Chapter 10
Mythological Thresholds of the Neolithic
I. The Great Serpent of the Earliest Planters
(c. 12,500 b.c.?)
A young woman — we are told — went into the forest. The serpent saw her. “Come!” he said. But the young woman answered, “Who would have you for a husband? You are a serpent. I well not marry you.” He said, “My body is indeed that of a serpent, but my speech is that of a man. Come!” And she went with him, married him, and presently bore a boy and girl; after which the serpent husband put her away, saying, “Go! I shall take care of them and give them food.”
The serpent fed the children and they grew. One day the serpent said to them, “Go, catch some fish!” They did so and returned, and he said, “Cook the fish!” but they replied, “The sun has not yet risen.” When the sun rose and warmed the fish with its rays, they consumed the food, still raw and bloody.
And the serpent said, “You two are spirits; for you eat your food raw. Perhaps you will eat me. You, girl, stay here! You, boy, crawl into my belly!” The boy was afraid and said, “What shall I do?” But the snake said, “Come!” and he crept into the serpent’s belly. The serpent said to him, “Take the fire and bring it out to your sister! Come out and gather coconuts, yams, taro, and bananas!” So the boy crept out again, bringing the fire form the belly of the serpent.
Then, having gathered roots and fruit, as told, they lit a fire with the brand the boy had brought forth, and cooked their food; and when they had eaten, the serpent asked, “Is my kind of food or yours the better?” To which they answered, “Yours! Our kind is bad.” [Note 1]
Here is a legend of the planting world such as might have been told practically anywhere along the tropical arc of the primary migration, from Africa eastward (south of the Elburz-Himalayan mountain line) to southeast Asia, Indonesia, and Melanesia; whereas, actually, its place along the arc was a primitive enclave at the remote eastern end of this great tropical province: the Admiralty Islands, just off the northern coast of New Guinea.
Now the archaeology of the paleolithic periods of Southeast Asia has, unfortunately, hardly been broached; but the bit that we know indicates that the region was far behind Africa in its development of Stone Age tools. Furthermore, as Professor Robert Heine-Geldern has observed: “The paleolithic seems to have lasted here into a very late period. Apparently paleolithic cultures maintained themselves in large parts of the area, particularly in western Indonesia, well into the second millennium b.c., and in places even into much later times.” [Note 2]
Of mythologies open to study in that extremely interesting area, many are undoubtedly of great age. But, as we have seen in the Andaman Island legend of Sir Monitor Lizard and Lady Civet Cat playing the roles of Tammuz and Ishtar, traits from the higher culture spheres can be absorbed even by the most primitive traditions. And yet, on the other hand, as we have seen in the case of the Solo (Ngandong) skulls from c. 70,000 b.c. – 40,000 b.c. treated in the manner of the modern Borneo headhunt, the most amazing conservatism can also be represented in these societies.* Coming across such a trait, therefore, as that of the serpent and the maiden among primitive Papuans, are we to think it a regressed, or a primitive, form of the Fall in the Garden? Or does anyone know, indeed, where this mythological theme first arose?
It is reasonably clear that the widely known mythological theme of the serpent and the maiden first appeared somewhere along the arc of the primary tropical diffusion from Africa through Arabia and the Near East, to India, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and Melanesia. As we have learned from the evidence of the paleolithic tools, a broad and even fairly rapid diffusion along this arc can be readily demonstrated; however, two major provinces are to be distinguished: (a) that from Africa to India; and (b) that from North-Central India, through southeast Asia, to Indonesia and Melanesia. In the first, a number of developed varieties of the paleolithic hand ax have been found as well as earlier and cruder “pebble tools”; but in the second, only relatively crude types of chopping tool. Furthermore, in the first we have found the vigorous microlithic-Capsian diffusion, which did not extend into the second. So that Province a would appear not only to have been the earlier of the two, but also to have retained the cultural lead at least until the end of the paleolithic.
No one has yet determined where the first steps were taken toward plant cultivation. Menghin has suggested tropical South Asia; [Note 3] Heine-Geldern has termed this idea unlikely, without suggesting an alternative. [Note 4] The only possible alternative, however, is some more westerly part of Province a; which, indeed, would seem to have been the sector — and therewith the likely sector also for our myth of the serpent and the maiden, which, as we have seen, is linked to the idea of the cultivated plant.
We have already spoken of the biological theory of a “zone of hominization”: a limited yet sufficiently broad area of the earth’s surface, relatively uniform in character, where a large population of closely related individuals became affected simultaneously by a series of genetic mutations conducing to the appearance of a considerable variety of manlike forms. I should like now to propose a comparable theory for the origin both of our myth and of the art of cultivating plants, with which it is affiliated. For we can be certain that from one end to the other of Province a there was an effective communication of though and techniques; slow, indeed, according to modern standards — requiring centuries instead of seconds — yet eventually effective, nevertheless. And so we may think of this broad area as a continuum in which a fairly uniform state of human affairs prevailed and which, consequently, was characterized by a fairly uniform state of psychological readiness for the reception of an imprint — a readiness, that is to say, for precisely such “seizures” as that described in our account of the professor’s little girl and the witch. The whole province might therefore be described as a limited yet sufficiently broad area of the earth’s surface, relatively uniform in character, where a large population of closely related individuals (to wit, the members of the relatively recent species Homo sapiens) became affected simultaneously by roughly comparable imprints, and where, consequently, “seizures” of like kind were everywhere impending and, in fact, became precipitated in a ritualized procedure and related myth. We may term such a zone a “mythogenetic zone,” and it should be the task of our science to identify such zones and clearly distinguish them from “zones of diffusion,” as well as from zones of later development and further crisis.
In the case of our present myth, we do not know where, on the great arc of Province a, the idea occurred to some of the women grubbing for edible roots that it would be sensible to concentrate their food plants in gardens; nor do we know whether the idea stemmed from a concept of economy or from some “seizure” and related ritual play. All that is certain is that the functions of planting and of this myth are related and that the myth flourishes among gardeners; moreover, that it can have appeared spontaneously within a broad zone of readiness in more than one place at once; and finally, that within a period which in terms of paleolithic reckoning need not have been long (say, a thousand years) the myths and rites, together with their associated gardening techniques, can have filled the arc. We may guess the date, therefore, to have been somewhere in the neighborhood of 12,500 b.c.
But since we know that a mythology of the goddess was already flourishing earlier than this — having shown itself in the Aurignacian figurines, practically with the first appearance of Homo sapiens on the prehistoric scene — we must recognize that the myth of the serpent and the maiden represents only a development from an earlier base. In the rickety child’s grave at the Mal’ta site, where some twenty female figurines were found, there was an ivory plaque bearing on one side a spiral design and on the other three cobralike snakes. Another spiral was stippled on the side of an ivory fish. The child was in the fetal position, facing east. And there were some ivory birds in the grave.
Now an extremely primitive Papuan tribe, the Baining of New Britain, declare that the sun one day called all things together and asked which desired to live forever. Unfortunately, man disobeyed the summons, and that is why the stones and snakes now live forever, but not man. Had man obeyed the sun, he would have been able to change his skin, from time to time, like a snake. [Note 5]
This symbolism of the serpent of eternal life appearing in the paleolithic period on the reverse of a plaque bearing on its obverse the labyrinth of death; a fish in the same assemblage bearing the labyrinth on its side; the birds, suggesting a flight of the soul in death, as in shamanistic trance; the orientation to the rising sun; and the fetal posture of the little skeleton — these, in a single grave in a site where twenty statuettes of the goddess were discovered as well as a number of ceremonially buried beasts, speak for the presence of a developed mythology in the late paleolithic, in which the goddess of spiritual rebirth was already associated with the symbols of the very much later neolithic cult of Ishtar-Aphrodite: the bird, the fish, the serpent, and the labyrinth.
And so we are brought, once again, as always through myth, to the problem of permanence in change, or, as James Joyce says, to what is “ever the same yet changing ever.” And the permanent presence in this particular context is obviously woman, both in her way of experiencing life and in her character as an imprint — a message from the world — for the male to assimilate. The Neanderthal graves and bear sanctuaries, our earliest certain evidences of religious ritual, point to an attempt to cope with the imprint of death. But the mystery of the woman is no less a mystery than death. Childbirth is no less a mystery; nor the flow of the mother’s milk; nor the menstrual cycle — in its accord with the moon. The creative magic of the female body is a thing of wonder in itself. And so it is that, whereas the men in their rites (as initiates, tribal dignitaries, shamans, or what not) are invariable invested with magical costumes, the most potent magic of the womanly body inheres in itself. In all her primary epiphanies, therefore, whether in the paleolithic figurines or in the neolithic, she is typically the naked goddess, with an iconographic accent on the symbolism of her own magical form.
Woman, as the magical door from the other world, through which lives enter into this, stands naturally in counterpoise to the door of death, through which they leave. And no theology need be implied in this, but only mystery and the wonder of a stunned mind before an apprehended segment of the universe — together with a will to become linked to whatever power may inhabit such a wonder. Let us recall the charge of the Blackfoot conductor of the buffalo to his two wives, that they should remain in the lodge that day and pray. “Pray,” is perhaps merely the word of the modern interpreter; better might have been the phrase, “perform their magic,” for, as we have seen, the men’s role in the hunt had to be supported by the magic of their women. However, in the regions of the Great Hunt, where an essentially unbroken masculine psychology prevailed, supported by tokens of prestige, skillful achievement, and the firm establishment of a courageous ego, the feminine principle could be only ancillary to the purposes conceived and executed by the males. The goddess and her living counterparts could give magical support to the men’s difficult tasks but not touch their ruling concept of the nature of being. In the mythologies of that world, or conceived in the spirit of that world, therefore, the fundamental theme is always achievement: achievement of eternal life, magical power, the kingdom of God on earth, illumination, wealth, a good-natured woman, or something else of the kind. The dominant principle is do ut des: “I give so that thou mayest give” — “I give to Thee, O God, so that Thou, in turn, mayest give something nice to me — whether in this life or in the next.”
In the milder regions of the plant-dominated tropics, on the other hand, the feminine side was not simply ancillary but could even establish — out of its own mode of experience- — the the dominant pattern of the culture and its myth. And this is the force that comes to view in the myth of the serpent and the maiden, where the basic elements are: (1) the young woman ready for marriage (the nymph), associated with the mysteries of birth and menstruation, these mysteries (and the womb itself, therefore) being identified with the lunar force; (2) the fructifying masculine semen, identified with the waters of the earth and sky and imaged in the phallic, waterlike, lightning like serpent by which the maiden is to be transformed; and (3) an experience of life as change, transformation, death, and new birth.
The analogy of death and resurrection with the waning and waxing of the moon; the analogy of the water’s disintegration and fructification of the seed with the shadow swallowing and releasing the moon, and therewith, as it were, the moon’s sloughing of its skin of death; furthermore the resemblance of both of these cycles, plant and lunar, to the passing and rising of the generations, as well as to certain spiritual experiences of melancholy and rapture intrinsic to the psyche — these perceived analogies must have constituted then, as they do still, a source both of fascination and of inspiration to at least the more thoughtful members of the species, who at that time may well have constituted an even larger proportion of the population than today.
A diffusion of this mythology and its ritual enactment of the mystery of the monster serpent and the maiden from the mythogenetic zone of Province a must have carried it in due course to Province b, and then eastward into the circum-Pacific area, as well as northwestward from Province a to the Mediterranean. So that the curious myth at the opening of our chapter, of the young woman whose serpent husband gave fire to their children, is almost certainly a descendant of the same tradition that in the Mediterranean sphere produced the legends of Persephone and Eve.
The amazing fact, however, is that in the Admiralty Island version, which is a comparatively primitive variant remaining on a proto-neolithic level, the antithesis that gave Nietzsche so much to think about, between the myths of the feminine Fall and masculine fire-theft, is dissolved — in a single image, full of seeming import, which contains both themes.
It is through just such shifts of emphasis that primitive myth, and the myths of alien worlds, enable us to read anew the once pliant images in our own tradition, which the centuries have embalmed.
II. The Birth of Civilization in the Near East
(c. 12,500 b.c. – 2,500 b.c.)
The concept of the “mythogenetic zone” applied to the stages of our subject already viewed will clarify the main outlines of this natural history of the gods.
Stage I we have termed the Stage of Australopithecus. There can be no question as to where myths and rites arose during this period, if at all. Whatever part of the earth the students of paleontology may ultimately recognize as having been the “zone of hominization” — the part of the earth in which our species stepped away from its less playful, more grown-up, more serious-minded, economically oriented fellows, and began to play games of its own invention instead of only those of nature’s — we shall recognize as our primary “mythogenetic zone.”
The brain capacity of Australopithecus does not promise much in the way of stimulating ideas; nor is the evidence rich enough to give us more than clues for romantic guesses. Yet both the pygmoid and the gigantic hominids of that time must have responded — as all animals do — to the sign stimuli not only of their environments but also of their own bodies and social situations. Also, no less than Köhler’s chimpanzees, they must have enjoyed the playful invention of new situations, games, and organizations. Such games, it is true, are not yet rites. But if the brain of Australopithecus was capable of playing with patterns of thought as well as with patterns of movement, the ground was present for a “seizure” on this level. An individual “seizure” — comparable, on the mental plane, to the chimpanzee’s “seizure” by the round polished stone — would have been a pointer, already, toward the mentality of shamanism, while a group “seizure” — again on the mental plane, but comparable to the fascination of the chimpanzees for their dervish dance of for their dance around the pole — would have produced something like a popular cult. The game, if communicated, would then have established a tradition. And the endurance of the tradition would have depended upon the force of its appeal — that is to say, its power to evoke and organize life energy. In short, if, besides inventing patterns of movement, Australopithecus was capable also of patterns of thought (mythological associations to go along with his ritual games), the first chapter of our science would have begun.
The only tangible evidence of anything of the kind, however, is that curious separation of heads and tails from animal skeletons observed and described by Professor Dart. Theorizing on the basis of this evidence, one might suggest, hypothetically, that the cult of the animal offering with its game of “life beyond death and a pleasant journey home” had already opened its prodigious career. The psychological force of such a play is epitomized in Róheim’s formula: “Whatever is killed becomes father.” The veneration of the food animal, according to this formula, is simply inevitable in a hunting community — provided the inhabitants are actually hominids, not beasts. And that Plesianthropus was a kind of man seems to be indicated by the fact that he brained his prey with a club — with a tool, that is to say — instead of his empty hands and naked teeth.
Stage II, that of Homo erectus (c. 1,890,000 b.c. – 70,000 b.c.), reveals a two-pronged diffusion from the “zone of hominization” (which was probably South and East Africa): (1) northward into Europe (Heidelberg Man), and (2) eastward through the tropical arc to Java, and then northward up the Pacific coast to Peking I. For the primitive mythology of the animal-head cult (if such existed), zones (1) and (2) would thus have been “zones of diffusion.”
However, two new phenomena now appear, and these would seem to indicate the emergence of two new “mythogenetic zones.” The first phenomenon is the elegant development of the hand ax in the western sector of the tropical arc (Africa to western India) and in Europe; the second, the appearance of fire in the gruesome den of Peking Man. Professor J.E. Weckler has observed that throughout much of the early glacial period the eastern end of the tropical arc was cut off from the west by desert and ice, and that, consequently, two separate provinces of human evolution were delineated. [Note 6] In the west, as we have already noted, stone tools developed into beautiful, symmetrically balanced forms, some of which are so large and elegant as to suggest implements for ritual use. In the east, on the other hand, stone tools remained in a relatively primitive state — but fire was discovered and put to use. The mythology and ritual lore of the hand ax, which in later myth and cult became linked to the idea of thunder (Thor’s hammer, the bolt of Zeus, Indra, etc.), would have begun, then in the west, while the mythologies and ritual practices associated with fire would have sprung — like the sun — from the east. We do not know what the early mythologies may have been; but I think it interesting that the bolt in later myth is generally associated with a god, whereas fire in the east is frequently the gift, or even the very body, of a goddess. We have already spoken of the Ainu goddess of the hearth, and have remarked also that the Ainu name of this goddess, Fuji, appears in the name of the sacred volcano Fujiyama. In Hawaii the goddess Pele is the goddess of the dangerous yet beloved volcano Kilauea, where the old chieftains dwell forever, playing their royal games in the flames. And in Malekula, in Melanesia, the journey of the dead leads to and through the goddess guardian of the path to a volcano. In Japan the sun is a goddess and the moon a god; so too in Germany, where the sun is female (die Sonne) and the moon a male (der Mond) — while in France, beyond the Rhine, the sun is le soleil, and the moon, la lune.
There is, in fact, a great mythological area east of the Rhine, where the myth of the moon brother and sun sister is told. Briefly, the tale is of a young woman who at night was visited by a lover whom she never saw. But one night, determining to learn his identity, she blackened her hands in the coals of the fire before he came and, embracing him, left the imprint of his back. In the morning she saw the marks of her own palms on her brother and, screaming with horror, ran away. She is the sun, he the moon. And he has been pursuing his sister ever since. One can see the hand marks on his back, and when he catches her there is an eclipse. This myth was known to the North American Indians, as well as to the northern Asian tribes, and may indeed be of immense age.
