I’m very excited, and damnably lucky, to have been granted a press pass for this year’s World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, Switzerland (21st to 24th March). I’ll be interviewing a number of the luminaries and “rising researchers” there, and using these interviews as the basis for an in-depth feature for Dreamflesh Journal (as well as posting the full interviews here).

I’m looking forward to seeing for the first time Stanislav Grof, Dennis McKenna and Ralph Metzner. Hopefully I’ll get round to interviewing Jeremy Narby, after nearly doing so a couple of times. And if Christian Rätsch rustles up anything approaching his impression of himself turning into a panther on his first acid trip that he did at Bath in 2004, I’ll be more than content.

Of course, as with all conferences, the real gems will be found hidden away in unexpected encounters between scheduled events, buried deep in late-night conviviality, and crystallized out of nowhere by the cumulative force of the ideas surrounding you.

I know of the people behind the event, the Gaia Media Foundation, from back in the ’90s—they used to stock Towards 2012. It’s great that they’re still going, stronger than ever, and putting together such catalytic gatherings.

I just had an enquiry about doing an interview on the C-Realm Podcast site. A current wave of research – my enthusiasm for the ideas finding each other before me and transforming as I simmer them – overcame my initial trepidation about doing a spoken interview.

And then I stopped. I realized that this is exactly the wrong time to let that enthusiasm loose; it needs to be held close, protected, gestated, cooked. I’m hoping to get some writing out of it. So, no interview. Hopefully someone will be interested in interviewing me when I’ve got all these churning thoughts pinned down with words, and before I get bored with the whole thing!

This all got me thinking about the discrepancy I find between my writing and my speech. Most people have it, I suppose. Some people don’t have it much, and some carefully craft their writing to follow their speech patterns; some (usually academics and scientists) allow their speech to get taken over by the formalities of the written word, and others accept or even encourage the split.

Is it a split? Allen Ginsberg used to say that the voice is the link between the body and the spirit; the neck is the bridge between torso and head, channeling the breath, the living spirit, to work with material vibrations in a sonic union. (I’m not even paraphrasing here, just my words spinning off from his idea…) It’s certainly a view I’ve a lot of time for, and one that’s fruitful to keep close by when studying the use of voice in spiritual traditions.

But what about the hands? When writing and speech are placed in opposition, it seems intuitive that speech is more of the body, more spontaneous and connected to our physical animality. Whereas writing is more intellectual, more minded, reflective and “civilized”. And yet the mouth sits right up there in our head; while the hands, the vehicles of writing, are way away from the brain, that organ which conventionally carries “mind” in our culture.

Writing has its isolation, allowing a retraction from the world into psychic reflection. But perhaps there’s something in this bodily symbolism which helps turn our conventional conceptions upside-down, to break down this oppositional “split” idea. We can begin to see in speech less groundedness, more flighty airiness, perhaps a little vulnerable to being seized by passing breezes of thought. And in writing we can see the tool-wielding craft of handiwork, sentences wrought on the keyboard or pressed in thick dark ink onto the pulped remains of trees.

Each mode has its own blend of elemental forces, and discerning these starts to break down those tired oppositional perceptions.

I recently read Stanislav Grof’s Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research. It’s basically a summary of his life’s work: from LSD psychotherapy in Prague during the fallout from World War II, to Holotropic breathwork in the States, taking in psychosomatic traumas, psychedelic mysticism, spontaneous psychic crises, death & dying… all revolving around Grof’s fascination with the information about intra-uterine experience that seems to sprout from all these arenas.

This isn’t the place for a detailed exposition of his theories. Suffice it to say that his basic premise—that the foetus registers the experience of the womb and birth, and that bringing these deep impressions into consciousness can reveal their potent role in shaping our lives—remains both convincing to anyone with an open mind prepared to read his evidence, and radically unaccepted by mainstream psychology and popular opinion.

