Abra Cadabra
and Zeitgeist
After
watching the first part of the movie "Zeitgeist", a film I
recommend highly, (see: http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/), which attempts to
show that Western religion, particularly Christianity, is nothing more than an
another version of a myth that was believed in by a large number of ancient
cultures; I came to a clearer understanding of what the language of myth is, a
problem with which I have been grappling for some time.
I watched
the movie, struck by the fact that so many cultures told and retold similar
versions of the same story, or, more accurately, used very much the same words.
As we shall see in the course of this discussion, that distinction is an
important one to understanding of what myth is and how the use of language has
evolved even as we have evolved from a holistically-oriented species to a
species that, overall, sees phenomena as discrete and other.
I have
read that John Zerzan recommends a pre-verbal Humans society.
Note: I do not write 'go back to', for everywhere we proceed to from here is
progression. I think I understand his reasons for suggesting this. It is true
that the symbolic removes us from the immediacy of experience; that it creates
the illusion of otherness and that it creates the chasm that allows for
ignorance of others' intentions. That chasm, in turn, allows secrecy and
duplicity. Ignorance of that which another knows and thinks sets the stage for
control by control of information. However, I also think the suggestion is
based on the assumption that language was always used as we use language, that
is, for the control and manipulation of phenomena by the applying of terms and
grammar of our choosing to it and for the principle purpose of affecting the
thoughts and emotions of a "target" audience.
When my
husband and I first started living together we discussed the fact that language
was extremely limited in appealing to only two senses: seeing and hearing.
Being, as I was, lost in a technologically-oriented state of mind (I was
straight out of megalopolitan America); I thought in
terms of developing a technology that would allow us to communicate and receive
packets of information using our other senses as well, or those senses that I
was then aware of, to wit: touch, smell and taste. I imagined sitting is a
chair in which we were rigged up to technology that transmitted information to
us on the level of all of those senses (a nightmarishly sci
fi thought in retrospect, I readily accede). Thus, we
would, in my "futuristic" vision, receive far more information in the
same amount of time that it now takes us to read or hear a lecture or converse.
I had a good idea. All I had to do was divest myself of the hi-tech
enculturation, a process that would take decades (and still proceeds).
Upon
attaining the level of what might be described as proficiency in Hebrew, a
person whose mother tongue, or tongues, is a language/are languages
that has/have a large vocabulary, realizes that Hebrew is a frustratingly deficient
medium of communication. Its vocabulary is paltry. Its terminology is
imprecise. One finds it difficult to express subtle ideas and distinctions in
Hebrew. It is woefully inadequate to convey complex thoughts. No matter how
fluent one becomes in Hebrew, one simply cannot express in Hebrew what one can
in English, for instance. Modern Hebrew, then, has necessarily become reliant
on foreign terminology in order to communicate subtleties and confer
technological information. There was an attempt made to introduce neologisms
into modern Hebrew, portmanteaux of existing terms,
but this was not well-received. The modern Hebrew-speaker preferred adopting
foreign terms for modern phenomena because zie thinks
it sounds more sophisticated to throw around foreign terms and because the
suggested Hebrew neologisms, being portmanteaux of ancient words, had a forced,
slap-dash, making do quality about them.
This
might sound as though I am criticizing Hebrew. Those who are familiar with the
fact that I have researched Hebrew for decades know better. I hold Hebrew in
the highest regard – not as a language, which it is not and was never meant to
be, but as a meditation and expression of the Spirit, which it is.
It was
not until I was able to walk out of the mind-set that living in a world of
ubiquitous technology had forced me into; in fact I did not realize that I was
in a mind-set at all, I fancied myself quite the free thinker, was I able to
understand that language, as we know it and use it, reflects our adjustment to
seeing the world as a collection of discrete phenomena that are all other.
During
the course of watching the part of movie "Zeitgeist" that relates to
mythology for the second time, aided by my recently-acquired ability to
disengage from my hi-tech enculturation to some extent; I came upon a clearer
understanding of the nature of mythological language, and language in general.
When we
disregard mythology as being nothing but stories that the ancients told based
on their anthropomorphization of natural phenomena, and
their attempt to control them by understanding them; we are assuming that they
thought, perceived, experienced and, most especially, that they used language
as we do. They didn't. They were in a far more natural state of consciousness. That
is to say, they were in a far more comprehensive state of consciousness of the
phenomenal world, which they experienced as being an integral part of their
very being and they an integral part of it. When they
spoke they did not speak to an 'other'. They did not attempt to control either
the consciousness of Human beings when they allowed sound to emanate from their
inner being, from their very breath (and they knew how to breathe in those
days). They did not attempt to control nature by 'apprehending' it, by
attaching a label to things, which they determined and which they could
manipulate by determining how they described phenomena grammatically.
Neither
were they relegated to the use of two senses when they spoke. Chellis Glendinning writes about
fifty-three senses (see: http://www.greenlivingjournal.com/page.php?p=1026). I don't know if that
number is accurate. Actually, I'm pretty sure that if we are assigning a number
to how many senses natural Man had, and we potentially have if we recover
ourselves; we are still in the rut of trying to understand the other by
classification and systematization. Natural Man has *one*, one very comprehensive,
holistic and plastic (forgive the expression), sense, which his spirit,
emotion, mind and body could interpret in a number of ways on a number of
levels in order for him to best perceive and decide whether, and if so, how to
act, not respond, act.