It would surely be ridiculous to press the contrast of the feminine fire and the masculine bolt on back to a couple of hypothetical mythogenetic zones of about 400,000 b.c. — but a polarity of some kind is surely indicated in the evidence, and who will say that in the deepest levels of our two culture worlds of east and West (which harbor even greater differences than anyone today cares to think) the dialogue could not still be in progress of the God of the Bolt and the Goddess Fire?
Stage III, that of Neanderthal Man (c. >200,000–75,000/25,000 b.c.), reveals in Central Europe the earliest dependable evidence found anywhere of an establishment of myth and rite: ceremonial burials with grave gear, and bear- skull sanctuaries in high mountain peaks. Professor Weckler has suggested that Homo neanderthalensis may have come from the Oriental zone, pressing west across the tundras into Europe, where he was the first to use fire. [Note 7] Peking Man, it will be recalled, who had already captured fire as early as c. 400,000 b.c., was a cannibal; so also Neanderthal Man: we have mentioned the evidence of the opened skulls at Krapina and Ehringsdorf. But in Java too a number of such opened skulls have been found among the remains of Solo (Ngandong) Man, Neanderthal’s Oriental contemporary; and these were opened precisely in the way of the skulls of the present-day headhunters of Borneo. Neanderthal and Solo Man, therefore, may have practiced some form of ritual cannibalism in connection with an early version of the head hunt; and if so , the formula should perhaps be carried back even to the period of Plesianthropus, who killed and beheaded men as well as beasts — in which case, this grim cult might reasonably be proposed as the earliest religious rite of the human species.
But now, with respect to the earliest employment of fire, a curious problem arises when it is realized that although the heavy-browed family of Peking Man crouched around its hearth as early as c. 400,000 b.c. and that of Neanderthal Man c. 200,000 those lusty brutes gobbled their meals of fresh meat and brains — whether human or animal — absolutely raw. For it was not until the period of the far more highly developed races of the temple caves, c. 35,000 b.c. — 12,500 b.c., that the art of roasting was invented.
But then, why the hearths?
It has been suggested that they were used to heat the caves, [Note 8] and this, indeed, would seem to have been the only practical end to which they were turned. However, even if this were the case, one would still have to ask by what accident Peking Man could have learned that the blast of a forest, prairie, or volcanic fire could have been turned to such congenial use.
A possible answer is provided by the Ainu ritual of the mountain bear ceremonially entertained during his night-long conversation with the goddess of the hearth; for the fire in that context was not a mere device for the provision of heat but the actual presence of a divinity. The earliest hearths, too, could have been shrines, where fire was cherished in and for itself in the way of a holy image or primitive fetish. The practical value of such a living presence, then, would have been discovered in due time.
The suggestion is rendered the more likely, furthermore, when it is considered that throughout the world the hearth fire remains to this day a sacred as well as secular institution. In many lands, at the time of a marriage, the kindling of the hearth in the new home is a crucial rite, and the domestic cult comes to focus in the preservation of its flame. Perpetual flames and votive lights are known practically everywhere in the developed religious cults. The vestal fire of Rome, with its attendant priestesses, was neither for cooking nor for the provision of heat. And we have already learned of the holy fire made and extinguished at the times of the installation and murder of the god-king.
The hearth, then; the mountain sanctuary of the bear; and the ceremonial burial with grave fear, animal sacrifice, and perhaps occasional ritual cannibalism — these, in the period of Neanderthal Man, supply our chief clues to the religious life of a broad middle paleolithic province, documented from the Alps to the arctic Ocean, eastward to Japan and south to Indonesia. But where the mythogenetic zone and where the diffusion zones within this vast area may have been we do not know — though, surely, the earliest points of reference thus far discovered are the bear-skull sanctuaries of the Central European peaks.
And finally, as to the question of other possible mythogenetic zones and ritual syndromes developed during the course of this long period, whether in Africa, western Europe, or Southwest Asia, nothing has yet been found that could be read as evidence. However, it is entirely possible that the cults of the female statuettes and temple caves, which appear abruptly in the following period, were in the process of formation during this earlier, darker day, but have left no evidence; for where wood is abundant as a material for sculpture, and leaves, bark, feathers, etc., for ritual masks, no remains survive. Some part of the great primary field of the tropics, therefore, may have been the mythogenetic zone for the earlier stages of the cults that abruptly appear, already fully formed, in the documented late paleolithic areas of the golden age of the Great Hunt.
Stage IV, then (c. 35,000-10,000 b.c.), reveals the mythology of the naked goddess and the mythology of the temple-caves. The richest finds of the first of these two complexes have turned up in the Ukraine, though the range extends westward to the Pyrenees and eastward to Lake Baikal. Provisionally, therefore, the Ukraine may be designated as the mythogenetic zone; and this likelihood is rendered the more evident when it is considered that many of the basic elements of the complex were to reappear in the neolithic goddess-cults of the fifth millennium b.c., directly to the south, on the opposite flank of the Black Sea.
The relationship of these two goddess-cults to that of the Ainu fire-goddess is probably extremely remote: they appear to have stemmed from different mythogenetic zones. Nevertheless, in the areas of their diffusion they undoubtedly met and possibly were amalgamated. and finally, of course, both represent the imprint of the “permanent presence” previously discussed, namely, woman.
The second mythology of this important era, that of the great temple-caves is definitely centered in northern Spain and southern France — the so-called Franco-Cantabrian zone — and though the cult may have commenced as a provincial form of some earlier masked ritual of the men’s dancing grounds developed in areas to the south, it achieved here a character and ritual investment of such force that the area must be regarded as our first precisely pin-pointed mythogenetic zone; one, furthermore, from whose truly marvelous amplifications of the symbology of the labyrinthine chambers of the soul every one of the high religions and most of the primitive, also, have received instruction.
What a coincidence of nature and the mind these caves reveal! And what an evocation it must have been that drew forth these images! Apparently the cave, as literal fact, evoked, in the way of a sign stimulus, the latent energies of that other cave, the unfathomed human heart, and what poured forth was the first creation of a temple in the history of the world. A shrine is one thing, a temple another. A shrine is a little place for magic, or for converse with a divinity. A temple is the projection into earthly space of a house of myth; and as far as history and archaeology have yet shown, these paleolithic temple-caves were the first realizations of this kind, the first manifestations of the fact that there is a readiness in man’s heart for the supernormal image, and in his mind and hand the capacity to create it. Here, therefore, nature supplied the catalyst, a literal, actual presentation of the void. And when the sense of time and space was gone, the visionary journey of the seer began.
The fashioning of an image is one thing, the
fashioning of a mythological realm another. And the remarkable
fact, it seems to me, is that, for all their complication, these
caves — or at least a number of them — are conceived as units, with
outer and inner chambers of increasing power. Consider, for
example, the composition of the upper cave at Lascaux, with its
scenes of the happy hunting ground and its curious wizard beast
with the pointing-stick horns; and then below, in the crypt, the
shaman and Master Bull, upon whose magical accord the whole happy
hunt above depends. Or consider at Trois-Frères the long flume of
the difficult approach — the difficult journey — leading to the
great chamber of the animals, where the only form with emphasizing
paint upon it was the dancing shaman. In this latter case we are
dramatically confronted by a new thing in the world: the use of a
change of art technique to render a magnification of power. and
then finally, at the cavern of Tuc d’ Audoubert, the visitor
passes, first, through beautifully painted chambers and then,
clambering through a very small entrance — -which the boys who
discovered the cave called “the cat’s hole,” and going through
which their father, the Count Begouen, got stuck and had to forfeit
both his shirt and his trousers — one arrives in the sanctuary of
the connubium of the two divine bison,
Figure 28. Bison who are rendered not in paint but in bas
relief, not in two dimensions but in three; so that here, once
again, the possibilities of art were being exploited, in a way
never known before, to communicate the sense of a heightening of
the spiritual power sphere. The placement of the shaman in the
crypt of Lascaux, the emphasized form of the dancing shaman of
Trois-Frères, and the plastic rendition of the bison pair of Tuc
d’Audoubert speak volumes for the degree of esthetic sensibility of
the artists of these caves, who were greater men by far than mere
primitive magicians, conjuring animals. They were mystagogues,
conjuring the minds of men.
And so it is, I believe, that we can say that in the mythogenetic zone of the Franco-Cantabrian caves the rendition in art of the mythological realm itself was achieved for the first time in the history of the world. all cathedrals, all temples since — which are not mere meeting houses but manifestations to the mind of the magical space of God — derive from these caves. And I would say, also, that we have here our first certain sign of the operation of the fertilized masculine spirit, the upbeat to La Divina Commedia and to all those magical temples of the Orient wherein the heart and mind are winged away from earth and reach first the heavens of the stars, but then beyond. Though within the earth in these caves, we have left it, on the wings of dream. And this, already, is the wondrous flight so beautifully rendered in Gregory of Nyssa’s image of the “wings of the dove,” as the primary symbol of the Holy Spirit, whereby our nature, “transforming itself from glory to glory,” moves on without bound or ultimate term toward no limit. “For the soul turned toward God, fully committed to its desire for incorruptible beauty, is moved by a desire for the transcendent ever anew, and this desire is never filled to satiety. That is why the dove never ceases to move on toward what is before, going on from where it now is, to penetrate that further to which it has not yet come.” [Note 9] It flies into the shadows, and the shadows continually recede, yet are ever there; for the shadows through which the dove is flying — now and forever — are neither more nor less that “the incomprehensibility of the essence or being of the divine.”
Stage V is represented by the Capsian. The vast diffusion of the microliths, from Morocco to Ceylon and from South Africa to northern Europe, charts the horizon of this new influence. But a much more limited center of creative force is indicated by the distribution of the art works of the period, the chief centers of which are in North Africa and eastern Spain — though with echoes of diffusion southward to the Cape and eastward into those regions that were soon to become the matrices of the next great mythopoetic transformation. The Capsian art, as we have said, is in clear contrast to the Magdalenian. In its passage from north to south, the paleolithic tradition renounced the task of projecting magical realms. Instead, it now is presenting the earthly scenes of a mythologically inspired community almost on the level, we might say, of women’s gossip, or of ethnology. We see the exterior, not so much the interior, of that long-forgotten period of mankind’s spiritual as well as physical development.
Can it be said, then, that we have the evidence here of an impact from the north upon the south? I believe it can. And I would say also that in Stage IV of our sketchy history we had the evidence of an impact from the south upon the north. For it is surely remarkable that in precisely those areas on either side of the Mediterranean where a possibility of cross-fertilization existed in that period of no sailing craft — that is to say, on either side of the comparatively narrow barrier of Gibraltar — the two most impressive heightenings of the paleolithic world of thought and performance come into view.
North Africa, in any case, can be provisionally regarded as the mythogenetic zone of the Capsian rites illustrated on its open-faced rock walls. And if we may judge from the evidence of a number of the scenes, the underlying mythology was almost exactly that which we have already seen represented also in the ritual of the Congo Pygmies. Their picture of a gazelle struck by the rays of the sun and the magical cry of the woman with her lifted arms were vestiges in the twentieth century a.d. of the world’s most advanced thinking of the tenth century b.c.
But in this art we are on the brink of a prodigious transformation, certainly the most important in the history of the world. For among the beasts represented we can identify precisely those types of cattle and sheep that are about to appear as the barnyard stock of the neolithic. Indeed, an only slightly later level of engravings on the same North African rock walls — in the same sites — shows the same animals domesticated. Furthermore, on several of the older engravings of the Capsian period appear superimposed engravings of planetary symbols; for example, on a rock wall in the Sahara-Atlas range, at Jebel Bes Seba, the disk of the sun superimposed upon the head of a ram [Note 10] — reminding us that in Egypt the sun-god Ammun presently would be represented as a ram.
In the broadest terms, the apogee of the Capsian phase of the epipaleolithic, mesolithic, proto-neolithic stage of development (however one may like to name it) we can associate with a time, about 10,000 b.c., “when,” as Dr. Henri Frankfort declares, “the Atlantic rain storms had not yet followed the retreating ice cap northward; when grasslands extended from the Atlantic coast of Africa up to the Persian mountains; and when, in this continuum, the ancestors of both the Hamitic- and the Semitic-speaking peoples roamed with their herds.” [Note 11]
The herds were followed by hunters first, we may imagine, precisely as were the bison of the North American plains, and the first step toward domestication can have been taken when- — as sometimes happened on the plains — a hunting band remained close to a single herd for some time, as if it were a kind of living larder, fighting off alien groups wishing to poach upon it, and killing only a few of its number from day to day. When the possibility of corralling such a herd then dawned on some bright mind — or number of minds — the idea would have spread like wildfire from one extreme of the herding continuum to another — just as, in the tropical arc, the idea of domesticating plants must have spread.
And now, it seems to me extremely significant that the neolithic came into being almost precisely at the point where the hunting continuum described by Dr. Frankfort (“from the Atlantic coast of Africa up to the Persian mountains”) and the tropical arc of our primary diffusion (from South and East Africa, through Arabia, Palestine, Mesopotamia and Iran, to India and Southeast Asia) intersect; namely, the area that old Professor James Henry Breasted used to call “the Fertile Crescent.” It is entirely possible that the idea of domestication passed form one of these two spheres to the other — form the herders to the planters, or vice versa. But in any case, it is surely no accident that the neolithic dawned — and with it civilization — in the Near East, and precisely at the point where the semi-primitive, proto- neolithic arts of plant and cattle cultivation would have met.
Stage VI, the birth of civilization in the Near East, we have outlined in Part Two, Chapter 3. The mythogenetic zone is the Fertile Crescent and its flanking mountains, from the Nile up the cast to Syria, then down to the Persian Gulf. And the phases of the development, sketched in the broadest lines, are four:
1. The proto-neolithic (c. 12,500–7000 b.c.), the phase of the Natufians, which can now be described as an advance form the Capsian, with the promising, highly significant addition of a grain or grass harvest to the provisions of the hunt.
As I have observed, we do not know whether a planting had preceded the harvest or whether the animals killed were yet domesticated. But if the Natufians were not domesticating, they were nevertheless slaughtering the pig, goat, sheep, ox, and an equid of some sort, the same beasts that were later to constitute the basic barnyard stock of all the higher cultures. and if they were not planting, they were nevertheless harvesting some variety of wild or primitive grain. As we have said, the first discoveries of their remains were made in the Mount Carmel caves in Palestine. But similar finds have turned up since, from Helwan in Egypt to Beirut and Yabrud, and as far west as the Kurdish hills of Iraq.
2. The basal neolithic (c. 7000–3500 b.c.), when the foundations of a well-established barnyard economy based on grain agriculture and stock-breeding were already a firmly established pattern and the new style of village living had already begun to spread from the primary zone.
The chief crops were wheat and barley, and the animals domesticated were the pig, goat, sheep, and ox, the dog having already joined the human tribes by the time of the Capsian period, as a companion of the hunt. Pottery and weaving had been added to the sum of human skills; likewise the arts of carpentry and house-building. And then suddenly — very suddenly — the evidence of a new great leap ahead appears in the pottery, the finely fashioned, very beautiful painted pottery of the next phase:
3. The high neolithic (c. 5000–3500 b.c.), when the elegant geometrically organized designs of the pottery styles of Halaf, Samarra, and Obeid appear.
As we observed in Part Two, Chapter 3, this sort of geometrical organization of a field was a new thing in the world at that time and its appearance poses a psychological problem For why should it have been that just when a settled style of village life came into being, an art of abstract forms geometrically organized came into being too? The answer, I believe, is that in the period of the earlier hunting societies there was no differentiation of social functions except along sexual or age lines, every individual was technically a master of the whole cultural inheritance, and the communities were therefore constituted of practically equivalent individuals; whereas in the larger, more greatly differentiated communities of the high neolithic, there had already begun that tendency toward specialization which in the next period was to reach a climax. On the level of a primitive society adulthood consists in being a whole man. In the later, differentiated type of society, on the other hand, adulthood consists in acquiring, first, a certain special art or skill, and then the ability to support or sustain the resultant tension — a psychological as well as sociological tension — between oneself (as merely a fraction of a larger whole) and others of totally different graining, powers, and ideals, who constitute the other necessary organs of the body social. The sudden appearance in the high neolithic of a geometrically composed art form, wherein disparate elements were brought and held together as a balanced whole, seems to me to indicate that some such psychological problem must already have begun to emerge.
We have already noted, too, that in the pottery styles of this period various symbols appear: in the Halaf style of the northwestern area, just southward of the Taurus (Bull) Mountains of Anatolia (now Turkey), the form of a bull’s head in association with figurines of the goddess, and with clay figures of the dove, cow, humped ox, sheep, goat, and pig. It was just to the north of this fruitful area, beyond the Black Sea, in the Ukraine, that a great number of paleolithic figurines of the goddess had appeared in the Aurignacian. That a connection must be supposed would seem to be clear.
Furthermore, we have noted that the symbols stressed in the Halaf ware are not quite the same as those of the Samarra style, which, with its chief area of distribution farther south and eastward, extended into Iran. The obvious conclusion to be drawn is that a number of mythological systems had been caught in the vortex of the new mythogenetic zone, and this conclusion is supported by the evidence of the later, literate period, when the earliest written documents appear, first in Sumer and then in neighboring Egypt. The impression one gets form these is of a considerable hodge- podge of differing mythologies being coordinated, synthesized, and syncretized by the new professional priesthoods. And how could the situation have ben otherwise, when it was the serpent of the jungle and the bull of the steppes that were being brought together? They were soon to become melted and fused — recompounded — in such weird chimeric creatures as the bull-horned serpents, fish-tailed bulls, and lion-headed eagles that form now on would constitute the typical apparitions of an extremely sophisticated new world of myth.
