Why we invented monsters

December 12th, 2011

Why we invented monsters:

[T]he dragon … in one guise or another, appears in almost every mythology and has been the subject of many books and countless articles. Perhaps the most intriguing of these examinations is “An Instinct for Dragons” by anthropologist David E. Jones. Jones argues that the image of the dragon is composed of the salient body parts of three predator species that hunted and killed our tree-dwelling African primate ancestors for about sixty million years. The three predators are the leopard, the python, and the eagle.

According to Jones (what follows is a condensed summary of a complex argument), ancient primates evolved alarm calls to identify each of the three predators, with each call triggering the defensive response appropriate to the nature of the attack mode of the specific predator. Jones calls this predator-recognition template the “snake/raptor/cat complex.” This complex is the source of what Jones refers to as the “ brain dragon.” The brain dragon emerged when our apelike ancestors left the trees to walk on the ground. rather suddenly, the relatively small brain of Australopithecus had to process a lot of information about many new forms of predators and develop new alarms calls and strategic responses to them. Faced with information overload, the brain of Australopithecus resorted to lumping information into manageable and memorable chunks. As a result, the cat, the snake, and the raptor were merged into a hybrid creature that had the salient predatory features of each: the face of a feline, the body of a snake, and the talons of a raptor. This is the hybrid “monster” that came to be known as the “dragon.”

Because the image combined features from three dominant predators, it could quickly send the neural message very dangerous animal. Indeed, the derivation of the word monster seems to acknowledge this ancient function. Monster comes from the Latin word monstrare, “to show,” and monere, “to warn.” Monsters are warning signs, reminding us of the many threatening creatures lurking in the environment eager to gobble us up.

Jones argues that the image of the dragon—the salient elements of which were already hardwired into the primate brain—became a “pattern” or “template” that could be passed on genetically as well as culturally. He spends a considerable amount of space demonstrating how this process could have worked, but the upshot is that the “ brain-dragon” was stored in the human mind for hundreds of thousands of years, where it lay dormant or lurked in the dreams of ancient humans, to be released during times of great communal anxiety. It was only with the development of language and art, Jones argues, that the image of the dragon could be given full expression and a greater semblance of reality. It could be said, then, that the dragon—like other monsters and mythic figures— is a product of the cognitive fluidity that underlies the mythic imagination. The archetype of the dragon gave form to the fears engendered by humanity’s developing ability to imagine all kinds of new dangers and threats.

Jones’s notion that the dragon is composed of tissue samples taken from real predators could account, as well, for the origin of other mythic monsters. The shape of the snake, for example, could furnish not only the body of the mythic dragon but the neck of the hydra; the beak of the raptor could replace the face of the big cat and also be combined with its paws. For example, the griffin has the body parts of a lion but the face and wings of an eagle. And so on. Whatever the particular form the monster may have taken within a specific geographical area, its essential features would clearly have identified it as a very dangerous creature even to those unfamiliar with local fauna. Monsters were used as a means of imbuing sacred or dangerous geographical areas with taboo and explaining the source and cause of lethal natural disasters, such as typhoons, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, and so on. But the basic function of the monster was to give fear a face, to graphically capture the dread that is bred into us by millions of years as a prey species that was stalked and sometimes eaten by huge and terrifying carnivores.

The “monsters” of the mythic imagination also inherited some of their DNA from the very real “monsters” created by Mother Nature herself. In ancient Australia (and perhaps in other areas of the Southeast), there was a flesh- eating lizard measuring up to thirty feet long and weighing two thousand pounds, almost “ten times the weight of its closest relative the ‘ora’ or Komodo dragon.” There were birds too huge to fly, four-legged animals that could walk at times on two legs, and carnivores that possessed both female and male genitals (as does the female hyena). In the nineteenth century, monster-lore scholar Charles Gould suggested that some monsters may reflect cultural memories of “a few cretaceous and early tertiary forms” that were thought to have gone extinct but that “struggled on” in isolated and remote areas of the world. This same claim is made today by some cryptozoologists.

Another fertile source of mythic monsters is the bone yard. It’s long been noted that the fossilized skeletons of long-extinct creatures from the age of dinosaurs contributed to the creation of mythic monsters. It was as far back as 1831 that Gould suggested that belief in monsters arose from the frequent discoveries of the remains of “monstrous amphibians.” Gould also pointed out that when the Chinese came across the skeletons of long-extinct dinosaurs, they referred to them as “dragon bones.” In the Carpathians, the bones of extinct cave bears also have been interpreted as the remains of dragons. The reptilian or serpentine characteristics given to many mythic monsters may reflect the fact that fossilized skeletons, often reduced to an undulating backbone and neck, look like a snake.

Compare the spinal kundalini energy as the “serpent power,” sympathetic-magically linked with the similarly undulating Milky Way—the path to the Pole Star, or stationary “hole in the sky,” through which one could climb out of the universe.

