In the Beginning: Origins of Man and Myth

 

The material of myth is the material of our life, the material of our body, and the material of our environment, and a living, vital mythology deals with these in terms that are appropriate to the nature of knowledge of the time. 

 

                  This woman with her baby is the basic image of mythology. The first experience of anybody is the mother's body. And what Le Debleu called participation mystique, mystic participation between the mother and child and the child and the mother, is the final happy land. The earth and the whole universe, as our mother, carries this experience into the larger sphere of adult experience. When one can feel oneself in relation to the universe.  In the same complete and natural way as that of the child with the mother, one is in complete harmony and tune with the universe. Getting into harmony and tune with the universe and staying there is the principal function of mythology. When societies develop out of the earlier primeval condition, the problem is to keep the individual in this participation mystique with the society. Now, looking around, you see how little chance we have, particularly if you live in a large city. 

 

                  Also we have the problem of the woman and the man in relation to mythological experience. In spite of what the unisex movement states, the differences are radical from the very beginning to the end. This is not a culturally conditioned situation. It is true also of animals, among Jane Goodall's chimpanzee friends, for example. One of the problems in human development is the long infancy. The child, until fifteen or so, is in a situation of dependency on the parents. This attitude of dependency, the attitude of submission to authority, expecting approval, fearing discipline, is the prime condition of the psyche. It is drilled in.  Also, the particular mores, the particular notions of good and evil and roles to play of the society, are imprinted. 

 

                  One is born, is a blank - a little biological creature living spontaneously out of its nature. But immediately after it is born, the society begins putting its imprinting upon it - the mother body and the whole attitude of the mother.  You can have a gentle, loving mother or you can have one who is resentful of the birth, which conditions a whole psychological, out-of-adjustment, situation. I was surprised to hear from Jane Goodall that the young chimpanzee also has a long period of dependency on the mother. And one of the psychological problems of the chimp is the same as that which the human being faces, namely, after weaning and disengagement, to become actively, psychologically,  disengaged from the mother. 

 

                  Until very, very recently, the condition of the female in the human society has been that of service to the coming and maintenance of life, of human life.  That was her whole function-the woman in the role of center and continuator of nature. The man, however, has a very short and ultimately unimportant relationship to this whole problem. He has another set of concerns. Jane Goodall's males control an area of some thirty miles circumference, and they know where the bananas are. When the bananas are failing in one area, they know where to go for more. They also are defenders. They defend against invasions by other little tribes. And just in the primary way, the function of the male in this society is to prepare and maintain a field within which the female can bring forth the future. These are two quite different roles. And their bodies are made for them as well. The male is not engaged, like the female, in the constant charge of children. He has a lot of free time. He knows where the bananas are, but it isn't time to go there now, and nobody's bothering us, so what do we do? This is it; in men's clubs, delousing each other. So, this is a long-standing institution, the men's hunting team, the sports team, the men's club. 

 

                  These are Hill Tribes people of New Guinea. Now the interesting thing about this is that this is a ceremonial battle, but serious. There is plenty of food. There is no need for one tribe to invade another to get their property.  What are the men going to do? They are sitting around, with nothing to do, so they invent a war. This is a war game, and the spears are serious. So, when one man is killed, the battle ends and then we have a period of waiting for another attack. This gives the men something to do. All the time they are on guard against the other one launching the return attack, preparing for it.  The male has to have something serious to do, that's all. 

 

                  The male body is built for combat, for defense. It is a fact that, in the human body, every muscle has an impulse to action and one is not fully alive unless one is in action. So we have the invention, always, in societies of games. Games of strength, games of cleverness, games of winning, as in ancient Greece. In the male community what is important is the ranking, the pecking order, what Jane Goodall called "Alpha Male" - who is Alpha Male? Who is top male? In a charging display, a fellow comes down the line pulling down branches, and anyone who wants to claim top male position has to challenge him in this action. The winner is top male. She describes one little fellow, who was anything but a top male, who found that by kicking oil cans around he could make quite an impression. For a couple of days, before everyone else caught on, he was top male. 