4. In the epoch of the hieratic city state (5400–2500 b.c.), the basic cultural traits of all the high civilizations that have flourished since (writing, the wheel, the calendar, mathematics, royalty, priestcraft, a system of taxation, bookkeeping, etc.) suddenly appear, prehistory ends, and the literate era dawns.
The whole city now, and not simply the temple compound, is conceived of as an imitation on earth of the cosmic order, while a highly differentiated, complexly organized society of specialists, comprising priestly, warrior, merchant, and peasant classes, is found governing all its secular as well as specifically religious affairs according to an astronomically inspired mathematical conception of a sort of magical consonance uniting in perfect harmony the universe (macrocosm), society (mesocosm), and the individual (microcosm). A natural accord of earthly, heavenly, and individual affairs is imagined; and the game is no longer that of the buffalo dance or metamorphosed seed, but the pageant of the seven spheres — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the moon, and the sun. These in their mathematics are the angelic messengers of the universal law. For there is one law, one king, one state, one universe. And beyond the walls of our little city state is darkness; but within is the order intended form all eternity for man, supported by the pivot of the king, who in his saintly imitation of the moon has purged from his heart all deviant impulse and been transubstantiated. He is the earthly moon, according to that magical law wherein A is B. His queen is the sun. The virgin priestess who will accompany him in death and be the bride of his resurrection is the planet Venus. And his four chief ministers of the state — the lords of the treasury and of war, prime minister, and lord executioner — incarnate the powers, respectively, of the planets Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Sitting about him in his throne room — when the moon is full and he therefore reveals himself, wearing, however, the veil that protects the world from his full radiance — the king and his court are the heavens themselves on earth.
What a marvelous game!
In the neighboring pinpoint on the map, perhaps, the king would be the sun, his queen the moon, and the virgin priestess the planet Jupiter; the game would go by a different set of rules. But no matter what the local rules, wherever this mad dream was played to the limit, the mesocosm of the local state, conceived as a reflection of the universe, was actually a reflection of something from deep within man himself, pulled form his heart as the paintings were in the great caves, evoked now by the void of the universe itself — the labyrinth of the night and its treading adventurers on their mysterious journeys, the planets and the moon.
Moreover, in the symbolism of this new and larger play of destiny, the earlier themes were all subsumed — those of both the monster serpent and the animal master — to produce a far more sophisticated, multidimensional symbolic play, qualitatively different and far more potent, both to evoke and to order the multifarious energies of the psyche, than anything the primitive world had ever produced.
Perhaps the most amazing revelation that has ever come to us of what mythology meant in that remote, heaven-guided age, when the awesome mystery of the planets was enacted on earth by divine kings who at death took with them — back into the night sea — the whole cast of characters of their pageant, has been that of the “royal tombs” of Ur in the cemetery of the sacred Sumerian city of the moon-god Nanna. The excavated graves, as Sir Leonard Woolley, their discover, declares, included burials of two sorts: those of commoners and those of kings — or perhaps, as certain others now suggest, not of kings but of their substitutes, the priests who assumed their roles when their moment came to die. And it was noted that whereas the older of the private graves, though clustered around the royal tombs, were respectful of their sanctity, the newer graves invaded the royal burials, as though, their memory having faded, there had been left in later ages only a vague tradition that this was holy ground. [Note 12]
The first of the royal tombs discovered had been plundered by grave robbers, so that little remained for the twentieth century a.d.; however, something more than even the boldest imagination might have conceived soon came to light. Wrote Sir Leonard Woolley, describing the course of his dramatic discovery:
We found five bodies lying side by side in a shallow sloping trench; except for the copper daggers at their waists and one or two small clay cups they had none of the normal furniture of a grave, and the mere fact of there being a number thus together was unusual. Then, below them, a layer of matting was found, and tracing this along we came to another group of bodies, those of ten women carefully arranged in two rows; they wore head-dresses of gold, lapis lazuli, and carnelian, and elaborate bead necklaces, but they too possessed no regular tomb furnishings. At the end of the row lay the remains of a wonderful harp, the wood of it decayed but its decoration intact, making its reconstruction only a matter of care; the upright wooden beam was capped with gold, and in it were fastened the gold-headed nails which secured the strings; the sounding-box was edged with a mosaic in red stone, lapis lazuli; across the ruins of the harp lay the bones of the gold-crowned harpist.
But this time we had found the earth sides of the pit in which the women’s bodies lay and could see that the bodies of the five men were on the ramp which led down to it. Following the pit along, we came upon more bones which at first puzzled us by being other than human, but the meaning of them soon became clear. A little way inside the entrance to the pit stood a wooden sledge chariot….In front of the chariot lay the crushed skeletons of two asses with the bodies of the grooms by their heads, and on the top of the bones was the double ring, once attached to the pole, through which the reins had passed; it was of silver, and standing on it was a gold “mascot” in the form of a donkey most beautifully and realistically modele.
Close to the chariot were an inlaid gaming-board and a collection of tools and weapons,…more human bodies, and then the wreckage of a large wooden chest adorned with a figured mosaic in lapis lazuli and shell which was found empty but had perhaps contained such perishable things as clothes. behind this box were more offerings….The objects were removed and we started to clear away the remains of the wooden box, a chest some 6' long and 3' across, when under it we found burnt bricks. They were fallen, but at one end some were still in place and formed the ring-vault of a stone chamber. The first and natural supposition was that here we had the tomb to which all the offerings belonged, but further search proved that the chamber was plundered, the roof had not fallen from decay but had been broken through, and the wooden box had been placed over the hole as if deliberately to hide it. Then, digging round the outside of the chamber, we found just such another pit as that 6' above. At the foot of the ramp lay six soldiers, orderly in two ranks, with copper spears by their sides and copper helmets crushed flat on the broken skulls; just inside, having evidently been backed down the slope, were two wooden four-wheeled wagons each drawn by three oxen — one of the latter so well preserved that we were able to lift the skeleton entire; the wagons were plain, but the reins were decorated with long beads of lapis and silver and passed through silver rings surmounted with mascots in the form of bulls; the grooms lay at the oxen’s heads and the drivers in the bodies of the cars….
Against the end wall of the stone chamber lay the bodies of nine women wearing the gala head-dress of lapis and carnelian beads from which hung golden pendants in the form of beech leaves, great lunate earrings of gold, silver “combs” like the palm of a hand with three fingers tipped with flowers whose petals are inlaid with lapis, gold, and shell, and necklaces of lapis and gold; their heads were leaned against the masonry, their bodies extended onto the floor of the pit, and the whole space between them and the wagons was crowded with other dead, women and men, while the passage which led along the side of the chamber to its arched door was lined with soldiers carrying daggers and with women….
On the top of the bodies of the “court ladies” against the chamber wall had been placed a wooden harp, of which there survived only the copper head of a bull and the shell plaques which had adorned the sounding-box; by the side wall of the pit, also set on the top of the bodies, was a second harp with a wonderful bull’s head in gold, its eyes, beard, and horn-tips of lapis, and a set of engraved shell plaques not less wonderful; there are four of these with grotesque scenes of animals playing the parts of men….
Inside the tomb the robbers had left enough to show that it had contained bodies of several minor people as well as that of the chief person, whose name, if we can trust the inscription on a cylinder seal, was A-bar-gi; overlooked against the wall we found two model boats, one of copper now hopelessly decayed, the other of silver wonderfully well preserved; some 2' long, it has high stern and prow, five seats, and amidships an arched support for the awning which would protect the passenger, and the leaf-bladed oars are still set in the thwarts; it is a testimony to the conservatism of the East that a boat of identical type is in use today on the marshes of the Lower Euphrates, some 50 miles from Ur.
The king’s tomb-chamber lay at the far end of this open pit; continuing our search behind it we found a second stone chamber built up against it either at the same time, or more probably, at a later period. This chamber, roofed like the king’s with a vault of ring arches in burnt brick, was the tomb of the queen to whom belonged the upper pit with its ass-chariot and other offerings: her name, Puabi, was given us by a fine cylinder seal of lapis lazuli which was found in the filling of the shaft a little above the roof of the chamber and had probably been thrown into the pit at the moment when the earth was being put back into it. The vault of the chamber had fallen in, but luckily this was due to the weight of earth above, not to the violence of tomb-robbers; the tomb itself was intact.
At one end, on the remains of a wooden bier, lay the body of the queen, a gold cup near her hand, the upper part of the body was entirely hidden by a mass of beads of gold, silver, lapis lazuli, carnelian, agate, and chalcedony, long strings of which, hanging from a collar, had formed a cloak reaching to the waist and bordered below with a broad band of tubular beads of lapis, carnelian, and gold: against the right arm were three long gold pins with lapis beads and three amulets in the form of fish, two of gold and one of lapis, and a fourth in the form of two seated gazelles, also of gold.
Figure 29. Headdress of Queen PuabiThe head-dress whose remains covered the crushed skull was a more elaborate edition of that worn by the court ladies: its basis was a broad gold ribbon festooned in loops round the hair — and the measurement of curves showed that this was not the natural hair but a wig padded out to an almost grotesques size….By the side of the body lay a second head- dress of a novel sort. Onto a diadem made apparently of a strip of soft white leather had been sewn thousands of minute lapis lazuli beads, and against this background of solid blue were set a row of exquisitely fashioned gold animals, stages, gazelles, bulls, and goats, with between them clusters of pomegranates, three fruits hanging together shielded by their leaves, and branches of some other tree with golden stems and fruit or pods of gold and carnelian, while gold rosettes were sewn on at intervals, and from the lower border of the diadem hung palmettes of twisted gold wire.The bodies of two women attendants were crouched against the bier, one at its head and one at its foot, and all about the chamber lay strewn offerings of all sorts, another gold bowl, vessels of silver and copper, stone bowls, and clay jars for food, the head of a cow in silver, two silver tables for offerings, silver lamps, and a number of large cockle- shells containing green paint…, presumably used as a cosmetic.[Note 13]
“Clearly,” writes Sir Leonard at the conclusion of this vivid description of his truly astounding discovery, “when a royal person died, he or she was accompanied to the grave by all the members of the court: the king had at least three people with him in his chamber and sixty-two in the death- pit; the queen was content with some twenty-five in all.” [Note 14]
Several more such tombs were discovered, some even larger than the dual burial of King A-bar-gi and his queen Puabi — he and his court having been buried first and she and hers above, as when the moon sets and the planet Venus follows. In the largest tomb the bodies of sixty-eight women were found, “disposed in regular rows across the floor, every one lying on her side with legs slightly bent and hands brought up near her face, so close together that the heads of those in one row rested on the legs of those in the row above.” [Note 15] Twenty-eight of these women had worn hair-ribbons of gold, and all but one of the rest precisely the same type of ribbon of silver. All had been clothed in red cloaks, having beaded cuffs and shell-ring belts, and they had been adorned with great lunate earrings and multiple necklaces of blue and gold. Four were harpists, and these were grouped together with a copper caldron beside them, which Woolley associates with the manner of their death, suggesting that it contained the drink that bore this multitude through the winged gate to the other world.
“Clearly,” he writes,
these people were not wretched slaves killed as oxen might be killed, but persons held in honor, wearing their robes of office, and coming, one hopes, voluntarily to a rite which would in their belief be but a passing form one world to another, from the service of a god on earth to that of the same god in another sphere….Human sacrifice was confined exclusively to the funerals of royal persons, and in the graves of commoners, however rich, there is no sign of anything of the sort, not even such substitutes, clay figurines, etc., as are so common in Egyptian tombs and appear there to be reminiscent of an ancient and more bloody rite. In much later times Sumerian kings were deified in their lifetime and honored as gods after their death: the pre-historic kings of Ur were in their obsequies so distinguished from their subjects because they too were looked upon as superhuman, earthly deities; and when the chroniclers wrote in the annals of Sumer that “after the Flood kingship again descended from the gods,” they meant no less than this. If the king, then, was a god, he did not die as men die, but was translated; and it might therefore be not a hardship but a privilege for those of his court to accompany their master and continue in his service. [Note 16]
“It is safe to assume,” he says in conclusion, “that those who were to be sacrificed went down alive into the pit. That they were dead, or at least unconscious, when the earth was flung in and trampled down on the top of them is an equally safe assumption…, they are in such good order and alignment that we are driven to suppose that after they were lying unconscious someone entered the pit and gave the final touches to their arrangement….It is most probable that the victims walked to their places, took some kind of drug — opium or hashish would serve — and lay down in order; after the drug had worked, whether it produced sleep or death, the last touches were given to their bodies and the pit was filled in.” [Note 17]
And what of the one young lady without a ribbon either of gold or of silver? Actually, she had had a ribbon of silver on her person. It was discovered among the bones of her skeleton at about the level of the waist: “carried apparently in the woman’s pocket, it was just as she had taken it from her room, done up in a tight coil with the ends brought over to prevent its coming undone.” [Note 18] She had been late, apparently, for the ceremony and had not had time to put it on.
Here, then, is the prototype of the miserable little Shilluk affair of the king buried with a living virgin, whose bones then would be gathered with his into the hide of a bull. For it was the moon-bull, the symbol of the lunar destiny of all things and the mathematics of the universe, that sang to these people their song of dreams. A magical equation had been conceived: the bull and the cow (as in the cavern of Tuc d’Audoubert) :: the monster serpent and the maiden (as in the ritual of the Dema) :: the moon and the planet Venus (which as evening and as morning star is the herald both of night-sleep-death and of dawn-rebirth) :: the fertilizing waters of the abyss and the seed that is to bear much fruit:: the king and the queen.
Among the cylinder seals of Mesopotamia, where many of the basic motifs of the earliest mythology of this dawning age were aphoristically illustrated, there is an image, more than once encountered, in which, on a fleece-covered couch having legs shaped like those of a bull, a male and female lie extended with a priest officiating at their feet. “It seems certain,” Dr. Henri Frankfort observes, “that we have here the ritual wedding of the god and goddess.” [Note 19] But in the period of the hieratic city state (though not in the later periods of Mesopotamia) the god and goddess were incarnate in the king and queen. In the queen’s chamber of the royal tomb, as we have seen, there was “the head of a cow in silver.” The king’s chamber had been plundered, but there were harps fashioned in such a way that their bodies terminated in beautiful heads of gold — the heads of bulls with lapis lazuli beards: mythological bulls (supernormal images) from which the music of the myth and this ritual of destiny derived. It is not known by what means the kings were killed (or the priests who may have been serving by this time as their substitutes, about 2500 b.c.; but the manner of Puabi’s death is perfectly clear. “On the remains of a wooden bier lay the body of the queen, a gold cup near her had.” [Note 20] Her court was interred above his, but her own tomb had been sunk to the level of A-bar-gi’s and placed beside it. The myth being enacted in this mad rite was that of the ever-dying and resurrected god, “The Faithful Son of the Abyss,” or “The Son of the abyss who Rises,” Damuzi-absu, or Tammuz (Adonis). The queen of heaven, the daughter of God, goddess of the morning and evening star, the hierodule or slave-girl dancer of the gods — who, as the morning star, is ever-virgin, but, as evening star, is “the divine harlot,” and whose names in a later age were to be Ishtar, Aphrodite, and Venus — “from the ‘great above’ set her mind toward the ‘great below,’ abandoned heaven, abandoned earth, and to the nether world descended,” to release her brother and spouse from the land of no return.
By chance a fragment of her legend from the period of the tombs of Ur survives; and we have, also, just such a hymn as the tongues of the women of the gold and silver ribbons sang to the harps of the moon-bull that were found still in the grasp of the girl-harpists’ skeleton arms:
Mayest thou go, thou shalt cause him to rejoice,
O valorous one, star of Heaven, go to greet him.
To cause Damu to repose, mayest thou go,
Thou shalt cause him to rejoice.
To the shepherd Ur-Nammu mayest thou go,
Thou shalt cause him to rejoice.
To the man Dungi mayest thou go,
Thou shalt cause him to rejoice.
To the shepherd Bur-Sin mayest thou go,
Thou shalt cause him to rejoice.
To the man Gimil-Sin mayest thou go,
Thou shalt cause him to rejoice.
To the shepherd Ibi-Sin mayest thou go,
Thou shalt cause him to rejoice. [Note 21]
The five last titles are the names, in order, of the last kings of the Third Dynasty of Ur (about 2150-2050 b.c.) * and express will the fundamental concept of this whole archaic world, which was that the reality, the true being, of the king — as of any individual — is not in his character as individual but as archetype. He is the good shepherd, the protector of cows; and the people are his flock, his herd. Or he is the one who walks in the garden, the gardener; the one who gives life to the fields, the farmer of the gods. Again, he is the builder of the city, the culture-bringer, the teacher of the arts. and he is the lord of the celestial pastures, the moon, the sun. The five kings — Ur-Nammu, Dungi, Bur-Sin, Gimil-Sin, and Ibn-Sin — are the same, namely, Damu, the ever-living, ever-dying god; just as the Queen is Inanna, the naked goddess, whom we have known since the beginning of time.
From the “great above” she set her mind toward the “great below,”
The goddess, from the “great above” she set her mind toward the “great below,”
Inanna, from the “great above” she set her mind
toward the “great below.”
