Scaling the Cliff of Prehistory

Part Three

How Low the Moon: Saharasia, the Onset of Patrism, and the Fall of Woman (and Child)

After the Freeze

Few realize how ambiguous the border was between the violent end of the Pleistocene and the warm interglacial Holocene. The so-called Younger Dryas constituted a glacial coda to the Pleistocene, from 12,500—11,400 BP (10,500 to 9,400 BCE). But the Holocene or current "interglacial" itself soon experienced its own "Mini-Ice Age" from 8,200—7,800 BP. (I will shift from here on to BCE dates as we encroach upon the historical era.) Thus two Mini-Ice Ages: 10,500 to 9,400 BCE—after which "agriculture" is believed to have started in the Anatolian highlands—and 6,200 to 5,800 BCE. Each of these freezes was of course followed by floods. Evidence for the smaller and later Mini-Ice Age has been scientifically and meticulously documented, while the earlier and far more impressive glacial meltdown has not (so far as I know).

The Black Sea Flood happened almost exactly 200 years after the Mini-Ice Age ended and produced the flood of 5,600 BCE. Ryan & Pitman contend that the great Black Sea "oasis in the midst of an arid landscape" was a stable environment before the last Mini-Ice Age. Unlike the Taurus-and-Zagros-mountain "crescent" of Anatolia-Iraq-Iran, the archeological evidence for the Black Sea as the true nexus of this evolutionary development, with its accompanying sedentary way of life, is buried under water. It seems more logical nonetheless that very large and deep, river-fed inland lakes, such as the Black Sea, surrounded by grasslands and by tall mountains and their spring run-off, would have been more likely candidates than the mountains themselves for the final domestication of wheat and other indigenous grains. To do agriculture one must have dependable sources of water. The high Anatolian lakes did not provide such sources, becoming desiccated and saline, even as the Black Sea remained usable for many millennia, until 5,600 BCE.

The entire Mesolithic and Neolithic prehistory of the Near and Middle East and southwest Central Asia is unbelievably dense with signs of more or less constant human movement, marked by spells of sustained habitation by one people in one place. The movement was in response to centuries-long patterns of climatic variation: from cold-dry to warm-moist, back and forth. Different peoples, languages, and cultures mixed. Compared to this area of the early Neolithic world, sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia, America, Australia, and Europe would seem to have been relatively quiet (although I do not know).

"[The Black Sea oasis] apparently attracted people of diverse cultures and language families to flourish along its fertile shores, exchanging goods and ideas and bits and pieces of their languages. Words borrowed by the Indo-Europeans from other languages such as Semitic, Kartvelian, Sumerian, and even Egyptian attest to the proximity of these people.…experienced vitners were thoroughly enjoying the grape at that time….[This] refuge for already- practicing farmers might have also provided a place to share tools, practical knowledge, seed, and livestock.…the borrowed vocabulary is especially rich in agrarian jargon.… [With the start of the flood] the Semites and Ubaids fled southward to the Levant and Mesopotamia; the Kartvelians retreated to the Caucasus; the LBK dashed across Europe, leapfrogging from one site to the next…; the Vinca retreated upstream…to the Hungarian plain. Others went to the Adriatic and the islands of the Aegean. Some refugees migrated into the heartland of Eurasia via the Don. Still others used the Volga as access to the distant steppes of the southern Ural Mountains.…the Tocharians struck out east to settle one day in the Tarim Basin [Chinese Turkestan] at the edge of what was to become the Old Silk Route" (Ryan & Pitman).

A millennium or so later (4,300 BCE) the first hoards of armed patriarchal herders on horseback came out of the steppelands north and east of the Black and Caspian seas, the "Proto-Indo-Europeans" or Kurgans, to invade the great matristic cultures of Old Europe. They were to be followed in the ensuing millennia by other violent "founders" of the new order we celebrate as "ancient history."

