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sacrifice of the beast, and this beast always symbolizes the Poisonous Placenta killed in the feral drama.

The prototypical sacrificial ritual is described by Hubert and Mauss in their classic book, Sacrifice, as follows. The sacrificer is first shaved and purified of pollution, then dressed in an animal's skin. "This is a solemn moment when the new creature stirs within him. He has become a foetus. His head is veiled and he is made to clench his fists, for the embryo in its bag has its fists clenched. He is made to walk around the hearth just as the foetus moves within the womb." Then he kills the Sacrificial beast, and either actually or symbolically eats its body and drinks its blood, pours it on the altar or smears it on himself. (105) The beast is first dressed in all sorts of placental symbols, from crowns with womb-circles and tree-of-life branches to costumes full of umbilical ribbons. During the killing the sacrificer becomes "merged . . . fused together" with the placental beast, and the killing itself "is a crime, a kind of sacrilege . . . the death of the animal was lamented, one wept for it as one would weep for a relative. Its pardon was asked before it was struck down . . . the knife was condemned and thrown into the sea."(106)

Every time, then, that man does something which stirs his punitive archaic superego - at bottom, his Poisonous Placenta - every time he goes on a hunt, builds a house, plants a crop or goes to war, he sacrifices, that is, he becomes a fetus and is reborn through the killing of the placental beast. And every time the group itself becomes full of pollution, it imagines that its leader has become the hated placental beast, and it must either kill him in a regicidal or revolutionary act or else find a scapegoat upon which this sacrificial violence can be displaced. Without knowledge of the symbols of the fetal drama, this basic human cultural pattern is quite unintelligible. But once armed with the Rosetta Stone of fetal psychology, it becomes possible, as in the next sections of this essay, to understand from the empirical evidence left to us from each historical period in the past what evolutionary form the fetal drama has taken, beginning with the earliest Paleolithic cultures and continuing right down to the political life of today.

II. THE FETAL DRAMA BY PSYCHOGENIC MODE

In this section, I will examine the major group-fantasies of each historical period in order to demonstrate the forms of the fetal drama as modified by the evolution of parent-child relations. (107)

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THE INFANTICIDAL MODE: SADISTIC PHASE

In 1962, archaeologist Alexander Marshack, wondering whether Paleolithic man could have been able to record "time-factored" sequences, examined a bone marked with a series of previously unexplained notches and hypothesized that they represented the days of the phases of the moon. Over the next decade, he examined thousands of such bones microscopically, and published his results in a book, The Roots of Civilization, which, along with Andre' Leroi-Gourhan's work on prehistoric art, has revolutionized modern views of prehistoric man.(108)

Yet as convincing as Marshack's investigations are, several unexplained patterns appear in his empirical evidence which require a revision in his explanatory scheme, and which will serve as a useful introduction to the group-fantasies of Paleolithic man. These unexplained patterns are:

1. Although Marshack's bones all show evidence of patterns with phases similar to those of the moon, they are oddly erratic, some cycles having as few as 25 days and others as many as 35. Since lunar cycles are not in fact erratic but occur every 29.5 days, Marshack tries to account for this anomaly with speculations about cloudy nights and uncertainties of when to count the beginnings of the moon's waxing and waning. Yet even aside from the improbability that Paleolithic man for 10,000 years was obsessed with a system the rules of which were haphazardly defined, a real empirical difficulty arises from this kind of explanation. For even if the counting rules were imprecise, the system should be self-correcting. As Marshack himself notes, "If he is off by one day here or there in his notation he will always be corrected by the next series of lunar phases . . . . The method is, therefore, self-correcting over a number of months."(109) Yet the majority of Marshack 's multiple-month examples do not add up to a correct total, a fact he simply ignores. Most add up to less than the correct lunar total. For instance, the Blanchard bone he analyzes most fully has 69+63 +40 172 marks, which he compares to a six-month lunar total of 29.5x6 = 177 and concludes it is about the same "plus or minus a few."(110) But 172 is a full 5 days less than 177, giving six "lunar" periods of 28.7 rather than 29.5 days.

2 The motivation he gives for engraving thousands of bones with a major religious system comprised of slightly inaccurate lunar notches seems improbable. One bone with a standard cycle should be all one needs if the purpose is to measure seasons, as Marshack

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thinks, not many variations with thousands of patterns.

3. Most of the bones are painted red, which Marshack parenthetically says may have something to do with "death, blood, birth and renewal," but does not otherwise seriously connect to his lunar theory.

4. Although the moon itself was never portrayed on the bones, many bones were either engraved with rutting animals, pregnant mares or vaginal symbols, or were actually made in the shape of the female torso. Sex therefore seemed to have some part in the "lunar" notation. Marshack at one point near the end of his book asks the reader "Is the image related to the lunar cycle via the story of birth, death, and rebirth and by comparisons between the lunar and the menstrual cycles?" but he never goes back to examine his initial lunar theory in light of this possibility.

As may be obvious by now, I believe the bone markings are actually for keeping track of menstrual periods, not lunar cycles, and that this explanation accounts for all the anomalies described above. Menstrual periods, not lunar, are variable, average 28 days rather than 29.5 days, and are not "self-correcting" over successive periods. The red ochre on the bones symbolizes menstrual blood, and the associated sexual scenes are connected with the timing of sexual intercourse to avoid the woman's menstrual period. Sexual, not lunar, scenes were engraved on the bones because the woman's unreliable sexual cycle is what has to be figured out, not the lunar cycle. Although this does not completely rule out lunar connections, since as we shall see many groups believed the moon was physically connected to the womb, the central focus of this system is in fact sexual and menstrual, not lunar.

