The Mythic Cycle of History

The usual view of history is that it is a linear sequence of mostly disconnected events. Or rather, that while there may be found patterns in specific things, such as the development of computers or the raising or lowering of women's hemlines in fashion, that there is no overarching pattern to the whole thing. 

This is in sharp contrast to many myths and religious views of history in which history is not linear but a circle, which is a continuation of a universal circular pattern that can be found in everything from the life and deaths of people to the passing of the seasons to the circular paths of the Sun and Moon. Birth, life, death, rebirth. Spring, summer, autumn, winter, and spring again. We can see the pattern in Christian mythology in which there was an original Eden, a fall from grace, a message of the return to grace, the end of the fallen world and a rebirth of a new Eden. All these circular understandings of history bear a family resemblance, though of course colored by the particular culture and spiritual tradition that they are found in. I leave it to you whether or not to acknowledge any of these circular views of history. 

However, whenever we are talking about history and particularly about time, we are getting into very tricky territory, so lets back up a moment. Previous posts of mine dealing with time probably only have parenthetic connections with this topic, though of course there are the similarities in terms of my denial that linear time is the only or even best understanding of time. Here I speak of a Mythic Age inside history: one may also speak of a Mythic Age outside history as Mircea Eliade does in his concept of the Eternal Return. I would say that this version of the Mythic Age is a religious experience of an essentially non-historical reality and so to call it an Age can be misleading, though usually traditional peoples who connect with this Age typically do view it as existing in the heroic past. Eliade's Mythic Age is similar to my experience in the Elysium Visions, an encounter with a sort of archetypal template of divine or mythic life which I did not view at the time as a particularly historical phenomenon. However the two do have a connection in that the Mythic Age IN history which I talk about here is typified by its harmony with the Mythic Age OUTSIDE history - Eliade's Mythic Age. The idea that Eliade's Mythic Age is essentially not historical is validated by the fact that people enacted patterns and rituals in which they were not merely repeating the actions of their mythic ancestors but actually participating in them by repeating. This can be most clearly seen in the Australian aborigine's ideas of Dreamtime; that by walking over the landscape reciting and repeating the epic events which are supposed to have happened in that landscape in the past, the person is not simply repeating things at a different sequential moment in time but actually participating in the original event. This signifies to me that the event is not an event, as if it existed in sequential time. It is an unhistorical archetypal pattern, a divine template. However, a historical Mythic Age does have much to do with this unhistorical version, in that it is in harmony with that template. The Cycle of History as I am talking about it now can be seen as a progressively increasing disconnect from that divine template, that unhistorical Mythic Age. 

You may understand this better in Judeo-Christian terms, limited though they are. In Christian myth there was originally no distance between the divine plan (unhistorical Mythic Age) and Man's actions (historical Mythic Age). Then the Fall happened, then the consequent spiritual decay leading to Armageddon, then the return to the original harmony. 

In this version of the circle of history, history is divided into three ages: the Mythic Age, in which the world and the "divine" are in sync; the Middle Age in which Man asserts his independence, and the Dark Age in which Man experiences the consequences of usurping the divine, and loses control over his fate to his dead idols which have taken on a weird life of their own, independent of him. The Dark Age is the result of "the arrogance men get when they see what they can do with their minds" to steal a quote from Freeman Dyson. It is important to note that this is a circle of history that concerns human history: it may be that it completely does not apply outside that. 

Now when I say divine, or when I say gods, do not imagine that I mean gods as conventionally imagined. Whether single God or multiple gods, gods are pictured in the image of human kings, which is itself a symptom of a post-Mythic world. To make the divine in the image of human power is a sign of a cycle of history that is well under way towards decay. I do not mean any such thing. The divine is not susceptible to definition in words, and the desire to so define it is an attempt to move it under human control.

MYTHIC AGE:

Age of Life

The Mythic Age is a time period, which probably ended at different times in different places, when there is no hard division of sacred and profane time. All time is sacred time, and people very regularly and easily interacted with mythic reality and in fact interacted with it in mundane everyday things. In most cases, it would be a pre-neolithic or at best very early neolithic world although it is often reimagined as later in the myths of later generations. It is characterized by the level of human power and control over their environment: they have very little of it. There is no significant imagined difference between "human" and "animal." Acts of heroism were to some extent required by the environment, facilitated by the regular strenuous physical activity that would often be needed to survive, and so tales of such heroism and epic feats of strength would be common. There are no centralized authorities, no work per se (relatively little time had to be spent obtaining food, shelter and so on), and visionary experiences and altered states of consciousness would be fairly common and expected. It is entirely possible, even likely, that their normal state of consciousness would be characterized by us today as an altered or visionary state of consciousness. Divination and other forms of prophetic activity would not be common as they would be later, since divination presumes a divide between the divine and mundane that needs to be bridged. There would be few or no religious leaders although some individuals might be prized for special abilities.

It goes without saying that in this age, there was little trade, no money, and life was centered on life itself. Actual life was everything.

