Our prehistoric past......
One of the favourite books of my childhood was 'From Cavemen to Vikings' by one R.J.Unstead. In easily understood text and fully illustrated, it purported to tell the tale of our dim, distant, and often dark, human past. All I remember is a full-page illustration (it might have adorned the front cover, I have been unable to locate a copy of the edition in question) which left a deep impression on me. It showed a Viking, resplendent in horned helmet and with a mad glint in his eye, holding a dagger-like sword to the throat of a terrified Englishman (possibly a priest or monk). Nearby stood a terrified young English maiden, while behind the village burnt furiously. 'Rape, pillage, and plunder' is what those heathen Vikings were about as they raided the christianised coastlines of eastern England. To me, the message behind this scene of horror was clear: 'Things might not be perfect today, son, but we've come a long way. Don't forget, and be grateful to be alive in our wonderful modern day and age.'
The stories that we tell and are told profoundly influence our view of ourselves. We can go a step further and say that our world - our place in it, our attitudes and aspirations, our relationships with other human and non-human beings - is in fact largely created by these narratives. This is a notion that is widely acknowledged nowadays when dealing with the individual person. Modern psychotherapy, along with the host of related disciplines that has sprung up over the past fifty years, is based upon this premise. Its prime method is for the 'patient' to tell the various stories going to make up their life, see how these stories affect the person concerned, and then, if appropriate, create a new story or otherwise find a way to release the grip of a destructive narrative.
Less frequently recognised is the moulding influence of the stories we are told on a social or cultural level, and which go to create 'the world'. One reason is that it is often not even realised that we are being told stories in the first place. 'That's not a story: that's a fact' will be the common rejoinder. The world out there consists of solid facts and bits of information; such is the efficacy of the conditioning factor of the various narratives that shape our views, beliefs, perception even. Yet, I would contend, for the person seeking awakening and liberation, personal therapy (and 'self-knowledge' as commonly understood) is no more important than social, cultural and religious therapy: unravelling the stories we are told from birth that unconsciously go to create the world we inhabit, and in which we become de facto participants.
One most important area where the narrative is everything is that of our history. The story we are generally told of civilisation begins with the ancient Greeks. True, there had been the Egyptians beforehand, but with their huge impersonal eyes staring into infinity they are a bit too weird to be of much relevance. Before them existed various other folk, mainly notable for their bizarre propensity to stick enormous slabs of rock into circles, a clearly pointless exercise from our modern, enlightened perspective. Indeed, so the story goes, our ancestors seem to have been an autonomous collective of idiocy until the Greek philosophers, mathematicians and the rest appeared as beacons of light out of the mire of ignorance. Along with other luminaries across the globe such as Buddha, Confucius, and Zarathustra, they all came to embody around 2500 years ago what Karl Jaspers famously referred to as the 'Axial Age'. This was the period when outstanding figures (all of them males, strangely) appeared in order to bring culture, spirituality, and higher learning - in a word, civilisation - to a level hitherto undreamed of.
The story of Britain from here onwards is a familiar one: Romans, Christians, the Dark Ages, Saxons and Vikings, Medieval stuff, the separation of Church and State, Industrial Revolution, the age of science and rationality, and so on and so on. And underlying this grand story of western civilisation is the assumption of progress and evolution. Despite the blood that's spattered on every page, it's a case of onward and up. The fruits of this narrative of development are plain for all to see today. OK, there are still millions of folk going hungry across the globe, and huge numbers of young children needlessly suffering cheaply and easily treated diseases. Genocide is ongoing in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and over 100,000 people have been killed in Iraq since western powers intervened to bring peace. Cities are ravaged just south of the U.S. border in turf wars over drugs (don't worry, they're only Mexicans). But still the signs of our evolutionary history are clear. We have clean water and no longer need to poo in the street. We can watch Lady Gaga 24/7 on the latest mobile devices. We have Simon Cowell; we have wind farms.
The trouble is, scratch beneath the surface and the story begins to fall apart. Were our Neolithic and Bronze Age ancestors simply neo-agricultural barbarians with a stone circle fetish, thankfully superseded by the glorious civilising influence of those noble Greeks and Romans? Quite possibly not. One readable source with a different narrative is 'The Chalice and the Blade' by Riane Eisler. There are aspects of this book that I cannot go along with. She talks of evolution and progress too much, where it would be better to let the evidence speak for itself, rather than jamming it into a dubious telos. There appear to be gaps in her understanding of modern dominator system techniques: she takes groups like the Club of Rome seriously as world improvers. And she has been duped by the story of Jesus the compassionate, peace-loving revolutionary, whose message has been corrupted along the way. She did not have the benefit of John Lash's 'Not in His Image' to expose the fake love-and-peace ethic of the Nazarene carpenter. And the words of D.M.Murdock, aka Acharya S, run to several hundred pages in demonstrating that Mr. Christ is most likely nothing more than a made-up character for political power purposes.
