earthmoss

Contents / click & jump to :

• 01: The Garden of Eden – and that dreaded apple​
• 02: Cain vs Abel – the fight will be settled
• 03: The impact upon the late Natufian people was felt within a generation
• 04: Noah and the flood
• 05: The Hindu version of the flood
• 06: Brahma – the being-for-itself
• 07: Which reality, is right and which is wrong?
• 08: Language and being-for-itself
• 09: The man and the circle
• 10: Individual totemism
• 11: The next century of human-made global warming

Introduction

As we saw in the previous chapter mankind began life as hunter-gatherers who followed the herd and lived in a universal peace in a world of plenty, which we saw described by academia as, but that we have not yet proved to be, the fabled ‘Garden of Eden’.

In this chapter I wish to show to you that the mythical stories that have come down to us from these ancient times tell us of the same story that science has just done, but in a far deeper and more intimately meaningful and universal way, as well as simply historical. These stories are told through the perspective of the change of consciousness from a ‘being-in-Being’ to a ‘being-for-itself’ as they actually happened in the real world. They record history as we understand it, within this consciousness, but in a way that is not yet so separated from God that history is an individual concept, it is still within the murk of myth, but as we shall see it is clearly present. Using the literal story of the Garden of Eden, of Aboriginal myths, of Greek myths and of Hindu myths, that spread the globe as stories describing that which our cave-man, saw and witnessed we will then see emerge from these stories, the birth of the being-for-itself as a social form and the form this took in the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. From there we will go on to understand the biblical flood, the Greek flood, and the Hindu flood through this same lens. We will end up in the family way that results from it, and one step closer to civilization. What you will see will hopefully be proof that whilst these things literally happened, it takes some of the perspective of our cave-man for modern-man to understand the ingenuity of this method of telling His-story, and some of the perspective of modern-man to help us prove that there is a ‘universal method’, or mind-set to how the ancients told their story.

We have seen what happens when an individual, a being-for-itself, comes into this society that has existed six times longer than the entirety of civilisation that we are exploring in the first half of this book, they are laughed at or secretly killed, in order to preserve harmony and morality. But what happens to the consciousness of a being-in-Being as it becomes a being-for-itself? How does its view of the world change, now that the world exists for-itself, rather that it exists not for-the-world, but with-the-world? Sartre explains this perspective change in ontological terms and frames it around sacrifice, that we have seen in the previous chapter, change from an alimental communion into a renouncing of possessions and freedom. But he takes us into the deeper perspective of how space and time also shift into a subject-object relationship.

A quick note however before we read this quote is that for Sartre (an atheist)  ‘being-in-Being’ had to be named differently and he adopted the term being-in-itself. Therefore our cave-man ‘being-in-Being’ is described as a ‘being-in-itself’ as it meets, for the first time, with a being-For-itself, an individual:

In other words it is the existence of the entrepreneur who uses his will in order to impose his world upon the world and not His, that creates a separation from this original ontology and psyche of the in-itself. It comes into existence by the creation of its opposite, as a reality-other-than, for the first time:

“To what being does the For-itself make itself presence? The answer is clear: the For-itself is what makes being-in-itself exist as a totality. For by this very mode of presence to being qua being, every possibility is removed whereby the For-itself might be more present to one privileged being than to all other beings. Even though the facticity of its existence causes it to be there rather than elsewhere, being there is not the same as being present. Being there determines only the perspective by which presence to the totality of the in-itself is realized. By means of the there the For-itself causes beings to be for one and the same presence. Beings are revealed as co-present in a world where the For-itself unites them with its own blood by that total ecstatic sacrifice of the self which is called presence. “Before” the sacrifice of the For-itself it would have been impossible to say that beings existed either together or separated. But the For-itself is the being by which the present enters into the world; the beings of the world are co-present, in fact, just in so far as one and the same for-itself is at the same time present to all of them. Thus for the in-itselfs what we ordinarily call Present is sharply distinguished from their being although it is nothing more than their being. For their Present means only their co-presence in so far as a For-itself is present to them.” (Sartre:2003:144-5)

What Sartre is describing is the tearing of consciousness away from being one with God in an eternal dream-time, into a subject-object relationship of real-time. In a subject-object world, time and space, as we saw with Kant, become related to you not God. It is where you are in the world, not where you are in relation to God, (who has no, and also is, every physical location) that frames your perceptions.

This is a major tear in the fabric of reality for a ‘being-in-Being’. Further on we will look at how such a perspective transforms the meanings of words, but for now we must look at the story told by the ancient peoples who witnessed this perspective change, from the perspective of ‘being-in-Being’. What was it like, to see individuals start to appear in a cohesive group.

Obviously, this experience must have happened globally, and so we are going to look at three stories in greater detail, that chart this experience. The first one that we will look at is the biblical version, before we explain the same truths, through Greek and Hindu myth, and see this corroborated by the Aborigines.

01: The Garden of Eden – and that dreaded apple

What therefore happened to most of the cave-men, that stopped them living in the manner of the Australian Aborigines and the North-American Indians?

The answer lies in the story of Cain and Abel. Theologists do not see this story as a story about two actual people. It is in fact a story about two types of people who came from one type of person- Adam. But in order to get to this Cain and Abel, we must first of all witness Adam and Eve, being expelled from the Garden of Eden by eating an apple from the ‘Tree of Knowledge’.

Adam is the father of all mankind, but this does not refer to an original individual person. Just as we our cave-man evaporate into a collective consciousness intimate with God rather than a single entity, so Adam refers to an original way of life, namely, being-in-Being.

As we saw in the previous chapter, the experience of this intimacy provides no language of individuality beyond the totem and clan. Concepts of Adam as an individual do not exist in the concept of wakan: The later terms of a collective, such as family bloodlines, or religious identity, or nationality, are not relative experiences:

“In the first place, the individuals who compose it consider themselves united by a bond of kinship, but one which is of a very special nature. This relationship does not come from the fact that they have definite blood connections with one another; they are relatives from the mere fact that they have the same name. They are not fathers and mothers, sons or daughters, uncles or nephews of one another in the sense which we now give these words; yet they think of themselves as forming a single family, which is large or small according to the dimensions of the clan, merely because they are collectively designated by the same word. When we say that they regard themselves as a single family, we do so because they recognize duties towards each other which are identical with those which have always been incumbent upon kindred: such duties as aid, vengeance, mourning, the obligation not to marry among themselves, etc.” (Durkheim:1982:102)

Therefore the collective name ‘Adam’ represents all humans who are living as being-in-Beings. He is called Adam for reasons that I cannot go into here, but it is not just an arbitrary name, it is deeply significant and will be outlined in my next book.

The ‘eating of the fruit’ of the  ‘tree of knowledge’, or in our terms- ‘the aliment of communion’ that was not done for God but ‘for-itself’-, does not indicate an actual tree but instead a change of our relationship with God into one of being-for-itself, and acquiring the knowledge of how to live in this manner. It is a tree because it symbolises a new branch of consciousness.

Now in most bibles the forbidden fruit is translated into the word apple, but in fact the original meaning can mean any aliment, sometimes being translated as melon, or figs. For Muslims however this aliment, has been translated, into its most pertinent meaning, namely, that of wheat.

“The ear of wheat became a trap for Adam, so that his existence became the wheat-ear (seed and origin) of mankind.”*[Rumi:Bk1:2760]

*“He has said, ‘Falsehood is (the cause of) disquiet in (men’s) hearts’; he has said, ‘Truth is (the cause of) a joyous tranquility.’

The (troubled) heart is not comforted by lying words: water and oil kindle no light.

(Only) in truthful speech is there comfort for the heart: truths are the bait that entraps the heart. [literally, “the grain of the snare of the heart.”]…

When Adam’s greed for the wheat [i.e. the forbidden fruit.] waxed great, it robbed Adams’ heart of health.

Then he gave ear to your lies and enticements: he was befooled and drank the killing poison.

At that moment he knew not scorpion (kazhdum) from wheat (gandun): discernment flies from one that is drunken with vain desire.

The people are drunken with cupidity and desire: hence they are accepting your cheatery.

Whoever has rid his nature of vain desire has (thereby) made his (spiritual) eye familiar with the secret.”[Rumi:Bk1:2735-2740]

As we have already seen, it is the aliment of wheat that changed man from a hunter-gatherer or being-in-Being into a settler-farmer as a being-for-itself who had to work the land as punishment of his small insurance policy, the consequences of which were probably the most dramatic in the whole history of mankind, far more so than anything that Hiroshima, or Christianity, or Rome or anything else that we will discuss ever could do or will. In fact it is not too far a stretch to say that wheat is the seed that gave birth to the knowledge of each of the above.

What we are being told therefore in the biblical story is that the seed, that science has called ‘a small insurance policy’, of planting a small crop of wheat eventually grew into a new life-style, which we call settling. This seed, was not however just an object in the outer-objective-world, but was also one in the inner world of the hunter-gatherers, who over thousands of years, began to think of the harvest of crops as ‘their own’ harvest from ‘their own labour’. This seed idea, therefore changed their relationship with Nature, as they started to will, their own desires upon the land.

Each harvest, and each replanting began to enhance the knowledge of how to bring in a better crop, but also brought knowledge of parts of nature that were affected by this planting, and also effected the fruitfulness of this planting. In other words, objectively, they would have seen how creating a furrow, and irrigating the land, led to increased crops, whilst they would have seen locust and weather destroy their crop. On a subjective level these helpful and destructive actions and forces, are seen as ‘good’ and ‘evil’. So the Tree of Knowledge is a symbol of a seed being planted in the collective conscious of the cave-man, both physically and ontologically. Over many generations this small insurance policy, grows in the outer world into greater harvests and settling, and in the inner world, into a knowledge of control of nature by the will of the individual. This results in a perspective change upon the world, where some things are good and others evil, because the settler sees the world through his will being done, and His will being done.

This new settler lifestyle was therefore regarded as a sin. Sin comes from the word ‘to tear’, ‘to rend’ or to be without. Sin-cere comes from the Roman construction of marbles statues, where, upon making a mistake, the sculptor would add wax ‘cere’ to mend the error, so a good statue would be ‘sincere’- meaning without wax. When a piece of fabric is torn, a distance is created, and when that fabric symbolises the fabric of collective, universal consciousness, experienced by the ‘being-in-Being’ to his alimental communion with God, then it creates a distance between ‘his’ consciousness and ‘His’ consciousness. By being in the world ‘for-itself’ the small insurance policy, tore this fabric, it sinned.

In other words as the race of Adam becomes the human-race of ‘being-for-itself’, he becomes distant from the God experienced and symbolised as walking beside him. This distance creates a perspective where man-kind is visible to God, because God is now visibly different to him. Not only in the fields of wheat, but also in the behaviour of the man and his very will. From this sin and subsequent distance man discovers his nakedness, meaning that he discovers that his dwelling, his Bauen, his way of being, Ich bin, from this be-haviour, has changed his perspective into an individual one, he is no longer a part of wakan, he is a no longer a creation (creature) loved by God, within the fold of his fabric, but instead, naked, and housed in a garment of skin. He dwells within his individual body, and experiences the world through the lens of his eye alone. This is the shame he feels. Shame means wound, and this is the pain felt by the hunter-gatherers consciousness as he begins to weigh the world in terms of its value for him, and not Him.

“The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live for ever” So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.”  Genesis 3:21-23

The story of Adam and Eve being cast from the Garden of Eden, is therefore the story of hunter-gatherers becoming settlers over thousands of years.

This new way of life, will eventually precipitate fully into the story of Cain and Abel, as the demographic of hunter-gatherers to settlers begin to become apparent across the globe, as we shall see. But first we must look at the time of Adam and Eve, and see how the land of plenty, the Garden of Eden, that they walked in was changing over the 30,000 years that the Aborigines existed in this story and how this effected the way mankind behaved:

“Around 12,000 years ago (i.e. 10,000 B.C.) hunting feasts occurred ever more rarely or not at all for a simple reason- the herds were vanishing. The era between 35,000 and 12,000 years ago had been an “Ice Age”: daytime temperatures in the Mediterranean regions of Europe and western Asia averaged about 60°F (16°C) in the summer and about 30°F (-1°C) in the winter. Accordingly, herds of cold-loving game species such as reindeer, elk, wild boar, European bison, and various kinds of mountain goats roamed the hills and valleys. But as the last glaciers receded northwards such species retreated with them. Some humans may have moved north with the game, but others stayed behind, creating an extremely different sort of world in comparatively short order.

Specifically, within about 3,000 to 4,000 years after the end of the Ice Age humans in western Asia had accomplished one of the most momentous revolutions ever accomplished by any humans:  a switch from subsistence by means of food-gathering to subsistence by means of food-producing. For roughly two million years humanlike species and humans had gained their sustenance by foraging, or by combined foraging and hunting. These modes of existence meant that such peoples could never stay very long in one place because they continually ate their way through local supplies of plant food, and, if they were hunters, they were forced to follow the movements of herds. But “suddenly” (that is, in terms of the comparative time spans involved) substantial numbers of human began to domesticate animals and raise crops, thereby settling down….

To say that some humans became food producers all of a sudden is of course justifiable only in terms of the broadest chronological picture. Seen from the perspective of modern historical change, wherein technological revolutions transpire in a few decades or years, the change in western Asia from food-gathering to food production was an extremely gradual one. Not only did the transition take place over the course of some 3,000 to 4,000 years (c.10,000 to c.7000/6000 B.C.), but it was so gradual that the peoples involved hardly knew themselves what was happening. It is essential to add that had they known what was happening they almost certainly would not have approved of the basic switch from gathering to raising food because Ice-Age hunting and gathering allowed its practitioners to live in health and comparative leisure (it has been estimated that hunter-gatherers worked for only about three hours a day), whereas early food-producing yielded poorer average diets (much less variety) and entailed much harder work. Yet the progression toward food production had its step-by-step logic which did not allow individual humans much choice.

The story of how humans became food producers is roughly as follows. … Around 10,000 B.C. most of the larger game herds had left western Asia. Yet people in coastal areas were not starving; on the contrary, they were surrounded by plenty because the melting glaciers had raised water levels and thereby had introduced he quantities of fish, shellfish, and water fowl in newly created bays and swamps. Excavations near Mount Carmel and at the site of Jericho in modern-day Israel- locations not far from the Mediterranean Sea- prove that wildlife and vegetation in that area between about 10,000 and 9,000 B.C. were so lush that people could sustain themselves in permanent settlements in an unprecedented fashion, easily catching fish and fowl, and picking fruits off trees as if they were in the Garden of Eden.  But the plenty of Mount Carmel and Jericho had its costs in terms of population trends. Modern nomadic hunting peoples have low birthrates, and the same is presumed to have been true of prehistoric peoples. The given in this regard is that a woman can trek with one baby in her arms but hardly with two; hence nature finds ways to limit nomadic births for each woman to one every three of four years….Once people became sedentary in Eden-like environments, however, their reproductive rates began to increase, until, over the course of centuries, there were too many people for the lush coastal terrains.

Accordingly, paleoanthropologists posit that around 9,000 B.C. excess populations in western Asia started migrating inland to territories where wildlife and plant foods were less plentiful, and where they were forced to return to the nomadic ways of hunter-gatherers. What is certain is that between 9,000 and 8,000 B.C. some humans in Iran had taken the first known step toward food production by domesticating animals- in this case, sheep and goats. This would have been no more than the equivalent of taking out a small insurance policy. People seeking to avoid overreliance on one particular food source, and starvation if that source failed, captured live animals and gradually bred them so that they had meat on the hoof, available whenever the need arose. Owning a few sheep or goats did not inhibit the people who first domesticated them from continuing in their nomadic way of life (it is easier to travel with trained goats than with babies). But it did make them accustomed to the notion of actively manipulating their environments.

Producing plant food came next. After the glaciers had receded, wild wheat and wild barley had begun to grow in scattered hilly parts of inland western Asia. Accustomed to gathering all sorts of seeds, hunter-gatherers between about 9,000 and 8,000 B.C. gladly drew on the wheat and barley because when these plants were ripe, gatherers could reap large amounts of seeds from them within as little as three weeks and then move on to other pursuits. Archaeological discoveries reveal that the peoples in question developed flint sickles to accelerate their harvesting, mortars for grinding their harvested grain into flour, and- most significantly for future developments- lined storage pits for preserving their grain or flour. In other words, these peoples had not only begun to pay special attention to harvesting wild grain, but they were saving their harvests for use over time. Again, people were manipulating their environments instead of merely adjusting to them.

Still nomads, the same people most likely would have been content to gather their grain and other foods forever. But since grain could be stored particularly well, some groups of grain gatherers may have come gradually to rely on it more and more. In such cases they would have been adversely affected by a poor growing year or by gradual depletion caused by excessive harvesting. Then, paying more attention to keeping their wild grain growing profusely, they would have noticed that the grain would grow better if rival plants (weeds) were removed, still better if the soil were scratched so that falling seeds could take root more easily, and still better if they themselves sprinkled some seeds into sparser patches of soil. The people who did these things were more influential discoverers and explorers in terms of the origins of our own modern existence than Columbus or Copernicus, yet from their point of view they were merely adjusting some of the details of their ongoing hunting and gathering way of life.

Imperceptibly, however, they became “hooked” and surrendered their nomadic ways for sedentary ones.

Already having small herds as “insurance policies”, they must have decided at some point that it would be equally sensible to be able to count on having patches of planted grain awaiting them when they reached a given area on seasonal nomadic rounds. And then they would have learned that planting could be done better at a different time of year than harvesting, and then that their livestock might graze well on harvested stubble, and then that they might grow more than one crop a year in the same place. Meanwhile they would have become more and more accustomed to storing and would have seen less and less reason to move away from their fields and their stores. And so sedentary plant-food production, or agriculture, was invented.

The earliest archaeological evidence for fully sedentary agriculture comes from eastern Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), Syria, Iraq, and Iran, and dates from roughly 7500 to roughly 7000 B.C. By 6,000 B.C. the entire western Asian region had adopted agriculture as the central mode of survival. Livestock-raising supplemented it, and by 6,000 B.C. the livestock raised included cattle and pigs as well as sheep and goats. Moreover, farming peoples continued to engage in some hunting and some gathering on the side…. Yet settled agriculture had not only become the dominant form of human existence in western Asia by 6,000 B.C., but soon after it conquered the world. Agriculture arose independently in at three areas in China and one or two sites in America around 5,000 B.C. and fanned out in Far Eastern Asia and the Western Hemisphere from there. From western Asia it reached southeastern Europe (the Balkans) by about 5,000 B.C. and spread from there over the entire European continent by about 3,500 B.C. it had reached its natural European limits in Scandinavia.  “Amber waves of grain” have played a central role in European- and by extension, North American- history ever since.” [Lerner et al: 1993:12-16]

“Although those using La Riera after 10,000 BC followed the millennia-old tradition of hunting deer, their social and religious lives had changed beyond all recognition. The people who used La Riera at the LGM and 15,000 BC had also travelled to the great painted caves to sing, dance and worship their ice-age deities. But those who hunted wild boar and filled the cave with a mound of shells, had no such obligations to fulfil.

The tradition of painting and carving animals, especially horse and bison, together with abstract signs and human figures, had lasted for more than 20,000 years. It had extended from the Urals to southern Spain, and produced masterpieces by the score: the painted bison of Altamira, the lions of Chauvet, the horses of Lascaux, the carved ibex from Mas d’Azil. For more than 800 generations, artists had inherited the same concerns and the same techniques. It was by far the longest-lived art tradition known to humankind, and yet it virtually disappeared overnight with global warming.

Had the closed woodlands also closed people’s minds to artistic expression? Was the Mesolithic a time when ancient knowledge was forgotten- ‘the dark age’ of the Stone Age? Well, no, not at all. The cave art tradition ended simply because there was no longer a need to make such art. The paintings and carvings had never been mere decoration; nor had they been the inevitable expression of an inherent human creative urge. They had been much more than this- a tool for survival, one as essential as tools of stone, clothes of fur, and the fires that crackled within the caves.

The ice age had been an information age- the carvings and paintings the equivalent of our CD-Roms today. Ambush and bloody slaughter had been easy: as long as the right people were in the right place at the right time, ample supplies of food could be acquired. Rules were then required to ensure distribution without conflict. An abundance of food in one region had meant scarcity elsewhere- groups had to be willing to join together and then to split apart; to do so they needed to know which group was where, and to have friends and relations that could be relied upon in times of need. Because herds of animals are prone to unpredictable extinctions the hunters required alternative hunting plans, always ready to put into practice.

To solve such problems, information was crucial- knowledge about the location and movements of animals, about who was living and hunting where, about future plans, about what to do in times of crisis. The art, the mythology and the religious ritual served to maintain the constant acquisition and flow of information.

When groups joined together once or twice a year for ceremony, painting and ritual, such as at Pech Merle, Mas d’Azil and Altamira, they also exchanged vital information about animal movements. Such groups would have spent the previous year living apart, some in the uplands, some on the coastal plains; some had made long treks to visit distant relations, others had watched for the arrival of migratory birds. There was a lot to tell and even more to find out. The religious beliefs of the hunter-gatherers provided sets of rules for the sharing of food when necessary. Cave paintings had not only depicted the tracks of animals, but had shown them in the act of defecating, and with their antlers and fatty parts exaggerated. Such pictures were the stimulus for accounts of what had been seen, for teaching the children; they contained the signs that a hunter must look for when searching for prey and selecting a victim in the months to come. The mythological stories contained survival strategies for those inevitable but unpredictable years of hardship.

So, for as long as the annual ceremonies and rituals were performed, and people had opportunities to gossip, to swap ideas and observations, to recount tales of hunters’ exploits, to reaffirm social bonds, to learn yet more about the animals around them, information flowed and society flourished- as far as it could under the constraints of an ice-age climate.

Life in thick woodland after 9600 BC did not exact the same demands. Animals were now largely hunted on a one-to-one basis; with no mass kills there were no surpluses to manage. Narrow valleys and river crossings no longer had the same significance; there was no longer a need to have people in precisely the right place at the right time. Neither was there the need to know what was happening many miles away, either in the natural or in the social world. Hunting could effectively take place anywhere, any time, by anyone. And if animals could not be found, there were plenty of plant foods to gather and limpets to collect. Just like the red deer, people began to live in smaller, more scattered groups, becoming increasingly self-sufficient.

Periodic gatherings still took place but these were to solve problems of maintaining social ties, to allow people to marry, to exchange raw materials and food; to learn and tech new techniques of basketry and weaving. There was no longer the need for these group activities to be conducted under the gaze of painted beasts.” (Mithen:2003:148-9)

So we can see from the above quotes that the rituals of equality and sharing innate within the experience of the hunter-gatherer, still continued once there Last Glacial Maximum started to recede, but that the forces that necessitated this behaviour had been removed by the sudden arrival of a great abundance of aliment, due to the increase in temperature of the Earth.

This warming however, caused the great herds to migrate north to colder climes and this produced the invention of the thought of ‘a small insurance policy’ within the minds of some hunter-gatherers in the warmer parts of the world. A policy, which eventually led to settling and the domestication of certain animals, in the outer world, but that resulted in a feeling of distance from Nature, God, as the behaviour of the hunter-gatherer changed into the behaviour of the settler. The race of Adam, became split into the two races of hunter-gatherer.

02: Cain vs Abel – the fight will be settled

In historical time, having left the Garden of Eden, we are at around 12,000 to 10,000 B.C. During that two thousand years, the settling life-style, has become a major feature of the landscape, and we must imagine hunter-gatherers coming across settled communities, and of how these two races would have seen and hence behaved to each other.

Imagine therefore being-in-Wakan (being-in-Being), and each year as you follow the wild herds you find yourself coming across an ever expanding settlement of people who are being-for-itself. This settler population and its way of life is changing the environment as you enter it, and each year that you return to this place ‘of theirs’ (as they call it) there is less food for you to eat because they claim it is theirs, less wood for you to burn because they have burnt the forests for themselves. But also imagine the strangeness of ‘their’ world. No longer are these people restricted in population because the mother no longer needs to carry her infant. Clay pots heavy to carry but great for storing grain are filled with food. Strange marks in the landscape, that are furrows or irrigation channels replace the forest that you have always known. When these people see you as hunter-gatherers coming into their land and settlement, they see you as either a threat or an opportunity, as ‘good’ or ‘evil’. Trade for skins with these people, results in some of the group having more than others, and this inequality gets worse each year, whilst the younger hunter-gatherer children are exposed to the lifestyle of a being-for-itself, and think of leaving the mind-set of being-in-Being, tempted to think of themselves as individuals, for these settler people have such an exciting way of life. They have loads of sex, they have a social milieu seemingly way more complex than that of their tribal group, they have a different architecture that invokes different feelings. Analogously it is like a country bumpkin stumbling across New-York City and being dazzled by the bright lights, unaware that every one in the city is simply out for-itself, the bumpkin is innocently drawn in by the whirlwind of difference that surrounds him, and becomes lost even to himself.

To the settlers, these hunter-gatherer peoples are people that come and take ‘their’ herds, ‘their’ wood, and one would expect often steal from them as they pass on by, but are also useful for trading things. An analogy of how this sort of arrangement pans out has been given in Chapter One with the fate of the North American Indians who were slowly tempted into wanting stuff and the consequent loss of community that they suffered and hard-work they inherited.

Now that we have walked a few millimetres in the shoes of these hunter-gatherers we may ask ourselves, once again how they would have told this same story to each other from the perspective of beings who were slipping from the collective consciousness of unity, due to the land of plenty, that the settlers were claiming were for them alone. This then is the biblical story of Cain and Abel, but in order to understand it we must look in greater detail at the environmental conditions of this vast stretch of time.

What we must first imagine is a peoples who for tens of thousands of years have been living in a world of winter, who suddenly find the ice thawing and in its place, comes a spring, a golden age, of plenty. Melting ice water produces fecund oceans of fish-stocks, and fresh rain causes an abundance of wild grains, that in turn produce great herds of prey. It is a Garden of Eden.

In the book, After the Ice, Steven Mithen, takes us around the continents during this time period through the character of a famous archaeologist John Lubbock who has gone fictionally back in time to visit the people’s that archaeologists have unearthed. What he finds is a period of time, when the hunter-gatherer is becoming a sedentary-hunter-gatherer, that is to say, not a settler who farms, but a hunter-gatherer who can stay in the same place, due to the abundance of prey and plant foods around him. This is the period of Cain and Abel:

“For a while Lubbock forgets his place in history; the butterflies, the flowers, the sun and the breeze are quite timeless. But the date is 11,000 BC and a dramatic change in the climate is about to happen; the families sitting on the steppe unknowingly teeter on the edge of an environmental calamity: the Younger Dryas is about to arrive.

For generation after generation since the LGM, life for the people of western Asia had been getting better and better. Ups and downs had occurred: years of relatively cold and dry weather when plant foods and game had been more difficult to find, years when these had been particularly abundant. But the trend was towards a warmer and wetter climate, a greater diversity of plants, increased yields of seeds, fruits, nuts and tubers, larger and more predictable animal herds, and a richer cultural and intellectual life. This had culminated in the village life that Lubbock has seen at ‘Ain Mallaha and on the banks of the Euphrates. The families from Abu Hureyra enjoying the summer sunshine on the steppe were certainly the lucky ones and they probably knew it. But they could not have known quite how lucky they were. For within a few generations the tide of climate change had turned and life was never quite so good again.” (Mithen:2003:44-5)

“This remarkable work by Moore, Rowley-Conwy, Legge and many other archaeologists shows that the hunter-gatherers of Abu Hureyra enjoyed the most attractive environmental conditions that had existed for many thousands of years, since long before the LGM. At no other times had animals and plants been so abundant, so diverse and so predictable in their availability- just as they were for the Natufian inhabitants of the Mediterranean woodlands. This provided them with the opportunity to give up the mobile lifestyle that had served human society since its first appearance 3.5 million years ago on the African savannah. But why do it?

Why create the social tensions that inevitably arise when one has permanent next-door neighbours within a village? Why expose oneself to human waste and garbage and the health risks that accompany a more sedentary lifestyle? Why risk the depletion of the animals and plants near one’s own village?…

The Natufian people appear to have quite peaceable as well as healthy. There are no signs of conflict between groups, such as embedded arrow points in human bones- unlike the situation that Lubbock will find on his European, Australian and African travels. The Natufian hunter-gatherer groups were good neighbours; there was plenty of land, gardens and animals for all.

Franҫois Valla, the excavator of ‘Ain Mallaha, believes that the Natufian villages simply emerged from the seasonal gatherings of the Kebaran people. He recalls the work of the social anthropologist Marcel Mauss who lived with hunter-gatherers in the Arctic at the turn of the century. Indeed, all the key elements of the Natufian villages were already present at Neve David: stone dwellings, grinding stones, dentalium beads, human burials and gazelle bones. As the climate became warmer and wetter, plants and animals more diverse and abundant, people stayed longer and returned earlier to their winter aggregation sites until some people remained all year round.

The sedentary hunter-gatherers at ‘Ain Mahalla, Abu Hureyra and indeed throughout western Asia between 12,500 and 11,00 BC were enjoying the good life.” (Mithen:2003:42-44)

“Adam lay with his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain. She said, “With the help of the Lord, I have brought forth a man.” Later she gave birth to his brother Abel.

Now Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil. In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the Lord. But Abel brought brought fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The Lord looked with favour on Abel and his offering, but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favour. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast.

Then the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.”

Now Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.”

And while they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.

Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?”

“I don’t know,” he replied.” Am I my brother’s keeper?”

The Lord said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.”

Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is more than I can bear. Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be forbidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth.”…

Cain lay with his wife, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Enoch. Cain was then building a city, and he named it after his son Enoch.” – Genesis 4 vs 1-17.

Here then we see quite clearly Abel as the sedentary-hunter-gatherer, the keeper of flocks, (“Owning a few sheep or goats did not inhibit the people who first domesticated them from continuing in their nomadic way of life” [Lerner et al: 1993:12-16]), and his fraternal brother Cain as the worker of the soil- the settler. Upon offering their gifts, their ways of life in the form of alimental communion, to God- Nature, God is angry with Cain, not Abel. We now know why this is, because Cain has claimed possession of a piece of Earth, a piece of God, and then offered it to God, this is a sin in the eyes of the hunter-gatherer, because how can wakan be split in such a way, how can its fabric been torn,  or sinned. As we saw in the previous chapter, the idea of sacrifice changes from sharing a meal with God as Abel does to sacrificing something, that one believes he owns, to God. Quite understandably this made God angry, because it not a sharing but a giving, which implies possession beforehand.

Cain does not like the judgement of the hunter-gatherers who tell him that his way of life is a sin, and so Cain kills Abel. ‘Am I my brothers keeper’? denotes the mind-set of the settler watching the hunter-gatherer coming through his territory and taking his animals and crops, as if they were their own. For the settler this is a valid question, for the hunter-gatherer it is an aberration. Today we have the same attitude towards Gypsies, or to the landless Jew, and settlers have the same reaction.

But the story is not about the life of an individual- Abel, it is about the way of life of a people called Abel, a way of life ended by being taken out into the field, the worked land, by taking the spirit of the hunter-gatherer and burying it under the ground worked through Cain like behaviour.