No one has done more to illuminate the relationship between fossils and mythmaking than Adrienne Mayor, who has documented hundreds of instances during the last two thousand five hundred years when fossil bones provided the scaffolding for elaborate mythmaking, as frightened people sought to give meaning to the startling animal remains they happened across. To cite just one example, the Thunder Bird of Native American mythology may have something to do with discoveries of Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons. “Someone who discovered a tyrannosaurid forelimb with its peculiar pair of claws, and perhaps with the elongated, birdlike shoulderblade, might well have identified the fossil as part of the skeleton of some mysterious bird.”

The mythologizing process probably did not start with the Greeks and Romans or even with the appearance of the modern brain. Homo erectus also must have tried to explain the frightful skulls and bones it came across. These remains must have been particularly terrifying since early humans could not have known that the remains belonged to carnivorous “monsters” long extinct. In fact, the hyper predator detection system of early humans would have prompted them to interpret the bones as the remains of creatures still alive and possibly lurking somewhere in the environment. The tens of millions of bones that accumulated ever since the first skeletal creatures swam in the sea provided our forebears with constant provocations to imagine the existence of monstrous predators.

Monsters were also created by dreams and reveries. According to medical anthropologist Alondra Oubre, “proto-humans” of the Early Pleistocene first discovered the emotional and psychological rewards of altering the normal chemistry of the brain. These altered states of consciousness enabled our ancestors to “unlock the doors” to the unconscious and to access its “unlimited reservoir of fantasia, hypnagogic imagery, day-dreaming, and creative ideation.” These counter-factual and counter-intuitive images and symbols were fabricated, necessarily, from the bits and pieces of daily life. The memories of these experiences were not stored as accurate snapshots but as somewhat distorted versions of that experience, reshaped, exaggerated, or diminished according to their emotional content. Oubre suggests that early humans engaged in these practices to escape their “anguishing existence in a prey-versus-predator world.” Admittedly, it would have been suicidal to “escape” from this world for too long or too often—to lose touch with the real threats that provoked the anxieties in the first place. But periodic escape, during rituals, would have been therapeutic, helping assuage fear and increase confidence.

These fear-management strategies, however, had ironic consequences. Among the salient experiences our ancient ancestors remembered and stored in their unconscious must have been life-threatening encounters with predators. Which means that during altered states, images of predators would have undergone further shaping, twisting, recombination, or hybridization. The upshot is that proto-humans were able to conjure up hybrid images of animals well before cognitive fluidity and mythmaking emerged during the Middle Paleolithic.

Think of ayahuasca users encountering “dragons” in their altered states: “Claudio Naranjo has noted that naive [i.e., expectation-less, unprimed] Westerners dosed with harmaline tended to have visions of snakes, as well as jungle cats and large birds of prey; imagery that is consistent with the cultural context of traditional ayahuasca use. He has proposed that these animals seen together comprise a ‘dragon’ symbol, which is produced through the ayahuasca alkaloids allowing one to experience kundalini energy (Naranjo 1987).”

The cross-section of the ayahuasca vine (Banisteriopsis Caapi), by the way, frequently looks strikingly similar to the pads on a cat’s/jaguar’s foot. (See esp. the photos at the bottom of this page for the vine, and here for the paw.) That alone, even without the fact that jaguars chew on b. caapi leaves, would have been enough for South American aboriginals to start experimenting with it—e.g., consuming it for its “cat power” associations—eventually stumbling into combining it with DMT-containing plants, as an MAO inhibitor.

Although proto-humans could not spin yarns about monsters, they may have been able to imagine them, and thus unintentionally add to their fears through the same processes they were using to escape their fears. Obviously we cannot know what proto-humans envisioned during consciousness-altering rituals, but we do know that during such states, humans with modern brains envision monsters. In several Native American cultures, visions often entail an encounter with powerful animal spirits….

We became efficient killers by watching and imitating efficient killers—which is to say that we “performed the predator” in more ways than one. Our ancestors studied predators, learned how to “read their minds” in order to predict their behavior, imitated their hunting behaviors and tactics in ritual and in the hunt, and eventually used the teeth and bones of predators to make weapons. Those who could most successfully imitate the hunting behaviors of predators had a better chance of surviving and passing on their genetic material than those who couldn’t.

Posted in Archetypes | 1 Comment »

The Book of Revelation: Prophecy and Politics

November 4th, 2011

The Book of Revelation: Prophecy and Politics:

The evidence suggests that John was a Jewish prophet. He was living in exile around the year 90 of the first century. We can’t understand this book until we understand that it was written in war time, or shortly after war. John was a refugee, apparently, from the Jewish war that had destroyed his home country, Judea, started, as you may know, in year 66 when Jews rebelled against the Roman Empire. The slogan of the war was, “In the name of God and our common liberty.” And four years later, in the year 70, 60,000 Roman troops stormed into Jerusalem and killed thousands of people….