What significance might the image of the menstruating woman have for Paleolithic man? Since so little prehistoric evidence remains, I will turn to contemporary hunting and gathering tribes to examine their group-fantasies before returning to our prehistoric evidence and, with awareness of possible differences between the two, see if they do not have some useful parallels.

As the best-documented hunting and gathering groups are the Australian aborigines, I will analyze them in some detail and only briefly touch on other hunting cultures to extend the patterns found among Australian tribes. To begin with, the childhood of Australian aborigines, like that of all contemporary hunter-gatherers,(112) is in the infanticidal mode. That is, they not only kill a large proportion of their newborn without remorse, but also treat those they do bring up with a combination of severe neglect, physical and emotional abuse, and symbiotic clinging. To begin with, many Australian tribes until recently ate their children, not from food hunger but

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from object hunger, so poorly differentiated were they from others. Some ate the fetus itself, procuring abortions for this purpose by pressing the pregnant mother's abdomen and pulling the fetus out by the head.(113) Others ate every second child, out of what they called "baby hunger," forcing their other children to share in the feast.(114) (That the anthropologist who described these habits concluded that parental cannibalism of children "doesn't seem to have affected the personality development" and that these are really "good mothers [who] eat their own children"(115) is more a commentary on the quality of anthropological research than on aboriginal reality.)

The most trustworthy field study of aboriginal childrearing, that of Arthur Hippler, concludes that mothers are "neglectful" of the child, with "routinely brutal" abuse of very young infants varying with "overt neglect" and the use of the breast as a control device.(116) Empathy is so absent that he states "I never observed a single adult Yolngu caretaker of any age or sex walking a toddler around, showing him the world, explaining things to him and empathizing with his needs. While categorical statements are most risky, I am most certain of this." He further says that every movement toward independence by the growing child is experienced by the mother as abandonment of her by the child, and since the world is regularly portrayed as "dangerous and hostile, full of demons," little individuation can take place. The growing child is then routinely sexually stimulated by both parents, beaten up and sexually abused by older children, and terrified by others in the group, so that it is not surprising that the result is an adult who employs magical thinking, psychologically as well as technologically very primitive.

Because of this infanticidal childrearing, the original terrifying fetal experience is little modified, only reinforced by equally terrifying parenting. Because the parent is virtually as infantile and needy as the newborn, the adult superego of every individual is as punitive and persecutory as that of psychotics in modern society. Like all hunters, the mind of the aborigine is characterized by massive splitting and projection rather than repression, by the use of the archaic defense mechanisms of grandiosity and omnipotence, by uncertain self-object boundaries, by a confusion of sexual zones and a predominance of rape fantasies, and by an adult life full of paranoid fantasies which require continuous undoing rituals to ward off omnipresent persecutory anxiety.

The group life of hunting tribes like the aborigines is a world filled with womb-furniture, and takes place in a dimension the aborigines call "the Dreaming," where every real tree, hole and rock has a "sacred" mythical meaning, that is, a fetal role. Most of life is a literal nightmare-indeed, one careful study(117) shows that during rituals they literally are in a waking dream state. Every possible occasion for pleasure provokes the sadistic in-

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fanticidal superego and requires a propitiation. Birth, puberty, marriage, hunting, in fact, all potentially happy occasions stir up retribution by the unmodified Poisonous Placenta and require a concrete playing out of the full fetal drama of death and rebirth.

The initiation drama follows the pattern of all primitives, only with extremely concrete fetal symbols.(118) The central figure of aboriginal ritual is the Poisonous Placenta, represented in one form by a dangerous but sexually exciting, copiously-menstruating woman called an alknarintja. Not only is she pictured as wildly menstruating, but she is also said to be smeared with blood and to own a magic bull-roarer (tiurunga), a wooden disk marked with placental circles and loops and called the "double" or shade" of the boy being reborn. The bull-roarer is actually called a "placenta" by some tribes and "inside the womb" by others, and is the central religious object given the reborn initiate. The purpose of the initiation ritual is (a) to fight the monstrous Poisonous Placenta - represented by the bull-roarer, which is supposed to swallow the initiate - and then (b) to be reunited with the placenta - the reborn initiate is given his bull-roarer at the end of the ceremony. All the objects of the fetal drama are present during the rebirth ritual. The umbilicus is represented by a ceremonial pole stuck in a hole into which the men pour some of their own blood. The womb is a circular trench with a placental Serpent engraved on its walls and into which the initiate is thrown and buried. The Poisonous Placenta is the bull-roarer, later attached to the umbilical pole, which is whirled about and made to emit a terrible noise to frighten the initiate. The death struggle of birth includes many painful ordeals, such as radical subincision (cutting through the underside of the penis into the urethra.) The amount of real blood in the ceremony is considerable. The blood from the subincision wound - called the boy's "vagina" - is collected and smeared on him to symbolize his birth, and the men of the tribe open their own veins to provide additional blood - which is often drunk by the initiate, symbolizing in the most concrete way the flow of placental blood to the fetus-initiate. This magical placental blood from the subincision wound is at other times also used by the tribe as a fertility device since it has the ability to cause animals as well as humans to be reborn and thus can increase the supply of food for the group.