Be all this as it may, Eisler's descriptions of the Neolithic partnership societies of the Near East, 'Old Europe' and Minoan Crete in the first eight chapters of the book are brilliant. She shows how these peoples, with their worship of the Goddess, were relatively life-loving, equalitarian, and peaceful, as well as bringing in many technological advances. It was only with the incursion of waves of more warlike peoples with their bloody male gods from the north and east that these civilisations began to break down between c4300 BCE and 2800 BCE. From then on the pattern of dominator cultures leading to our current situation began to emerge.
Scratch more deeply, and things get stranger still. What do we make of the already well-developed cave art of south-west Europe that goes back over 30,000 years? Were its creators really gormless primitives? And what do we make of Tony Wright's contention that human brain capacity seems to have increased rapidly until about 200,000 years ago, since when it has been pretty much stable. Get this: our ancestors of 200,000 years ago had the same kind of brain as us (actually, Tony suggests it might have been superior to our own). Do you really need all that cranial capacity simply to organise a trap for a woolly mammoth?
Of course - and this is a vital point to recognise vividly - the stories that we are told are not random, related as if by accident. The story of civilisation that has come down to us today is a reflection of a cluster of belief systems, and serves specific purposes. The notions of progress and evolution superimposed onto the passing of events confirm Darwinian principles, those by which the world is largely interpreted in our western world. Forget that this application of a distorted Darwinism to social changes in the human realm is a highly dubious project. The story of our history, achieved in large part by plunder and domination, is excused and justified by fitting it into this cheapened and dumbed-down version of Darwinism, summarised as 'the survival of the most brutally fit' and 'human nature, red in tooth and claw.' Slaughter, beheadings, betrayals, tyranny over the many by the few: all are an integral part of this inevitable march of progress, of evolution.
We, meanwhile, and it goes without saying, stand at the apex of this process, in spite of our little problems. This is our story, and it couldn't be any different. Needs must that our children are informed that they are the brightest and best, fortunate to be living at this pinnacle of human civilisation (one of the major functions of education in modern society, it appears, is to inculcate the main stories of our culture into the hearts and minds of our young ones). How could they be told otherwise? That times may have existed that were less warlike, more caring, and that somehow we messed up and got lost along the way. Not exactly the story to tell if you want children who are obedient to the status quo, 'good members of society', fearful and respectful of the imperatives of modern western civilisation.
Revisiting and revisioning the narratives of our history is an ongoing project that I have found extremely liberating. There is freedom in escaping the confines of the past 2500 years as the only past that is relevant to the question of who we are. Our story is broader, richer, and possibly far more noble. Maybe times have existed when human minds have been imbued with a deeper spiritual awareness. Maybe (in fact most likely) some of our ancestors possessed vast knowledge of the workings of the universe that has been lost or deliberately destroyed by those who superseded them. Maybe some were creators of marvellous technologies that we remain hopelessly ignorant of. Maybe, just maybe, the much-vaunted 'Axial Age' marks, not so much a flowering to new heights of human consciousness, as a wisdom once in the more general domain, now able to manifest only through the lives of a few individuals. Plato, Mr. Axial Age himself, referred to his times as 'a remembering of things forgotten.'
Reflecting on the undulating horizon of this much vaster panorama of human history also gives the lie to the notion that human nature is fixed: that the way things are is the inevitable consequence of our makeup, of a selfish gene and a nature red in tooth and claw. It becomes clear that the application of half-baked Darwinian principles to our story is a fabrication, a convenient narrative for those deeply invested in maintaining the social and perceptual status quo. To echo William Blake, the manacles we clamp upon our present and future are mind-made, nothing more.
As a postscript, there is a wealth of written and spoken information out there on revisiting our past. Be discerning, treat it as opening doorways rather than trying to nail down 'the truth'. Red Ice Radio has interviews with a multitude of researchers in these areas. For myself, I have been respectfully instructed by, among others, Riane Eisler as described above; Terence McKenna's rather speculative but visionary and poetic evocation in the first part of 'Food of the Gods'; Graham Hancock, especially 'Supernatural'; Marija Gimbutas; Lucy Wyatt; there are the energy-challenging but remarkably comprehensive tomes of Acharya S.; Michael Cremo. Michael Tsarion is another prominent figure in this world. Loads more. Dip in and follow your daimon!
And as a final postscript, even not pooing in the street is nothing for modern civilisation to be uniquely proud of: private loos with efficient sewage systems existed in the townships of the Indus Valley in 2,700 BCE!