Worship of the Blade

The evidence suggests that during these times, 10,000 to 4,000 BCE, cultures exhibited respect, if not outright reverence, for women and their role in society (with some local and temporally circumscribed exceptions), throughout the alleged zone of the Neolithic Revolution. The evidence is for nonviolent change, that is, for change caused by powerful cycles of climate as opposed to war.

Take, for instance, the world’s allegedly oldest urban settlement, Jericho, founded on a deep and powerful underground spring north of the Dead Sea Basin. A Natufian settlement in the ninth millennium, in the ensuing millenium "Jericho expanded to about ten acres, and fortification walls, towers, and tombs for dead kings….are the earliest of all evidences ever found anywhere for the presence of possible conflict and social stratification" (DeMeo, citing M.K. Roper). But it is a temporary, localized development.

Meanwhile, and one strongly suspects not coincidentally, at least in terms of those fortifications and tombs, pastoralism was increasing throughout the Levant. By the middle of the millennium, 7,500 BCE, Jericho was abandoned, due to growing aridity, and again resettled in 7,350 BCE, with the "onset of wetter conditions." This was the early Neolithic pattern, prior to the creation of the first large, river-based city states in the fourth millennium.

DeMeo characterizes these millennia in the Levant as follows: "Only fleeting visions of military conflict, fortifications, social stratification, or cranial deformation occur in the Near East before c.5,000 BCE, appearing here and there at isolated sites, and without any clear pattern or widespread distribution. And even after 5,000 BCE, and for the next thousand years, evidence of social turmoil still seems to crop up only occasionally, perhaps incubating within some unknown culture or region before revealing itself in studied archaeological deposits. It is only after c.4,000 BCE, when desiccation clearly became more widespread and intense, that these initial traces of disturbed human behavior begin to blossom in clear, unambiguous, and often organized, institutionalized forms" (my italics).

What then of the rising pastoralism? As the Paleolithic hunters became the herders of Mesolithic and Neolithic times, so too the gatherers became the first agriculturalists, having done pre-agricultural gardening or horticulture for millennia beforehand (Tudge). The entire momentous conflict between these two groups undoubtedly grew and became so widespread and significant in the Levant that long afterward it was codified and memorialized in the Genesis story of Cain, the farmer, and Abel, the herder. The farmer’s way of life had destroyed (murdered) the idyll of the shepherd’s (hunter’s), and Yahweh, that dyed-in-the-wool patriarchal herder’s god, preferred the ancestral meat. Guilt for the murder accrued to the farmer, Cain, whose way of life had nonetheless become ubiquitous and dominant. Cain’s "banishment" refered to the spread of agriculture eastward, as of course the story was written down in 800 — 400 BCE, long after the Fall of Woman had occurred, by severely patristic Hebrew scribes, and so it reads as "a brother’s tale."

But why did humanity’s perennial religious ecology, in which the female and the male co-exist, more or less in balance, as social equals, collapse into patriarchy, which religious career began as the worship of the blade, of the lone spear (Eisler)? How did we fall into the reign of might (terror) and pronounced social stratification and out of a millennial civilization of egalitarian justice?

This is a particularly deep and vexing question, one that I believe we must resolve before we are truly freed to create a wholly new and sustainable future that honors all we have done that is of lasting, human merit.

"Catastrophic Biology"

Shepard, who speaks from the perspective of what he empathetically imagines to be the Pleistocene hunter-culture’s Weltanschauung, speculates: "Perhaps sexism comes into being with the doting on fertility and fecundity in agriculture and the androgynous [sic!] ‘reply’ of nomadic, male-dominated societies of pastoralism." Shepard, who has an obvious aversion to both "the catastrophic biology" of agriculture—Pandora’s Box—and the possibility of its peaceful co-existence with the Earth, further speculates that "War and warriorhood probably grew out of the territorialism inherent in agriculture and its exclusionary attitudes and the necessity of expansion because of the decline of field fertility and the frictions and competitions of increased human density."

Shepard drops a grievously understated remark about the basic situation posed by a new, sedentary lifestyle centered, not on the males’ hunt, but on women’s miraculously providential horticulture: "She became the symbol of productivity and access to the hidden powers of earth, an image that has gone against her ever since" (my italics).