MIDDLE AGE:
Age of Power

In certain areas even before the development of agriculture, there would have been areas which were so rich in food sources that the centralization of power in chiefs or kings, division of labor, and creation of religious specialists could occur even without agriculture. Organized warfare would have also started over possession of such areas. With the advent of agriculture however came the idea that life could be "reinvented" by humans: that the stable established pattern of life that had persisted for thousands of years could be changed at the will of humans, and that their immediate environment could be changed for the benefit of humans. However, these changes generally were not to the benefit of humans: they had to work harder, live shorter, be unhealthier and more prone to disease. Compared to the lives of their ancestors in all but one respect, their lives were worse. The one significant advantage of this way of life lie in warfare: large agricultural communities could both defend themselves better against attack and attack others more effectively than earlier peoples. This was a short-term advantage however as more centralized civilizations arose and the level and scale of wars increased. This era led to the rise of human kings, who then changed the myths and the religion of the people to reinforce their power and justify their rule. Religion became the province of specialists who could be placed under the power of the king, and rogue spiritual authorities who contradicted their message eliminated. Religion morphed from something which dealt with the whole world, to something primarily centered on humans, and god in the image of a human king. Kings who then claimed right of rulership from the god they made in their own image. Money was first developed, a conceptual exchange that began to mean more than the real things it represented. At the same time, people instinctively realized that something had been lost, and this gave rise to myths of a primordial paradise, golden age or Eden. Sometimes people who no longer understood this Eden primarily in spiritual terms developed myths of especially divine or wise kingship that allowed a golden age, such as in the Arthurian mythos. 

The various stages of this human revolution exploded across the world like waves of an ocean, as cultures that possessed stronger centralized control and higher technology and more human-centered religions conquered those who were still living in earlier stages and replaced the myths and religious practices of such people with their own. Under the pressure of these succeeding waves, the original heart of a culture could be completely overwhelmed and erased, and there are many cultures who we only know from the accounts of the people who destroyed them. The people themselves usually mostly survived, but the culture was killed. When Europeans with gunpowder-age technology encountered the still neolithic societies of the New World, the result was pure devastation of both culture and people, but devastation of that sort had been going on in the Old World for a long time. The Native Americans weren't the first people who got their culture raped, the conquistadors themselves came from a long line of raped cultures. 

However, though people were subjugated and enslaved, at least you could say they were still enslaved to individual persons. Kings or bigwigs of some sort. Neither concepts, capital, organizations or technology had at this point taken a life of their own and started essentially running the show. 

DARK AGE:

Age of Ghouls

The name "Age of Ghouls" might sound melodramatic, but it was the best phrase I could think of to describe the overall trend of this era. Technology had been developing in fits and starts - Roman technology depended on large armies (literally, the Imperial Legions) to build things like aqueducts and stadiums, which later times couldn't sustain because it lacked that labor base. However in about the 12th Century or thereabouts technology began to be a self-sustaining march, the pace of which was originally very slow but which increased with each passing century. The mechanical clock in the 13th century allowed those in power to order the lives of workers in accordance with abstract time rather than the natural rhythms of the days and seasons. By the 14th Century Europeans had gunpowder, which allowed them to dominate those that did not. By the 16th century they had steel. Corporations had their origins prior to the 14th Century, but didn't really catch on until the 17th Century when corporations like the Dutch East India Company, the British East India Company and the Hudson's Bay Company could ruthlessly wield power greater than many kings had at their disposal, purely in the name of money. Importantly, corporations were not tied to any living thing: they could have a life of their own. They could long outlive the people that founded them. Ideologies had long been able to take on a life of their own, as sort of mental viruses, and actually redefine the words that defined them. Concepts like "freedom". 

In the earlier Age of Power, ideology served power and always had. In the Age of Ghouls, ideology serves capital. Now we have a self-perpetuating, world-reconstructing power that has nothing to do with real biological life at all except as merchandise. It needs no king, and even Presidents and world leaders can be seen as servants of it rather than rulers of it. It depends on no individual people. It doesn't even depend on any one country; it can shift around as it pleases. And since it gets to redefine the public dialogue to suit it, it shifts the concerns of people from real things (whole food, clean water, clean air, clothes and shelter) to their fake surrogate reality (jobs, money, "opportunity," "free trade"). Moreover, by now people on the whole lack the ability to see through this manufactured reality, since they and their ancestors already had a warped worldview from the Middle Age and its focus on power and kings rather than the lives of people. The language in play in this new ideological environment literally does not allow them to see clearly unless something nudges them loose. Sacred time, which had been progressively more and more dislodged from people's experience (as something potentially disruptive to the prevailing power), is now declared not to exist. All time is profane time. We imagine that human beings are in control of our civilization, but in truth we are not. We have been captured by the ghouls of money and image and put in a cage of false language, so that we may never even see the bars of the cage we were put in. 

Divine realities are hidden at this time, but they aren't gone. You have to go looking for them, but how do you look for something that you don't think is there? How do you look for something when people for 6000 years have been pointing in other directions, or not pointing? Thus, for most people this is a trap without an escape, and certainly without an easy escape. As long as the handcuffs aren't binding too tightly, one might not look for the key, and become comfortable with the cage. It requires enormous courage to buck thousands of years of history.

How does the Dark Age end? Well, it certainly seems to think it will never end, that it can go on in just this way indefinitely, and in fact it might continue for centuries (a horrible thought.) However, eventually it will end sort of like the Norse said it would. Ragnarok. The End Of The World As We Know It. It could in fact involve literal battle, as different powers fight over the scraps of a falling system, or fight to prop up the system. In Norse mythology, Ragnarok is preceded by an unusual winter, a year at least without a summer. In essence, civilization as we know it is just that far away from utter collapse: one year without a summer. One year without a crop. Perhaps some natural disaster will precipitate this.

