Archive for the ‘Milky Way’ Category

The Faith Instinct (Review)

Sunday, November 22nd, 2009

Turns out I was basically spot-on in my “pre-view” of Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct. So I won’t bother covering that same ground again, with quotes from his book to demonstrate how I had generally “guessed right” about its perspective. But there’s other stuff in it that’s worth preserving … or worth debunking.

First, there’s this excellent summary of where our holidays (i.e., “holy days”) came from:

The most important religious ritual of the Christian church is Easter, which celebrates the resurrection of Jesus. How surprising, therefore, that the word Easter should derive from Eostre, an Anglo-Saxon goddess of the dawn. The Anglo-Saxon word for April was Eostur-monath, a month which probably then started on March 25, a date that falls close to the vernal equinox. Spring festivals are ancient rituals, probably observed in all religions that have existed since the birth of agriculture….

Several festivals of the Israelite and Jewish liturgical calendar are adaptations of Canaanite agricultural festivals. Rosh Ha-Shanah marks the onset of the fall rains, heralded in Canaanite mythology by the resurrection of the storm god Ba’al. Sukkot is the Canaanite fall harvest festival, adapted in Judaism to commemorate the wandering in the desert after the exodus from Egypt. Pesach was a Canaanite spring feast [marking the beginning of the barley harvest] at which young lambs, born the previous fall, were sacrificed; in Judaism Pesach has become Passover and historicized to mark the [fictional] exodus from Egypt, with the lambs’ blood translated for the Israelites into a rite commemorating the sparing of their first-born children from the tenth plague sent against the pharoah. Shavu’ot, 50 days after Passover, is a late spring festival that marks the conclusion of the wheat harvest. (p. 146, 149-50)

This, too, is a good summary:

In the view of nineteenth-century anthropologists such as Edward Tylor, people assumed that the figures seen in dreams were spirits. Speculating about the nature of death, they inferred that after the body was dead, its spirit essence lived on in another world. In dreams, the appearance of particular spirits known to the dreamer proved that this was so….

Our ancestors extended this idea to the natural world, imputing spirits to animals and plants, and then assuming the existence of especially powerful spirits whom they considered to be gods….

[T]he concept of regular, controllable access to the supernatural realm was perhaps suggested by trances. Trances would have been attained, accidentally at first, during the prolonged dance sessions of early ritual. (p. 53, 119)

But, trances attained accidentally, from dances that were happening anyway, as randomly-evolved memes which happened to produce social cohesion and thus helped the group survive and propagate? Uh, no.

Think about Joan of Arc. Her trances were induced by hearing (rhythmic) church bells. Similar epileptic seizures can also be induced by flickering lights—e.g., by sunlight seen through tree leaves on wind-swayed branches, or even (IIRC) by flickering firelight. (Epilepsy correlates highly with religiousness and religious feelings, both today and historically: “In the past, epilepsy was associated with religious experiences and even demonic possession. In ancient times, epilepsy was known as the ‘Sacred Disease’ because people thought that epileptic seizures were a form of attack by demons, or that the visions experienced by persons with epilepsy were sent by the gods. Among animist Hmong families, for example, epilepsy was understood as an attack by an evil spirit, but the affected person could become revered as a shaman through these otherworldly experiences.”) There are also many suggestions floating around (from people concerned more with shamanism than with the communal dancing which accompanied it) that shamans beat their drums specifically to assist with trance-induction. (Rainforest shamans, IIRC, didn’t have drums, just because everything rots in that humidity. They had/have ayahuasca instead, for their Leary-esque “tripping through the cosmos.”)

If you want to trace that causal chain, there, it’s more likely that early peoples discovered that trances can be induced by rhythmic sounds/lights. The communal dancing followed after that, possibly as a sympathetic-magical imitation of the “divine experience-inducing” rhythms, which just happens, by dumb luck and human neurology, to have the same effect. From that point onward, you could even have group selection effects; but the point is that these weren’t just memes which evolved randomly, and then propagated because they produced social cohesion, giving the tribe(s) in which they evolved an evolutionary/survival advantage over tribes which lacked them. Rather, even trances originated as spandrels—i.e., unintended by-products of our nervous system’s basic construction, shared by all members of our species. That is, they would exist and have been discovered even if no communal dancing had ever “evolved.”

Early people had many needs, for fertility, health, good hunting, success in warfare, all of which were assumed to lie in the ancestors’ power to grant…. Special forms of respect—prayer and worship—were developed for the ancestors’ benefit. (p. 75-6)

Well, Alison Gopnik suggests, in one of her books about “theory theory”—i.e., about babies being little scientists—that belief in telepathy is an entirely natural thing, not even based in magical thinking as such:

As scientists we think that everything is mediated by physical causality of some sort, including our interactions with other people. There are, in fact, light and sound waves that go from one person to another even if we can’t see them with the naked eye. But from our everyday point of view, it appears we are able to influence people without any direct physical contact at all. (It’s probably that fact that makes telepathy seem plausible to so many people.) After all, just looking at someone across a crowded room can set quite a drmatic chain of events in motion. We influence people psychologically by communicating, talking, gesturing, and making faces—we don’t have to touch them…. Psychological causality is often our most powerful tool.

Prayer is just “telepathy with God,” rather than with another human being receiving our thoughts directly. As such, it didn’t need to be specifically “developed for the ancestors’ benefit”—rather, it is (or at least appears to be) a natural activity of the human mind. Plus, if you can communicate with dead ancestors in dreams, then why not also in imagination/visualization/prayer?

Little by little, the ancestral religion was suppressed in the settled societies that began to emerge 15,000 years ago and has survived only among the handful of hunter gatherer tribes that endured into the modern era. The new settled societies adopted a structured form of religious practice, one in which priests controlled the ritual and monopolized interaction with the supernatural. The communal dances ceased. The songs were silence. The shamans were marginalized as witch doctors or sorcerers. (p. 79)

Are you sure about that? The shamans were the existing religious specialists in those societies. If you were trying to consolidate religious power into an early agrarian government, would you be better off marginalizing them, or co-opting them? Wade’s own book gives a good hint, for that:

In bringing heathen tribes into the fold, the early church found it expedient to co-opt their temples and festivals rather than force them to embrace an alien faith outright. An explicit statement of this policy occurs in a letter written by Pope Gregory the Great in 601 to the Abbot Mallitus who was en route to visit Bishop Augustine in Canterbury. (p. 146-7)

And this next thing is surprisingly related, if you just know how to look at it:

In coronation rites, whether by anointment or the placement of a crown or diadem on his head, a man becomes a king. Religions are powerful creators of social fact. (p. 11)

Of course, Wade doesn’t make the connection, there. But the fact is that the very symbolism of coronation by the placing of a crown on the new king’s head—i.e., over the fontanelle, cf. crown chakra (the doorway to transcendence in the human body, by analogy with the North Star as the “door in the sky” to other worlds)—strongly suggests a spiritual and shamanic basis for kingship. So don’t be surprised if it turns out that early kings and priests were the (Chopra-esque) shamans who wanted power or at least could be bought, as tribes were consolidated under early agrarian governments.

When egalitarian societies stratify into hierarchical ones, who are the people most likely to wind up in positions of leadership? Why, the ones who were already widely respected, not merely for having exhibited political/warrior abilities within the tribe but also for their “spiritual abilities.” Who would make a better king, in societies which had depended on shamans for their very health, than the best shaman in the region?

Compare not merely the “divine right of kings” but also the “healing touch of kings.” Do you really think it’s just coincidence that kings shared those characteristics with shamans? Do you really think that early agrarian societies could have fabricated such things out of whole cloth, without a history and continuity for the ideas? Do you really think that, when they were consolidating tribes, they would have dared to marginalize the only source of healing of their new citizens, and their only source of protection against the curses placed on them by other tribes (which warriors were powerless against), etc.?

Shamans have always had a “divine right” and a “healing touch.” And as Pope Gregory knew, rather than creating a parallel institution to that, the easier thing to do would be to simply co-opt the existing “institutions,” i.e., give their tribal-leading members high places in the new government-religion. It never required any cunning, political manipulations to join religion and government at the hip: they were born that way.

Unlike our view of it today (e.g., in California), primitive shamanism was never a “personal spiritual development” path. Rather, it was done as the only source of healing, for the good of the members of the community. The early priesthood, for all the ways in which it’s vilified, was simply taking over the responsibility for the most important activities of the community: the rituals which had to be performed absolutely correctly in order for the land to produce food. And since any increase in the productivity of the land meant a comparable increase in the population, these early agrarian communities were always on the verge of starvation—an excellent recipe for invoking runaway superstitions/rituals in the people.

Elsewhere, I’ve seen the suggestion made that it was exactly the formation of settled villages and larger towns that caused shamans to stop disturbing their close neighbors with drumming, and internalize their formerly acted-out-in-public shamanic journeys into techniques of content/kundalini meditation. Could very well be true.