God’s anger at Cain for attempting to end the way of life that He has dictated comes into being through his judgement of Cain, who will now be forced to wander the earth once again. So, if this theory is right, then we should see a global shift in Nature that does in fact cause the settler life-style to end and a return to hunter-gathering? Well we do, and it is called by science, the Younger Dryas:

“The date is 10,800 BC. Sedentary village life exists only in the stories, passed from generation to generation, of people who live in transient campsites scattered throughout the struggling woodland and the now desert-like steppe. The cultural achievement of the Natufian remains as no more than a faint echo…

The experiment of sedentary village life lasted for close on two thousand years but ultimately failed, forcing people to return to a more ancient peripatetic lifestyle. Before so doing, Natufian culture had spread far beyond the Mediterranean woodlands claimed by Ofer-Bar-Yosef to have been its ‘homeland’. The signature of this culture- the crescent shaped microliths- became widespread throughout western Asia, with Late Natufian settlements appearing all the way from the southern deserts of the Arabian peninsula to the banks of the Euphrates.

The spread of Natufian culture suggests that the sedentary villages were partly victims of their own success.

Their inhabitants are likely to have grown in number unremittingly….

It seems likely that the spread of Natufian culture arose partly from groups of people leaving their villages to establish new settlements. This may have been the only way that ambitious young men and women could gain power for themselves. But another reason for dispersal also presents itself: there was no longer enough food to go round…

The village people had begun to over-exploit the wild animals and plants on which they relied. The gazelle bones from their rubbish heaps provide a telling story about attempts to manage the herds that ultimately backfired and led to a shortage of food….

Cope found that the Natufian people preferred to kill the male animals. This was evident because the foot bones (the astragali) she studied were easily divided into two groups on the basis of size, with the larger bones outnumbering the smaller by four to one. Big feet imply big bodies, and for gazelle those bodies would have been male.

When the Kebaran people had used Hayonim Cave, five thousand years before the Natufian became established, they killed male and female gazelles in equal proportion. By preferentially selecting the males, the Natufians were probably attempting to conserve the gazelle populations. Although both sexes were born in equal proportions, only a few male animals were actually needed to maintain the herds. Carol Cope thinks that the Natufian people decided that the males were expendable while recognizing the need to ensure that as many females as possible gave birth to young.

If this was their aim, it went horribly wrong. The Natufians made the mistake of not just hunting the males, but selecting the biggest that they could find to kill. So the female gazelles were left to breed with the smaller males- unlikely to have been their natural choice. As small fathers give rise to small offspring, and as the Natufians killed the largest offspring, the gazelles reduced in size with each generation. Hence the gazelle bones found in the rubbish dumps of Hayonim Cave were from animals much larger than those from the rubbish dumps on the terrace- the two being five hundred years apart.

Smaller gazelles meant that there was less meat available to feed an ever-growing population. This shortage was compounded by over-exploitation of the ‘wild gardens’: too many stalks of the wild cereals had been cut and excessive quantities of acorns and almonds had been collected for natural replenishment to occur….

Food shortages within the Natufian villages, leading to emigration and eventual abandonment, cannot be blamed solely on the Natufian people themselves, on their failure to control their own numbers. The problems of population growth are likely to have been eclipsed by something over which people had no control at all: climatic change.

The Younger Dryas, one thousand years of cold and drought, was triggered by the massive influx of glacial melt waters into the North Atlantic when the North American ice sheets collapsed. Its impact on the landscapes of western Asia is readily seen in the pollen grains from the Hula core. The sediments laid down with that lake around 10,800 BC shows a dramatic reduction in the quantity of tree pollen, indicating that much of the wood-land had died through lack of rain and warmth. Indeed, within five hundred years conditions little different to those of the LGM had returned: a devastating collapse of food supplies just as population levels had reached an all-time high.

With the double-whammy of population pressure and climactic deterioration, we should not be surprised at the collapse of Early Natufian village life. But people could not simply return to how their Kebaran forebears had lived. Not only were population numbers substantially greater but the Late Natufian people had a legacy of sedentary life: new technology, new social relationships, new attitudes to plants and animals, new concepts about land and dwellings, perhaps even those about ownership and property.

There could be no turning back from such ideas, even though people had returned to the ancient lifestyle of transient campsites and weary feet.” (Mithen:2003:46-9)

At 10,800 B.C. then the Garden of Eden is over for the Early Natufian settlers, and indeed for all, as the Younger Dryas, depletes the abundance of life alongside the lifestyles of the settlers themselves, who are forced to return to hunter-gathering. But they can not walk back into ‘being-in-Being’, because they remember the settled way of life and are still marked by it, they are still beings-for-itself, and so the Garden of Eden becomes a myth, where it felt like walking with God through the world, and that the race of Adam was favoured. The hunter-gatherer Abel’s find their way of life one that has to expand this type of individual or protect themselves from it and who see the changing landscape of the Younger Dryas as God’s punishment upon Cain.

But the Cain’s that return to hunter-gathering do not forget their way of life, and so they return to it as soon as conditions change, as soon as the punishment is over, they return to a settlers way of life. The Early Natufian- ‘Cain’ returns to his settled life once again as the Late Natufian peoples amongst others. However due to their experience as hunter-gatherers we find that their morality has been infected by it. Whereas the Early Natufian had had two thousand years to walk away from hunter-gatherer mentality, the Later Natufian discoveries reveal their closeness to it:

“Archaeologists are still struggling to understand the new lifestyle that the Late Natufian people of the Jordan and Euphrates valleys adopted during the Younger Dryas. A telling source of evidence is their burial practice, and how this had changed from those of their village-based ancestors. Perhaps the most striking development is that people were no longer interred wearing elaborate head-dresses, necklaces, bracelets, and pendants made from animal bones and seashells. The fact that about a quarter of the Early Natufians had been buried in this fashion suggested that some had been much more wealthy and powerful than others.

Wealth and power had evidently been dependent on the sedentary village life. This provided an élite with the opportunity to control the trade that brought seashells and other items to the villages. A return to mobile lifestyles swept away their power base and society became egalitarian once again, much as it had been in the Kebaran period….

Another sign of a return to a more egalitarian society was a switch from burying people predominantly in groups- probably as members of a single family or lineage- to individual interments. Evidently family membership no longer held the same significance- people were valued on the basis of their accomplishments and personality, rather than their blood ties.” (Mithen:2003:50)

In oral tradition we therefore can conceive of a single race of Adam created by God, who were suddenly blessed by the arrival, after over forty thousand years of ice, of a Garden of Eden so bountiful that it allowed all to live in peace and comfort, safety and plenty, and liberty. It also allowed some to begin living ‘for-itself’, who, due to the ‘advantages’ that settling provides for this way of life, began to gain individually over each other, as well as the hunter-gatherers, and to instigate inequality, to take away liberty, and to end the fraternity of the global phratry of Adam. This is the race of Cain, who were then punished and who were then forced to return, as best as a ‘being-for-itself’ could, to a life-style of ‘being-in-Being’.

As we saw with the Australian Aborigines, and as we saw with the Early Natufians, it was the lack of this bounty that returned these peoples to an equal, fraternal, and free existence, once again able to walk whatever part of the Earth, they desired without being told that certain bits of it were no longer ‘theirs’. But they were still in their own skin, still individuals in a group.

The punishment of God, or the Younger Dryas as we may now call it, lasted for around a thousand years, at which point conditions returned to that of seeming abundance and so, the Late Natufians, still perceiving their old way of life hidden within the world begin to return to it:

“At 9600 BC global temperatures rose by 7°C in less than a decade. It was a phenomenal helter-skelter change in climate. There is a sudden upsurge in the quantity of tree pollen in the sediments of the Hula core, although woodland never returned to the density and lushness that had been enjoyed by the Early Natufian people of 12,500 BC.

03: The impact upon the late Natufian people was felt within a generation

Localities that had been able to sustain no more than a seasonal campsite, offered the possibility of a permanent home. Once again wild plant foods were abundant, closely followed by burgeoning animal populations. Streams and rivers flowed with renewed vigour; lakes reclaimed the soils they had for so long abandoned. Wild cereals benefited from increased CO2 in the atmosphere.

The tricks of cultivation, those that had provided no more than meagre supplements to the diet of wild foods during the drought-ridden Younger Dryas, now produced abundant quantities of grain, peas and lentils. So the opportunity arose for the Early Natufian experiment in village life to be undertaken once again- an experiment perhaps remembered by the stories passed from generation to generation, an almost mythical way of life that could again become a reality. The opportunity was grasped- and this time there really was no turning back.

For the Early Natufians the key to village life had been the gazelle, the produce from the oak, almond and pistachio, and the wealth of plant foods gathered from the woodland undergrowth and the forest steppe. When salvation from the Younger Dryas arrived at 9600 BC a quite different environment was the key: it was on the alluvial valley soils that the new phase of human history began. Archaeologists call it the Neolithic- the New Stone Age.” (Mithen:2003:54-5)

So, once again, if this theory is right, then God should be extremely angry at this race of Cain for settling, after such a huge punishment, and his next punishment should be one so astoundingly huge that it should be recorded in the myths of all peoples around the world, and once again destroy their way of life and force them to return to that of the hunter-gatherer.

Indeed, we will witness such a punishment shortly, but before we get to that we need to walk in the shoes of these peoples in order to understand the evolution of the race of Cain during these thousands of years, for they are to become the civilisation that we are a part of. We need to look at how their behaviour towards the attainment and consumption of this forbidden fruit changed through knowledge of it and how this knowledge changed the settlers way of behaviour:

“We know that the Natufian people were cutting the wild cereals with sickles. In the light of their decorated handles, this might have been an activity infused with symbolic meaning, just as picking marigolds is for my wife. Cutting with sickles would have been much more efficient than beating the grain into baskets because it reduced the amount falling uncollected to the ground. Another impact of this new harvesting method remained unknown to the Natufian people: cutting with sickles laid the foundations for the transition from the wild to the domesticated forms.

Recall that the principal difference is the brittleness of the ear- the wild strains spontaneously fall apart when ripe, scattering their seed on the ground while the domestic strains remain intact, ‘waiting for the harvester’. Within the stands of wild cereals there would always have been a few plants that were relatively non-brittle- rare genetic mutants, estimated by Gordon Hillman as numbering one or two for every 2-4 million brittle individuals.

Those beating the stalks and catching the grain in baskets held below would not have collected it from such genetic mutants. Only when cut by sickles would the grain from these have been collected along with that from the normal brittle plants. Imagine a situation in which a small party of Natufians arrived to begin cutting a stand of wild cereals. If the wheat or barley was already ripe, then much of the grain from the brittle plants would already have been scattered. But the rare non-brittle plants would still be intact. So when the stalks were cut, the grain from those plants would have been relatively more abundant within the harvest than it had been in the woodlands or on the steppe.

Now imagine what would have happened if the Natufian people began to reseed the wild stands of cereal by scattering grain saved from a previous harvest, or perhaps sowing it into holes made with a stick or even into tilled ground. That seed grain would have had a relatively high frequency of the non-brittle variants. When the new stand was cut with sickles, the non-brittle variants would have been favoured once again and hence gained an even higher presence within the harvested grain. If this process had been repeated many times, the non-brittle plants would gradually come to dominate. Eventually they would be the only type of plant present- the domestic variant that ‘waits for the harvester’ would have arisen….

Gordon Hillman and Stuart Davies, a biologist from the University of Wales, have used their knowledge of plant genetics and ancient gathering techniques- much of it acquired by experimentation- to estimate how long the change from wild to domestic strains would take. By using computer simulation they showed that in ideal circumstances as little as twenty cycles of harvesting and resowing in new patches could have transformed a wild, brittle type of wheat into the domesticated non-brittle variant. Under more realistic conditions, 200 to 250 years is most likely period of transition.

The archaeological evidence makes it clear that this transition did not happen during the Natufian. There are microscopic differences between the shape of the grain from domestic cereals and wild varieties, and although cereal grains are rare in the Natufian archaeological record all of those known are clearly from wild cereals. Not for another millennium at least do we encounter the first domesticated grains- from the settlements of Abu Hureyra and Tell Aswad in Syria, and Jericho in Palestine. So the Natufian people appear to have cut the wild cereal stands with their sickles for a much as 3,000 years without the evolutionary leap from brittle to non-brittle plants.

There seems to be a very simple explanation for this, identified in some remarkable research by Romana Unger-Hamilton during the 1980s while she worked at the Institute of Archaeology in London. Under the guidance of Gordon Hillman she spent many months replicating the Natufian style of harvesting wild cereals. Using identical sickles made with bone handles and flint blades, she cut stands of wild wheat and barley on the slopes of Mount Carmel, around the Sea of Galilee and in southern Turkey in a series of controlled experiments. The blades were then microscopically examined for signs of ‘sickle-gloss’- the texture, location and intensity of gloss will vary with different types of cereals and at different stages of ripeness.

Unger-Hamilton found that the sickle-gloss on the true Natufian blades was most similar to that on the blades she used to harvest cereals that were not yet ripe. In that state, the brittle plants would have shed only a little of their grain, so that it would be collected from the non-brittle variants in virtually the same minute proportion as from those plants within the stand. So even if the Natufian people were sowing seed to generate new stands of wild cereals, non-brittle variants were unable to become dominant. Harvesting the unripe ears was perfectly sensible as it avoided the loss of most of the grain from the brittle plants, which would have already been shed to the ground.” (Mithen:2003:37-9)

“Patricia Anderson’s experimental work has shown that the reseeding of existing strands- as the Early Natufians may have done- would have made little difference to the proportion of the non-brittle variants due to the amount of grain already in the soil. What was needed for domestication to occur was that brand-new plots of cereal, peas and lentils were regularly sown and harvested, and this is just what many Late Natufian people are likely to have done. But what could have caused them to do so?

We know that times were hard in the increasingly arid landscapes of the Younger Dryas, but quite how hard remains unclear. The droughts certainly caused many ponds and rivers to disappear completely, and the larger lakes to shrink in size. The people who lived in the south, in today’s deserts of the Negev and Sinai, were most likely hit the hardest. They returned to a completely transient hunter-gatherer way of life, one much like that of the Kebaran people. Survival required improved hunting weapons: game had become scarce and consequently success had become essential when a kill was possible. And so we see invention of the Harif point- a rhombic-shaped arrow-head….

Another response was to continue, and perhaps expand, the cultivation of plants. Wild cereals were particularly hard hit by the Younger Dryas owing to a decrease in the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. This diminution, carefully documented from air bubbles trapped in the Antarctic ice, inhibited their photosynthesis and markedly reduced their yields. Consequently, whatever cultivation practices had begun during the Early Natufian- weeding, transplanting, watering, pest control- may have now become essential to secure sufficient food. And these may have created the first domesticated strains.

This appears to be what occurred at Abu Horeyra just before its abandonment. When Gordon Hillman studied the cereal grains from the site he found a few grains of rye from plants that had undergone the transition into domestic forms. When dated, they were shown to lie between 11,000 and 10,500 BC- the oldest domesticated cereal grain from anywhere in the world. Along with these grains, Hillman found seeds from the weeds that typically grow in cultivated soil. And so, it appears that, as the availability of wild plant foods declined due to the onset of the Younger Dryas, the Abu Hureyra people invested an ever greater amount of time and effort in caring for the wild rye, and by doing so unintentionally transformed it into a domestic crop….

With their increased interest in plant cultivation, the late Natufians drifted away from the depleted woodlands where their forebears once flourished.

They were drawn to the alluvial soil of the valleys, not only those of the River Jordan, but also those found by the great rivers of the Mesopotamian plain, and in the vicinity of lakes and rivers throughout the Near East. Large expanses of these rich, fertile soils became available as the rivers and lakes shrunk in size during the Younger Dryas. Wild, but cultivated, cereals grew well in such soil, especially when close to the meagre springs, ponds and streams that survived in the arid conditions.

The few rye grains from Abu Hureyra are the only existing evidence that such cultivation in the Late Natufian created a domesticated type of cereal” (Mithen:2003:52-3)

So we see from all the above (don’t you just love the term sickle-gloss) that the Late Natufians, started not just settling moved into plains rather than woodlands , increasing their work-loads with irrigation and planting techniques, what we may term farming. That is to say deliberately planting plants that were domesticated, where the grain waited for the harvester and did not fall to the ground by Natures hand, all due to the effects of the Younger Dryas- Gods punishment being fought against by the willed behaviour of the being-for-itself.

This resulted in a vast expansion of the settler way of being:

“For more than a thousand years the hunter-gatherers at Abu Hureyra will continue to hunt the gazelle. The animals are so numerous that their slaughter has no impact on the size of the herds. The women and children will continue to tend their wild gardens and reap a rich harvest. The accumulation of dirt, sand, lost artefacts, and other debris within the dwellings will become either unbearable or simply make access impossible. And then the Abu Huryera people will build new dwellings, this time totally above the ground. But eventually hard times will arrive. The drought of the Younger Dryas will disrupt the gazelle and decimate the productivity of the steppe. The village will be abandoned, the people returning to a life on the move.

At 9000 BC they will return, not as hunter-gatherers but as farmers. They will build mud-brick houses and grow wheat and barley on the alluvial plain. The gazelle herds will have resumed their migrations and be hunted for another thousand years until the Abu Hureyran people suddenly switch to herding sheep and goats.” (Mithen:2003:41)

“Around 9600 BC the summer droughts came to an end. Renewed rainfall fed the streams that gushed between the Palestinian hills; the River Jordan began to swell. Thick layers of rich fertile soil were deposited across the Jordan valley by new annual floods, and these were watered by the spring that flowed with a new-found vigour. The cultivated crops flourished, most likely replacing the untended wild plants as the main provider of food. The Late Natufians extended the duration of their stay, until history repeated itself and sedentary village life was reborn far from those Mediterranean woodlands, favoured by the Early Natufians. And so Jericho was founded, and with it people became farmers.” (Mithen:2003:56-7)

“At 9600 BC there are likely to be over five hundred people living at Jericho- perhaps the very first time in human history that a completely viable population was living in the same place at the same time… But the most striking difference to the village was that its western side, that which faced the Palestine hills, had been enclosed by a massive stone wall and a large circular tower had been constructed inside….

Bar-Yosef concluded that the walls had been for defence but not against an invading army- the enemy was flood water and mud-flows. Jericho was in perpetual danger as increased rainfall and vegetation clearance destabilised settlements on the Palestinian hills that could then be carried to the edge of the village by the nearby wadis. By the time the village rubbish had buried the walls, the level of human settlement had literally been raised up by the accumulation of collapsed houses and human debris. This had removed the threats of flood water and mud-flow. A wall was simply no longer required.” (Mithen:2003:59)

“The town of Beidha is a dramatic statement of human detachment from the natural world, epitomised by the sharp angles and ordered layout of buildings, the goats within their pens, the land cleared for farming.” (Mithen:2003:72)

“The transition from small circular dwellings typical of PPNA settlements such as Jericho, Netiv Hagdud and WF16 to the relatively large, rectangular and often two-storey buildings of Beidha and other PPNB settlements documents a major social transformation. Kent Flannery from the University of Michigan has argued that this reflects a shift from a group-oriented society- in which any food surpluses are pooled and available to all- to one in which families are the key social unit. Rather than being spread out between several small circular huts, such families consolidated their presence with multiple rooms within a single building….

Lubbock’s walk through the alleys and courtyards of Beidha provides him with other new experiences. In the hunter-gatherer settlements he had visited there had been few surprises- he could almost always see from one side of the village to another, most of the work occurred in the open air, and everyone seemed to know everyone else’s business. Here, as in the other Neolithic towns, turning almost every corner can lead to a surprise- unexpected clusters of people, an outdoor hearth, a tethered goat. People simply cannot know what is happening elsewhere in the town- even just a few metres away- because so much occurs behind thick walls. The number of inhabitants has become too great for people to know one another’s business and relations. There is, Lubbock senses, an atmosphere of distrust and anxiety, one brought on by the impact of town life on a mentality that had evolved for living in smaller communities.

Along with sheep, goats were the first animals to be domesticated after the dog, and completed the shift from hunting and gathering to a farming lifestyle. Precisely where, when, and why such domestication occurred is still much debated by archaeologists.

The goat is very rare in the collections of bones from Natufian and Early Neolithic villages, these being dominated by gazelle- the preferred prey ever since the LGM. So the abundance of goats found at Beidha- 80 per cent of all animals bones- suggests herding rather than hunting.

The Beidha goats were also small in size compared to known wild goats. A reduction in body-size occurs with all animals once they become domesticated- pigs are smaller than wild boar, cows smaller than wild cattle.” (Mithen:2003:76-77)

“The town of ‘Ain Ghazal made remarkable growth, reaching thirty acres in extent, spilling over to the east side of Wadi Zarqa, housing 2,000 people and more. By 6300 BC, however, it is in an advanced state of  terminal decline….

The river within Wadi Zarqa still flows but the valley sides are bare- not just around the village but as far as one can see. Soil exhaustion and erosion had devastated the farming economy of ‘Ain Ghazal. Not a single tree remains within walking distance of the town. Its people had travelled further and further every year to plant their crops and to find fodder for their goats. Yields declined, fuel became scarce and the river polluted with human waste. Infant mortality, always high, reached catastrophic proportions, so that population levels collapsed, compounded by the steady departure of people back to a life within scattered hamlets. Such is the story of all PPNB towns of the Jordan valley- complete economic collapse.” (Mithen:2003:87)

“The new architecture in western Asia had gone hand in hand with new rules and regulations for living together. These were imposed by the priests such as Lubbock had seen in ‘Ain Ghazal, or agreed upon in public meeting-houses such as that of Beidha. But no such authority or decision-making for the common good has arisen at Khirokitia. Each extended family effectively cared for itself alone- producing and storing its own food, burying its own dead, even having its own religious beliefs.

Lubbock had searched in vain for public buildings where communal planning, worship or ritual might have taken place. Neither could he find any sign of authority-figures that might have provided rules and resolved disputes. While such independent family groups had been viable when fresh water, land and firewood were in good supply, these were now seriously depleted. The result was unremitting tension and conflict in the over-populated town.” (Mithen:2003:105)

“The date is 9600 BC and John Lubbock looks upon Jericho, a village that marks a turning point in the history of western Asia, perhaps the history of the world…Kenyon had written how ‘the oasis of Jericho stands rather as one imagines the Garden of Eden’” (Mithen:2003:119)

“Meanwhile, the domestication of cattle and sheep had begun. By the Neolithic period (7000 to 5500 BC), farming had developed to the point where stock breeding and seed agriculture were established techniques of food production. The switch from hunting and gathering to food production seems to have occurred very slowly, however- it was not a revolutionary change that suddenly transformed local practices. Archaeological evidence from a Neolithic village in western Asia, for example, shows that the wild legumes that were the major food item in 7500 BC were gradually replaced by cultivated grains over a span of almost 2000 years (Flannery, 1969). Ester Boserup (1981) suggested that there was little incentive to switch to food production until population densities began to increase and/or wild food sources became scarce because hunting and gathering often provided adequate levels of subsistence with relatively low workloads. From this perspective, then, demographic conditions as well as technological innovations were a critical precondition for economic change.” (Knox et al:2003:120)

This return then, to a now new and ‘improved’ settler way of life, led to not only the tensions, disease, infant mortality and sociological cooking-pot of this type of human existence that we still as settlers, know today, it also led to over-population, and desertification of the surrounding environment, that we are also familiar with, and on a global scale.

Imagine then, if the Younger Dryas was the earlier punishment for cultivating the wild grain, what would the punishment be for cultivating a domesticated grain, a domesticated goat, pig, and bull. Turning these Natures of God, towards serving the Nature of the being-for-itself. Imagine the anger of when God witnesses the turning away from wakan towards families as the basis for behaviour.

In the Bible this punishment is called The Flood, in all myths of all civilizations it is called The Flood, and in our modern day civilization and scientific mythical language, it is called ‘The Flood’.

04: Noah and the flood

“There were vast expanses of water, quite unlike any in North America- indeed the whole world- today. They were formed by the melt-waters, dammed by cliffs of ice on their northern edge and gently rising ground to the south. The first had appeared by 15,000 BC- Lake Missoula at the southern edge of the Cordilleran ice sheet, the size of Lake Ontario today- but their apogee came with Lake Agassiz in the west, which had appeared by 12,000 BC and lasted for 4,000 years. When at its most expansive, it covered 350,000 square kilometres. That is four times the area of Lake Superior today, which is itself equivalent to a medium-sized European country, such as Ireland or Hungary, and currently the largest freshwater lake in the world.

The drainage routes of these lakes were changeable- the most dramatic example being Lake Agassiz, which, up until 11,000 BC, had drained to the south, into the Gulf of Mexico. Soon after that date an ice dam at its eastern edge was breached and rather than taking the southern route, billions of litres of water began to flow east, into the St Lawrence River and then the North Atlantic. There it may have had a catastrophic effect on the circulation of ocean waters, which may in turn have influenced the climate, perhaps causing the Younger Dryas itself.” (Mithen:2003:242)

“When the ice sheets finally lost the battle against global warming a mighty legacy was left on the landscape of North America in fact havoc was wreaked on coastlines and coastal communities throughout the world as billions of litres of melt-water poured into the oceans. Those who lived in the far north of the Americas would have seen their homeland of Beringia diminish in size year by year as the coast flooded and salty water seeped across the steppe. I imagine the people standing upon hilltops, old men telling young children how the forests of birch that now stretch before them are quite new to their land. They explain how, during their own childhood, herds of mammoths and musk oxen had gazed on grasslands where the caribou now browse. Settlements were abandoned as communities headed for the coast where they hunted the newly abundant seals and walrus. As they did so, clear icy-blue skies became shrouded in fog and drizzle.” (Mithen:2003:239-40)

“Sea-level change and its consequences 10,500- 6,400 BC

Forty millimetres. Perhaps 33 millimetres, or even no more than 23 millimetres. About the thickness of a small pebble on the beach or the depth of a shallow rock pool. Had the people of the Mesolithic been told that these were the best guesses for the average yearly increase in sea level during the century following 7500 BC, I doubt if they would have shown much concern. After all, such statistics are practically identical to the estimated rise in our own global sea level during the next hundred years and none of our governments seem too bothered.

These figures are estimates made in the last few years by scientists who struggle with the imprecision of radiocarbon dates and the sheer complexity of sea-level change in northern Europe. Although they sound small, the implications of such figures for Mesolithic times were extraordinary: coastal catastrophe. Its ultimate cause was the final melting of the great ice sheets, especially those of North America. Millions upon millions of gallons of water poured into the oceans and touched the lives of many thousands of people- sometimes quite literally.

At 7500 BC the coast of northern Europe ran directly from eastern England to Denmark. It was deeply incised with estuaries that led into narrow-sided valleys that in turn wound their way between gently rolling hills. Doggerland- the region now submerged below the North Sea- had a coastline of lagoons, marshes, mud-flats and beaches. It was probably the richest hunting, fowling and fishing grounds in the whole of Europe. Grahame Clark, the excavator of Star Carr, believed that Doggerland had been the heartland of the Mesolithic culture. …

The Mesolithic coastal dwellers of Doggerland began to see their landscape change- sometimes within a single day, sometimes within their lifetime, sometimes only when they recalled what parents and grandparents had told them about lagoons and marshes now permanently drowned by the sea. An early sign of change was when the ground became boggy, when pools of water and then lakes appeared in hollows as the water table rose. Trees began to drown while the sea remained quite distant. Oak and lime were often the first to go, alder normally the last, surviving until sea water was splashing upon its roots and spraying upon its leaves.

High tides became higher and then refused to retreat. Sandy beaches were washed away. Coastal grasslands and woodland became salt marsh- land washed daily by the sea which saturated the soil with salt….

The North Sea invaded Doggerland. Marine waters worked their way into the valleys and around the hills, new peninsulas appeared, became offshore islands and then disappeared for ever. So, too, in the Mediterranean where the sea edged its way closer and closer to Franchthi Cave, where so many plant foods had been collected by hunter-gatherers in Greece. By 7500 BC the seashore was little more than an afternoon stroll away for the occupants of Franchthi; their forebears had required a whole day’s hike to reach the coast. Layers of buried food waste within the cave show how the Franchthi people first began to gather limpets and periwinkles and then became sea-going fishermen. They started to visit islands, such as Melos 120 kilometres away where they found obsidian and brought it back to their cave. This new lifestyle favoured expedition and colonisation: Corsica, Sardinia and the Balearic islands were settled for the very first time.

The experience of those who dwelt along the coastlines of Europe varied with time and place. For some, the environmental changes were so gradual as to go unnoticed: minute year-by-year shifts in diet, technology and knowledge- a subtle, unconscious moulding of lifestyle. Others would have stared in amazement as they watched the sea race inland after a shingle ridge or dunes had been breached. Still others- such as the inhabitants of what would one day become the town of Inverness in eastern Scotland- faced catastrophe.” (Mithen:2003:150-2)

“On some day close to 7000 BC a small group of Mesolithic people had nestled themselves into a natural hollow within the dunes overlooking the estuary and most likely with a view out to sea. Perhaps they were waiting for dusk before setting out to hunt seal; perhaps they had spent the day collecting tern’s eggs and samphire and were ready for sleep, except for one or two who chipped at beach pebbles, replenishing the store of microliths and scrapers that they carried inside their otter-skin bags. A scene probably repeated a thousand times throughout the coastlands of northern Europe- another normal Mesolithic day in a normal Mesolithic hunter-gatherer’s life.

It was not to last. A few hours earlier a massive sub-marine landslide had occurred almost 1,000 kilometres to the north, within the Arctic Ocean midway between the coast of Norway and Iceland. This was the Storrega slide and it created a tsunami, an immense tidal wave. Those who were at the site of the future 13-24 Castle Street, Inverness, are likely to have been startled by the sudden shrieking of gulls; they heard a distant grumbling that turned into a roar. One assumes they first stared in disbelief, and then panic, as 8-metre-high waves approached the estuary mouth. I guess they ran for their lives.

Whether they made it to safety, we cannot know. If they did, and then returned after the water had subsided, they would have found a vast expanse of white, stony sand burying not just their picnic spot but everything as far north and south as they could see. More than 17,000 cubic kilometres of sediment was dumped across the east coast of Scotland and remains buried below farmland, dunes and town houses as a record of a Mesolithic catastrophe.

The impact of this tsunami across the low-lying coast of Doggerland must have been devastating.

Many kilometres of coastline are likely to have been destroyed within a few hours, perhaps minutes, and many lives lost. …

Another catastrophe happened on the other side of Europe, 3500 kilometres away. The victims were those who lived upon the lowlands around the freshwater lake that was the Black Sea. These provided flat, fertile soils, many thousands of years. By the date of this event, however, a new people had arrived: Neolithic farmers. They had travelled from communities in Turkey, settling upon rich alluvial soils; felling trees to make way for fields of wheat and barley and to provide wood for their houses, fences and pens for their cattle and goats. The story of their journey and their reception by the native Mesolithic people is one for the following chapter. Here our concern is with their tragic end.

The Black Sea had become a freshwater lake during the ice age. The level of the Mediterranean had fallen to below the base of the Bosphorus channel, its link to the Black Sea through which seawater had once flowed. The channel became blocked with silt. Then, when global warming began to melt the ice, the Mediterranean Sea began to rise again. As it did so, the level of the Black Sea was doing the precise opposite- it was falling, due to evaporation and reduced run-off from rivers. As the sea level rose above the base of the channel, the plug of silt held firm. It held, and it held, as a gigantic wall of marine water built up on its western face. And then it began to seep. Then it burst.