Even this brief description illustrates the roles of the placenta and its blood in primitive ritual, as well as the crucial role of the menstruating placental woman in myth and ceremony, far beyond her role in sexual taboo. In fact, the very origin of the word "taboo" is from tupua, which is Polynesian for "menstruation," and in every primitive culture known the menstrual taboo is connected with the very foundations of group life. "Greater than the fear of death, dishonor, or dismemberment has been the primitive man's respect for menstrual blood. The measures he has taken to avoid this mysterious substance have affected his meal times, his

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bed times, and his hunting season; and primitive woman, unable to separate herself from her blood, knew that upon her tabooed state depended the safety of the entire society."(119)

Since the blood of the Poisonous Placenta was visible as menstrual blood, it literally had mana, it was sacer - - that is, it was both dangerous and desired. And since all kinship ties are "blood ties" connecting members of the clan, the initiation rite which makes one a member of the clan is a literal sharing of the placental blood-that is, a concrete connecting of the initiate to a group-fantasy of a shared placenta. Every new member of any group enacts this group-fantasy of being connected to a common placenta, whether by drinking placental blood, by pledging allegiance to a placental flag or by other symbolic devices. The menstruating woman, therefore, is the Poisonous Placenta, and in every group ever formed the bloody woman can be found to be a central object of group-fantasy. What is, therefore, concretely true of the Australian aborigine is true in fantasy of all other groups, even today. It will be my task in the remainder of this essay to give the empirical evidence for this seemingly strange concept.

I shall begin by returning to Marshack's Paleolithic bones, which mark phases of the menstrual cycle. Whether these were used as "counters" for menstrual cycles or as part of rituals with "story-telling" functions is sec-ondary: they were menstrual, that is, placental, in essence. They may even have been used at times as bull-roarers, for many contain holes which might have allowed them to be swung on strings-similar to the so-called "baguettes" and other Paleolithic batons which Maringer says had the same "loops, circles and spirals . . . like the batons of the Australian aborigines."(120) In fact, it is only when the placental key is furnished that Paleolithic objects and ritual begin to make sense. The widespread "vulva discs" with various vulval symbols marked on them are also Poisonous Placentas-used in ritual similar to the use of the bull-roarer-as are the great number of vulva-symbols found everywhere in cave drawings. (121) So, too, are the familiar "Venus" statues, which not only are painted blood-red but are almost all abdomen, without feet or face, and, as can be seen in Illustration 1, are sometimes even overtly shown menstruating at the back of the statue.

The notion that these grotesque blood-red statues are Venuses, "love-goddesses, or that they have anything to do with the increase in real human fertility, is a purely defensive concept on the part of moderns. In the first place, they are identical in every detail to the copiously-menstruating alknarintja and similar figures in other hunting tribes, from their red color to their frightening lack of a face and treatment of the braided hair. In the second place, they cannot have anything to do with human fertility because contemporary hunting tribes are highly infanticidal, and parents rarely

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want to keep more than one baby at a time to carry around. That Paleolithic parents were equally infanticidal is certain: not only because prehistoric fossils show a highly unbalanced sex ratio, revealing differential female infanticide,(122) but also because they have left considerable evidence that they were ritual cannibals, eating their children's brains. (123) In fact, one of the most common confusions of all anthropological and early archaic research is the ascribing of "human fertility" motivations to elements which are in fact part of the fetal drama: every symbolic vagina or womb or "mother" figure is not a wish to have more babies; it is a wish to be a fetus. It is true that this fetal drama often gets linked up to the "fertility" of the herd or of the earth, but this is an adult overlay, not an infantile wish. And it in any case does not apply to human babies.

The Paleolithic menstruating Poisonous Placenta figure can be seen most clearly in the famous great bas relief from Laussel (see Illustration 1), painted all over blood-red, holding her menstrual-blood horn, crescent- shaped like the moon, with thirteen marks on it for the thirteen menstrual periods of the year. McCully says of this figure: "Like later goddesses in mother-earth cults, she was not meant to be loved, but served and placated . . . by the sacrifice of human infants. . . . Her right hand holds a bison horn. Its position gives it the appearance of the crescent moon (which, like a woman's fertility, shows cyclic sequence), while it serves as a container for blood. A blood-filled horn symbolizes the highest fertility in Cretan bull cults. Her left hand sinks into her abdomen, the fecund zone of great significance in fertility ritual."(124) I would only add that it is rebirth not birth, and fetal not "fertility ritual," which are here portrayed. The right hand holding the dreaded menstrual blood container and the left hand in the abdomen are clues to what the blood container really represents.

If we turn to the work on prehistoric art by Leroi-Gourhan, we will find these placental symbols repeated everywhere in a few guises. Leroi-Gourhan's central finding is that the animals and symbols in cave art are all chosen and arranged according to a widely-shared symbolic system, with "female" animals and signs central, and "male" animals and signs peripheral. All bison, for instance, were "female" symbols in cave art, and many drawings were found showing bison and women in identical poses, as though one changed into the other.(125) This beast-woman figure is in fact the Poisonous Placenta, and the subsidiary "male" symbols are the fetus. The drama that is portrayed deep in the womb of the dim cave is the same fetal scene that is dramatized on the stage of all dim cathedrals: the battle with the Poisonous Placenta-beast and the death and rebirth of the fetus-hunter.

This can best be seen in the famous composition from the cave of Lascaux (Illustration 4).