Primitive religions have no priests or ecclesiastical hierarchy. They are practiced by the community as a whole, with no distinctions of rank….

In the ancestral religion people communed directly with the supernatural world through dreams and trances, not through the mediation of priests. They asked their gods for practical help, such as good hunting, children, or health. (p. 101, 126-7)

Yeeaaaah, but again, not everyone bangs the shaman’s drum, or climbs the pole to the hole in the sky. Much less is everyone a shamanic healer, tasked with either healing by sucking invading spirits out of others’ bodies into “spirit darts,” or traveling in trance to retrieve the wandering souls whose absence is causing the illness. Wade doesn’t even mention those specifics, and consistently downplays the role of individual shamans in primitive societies. After all, doing so serves his thesis wonderfully, so therefore….

Many of the depictions [on Oaxaca Valley pottery] show people dancing in circles, a practice Garfinkel believes held great symbolism for early agriculturalists struggling to march to the rhythm of the seasons and, on pain of starvation, to plant and harvest their crops at the right time. (p. 132)

Such rituals originated as sympathetic-magical, voodoo-like imitations of natural processes. They were performed not to generate social cohesion (even if they had that side-effect) but rather because, at the very least, imitating such cycles brought the people into harmony with the cosmos—and at the most, because without the rituals being performed properly, down to the letter, the world literally wouldn’t keep turning:

“The imperial cosmology held that the Mexica must relentlessly take captives in warfare and sacrifice them,” write the anthropologists Geoffrey Conrad and Arthur Demarest. “The spiritual strength of the sacrificed enemy warriors would strengthen the sun and stave off its inevitable by the forces of darkness. Thus, it was specifically the Mexicas’ sacred duty to preserve the universe from the daily threat of annihilation.” (p.242)

When you have no pre-scientific idea how planetary rotation works, there’s really no reason to feel confident that the sun will keeping rising. Especially if (via excessive agency-detection) that golden orb is seen as a living being. Best to “keep it happy,” then.

A symbol of royalty throughout the Mayan lowlands was the water lily, a plant that grows only in clean, still water and affirmed by its presence that the rulers were keeping the stored water drinkable. (p. 225)

They also look very similar to (chakra-symbol) lotuses. Coincidence? You know, with Om being the “sound of rushing waters,” and all. Flowers have also long been symbols of transition—that being the reason why we associate them with funerals (and probably with weddings, too). So “conscious death in samadhi,” etc.

There is some (yet-undiscovered) esoteric meaning, there, where Wade is just doing a one-dimension, sociological reading.

It was presumably in order to control population numbers that societies chose to extend the iron discipline of religion into reproductive behavior. (p. 214)

Uh, no. Fertility was always the #1 concern (cf. muelos) of even hunter-gatherer societies, as of agrarian ones. Warriors going off to war have observed sexual taboos since the dawn of human culture. The idea that any of that began to limit population numbers, even as an unintended by-product, is beyond ignorant.

If you want to summarize what’s wrong with Wade’s over-reaching book in a single quote, this is it:

Few human bonds are stronger than those of family, but the prophet’s [i.e., Warren Jeffs'] dictates induced parents to abandon and exile their teenage children. Once the innate susceptibility to fear supernatural justice is triggered, people will go to almost any lengths to obey what priests or rulers tell them is the gods’ will. (p. 219)

There, we’re into religious cults. And the principles by which religious cults form are, without question, exactly the same as those which cause political and psychological cults to form, even down to Zimbardo’s prison study. It’s not necessary to have a “priest or ruler” convey god’s will; it’s enough to have a fraudulent pandit expounding a four-quadrant view of the Kosmos, or even just a psychologist who is the sole source of validation for your self-worth.

The point being that while fear of supernatural justice is indeed probably the strongest way of binding people into a closed community (cult, tribe, etc.), “totalitarian justice” (whether secular/communist, integral, or anything in between) is close behind: In all cases, basic human psychology is enough to ensure that many people who have joined will not be (psychologically) able to leave the group.

All of that is based in simple in-group/out-grouping, with varying group-entrance and group-exit costs. None of it—even when applied to religion itself—has anything inherently to do with “religion” as such, much less with a genetic, evolved “religion module” in the brain. Rather, in/out-grouping is a basic capacity even of animal minds; and the ability to evaluate entrance- and exit-costs from the group must also exist in every animal which depends on its herd for survival.

There’s also some semi-interesting stuff on p. 218 about monasticism as an inadvertent means of population control; and on p. 165-71, regarding the early days of Christianity. This is the best part of the latter:

Not only was the culture of early Christianity Greek but several of its central beliefs have little or no counterpart in Jewish thought. They were, however, perfectly familiar in the Greco-Roman world of the first two centuries A.D. One is the worship of a mother and child, as in the ancient cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis. She is often shown as suckling her infant son Horus, who was conceived by a virgin birth. The Isis cult was popular throughout the empire, particularly in Rome during the first century B.C. The church in Egypt co-opted the cult, plagiarizing its iconography to depict mother and child in the now familiar image of the virgin and Jesus….

The figure of Isis and Horus “is so like that of the Madonna and child that it has sometimes received the adoration of ignorant Christians,” noted the anthropologist James Frazer.

A prominent feature of several popular mystery cults of the time was the theme of a god who dies and is later resurrected, as in the cults of Dionysus or of Attis and Cybele. The common idea, presumably inherited from the dawn of agriculture, was of a vegetation god who dies in autumn and must be resurrected in the spring with appropriate ritual. Followers of Dionysus, the god of wine, would tear apart a live bull—or occasionally a person—and eat the flesh raw, in commemoration of the killing and resurrection of the god. As for Attis, he was born of a virgin—his mother conceived by placing a ripe pomegranate in her bosom—and his death and resurrection were celebrated at a spring festival at which his followers shed copious amounts of blood through self-mutilation.

Mithraism, a religion with a large following among Roman army officers, included among its rites “sacred meals not unlike the Christian eucharist and offers souls a way through the seven planetary spirits which bar the ascent to the Milky Way after death,” writes Chadwick.

A follower of any of these mystery cults, whether of Adonis, Isis, Mithras, Dionysis or Attis, would have recognized many familiar elements in Christianity, such as the virgin birth, the death of the god, the springtime resurrection festival, and the symbolism of the eucharist in which celebrants consumed bread and wine that were taken as representing the body and blood of the sacrificial god. [Bread and wine are both products of the action of yeast, on grains and fruits, respectively; that is, they are living foods, produced from non-living ones.]

Given that Jews are strictly forbidden to taste blood, which must be drained away before an animal can be eaten, it would have been strange indeed for Jesus, an observant Jew, to recommend that his disciples should drink his blood, even symbolically. Indeed in a very early description of the eucharist, that of the Didache, also known as “The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,” no such symbolism is indicated nor is any conneciton made with Passover or the resurrection…

Sunday is a day of rest in Christian countries because in 321 the emperor Constantine himself declared it should be so—in honor of Sol Invictus…. The Christian Holy Week and Easter resembled the Attis cult’s Day of Blood and the Hilaria, days marking the death and the resurrection of Attis. Both festivals had an all-night vigil with lights and were so similar that pagan critics of the fourth century accused the church of plagiarism.

The book’s worth reading, even just for stuff like that; it’s just that Wade way overplays the sociological aspects of religion. So like most books in this field, he really only accounts for around 5% of religion, completely overlooking its esoteric aspects and the origins of its symbols.

There are some other reviews of Wade’s book floating around out there, FYI. Predictably, they’re woefully uninsightful; but what did you expect? Wade’s in far over his head on this subject … but so are one-dimensional, know-it-all pretenders like Razib and Derbyshire.

Posted in Chakras, Civilization Dev, Milky Way, Shamanism, Sympathetic Magic | 6 Comments »

The Faith Instinct

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

John Derbyshire:

Nick Wade’s new book The Faith Instinct comes out next week. I’ve been reading it for review, and it’s excellent. He seems (I’m only 60 pages in) to plant himself firmly in the religion-is-adaptive camp. This puts him in a minority among people who write about the natural history of religion. Most take religion to be an accidental by-product of cognitive processes—hair-trigger “agency detection” modules etc. Nice to see the other point of view (and group selection, too) get an airing.

I’ve got that book on order from amazon, and am quite looking forward to reading it, given the caliber of Wade’s previous writings.

But, religion is (evolutionarily) adaptive? In the sense that the belief that an Imaginary Friend in the Sky is watching you and can reward or punish you for your behaviors, no doubt it will usually result in people treating each other better than they otherwise would. And that would indeed provide a survival advantage for members of the group, and provide a converse out-group of sinners/infidels, which will further bind the in-group community together, in both war and peace. That is, there is indeed probably something to the “group selection” side of that—where the culture establishes firm group boundaries for gene flow and selection for particular traits, with marriage/reproduction happening primarily within the group—especially if it encourages women to be baby machines (cf. Catholicism, Islam). But of course that doesn’t mean that it’s an environment which anyone should be brainwashed into living in, even if, when you’re looking just at the widely-embraced, watered-down versions of “religion,” it can be “adaptive” in the sense of producing more surviving offspring.