My lady abandoned heaven, abandoned earth,
To the nether world she descended,
Inanna abandoned heaven, abandoned earth,
To the nether world she descended,
Abandoned lordship, abandoned ladyship,
To the nether world she
descended.
The seven divine decrees she fastened at her side,
The shugurra, the crown of the plain, she put upon her head,
Radiance she placed upon her countenance,
The rod of lapis lazuli she gripped
in her hand,
Small lapis lazuli stones she tied about her neck,
sparkling stones she fastened to her breast,
A gold ring she gripped in her hand,
A breastplate she bound about her
breast.
All the garments of ladyship she arranged about her body,
Ointment she put upon her face.
Inanna walked toward the nether world. [Note 22]
Thus our precious fragment begins. the goddess is walking to the nether world, which is ruled by the dark side of her own self, her sister-goddess Ereshkigal. And she comes to the first gate.
When Inanna had arrived at the lapis lazuli palace of the nether world,
At the door of the nether world she acted evilly,
In the palace of the nether world she spoke evilly:
“Open the house, gatekeeper, open the house,
Open the house, Neti, open the house, all alone I
would enter.”
Neti, the chief gatekeeper of the nether world, answers the pure Inanna:
“Who, pray, art thou?”
“I am the queen of haven, the place where the sun
rises.”
“If thou art the queen of heaven, the place where the sun rises,
Why, pray, hast thou come to the land of no return?
How has thy heart led thee to the road whose
traveler does not return?”
The pure Inanna answers him:
“Ereshkigal, my elder sister,
The lord Gugalanna, her husband, has been killed:
I have come to attend the funeral.”
The chief gatekeeper of the nether world, Neti, answers the pure Inanna:
“Stay, Inanna, let me speak to my
queen.”
He goes, and returns. The chief gatekeeper of the nether world, Neti, speaks to the pure Inanna:
“Come, Inanna, enter.”
And the following dialogue then comes to pass.
Upon her entering the first gate,
The shugurra, the “crown of the plain” of her head, was removed.
“What, pray, is this?”
“Extraordinarily, O Inanna, have the decrees of the nether world been perfected,
O Inanna, do not question the rites of the nether
world.”
Upon her entering the second gate,
The rod of lapis lazuli was removed.
“What, pray, is this?”
“Extraordinarily, O Inanna, have the decrees of
the nether world been perfected.
Upon her entering the third gate,
The small lapis stones at her neck were removed.
“What, pray, is this?”
“Extraordinarily, O Inanna, have the decrees of the nether world been perfected,
O Inanna, do not question the rites of the nether
world.”
Upon her entering the fourth gate,
The sparkling stones of her breast were removed.
“What, pray, is this?”
“Extraordinarily, O Inanna, have the decrees of the nether world been perfected,
O Inanna, do not question the rites of the nether
world.”
Upon her entering the fifth gate,
The gold ring of her hand was removed.
“What, pray, is this?”
“Extraordinarily, O Inanna, have the decrees of the nether world been perfected,
O Inanna, do not question the rites of the nether
world.”
Upon her entering the seventh gate,
All the garments of her body were removed.
“What, pray, is this?”
“Extraordinarily, O Inanna, have the decrees of the nether world been perfected,
O Inanna, do not question the rites of the nether
world.”
Thus, naked, the goddess came before her sister and the seven judges of the nether world, Ereshkigal and the Anunnaki.
The pure Ereshkigal seated herself upon her throne,
The Anunnaki, the seven judges, pronounced judgement before her,
They fastened their eyes upon her, the eyes of death,
At their word, the word that tortures the spirit,
The sick woman was turned into a corpse,
And the corpse was hung from a stake. [Note 23]
But death, as we are taught in all the mythological traditions of the world, is not the end. The lesson of the moon-god, three days dark, is still to be told. Inanna’s corpse remained on the stake.
After three days and three nights had passed,
Her messenger Ninshubur,
Her messenger of favorable winds,
Her carrier of supporting words,
Filled the heaven with complaints for her,
Cried for her in the assembly shrine,
Rushed about for her in the house of the gods,
Like a pauper in a single garment he dressed for her,
To the Ekur, the house of Enlil, all alone he directed his step.
Ninshubur, known too as Papsukkal, “chief messenger of the gods,” and Ilabrat, “the god of wings,” was told by the goddess before her departure that if she did not return he should “Weep before Enlil (the air-god), weep before Nanna (the moon-god), and if these failed to respond, then weep before Enki, the lord of Wisdom (the serpent), who knows the food of life and the water of life. He,” she said, “will surely bring me to life.”
The clay figurines of Ninshubur, the messenger, found in foundation boxes beneath the doors of temples, show him without wings but bearing a staff or wand in his right hand. [Note 24] He is the prototype of Hermes (Mercury), the Olympian messenger of the gods and the guide of souls to the underworld, who also brings souls to be born again and so is regarded as the generator both of new lives and of the New Life. Hermes’ staff, it will be recalled, is the caduceus, with entwined serpents. But the meaning of these serpents is precisely the same as that of the ritual and myth we are now discussing: namely, it is a reference to the divine, world- renovating connubium of the monster serpent with the naked goddess in her serpent form.
Wishing to be certain of the reference of the sign of the caduceus, Dr. Henri Frankfort once sent an inquiry to the British Museum of Natural History. “The symbol in which you are interested may well represent two snakes pairing,” Mr. H.W. Parker, Assistant Keeper of Zoology, replied. “As a general rule the male seizes the female by the back of the neck and the two bodies are more or less intertwined….Vipers are said to have the bodies completely intertwined.” “This then,” comments Dr. Frankfort, “explains most satisfactorily why the caduceus should have become the symbol of our god, who is thus characterized as the personification of the generative force of Nature.” [Note 25] Hermes, the Greek carrier of the serpent staff — which is both beautiful and terrible and both bestows sleep and awakens — is the inventor of the lyre and of the art of making fire with the fire-sticks. He is, furthermore, the archetypal trickster god of the ancient world. We think of the bull-voiced lyres of the graves of Ur and of the Greek orgies where “bull-voices roared from somewhere out of the unseen” (Aeschylus, Fragment 57). We think of the young boy and girl of the fire-sticks in Africa, and their shocking rite. And we think, too, of Coyote-trickster, who turned himself into a girl and became pregnant. Hermes, too, is androgyne, as one should know from the sign of his staff.
When the messenger, Ninshubur, then Hermes’ prototype, had wept to no effect first before Enlil and then before the moon-god, Nanna, of the city of Ur, he turned to Enki, “Lord of the Waters of the Abyss,” who, when he had heard, cried out:
“What now has my daughter done! I am troubled,
What now has Inanna done! I am troubled,
What now has the queen of all the lands done! I am troubled,
What now has the hierodule of heaven done! I am troubled.”
He brought forth dirt and fashioned two sexless creatures, two angels. To the one he gave the food of life; to the other he gave the water of life. k and then he issued his commands.
“Upon the corpse hung from a stake direct the fear of the rays of fire,
Sixty times the food of life, sixty time the water of life, sprinkle upon it,
Verily Inanna will arise.”
Upon the corpse hung from a stake they directed the fear of the rays of fire,
Sixty times the food of life, sixty times the water of life, they sprinkled upon it,
Verily, Inanna arose.
Inanna ascended from the nether world,
The Anunnaki fled,
And whoever of the nether world had descended peacefully to the nether world;
When Inanna ascended from the nether world,
Verily the dead hastened ahead of her.
Inanna ascends from the nether world,
the small demons like reeds,
The large demons like tablet styluses,
Walk at her side…. [Note 26]
The conclusion of the piece is missing. But the import of the image is clear enough. It is a theme that has been given many turns in the course of the centuries since. One thinks, for example, of Mary Magdalene at the tomb, weeping outside the tomb; and as she wept she stooped to look within. But she saw two angels sitting in white where the body of Jesus had been, one at the head and one at the feet, and they said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She answered, “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” Saying which, she turned around and saw Jesus standing, but did not know that it was Jesus. He said to her: “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom do you seek?” And supposing him to be the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” He said to her, “Mary!” She turned, and she said to him in Hebrew, “Teacher!” Jesus said to her, “Do not hold me; for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Then Mary Magdalene went and said to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord.” [Note 27]
III. The Great Diffusion
Huizinga, in his highly suggestive study of the play element in culture, Homo Ludens, points out that the Dutch and German words for “duty,” Plicht and Pflicht, are related etymologically to our English “play,” the words being derived from a common root. [Note 28] English “pledge,” too, is of this context, as well as the verb “plight,” meaning “to put under a pledge, to engage” (as in “to plight troth,” “a plighted bride”). We may recall here Huizinga’s reference to the Japanese “play language,” or “polite language” (asobase- kotoba), where it is not said that “you arrive in Tokyo,” but that “you play arrival”; not that “I hear you father is dead,” but that “I hear your father has played dying.”[Note 29] “The play-concept as such is of a higher order than seriousness,” Huizinga declares. “For seriousness seeks to excluded play, whereas play can very well include seriousness.” [Note 30]
The royal tombs of Ur illustrate the capacity and spirit of the world’s first aristocracy for play: pledging in play and then playing out the pledge. And it was in their utterly wonderful nerve for this particular game that the world was lifted from savagery to civilization. In such a performance the question of belief is of secondary moment and effect. The principle is that of the masque, the dance, the pageant, the motion pattern through the form of which a new power for life is evoked. An image is conceived, a supernormal image, surpassing in scope the requirements of food, clothing, shelter, sex, and a pleasant hobby for one’s leisure time. Nerve is required to move into such a game and to play out the fraction of one’s part in the picture. But then, behold! A transformation of life, an increment such as before had not been even imagined, and therewith a new horizon, both for man and for his gods. It was in the marvelous talent of the Sumerians for their function of an aristocracy of spirit. And it was continued as such in many parts of the world up to a very recent date.
Now, as Sir Leonard Woolley has already shown, the effigies of servants at their tasks in certain Egyptian tombs indicate that at one time the courts of the Nile too went with their kings into the underworld. Likewise, in the royal tombs of ancient China ceramic effigies have been found. In fact, in China the practice of human sacrifice at royal entombments persisted until well into the twelfth century a.d.; and in the neighboring island empire of Japan an impressive instance of the custom of voluntary “dead following” (jinchū, “loyalty”) came to the notice of the world as late as 1912, when the general Count Nogi, the hero of Port Arthur, put himself to death at the precise hour of the burial of his shōgun, Meijitenno, and the Countess Nogi then killed herself to accompany her spouse.
It is clear from the evidence that the ritual of “dead following” was a generally honored social and religious practice, not only in the cities of the Near East, where the epochal transition was fade from savagery to civilization, but also wherever the earliest carriers of the new game of destiny settled in their astonishingly broad and rapid conquest of new fields. The diffusion of their influence can be readily traced in the four directions — or rather, to the points between — somewhat as follows.
The Southwestward Diffusion
Already we have heard something of the early diffusion of this high culture complex to the Sudan. Far to the south, in the area marked by the great stone temple ruins of Zimbabwe, in Matabeleland, ritual regicide appears to have been practiced until as late as 1810. The stars and a sacred oracle were consulted by the priests every four years and, without fail, the verdict would be “death for the king.” The custom there was that the king’s first wife — who had assisted him with the making of the sacred first fire of his reign — should strangle him with a cord made of the foot- sinew of a bull. The night should be a night of the new moon. The corpse should be taken by the priests that night to a hut on the summit of a mountain and there placed on a platform beneath which a great leathern sack should be hung. The first day, the entrails of the king were removed and tossed into the sack; the second, the body was stuffed with herbs and leaves and sewn up again. On the third day, the skull was opened from behind and its contents were emptied into the sack. The fourth day, the corpse was lashed in a crouch position, swathed with cloth in such a way that the toe-and fingertips with their nails should protrude, and then wrapped in the fresh hide of a jet-black full with a white mark of its forehead. Every night for a full year a priest would open the bull hide and massage the mummy in such a way that its liquid and maggots as well as toe and fingernails should drop into the sack. And when this year was accomplished — once again on a night of the new moon — the favorite wife of the king (not she who had strangled him, but another) was compelled to submit to the removal of her clothing, piece by piece, after which she was strangled, naked. The body was brought into a cave on the east slope of the mountain; the king’s body into one on the west. And when the king had been immured, the dead queen was clothed and likewise immured. The most elaborate ceremonies, however, were reserved for the transportation of the sack from the charnel hut on top of the mountain to a holy cave in its side. Three people were slain as sacrifices and the sack was sealed within the cave — with a hollow reed leading from the chamber to the outer world. A priest watched this reed until, one day, the king’s soul emerged from it in the form of a worm, beetle, lizard, snake, or some other small dragon; whereupon the reed was removed, the hole was sealed, and offerings were made that should be annually renewed. [Note 31]
“In all of our mappings of historical culture movements in Africa,” Frobenius writes, “no distribution is repeated more frequently than that of a broad plain down the east coast from the Nile to the Zambesi — that is to say, running in a north-to-south direction and lying close to the Eritrean shore — and then two tongues extending westward from this belt across the continent, the one in the north reaching as far as to Senegal. (See map) These two transverse areas reveal divergencies, which, however, are by far neither as numerous nor as important as the signs of inner accord and unity.” [Note 32]
And elsewhere he writes:
The fragments of mythology and ritual that have come to light in southeast Africa, in the nuclear zone of the southern part of the Eritrean sphere, compel us to reconstruct an image that resembles that of the Sumerian and the Indian Dravidian lore of life and the gods as closely as one egg resembles another. The moon-god imaged as a great bull; his wife, the planet Venus; the goddess offers her life for her spouse; and everywhere, this goddess, as the Morning star, is the goddess of war, as Evening Star a goddess of illicit love, and a universal mother besides; in all three zones (Africa, Dravidian India, and Sumer) the drama of the astral sky is the model and very destiny of all life, and when projected as such upon earth gave rise to what may have been the very earliest form and concept of the state — namely, that of a sacred, cosmic, priestly image. Is it too bold, given these circumstances, to speak of a Great Eritrean Culture Zone, which in ancient times comprised the shores of the Indian Ocean? [Note 33]
We can regard this Great Eritrean area as the first zone of diffusion of the mythology of our mythogenetic Fertile Crescent; for a basal neolithic culture stratum has been identified as early as about 4500 b.c. in the Nile Valley; and a high neolithic about 4000. Furthermore, there is now dependable C-14 evidence that something of the neolithic had reached Zambia as early as c. 400 b.c., [Note 34] while the arts of the Bronze and Iron Ages surely were established in Sudanese Napata by, respectively, c. 750-744 and c. 397- 362 b.c. [Note 35]
The chief Egyptian sites of the basal stratum are on the left bank of the Nile, at Merimde, in the Delta region, and at Fayum, somewhat farther south, as well as on the right bank, about two hundred miles up the river, at Tasa. The assemblages differ slightly among themselves but in their culture level are about equivalent, the characteristic features being a rough black pottery; excellent basketry; spindle whorls for the fashioning of linen; palettes for cosmetics; burial in a contracted posture (at Tasa) or as in sleep, facing east (Merimde); bone, ivory, and (at Fayum) ostrich-shell beads; boar’s-tusk and tiny stone-ax (celt) amulets (at Merimde); wheat stored in silos; and a barnyard stock of swine, cattle, sheep, and goats. C-14 dates for Fayum range c. 4440-c.4100 b.c.
Merimde and Fayum, owing to an encroachment of the desert, were abandoned toward the close of this period, while at Tasa a new racial stock appeared with a high neolithic style of culture, the so-called Badarian. A beautiful red-to-brown pottery shaped and fired with a skill never excelled in the Nile Valley, clay and ivory female figurines (the first in Egypt), pottery models of boats, and the first signs of copper give the clue to the level of this culture. In the hunt the Badarians used the boomerang, and their racial traits suggest Frobenius’ Great Eritrean zone. Cattle and sheep, as though deified, were sometimes given ceremonial burial, and human remains faced west, not east, toward the land of the setting, not the rising sun. No bones of the pig have been discovered among their remains, and this may signal the commencement of a tradition of abstention from the flesh of swine. An association of the pig with some despised alien or socially inferior group, or with a mythology of the underworld, would suffice to account for such an avoidance — which, in any case, cannot possibly have been rationalized, in the usual modernist way, as a prophylaxis against a possible case of trichinosis. The boar’s tooth, as we have seen, was a fetish of the Merimde of the delta, while, in contrast, the sacred beasts of the Badarians of the Upper Nile were the bull and ram.