So, one fateful day about 6400 BC, a cascade of salty water crashed with the force of two hundred Niagara Falls into the placid waters of the lake- and continued to do so for many months. The roar would have been heard 100 kilometres away- echoing in the ears of those hunting within the hills of Turkey and those who fished around Mediterranean shores. Fifty cubic kilometres of water thundered into the lake each day until the Black Sea and the Mediterranean were one again. Within a matter of months, a staggering 100,000 square kilometres of lakeside woodland, marshland and arable fields had been submerged- an area equivalent to the whole of Austria.” (Mithen:2003:152-3)

Stone Age- 10,000 years ago, Mediterranean coastline and the Black Sea is formed by melting glacial waters, rising by over 120 metres. Black Sea was a freshwater lake by a land bridge (giant dam) where Istanbul and the Bosphorous that exists today.

“All this flooding was pretty bad news for those who lived along the old lake shore. This was one of the biggest natural human disasters in human history. Did the stone-age people who lived here manage to survive? The evidence suggests that many of them did, they even journeyed across Europe and as far away as Asia. The clues can be found in our language. Some linguists believe that many modern languages throughout Europe and western Asia are related and can be traced back to those stone-age travellers.” Dr Iain Stewart.

“It wasn’t until the 1930s, however, that the changes in sea level at the end of the ice age began to be well documented. Today they are known to have been extraordinarily complex in some parts of the world, occurring much more rapidly than the maximum figure of 6 feet per century that Charles Lyell was prepared to consider. Victorian John Lubbock would, I suspect, have been astonished had he known about the sequence of sea-level change in the far north of Europe between 10,500 and 8000 BC.

“Josephine Flood, a distinguished Australian archaeologist, believes that many other Aboriginal myths also relate to the environmental events at the end of the ice age. The mythological accounts of a great flood are often so detailed and specific that she cannot doubt that they are recalling actual events that occurred thousands of year earlier…

If Josephine Flood is correct, the Aborigines have passed down stories from generation to generation about sea-level change, mega-fauna and the desiccation of inland lakes for ten, perhaps even twenty, thousand years. Such stories may have begun as factual accounts and gradually became embedded within the Dreamtime mythology…

By 6000 BC, Greater Australia is no more; one seventh of its land, about 2.5 million square kilometres, has been drowned by the sea. Tasmania, once a southern peninsula, is now an island whose Aborigines have lost all contact with those on the mainland, divided from them by the ferocious waters of the Bass Strait. The people of New Guinea will, however, remain in contact with those of Australia across the more benign and island-spotted Torres Strait.” (Mithen:2003:334-5)

“By travelling into the Central and then West African rainforests, Lubbock was unable to appreciate the dramatic change that the lakes of East Africa had undergone. When he had passed along the shores of Lakes Turkana and Victoria at the LGM, the water was at levels far below that found today. Many smaller lakes had disappeared entirely. By 7000 BC the precise opposite was the case: for several thousand years the lakes had been far exceeding their present-day levels. Just as the increased rainfall after 12,000 BC enabled the rainforest to expand further than it does today, so too did it fill the lake basins of East Africa to unprecedented levels.

The new shorelines are still quite visible as bands of shells and lake sediments stranded high and dry many metres above the present water level. Lake Turkana was 85 metres higher than it is now, doubling its current size and causing it to overflow its basin and feed water into the Nile river system. Numerous small basins became entirely flooded; many of the small lakes now found in the Rift Valley of southern Ethiopia had joined together to make one massive lake which spilled into the Awash River….

After 12,000 c.c. period, tropical africa enjoyed the wettest period of its recent history, perhaps receiving 50 per cent more rain than it does today.

The ultimate cause was a northward shift of the monsoon system which brought rainfall to the tropics while depriving more southerly areas such as the Kalahari. This situation was not to last, however. Soon after 3000 BC, rainfall was reduced once again; lake levels fell and the forests retreated to their present positions.” (Mithen:2003:488-9)

So The Flood, is an actual event that actually happened and the myths around the world that inform us of it, where Noah (as named by Judaism, Christianity, and Christianity), or Deucalion (the Greeks) or Ziusudra (the Babyloninans) are the heroes that save mankind from this flood and begin a new covenant with God.

Once again, there unfortunately is not enough space to go into this fully in regards to the metaphysical side of this, that will be in the next book, but we do need to look at the Ark that Noah built, for just an instant in order to understand that the peoples who handed down this story did not mean an actual Boat. We will witness this same flood in a Hindu myth later on, but for now let us remain with the biblical version.

In order to understand that, we need to look at the original version of the biblical one, that is many thousands of years older. In the description of the flood below, we witness not just rain, but the collapsing of ice sheets, tsunamis, and breaking of natural dams, that have been described above:

“The time was fulfilled, the evening came, the rider of the storm sent down the rain. I looked out at the weather and it was terrible, so I too boarded the boat and battened her down… With the first light of dawn a black cloud came from the horizon; it thundered within where Adad, lord of the storm was riding… Then the gods of the abyss rose up; Nergal pulled out the dams of the nether waters, Ninurta the warlord drew down the dykes, and… the god of the storm turned daylight to darkness, when he smashed the land like a cup…

For six days and nights the wind blew, torrent and tempest and flood overwhelmed the world… When the seventh day dawned… I looked at the face of the world and there was silence, all mankind was turned to clay. The surface of the sea stretched as flat as a rooftop; I opened a hatch and the light fell on my face. Then I bowed down low, I sat down and wept… for on every side was the waste of water.” (Wright:2006:76)

The original Noah, was called Ziusudra, and we know this because the story of the flood is recorded in the oldest myth known, in fact, in the oldest written document that exists, ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’. In this myth, Ziusudra is told in a dream-time that the god’s are angry and are planning to bring a flood, and so he must build an ark, just as with Noah, however, this Ark does not when described resemble a boat but a cube. It is posited by some that this cube is in fact the original Ka’Ba, that is the cube which Muslims circumambulate in praise of God at Mecca. In Muslim belief this Ka’ba was originally built by Adam and then rebuilt by Abraham, and it is this Ark of Abraham, that it is the duty of all Muslims to visit within their life in order to fulfil their duty to God.

A further mental shift away from the idea of the Ark being a boat is quite simply the Jewish Ark, that is the Ark of the Covenant, another box that contains the stone tablets detailing the Ten Commandments given to Moses as he set up another new covenant with God. The word Ark, literally means, a chest or box; hence a large floating vessel, from the Latin ‘arcere’ meaning to ‘keep’. But ‘arcere’ is also the root word for ‘arcana’, meaning ‘kept secret’, just as the Covenant and the interior of the Ka’ba is. Noah at the end of The Flood, sets up a covenant with God, and God appears to Noah as a rainbow* in order to show His agreement. There are seven colours in the rainbow and the Ka’ba has to be circumambulated seven times, not to mention to the seven chakras whose colours are those of the rainbow, of the Hindu tradition. Ziusudra in the Epic of Gilgamesh gets to eat of the tree of immortality, that we visited in the Garden of Eden, where Ziusudra ends up. Gilgamesh however, as a son of Cain- settler, does not get to partake from the Tree of Immortality because it is taken from him by a snake.

The Jews were captured by the Babylonians and taken to live in Babylonia for centuries, and it is here that these stories, already thousands of years older than Babylon itself, were first heard and then introduced into the Jewish canon.

Again briefly but to be expanded in my next book, the animals going in two by two, so familiar to us in regards to Noah are the not actual animals. That is a logistical nightmare resultant from such a misunderstanding. The animals going into the ark two by two symbolise the signs of the zodiac, zodiac means, ‘the circle of animals’, and two by two refers to the how these zodiacal signs are paired by day and night.  The forty days and forty nights refer to the constellation of the Pleiades and its disappearing from our night sky for this time-period. In other words they are a way of recording the amount of time of The Flood and its change upon our consciousness and behaviour. Just as Egyptians for thousands of years used the return of the star Sirius to their night skies to mark the beginning of the Flood of the Nile, that would bring their lands new life, and so Sirius symbolises, the bringer of life in their mythology, so the Pleiades throughout all world myths has its own meaning. Detailed explanation and factual references will be given in my next work.  For further reference to this please refer to Robert Temple’s translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh- “The Man Who Saw Everything”. However the point I am trying to outline is that I can outline in great detail all of these meanings, and am planning to do so, but cannot here. This is to give weight without content I know, but some readers will be attached to their interpretation of these stories on a deeply personal level, and I wish to acknowledge this, beyond just that necessary to continue our story at these points. The fact that the version I am giving has a weight behind it of global concurrence through both space and time, and that I am planning to write about, is I hope enough to at least enable such a reader to suspend their judgement, rather than judge my suspension of this information at this present moment.

*“The striking colours of many Clovis patterns also suggest that they may have been more than mere utilitarian objects. Points were made from chert coming in alternating red and brown bands, multicoloured chalcedonies, red jasper, volcanic glass and petrified wood. Why choose such an exotic range of coloured raw materials? The Australian Aborigines did likewise because of their religious beliefs. A deep red chert was often used because it had been formed from the blood of ancestral beings; quartz was treasured because the way it shimmered was related to the quality of ‘rainbowness’, believed by Aborigines to be the essence of life.” (Mithen:2003:249)

 “In phenomena, we commonly, indeed, distinguish that which essentially belongs to the intuition of them, and is valid for the sensuous faculty of every human being, from that which belongs to the same intuition accidentally, as valid not for the sensuous faculty in general, but for a particular state or organization of this or that sense. Accordingly, we are accustomed to say that the former is a cognition which represents the object itself, whilst the latter presents only a particular appearance or phenomenon thereof. This distinction, however, is only empirical. If we stop here (as is usual), and do not regard the empirical intuition as itself a mere phenomenon (as we ought to do), in which nothing that can appertain to a thing in itself is to be found, our transcendental distinction is lost, and we believe that we cognize objects as things in themselves, although in the whole range of the sensuous world, investigate the nature of its objects as profoundly as we may, we have to do with nothing but phenomena. Thus, we call the rainbow a mere appearance of phenomenon in a sunny shower, and the rain, the reality or thing in itself; and this is right enough, if we understand the latter conception in a merely physical sense, that is, as that which in universal experience, and under whatever conditions of sensuous perception, is known in intuition to be so and so determined, and not otherwise. But if we consider this empirical datum generally, and inquire, without reference to its accordance with all our sense, whether there can be discovered in it aught which represents an object as a thing in itself (the raindrops of course are not such, for they are, as phenomena, empirical objects), the question of the relation of the representation to the object is transcendental; and not only are the raindrops mere phenomena, but even their circular form, nay, the space itself through which they fall, is nothing in itself, but both are mere modifications or fundamental dispositions of our sensuous intuition, whilst the transcendental object remains for us utterly unknown.” (Kant:1964:56). In other words the form (rain and sunlight) and not God, but the rainbow shows his spirit through them. We can know nothing of this empirically, i.e. scientifically, but we can experience the feeling a rainbow gives us. We can measure the ingredients of God but not know anything about His existence.

For now then let us proceed and see what happened to Noah after The Flood, that is, after the way of life of settlers had been devastated across the Earth around 7,000 B.C. by the melting of the glacial waters, and see if this theory maintains its integrity with the scientific evidence and other global myths that we will encounter:

“The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shen, Ham and Japheth. (Ham was the father of Canaan.) These were the three sons of Noah and from them came the people who were scattered over the earth.

Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded to plant a vineyard. When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father’s nakedness and told his two brothers outside. But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backwards and covered their father’s nakedness. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father’s nakedness.

When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him, he said,

Cursed be Canaan!

The lowest of slaves

Will he be to his brothers.”….

The table of nations

This is the account of Shem, Ham and Japheth, Noah’s sons, who themselves had sons after the flood.

The Japhethites. The sons of Japheth:… From these the maritime peoples spread out into their territories by their clans within their nations, each with its own language.)

The Hamites. The sons of Ham…Cush was the father of Nimrod, who grew to be a mighty warrior on the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord. … The first centres of his kingdom were Babylon, Erech, Akkad and Calneh..

The Semites. Sons were also born to Shem,… The region where they lived stretched from Mesha towards Sephar, in the eastern hill country.

These are the sons of Shem by their clans and languages, in their territories and nations.

These are the clans of Noah’s sons, according to their lines of descent, within their nations. From these the nations spread out over the earth after the flood.” – Genesis 11 vs 10-32

In the above biblical account we see Noah, described as- ‘a man of the soil’, just as with the Epic of Gilgamesh where mankind is reduced to clay, i.e. back to his original form- being-in-Being by The Flood, as was Abel, not of ‘working the soil’, as was Cain.

The reason that we are told, of all things, that ‘Noah lies naked in the tent’ is not because Noah was naked in a tent, and that seemed so important to be orally told and handed down for thousands of years, but because it conveys something profound about Noah after his new covenant with God. Just as Adam sore he was naked and had sinned, making himself wear a garment of skin. So Noah is now once again naked, and is sitting inside a garment with a tear in it, but which is now his protection. In other words, Noah has made a new covenant with God. The tent also signifies the nomadic way of life of the hunter-gatherer. To bring all of this full circle, the Jewish word for tent is tabernacle, and it in this tabernacle that they kept the Ark of the Covenant. Tabernacle can also mean niche or recess, and it is to this niche that Muslims pray in their mosques, as did Mohammed, and in Catholicism the tabernacle is the ornamental recipticle on the high altar, in which the vessels containing the Blessed Sacrament are reserved. The Jewish Feast of the Tabernacles, lasts seven days, and commemorates the way the Jews dwelt in tents in the wilderness with Moses and also celebrates the final gathering of the harvest .

So Noah’s spirit, beneath his garment of skin is once again naked. He is at one with God and is living back in the wilderness, not the domesticatedness. It is, ‘in this spirit’ that he becomes drunk. To his son’s who are separate from this ‘truth’ by experience he seems insensible, just as a hunter-gatherer would be insensible to a settler, because of their differences.

Now the Ark of the Covenant and the Ka’ba are not actually physically very important, they are not the sacred thing, but the content of them is. What exists then within the Ka’Ba and the Ark of the Covenant? Well nothing, they are empty. Their purpose, best described by the Ka’ba and its circumambulations are simply that the people of Allah, around the world (a whole nation) pray in that same direction, and when they stand physically in front of it, they are at the centre, the Heart, of their religion on Earth, and hence are closest to God. They originally prayed to Jerusalem, but the different location does not change this same truth or experience. God cannot be depicted as we have already seen by the last 30,000 years of hunter-gatherers behaviour, because ‘he’ is no-thing, he is not a part of the subject-object world, where nothing becomes seen as some-things. He is nature and all of nature including emotional landscapes and dream landscapes, etc. Therefore nothing,  embodied and named by a sacred space represents God but does not locate him.

In Hindu this same truth is told through its representation of the god Shiva, whose name means, purified of all forms.

“One day a sculptor was given a rock and asked to carve an image of God. He tried to imagine a form that would best encapsulate God. If he carved a plant, he would exclude animals and humans. If he carved an animal, he would exclude humans and plants…..If he carved a male, he would exclude the female…God, he believed, was the container of all forms. And the only way to create this container was by creating no form. Or maybe God is beyond all forms, but a form is needed to access even this idea. Overwhelmed by these thoughts, the sculptor left the stone as it was and bowed before it. This was the linga, the container of infinity, the form of the formless, the tangible that provokes insight into the intangible.” (Pattanaik:2011:3)

“The body is the totality of meaningful relations to the world. In this sense it is defined also by reference to the air which it breathes, to the water which it drinks, to the food which it eats. The body in fact could not appear without sustaining meaningful relations with the totality of what is. Like action, life is a transcended transcendence and a meaning. There is no difference in nature between action and life conceived as a totality. Life represents the ensemble of meanings which are transcended toward objects which are not posited as thises on the ground of the world. Life is the Other’s body-as-ground in contrast to the body-as-figure inasmuch as this body-as-ground can be apprehended, not by the Other’s for-itself and as something implicit and non-positional, but precisely, explicitly, and objective by me. His body appears then as a meaningful figure on the ground of the universe but without ceasing to be a ground for the Other and precisely as a ground.” (Sartre:2003:368)

Now that we have seen the meaning of Noah, naked and drunk, in his tent really means, we can turn our attention to the behaviour of the three sons of Noah and see just what this story is telling us, before proving it against the scientific version of this story.

The sons of Noah that turn their backs on him, are three new beings or ‘ways of being’ that emerge, subsequent to the flood and the return to hunter-gathering once again. Just as Cain and Abel describe this same splitting of man’s way of existence in the Younger Dryas of the Early Natufians into two elements- settling and hunter-gathering, so do these three brothers. Their nature, ‘faces a different way’, they have their backs to him as they clothe him in their garment* of judgement, as they break from the covenant and return to a settled way of life and away from Noah’s spiritual vineyard where the fruit of the grape is collected in bundles together and where the egoic skins of the young are broken individually and then are walked upon in order to coalesce as one mature spiritual aliment of communion.

*Garment comes from the word garnis meaning to warn, avert, fortify or protect, see Heidegger re: unshieldedness:

“To Noah his people said, ‘Where is the Divine recompense?’ He said, ‘On the other side of they cover themselves with their garments.

Ye have wrapped your faces and heads in your clothes: of necessity ye have eyes and see not.’” [Rumi:Book 1:1405]. In other words: “The lover’s illusion of self-existence is a “veil” which separates him from the Divine Beloved. In mystical union this illusion vanishes and the absolute Unity of God is realised.” [Rumi: commentary:book 1:p14] ‘The Jesus of your spirit is present with you: beg aid from him, for he is a goodly aider;…This body is a tent for the spirit, or like an ark for Noah.” [Rumi:Book II:455]

“Saná’I (Hadiqah, ed.,Stephenson, I 88, 18 sqq.), in a passage which Rumi may have have recollected here, contrasts the letter of the house (naqsh-i garmábah) which know nothing about the nature of the bath (cf. infra, IV 800 sqq). But in the present context the “bath-house” is the world, and the “pictures”, phenomenal forms. Viewed externally these forms are mere “clothes”; in order to perceive the reality concealed by them, you must enter the “disrobing-room” (jámah-kan= maslakh) or tajrid (remotio, self-abstraction), where everything is stipped of limitations and contemplated in its essence. While clothed with bodily qualities, you cannot penetrate within and attain to knowledge of the Spirit which is your real self; for the body is just as ignorant of the soul as the clothes you wear are unconscious of your body. On the practice of decorating baths with pictures, see Arnold, Painting in Islam, 85-89.” Rumi Commentary Book I p 173

The three news way of being-for-itself, that leave the race of Adam, (which under this new covenant is the race of Noah) are represented by Noahs sons and their names. Firstly the settler clans that provides for itself by using the fruits of the sea, from the melting glaciers- The Japhethites- the maritime peoples. Secondly, the civilization that builds cities and requires war to provide for itself- The Hamites who produce Babylon (see below). Thirdly, the civilization that continues to hunt and gather in the hills, still living in the being-in-Being- the Semites. As Noah states:

‘Blessed by the Lord, the God of Shem!

May Canaan be the slave of Shem.

May God extend the territory of Japheth;

May Japheth live in the tents of Shem, and may Canaan be his slave.” –Genesis 9 vs 26-27

“These are the clans of Noah’s sons, according to their lines of descent, within their nations. From these the nations spread out over the earth after the flood.” –Genesis 11 vs 30.

In other words, Noah states, the two ways of life most acceptable to God are those firstly of Shem, the hunter-gatherer, secondly the fishermen who take from a vast ocean but who still settle (may they live in the tents of Shem meaning to experience being-in-Being under those conditions) , and lastly, a most lowly and accursed way of living is the way of the warrior king, of Canaan, son of Ham, (may they be Shem’s slaves). Noah wishes to enslave this civilization to its moral higher ways of the being-in-Being, not as Canaan will do, to enslave their bodies for-itself. The land of Canaan today is sometimes identified with the geographical Israel.

So for this theory to be right it must be also shown scientifically that after the physical flood came these three ways of existing.

“The story of how humans became food producers is roughly as follows. … Around 10,000 B.C. most of the larger game herds had left western Asia. Yet people in coastal areas were not starving; on the contrary, they were surrounded by plenty because the melting glaciers had raised water levels and thereby had introduced he quantities of fish, shellfish, and water fowl in newly created bays and swamps. Excavations near Mount Carmel and at the site of Jericho in modern-day Israel- locations not far from the Mediterranean Sea- prove that wildlife and vegetation in that area between about 10,000 and 9,000 B.C. were so lush that people could sustain themselves in permanent settlements in an unprecedented fashion, easily catching fish and fowl, and picking fruits off trees as if they were in the Garden of Eden.  But the plenty of Mount Carmel and Jericho had its costs in terms of population trends. Modern nomadic hunting peoples have low birthrates, and the same is presumed to have been true of prehistoric peoples.” [Lerner et al:1993:12-16]

“This paucity of Mesolithic sites in Southeast Europe, all the way from the Danube to the Mediterranean Sea, has been of considerable worry to archaeologists. Was there a genuine absence of settlements? Have Mesolithic sites been destroyed, or do some remain to be discovered? In Greece, for instance, there are barely a dozen Mesolithic but many hundreds of Neolithic sites, thousands from later periods and a great many from much earlier periods of human evolution. Catherine Perlès, the leading scholar of early prehistoric Greece, recently evaluated all possible reasons for the rarity of Mesolithic sites and concluded that this must genuinely reflect a very small population, one that was almost entirely based on the coast.” (Mithen:2003:162)

“What is agreed upon is that the Mediterranean Neolithic between 6000 and 4500 BC looks quite different to that of central Europe. In that region there is a clear separation between sites that have the complete Neolithic ‘package’ on the one hand- those of the LBK with timber-framed houses, cattle, sheep, crops, pottery and polished stone axes- and Mesolithic sites, with microliths, deer and wild boar bones, on the other. In the Mediterranean, however, Neolithic and Mesolithic elements are mixed together at single sites, appearing to have been used by the same people at the same time….

As a result of this piecemeal, and partial adoption of the Neolithic package, people who were neither strictly Mesolithic hunter-gatherers nor Neolithic farmers occupied the Mediterranean.” (Mithen:2003:189)

So here we clearly see that a major shift of lifestyles has emerged and that fishing, symbolised by the brother Japheth, has joined the hunter-gatherer and the settler way of life.

05: The Hindu version of the flood

Let us now look at the Hindu mythology regarding The Flood, and we will see that the above same story is told, but only slightly differently. However for us it is almost like reading the above translation of the biblical story, whilst also bringing it in line with our previous story of the Magic Horse.

“Of all living creatures only humans can imagine a world where might is not right. Where the tiger and the goat live in harmony, where the hawk and serpent are friends. From this imagination comes the notion of heaven- the paradise of perfection. Desire to create this paradise of perfection provokes man into creating culture.

Manu does what no other creature can do. He responds to the cry of the little fish, collects it in the palm of his hand and puts it in a small pot. In other words, Manu interferes with nature. This interference has its roots in empathy. Manu feels the fear of the little fish and does something to allay it. The presence of Manu transforms nature. The little pot in which the fish is kept represents culture, a man-made creation, where the little fish is safe from the big fish.

It is this emotion and action that enables man to create society, a world where jungle law is challenged, where the mighty take care of the meek, where the weak are given opportunities by the strong. The thought that creates this secure world is called dharma, from the root ‘Dhr’ which means ‘to make secure’ or ‘to bind’.

Dharma thus is an artificial construct. One can argue that Dharma is what is natural to man. In overturning matsya nyaya lies purusha-artha, the validation of human existence. That is why humans were created. So long as we follow jungle law, we are pashu or animals. Only when we rise above it and start establishing dharma do we become purusha or human.” (Pattnaik:2011:41-3)

“The fish grows in size and so Manu transfers it from a small pot to a bigger pot. The fish keeps getting bigger and to accommodate it, out of compassion for the poor creature, Manu keeps providing it with bigger and bigger pots….

The desire for the larger pot can also indicate a lack of sensitivity and a lack of contentment. As more of the forest is domesticated and turned into fields to provide human society, more and more of nature is destroyed for culture. Human laws tend to include some and exclude some and in doing so push nature to its limits. This is evident in the following story from the Mahabharata.

A king called Shibi, in compassion, rescues a dove being chased by a hawk. The hawk asks the king, ‘What will I eat now?’ The king suggests he eat another dove. The hawk retorts, ‘So that you can indulge your compassion for this dove, you are willing to sacrifice another dove. Is that fair? The king then asks the hawk to eat a rat or a serpent? ‘Why should they die so that the dove can live?’ The question has no answer.

In being kind to the dove, the king is being cruel to the hawk. The king has included the dove but excluded the hawk. Why should the dove be saved? Why should the hawk be made to starve? The questions, which have no answers, challenge the human construct of society.

Man creates a society as he pursues his imagination of paradise, a place where all creatures are safe. However, in the process, he creates a world where some are more safe than others. Human society invariably favours a few over others. Culture is thus always imperfect. Vishnu lore always draws attention to this truism for Vishnu is a worldly god and knows that seeking answers by controlling material reality will never be satisfactory. …

Manu’s motivation may be noble, but it includes only the fish in the pot, not the other fishes outside. Thus, what begins as empathy for one ends up becoming rather exclusive- lack of empathy for the rest.” (Pattnaik:2011:41-51)

“Humans can never include everybody. Plants and animals are excluded if they do not serve the needs of society. Crops are included, weeds are not. Domesticated animals are welcomed but wild animals are shunned. People whose points of view align with ours are included; the rest are excluded. Society will always exclude somebody. And this exclusion eventually claims a huge price.

So the fish gets bigger and bigger, utilising all the resources provided by Manu, and Manu keeps transferring it to bigger pots to satisfy its ever growing needs. At no point does Manu think the fish can fend for itself and so he does not bother to throw the fish back into the sea. At no point does the fish think it can fend for itself and ask Manu to throw it back into the sea. The fish in the pot gradually becomes dependent on Manu and displays no desire to be independent. Eventually the fish has to be put in a pond, then a larger pond, then a lake and finally a river. A point comes in the story when dark clouds gather overhead and it rains relentlessly. The sea begins to swell and swallow the earth. It is Pralaya, death of the world.

This is what happens when human society becomes so focussed on itself that it loses touch with the rest of nature, when culture expands at the cost of everything else, when the needs of culture override the needs of nature. Eventually something will snap. Nature will strike back.

At first Manu wonders why he is suffering even though he spent his life doing a noble deed: caring for the small fish. He blames the rain and curses the sea. But then realisation dawns.

This is not explicitly stated in the scriptures as Manu is the reader of the tale. Manu is all of humanity. This wisdom has to be figured out by the story-listener, not communicated by the story-teller.

Manu realises that his obsession with the small fish is the cause of the great calamity. This obsession made him insensitive to the fact that the fish had grown and could take care of itself. He became insensitive to the consequences of his action on the rest of the world. Every action has a reaction that one is bound to experience. This is the law of karma. Just as society is created by an act of compassion, when Manu saves the fish, society is destroyed when the compassion becomes exclusive, and fails to include all of nature. When Manu realises this, he takes responsibility for his role in Pralaya. It is then that the fish reappears before Manu. This time, the fish has a horn on his forehead.

Why a horn on his forehead? Is it to direct Manu towards his larger brain, that source of imagination, that root of empathy and exploitation? The horn is very much like the vertical mark of Vishnu, reminding Manu that life is about growth. Manu grew from animal to human when he saved the fish; but he was unable to make the move from human to divine when he focused exclusively on the fish, and became too insensitive to include the rest. While there was material growth, indicated by the larger pots, there was no emotional and intellectual growth to realise that he has to expand his vision to include all.

The horned fish guides Manu to build a boat, much like the Biblical Noah’s ark. The fish asks Manu to tie the boat to his horn using the serpent Adi-Ananta-Sesha. The fish then tows the ship to safety to Mount Meru, the centre of the world. When the waters recede, an enlightened Manu saved by the fish and its horn starts the world anew.” (Pattnaik:2011:51-55)

So, The Flood, in the Hindu telling of this story is once again an experience associated with the increase of settlements, of the challenges of these divisions of peoples into a group that was no longer a part of wakan, in their behaviour, and hence their perspective. In the eyes of the author of the story, Nature brought a reasonable punishment, brought about by unreasonable behaviour.

This story of settlement life takes us to the race of Ham, who creates Babylon. But in order to get to Babylon we must firstly look to see the demise of the concept of being-in-Being and the beginning of its replacement idea, being-for-itself, at the ground roots.

As we have already seen, in regards to settling, civilization, is a process that takes thousands of years, and requires many subtle perspective changes to occur for it to ‘be-come’ into existence.

With the definition of the word ‘dwell’ being so radically changed in meaning as the settler changes his behaviour, so the movement away from wakan towards religion changes the meaning of language itself. It is a slow process that finally evolves into the new word, civilization, as meaning dwelling. “I am civilized, not a wild man.”

“God replies to the cursed people of Ham; as they say to themselves, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”; God says, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other…. The Lord confused the language of the whole world.” Genesis 11: vs 4-9

Before we move on to Babylon, then, I wish to look at exactly how the sons of Noah, as they moved away from the universal community of wakan, God over the self, managed to turn ever and ever deeper towards their individual selves and how their perspective and consequently, their language changed and grew. It is a gradual process, dating from the end of The Flood- around 6,000 B.C., to the foundation of Babylon in 3,500 B.C. To do this we will use science, philosophy, biblical and Hindu mythology, and once again see their correlation of facts.

The ontological reality of settled man,  the consequent nature of his behaviour, and the subsequent nature that results.

We have already seen the equitable, free, and communal worship of the Cave-man and his way of life, seen through the perspective of ‘God’s will be done’ as living in harmony with Nature. But this is still a very subtle presence in our settled mind-set, we are closed to its full repercussions by our experience as modern humans. In order to understand it further let us return to philosophy and the concept of a starting-place.

For us, the cave-man and God are our starting-place, and we have witnessed a journey from that spot, which we have named as the beginnings of pre-civilization or of being-for-itself from being-in-Being, from an inner and outer world, subjective or objective perspective, respectively. In Babylonian mythology Babylon was not the city itself but instead a place between heaven and earth, a transcendent place (like the Magic Horse’s destination) but one that connected heaven and earth. In other words Babylon was a place made by the separation of heaven from earth, by the ontological perspective of the beings-for-themselves that inhabited it. We will see this more clearly in the Hindu myth and those of the Tiwanaku in South America, later on.

This transcendent place was depicted as a small piece of ground that stuck out from the waters beneath the sky.

Once again this is not supposed to be taken to be a physical place but a metaphysical one, and at the very least, and for now, symbolically.

Civilization then is a place where the settler can begin his way of life. It is separate from God, but it is not ostracised from God, such as hell is. It is a middle ground upon which to build a way to God, starting from the foundations of a being-for-itself, whose ground must be worked in order to achieve its goal.

The point here being, that a new goal, requires a new ground, a new starting point, a new perspective by which to see existence, and most importantly, a new will, a new spirit. For the hunter-gatherer, the universe was Gods Nature, Gods venture, Gods will, and they were along for the ride, but for the settler, he was the venture, he was the will, and all nature around him was to be bent towards fulfilling it. The world was now an objective reality through the subjective willed perspective and hence experience of this being-for-itself. The world looks very different from each of these perspectives and so therefore are the words used to describe the experiences of the lives that live them. These words construct sentences and these sentences construct stories, and as we have just seen, are all reasonably created from each of these perspectives, and yet, as we have just seen, describe the same thing, once the perspective behind the words is understood.

We are very familiar today with the settler vision, but in order to elucidate the transition towards it from that of the hunter-gatherer it is necessary for us ourselves therefore to pick up a few new words and a few new meanings by which we can leave our familiar country, and rediscover an ancient one. We must look from a different place in order to see. We must lose the perspective of someone who is self-centred, and become people where perspective of the centre is universal.