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Illustration 4-Scene from Cave of Lascaux

Marshack describes this scene as depicting "a naked bird-headed man with an erect phallus lying or falling before a wounded bison with its entrails spilling. There is a spear in the bison, a bird on the stick and an oddly branched form," usually called a "spear-thrower."(126) If you will look carefully at the scene, however, you will note several obvious errors in this explanation. First, the "spear" is not in the bison at all-it is superimposed on it, with its "point" facing away from the bison, certainly odd if a spear-scene was meant. In fact, the "spear" is not a spear at all. Paleolithic spears are poles with small stones at their very end-this is a long line with a branch line at some distance from the end. Neither is the "spear-thrower" like any one ever seen in the Paleolithic. Spear-throwers are short sticks with a slight notch at the end, while this is again a branched symbol, very much like the so-called "spear" itself. Both, in fact, are versions of the standard placental symbol of a branch from the "Tree of Life," mentioned above, and so often drawn near beasts in cave art (see Illustration 1). The bird-headed man is, of course, a shaman, not a hunter at all, and his shaman's umbilical stick is shown next to him, with its bird on the top exactly as it is found in so many contemporary shamanistic groups. The shaman has an erect penis here just as he does in primitive myth, because he has been reborn, revitalized. The "entrails" are probably not entrails at all, since it is a shamanistic rebirth ritual not a hunting scene; the lines are menstrual blood, as they are on the "Venus" figurines. The scene is in fact

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the complete fetal drama, and contains every one of the five elements we previously described: (1) Poisonous Placenta (woman-beast with "branch of life" signs), (2) Suffering Fetus (dying shaman), (3) Pollution (menstrual blood), (4) Nurturant Umbilicus (bird-headed shaman-stick) and (5) Cosmic Battle (the whole composition, the opposition between dangerous beast and shaman.)

Leroi-Gorhan also divides all the abstract signs of prehistoric art into female and male. The central female sign is easily recognized, as it is usually either vulval (triangle, oval, rectangle) or what he calls a "wound" sign.(127) But the "male" signs are not really phallic, if we think of this as spears or other possible symbols-they are usually dots or short strokes. Now in psychoanalytic symbolism, dots or short strokes associated with a triangle represents babies in the womb. I believe this is so also in Paleolithic art. The similarities can be best brought out by comparing a child's drawing with a typical cave drawing.

In Illustration 5 we see to the left two Paleolithic "female" vulval signs, accompanied by many dots below them. To the right is a drawing by a young boy, Richard, who was a patient of Melanie Klein's. The drawing shows a red "nasty octopus" (the entire circle) with a little fish below it and to the left. This "bad octopus," the boy said, was in a "blazing fury" and "very hungry" for the fish "babies" in the water, which he, Richard, had to "make alive" again.(128) Richard's graphic description of the fetal drama, like his repeated drawings of the red "bad octopus" and its watery battle

Illustration 5-Paleolithic Signs and Child's Drawing

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with the fish-babies, parallels the similar drama shown in the cave drawings. In fact, as anyone who has taught art to little children can confirm, the placenta, often termed a "sun" or a "mandala" by teachers, is the first object drawn by most children.(129) It usually looks very much like Richard's "octopus" or the Paleolithic "vulval" signs-a memory, I believe, of the real placenta in both instances.

The Paleolithic cave, then, is a womb-sanctuary wherein the fetal drama is depicted. Leroi-Gourhan sums up his research by saying, "What constituted for Paleolithic men the special heart and core of the caves is clearly the panels in the central part, dominated by animals from the female category and female signs, supplemented by animals from the male category and male signs. The entrance to the sanctuary, usually a narrow part of the cave, is decorated with male symbols, either animals or signs; the back of the cave, often a narrow tunnel, is decorated with the same signs... "(130) That is, the central large cavities contain the placentas and the narrow tunnels at each end contain the fetuses being born. It is not surprising, therefore, to find heel-prints of youth in the mud as though young people had been dancing in the caves, such as the fifty heel-prints in Le Tuc d'Audoubert, near two modeled bison, a discovery which Abbe Breuil said "evokes the thought of some initiation ceremony."(131)

This equation between dangerous beast and Poisonous Placenta which is depicted in cave art can be extended to the entire life style of all hunting and gathering groups, past or present. One of the curious discoveries of recent ethnography is how easy it is simply to gather the food necessary for life in a few hours a day. Jack Harlan, a specialist in early farming, went out himself to one of the "vast seas of primitive wild wheats" still growing in Near Eastern mountain areas, and, using a 9,000-year-old sickle blade, harvested grain so quickly that "a family group.. could easily harvest wild cereals over a three-week span or more and, without ever working very hard, could gather more grain than a family could possibly consume in a year."(132) Contemporary gathering groups can do equally well: "far from being on a starvation level.. they get all the calories they need without even working very hard. Even the Bushmen on the relatively desolate Kalahari region, when subjected to an input-output analysis, appeared to get 2,100 calories a day with less than three days' worth of foraging per week. Presumably, hunter-gatherers in lusher environments in prehistoric times did even better."(133) When a contemporary gatherer is shown how to farm, he usually laughs at the notion, like the Bushman who said, "Why should we plant, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"(134)

The question which leaps to mind, of course, is "Why, then, hunt?" Hunting, it turns out, is actually a group-fantasy activity, for it is often highly uneconomical, requiring more calories in the chase than are returned in the capture. To put it another way, hunting, like war, is the group-

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fantasy men do while women gather the food which supports these religious activities. "Kill the Beast" is mainly a game played for fetal and not for caloric motives, whether it is acted out in a cave or in a forest. "Animal Guardian" worship, which historians of religion now agree was the original religion of hunter-gatherer groups,(135) with its worship of an "animal-soul" which rules over the species and the forest, is displaced worship of a placental beast which nourishes, threatens, kills and gives birth to all living beings - the group itself very much included - whether it is represented as a bear-spirit or as a Mistress of the Animals. As Eliade points out, killing this sacred animal is a ritual each time it is done - the soul of the animal is respected and ritually addressed, the bones, especially the skull and long bones, have special rituals connected with them, part of the animal is often offered to the god, its blood is handled ritually, and so on.