John put his own cry of anguish in the mouth of people he said he saw standing under the throne of God. They were dead. They were standing there, the souls were crying out this cry: “Lord, how long? How long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood on the nations of the earth?”….

What John did in the Book of Revelation was draw on the cultural resources of his own people to create, if you like, anti-Roman propaganda. Especially, he drew on the writings of the classical prophets like Ezekiel and Daniel, Isaiah, because those prophets writing hundreds of years before John—he was immersed in their writings—had written many of them about 600 years earlier, about the time that Babylonian armies had destroyed and devastated the nation of Judea and the city of Jerusalem.

What the prophets did is, they took the most ancient version of the creation story—it’s not the one you find in Genesis. The most ancient creation story tells how the God of Israel had to fight a giant dragon. This is a Babylonian story. It goes back to the god Marduk. But they took the story about God fighting a dragon in the beginning of time, and they applied it to the crisis of the war. The prophet Jeremiah talked about how the king of Babylon is a beastly sea monster whom God spears and slaughters. The prophet Isaiah calls on God to wake up and fight against Israel’s foreign enemies. Isaiah pictures Israel’s enemies. It’s the Babylonian empire. He says, “That old serpent, the dragon, Leviathan, the dragon that lives in the sea.” Isaiah also pictured Israel’s foreign enemies as a rich and decadent whore.

When John of Patmos, who was steeped in these writings, asks, “How long is God going to allow evildoers to triumph over Israel?” he says Jesus told him what the earlier prophets had said, that God is about to come and finish the cosmic war he started in the beginning of time, and kill the dragon who embodies the forces of evil once and for all. John of Patmos triumphantly says that today’s Babylon, which is Rome, although it’s raging like Leviathan, is decadent as the whore, is about to fall as Rome triumphs.

Just a note that this Book of Revelation doesn’t contain things that many of its contemporary admirers claim to find. It doesn’t have anything about a rapture. It doesn’t have anything about a requirement that Jews become Christian. Although, for over a thousand five hundred years, John’s book has been in the New Testament, John had no anticipation of a New Testament, because his only scriptures were the Hebrew Bible. John regarded himself as a Jew who had found the Messiah. And would have been shocked to learn that his future readers regarded him as a Christian. As far as he was concerned, Christianity hadn’t yet been invented….

Although John was traveling in Asia some 20 years after Paul died, he met there many second generation followers of Paul who were spreading the apostle’s teaching all over Syria, Greece and Turkey. And teaching, they went further than Paul. They were saying, these gentiles were saying they were actually the true Jews, because Jesus had actually disinherited his chosen people.

That kind of teaching made Paul angry. And so he said, I don’t care if these converted gentiles say they are Jews, he said, they’re not. They’re lying. Instead of belonging to Israel, they belong to Satan’s synagogue. John could not have imagined what he would have regarded as the greatest identity theft of all time, that eventually gentile believers would not only call themselves Israel, but claim to be the sole rightful heirs of Israel’s legacy.

In retrospect, we can see that he stood on the cusp of an enormous change. This movement, which attracted few Jews within two to three generations after the death of Jesus, was attracting floods of gentiles all over the empire, particularly in those other provinces. And these other people would flood the movement and create, in effect, a new religion….

[T]he people who championed this book during the next hundred to 200 years were followers of Jesus who were experiencing or witnessing Roman persecution first hand. They were living under threat of being arrested, tortured, executed, for atheism and treason. During those dangerous times, many of them found in John’s prophecy hope that Rome, which was of course indomitable, was going to just fall and collapse at the end of the world. The Book of Revelation, as you see, talks about the world turned upside down. Suddenly the crucified, tortured, dead Jesus will come back and be king of the world.

What happened, though, is not what John prophesied. What came to an end wasn’t the world. What came to an end was persecution. And it was astonishing. As you know in the year 312, on the night of October 12th, Constantine, who was the illegitimate son of an emperor, was preparing to fight his rivals, for the throne, and he said he saw a great sign in the sky that promised him victory in Christ’s name. Constantine had that sign put on some of the weapons, and on the shields, had it carried before the armies into battle. And the next day he won a magnificent victory. His enemies were all killed. And he marched into Rome in triumph, and was acclaimed as emperor….

We have only five lists that remain from the year 350 to the year 400 of canon books, and you can see that the Bishop of Jerusalem, the Counsel of Bishops in Asia Minor, Gregory of Nazianus, this one’s the Fathers of the Church and other bishops, they all have many books that are now in the New Testament. But every single list leaves out The Book of Revelation very deliberately, except the one list that happened to be the list that was adopted. And that book is included on Athanasius’ list, the Bishop of Alexandria, in Egypt.

I was asking myself, what made Athanasius’ take on Revelation different? Was it that he could actually reinterpret all the prophecies. Instead of taking John’s prophecies as referring to God’s victory over evil powers embodied in Rome, he said, well, you can’t take it literally. We’re going to apply John’s vision of cosmic war to my lifelong battle, which is a lifelong battle to establish a Catholic church which is a Catholic church endorsed by the Roman Empire….