From there we must walk a mile in the shoes of these two perspectives. How does it feel to follow the herd that will clearly provide for you amongst people who are a part of you, as you are of them, and of all. And how does it feel to wake up each morning with just a field and a pig to sustain you and a few relatives to protect you from losing that field, and a Nature that does not bend to your will, and may send disaster at any moment. How does it feel to have lots of possessions, and a surplus of grain that will last you all year? How does it feel when your life is coming to an end from each of these perspectives?

Let us begin to explore these ideas more fully then with those used and defined by the religious-poet and philosopher Rilke:

“Rilke calls Nature the Urgrund, the pristine ground, because it is the ground of those beings that we ourselves are. This suggests that man reaches more deeply into the ground of beings than do other beings. The ground of beings has since ancient times been called Being. The relation of Being which grounds to the beings that are grounded, is identical for man on the one hand, plant and beast on the other. It consists in this, that Being each time “gives” particular beings “over to venture.” Being lets beings loose into the daring venture. This release, flinging them loose, is the real daring. The Being of beings is this relation of the flinging loose to beings. Whoever is in being at a given time is what is being ventured. Being is the venture pure and simple. It ventures us, us humans. It ventures the living beings. The particular being, is, insofar as it remains what has ever and always been ventured. But the particular being is ventured into Being, that is, into a daring. Therefore, beings hazard themselves, are given over to venture. Beings, are, by going with the venture to which they are given over. The Being of beings, is the venture. This venture resides in the will which, since Leibniz, announces itself more clearly as the Being of beings that is revealed in metaphysics. We must not think of will here as the abstract generalization of willing understood in psychological terms. Rather, the human willing that is experienced metaphysically remains only the willed counterpart of will as the Being of beings. Rilke, in representing Nature as the venture, thinks of it metaphysically in terms of nature of will. This nature of will still conceals itself, both in the will to power and in the will as venture. The will exists as the will to will…

Nature ventures living beings, and “grants none special cover.” Likewise, we men who have been ventured are “no dearer” to the daring that ventures us. The two imply: venture includes flinging into danger. To dare is to risk the game. Heraclitus (Fragment 52) thinks of Being as the aeon, the world’s age, and of the aeon in turn as a child’s game: Aion pais esti paizon, pesseuon- paidos he basileie (“Time is a child playing, playing draughts; the kingship is a child’s”) If that which has been flung were to remain out of danger if it were shielded. Words in German associated with shield are Schutz (protection), Schütze (marksman), schützen (to protect); they belong to schiessen (to shoot), as Buck (boss, knob), bücken (to bend or stoop) belong to biegen (to bend or bow). Schiessen, to shoot, means schieben, to thrust, e.g., to thrust home a bolt. The roof thrusts forth over the wall. In the country we still say: the peasant woman schiesst ein, she shoves the dough formed for baking into the oven. The shield is what is pushed before and in front of. It keeps danger from harming, even touching, the endangered being. What is shielded is entrusted to the protector, the shielder. Our older and richer language would have used words like verlaubt, verlobt- held dear. The unshielded, on the contrary, is “no dearer”. Plant, animal, and man- insofar as they are beings at all, that is, insofar as they are ventured- agree in this, that they are not specially protected. But since they differ nonetheless in their being, there will also be a difference in their unprotectedness.

As ventured, those who are not protected are nevertheless not abandoned. If they were, they would be just as little ventured as if they were not protected. Surrendered only to annihilation, they would no longer hang in the balance. In the Middle Ages, the word for balance, die Wage, still means about as much as hazard or risk. This is the situation in which matters may turn out one way or the other. That is why the apparatus which moves by tipping one way or the other is called die Wage. It plays and balances out. The word Wage, in the sense of risk and as name of the apparatus, comes from wägen, wegen, to make a way, that is, to go, to be in motion. Be-wägen means to cause to be on the way and so to bring into motion: to shake or rock, wiegen. What rocks is said to do so because it is able to bring the balance, Wage, into the play of movement, this way or that. What rocks the balance weighs down; it has weight. To weigh or throw in the balance, as in the sense of wager, means to bring into the movement of the game, to throw into the scales, to realise into risk. What is so ventured is, of course, unprotected; but because it hangs in the balance, it is retained in the venture. It is upheld. Its ground keeps it safely within it. What is ventured, as something that is, is something that is willed; retained within the will, it itself remains in the mode of will, and ventures itself. What is ventured is thus careless, sine cura, securum- secure, safe. What is ventured can follow the venture, follow it into the unprotectedness of the ventured, only if it rests securely in the venture. The unprotectedness of what is ventured not only does not exclude, it necessarily includes, its being secure in its ground. What is ventured goes along with the venture.

Being, which holds all beings in the balance, thus always draws particular beings toward itself- toward itself as the center. Being, as the venture, holds all beings, as being ventured, in this draft. But this center of the attracting drawing withdraws at the same time from all beings. In this fashion the center gives over all beings to the venture as which they are ventured. In this gathering release, the metaphysical nature of the will, thought of in terms of Being, conceals itself. The venture- the drawing and all-mediating center of beings- is the power that lends a weight, a gravity to the ventured beings. The venture is the force of gravity. One of Rilke’s late poems, entitled “The Force of Gravity” says of it:

‘Center, how you draw yourself

Out of all things, regaining yourself

Even from things in flight: Center, strongest of all!

Standing man: like a drink through thirst,

Gravity plunges through him.

But from the sleeper there falls

As from low-lying cloud,

A rich rain of weight.

In contrast with physical gravitation, of which we usually, hear, the force of gravity names in this poem is the center of all beings as a whole. This is why Rilke calls it “the unheard of center” (Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 28). It is the ground as the “medium” that holds one being to another in mediation and gathers everything in the play of venture. The unheard-of center is “the eternal playmate” in the world-game of Being.” (Heidegger:1971:100-05)

“Everything that is ventured is, as such and such a being, admitted into the whole of beings, and reposes in the ground of the whole. The given beings, of one sort or another, are according to the attraction by which they are held within the pull of the whole draft. The manner of attraction within the draft is the mode of the relation to the center as pure gravity. Nature therefore comes to be represented when it is said in what manner the given ventured being is drawn into the pull toward the center. According to that manner, the given being then is in the midst of beings as a whole.

Rilke likes to use the term “the Open” to designate the whole draft to which all beings, as ventured beings, are given over. It is another basic word in his poetry. In Rilke’s language, “open” means something that does not block off. It does not block off because it does not set bounds. It does not set bounds because it is in itself without all bounds. The Open is the great whole of all that is unbounded. It lets the beings ventured into the pure draft draw as they are drawn, so that they variously draw on one another and draw together without encountering any bounds. Drawing as so drawn, they fuse with the boundless, the infinite. They do not dissolve into void nothingness, but they redeem themselves into the whole of the Open. …

Where there is confinement, whatever is so barred is forced back upon itself and thus bent in upon itself.

The barring twists and blocks off the relation to the Open, and makes of the relation itself a twisted one. The confinement within the boundless is established by man’s representation. The oppositeness confronting him does not allow man to be directly within the Open. In a certain manner, it excludes man from the world and places him before the world- “world” meaning here all beings as a whole.” (Heidegger:1971:106-7)

“The willing of which we speak here is the putting-through, the self-assertion, whose purpose has already posited the world as the whole of producible objects. This willing determines the nature of modern man, though at first time he is not aware of its far-reaching implication, though he could not already know today by what will, as the Being of beings, this willing is willed. By such willing, modern man turns out to be the being who, in all relations to all that is, and thus in his relation to himself as well, rises up as the producer who puts through, carries out, his own self and establishes this uprising as the absolute rule. The whole objective inventory in terms of which the world appears is given over to, commended to, and thus subjected to the command of self-assertive production. Willing has in it the character of command; for purposeful self-assertion is a mode in which the attitude of the producing, and the objective character of the world, concentrate into an unconditional and therefore complete unity. In this self-concentration, the command character of the will announces itself. And through it, in the course of modern metaphysics, the long-concealed nature of the long-since existing will as the Being of beings comes to make its appearance.

Correspondingly, human willing too can be in the mode of self-assertion only by forcing everything under its dominion from the start, even before it can survey it. To such a willing, everything, beforehand and thus subsequently, turns irresistibly into material for self-assertive production. The earth and its atmosphere become raw material. Man becomes human material, which is disposed of with a view to proposal goals. The unconditioned establishment of the unconditional self-assertion by which the world is purposefully made over according to the frame of mind of man’s command is a process that emerges from the hidden nature of technology. Only in modern times does this nature begin to unfold as a destiny of the truth of all beings as a whole; until now, its scattered appearances and attempts had remained incorporated within the embracing structure of the realm of culture and civilization.

Modern science and the total state, as necessary consequences of the nature of technology, are also its attendants. The same holds true of the means and forms that are set up for the organization of public opinion and of men’s everyday ideas. Not only are living things technically objectivated in stock-breeding and exploitation; the attack of atomic physics on the phenomena of living matter as such is in full swing. At bottom, the essence of life is supposed to yield itself to technical production. The fact that we today, in all seriousness, discern in the results and the viewpoint of atomic physics possibilities of demonstrating human freedom and of establishing a new value theory, is a sign of the predominance of technological ideas whose development has long since been removed beyond the realm of the individual’s personal views and opinions. The inherent natural power of technology shows itself further in the attempts that are being made, in adjacent areas so to speak, to master technology with the help of traditional values; but in these efforts technological means are already being employed that are not mere external forms. For generally the utilization of machinery and the manufacture of machines is not yet technology itself- it is only an instrument concordant with technology, whereby the nature of technology is established in the objective character of its raw materials. Even this, that man becomes the subject and the world the object, is a consequence of technology’s nature establishing itself, and not the other way around….

The formless formations of technological production interpose themselves before the Open of the pure draft. Things that once grew now wither quickly away. They can no longer pierce through the objectification to show their own. In a letter of November 13, 1925, Rilke writes:

‘To our grandparents, a “house,” a “well”, a familiar steeple, even their own clothes, their cloak still meant infinitely more, were infinitely more intimate– almost everything a vessel in which they found something human already there, and added to its human store. Now there are intruding, from America, empty indifferent things, sham things, dummies of life…  a house, as the Americans understand it, an American apple or a winestock from over there, have nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which the hope and thoughtfulness of our forefathers had entered…” (Heidegger:1971:111-13)

Noah’s venture then, Noah’s Ark, is one of being-in-Being journeying to God and Nature is the Urgrund from which this journey begins. The venture of his sons however contain themselves as the Urgrund, and consequently Nature becomes perceived as a conglomeration of objects useful for that venture through techniques of technology and culture, whilst God becomes an ideal separate from any part of his Earthly body- Nature- the Universe, as in the idea of wakan, and he becomes an ethereal unit, separate from reality, that must be sacrificed to, rather than communed with on the Earth, as did Adam. For Noah, God is the centre of Noahs-self, and this is in the Open. For the Muslim, the Ka’ba is his centre and is not closed off by his outer proximity when he prays towards it in his subjective experience. This is what Rilke refers to when experiencing something, ‘infinitely more intimate’ than some mass produced consumer product.

Just as with the rainbow there is no change in the ingredients (the rain) or the instructions (the light) that make the product, but the experience of those who are looking (not using ‘il poche’) is the perception of a rainbow as a transcendental experience or movement of the spirit on the waters, whilst for those who deny the inner subjective world, they witness an accident of physics, and because fruit is red when ripe, they call it beautiful.

Let us hear from Sartre regarding the perceptual shift of the centre being wakan to it being our own physical body in order to understand the change from Adam taking the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge into his nature by eating it- wheat domestication- and becoming Cain, a being-for-itself, and then see how this relates to Noah and his subsequent sons. What do we perceive from these two different centres of being?

“For example, in a perspective scheme the eye is the point toward which all the objective lines converge. Thus the perceptive field refers to a centre objectively defined by that reference and located in the very field which is oriented around it. Only we do not see this centre as the structure of the perceptive field considered; we are the centre. Thus the order of the objects in the world perpetually refers to us the image of an object which on principle can not be an object for us since it is what we have to be. The structure of the world demands that we can not see without being visible… This object appears in the midst of the world and at the same time is defined by the orientations would be equivalent. It is the contingent upsurge of one orientation among the infinite possibilities of orienting the world; it is this orientation raised to the absolute. But on this level this object exists for us only in the capacity of an abstract indication; it is what everything indicates to me and what on principle I can not apprehend since it is what I am. In fact what I am can not on principle be an object for me inasmuch as I am it. The object which the things of the world indicate and which they include in their radius is for itself and on principle a non-object. But the upsurge of my being, by unfolding distances in terms of a centre, by the very act of this unfolding determines an object which is itself in so far as it causes itself to be indicated by the world; and I could have no intuition of it as object because I am it, I who am presence to myself as the being which is its own nothingness.

Thus my being-in-the-world, by the sole fact that it realizes a world, causes itself to be indicated to itself as a being-in-the-midst-of-the-world by the world which it realizes. The case could not be otherwise, for my being has no other way of entering into contact with the world except to be in the world. It would be impossible for me to realize a world in which I was not and which would be for me a pure object of a surveying contemplation. But on the contrary it is necessary that I lose myself in the world in order for the world to exist and for me to be able to transcend it. Thus to say that I have entered into the world, “come to the world”, or that there is a world, or that I have a body is one and the same thing. In this sense my body is everywhere-in the world; it is over there in the fact that the roof up there is above the windows of the sixth floor or in the fact that the roof up there is above the windows of the sixth floor or in the fact that a passing car swerves from right to left behind the truck or that the woman who is crossing the street seems smaller than the man who is sitting on the sidewalk in front of the café. My body is co-extensive with the world, spread across all things, and at the same time it is condensed into this single point which all things indicate and which I am without being able to know it. This explanation should allow us to understand the meaning of the senses.” (Sartre:2003:341-42)

So Sartre tells us that once we exist ‘in our garment of skin’, as beings-for-itself we ourselves become the meaning for the world, and so the world becomes co-existent and co-extensive. Distance becomes relative to our bodies (garments of skin), and not to the inner subjective experience. So the Ka’ba, at Mecca, seen from this perspective is miles away, and not intimately close. It cannot be experienced accept by a feeling of distance, loss, and loneliness from the centre. God is replaced in his symbolised form as the empty nothing that inhabits the Ka’ba, a nothing that meant, the infinite potential of creation in all its forms- wakan, and is replaced with meaning, no-thing, in a world of things, objects outside of one-self. It is analogous to the child’s rhyme, ‘Sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but names will never hurt me’. Only the objective world can effect a change of your world, and the inner world has no power. ‘There is no such thing as magic’ is another line from the being-for-itself perspective, but as we have seen the atheist Durkheim state, there is, and we will see a lot, lot more.

From this Urgrund, this primal perspective of either being-in-Being or being-for-itself, comes a project or a venture, ontologically, the conscious individual decides upon what ground he stands, ‘square one’, and then decides in what direction to move, towards himself or towards Himself, thy will be done, or Thy will be done. Only from this decision can he begin his adventure. Psychology which rests upon ontology is about the pains and pleasures, the fetishes, and superstitions that we experience upon this ontological decision, upon which the psyche forms around, in order to become the persona (personality) of that person. Obviously a child raised under these perspectives will gain that world view and from that starting ground begin the walk of life, down that path.

The word ‘path’ comes from the Greek ‘pathein’, meaning to learn by experience, as opposed to mathein (from where we derive mathematics) which means to learn by example. In other words science learns by measuring Nature as its example and then learns from it its laws by copying it- (example literally means ‘a copy’) and derives the language-game of mathematics which from a perspective whose essence is is, ‘At bottom, supposed to yield itself to technical production’ for man’s ventures, whilst the man on the spiritual path walks towards his goal and gains it only through experiencing life, not copying it. This path is intimate and exists within the being-in-Being no-one else can walk it map it, or own it, yet it is not a possession of the person it possesses the person. Maths requires a separation of consciousness from the Being into a garment of skin, separate from the World, and creates the very distance from by which it can then be measured, weighed and surveyed. The fact that a plants breathe is my next breathe and my next breathe is a plants breathe is a consequent truth of science and can ‘be proven by example’ (quad erat demonstrandum –QED) but the experience of a plants breathe and my breathe being one are not separable, they are one. Which is the fruit of the other and what is the fruit of both? Measure that or predict that with a mathematical calculation please. The language created by the perspective of the being-for-itself closes off, makes taboo, the idea of breathe not being mine and the plants. When God breathes life into clay to create man, whose breathe is it, when Adam breathes out for the first time, and then in again? A stupid question on the spiritual path, but a reasonable mathematical question for a being-for-itself.

Another way of looking at this is to imagine a picture of a man standing next to a plant with a circular arrow circumambulating the man and the plant. It is the wholeness of this picture that conveys to us the idea of plant and man being co-incident, within the frame of existence. It is only when we describe the picture in language that we end up with the illusive question of the chicken and the egg, or the smell or the fart, or my breathe or the plants breathe analogy of reason, cause and effect, past, present, and future, distance, separateness and individuality.

As we will see in greater detail soon, language itself is a technology that creates the technological apparatus of civilization, and written language is its zenith.

A picture tells a story but it requires deconstructing using the perspective that was relevant to its creator. It is therefore useless for example to look at renaissance art without knowing the humanist perspective by which to understand it. In like manner we have looked at the biblical stories using the perspective of being-in-Being in order to understand it, but have discovered it required a different ontology.

The perspective change of the being-for-itself could not and can not understand the meaning of a naked Moses in a tent or of a single man called Adam producing an entire race of people, especially today when modern man knows that this is genetically impossible. Just as modern man reads the story of Adam and says, ‘what a load of crap’ because his perspective cannot glean what is being said, so Noah’s sons, those nations of people that lived the settled life, could not understand Noah’s way of life.

Let us look at the symbol of the rainbow now, not from the perspective of the being-in-Being, but from the perspective of some individual beings-for-itself. To see a rainbow from the perspective of the being-for-itself is simply to posit this question in their mind- “What can it do for me?”. Well for most people a rainbow can’t do much but it can be beautiful and intangible so it has come to symbolise a dream world, not a sign of Gods nature as beautiful and intangible in the real world, but as their own projected world being beautiful yet sadly intangible. ‘Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high, there’s a crock of gold, and my individual version of heaven’.  Others though have asked this question and got cause and effect answers. For Isaac Newton his rainbow could show him the nature of light. For Hubble it could tell him how, way up high, (distant) galaxies are from each other, and for modern man its violet wavelengths could tell us the exact and constant distance of a metre by which we now measure out our will upon the Earth by our behaviour. All these truths contained within the rainbow are actually truths contained within our perspective of the rainbow, none is truer than the other, they are just simply the experience (pathein) that attributes itself upon each of these ways of being. I would like to assure the audience that no rainbow has been effected or hurt in anyway, in the making of these truths.

With civilization then comes a dual teleology, two ways of living, whereas before there was only one goal, communion, there are now two- communion or My-self, being-in-Being or being-for-itself.

These teleologies then are ventured into the worlding of the World, and consequently change the world, firstly as we have seen into Cains and Abels and then into Hams, Japhites and Shem’s. These ways of life create a physical landscape upon which each of these will be played out and they also create an internal landscape of sociological factors upon which these ways of life will be played out. Consequently the making of a desert from one perspective may be seen as the creation of a utopia from the other; of a prison for one, a garden for the other, etc, out of a physical world, that we all inhabit and make by our actions from these perspectives. For the being-in-Being a desert is a settled land stripped of its Nature, whilst for the being-for-itself, that desert is a great empire made of his own human-nature. For the being-for-itself Nature is a great desert of meaning, whilst for the being-in-Being it is utopia. For the being-in-Being a garden is a prison of walls, a closed-ness to the great open-ness of Nature, to the being-for-itself it is their own part of their own world manifest, made beautiful in accord with their will, not His.

“The world is not the mere collection of the countable or uncountable, familiar and unfamiliar things that are just there. But neither is it a merely imagined framework added by our representation to the sum of such given things. The world worlds, and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home. World is never an object that stands before us and can be seen. World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into Being. Wherever those decisions of our history that relate to our very being are made, are taken up and abandoned by us, go unrecognized and are rediscovered by new inquiry, there the world worlds. A stone is worldless. Plant and animal likewise have no world; but they belong to the covert throng of a surrounding into which they are linked. The peasant woman, on the other hand, has a world because she dwells in the overtness of beings, of the things that are. Her equipment, in its reliability, gives to this world a necessity and nearness of its own. By the opening up of a world, all things gain their lingering and hastening, their remoteness and nearness, their scope and limits. In a world’s worlding is gathered that spaciousness out of which the protective grace of the gods is granted or withheld. Even this doom of the god remaining absent is a way in which world worlds.” (Heidegger:1971:44-5)

The inner life of the being-in-Being in comparison to the being-for-itself is therefore that with the appearance of the being-for-itself there are two ventures, two path’s to walk, they can be called ad-ventures Two types of world to world into existence through our will not His will. Ad means towards. Upon this invention of human-nature as a willed behaviour an adventure commenced that we call civilization(s), the distance created is still being travelled today and has no measure of achievement as it has no clear teleology, only a belief in human-nature not human-being-Nature. However it seems that in the inner world, the distance to God by the creation of this second venture, has become at least for the majority, externalised and made distant by the length of a book or the length of a priests sermon, or the length of  a trip to the market-place of the external world that they are worlding by this behaviour.

In other words we have as human-beings one will, and that is to be in Being. But, as the idea of human-nature is born by the life-style of settling, our will is to be in our-selves. The adventure is the buried treasure that lies at the end of these teleologies, the goal towards which we journey, whether they can be achieved or not, whether happiness lies at the end of these rainbows, or not. The venture of self was created, not by the gods, but in human-nature when through settling we unknowingly (that is without knowledge) created the domesticated strains of wheat, corn, and rice, etc, which created the subsequent ability to settle and the will to explore this aspect of our human-nature, over the Will of God. By doing so we obtained knowledge, or good and evil techniques by which to empower our will.

In other words the life-style of Ham, whose will we will see, is to build a tower to reach heaven, to world a World,  that will compete with the heights of Gods World. The great venture of the human-nature once separated from Nature is the human-race of civilization, of being-for-itself, so that ‘The whole objective inventory in terms of which the world appears is given over to, commended to, and thus subjected to the command of self-assertive production’. Willing has in it the character of command; for purposeful self-assertion is a mode in which the attitude of the producing, and the objective character of the world, concentrate into an unconditional and therefore complete unity. In this self-concentration, the command character of the will announces itself. And through it, in the course of modern metaphysics, the long-concealed nature of the long-since existing will as the Being of beings comes to make its appearance.’

The risk of this venture of civilization is that the rewards are worth the price we are obliged to pay. This is what still hangs in the balance at this present moment, in your lifetime.

When Knox, tells us that with agriculture, came the “equivalent of taking out a small insurance policy”, this was not an insurance policy so much as a willed-venture, namely to use Nature towards  our-own benefit and consequently towards, our-own worlding of the World. A world that subsequently we think that we own.

We willed this because Nature herself, whilst sacred as a God, is also savage as a mistress (consider the ten thousands years of ice age before the Garden of Eden). The taming of the shrew is civilizations basic tenet, whether the shrew wishes to be tamed or named a shrew, is irrelevant from this perspective. Yet Nature herself is not looking upon man as the be-all and end-all of her Being. She is venturing herself, also through our being, to find subjectively, ‘the embodiment of harmony’, or from the perspective of a being-for-itself, objectively named in modern terms- ‘the survival of the fittest’. We cannot actually escape being-‘beings-in-Being’, whether you call it global warming, or sin, or wait awhile and call it a bloody great asteroid that  suddenly appears and wipes us off the face of the Earth that will world our World without taking into consideration our perspective of it, we will always be, beings-in-Being, whether you call it God or accident, it is still the greater Being. We will always exist in this truth.

What we are talking about in modern parlance is of course the birth of the Ego. But the being-for-itself, underlies this Egoic perspective that has so all-pervasively entered our experience that it is difficult to conceive of the Ego as not having existed for thousands of years, and was originally laughed at or killed by the group when it began to appear in any ‘individual’. But, just as the story of Cain and Abel showed and the behaviour of the tribes that bore this story, this perspective was recognised as a new aspect of humanity. Let us now hear all of this again, but not through philosophy, but through another of these stories, or myths.

06: Brahma – the being-for-itself

“Because humans have the ability to imagine, humans stand apart from the rest of nature. This division is the primal division described in the Rig Veda. On one side stands nature, the web of life, the chain of eaters and eaten. On the other stands the human being who can imagine a world where the laws of the jungle can be disregarded, overpowered or outgrown. Humans therefore experience two realities: the objective reality of nature and the subjective reality of their imagination. The former is Prakriti; the latter is Purusha…

Nature creates and destroys life without prejudice. Human imagination is the seat of prejudice. It has two choices: to imagine a world without fear or to imagine a world with amplified fears….When Purusha amplifies fear and gets trapped in delusions, it is Brahma, the creator of fear….

Brahma has no faith. He refuses to look beyond the flesh. He ignores atma (soul), and so catalyses the creation of aham, the ego.

The ego is the product of imagination. It is how a human being sees himself or herself. It makes humans demand special status in nature and culture. Nature does not care for this self-image of human beings. Culture, which is a man-made creation, attempts to accommodate it. Brahma is every human being….

Imagination makes Brahma think of scarcity in the midst of abundance, war in times of peace. Though he can rein in his fear, he ends up exaggerating fear. He assumes he has no choice in the matter… He therefore does not discover atma, and finds himself alone and helpless before nature, a victim….

Who came first- the victim or the villain, nature or humanity, Prakriti or Brahma? Objectively speaking nature came first. Nature is the parent. Humanity is the child. Subjectively speaking, however, imagination caused the rupture between humanity and nature, imagination forced Purusha to visualize itself as distinct from Prakriti. That makes nature the child. Humanity then is the parent. Thus Prakriti is both parent and child of Brahma. He depends on her for his survival, but she is not dependable. She is the cruel mother and the disobedient daughter. He feels ignored and abandoned and helpless and anxious. He blames her for his misery. In fear, he allows his mind to be corrupted.

…Nature does not love him or hate him. Nature has no favourites. All creatures are equal in Prakriti’s gaze. Because Brahma can imagine, he imagines himself to be special and so expects to be treated differently by nature. This is because of the ego. (Pattanaik:2011:36-41)

“Brahma renames Prakriti [Nature] as Shatarupa, she of myriad forms [The Outer World of Objects- denying the Nature of the Subjective World]. Some forms nourish him and make him secure. Others frighten him. Brahma seeks to control nature, dominate and domesticate Shatarupa so that she always comforts him…. Brahma seeks to control nature.

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad describes how Shatarupa runs taking the form of various animals and how Brahma pursues her taking the form of complementary male animals. When she runs as a goose, he pursues her as a gander. When she runs as a cow, he pursues her as a bull. He becomes the bull-elephant when she is the cow-elephant; he becomes the stallion when she is the mare; he becomes the buck when she becomes the doe. Shatarupa’s transformations are natural and spontaneous. Brahma’s, however, are the result of choice- he chooses to derive meaning from her, be dependent on her and in the process loses his own identity. The autonomy of his mind is thus lost, its purity corrupted, as it grows attached to the world.

Brahma’s chase of Shatarupa thus entraps him. It is the movement away from stillness and repose towards fear and restlessness.” (Pattanaik:2011:42-3)

“Every human being compares his subjective reality with nature and finds nature inadequate. This dissatisfaction provides an opportunity to outgrow dependence on nature, hence fear. But instead of looking inwards, Brahma looks outwards. Rather than take control of his mind, he chooses to take control of nature. He proceeds to demonstrate the world around him. Every Brahma creates Brahamanda for his own pleasure or bhoga, indifferent to the impact it has on others…

The story of Brahma chasing his daughter is taken literally to explain why Brahma is not worshipped. Metaphorically, it refers to the inappropriate relationship of humanity and nature. Rather than pursuing atma and becoming independent of nature, man chooses to pursue aham and dominate nature. This does not allay fear, it only amplifies fear.” (Pattanaik:2011:47)

In the above quotes we see therefore, that underlying the ego (aham) is the being-for-itself perspective that imagines the ego into existence. It is this ego that becomes the holy thing in the tabernacle nakedly declaring its desires as it imagines the world according to them. To the behaviour of the world to accommodating these desires the ego attributes the names, good and evil. In other words the ego begins to place the idea of value upon the world in accordance with his will not His will. What is the experience of this new view?

“Brahmanda [the view of the ego, being-for-itself] creates artificial value. In Brahmanda, we are either heroes or victims who matter. In Prakriti [Nature], however, we are just another species of animal who need nourishment and security and who will eventually die.

Realisation of this truth creates angst. Brahma wonders what is the point of existence then. He finds no answer and a sense of invalidation creeps in….A life with imagination but no meaning is frightening. The human mind cannot accept this and so goes into denial. It seeks activities that fill the empty void created by time. …

Shiva recognises this and so holds a damaru in his hand. A damaru is a rattle-drum that is used to distract and train a monkey. Siva rattles the drum to comfort Brahma’s mind. He hopes that, eventually, Brahma will realise that meaning will only come by moving towards atma (soul) rather than aham (ego), pursuing yoga (unity/alignment) instead of bhoga (pleasure), choosing Prakriti (nature) not Brahmanda (culture).” (Pattanaik:2011:49-51)

“Brahma splits Brahmanda into three parts: me, mine and what is not mine. This is Tripura, the three worlds. Each of these three worlds is mortal. The ‘me’ is made up of the mind and body. ‘Mine’ is made up of property, knowledge, family and status. ‘Not mine’ is made up of all other things that exist in the world over which one has no authority…Human self-image is thus expanded beyond the body and includes possessions.

Humans identify themselves with other things beside their body, and hence get hurt when those things get attacked. A man derives his self-worth from his looks and his car. When his looks go, or his car gets damaged, his tranquillity is lost…

Humans yearn to come to terms with the three worlds.” (Pattanaik:2011:51-3)

We see therefore that the experience of the Ego is that the world becomes three worlds, based upon its perspective.

Me, mine and not mine- are the spatial objective linguistic terms used to name this perspective in Space, whilst past, present, and future- are the spatial linguistic terms used to name this subjective perspective in time. Egoically we may phrase this as, ‘was mine, is mine, and will be mine.’

By assuming the mask of the ego, the being-for-itself, finds a new language-game, through which the perspective of the being-in-Being is only ‘sense-able’ or ‘sensible’ as an idea in the imagination, and no longer an experienced behaviour through His will. It finds its-self even saying to its-self, ‘how can I do Gods will’? or ‘What is Gods purpose for me’, or ‘Why did God take this person or thing from me’? Most of all, as we learned above and will explore below, the ego therefore experiences angst and desire, and calls these ‘good and evil’, ‘pleasure and pain’, or ‘Gods judgement upon him individually’.

“Voluntary activity is activity in response to an idea, and therefore it has its beginning in imagination. Its undifferentiated form is called Endeavour, which, when it is towards the image from which it sprang is called Desire or Appetite, and when it is away from its originating image is called Aversion. Love corresponds to Desire; Hate to Aversion. And whatever is the object of a man’s Desire he calls Good, and whatever he Hates he calls Evil. There is, therefore, nothing good or evil as such; for different men desire different things, each calling the object of his desire good, and the same man will, at different times, love and hate the same thing. Pleasure is a movement in the mind that accompanies the image of what is held to be good, pain one that accompanies the image held to be evil. Now, just as the succession of images in the mind is called Mental Discourse (the end of which is Prudence), so the succession of emotions in the mind is called Deliberation, the end of which is Will.