Eventually the Age will be destroyed, and humanity perhaps almost destroyed along with it because the mass of people will be so alienated from any process of actual biological survival that they will just wander the ruined streets until they die. There will be massive ecological damage as well, but the Earth can recover. Eventually, the cycle begins again, a new Mythic Age.

******

I was prompted to make this post because of a sort of vision I had, half-awake. There was a man or god who was a being of goodness in charge of an age of light. This man or god was slain, leading to the beginning of the age of darkness. I did not know the name at that time, but later I was doing a little research and came across him and instantly recognized him: Baldr. Baldr had begun to have dreams of his death, and this concerned his mother Frigg enough that she made every object or entity in every realm swear not to harm him. Since Baldr was good and loved, she was able to obtain that vow... from all but one thing. Mistletoe, for whatever reason was ineligible to swear a vow. 

The other gods had begun to make a sport of shooting arrows at Baldr and watching them fall harmlessly to the ground because the arrows would not harm him. Loki, the trickster god, put an arrow made of mistletoe in the quiver of Baldr's blind brother Hodr, who shot and killed Baldr. Frigg begged Hel, ruler of the underworld, to release Baldr and Hel agreed on the condition that all beings alive or dead would weep for him. All beings did, except one giantess, who is believed to have been Loki himself in disguise. The death of Baldr starts a series of events that leads to Loki's imprisonment and ultimately to Ragnarok. 

Baldr being shot by arrows. Loki is at right handing a mistletoe arrow to Hodr.

World-Tree

Y G G D R A S I L - Artwork by Robert Dodd

Omphalos (Navel of the World). Axis Mundi (Axis of the World). World-Tree.

These are symbols essentially referring to the same idea: a place where heaven, earth and underworld all come into contact, a place of communication between Earth and Otherworld. I consider it one of the most compelling single images in all mythology, and I was always instinctively fascinated by it. Even in times of my life when I was otherwise not very interested in such things, I always intuitively understood what they referred to. Of course, the idea of a 'holy place' at all signifies a place of connection between the mundane world and the divine world, and almost every religion has some version of it, even if they don't account for it much in their ideas. In Islam, the Kaaba in Mecca, towards which all Muslims bow. For Jews, the Foundation Stone in Jerusalem.

Of course in our post-Einstein world, we know that there is no one center of the physical Universe, but to interpret the World-Tree as a mere axle upon which all things rotate in mechanical fashion is to miss the idea completely. Many peoples revered multiple locations as omphalos or world-trees, and saw no contradiction in that. The Greeks had multiple omphalos sites in addition to the most famous one at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. There were multiple 'centers of  the universe'. Nordic peoples who revered Yggdrasil, the cosmic world-tree, also revered real trees in multiple sites as also places of connection, especially the yew tree which was regarded as related somehow to Yggdrasil. Sacred groves and sacred trees of many peoples can be seen as places of connection, as points of contact with the World-Tree. 

The idea of a World-Tree is a common worldwide mythological constant in shamanic cultures. Norse, Native American, Siberian, and early Indo-European beliefs all made reference to it. Generally speaking it appears in the most archaic, animist, shamanic traditions and tends to dissipate or become more abstract as religion becomes more abstract and more under the control of religious professionals and centralized religious and political authorities. What for the Celts or the Norse was incarnated in living trees became symbolized by human-made stone pillars or other structures for the Romans and Greeks. And these structures were often placed in human centers of power rather than where they might be found naturally. What did the Romans do when they wanted to shift the Celts to the Roman center of power and to destroy their independence? Cut down their sacred groves. The Christians did the same thing when they wanted to shift the center of gravity of the pagan Europeans to Christian Rome rather than their own sacred places. 

This is typical of what you may see as a recurring theme in my posts: that early on the divine was more and more wrested away from local people and places and from eccentric local shamans, druids and mystics; more and more distanced from the real world that they experience; and more and more the province of human power and ideology. More and more the world is perceived as centering on human beings, rather than human beings centering on and revering the world. An inverted World-Tree, we redefine the universe to center on us. It's a coup of sorts, actually; a power grab. They dethrone the actually sacred and put humans and especially the king or political power and authority in its place. The effect of this was to make spirituality more and more something that happens in people's heads or to religious professionals, and to degrade the network, the connections that actually existed through people's contact with sacred places. We can see recapitulations of this process in more recent history, it is always ongoing. The hearth was once the spiritual center of the home in many ways, and a place where essential life processes like cooking and eating happened. When television came along, it became a sort of hearth but not local or grounded in real life anymore - it pointed towards the centers of human power in distant places like New York or Washington. A false omphalos, a false World-Tree. It dragged the focus of people's lives away from the real and local and towards the distant and abstract (and unreal). The same process happens over and over again, it's everywhere.

The World-Tree is fundamentally a network of sorts, a meeting-place. A point of connection between World and Otherworld. There are of course multiple 'terminals' in this network, that is why the Greeks saw no contradiction in having multiple centers of the world. The World-Tree is not a center in space and time, it is a center as a place where the cosmos can come together in connection, because holiness is essentially a sort of relationship one has with what is more than oneself, and a realization that you are connected vitally with this 'more' and a part of it. A tree has its roots in the ground (Underworld) and its branches in this world, and those two branch systems are mirror images of each other, a place where two worlds come together. A human being might also be viewed as a sort of World-Tree in miniature: the Asian idea of chakras arranged along the spine is very similar to the idea of different worlds arranged along the branches and roots of Yggdrasil in Norse mythology.

