Scaling the Cliff of Prehistory

Part Two

How High the Moon: the Realm of Neanderthal

This essay is an idiosyncratic rough-and-ready attempt to give us a context in which to situate those high moments of metahistory that define who we are. I do not focus on the contexts and prehistorical beliefs and achievements of Homo erectus, or on the more accessible heritages of our Cro-Magnon African, Asian, Australian, and American cousins. The sources I have used for this narrative are European and Semitic, culturally speaking. Despite their long, intimate, troubled, and always profusely intertwined relations, the Semite and the European arise from the same basic cultural matrix. Anyway, we who were born into patriarchal monotheism need to begin with our own story.

Before the solar calendar with its 12 constellations, before the spear and the chariot, the fortress, patriarchal storm gods, the rape, enslavement and demotion of women, the invention of private property, sin and farming, the scarification of genitalia, genocide, law, "philosophy," "scientific progress," ecocide and the ‘we-bring-good-things-to-life’ gifts of corporate culture, before all this cornucopia of "progress," was the Moon. Her calendar, rituals, and sacred round.

The Cradle of Life

I myself did not learn about the Earth-moon dyad, that is, the real identity of the moon, until reading Sitchin’s translations of the Sumerian, Akkadian and Babylonian cosmologies, and Whitley Strieber’s recounting of his childhood "lessons" at the hands of ETs. You could, I suppose, claim that no one really understood the moon until the rocks we stole from her during and after 1969 were finally given consensual analysis in 1984, when it was agreed a "projectile" had impacted Earth and sent from Gaia’s lifeless ribcage a massive body we now call the moon. Gaia’s twinned self went into close orbit, that is, an orbit exactly calibrated for the production of biological creativity on an almost unimaginable scale. The Sumerian myths, as I recollect from Sitchin, also indicate that the dyadic Earth, as a result of this cosmic "hit" out of nowhere, gained a new solar orbit—perfectly calibrated to tolerate abundant life.

Consider: "Without the slowing effects of the moon’s gravity, the planet’s thousand-mile-an-hour rotational speed would cause constant surface winds of at least three hundred miles an hour…. a ceaseless hurricane. Water vapor, borne aloft by the wind, would sheathe the planet in an unending cloud cover" (Strieber). Maybe bacteria and lichens could survive. Nothing else. No light to heat the oceans, cauldron of biological wonders.

"So it is not the Earth that is the cradle of life, but the Earth-moon system." (Strieber goes on to point out that "the Earth-moon structure is so carefully balanced that it is hard to think of it as the outcome of chance. It looks much more like a construction of some sort—an incubator, if you will—given the exquisite balances that are involved." I will not pursue this line of thought, but I commend pages 103 — 116 of The Secret School to you, as these comprise the most provocative short presentation of the case for a biologically-based intelligent cosmos I have read.)

Nocturnal Cosmos

We lived outdoors. In the open. For 200,000, 500,000, no, 2 million, well, if you think about it, 6 million or more years. Is it far-fetched to call our night-living a Tradition, a honored timeless mode of being-in-the-world? Did Nature’s nocturnal cycle, the wheeling heavens, contribute to hidden, as yet unexamined capacities of our brains (cerebrum or cerebellum)? Eons of watching the mysterious clockwork phases of the moon, her waxing, climax, waning, three-day absence, return? All in relation to the magically constellated ecliptic?

I understood then something very vital had been lost to those of us who dwell in hyper-lit, sealed apartments and shuttered houses. (Constellation of Orion seen over a city.)

The power of the nocturnal cosmos came home to me full force during a stay on a generous fellow-traveler’s rooftop in Bombay, after a long, long dust-filled train trek across the half of India some decades ago. I washed my blackened face and hands, we ate and talked, and finally I lay down alone for the night on an open-air cot. Above me the heavens were so unprecedentedly thick with starry splendor that I sank awed into their powerful luminescent communing tide. All through the summers of my youth I had experienced the deep pleasure of contemplating the night sky. But it was many years later while watching John Lash dance with a slow, wavy, and subtly rapturous motion as he described the Milky Way and the constellations of the ecliptic, that I finally "got it."

I understood then something very vital had been lost to those of us who dwell in hyper-lit, sealed apartments and shuttered houses. Our relation to cosmos—the night sky we experience physically with our whole bodies and being—had been a primal, ancient, and formative experience, the source of our most elemental dancing, our first music, our most bedrock religion, ground of our deepest and most honorable and enduring imaginings. This was, and is, the original "dark side."