While desire and aversion succeed one another without any decision being reached, we are said to be deliberating; when a decision is reached, and desire is concentrated upon some object, we are said to will it. Will is the last desire in deliberating. There can, then, be no final end, no summum bonum, for a man’s active powers; the appropriate achievement will be continual success in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desires, and this success lies not only in procuring what is desired, but also in the assurance that what will in the future be desired will also be procured. This success is called Felicity, which is a condition of movement, not of rest or tranquillity. The means by which a man may obtain this success are called, comprehensively, his Power; and therefore there is in man a perpetual and restless desire for power, because power is the condition sine qua non of Felicity.” (Hobbes:1651:xxxi)

What Hobbes tells us above, from the egoic perspective of human-nature, from the world of being-for-itself, is that because felicity is movement, the human-being must start the human-race as a venture towards its own imagined goals, that pleasure and pain, good and evil, henceforth rely upon his imaginations, upon his teleology, his goal. In this world no one tells you where to run, or where the finish line of desire is- because there isn’t one, only that your desire is what to run towards, and then, before the race ends, you die. What happens after that either: doesn’t matter, because your life didn’t matter either, as we are all part of an accidental and very large Bang and never had a free-will anyway as it was but an illusion of our brains; or our soul re-incarnates, or awaits final judgement, etc, but eventually…… gets to a place, an inner world, now stripped of the outer (the physical body of skin), where pleasure and pain are no longer experiences… Heaven, where you are with God. The experience of heaven on earth and the behaviour that we saw world it are not perceivable, and so must become a named idea, they must become possessed by the language of the ego into space and time.

What was the Garden of Eden for all, the actual world, becomes torn into a future individual egoic Heaven that is real, and a future dreamtime named Utopia which we may will into the present but that never arrives because the very Ego that has dreamed it, has failed to take into account the desires of the Egos that must live under it. In mythical language, we would say that the fabric of the world was torn apart into two pieces, which due to this sin can now no longer be experienced in reality but only as a dreamtime. We will see all of this come to pass in greater detail later on.

These two ventures then, these two ways of seeing the world and then behaving, are both, and reasonably so, what we may call ‘reality’ and through them these realities, world the world into their repercussions of self-fulfilling experience. We have seen the peaceful world of abundance, freedom, and fraternity, created by the beings-in-Being, for the last thirty thousand years as hunter-gatherers and we have experienced their inner world. We are now beginning to see the ‘reality’ of the settler, and the birth of the ego, and to experience his world.

With the creation of the settler the reality of human-nature comes into existence over Nature. As a consequence, reality, itself must change. The teleology of being must change. The Path must lead to a different goal and must form a different perspective due to its consequent experiences when it is walked.

07: Which reality, is right and which is wrong?

Which reality causes the most pleasure and pain, and which reality causes the necessary effect of having to seek the cause of more pleasure than pain? Well, as we saw above with the idea of a prison being a garden and a garden being a prison, the pleasure and pain of reality relies upon your imagination of what reality therefore is. We must therefore look at how these two perspectives are framed by the language that emerges from them. We must also learn a term that overrides the concepts of right and wrong, good and evil, pleasure and pain, in order to gain a higher perspective than these dualities give us from their opposition of each other.

“In order to surmount the limits of this sense-experience and achieve reasoned knowledge of our sensations, we require not only to have sensations, but to be conscious of having them; we require the power of introspection. But the cause of this power must lie in sense itself, if the power is to avoid the imputation of being an easy deus ex machina. Language satisfies both these conditions: it makes introspection possible, and springs from a power we share with animals, the physical power of making sounds. For, though language ‘when disposed of in speech and pronounced to others’ is the means whereby men declare their thoughts to one another, it is primarily the only means by which a man may communicate his own thoughts to himself, may become conscious of the contents of his mind. The beginning of language is giving names to after-of sensations and thereby becoming conscious of them; the act of naming the image is the act of becoming conscious of it. For, ‘a name is a word taken at pleasure to serve as a mark that may raise in our minds a thought like some thought we had before.’

Language, the giving of names to images, is not itself reasonable, it is the arbitrary precondition of all reasoning: the generation of rational knowledge is by words out of experience. The achievement of language is to ‘register our thoughts’, to fix what is essentially fleeting. And from this achievement follows the possibility of definition, the conjunction of general names proposition and rational argument, all of which consist in the ‘proper use of names in language.’ But, though reasoning brings with it knowledge of the general and the possibility of the truth and its opposite, absurdity, it can never pass beyond the world of names. Reasoning is nothing else but the addition and subtraction of names, and ‘gives us conclusions, not about the nature of things, but about the names of things. That is to say, by means of reason we discover only whether the connections we have established between names are in accordance with the arbitrary convention we have established concerning their meanings.’ This is at once a nominalist and a profoundly sceptical doctrine. Truth is of universals, but they are names, the names of images left over from sensations; and a true proposition is not an assertion about the real world. We can, then, surmount the limits of sense-experience and achieve rational knowledge; and it is this knowledge, with its own severe limitations, that is the concern of philosophy.” (Hobbes:1651:xxiv-xxv)

Learning a language where a god of Love means, ‘the name of the invisible force that brings objects together’ is very different to learning a language where it is divided into different egoic perspectives: On the path-ein of physics its fabric is split into physical objects only and is unreasonably named Gravity – an accidental property of mass that draws objects together;  on the path-ein of chemistry it is unreasonably named-the chemical neuro-endorphin- oxytocin that draws people together to mate; and on the biological level it is divided and unreasonably named, ‘selfish genes’ that do not love their hosts ‘us’ and are separate from us therefore, and indeed force us to procreate, whereupon we are ‘seen’ as expendable by ‘them’, are very different ‘truths’ and consequently, experiences, and consequently- realities create by the subsequent behaviour of their bearers. All however have ‘good’ ‘reason’ for their subsequent behaviour, and experience this consequently, tautologically. That is to say that they are all simple self-fulfilling prophecies that can be experienced and hence seen as ‘being-true’. What we therefore need is a word that allows us to see beyond these tautologies that frame the subsequent unreasonable names of good and evil, etc.

The Greek mythologisers who used language to attempt to speak of these invisible forces of Nature therefore used names like Gravity but unreasonably named these invisible forces gods instead of force, as lesser forces of wakan– the one God, just as science today sees all invisible forces as lesser forces of energy. From this perspective they used a different word for truth in order to convey this greater truth about the limits of the word truth itself. For them truth, was not as we understand it today, as a sequence of factual, provable, statements, for the mythologisers who saw the gods in Nature, and could name Gravity, oxytocin, and selfish genes- the singular name of Love, truth was to them also a unifying concept not a dualising one. Not right and wrong, not good and evil, not truth and untruth, they willed for a name that lay under the perspective of the being-for-itself that had created these dualities.

The word they chose was, Aletheia, meaning ‘the unconcealedness of Being’. Because all truths, come from the perspective of that original state of being-in-Being as told in their myths- stories, truths, like any depiction of God’s Nature are seen as limiting that Nature. Just as we have seen the no-thing in the Ark of the Covenant, in the rainbow, and in the formless-form of the Linga represent the unrepresentable by framing it in an outer object but not limiting it by portraying it, so the word truth itself owes its primal cause, its beginning, its urgrund to this same now concealed (framed) unconcealedness, and hence limits it, when misunderstood. God is not in the Ark of the Covenant, in the same way as truth is not in the framework of words or artistic lines or architecture or the geographic name and distance of a location, and of course, he also is in and is all of them. If He is here, he cannot be there. If the truth is held by us it cannot also be held by them in a different frame-work of words, rituals and practices, can therefore be maintained as a truth but it cannot be aletheia:

“If here and elsewhere we conceive of truth, as unconcealedness, we are not merely taking refuge in a more literal translation of a Greek word. We are reminding ourselves of what, unexperienced and unthought, underlies our familiar and therefore outworn nature of truth in the sense of correctness. We do, of course, occasionally take the trouble to concede that naturally, in order to understand and verify the correctness (truth) of a proposition one really should go back to something that is already evident, and that this presupposition is indeed unavoidable. As long as we talk and believe in this way, we always understand truth merely as correctness, which of course still requires a further presupposition, that we ourselves just happen to make, heaven knows how or why.

But it is not we who presuppose the unconcealedness of beings; rather, the unconcealedness of beings. (Being) puts us into such a condition of being that in our representation we always remain installed within and in attendance upon unconcealedness. Not only must that in conformity with which a cognition orders itself be already in some way unconcealed. The entire realm in which this “conforming to something” goes on must already occur as a whole in the unconcealedness; and this holds equally of that for, which the conformity of a proposition to fact becomes manifest. With all our correct representations we would get nowhere, we could not even presuppose that there already is manifest something to which we can conform ourselves, unless the unconcealedness of beings had already exposed us to, placed us in that lighted realm in which every being stands for us and from which it withdraws.” (Heidegger:1971:52)

Aletheia therefore reminds us of our unperceived perceptions and hence of our unexperienced experiences and hence, unthought thoughts and hence, unreasoned reasons, that permanently underlie our familiar and therefore ‘closed’ nature of truth, what ever that may reasonably be. Therefore, truth, is always a thesis, that elucidates an aspect of aletheia, and contains a ‘chain of reason’ untranslatable into the experience of a person who sits in a different perspective, a different part of aletheia.

“Today, the intellect has become the only myth maker: thoughts that have become hypotheses that have become theories that have become truths that have become factual realities…

The complex powers of the intellect and its myths are not easily disentangled. They are part of a greater tale that is still being told- contemporary myth. And like all myths, they run deeper than thought. They are a second skin, tailored by world destiny.

The scientific myths created by the intellect are not restricted to those who practise or study them. They are omnipresent, and most potent in disguise. Without our knowing it, they colour the way we see the world. Our modern myths have paled the stars, eclipsed the sun and reduced the soul. They govern politics and shape history, they determine economics and influence education. They fuel conflicts between nations and give licence to cruelty. They are the tales that teach us to violate nature and exploit the world without regard for the future. But they are tales, not the truth.” (Kornberger:2008:62-3)

“The unconcealedness of beings- this is never a merely existent state, but a happening. Unconcealedness (truth) is neither an attribute of factual things in the sense of beings, nor one of propositions….

Truth, in its nature, is un-truth. We put the matter this way in order to serve notice, with a possibly surprising trenchancy, that denial in the manner of concealment belongs to unconcealedness as clearing. The proposition, “the nature of truth is untruth”, is not, however, intended to state that truth is at bottom falsehood. Nor does it mean that truth is never itself but, viewed dialectically, is always also its opposite.” (Heidegger:1971:54-5)

“Truth is un-truth, insofar as there belongs to it the reservoir of the not-yet-uncovered, the un-uncovered, in the sense of concealment.

In unconcealedness, as truth, there occurs also the other “un-“ of a double restraint of refusal. Truth occurs as such in the opposition of clearing and double concealing. Truth is the primal conflict in which, always in some particular way, the Open is one within which everything stands and from which everything withholds itself that shows itself and withdraws itself as being. Whenever and however this conflict breaks out and happens, the opponents, lighting or clearing and concealing, move apart because of it. Thus the Open of the place of conflict is won. The openness of this Open, that is, truth, can be what it is, namely, this openness, only if and as long as it establishes itself within its Open. Hence there must always be some being in this Open, something that is, in which the openness takes its stand and attains its constancy. In taking possession thus of the Open, the openness holds open the Open and sustains it. Setting and taking possession are here everywhere drawn from the Greek sense of thesis, which means a setting up in the unconcealed.

In referring to this self-establishing of openness in the Open, thinking touches on a sphere that cannot yet be explicated here, concealedness of beings belongs in any way to Being itself, then Being, by way of its own nature, lets the place of openness (the lighting-clearing of the There) happen, and introduces it as a place of the sort in which each being emerges or arises in its own way….

Clearing of openness and establishment in the Open belong together. They are the same single nature of the happening of truth. This happening is historical in many ways.

One essential way in which truth establishes itself in the beings it has opened up is truth setting itself into work. Another way in which truth occurs is the act that founds a political state. Still another way in which truth comes to shine forth is the nearness of that which is not simply a being, but the being that is most of all. Still another way in which truth grounds itself is the essential sacrifice. Still another way in which truth becomes is the thinker’s questioning, which, as the thinking of Being, names Being in its question-worthiness. By contrast, science is not an original happening of truth, but always the cultivation of a domain of truth already opened, specifically by apprehending and confirming that which shows itself to be possibly and necessarily correct within that field. When and insofar as a science passed beyond correctness and goes on to a truth, which means that it arrives at the essential disclosure of what is as such, it is philosophy….

Creation is such a bringing forth. As such a bringing, it is rather a receiving and an incorporating of a relation to unconcealedness. …

Truth wills to be established in the work as this conflict of world and earth.” (Heidegger:1971:60-2)

What the term aletheia allows us to due therefore is to transcend the idea of subjective reality and objective reality, and see them both existing within a greater reality, whereupon they become a perspective upon an unknowable truth, or thesis from which reason and experience will be proved true, but will never be ‘the truth’, as that is always concealed by that which you have just unconcealed by positing a thesis. For example, ‘I think therefore I am’, or ‘cause and effect’ or ‘physics’ or ‘metaphysics’ or ‘quantum physics’.

To illustrate this point Heidegger analyses a painting by Van Gogh, of a pair of peasant shoes, and of how differently they can be viewed as ‘being-in-reality’. He asks are the shoes simply a name for a piece of objective matter- nomina, or do they contain a subjective world and hold the spirit of the peasant who has worn them- numina:

“What happens Here? What is at work in the work? Van Gogh’s painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth. This entity emerges into the unconcealedness of its being. The Greeks called the unconcealedness of beings aletheia. We say “truth” and think little enough in using this word. If there occurs in the work a disclosure of a particular being, disclosing what and how it is, then there is here an occurring, a happening of truth at work.

In the work of art the truth of an entity has set itself to work. “To set” means here: to bring to a stand. Some particular entity, a pair of peasant shoes, comes in the work to stand in the light of its being. The being of the being comes into the steadiness of its shining.

The nature of art would then be this: the truth of beings setting itself to work.” (Heidegger:1971:36)

The philosopher Heidegger, can therefore experience the numina of the gods in the peasants shoes, and the spirit of the artist who painted them, by the work of the painting and the wear of the shoes. Max Müller an anthropologist scientist using ‘il poche’ never can:

“Max Müller recognized this. See Physic, Rel.p.132 and Comparative Mythology, p.58. “The gods are nomina and not numina, names without being and not beings without name.” (Durkheim:1982:82)

“Meyer Schapiro- The Still Life as a Personal Object- A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh

[…] Alas for him, the philosopher has indeed deceived himself. He has retained from his encounter with van Gogh’s canvas a moving set of associations with peasants and the soil ,which are not sustained by the picture itself but are grounded rather in his own social outlook with its heavy pathos of the primordial and earthy. He has indeed ‘imagined everything and projected it into the painting.’ He has experienced both too little and too much in his contact with the work. …

In find nothing in Heidegger’s fanciful description of the shoes represented by van Gogh that could not have been imagined in looking at a real pair of peasant’s shoes. Though he credits to art the power of giving to a represented pair of shoes that explicit appearance in which their being is disclosed- indeed ‘the universal essence of things’, ‘world and earth in their counterplay’- this concept of the metaphysical power of art remains here a theoretical idea. The example on which he elaborates with strong conviction does not support that idea. …

In his account of the picture he has overlooked the personal and physiognomic in the shoes which made them so absorbing a subject for the artist…

We come closer, I think, to van Gogh’s feeling for these shoes in a paragraph written by Knut Hamsun in the 1880s in his novel Hunger, describing his own shoes:

‘As I had never seen my shoes before, I set myself to study their looks, their characteristics, and when I stir my foot, their shapes and their worn uppers. I discover that their creases and white seams given them expression- impart a physiognomy to them. Something of my own nature had gone over into these shoes; they affected me, like a ghost of my other I- a breathing portion of my very self.’

In comparing van Gogh’s painting with Hamsun’s text, we are interpreting the painting in a different way from Heidegger’s. The philosopher finds in the picture of the shoes a truth about the world as it is lived by the peasant without reflection; Hamsun sees the real shoes as experienced by the self-conscious contemplating wearer who is also the writer. … In isolating his own worn shoes on a canvas, he turns them to the spectator; he makes of them a piece from a self-portrait, that part of the costume with which we tread the earth and in which we locate the strains of movement, fatigue, pressure, heaviness- the burden of the erect body in its contact with the ground. They mark our inescapable position on the earth. …the shoes as ‘a portion of the self’ (in Hamsun’s words) are van Gogh’s revealing theme.

Gauguin, who shared van Gogh’s quarters in Aries in 1888, sensed a personal history behind his friend’s painting of a pair of shoes. He has told in his reminiscences of van Gogh a deeply affecting story linked with van Gogh’s shoes.

‘In the studio was a pair of big hob-nailed shoes, all worn and spotted with mud; he made of it a remarkable still life painting. I do not know why I suspected that there was a story behind this old relic, and I ventured one day to  ask him if he had some reason for preserving with respect what one ordinarily throws out for the rag-picker’s basket.

“My father”, he said, “was a pastor, and at his urging I pursued theological studies in order to prepare for my future vocation. As a young pastor I left for Belgium one fine morning, without telling my family, to preach the gospel  in the factories, not as I had been taught but as I understood it myself. These shoes, as you see, have bravely endured the fatigue of that trip.”

‘Preaching to the miners in the Borinage, Vincent undertook to nurse a victim of a fire in the mine. The man was so badly burned and mutilated that the doctor had no hope for his recovery. Only a miracle, he thought, could save him. Van Gogh tended him forty days with loving care and saved the miner’s life.

‘Before leaving Belgium I had, in the presence of this man who bore on his brow a series of scars, a vision of the crown of thorns, a vision of the resurrected Christ’.

Gauguin continues: ‘And Vincent took up his palette again; silently he worked. Beside him was a white canvas. I began his portrait. I too had the vision of a Jesus preaching kindness and humility.’

….Gauguin’s story confirms the essential fact that for van Gogh the shoes were a piece of his own life.” (Preziosi:2009:298-300)

What we must imagine then, when we speak of the search for truth or God, in the mind of the cave-man, is a perspective that attempts to understand Natures concealed truths, its numina, its invisible forces, just as physics and science does, but that its perspective is subjective before it is objective, and that is how it tells the truth, through its stories, as we have seen. It seeks to commune with Natures powerful forces by seeing them through being-in-Being themselves , not to force Mans power over them by seeing it Being through-themselves. That is to say, to discover the unconcealed truth of how Nature came from Being, not how being came from nature. Not as Brahma running behind its myriad forms with his own selfish gene agenda, but as Siva, the formless form that Nature is in love with.

The very beginning story of Genesis in the Bible, and the myths of all ancient civilizations, relates these truths consequently, but it requires a perspective change in order for modern man to glean anything like ‘our’ (version of the) truth from it. In the Bible the world and then man is made in His willed-image, meaning in his ‘imagination’- the dreamtime- or what we would as beings-for-itself call, Nature. The being-for-itself concordantly, makes the world himself in his willed-imagination.

As we have seen science and primitive man both agree that the Universe is made up of energy, force, or wakan, and that all other things spring forth from it, including ourselves. What science and primitive man do not agree on is that to the primitive (religious) man, these observed things, the lesser gods, that spring from it are, numina (meaning spirit, or breathe, i.e. pneumatic), that is of the Great Spirit- Wakan, they are His word, His breathe, His logos, His language, of speaking, i.e. Nature. Gravity is Love in this language, calling all together to be one, a love so strong that it can create a black-hole to an inner world, where space and time, matter and energy, become one thing- theoretically of course, as we can never prove it experientially, that is to say reasonably, because our outer world would be destroyed in the process. Theoretically, though the person in the black hole would experience this subjectively, whilst those outside of the black-hole (‘il poche’) would see a man frozen in space and time, whilst they would reason that that same man they could see, weigh, measure, etc, was in reality no longer there, but is in fact, no-where.

So for primitive man, the force that pulls an apple to the ground is called the love of Mother Earth for its children, but for modern man it is called gravity.

Gravity is nomina (meaning a name only, i.e. nominate, and phenomena) it is a name given to an aspect of that force, that energy, that wakan, that behaves differently under certain circumstances, to those other forces that science has named, i.e. magnetism, the super-strong force, ups and downs, fuzzies, and so on. In reality all of these particles and forces are made up of one energy, but all of it is a meaningless accident, with no Being, behind, within, or at the end of it, not even our own human being, they are merely names (nomina) given to phe-nomena. Phenomena are merely names that we have appended to different faces of the same single energy within ‘time’ and ‘space’, once it is in a form that we care to nominate by closing its reality off from those other things around it that we have named, all of which, once again in science, these natures and objects are themselves merely phenomena, as is consciousness, love, art, life and death etc, etcetera, etcetera.

To the primitive man then, his Truth, his aletheia, revealed the same truth as science has discovered, but by naming these things as gods, as animals, or vegetable forms he could have a relationship with them, in spirit, that is in the unconcealedness of Being, by living in harmony with them, with the sociology of the clan, the phratry, the totem, the churinga, the ritual, etc, etcetera. Living in this way created an experience that created a reality of numina, of spirits or natures within the Great Spirit, Nature. These rituals and practices did, in fact, create a land of peace and abundance, of equality, libertie and fraternitie, just as their rain dance invoked. But the cause and effect, the lens of science, was not so linear. By maintaining these beliefs, subsequent rituals and subsequent practices, the land was not worn out, the animals were not hunted to extinction, the harmony of Nature was maintained and experienced as abundance and peace.

Let us hear Durkheim’s ‘il poche’ account of this same ‘truth’ on his ideas of the original perspective of our cave-man in comparison to sciences, and see how cause and effect from the perspective of a being-for-itself, cannot make sense of the ‘truth’ that I have just espoused above and that history has proved existed for 30,000 years:

“In fact, he says, “at first sight, nothing seemed less natural than nature. Nature was the greatest surprise, a terror, a marvel, a standing miracle, and it was only on account of their permanence, constancy, and regular recurrence that certain features of that common, intelligible… It was that vast domain of surprise, of terror, or marvel, or miracle, the unknown, as distinguished from the known, or, as I like to express it, the infinite, as distinct from religious thought and language….

The same author says in another work that a man could not enter into relations with nature without taking account of its immensity, of its infiniteness. It surpasses him in every way. Beyond the distances which he perceives, there are others which extend without limits; each moment of time is preceded and followed by a time to which no limit can be assigned; the flowing river manifests an infinite force, since nothing can exhaust it. There is no aspect of nature which is not fitted to awaken within us this overwhelming sensation of an infinity which surrounds us and dominates us. It is from this sensation that religions are derived.” (Durkheim:1982:74)

“However, it will be said that in whatever manner religions may be explained, it is certain that they are mistaken in regard to the real nature of things: science has proved it. The modes of action which they counsel or prescribe to men can therefore rarely have useful effects: it is not by lustrations that the sick are cured nor by sacrifices and chants that the crops are made to grow. Thus the objection which we have made to naturism would seem to be applicable to all possible systems of explanation.

Nevertheless, there is one which escapes it. Let us suppose that religion responds to quite another need than that of adapting ourselves to sensible objects: then it will not risk being weakened by the fact that it does not satisfy, or only badly satisfies, this need. If religious faith was not born to put man in harmony with the material world, the injuries which it has been able to do him in his struggle with the world do not touch it at its source, because it is fed from another.” (Durkheim:1982:83)

So Durkheim, from the perspective of the being-for-itself, has to see religion as being the birth place of the idea of God because it effects the environment in the manner that we have seen it does, peace and abundance being the fruit of this behaviour. Were the beliefs the cause of the desired effects or were the desired effects the cause of the beliefs? For the being-for-itself, Durkheim, it is of course the desired effects that are the cause, and for the being-in-Being it is the beliefs. Does man imagine God or does God imagine man? Is all numina or just accidental nomina, and whatever the answer, what caused numina or nomina in the first place? These are questions formed in a language-game created from the egoic perspective. That is not to say that they are unreasonable to ask, only that they are unreasonable to think that there answers will contain the truth, rather, they are a always just a way of perceiving the truth. This is to say that, when you ‘frame a question’, you are also framing your perspective and portraying the nature of your being, whilst creating a tautology for the language and meaning of the answer, for it to be experienced as being true.

‘Adapting ourselves to sensible objects’ is the perspective of the for-itself that looks at the names, ‘sacrifice’ and ‘lustrations’ as tautological implorations to the gods, which, as we saw above, they were not originally, but were in fact, alimental communion with the gods. From this perspective change then the languages meaning changed to fit in with the tautological framework that formed the name ‘sacrifice’. No one announced the change of the words meaning, it just changed to fit the experience of the tautology of that perspective and was therefore proved to be reasonable as an answer to ‘what does sacrifice mean?’. As we have also seen, the word aliment (nourishment) is the root of the words Adult, meaning to grow-up, and Coalesce, meaning to grow up together. The change from Coalescing to Adult, both required aliment but no longer willed communion, and so the meaning of the word sacrifice changed accordingly from communion to renouncement or deprivation. In other words the nomina stayed the same but the numina changed. Did man create that word or did that word create man? Are the gods nomina without numina or  without nomina? Are we all just stuck in a language-game of reason that can never escape itself, or contain the truth it seeks? Yes- and that is the meaning of Aletheia.

Let us turn the tables however and imagine a modern day weather man today praying to the Gods, “Oh please great gods bring westerly precipitation and a low iso-bar front over the Atlantic in order to bring a nice sunny weekend to the people of  Britain”. He’s got no chance has he. Because there is no cause and effect of his behaviour to nature, because he is not speaking in its language, which is that of forces.

Now weekend rain comes, on average, 11% more often than weekday rain in Britain. Why? Because of the beliefs and practices of the beings-for-itself. Each weekday millions of them drive in cars to work-for-themselves, in a grand ritual called ‘the rush hour’. The fumes from the car exhausts cause the atmosphere to heat up and the clouds to rise higher in the sky. But on Saturday morning, when these same people get up to enjoy their weekend they find its ‘bloody-well raining again’.

So if the weather-man, desiring a sunny weekend changed our belief system using these magical factual statistical words, and got us all to commute on weekdays, rather than drive in our luxury car-spaces where we can be-for-itself, then, yes indeed the rain would be likely not to fall.

The question is, did the nature of the rain (the rain god) change because Nature has changed its behaviour by these magical words and our behaviour- a subject-object-reasoned view of phenomena. Or did the nature of the rain change (the rain god) because we are a part of Nature and hence we do have a power to change the rain god by our behaviour?- a being-in-Being view of numina?

Were the weather mans words magical in changing the nature of us and therefore the nature of Nature itself, did rain not fall because of his dance in front of the T.V camera, was he the cause or was it the force of the words that invoked a response in our natures, or the force of the feelings that changed our behaviour, or the change of our behaviour that changed the Nature of our pleasant experience on Saturday and of how we behaved the next week, experiencing a feeling of harmony as we all sacrificed our being-for-itself for the benefits or being-in-Being? Would that not invoke a new social spirit, a new god, who we could also pray to and effect Nature further with? Which of these experiences is the true cause? Maybe the true answer is still concealed.

The hunter-gatherer would of course not have prayed in such a manner as the rain dance so as to manifest his will, because he did not behave in such a manner as to need to. Their was no such necessity as rain on a field, their in fact was no such necessity as necessity, and hence no necessity for the word necessity to be imagined into existence from his perspective, nor for the words, abundance or Garden of Eden, there was just reality- a dreamtime. It is only as these perspectives became unconcealed by changing into, ‘not-the Garden of Eden’, and ‘not-abundance’, that the words necessary became necessary and named.  As we saw above, the rituals of hunter-gatherers were joyous, communing affairs, where the source of their truth was fed by the intimate experienced reality of the ‘unconcealedness of Being’, in a world of abundance. It is only with settlers that the dance for rain becomes a necessity that they themselves magically effect from this cause, for their cause, by necessity.

For early settlers, the cause and effect world view of modern man was no so clear and distinct, it was still embroiled in Nature. In this regard the early settlers are people who still view being-in-Being in their rituals, now orientated towards themselves Perhaps we could say, when they are performing sacred rituals they are ‘being-with-a-Being’. That is why the meaning of the word sacrifice changes so, due to this distance. But cause and effect are not so well defined as in our scientific minds, and therefore can still transcend this linear perspective of a being-for-itself into that of being-with-a-Being more easily than we can.

So whilst they are applying their own agenda to their rituals, they are still being with a greater Being when they do so. It is this Being therefore that sustains them and their crops are one continuum of it. The cotton of ones clothing remains but not the spring that created it, only oneself and the cotton, that is the nomina of the gods, whilst the cotton of numina not only demands the necessity of the proof of spring but intimates that season of spring from whence it grew. The action of growing the cotton, the action of it Being grown, the harvesting and weaving of it, the possessing of something created by yourself and your possessor are therefore still experienced intimated by settlers who are lovers of Being, as intimate lovers becoming one through possession and alimental sustenance of each other.

“That into which the work sets itself back and which it causes to come forth in this setting back of itself we called the earth. Earth is that which comes forth and shelters. Earth, self-dependent, is effortless and untiring. Upon the earth and in it, historical man grounds his dwelling in the world. In setting up a world, the work sets forth the earth. This setting forth must be thought here in the strict sense of the word. The work moves the earth itself into the Open of a world and keeps it there. The work lets the earth be an earth.

But why must this setting forth of the earth happen in such a way that the work sets itself back into it? What is the earth that it attains to the unconcealed in just such a manner? A stone presses downward and manifests its heaviness. But while this heaviness exerts an opposing pressure upon us it denies us any penetration into it. If we attempt such a penetration by breaking open the rock, it still does not display in its fragments anything inward that has been disclosed. The stone has instantly withdrawn again into the same dull pressure and bulk of its fragments. If we try to lay hold of the stone’s heaviness in another way, by placing the stone on a balance, we merely bring the heaviness into the form of a calculated weight. This perhaps very precise determination of the stone remains a number, but the weight’s burden has escaped us. Colour shines and wants only to shine. When we analyze it in rational terms by measuring its wavelengths, it is gone. It shows itself only when it remains undisclosed and unexplained. Earth thus shatters every attempt to penetrate into it. It causes every merely calculating importunity upon it to turn into a destruction. This destruction may herald itself under the appearance of mastery and of progress in the form of the technical-scientific objectivation of nature, but this mastery nevertheless remains an impotence of will. The earth appears openly created as itself only when it is perceived and preserved as that which is by nature undisclosable, that which shrinks from every disclosure and constantly keeps itself closed up. All things of earth, and the earth itself as a whole, flow together into a reciprocal accord….

To be sure, the sculptor uses stone just as the mason uses it, in his own way. But he does not use it up. That happens in a certain way only where the work miscarries. To be sure, the painter also uses pigment, but in such a way that color is not used up rather only now comes to shine forth. To be sure, the poet also uses the word- not, however, like ordinary speakers and writers who have to use them up, but rather in such a way that the word only now becomes and remains truly a word.” (Heidegger:1971:46-8)

08: Language and Being-For-Itself

“Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastwards, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar instead of mortar. Then they said, “Come let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why is was called Babel- because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world.”- Genesis 11 vs 1-9.

Before we move on to the astounding change in language that takes place at the creation of Babylon I wish to look further at the amazing changes of language that we have been unknowingly using in order to explain all of the above. Words such as mine, other, us, them, purpose, family, blood, prayer, pilgrim, freedom, liberty, possessions, etc, etcetera. All of these words are either- words that have changed their meanings, or, words that have only now, with settling, come into meaning. That is to say they were required to be created in order to explain the new experiences, techniques, and perspective of the settler- meanings- literally meaning, ‘to have in mind’, or ‘to be able to think’.