None of that negates the by-product view, but it does provide a valid “other half” which has previously been missing from these one-sided analyses.

And yet, those two halves do not make a whole. Not even half a one. Because, what about esoteric spirituality? What about all mainstream religions beginning as Scientology-like cults, generally with a charismatic leader? (Of course, the fact that Jesus probably never even lived, but was still the “charismatic founder” of Christianity, pretty much blows the whole “charismatic founder” necessity out of the water.) What about yogis retiring to the Himalayas to live their lives in silent meditation, producing no offspring? Is that behavior also “adaptive”? If not, how do you get from a maladaptive, isolating cult, to an adaptive, community-cohesioning religion?

‘Cause Yogananda (et. al.) was right about one thing: Exoteric religions are degenerate, popularized, misunderstood (i.e., symbols being taken literally) versions of esoteric, meditative experiences. What he and others like him didn’t understand is that those experiences themselves are a product of human neurology, and get connected with the natural world via sympathetic-magical similarities in patterns—e.g., the migraine scotoma looks like a jagged lightning strike, or (in its closed-circle form) a snake about to swallow its own tail.

(I hadn’t known this before, but migraine auras can also look a lot like the Northern Lights—e.g., the souls of one’s ancestors, dancing around the North Star. ["The Cree people call this phenomenon the 'Dance of the Spirits.'"] There are some other amazing animations here—all of which are glimpses into the “other world.” That is, there are tribes [e.g., the Jivaro, IIRC] which, quite “reasonably,” take these forms and form constants as being the archetypes upon which the physical world is based.)

You can’t explain where exoteric religion comes from without understanding esoteric spirituality, with techniques of content meditation originating as internalized shamanic rituals (e.g., the believed path of souls along the Milky Way to the North Star—the “still point of the turning celestial world,” and “doorway” to the world beyond—being sympatically imitated in the climbing and descent of a pole, which was then internalized as the simply visualized climbing and descent of the spine to a point/bindu in the brain and the escape of consciousness through the brahmarandhra, cf. in kundalini meditation). And neither the by-product viewpoint nor the adaptive one can begin to account for the specific, widespread symbols which form the core of all religions. For that you need neurology and sympathetic-magical thinking. And I’d bet dollars to donuts that the latter, in particular, gets barely a mention in Wade’s book.

Like this:

Don’t try and tell me that any (esp.) agrarian culture wouldn’t have seen that as an attempt by the spirit of the crescent moon to communicate with the person experiencing the aura.

Posted in Agents, Form constants, Milky Way, Origins of Christianity, Shamanism, Sympathetic Magic | 4 Comments »

Milky Way Panorama

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

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The Vagina (l) Mary Revisited

Saturday, September 12th, 2009

From The Vagina (l) Mary Revisited:

This archetypal image … —now of the Virgin Mary but once of Mother Nature’s “vagina”—has been with us for many ages however, in fact, the Pagans of antiquity saw them on trees and on rocks and in the earth and in the sky (as the Milky Way Galaxy overhead) as the Great Vulva of the Goddess and believed that any sap or dew (or rain—the manna motif) that issued from such a sweet spot was absolutely magical and held life renewing potential….

Many Pagan shrines were constructed around these naturally occurring vaginal manifestations—but it might have taken a leap of insight from some brilliant medieval artist—who will probably remain anonymous to history—who must have had the “A-ha!” insight of being able to see a way to transform and SUBLIMATE the Pagan adulation and worship of these nature vaginas into the iconic image of the Virgin Mary that we know today—using the very same recognizable shape as the nature vagina—and re-manifesting the vulva of the Old Goddess—into the haloed and hooded image of the Virgin Mary as a venerable figure imbued with sacred energy from head to toe in soft, flowing robes parted along the center, sometimes with her hands held to her chest in prayer (perfectly matching the anatomy of the vaginal labia).

Posted in Milky Way, Symbols | No Comments »

Fire in the Brain, Part II

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

The rest of Siegel’s Fire in the Brain:

There are striking parallels between changes in real stimuli seen with open eyes and those reported for mental images seen with closed eyes [under the influence of hallucinatory drugs]. Probably the same mechanisms in the brain are responsible for duplicating images of polygons or [external objects]. These processes can just as easily scramble mental images or structures of the real world into random and sometimes nightmarish arrangements, like pieces of a picture puzzle thrown on the floor….

This madcap universe is in constant motion. For reasons that are still not understood by psychologists, heavy objects do not appear to move as much as lighter ones. Mountains will hardly shimmer, but matchsticks jump about. A bowl of spaghetti may look like a churning knot of worms while the table it sits on remains motionless….

Sounds are amplified, but they are not always clear. A simple swallow, for example, might sound like the crashing surf, but where is it coming from?….

Hallucinogens generate a continuum of electrical activity in the central nervous system that progresses from mild excitation to seizures. It begins with irregular waves of high-frequency, low-voltage activity in the brain. People experience excitement and euphoria during this initial stage. As the process continues, the brain activity is characterized by intermittent bursts of synchronous waves, the signpost of hallucinations. This increased excitation starts to overload the part of the brain that regulates incoming stimuli. The result is a failure in the brain’s ability to modulate incoming signals, thus permitting all signals to enter with full power. The gates of the brain’s sensory systems swing open, so to speak, and we are given access to many more inputs than we are able to sort through. This creates the sensory confusion. (p. 47, 49)

Sleep paralysis provides a fertile setting for hypnopompic hallucinations. In the hypnopompic state, the brain cannot instantaneously switch from dreaming to a waking state, and the dream extends into the waking period. The brain circuits activated during dreams then send signals—such as an image of the succubus—to the cerebral cortex, where they are processed as if they came from the outside world. Thus, dream images extend into waking and the sleeper sees visual images (or has sensations in other modalities) within the context of the real bedroom.

Our brain knows what state it is in only from the surrounding context. In dreams, the context is of disorganized images, and this tells the brain it is sleeping. In the sleep paralysis/hypnopompic state, the context is of organized perceptions and the brain assumes that it is awake despite the very different nature of the experience….

Awakening in a state of sleep paralysis can cause the person to hyperventilate and experience feelings of tightness or heaviness in the chest. Hyperventilation, even in the form of sighing respirations, also diminishes the supply of oxygen to the brain. This can produce hyperacusis, whereby sounds seem especially loud. Simple background noises, ticking clocks, even one’s own labored breathing can provide the seeds from which grow more complex auditory hallucinations such as opening doors, footsteps, and garbled voices. If the oxygen supply is sufficiently reduced, sexual pleasure centers in the brain may be affected for both men and women. This effect is utilized in autoerotic asphyxia, a bizarre practice of tying ropes or scarves around one’s neck during masturbation in order to intensify the orgasm. Some sexual arousal may also be a carryover from REM sleep, which, for males, is accompanied by penile erections.

Intense efforts to move against the paralysis increase awareness of the rigid muscles, the body lying in bed under the covers, and the perspiring skin. In the hypnopompic brain, the restraint can turn into pressure from a grasping hand, the covers become another body folding itself over the sleeper, and the sweat nurtures gelatinous sensations complete with odors. Even the movement of the mattress and creaking of the bed were probably the result of my own struggles, not the intruder’s. Autonomic nervous system changes in cardiac activity, skin temperature, and skin resistance can make additional contributions to the tingling, sensations of cold, and strong emotional response….

You don’t have to have a medieval mind to see a succubus emerge from all these data points. One of the best cognitive “fits” the brain can make of these sensations is that someone or something is sitting or lying on top of the body….

During the Middle Ages, paralyzed sleepers thought they were being drained of blood by vampires…. The Eskimos believed the attacks were proof of the spirit world, which was out to get them. (p. 88-90, 106)

[S]ometimes it is possible to tell if a person is engaged in a fantasy or an actual reminiscence by the shifting of their eyes. Shifts to the left usually indicate that the person is imaginative and prone to vivid fantasies, while shifts to the right indicate that person has the information readily available from a minimal search of memory. (p. 103)

Inside the darkened lecture hall, a small object was barely visible in the right corner of the screen. The object resembled Venus as it appears in the eastern sky just before sunrise. “This is a typical hypnagogic image of a starlike dot as drawn by a subject who saw it just before falling asleep”….

“And here we see two stars in the same position, the result of diplopia, or simple duplication of imagery.” I pushed the advance button again. A thousand points of light lit up the right side of the screen, creating a Milky Way that curved from the bottom to the top of the screen. The audience gasped. “This is the final stage, polyopia, the multiplication of the image, usually seen in one eye,” I said.