A second high neolithic stratum overlies the Badarian — the Amratian, where five new types of pottery appear, decorated with figures and geometrical designs that do not have the elegance, formal beauty, or mathematical regularity of those of Mesopotamia, but on the other hand are extremely interesting for their obvious derivation from the Capsian art style of North Africa and Eastern Spain. The human forms, furthermore, show that the manner of dress had not changed. The men still wore decorated penis sheaths and were otherwise stark naked, with grass sandals and with feathers in the hair. The women wore linen aprons, and frequently shaved their heads to wear wigs. The physical type was about that of the Capsians: 5' 3" tall, slender, slightly built, with a long, small skull, small features, and straight hair. The bodies were tattooed. Figures of clay and ivory; copper, sometimes used now for small tools; papyrus-bundle boats; a number of types of arrowhead, and many elegant stone blades characterize the assemblage. Imports of malachite from Sinai, gold from Nubia, coniferous wood from Syria, and obsidian from Armenia and the Aegean speak for a development of trade — while in the graves we find that dogs were buried with their masters (perhaps as guides to the land of the dead), as well as statuettes of women and servants. [Note 36]
But then, abruptly, something new in the Delta: hieroglyphic writing, the calendar, the mythology of the sun-god Horus and resurrected god Osiris, trading fleets sailing the seas to Crete, Syria, and Palestine, flying the signal flags of their nomes, the harpoon flag and the fish flag! There is an elegance in the arts and life style of pre- dynastic Egypt completely different from those of the mythogenetic zone of Southwest Asia. Furthermore, in Egypt the new arts were applied to life in new ways. The mythology was adjusted to a geography in which the fertility of the earth sprang from the Nile, not from the clouds; and to a protected land — a grandiose oasis — unified and held in form with comparative ease, in contrast to the motherland of Southwest Asia, where city was to battle city and then empire empire for millenniums. But a complete contrast in style does not rule out in any way our recognition of the impact of a new idea, derived by diffusion from an alien land. Nor is the diffusion random; it is selective. The wheel appeared in Sumer about 3200 b.c., but not in Egypt until fourteen hundred years later. For the Nile supplied the best possible transportation; and it was not until the light was chariot, maneuverable in battle and drawn by steeds, had been invented that the wheel recommended itself as a valuable addition to the culture of the Pharaohs. The date of the introduction of writing, the calendar, and their associated arts to Egypt was c. 2800 b.c. that of the wheel, c. 1800 b.c.
The basic myth of dynastic Egypt was that of the death and resurrection of Osiris, the good king, “fair of face,” who was born to the earth-god Geb and sky-goddess Nut. He was born together with his sister-wife, the goddess Isis, during the sacred interval of those five supplementary days that fell between one Egyptian calendric year of 360 days and the next. He and his sister were the first to plant wheat and barley, to gather fruit from trees, and to cultivate the vine, and before their time the races of the world had been savage cannibals. But Osiris’s evil brother, Set, whose sister-wife was the goddess Nephthys, was mortally jealous both of his virtue and of his fame, and so, stealthily taking the measure of his good brother’s body, he caused a beautifully decorated sarcophagus to be fashioned and on a certain occasion in the palace, when all were drinking and making merry, had it brought into the room and jestingly promised to give it to the one whom it should fit exactly. All tried, but, like the glass slipper of Cinderella, it fitted but one; and when Osiris, the last, laid himself within it, immediately a company of seventy-two conspirators with whom Set had contrived his plot dashed forward, nailed the lid upon the sarcophagus, soldered it with molten lead, and flung it into the Nile, down which it floated to the sea.
Figure 30. Osiris in the tamarask tree
Isis, overwhelmed with grief, sheared off her locks, donned mourning, and searched in vain, up and down the Nile; but the coffer had been carried by the tide to the coast of Phoenicia, where, at Byblos, it was cast ashore. A tamarisk immediately grew up around it, enclosing the precious object in its trunk, and the aroma of this tree then was so glorious that the local king and queen, Melqart and Astarte — who were, of course, a divine king and queen themselves, the local representatives, in fact, of the common mythology of Damuzi and Inanna, Tammuz and Ishtar, Adonis and Aphrodite, Osiris and Isis — discovering and admiring its beauty, had the tree felled and fashioned into a pillar of their palace.
Figure 31. The Djed PillarThe bereaved and sorrowing Isis,
meanwhile, wandering over the world in her quest — like Demeter in
search of the lost Persephone — come to Byblos, where she learned
of the wonderful tree. And, placing herself by a well of the city,
in mourning, veiled and in humble guise — again like Demeter —
she spoke to none until there approached the well the handmaidens
of the queen, whom she greeted kindly. braiding their hair, she
breathed upon them such a wondrous perfume that when they returned
and Astarte saw and smelt the braids she sent for the stranger,
took her into the house, and made her the nurse of her child.
The great goddess gave the infant her finger instead of breast to suck and at night, having placed him in a fire to burn away all that was mortal, flew in the form of a swallow around the pillar, mournfully chirping. But the child’s mother, Queen Astarte, happening in upon this scene, shrieked when she spied her little son resting in the flame and thereby deprived him of the priceless boon. Whereupon Isis, revealing her true nature, begged for the pillar and, removing the sarcophagus, fell upon it with a cry of grief so loud that the queen’s child died on the spot. Sorrowing, then, the two women placed Osiris’s coffer on a boat, and when the goddess Isis was alone with it at sea, she opened the chest and, laying her face on the face of her brother, kissed him and wept.
The myth goes on to tell of the Blessed boat’s arrival in the marshes of the Delta, and of how Set, one night hunting the boar by the light of the full moon, discovered the sarcophagus and tore the body into fourteen pieces, which he scattered abroad; so that once again, the goddess had a difficult task before her. She was assisted, this time, however, by her little son Horus, who had the head of a hawk, by the son of her sister Nephthys, little Anubis, who had the head of a jackal, and by Nephthys herself, the sister-bride of their wicked brother Set.
Anubis, the elder of the two boys, had been conceived one very dark night, we are told, when Osiris mistook Nephthys for Isis; so that by some it is argued that the malice of Set must have been inspired not by the public virtue and good name of the noble culture hero, but by this domestic inadvertence. The younger, but true son, Horus, on the other hand, had been more fortunately conceived — according to some, when Isis lay upon her dead brother in the boat, or, according to others, as she fluttered about the palace pillar in the form of a bird.
Figure 32. Isis and Horus
The four bereaved and searching divinities, the two mothers and their tow sons, were joined by a fifth, the moon-god Thoth (who appears sometimes in the form of an ibis-headed scribe, at other times in the form of a baboon), and together they found all of Osiris save his genital member, which had been swallowed by a fish. The tightly swathed the broken body in linen bandages, and when they performed over it the rites that thereafter were to be continued in Egypt in the ceremonial burial of kings, Isis fanned the corpse with her wings and Osiris revived, to become the ruler of the dead. He now sits majestically in the underworld, in the Hall of the Two Truths, assisted by forty-two assessors, one from each of the principal districts of Egypt; and there he judges the souls of the dead. These confess before him, and when their hearts have been weighed in a balance against a feather, receive, according to their lives, the reward of virtue and the punishment of sin. [Note 37]
The myth is clearly of the family of Damuzi-absu and Inanna. However, the symbolic animal involved — at least in this version of the great adventure — was not the moon-bull, as in the Mesopotamia myths and rites of the royal tombs of Ur, but the pig, as in the Greek rituals of Persephone and Melanesian of Hainuwele. For Set, as we have just seen, was hunting the boar on the night of the full moon when he found and dismembered the body of Osiris. Comparably, according to Ovid, the young Adonis, beloved of Venus-Aphrodite (the classical counterpart of both Isis and Inanna), was killed by a wild boar when out hunting. [Note 38] and the Phrygian ever-dying and resurrected divinity, Attis, following one version of his legend, was likewise gored by a boar — but, according to another, was himself a pig. [Note 39] Apparently, therefore, we have here the evidence either of two periods or of two provinces of the same essential myth; one associating the bull, but the other a boar, with the force of the abyss.
The Northwestward Diffusion
“There is a land called Crete in the midst of the wine-dark Sea,” we read in the Odyssey, “a fair land and a rich, begirt with water, and therein are many men innumereable, and ninety cities. And all have not the same speech, but there is confusion of tongues; there dwell Achaeans and there too Cretans of Crete, high of heart, and Cydonians there and Dorians of waving plumes and goodly Pelagians. And among these cities is the mighty city Knossos, wherein Minos when he was nine years old began to rule, he who held converse with great Zeus….” [Note 40]
Professor Bedrich Hrozny has pointed out that in Cnossus, the capital of ancient Crete, the kings ruled “through periods of nine years” and that Homer’s reference to the nine years of Minos must be a reflection of this circumstance. [Note 41] Frazer, in The Golden Bough, in his chapters on “The Killing of the Divine King,” states that the period of the rule of Minos was eight years and suggests that the Athenian legend of the tribulte of seven youths and seven maidens sent to Knossos periodically to be consumed by the Minotaur may have had some connection with Cretan ceremonials devoted to the renewal of the kingly power. “At the end of each period,” says Frazer in his discussion of King Minos, “he retired for a season to the oracular cave on Mount Ida, and there communed with his divine father Zeus, giving him an account of his kingship in the years that were past, and receiving from him instructions for his guidance in those which were to come. The tradition plainly implies,” he continues, “that at the end of every eight years the king’s sacred powers needed to be renewed by intercourse with the godhead, and without such a renewal he would have forteited his right to the throne.” [Note 42]
Nine years or eight; in either case, the Cretan tradition gives evidence of an actual or modified periodic regicide, and we may think, therefore, of the late Athenian legend of Theseus’ victory over the Minotaur at the opening epoch of the Occidental, humanistic tradition, as a northern, European prototype of the Nubian victory of Far-li-mas and the princess Sali over the priests whose function it was to constrain man to heed the revelation of God’s writing in the sky.
We have already mentioned both the diffusion of the Halaf ware motifs of the bull and the naked goddess, the maltese cross, double ax, and beehive tomb, from the Syrian area to Crete, and the further diffusion of the Cretan motifs of the labyrinth and megalithic mound burial westward, through Gibraltar to Ireland. A second way of diffusion was by landm, largely up the valleys of the Danube and Dniester, the former leading to the heart of Central Europe — south Germany, Switzerland, and southern France — and the latter to the Vistula and the Baltic. For already, in the fourth millennium b.c., radiations from the Tigris-Euphrates were crossing the Caucasus to the northern shores of the Black Sea and radiations from the Aegean had begun to penetrate the Balkans.
Indeed, a secondary mythogenetic zone of prodigious import for the future is to be seen developing now, immediately northwest of the nuclear matrix of the Fertile Crescent. Here a vigorous population of mesolithic hunters were receiving ideas and new techniques from the great centers of the south much in the way of our Apache Indians of Part Three. And retaining all their savagery while finding their powers of attack and plunder increased, they soon became a source of really terrible danger to the farming villages and merchant cities of the primary zone. Their style was pastoral, not sedentary, stressing stock-breeding, not agriculture; and even though they had not yet mastered the warrior’s mount, the horse, they were adequately mobile with their oxen carts and could readily surprise and overwhelm a sleeping town. They could also drive and scatter their less advanced paleolithic cousins to the wastelands ofthe arctic north. And they coud move eastward as well, toward China. We may think of the arc above the Balck Sea as their matrix — Bulgaria, Rumania, and the Ukraine — the lands of the lower Danube, Dniester, Dnieper, and Don. But the reach of thier influence has been traced from the arctic to the tropics, and from Ireland to the South China Sea.
Richly furnished royal burial mounds (known variously as kurgans, barrows, or tumuli); smaller graves containing skeletons in the crouch position liberally sprinkled with red ocher; ceremonially buried bulls; a type of pottery bearing cor-marked and incised, zigzag, triangular, and stippled decorations; another type incised with loops and spirals; copper tools and beads, spiral earrings, and hammer-headed pins of bone and copper mark the passage of these folk as they pass from their homeland in the Caucasus area, westward along the northern shore of the Black Sea, and then, on the one hand, southward into Rumania, Bulgaria, and the Balkans, and, on the other, northward to the Baltic, southern Scandinavia, northern Frrance, and the British Isles. [Note 43] The dating of this diffusion, c. 2500-1500 b.c., is about the same as that of the seaways from Crete westward and the megalithic “giant graves” of France, Spain, Portugal, southern Scandinvia, Denmark, northern Germany, and the British Isles.
Up the Danube, meanwhile, a gradual advance of the peasants, slow wave upon wave, gradually conquered the greater part of Europe. their various potteries again show incised, but also gracefully painted designs in meanders, spirals, and linked spiral. In the area of the Swiss lakes a folk who wore as amulets boars’ tusks, as well as fragments of human skull, dwelt in pile dwellings over the water, while planting crops ashore of emmer and wheat, millet and flax.
In the Aegean itself, this was the great peiod of the flowering of the Bronze Age civilizations, with the powerful city of Troy (Hissarlik II) as one of the leading trading centers, and the fleets of the Cycladic Isles and crete as the dominant conveyors oversea. Wherever tin was found, there was a mining outpost in continuous — even if remote — commercial contact with the major centers; and two important areas of such mining enterpirse were Transylvania, in what is now Rumania, and Cornwall, in southwestern England. The gold of Ireland, furthermore, was abundant and greatly prized, and this too conduced to a maintenance of cultural bonds; while the precious amber of the Baltic flowed in a slow but steady trickle southward, through Central Europe, to the Adriatic.
We may take the Irish royal burial mound of
New Grange as a typical monument of the period and a sign or
marker, furthermore, of the reach of the northwestward diffusion.
This tomb is the largest of a number in a broad area on the river
Boyne, about five miles above Drogheda, known as Brugh no Boinne (“Palace of the
Boyne”) and traditionally associated with a mysterious personage
called variously Oengus an
Brogha (“Oengus of the Palace”) or Oengus mac in Dagda (“Oengus, Son of
the Good God”). The height of the burial mound of New Grange, which
originally must have been greater, is now some forty-two feet,
while the diameter is nearly three hundred. Originally the whole
hemispherical surface was covered with a layer of quartz fragments,
so that, sparkling in the sun, the monument would have been seen
for many miles around.
Figure 33. Spirals at Newgrange Moreover, a curb of slabs,
about a hundred in number, some four feet in breadth and six to ten
feet long, forms an unbroken ring around the structure and on
certain of these formidable rocks engraved designs appear of
zigzags, lozenges, circles and herring bones, spirals and linked
spirals. A rough and narrow passage, roofed and walled by great
slabs, some as long as fifteen feet, penetrates the souteast
quarter of teh mound, from behind an extremely handsome engraved
curbing stone; and at the end of this tunnel is a cross-shaped
burial chamber, where the remains of the kings were placed,
probably in urns.
The relics, however, and everything else protable, were removed in the year 861 a.d., when the grave was plundered by Scandinavian pirates, so that today nothing remains but the eerie passage, 62' long, and the chamber, 21' from side to side and 18' in depth, [Note 44] with its curious labyrinthine spiral on the walls and ceiling, an interesting floor stone with two wron sockets, where a man might have been made to kneel, and the still more interesting circumstance that precisely at sunrise, one day in eight years (or, at least, so the local story goes), the morning star may be seen to rise and cast its beam precisely to the place of the stone with the two worn sockets. The tale may be true or not, but the coincidence of eight years with the period assigned by Frazer to the reigning term of the kings of Crete gave me a shock when I heard it; and here it is, therefore, for the reader to take or to leave as he likes — or to go to Ireland, perhaps, to prove.
These grave tumuli in Ireland are associated with the fairy folk, who of old were the mighty Tuatha De Danann, “the tribes or folk of the goddess Danu.” [Note 45] Defeated in a great battle by the Milesians (the legendary ancestors of the Irish people, who are supposed to have arrived by sea from the Near east, via Spain, about a thousand years before the birth of Christ), the people of the goddess withdrew from the surface of the land to the sidhe (pronounced shee), the fairy hills, where they dwell to this day in Elysian bliss, and without touch of age, as the fairy folk. Deep under gournd they have built themselves timeless abodes, glorious with gold and ablaze with the light of glittering gems. [Note 46]
Danu, their mother, is again our goddess of many names. She is Anu, a goddess of plenty, after whhom two hills in Kerry are called “the Paps of Anu,” but who is said also to have been a savage woman devouring human beings. [Note 47] Brigit, the goddess of knowledge, poetry, and the arts, was another aspect of this great “mother of gods,” who had two sisters of the same name, connected with leechcraft and smithwork; and her worhsip is continued in the Irish devotion to Saint Brigit, at whose shrine in Kildare a sacred fire was maintained by nineteen nuns in turn, and on the twentieth day by the saint herself. “Similar sacred fires were kept in other monasteries,” writes one of the chief authorities in this field, Dr. J.A. MacCulloch, “and they point to the old cult of the goddess of fire, the nuns being successors of a virgin priesthood like the vestals, priestesses of Vesta. Brigit…must have originated in a period when the Celts worshiped goddesses rather than gods, and when knowledge — leechcraft, agriculture, inspiration — were women’s rather than men’s. She had a female priesthood and men were perhaps excluded from her cult, as the tabued shrine at Kildare suggests.” [Note 48] Other famous figures of the rich fairy lore of the sid are Aine, the fairy queen at whose seat, Knockainy in Limerick, some of the rites connected with her former cult are still performed, on Midsummer Eve, for a fruitful harvest, and who, at one time, according to local legend, was the captured fairy-bride of the Earl of Desmond; further, Morrigan, Neman, Macha, and Badb, the goddesses of battle; likewise, the hags, the fairy mistresses, and the washers at the ford, the banshee; and again, the White Women who assist in spinning. Among the Celts of ancient Gaul a feast and sacrifice were offered for every animal thaken in the chase, to a goddess whom the Romans equated with Diana, who was thought of as rushing through the forest with an attendant train, the leader of the “furious host”; and when the great pagan days were ended she became the leader of the witches’ revels. In a bronze statuette this same goddess of the Celts is shown riding a wild boar, “her symbol,” as MacCulloch tells us, “and, like herself, a creature of the forest, but at an earlier time itself a divinity of whom the goddess became the anthropomorphic form.” [Note 49]
In fact, according to an Irish folktale told to this day in the peasant cottages of Connaught, the ancient hero Oisin — one of the sons of the fabulous giant Finn MacCool — was for many days annoyed in his fort and palace at Knock an Ar by a supernatural female with a pig’s head, who was always making up to him and coming toward him, and this he did not particularly like. And it was usual in those days — as the tale goes on to tell — for the great warriors to go hunting on the hills and mountains; and whenever one of them did so he never neglected to take with him five or six strong men to bring home the game. And yet it so happenen that on a day when Oisin had set out with his men and dogs to the woods in this way, he ranged so far and killed so much game that when it was brought together the men were so weak, tired, and hungry that they where unable to carry it, but went away home and left him, with his three dogs, to shift for himself. However, the female with the pig’s head — who was the daughter of the king of the Land of Youth and herself, indeed, the queen of Youth — had been following closely in the hunt all day, and when the men departed she came up to Oisin.