‘Language, by naming beings for the first time, first brings beings to word and to appearance. Only this naming nominates beings to their being from out of their being. Such saying is a projecting of the clearing, in which announcement is made of what it is that beings came into the Open as.’ (ibid.)

It is to a certain branch of this new requirement for words, for a new language, that I wish to speak before moving on to those that created Babylon specifically. That is the ontological perspective of the being-for-itself, and from there to see this perspective once it is within a group of others (no matter their circles nominated story) who are also being-for-itself.

Jean-Paul Sartre, French existentialist philosopher (1905–1980)

What happens when two such consciousnesses look at each other? For most of human history this look was one of unity, now with civilization comes a look of us and them, what Sartre calls, of ‘being-for-others’. He does not mean by this, some sacrificial way of life, like a self-help book might use the phrase psychologically*, but instead, being in the eyes of others, that is to say, being judged by their story and your purpose within it. That is to say to be looked at as an object by another, ‘myself-being-object’ as Sartre also phrases it.

*Psychology rests upon ontology, and all psychology is therefore consequent to a human-beings ontological perspective.

To understand this more fully then we need to look at the perspective of a being-for-itself. We have heard all about the lifestyle of the being-in-Being but now we must look at what it is like to stare out across the world, and not feel ones own nature within it, but instead to be separate. We have come across this feeling in the Bible as being cast out of Eden and no longer walking with God. That describes the distance of perspective, but it does not give us an idea of the being-for-itself, Cain, and how life presented itself to him through his perspective.

Let us hear from Sartre what it is like to experience this ontological ‘look’ from another being-for-itself:

This fundamental project must not of course refer to any other and should be conceived by itself. It can be concerned neither with death nor life nor any particular characteristic of the human condition; the original project of a for-itself can aim only at its being. The project of being or desire of being or drive toward being does not originate in a physiological differentiation or in an empirical contingency; in fact it is not distinguished from the being of the for-itself. The for-itself is a being such that in its being, its being is in question in the form of a project of being. To the for-itself being means to make known to oneself what one is by means of a possibility appearing as a value. Possibility and value belong to the being of the for-itself. The for-itself is defined ontologically as a lack of being, and possibility belongs to the for-itself as that which it lacks, in the same way that value haunts the for-itself as the totality of being which is lacking. …lack can be just as well expressed in terms of freedom. The for-itself chooses because it is lack; freedom is really synonymous with lack. Freedom is the concrete mode of being of the lack of being. Ontologically then it amounts to the same thing to say that value and possibility exist as internal limits of a lack of being which can exist only as a lack of being—or that the upsurge of freedom determines its possibility  and thereby circumstances its value.

Thus we can advance no further but have encountered the self-evident irreducible when we have reached the project of being; for obviously it is impossible to advance further than being, and there is no difference between the project of being, possibility, value, on the one hand, and being, on the other. Fundamentally man is the desire to be, and the existence of this desire is not to be established by an empirical induction; it is the result of an a priori description of the being of the for-itself, since desire is a lack and since the for-itself is the being which is to itself its own lack of being. The original project which is expressed in each of our empirically observable tendencies is then the project of being; or, if you prefer, each empirical tendency exists with the original project of being, in relation of expression and symbolic satisfaction just as conscious drives, with Freud, exist in relation to the complex and to the original libido. Moreover the desire to be by no means exists first in order to cause itself to be expressed subsequently by desires a posteriori. There is nothing outside of the symbolic expression which it finds in concrete desires. There is not first a single desire of being, then a thousand particular feelings, but the desire to be exists and manifests itself only in and through jealousy, greed, love of art, cowardice, courage, and a thousand contingent, empirical expressions which always cause human reality to appear to us only as manifested by a particular man, by a specific person.

As for the being which is the object of this desire, we know a priori what this is. The for-itself is the being which is to itself its own lack of being. The being which the for-itself lacks is the in-itself. The for-itself arises as the nihilation of the in-itself and this nihilation is defined as the project toward the in-itself. Between the nihilated in-itself and the projected in-itself, the for-itself is nothingness. Thus the end and the goal of nihilation which I am is the in-itself. Thus human reality is the desire of being-in-itself. But the in-itself which it desires can not be pure contingent, absurd in-itself, comparable at every point to that which it encounters and which it nihilates. The nihilation, as we have seen, is in fact like a revolt of the in-itself, which nihilates itself against its contingency. To say that the for-itself lives its facticity, as we have seen in the chapter concerning the body, amounts to saying that the nihilation is the vain effort of a being to found its own being and that it is the withdrawal to found being which provokes the minute displacement by which nothingness enters into being.

The being which forms the object of the desire of the for-itself is then an in-itself which would be to itself its own foundation; that is, which would be to its facticity in the same relation as the for-itself is to its motivations. In addition the for-itself, being the negation of the in-itself, could not desire the pure and simple return to the in-itself. Here as with Hegel, the negation of the negation can not bring us back to our point of departure. Quite the contrary, what the for-itself, demands of the in-itself is precisely the totality detotalized—“In-itself nihilated in for-itself”. In other words the for-itself projects being as for-itself, a being which is what it is. It is a being which is what it is not, and which is not what it is, that the for-itself projects being what it is. It is as consciousness that it wishes to have the impermeability and infinite density of the in-itself. It is as the nihilation of the in-itself and a perpetual evasion of contingency and of facticity that it wishes to be its own foundation.

This is why the possible is projected in general as what the for-itself lacks in order to become in-itself-for-itself. The fundamental value which presides over this project is exactly the in-itself-for-itself; that is, the ideal of a consciousness which would be the foundation of its own being-in-itself by the pure consciousness which would have of itself. It is the ideal which can be called God. Thus the best way to conceive of the fundamental project of human reality is to say that man is the being whose project is to be God. Whatever may be the myths and rites of religion considered, God is first “sensible to the fundamental project. If man possesses a pre-ontological comprehension of the being of God, it is not the great wonders of nature nor the power of society which have conferred it upon him. God, value and supreme end of transcendence, represents the permanent limit in terms of which man makes known to himself what he is. To be man means to reach toward being God. Or if you prefer, man fundamentally is the desire to be God.

It may be asked, if man on coming into the world is tending toward God as toward his limit, if he can choose only to be God, what becomes of freedom? For freedom is nothing other than a choice which creates for itself its own possibilities, but it appears here that the initial project of being God, which “defines” man, comes close to being the same as a human “nature” or an “essence”. The answer is that while the meaning of the desire is ultimately the project of being God, the desire is never constituted by this meaning; on the contrary, it always represents a particular discovery of its ends. These ends in fact are pursued in terms of a particular empirical situation, and it is this very pursuit which constitutes the surroundings as a situation. The desire of being is always realized as the desire of a mode of being. And this desire of being is always realized as the desire of a mode of being. And this desire of a mode of being expresses itself in turn as the meaning of the myriads of concrete desires which constitute the web of our conscious life.

Thus we find ourselves before very complex symbolic structures which have at least three stories. In empirical desire I can discern a symbolization of a fundamental concrete desire which is the person himself and which represents the mode in which he has decided that being would be in question in his being. This fundamental desire in turn expresses concretely in the world within the particular situation enveloping the individual, an abstract meaningful structure which is the desire of being in general; it must be considered as human reality in the person, and it brings about his community with others, thus making it possible to state that there is a truth concerning man and not only concerning individuals who cannot be compared.

Absolute concreteness, completion, existence as a totality belong then to the free and fundamental desire which is the unique person. Empirical desire is only a symbolization of this; it refers to this and derives its meaning from it while remaining partial and reducible, for the empirical desire can not be conceived in isolation. On the other hand, the desire of being in its abstract purity is the truth of the concrete fundamental desire, but it does not exist by virtue of reality. Thus the fundamental project, the person, the free realization of human truth is everywhere in all desires (save for those exceptions treated in the preceding chapter, concerning, for example, indifferents”). It is never apprehended except through desires—as we can apprehend space only through bodies which shape it for us, though space is a specific reality and not a concept. Or, if you like, it is like the object of Husserl, which reveals itself only by Abschattungen, and which nevertheless does not allow itself to be absorbed by any one Abschattung. We can understand after these remarks that the abstract, ontological “desire to be” is unable to represent the fundamental, human structure of the individual; it cannot be an obstacle to his freedom. Freedom in fact, as we have shown in the preceding chapter, is strictly identified with nihilation.

The only being which can be called free is the being which nihilates its being. Moreover we know that nihilation is lack of being and can not be otherwise. Freedom is precisely the being which makes itself a lack of being. But since desire, as we have established, is identical with lack of being, freedom can arise only as being which makes itself a desire of being; that is, as the project-for-itself of being in-itself-for-itself. Here we have arrived at an abstract structure which can by no means be considered as the nature or essence of freedom. Freedom is existence, and in it existence precedes essence. …

It should be possible to establish the human truth of the person, as we have attempted to do by an ontological phenomenology. The catalogue of empirical desires ought to be made the object of appropriate psychological investigations, observation and induction and, as needed, experience can serve to draw up this list. They will indicate to the philosopher the comprehensible relations which can unite to each other various desires and various patterns of behaviours, and will bring to light certain concrete connections between the subject of experience and “situations” experientially defined (which at bottom originate only from limitations applied in the name of positivity to the fundamental situation of the subject in the world)…

The principle of this psychoanalysis is that man is a totality and not a collection. Consequently he expresses himself as a whole in even his most insignificant and his most superficial behaviour. In other words there is not a taste, a mannerism, or a human act which is not revealing.

The goal of psychoanalysis is to decipher the empirical behaviour patterns of man; that is to bring out in the open the revelations which each one of them contains and to fix them conceptually.

Its point of departure is experience; its pillar of support is the fundamental, pre-ontological comprehension which man has of the human person.” (Sartre:2003:580-89)

“The for-itself as the nihilation of the in-itself temporalizes itself as a flight toward. Actually it surpasses its facticity (i.e., to be either given or past or body) toward the in-itself which it would be if it were able to be its own foundation. This may be translated into terms already psychological—and hence inaccurate although perhaps clearer—by saying that the for-itself attempts to escape its factual existence (i.e.. its being there, as an in-itself for which it is in no way the foundation) and that this flight takes place toward an impossible future always pursued where the for-itself would be an in-itself-for-itself—i.e., an in-itself which would be to itself its own foundation. Thus the for-itself is both a flight and a pursuit; it flees the in-itself and at the same time pursues it. The for-itself is a pursued-pursuing. But in order to lessen the danger of a psychological interpretation of the preceding remarks, let us note that the for-itself is not first in order to attempt later to attain being; in short we must not conceive of it as an existent which would be provided with tendencies as this glass is provided with certain particular qualities. This pursuing flight is not given which is added on to the being of the for-itself. The for-itself is this very flight. The flight is not to be distinguished from the original nihilation. To say that the for-itself is a pursued-pursuing, or that it is in the mode of having to be its being, or that it is not what it is and is what it is not—each of these statements is saying the same thing. The for-itself is not the in-itself and can not be it. But it is relation to the in-itself. It is even the sole relation possible to the in-itself. Cut off on every side by the in-itself, the for-itself can not escape it because the for-itself is nothing and it is separated form the in-itself by nothing. The for-itself is the foundation of all negativity and of all relation. The for-itself is relation.” (Sartre:2003:384-6)

What Sartre is saying in the above is that when a person in a body stands in the world as a being-for-itself, they become separate from the World. They have split their worlding (through free-will) away from that of the Worlds, i.e. that defined by nature into one defined by himself (i.e. settling and farming). From this perspective then being alive does not have a purpose in-itself, as it did for the being-in-Being who saw himself and his sociological technologies as fractal patterns of Nature-itself. Life then must be given a reason, and until that reason is found the human-being experiences a nothingness of existence. People who have gone through depression will know this feeling, whilst most of us spend our lives running from this feeling of a lack of purpose, and replace it with a purpose, a purpose that is oriented around ones own self. For instance as we have seen above, the first of these is individual totemism, followed by its reasonable consequence, family. It if for myself that I live and these people that I live for are my purpose physically incarnated (facticity), created in my worlding in the World.

However, whatever purpose one chooses from this paradigm of being-for-itself, one can never actually achieve ones purpose in regards to understanding a transcendental reason, a truth, that denotes these actions. Family is merely the genetic requirement of our animal nature, and does not denote our total individual experience in facticity, that is to say in empirical, lived experience, as we always require some other purpose as well, a purpose that the World seems to call out in us, separate from our family. In other words, the being-for-itself attempts to make himself the urgrund, the primal centre, of the World, as God, and yet can never achieve this due to the empirical nature of that same World in which, unlike God, he is powerless, where he discovers he is not in actual control of the World, only of his desires in his world that will fulfil his purpose, and it is through this lense that he sees the objects of the World. Therefore in a world of existence, his essence, his centre, his purpose can never be free to exist, it must always be fought for and maintained. On top of this it must also, always end in a failure to do so, because of the truth of death- reality, nothing about the mans perceived essence can overpower or control death, the reality of finite existence, despite the infinite desires of man. Therefore a being-for-itself lives in a world where Freedom is a dream World, because it has been separated from his reality by his ontological choice to exist, in essence, as a being-for-itself.

In this regard then Sartre tells us that the concept of freedom is negated: ‘Freedom is precisely the being which makes itself a lack of being. But since desire, as we have established, is identical with lack of being, freedom can arise only as being which makes itself a desire of being; that is, as the project-for-itself of being in-itself-for-itself. Here we have arrived at an abstract structure which can by no means be considered as the nature or essence of freedom. Freedom is existence, and in it existence precedes essence.’

What Sartre is touching on here is that freedom within being-in-Being only exists by giving up the egoic perspective of the being-for-itself, but seeing as that was not a choice until agriculture was invented, what freedom is there, when that is the only choice. In Sartre’s world therefore freedom, no matter what ontological perspective one stands in always results in a lack of freedom. I would disagree with this. Obviously at times in the 15,000 years we are looking at, some peoples freely chose to be beings-for-itself, yet were laughed at or secretly killed by the group in order to maintain the coherent perspective of the beings-in-Being. Therefore, free-will, and the choice exist. What Sartre states is that one cannot have a choice in a (hunter-gatherer) world as there is only the Way of being-in-Being.

My perspective is that of a musician and fan of Mozart. All of Mozarts’ work are masterpieces of harmony. That is to say in musical terms, a sequence of notes that do not use notes outside of the scale pattern, of the key (the centre) that Mozart is composing in. To our ear, when musical law is obeyed in this way, we hear harmony, and not discord. It feels right, peaceful and most importantly free in expression. At no point in listening to Mozart does one feel that the composer is being imposed upon in his free-willing, his worlding, of this music. In other words, one may chose to live in a way of life or not, that is free-will, that is freedom. It is of no matter how many choices there are, only that one may choose it. As we have seen, the being-for-itself can choose his own but can never achieve it in reality, whereas the being-in-Being can choose his own or not but can only achieve the original choice in facticity, in reality, as it is in harmony with that reality, it is within the nature of all Nature- God.

Sartre does not believe in God, and so for Sartre, man is left in a state of nihilation, a nothingness of purpose in truth, a lack of ultimate reason for being, that can only be filled by desire.

It is through the perspective of desire therefore that the being-for-itself sees the world. The being-in-Being does not see him self in the world, desiring proximity to its goal, as it is being it (and is therefore not distant from it), he dwells in it- I am. The being-for-itself has to think of a desire in order to be, as we see 6,000 years later with Descartes who, due to his desire for knowledge, has to think, before he is. Whereupon he discovers that he is separate from the World and God. ‘I desire that I am, therefore I think I am’ is another way of phrasing the ‘truth’ of Descartes rationalism, whilst many religious people think about the desire that no they are no longer in order to discover that they are closer to God.

Desire then, is the world view maker of each individual being-for-itself. From the feeling of a lack of being, the person creates a desire, and from this desire he creates a project, a purposeful action, in order to appropriate the necessary things by which he can obtain that desire. We call it ‘making my living’ followed by ‘living my life’. This life is the egoic one when its desires centre upon oneself, and therefore it is the ontological perspective and experience of the being-for-itself combined with the nihilation of our intimate existence in Being, that causes the emptiness that we fill with desire. This new god is called the Ego, a force or spirit, born from ontological willed-desire by necessity of an other wise reasonable annihilation of this I that we living and hence of lifes meaning and it is through this meaning that I see myself and the world.

“The answer is clear. I am the one who desires, and desire is a particular mode of my subjectivity. Desire is consciousness since it can be only as a non-positional consciousness of itself. Nevertheless we need not hold that the desiring consciousness differs from the cognitive consciousness, for example, only in the nature of its object. For the For-itself, to choose itself as desire is not to produce a desire while remaining indifferent and unchanged—as the Stoic cause produces its effect. The For-itself puts itself on a certain plane of existence which is not the same, for example, as that of a For-itself which chooses itself as a metaphysical being- (that is to say believes he is a being-in-Being, in Sartre’s terminology)- [authors note]. Every consciousness, as we have seen, supports a certain reality with its own facticity. But this relation can vary from one mode of consciousness to another. The facticity of a pain-consciousness, for example, is a facticity discovered in a perpetual flight. The case is not the same for the facticity of desire.

The man who desires exists his body in a particular mode and thereby places himself on a particular level of existence. In fact everyone will agree that desire is not only longing, a clear and translucent longing which directs itself through our body toward a certain object. Desire is defined as trouble. The notion of “trouble” can help us better to determine the nature of desire. We contrast troubled water with transparent water, a troubled look with a clear look. Troubled water remains water; it preserves the fluidity and the essential characteristics of water; but its translucency is “troubled” by an inapprehensible presence which makes one with it, which is everywhere and nowhere, and which is given as a clogging of the water by itself. To be sure, we can explain the troubled quality by the presence of fine solid particles suspended in the liquid, but this explanation is that of the scientist. Our original apprehension of the troubled water is given us as changed by the presence of an invisible something which is not distinct from this water and which is manifested as a pure factual resistance. If the desiring consciousness is troubled, it is because it is analogous to the troubled water.

To make this analogy precise, we should compare sexual desire with another form of desire—for example, with hunger.

Hunger, like sexual desire, supposes a certain state of the body, defined here as the impoverishment of the blood, abundant salivary secretion, contractions of the tunica, etc. These various phenomena are described and classified from the point of view of the Other. For the For-itself they are manifested as pure facticity. But this facticity does not compromise the nature of the For-itself, for the For-itself immediately flees it toward its possibles; that is, toward a certain state of satisfied-hunger which, as we have pointed out in Part Two, is the In-itself-for-itself of hunger. …The body here is indeed the past, the passed-beyond.” (Sartre:2003:407-09)

“Thus ontology teaches us that desire is originally a desire of being and that it is characterized as the free lack of being. But it teaches us also that desire is a relation with a concrete existent in the midst of the world and that this existent is conceived as a type of in-itself; it teaches us that the relation of the for-itself to this desired in-itself is appropriation. We are, then, in the presence of a double determination of desire: on the one hand, desire is determined as a desire to be a certain being, which is the in-itself-for-itself and whose existence is ideal; on the other hand, desire is determined in the vast majority of cases as a relation with a contingent and concrete in-itself which it has the project of appropriating. Does one of these determinations dominate the other? Are the two characteristics compatible?…

What is meant by “to appropriate”? Or if you prefer, what do we understand by possessing an object? We have seen the reducibility of the category “to do”, which allows us to see in it at one time “to be” and at another “to have.” Is it the same with the category “to have?”…Of course we could try to define ownership as a social function. But first of all, although society confers in fact the right to possess according to certain rules, it does not follow that it creates the relation of appropriation. At the very most it makes it legal. If ownership is to be elevated to the rank of the sacred, it must first of all exist as a relation spontaneously established between the for-itself and the concrete in-itself. If we can imagine the future existence of a more just collective organization, where individual possession will cease to be protected and sanctified at least within certain limits—this does not mean that the appropriative tie will cease to exist; it can remain indeed by virtue of a private relation of men to things…It is necessary then to distinguish between possession and the right to possess. For the same reason I must reject any definition of the type which Proudhon gives—such as “ownership is theft”—for it begs the question. It is possible of course for private property to be the product of theft and for the holding of this property to have for its result the robbing of another. But whatever may be its origin and its results, ownership can be nevertheless described and defined in itself. The thief considers himself the owner of the money which he has stolen. Our problem then includes describing the precise relation of the thief to the stolen goods as well as the relation of the lawful owner to property “honestly acquired.”

If I consider the object which I possess, I see that quality of being possessed does not indicate a purely external denomination marking the object’s external relation to me; on the contrary, this quality affects its very depths; it appears to me and it appears to others as making a part of the object’s being. This is why primitive societies say of certain individuals that they are “possessed”; the “possessed” are thought of as belonging to…This is also the significance of primitive funeral ceremonies where the dead are buried with the objects which belong to them. The rational explanation, “so that they can use the objects”, is evidently after the event. It is more probable that at the period when this kind of custom appeared simultaneously, no explanation seemed to be required. The objects had the specific quality belonging to the deceased. They formed a whole with him; there was no more question of burying the dead man without his usual objects than of burying him without one of his legs. The corpse, the cup from which the dead man drank, the knife which he used make a single dead person. The custom of burning widows in Malabar can very well be included under this principle; the woman has been possessed; the dead man takes her along with him in his death. In the eyes of the community, by rights she is dead; the burning is only to help her pass from this death by right to death in fact. Objects which can not be put in the grave are haunted.

A ghost is only the concrete materialization of the idea that the house and furnishings “are possessed.” To say that a house is haunted means that neither money nor effort will efface the metaphysical, absolute fact of its possession by a former occupant. It is true that the ghosts which haunt ancestral castles are degraded Lares [Lares were originally ghosts or spirits of ancestors related to agriculture- author’s note]. But what are these Lares if not layers of possession which have been deposited one by one on the walls and furnishings of the house? The very expression which designates the relation of the object to its owner indicates sufficiently the deep penetration of the appropriation; to be possessed means to be for someone (être à…). This means that the possessed object is touched in its being. We have seen moreover that the destruction of the possessor involves the destruction of the right of the possessed and inversely the survival of the possessed involves the survival of the right of the possessor. The bond of possession is an internal bond of being. I meet the possessor in and through the object which he possesses. This is evidently the explanation of the importance of relics; and we mean by this not only religious relics, but also and especially the totality of the property of a famous man in which we try to rediscover him, the souvenirs of the beloved  dead which seem to “perpetuate” his memory….

This internal, ontological bond between the possessed and the possessor (which customs like branding have often attempted to materialize) can not be explained by a “realistic” theory of appropriation. If we are right in defining realism as a doctrine which makes subject and object two independent substances possessing existence for themselves and by themselves, then a realistic theory can no more account for appropriation than it can for knowledge, which is one of the forms of appropriation; both remain external relations uniting temporarily subject and object. But we have seen that a substantial existence must be attributed to the object known. It is the same with ownership in general: the possessed object exists in itself, is defined by permanence, non-temporality, a sufficiency of being, in a word by substantiality. Therefore we must put Unselbständigkeit on the side of the possessing subject. A substance cannot appropriate another substance, and if we apprehend in things a certain quality of “being possessed”, it is because originally the internal relation of the for-itself to the in-itself, which is ownership, derives its origin from the insufficiency of being in the for-itself. It is obvious that the object possessed is not really affected by the act of appropriation, any more than the object known is affected by knowledge. It remains untouched (except in cases where the possessed is a human being, like a slave or a prostitute). But this quality on the part of the possessed does not affect its meaning ideally in the least; in a word, its meaning is to reflect this possession to the for-itself.

If the possessor and the possessed are united by an internal relation based on the insufficiency of being in the for-itself, we must try to determine the nature and the meaning of the dyad which they form. In fact the internal relation is synthetic and effects the unification of the possessor and the possessed. This means that the possessor and the possessed constitute ideally a unique reality. To possess is to be united with the object possessed in the form of appropriation; to wish to possess is to wish to be united to an object in this relation. Thus the desire of a particular object is not the simple desire of this object; it is the desire to be united with the object in an internal relation, in the mode of constituting with it the unity “possessor-possessed.” The desire to have is at bottom reducible to the desire to be related to a certain object in a certain relation of being.” (Sartre:2003:606-9)

“But we must describe this relation more carefully. In the project of possession we meet a for-itself which is “Unselbständig”, separated by a nothingness from the possibility which it is. This possibility is the possibility of appropriating the object. We meet in addition a value which haunts the for-itself and which stands as the ideal indication of the total being which would be realized by the union in identity of the possible and the for-itself which is its possible; I mean here the being which would be realized if I were in the indissoluble unity of identity—myself and my property. Thus appropriation would be a relation of being between a for-itself and a concrete in-itself, and this relation would be haunted by the ideal indication of an identification between this for-itself and the in-itself which is possessed.

To possess means to have for myself; that is, to be the unique end of the existence of the object. If possession is entirely and concretely given, the possessor is the raison d’être of the possessed object. I possess this pen; that means this pen exists for me, has been made for me. Moreover originally it is I who make for myself the object which I want to possess. My bow and arrows—that means the objects which I have made for myself. Division of labour can dim this original relation but cannot make it disappear. Luxury is a degradation of it; in the primitive form of luxury I possess an object which I have had made (done) for myself by people belonging to me (slaves, servants born in the house). Luxury therefore is the form of ownership closest to primitive ownership; it is this which next to ownership itself throws the most light on the relation of creation which originally constitutes appropriation. This relation in a society where the division of labour is pushed to the limit, is hidden but not suppressed. The object which I possess is one which I have bought. Money represents my strength; it is less a possession in itself than an instrument for possessing. That is why except in most unusual cases of avarice, money is effaced before its possibility for purchase; it is evanescent, it is made to unveil the object, the concrete thing; money has only a transitive being. But to me it appears as a creative force: to buy an object is a symbolic act which amounts to creating the object.

That is why money is synonymous with power; not only because it is in fact capable of procuring for us what we desire, but especially because it represents the effectiveness of my desire as such. Precisely because it is transcended toward the thing, surpassed, and simply implied, it represents my magical bond with the object. Money suppresses the technical connection of subject and object and renders the desire immediately operative, like the magic wishes of fairy tales. Stop before a show case with money in your pocket; the objects displayed are already more than half yours. Thus money establishes a bond of appropriation between the for-itself and the total collection of objects in the world. By means of money desire as such is already informer and creator. …

My lamp is not only that electric bulb, that shade, that wrought iron stand; it is a certain power of lighting this desk, these books, this table; it is a certain luminous nuance of my work at night in connection with my habits of reading or writing late; it is animated, coloured, defined by the use which I make of it; it is that use and exists only through it. If isolated from my desk, from my work, and placed in a lot of objects on the floor of a salesroom, my lamp is radically extinguished; it is no longer my lamp; instead, merely a member of the class of lamps, it has returned to its original matter. Thus I am responsible for the existence of my possessions in the human order. Through ownership I raise them up to a certain type of functional being; and my simple life appears to me as creative exactly because by its continuity it perpetuates the quality of being possessed in each of the objects in my possession. I draw the collection of my surroundings into being along with myself. If they are taken from me, they die as my arm would die if it were severed from me.

But the original, radical relation of creation is a relation of emanation, and the difficulties encountered by the Cartesian theory of substance are there to help us to discover this relation. What I create is still me… Where could my creation derive any objectivity and independence since its form and its matter are from me? Only a sort of inertia could close it off from my presence, but in order for this same inertia to function, I must sustain it in existence by a continuous creation. Thus to the extent that I appear to myself as creating objects by the sole relation of appropriation, these objects are myself. The pen and the pipe, the clothing, the desk, the house—are myself. The totality of my possessions reflects the totality of my being. I am what I have. It is I myself which I touch in this cup, in this trinket. This mountain which I climb is myself to the extent that I conquer it; and when I am at its summit, which I have “achieved” at the cost of this same effort, when I attain this magnificent view of the valley and the surrounding peaks, then I am the view; the panorama is myself dilated to the horizon, for it exists only through me, only for me.

But creation is an evanescent concept which can exist only through its movement.

If we stop it, it disappears. At the extreme limits of its acceptance, it is annihilated; either I find only my pure subjectivity or else I encounter a naked, indifferent materiality which no longer has any relation to me. Creation can be conceived and maintained only as a continued transition from one term to the other. As the object rises up in my world, it must simultaneously be wholly me and wholly independent of me. This is what we believe that we are realizing in possession. The possessed object as possessed is a continuous creation; but still it remains there, it exists by itself; it is in-itself. If I turn away from it, it does not thereby cease to exist; if I go away, it represents me in my desk, in my room, in this place in the world. From the start it is impenetrable. This pen is entirely myself, as the very point at which I no longer even distinguish it from the act of writing, which is my act. …

Thus the relation of continuous creation encloses within it as its implicit contradiction the absolute, in-itself independence of the objects created. Possession is a magical relation [authors italics]; I am these objects which I possess, but outside, so to speak, facing myself; I create them as independent of me; what I possess is mine outside of me, outside all subjectivity, as an in-itself which escapes me at each instant and whose creation at each instant I perpetuate. But precisely because I am always somewhere outside of myself, as an incompleteness which makes its being known to itself by what it is not, now when I possess, I transfer myself to the object possessed. In relation of possession the dominant term is the object possessed; without it I am nothing save a nothingness which possesses, nothing other than pure and simple possession, an incompleteness, an insufficiency, whose sufficiency and completion are there in that object. In possession, I am my own foundation in so far as I exist in an in-itself….We see that appropriation is nothing save the symbol of the ideal of the for-itself or value. The dyad, for-itself possessing itself and whose possession is in its own creation—God. Thus the possessor aims at enjoying his being-in-itself, his being-outside. Through possession I recover an object-being identical with my being-for-others. Consequently the Other can not surprise me; the being which he wishes to bring into the world, which is myself-for-the-Other—this being I already enjoy possessing. Thus possession is in addition a defense against others. What is mine is myself in a non-subjective form inasmuch as I am its free foundation.

We can not insist too strongly on the fact that this relation is symbolic and ideal. My original desire of being my own foundation for myself is never satisfied through appropriation any more than Freud’s patient satisfies his Oedipus complex when he dreams that a soldier kills the Czar (i.e., his father). This is why ownership appears to the owner simultaneously as something given at one stroke in the eternal and as requiring an infinite time to be realized. No particular act of utilization really realizes the enjoyment of full possession; but it refers to other appropriative acts, each one of which has the value of an incantation.” (Sartre:2003:610-13)

“one could foresee, handing over a bank-note is enough to make the bicycle belong to me, but my entire life is needed to realize this possession. In acquiring the object, I perceive that possession is an enterprise which death always renders still unachieved. Now we can understand why; it is because it is impossible to realize the relation symbolized by appropriation. In itself appropriation contains nothing concrete. It is not a real activity (such as eating, drinking, sleeping) which could serve in addition as a symbol for a particular desire. It exists, on the contrary, only as a symbol; it is its symbolism which gives it its meaning, its coherence, its existence. There can be found in it no positive enjoyment outside its symbolic value; it is only the indication of a supreme enjoyment of possession (that of the being which would be its own foundation), which is always beyond all the appropriative conduct meant to realize it.