To give
you an idea of how very differently we use language than did natural Man: try
to imagine natural Man saying: "Are you hungry?" or "Can I stay
the night?" or "You're not talking to me. Are you angry at me?"
How isolated and how reduced in our ability to sense we are that we communicate
in these terms, that we have to make these inquiries of 'the other'! Natural
Man would not ask if someone is hungry, and most certainly would not ask if
they felt like Mickey D's or doing the town red at Red Lobster. Natural Man
would know if someone is hungry. Zie would not just
sense it. Zie would experience it. No one wondered if
they were going to get lucky that night (or day) or not. They picked up on the
pheromones from a mile (or more) away. Neither did they need to ask what
another was feeling, most certainly not about something as critical as anger.
Anger was a critical situation in those days, not just a petulant pout which
means: "Fuck yourself, buddy. If I was worth anything to you, you wouldn't
even suggest Mickey D's".
It was
while our Mothers and our Fathers were still in their natural state of
consciousness that the myths were born.
What
were the myths, then?
They
were enunciations of the Human spirit, of Human being. They were specific sounds
and frequencies that Human beings emitted in the full knowledge and awareness
of "the butterfly effect" that those sounds would have on creation,
which of course included themselves. They spoke as God
speaks. They created as they spoke and what they created was that which issued
from the depths of their Human being, of which they were exquisitely awareness.
They did not have the psychological problem of not knowing what they were
feeling or how to express it. They enunciated these sounds and frequencies
spontaneously even as nature impacted on them spontaneously. The closest that
we can come to what their speech was is the expression of a blessing, not a
prayer, not a supplication to an Other, but a
blessing.
That
the myths are so very similar in so many cultures should be no surprise to us. At
the time that they were pronounced Human beings were of one tongue, just as
other species, no matter where they may be, are of one tongue.
Something
fractured that. I know not what. I know not if we merely blundered or if we
developed in response to something we are "hard wired" to become. I
do not know when Man became the creature that fabricated the elaborately
designed and painstakingly ornamented weapons that we find from the Bronze Age.
I do not know when Man became so perverse as to
glorify his weapons and treat them as though they were art, and not mere craft,
he was in a state of fractured consciousness and became trapped in a loop that
fed upon itself. The first person that fabricated a weapon to kill and conquer
an 'other', was a being torn from hir
roots and broken. The acts that that person committed with that weapon
shattered hir further. It can only be in the state of
mind of otherness that we can kill in order to conquer and killing and
conquering propels us further into the space of isolation.
Whatever
it was that occurred to us, whenever the transition from natural Man to
fractured creature occurred; it also affected how we use language. Before then
Human to Human violence was no different than our internal struggles, our
struggles with and within ourselves. It is in a state
of otherness that the sounds we emit become representations of what we now
perceive as other phenomena, distinct and discrete from ourselves. Were this
not so, we would feel the pain we inflict as our very own and experience how
the death of a fellow creature makes own world and self the poorer. It is in a
state of isolation that words take on meanings, that
they refer to an other that exists elsewhere, over an unbridgeable chasm. It
was then the age-old enunciations that were once the spontaneous emissions of
the Human breath, the Human spirit, became terms. It was then that the
blessings became stories.
As we
evolved in the direction of becoming every more alienated from ourselves, and
thus from all fellow beings, the stories became more and more abstract. We
became more and more abstracted from nature, so much so that we came to
perceive not only one another, but ourselves as abstractions. We had gone past
the point of experiencing other. We arrived at the point of experiencing the
other as unreal. Thus we were become unreal to ourselves. We began to live in
our heads, inside our bodies, which had become isolation cells. But we
desperately needed to feel that *something* was real. It was then that we
assigned the stories to an Other. Those stories became
his, the stories of and about some imaginary Other, to
which we attributed all of the reality we had lost.
As our
being continuously diminished and retracted, as we lost our sense of total
identification with the All, so our conceptualization of God became
increasingly
distant, increasingly untouchable, increasingly
unfathomable, increasingly imaginary.
And as
the words solidified into meanings which referred to specific entities which
were no longer a part of us and we of them, and we contracted into our own
bodies, into discrete entities, as we lost control of our bodies and could no
longer breathe; the pronunciation of the Name of God, which once issued from us
spontaneously, when we were That, became the ineffable Name of the apotheotic Other that our fractured minds created.
We
developed written language and began to write the sounds of blessing that the
ancients had produced as naturally as they breathed in books and we regarded
them as stories. We believed in those stories desperately. They gave us a sense
that something was real because once they had been real utterances of Holiness.
But we could only see them as stories, stories of the Infinitely
removed.
The
phrase abra cadabra comes
from the time when there were a few people who were still capable of attaining
the primordial state of mind and spoke in the primordial way. To most, it was
magic. To us, it is quaintly amusing. In fact, it is an artifact of the old
time that still exists in our midst that reminds us that we can recover speech
as it was meant to be: as I speak, so I create.
Doreen
Ellen Bell-Dotan,