“I am very sorry,” Oisin said to her, “to leave behind anything that I’ve had the trouble of killing.”
And she replied, “Tie up the bundle for me and I’ll carry it to lighten your load.”
So Oisin gave her a bundle of the game to carry and took the remainder himself; but the evening was warm and the game heavy, kand when they had gone some distance, Oisin said, “Let us rest a while.” Both threw down their burdens, and put their backs against a great stone that was by the roadside. The woman was heated and out of breath and opened her dress to cool herself. Then Oisin looked at her and saw her beautiful form and her white bosom.
“Oh then,” said he, “it’s a pity you have the pig’s head on you; for I have never seen such an appearance on a woman in all my life before.”
“Well,” said she, “my father is the king of the Land of Youth, and I was the finest woman in his kingdom and the most beautiful of all, till he put me under a Druidic spell and gave me the pig’s head that’s on me now in place of my own. And the Druid of the Land of Youth came to me afterward and told me that if one of the sons of Finn MacCooll would marry me, the pig’s head would vanish and I should get back my face in the same form as it was before my father struck me with the Druid’s wand. When I heard this I never stopped till I came to Erin, where I found your father and picked you out among the sons of Finn MacCool, and followed you to see would you marry me and set me free.”
“If that is the state you are in, and if marriage with me will free you from the spell, I’ll not leave the pig’s head on you long.”
So they got married without delay, no waiting to take home the game or to lift it from the ground. That moment the pig’s head was gone and the king’s daughter had the same face and beauty that she had before her father struck her with the Druidic wand.
“Now,” said the queen of Youth to Oisin, “I cannot stay here long, and unless you come with me to the Land of Youth we must part.”
“Oh,” said Oisin, “wherever you go I’ll go and wherever you turn I’ll follow.”
Then she turned and Oisin went with her, not going back to Knock an Ar to see his father or his son. That very day they set out for the Land of Youth and never stopped till they came to her father’s castle; and when they arrived, there was a welcome before them, for the king had thought his dughter was lost. That same year there was to be a choice of a king, and when the appointed day came at the end of the seventh year all the great men and champions and the king himself met together at the front of the castle to runa dn see who should be the first in the chair on the hill; but before a man of them was halfway to the hill, Oisin was sitting above in the chair before them. After that time no one stood up to run for the office against Oisin and he spent many a happy year as king in the Land of Youth. [Note 50]
The Southeastward Diffusion
The archaeology of India entered a new phase in the early twenties of the present century when a dramatic revelation of archaic cities antedating the arrival of the Vedic Aryans occurred at three widely separated sites in the Indus Valley: Mohenjo-daro, Chanhu-daro, and Harappa — the first two being in the lower quarter of the valley and the last in the Punjab, far to the north. The dating is c. 2500-1200/1000 b.c.; but earlier levels, since discovered in India, suggest a neolithic base going back perhaps to the fourth millennium. The beasts domesticated were the humped, long-horned Indian bull, a short-horned bull, the pig, buffalo, dog, horse, sheep, and elephant. Spinning and weaving were known, and the metals were gold, silver, copper, tin, and lead. Side by side with the metal tools, however, were knives made of flakes of chert, as well as stone axes and maces, revealing that even in the latest levels of this culture province the influence of the neolithic age had not completely passed.
Four stages can be readily distinguished in the Indian series.
1. The pre-Harappan simple village cultures of perhaps the late fourth millennium b.c. Derivation, by way of Iran, from the Mesopotamian mythogenetic zone is indicated by the painted pottery styles, but the level of civilization was considerably below that of the contemporary high neolithic and hieratic city states of Mesopotamia. The architecture is poorly developed; metal is either unknown or little used; and the industries are chiefly of pottery, chert, and shell. The familiar triangular, zigzag, meander, checker, lozenge, and double ax motifs appear, as well as — once again — a series of crude female statuettes, often associated with figures of the bull, and some even with evidences of human sacrifice.
2. The so-called Harappa stage of the great cities of Mohenjo-daro, Chanhu-daro, and Harappa (c. 2500-1200/1000 b.c.), which bursts abruptly into view, without preparation, already fully formed and showing many completely obvious signs of inspiration from the earlier high centers of the West, yet undeniable signs, also, of a native Indian tradition — this to already well developed. As Professor W. Norman Brown has suggested, [Note 51] a native Indian center (i.e., a mythogenetic zone) somewhere either in the south or in the Ganges-Jumna area would seem to be indicated, where the characteristically Indian traits, unknown at this time farther west, must have come into form. For on two of the stamp-seals of the period we find figures seated on low thrones in the meditating yoga posture. One of these is flanked by two kneeling worshipers and rearing serpents, while the other, with two gazelles reposing beneath his seat, is surrounded by four wild beasts — a water buffalo, rhinoceros, elephant, and tiger. It is well known that precisely these compositions are associated in later Hindu and Buddhist art both with the god Śiva and with the Buddha. One can only suppose that the practice of yoga must already have been developed and associated with the concept of a heightened state of consciousness, not only worth of worship but also capable of quelling and fascinating the animal world — like the music of Orpheus in the later tradition of the Greeks. The presence of serpents in the attitude of attendant worshipers or protectors, furthermore, indicates that the well-known serpent-daemon (nāga) motif that plays such a conspicuous role in later Indian religion had already been evolved — no doubt from the primitive theme of the monster-serpent of the abyss. We have referred to the imagery of the god Viṣṇu reclining on the Cosmic serpent, which in turn is floating on the Cosmic Waters. The supporting energy and substance of the universe, and consequently of the individual, is imaged in India in the figure of the serpent. And the yogi is the master of this power, both in himself (in his control of his own spiritual and physical states) and in the world (in his magical mastery of the phenomena of nature).
Figure 34. Master of the Beasts
The seated yogi among the beasts wears on his head a curious headdress with a high crown and two immense horns, which, as Heinrich Zimmer has pointed out, [Note 52] resembles to a striking degree one of the most prominent symbols of early Buddhist art, the sign of the so-called “Three Jewels” (symbolizing the Buddha, the doctrine, and the order of the Buddha’s followers), which is in the form of a kind of trident. The Hindu god Śiva carries a trident also; and among the Greeks, as we know, this same sign was the attribute of Poseidon (Neptune), the god of the watery deep.
Figure 35. The dancer of Mohenjo-daroAnother important art
miniature of the period is a well- formed stone torso, 3 3/4" high,
of a male dancer in a posture suggesting that of the later dancing
Śiva of the South Indian bronzes. the figure, apparently, was
ithyphallic, which would have accorded with Śiva’s character as a
phallic as well as meditative god. And yet another dancer — a
beautifully cast copper female nude, 4 1/4" high — indicates,
further, that already in the second millennium b.c. the temple dance had been developed, which
in India, until most recent times, has been one of the principal
liturgical arts.
But with this we are back on familiar ground. For have we not read that Inanna, the queen of heaven, who abandoned heaven, abandoned earth, and to the nether world descended, was the hierodule, the slave-girl dancer, of the gods? among the stamp seals of the Harappa culture there is one showing the apparition of a goddess wearing a headdress of three horns, somewhat like that of the god whom we have just discussed; and there is a worshiper obeisant before her, accompanied by a strange sort of man-faced chimera, while a chorus of exactly seven pigtailed attendants stands in the foreground in a measured row. Ceramic female figurines discovered in dwellings likewise point to an extension of the cult of the goddess from the Near east. However, there have been found, in addition to these images, a number of simple sexual symbols: cone-shaped or phallic erect stones, denoting the male and circular stones with a hollow center, representing the female. Such primitive forms (known as liṅgam and yonī) are still the most common objects of worship in India, whether in temples, in the open country, or in the household cult. Surviving from the tradition of the neolithic, they outnumber statistically all the other types of Indian sacred images, and occur most commonly in association, specifically, with Śiva and his goddess, Parvatī.
In brief, then, the evidence indicates that in the course of the third millennium b.c. a powerful influence from the Mesopotamian mythogenetic zone, on the levels of the high neolithic and of the hieratic city state, reached India by way of Iran. It touched here, however, another mythogenetic zone of considerable force — of which, up to this time, there had been left no indubitable archaeological evidence.
Among the leading elements of this suddenly revealed native Indian mythogenetic complex we may number: the serpent, as a development of the primitive proto-neolithic monster serpent of the tropical planters; the yogi, as a higher transformation of the shamanistic techniques and experiences of ecstasis; the goddess, though in what way or to what degree differently conceived and developed from the goddess of the Mediterranean sphere we cannot say; and the abstract symbol of sexual union (liṅgam and yonī in conjunction) as a primary symbol of the divine connubium through which the world is simultaneously generated and dissolved.
Among the elements and ideas imported, on the other had, were certainly writing, the art of the stamp-seal, polychrome pottery, wheeled vehicles, metalcraft, grain agriculture, stock-breeding, the idea of the city, and — possibly — the hieratic city state. Almost without question, also, the later Indian ideas of duty (dharma) and the round of rebirth (samsara), the cosmic mountain crowned with the city of the gods, the underworlds of suffering and upper worlds of bliss, the kingly solar and lunar dynasties, and the sacral regicide were derived from Mesopotamia; likewise the sacred bull and cow as theriomorphic counterparts of the liṅgam and yonī. But a characteristic inflection was given to all these, in which it is difficult not to recognize a native Indian impulse, and which, even though not earlier represented in tangible evidence, may well derive at least form late Capsian (mesolithic) times. A number of the seals, it should furthermore be noted, show the forms of certain trees and plants that are regarded as sacred in India to this day. And, finally, some of the bulls look like unicorns — though perhaps only as a consequence of inept perspective.
3. From the middle of the second millennium onward, an epoch-making new development: the entry into India of the Vedic Aryans (remote cousins of the Homeric Greeks, who were penetrating the Balkans at the same time, both perhaps being direct descendants of the people of the kurgans and ocher graves discussed in the description of the northwestward diffusion). With the coming of these Aryans the higher civilization of the Indus cities was destroyed and a new age initiated, in which the male gods of a nomadic herding people for a time triumphed — and seemed to have triumphed forever — over the goddess of the soil-rooted city states. The Vedic heroic age is to be dated c. 1500-500 b.c. and the archaeology of this millennium is practically a total blank; for the early Indo-Aryans, like the early Greeks, neither built in stone nor committed their traditions to writing. Their sacred books (the Vedas, Brahmanas, and Upaniṣads), no less than their two great epics (the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa), were communicated only orally until some time following the third century b.c.; so that everything not regarded as worthy of a special school of rememberers was lost.
4. A period from c. 500 b.c. to c. 500 a.d., when the Aryan, Vedic tradition and the earlier so-called Dravidian, Harappa traditions gradually combined to form the great structures of modern Hinduism and Indian medieval Buddhism. Whereupon India became the primary mythogenetic zone of the whole later Orient, sending its philosophically illuminated mythologies and mythologically illustrated philosophies northward and eastward into Tibet, Mongolia, China, Korea, and Japan; southward and eastward to Ceylon, Burma, Cambodia, Thailand, and Indonesia; and even westward, though with less force, into the Alexandrian sphere. The principal figures in this development were Gautama Buddha (563-483 b.c.); the Buddhist Emperor Aśoka (c. 274-237 b.c.), who sent, according to his own report, missions to Ceylon, Macedonia, and Alexandrian Egypt; the anonymous author of the Hindu Bhagavad Gītā; the Buddhist Emperor Kaniṣka (c. 78-123 a.d.), in whose time the Buddhist law was carried to China; the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna (c. 200 a.d.), whose paradoxical teachings of the “full void” represent perhaps the culmination of the history of metaphysical speculation; the myriads of anonymous craftsmen, to whom the world owes the glorious art of India’s Maurya, Andhra, and Gupta periods; and again, those anonymous priests and poets through whom Indian’s medieval Puranic and Tantric traditions were developed. Through all these the compound inheritance of the two great mythogenetic zones of the hieratic city state and the yogic awakening of the serpent power were wrought into mankind’s most radiant vision of the harmony of being.
The Northeastward Diffusion
1. The Basal Neolithic. The bronze Age was already in full flower in Crete, Egypt, and Mesopotamia when the elements of the basal neolithic reached the Far East. A coarse, unglazed pottery, shaped by hand by a coiling process and decorated with impressions or with lumps and strips of clay stuck on before firing, is the characteristic sign of this earliest northeastern stratum of diffusion. The Dwellings were sometimes built on piles along the waterways (reminding us of the pile dwellings of the Swiss lakes) and a kind of millet was the basic crop (again reminding us of the Swiss lakes). But in the earliest stages no signs of cattle, sheep, or goats appear, the dog and pig being the only domesticated beasts; and even later, when cattle were introduced, pigs continued to preponderate. Oswald Menghin, therefore, has proposed that western China may have been the initial center of swineherding, which then would have been diffused in two directions: southeastward to Indo-China, Indonesia, Melanesia, and from Indo-China westward into India; and directly westward into Europe, the Near east, and Africa. [Note 53]
However, the very early appearance of the pig in the Near East, in the earliest proto- and basal neolithic strata, makes it difficult to imagine how the relationship of such a Chinese origin to the early Western data might be interpreted. Heine-Geldern links the herding of swine to the basal neolithic of the Near East, while Jensen, as we have already seen, associates the pig with the earliest planting cultures of the tropical zone. Apparently all the is certain is that the beast appears throughout the whole extent of the basal neolithic, whereas sheep, goats, and cattle enter into the northeastward province of this broad domain only centuries later; that in the rites of Persephone and Demeter, as well as in the myths of Attis, Adonis-Tammuz, and Osiris, the legends of Odysseus and Circe, and Irish fairy-lore, the pig and wild boar appear in roles that suggest a very early association with themes that were later adjusted to a cattle- herding complex; that in China and Southeast Asia the pig remained important even after cattle had been introduced; and that throughout Oceania the role of the pig in both ritual and myth is of supreme moment.
Professor Heine-Geldern has suggested — with a magnificently organized assemblage of evidence — that this basal neolithic complex of the Far East (the place of origin of which has not been definitely fixed, though it would seem sensible to place it, provisionally at least, in the Afro-Asiatic Near East, as suggested in Section I of this chapter) reached the Pacific by way of China and Japan, then spread southward across Formosa, the Philippines, Celebes, and the Moluccas to New Guinea and Melanesia, and even touched, finally, the primitive Australians and — as shown earlier — the Andamanese. Its form of boat was the plank-boat with no outriggers, and its characteristic ground ax a roughly ovoid-cylindrical type. [Note 54] Many signs exist throughout the area of an early matriarchal social organization, with female shamans and perhaps even female rulers, while among the mythological and ritual motifs that were almost certainly associated with this Far Eastern basal neolithic complex are the immolated maiden and the fire goddess. “Society in the Far East during the New Stone age,” as Professor Carl W. Bishop has observed, “seems indeed to have borne a decidedly feminine cast.” [Note 55]
However, all consideration of the proto- and basal neolithic of the Far East is rendered difficult, first by the paucity of archaeological material from the provinces in question, and second by the vivid character of the bit that we have recently learned concerning the period immediately subsequent to the basal, when a powerful high neolithic center suddenly burst into view in the western provinces of China, largely influenced by a cultural impact from the Southeast European, Danube-Dniester zone.