This is precisely why the recognition that it is impossible to possess an object involves for the for-itself a violent urge to destroy it. To destroy is to reabsorb into myself; it is to enter along with the being-in-itself of the destroyed object into a relation as profound as that of creation. The flames which burn the farm which I myself have set on fire, gradually effect the fusion of the farm with myself. In annihilating it I am changing it into myself. Suddenly I rediscover the relation of being found in creation, but in reverse; I am the foundation of the barn which is burning; I am this barn since I am destroying its being. Destruction realizes appropriation perhaps more keenly than creation does, for the object destroyed is no longer there to show itself impenetrable. It has the impenetrability and the sufficiency of being of the in-itself which it has been, but at the same time it has the invisibility and translucency of the nothingness which I am, since it no longer exists…thus to destroy is to recreate by assuming oneself as solely responsible for the being of what existed for all.

Destruction then is to be given a place among appropriative behaviours. Moreover many kinds of appropriative conduct have a destructive structure along with other structures. To utilize is to use. In making use of my bicycle, I use it up—wear it out; that is, continuous appropriative creation is marked by a partial destruction. This wear can cause distress for strictly practical reasons, but in the majority of cases it brings a secret joy, almost like the joy of possession; this is because it is coming from us—we are consuming. It should be noted that the word “consume” holds the double meaning of an appropriative destruction and an alimentary enjoyment. To consume is to annihilate and it is to eat; it is to destroy by incorporating into oneself. If I ride on my bicycle, I can be annoyed at wearing out its tires because it is difficult to find others to replace them; but the image of enjoyment which my body invokes is that of a destructive appropriation, of a “creation-destruction”. The bicycle gliding alone, carrying me, by its very movement is created and made mine; but this creation is deeply imprinted on the object by the light, continued wear which is impressed on it and which is like the brand on the slave. The object is mine because it is I who have used it up; the using up of what is mine is the reverse side of my life.

These remarks will enable us to understand better the meaning of certain feelings or behaviour ordinarily considered as irreducible; for example, generosity. Actually the gift is a primitive form of destruction. We know for example that the potlatch involves the destruction of enormous quantities of merchandise. On this level it is indifferent whether the object is destroyed or given to another; in any case the potlatch is destruction and enchaining of the Other. I destroy the object by giving it away as well as by annihilating it; I suppress in it the quality of being mine, which constituted it—in relation to my table, to my room—as absent; I alone shall preserve for it the ghostly, transparent being of past objects, because I am the one through whom beings pursue an honorary existence after their annihilation. Thus generosity is above all a destructive function. The craze for giving which sometimes seize certain people is first and foremost a craze to destroy; it is equivalent to an attitude of madness, a “love” which is at the bottom of generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away; given is a keen, brief enjoyment, almost sexual. To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives; it is a destructive-appropriative contact. But at the same time the gift casts a spell over the recipient; it obliges him to recreate, to maintain in being by a continuous creation this bit of myself which I no longer want, which I have just possessed up to its annihilation, and which finally remains only as an image. To give is to enslave. That aspect of the gift does not interest us here, for it concerns primarily our relations with others. What we wish to emphasize is that generosity is not irreducible; to give is to appropriate by destruction while utilizing this destruction to enslave another. Generosity then is a feeling structured by the existence of the Other and indicates a preference for appropriation by destruction.” (Sartre:2003:613-5)

From the above quotes Sartre tells us that the being-for-itself is a desire-being. That is a being who exists and exists the World in a relationship defined by his desires. In Buddhism the student (of the Way of being-in-Being), is told that the human realm is a desire realm, and that this is the ontological trap of our existence in human form, symbolising this same perspective. Other religions tell us that it is impossible for a rich man to enter heaven, i.e. to be with God. Why, because he is so overwhelmingly possessed by that which he possesses. Possession then is not just- of a thing, but in fact- by a thing, at the same time. In desire lies the requirement and the perspective of seeing the World as yours to appropriate, to create or destroy as ones-self sees fit. Creation and destruction are merely nominated symptoms given by each perspective, as it freely wills in order to judge if the action ‘created’ or ‘destroyed’ some-thing, but no matter what happened it was always possession, and one was creating or destroying your and their worlding only, and not the World.

When Jimi Hendrix famously set light to his guitar after playing the American national anthem, what we were witnessing was Jimi possessing that which he had created by destroying it. It was an indictment upon the spirit of the National Anthem that possesses its peoples against the reality of those peoples and their actions against this spirit. The flames licking, digesting, this object were returning the reality back to its spirit in form in order to be possessed by all looking-on-it. The burning of the American flag by the Taliban is the possession of that American spirit and its destruction in the name of the Great Spirit that does not recognise it. All of these ‘truths’ are therefore not truths but ‘opinions’ that revealing the perspective of your story only, but not any actual truth- Aletheia. That perspective lies deep beneath ontology, in metaphysics, and cannot be discussed further here.

“With all possession there is made the crystallizing synthesis which Stendhal has described for the one case of love. Each possessed object which raises itself on the foundation of the world, manifests the entire world, just as a beloved woman manifests the sky, the shore, the sea which surrounded her when she appeared. To appropriate this object is then to appropriate the world symbolically” (Sartre:2003:616-7)

“From the contrariety of some of the natural faculties of the mind, one to another, as also of one passion to another, and from their reference to conversation, there has been an argument taken, to infer an impossibility that any one who can should be sufficiently disposed to all sorts of civil duty. The severity of judgement, they say, makes men censorious, and unapt to pardon the errors and infirmities of other men: and on the other side, celerity of fancy, makes the thoughts less steady than is necessary, to discern exactly between right and wrong. Again, in all deliberations, and in all pleadings, the faculty of solid reasoning is necessary: for without it, the resolutions of men are rash, and their sentences unjust: and yet if there be not powerful eloquence, which procureth attention and consent, the effect of reason will be little. But these are contrary faculties; the former being grounded upon principles of truth; the other upon opinions already received, true or false; and upon the passions and interests of men, which are different, and mutable.

And amongst the passions, courage, (by which I mean the contempt of wounds, and violent death) inclineth men to private revenges, and sometimes to endeavour the unsettling of the public peace: and timorousness, many times disposeth to the desertion of the public defence. Both these, they say, cannot stand together in the same person.

And to consider the contrariety of men’s opinions, and manners in general, it is, they say, impossible to entertain a constant civil amity with all those, with whom the business of the world constrains us to converse: which business consisteth almost in nothing else but a perpetual contention for honour, riches, and authority.

To which I answer, that these are indeed great difficulties, but not impossibilities: for by education, and discipline, they may be, and are sometimes reconciled. Judgement and fancy may have place in the same man; but by turns; as the end which he aimeth at requireth. As the Israelites in Egypt, were sometimes fastened to their labour of making bricks, and other times were ranging abroad to gather straw: so also may the judgement sometimes be fixed upon one certain consideration, and the fancy at another time wandering about the world.” (Hobbes:1651:460)

Now that we understand the relationship of the being-for-itself to the World we have seen that the language use of this being has created the necessity of the word freedom (liberty), to denote its lack, (equality and fraternity, also) it has used the ontological feeling of being a possession of the Worlds, of Gods, i.e. of being seen and held by the Greater spirit, in order to create rights to possess land due to the feeling created by its ancestral burials and hence its spirit becomes his and he becomes it as his urgrund, as his centre. He becomes tied to the land. He has also given value to the World, framed by each of its separate parts’ ability or disability in aiding in the appropriation of his purpose (i.e. possible farmable land, or wilderness). We have also seen that the desertification that settling causes by its destructive nature, only further creates a feeling of urgrund, of worlding, in the real World and of his consequent right to do so.

These possessions then, now possessed in the framework of words, reveal that the possessor when thinking, (therefore I am) has to think, in ‘their’ way, which he is free to call free-thinking or totalitarian thinking but which nevertheless, form his thinking self and therefore he is framed, possessed by them. These words then, created or turned towards a new meaning by the being-for-itself are self-progenitating by their framing of his world-view, and the physicality of objects that he creates or destroys from this view, are the seed-bed of the biblical babble of Babylonian that language that must be created in order to view the world.

The next stage of growth in this seed-bed before we move on to Babylon is that of being-for-Others. What feelings, what realities, what empowerments and disempowerments will these words create in an other whose perspective is also one that sees the World in regards to his self as the urgrund, his lack as the purpose of things in the World, his freedom, his power, his right, etc, etcetera. We must therefore look at the relationship of the being-for-itself to another being-for-itself.

09: The Man and the Circle

What we are talking about above is how the universal wakan or ‘Openness’ as Heidegger refers to it, becomes closed with the perspective of the being-for-itself. This closedness has an ontological shape, which is that of a dot (symbolising the perspective) in the circle.

All of the above concepts are extremely hard for the modern mind to even understand, let alone to sit in and experience as realities. The language used above in order to express this, has also been exceedingly difficult to understand for many readers and so, at the risk of going on too long about this extremely pivotal perspective, I will try and lighten the language with a joke that expresses the same truth.

Before I begin it let me just remind the reader that we are trying to ascertain the mind-set of the cave-man in order to see more clearly, not only just how the journey began away from that mind-set, but also the distance between these two realities, and the price of them in regards to the actual daily and life-long experiences in relation to pleasure and pain of these ways of life, these ventures. Remember that our cave-man is attempting to choose which of the worldings of humanity he is going to live in. To ascertain, at what point in history would he choose to continue the work he sees taking place and the teleology, the goal, to which that work is focused- his perspective.

One day a white man was walking home from work after being screwed over for a promotion that would have helped him in his worship of his god- Money. Needless to say, he was annoyed and was trying to decide whether to go home and crawl into a corner with a bottle of whisky (flight), or to pick a ‘fight’ with someone.

As this was passing subconsciously through his liminal, animal size brain, he began to walk down the poshest street in town, passing mansion after mansion.

“Bastards, rich shits with all the money”, he was thinking to himself as the electric gates of the mansion he was in front of began to part and an open-top Ferrari Testarossa pulled up to the gate, blocking the mans path.

The driver of the car is a black man in a designer suit and this set of totems is enough for the white racist man to see an-other to blame. His anger surges and he grabs the man out of the car and onto the street and starts his self justified rant about how he’s poor and doing hard work, “a white man in his own country, trying to make an honest buck”, etc, etc………….. i.e. It’s not fair, I want it, and I’m having a tantrum like a three year old.

“Right you black bastard”, he rounds up, “Stay here!” and he proceeds to draw a circle around the rich-black-man in chalk, “Stay X!+%& there!” he screams, turning his vociferous attention to the Ferrari.

For the next twenty minutes he scratches the paint with his keys, kicks off the wing mirrors, smashes the windscreen with his briefcase, pisses on the leather seats and lets the tyres down. Turning back, victoriously to the rich-black-cave-man, he finds the man laughing at him with a beaming smile spread across his face.

“Right you bastard. Now you’ve asked for it!” and he stomps off down the drive towards the mansion, “and stay in that circle”, he spits, turning on his heel. Twenty minutes later he returns laden with all of the fine art he could find in the house, to an ever greater laughing black-rich-bastard-happy-cave-man.

“Right! Right! You little shit, see how you like this!”, he cries as he slashes every painting, smashes every bit of Objet d’art, kicking and screaming racist statements that spew forth like urban poetry. After this attack he once again turns to the black-rich-bastard-happy-cave-man, who is laughing so hard now that he’s having to hold his sides as he weeps uncontrollably.

The white man now delivers his own personal Hiroshima in frustration as he goes back into the mansion and sets light to the whole place, walking smugly back up the drive as the inflagration dances behind him. Only to find the man on the floor wetting his pants in hysterics.

“What! You useless lump of tanned meat, is so damn funny?! I’ve ruined your entire life and you’re laughing like a school girl!”

“Well!” says the black man through his laughter, “Whilst you weren’t looking I’ve been jumping in and out of the circle!”

I know it’s a crap punchline, but the joke reveals a deep truth. You see the nature of making a circle and then demanding someone stay in it for your reasons begins with an imagined circle, a closedness of the mind to a universal reality, a truth. The white man only drew the circle around another man because he believed that he was ontologically in a circle of his own, of which he, him-self was the centre. To our cave-man as we have seen this is laughable or the reason to kill someone. In like manner, it is only by believing in the closed reality of the cultural ‘truth’ of ‘the white man’ that ‘the black man’ becomes imprisoned (en-closed) by his ontological reality of being-for-itself and no longer being-in-Being, where no circles exist greater that wakan.  In other words, jumping in and out of the circle is only possible if you are not in one of your own making that gives power to the others circle. Within the ontology of for-itself lies the circle and the self as centre. The World is a separate place unless it is your possession and within your circle of power, and within your circle of power, the world is yours to be destroyed by another, to be claimed by another, who sees that part of the world as theirs to world with as they Will. With each for-itself, all that actually happens is a library of nominal rights and laws of the ever decreasing circles of for-itself ontological reasons for the wielding of will-power.

At the beginning of the joke, who had power over whom?

At the end of the joke, who had power over whom?

That is the joke. It is mistaking the profane for the sacred, the universal infinite potential of social capital and turning it into the finite capital of gain for-itself, and of subsequent inequality and hence nemesis, for a purpose, a philosophy, that you, not they, adhere to, but which you must believe relies on the acquisition of material things in order to achieve, as otherwise you would not need to create a subdivision. The Holy of Holies only needs creation when the profane has entered the world through the imagination of the for-itself, and created a place that is unholy. The work towards God only begins when you have created a distance, the work towards the things you desire only begins when you have decided that what you have is not enough.

The circle then for the purpose of this discussion represents A society, or A religion, A truth, that by its creation creates a sacredness and a profane, a goal and a distance, a closed-ness and a concealment of truth, and any part of the circle represents the whole, for example, on the news we often hear something along the lines of, ‘today an airplane crashed killing 200 passengers. Three of them were English.’, and often the impartial newsreader gives the viewer a sociological grimace at the news that, ‘three of the dead were English’. Of course this is a circle within a circle, 200 Human-beings died but three were from your circle, the other 197 were not and were not therefore as sacred.

Every American child by law has to stand an pledge their allegiance, their will, to the American flag each morning at school, where they will be taught the perspective of the circle.

Let us look, with reason then, at the perspective of the cave-man who has decided for the sake of this experiment to pretend that he is being-for-itself:

“The possibility of tracking population history through human genes arises from the fact that although we are all members of a single species, Homo sapiens, and have a high degree of genetic similarity, we vary in specific details. The similarity is present because all people in the world today originated from the same small population that lived in Africa no more than 130,000 years ago. The severe environmental conditions of the last but one glacial maximum had caused that population to fall to no more than 10,000 individuals. This reduced the amount of genetic variation present, being known as a population bottleneck. When global warming occurred at 125,000 years ago, that population expanded. Its people dispersed from Africa and the first Homo sapiens entered Europe, Asia and eventually the Americas. Any existing populations, such as those of H.neanderthalensis in Europe, were entirely replaced without making any contribution to the modern gene pool.” (Mithen:2003:191)

“Just one of these [groups that dispersed across the globe] was sufficiently recent to relate to the immigration of farmers from western Asian origin. Moreover, its geographical distribution in Europe matched the two archaeologically recognised routes of colonisation: central Europe and the Mediterranean coast. But this group only constituted 15 per cent of the total number of lineages within the six groups. All other lineages dated to between 23,000 and 50,000 years ago, indicating that 85 per cent of the existing mtDNA lineages were already present in the Mesolithic, having originated during the preceding ice age. The wave of advance had been nothing but a tiny ripple.” (Mithen:2003:194)

So before our cave-man can even make a choice 85% of the DNA of people was uniform, the rest of the circles in the pond of humanity, over which the greatest wars of history have been fought in the last century, are but a tiny ripple, insignificant.

Allow me one more attempt at a joke:

“There is a notorious logical trouble when Epimenides, the Cretan, says that everything Cretans say is false. But there is no problem when someone from somewhere else says it.” (Blackburn:2005:82)

Such circular statements of difference are therefore, as we have seen, not a part of primitive mans ontology, even to the extent that their circle whilst divided into clans, requires a member of one to pass life giving water to another in order for the whole to continue to exist under one spirit- wakan.

In case the jokes haven’t helped in expressing what I am saying, let us try some poetry that tells the same perspective. In the verse quote we will see the allegory of throwing babies into the river that I began with in my Introduction. At first the River is Nature conscious of itself, but then it becomes separate from our human self, it becomes a frontier created by the being-for-itself, the same river (numina) becomes seen as (nomina- The river from this point, as we shall see further on, is named by Hobbes as ‘The Leviathan’), only a problem confronting builders of bridges, i.e. of separating one group of being from another. This river then becomes a river for our will, and the brown god is almost forgotten, and he is only remembered to propitiate our will as the seasons, floods, etc, etcetera.

In the second quotation we see the closedness of the circle, in this instance depicted in the allegorical form of the British hedgerow, that great separator of land and people by the farmer, the settler and of its consequences, we see the iron-fish and the wasted unflowering of the unconcealedness of Being, and most importantly we see the perspective shift between the primitive man and the settler as attachment to self:

‘I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river

Is a strong brown god- sullen, untamed and intractable,

Patient to some degree, at first recognized as a frontier;

Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;

Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.

The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten

By the dwellers in cities- ever, however, implacable,

Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder

Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated

By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and

waiting.” (Eliot:35)

‘Lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory,

Pray for all those who are in ships, those

Whose business has to do with fish, and

Those concerned with every lawful traffic

And those who conduct them.” (Eliot:41)

‘There are three conditions which often look alike

Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:

Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment

From self and from things and from persons; and, growing

between them, indifference

Which resembles the others as death resembles life,

Being between two lives- unflowering, between

The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:

For liberation- not less of love but expanding

Of love beyond desire, and so liberation

From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country

Begins as attachment to our own field of action

And comes to find that action of little importance

Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,

History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,

The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,

To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.” (Eliot:55)

Eliot in the above quotes shows us the metallic fish of civilization in the river of God, that civilization has forgotten by its social constructions of technologies, ever producing circles of division, that rise and fall on the ocean of time, in the Nature of Being, ever producing the distances within the same hedgerow until we reach indifference, though never indifferent.  That this is described as a hedgerow is best explained by the word, to hedge, just as one hedge’s a bet, or as a hedge fund works, the hedgerow is the small insurance policy, that caused civilization, that delineated my land from your land. Can these ‘three conditions which often look alike yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow, as growing between them, lies- indifference? Eliot jumps in and out of the ontological circle at this point, between being-in-Being and being-for-itself. The live and the dead nettle represent the soul perspective and the accidental phenomenal perspective, respectively. Love becomes either expanding beyond desire toward liberation, it becomes open not closed in order to find liberation. The story of past and future, and the work of self becomes of little importance, tiny ripples in the Great River of wakan and the greater pattern is revealed.

These circles that keep us from the whole of reality and allow us to point at something outside of that circle and judge it, condemn it, hate it, envy it, desire it, have rights over it, feel superior to it, be happier than it, greater than it, etc, etc. ‘into indifference’, are also the cause of feeling isolated, alone, scared, angry, forlorn, oppressed, insufficient, unloved, and hated.

The winning circle of peoples gets to write the history and they get to proudly call themselves, English, American, German, etc and believe that they have the right to invade another countries circle and take what they want, including the lives of others in that same circle. We sing the anthemic songs of our savage tribe, put up memorials for the brave heroes we lost and wave coloured bits of material- ninurga, or other sacred yet profane objet d’art and stand on the corpses of glory of those we defeated, lets call them the Indonesians, Africans, or any other circle you care to draw around a group of human beings, who exist, and who love, and who feel pain.

Maybe we do that because 85% of everyone’s genome is that same as everyone elses, and we are all alike?

This reminds me of a T.V. games show for kids called “RUNAROUND”. In this game show kids are asked a question and three possible answers are lit up on three different coloured circles, whereupon the kids run to the circle symbolising the answer that they think is right, upon the command, “RUNAROUND”.

If we took humanity back to its conception and shouted “RUNAROUND” we could then speed up history to reveal a load of bipeds running from one circle to another in an attempt to escape the settled circle they had created. They would run from Babel, to Rome, to Persia, to Spain, to England, to America, etc, etc; they would run from Paganism to Judaism, to Christianity, to Buddhism, to Shintoism, Sikhism, Islam, New Age etc, etc.; from witch doctors, to healers, to quacks, to psychologists, to counsellors, to homeopathists, to acupuncturists, to immortality bringers of cryogenic promises, etc, etc.; to the Moon, to Mars, to Alpha Centuari, to the local cluster of galaxies, to the whole Universe for all time, in a few sped up moments. Yet all of these perspectives are blinks of the eye to the length of vision of primitive man’s perspective upon humanity, oneness, wakan, universality. Catholic, means Universal, but a Catholic way of life cannot be universal if I am a Protestant. Wakan means universal and you come from any clan, or phratry  you wish, that is still Wakan. Wakan is not a religion or an institution, it is. Naming the Universe, universe does not make it the Universe, it is the Universe because it is the Universe, its field of action is the universe, as its Wakan. Catholicism is a belief system of a Universal truth, not a Universal truth. It is the name of a path to that Truth, a sequence of nomina to the numina, not the numina. As nomina it is a map, a path, but maps rely on a separation of territory from profane to sacred, of higher and lower, most importantly they require that you live upon the urgrund of distance from the Universal in order to detail how to get to the universal. Paths are made by the steps of each individual, who is not where they wish to be withinside themselves.

“Besides that, there are cases where this social character is made manifest. There are societies in Australia and North America where space is conceived in the form of an immense circle, because the camp has a circular form; and this spatial circle is divided up exactly like the tribal circle, and is in its image. There are as many regions distinguished as there are clans in the tribe, and it is the place occupied by the clans inside the encampment which has determined the orientation of these regions. Each region is defined by the totem of the clan to which it is assigned.” (Durkheim:1982:11-12)

“So we may rest assured that this way of conceiving the world is independent of all ethnic or geographic particularities; and at the same time it is clearly seen to be closely united to the whole system of totemic beliefs.” (Durkheim:1982:144)

10: Individual totemism

Now that we have ascertained the veracity of the case of a change of consciousness from the hunter-gatherer, and that indeed there is a more psychically aware concept of universal conception within that perspective, to the settler, we can look at the journey of the first intimations and reasons for some individuals, as indeed it must first have been, choosing a life of being-for-itself, why this was at first tolerated and then progressed within their peoples, and what effect it gradually had upon the living conditions of human-beings, i.e. its movement towards the venture of civilization.

To begin with the clan required external pressures to create a weakness in their equitable way of life, and in order to smooth the resulting effects that it had on their society, by creating new institutional ideas and practices.

These external pressures, as we will see, were not disease, or famine, but quite the opposite, plenty and health:

“With such unlimited wild foods the Native Americans of Cascadia lived in permanent villages, relying on their stored supplies during the lean periods of the year. They could afford to support specialist craftsmen and engage in trade. Their populations grew, uninhibited by the usual constraints on hunter-gatherer numbers: the need to keep on the move and periodic shortages of food. It is hardly surprising that, amidst such wealth, leaders emerged and waged war upon their neighbours.

Such ‘complex hunters’ as they are referred to by archaeologists, first appeared at around 500 BC. But when Lubbock arrives on the northwest coast at 5000 BC the groundwork for their emergence is already being laid.” (Mithen:2003:298)

“In the early twentieth century, the British social anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown described the Murray River as ‘the most densely populated part of Australia before the days of White Settlement’. He found Aboriginal tribes who claimed exclusive ownership of stretches of river and the surrounding land; people who were prepared to defend their boundaries by force. As such, they were much like people that Lubbock had observed at Skateholm when travelling in Europe in 5000 BC.

Moreover, the Murray River tribes that Radcliffe-Brown encountered, such as the Yaralde, organised their social lives quite differently to those in the arid deserts of Australia. Rather than having a system in which everyone was related to everyone else in both adjoining and quite distant groups by a complex system of social ties, those in the Murray River region had far fewer outside links. They were more concerned with rules and customs which excluded people from their social group, rather than those which would include as many people as possible, as found among the desert-living Aborigines.

Colin Pardoe believes that the origin of the Murray River societies described by Radcliffe-Brown is found several millennia before the Holocene began, with the people of Kow Swamp and Coolbool Creek. These were, he believes, the first to live at high densities in a resource-rich environment; the first to establish boundaries and develop a social system on the principle of exclusion rather than inclusion. This, he suggests, explains the ‘robust’ skeletons and skulls: with greater degrees of inbreeding, gene flow became restricted and regional differences in physique appeared. It also explains why cemeteries were made: to invest the land with the bones and spirit’s of one’s ancestors and hence claim ownership. And it explains the body sculpture: this was a means to accentuate existing physical differences from other groups. Having an elongated skull was a mark of belonging to Kow Swamps or Coolbool Creek, and with such belonging came rights to hunt and fish.

The people of Kow Swamp and Coobool Creek of 14,000 BC appear to have been the first Australians to live in this manner. During the next few thousand years this lifestyle spread throughout the whole Murray River valley. New methods were adopted to demonstrate group membership, such as tooth avulsion- knocking out particular teeth during a rite of passage from adolescence to adulthood. Both men and women suffered injury as territories were defended. By 6000 BC many cemeteries had been established along the course of the river.” (Mithen:2003:315-6)

“Such warfare was recorded by Lloyd Warner, an anthropologist who lived among the Murngin Aborigines of northeast Arnhem Land in the 1920s. The Murngin had lived by hunting and gathering in a not dissimilar landscape to that reconstructed for 6000 BC. Violence and warfare were endemic in their society; Lloyd Warner estimated that this caused about two hundred deaths of young men each year. He described several types, ranging from nirimaoi yolno, one-to-one fights between men seldom resulting in any casualties, to milwerangel, a pitched battle between members of several clans arranged to take place at a specified time and place, usually ending in a violent brawl with several fatalities.

A great deal of this fighting originated from disputes over women. Nirmimaoi yolno arose when a man from one camp accused one in another of having been- or at least trying to become- his wife’s lover. The two men rarely ever got further than hurling insults at each other, happy at being ‘restrained’ by their friends so they could feign much bravado without risking getting hurt. In another form of combat- narrup– a man will be physically attacked while sleeping. The whole clan of the attacker will be held responsible and the incident may easily escalate into maringo, an expedition to revenge the killing of a relative or even milwerangel.

Lloyd Warner argued that warfare and killing within the Murngin was a consequences of their marriage system. This was polygyny, which allowed men to have several wives; most middle-aged Murngin men had at least three. As the number of Murngin men and women were approximately equal, and as women married just before puberty, there were simply too few women for the young men to marry. And so, in Lloyd Warner’s words,  there was a ‘seasonal slaying’ of young men who had passed into adolescence and were ready to find their first wife. This culling of the young and eligible was presumably in the interests of the older members of society who were happy to encourage the younger men to fight.

There is no direct evidence that the 6000 BC battle-scene paintings of Arnhem Land depicted real life; even if they did so, there is nothing to prove that the battles corresponded to those described for the Murngin or were undertaken for the same reasons. Chippindale and Taҫon are confident, however, that this change from paintings of fighting men to battle scenes is indeed a historical record and is ultimately explained by the changing environments of Arnhem Land brought about by global warming.

Exactly how environmental, social and artistic changes may be related remains unclear. One scenario is that the appearance of wetlands created a new diversity and abundance of plant and animal foods. With better nutrition, the population grew. But the sources of food were not evenly dispersed across the landscape. Instead, the particularly profitable stretches of river, groves of trees, water-holes and animal haunts were highly localised. And so groups became concerned with establishing and defending territories that encompassed these locales. They did so partly through ceremony and partly through warfare. It may have been at this time that the historically known territorial patterns and linguistic divides of Aboriginal groups in Arnhem Land began to emerge: those between-groups known as the Jawoyn, Gundjeibmi, Kunwinjku and the Murngin. Moreover, the modern-day Dreamtime ideology might also find its origins in this time of adjustment to the Holocene world.” (Mithen:2003:332-33)

“The intensity of horticulture encountered by Harris was minimal compared with that observed by the first Europeans to visit New Guinea. Both in its lowlands and highlands vast areas of forests had been cleared and turned to garden plots for root crops. In complete contrast to the transient hunter-gatherer campsites of northern Australia, the first European explorers found densely populated villages ruled by powerful chiefs whose wealth was measured by the number of pigs they owned and who regularly waged war against each other. Hence the narrow Torres Strait divided two quite different worlds: Australian hunter-gatherers to the south and New Guinea farmers to the north.

Why hadn’t the Australian Aborigines adopted agriculture? Captain James Cook asked this question when he landed on Possession Island off Cape York in 1770 and reflected that ‘the Natives know nothing of cultivation’ and ‘when one considers the proximity of this country with New Guinea… which produces cocoa-nuts and many other fruits proper for the support of man it seems strange that they should not long ago have been transplanted here.’ To Cook, and many later anthropologists, the Aborigines appeared quite backward to have remained as hunter-gatherers when they could have adopted a lifestyle ‘proper for the support of man.’

From studies of the Aborigines, it became apparent that their devotion to hunting and gathering could not be explained by a lack of farming knowledge, as they were quite aware of how to cultivate plants. When those in Cape York gathered wild yams, for instance, they often ensured that parts of the tubers were left behind, or were even replanted to ensure a supply in the following year. Moreover, substantial trading contacts between the Aborigines and the Torres Strait islanders had brought the hunter-gatherers into direct contact with the farmers. So why had farming not spread from New Guinea to Australia, just as it had spread from Western Asia to Europe?

An answer was provided by Peter White from Sydney University in 1971: the Austrialian hunter-gatherers were ‘simply too well off to bother about agriculture’. By that date, views about farming had changed dramatically from those held by James Cook, and indeed by academics right up until the late 1960s. The view that farming was an inevitable step on the path to civilization, one that would be grasped at every opportunity, had been overthrown. Western academics who lived with hunter-gatherers in Australia and Africa decided that they had been among what the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins declared to be the ‘original affluent society’.

Such hunter-gatherers were found to work for no more than a few hours each day, to be free from the physical ailments caused by back-breaking tillage and harvesting, and unencumbered by the social tensions and violence found in densely populated farming communities.” (Mithen:2003:338-9)

“But since at this period, the individual did not yet have a real personality, and was regarded only as a part of his group, or clan, it was the clan as a whole, and not the individual, which collectively contracted this relationship. For the same reason, it was contracted, not with a particular object, but with the natural group or species of which this object was a part; for men think of the world as they think of themselves, and just as they could not conceive themselves apart from their clans, so they were unable to conceive of anything else as distinct from the species to which it belonged.” (Durkheim:1982:171)

“In fact, what has made certain geographical features of the land become totems is that a mythical ancestor is supposed to have stopped there or to have performed some act of his legendary life there. But at the same time, these ancestors are represented in the myths as themselves belonging to clans which had perfectly regular totems, that is to say, ones taken from the animal or vegetable kingdoms. Therefore, the totemic names thus commemorating the acts and performances of these heroes cannot be primitive; they belong to a form of totemism that is already derived and deviated. It is even permissible to ask if the meteorological totems have not a similar origin; for the sun, the moon, and the stars are frequently identified with the ancestors of the mythological epoch….

