Education is one of the major weapons of mind control available to dominator culture. Seen in this light, the British National Curriculum is a most effective tool, enabling those in power to determine quite precisely what our young citizens should be taught; what they should and should not know and believe to be true. One book unlikely to find its way onto any course of Religious Studies is 'Supernatural' by Graham Hancock: it might give the kids all sorts of inconvenient ideas.
What is ignored by scientists and academics as a topic for study can be as revealing as what they endlessly research. Two such ignored mysteries readily come to mind. One is the seemingly unfathomed question of the origins of religion and the spiritual. Another - which, we shall see, dovetails neatly into the riddle of our sense of the religious - concerns human anatomy in general, and the human brain in particular. With regard to the latter theme, it would seem that the human being of 100,00 years ago was anatomically identical to our 21st century specimen. This fact extends to the brain, in terms both of its size and its complexity. In other words, everything we are mentally capable of today, our ancestors of that time should have been likewise. For most of the intervening time, however, nothing much seems to have happened - an enormous time gap exists between the appearance of the modern human skeleton and behaviour that is deemed fully human by we moderns.
Suddenly, and without prior warning, we get the great cave paintings of Peche Merle, Cosquer, Fumane, and the rest, between 20,000 and 35,000 years ago. No gradual evolutionary path leads to these astonishing eruptions of artistic vision and accomplishment, at least as far as current evidence shows. They appear as if out of nowhere, and with a degree of artistic skill that amazed Picasso, among others. They are also the first signs we have of anything beyond a most rudimentary imagination, which again seems to manifest fully formed, as does a sense of cognisance of supernatural forces and spiritual dimensions. A closer look at these paintings shows their content to be bizarre. Alongside half-naturalistic animals, the paintings teem with therianthropes (half-human, half-animal beings), people transforming into animals, wounded men, and extensive patterns of dots, lines, and arcs. What on earth is going on?
As the earliest expressions of complex artistic imagination, let alone a sense of the broadly religious, you would think that these paintings are uniquely significant in helping us understand what it is to be human. Yet their meaning has remained elusive. Earlier theories, such as hunting magic, have been thoroughly discredited, and most scientists have moved on to less enigmatic subjects - and ones that are more likely to attract research funding....
Enter Graham Hancock and his 700-page tome. His investigations lead him from these magnificent cave paintings of prehistory onto the almost modern rock art of the San people in South Africa. He is subsequently drawn in the direction of European fairy lore, the psychedelic shamanism of Africa and South America, modern encounters with UFOs and abductions by aliens, and the experiences of volunteers in Dr. Rick Strassman's groundbreaking research with the powerful psychedelic DMT.
His remarkable conclusion is that all these peoples and situations, disparate in time and space, are nevertheless expressions of the same core phenomena. They keep on cropping up, regardless of culture: weird alien beings, therianthropes, transformations and shape-shiftings, wounds and surgical procedures, patterns of dots, lines, and other entoptic phenomena. It appears that these are all universals to the human condition, somehow hard-wired into our very being. And that they can be accessed through entering into what are called (rather unsatisfactorily) 'trance states' or 'altered states of consciousness' (a.s.c.'s). The means for exploring such states are various, and have been used by shamans and others since time immemorial: meditation and yoga techniques, psychedelic (entheogenic) plants and substances, sensory deprivation, fasting, trance-dancing, flotation, and sleep deprivation are some that immediately come to mind.
If this scenario is not already bad news for pontiffs, archbishops, imams, and other leaders of organised hierarchical religions - that religion most likely has its origins in a.s.c.'s accessed by hallucinating shamans in caves 35,000 years ago - then things are about to get far more uncomfortable. The obvious next question any half-intelligent humanoid is bound to ask is: how did our Paleolithic ancestors get to experience these a.s.c.'s anyway, all of a sudden after thousands of years of apparent cultural stagnation? While difficult to prove conclusively, the most likely contender as a means for significant numbers of a population to access such states would be a psychedelic plant of some kind - for our European ancestors, this could well have been the liberty cap mushroom, psilocybe semilanceata. The possibility of a fungal contribution to the evolution of human consciousness was made more speculatively by Terence McKenna in 'Food of the Gods'; Graham Hancock's treatment of the subject is more thorough and convincing, however. It seems that, in any given human population, around 2% of people have a natural ability to enter altered states. For the rest of us plebs, we need help in one form or another, and our Paleolithic ancestors may well have discovered that the swiftest, simplest, and most reliable means was through ingesting the sacred mushroom.
Unburdened of the prejudiced moralistic clutter and inhibition that blight our modern monotheistic-based cultures, most extent shamanic peoples appear to use pretty much whatever thay can get their hands on in order to enter altered states, including plants that are potentially far more hazardous than any psychedelic psilocybin-containing mushroom. Whatever, it is worth considering for its far-reaching implications: the major catalyst for our human sense of imagination and spirit may well be growing in a field or grass verge near you right now!
For anyone interested in the human endeavour beyond the pathetic confines of the western dominator pig trough (apologies to our porcine buddies), 'Supernatural' is pretty much a must-read. If Mr. Hancock's 700 pages seem a bit daunting, believe me, they are not. But you could always listen to his excellent lecture at October Gallery in episodes 27 and 28 of Shamanic Freedom Radio (see my 'sites on the web' list for the connection).