2. The High Neolithic. The most important archaeological site in the whole of the Far East is at Anyang, in the northeastern corner of Honan, where the Swedish geologist J.G. Andersson (the same to whom we owe the find of Choukoutien), discovered three superimposed strata of pottery, representing the earliest levels of the Chinese high neolithic and hieratic city state, as follows: the painted pottery of the Yangshao culture level (c. 2200-1900 b.c.), the black pottery of the Lungshan culture level (c. 1900-1523 b.c.), and the white pottery and bronze sacrificial vessels of the Shang culture level (1523-1027 b.c.). [Note 56]
Pigs, cattle, and dogs were the domestic beasts of the Yangshao complex, with a considerable emphasis on the pigs, and the chief crop was a millet or primitive wheat. Among the other elements carried form the southeast European, Danube-Dniester zone were a number of distinctive painted pottery motifs (e.g., the double ax, spiral and swastika, meander and polygonal designs, concentric-circle and checker patterns, wavy-water lines, angular zigzags, and organizations of bands), [Note 57] spear-and arrowheads of slate, a way of building pile dwellings along river and lake shores, arrowheads and awls of bone, as well as a particular technique, which, in the further course of its migration, was to appear throughout the Malay Peninsula, Indonesia, and a good part of Melanesia, as well as in a modified form throughout Polynesia. The headhunt, too, was a component of this barbarous bronze-age culture of the steppes and followed the square-cut ax into Indo-China and Oceania — though apparently not to the northern sphere of Yangshao. [Note 58] For a second, parallel phase of the same stream of life that brought the Yangshao complex to Kansu, Shensi, Shansi, and Honan (not reaching, however, as far as to Shantung) turned south into the Malay Peninsula. “This branch,” writes Heine- Geldern, “before coming to Further India, must have passed through western China.” [Note 59] It must have been a folk and culture wave of prodigious force,” he then goes on to say, “which arrived in east Asia from the West in the late neolithic, transformed its entire ethnic and cultural structure, laid the foundations of Chinese culture and the Chinese empire as well as of the Further Indian and Indonesian cultures, and finally went on even to Madagascar, New Zealand, East Polynesia, and in all probability America as well. Relatively small groups are enough to give an impulse that will continue to work for millenniums and across continents and across seas.” [Note 60]
It is, in short, to the impact of this Yangshao-Austronesian culture wave that a great part of the broad diffusion to which I have devoted Part II of this study must now be attributed. The headhunt, the pig, pile dwellings, megaliths, and their associated rites of animal sacrifice came together on this wave from the West. In the Southeast Asian zone a secondary neolithic complex, involving rice- culture and the water buffalo, was encountered and absorbed, and on the great riverways of the Irrawaddy, Salween, Chao Phraya, and Mekong, etc., a characteristic boat, the outrigger canoe, was developed, which then bore the assemblage not only westward to Madagascar but also far eastward to Easter Island, and no doubt beyond. The basic rites of the cannibals of Ceram, and the Panpipes as well of Brazil as of the Solomon Islands, were almost certainly transported by this culture wave; for it achieved in Indonesia an impressive adaptation to the highways of the sea. The island of Java, in particular, abounds in examples of the characteristic square-cut ax of this brilliant day in many significant modulations, including a number of perfectly magnificent ceremonial forms which Heine-Geldern has described as marking the high point of the Indonesian neolithic stonecraft. A considerable cultural peak was achieved; the population of the area was relatively dense; trade was vigorously plied; and the impress of this specific center can be readily discerned from Madagascar to Easter Island and from New Zealand to Japan.
Furthermore, if we may judge of the date of this important prehistoric cultural movement from the carefully checked evidences of the Chinese Yangshao stratum (c. 2200-1900 b.c.), its period of florescence must have been early in the second millennium b.c. — in plenty of time for the delivery to the coast of Peru of those telling calabashes of Huaca Prieta. And to mark a still further point of coincidence, we may recall that the formidable culture center in the Black sea area from which this broadly influential Far Eastern complex came was sending its spreading rings westward into Europe as well as eastward to Honan. We have already noted that c. 2500-1500 b.c. its impulse reached both the Baltic and the Balkans. V. Gordon Childe has remarked that when pig bones are found among the remains of the ancient dwelling places of eastern Sweden, they belong to a cultural horizon contemporary with the middle (i.e., high) neolithic and illustrate the start of a secondary (or even tertiary) neolithic culture, “the first steps in swine-breeding by autochthonous hunter-fishers.” [Note 61]
May we, then, think of the Panpipe of Arcadian Greece as an inkling of the same great diffusion as that represented by the Panpipes of Melanesia and Brazil — on the opposite rim of the spreading ring of waves? It is not our only sign of such diffusion, by any means; for, indeed, have we not already had Persephone and Hainuwele to teach us? Or shall we say that all these correspondences of archaeology and mythology, now adequately identified in the farthest flung branches of our science, which so neatly gear even as to date and would readily clarify an otherwise inscrutable enigma, must be overlooked as simply accidents of chance? The purely psychological reading of these parallels will not do at all, since a clearly, even though sparsely documented historical sequence has to be recognized, with its perfect coincidence of dates: the kurgan, barrow, or tumuli people entering Europe c. 2500-1500 b.c.; the Yangshao culture stratum of China, c. 2200-1900 b.c.; a parallel cultural development in Java, with a mastery of the seaways; and then at Huaca Prieta those grinning calabashes, c. 1016 +/- 300 b.c., to mark the smuggling of an alien agriculturalist across the Pacific into the New World.
But what, then, was the meaning of this ritual of the sacrificial pig, lamb, goat, or bull, which having come into form as a basic feature of the high neolithic, was diffused, one way or another, throughout the world?
On the Melanesian island of Malekula, in the New Hebrides, halfway between Fiji and the Solomon Islands, and extremely complicated system of men’s rites involving the sacrifice of many sacred pigs is celebrated among megalithic shrines that closely resemble those of prehistoric Ireland. John Layard in his richly illustrated Stone Men of Malekula [Note 62] has given evidence enough to establish such an association, and, as Heine-Geldern has sufficiently shown, there was indeed a late diffusion in several waves of a megalithic culture complex into this part of the world, where the great stones are associated with the ceremonious pledging of a covenant, the offering of a sacrificial beast (originally a bull, states Heine-Geldern, but, in peripheral areas, the pig), memorials to the honored dead, and to capture of heads in the headhunt. [Note 63]
According to Layard the Malekulans attribute their own megalithic tradition of the pig sacrifice to a mythical family of five culture-bringers, who were brothers and “white men” with aquiline noses. Their chief, the creator and giver of all good things, is represented constantly, Layard declares, “as sailing in a canoe, and in almost all, if not in all, areas where he is known, he is represented as having finally sailed away over the horizon to an unknown destination. In his heavenly aspect he is invariably associated with light and, in one way or another, with the sun and moon.” [Note 64] But he is also said to have been buried sitting on a stone seat within a stone chamber covered by a mound of earth and loose stones — “in other words,” as Layard points out, “what we in Europe would call chambered round-barrow”; and his body and that of his wife are said to be incorruptible. The alleged undecayed bodies of this culture-bringer and his wife are ritually washed at certain festival times for the purpose of ensuring the continuance of the human race. [Note 65]
This highly interesting, theoretically challenging megalithic complex of Malekula is brought to focus in a context of ceremonials known as the Maki, which lasts from fifteen to thirty years and when finished is immediately recommenced. It serves on the one hand the aims of the community, inasmuch as it magically fosters the fertility of the race, but on the other hand the personal fame and ambition of the individual, since it is a rite of a strongly competitive kind, in which the men of the village, breeding up and sacrificing numberless boars, vie for status both in this world and in the next.
We have been introduced already to one of the chief elements of the mythology of the Maki. When a Malekulan dies, we have noted, and commences his journey to the land of the dead, the female guardian of the cavernous entrance to the other world draws a labyrinth of the ground across his way and as he approaches erases half. To pass, he must know how to reconstruct the labyrinth. And he must also offer a pig for the guardian to eat in lieu of himself. But this can be no simple, ordinary pig. It is to be a boar bred up by his own hands and ritually consecrated, time and again, in the ceremonials of the Maki, at every stage of the development of its greatly cherished tusks. And hundreds of other boars must have been sacrificed in the course of these ceremonials, so that the beast offered represents the whole life-effort, as well as the ritual status, of the voyager.
At the beginning of its days the upper canine teeth of a male pig are removed ceremonially, so that the lower, meeting no resistance, may continue to grow. These lower tusks then curve outward, down, and around, in such a way as to circle back, penetrate the lower jaw, and form a ring. Such growth requires at least seven years. and every stage represents an increment in spiritual and therefore economic worth. But one circle is not the highest stage of achievement. Two are not uncommon and with great good fortune even three can be attained. The pain to the animal is so great, meanwhile, that it puts on little flesh and from the standpoint of a gourmet would be a miserable morsel; but in the realm of the spirit we are not to think as gourmets. These radiant pigs are not physical food; they are spiritual food. They represent the moon, that glowing orb with which the sea- voyaging ancestral “white man,” the founder of the cult, is himself identified. For, as Layard explains their power: “The really fundamental concept of the tusks is not that they should form a spiral but simply that they should be curved or crescent shaped, thus representing, on one symbolic level, the waxing and waning moon, both represented together on either side of the mouth of the same sacrificial animal…. The black body of the boar between them corresponds to the ‘new’ or ‘black’ invisible moon at the time of her apparent death.” [Note 66]
The boars, then, are the moon at the moment of its death, consumed by the goddess guardian of the underworld. Their tusks point to the continuance of life, however, waxing and waning over the ground of death. Thus, in their own way, they symbolize the mystery that we have already discussed in connection with the planting-world mythology of the serpent and the maiden. The boar sacrifice, symbolically, is equivalent to the sacrifice of the maiden. But the boar is a male; furthermore, it is a figure derived from the domain of masculine interest, the animal world, the world of the hunt, the world of domesticated flocks. Sows are neither sacrificed nor eaten. their flesh is taboo, even despised. And the staple food of this society is the yam, cultivated by the women, to which breadfruit, shellfish and fish, turtle eggs, prawns, eels, flying fox, and other bits of wild game may be added. So that, from the physical point of view, all is well enough cared for by the women — the circumstance being precisely that described by Father Schmidt in his characterization of the natural supremacy of the female among primitive planters. However, with the pig, the Maki, and the rites of the men’s lodge, a masculine, mythological, “spiritual” counterforce is brought to bear against the feminine power. The chief divinity concerned is female, indeed — the guardian of the gate, who eats. But she is cheated, overcome, by the rites. She consumes the boar, but the man escapes. She consumes the black boar, but the radiant tusks survive and are hung as signs of man’s immortality from the roof beams of the cult houses. Women, furthermore, being without souls, are not deeply concerned in this spiritual game. They acquire rank along with their husbands as the men, through sacrifice, proceed up the mystical ladder of their masonic lodges; but the cult itself is a man’ affair, and through it the role and importance of woman have been systematically reduced, so that she cannot even figure now as the sacrifice. It is the boar, not the sow, that is killed; and when a human offering is to be made, it is no longer a maiden but a man or boy.
In the first phase of a Maki ceremony the focal center is a dolmen, a kind of table of stone, formed of a great slab supported by stone uprights, symbolizing three things: a stone grave, the cave through which the dead must pass on their journey to the other world, and the womb through which the living may achieve rebirth. a wooden figure is erected before this symbolic structure, to represent all the male ancestors who have gone through this rite in the past and to serve also as the gable post of a roof thatched over the dolmen. The main beam of this roof terminates in a carved image of the mythological hawk whose spirit hovers over the ceremonies. And since no portion of the cult structure is ever removed, the ground all about is strewn with the rotting remains of earlier times.
The crucial rite before the dolmen occurs when a man seeking to elevate himself in the power scale ceremonially approaches, in imitation of the soul approaching the cavern entrance to the other world. His mother’s brothers block the way, just as the female guardian spirit will block his way at the time of death. And he then makes copious offerings to them of boars — and these go to his credit in the spiritual account that will be closed only when he dies and is buried together with his supreme pig.
The values of the offerings are reckoned by the tusks; and according to these values a man’s rank is made. Without tuskers he can neither enter the land of he dead nor be reborn, cannot even marry. Moreover, since in the course of a ceremonial as many as five hundred pigs may be offered in a day, it is clear that any man who takes seriously the salvation of his eternal soul must be considerably occupied with the spiritual exercise of breeding, trading, and reckoning his pigs, which, indeed, serve as money in Malekula, so firmly fixed and well known are their relative values — just as, in the higher cultures, gold, which is of no more practical value than a Melanesian pig, supplies the basic standard of all monetary worth because of its mythological reference to the sun. Gold is of incorruptible character, untarnished by the touch of time. The kingly crown of gold, symbolizing the secular power as well as spiritual authority of the character on whom it sits, correspond to the boar’s-tusk decorations of a cloud-catching Melanesian. And just as a man with a golden crown — or even a golden cigarette case — may regard himself as having gained the fruit of his birth, so likewise the Melanesian Maki-man with a fine display of the skulls of one-, two-, and three-circle tuskers along the roof beam of his family home.
The natives declare that their boar offerings have taken the place of human sacrifices; yet to this day a personage of great purpose, seeking the paramount crown, may offer a young human being along with a fine three-circle tusker, and thus perform a feat of as great value as can be expected of an aspirant, wither in heaven or on earth. The human victim of such an offering is generally a bastard, bred and reared solely for sacrifice, kept healthy and given the greatest affection, while being kept ignorant of the fate in store. The boy and the very precious three-circle tusker, painted exactly alike, are led together to the dolmen, when “suddenly, those dancing behind the boy seize him, and slipping over his blue-painted neck a rope dangling form the hawk image, jerk it so that he is left hanging, whereon the sacrificer, lifting his club, sacrifices him by striking him on the head. The victim is then lowered and the three-circle tusker he led in is clubbed also and left on the victim’s body to die.” The boy’s body is given to the makers of the ancestral image to eat, and the man who has made the sacrifice assumes the title of Mal-tanas, “Lord of the Underworld.” “He communicates with the unearthly,” we are told. “He may do as he wishes; he may even do what is not done. No man dare be hated by him.” [Note 67] And after the killing, the new Lord of the Underworld remains for thirty days on the stone platform, eating only yams. His limbs are covered with armlets of the most valuable shell beads, and he has pig’s tusks as bangles from elbow to wrist. He is a very picture of that immortal person for whom death has no sting.
And with this, I believe, we have our final clue to the ritual sacrifice of the royal tombs of Ur, as well as to the “fury for sacrifice” that beset, at one time or another, every part of the archaic world in the various high periods of its numerous cultures. A magical power is gained according to the measure of one’s sacrifice. The ultimate sacrifice is, of course, one’s self; yet the value even of this self is to be measured according to the orders of sacrifice accomplished during life and made by one’s survivors at one’s mortuary feast. The most potent supporting offering of this sort is another human being — one’s son, one’s slave, one’s prisoner of war. But the next in order is some beast that one has raised oneself and cared for as one’s own. Moreover, wherever such animal offerings are rendered, the beast is of a species mythologically associated with deity. We have mentioned the Capsian petroglyphs in North Africa, showing a ram with the sun between its horns and the figure of the moon-bull on the sacred harps of Ur, as well as the bulls’ heads on the high neolithic pottery of the Halaf style. Let us add, now, the rites of the Minotaur in the bull rings of Crete, whence the imagery was carried with the megalithic culture complex to Spain, where, even today, we may see the brave moon-bull with its crescent horns slain by the solar blade of the sparkling matador, just as the paleolithic bulls in the deep temple caves of the neighboring Catabrian hills and Pyrenees are slain by the solar power of the shamans. And in Malekula, at the other end of the line, the same symbolism is rendered in the megalithic rites of the sacrifice of the lunar boar.
The offered beast is a captured quantum of divine power, which, through its sacrifice, is integrated with the giver. The giver climbs, so to say, on the rungs of his sacrifice. and the Maki is a great ladder of such rungs.
When the aspirant has accomplished his ultimate sacrifice, he is identified with the hovering hawk, the mythological bird that is carved on the roof beam over the dolmen, and the old man presiding at the rite, who has invested him with the power-name of the boar that has just been killed, which now is the name of his own new life, “springs into the air, with extended arms and fluttering hands, in imitation of the hawk.” At other times, “it is the sacrificer himself, who, mounted on his stone platform at the supreme moment of sacrifice, spreads out his own arms in imitation of a soaring hawk and sings a song about the stars.” The word Na-mbal, “hawk,” may be used as a personal name by the man who has achieved such rank. Other lofty names are “the face of the sun,” “catches clouds,” “at heaven’s zenith,” “holy ground on top,” and “lord of the above.” [Note 68] Moreover, this yearning upward, which, as we have seen, was characteristic also of the shamanism of the north, is rendered here in the symbolism of the great dolmens and monoliths themselves — some of the platforms that play a part in the second phase of the Maki being of such a height that they overtop the trees. [Note 69]
In this second phase, the structure on which the offering is made is a high platform of stone, raised behind the dolmen, on the summit of which the culminating boar offering takes place, the kindling of the new fire, and the assumption of the new name. The mythological reference of this tower and its sacrificial fire is to a large volcano on the neighboring island of Ambrim, which is supposed to be the happy land of the living dead. Abiding in that fire is bliss; there is no fear of being consumed.
A number of variant images are given of the voyage of the dead to their happy land. According to one, the soul entering the cave is immediately blocked by the guardian spirit, Le-hev-hev, to whom the boar-offering is presented to be consumed in lieu of the soul itself; and the voyager, then allowed to pass, goes through the cave and emerges on the coast, along which he walks to a certain rocky place, well known, where he lights a fire to summon the ferryman. The latter comes in a ghost canoe, which is called “banana peel” and might be any little bit of bark from the banana tree, floating on the water. The waiting soul, then, is ferried to the great volcano — which is called “The Source of Fire” — -and there the ghosts dance every night and sleep all day. But according to a second version, the fire of the volcano is spread over the whole path and the boar is placed in the grave to appease this fire. “the guardian,” they say, “stands upright in the midst of the path of fire, then rushes forward to consume us; but is content to eat the boar.” [Note 70]
We are far, indeed, in these myths and rites from that profound feminine experience of immolation and transformation which the noble Abyssinian woman, earlier quoted (from Frobenius), expressed when she remarked on the utter triviality of the male’s mode of experience and understanding. “His life and body are always the same….He knows nothing.” They represent, in fact, a masculine transformation of the planters’ myth of the immolated maiden, through a force derived from the northern, shamanistic sphere.