These specks of light, I explained, are produced by electrical activity in the visual system and brain….

Even when the hypnagogic forms are not consciously noticed, they can still register as subliminal stimuli and influence subsequent image formation and fantasy. For example, a person may not notice some wavy lines moving about in the corner of the visual field. However, depending upon the subject’s particular thoughts at the moment, the wavy lines could turn into blades of grass blowing in the wind, flames from a fire, or even snakes. Similarly, two lines forming the letter V, when duplicated, can become a row of menacing teeth. If presented upside-down, they can turn into a range of mountain peaks.

“So, the Milky Way could easily become …” I advanced the slide projects and dimmed the lights again. A brilliant shower of fireworks covered the screen. (p. 117-8)

If human beings, as a simple consequence of our neurology, have been seeing internal Milky Way-like images since the dawn of time, we would certainly have connected that “mystical vision” with the external Milky Way in the night-time sky—being equally ignorant of the real causes of both, but keenly noticing the visual similarities. The Jivaro Indians in South America actually take the form constants seen in their drug-induced visions as being an archetypal basis for creation, upon which the physical world is patterned. In fact, it’s precisely because they’re able to distinguish between those hallucinogenic reveries and real life, that they regard the hallucinations as being a separate and higher reality.

Sleep deprivation also causes the fine movements of the eye to decrease, creating the tendency to stare. Lacking fine movements, the eye begins to move in a jerkier fashion, resulting in illusions of movement in the periphery of vision. (p. 127)

There were six black lines joined together in a ring. This had to be the structural formula for benzene, a form from organic chemistry that had been embedded in my brain during many all-night study sessions fueled by NoDoz. But it was actually nothing more than dots connected with black lines, the basic elements of a hypnagogic form. It would have been a simple matter to rearrange those six lines into the six lines of a twisted cross [i.e., swastika]. (p. 132)

Kekulé, of course, stumbled on the benzene-ring form in the most famous hypnagogic dream of them all.

[Mark David] Chapman played with thousands of “little people” who lived in the walls of his living room. He created an entire imaginary world in which the little people worshipped him like a king. Chapman was a benign ruler who frequently staged imaginary Beatles concerts for his subjects. But if any of the little people dared to get out of line or anger him in any way, Chapman would kill them by pressing an imaginary destruct button on the arm of his family sofa. When John Lennon angered him, Chapman discussed plans to murder the ex-Beatle with the little people. “They were shocked … they didn’t want any part of it,” Chapman later told his psychiatrist. So Chapman went to another imaginary figure, Satan. (p. 201)

Not exactly the “John Lennon was killed for being a stupid Leftist” argument that the bothersome Christian conspiracy-theorizers in my life have put forward, is it? And, of course, Chapman’s kingdom of little people, and Satan, are every bit as (un)real as God and Jebus.

And, why would Satan want to kill the Leftists, anyway? Aren’t they his best tools? Something in that (“conspiracy”?) does not compute.

But of course, that’s just what the Illuminati … and the Jews … want me to think, isn’t it?

Visionary drugs like hashish cause cerebral excitation that enables thoughts and memories to become transformed into sensory impressions. Drugs that anesthetize the body and kill pain act to block awareness of sensory impressions, thus allowing the mind to focus on the same internal imagery of thoughts and memories [i.e., in a "sensory deprivation" state]. Some researchers think that the emotional or physiological processes in dying or in near-fatal accidents work in similar ways [producing] a sense of detachment, flashes of past memories, and a mystical state of consciousness including visions of the afterlife….

Just as physiological shock helps keep the body together, the near-death experience keeps potentially disorganizing emotion in check. It’s an adaptive way for us to survive a life-threatening situation. (p. 254-5)

So, you see, there’s an evolutionary reason for it.

I described how a team of psychologists taught a gorilla to communicate with American Sign Language. Once he acquired a basic vocabulary, the gorilla showed that he had sophisticated thoughts about life and death. There was great wisdom in his signs, especially when asked “What is death?”

I signed the answer he gave….

The sign meant finished, the end. (p. 256)

There’s plenty of controvery about gorillas’ use of language. And you wouldn’t expect apes to have a detailed mental cartography of, say, the afterlife. But it makes one wonder whether such primates have a conception of death. There have been other situations where conspecifics and children have doted on the body of a murdered ape, so it’s quite possible that they do.

Posted in Milky Way, NDEs and OBEs, Sleep Paralysis | No Comments »

Twilight of the Clockwork God

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

From Twilight of the Clockwork God, p. 82, wherein Lynn Margolis provides a very good, concise definition of the scientific method:

Is it not ironic that in order to do anything at all in science one must hold the rest of the world constant and concentrate intensely on some tiny detail? One must control the variables one at a time.

Separately (p. 172):

The great German anthropologist Leo Frobenius, in his still untranslated book Unknown Africa, gave an account of a hunting ritual he witnessed one morning amongst the pygmies. Three men and one woman went out to a clearing before dawn and drew an image of an antelope on the ground. When the first rays of the sun struck the drawing, one of the men stepped forward with his bow and shot an arrow into the neck of the antelope as the woman shouted something in her native tongue. Then the men went off to hunt and came back later in the day with an antelope which they had shot through the neck in exactly the same spot as in the diagram. They returned to the image and poured some of the animal’s blood on it, then erased it, lest its unpropitiated ghost take vengeance on them and cause a hunting accident.

It seems to me that I read a while ago that the idea of cave paintings (e.g., at Lascaux and Les Trois Freres) being made as part of hunting rituals hasn’t been taken seriously by anthropologists for quite some time. But if so, why the heck not? (The book didn’t give a reason.) From what Frobenius observed, that’s a completely reasonable interpretation of the animals drawn in caves—the only thing that’s different is that they obviously weren’t erasing the cave-wall images afterwards. Not that there aren’t form constants involved, too, in the non-animal pictures—e.g., ladders-to-heaven as subsets of lattices, in San (!Kung, i.e., Bushman) cave paintings. But how can scholars have ruled out hunting-magic for the others (assuming I’m remembering that accurately)?

Again separately (p. 164), there’s this:

The Jains [of India] envisioned the cosmos as a single, gigantic Goddess from out of whose protoplasmic substance all of creation had come into being. The earth had grown from her navel, and below her waist were stacked various levels of hell, while the heavens rose above like the tiers of a wedding cake. The inside of her skull was thought to be the world ceiling, within which the souls of the released hovered like bubbles of liquid metal in zero gravity.

That was also a common medieval Christian conception—i.e., of the universe being the body of God.

If the star-filled hemisphere of sky visible to us is the inside of the skull of God (for having a similar shape), then the North Star—the stationary “hole” in the night sky—would correspond to the fontanelle in the human body. And what would correspond to the human spine? The Milky Way, of course. (The Milky Way is just how our galaxy appears, from our position in it, when we are looking along the galactic plane, at all the stars in our galaxy. Because the axis of the Earth’s rotation is nearly parallel to that same plane, the Milky Way always passes reasonably near to the North Star, and in some epochs actually appears to “touch” it.)

Are you beginning to see how early “spiritual cosmologies,” in which the “visible universe” was literally the “body of God,” and where the Milky Way was the road used by (shamanic and deceased) souls in traveling to the North Star, became internalized as techniques of kundalini meditation?

Just as the North Star is the only stationary point in the heavens (for viewers in the north hemisphere), each of our heads is the center of our sensory experience of the world: every experience in which we see, hear, smell, or taste anything places us, phenomenologically, at the “center of the universe.” (Touch does too, but it’s not confined to our heads.) Even visually, when we are standing out in the middle of a vast plain, or atop a mountain peak, or even in having climbed a tall tree, the horizon is equally far away from us in all directions; so again, were we paying proper attention, we could not help but be struck at how we appeared to be, visually, “at the center of the world.”

When shamans climbed poles, they were thus not merely engaging in a sympathetic-magical imitation of the flight of souls along the Milky Way to escape through the “hole in the roof” of the universe; rather, in reaching the top of their pole in any environment where the horizon was visible on all sides from that position, they were visually experiencing themselves as being “at the center of the world.” In pre-scientific societies which had no idea of how geometry or perspective works, and spent far less time “living in their own heads” than we do, that must have been a powerful “spiritual” experience. These were people, after all, who genuinely believed that they could secure a good hunt by magically acting it out on drawings of animals beforehand.

Further, since our heads are “at the center of the Earth” just as the North Star is at the “center of the heavens” (i.e., all the stars rotate around it, once per day, just as all of our sensory experiences “rotate around” us), that similarity should have provided another reason for pre-scientific people to expect a “magical correspondence” to exist between our microcosmic human bodies, and the macrocosmic universe.

(These are my original explanations, by the way: You won’t find them anywhere else.)