 

                  Jane Goodall described a very interesting episode which struck me, and I bring it forward as a little suggestion.  She was seated on a hill slope, observing through glasses a number of her chimpanzee friends over on the opposite slope of the valley. There were half a dozen males, and females of about the same number, and a few of the little ones. It was pouring rain, and suddenly there was a prodigious thunderclap and the males went bananas.  They started charging displays one after another. When I heard that I recalled that the philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) had suggested that the first notion of the godhead arose out of experiencing the voice of the thunder. The voice in the thunder

is the first suggestion of a power greater than that of the human system. 

 

                  The male chimpanzee is almost twice as heavy as the female. There is no question about physical supremacy. This applies largely to the male!  female in the human sphere as well.  Here is Theseus abducting Antiope, the queen of the Amazons - the power of the male and the female submission to it. The female is physically vulnerable. Also, she is booty, and one of the problems of the male is to protect the females of the community from abduction. This is a long-standing situation, and the breeding of the race favors these two opposed physical organizations. And so the myths have to deal with this, and the male body and the female body have their symbolic values throughout the system. 

 

                  Now, as for biological spontaneity, a young female chimp takes her younger brother or sister as a doll and imitates mother and plays with the child. Males don't do this. The young male starts pushing young females around. Then he starts pushing older females around. When he gets to be really big and strong he enters the

men's group and finds his place in the pecking series. Two entirely different spontaneities. Two very different

natures. 

 

                  It used to be thought that the thing that distinguished man from the beast was his toolmaking. Homo habilis, man the toolmaker. Yet a female chimp made a little sheaf of reeds. She pulled the leaves off and prepared a system of tools for herself. She poked the reed down a termite hole, and the termites down there grabbed it, and then she drew it out and licked them off. After she did this for a half hour or so, the reed began to get soft. So she threw it away, picked up the next one she had prepared, and went on. It went on for two or three hours this way, like some woman eating candy and reading a French novel. But she actually had tools here. 

 

                  Now we come to an artist's representation of an australopithecine. This is one of the, well, perhaps the earliest grade of hominid that has yet been identified. This is in south and east Africa. This type of creature is now being pushed back to something like four or five million years ago. He has picked up a toool and is running, but the important thing is the legs. Apparently the first essential development of the hominid, distinguishing him from the arboreal ape, is this kind of running leg, which released the hands. The way in which apes walk uses the knuckles of the front legs or arms. It used to be thought that the brain enlargement was the main distinction; not so anymore. It was the legs. This left the hands free for manipulation, and then the brain increased. 

 

                  A hand from southern Ethiopia from four-and-a-half million years  ago shows no knuckle walking. This is a human hand already, four-and-a-half million years ago. Now this first type of human being, when we get above the australopithecine, which has the brain capacity simply of an ape, is the Homo habi/is, as he is now called, with a brain capacity a little larger than that of a male gorilla, something like 800 or so cubic centimeters. Beyond that, then, we come to the second grade of man, known now as Homo erectus, an early example of which was Pithecanthropus from Java, called Java man. The brain capacity here is up around 900 cubic centimeters. 

 

                  We also have tools from this date, about 500,000 B.C. - practical tools. If apes could handle stone and break it, the tools would be practical tools of this kind. But there is a particular tool that, for me, represents the emergence of a human type of consciousness - the birth, you might say, of the spiritual life such as no animal would ever have invented. This tool, also from 500,000 B.C., was found on the banks of the River Thames. It's larger than what would be useful, about six inches or eight inches long. What Robinson Jeffers, the California poet, calls "divinely superfluous beauty" is here. 

 

                  There are two types of human beings. There is the animal human being who is practical and there is the human human being who is susceptible to the allure of beauty which is divinely superfluous. This is the distinction. This is the first little germ of a spiritual concern and need, of which the animals know nothing. Since this tool is larger than what would be practical, the suggestion is that it must have been used in some sort of ritual context. So there is a slight suggestion here of the probability - the possibility, if not the probability - of some sort of ritual action, probably associated with the meat or food that is to be eaten. 