This of course is a male scholar who speaks. The most trenchant reply comes pre-eminently from a female scholar, Gimbutas, who almost single-handedly deciphered the geographic extent and religious premises of the Old European civilization that flourished throughout southeastern and central Europe and as far south as the Aegean, Crete, Sicily, and Malta. Gimbutas found that this civilization endured from 6,000 to 1,500 BCE. Citing Mellart’s work at Catal Hüyük as supplying the first evidence of Goddess-based agriculture in 6,500 BCE (older levels are now being explored by his student and successor, Ian Hodder), the origins of sedentary, Goddess-based agricultural civilization endured for not less than 5,000 years—roughly the age of patriarchal civilization today.

Thus, one must question Shepard’s notion of a "catastrophic biology," or at least its timing, as there is no evidence of it being the cause of the fall of glylanic (non-stratified or egalitarian) cultures. They disappeared over several millennia because they were massively attacked and unfortified, and thus utterly destroyed (more or less along familiar Old Testament lines). "Catastrophic biology" commenced, I strongly suspect, much later, when the male-led, herd-centered warrior cultures took over the Mesopotamian plain and established vast, irrigation-based, monocultural croplands, serving fortified city states, sometime after 4,000 BCE.

Saharasia: the Onset of Patrism

Saharasia consists of the "great belt of arid lands encompassing North Africa, the Near ("Middle") East, and Central Asia [and] is the largest single contiguous land region of generally similar climate on the face of the Earth." DeMeo continues, "It encompasses some of the largest individual true desert regions: the Sahara…Arabian…Rub’al Khali…Negev and Syrian… Iranian…Rajasthan and Thar…and Turkestan, Takla Makan, and Gobi deserts of Central Asia. These various desert regions are each surrounded by belts of semiarid lands which merge them together into a generally contiguous zone or belt of aridity, stretching nearly halfway around the Earth." A 1,000-mile-wide and 8,000-mile-long swath of forbidding land. A continent bereft.

The most desiccated "core" of the region consists of the Sahara Desert from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, the Negev and Syrian deserts, the Arabian Peninsula, the Iranian Plateau, and, west of the Caspian Sea, the Gobi (Mongolia). When these core zones went arid in historical time they spawned cultural responses of extreme violence (as is well-known: recall the terrors of the Khans).

It was not, however, always thus.

The great global flood that ended the Pleistocene resulted in the moistening of the Sahara—all of Saharasia. It reached its climax in the Sahara about 8,000 - 7,000 BCE which remained more or less intact as a fertile, lake-dotted grasslands until 4,000-3,000 BCE and even, in spots, to 2,000 BCE. Similar dates and findings may be ascribed to Arabia and Central Asia. The rock artwork of the Sahara itself indicates a patrist warrior cultural ascendance around 2,000 BCE, but not much before. According to DeMeo "the peoples of this wet, lush period were unarmored, and matrist in character….[Further] there does not exist any clear, compelling, or unambiguous evidence for the existence of significant armoring or patrism anywhere on earth prior to c.4000 BCE."

What then happened between the fourth, third and second millennia to bring about the Afro-Eurasian ascendance of a wholly new, disruptive cultural change we continue to perversely (and illogically) designate "civilization"?

Consider Arabia, one of the two primary pumps of patristic culture, the Semitic branch, whose drought-driven migrations bore with them misery and a new set of beliefs. (The other patriarchal "storm-god" pump was Central Asia, the Indo-European "heartland.") Widespread matristic Neolithic farming settlements and a growing population characterized Arabia between 7,000—4,000 BCE. The region had extensive trade with Egypt, the Levant, and especially Mesopotamia. According to scholar D.J. Hamblin, "There are still-sturdy dams across now-dry streams and networks of stone-lined cisterns and canals which once served fields of grain, herds of sheep, and the needs of slowly plodding caravans" (quoted in DeMeo).

