"Reality is a hypothesis. That’s what I call it - a hypothesis."

Chapter One

This fantasy began in the museum at the Mesa Verde National Monument near Cortez, Colorado. When I looked at the artifacts there, I felt that I was looking at the symbols from Marija Gimbutas’ three books on the Mesolithic goddess taken from her work in the vicinity of the Danube River in Europe. Later I was fortunate enough to go on an archaeological field trip to look at rock art on the Singleton Ranch south of Santa Fe, New Mexico. There, reluctantly, I realized that I had no basis for my premise that somewhere in the deep dark past there were symbolic connections that covered the Earth. This failure of my premise was reinforced when at a lecture by Polly Schaafsma (one of the Southwest’s leading archaeologists) at the Indian Arts Museum of New Mexico she answered a question from the audience saying that there was absolutely no relation between the Southwest American rock art and Paleolithic art in the caves of France and Spain. Then William Sullivan’s book The Secret of the Incas carried Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend’s theories from Europe and Asia into the New World. This, together with an idea from Alexander Marshak’s The Roots of Civilization stating that any concept has deep roots prior to its being accepted into a culture and therefore being recognizable later gave me hope. Mircea Eliade’s works on Shamanism and Alchemy and my own playing with the transformative fires of the coal forge convinced me that my premise probably had some truth in it but that I would have to approach it, as it were on the bias, not directly.

One of the difficulties in a study of this sort is a pseudoscientific belief that if something hasn't been proved, then it must be considered false. This I passionately reject. If something hasn’t been proved, it may be false or partly false, it may be true or partly true and this takes us into the realm of probability. We only work on an idea if we think that there is some possibility of success.

In trying to approach my premise ‘on the bias’, I have arrived at a number of assumptions that I believe to be universally true. The six assumptions stated below are the ones that form the basis for this fantasy.

First, if something is precious to us our instinct is to hide and protect it. These are not the "precious" stones of commerce but things that we find are an integral part of our soul. Second, the form of a symbol has a very conservative nature. As the meaning of the symbol changes, the form of the symbol remains close to invariant over many millennia. Third, the encoding of data for long term memory is best accomplished in story form or in poetry, in song or dance or in some combination of them. The population can learn and enjoy stories, songs, dance and poetry while those educated to look for depth can read their deeper meanings. Fourth, if we can put aside our own values and prejudices, mankind in all ages can be seen to be equally intelligent with equal ability to cope with the surrounding world. Each age has its own philosophic blinders. Fifth, the nature of observation changes with the changes in social beliefs and needs. The nature of observation sets the limiting screen for the understanding of cause and effect, or its absence. Finally, that the first five assumptions can be applied to mankind in all ages from the middle Paleolithic to the present, a span of one hundred thousand years.

A look at the "Precious"

(The first assumption.)

When something is truly precious people don’t flaunt it, they hide it and even try to hide its very existence. They try to distract attention from it, they try to protect it. To share what is precious is to risk being hurt.

Children, precious as they are, can not easily be hidden, though Rhea tried. Most societies have a group of mores designed to prevent a new mother from facing criticism of her new baby or else quickly killing it and when these mores are violated it can cause the mother a dreadful hurt.

Most precious things are personal beliefs that seem to be at the center of our soul. When they are challenged or ridiculed, our very being is under siege. For this reason a sexual relation that is precious is kept very private. A "sacred" place is profaned by the intrusion of others, especially those of a different mind set. We say that we are going off by ourselves, we don’t say where except to those we trust.

The instinct to hide the things that are precious is based on a pragmatic ‘truth’. There is no rational explanation for the things that are held precious. There are rationalizations but those usually fall when attacked. This is true for both individuals and societies. In the competitive power struggles that beset mankind the weakest, the most vulnerable points to attack are the things that are cherished. Both literature and history are full of examples.

Robert Graves expresses this idea of the precious in The White Goddess giving related meanings to three animals found in early Welsh and Irish poetry: The Roebuck, the Lapwing, and the Dog. The Roebuck, the white deer, that gets chased through the forest is a poetic metaphor for the search for a secret - the Roebuck being a simile for a secret. The Lapwing is a bird that uses misdirection to hide its eggs. The dog metaphor seems clear, the fighters that protect the secret.