Athanasius says, well, the beast is really not about Rome. The whore is not about Rome. The beast and the whore represent heresy. And when Jesus divides the saved from the damned, it’s really the Orthodox Christians being divided from Pagans, Jews and heretics. And that is the way he pictures it throughout all of his writing. I mention this only because his spin on these prophecies shows us, gives a clue about how this book has survived for a couple thousand years.

One literary scholar says, well, these are very open symbols that John has, and another scholar at Yale says they’re multivalent. It’s very clear that John had very specific targets in mind when he was writing. For example, if you read about a great mountain that suddenly erupts, and is thrown into the sea and pollutes the waters for days, he’s thinking about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that happened in the year 79, about ten years before his writing. And everybody would know that. And if he’s writing about the great beast whose human number is six hundred and sixty-six, you know that he’s either thinking about the imperial name of the emperor Nero, who was the one you’d choose for the worst possible emperor, or Domitian, who was ruling at the time John wrote. He had very specific targets in mind….

Jesus is said to have said when people say, well, okay, the Last Judgment, when God judges the world, how will he judge it? And the answer is the parable of the sheep and the goats. I was naked and you took me in. I was imprisoned and you visited me. I was sick and you took care of me, and so forth. The people who act with compassion are the people who go into the kingdom of heaven. This is traditional Jewish ethics. Right? This compassion for the needy, and the widow and the orphan and so forth.

Elaine Pagels, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation.

Posted in Origins of Christianity | 1 Comment »

Believing in “Bad Vibes”

November 1st, 2011

Believing in “Bad Vibes”:

Savani looked at people’s beliefs about how emotional residue influences other people’s behavior. He had participants read about Margaret who sublets an apartment from a woman named Alice. Unbeknownst to Margaret, Alice spent the last couple of months in the apartment feeling very sad, due to problems she was having with her boyfriend. Margaret moves into the empty apartment and immediately begins feeling very happy. Savani asked his participants, “To what extent do you think Margaret’s behavior is surprising?” Both Americans and Indians said they found Margaret’s behavior surprising. They expected her to feel sad after moving into a space that had witnessed so much recent sadness.

In a final study, Savani looked at whether beliefs in emotional residue influence people’s actual behavior. He ran an experiment where he gave people a choice of two different rooms in which to fill out a survey. The sign on the door of one room indicated that the previous occupants had spent the past two hours recalling happy life events. The sign on the other door indicated that the previous occupants had spent the last couple of hours remembering unhappy life events. He then made note of which room the participants chose to enter. Savani found that the majority of both Americans and Indians chose to fill out their surveys in the room where they thought people had previously spent time recalling happy memories.

To find out whether people chose the room simply because it was associated with more positive feelings, Savani also examined his participants’ beliefs in emotional residue. He discovered that people who were more likely to believe in emotional residue were also more likely to choose the room with the happy sign. Therefore, beliefs in emotional residue, and not general positivity, seemed to be driving his results.

In India, people often burn incense to clear out emotional residue. Americans may engage in similar rituals in their attempts to get rid of “bad energy.” Such rituals could include anything from keeping windows open, to saying prayers, to aromatherapy….

Beliefs in emotional residue have some interesting implications for behavior. For example, might people be willing to pay less for a home or office after being told that the previous occupants experienced a lot of negative emotions there? Might someone choose a less beautiful home over a more beautiful one, if the less beautiful house was thought to have less emotional residue? The answer to these questions may depend on how long people believe that emotional residue tends to hang around.

The question of whether emotional residue actually exists remains to be answered, but intriguing new research suggests that it may have biological underpinnings. A well-publicized study from earlier this year demonstrated that human tears emit a chemical that other people detect and respond to. Specifically, women’s tears were shown to reduce testosterone and sexual arousal in men. Research by Wen Zhou and Denise Chen of Rice University have demonstrated that human sweat glands emit distinct chemicals when people experience different emotions. In addition, they showed evidence that other people can sense those chemicals at a later point in time. Taken together, these new findings suggest that our intuitive beliefs in emotional residue may be more than just superstition.

Posted in Subtle Energies, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Entoptics or Doodles: Children of the Cave

October 2nd, 2011

Entoptics or Doodles: Children of the Cave:

[Cognitive archaeologist David] Lewis-Williams … contends that shamans were largely responsible for the European cave paintings and that access to the caves (and images) was restricted. He sees in this an emerging social complexity and stratification, whereby shamans are privileged and powerful. Although this is plausible it is also speculative. There is little evidence for emerging complexity or stratification in the Upper Paleolithic archaeological record.

While the functional linkage between shamans-ASC-entoptics and ritual surely holds in some or even many cases, it is looking less likely in others. In 2004, Kevin Sharpe and Leslie Van Gelder suggested that 13,000 year old “flutings” inside Rouffignac Cave, France were made by children. In 2006, Sharpe and Van Gelder experimentally confirmed these findings and found that children between 2 and 5 years of age made these markings….