When a progressively dry period hit the peninsula, exacerbated, let us note, by such anti-ecological practices as "overgrazing, wood grubbing, and burning," sedentary people begin to abandon their settlements, adopting a "migratory, nomadic" way of living, as they dispersed "out of Arabia, in all directions." The ability of sedentary Neolithic Arabians to "move on" was eased by the fact that long before their diaspora took place, "peoples of the interior [had] developed migratory adaptations and an emphasis upon nomadic herding" (DeMeo, my italics).

The economic interests and values of these nomadic pastoralists may not have been exactly co-incidental with their cousins, the settled farmers, or agriculturalists. In any event as one group they walked and sought food and water, source of the miracle of agriculture.

Desert Cowboys

It is my suspicion that the taproot of patrism begins with the hunting male turned herder. Men lost something momentous, and today perhaps indescribable, in the long transition to an increasingly sedentary way of life that was dependent on the old knowledge and labor of women. In time they suffered, it may be surmised, a "loss of freedom" (Wolfe Herre, quoted in Shepard), that is, the glorious freedom of being in the wild with their game "committed to the understanding of a vast semiosis…in which they are not only readers but members….[in which the] hunt becomes a kind of search gestalt [whose]…lifelong test and theme is ‘learning to give away’ what was a gift received in the first place—life itself—a theme demonstrated daily in the sharing of meat" (Shepard). Where was their glory as hunters, bringers of the sacred meat?

What had they become?

Domesticators of sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, dogs and chickens, no more. These animals were not equals, the "wild free beings who owned the world as much as the hunters themselves, and in whose great beauty Homo sapiens had discovered a mirror of the best human qualities" (Shepard). How did these hunters-turned-herders hold onto their immemorial role, their meaning in the social equation?

I believe there is a hidden bitterness and rage at the very core of the patriarchal cultural impulse. It remains to this day (cf. Jensen).

The herder was more or less constantly on the move, in bondage to his no-longer-wild ungulates. But at least out in open spaces, not bound to tilled lots where the farmers were. Where was the civilizing influence of woman on the lonely mountainsides and empty plains "where the deer and the antelope roam[ed].…"? The Saharasian cowboys had pioneered a new co-dependent relationship, one in which there was no question about who was in charge. Thus, perhaps, their psychology of dominance began to take root.

The archeology of ideas—or perhaps, in time, the archeomythology practiced and advocated by Gimbutas—is our best trail to track down clues about the religious-value system of the Semites migrating out of Arabia (cf. Salabi). It leads eventually to such Semitic nomad-tribal texts as the Pentateuch, which specifically encouraged and lauded the take-over of foreign lands, and sanctioned what today we call genocide. Mitigating the Biblical story evidence, however, are recent on-the-ground archeological discoveries that make it seem unlikely the early Semites, Jews or Arabs, committed widespread, sustained genocide, despite the bellowing commands of their male god (Finkelstein & Silberman).

These early Semites did however certainly assert themselves: "By 3500 BCE, Semitic elements appeared in Sumerian cuneiform texts, and the language of Egypt developed Semitic aspects" (DeMeo). Lasting Arab (and, later, Hebrew) ties with Mesopotamia and Egypt go back many millennia.

Nor were the Semitic tribes alone. To the north, in Central Asia, similar waves of "militant armored nomad groups…initiated cultural transitions which destroyed the male-female and mother-infant bond, and placed all family matters, to include the choice of marriage partner, in the hands of dominant males" (DeMeo). These Kurgan and later Indo-European hordes descended south (as we have already seen from the account of the Black Sea flood). The lands of the entire Fertile Crescent become a perennially and frequently tormented succession of encounters between the indigenous and eventually predominantly Semitic southerners and the more sporadic Indo-European northerners (Stone).