The mythogenetic zone of this high neolithic mythology of acquisitive sacrifice was the Black Sea area: first the southward shore of Anatolia and the Taurus mountains, where the figure of the bull in association with the naked goddess first appears about 4500 b.c., on the painted pottery of the Halaf style; and then, with an even stronger stress on the values and anxieties of the male ego, in the barbaric steppe lands of the lower Danube, Dnieper, Dniester, and Don valleys, from which, we have just seen, the wielders of the square-cut ax broke away, in the third millennium b.c., to reshape the world.
3. The Hieratic City State. In the Historical Records of Ssu-ma Ch’ien (c. 145-86/74 b.c.) we are told of the concern of the legendary Chinese “Yellow Emperor,” Huang Ti, for accurate astronomy. The supposed date of this fabulous ruler would place him half a millennium earlier than the period of the painted-pottery culture of Yangshao. He is, however, a sheer invention of the later Chinese scholars. And yet his supposititious interest in astronomy represents a basic inheritance of the Celestial Empire and, indeed, derives from a very early date. “Huang Ti,” we are told, “commanded Hsi Ho to take charge of the observation of the sun, I Chang the observation of the moon, and Yu Chu the observation of the stars.” [Note 71]
The sun as the source of light, heat, and dryness represents in China the masculine, positive force of the universe, the yang, while the moon, governing moisture, shadow, and cold, stands for the negative, feminine, the yin. These, interacting, produce the order, sense, direction, or way, tao, of all things, which is represented geometrically as an ever-turning circle, mixed of black and white, of yin and yang:
Figure 36. yin and yang symbol.
Below the sun and moon are the five planets, each affiliated with an element. Mercury is the planet water, the element of the north; Venus of metal, the element of the west; Mars of fire and the south; Jupiter of wood, which is east; and finally Saturn, the planet of the element earth, which is of the center. In India, too, there is a doctrine of five elements, old enough to have been studied by the Buddha (563-483 b.c.) and traditionally attributed to a still more ancient sage named Kapila, who may have lived as early as the eighth century b.c. The five elements in the Indian tradition are associated with the five senses: ether, the first, is the element of hearing; air, the second, the element of touch; fire, of sight; water, of taste; and earth, of smell. In the Occident, however, since the period of the Buddha’s contemporary, Empedocles (c. 500-430 b.c.), we have heard only of four elements: fire (which is hot and dry), air (which is hot and moist), water (which is cold and moist), and earth (which is cold and dry). The systems differ, yet they are derived from the same root.
And how far back should this root be dated?
A clue is given by the harps in the royal tombs of Ur, to the sound of which the king and his celestial court died, and which were fashioned in such a way as to suggest that their harmony was that of the moon-bull, whose body was their sounding chamber and on whose golden head the lapis lazuli heard of the heavenly principle was displayed. The five notes of the Chinese pentatonic scale are associated with the harmony of the five elements and the five planets. In a Chinese musical treatise of the second century b.c. we read:
If the note, Kung (C = the tonic), is disturbed, then there is disorganization, the Prince is arrogant.
If the second note, Shang (D), is disturbed, then there is deviation: the officials are corrupted.
If the Chiao (E) is disturbed, then there is anxiety: the people are unhappy.
If the Chi (G) is disturbed, then there is complaint: public services are too heavy.
If the Yu (A) is disturbed, then there is danger: resources are lacking.
If the five degrees are all disturbed, then there is danger: ranks encroach upon each other — this is what is called impudence — and, if such is the condition, the destruction of the kingdom may come in less than a day….
In periods of disorder, rites are altered and music is licentious. Then sad sounds are lacking in dignity, joyful sounds lack calm….When the spirit of opposition manifests itself, indecent music comes into being….when the spirit of conformity manifests itself, harmonious music appears….So that, under the effect of music, the five social duties are without admixture, the eyes and the ears are clear, the blood and the vital spirits are balanced, habits are reformed, customs are improved, the Empire is in complete peace. [Note 72]
The five social duties here associated with the pentatonic scale are the “five activities of high importance under heaven” announced in the Confucian Doctrine of the Mean. They are, namely, “the obligations between prince and minister; between father and son; between husband and wife; between elder and younger brothers; and between friends. Those,” we read, “are the five obligations that have great effects under heaven.” [Note 73]
“Tuned to the tone of Heaven and Earth,” we learn from another text of the second century b.c., “the vital spirits of men express all the tremors of Heaven and Earth, just as several cithars, all tuned on Kung, vibrate when the note Kung resounds. The fact of harmony between Heaven, Earth, and Man does not come from a physical union, from a direct action; it comes from a tuning on the same note producing vibrations in unison….In the Universe there is no hazard, there is no spontaneity; all is influence and harmony, accord answering accord.” [Note 74]
But this, precisely, was the view of the Greek Pythagoras (582–c.507 b.c.), an echo of whose lore we have already heard in Plato’s words concerning the pristine accord of man’s nature with “the harmonies and revolutions of the world.” And the concept of musical accord in India is the same, where it is said that “all this universe is but the result of sound.” [Note 75]
The Chinese terms for heaven are t’ien and shang ti. The first is impersonal, denoting “what is above”; the second, personal, and translated “lord.” “It is called Heaven (t’ien) when viewed from the point of its overshadowing the entire world,” states a commentator to the Wu Ching; “it is called Lord (ti) when viewed from the point of its rulership.” [Note 76]
The lord and ruler of the earth, the emperor of China — which is regarded as the “middle kingdom” of the world — occupies his throne with the approval, or mandate, of heaven. He is the tonic note or pivot of the earthly harmony and, when attuned, his empire prospers. In the fabulous prehistoric period of Huang Ti the people were able to control their passions perfectly, and there was such an accord between Heaven and earth that the middle kingdom became an earthly paradise. Its inhabitants did not have to eat; merely to sip the dew was enough. The four benevolent animals, the unicorn, dragon, tortoise, and phoenix — the four lords, respectively, of the warm-blooded quadrupeds, scaly animals, mollusks, and birds — appeared and took up their abodes in the gardens of the palace. Boons, moreover, proceeded from the understanding of the emperor, who taught the arts of divination and mathematics, composed the calendar, invented musical instruments of bamboo, taught the use of money, boats, and carriages, and the arts of work in clay, metal, and wood. He established the rituals of address to shang ti, built the first temple and the first palace, studied and taught the properties of healing herbs. And when he died, at the age of one hundred and eleven, he left a nation established in a harmony that survived, in the main, for some four thousand years.
But on the other hand, when an emperor becomes unworthy of the mandate of heaven, inauspicious omens presently appear, and the Son of Heaven may be overthrown. We recognize, therefore, a deep and real anxiety in the words of the Emperor Ming (227-239 a.d.), following the solar eclipse of the year 233.
“We have heard,” states Ming Ti,
that if a sovereign is remiss in government, God terrifies him by calamities and portents. These are divine reprimands sent to recall him to a sense of duty. Thus, eclipses of the sun and moon are manifest warnings that the rod of empire is not wielded aright. Our inability to continue the glorious traditions of Our departed ancestors and carry on the great work of civilization ever since We ascended the throne has now culminated in a warning message from on high. It therefore behoves Us to issue commands for personal reformation, in order to avert impending calamity. The relationship, however, between God and man is that of father and son; and a father, about to chastise his son, would not be deterred were the latter to present him with a dish of meat. We do not therefore consider it a part of Our duty to act in accordance with certain memorials advising that the grand Astrologer be instructed of offer up sacrifices on this occasion. Do ye governors of districts, and other high officers of State, seek rather to rectify your own hearts; and if anyone can devise means to make up for Our shortcomings, let him submit his proposals to the throne. [Note 77]
The coming of this concept of the hieratic city state to China is to be dated from the period of the black ware of the Lungshan culture (c. 1900-1523 b.c.), which now appears to have stemmed from the same centers of northern Iran and southern Turkestan (Tepe Hissar, Turang Tepe, Shah Tepe, Namazgah Tepe, Anau, etc.) [Note 78] that sent the concept into India for the formation of the Harappa style. The characteristic fortress-city of this Chinese stratum is perfectly quadrangular in form, bounded by a powerful wall of pounded earth, and of considerable size. Sheep and horses have been added to the earlier barnyard stock of cattle, pigs, and dogs, and two of the pottery shards discovered show that writing was now known — in two scripts that have not yet been deciphered.
The evidence of the next stratum, though, is much more abundant: the level, namely, of the white pottery of the Shang Dynasty (c. 1523-1027 b.c.). Here the basic socio-political structure of the later Chinese empire can be seen to have been already laid. Bronze-casting, tools and weapons of bronze, war chariots drawn by yoked steeds, a highly developed writing system, chamber burials and human sacrifices, an impressive architecture, gabled and colonnaded, advanced stone carvings, oracle bones, and a great passion for the hunt as a royal sport mark the flowering of an elegant, highly developed civilization, following essentially the lines laid down some fifteen hundred years earlier in Ur, Kish, Lagash, Erech, and Nippur in Mesopotamia.
An important feature of considerable interest, however, is the novel art style that appears at this time; for although many of its themes are derived directly from the West (entwining serpents, antithetical beasts with a human figure between, and the hero subduing beasts, for example), the style itself and the manner of composition through which its themes are rendered not only are distinctive but also represent the earliest appearance anywhere of certain basic traits characteristic of the circum-Pacific arts, whether in the Old World or in the New. The first of these is the principle of the totem pole, a piling up of similar forms in vertical series. A second device consists in splitting the body to be represented, either down the front or down the back, and opening it like a book. A third renders in a particular way decorative organizations of angular spirals and meanders. Furthermore, many of the Shang face-formations and body postures are unmistakable, in whatever cultural context they appear.
Professor Heine-Geldern, tracing the trans-Pacific courses of the various Far Eastern cultural influences, has pointed out, among other significant signs of a long-continued impact on America: art motifs of the Chinese eighth century b.c., from the coastal states of Wu and Yueh, in the Chavin culture of the same period in the Central Andes (gold work and fine waving now appearing in America for the first time); art motifs of seventh- and sixth-century China in the Salinar culture of the North Central Andes, dating from the first centuries a.d.; art motifs of seventh-to fourth-century China in the Tajin culture of Middle America, dating from c. 200- 1000 a.d.; the art of the late Chou Dynasty bronzes and jades (fifth to third centuries b.c.) reflected in the Ulua style of Middle America (c. 200-1000 a.d.); a brief break in the contact of the Chinese with America after 333 b.c., when the seafaring state of Yueh, in the southeast, lost its independence and the Dong-son folk of Vietnam, in northeastern Indo-China, took over the commerce with such effect that their influence can be recognized from Panama to Chile and the Argentine, particularly in techniques of metallurgy and ornamental metal designs; during the period of the Han Dynasty (202 b.c.-220 a.d.), a resumption of the Chinese voyages, and after c. 50 a.d., with the conquest of Tonkin and North Annam by China, a probable end of the Dong- son trans-Pacific sailings; and finally, with the fall of the Han Dynasty, a passing of the lead from China to the Hinduized peoples of Southeast Asia, where Cambodia was the chief power from the seventh to tenth centuries a.d. — the contacts of these voyagers with America perhaps then continuing until the death of Jayavarman VII of Angkor, about 1219 a.d. [Note 79]
And so, we are not surprised to learn that the great high priest and monarch of the Golden Age in the Toltec city of Tula, the City of the Sun, in ancient Mexico, whose name, Quetzalcoatl, has been read to mean both “the Feathered Serpent” and “the Admirable Twin,” [Note 80] and who was fair of face and white of beard, was the teacher of the arts to the people of pre-Columbian America, originator of the calendar, and their giver of maize. His virgin mother, Chimalman — the legend tells — had been one of three sisters to whom God, the All-Father, had appeared one day under his form of Citlallatonac, “the morning.” The other two had been struck by fight, but upon Chimalman God breathed and she conceived. She died, however, giving birth, and is now in heaven, where she is revered under the honorable name of “the Precious Stone of Sacrifice,” Chalchihuitzli.
Quetzalcoatl, her child, who is known both as the Son of the Lord of the High Heavens and as the Son of the Lord of the Seven Caves, was endowed at birth with speech, all knowledge, and all wisdom, and in later life, as priest-king, was of such purity of character that his realm flourished gloriously throughout the period of his reign. His temple-palace was composed of four radiant apartments: one toward the east, yellow with gold; one toward the west, blue with turquoise and jade; one toward the south, white with pearls and shells; one toward the north, red with bloodstones — symbolizing the cardinal quarters of the world over which the light of the sun holds sway. and it was set wonderfully above a mighty river that passed through the midst of the city of Tula; so that every night, precisely at midnight, the king descended into the river to bathe; and the place of his bath was called “In the Painted Vase,” or “In the Precious Waters.” But the time of his predestined defeat by the dark brother, Tezcatlipoca, was ever approaching; and, knowing perfectly the rhythm of his own destiny, Quetzalcoatl would make no move to stay it.
Tezcatlipoca, therefore, said to his attendants, “We shall give him a drink to dull his reason and show him his own face in a mirror; then, surely, he will be lost.,” And he said to the servants of the good king, “Go tell your master that I have come to show him his own flesh!”
But when the message was brought to Quetzalcoatl, the aging monarch said, “What does he call my own flesh? Go and ask!” And when the other was admitted to his presence: “What is this, my flesh, that you would show me?”
Tezcatlipoca answered, “My Lord and Priest, look now at your flesh; know yourself; see yourself as you are seen by others!” And he presented the mirror.
Whereupon, seeing his own face in that mirror, Quetzalcoatl immediately cried out, “How is it possible that my subjects should look upon me without fright? Well might they flee from before me. For how can a man remain among them when he is filled as I am with foul sores, his old face wrinkled and of an aspect so loathsome? I shall be seen no more, I shall no longer terrify my people.”
Presented the drink to quaff, he refused it, saying that he was ill; but urged to taste it from the tip of his finger, he did so and was immediately overpowered by its magic. He lifted the bowl and was drunk. He sent for Quetzalpetlatl, his sister, who dwelt on the Mountain Nonoalco. She came, and her brother gave her the bowl, so that she too was drunk. And with all reason forgotten, the two that night neither said prayers nor went to the bath, but sank asleep together on the floor. And in the morning Quetzalcoatl said, in shame, “I have sinned; the stain of my name cannot be erased. I am not fit to rule this people. Let them build a habitation for me deep under ground; let them bury my bright treasures in the earth; let them throw the glowing gold and shining stones into the Precious Waters where I take my nightly bath.”
And all this was done. The king remained four days in his underground tomb, and when he came forth he wept and told his people that the time had come for his departure to the Red Land, the Dark Land, the Land of Fire.
Having burned his dwellings behind him, buried his treasures in the mountains, transformed his chocolate trees into mesquite, and commanded his multicolored birds to fly before him, Quetzalcoatl, in great sorrow, departed. Resting at a certain place along the way and looking back in the direction of Tula, his City of the Sun, he wept, and this tears went through a rock; he left in that place the mark of his sitting and the impress of his palms. Farther along, he was met and challenged by a company of necromancers, who prevented him from proceeding until he had left with them the arts of working silver, wood, and feathers, and the art of painting. As he crossed the mountains, many of his attendants, who were dwarfs and humpbacks, died of the cold. At another place he met his dark antagonist, Tezcatlipoca, who defeated him at a game of ball. at still another he aimed with an arrow at a large pochotl tree; and the arrow too was a pochotl tree, so that when he shot it through the first they formed a cross. And so he passed along, leaving many signs and place-names behind him, until, coming at last to where the sky, land, and water come together, he departed.
He sailed away on a raft of serpents, according to one version, but another has it that his remaining attendants built a funeral pyre, into which he threw himself, and while the body burned, his heart departed and after four days appeared as the rising planet Venus. All agree, however, that he will presently return. He will arrive with a fair- faced retinue from the east and resume sway over his people; for although Tezcatlipoca had conquered, those immutable laws that had determined the destruction of Tula assigned likewise its restoration.
Quetzalcoatl was not dead. In one of his statues he was shown reclining, covered with wrappings, signifying that he was absent or “as one who lays him down to sleep, and that when he should wake from that dream of absence, would rise to rule again the land.” [Note 81] He had built mansions underground to the Lord of Mictlan, the lord of the dead, but did not occupy these himself, dwelling, rather, in that land of gold where the sun abides at night. This too, however, is underground. Certain caverns lead to it, one of which, called Cincalco, “To the Abode of Abundance,” is south of Chapultepec; and through its gloomy corridors men can reach that happy land, the habitation of the sun, which is still ruled by Quetzalcoatl. Moreover, that land is the land from which he came in the beginning….
All this, which in so many ways parallels the normal imagery of the Old World culture-hero myths, telling of the one who is gone, dwells underground in a happy, timeless land, as lord of the realm of the happy dead, like Osiris, but will arise again, we can read without surprise. But what is surprising indeed was the manner of Quetzalcoatl’s actual return. The priests and astrologers did not know in what cycle he was to appear; however, the name of the year within the cycle had been predicted, of old, by Quetzalcoatl himself. Its sign was “One Reed” (Ce Acatl), which, in the Mexican calendar, is a year that occurs only once in every cycle of fifty-two. But the year when Cortes arrived, with his company of fair-faced companions and his standard, the cross, was precisely the year “One Reed.” [Note 82] The myth of the dead and resurrected god had circumnavigated the globe.