This year a Cambridge University doctoral student in archaeology, Jessica Cooney, discovered that children were responsible for even more “art” at Rouffignac than was previously thought. In a recent interview with History (which includes a slide show), Cooney discussed her findings:

What I’ve found in Rouffignac is that they are screaming to be heard—the presence of children is everywhere in the cave, even in the passages furthest from the entrance. There are no areas in Rouffignac with flutings where we find adults without children, and vice versa.

Many theories about cave art point to shamanism or ritual use. While I don’t rule that out, I don’t think that that’s necessarily the case for all caves. With children involved, it could have been one of those reasons but also very likely could have been play or a time for practicing art, or simply an exploration of the landscape.

If we didn’t know that young children made these markings, it would be tempting to attribute them to shamans experiencing ASC. There are some obvious resemblances between entoptic forms (see chart above) and the childrens’ markings at Rouffignac. While one could argue that the children were shaman apprentices being tutored in ASC and entoptics, this amounts to special pleading. I can’t think of any ethnographic or ethnohistoric instances of children this young being trained as shamans or inducing ASC.

These findings also call into question Lewis-Williams’ contention that deepest, darkest recesses of caves were reserved for the most experienced shamans (with privileged access to the spirit world) undergoing the most intense ASC. If children were in these dark zones, it is hard to argue for restricted access or shamanistic exclusivity.

The most likely or parsimonious interpretation of these symbols is the one given by Cooney: play. If children were doodling “entoptics” in the cave with their parents, it suggests that “artistic” interpretations of these symbols deserve reconsideration.

Posted in Form constants, Shamanism | 1 Comment »

Neolithic Death & Paleolithic Life

September 19th, 2011

Neolithic Death & Paleolithic Life:

It is well known that the modern world religions which trace their origins to the Axial Age are centrally concerned with death. Some might call this concern an obsession. Of these world religions, only Hinduism does not have Axial roots. This is not to say that “Hinduism” (which is neither singular nor unified) was unaffected by Axial ideas. Those who had such ideas broke from traditional Hinduism and became the progenitors of Jainism and Buddhism, both of which are Axial. Although not an Axial tradition, Hinduism shares an Axial concern or obsession with death.

In “Death and Deification: Folk Cults in Hinduism,” Stuart Blackburn addresses this concern and notes it is not limited to high-caste and literate Brahmins:

As a source of Indian religious thought, death is probably unsurpassed; no matter which historical period or cultural level one chooses to examine, concepts lead to or from the problems it presents. Beneath their cosmic purposes, Vedic sacrifices were designed to ward off death temporarily and attain a full life span for men….And even the process of samsira, the foundation of Indian thought, was first understood not as a rebirth but as continual “redeath” (punarmrtyu).

In the social world, if purity and impurity have anything to do with the way Hindus perceive and organize it, death is all the more central because it is the single most polluting human experience. And even if the pure/impure dichotomy is not the organizing principle of Hindu life, an opposition between death and life may be; this is the conclusion of several important studies of Sanskrit ritual and literary texts, and one confirmed by my own work with an oral tradition…[T]he popular streams of Hinduism, no less than the high-status ones, are centered on death.

Blackburn is not alone in his assessment. In The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology, renowned Indologist Wendy Doniger comments: “Much—some might even say all—of Indian religion is dedicated to the attempt to achieve immortality in one form or another.”

What is up with all this death obsession? Some, such as Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death, claim that humans are universally obsessed with death and all of life is governed by our attempts to deny or thwart it. Although Becker was a cultural anthropologist, he apparently did not read much ethnography or ethnohistory. Had Becker done so (and not immersed himself in existential psychoanalysis), he would know that death obsessions are not a human universal.

We are fortunate to have a substantial ethnohistoric and ethnographic record of hunter-gatherers. Although large portions of this record remain unpublished and languish in archives, anyone who has spent much time with this record knows that hunter-gatherers do not devote much time, energy, or thought to the fact of death and death’s supernatural concomitants: afterlife and/or rebirth.

There are reasons why late Neolithic and Axial religions are so concerned with death and are sometimes characterized as “world rejecting.” There likewise are reasons why hunter-gatherers are not so concerned and their “religions” (or more aptly, supernaturalism) are characterized as “world affirming.”

Comments:

Farming meant keeping people on the land and as in Sumarian text, the rise of slavery and castes or classes. The rulers had to convince people to work and support a ruling class that did not.

If you have an afterlife, then injustices of this life can be worked out in the next. Karma, heaven & hell are all promises to be kept after death. The dutiful poor are rewarded and the nasty rich get theres but only after death.

This is different than having a shaman cross over to bring back healing or information.