The Ubaids (who did not settle in the broad Mesopotamian plain after the Black Sea catastrophe, but lived in the presumably safer environs of the Zagros Mountains for over a millennium) descended into Mesopotamia and in ca. 4,000 BCE built a temple to their god Enki, Lord of the Sail and Waters, in the world’s first city (state), Eridu. In this first ziggurat-temple "not a single Goddess figurine was found" (Stone). A millennium later the Shemsu Hor tribes arrived, probably from Sumer, to "lower kingship" in already ancient Egypt, and by "2,900 BCE pictures of the sun god Hor-Wer show him riding about in his boat of heaven" (Stone).

Why did these new militarized cultures spread? The cultures of Old Europe, and even those of pre-dynastic Egypt and Mesopotamia, were considerably more permanent, albeit unfortified and generally unmilitarized, with deep economic and religious roots in their landscapes. It seems likely, following DeMeo, that environmental cycles of sudden or relentlessly increasing yet highly unpredictable aridity combined with the intensification of nomadic herding practices that exacerbated the overall ecological deterioration of the drylands. If we add to this mix a rage against the failed technology of the early agriculturalists of Arabia, Central Asia, and later the Sahara, and against the female providers themselves, as well as their Great Goddess religion, we may begin to tentatively grasp the appalling savagery of the Kurgans, Aryans, and Semites.

To this volatile mix must be added the fearsome war technology of the tamed horse and the radical enhancement of mobility it bestowed. Along with a new approach to human relations. Shepard bluntly maintains: "Cattle stealing was so central to the herders’ way of life that it gave rise to a warrior class." Bands of rustlers "alternately cooperated with others as needs arose for combining power to facilitate raiding, self-defense, and retaliation or competed with each other for water and grass. In this sense the horse intensified the need for collective solidarity, even though it [also] undermined central control and magnified the means of dispute and aggressive individualism" (Shepard). This is the cinematic landscape of my youth, orchestrated by Hollywood.

"To be on horseback is not only to be [feel] godlike but also to see the earth itself as the underworld….[Thus] caught in the regressive headiness of leaving the world, the mounted horseman is puerile…." (Shepard). Here resides the origins of aristocracy, of those "lords" whose quest was for "Power over ever larger herds of ungulates, hence over people.…" Shepard goes on to speak of "the rapture of horseriding the kinetic form of pyramidism, the architectural expression of leaving the earth,…of ‘flight’ mythically taken on horseback. The horse was….the apocalyptic beast who carried Middle East [and Central Asian] sky worship and the sword to thousands of hapless peoples…." These warriors believed people without horses and chariots were "beneath" them—as of course they were—and being "puerile" they transposed their physical situation literalistically. Thus the horseless peasant—man, woman, and child—was radically de-humanized and deserved to be slaughtered, tortured, raped, and enslaved—to become henceforth rightless private property. All to the "glory" of a savage deity.

Ecology Be Damned

All this, Shepard muses, came about by the need to escape "the degradation of the land" caused by monocultural farming on a large scale. But the origins of this brand new organized violence seem more complicated, as I’ve already suggested.

Whatever else we may say, patriarchy sprouted in the garden of scarcity.

Scarcity gives rise to a psychological climate of fear; a loss of faith in Nature as Divine Nuturer; to hoarding behavior, the arts of concealment, of stealth, and values that encouragecompetition for the scarce coin of Life itself. In such an anarchic situation, "Might" ineluctably tends toward an associated reified status as "Right," masked in varying degrees over the course of history, but understood in such language as "the Emperor’s clothes" (or lack thereof).

It seems also likely that the sedentary way of life may have led to local population explosions, though the evidence I’ve read for this seems little more than casual or conjectural. The archaic culture of the Goddess would have had to been already in the throes of fragmentation for women to lose control of their own fertility, or to have changed their millennial notions about the number of children to bear in relation to the needs of the land and its capacity to sustain the group. It seems the herders, with their lawless rustler ways, began to gain stature as individual "strongmen" who measured their success in the size of their herds. Is it too much to imagine they also wanted sons to assist them and to reflect their "glory"? I can myself only conjecture, too, that males began to usurp reproductive control by insisting the group adopt the rule of patrilineal descent. Thus demoted, women’s reproductivity went awry for the first time, and served the interests of a radically different social contract, in which "ecology be damned."