The ritually - preserved skull and long bones of the sacred placental animal - and of human beings-have in fact been found as far back as Choukoutien (400,000 B.C.), and deserve closer attention before we leave the Paleolithic. The most widespread Paleolithic ritual on which evidence remains to us is headhunting. Many skulls have been found which show clear evidence at the base of decapitation and mutilation for the purpose of extracting and eating the brain.(136) The skull was then saved, either by putting a circle of skulls in a special area of the cave, or by surrounding the skull with a circle of stones. Many of these skulls were of sacrificed children, and most were covered with red ochre.(137) As bear skulls, too, have been found in similar states, the collecting and ritual eating of the brain from both human and animal skulls was an important early ritual, with many elements identical to those of the skull cults of contemporary primitives such as the Ainus, the Tungus and the headhunting tribes of New Guinea.(138) These skull cults all are centered on sacrifice to a placental beast-spirit or Mistress of Beasts in ceremonies that stress that the soul of the beast or human resides in the brain. The saving of the skull is believed to give protection to the tribe from all kinds of disasters, including retribution for hunting.

That the skulls, too, might represent Poisonous Placentas seems a strange notion, but in fact turns out to be true, as can be seen from the details of the ritual. Among the headhunting Asmat, for instance, the headhunting raid is a prelude to the initiation rebirthing ritual, and the blood from the cut-off head is smeared on the initiate, exactly as is the blood from the subincised penis of the Australian aborigine.(139) The head is obviously a symbolic placenta. It is roasted, a hole is cut in its base, and the brains are removed and eaten, reflecting the oral sadism of their infanticidal childrearing. The skull is then painted red and placed between the spread legs or on the groin of the initiate-he is then considered reborn, and crawls around like a newborn baby. Other placental symbols connected

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with the skull-cult are many, from the name of the mythical first headhunter ("Man with Wound") to the pre-headhunting ceremony, where the "men sit around the stone disk which the ancestor-mother had worn on her abdomen... moving their bellies toward the disk while sighing," like a pregnant woman in labor.

It is less surprising to find all these symbolic "placental disks" among primitives, whether called abdomen-disks or buIl-roarers, when it is first understood that the real placenta itself which is born after the baby, is saved and handled ritually by most primitive tribes. The baby's placenta is called its "double," "soul," ''brother'' or "secret helper," and is either ritually buried in a special spot or placed in a tree or on top of a pole, which then becomes a Tree of Life. Sometimes it is sacrificed to, and sometimes either it or the umbilical stump are preserved as a potent magic charm, be-ing hung around the neck or waist of the child or kept in special placenta baskets. In some tribes, the umbilical stump is saved and called a "personal serpent" which, being a bridge to the womb, would if propitiated bring its owner much wealth. Sometimes the newborn's placenta is even eaten by the adults present. In fact, placentophagy is still practiced in various countries, and has even been revived recently among many health food addicts in California. (140)

The clearest example of the connections between placenta beliefs, concepts of the "soul," and group-fantasy can be seen in the rituals of the Baganda.(141) Here the placenta is called a "spirit-child" and is placed in a plantain tree, which is then eaten by the grandparent so the child's spirit will remain in the clan. In the child's naming ceremony, the umbilicus is floated in milk (if it does not float, the child is disowned by the clan), and is then preserved by the owner. The King's placenta, called his "double," is considered to have lethal power, and is always carefully dried and preserved, complete with umbilicus, sealed in a pot, and placed on a special throne in a sacred house it occupies all for itself. This Royal Placenta is worshipped by the tribe; it is addressed as "King" by the people, a medium is on hand to give them the Placenta s messages," and human sacrifices are made to it Every new moon, the Royal Placenta is smeared with butter and exposed to the moon to give it new strength. A celebration of seven days is then begun, followed, it is said, as the moon wanes, by the menstrual periods of all the women. It is, in fact, the Royal Placenta which has the real power or mana of the group, for when the old king dies, it is only upon being given the old king's Royal Placenta that the new king is considered to own the royal power. (Indeed, the placental power of the "double" is so deeply felt by the Baganda that another "twin," their own shadow, is believed to be equally vulnerable, dangerous to step on, lethal to see on a wall, and poisonous if allowed to fall upon any food. Many primitives share this fear of the shadow "double.")

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The universal meaning of circumcision ceremonies becomes clearer when compared to the ritual treatment of the placenta. Behind the obvious oedipal meaning of a circumcision ceremony which mutilates the child's penis lies the fetal meaning in the similarity between the cutting of the um-bilicus after birth and the cutting off of the foreskin during rebirth. Both the foreskin and the placenta are often called "doubles," both are often eaten, and both are often put in trees or are saved by the group. In the present-day Jewish bris, the moyel (circumeisor) gives the infant a yarmulka (placental disk) as compensation for his cut-off foreskin, along with some blood-red wine - exactly as the aborigine gets a bull-roarer disk and some real blood to drink in exchange for his foreskin. In fact, the Australian aborigines actually color the cut-off foreskin red, and either place it in a bag for the boy to keep or put it on the totem tree (Tree of Life) to make the totem animal reproduce. Thus the foreskin, the placenta, the "double," the bull-roarer and the menstrual blood all are symbolical as the placental "Red Serpent" which the aborigine says "controls the heart and blood of man [and] his totem place [and] is the source of men's blood supp-ly "(142)