The sinuous Milky Way also resembles a River, a Cosmic Sky-Serpent, or a Tree trunk growing out of the horizon. But them’s a whole ‘nother set of symbolisms, derived from the same astronomy….

Posted in Form constants, History of Science, Milky Way, North Star, Rituals, River, Serpents, Shamanic Flight | No Comments »

Just a (Astrological) Theory

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

From Georg Feuerstein, et al., In Search of the Cradle of Civilization (p. 211):

Astrology is traditionally considered to be effective not because of any actual physical influence of the planets or stars upon the human individual or collectively, but because of the preestablished harmony between macrocosm and microcosm. In other words, astrology is deemed an expression of the inherent generative mechanism of Nature, which we can grasp, to some extent, through the theory of correspondences or equivalences [i.e., through sympathetic-magical thinking].

From Moti Ben-Ari’s Just A Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (p. 85-8):

The word “planet” means “wanderer,” because these apparently star-like objects were observed to move relative to the immense number of other stars, which just rose and set together. Once upon a time, it was believed that there were only five such planets—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn—because only these can be discerned by the unaided eye….

As for the constellations, they have no physical meaning whatsoever. A constellation is simply a two-dimensional projection of a subset of the bright stars in a three-dimensional sector of the sky. Individual stars in a constellation may be thousands or tens of thousands of light years distant from each other, and they may be of widely differing sizes and temperatures, because a small, weakly radiating star may appear bright and thus significant simply because it is relatively nearer….

From a vantage point in the universe “off to the right” of our position [on Earth, observing the Musca Borealis constellation in Aries, i.e., the Ram], you might still be able to see Sheratan and Hamal, but the other two stars would be out of your field of view. Ascribing “Ram-ness” to these four unrelated stars is totally arbitrary and meaningless, unless you believe that the Earth is a privileged vantage point. But that puts you back into the pre-Copernican dark ages.

The number of constellations and their boundaries is totally arbitrary. The arbitrariness is reinforced when we note that people of other civilizations (for example, the Chinese) saw a different number of constellations and gave them entirely different forms and meanings….

The definition of a constellation is based upon ancient observations performed with the unaided eye; now that telescopes have been invented, the projection of the region of space attributed to a constellation will contain hundreds or thousands of other stars that could not have been observed before its invention. There is no a priori reason to assume that these stars have less influence on our lives than the ones that are interpreted as forming the constellations simply because they were easy for the Greeks and Babylonians to see.

Since the stars are moving with tremendous velocities, the two-dimensional projection changes over time, so the constellations are not an “eternal” characteristic of the universe….

And that, you see, is why the claim that astrology “works” through sympathetic-magical “correspondences” rings even more of a death-knell for the validity of that art, than if known or yet-to-be-discovered forces were involved. (Ben-Ari successfully debunks those other possibilities, on p. 89-92.) Because, if the positions of the stars (and thus the shapes of the constellations) are changing, there cannot be a constant set of “correspondences” in pattern between any constellation or zodiacal sign, and the traits or behaviors of human beings supposedly being influenced by that sign.

The most basic and central concepts of astrology turn out to be a remnant of the Earth-centered worldview that was demolished by Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo hundreds of years ago, yet the “theory” of astrology does not take this new knowledge into account.

Of course, the seeming predictive validity of astrology is all just the Forer effect anyway….

The five planets mentioned above, plus the sun and moon, constitute the seven heavenly bodies, each of which gives its name, directly or indirectly, to one of our days of the week: Sunday is the day of the sun, Monday the day of the moon, and Tuesday the day of Tiw (the Anglo-Saxon counterpart of the Roman god of war, Mars). Wednesday, then, is Wotan’s day (a corrupted form of the day of Mercury), while Thursday is Thor’s day. (Thor was the Norse god of thunder and the sky, akin to the Roman god of the sky and of rain, Jupiter. In German, Thursday is “Donnerstag,” or “Thunder Day.”) Friday is the day of Freya (she being the Norse goddess of love, cf. Venus), and Saturday, finally, is Saturn’s day.

There are also seven stars in the Big Dipper, which itself circles rather magically around the North Star, while even pointing to the latter (in a line along the two stars in its ladle).

If you wonder where the “magical” nature of the number seven came from, and why it is so prevalent in religion and mythology, those two natural phenomena (i.e., the visible planets, and the stars of the Big Dipper), visible to everyone in the northern hemisphere regardless of their latitude, are more than sufficient to account for that. (There is no “South Pole” star; but there is, conveniently and not coincidentally, the Coalsack Nebula in the same position, which appears as a starless “hole” in the southern sky. So, although people in the southern hemisphere didn’t have the seven stars of the Big Dipper to find magical “correspondences” with, they still had the seven heavenly bodies.)

Even with no knowledge at all of anatomy, it’s easy to pick out the following major regions of sensation in the body: one’s sexual organs, a full bladder, an empty stomach, the beating of one’s heart, the vibrations of one’s voice, the eyes which are our primary means of gathering information about the world, and the fontanelle opening at the crown of the head, observed in newborn children (and associated in sympathetic magic with the North-Star “hole” in the hemispheric “cranium” of the sky).

Those easily discernable regions correspond closely with the seven chakras. And indeed, there have been numerous attempts in recent centuries to locate the chakras at the endocrine glands, and/or centers of the nerve plexuses along the spine:

It is noted by many that there is a marked similarity between the positions and roles described for chakras, and the positions and roles of the glands in the endocrine system, and also by the positions of the nerve ganglia (also known as “plexuses”) along the spinal cord (branching to plexuses by endocrine glands or organs), opening the possibility that two vastly different systems of conceptualization have been brought to bear to systemize insights about the same phenomenon. By some, chakras are thought of as having their physical manifestation in the body as these glands and their subjective manifestation as the associated emotional, mental, and spiritual experiences. (Wikipedia)

And since the axis of the (serpent/tree/river/spinal-symbol) Milky Way always passes close to the North Star (in exact line with the literal World Axis) which the seven stars of the Big Dipper point to, it would have been very natural, by the “theory of correspondences,” for the spiritualities of pre-scientific societies (esp. in the northern hemisphere) to associate seven “stars” or chakras with the human cerebrospinal axis.

Of course, pre-scientific people had no idea why the North Star was stationary in the sky, while all of the fixed stars rotated like clockwork around it. (Literally like clockwork, completing a revolution in 24 hours, so that the Big Dipper’s rotation around the Pole Star can be used to tell time.) On the contrary, since even the most complex ancient Grecian models saw the universe as being composed of concentric crystal spheres revolving around a stationary Earth, they had no idea that North Star appeared to be stationary in the night sky precisely because of the Earth. But, would that not have made that “still point” all the more magical? To be singled out in the sky for no apparent reason … while being so near to the serpentine Milky Way.

Posted in Astrology, Chakras, Milky Way, North Star, Planets, River, Sympathetic Magic, World Axis | 3 Comments »

Draco

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

I’ve been reading William Warren’s (1909) The Earliest Cosmologies: The universe as pictured by the ancient Hebrews, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, Iranians and Indo-Aryans.

All of the stuff about ancient cosmologies prompted me to look up the history of our ideas of a spherical earth. From Wikipedia:

The concept of a spherical Earth dates back to around the 6th century BCE in ancient Greek philosophy and possibly ancient Indian philosophy.

The concept of a spherical Earth displaced earlier beliefs in a flat Earth: In early Mesopotamian thought, the world was portrayed as a flat disk floating in the ocean, and this forms the premise for early Greek maps like those of Anaximander and Hecataeus of Miletus. Other speculations on the shape of Earth include a seven-layered ziggurat or cosmic mountain, alluded to in the Avesta and ancient Persian writings….

If you travel far enough, on land or sea, you’ll see the features of the place you left sink below the horizon, and likewise for when you leave your destination and travel even farther in the same direction. So in that regard it’s not difficult, even for people with no technological development at all, to come up with the idea that there’s a fairly constant curvature to the surface of the Earth, even if you’re coming from a pre-scientific society: You just have to travel a lot in many different directions, and observe a little.

Barbarians have been known to point out cave-mouths supposed by them to lead to an underworld. (p. 42)

The three regions of primitive cosmology were basically Earth, Atmosphere, and Sky.

[I]n the ancient literatures the term “the Navel of the Earth” ordinarily signifies the northern terrestrial pole. (p. 94)

Ah, so that must be where he’s gotten the absurd notion from, that the Garden of Eden was up at the center of the Arctic Circle. Oy vey….

The navel in the human body is at its center of gravity. What other “centers” do we know of, that could have a sympathetic-magical correspondence with that, for sharing the property of “center”? How about the “center” of the revolving sky, at the North Star, which sits directly above the north pole, and due north of anywhere else on Earth. So the north pole would indeed be the “Navel of the Earth”; but it’s a bit of a leap from that, to thinking that the Garden of Eden (with its Trees being symbols of the World Axis, etc.) literally existed, at one time in history, at the same pole.