With the rise of patrilineal descent, "Parthogenetic goddesses creating from themselves without the help of male insemination gradually changed into brides, wives, and daughters and were eroticised, linked with the principle of sexual love…." (Gimbutas). They lost their supreme status as life givers.

DeMeo cites "Grinnell’s principle of competitive exclusion (formulated for competing animal species) and extrapolates to human populations that due to drought live in land with a reduced "carrying capacity." Modified, this principle might be extended to hold that no two cultures are on an "equal footing" in gaining limited resources (e.g., food) in a circumscribed environment, and further "that those cultures most successful in competing for food or water, possibly by using violent means, would be at an advantage over those who were less competitive in character" (DeMeo). Of this principle the archeological record leaves us in no doubt.

The Solar Takeover

With the collapse of her legendary, ever-efficacious agricultural know-how and magico-ritual power vis-à-vis the life-giving Goddess, women lost authority in these early, seemingly desperate, or certainly manic, pastoral nomad societies. The all-potent Sun had taken over, wasting the land, smiting one and all. It was, apparently, His turn to commit murder. How was He to be propitiated, now that the Moon had gone mad, or been robbed of Her primal powers, and in any event was no longer the awesome Regal Presence of the night sky? The great repository of magical Earth-Moon powers were handed over to the male pastoralists’ rainmaking storm gods. The rule of fire and water, for tens of thousands of years the province of the organic, life-giving Moon and her menstruating priestesses, was turned over to deities like Zeus, patricidal (and matricidal) deities of the "Thunder-bolt," supreme among the gods in the herders’ mountain redoubts and open steppelands.

The "signs" of the Moon’s realm, the "unlucky" thirteen, the left hand, the snake, the spider (those species whose males are much smaller than the females— Gooch!; he might have add the Mantis of the Bushman), the labyrinth, the cave, the dragon, leviathan, all are cast aside as anathema. Much later, the lunar bull is ceremonially "gored" (versus danced with). And much later still, that is now, the entire living, starry-night-sky darkness itself is no longer universally experienced, and thus honored. The once sacred menstruating female became cause for the most extreme treatment (detailed by Gooch, DeMeo, and many others before) and women became first demonized as witches, temptresses, back-stabbers (an epithet linked to the male’s fear of vulnerability during intercourse), and more recently as the childish and weaker sex requiring male "protection" (read: dominion).

And what of the child, repository of the future, of tribal and cultural evolution?

Armoring the Species

"It is known that infant cranial deformation occurs when a baby is unmovingly secured against a cradle board," as happened during the forced marches of the Arabian and Central Asian diasporas. DeMeo continues: "The newborn baby’s head might be tied against the cradle board, to prevent it from flopping about" as the mother struggled across demanding terrain. "The child’s arms and legs would be wrapped and also securely tied….and the drier the environment, the longer the migration [and thus confinement]….the pressure against the head would deform the skull" and provide archeologists with prima facie evidence of past migrations and cultural typology.

"When on the move, the child…would not be breast-fed regularly, nor allowed out for regular waste functions….[as the mother] might fall behind the rest of the group.…[T]he swaddling [was]…used to ‘still’ the child and immobilize it in the painful cradle….[Thus] the child’s view of the maternal figure would likely become contaminated with anxiety and rage." Here is a potential source of those culturally determined sado-masochistic features unique to what Eisler calls the dominator societies. DeMeo goes on to raise questions about the entire panoply of human relations formed by constant and severe conditions of scarcity and aridity, precipitate migration, constant raiding, and militarization that ended by "disturbing the emotional relationships between infant and mother…young men and young women, and husbands and wives."

A scar—cranial deformation, circumcision, other genital and body-part marrings—then became an honored tribal signature, a rite of passage, internalized as ritual, and ultimately, alas, imitated. For imitation is not only the sincerest form of flattery (among free adults, a dubious assertion), but the most durable technique for survival when one must survive—that is, co-exist—in the company of an armed, amored, and amoral bully.