 

                  We come now to Homo sapiens. This is the first order of Homo sapiens, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, Neanderthal

man. He used to be the one that was called the ape man, but we find that his brain capacity in some cases is over i,6oo cubic centimeters, and the brain capacity average today is less than 1,600 cubic centimeters. So we've got

to pay our respect to this chap. He was a tremendously powerful figure that emerged and took the land just south of the great glaciers of the Riss-Wurm glaciation, the last laciation, appearing somewhere around 200,000 B.C. and surviving until about 40,000 B.C.  That's a long, long season. And I want to stress him. This is Homo sapiens. The brain has come to a certain size and there is a transformation of consciousness and it's at this period that the first infallible signs of mythological thinking appear. And they appear in two aspects. 

 

                  The first is of burials. In a burial from about 6o,ooo B.C., from Mount Carmel, in what is now Israel, the jaw-bone of a boar was found. In other words, a sacrificial offering has been associated with the burial. The body is in the crouch position of the fetus - returned to the womb. This is the first experience of mystery beyond that of the magic of divine and superfluous beauty. This character was our friend: walking around, warm, talking. He lies down, something departs, he's cold, stiff, and begins then to decay.  What has left him? The notion that what has left is still alive is what we experience here. Burial with grave gear. It is in this period of Neanderthal man that the first burials appear. Some remarkable burials have recently been found in northern Iran and Iraq of Neanderthal man from about 6o,ooo B.C. At Shanidar, a male, a powerful male, was buried with flowers on top.  The pollens remain and have been identified, most of them of medicinal plants. He may have been a shaman of some kind. But beyond that, beneath him were the bones of two women and a child. Do we have a suttee burial here already? We don't know. The date is about 6o,ooo B.C. So, the human spirit lives on beyond the wall of time that we know, and one relates to it. 

 

                  One of Jane Goodall's apes' tiny little babies died of polio. A polio plague struck the little community. This poor female had no idea what had happened, and she just walked around for days holding the little thing in her hand until it began to stink. Then she took it over her shoulder, walked off into the forest, and came back without it. Something has happened, but there is no conscious relationship to it; there is no way to handle it, to turn it into something significant. That is the opposite to the human experience system. 

 

                  Now we go back to Neanderthal times. There were two signs of the beginning of mythological experience and thinking. First was human burial, the second is worship of cave bear skulls. In the high alps of Switzerland and Silesia there have been found half a dozen small cave chapels in which there are cave bear skull caches, hiding places where cave bear skulls have been kept. Some of them have rings of stone around them. Others have the long bone of the bear in the bear's mouth, as though the bear were eating its own flesh. Others have the long bones poked through the eyes - fear of the evil eye, apparently. But just as the human being who has died is still there, so is the animal who has been killed still there, and we have to take care of revenge, malice, and so forth. 

 

                  Now the typical system of belief among hunting people who are killing and eating animals all the time and do not feel, as we do, that the animal is a lower form of life, is that the animal is an equivalent form in another aspect and is revered, is respected and yet killed. The basic mythic theme of hunting cultures is that the animal is a willing sacrifice. It comes willingly to be killed. You can find this in the myths all over the place. But the animal comes with the understanding that it will be killed with gratitude, that a ceremonial will be conducted to return its life to the mother source for rebirth, so that it will come again next year. There is also the idea of a specific animal - that is, you might say, the Alpha Animal - to whom the prayers and worship are addressed that are to concern the entire animal community.  It is as though there were a covenant between the animal and the human communities honoring the mystery of nature, which is: life lives by killing.  No other way. And it is the one life, in two manifestations, that is living this way, by killing and eating itself. And so perhaps already, in this figure of the cave bear skull consuming its own flesh, we have that image of what life is, which I think is the prime image. 

 

                  Today we don't kill the animals we eat. We have butchers who do that, and the food comes all nicely packed, particularly in the shopping centers.  You see people throwing this one around, or that one, saying, "Oh, I'll take this." It's a different attitude.  These people thanked the animal for having given itself. We thank our notion of divinity for having given us this meal. It's a totally different psychology, a totally different mythology. The

prime one is this of life, in its various manifestations, consuming itself. 