What is most important to say is that this is not an abstraction and not something that has to be remote from personal experience, though due to our historical conditioning it may seem extremely bizarre to you. The World-Tree is not just some abstract tree in an abstract heaven. You can experience it through real trees (and other things). Initially when I started having visionary experiences connected with trees, I didn't clearly understand what was going on. I had a dream in which I traveled through the roots of trees and it began to make a bit more sense. There is no point in abstractly believing the concept of the World-Tree, as one might believe or have faith in the Christian god despite the lack of first-hand experience: the only point is in actually connecting with it. It's not an idea, it's a place.

I can't tell you where your local holy tree is located, at least not without spending time there myself. I can tell you there probably is one and likely more than one. I can't tell you how you can recapture the ability to identify such places: while it is natural to human beings to be able to identify them (some people having more ability than others), that ability has been squeezed out of us for the most part by our culture, which is the latest in a long line of cultures that has systematically and intentionally alienated people from such experiences. It is probably not that I regained that ability but that I never completely lost it.

Hopefully though, this talk about the World-Tree might rekindle that spark in some. Forget what you have learned. Forget the false World-Trees of television and schools and modern religion. Experience directly.

Trunk of an extremely ancient yew tree in Brittany. 

A Post For International Women's Day

Kali, Hindu goddess and bad to know.

I have posted many times touching on the topic of how the gods and goddesses of Mankind shifted from the archaic nonhuman, feminine, transgender and shapeshifting gods, to exclusively human-like and predominantly male and warlike gods, and how this transition reflected a change from a way of life closer to nature, where man was a part of the natural world, to one where Man attempted to dominate nature and set himself apart from it. However, it is important in the quest to return the feminine to her proper place in the world of the sacred that we do not engage in wishful thinking, because the transition to the patriarchal gods to begin with was an attempt to mold the sacred to be in line with the new human-dominated worldview. The most archaic goddesses were not all warm and loving and caring and all the things we associate with goddess nowadays. They could be destroyers, they could be scary, they were both givers and takers, birthers and slayers. This is because the real things the goddesses were based on were these things.

Take water. Life can't exist without it. 3 inches of it can kill you. Anyone who has looked at video of floods or tsunamis can appreciate how destructive water can be. I tend to regard Water as a goddess because nothing exists without it. It gives life. I love and respect Water, but if it is a goddess it is a powerful one that gives and takes life without concern for individual forms.

Earth. The Earth, the soil, nourishes all things. It is also the Underworld, the dead, decay. This is the nature of these particularly two-edged deities - both giving life and taking it. The story goes that when the (presumably native) excavators first dug up this statue of Coatlique, the Aztec Earth goddess, they buried it again out of fear. Like the Earth itself, it births you and eats you back again.

Coatlique. All-birthing, all-consuming Earth goddess.

You know, being human, I would love to believe in a warm motherly Virgin-Mary-like Goddess, but I am not called to share reassuring fibs with you. If you want love, get a dog or a loving mate or something. The Universe is both beautiful and heartless and that is the real world I want to share with you, and the real world that I want to come more into contact with myself. Because this beautiful heartless universe is not something different from yourself, you are a part of it.

And because the goddess stories generally come from the most archaic and in a sense most truthful and trustworthy sources, they share this resemblance. They are bounteously giving, they give us everything in fact, but are not therefore kind. They can be ruthlessly destroying but not therefore cruel. Kindness and cruelty are attributes of humans, not gods, and alongside the purely benevolent and loving maternal human-like goddesses of "more civilized" and patriarchal cultures comes the more cruel and warmongering human-like gods too, and a way of thinking that justifies human cruelty and oppression to women, destruction of the natural world and oppression of those who are different.  

"When the Dao is abandoned
'Charity' and 'righteousness' appear
When intellectualism arises
Hypocrisy follows naturally
When there is no peace in the family
people talk about 'brotherly love'
When the nation falls into decay
'Patriotism' appears.

-Daodejing #18

And so the simplistic loving goddesses and saints of later cultures are part and parcel with the wrathful and cruel male gods of those cultures. If you have a Virgin Mary, you have to have a Yahweh. You have ancient Romans who spoke a lot about family values while treating their women and children as property. Archaic goddesses are never simplistic, never mere embodiments of human virtues because they reflect real nature. Goddesses could be life-giving and total badasses at the same time, the nurturing breast and the red fang. They were above good and evil. So while we must reinsert the female into our spiritual life, that is not necessarily the same thing as only inserting stereotypical feminine attributes, because to some extent limiting loving and nurturing to women and war and wrath to men is an artifact of the very historical process we must turn away from.

The archaic gods and goddesses were also pretty gender-flexible, not to mention species-flexible. My favorite example is the Norse god Loki, who transformed himself into a mare and got himself knocked up by a stallion, giving birth to Odin's mount, the eight-legged superhorse Sleipnir.

