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)