 

                  In northern Japan, in Hokkaido, there remains a race of people that is Caucasoid, not Mongoloid. They are known as the Ainu and their principal cult is a bear cult. This is today, forty thousand to sixty thousand years later.  The conservatism of primitive man is basic. To change a form, even of a tool, is to lose its power. And so you have here a cult from 6o,ooo B.C. still in northern Japan among the Ainu people. There is a sanctuary of black bear skulls of the Ainu, the counterpart of the caves in Switzerland from sixty thousand years ago. Now this idea, the animal master, is basic: the covenant of the animals, the notion of the physical as being secondary to the spiritual life's energy, a ritual of thanks and of returning the energy to its source for another visit. 

 

                  Now we come to later Homo sapiens, Cro-Magnon man. This order of the human species appears around 30,000 to 40,000 B.C. and appears not only in Europe, where he was first discovered, but also in Southeast Asia and in two or three other places, as though there was a parallel evolution taking place. This reconstruction by W. K. Gregory is based on the first CroMagnon skull that was found in the Dordogne. Known as the "Old Man of Cro-Magnon," this is the man who did those beautiful works of art in those great caves. 

 

                  Among the first images were Paleolithic Venus figurines, as they are called. They stand a few inches high, and now something like two hundred of these have been found in a belt stretching from the Atlantic coast of France and Spain right across Asia to Lake Baykal on the borders of China.  They are all of essentially the same type. There is no action on the face at all, no face whatsoever, and there is great emphasis on the breasts and hips and loins. Here is the miracle of the female body, the mystery of the female body, which gives birth to life and nourishment to life - that mother we were talking about in the beginning.  There are no feet, and this is explained simply by knowing that they were made to stand up in little household altar shrines. Two or three have been found actually In situ. These little figures are associated with dwelling sites, rock shelves under which the community lived. They do not appear in the big caves, only in dwelling sites. This is the mother of life. She is symbolic of that which all women incarnate.  

 

                  This figure is from a shelf in France called Laussel, and it is a very important and suggestive figure. This little Venus of Laussel is holding in her right hand, elevated, a bison horn with thirteen vertical strokes. That is the number of nights between the first crescent and the full moon. The other hand is on the belly. What is suggested - we don't have any words of writing from this period - is a recognition of the equivalence of the menstrual and the lunar cycles. This would be the first inkling we have of a recognition of counterparts between the celestial and earthly rhythms of life. 

 

                  Alexander Marshack, in his formidable volume The Roots of Civilization, deals with a number of staves, or staffs, of this kind which are notched.  He studied a number of them with a microscope and found that the notches were not made by the same instrument at the same time on any one piece. He says these are probably timefactored counts. Many of them suggest very strongly counts of the lunar cycle.  So maybe, out of the women's concern for this rhythm that they will have recognized in their own bodies, we come to mathematical and even astronomical reckoning. 

 

                  This figure is known as the Venus of Lespugue. It has been damaged and so it isn't so beautiful as it once must have been. But I'm presenting this to demonstrate that these are not naturalistic; they are aesthetic compositions.  Brancusi might have been interested in this. The whole magic of the woman is brought here into one circle. The breasts and the hips brought down together, and then you have that elegant sweep of the chest to the head and then the feet, where she was made to stand in a little shrine. These figures date from around i8,ooo B.C., the Magdalenian times, or even earlier. 

 

                  Turning to the problem of the male in this society, we go into the great temple caves. Nobody would live in these caves. They're cold, they're dangerous, they're dark, and they are frightening. The general consensus of scholarship is that they represent the sanctuaries of the men's rites, where boys were turned into men. And what they had to learn was courage. They had to undergo death and resurrection rituals. They died to their dependent infancy, and they came to maturity as self-responsible,  active,  protecting males. And they had to learn also not only the art of the hunt but also the rituals of the hunt. 