Most Awesome Horse Ever. ;)

So the humanoid male trickster/troublemaker god Loki gave birth from his(!) female animal womb to the animal horse Sleipnir. So mixed up, gotta love Loki. ;)

Artwork by briannacherrygarcia

Some might say that on this International Women's Day I have not said much about women, or human women anyway. Even though I might have taken this as an opportunity for talking about being more loving and nurturing towards the animal and natural world, perhaps I haven't. Or perhaps you see actual human women you know in some of these goddesses, I know I do. I think the point however is that the stereotype of women as more loving and nurturing than men is part of a cultural legacy that has always oppressed women. So if I say that we need to incorporate more of the softer, more loving and inclusive in our spiritual life (which of course is always a good thing), to say that these are feminine characteristics is part of the severing of ourselves that has been the cause of much of the oppression of women, oppression of the natural world and oppression of people who don't fit the normal sexual or gender orientation. Men can be very gentle and loving. Women can be ass-kickers.

And women must be accepted as being more complicated creatures than the Virgin-Mary or Whore cardboard cutouts that our cultural heritage gave us. Like us all, both mother and bitch. Giver of life and destroyer. Like us all in fact, male or female, whether we accept it or not. Like Nature herself. 

In fact I am not talking about the liberation of women at all. I am talking about the liberation of us all.

The Flower of Corn

The Flower of Corn from The Perennial Plate on Vimeo.

Anyone who has read my previous blog posts will know what a powerful thing I think the corn plant is. And how important it is to preserve the strains that have been handed down for generations.

Spinach Devas

A spinach seedling in my back yard

Weirdness warning: this post is pretty far out for most people and I understand that. Feel free to skip it if it is too weird for you. Which, to be honest, it probably will be. ;)

I communicate with plants. Many people would consider that to just be weirdness or a symptom of some sort of mental instability on my part, and that's okay. I care not. Plants do however have an analogue to the animal nervous system and they do have a proven ability to use pheromone-type chemicals to communicate with each other, and it is not completely inconceivable they could communicate in this way with a suitably susceptible human.

I am growing spinach in my back yard and I have been cooing and fretting over my spinach seedlings as though they were little infants. And I have found that they are reacting to this, they greet me. This "greeting" is a wordless feeling, like a smile, that I get from them. Sometimes I sit in the back yard and tell them my troubles, mentally of course. They don't seem that keen to hear my troubles however. ;) The strongest reaction I get from them is when I am coming out into the back yard and checking how they are doing, checking the moisture content of the soil and so on. Looking after them, in other words. 

Why, however, would I be getting such a strong vibe from spinach seedlings? With trees, it is not every tree that I communicate with, it is a tiny minority of the trees I encounter, and one would assume trees individually have a greater complexity than a little spinach sprout. It's just a tiny spinach sprout. Even if plants are aware, one would think that these little things would be among the least aware because so small and undeveloped.

This leads us back to an issue in Japanese Shinto religion and some other animist ways: is it the plant I am communicating with, or a spirit in the plant? In Shinto, they have holy trees, but the tree is considered the "home" if you will of a spirit. In other words, it is not the tree that is holy per se, but the spirit (kami) dwelling in it. For the most part, I have tended to look at it the other way around, the tree is the spirit, there is no separate spirit indwelling in it like it was a mere log cabin. The spinach seedlings make me wonder however. Is it the spinach sprouts themselves that I am feeling, or has a kami or deva of some sort taken up residence in my spinach plants?

Alternately, it is possible that the plants have a sort of group or species spirit and that all the individual spinach plants in the world participate in this. So it would neither be true that the spirit is totally separate from the plant, nor would it be true that the spirit is only that individual plant. Rather, one spinach sprout is merely one extension, one instantiation, one particular body which participates in the species-entity spinach. It may be possible that some of my other interactions with plants were actually interactions with the species-entity in which that plant participates. I don't know, the question only arises in an extreme case like this where it does not seem possible that the communication is simply with the spinach sprout. And in most cases it really shouldn't matter one way or another, it's just curious. It mostly only arises because I am deeply suspicious of the idea of entirely disconnected nature spirits, pure spirits not directly participating in the being of the thing itself. That kind of idea, a disconnected ghost that just happens to associate with a particular thing or place, is a symptom of the decay of animism into the more abstract forms of polytheism. A development that I am inclined to think of as a bad thing, something leading to abstract gods in general and the abstraction from a directly experienced animism to a conceptual polytheism.

***

After I wrote this, it started sleeting hard here, a late freeze for these parts. When I braced myself to exit the house and look at the sprouts, they were looking a tad frozen but spinach is pretty hardy. I see this very frequently with the very early spring weeds that are sprouting about, they endure a frost that you would think would surely kill them and they look damaged, but the sun comes out and it warms up and they're right as rain. Hope they'll be okay, I think they will be.

A Metaphor for The Universe

© Alexey Kljatov

How much we could learn from snowflakes, if only we were paying attention. Here we have a very simple thing, water, and yet it allows for this incredible complexity. It's like saying you could take a mud pie and have it magically transform into the roof of the Sistine Chapel. Or in fact like you could take the simplest atom in the universe, hydrogen, and have it transform into galaxies and stars and planets and people and chocolate and New York and poetry and sex and all the rest. Which in fact happened. Such incredible complexity, emerging from simplicity. What universe is this, where such a thing could happen?

Another thing we can learn from snowflakes is reflected in a quote from the Daodejing:

"The Universe is ruthless
it treats the ten thousand things as straw dogs."

"Ten thousand things" means the innumerable individual things in existence. Straw dogs meaning empty forms, the manikins used in Chinese religious rituals.  