How we came to designate and name the 13 constellations of the ecliptic I do not know, for they remain by and large very peculiar abstractions relative to most of the mythic beings they represent: the Twins, the Crab, the Virgin, and so forth. Snake Tamer was dropped from initiatic view to rob the lunar calendar of its vital 13th station, eviscerating and replacing it with the solar 12-month calendar. (Yet Ophiuchus remains on the ecliptic, as any astronomer will tell you!) This but one of many all-but-lost-to-view, archaic signs of the struggle between the Old Moon and the New Sun religions. Perhaps someone will run the configurations of the constellations backwards in time on a computer and see when and if the forms they designate cohered at some distant point. (Since changes in the structure of constellations occur very slowly indeed, would 100,000 years make a difference?)

Meantime, our ancestors created powerful myths (histories in story form) and encoded them in the night sky with a precociousness that is incontestable and even shocking (de Santillana & von Dechend; Hancock; Sullivan; Temple; inter alia).

How did it come about, for instance, that "a tiny group of seven undistinguished fourth-magnitude stars…[were] noted and named by every single culture on Earth past and present" (Gooch)? That, further, these stars (the Pleiades) were universally designated females, pursued females, and universally rescued by different dei ex machinas? When Cro-Magnon finally gained global dominance over Neanderthal some 30,000 years ago, these seven bringers of nourishment in the form of rain and fertility rose in the vernal dawn; and then again rose in the autumnal equinox at dusk, unleashing Orion, the Hunter. Even after the defeat of Neanderthal, these "sisters," possessed of millennial authority, magical, portentous, delicate presences, forever memorialized, trailed behind the Cro-Magnon Sun People everywhere they went, lodged in their hearts (and certainly in the hearts of the women).

How did it come about, for instance, that "a tiny group of seven undistinguished fourth-magnitude stars…[were] noted and named by every single culture on Earth past and present" (Gooch)? (Pleiades, above, with the belt and sword of Orion, pictured in an Australian Aborigine bark painting from Arnhem Land. Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.)
NOTE: The Aboriginal version of the Seven Sisters contains thirteen stars because this is how many are seen in the configuration by individuals with high-powered night vision, compared to the six seen by most people. JLL

The Archeology of Ideas

So who were these Moon People, left-turning walkers of open-air labyrinths, those seven-ringed terrestrial-cosmic spirals created by the strange hand of our ancestral cousins? I’ll be terse: Turn to Stan Gooch’s miraculous work Cities of Dreams and find out. There is so much crammed into these pages, a book whose mere asides are nuggets of inestimable value, that I cannot justly summarize it. That it is "merely" a work of the imagination and bears no impact on the tightly circumscribed debate of university-based scholars, whom we’ve allowed to arbitrate the story of our origins—the physical anthropologists, recently the geneticists, and of course those monocular, ground-staring accountants of the past, the archeologists. I should add that some of Gooch’s outrageous speculations (convictions) about Neanderthal are given significant, even if tangential or unintended, support by scholars like Alexander Marshack, Paul Bahn, and Robert Bednarik, among others.

Gooch is a psychologist who deals in what he calls the "archeology of ideas" (aka metahistory), following the footsteps of Frazer, Graves, Margaret Murray, and Robert Briffault (author of the three-volume magnum opus called The Mothers). To quote this master: "…all legends, myths and fairy- tales are (a) not fiction, (b) not psychological or psychoanalytic projections …they are statements of fact. They are all first and foremost, and essentially, historical accounts of actual events which once actually occurred. "Gooch further admonishes that "we must expect our information sometimes to survive only in the form of broken and distorted fragments. In this respect the work of the archeology of ideas does not differ from that of…archeology, or geology."

And so we have an unambiguous statement regarding the queen of all the many disciplines that lead us into metahistory’s inner sanctum. The Queen of Metahstory is myth itself, or perhaps, too, that unique amalgam that Gimbutas calls "archeomythology," which the archeologists have yet to explore. About myth cluster the lesser disciplines that act as physical-temporal boundary markers, objective check-points, and assist us in the whole-minded reconstruction of our past out of literature, myth, legend, historical reports, hidden taboos, modern prejudices, and fairy tales. Left to itself "science" does not delve very far into the realm of meaning, and thus help us integrate all the confusing pieces in the house metahistory.