When aborigines are reborn in initiation rites and drink quarts of human blood for days at a time, they are being literally "tied in" to the blood of the totem clan, and are also being reunited with their own placentas. An indication that this ceremony is not just symbolic "castration" is seen in those primitive tribes which often initiate women (upon their first menstrual period) by dressing them in a red robe and making them drink red water, as though they too were drinking sacred (placental) menstrual blood to unite them to the group.(143) In fact, one Australian tribe, the Bardi, experiences this placental memory so concretely that they save their actual placentas, like the Baganda, also call them their "double," believe they live in their arm blood, and dream that their placentas visit them at night and give them advice. (144)

Thus it can be seen that each element of the group-fantasy life of hunting and gathering groups is a reliving of the fetal drama in its most concrete form. When a shaman describes his dangerous journey to reach the Great Sea Goddess who has caused the group's pollutions, he reexperiences his own birth as directly as does a patient of Grof's under LSD, from the periodic uterine contractions to the passage through the pelvic bone and down through the birth canal. As one shaman describes the experience to the anthropologist:

The earth opens up under the shaman, but often only to close up again; he has to struggle for a long time with hidden forces, ere he can cry at last 'Now the way is open'... he is on his way to the ruler of the sea beasts... one hears only sighing and groaning... as if the spirits

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were down under water... [He] will encounter many dangers in his flight down to the bottom of the sea, the most dreaded are three large rolling stones... he has to pass between them, and take care not to be crushed by these stones... a way opens... a road down through the earth... He almost glides as if falling through a tube so fitted to his body that he can check his progress by pressing against the sides...(145)

I have termed this unmodified version of the fetal drama the "sadistic" phase of the infanticidal mode because it is primarily acted out through rituals symbolizing the sadistic killing of the dangerous placenta-beast, including the whole hunting lifestyle itself. In the next section, I will give the second evolutionary level of the fetal drama, the "sado-masochistic" phase, where the placental beast becomes the "Great Mother" and the fetus becomes her "Dying Son."

INFANTICIDAL MODE: SADO-MASOCHISTIC PHASE

The invention of agriculture and then of civilized urban life which marks the Neolithic is an achievement based on the evolution of childrearing. This evolution consisted of an increase in attention, consistency and identifica-tion by the parent with the child. Hunting groups can be distinguished from farming and urban groups by the shift from the impassive mother-who can handle her infanticidal wishes only by either merging with the child or by complete emotional withdrawal - to the mother-father unit, which is able to massively project their unconscious into the child, identify with it, and then severely discipline and shape it. The mark of early civilizations is, paradoxically, connected with the invention of severe physical punishment in obedience training. Even with contemporary groups, the higher the level of culture, the more consistant the child training for "obedience, self-reliance and independence."(146) Although psychological anthropologists have assumed the opposite causal direction - as though agriculture somehow magically elicited the kind of parenting which was necessary to invent and support itself - the evolution of childrearing in fact came first, and the cultural changes followed.

The theme of the second phase of the infanticidal childrearing mode is summed up in the well-known saying from Proverbs 13, 24: "He that spareth the rod, hateth his son: But he that loveth him, chasteneth him betimes." A hunting level parent cannot achieve the stability to consistently physically discipline the child - at most, he or she can strike out impulsively, but disciplinary beating practices are not found among hunters. Controlled beating with instruments designed for the purpose is an advance in the parents' ability to identify with the child - that is, as the Bible says, in

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the ability to "love" the child. When one finds in the code of Hammurabi the punishments "If a son strikes his father, they shall cut off his fingers," and "If a son has said to his mother, 'You are not my mother,' one shall brand his forehead," or when one discovers in ancient Mesopotamian narratives the continuous floggings with canes given children at school who speak without permission, one knows civilized childrearing has begun.(147) The Egyptian teacher who said "The ear of the boy is on his back-he listens when he is beaten," and the schoolboy who thanked his teacher for "taming his limbs" by tying him to the block for three months(148) are both receiving the kind of consistent attention, however brutal, which the primitive hunter simply cannot achieve. So, too, such inventions as tight swaddling-evidence for which I have found at least as early as the second millenium B.C. - is a "moulding and controlling" device which hunters do not use because they do not cathect the child enough to want to control it.

This is not to say that early civilizations are not infanticidal: newborn infants could be found piled on the dung-heaps of every city, and massive infant sacrifice proliferated in every early civilization, as I have elsewhere detailed. (149) But the sacrifice of the newborn, usually the firstborn, was itself an advance in ability to identify, since hunters only see their children as fully human when they reach puberty, at which time they go through the fetal initiation ordeal. But early civilizations put newborn babies through the rebirth ordeal, sacrificing their best-loved (most identified with, masochistically) first child to the Poisonous-Placenta god, "passing through the fire of Moloch" with wild cheers, as in Carthage, or being eaten by holy crocodiles, as in Egypt, while, Plutarch says, their mothers felt "proud" of them.(150)

The evolution from the sadistic schizoid personality of the hunter to the more disciplined and therefore more internalized sado-masochistic personality of early civilizations can already be seen prior to the invention of agriculture, in the Mesolithic. For instance, in Mesolithic art such as that of Spain, drawings proliferate of life-like human beings in some relationship to each other, as compared with the placental beasts and bizarre figurines or stick-figure drawings of men of the Paleolithic.(151) Likewise, many cultural advances which showed a decrease in persecutory elements and an increase in ego control were in fact achieved in the Mesolithic, prior to the invention of agriculture: the first containers, such as pottery and nets; the first cemeteries; the first round houses and permanent villages; the first organized religion centering on man, woman and child; etc.(152) Since the womb, and the mother, were no longer seen as places of horror full of destruction, womb-houses and womb-containers could be invented and used without openly sadistic fantasies breaking out. Only when people could achieve this new level of consistency in childrearing could they settle down more permanently instead of always having to move on, endlessly avoiding their fantasized buildup of blood pollution through abandonment of every