He can seem reductionist; this was always my main point of contention with his theories. Perhaps in this summing-up he’s aware of that, and takes pains to stress that he’s merely trying to bring another dimension into our map of the psyche. I’ve a lot of sympathy for people in this position. When your discoveries are so curiously neglected by the mainstream, the act of shouting louder to get yourself heard often forces you to be more strident and reductionist than you might otherwise have been. Wilhelm Reich‘s brilliant theories suffered greatly on this account; Grof seems to have kept his balance admirably.

His model of “COEX systems” (systems of COndensed EXperience) is, to my mind, his best guard against reductionism. He sees various intense experiences—reaching through adulthood and childhood traumas and joys, back through birth and the womb, and beyond into the transpersonal realm of past lives and karma—as all hanging together, grouped by common resonance into a single multi-faceted system. Any reductionism here seems to be a necessary relic of linear time, where birth necessarily precedes life; but linear time, of course, loses some of its monolithic grip when your means of investigation are altered states (what Grof calls “holotropic consciousness”, i.e. consciousness moving towards wholeness).

The most persuasive case study presented in this book is that of Joan, a middle-aged woman dying from stomach cancer. Her description of her LSD experiences, as part of the project at Spring Grove in Baltimore that Grof headed with Walter Pahnke in 1971, are moving in the extreme. There are very good cases to be made for psychedelic therapy in any number of situations. But, as Grof notes, the idea that it’s still difficult to license it for terminal patients who are deemed beyond medical help, is both ridiculous and revealing. It shows clearly that our culture’s problem with the issue has little to do with the idea that psychedelics might mess people’s lives up in some way, and much more to do with an unwillingness to do what Joan and people like her want to do: face death consciously.

Regarding Grof’s theories on the crucial role that womb experience has to play in shaping our lives, it was interesting to read a couple of related news stories today.

There’s the catchy headline ‘Womb experience makes men gay’, reporting on a study that seems to show a correlation between male homosexuality and being the younger of several brothers. I’d not heard about this one, but apparently there is a correlation; and what’s more, it doesn’t seem to hold if the brothers are adopted step-siblings. The theory from this is an intriguing and blatantly charged one: “A woman’s body may see a male foetus as ‘foreign’ [...] prompting an immune reaction which may grow progressively stronger with each male child. The antibodies created may affect the developing male brain.” Talk about sex war!

Then there’s a report on the rise of obesity in the developing world. The theory here is that an infant gestating in the womb of a woman in rural India will be primed, through its connection to the mother’s metabolism, for a certain type of diet—certain foods, certain patterns of eating or, crucially, not eating. If this child grows up and “makes good”, moves to the city, gets an office job and a good salary, their relative inactivity and rich diet can play havoc with their womb-inspired metabolic habits, and leave them with a big ass of lard.

Both stories are notable, in relation to Grof’s work, in that they are wholly materialist, biochemical theories about the role of womb experience. Naturally this aspect is highly important, and Grof would be the first person to acknowledge that. But this can only be the thin end of the wedge for science. With the cognitive sciences amassing more and more evidence for the psyche’s profoundly deep relationship to the body, purely biochemical theories will have to rely more and more on dogma and ignorance to keep psychological elements at bay.

In the refusal to embrace evidence for pre- and perinatal psychological experience, science betrays itself. I think we’re dealing here with the same issue that is revealed in the curious fact that even though Darwinian evolution sees humans as part of a continuum with animals, science habitually carries on the sharp Christian-Cartesian distinction between self-aware human agents and ‘mere animals’ (although there’s evidence of movement in that situation). Similarly, it’s habitual to believe that the roots of consciousness only extend out, to the social sphere in which we’re enmeshed, and not in or down to the inarticulate world of the womb. Or rather, the downward roots are seen to be beyond the pale for consciousness itself, anchored to genetic realms that we can only contact via the abstractions and instrumentations of experimental science. This habitual view may be a self-justifying avoidance of conscious access to these roots as much as it is a rational methodology.

In the face of the evidence from neuropsychology and holotropic research, these habits must wither. All I can say is we had better reflect on the abortion debate in light of this. “Pro-lifers” aren’t, at root, killing abortion doctors to defend inarticulate life because of a belief in the reality of womb experiences. No; they kill in the name of the atomistic personal soul, a wholly inorganic and abstract notion. Such simple-minded concepts need to be killed, but, in the face of extensive evidence from Grof and others, without sacrificing the probability that there is a form of foetal consciousness.