For most of history, and I think even today, to know the name of something is to have power over it. As Robert Graves says"In ancient times, once a god’s secret name has been discovered, the enemies of his people could do destructive magic against them with it." Is this so different from a person’s name being placed on a list and sold across the country or having their names highlighted by the IRS?

A look at Symbols

(The second assumption)

Looking at three very ancient visual symbols - The Oak Tree, The Hercules (complete with lion skin) and the Christian form of the cross - we can trace some of their changing meanings, their intersections and separations.

There is an example of a Christian shaped cross in the Chauvet Cave (Upper Ardeche Region) to the right of the long panel of red dots. This may have been drawn some thirty thousand years ago. It is only twenty meters from the Paleolithic entrance to the cave where paintings have been radio carbon dated to thirty two thousand years ago. Its meaning has not been determined and probably never will be.

Hercules, a shamanistic figure, is thought to go back to the Paleolithic period in Lybia. Our earliest knowledge of him tells of a shaman that used hollow oak drums to make thunder - a thunder god - and was a cannibalistic sacrifice victim at the winter solstice. Later he became the Oak King serving the Priestess of the Triple Goddess with his twelve "merry men " in attendance. He also was tied to the Sacred Oak at the solstice, beaten to death and cannibalistically eaten. His head was sometimes smoked for oracular purposes.

The Oak Tree in early Celtic mythology became Duir,the seventh letter in the Beth-Luis-Nion alphabet and represented Dagda, the chief of the elder Irish gods. This tree/god relationship applies to all the rest of the thunder gods: Zeus, Hercules, Thor, etc. The Oak month went from June 10 to July 7 with St. John’s Day, June 24, in the middle. It was this day that the Oak King was burned alive reminiscent of the play by Sophocles, Heracles. The translation of these elements into the Christian story - the wooden cross of sacrifice, the central sacrificial figure (The Christ), the twelve apostles, the reincarnation (The Second Coming) tie these three symbols together. As the cross has become the central symbol, The Oak Tree has lost much of its symbolic importance.

A look at Menologic Story and Poetry

(The third assumption.)

Until thought, memory, and communication became completely codified in alphabetic print, stories, myth and poetry, song and dance were the vehicles for remembering and communicating across distance and the generations. The modality of thought is strongly influenced by the whats and hows of memory and communication: "...Wildly he shouted, and loud: John Alden, you have betrayed me! Me, Miles Standish, your friend! have supplanted, defrauded, betrayed me."

If Longfellow hadn't put it into verse, who, today, would know who Miles Standish was?

Often stories and poetry have a popular surface and an underlying depth of meaning or memory accessible to those educated to look for it. As an example, the Mother Goose nursery rhymes can show strange depths.

Sing a Song of Six pence, A pocket full of Rye, Sing a Song of Sixpence, A pocket full of Rye, Four and twenty Blackbirds, Bak’d in a Pye

When the pie was opened, The birds began to sing; Was not this a dainty dish, To set before the king?

The king was in his counting-house, Counting out his money; The queen was in the parlor, Eating bread and honey.

The maid was in the garden, Hanging out the clothes, There came a blackbird, And snapped off her nose.

The Mother Goose rhymes are easily learned by children for fun and entertainment with no meaning attached. In the case of "Sing a Song of Six pence" there are several, not necessarily conflicting or exclusive, meanings proposed by students of the genera.

One interpretation is that the four and twenty blackbirds are the twenty four hours of the day, the king is the Sun, the queen, the Moon.

Another is that the king is Henry VIII, Katherine is the queen and Anne Boleyn the maid. The blackbirds here become manorial deeds baked into a pie. This is reminiscent of Little Jack Horner and his plum.

There are others but the point is clear; little stories can have both memory and a meaning which either is not popularly known or is lost over time. These can be read by those educated to read them.

Myth and poetry - not mutually exclusive - record political events, astronomical events and changes, changes in the social structure. Often, all three are clearly related. Knowing the relationship between Earth and Heaven as recorded in historical China can make the nature of some astronomically oriented myth more believable and understandable.

In China the shaman-astronomers are recorded going back into prehistoric, Paleolithic times. The historical information showing this must have come down to the fourth century B.C. in mythic/poetic form much as Homer’s tales came down to him.

