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Aug 14View Source{Paul Shepard's 'Coming home to the Pleistocene' is a book critical of the Hebraic tyranny of linearity of historical consciousness, while also critical of the I.E. warrior and sacrificial culture, written from an anarcho-primitivist perspective it considers agriculture as a violence that ended the 'game' and the natural connect of man, animal, ecology.}
"The philosophy of the hunt tells us that games are infinite. Life goes on and nature provides the essential structure in a rule-regulated cosmos. The ecology and behav-ior of the "game" animals become the metaphorical model of human society, the rules of one's own biological being, and the world's working or playing. Winning and losing are transient phenomenasome small part of the whole. Opponents are essential. One loves one's enemies. To destroy them in any final sense is unthinkable. Somehow that sense of perpetual play and the brotherhood of endless but leisurely opposition has faded with our primal ancestors, its place taken by the need for complete victory, a final solution. The authoritarian decree, reiterated again and again, has been the death of the others, the defeat of nature, of germs, of wolves. It is all the same, an obsession with total supremacy, as though the objective were to obliterate all defeated foes, all pests, all disease, all opponents, all the Others. To end the game. Sacrifice does accommodate the "problem of death," as Campbell claims, but it does so merely by domesticating death. Sacrifice reverses the hunter/gather idea of gifting in which humans are guests in life who receive according to their due; in its stead it substitutes offerings as a kind of barter with blood as currency. Agriculturedomestic crops, for exampleis characterized by glorious abundance or desperation. Harmony with the world is reckoned in terms of mastery over parasites and animal competitors by enlarging the scope of the simplification of ecosystems and, ceremonially, by sacrificial rites of negotiation with gods with human faces. Ostensibly a participation with the cosmos, the sacrificial ceremony is only a thinly disguised bribe. In this "New Age" in search of messianic solutions to modern problems and the recovery of a lost world, we have uncritically embraced the shaman as visionary, medicine man, guru, ecologist, cosmologist, and wise man or woman and accepted the model of shamanistic thinking as ecological and nature-friendly. Spontaneous healers, usually women, have always accompanied humans. But the shaman is a latecomerpart of the agricultural fear of curses and evil spirits, the use of intoxicants, the spread of male social dominance, the exploitation of domestic animals (especially the horse) as human helpers, and the shift of sedentary peoples toward spectatorship rather than egalitarian participation. Among foraging peoples, healers appeared spontaneously and did not necessarily hold other powers, sponsor séances, go on vision quests, do magic tricks, or wield political influenceall of which were true of the later shaman. Esther Jacobson, a scholar on Scytho-Siberian cultures, has shown how shamanism emerged as a late expression of what separates us from nature and marked the decline of the great cults of the bear and the mountain. The veneration of terrain featureslake, cliff, river, mountain, and cavethat attached people spiritually to place reflects "archaic traditions which go back before shamanism," which became a male-dominated political practice. Also lost were "contrasting relationships of bear/woman and bear/man" that carried "totemic inderstanding of tribal origins." The shift away from affirmation and participation in palingenesisthe round of lifeto an attempt to control it can be seen in the deterioration of the ceremony of the slain bear as it was influenced by the outreaches of agrarian thought. In primal form the festival was an egalitarian, ad hoc, celebration of the wild kill as a symbolic acceptance of the gift of food. Modern tribal ceremonies of the bear cult have all but disappeared or have been altered, as in the Gilyak and Ainu of East Asia who kill a reared bear, scheduling the death of an animal under human controlsurely not a hunt. The ancient ceremony degenerated to a shaman-centered spectacle of the sacrifice of a captive bear, deflecting evil from the village. The animal cannot be the focus of veneration and the object of sacrifice at the same time. ...The Indo-European shamanistic heritage is evident among the Greeks in the hero Perseusthe Greek betrayer of the feminine traditions of oracular and collective intuition from which he originally came, hypocritically wearing the shaman's gear, wallet, cap, sandals, and shield, "in the cause of descent from father to son; of politics, not religion; of ratio- nality, not divination or possession." The original visionary healing by individual women or men had been associated with the flight of birds who came to the healer. The professional shamanism that succeeded it was most fully developed by Indo-European pastoralists who reconceived the shaman's flight on the horse. The shaman, who had earlier departed the village by climbing a central tree or pole and taking flight, or who rode the drum, would instead leave by visionary horseback. Riding a swift horse was the nearest experience of humans to intoxica-tion and flightto that ancient vertiginous excitement of the swaying tree. The mythical winged horse emerged as Pegasus sprang from the neck of the Medusa, decapitated by Perseus. As Medusa, the old goddess with her snakes, faded, her sacred horses were stolen by warrior heroes. "The wild and powerful thrust" of the "hoofs and beating wings" of Pegasus and the other winged horses of legend, says Butterworth, "imperatively demands the means and the knowledge" of control. WHEREVER THE INDO-EUROPEANS encountered indigenous cults, the victory over them was mythologized as a battle between a sky god and earth dragons such as the Greek Titans and Typhons. As it happened, the Indo- European incursions into the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates corresponded with the zenith of great city-states such as Ur, Kish, and Lagash. These cities grew up from the rich monocultures of the riverine flood-plains of the Near East. Their divine kings were seen in the sheep/goat idiom, an image of the benign pastorality in a mixed agriculture, as "the shepherd at the head of his flock," the defender against predatory enemies represented and then symbolized by the lion. Such autocracies had already begun the ideological move away from deified maternity, but not so far that the semidivine regents gave up the stories of being suckled at the breast of a goddess, or that priestesses did not still rule temples dedicated to one or another goddess of fertility. The sacred nuptials central to ancient Mesopotamian agrarian renewal rites, seen as necessary to the success of the crops upon which a growing population depended, declined in mythic force just as the impact of Indo- European cattle-keeper invasions and three thousand years of soil loss and deterioration of vegetation, aggravated by climatic changes, made itself felt. The cutting of forests for construction and for fuel needed to heat, cook, make quicklime, and smelt metals, the destabilization of the water and soil by deforestation and overgrazing, and the salination of croplands may at first have intensified the worship of the sky god, Tamuz, son of the earth and water, who was dependent upon his mother/consort, the divine restorer of the seasons, to whom he looked for "release." Disorder in the basic ecosystems of the watershed and its life did not bode well for political or religious stability. The plant motif, embodied as seasonal renewal, with its emphasis on fertility in the earth, gradually lost ground to a heroic style shaped after the adventuring warrior and competitive pastoral society with its appeal to a distant sky god, instead of the village spirits, and the celebration of theft and recovery by countertheft, paradigmatic control over animals and women, and disdain for the earth. The sky god was imagined as a weather god, an outsider, a messiah who rides in to save all the people much as raiding parties of kinfolk or friends galloped in to rescue the stolen cattle or smite the enemy. Assistance in time of crisis or to augment a raid grew from pastoral society, but it became a major metaphor and mythic story by Hebrew times. The dream of the messianic savior became the Christian redeemer."
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