From Wikipedia: 

Su Ch'e commentary on this verse explains: "Heaven and Earth are not partial. They do not kill living things out of cruelty or give them birth out of kindness. We do the same when we make straw dogs to use in sacrifices. We dress them up and put them on the altar, but not because we love them. And when the ceremony is over, we throw them into the street, but not because we hate them." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_dog)

 What is the universe going to do with all these billions of tiny pieces of art? It's going to melt them. ;) Almost all will go unnoticed by human beings, who will be forever deprived of the wonder of that form that melts on the top of their woolen cap, with them oblivious. And that is the way the Universe is also. It spits out all these marvelous things that fade away. People and pterodactyls and ivory-billed woodpeckers and gods-know-what might have arisen under some alien star, and it seems recklessly shamefully extravagant with these forms and the wasting of these forms but there are always more coming. Snowflakes are probably more individual in appearance than people are, unknown billions of configurations. And except for a miniscule percent of them, they go totally unnoticed by human beings.

Tree seeds and fish are notable examples in the biological world of this seemingly wasteful explosion of entirely expendable forms. A tree can dump thousands of seeds for the sake of one seedling that will survive. Fish throw thousands of eggs onto the waves, most of which will be eaten, for the sake of having one or two survive. Such a view of the universe, one in which we are spewed, erupted like lava from a volcano, into creation in a kaleidoscope of forms by a Nature that is neither particularly invested in our lives nor particularly grieved by our deaths, is not a view that is very flattering to human desires or human conceits. It is however the real universe, and we have to understand that in order to understand what sort of cosmos is behind all that. It is a universe capable of endless, seemingly frivolous, explosions of creativity for its own sake, the forms of which rise and fall and new ones arise perhaps endlessly, and perhaps in more universes than just this one. It is as if not being boring is the highest good, and all other things are secondary. Stasis is death.

And so, snowflakes. Billions of tiny pieces of art that go almost totally unnoticed, are born and melt and some day become other snowflakes. Because while the form of the snowflake changes, the water in the snowflake continues. Neither matter, energy nor information can ever be destroyed. And so it is with us all.

There is another thing we can learn from snowflakes, a human thing we can learn. That we can go through life completely surrounded with such marvels as they, and live completely oblivious to them. Probably everyone has viewed snow as this nasty bitter stuff you have to shovel off the steps and which makes your toes cold. But if that is all you know snow as, you are sleepwalking through life. You want to grab ahold of someone and shake them and say, "You are surrounded with billions of fabulous creatures and things, works of art are falling on your shoulders, wake up!" To not become dead to such things, I would think, would be the highest possible human priority next to survival perhaps, and yet people seem dead to them all the time, and only concerned with the human noise around us.

It is a magical, mystical, mysterious universe. It is not the universe you hoped for perhaps, and not the universe that flatters human psychology, but it is still magic. And I would think that delving into that mystery would be a very high priority in life, because in the end you are it. You are not separate from this strange mysterious mess. You are just the form that this strange mysterious mess is taking at this place and time. ;)

The Fall of the Fomorians

The Fomorians are described as sometimes having various features of animals, but also sometimes of
being very beautiful and completely human in appearance.

I am hardly an expert on Irish Mythology, these are just my observations from my hardly-expert readings on the subject.

The Fomorians are the bad guys of the Irish Mythological Cycle, which is the story of how the semi-divine Tuatha de Danann came to Ireland and were eventually supplanted by the Milesians, the ancestors of today's Irish. I am not going to suggest in this post that the Irish Mythological Cycle describes actual history: clearly it does not. What it does describe, in sometimes clouded and metaphorical terms, is a history that occurred in many places over long periods of time, and in a sense continues to this day. It describes in rough terms the outlines of the Neolithic Conquest.

I. The Neolithic Conquest

The usual term is "Neolithic Revolution" or "the Agricultural Revolution," the change that occurred when people starting raising crops and domestic animals more or less full time, in sedentary non-transient settlements. However, to call it a revolution suggests several things that probably aren't true. First is the suggestion that mesolithic peoples were unfamiliar with agriculture: this is almost certainly not the case. It's not rocket science to figure out that the place you spat watermelon seeds last summer is the place that is growing watermelon plants this spring. Mesolithic people had agriculture, but they used it as an adjunct to a primarily hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

The word "revolution" also implies that as soon as people were exposed to agriculture and village living, they had this "Aha!" experience and were immediately converted to the idea of working hard in the fields all day rather than goofing off enjoyably in the forest. More and more everyday the evidence is coming in that this was certainly not the case. Skeletons of people are compared before and after they undergo this revolution: the skeletons of sedentary agriculturalists show more signs of stress, spinal problems, disease, dental decay, and are overall shorter and show every sign of being less healthy than their own hunter-gatherer ancestors were a few hundred years previous. Agricultural work is hard, their diet less varied, and because of their closer quarters with other people they are more subject to disease. Also almost invariably with denser populations came more autocratic forms of government. A band of hunter-gatherers might have had some sort of informal boss-man, but he was probably pretty limited in the ways he could throw his weight around without encountering significant opposition. Compare this to the amount of labor that more hierarchical agricultural societies could compel from their people. The mounds and pyramids of the Americas and the pyramids of Egypt and many other ancient earthworks required immense labor, and that labor really wasn't done for the benefit of those who were doing the work. The labor was done to glorify the king. You get the "Neolithic Revolution" and soon you get chiefs and then kings and standing armies who can compel obedience on behalf of that king. None of this is an advance in human health or happiness compared with mesolithic hunters and gatherers.