Neanderthal Clues

Here are some clues Gooch provides about the culture the anthropologists call Mousterian, so named after the discovery of complete sets of stone toolkits (what else!) found in the Le Moustier rock shelter in the Périgord, near the Vézère river. These clues are almost entirely extra-anthropological, needless to say. Here they are: 13 and its midpoint 7; 4 the midpoint of 7; 3, the number of days the moon disappears before reappearing, and her three faces of waxing (the Virgin, white), full (the fertile mother, red) and waning (the old crone, black); 4 quarters x 13 months or 52 (Mayan, Aztec sacred calendar); 13 x 28-day menses or 364 + 1, aka the lunar calendar itself or the "year and a day" of fairy tales; the sacred coven of 13: 12 plus the person in the center—speaking of which, Jesus and his 12 disciples made up our best-known "coven"—we are talking about a codex likely not less than 100,000 years old, when according to one anthropologist Mousterian culture was "at its height."

Continuing: red ochre; blood; womb; the sea and all waters; salt; rain; the liquid fire of volcanoes, the lightning fire of thunderstorms, the fire of the hearth; fertility; the butterfly; the bull and its horns; the serpent; the spider and the square or even-sided cross; the bear and its constellations; mazes and labyrinths and spirals; mistletoe (if only we knew the many ancient uses of this most sacred of all the Moon’s plants); trees; the colors white, red, and black; the hood; the mushroom; hallucinogens; orgiastic moonlit group sex; ritual (willing) human sacrifice; re-incarnation; an herbal chest whose contents would choke our writing-shriveled memories; left-handedness, honoring Moon’s path about the Earth; and a big cerebellum.

And above it all, comprising it all, was the awesome power of the menstruating female magician.

Long after Neanderthal’s "disappearance" come faint echoes: Big Foot, "wildman," elves, dwarves, witches, hobgoblins, magick, "left-handed" comments, "two-faced" untrustworthies, blood-drinking vampires, hooded initiates, "hooded" eyes, indeed hood itself, "Satanic" nocturnal orgies, the thirteenth card, the Joker, the Fool of the Tarot deck. Gambolers with no bloody sense of time! A curse upon the lot! Yet they hang on, as if by magic, in the crannied walls of our own brilliant sunshine culture.

The truth is, according to Gooch, Neanderthal worshipped Mother Moon. Not as Earth Mother or Great Goddess, which forms arise with agriculture, but as the heavens-residing ruler of the waters that flowed in Earth and in Woman, whose chambered womb held the salt-blood sea of creation. Moon-Mother, ruler of the tides, of the bull-bellowing power of creation, she and she alone tempered her daughter Earth’s fatal icy-hot fingers. So her priestesses danced for rain; danced for their own birthlings; danced for the dead and watched the spirits of the dead pass into the other Realm. They saw the spirits leave their husks. Without taking ayahuasca or any other such heavy hitter. (Well, maybe some sort of tea.)

What of the males, you ask? Gooch is truly remarkable in all he gives to us, even here. About the Neanderthal male he is particularly funny, for he believed him to be almost fatally, we’d say childishly, over-sexed. We have him, burnished and embellished in our own mythology as the faun, satyr, the god Pan, possibly the centaur, "wild men…reknowned for their sexuality …drawings…often show the males [with nymphs, aka nymphomaniacs] in a state of full erection." It seems Homo Neanderthalus was jubilant putty the hands of his women.

Pan in the Zodiac. Roman amulet, 2nd C. AD.

But he, like she, was no mean creature. This was a human being for whom death did not exist—in contradistinction, for instance, to the solar overlay religion of the Hades-dreading Greeks. That was the way of Two-Faces, the Dark and the Light, our Lady Moon: she was forever changing, waxing and waning, leaving and returning. Unlike the steady, invariable sun, she was organic and mystical. To die was to return. Neanderthal knew this. The entire mystic or yogi’s panoply of paranormal powers, governed by the human autonomic nervous system (largely under the cerebellum’s influence) was probably available to every Neanderthal. He was considerably more powerful physically than Cro-Magnon and lived in a far more drastic climate. It took Cro-Magnon, based in his Levantine fastness, on the order of 50,000 years to penetrate the European "empire" (Gooch) of Neanderthal. A very interesting time lapse indeed. Measure that span against Egypt’s or Rome’s great "dynasties" or "empires."