In historic times (Xia dynasty onward)the relationships between Earth and Heaven are accurately recorded. For the time between the fourth and first centuries B.C. there was no North Star, just stars revolving around an empty space in the heavens, the celestial pole. Confucius (ca 551 - 479 B.C.) compared the ideal ruler with the pole around which the whole cosmos revolved. Earth/Heaven was the interactive kind of interrelationship that typified Chinese thought when the celestial pole, the axis mundi was the deity Shangoli. The planets came together variously in conjunction; Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury. When they came together and went apart their motion on the background of fixed stars was similar to the king’s messengers moving about on the king’s business and coming together to set policy. They were Shangoli’s five Minister Regulators. Their conjunctions also set policy on Earth and when all five came together it heralded a change of ruling dynasty, permission for another family to take over since the Shangoli was unhappy with the state of affairs on earth. In late May 1959 B.C. the "great scarlet bird" (the Vermilion Bird constellation) set in the northwest clasping a jade scepter of authority - the five planets - in its beak. This heralded the fall of the Shang Dynasty and the rise of the Zhow.

Moving from recorded history into myth, a similar relationship is found in Meso and South America. William Sullivan’s work shows a strong probability that the overly easy fall of the Inca civilization to the Spanish was based on myths predicting the fall of a World Age at the time of the Spanish invasion. Myth predicted that the Gates to Heaven were to be closed - the precession was shifting the milky way in the predawn of the vernal equinox. The road to Heaven was closing and the Incas surrendered to the Spanish knowing that the change was inevitable. Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend’s great essay Hamlet’s Mill shows how myth records planetary convergence, the changes of World Ages, the precession of the Zodiac, and Hamlet’s Mill; the breaking the axis of the wheel of the heavens. As the north star moves out of position the great maelstrom looses its center point and a new wheel must be built.

Found in all societies along with the astronomical records encased in myth are the heaven’s mandate, as in China’s tain ming, which gives heavenly sanction to the existing earthly powers. Myths also define the society and change over time so societal shifts can be traced. In early Sumerian times Gilgamesh was an Date-palm Tree King and consort to the grain goddess Inanna. These were the myths of a matrilinear society. In the middle Babylonian texts Gilgamesh was king, a demigod, Inanna safely in her temple, women exiled and the patriarchy safely in control.

It is the responsibility of myth to give the theoretical and moral backing for the current society while protecting itself from the incursion of other belief systems. Myth must show the superiority of its culture over all other cultures and pass down important information between generations. It must also destroy earlier belief systems held by its ancestors. We see this in Western European society's attitude towards Alchemy which was a philosophical inquiry and became the roots of chemistry. We refuse to admit Shakespeare's relation to Alchemy as seen strongly in King Lear while we focus on all of its abuses as depicted in Ben Johnson’s play The Alchemist.

The problem with contemporary thinking about mythic society (a society whose stories we think of as myth) is that we look through our own truths (myths) thinking that the stories we tell ourselves are simply, reality.

A look at mankind’s coping skills and intelligence

(The fourth assumption.)

There are three broad areas where physical and social coping with the environment is required of any species. The individual must develop the skills within a society that allow for both mental and physical wellbeing. Since societies reflect the intellectual and physical natures of their environments they determine the individual’s environment. As a society loses its relationship to its environment, its ability to cope, it is forced out of existence by other, better integrated, more aggressive, social structures. On the grandest level there is species coping and survival. With ninety nine percent of all species that have graced the Earth now extinct the ability of a species to cope with its environment is not to be taken lightly. (The cockroach seems to have done rather better than most.)

Intellegence is harder to pin down since it is a culturally defined idea. On an individual level, intelligence, in this society,is generally defined as the ability to learn a body of intellectual information quickly and easily. This implies highly receptive long and short term memories. On a more exulted level, an ability to visualize and create is included. When societies have different goals,intelligence has different meanings.

Societal intelligence, as a concept, seems mostly to be used to produce and maintain a "pecking order" with the given society at the top, thus enhancing the societies self image and degrading all the others. For example, the Negro from being only a part of a person under the Constitution has typically been depicted as less intelligent and their culture deemed inferior to the dominant Caucasian society. The change in this belief indicates a change in the dominant culture.