Where the main advance does lie, is in physical security. Not food security so much, though of course there was always the possibility for hunters and gatherers that they might starve, and farmers can have granaries that can store food for years. No it was an advance in physical security, protection against attack. Obviously if you are in a neolithic village with a couple hundred people in it, and the other tribes around you are mesolithic hunter-gatherer bands of twenty-odd people, they would be a fool to attack you. You on the other hand are more able to attack them without putting your homes at that much risk. And this is what happened. The change to sedentary living dependent on agriculture wasn't an improvement to freedom, convenience or health, it adversely affected those things. What it was, was a stone-age arms race, and once a community converted to that way of life all those around them would likely either follow suit for their protection or eventually be annihilated as the agriculturalists required more and more land for their crops and flocks. Undoubtedly many hunter-gatherers looked at the early agriculturalists and said, "they live and work like slaves, their way of life makes them sickly, why would I want that?" Unfortunately, they would have eventually been destroyed or assimilated by these agriculturalists who if nothing else were able to have much higher and denser populations than their enemies. Even those who were not conquered or assimilated, the new villages and towns were disease factories, and although the hunter-gatherer's more dispersed groups would have given them some protection from these plagues, eventually they would have reached them too with disastrous results.

So we see that we cannot really call it a "Neolithic Revolution" or an "Agricultural Revolution," it was a conquest, an innovation in weaponry that gave those who had it power over those who didn't and who quite sensibly would have preferred to have nothing to do with a life of backbreaking labor under increasingly dictatorial chieftains. To quote Stalin on the topic of weaponry: quantity has a quality all its own. However strong or healthy or brave the hunter-gatherers would have been, the farmers just had way more numbers. It wasn't a revolution to a better way of life which hadn't existed before. Mesolithic peoples had agriculture and more freedom AND a healthier way of life. It was a change for military advantage. Hence, I call it the Neolithic Conquest. While we might be inclined to say that it all worked out for the best, now that we have televisions and Xboxes and jet planes and convenience stores (and computers and blogs), it is clear that up until the Nineteenth century perhaps (and even later), "civilization" was a bum deal for the vast majority of people who were subject to its effects. People were healthier and freer as hunter-gatherers than they would be for centuries to come, and probably much of that still holds true. They had no jobs, no bosses, better diets, and had to work for their sustenance maybe a third as much as people today do, and had no significant problems getting their needs met. You didn't have to wait for the weekend, or yearly vacation time, to knock off. If you had enough pemmican in your pocket, every day was a vacation day. No, they didn't have modern medicine, and many things that hospitals today can treat very handily might have proved fatal to them, but it remains to be seen what the long-term effects of medicine are going to be on the human race.

II. The Fomorians and the Tuatha de Danann

According to the mythology, when the Tuatha de Danann (the People of the goddess Danu) arrive on the shores of Ireland, they don't appear to have agriculture (although the matter seems slightly uncertain.) When they arrive, the Fomorians are already living in Ireland and they either have yet to develop a sedentary agricultural way of life or only recently developed it. It does clearly state that the Fomorians were known as hunter gatherers prior to this time. So as far as the Neolithic Conquest goes, they seem to be about at the same level. They both came to agriculture only lately, and they both have a moderate level of hierarchy (they both are referred to as having 'kings') If you read between the lines however, the Fomorians seem much more cut from the hunter-gatherer cloth and the Tuatha de Danann much more in an agricultural mode. Why do I say that?

First, the Tuatha de Danann: they are clearly referred to as civilizers. No hunter gatherers ever had reason or need to call themselves such, and the more hierarchical the society the more likely they are to call themselves such. Classical examples (literally) would be the Greeks and Romans. The Greeks clearly felt themselves to be culturally superior to all other societies, and the Romans not only considered themselves superior to the 'barbarians' but felt an obligation, a 'white man's burden' if you will, to bring civilization to them. This reaches its ultimate level in Victorian England and America, where it is considered not only right but a moral necessity to bring the benefits of Anglo-Saxon enlightenment to all the non-Western peoples of the world. What they were actually doing to the Africans and the Native Americans and other peoples all over the world, was enslaving them. The fact that they not only wouldn't admit this but honestly couldn't see it, couldn't see that what they were bringing was oppression, calls for levels of blindness to the faults of one's own society that are hard to imagine. I don't doubt the accounts of the time that they really believed they were civilizing the wild godless savages, doing them a good turn. They probably even expected to be thanked in some future time for bringing Anglo-Saxon superiority to their shores.

The Tuatha de Danann also possessed some magical objects, one of which was an inexhaustible cauldron of food that would never run out and from which no man would ever leave unsatisfied. One wonders why they would have needed agriculture if they had the magic endless bucket O chicken. One answer is that the magic cauldron wasn't a substitute for agriculture, it was the result of agriculture. Imagine a hunter-gatherer staring at a granary that contained enough grain to feed the whole village for two years. Would such a structure (roughly cauldron shaped perhaps?) not seem an inexhaustible supply of food and in fact magical? Certainly no one man would ever eat to the bottom of it. Granted, one might be tempted to write off the story of the cauldron, and the whole thing, as so much higgledy-piggledy nonsense, but that nonsense has been communicated down the generations for millennia. While the literal truth of the magic cauldron is of course nonsense, there are truths behind most legends. To a person who never sees any more food than one killed deer or whatever his next handful consists of, a large granary is very impressive and could very easily be mistaken for magic. The persistence of these magic cauldrons in Celtic myth certainly points to some powerful experience which has become obscured by the mists of time.