What were all the "Leavers" to do in the face of these ravenous "Takers" (Quinn)? This was, and remains, our tragic predicament. "At the core of the invaders’ system was the placing of higher value on the power that takes, rather than gives, life" (Eisler). This was a truly fatal transmutation of the original ideology of the male hunter himself, whose meaningful pursuit, if we recall Shepard’s incisive remark, was about "’learning to give away’ what was a gift received in the first place—life itself…."

Large numbers of archeologists over the past century and more have generously chronicled the rise of their favorite individual patristic cultures and "civilizations" and, far more sparingly, the concomitant, gradual erosion of matristic cultures. This metamorphosis can be measured in the variously extreme forms of sado-masochistic practices endemic to most societies today, codified in their taboos and "laws," unwritten and written, secular and sacred. Patristic cultural values and attitudes have spread globally, certainly with the final expansion of Europe in the past 500 years, and now persist on a virtually universal basis.

DeMeo provides an exhaustive review of these scholars’ collectively monumental work. But the work of metahistory (Lash), of the "archeology of ideas" (Gooch), of archeomythology (Gimbutas) has only just begun.

Meantime the ruling male-dominator Weltanschauung that has shaped all of us up to the present moment keeps getting unconsciously "ramped up" in the current religio-scientific realm of "new ideas" that parade before our mesmerized minds as "the naked ape," "the selfish gene," or "sociobiology." At all costs we must not, it seems, truly remember, acknowledge, and commemorate our own past— all of it.

Postscript: How Do We Re-enchant Our World?

In the end this is the question that must engage us. We live now in a world that patriarchy, riding its new unbridled, a most fearsome-yet steed—the transnational corporation—is unconsciously transforming the Earth itself into the arid wasteland of its own genesis. (Almost all the science fiction I have read, admittedly, not much, or seen on film, seems strangely to celebrate with reiterative compulsion this archetypal arid landscape.) Even though, as Shepard has remarked of us urban Moderns, "the living metaphor of cosmic power…has become the machine," and even though we are so worshipfully enmeshed in our physical technology that we threaten to eradicate a good portion of our biologically original form, the basis of our meaning and being in the world, we still have the capacity to change.

One of the most intriguing passages of the literature of metahistory describes how the temperate-zone Tasmanian Aborigines reversed the evolution of their dependence on technology in about 4,000 BCE, presumably seeing in it a subversion of their original contract with the cosmos, or with Gaia. They "stopped using not only the bone tools for making clothing, but clothing itself" (Lawlor). They gave up using a sophisticated scale-fishing technology in favor of the more difficult and time-consuming process of harvesting abolone and other shellfish and managed to create a situation of inter-tribal dependency through the custom of returning to a single fire stick for each tribe so that "fire was a motivation for peace rather than war among tribes," as fire sticks sometimes got extinguished and required a neighbor tribal fire-keeper to rekindle. Lawlor observes that the first Europeans to see these people reported they were "a well-nourished, physically strong, radiant, and energetic people." (Leavers who alas were finally doomed to meet Takers.)

Rudgley reminds us that hunter-gathers in historical times have not always embraced an agricultural way of life, "not because they were too ignorant or primitive to appreciate [it]…but because they were simply happy to carry on as they were." Going much further back in time, Rudgley notes that "Paleolithic peoples had capacities (reflected in their tool-making capabilities) that they chose not to continue using on a regular basis.…[The reversion to simpler technology] can perhaps be seen as the lack of need or desire for the changes that such tools could make possible, and not…that such bold inventions were inadvertently forgotten. "

Have we lost our primordial cultural flexibility, or are we truly caged in the dream of technology—and its accomplice, history?

There are today scores of technological and entrepreneurial pioneers: pre-eminently perhaps the founder of permaculture, Bill Mollison; also such innovators as John Todd (water purification technology), E. F. Schumacher and the so-called "intermediate technologies"; the micro-economic, zero-emission enterprises of Gunter Pauli; the theories (and practices) of energy-conservation guru, Amory Lovins; and, on a broad transitional scale, the principles embodied in "The Natural Step," as formulated by Karl-Henrik Róbert and Paul Hawken. These and many other innovators work on the fringes of the global economic system. But they may not always be consigned to the periphery and their tireless work is a source of inspiration.