The most common criteria for species intelligence is either skill in problem solving (a social scientific concept) or brain size and articulation.  The problem solving approach imposes the scientific view using our thinking as an ideal model. The brain size test fails within our own species and definition of intelligence. When confronted with Homo Sapiens Neanderthalis whose average brain size was probably equal to or slightly larger than ours, we squirm a little. Whales and elephants are of a different order so we have no useful models for comparison.

Tor Norreteander’s definition of intelligence is perhaps the most technically acceptable: Intellegence is thus not about remembering lots of microstates at once in sequence. Intelligence is about being able to see which macro- states best combine all the microstates.

The trick with intelligence is not to be able to account for a load of information but to be able to account for a load of exformation: information deliberately discarded, compressed into notions encompassing the vast exformation.

But this is not particularly helpful in this context so perhaps an intelligence sufficient to its needs is all that we can honestly say.

Returning to the coping individual, each person enters the world as a part of a culture with its own beliefs and technology. Survival is dependent upon finding a place in that society and learning the societal techniques utilized by the society. Occasionally someone is able to add a new idea or technical refinement and the society changes a little. When the balance within the society shifts sufficiently, the old beliefs are ridiculed into oblivion and the new beliefs become a new base. Both the good and the bad parts of the old society are discarded and the good is attacked the most vigorously - the bath water being thrown out with the baby. In communication theory the entropy - the exformation (discarded information used in producing the synthesis)- provides the depth of the new ideas. This process seems to pervade all nature. Only a minimum of information survives into the new order, but that is very meaningful and important.

A look at observation and cause/effect

(The fifth assumption.)

Our conscious mind will normally entertain between eight and sixty four bits of information per second. We receive around two million bits of information per second from our various sensory inputs and this means that most of the information we receive is dealt with subconsciously and mostly discarded. The question of what is presented to the conscious mind for consideration is largely a combination of two elements. Structure (DNA and the hard wiring of the nervous system), which varies from individual to individual, provides a basis for acceptance or rejection of information by the conscious mind. The other is the World View of the society that directs what is worth considering and what isn't. In the united States today we ignore and block almost all information that can be derived from the sense of smell. The other senses are equally, though not so obviously, restricted.

The disparity between incoming information and conscious thoughtimplies the need for one or more filters to decide what we consciously observe and think about. Even a casual observation of people, including one self, would seem to imply a variety of filters for conscious observation and thought. For the most part conscious observation is limited to things that "make sense" to us - things that in some sense we expect. The first stage of a shamanistic ecstatic trance sees abstract geometric figures. In a shamanistic society this is common, in ours it is rare. (Most rock art from around the world have examples depicting this stage of ecstasy.)

Modern Western society observes nature through a filter of theoretical science. Anything that doesn't fit into some acceptabletheory is not only overlooked but denied when pointed out. In all cases people observe what they want to observe and there is no reason to believe that it hasn't always been that way.

Cause and effect are very closely related to observation and it's mirror concept, synchronistically. Survival often depends upon finding a causal relationship in both nature and society. Finding a causal relationship carries the possibility of affecting the outcome but is often limited by what is considered worth observing.

Contemporary culture thinks of cause and effect in scientific terms. It dismisses all shamanistic, magical, alchemistic and, to a large extent, religious causality yet, each it its time were viable systems for survival and growth. Perceived cause and effect are an integral part of the social filters that direct observation. Like all social systems, they deny and demean all other systems.

How to become involved in the power of a different thought system without becoming trapped by it seems to be an open question. How to maintain detachment without being detached. "Is this possible?" is one of the critical questions in contemporary science and society.

A look at the universality of these assumptions

(The sixth assumption.)

Even though observational awareness and the focus of the conscious mind varies over time and place, its purpose remains the same: the preservation of the individual, the culture and the species. Species survival takes precedence over the culture survival and cultural survival takes precedence over individual survival. This structure is not a result of any conscious awareness and can be seen in most other species as well. Without it we wouldn’t be here.

As with all assumptions, this assumption must remain an act of faith, but faith needs some perceived congruence with a pragmatic reality. Most modern views of mankind come from some generalized Darwinian evolutionary model for physical, psychological and social development and there is evidence supporting these views - a congruence to a perceived pragmatic reality. Taking our egotistical values into consideration, it is not surprising that our predominant views are hierarchal; we can be superior to all previous cultures physically, technologically, intellectually, and culturally.

