portray Africa/Negro individuals.  Around this time, the Olmec people started creating step pyramids similar to the ones created in the Nubian kingdom that preceded the Egyptian dynasties. 

A second wave of African immigration to the New World occurred sometime between 1000 AD and 1200 AD, which coincides with the histories provided by West African peoples.  They spoke of massive fleets sent out from western Africa heading west to a new world.  This may seem weird, based on the false notions we have been taught that state the African was backwards, ignorant, and lacking in technological knowhow.  In fact, the desert-wandering Africans were the first people that understood navigation by the stars, and how to use both longitude and latitude to determine location.  Their ideas and instruments disseminated into the ancient Mediterranean by the Phoenicians who traded with these highly advanced African civilizations.  The racism barely hidden in the history books tries to portray the Phoenicians as the true innovators, relegating the Africans who sailed with the Phoenicians to slave or menial status.  Racism is a bitch and demeans everyone involved.

I wish I could write more and more about this book, but it is better read that talked about.  Much of the subject matter and topics covered in this book has been ignored since its publication, as the European historians seek to keep light-skinned folks as the primary drivers of human innovation.  It is a self-serving load of shit.  Any new finds that corroborate the African presence in the Americas are either ignored, hidden, or portrayed in such a light as to seem unimportant.  Even in the very first voyages of Columbus and his Spanish mercenaries, the natives would talk of dark-skinned visitors from the “morning,” (the East, where the Sun rises).  In Central America and the coast of South America, the native peoples talked of villages of dark-skinned men that came by boat over the water.

Even today, much of the world lives under the lie that the ancient Egyptians were not Black Africans, but light-skinned people.  The (white) world cannot accept that the original Egyptians, the builders of the great Pyramids, the creators of a religion and culture that lasted for millennia, were dark-skinned, Negro Africans.  The fact that Nubia, and Nubian kings, ruled over what is now Egypt is forgotten, or relegated to a mere happenstance.  The empire of Mali, on the west of Africa, was, in medieval times, larger, more prosperous, and far more advanced in every way than the contemporary Holy Roman Empire.  They had the resources, capabilities, and knowledge to sail around all of Africa, the Mediterranean, and, as Ivan Van Sertima has shown, all the way to the New World.  This is something to celebrate alongside all other great human achievements, but racism and prejudice prevents us from doing so.  What a shame.  I highly recommend this book.

(This book is available for download here: https://afrikin.org/books/Ivan-Van-Sertima-They-Came-Before-Columbus.pdf )

Humanity Owes Our Females a Huge Debt

The Gender of Debt: The Last 50,000 Years – Mariano Pavanello (2019)

When I began this book review journey, my wife asked me what I hoped to be a good end-result for this endeavor.  I told her that I wished to create a resource, a website that readers could use to find interesting books to read, and that it would be awesome if writers thought enough of my commentary to seek me out so I could provide a review of their work.  I specifically considered writers of science books, science history, and other such work to be ones I would love to collaborate with and provide reviews of their writing.  Through hard work and diligence, this has indeed come to pass.  I am contacted regularly by book publishers and authors with requests to review their work, which is extremely satisfying.  However, receiving an email from a renowned anthropologist asking if I would consider reviewing their book on my site was a tremendous thrill.  Reading the work, and understanding the implications this book could have on our understanding of human social development, is a privilege.

Mariano Pavanello’s aim with The Gender of Debt is to shed some light on the erroneous assumptions that many anthropologists still hold in regards to the role of labor sharing in early humans, and the motivations that drove the specializations of hunting and food gathering into a sexual division that we still take for granted today.  He seeks to correct the social debt that human males owe to human females, a debt which is never acknowledged in our patriarchal society.

It is currently assumed that what drove humans to develop the society and culture we see around us today was the increase in meat provided by the male hunters of early tribes.  Meat is highly nutritious and full of energy.  The idea was that, as this great resource requires a large expenditure of effort and energy, and came fraught with danger, the risks associated with hunting became more and more a male dominated pursuit, leaving women to tend the camps, care for children and elderly, and gather up other food items such as plants, tubers, honey, and other such food sources as could be collected not too far from their camps.  This, they assume, is what drove the push to patriarchy and male control over women.  Mr. Pavanello goes into great detail explaining why previous researchers and scientists drew these conclusions, and then adroitly points out why these assumptions are dead wrong.  The complexities of human social order do not fall so neatly into the categories our assumptions place them in.