I many years ago printed a study in which the World-tree symbol of the universe was traced through twelve mythologies. The idea was found to be pre-Babylonian. The study further showed that sometimes, in place of the “Spindle of Necessity,” we have a “lance,” or an “arrow,” or a “spear,” on which the heavens revolve. In the Vedas, it is an “imperishable axle,” on which without intermission celestial and terrestrial wheels are forever turning. Again, as in several mythologies, the columnar “bridge” is pictured as a “ladder,” with seven, or eight, significant step-supports. In Burmese thought and imagery it is the “Umbrella Staff of Universe Sovereignty.” (p. 114-5)

Plato locates Apollo, the god of light, at the North Pole…. The present writer has little doubt that the remarkable Stone Tablet of Abu-habba will eventually be recognized as a representation of Shamash, seated in state in his sanctuary, upon the summit of the “mountain of the world,” precisely as Plato has represented Apollo; that the solitary timeru (column) will prove to be the Atlas-pillar, the Shu-support, of the world; that Siru, the over-arching serpent, will be recognized as the guardian constellation Draco; that the so-called “sun wheel” upon the altar will be found to be the Earth-navel with the sign of the Quadri-furcate Waters…. (p. 194-5)

Well, I suppose if I had ever taken as astronomy course, I would have known that the Little Dipper (Ursa Minor, in the constellation Draco), too, is composed of seven stars, with the one at the end of its handle (Polaris) being the current North Star itself:

In early Greek mythology, the seven stars of the Little Dipper were considered to be the Hesperides, daughters of Atlas. Together with the nearby constellations of Boötes, Ursa Major, and Draco, it may have formed the origin of the myth of the apples of the Hesperides, which forms part of the Labours of Hercules.

In earliest times, Ursa Minor was named the Dragon’s wing, and was considered a part of Draco….

In other cultures, Ursa Minor was the hole in which the earth’s axle found its bearing. In Hindu mythology, the Pole Star is Dhruva (the word means pole today)….

On Draco:

The star Thuban (α Draconis) was the northern pole star around 2700 BC, during the time of the ancient Egyptians. Due to the effects of precession, it will once again be the pole star around the year 21000 AD….

In another Greek legend, Draco represents the dragon killed by Cadmus before founding the city of Thebes, Greece. In a third legend, it represents the dragon that guarded the Golden Fleece (occasionally revealed as the sleeping or nearly dead figure of Ladon) and was killed by Jason. The fact that the stars of this circumpolar constellation never set plays an important part in its mythologies.

In Roman legend, Draco was a dragon killed by the goddess Minerva and tossed into the sky upon his defeat.

Early Christians originally of the Roman or Greek faith then depicted Draco as the serpent who temped Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

[T]he moment we take, as we ought to do, a high-north viewpoint in visualizing the heavens and earth, we immediately find the world’s axis substantially upright in position, and therefore easily seeming like a column for the support of the dome of stars which revolves, as on a pivot, at its head. This column, extending from visible zenith to lowest nadir of the universe, furnishes the one bond needed to give unity to all regions celestial, terrestrial, and infernal…. It is the trunk of all world-trees. (p. 200-1)

That’s a bit different from how I had been thinking of it, but it would still leave the two “halves” of the Milky Way as paths to the North Star at the top of that (spine-like) column, a la the serpentine ida and pingala nadis.

West of Babylonia is found the Hebrew conception of a quadrifurcate river of Paradise which flowed forth in opposite directions to water the four quarters of the pristine earth. East of Babylonia is found the Indo-Aryan conception of the Ganga-stream which, descending from heaven to the top of the Sumeru, there divides itself, according to the Vishnu Purana, into four world-rivers, and descending the several sides of the mountain from varsha to varsha, waters the whole earth. (p. 206)

In both [Indo-Aryan and Babylonian] systems the order of the seven planets is not that of the matured Greek teaching of Ptolemy, but is conformed to the older Babylonian view, according to which both sun and moon are nearer to the earth than the nearest of the remaining five. (p. 209)

Posted in Astronomy, Milky Way, North Star, Planets, River, Serpents, World Axis | No Comments »

Lost (Not) City of the Incas

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

The “Lost city of the Incas” was not a true city:

Magli suggests that the ceremonial path into the city was conceived as a replica of the path followed by the first Incas in cosmological myth….

According to Magli, the picture also fits with celestial cycles that appeared in the sky at the times of the Incas. These were dominated by the Milky Way, which was perceived as a “celestial river” having its terrestrial counterpart in the Urubamba River.

… and, if their spiritual seekers were practicing techniques of kundalini-like meditation (as many New Agers would certainly argue), those again also mapped to the astral spine, cf. the Ganges in India, as an internalization of shamanic rituals aping the travel of souls along the river-like/serpentine Milky Way.

“Machu Picchu was located at the ideal, opposite crossroads between the terrestrial and the celestial rivers. It was the other end of the sun’s path,” Magli concluded.

Posted in Kundalini, Milky Way, River | No Comments »

Muelos

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

Weston La Barre’s sadly out-of-print Muelos: A Stone Age Superstition About Sexuality is amazingly insightful. He summarizes the Stone Age view:

Bones are given by the male parent, and bones can magically reconstitute the whole animal. As the main storehouse of bone marrow, the brain is the source of semen, via the spinal cord. The supply is limited. The fertility of the head is assimilated to cosmic fertility of the sun, rain, lightning. Fire, light, lightning, and seed are all aspects of the same holy male mystery. The fertility of human, wild animals, and fields can be increased by collecting severed human heads. Fat-marrow and bones are appropriate sacrifice to the immortal spirits, the eternal gods. Immortality also consists in the “continence” of muelos-seed, achieved in various ways. Adult manhood is not the result of endogenous forces but must be obtained from outside through a variety of methods, including homosexual acts. Virility is secreted with the semen, in all ejaculation of whatever kind; virility can thus on occasion be made a gift. Loss of manhood, power, and ultimately life itself results from the “spending” of the life-force, which is a finite capital….

In the Old World … there are relics of a bone cult of the first hunters, and even evidence of head collecting by pre-sapiens Neanderthaloids in Europe and Asia…. [Thus, the] belief that semen is held in the head … may be even older than our immediate hominid species, trailing back through Neanderthaloid even to brain-eating Australopithecine erectus….

[B]elief in the separable soul … is arguably as old as Neanderthal burials and the Neanderthal-inhabited caves. (p. 130-1)

In more detail:

The oldest ritual of which we have any knowledge is the rite at the site of the ancient hunter’s ill. The rite is partly propitiation of the animal’s spirit for stealing its life to feed one’s own and is partly expression of a concern that animals be available again in the future. Life in animals and men is enough alike to assimilate the animal’s feelings to one’s own, and the ritual is essentially both placation and a magical undoing. In order for the animal to come to life again, the hunter puts the bones, often only the head and feet, in proper anatomical position—and the animal, reconstituted and clothed in flesh, will return alive….

The skull and bones … or more properly the head and the skeleton, are regarded as the germinal source of animal life, and capable of reproducing the whole. [footnote: So persistent is the concept of bone-regeneration that it is also applied to plants. "The ritual practice of leaving part of the (peyote) rootstalk in the ground to ensure new growth 'from Elder Brother's (Deer's) bones' is common among Huichol peyote seekers."]…. American and European prehistorians consider that such ritual-induced immortality of animals is an even older belief than that of human immortality, which is based on it. (p. 1)

Of course it makes complete “sense,” from a pre-scientific perspective: You can reproduce plants, in their entirely, by “burying” (i.e., planting) small cuttings or seeds from them; so why couldn’t you do the same thing for animals, by burying/planting their “seed”? Even hunting-gathering peoples often understood how such planting worked; they didn’t make use of that knowledge simply because they could get by with scrounging for food, without doing all the planning and prep work, and staying in one place, that’s required to do even simple horticulture.

In fact, that’s a much more plausible explanation for where the superstition originated in the first place: from an observation of plant behaviors, magically transferred to animals.

Animistic belief in a separable soul, besides explaining life and death, serves also explain the mysterious persistent patterning in animals, since no matter how many individual animals are killed by hunters, and their flesh eaten by the people, the animal species remains abundant, in a kind of immortal logos-pattern that remains unchanged….

Since semen is the material vehicle of life, the question becomes the origin of semen. It is here that consciousness and life become inextricably melded. The head is easily ascertained to be the main site of the senses. Closing the lids extinguishes eyesight, and turning the head alters the field of vision, as does darkness (hence light is a critical component of life consciousness). Hands over the ears muffle hearing. Taste seems to be in the mouth, smell in the nose. Of course the matter is not so simple, for the sense of touch is widely dispersed in the body, like heat-, pain-, and cold-awareness, proprioceptive kinesthesia, etc. And life surely remains related to breath and warmth, all of which complications account for many alternatives to the head as seat-of-the-soul familiar to anthropologists…. (p. 2-3)

Discerning that the senses are, in humans, significantly in the head seems to be [an] inevitable discovery of a real situation…. (p. 7)

I had, of course, figured out most of that (re: the centering of experience in the head) independently.