Under the influence of diverse causes and by the very development of mythological thought, the collective and impersonal totem became effaced before certain mythical personages who advanced to the first rank and became totems themselves.” (Durkheim:1982:105)

“The Australian tribes are far behind those of North America; yet Australia is the classic land of collective totemism. In the great majority of the tribes, it alone is found, while we do not know a single one where individual totemism alone is practised. This latter is found in a characteristic form only in an infinitesimal number of tribes. Even where it is met with it is generally in a rudimentary form. It is made up of individual and optional practices having no generality. Only magicians are acquainted with the art of creating mysterious relationships with species of animals to which they are not related by nature. Ordinary people do not enjoy this privilege. In America, on the contrary, the collective totem is in full decadence; in the societies of the North-west especially, its religious character is almost gone. Inversely, the individual totem plays a considerable role among these same peoples. A very great efficacy is attributed to it; it has become a real public institution. This is because it is the sign of a higher civilization.” (Durkheim:1982:178-9)

Here we see then that unlike the Aborigines who remained in the harsh scrubland and desert and preserved and egalitarian way of life, it was those that settled and therefore had the opportunity to gain more things, and also more children, (as they didn’t have to wait for each one to be able to walk i.e. no longer have to be carried, before conceiving again), that created the idea of mine and not yours, of desire and the will-to-power-for-itself or its peoples.

Within these peoples however, also came individual totemism, an evolving consciousness not found in Durkheim’s clans but found in those of North America. Indeed the difference between these two peoples when discovered by the West was that, unlike urban myth, the North Americans Indians did not believe that the land was the Great Spirits but in fact their own peoples. Not a kings or chiefs but their peoples. Individual totemism is a symptom of a dis-ease taking place on the ontological level of a people no longing being-in-Being but discovering the idea of self, as individuals. That is not to say of free-will in any way whatsoever, but of self-will over His-Will, not a persona that gets angry from a distance, not a nomina of a phenomena, but a harmony of existence unconcealed in form as being/Being.

What we witness with the advent of possessions is the idea of possession itself.

Ancestors can possess a land with their bodily remains. Burial becomes a practice ontologically focused upon the being-for-itself and his consequent rights. Blood becomes a sacrifice of one’s own power, and not a release of the Great Spirits.

What we are witnessing in fact by the idea of individual totemism, individuality, is the idea of an ontological creation of a way of perceiving another consciousness being, whose perception of the world sounds something like, “What can you do for me?” whenever it looks at something*

*What is worth considering however in the above phrase is not so much the fact that every being-for-itself is thinking that same thing, it is what happens when every one looks at you like that, and not as being-in-Being universally, meaning uni-spatially and uni-temporally, states, “We are being-in-Being.” Another way of looking is not that the man is cultivating wheat for himself, but that wheat is cultivating man for its-self. How unsuccessful would a grain been that cannot shed its seeds to grow new ones? Not very, yet it has harnessed man to a life of toil, harvesting and spreading them for it across the entire globe each year. Have we not, from one perspective, been enslaved, nay, ‘hooked’, upon a plant? See the nature of the grasshopper and the locust.

What exactly happened then in order for villages of peace and equality to turn into the forms of civilization that we know today, where war and inequality is the rule of thumb of civilization. To conclude this chapter we will look at the first resultant step from individual totemism. Kinship, and family.

Divide and Conquer- The Sociological changes affected to instigate a system of being-for-Others

“But Brahma stubbornly refuses to take the journey towards Purusha [the inner subjective- the magic horse]. He is determined to find identity and meaning through Prakriti alone. Brahma divides subjective reality into two parts: what belongs to him and what does not belong to him. Property is thus created. It is humankind’s greatest delusion through which humanity seeks to generate meaning and identity.

Animals have territory but humans create property. Territory is held on to by brute force and cunning; it cannot be inherited; it enables animals to survive. Property on the other hand, is created by man-made rules; take away the rules and there is no property. Rules also govern relationships in culture, creating families to whom property can be bequeathed. Neither wealth nor family is a natural phenomenon, both are cultural constructions, hence need to be codified and enforced…

Through the idea of property Brahma hopes to outsmart Yama (death). A human being can die but his property and his family can outlive him.” (Pattanaik:2011:49-51)

With the arrival of the settler, we have seen that the will of the settler changed the truth of existence, from one of being-in-Being, to one of being-for-itself. In other words, we have seen the open-ness of the sphere of Nature become closed and protected into a sphere of social village life inside a physical territory, i.e. outside of the Garden of Eden.

As Heidegger cites above, there is truth and untruth, that is concealed truth of the nature of an object, in this case, the concealed nature of man in a land of plenty, had been couched within-side the ‘being-in-Being’ man due to a landscape of poor pickings up until the Last Glacial Maximum, that is for hundreds of thousands of years. But once abundance came, around 12,000 years ago, then humans began to find within them a new series of natures, based around the idea of being-for-itself. Natures such as being highly social, sexual, or greedy, or seeking knowledge for power, etc, etc.

This movement towards Civilization is a clearing in the woods of being-in-Being, from which to see the trees, the nature, of our existence, but perceived, however fictitiously, as separate from that existence, now that we are aware ontologically, on a conscious level, of our separateness from God. We have become our own individual totem to worship.  Heideggers ‘Clearing of openness and establishment in the Open’ that co-exist as ‘the same single nature of the happening of truth.’ Has now another sense of Open as meaning, ‘the man in the circle’ of his village, nominally therefore against the outer world. This new clearing is historical in every way, for it is the history of the settlers, who by settling revealed the nature of this new type of self, and hence created its own philosophy of history. It is in the Epic of Gilgamesh, that myths change to legends, where stories of the gods, turn into stories revolving around an actual reigning Sumerian King Gilgamesh as they are written down and combined with the oral tradition of The Flood, that must have been a global myth as we saw. With Civilization, it becomes enclosed within the Sumerian Circle, and on to the Greeks, and the Jews, etc, as we saw each of them declare their version of the truth, of the urgrund upon which their perspective they chose to make their stand, to under-stand.

In like manner today so has science created a clearing from which to view the Open and hence tell ‘its’ (being-for-itself) story and witness the subsequent natures that arise in humans-being, as chemicals and physics. As is hunter-gathering, as is religion, as is philosophy, and each gives birth to it’s own truth and it’s subsequent method of work, but as such, it can never be the whole truth and nothing but the truth, merely a willed Clearing in the Open circle of the infinite possibilities that is truth or God, depending on your place in the forest and the path you have walked in your life’s work, i.e. they are willed into existence through the imagined perspective, just like magic, in an inner world of infinite inner natures.

Once this Clearing, in which you stand has been made, then the subsequent natures from that perspective are revealed and framed in language by being ‘named’:

“What is here called figure, Gestalt, is always to be thought in terms of the particular placing (Stellen) and framing or framework (Ge–stell) as which the work occurs when it sets itself up and sets itself forth.

In the creation of a work, the conflict, as rift, must be set back into the earth, and the earth itself must be set forth and used as the self-closing factor.” (Heidegger:1971:64)

“The willing here referred to, which neither merely applies knowledge nor decides beforehand, is thought of in terms of the basic experience of thinking in Being and Time. Knowing that remains a willing, and willing that remains a knowing, is the existing human being’s entrance into and compliance with the unconcealedness of Being. The resoluteness intended in Being and Time is not the deliberate action of a subject, but the opening up of a human being, out of its captivity in that which is, to the openness of Being. However, in existence, man does not proceed from some inside to some outside; rather, the nature of Existenz, is out-standing standing-within the essential sunderance of the clearing of beings.” (Heidegger:1971:67)

“The answer to the question, like every genuine answer, is only the final result of the last step in a long series of questions. Each answer remains in force as an answer only as long as it is rooted in questioning.” (Heidegger:1971:70-1)

“To see this, only the right concept of language is needed. In the current view, language is held to be a kind of communication. It serves for verbal exchange and agreement, and in general for communicating. But language is not only and not primarily an audible and written expression of what is to be communicated. It not only puts forth in words and statements what is overtly or covertly intended to be communicated; language alone brings what is, as something that is, into the Open for the first time. Where there is no language, as in the being of stone, plant, and animal, there is also no openness of what is, and consequently no openness either of that which is not of the empty.

Language, by naming beings for the first time, first brings beings to word and to appearance. Only this naming nominates beings to their being from out of their being. Such saying is a projecting of the clearing, in which announcement is made of what it is that beings came into the Open as.” (Heidegger:1971:73)

“As thinking beings we think back, of course, to the fact that the Being of beings has from the beginning been thought of with regard to the orbiting. But we think of this spherical aspect of Being too loosely, and always only on the surface, unless we have already asked and learned how the Being of beings occurs initially. The eon, being, of the eonta, beings as a whole, is called the hen, the unifying One. But what is this encircling unifying as a fundamental trait of being? What does Being mean? Eon, “in being”, signifies present, and indeed present in the unconcealed. But in presence there is concealed the bringing on of unconcealedness which lets the present beings occur as such. But only Presence itself it truly present- Presence which is everywhere as the Same in its own center and, as such, is the sphere. The spherical does not consist in a circuit which then embraces, but in the unconcealing center that, lightening, safeguards present beings. The sphericity of the unifying, and the unifying itself, have the character of unconcealing lightening, within which present beings can be present.

This is why Parmenides (Fragment VIII, 42) calls the eon, the presence of what is present, the eukuklos sphaire. This well-rounded sphere is to be thought of as the Being of beings, in the sense of the unconcealing-lightening unifying. This unifier, uniting everywhere in this manner, prompts us to call it the lightening shell, which precisely does not embrace since it uncovers and reveals, but which itself releases, lightening, into Presence. We must never represent this sphere of Being and its sphericity as an object. Must we then present it as a nonobject? No; that would be a mere flight to a manner of speaking. The spherical must be thought by way of the nature of primal Being in the sense of unconcealing Presence.” (Heidegger:1971:123)

In a letter from Muzot dated August 11, 1924, Rilke writes:

‘However vast the “outer space” may be, yet with all its sidereal distances it hardly bear comparison with the dimensions, with the depth dimension of our inner being, which does not even need the spaciousness of the universe to be within itself almost unfathomable. Thus, if the dead, if those who are to come, need an abode, what refuge could be more agreeable and appointed for them than this imaginary space? To me it seems more and more as though our customary consciousness lives on the tip of a pyramid whose base within us (and in a certain way beneath us) widens out so fully that the farther we find ourselves able to descend into it, the more generally we appear to be merged into those things that, independent of time and space, are given in our earthly, in the widest sense worldly, existence.’ “(Heidegger:1971:129)

What the above quotes hint towards is the change in language, and the creation of new language that is going to be required in order for a peoples being-for-itself, in order to exist. The old rituals, and practices, mores and ethics, are not going to cohere such a group of peoples, and indeed will serve to remind them that they are not communing with God anymore. In fact, as we have seen, this is so well understood that sacrifice as communion becomes sacrifice as propitiation, walking and talking with God in his Garden become pilgrimage and prayer. The word pilgrim relates directly to the word agriculture- peregriner meaning to wander the land, ager meaning land, field. The word prayer comes from precarious, meaning ‘obtained by prayer,’ as well as, ‘doubtful’ In other words the prayers of the settlers who wandered their land, a land separate from Gods, asking for their work to be fulfilled not His.

As we have seen the definition of family changed in order to understand the concept anew, in order to understand the truth of Noah’s family as the race of Adam, as one peoples, so we must now change it back again to that which we are ‘familiar’ with. Namely, blood.

The first conceptual change of the being-for-itself, as we have seen, is a distance between the human and His God- wakan. From this distance comes the ontological concept of his body being his own, his own garment of skin to do with as he wills. This new spirit, this new nature, then claims the blood (the spirit energy) of his inner world, and hence of his literal physical blood. That is he claims birth-right, inheritance, and family loyalty over the rest of the group, who are not his blood. On a larger scale this ‘blood’ we call ethnicity or separate races of human-beings.

Why do we do this? Why do we choose such a story in order to cohere a group to us over another? The answer is in the question.

“Most important of all for the long-term evolution of the world economy were the changes in social organization that resulted from the establishment of settled agriculture. The previous communal social order was steadily replaced by a kin-ordered system that laid the basis for a new, stratified social structure. Kin groups emerged as a ‘natural’ way of assigning rights over resources, and organizing the production and storage of food, but they also generated new social institutions to deal with the ownership of property and the formal exchange of goods.

The increased volume and reliability of food supplies allowed much higher population densities and encouraged the proliferation of settled agricultural villages. Together with the new social institutions of kin-ordered societies, this, in turn, facilitated the development of non-agricultural crafts, such as pottery, weaving, jewellery and weaponry. Such specializations in their turn encouraged the beginnings of barter and trade between communities, sometimes over substantial distances.” (Knox et al:2003:121)

“Between these two types of unit, the one based on kinship and the other on common interest, there was a complex relationship. In illiterate societies few remember their ancestors five generations back, and to claim a common descent was a symbolic way of expressing a common interest, of giving it a strength it would not otherwise have. In some circumstances, however, there could be a conflict. A member of a kinship group called upon for help might not give it fully because it went against some other interest of personal relationship.

Beyond these more or less permanent minimal units there might be larger ones. All the villages of a district, or all the herding units of a grazing area, or even groups widely separated from each other, might think of themselves as belonging to a larger whole, a ‘fraction’ or ‘tribe’, which they would regard as differing from and standing in opposition to other similar groups. The existence and unity of the tribe were usually expressed in terms of descent from a common ancestor, but the precise way in which any fraction or family might be descended from the eponymous ancestor was not usually known, and the genealogies which were transmitted tended to be fictitious, and to be altered and manipulated from time to time in order to express changing relationships between the different units. Even if they were fictitious, however, they could acquire a force and strength by intermarriage within the group.

The tribe was first of all a name which existed in the minds of those who claimed to be linked with each other. It had a potential influence over their actions; for example, where there was a common danger from outside, or in times of large-scale migration. It could have a corporate spirit (‘asabiyya) which would lead its members to help each other in time of need. Those who shared a name shared also a belief in a hierarchy of honour. In the desert, the camel-breeding nomads regarded themselves as the most honourable, because their life was the freest and the least restrained by external authority.”(Hourani:1991:106-7)

“The power of such leaders and families varied across a wide spectrum. At one extreme stood leaders (shaykhs) of nomadic pastoral tribes, who had little effective power except that which was given them by their reputation in the public opinion of the group. Unless they could establish themselves in a town and become rulers of another kind they had no power of enforcement, only that of attraction, so that nomadic tribes could grow or diminish, depending on the success or failure of the leading family; followers might join or leave them, although this process might be concealed by the fabrication of genealogies, so that those who joined the group would appear as if they had always belonged to it.” (Hourani:1991:108)

“The family extended kinship groups often operate economic functions for their own benefit and such ties are a major basis for labour recruitment. Ascribed systems of social stratification focus primarily on those aspects of human experience which centre on kinship, gender, ethnicity and territorial locality. Life chances depend upon the status accorded by birth into a particular family or tribe. Under a simple form of economic organization, for example subsistence agriculture of household industry, there is little differentiation between economic roles and family roles. Pre-modern societies fuse social and political integration with kinship position, control of land, chieftainship or powerful culturally significant groups. Often peoples’ sense of self is bound up in the actualities of blood, race, language, locality, religion and tradition (Geertz 1967:168). According to one theorist, these deep-rooted sentiments stem from the feeling that, whatever may be the monetary economic advantages of the larger sphere, ultimate security, not necessarily dominated by economic forces, exists and persists within the village orbit:

‘Here there are always kinsmen and people’s of one’s own blood to whom the peasant may turn. Here is the plot of land enduring through generations. Here is the familiar world which, through lore and tradition, has nourished the peasant since childhood. Here within the village is an emotional form of security not found elsewhere.’ (Fuller 1969: 116)

These primordial instincts can be powerful and resistant to change. As Max Weber claimed, social action includes both ‘failure to act and passive acquiescence’ (Roth and Wittich 1968:22).

When industrialization occurs only in villages or when villages are built around paternalistic industrial enterprises ‘many ties of community and kinship can be maintained under industrial conditions’ (Smelser 1966:35). The difficulty with such communities is that political authority is coterminous with kinship relations and, therefore, can inhibit reform and development.” (Deegan:2009:10-11)

“There is a strong relationship between families and social capital. Families in the first instance constitute the most basic cooperative social unit, one in which mothers and fathers need to work together to create, socialize, and educate children. James Coleman, the sociologist who was most responsible for bringing the term social capital into broader use, defined it as “the set of resources that inhere in family relations and in community social organizations and that are useful for the cognitive or social development of a child.” Cooperation within families is facilitated by the fact that it is underpinned by biology: all animals favour kin and are willing to undertake large one-way transfers of resources to genetic relatives, in ways that vastly increase the chances of reciprocity and long-term cooperation within kin groups.  The propensity of family members to cooperate facilitates not just raising of children, but other sorts of social activities like running businesses. Even in today’s world of large, impersonal, bureaucratic corporations, small businesses, most of them run by families, account for as much as 20 percent of private sector employment in the American economy and are critical as incubators of new technologies and business practices.

On the other hand, excessive dependence on kinship ties can produce negative consequences for the broader society outside the family. Many cultures, from China to Southern Europe to Latin America, promote what is called “familism”, that is, the elevation of family and kinship ties above other sorts of social obligations. This produces a two-level morality, wherein the level of moral obligation to public authority of all sorts is weaker than that reserved for kin. In the case of a culture like that of China, familism is promoted by the prevailing ethical system, Confucianism. In this type of culture, there is a high degree of social capital inside families but a relative paucity of social capital outside kinship.” (Fukayama:1999:36-7)

“A popular saying in Brazil is that there is one morality for the family and another for the street.” (Fukayama:1999:241)

In other words, as communities started to gain, so people wanted to place themselves above, others, in order to gain rights to more of the gain than others. The real power behind this was of course having more people cohered to that story, that belief system, that bound them to their leader and hence had more power with which to enforce its story.

Family is the first successful story to emerge from the ontological perspective of the being-for-itself, because of the inner world of blood that allows for the Love of family as the Magic Horse, and the outer world of experience of that person and the powers of cohering through trade and labour etc,- making iron fish.

The most important thing to realise about the concept of family is one of ‘Social Capital’ over ‘Capital’.

Social Capital is value that can be turned to ones use from the inner world, from the world of story, namely in this case, family bonds. Capital is value that can be turned to ones use from the outer world. And so if I choose a piece of land that looks no different from any other, but then use my social capital to get family members to work it for me, over anothers land, then I have transformed my social capital into capital as a rich piece of land from a wilderness, and can grow wheat, etc, etc,. Capital, being by its nature, made of physical material things, cannot be infinitely given, they have a natural boundary innate in the nature of a material thing. Social Capital however, such as friendship, love, sacrifice, equality, safety, belonging, etc, are in fact infinite. I can love my partner, my daughter, my parents, my friends, my God, and give out this love without it being depleted, in fact,  quite the opposite as by giving it away I find it being filled over afresh by the nature of the giving.

This therefore is social capitals infinite nature, and its natural reward. This is being-in-Being, as one race of Adam before Cain, and it felt like Paradise according to the gossip

Capital on the other hand has no natural nature. It is a construct of ownership, and subsequently of inequality, innately required by the finite nature of matter, and so cannot be given freely to all, but must be divided, equally or unequally, according to the will of the story-teller at the top of the group.

Another consequence of Capital, but not so with Social Capital, is that it can be taken as well as given. We require a law of property rights, because it can be taken by force from another, but we do not require love rights, as it is impossible to take someone’s love or to make someone give love to you.

As we have seen above, family is the first system that divides the whole peoples into those who have and those who do not, as soon as there is something to have due to the nature of a settlement, that is something to be settled (therefore the subsequent requirement of the legal interpretation of this same language-word). And that this system, still holds sway over much of the organisation of peoples in the world today. Today we call familism- nepotism, and the ‘antidote’ to this form of division, that trumps a blood-line, we call an, ‘education’ by society- ‘nationalism’, facilitated by the ‘parents’ of that society. “We will become a nation of scientists”, said the Prime Minister of England just recently.

As we have seen then, behind the story of a closed-ness (for instance family or nation) lies the ontological decision of us over them, of ‘what can you do for me’ over ‘being-in-Him’, as the work of one’s life choice, its perspective, and its subsequent experiences.

In other words, what we have witnessed is the cause of the effect, namely of babies being thrown down the river. It turns out that the great brown river as described by Eliot above became seen through the ontological consciousness of being-for-itself, which requires, by the nature of settling to irrigate wheat- capital, namely of land, requiring the social capital of family, but more family means more land to be cultivated, which means over-population. It is the cause of the effect where instead of abundance for all, comes famine for some, all motivated by this individual will to gain, over another,  to gain a better place in the river of social life, – The Leviathan.

We leave this chapter then at around 5,000 B.C. Man has become globally settled and familism rules the sociological structure of ontologically being-for-itself mankind. The hunter-gatherers are all but gone to the historical journey that we are about to undertake through ‘civilization’ until they are rediscovered in 1492 (the discovery of America) and 1770 (the discovery of Australia). However we now know what ‘civilization’ means at least in terms of what we have lost by gaining it. It is a long list of words, such as freedom, equality, abundance, universal brotherhood, etc, etc, but I feel that it is a longer and more sublime set of states, perhaps super-states, containing experiences, thoughts, feelings, perspectives, understanding, knowledge, mystery, etc, etc, and ultimately answers, that we are eternally blind to ontologically unless we change

As we shall see below, familism, whilst still reigning as a structure of the world today, nearly 20,000 thousand years later, it is in fact only a strong form of organisation up unto a certain amount of peoples, whereupon its cohesive powers begin to subdivide and fall apart.

It is these new structures, built upon an ontological perspective created by the being-for-itself in a direct cause and effect relationship, that gave birth to the name  ‘Civilization’ to which we shall now look.

The thoughts that I wish to leave us all with in this chapter are those of Steven Mithen, our Ice Age expert throughout this chapter, and his perspective on his character John Lubbock and modern day man:

“In each continent he visited, John Lubbock stepped into the history of the world at 20,000 BC and left it 15,000 years later. His travels have enabled me to write a narrative about human lives rather than a catalogue of archaeological finds. When they began, it was a time of global economic equality when everyone lived as hunter-gatherers in a world of extensive ice sheets, tundra and desert. By their end, many were living as farmers. Some people grew wheat and barley, others rice, taro and squash. Some lived by herding animals, some by trade and others by making crafts. A world of temporary campsites had been replaced by one with villages and towns, a world with mammoths had been transformed into one with domesticated sheep and cattle. The path towards the huge global disparities of wealth with which we live today had been set.

Many hunter-gatherers survived but their fate had been sealed when agriculture began. The new farmers, eager for land and trade, continued to disrupt hunter-gatherer lives. They were followed by warlords and then nation-states building empires in every corner of the world. Some hunter-gatherers survived until recent times by living in those places where farmers could not go; the Inuit, the Kalahari Bushmen and the Desert Aborigines. But even these communities are no more, effectively killed off by the twentieth century.

It is no coincidence that human history reached a turning point during a period of global warming. All communities were faced with the impact of environmental change- sudden catastrophic floods, the gradual loss of coastal lands, the failure of migratory herds, the spread of thick and often unproductive forest. And along with the problems, all communities faced new opportunities to develop, discover, explore and colonise.

The consequences were different to each continent. Western Asia, for example, happened to have a suite of wild plants suited to cultivation. North America had wild animals that were liable to extinction once human hunting combined with climate change. Africa was so well endowed with edible wild plants that this cultivation had not even begun there by 5000 BC. Australia likewise. Europe lacked its own potential cultivars but it had the soils and climate in which the cereals and animals domesticated elsewhere would thrive. South America had its vicuña and North America its wild cattle; Mexico its squash and teosinte, the Yangtze valley its wild rice.” (Mithen:2003:504)

“While the history of each continent was unique, and has required its own specific mix of narrative and causal argument to explain, some forces of historical change were common to all. Global warming was one. Human population growth was another; this occurred throughout the world as people were freed from the high mortality imposed by ice-age droughts and cold and required new forms of society and economy irrespective of environmental change.

A third common factor was species identity. All people in all continents at 20,000 BC were members of Homo sapiens, a single and recently evolved species of humankind. As such, they shared the same biological drives and the means to achieve them- a mix of co-operation and competition, sharing and selfishness, virtue and violence. All possessed a peculiar type of mind, one with an insatiable curiosity and new-found creativity. This mind- one quite different to that of any human ancestor- enabled people to colonise, to invent, to solve problems, and to create new religious beliefs and styles of art. Without it, there would have been no human history but merely a continuous cycle of the adaptation and readaptation to environmental change that had begun several million years ago when our genus first evolved. Instead, all of these common factors combined, engaging with each continent’s unique conditions and a succession of historical contingencies and events, to create a world that included farmers, towns, craftsmen and traders. Indeed, by 5000 BC there was very little left for later history to do; all the groundwork for the modern world had been completed. History had simply to unfold until it reached the present day.” (Mithen:2003:505-6)

“Victorian John Lubbock had valued science, not only for its role in the nascent discipline of archaeology which he himself helped to create, but as one of the great ‘blessings of civilisation’ that farming and industry had delivered to humankind. He lavished praise on the telescope and the microscope as having improved the eye and provided ‘fresh sources of interest’ for enquiring minds. He praised the printing press, which ‘brings all who choose into communion with… the thoughts of a Shakespeare or a Tennyson, the discoveries of a Newton or a Darwin… the common property of mankind.’ He cited chloroform to illustrate how the progress of science has diminished the extent of human suffering.’

We have no cause to challenge such claims- the idea of living permanently in a hunter-gatherer world without books and medicines is quite appalling. But when one sits upon a hilltop in southern England and looks across the devastated landscape that modern farming has delivered, one must be less sanguine than Victorian John Lubbock. At 12,500 BC southern England had been an ice-age tundra frequented by reindeer, snowy owl and arctic hare; by 8000 BC it was smothered in lush woodland within which red deer browsed and wild boar rooted on the forest floor. Even in 1950 it had been a richly textured landscape of woods and fields, of ponds, paths and pastures. But in 2003, there are vast expanses of southern England where hardly a tree or bush exists, from which wild animals and birds have been almost entirely expelled by the industry of modern farming. There are very few hills from which traffic below and aeroplanes above cannot be heard.

Its polluted air requires one to ponder the circularity of history. Farming and industry were products of a history brought about by global warming. Now they themselves are the cause of renewed global warming that has already had a sizeable impact upon the world and will condition that future history of mankind. Mass deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels have increased the level of greenhouse gases and planet earth is becoming warmer than nature intends. During the last few decades, glaciers on all continents have receded, snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has reduced dramatically, and the Antarctic ice shelf is on the verge of collapse….

11: The next century of human-made global warming

The next century of human-made global warming is predicted to be far less extreme than that which occurred at 9600 BC.

At the end of the Younger Dryas, mean global temperature had risen by7°C in fifty years, whereas the predicted rise for the next hundred years is less than 3°C; the end of the last ice age led to a 120-metre increase in sea level, whereas that predicted for the next fifty years is a paltry 32 centimetres at most, rising to 88 centimetres by AD 2100. However, while future global warming may be less extreme than that of 9600 BC, the modern world is in a far more fragile state owing to environmental pollution and the resource requirements of six billion people. As a consequence, the threats of human communities and natural ecosystems are far more severe than those of prehistoric times. When the vast low-lying regions of the ice-age world were flooded, many were uninhabited; those settlements that did exist- such as the 7000- BC town of Atlit-Yam on the Israeli coast- housed a few hundred people at most. Today, 120 million people live in the delta regions of Bangladesh, six million of them on land less than one metre above current sea level, and 30 million below three metres. Rising sea level will be accompanied by devastating storms and the penetration of salt into their freshwater supplies.

When global warming made the Tasmanian valleys uninhabitable after 14,000 BC and the Sahara Desert after 5000 BC, their people found other places to live- the world was still quite empty of human settlement. But where will the new displaced populations be able to go? Those from the flooded delta regions; those from inundated low-lying islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans; those from Sub-Saharan Africa where the frequency and intensity of drought will become too severe to be relieved by any amount of international aid?

The global warming that brought the ice age to its close created localities of abundant resources which people claimed as their own and were prepared to fight for, such as in the Nile valley at 14,000 BC, northern Australia at 6000 BC and southern Scandinavia at 5000 BC. Such conflicts were trivial affairs in comparison to those that we know today; but our modern world seems destined to become yet more violent as the impacts of renewed global warming are felt.

Shortage of fresh water will become a major source of conflict. Its supplies are already under pressure will become severe with the predicted reductions of rainfall and increased evaporation in the key catchments of the world. Water will eclipse land, politics and even religion as the source of dispute between Middle Eastern states- a development that has already begun. Moreover, global warming will likely exacerbate the existing extremes of wealth and poverty in world; agricultural productivity in the developed nations is predicted to increase, while the reverse will happen in the developing world. Global terrorism is bound to thrive.

It is ironic that the continent that became habitable as a consequence of the natural global warming after the LGM, is now the one doing most to make vast areas of the world uninhabitable for others by its excessive contribution to the cause of renewed global warming: America is the main polluter of our skies.” (Mithen:2003:507-8)

“John Lubbock looks beyond the traffic at the countryside of southern England. It is bleak. Much of the Early Holocene oak woodland had already been cleared in prehistoric times. But this region only took on its now desolate appearance during the last fifty years: ponds were left to silt up and soon disappeared, copses were removed, hedges grubbed-up, small farms replaced by factory-like enterprises that specialised in growing wheat and harvesting subsidies. Today’s prairie-like landscape suffers from soil erosion and has been polluted by an excess of fertiliser and pesticide. As with so much other farmland in the Western world, it produces far more food than we require. And yet we live within a world blighted by hunger. Eight hundred million people live close to starvation- a number predicted to increase with the new global warming. Over the next hundred years, an additional 80 million people are likely to become hungry and malnourished because of environmental change. Some believe that the only way to end world hunger is by genetically engineering existing crops to increase their yields, improve their pest resistance and make them tolerant of salt-ridden soils.” (Mithen:2003:508-9)

“This may indeed be the case but archaeology has given us another, and perhaps far more important, lesson from the past. As soon as farming had begun, the surpluses arising from the new, high-yielding genetic variants had come under centralised control, as is evident from the buildings at Jerf el Ahmar in 9300 BC, Beidha in 8200 BC and Kom K in 5000 BC. From the very start of farming, food had become a commodity, a source of wealth and power for those who controlled its distribution. And so one should suspect that the already existing inequities of global food supply are likely to become enhanced by the creation of yet more genetic variants with even higher yields. Those who guarded the grain silos in prehistoric times are being reincarnated as the biotechnology companies who patent such plants and distribute their seed.

The defiled landscape of southern England, and that of so many other regions of the modern world, poses another question about biotechnology. As has been evident from this history, when archaeologists study a past environment they invariably find a far greater diversity of plants and animals than are known in the same locality today. The flora of the forest steppe in the vicinity of Ohalo at 20,000 BC and the fauna of North America at 15,000 BC are just the most obvious examples of a far richer and more varied natural world in prehistoric times. Biodiversity was reduced by climate change- the increasing zonation of vegetation types in northern latitudes favoured the few specialists over the many generalists. But the consequences of farming for biodiversity have been far more severe, as can be appreciated by either imagining the devastated landscape around ‘Ain Ghazal in 6500 BC or by looking at that of any intensively farmed region of the world today.” (Mithen:2003:509-10)

“So what about the ‘blessings of civilization?’ Are the delights of the microscope, the thoughts of Darwin, the poetry of Shakespeare and the advances of medical science, sufficient recompense for the environmental degradation, social conflict and human suffering that ultimately derive from the origin of farming 10,000 years ago? Would it have been better if we had remained as Stone Age hunter-gatherers forsaking the development of literature and science? The answer is in our hands; it depends upon what we choose to do during the next hundred years of global warming- our future, that of planet earth, remains within our control. All we can know for sure is that by the end of the twenty-first century the world will be quite different from how it is today- perhaps as different as the world of 5000 BC was from that of the LGM.” (Mithen:2003:510)