[S]edentism, stratification, and slavery were major issues. I would also include sickness, the seriousness of prevalence of which was never experienced by hunter-gatherers until or unless they had contact with agriculturalists. The yearning for an afterlife, a different life or another life (reincarnated), and immortality seem to be compensations or justifications for a tough life under horrid socioeconomic conditions.

When people were migratory, their bodies remained where they fell, and people had to rely on recollection. When populations became geographically stable, all those ancestors were just on the other side of the hill … or under the floor-boards, or wherever.

Bodies started hanging around in the early Neolithic, when people first settled down and began creating ancestor lineages. The creation of such lineages probably went hand in hand with increasing stratification, with certain lineages making claims to resources and excluding others. We usually see evidence of kin or ancestors being buried in close proximity wherever we see an early agricultural communities of any size. We begin to see such communities perhaps 9,000 years ago, and in many places by 5,000 years ago. Catal Hoyuk is a good and early example.

Posted in Agriculture | 1 Comment »

The Mithras Cult & Christianity

September 10th, 2011

The Mithras Cult & Christianity:

[T]he Mystery Cult of Mithras was a potent religious force in the Roman Empire during the first through fourth centuries A.D.

Because Mithraism came to prominence during those centuries when Christianity was in its formative period, comparisons between the two are inevitable. While some claim that Christianity borrowed heavily from Mithraism or was modeled on it, this seems unlikely and arguments to this effect are more polemic than history. The Roman elites devoted to Mithras were quite different from the provincials devoted to Christ, and these differences are reflected in the two religions.

If there is any correspondence between the two, it is one of changing sensibility. To the extent early Christianity was pacifist and loving, it held little appeal for Roman soldiers and aristocrats who valued strength and virility. With its primary icon being the sun god Mithras (who is usually portrayed as slaying a wild bull) and its primary ritual being a communal feast among “brothers,” the cult was well suited to those whose business was war.

While Constantine’s 4th century A.D. conversion gave Christianity a substantial boost, Roman elites were skeptical and slow to follow. The subsequent adoption of Christianity as the official religion of empire had many consequences, one of which was that it had to serve the interests of empire. Because one of those interests is war, I suspect that at least some of the martial elements of Mithraism were incorporated into Christianity. The mature (and militarized) fruits of this incorporation appeared several centuries later, during the Crusades. The rituals of the Knights Templar and other Christian military orders bear a striking resemblance to the Mithraic rituals so favored by Roman legionnaires.

Posted in Origins of Christianity | 5 Comments »

Mesopotamian Religion: Prelude to Axial Age

September 1st, 2011

Mesopotamian Religion: Prelude to Axial Age:

The few thousands of years preceding the Axial Age were an especially turbulent time in human history; warfare, urbanization, disease, and famine were operating full-tilt and on a scale never before seen. People everywhere were at a loss and legitimacy was in short supply. Under such conditions, it would be surprising if something like the Axial movements did not appear. During times of immense and protracted crisis, intellectuals will often generate new and paradigm shifting ideas.

But before such breakthroughs can occur, the ground must be prepared. Although Axial movements were innovative, they did not simply appear sua sponte. To the extent they were reformist or reactionary, they were backward looking and dependent on the past for comparative appeal. In “Ancient Mesopotamian Religion: The Central Concerns,” renowned ancient historian Thorkild Jacobsen summarizes that past by dividing it into three thematic and millennial epochs:

Fourth Millennium BCE — Famine

“Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread”

The fear at the very roots of existence that long ago, down through the fourth millennium, gave to the religious response in Mesopotamia its major direction would seem to have been a simple one: fear of starvation. Early Mesopotamian economy was unquestionably a remarkable achievement, able for the first time to provide sufficient food so that large numbers of humans could congregate in cities. But it was also a precarious and uncertain economy, for it was based on artificial irrigation, the most touchy and tricky basis imaginable, nervously reacting to vagaries of nature and man alike.

And the character of their religion as we know it bears this out. The powers to whom they turned were powers in and behind their primary economics on which life depended: fishing, herding, agriculture, as even the briefest look at the character of the chief gods of their cities will show. [T]heir cults were to insure the presence of these essential powers for fertility, produce, and food.

Third Millenium BCE — War

“Preserve Us From Evil”

As the settled areas of the country grew and joined, the protection that had been afforded by relative isolation was no longer there and fear of enemy attack, death or slavery, became a part of life ever present in the depth of consciousness. The intensity of the danger and of the fear it engendered can be gauged by the great city-walls that arose around the towns in this period and the staggering amount of labor that must have gone into them.

For a shield against danger men looked to the now vitally important institutions of collective security, the great leagues and their officers, and particularly to the new institution of kingship as it took form and grew under the pressures of these years. The new concept opening up, as it did, a possibility of approach to the element of majesty in the divine, was early applied to the gods and it profoundly influenced the religious outlook. The gods, seen as kings and rulers, were no longer powers in nature only, they became powers in human affairs — in history.