If bones are the framework of life, more specifically it is the semen-like marrow (muelos) [i.e., yellow marrow, consisting mostly of white-ish fat cells] in the bones that is believed to be the source of semen. The skull, as the bone enclosing the most plentiful muelos-marrow in the body (the brain), is therefore the major repository of the generative life-stuff or semen. Consciousness and life are the same stuff and thus have the same site…. [T]he concept of brain-muelos as the source of semen is everywhere inherent in European thinking, as well as in that of societies elsewhere….

When primitive peoples supplemented their diet with marrow sucked from animal (and human) bones, then, they were doing that with the full expectation of imbibing the life-force from the former animal.

That worldwide primitive superstition is the reason for head-hunting, and very possibly also for the cannibalism which every race has indulged in:

[S]uperstition about the manly marrow is implicit in the Hindu and Christian rationale of “continence”—which aims literally to retain the soul-stuff of life, hence attain immortality, through non-expenditure of it in sexual orgasm…. [W]idespread headhunting, both primitive and ancient European, had as its motive the collection of male strength and fertility (hence no youth could marry before collecting an enemy head, lest the total tribal supply of fertility be depleted). (p. 4)

[T]he springing of male antlers directly from brain-muelos is quite to be expected, given the ancient placing of the life-stuff itself in the head. “The yearly growth of stag antlers and the obvious connection with the sexual cycle suggest fertility and reproductive potency; the autumnal shedding and spring regrowth further imply seasonal rebirth and immortality in nature.” (p. 19-20)

Any other mythologist would just associate antlers/horns with rutting competitions among males, etc. La Barre goes at least an order of magnitude beyond that in understanding where the “fertility symbol” comes from, and explains the primitive thought process underlying it.

The head as glans of the body-as-phallus is also a very old visual trope in Indo-European iconography: compare European examples of great age with the traditional Indic Shiva producing the river Ganges from the top of his head. (p. 21)

The head having contained the life essence, the skull cap was also appropriate for drinking from. The practice is evidently ancient. In the Solutrean and Magdalenian (Upper Paleolithic) levels in the Grotte du Placard, skull tops were found which Breuil and Obermaier thought were used for drinking; one of the best of the Placard cups shows traces of red ochre, a well-known Paleolithic symbol for blood–fire–life….

“In 1875, a skull was found at Pompeii, mounted in precious metals and with the inscription in Greek, “Drink and you shall live for many years”—as if longevity could be increased by imbibing life-stuff. In fact, there is much evidence that the contents of the ‘cup,’ the brain muelos or skull ‘marrow’ was the life source and seed itself.” Here, to drink life (eau de vie, whiskey—both, literally, “water of life”) is to prolong it; hence the familiar toasts “to your health” or “salud” and the like—although purists consider that only the hostess who offers it should propose “skoal” (skull)….

[T]he philologist Onians gives many examples of the overlap or the identity of genius and genital words in the Indo-European languages and explains why the seed of grain is in its “head,” why from Plautus onward the source of a stream is its “head,” and why the generative force and genius alike are thought to be in the head…. A man’s genius (feminine juno) is his personality and capacity for pleasure, but originally meant the generative potency resident in his head…. (p. 22-4)

The head of a man in a long series of first-born lineages is peculiarly sacred, for in the head of this living god is embodied the fertility of all the noble ancestors…. For the same reason of rank, commoners crouch or sit down in the presence of the highborn. No man dares stand higher than the head of the high chief, since within it lies his formidable mana and powerful taboo-placing potency. (p. 29)

[Among the Angami Naga ... [m]aleness is thought to be a fixed quantity of substance, not a quality, and headhunting is imperative because of a “zero sum” ideology. Sexuality depletes total tribal vitality, and therefore young men must collect enemy heads to replenish the sum. A man must therefore take an enemy head before he may marry.

The ancient Egyptians collected male genitals in their battles, and something like this is recorded of biblical Hebrews. (p. 31-2)

Among [the Toradja of Celebes, in Indonesia], headhunting was thought necessary to provide spirit-food for the ancestors. When headhunting was suppressed, “there was an intense anxiety lest the ancestral spirits, no longer fed with a ‘harvest’ of enemy heads, would perforce eat the villagers themselves”….

[A]lmost worldwide, there are magic male rituals—we even have evidence of puberty rituals in the Old Stone Age (e.g., at Montespan)—that are typically patterned on ordinary birth but zealously kept secret from women who do not understand these male mysteries. Puberty rites are a rebirth of the initiate from the male group, and not uncommonly with a significant surgical editing specifically of the genitals. (p. 34-5)

Decapitation was associated with numerous [Mesoamerican] earth-fertility goddesses, and with the ritual alcoholic drink pulque and the maguey plant. There was “strong conceptualism linking agriculture, fertility, birth, and the [ritual] ballgame with severed heads and decapitation [as well as with female and] male agro-fertility deities”….

A Rockefeller-financed expedition to the Kiowa led by the late Alexander Lesser discovered in this Plains tribe the belief that the bones of any animal, including humans, were the contribution of the male parent … a concept probably universal among American Indians…. (p. 48-9)

[H]air on the head and hair appearing at puberty (on jaw or pubes) are believed to be so located because of their proximity to the main storage place and conduit of the muelos. Like male animal horns, hair is the sign and the locus of virility and strength. Samson’s great strength lay in his hair; folklore is full of such beliefs…. (p. 50)

Reichel-Dolmatoff has uncovered a rich cosmology and symbolism among the Tukana Indians, implicating the Sun, sexuality, and the animals. The yellow rays of go’a-mëe, the Sun Father, are his semen and fertilizing power, penetrating all realms of space. The name refers to bone, the skeleton that sustains the body and “constitutes the basis of the moral code,” as well as the continuity of traditions and the conviction of their validity. “The bone-god is a penis,” said an informant. Lightning is “the ejaculation of the Sun that can fertilize the land,” and the paya (shaman) himself is believed to be able to produce lightning…. [T]he Milky Way is envisaged as a vast area of semen and is the sphere of hallucinations [i.e., the place traveled to in visions], where the cosmic levels join. (p. 56)

[T]o the American Indian, any plant [e.g., peyote, Amanita muscaria] that can move life-consciousness in the human head must by that token contain supernatural power to be held in holy awe. (p. 64)

Aztec collected victims’ heads to feed soul-stuff to their gods, according to plentiful contact-period information. (p. 66)

The Greeks had two major and originally conflicting beliefs concerning the location of the life-force or soul: the phrenes and the psyche. The phrenes, or midriff, was clearly associated with breath (pneuma), hence speech, thought, consciousness, life. The various states of breathing and the beating heart, especially under stress and emotion, were evidence for the phrenes location of the life of the individual. But to the Greeks the generative power of man was just as plainly in the head…. Hesiod relates sexual vigor to the seasons and the presence of moisture in the head, as does Alcaeus…. Aristotle taught that the psyche is given in the seed of the male, which no doubt facilitated the widely held notion that a woman has no soul…. The human head and the seed of grain are commonly juxtaposed in Greek metaphor: in one legend, Perseus cut off the Gorgon’s head with a sickle. (p. 73-4)

[T]he Greeks did not think the testes produced the seed. They were only a cache by the way, part of the channel, removal of which prevented issue. As late as Aristotle the testes were believed merely to retard the seed….

Alcmaeon of Croton observed the connection of senses in the head with the brain, as evidenced by the “passages” he discovered from the eyes, etc., to the encephalon…. [H]e held—as later did also Hippocrates, Democritus, and Diogenes of Apollonia—that muelos was gathered also from the flesh, more particularly from the fat, though to be sure gathered to the spinal marrow (as evidenced in spinal nerves) and thence to the brain….

In the Timaeus, Plato replicates in classic source the popular Greek beliefs in muelos. The divine part of the marrow is in the head (encephalos), and here life (bios) is ensconced. The psyche is itself seed (sperma), or perhaps more precisely it is in the seed, and the seed is in the skull and in the spinal “generative marrow” and breathes through the genital. The significance of breathing is important…. [T]he seed is breath or pneuma for the stoics; and procreation as blowing is very explicit in Aristotle….