 

                  This particular figure is known as the Sorcerer of Trois Freres. An enormous cave, something like a mile in its reaches, in the Pyrenees, it is called Les Trois Freres because three brothers, playing with their dog, discovered it. The dog fell down a hole, and when they went down that hole they came into this fantastic cave. The main chamber is an enormous chamber with this figure dominant. The chamber is now entered through artificial openings, but originally, apparently, it could be entered only through a long flume, like a pipe, about fifty to seventy-five yards long, through which one had to crawl, as though it were a rebirth theme. One of the great scholars in this field, Herbert Ku' hn, has described crawling through it, and if you're susceptible at all to claustrophobia you would hardly get through. Well, one can imagine a team of four or five youngsters being sent through, and when they came out the other end, this is what was looking at them.  And all around the rest of the cave are engravings of animals: the animals of the great hunting plains. The hunting plains were abundant in animals, like the animals of the Serengeti. The Sorcerer is part human, part animal. This is the animal master in a ritual context. The evidence for shamanic action in these periods is very convincing. He

has a lion body, and the placement of the genitalia in the rear is of the feline.  The legs are of a man, the eyes are possibly of an owl, or of a lion, the antlers of the stag. The stag loses his antlers annually, but he brings them back again and so is an incarnation of the forest spirit. Any animal that has an annual cycle, for instance, the peacock losing his tailfeathers, becomes symbolic of the process that moves the seasons. So this is the mysterious Sorcerer of Les Trois Freres. Does he represent a deity, or does he represent a shaman? There's been an argument on this, but it doesn't make any difference whatsoever. Because the shaman, in that form, would be the deity. 

 

                  We keep thinking of deity as a kind of fact, somewhere; God as a fact. God is simply our own notion of something that is symbolic of transcendence and mystery. The mystery is what's important, and that could be incarnate in a man or in an animal; or not incarnate but recognized in a man or in an animal. George Catlin, in the northern Missouri River among the Mandan Indians, painted a Mandan shaman, an animal man. In one of the caves of France, there is the same dancing figure. 

 

                  In the great cave of Lascaux, in the Dordogne, in what is called the rotunda, another great chamber, there is a frieze of animals. On the left corner is this strange beast with these strange horns. No animal in the world looks like that, and yet these artists painted animals in a way that no one's been able to paint them since. So what did they have in mind here? We will go to Australia. It is remarkable the continuity from these caves to Australia and what we can find. Here is an Australian elder in a ritual costume with the same "pointing sticks," as they are called there. Now the pointing stick has been described at length by Geza R6heim in his study of Australian psychology. The pointing stick is a negative phallus; instead of generating, it kills. With certain whispered magical charms it is pointed between the legs at the enemy, and the enemy will then be killed by being ripped open from the rectum to the genitals. 

 

                  At Lascaux, in the crypt, a lower chamber, this famous image appears.  This definitely is a shaman. He's got the masked head of a bird on his baton de commandement. Here is the erect phallus, the negative phallus, the pointing sfick; and by miracle a lance has struck through the animal master here, which is a bison, and opened up his guts exactly as the pointing stick would have worked. This particular figure has brought about a great deal of discussion. Some writers have suggested it represents a hunting accident, which is ridiculous. What we know about magic would indicate that

if a hunting accident were depicted in the most sacred place of a sacred cave, it would produce hunting accidents by sympathetic magic. What it certainly represents is the bison. The principal animal of the hunt is the principal animal master. The bison is invoked in the name of the covenant, animals giving their lives willingly through the power of the shaman. 

 

                  The whole idea of the men's sacred ground, the men's cave, is continued in ceremonial huts which are associated with rebirth. You enter the tiny little door as though it were the vulva and go into the mother body and everything inside is magical. We're in a magical field. When you go into a cathedral today, you are in a magical field. And the men who are in there are not this individual, that individual, another individual, they are in a role.  They are the experiences of the energy of nature coming through them. 

 

                  In a great cathedral such as Notre Dame de Chartres, our mother church, the mother body, you're in the magic realm again. The imagery is that of dream. The imagery is that of myth.  The imagery is that of reference to transcendence. On the west portal of Chartres is a mandala actually symbolic of the vulva and the womb, and the second coming, the birth. And just as the great prime magician was portrayed in the caves, Pope Innocent III is portrayed here. Now there are two ways of coming into this role, one is temporarily for the ceremony, another is permanently. Here is a Maori chieftain, permanently in the role. His whole body is tattooed. He's got a magical body. That is to say, the stained-glass windows and incense and all have been imprinted on him.  He's in the cathedral all the time, you might say. His life is that of a mythological role. 