There’s the danger that the work of people like Grof may be held up as evidence—presumably against his will—for the “pro-life” position. We must be clear that yes, some form of experience is going on in the womb; but no, this doesn’t detract in the slightest from the conscious choice that should be given to women about what happens to their bodies. The clarity of the bottom line here shouldn’t detract from the complexity of the issue, nor vice versa.

by Gyrus

In brief: Is suffering necessary?

In full: Given the possibilities raised by genetic engineering, pharmacology, neural augmentation, and other "transhuman" future technologies, do you think it’s possible or desirable to abolish suffering from the human experience? Do we need pain to feel pleasure? Do you think our evolutionary inheritance, the physical and emotional responses that served us well on the African savannah, could be usefully updated with modern technology? Is suffering an intrinsic part of the dynamics of evolution, personal and collective, or is it an outdated hangover from a brutal past?

Amodali

On the issue of eliminating emotional pain, aside from whether this is desirable or not the Point is we already have chemical technologies that can heal suffering in the form of psychedelic substances. I have no idea if these have any place in a transhumanist agenda but any research into chemical augmentation of our nervous systems cannot afford to ignore the body of knowledge associated with these substances. If the mechanisms of psychedelics and supporting esoteric healing systems are not incorporated within the debate then it’s hard to see how any purely scientific developments in the near future could result in genuine healing and transformation.

Generally speaking I just think it’s far too early in this stage in our evolution to think about ‘editing’ any parts of our physical/emotional responses. Neither scientific nor esoteric communities, nor any movement in which both of these are beginning to cohere could begin to claim there is nothing left to explore here. If coherence does blossom over the next decades I feel that we will be less inclined to interfere with the unutterably sophisticated transformative responses we already have. A rather utopian and naïve perspective I guess but I believe we can’t short-circuit our evolution by assuming intellectual superiority over our bodies. A hugely significant part of our salvation lies in the untapped knowledge within our flesh and magickal practitioners need to urgently focus on articulating this on every level. As a race I don’t think we can move on or contemplate the kind of technologically enhanced transformations that human potential movements aspire to until we have truly absorbed the mysteries of our physical manifestation.

Is suffering necessary? Again on a psychological level it’s the price we pay for emotional sensitivity. Depression is now one of the most common illnesses, we need to examine why many are so unhappy with their lives rather than looking for ‘magic bullets’ to treat the symptoms. I don’t think our emotional responses are outmoded, people generally have good reasons for their pain. It’s insulting to the integrity of Individuals to think that manipulating emotional responses is any real solution. (I’m not including here any psychological illness that has a physiological basis, that’s another area of the debate).

On a more esoteric level magickians/shaman/artists are often predisposed to extreme emotional/psychological sensitivity which is a curse/blessing in equal measure. Most would consider it a vital and precious aspect of their consciousness, a great source of mana, despite the trauma it can bring.

I don’t feel there is any intrinsic nobility to suffering as part of magickal self development. Obviously there are well-known traditions within magick and shamanism in particular where physical/mental suffering is actively invoked as part of a transformational process. This is perfectly valid, but in my own work and experience I have found sex magickal/trance techniques to be a more powerful catalyst for entering into extremes of magickal consciousness and creative work.

Daniel Waterman

I personally don’t believe in the possibility of banishing all pain from human existence. Its just not technically feasible. Even if it were possible to remove all physically unpleasant sensations, which is what heroin can do, we still have to face the biggy, ‘existential’ pain.

There is no drug on earth that can permanently remove that pain; in fact heroin is completely useless for it in the long run. Pain and suffering are part of the human parcel. Without pain and suffering we would not be able to enjoy a release from them, one would expect to die of boredom in such circumstances. There is one ray of hope though, by accepting pain and becoming truly compassionate people, we can maintain a certain sense of proportions with regards to pain. Now to your question: is suffering necessary? No, suffering is not necessary but neither can it be avoided. Living beings need a stimulus to do things, hunger to go out and find food, cold to find a warm place.