These assumptions challenge the Darwinian views. There are other viable hypotheses that lead to other conclusions modeling a pragmatic reality. Jeremy Narby says in the conclusion of his book, The Cosmic Serpent "We Westerners have our paradoxes. Rationalism has brought us unhoped-for material well-being, yet few people seem satisfied." Later he discusses a dimension of the mind that transcends rational materialism. "Scientific discovery often originates from a combination of focalized and defocalized consciousness. Typically, a researcher spends months in the lab working on a problem, considering the data to the point of saturation, then attains illumination while jogging, daydreaming, lying in bed making mental pictures, driving a car, cooking, shaving, bathing - in brief, while thinking about something else and defocalizing." In this fantasy the argument is that all awareness, conscious and unconscious, is based on environmental forces. Consciousness for a hunter - gathering society will dictate a different awareness and conceptual integration than for our theoretically indoctrinated contemporary society. The mental processes are the same for both, only what is important has changed because of a different society and technology.

An early tribal society protecting the name of its god, unsuccessfully, was no stranger to them than the United States trying, unsuccessfully, to protect its nuclear secrets. Both are attempting to keep a secret that an enemy could use against them.

Modern communication theory focuses on the exformation (all the data that is discarded when a synthesis is achieved) and the organizing of the exformation into some condensation that the conscious mind can handle. Audio and visual symbols, including key words written or in speech, are the ultimate in this kind of compression. Words, both audio and visual symbols are recognized in a way that allows the exformation associated with the symbol to come into awareness and the conscious mind. When my wife asked me what was Macbeth’s title, my mind went blank. Then "Thane" popped up from somewhere and with it a very dark picture of Orson Wells and the term "Thane of Cawdor." Slowly, more information made its presence known to me. The word "Macbeth", a loaded symbol, brought up some of the exformation in my subconscious mind, both informational and emotional.

Whether an audio or visual symbol is passed down through the generations is socially transmitted, regenerated through observation of nature, a part of the "hard wiring" of the brain, or regenerated as an archetype (also passed down through the generations) seems less important than the continual occurrence of certain symbols from the Neolithic onward across the face of the Earth. The meander, the whorl, the right, left and double spiral, the maelstrom and mill stone, the snake etc. are found in almost every society for which we have any record.

These six assumptions can be thought of as part of my unified "world view." This fantasy has turned out to be more about this time than about our ancestors, but peeking through the cracks I hope you find some potentially insightful ideas. We can never go back in time physically or intellectually and it is more helpful to look forward than backwards. Yet, there are ideas and processes from the past that could give us an idea about how to shape the future.

Send reviews,

Maurice H. Webster

e-mail address

webster@nets.com

Chapter One Bibliography

Opening quote: Richard Gregory as quoted in THE USER ILLUSION, Tor Norreteabder , Sydenham translation, Viking Press 1998

Alexander Marshack, THE ROOTS OF CIVILIZATION, Moyer Bell Ltd., 1991

Robert Graves, THE WHITE GODDESS, Noonday Press, 1948

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, THE COURTSHIP OF MILES STANDISH, 1859

Paula Underwood, THE WALKING PEOPLE, The Institute of Noetic Sciences, A Tribe of Two Press, San Anselmo, CA, 1993

David W. Pankenier, THE MANDATE OF HEAVEN, Archaeology, March/April 1998, pp. 26-31

Andrew George, THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH, Barnes Nobel Books, 1999

David Ferry, GILGAMESH, The Noonday Press, 1992

Sylvia Brinton Perera, DESCENT TO THE GODDESS, Inner City Books, Toronto Canada, 1981

Charles Nicholl, THE CHEMICAL THEATRE, Common Reader Ed., Akadine Press, 1997

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE Vol. 175, No 6, June 1989, pp. 662-695

Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams, SHAMANS OF PREHISTORY, Harry N. Abrams Inc., English Translation, 1998

Jeremy Narby, THE COSMIC SERPENT, Tarcher/Putnam, 1998

m. h. webster1999

Threads from the Past

Biblography