The long-conflicting soul-sites of the Greeks (phrenes vs. psyche) are melded when brain and breath become united—yet still expressing the ancient idea of muelos as brain-semen. The Pythagorean Diogenes of Apollonia taught that “the seed is a drop of the brain containing in itself warm vapor,” which vapor becomes in turn the psyche of the new creature…. Greeks believed that both the genius of a man and his psyche might emerge from his loins as a snake when he died. [footnote: "Pythagoras says: 'serpents are created out of the spinal marrow of corpses'—a thing which Ovid also calls to mind in the books of the Metamorphoses, when he says, 'Some there are who believe that sealed in the grave, the spine rotting, marrows of humankind do turn themselves into serpents.'"] And like the psyche itself, the snake had the basic attribute of immortality…. Anciently, it was believed, spirit resides in the bones, a notion probably behind the later Christian use of saints’ bones as miracle-cure relics. The earliest Greeks even knew the very old connection of male puberty with the sun….

Belief in the supernatural master-pattern of a species had been the first approximation of an answer to what later came to be called “the problem of the one and the many,” of the universal and the particular, pattern and specimen, species and individual…. Plato transformed into an all-explanatory metaphysical principle the ancient mystical concept of the “master of animals,” each logos or Word fathering its species.

The master of animals is a nearly worldwide belief of hunting peoples in an immortal spirit-principle provided for each animal species. That is, the master is the divine pattern or logos of each particulated specimen or individual animal. The platonic Idea as father to each actuality is essentially the notion of Form as the master-of-animals father of each species of individual objects: the inseminating Idea of it is in the mind like metaphysical muelos and is the mystical progenitor of each material object. For Greeks the seminal Idea would as a matter of course be housed in the psyche, that is in the head, and … an implicit theory of the facts of life became a fundamental metaphysic. Indeed, the platonic Idea reverberated throughout the Great Tradition of subjective idealism in all later European philosophy and religion. The development of Platonism from this primitive conception is direct and demonstrable….

Greeks also had the very archaic concept of the material finiteness of the male-stuff or muelos. A man aged because he had used up in venery his very soul- or life-substance. A boy became a man only after being given muelos—hence Greek love or paiderastia. And, finally, life could be preserved immortal only by self-containment, literal “continence” or ascetic non-spending of semen….

From outside, from muelos housed in the head in the psyche-semen, the virtue (virility) of a man was passed on to a worthy youth…. (p. 75-80)

A striking assimilation of bones–muelos–fire–life is found in a pre-Buddhist saito goma cult, in which “the ninety-one pieces of wood used to construct the fire are likened to the same number of bones in the human body—the burning fire signifies becoming a human being in the process of growth within the womb.” Again, “Self-generation, perpetual regeneration, has its image in Agni, the Fire”—for which reason a “perpetual fire” is a favorite symbol for immortality, commonly of a great hero. In this context, fire is often associated with another very old symbol of life, in the red-ochre burials dating from the Upper Paleolithic (Aurignacian-Magdalenian) in Eurasia, which also occur in America. (The Paleolithic Sungir red-ochre burial in Russia had had a layer of live coals placed beneath it; the painting red of a side-recess at Altamira and another at Gargas “appear to mean the magic making of life deep in the earth, as though in the menstrous womb of a woman.”) Red–fire–blood is thus a very old association….

The striking of flint on flint, giving so-called triboluminescence, has no fire-making properties. But sparks struck with flint and iron pyrites (“fool’s gold”) are hotly incendiary particles that easily ignite dry punk…. The necessary differentness of flint and pyrites may relate to sexual metaphor.

The association of fire-making with sexual intercourse is well-nigh universal, especially with regard to the method of rubbing sticks together….

[F]or Heraclitus, sacred seminal fire is the substrate of all changing reality. All fire flies upward, striving to rejoin the cosmic fire in the Empyrean….

Pliny also wrote that the marrow descends through the vertebrae from the brain … and argued that brain-marrow is of the same substance as semen….

Marrow and fat are not sharply distinguished in classical thinking. Since both easily burn, they are regarded as obviously rich in hidden fire, life. The confounding of muelos and fat and their identification with seed and life explain the many associations of fat with sacred fire and light. A candle … is both a sacrifice and a prayer…. The meaning of anointment is literal for the ancients: it is an en-oiling of the king or other favored individual, bestowing new life and strength. And, naturally, anointment is of the head….

[N]othing is more logical than that spirits should be fed spirit-food [i.e., the fat and bones of sacrificial victims]. The gods are not being cheated, but are getting the stuff of life. The sacrifice to them of fat and bones therefore keeps immortal gods immortal. (p. 81-5)

The pig is highly suitable for symbolizing the great goddess, whose worship in Europe perhaps reached back to the hypermammalian “Venuses” of the Upper Paleolithic. The pig, rich in fat, is notably fecund…. Classic peoples understood that pigs’ fatness and fecundity (in their eyes much the same thing) resulted from their feeding on the [phallic] “mast” (mas, male) of the oak, the All-Father’s tree with its abundant replication of the glans or acorn (oak-kernel). Again, according to Frazer, the “reason why the Druids worshiped the mistletoe-bearing oak, above all the other trees in the forest, was the belief that every such oak had not only been struck by lightning but bore among its branches a visible emanation of the celestial fire. [footnote: Annual observations, made for seventeen years in the Lippe-Detmold forest, showed that lightning-stricken oaks exceeded the number of stricken beeches by 60 to 1.]….

The head of the boar, sacred to the fertility goddess Freyr (Freja) whose emblem it was, constituted the chief feature of the Yule feast; the combination of head, boar, and goddess indicates that this solstitial sun rite of Yule was a fertility festival before it became Christmas. (p. 86-8)

Classic peoples … came to contrive a network of mutually equivalent symbols for their divinely Shining One. Gold, which does not corrode or tarnish, is a fit symbol for the eternal undying “spiritual” male principle of life. “Incorruptible” gold plainly has eternal life. It is as immortal as the sun, which gold also symbolizes. The sun seems to die daily when it sinks into the mother earth at night, her son-consort, but is reborn each dawn, the Roman Sol Invictus…. Because of the seemingly infinite extensibility of gold leaf—like Fire, like Logos—the Orphics found gold symbolic of the soul and its immortality. Another symbol for immortality was a spring of ever-flowing water—ever since Plautus the source of a river, incidentally, is its “head”…. Gold is as sacredly eternal as the Sun, as life itself….

Greeks, we have noted, believed that at death a man’s spinal marrow emerged from his loins in the form of a serpent. [footnote: "One is led to wonder whether the fascinating quality of the snake (in sloughing its skin) might not have contributed to the origin of circumcision.... Circumcision is an attempt to obtain for the penis the reinvigoration experienced by the snake, through a bit of sympathetic magic"....] The snake is a very old symbol of immortality because it seems to be reborn at each shedding of its skin…. [T]hat flaccid flesh becomes seeming bone [in the male organ] could be another Stone Age metaphor.

Later Jews [after Moses] had a special form of the ageless bone-engendering-life motif. Rabbinic tradition held that the luz, or lower coccyx end of the spine, remains in the grave after the rest of the body is gone and, when the dew of heaven falls on it, will become again a complete body and live. Similarly, Jewish legend has it that the bones, nails, and brain come from the father, but flesh and blood from the mother—in good Old Stone Age tradition. And seemingly before any influence from Europe, Hebrews and other Semites took and kept severed trophy heads in the belief they could prophesy. Gold as a symbol of immortality was also Hebraic…. (p. 89-91)

Siva and his worshippers are often smeared with ashes. “Rebirth from fire is a generally accepted theme in Hinduism, and ashes are a particularly potent form of seed”….

For the Hindus, gold was the stuff of life or immortality. Gold is fire, gold is the seed of Agni = Fire, or of Indra, the god who fertilizes with lightning in the thunderstorm….

Hindus also believe there can be power-transmission from husband to lover via adulterous coitus, much in the same manner of power-transfer among Blackfoot Indians. (p. 94-5)

I had previously guessed that the “the idea of semen being produced in the brain also relates to the kundalini-yoga practice of transmuting your seed into life-force, and raising it up the spine, into the brain.” Thus, observe:

The [chakra in the] middle of the forehead may represent a displacement upward of the female organ. “The yogi, by drawing his semen to this special point, the site of the third eye, reverses the flow of normal sexuality and hence the flow of normal time; thus he transmutes seed into Soma, converting the fatal act of intercourse into an internalized act that will assure immortality.” The head as “the reservoir in which semen is stored” is the rationale behind the belief that “there are some holy men who learn the trick of stopping the falling nectar [from the brain, down the uvula] with their tongues; and as long as they do that, they cannot die… [A powerful yogi is said to have an intact store of rich, uncurdled semen in his head.]” (p. 97)

That “trick” is known as khechari mudra.

Leonardo [da Vinci] made a full dozen of coition studies in his anatomical drawings, yet in at least one saggital section of the male he shows ducts to convey the brain-muelos from the cerebrospinal canal to the male genital that are in fact not there….

Leonardo believed the tradition that spinal marrow is the same substance as the brain whence it is derived. (p. 2-3, 117)

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