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campsite, endlessly searching out and killing the placental beast. Once settled in villages in the Mesolithic, once pottery and houses were invented out of the safer womb, then agriculture invented itseIf as wild grain seeds grew in the refuse-heaps of the villages. As Hawkes puts it, "Plants sought man out as much as he sought them out, because of their specific manurial requirements"(153) - that is, wild weeds themselves evolved into replantable varieties as soon as psychological conditions allowed people to settle down in more permanent villages. This theory is similar to the one which the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein speculated might be true when she wrote: "Could then the ferocity of early man's attacks on the mother's body be responsible for the intellectual inhibitions? And could the reason why agriculture was the first invention... be that it was women not men who did the inventing, who could investigate the effects of seeds and cross-breeding... and therefore only women who had not destroyed the mother so badly that they could not 'know' her body (ground, as agriculture, or basket, as pottery, etc.)."(154)

Agriculture, the domestication of cattle, and the invention of cattle-drawn ploughs could only occur when man achieved enough reduction of his sadism to stop hunting the placental beast and instead settle down and "save the beast" in a resurrection-centered cattle-cult and "save the baby seed" in a fertility-centered crop-cult, both based on fetal drama rituals.(155) This decrease in the sadistic version of the fetal drama is also at the base of the shift from the purely kinship organization (all are connected directly to the same invisible sacred placenta) to a more hierarchical, class organiza-tion (divine leader is the placenta, as well as the fetus.) One of the reasons I term this phase the "sado-masochistic" is that the ability to organized and be subordinate and masochistic is an advance over the primitive's com-munity of sadistic equals. It takes trust and a considerable decrease in sadism to have a leader, be he king, priest or even slaveowner, and the growth of differences in both wealth and "power" requires the ability of the subjugated individual to project good and bad parts of himself into another. The severe stratification of all archaic civilizations - often including the outright slave status of the majority - is caused by the ability of this majority to use masochistic obedience as a psychic control mechanism, not by any increase in "power" by a minority. Hunters are simply too sadistic to use masochistic obedience as a defense and too persecutory to trust a leader.

With this increase in masochistic defenses and in obedience training in childhood, archaic civilizations could achieve all the advances dependent on group organization, such as irrigation farming, defense of the group, etc.,(156) and were able to begin to develop the ego control mechanisms required to outlaw private vengeance and slowly achieve the group's jurisdiction over crime. These advances were dependent on psychological, not economic, progress-there being no good economic reason why hunting

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groups cannot have kings, priests, slave classes or criminal laws. The only writer who understands the crucial importance of psychic primacy to any theory of the evolution of early civilization is the psychoanalytic sociologist, Eli Sagan,(157) whose work on ancient Greece and on early complex societies brilliantly elaborates much of what I will only briefly be able to touch upon here.

The central figure of archaic group-fantasy, the so-called "Great Mother," is the Poisonous Placenta, only now with a combination of placental and human attributes: "she who fashions all things [and] gave birth to monster serpents, sharp of tooth and fang, filled with poison in-stead of blood, ferocious, terrible and crowned with fear-inspiring glory."(158) The fetal hero cleans out the group's blood-pollution and achieves his own rebirth by defeating the placental serpent-goddess. The classic form of the battle, repeated in hundreds of variations for other groups, was the Babylonian epic of the fight between Tiamut and her off-spring, Marduk. That these battles often have partial oedipal themes is quite true, for Marduk claims supremacy over his father as the price for slaying Tiamut. Yet the oedipal reference (159) is only cursorily mentioned, a subplot to the main fetal drama of the fury of the poisonous female serpent whose heart is pierced and arteries cut by the brave hero.

This group pollution and rebirth through the battle with the placental serpent by the Marduks, Gilgameshes and Zeuses of archaic times is, moreover, played out in central group rituals which represent the pollution-rebirth struggle by public processions and mock battles, such as the Sumerian New Year's festivals in which the Great Serpent who threatens to reduce the world to chaos is annually defeated. These rituals form the matrix for every archaic group activity. As Halpern says, "culture is the work of the hero, the mother-killer,"(160) and agriculture itself, as Eliade puts it, is the '"product of a murder" in all archaic myth (161) - which is why food is sacred and rebirth rituals necessary for planting, so the placental Tree of Life may be annually renewed. These rebirth rituals could be seen even before farming was invented, as in the images of the horrible vulture-goddesses or leopard goddesses of pre-agricultural Catal Huyuk or Halicar, which give birth to animal or human babies (see Illustration 1.) Both the goddess and her bull-child only slowly and uncertainly assumed human form as childrearing evolved further. These paintings on the walls of Catal Huyuk which show the vulture goddess attacking headless men are beautifully counter pointed by molded bas-reliefs on adjoining walls of women's breasts, each with a vulture's beak protruding from red-painted nipples.