Physical anthropologists don’t speculate about the powers endowed by Neanderthal’s brain-physiology, as, a priori it must be inferior to Cro-Magnon’s. Though it would seem the raw physical evidence of Neanderthal craniums might provide them with a basis for imagining how Neanderthal’s endowment for intelligence might have differed from ours. Instead anthropologists tend to focus on the fruits of Cro-Magnon’s superior blade technology which allows him to "outcompete" clumsy Neanderthal—in the long run. Simple, at least if you stay fixed on the bare bones of it.

Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal

Psychologist-turned-metahistorian Gooch insists that "Cro-Magnon very much wanted the amazing Neanderthal magic for himself. The problem was how to get the magic…without falling into the power of, or under the spell of [Neanderthal]… of the actual spirits, powers and forces involved. That the situation was/is [sic] perceived as one of very real risk we see again and again in countless legendary descriptions. How do you manage to get the Nibelungen treasure? How do you get the golden fleece [mistletoe, aged]? How do you get the Princess away from the Dragon? How do you make a contract with the Devil that is not finally binding? How do you get the crock of gold from the leprechaun? How do you get safely into the Underworld and back, and so on, and so on."

Later Gooch continues this train of thought: "Cro-Magnon would have come to know Neanderthal religion through initially secret…[and] dangerous… observation, and from actual demonstration when official delegations visited back and forth. No doubt Neanderthal deliberately used his [sic] psychological advantage…There would have been times, too, when captured Neanderthals would have ‘miraculously’ treated…Cro-Magnon wounds, and other ailments. There were other ‘trifles’ too, such as Neanderthal’s undoubted ability to predict eclipses of the sun and moon…to say nothing of hallucinogenic drugs, the ability to dowse, and many, many other such wonders.…The long-term result…was that Cro-Magnon was in large part converted to the Neanderthal religious world-view and practice." Gooch then adds an aside whose importance I am convinced he underestimates: "Perhaps…Neanderthal woman converted and politicised Cro-Magnon woman" (my italics).

It is, in my opinion, no accident that the best imaginative works about these times (the Upper Paleolithic) have been authored mainly by women: Ursula Le Guin, Jean Auel (herself highly respected by academic paleontologists), and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (a trained anthropologist). In her book Reindeer Moon Thomas has a wonderful passage about two camps of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers encountering each other. The women of one camp meet, catch fish in the river, eat and cavort, laughing: "Before the moon of Flies was a crescent, the women knew all about each other and were kissing and calling each other ‘Sister.’"

Here is this anthropologist-novelist’s reconstruction of how the men of the two camps dealt with each other: "It was very different with the men. They spent the first few days sitting and talking, not only in the day but far into the night. We bought them fish, sedge, goosefoot sprouts, and bullrush shoots. They ate without looking at their food, but kept their eyes fixed on each other. Their words, whether the good speech of our men or the ugly speech of their men, sounded stiff and guarded, as they carefully measured how much they told each other." You will not read, dear brothers and sisters, more revealing passages than these about how culture changes non-violently and by what agents.

Of course it’s merely a novel, a right-brained construction, that is, a left-handed trifle. Not science. Not knowledge.

According to Sykes the Neanderthals "hung on for at least fifteen thousand years after the first Cro-Magnons reached western Europe some fifty or forty thousand years ago.…An era that had lasted for a quarter of a million years ended, finally and irreversibly, in a cave in southern Spain about twenty-eight thousand years ago."

Adios. Adieu. Farewell.

The Wounded King Ritual

The Mousterian stone toolkit of Neanderthal disappeared toward the end of the Middle Paleolithic (ca. 90,000 — 40,000 BP) and was replaced by the "blade technology," the light hurlable spear and atlatl credited to Cro-Magnon. But the latter ended up by inheriting or stealing the former’s really important "toolkit," the one paleontologists cannot hold in their hands, examine with microscopes, and time test with dendrology-corrected carbon-14 methodology. The mental, mythically memorialized "tools" of naked-eye astronomy, herbal medicine, and the entire complex of beliefs and behaviors that are subsumed in Gooch’s term "the Old Religion." According to Gooch this psychic "kit" traveled with Cro-Magnon, all the way into the heart of the Neolithic, and beyond.

"What the Grail legend is trying to tell us," Gooch continues," is that unless these (ancient) mysteries are understood for what they are, and unless the rites are duly performed (the king’s wounds must break out every year afresh) life on earth will not be renewed. (The Fisher King pierced in the thigh. Manuscript illustration for Le Roman du Sanit Graal, France, 14th C.)