What is ignored by scientists and academics as a topic for study can be as revealing as what they endlessly research. Two such ignored mysteries readily come to mind. One is the seemingly unfathomed question of the origins of religion and the spiritual. Another - which, we shall see, dovetails neatly into the riddle of our sense of the religious - concerns human anatomy in general, and the human brain in particular. With regard to the latter theme, it would seem that the human being of 100,00 years ago was anatomically identical to our 21st century specimen. This fact extends to the brain, in terms both of its size and its complexity. In other words, everything we are mentally capable of today, our ancestors of that time should have been likewise. For most of the intervening time, however, nothing much seems to have happened - an enormous time gap exists between the appearance of the modern human skeleton and behaviour that is deemed fully human by we moderns.
Suddenly, and without prior warning, we get the great cave paintings of Peche Merle, Cosquer, Fumane, and the rest, between 20,000 and 35,000 years ago. No gradual evolutionary path leads to these astonishing eruptions of artistic vision and accomplishment, at least as far as current evidence shows. They appear as if out of nowhere, and with a degree of artistic skill that amazed Picasso, among others. They are also the first signs we have of anything beyond a most rudimentary imagination, which again seems to manifest fully formed, as does a sense of cognisance of supernatural forces and spiritual dimensions. A closer look at these paintings shows their content to be bizarre. Alongside half-naturalistic animals, the paintings teem with therianthropes (half-human, half-animal beings), people transforming into animals, wounded men, and extensive patterns of dots, lines, and arcs. What on earth is going on?
As the earliest expressions of complex artistic imagination, let alone a sense of the broadly religious, you would think that these paintings are uniquely significant in helping us understand what it is to be human. Yet their meaning has remained elusive. Earlier theories, such as hunting magic, have been thoroughly discredited, and most scientists have moved on to less enigmatic subjects - and ones that are more likely to attract research funding....
Enter Graham Hancock and his 700-page tome. His investigations lead him from these magnificent cave paintings of prehistory onto the almost modern rock art of the San people in South Africa. He is subsequently drawn in the direction of European fairy lore, the psychedelic shamanism of Africa and South America, modern encounters with UFOs and abductions by aliens, and the experiences of volunteers in Dr. Rick Strassman's groundbreaking research with the powerful psychedelic DMT.
His remarkable conclusion is that all these peoples and situations, disparate in time and space, are nevertheless expressions of the same core phenomena. They keep on cropping up, regardless of culture: weird alien beings, therianthropes, transformations and shape-shiftings, wounds and surgical procedures, patterns of dots, lines, and other entoptic phenomena. It appears that these are all universals to the human condition, somehow hard-wired into our very being. And that they can be accessed through entering into what are called (rather unsatisfactorily) 'trance states' or 'altered states of consciousness' (a.s.c.'s). The means for exploring such states are various, and have been used by shamans and others since time immemorial: meditation and yoga techniques, psychedelic (entheogenic) plants and substances, sensory deprivation, fasting, trance-dancing, flotation, and sleep deprivation are some that immediately come to mind.
If this scenario is not already bad news for pontiffs, archbishops, imams, and other leaders of organised hierarchical religions - that religion most likely has its origins in a.s.c.'s accessed by hallucinating shamans in caves 35,000 years ago - then things are about to get far more uncomfortable. The obvious next question any half-intelligent humanoid is bound to ask is: how did our Paleolithic ancestors get to experience these a.s.c.'s anyway, all of a sudden after thousands of years of apparent cultural stagnation? While difficult to prove conclusively, the most likely contender as a means for significant numbers of a population to access such states would be a psychedelic plant of some kind - for our European ancestors, this could well have been the liberty cap mushroom, psilocybe semilanceata. The possibility of a fungal contribution to the evolution of human consciousness was made more speculatively by Terence McKenna in 'Food of the Gods'; Graham Hancock's treatment of the subject is more thorough and convincing, however. It seems that, in any given human population, around 2% of people have a natural ability to enter altered states. For the rest of us plebs, we need help in one form or another, and our Paleolithic ancestors may well have discovered that the swiftest, simplest, and most reliable means was through ingesting the sacred mushroom.
Unburdened of the prejudiced moralistic clutter and inhibition that blight our modern monotheistic-based cultures, most extent shamanic peoples appear to use pretty much whatever thay can get their hands on in order to enter altered states, including plants that are potentially far more hazardous than any psychedelic psilocybin-containing mushroom. Whatever, it is worth considering for its far-reaching implications: the major catalyst for our human sense of imagination and spirit may well be growing in a field or grass verge near you right now!
For anyone interested in the human endeavour beyond the pathetic confines of the western dominator pig trough (apologies to our porcine buddies), 'Supernatural' is pretty much a must-read. If Mr. Hancock's 700 pages seem a bit daunting, believe me, they are not. But you could always listen to his excellent lecture at October Gallery in episodes 27 and 28 of Shamanic Freedom Radio (see my 'sites on the web' list for the connection).
(photo by G. Mueller, from Erowid)