Second Millennium BCE — Guilt

“Forgive Us Our Trespasses”

[W]ith the beginning second millennium the personal fortunes of the individual worshiper, his fears of personal misfortune, anxieties in illness and suffering, begin to be voiced adding a personal dimension to the relation with the divine. [Because of famine and war, it appears this personal] god has abandoned the worshiper and lost interest in him. He realizes that the blame lies with himself-pleading, however, that no man is perfect and asks to be shown his faults, his transgressions, that he may confess them before his god and be forgiven. And the god is moved by his contrition and takes him back into favor.

There is here the beginnings of a searching of the heart: the insight gained in the preceding millennium that the divine stands for, and upholds, a moral law is now bearing fruit in a realization of individual human responsibility, but also of innate human inability to live up to that responsibility. [T]he question of man’s acceptability before his god — the problem of the righteous sufferer — led on to realization of man’s finiteness and the altogether finite character of his insights and his moral judgments.

During the first millennium BCE Mesopotamian religions stagnated, perhaps because for thousands of years they had always been concerned with that which was immanent or present in this world. If the divine was present in the world, few (other than the rich and powerful) seemed to be feeling it. It was time for something new. The stage was thus set for Axial transcendence.

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The Christian Delusion

June 15th, 2011

Richard Carrier, in the book The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails:

Pagans did set the stage for the end of ancient science—just not for any of the reasons Christians now claim. By failing to develop a stable and effective constitutional government, the Roman Empire was doomed to collapse under the weight of constant civil war and disastrous economical policy; and in the third century BCE that’s exactly what it did—society responded to this collapse by retreating from the scientific values of its past and fleeing to increasingly mystical and fantastical ways of viewing the world and its wonders. Christianity was already one such worldview, and thus became increasingly popular at just that time. But as one could predict, when Christianity came to power it did not restore those scientific values, but instead sealed the fate of science by putting an end to all significant scientific progress for almost a thousand years. It did not do this by oppressing, or persecuting science, but simply by not promoting its progress and by promoting instead a deep and enduring suspicion against the very values necessary to produce it.

Likewise, modern science did develop in a Christian milieu, in the hands of scientists who were indeed Christians, and Christianity can be made compatible with science and scientific values. Christianity only had to adapt to embrace those old pagan values that once drove scientific progress. And it was Christians who adapted it, craftily inventing Christian arguments in favor of the change because only arguments in accord with Christian theology and the Bible would have succeeded in persuading their peers. But this was a development in spite of Christianity’s original values and ideals, returning the world back to where pagans, not Christians, had left it a thousand years before at the dawn of the third century. Only then did the Christian world take up that old pagan science and its core values once again. And only then did further progress ensue.

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History of science

June 13th, 2011

History of science:

A common delusion is that Christianity was a precondition of science. One could pass this off as simple hubris, arrogantly ignoring the contributions to science made by medieval Islam, the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Indians, Chinese, Egyptians, Babylonians, etc. However, I think it is more serious than this because theologians and many philosophers of religion (who just love to pontificate on the history and epistemology of science) promote the delusion….

[Richard Carrier argues that] “Christianity fully dominated the whole of the western world from the fifth to the fifteenth century, and yet in all those thousand years there was no Scientific Revolution. A cause that fails to have its predicted effect despite being continually in action for a thousand years is usually considered refuted, not confirmed.”

Apologists claim that scientific investigation needed the Christian idea of a rational creator before it could occur and laws of nature could be discovered.  Carrier points our “that the universe is rational is observed. So it doesn’t have to be proved. Such a belief requires no faith or theology because it rests entirely on evidence.”

And these apologists are silent about the common medieval theme that religion was more worthy of study than natural phenomena. In 1277 the idea that nature followed laws was included in a list of heresies published by Bishop Tempier of Paris, on Pope Pius XXI’s instructions, because it conflicted with God’s omnipotence.

Carrier speculates on the idea that scientific thinking was a by-product of early pagan theology. And he provides many examples of advances made in science and mathematics by the ancients. Examples which apologist theologians usually erase from their histories.

[T]he pagans “set the stage for the end of ancient science—just not for any of the reasons Christians now claim.” The Roman Empire collapsed under the weight of civil war and disastrous economic policy. “Pagan society responded to this collapse by retreating from the scientific values of its past and fleeing to increasingly mystical and fantastical ways of viewing the world and its wonders.” Christianity profited from this. “Only with considerable ingenuity, and against considerable resistance, did some Christians eventually figure out a way to reintegrate these pagan values into a thoroughly Christianised culture, and then only after many centuries of nearly complete disinterest.”

So, history also shows that Christianity could be made compatible with science and scientific values. The scientific revolution occurred “in spite of Christianity’s original values and ideals.” “Christianity only had to adapt to embrace those old pagan values that once drove scientific progress.”