Meantime the essential question remains: how do we recover our original re-enchantment with Earth, with Sophia-Gaia (Lash), our progenetrix, the immense self-regulating, bio-geo-chemical "intelligence" (Lovelock) whose destiny enmeshes our own? Without the enchantment, the 5,000-year-old saga of destruction and death proceeds. We must engage. To be engaged requires new forms of communion and communication. These may be as various and copious as we have the heart and mind and energy to invent.

A transformation in consciousness will exhibit the practice of compassion with a razor-sharp awareness. The amount of suffering that entire peoples now experience daily, not to mention vast swaths of living land and biota, is overwhelming. Flowing from the heart, grounded in metahistorical awareness, compassion must also extend, I believe, to the impoverished, shamed, archaically patriarchal remnant males, those who practice a less disguised form of patriarchy than the West’s. But we must also work with unbending intent to bring male and female back into balance, into some new form of dynamic equilibrium. The female who enters into "competition" with the male and plays the patriarchal game by dominator rules changes nothing, structurally.

In my opinion the time is overripe for the rise of womankind, for women to speak, variously as individuals and en mass, to re-assert or re-invent a new form of gylanic, socially egalitarian culture, that pays homage to our 100,000-year legacy of our pre-patriarchal past, in equilibrium with Gaia. Above all, and at the very outset, women must control their own reproductive lives, as they most certainly did for tens of thousands of years prior to the "legal" private-property-concubinage-slave systems of the dominator cultures.

The temptation to take the "tough-minded" aspect of compassion into the domain of violence is sometimes overwhelming. The formula of course is Us (the Good) against Them (the Bad). A minefield for all who enter it. Jensen rhetorically poses the question thus: "You are locked in a room with 15 armed psychopaths, 80 people who are asleep, and 5 other people who understand the danger. What are you going to do?" One could quibble with the numbers, but we get his stark point. We each know the names of some of those "15."

The Ego-Shattering Roar

Despite my being a man with a deep core of anger, even rage (as well as tenderness!), all I have learned cautions me against the resort to violence. Armed revolution has a very sorrowful and bloody history, a 5,000-year history. It has never wrought permanent, structural change of the kind I speak of. We should take heart, however, for the indestructible strongman, the hero-gods have their "Achilles’ heels," though these vulnerable places remain secret to most, most of the time. Gandhi was powerful because he radiated a profound, unshakable commitment to non-violent action and was able to convey to his adversaries the feeling that he valued them as fully moral human beings. He then relentlessly and simultaneously challenged them to confront their moral, existential situation, to envision the mutually degrading, structurally-violent condition of oppressed and oppressor. He worked to make "the other side" see that the cage of prejudice, or legitimated belief, that both sides lived in, was not only immoral, but illegitimate, and in the end, untenable. Gandhi’s was a tough compassion. Undoubtedly that was why he was called in his own land, Mahatma or Great Soul.

Can each of us strive for such high ground? Can we bring to the world the missing core idea of "civil" that has taken up such wonton, illegitimate residence inside our word "civilization" for so many centuries?

There is nothing more powerful than to work on the meaning of the underlying story, the "scripts" (Lash) that are driving our destruction of life, and to bring them to light in as many ways and in as many hearts and minds as possible. Walls do collapse, suddenly. Rigid social structures, maintained by the most wicked violence, do crumble. Suddenly.

Ours is the work of termites.

As for the future, which the Greek tragedians taught lies forever beyond our ken and control, Gaia herself has just begun to whisper in our ears. Let us listen carefully and attend to what we hear. Let us pray that before we die we too will hear the deep and ego-shattering roar our ancestors knew.

And awaken, at long last, to our true selves.

Ian Baldwin
August 2002

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