As the bull-baby who was born of the goddess slowly turned into the youth-god who had to die and be resurrected in an annual descent into the underworld, sado-masochistic fetal myths and rituals multiplied, featuring

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the devotion (extending often to self-castration) of the young fetal god and his priests to the bloodthirsty serpent-goddess.(163) The blood of the sacrifice, like the placental blood in primitive initiatory rites, was real and plentiful. Blood was" 'sprinkled' on the worshipper, and on the new priest at the time of his consecration. It is 'sprinkled' before the sanctuary, around the altar, on the altar, at the base of the altar, on the side of the altar, on the horns of the 'mercy seat,' and sprinkled or poured on the burning sacrifice."(164) In initiatory rituals, blood was also used quite lavishly, as Prudentius described in the Taurobolium:

A trench was dug, over which was erected a platform of planks with perforations and gaps. Upon the platform the sacrificial bull was slaughtered, whose blood dripped through upon the initiate in the trench. He exposed his head and all his garments to be saturated with the blood; then he turned round and held up his neck that the blood might trickle upon his lips, ears, eyes, and nostrils; he moistened his tongue with the blood, which he then drank as a sacramental act. Greeted by the spectators, he came forth from this bloody baptism believing that he was purified from his sin and "born again for eternity."(165)

That the fetal drama was also concretely played out by killing live human babies and youth is now beyond doubt, for human sacrifice has been found all over the ancient world, right down to the child sacrifice "into the mouth of Moloch" of Judaic and Carthaginian historical times.(166) But the majority of the time group stress was successfully contained within ritual group-fantasy, including for the first time organized war, and the fetal drama could be played out in sado-masochistic rituals which put equal stress on the death and suffering of the fetus and the death of and reuniting with the placenta. The replaying of the fetal drama could in fact defeat real death itself, as when the scattered parts of Osiris' body were reassembled they were made whole by being wrapped in a cow's skin, called a "meshkent" or "placenta." In fact, the usual Egyptian tomb ritual involves the rebirth of the dead man or woman by wrapping him or her in a "meshkent" skin and waving a wand in the shape of a placenta over him, while addressing his ka amulet as "my heart, my mother, my heart whereby I came into being."(167) At the great Egyptian Sed festival, the pharaoh himself cleanses the group's pollution by curling up "like a fetus," wrapped in an animal skin, and coming forth to cry "the pharaoh has renewed his births!" During this festival, the pharaoh leads a huge procession, proceded by his actual placenta stuck on the top of a long pole, complete with

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dangling umbilical cord (see Illustration 6) - the concrete prototype of all flags and standards to follow. Just as with the Baganda and other primitives previously mentioned, the pharoah's placenta was thought to be his "double," his ka, his "helper," his "twin" who would help him in battle.(168) Separate pyramids were even built for the pharoah's placenta. In fact, the placental ka or double of every Egyptian was believed to accompany him everywhere, and it was the goal of each of the 500 million Egyptians who were mummified "to rejoin their kas," their placentas, in after-

Illustration 6-Egyptian Standards of The Pharoah's Placenta

life. This placenta twin, whether as the Egyptian ka, the Babylonian "in-dwelling god," the Iranian fravishi or the Roman genius, is the original "soul" of all mankind, the original "guardian spirit," and wooden models of actual placentas or else statues of kas are found in most Egyptian tombs.(169) All flags and banners are therefore sacred, placental, whether they are made of actual placentas, of rags dipped in the enemy's blood or of images in the shape of reptilian dragons,(170) for, as Grafton Smith puts it, the "sanctity of the flag is due to the fact that originally it was supposed to be functionally active as the life-giving powers of the king, and the celestial source of all life represented by the king's placenta."(171)

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The symbol of the placenta, either as swastika (see the public area of the Hissarlik statue in Illustration 1), as the pharoah's standard (Illustration 6), or as a simple circle within a crescent moon, contains the power of man. The ka is often equated by the Egyptians with the "heart" of man, and each Egyptian wore a "heart scarab" amulet with a message to his ka on the back. The Sumerian symbol for the placenta, the lugal, was their symbol for "great man" or "king."(172) Both goddesses and kings were often represented by concrete placental images. In Egypt, for instance, where the main goddess Isis was represented in processions as a gold uterus,(173) the symbols of divinity of the pharoahs were the placental serpent on their forehead, the ankh (life symbol, derived from uterus), or the sceptre (branch from placental Tree of Life) which they carry in their hands.(174) Those serving the pharoah were often called "guardians of the placenta of the pharoah," and the standard with the Royal Placenta appears associated with his kingship from the earliest royal monuments to the end of Egyptian history.(175) In royal birth scenes, two babies are often shown, one representing the pharoah himself, the other his ka, or twin, his placenta born after him, in order to represent the source of his power or vital force.

It should not be thought that all these placenta-images were mere "symbols" of kingship. They were the power itself in concrete form. As Frankfort puts it, the "large class of objects consisting of some sacred sym-bol in a bracket at the top of a pole from which streamers hang down . . . are true fetishes, replete with power [and] very closely related to the king: the falcon, the ibis, the wolf, and the Royal Placenta."(176) During the King's coronation, hymns were addressed directly to the Red Cobra-Crown itself, which contained the Isis-god, and the king, first stating that he had "come from her," ritually addressed the placental crown as follows:

O Red Crown, O Inu, O Great One
O Magician, O Fiery Snake!
Let there be terror of me like the terror of thee
Let there be fear of me like the fear of thee
Let there be love of me like the love of thee.
Let me rule, a leader of the living.(177)

Thus do all leaders derive their power from being "crowned," like a newborn "crowns," in a rebirth ceremony that confers upon them the blood-power of the worshipped placenta. From this moment on, the leader is literally a man-god, a fetus with the power of the placenta. As fetus, he undergoes the suffering and rebirth roles in the fetal drama in all its forms, in daily rebirthing of the sun, in annual festivals, in the birth ordeal of war. As divine placenta, holder of all placental fetishes-crown, scepter, robe, banner, flag-he is worshipped as the source of all blood-power "flowing" to the people, he sustains all life. These two roles-fetal and placental-

by: Lloyd deMause
The Institute for Psychohistory
140 Riverside Drive, NY NY 10024

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