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Vagus Nerve

June 12th, 2011

Vagus Nerve:

[T]he vagus nerve is responsible for such varied tasks as heart rate, gastrointestinal peristalsis, sweating, and quite a few muscle movements in the mouth, including speech (via the recurrent laryngeal nerve) and keeping the larynx open for breathing (via action of the posterior cricoarytenoid muscle, the only abductor of the vocal folds). It also has some afferent fibers that innervate the inner (canal) portion of the outer ear, via the Auricular branch (also known as Alderman’s nerve) and part of the meninges. This explains why a person may cough when tickled on the ear (such as when trying to remove ear wax with a cotton swab).

I’m thinking, of course, of Swami Rama, via Stanislav Grof’s Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science (p. 249-50):

When I asked Swami [Rama] how he managed to put his heart into the peculiar non-pumping state of atrial flutter, he said that a large energy center in the middle of his chest (the “heart chakra in the subtle body”) was connected by a little line of “light” (prana) to a small energy center (chakra) associated with the right ear. In a state of meditation he “looked” inside himself, and when he saw the line of light he made it become “very bright,” and then the heart “stopped.”

[A physician gave a neurological explanation:] There is a loop of the vagus nerve (which controls the heart) very close to the right ear; the Swami obviously had learned a way to manipulate it.

Dr. Mehmet Oz:

We know from experiments with rats that the vagus nerve plays a role in overall immunity. When they’re given an infection in the gut, the rats go into septic shock. Their blood pressure drops, their organs fail, and then they die. Now give the rats the same exact infection and cut the vagus nerve. What happens? Bingo. They live. By cutting (or controlling) that message system, you haven’t eliminated the infection, but you’ve altered the rat’s brain’s response so that it doesn’t get the message that this infection’s a doozy and doesn’t kick off a huge immune reaction. Luckily, we don’t have to cut our own nerves to get a similar effect.

If you can do things to regulate your vagus nerve, you can block some of the bad stuff that you’re feeling, whether it’s caused by stress, infection, or sun-hot coals. Fire walkers, for instance, have figured out a way of meditating to change how the vagus and other nerves interpret the world around them to block not just the pain but also the blisters and other bad stuff that would happen if we mere mortals attempted the same thing.

Uh, no. Anyone can do firewalking; it’s about physics and the specific heat of coal, not about “changing how the vagus and other nerves interpret the world around you.”

The vagus remains a mysterious nerve in your body, but thanks to new insights about it and data that seem to indicate its power, we’re starting to understand not only that meditation (or, as I prefer to call it, training your vagus) might work, but how it works to influence your immune system and aging.

 From Oz’s You: Staying Young (p. 115, 135-6):

Acupuncture causes measurable increases in vagus nerve activity, so it is at least theoretically possible that these electrical circuits can reduce the inflammatory response by calming down aggressive white blood cells and the cytokine chemicals they release….

One of the key players in lung health is the vagus nerve. When the lung expands during normal shallow breathing, that stimulates the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve then sends a message to the brain to constrict the bronchi, making breathing more difficult…. Meditation serves to physiologically cut the the vagus nerve, so it disrupts the feedback loop of bronchial constriction, allowing you to breathe easier.

Thanks for the Memories:

Scientists have long known that emotional arousal enhances memory, but they didn’t know exactly how. Adrenaline and other hormones produced when your emotions are engaged have memory-boosting effects—but they don’t readily cross the protective blood-brain barrier. Likewise, certain synthetic drugs improve memory, also without entering the brain. How?

SIUC behavioral neuroscientists and psychology professors Robert Jensen and Douglas Smith have discovered that these agents have their effects via the largest cranial nerve, called the vagus nerve.

The vagus starts in the brainstem, runs snugly along the carotid arteries, and then snakes through the abdomen, sending feelers out to all the internal organs. It carries messages about the body’s physiological state up to the brain—how fast the heart is beating, how quickly the lungs are respiring, and so forth. When the body’s arousal level goes up—whether due to fear or elation, anger or anticipation—those messages somehow cue the brain to make the memory of that moment stronger.

Smith, Jensen, and their students have shown that electrical stimulation of the vagus nerve can improve people’s memory, and hence learning. They’ve also shown that such stimulation can help lab rats recover much more quickly from brain injury—and they expect the same to be true of you or me.

[Vagus nerve stimulation] may also be achieved by one of the vagal maneuvers: holding the breath for a few seconds, dipping the face in cold water, coughing, or tensing the stomach muscles as if to bear down to have a bowel movement. Patients with supraventricular tachycardia, atrial fibrillation, and other illnesses may be trained to perform vagal maneuvers (or find one or more on their own)….

Research has shown that women having had complete spinal cord injury can experience orgasms through the vagus nerve, which can go from the uterus, cervix, and, it is presumed, the vagina to the brain.

Dr. Dharma Singh Khalsa, Brain Longevity (p. 373):

[R]esearch has shown that the chanting of primal tones stimulates the vagus nerve…. It is reasonable to expect that the vagus nerve would be stimulated by chanting, because it passes through the larynx, or voice box.

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