 

                  So much for the first crisis - that of maturation from infancy to maturity.  We come to the second, marriage, where one becomes one member of a two-fold being. This beautiful thing from Athens is a fifth-century, red-figured ceramic piece, and it shows a woman initiating a man. Actually, in a marriage, woman is the initiator. She is the one closer to nature and what it's all about. He's just coming in for illumination. This becomes especially interesting because this is Thetis and Peleus, the mother and father of Achilles. So it is a marriage. Thetis was a beautiful nymph with whom Zeus fell in love. Then Zeus learned that her son would be greater than his father and so Zeus thought better of the relationship and withdrew and saw to it that she should marry a human husband. So Peleus is her human husband and she is a goddess. And the text tells us that when he went to take her in marriage she transformed herself into a serpent, into a lion, into fire, into water, but he conquered her. Well, that's not what you see here at all. She has power that is symbolized in serpent and in lion. 

 

                  Let me repeat the basic story of the sense of these two symbols. The serpent sheds its skin to be born again as the moon sheds its shadow to be born again. The serpent, therefore, like the moon, is a symbol of lunar consciousness. That is to say, life and consciousness, life energy and consciousness, incorporated in a temporal body - consciousness and life engaged in the field of time, of birth and death. The lion is associated with the sun. It is the solar animal. The sun does not carry a shadow in itself; the sun is permanently disengaged from the field of time and birth and death, and so it is absolute life. These two are the same energy, one disengaged, the other engaged. And the goddess is the mother personification of both energies. 

 

                  One serpent is biting the youth between the eyes, opening the eye of inner vision, which sees past the display of the field of time and space. A second serpent is biting under the ear, opening the ear to the song of the music of the spheres, the music, the voice of the universe. The third serpent is biting the heel, the bite of the Achilles tendon, the bite of death. One dies to one's little ego and becomes a vehicle of the knowledge of the transcendent - becoming transparent to transcendence. That was the sense of the initiations that we have been reading about. The woman becomes a vehicle at the time of her menstruation, and the man in his ceremonial is a vehicle as well. 

 

                  And so to the world of art. The two hands - this is important - good and evil together. The yin-yang cycle.  Chinese. The mystical dimension is beyond good and evil. The ethical dimension is in the field of good and evil. One of the problems in our religion lies in the fact that it accents, right from the very start, the good and evil problem. Christ comes to atone for our sins, evil atonement. The first people to listen to St. Paul were the merchants of Corinth, and so we have the vocabulary of debt and payment in our interpretation of the mythic themes.  Whereas in the Orient, the interpretation is in terms of ignorance and illumination, not debt and payment. The debt and payment explanation goes haywire when you realize there was no Garden of Eden, there was no fall of man, and so there was no offense to God. So what is all this about paying a debt? You have to read the symbols in another vocabulary now. Furthermore, we have to deal with the

assumption and ascension to heaven.  What heaven? Going at the speed of light, the bodies would not be out of the galaxy yet. Your mythology, your imagery, has to keep up with what you know of the universe, because what it has to do is put you in accord with the universe as known, not as it was known in 2000 B.C. in the Near Fast. 

 

                  This beautiful work is from a wall in Pompeii. This young man is being initiated. There is an initiator and an assistant. The boy is told, "Look in this bowl, it is a metal bowl, and you will see your own face, your own true face." The bowl is of such concavity inside that what he is going to see is not his own face at all but the face of old age held behind him. And isn't that a shock! He is being introduced to what our American Indians call the "long body," the whole body of your life from birth to death. And so, again, we have the mythology of the long body. Now suppose one of his friends, before he went in there, said, "Now look, you see, this guy, he is going to have a bowl there and he is going to tell you you're going to see your own face. You're not. He's got another fellow there and he's holding this face of an old man." There would be no initiation. There would be no shock. That's why mysteries have to be secret; because what is experienced is experienced for the first time.