Secondly, the Formorians: they are clearly depicted as chaotic, primeval and atavistic. The opposite of the bright and shiny and civilized Tuatha. They have two related features that are most interesting for the purposes of this discussion: they are often depicted as partly animal, and they are depicted as having multiple forms. So for instance, some of the Formorians are clearly completely human in form, even beautiful, while some others are depicted as having goat heads on human bodies and other such things. And yet the Formorians are one people, not multiple, and they are the same species as the Tuatha (or very close) since they are able to marry them and have offspring. Again, you have to give some leeway for this being mythology, but maybe not completely. I think there is a kernel of truth behind these outlandish legends.

One tendency of hunter-gatherer societies that tends to diminish the more "civilized" the society becomes, is the tendency of priests and shamans to wear animal skins ritually or even take on the personality or become possessed by the spirits of animals. In hunter-gatherer societies it is basically a universal, and no better demonstrated visually than by the paleolithic rock painting of the shapeshifted "Sorcerer at Trois-Freres," made around 13,000 bce. Here the feet. legs and hands are human, and everything else is animal.

Images of antlered and semi-animal humans are very common in pre-agricultural and early post-agricultural societies and with a few exceptions tends to disappear in more hierarchical societies, as presumably does the wearing of animal parts by shamans and spirit possession of shamans by animals. One might be tempted to note ancient Egypt as an exception, with their plethora of animal-headed gods, but these are clearly gods not human beings. In ancient Greece and Rome, animal form disappears from both the figures of the gods and the regalia of the priests (with the exception of a few marginal cults perhaps.) Images of the gods become wholly human in appearance, denoting perhaps a disconnection from the animal world and a preoccupation with the human one. The fact that there are priests who officially handle a person's interaction with the gods signifies a distanced and abstracted relationship.

So a visitor from an "advanced" society who sees animal-human forms in a dark forest and who sees these creatures acting like animals not humans, might be excused for thinking that they aren't human. Moreover, shapeshifting is a common theme in most shamanic cultures, by which I mean that I don't think that they actually turn into animals but that they can put on the quite convincing appearance of being one. This shapeshifting is an attribute which is normally transferred to gods, not humans, in hierarchical cultures like the Greeks and Romans. Zeus might be able to turn into a swan, various divine beings change form with ease, but people cannot.

III. Semi-Divine Beings

Both the Tuatha de Danann and the Formorians were considered to be semi-divine beings by the Milesians who were considered the ancestors of the modern Irish people. The Christians who recorded these myths were careful to call them "semi-" divine, but they are often considered to be half-remembered relics of the archaic gods of Ireland. Of the two though, the Tuatha de Danann would clearly be agricultural and civilized gods, perhaps the very same gods as the gods of the ancient Celts, and the Formorians the wild ancient deities of the hunter-gatherers that preceded them. However the Tuatha de Danann and the Formorians can also be seen as the peoples that worshiped these gods. In other words, the Tuatha represent the first wave of the ancient Celtic invasion of Ireland and the Formorians represent the pre-Indo-European peoples that were there originally.

If so, then a rather sad picture emerges, one that was undoubtedly repeated around the world throughout the Neolithic Conquest. The Tuatha, the first wave of Celtic immigration, invade and eventually displace the Formorians by virtue of the high population concentrations that crops and flocks make possible. It is said that the Formorians are eventually "swept into the sea" by the Tuatha.

The Tuatha in turn are displaced by a new wave of Celtic immigration, the Milesians. According to legend, the Tuatha and the Milesians make a deal and divide Ireland, but the Milesians get all the land that is on or above the surface of the Earth and the Tuatha get all the territory below the surface. So the Tuatha retreat into the sidhe, the fairy mounds, the various ancient tombs and mounds dotting Ireland. They retreat to the underworld or otherworld, from which they supposedly occasionally make forays into the world of men as elves or other fey beings. The Tuatha have "become" ancestors, withdrawn into the world of the ancestors represented by the mounds, which is the same place as the underworld or otherworld. Which might just be a snarky way of saying "they're all dead," but certainly their influence on Celtic mythology was far from dead. They would continue to put in appearances even as far away as Britain, where the Morgan le Fay of Arthurian legend and in fact Merlin himself were reputed to be at least partly "fey," supernatural descendents of the Tuatha de Danann.

The Formorians and their lore, unfortunately, was swept aside and forgotten, as one day the lore of the Celts in most of Europe would also be swept aside and forgotten, and their druids killed, when Rome invaded Western Europe. In other words, just as the Formorians were deprived of their culture by the 'civilized' Neolithic conquerors of their time, the Celts would one day be deprived of their culture by a more hierarchical and 'civilized' society with a more abstract and distanced religion, the Romans. It's a sad tale, both for the Formorians and eventually for the Tuatha. One becomes extinct, the other becomes a dim and misty legend. One that would probably have been lost to the sands of time had the Romans not stopped short of invading Ireland.

Modern shaman

Native American rock art

Perhaps the Celtic antlered god Cernunnos

Lion Man of the Hohlenstein Stadel, the oldest known zoomorphic (animal-human) sculpture and the oldest uncontested example of figurative art, period. 40,000 years old, twice as old as the cave art at Lascaux.

Native American rock art, a horned entity.