One of the most interesting chapters in this book delves into the scientific literature to explore exactly what we know about how tribal people throughout the world manage to subsist.  Various charts are used to explain the variations between the amount of labor that goes into hunting and the amount of labor that goes into food gathering.  What the data shows, and what is not present in the modern conversation about early man, is that, for the most part, the food gathering side is the crucial one.  It is the side that allows for all other functions of humanity to continue, including long, arduous hunting excursions. Many groups could survive on just food gathering alone, but no one could survive on just hunting alone.  In fact, without the steady, constant work of the food gatherers the hunters would have no sustenance to support their physical work.

Mr. Pavanello posits that, because the hunters realized how much they depended on the gatherers, they began to implement cultural methods by which they would control the females, assuring the hunters of constant food, constant care for their children, and autonomy in the hunting process.  This was not done by coercion or force necessarily, but by the strict codes of societal control, such as food sharing, child care, daughter exchange for marriages, etc.  Most tribal cultures share all food items as a rule.  The gatherers will share their supplies with all in the tribe, while the hunters would divide up the kill for all people to share.  This reciprocity is integral to understanding early human cultures.  It is because of this system that humans thrived in a manner that our Neanderthal and other relative species could not.  Assuring communal survival through food sharing allowed humans to develop free time, to eventually come up with higher social structures such as religion, markets, etc.

What is evident throughout this book is that humanity indeed owes a huge debt of gratitude to the females of our species, for without their abilities, knowledge, and wisdom we humans would have stayed tribal peoples, never developing the complexity and intricacy of our modern human society.  I hope more people read this book, or at least study its conclusions, so that as a society we all accept, understand, and appreciate the achievements of the female of our species, instead of solely focusing on the achievements of male humans in our history.  

This is quite a dense treatise, and explores far more data and ideas than I could possibly cover in this review.  I hope it is a touchstone for scientists and social anthropologists to view the human condition through a new spectrum.  The debt humanity owes to our females is over 50,000 years old, and needs to be addressed sooner than later.  We are all one humanity, with shared goals and shared credit for our successes. 

(This book can be purchased here: Cambridge Scholars Publishing )

A Tour Through the Human Body and the World It Creates For Us

Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form – Michael Sims (2003)

      While I am a huge fanatic of reference books, and of highly detailed and deep dives into very specific topics, there is another type of book I find very entertaining.  Those would be the books that aggregate data from widely ranging fields, but which all serve to shed light on a specific subject.  This book, Adam’s Navel, is a great example.  It explores the visible human form from head to toe, and draws from the obvious sciences, biology, anthropology, anatomy, as well as the humanities.  This helps to paint a much greater picture of the history of how humans have seen their body and how they have used the parts of that body to develop their view of the Universe at large.

      I found out about this book while perusing the bibliography of a different book I recently read.  Luckily the amazing M.D. Anderson Library at the University of Houston always hooks me up.  The author, Michael Sims, developed the core of this book while he was incapacitated due to a serious medical procedure.  His inability to move left him alone with his thoughts, and he began to write about the various things he associated with the currently not working parts of his body.  Those original thoughts informed this work.

      Starting at the top of the head, Michael Sims describes not only the biological nature of hair, the various types, and the hair of our closest primate relatives, but he discusses several of the rules, myths and legends humanity has created in regards to hair.  From Samson in the bible, whose power came from his uncut locks, to the attitudes of certain christian fundamentalists who believe that they must collect their life’s hair to be “complete” upon the resurrection, to the hairlessness of certain ascetic monk groups worldwide, humans have assigned so much meaning to hair, a substance made from keratin, the same material our fingernails, and certain animal horns are made of.  Every single visible part of the body is explored in this manner.

      This was a very fun book to read, and helped me better understand the way in which our corporeal form is used as a prism by which we analyze the entire Universe around us.  Our ten fingers inspired our decimal system of mathematics.  The size of past ruler’s body parts determined measurements. The eyes, by virtue of their power to see the world around us, have always been treated as gateways to see the inner self.  Even something as simple as the shape of the ear has been conflated by desperate, or deluded, people into providing intimate details about that ear-owner’s personality traits.  We live our lives in these ever changing bodies.  It is understandable that our bodies helped shape our ideas about the world around us.  For anyone who is interested, this is a great resource and a really fun read.

(This book can be purchased here:  ADAM'S NAVEL  )