Without such sensations we would simply have become extinct. There is nothing wrong with extinction though, plenty of species have done it more painlessly than we are going to.

Dave Lee

Three things lead me to posit that it is:

1. Society and culture seems to get better at exactly the same rate as they get worse, overall. The horrors of the monotheistic era are no worse than, just different to, those of the urban technological era.
2. Extinction happens anyway; the pain of that is inconsolable. Relative immortality is no immortality at all.
3. Does anyone know of any culture or individual who created wonderful things without suffering? The Swiss and cuckoo clocks.

David Jay Brown

Interesting question. This is actually something that I’ve thought about quite a bit. I certainly think that we should do everything possible to eliminate, avoid, and reduce suffering on this planet. I think that we should use every technological and pharmacological tool at our disposal to help accomplish this, and that we should view ecstasy as the goal of life. With that said, I don’t think it’s actually possible to completely eliminate suffering, nor am I sure that this would even be a good idea.

I think that to be embodied in a flesh and blood form—with all the limitations and conflicting or unfulfilled desires that come with that, and from living in a world defined by duality—leads to inevitable suffering. Also, I’m not sure that we would be better human beings if we didn’t suffer, as I think that suffering has the potential to teach us compassion.

Jason Louv

I think that people already have a built-in system for looping around suffering with words and editing its thorns away. It consists of saying the following thing: "It happened for a reason." Narrative is our best painkiller; the ability to recontextualize is our greatest adaptive strategy and tends to be the last thing standing between us and the dirt. Is suffering necessary? There’s no real reason that it should be, but until we do abolish it (whatever that means), we’re going to have to believe that it is.

Mogg Morgan

Is suffering necessary—not sure i’d put it that way—perhaps inevitable—as in the Buddhist sense that it goes with the territory—i.e. of incarnation. When the Buddha said, in his first sermon, that ‘everything is suffering’ I do not think he meant that it was necessary, merely that it was a fact of life—and indeed the means to remove it were also manifest in medicine. The Buddha was active at a challenging time when a whole new crop of diseases had just hit humanity as a result of growing population and urbanisation. I’m not too convinced by notions that medical intervention can end suffering of this kind—although the quest for physical immortality has always been an very productive quest. But in the end I find myself agreeing with the ideas of Ivan Illich, where he says there are limits to medicine.

When you talk of African savannah I guess you have in mind the first humans, with their mutated brains, more than up to the task of surviving in such a simple environment—things could only go down hill. Currently I’m thinking about another African savannah, the one that once bloomed in the Egyptian desert on what is now the Sudanese/Egyptian border. This was the locus for a very early experiment in social living—which later transferred itself to the Nile valley and the peaceful, communalist settlements that worshipped the hidden god Seth. I think that may have been one of those golden ages—quickly overwhelmed by the cult of the king, and the growth of the nation state. Perhaps the cycle has come full circle now and we can see that we lost something of value when we abandoned our African savannah.

Paul Devereux

We are heading into a future that will ultimately be posthuman, in the sense that there will be hybrid cyberhumans. Some developments towards this are already afoot, and I reckon we will become fully posthuman within this century. I’m not sure what I feel about the prospect. In some sense, I have to feel happy if it reduces human suffering which I think it will do in a physical way, but it may be that psychological and spiritual suffering increases proportionally.

Every person needs to experience a measure of suffering in order to know themselves and to develop empathy and humanity. Without any personal suffering an individual could all too easily be incapable of understanding the suffering of others. Also, without suffering a person does not know their own limits. Without suffering, there would be no worthwhile music, art, writing, philosophy. Without suffering there would be less of a spur to scientific and technological endeavour. However, I think some of the excessive sufferings (pain, starvation, mental illness, and so forth) too many human beings have to endure is not necessary, and should be alleviated where possible. As Heller more or less said in his book Catch-22, you don’t need pain to know that something has been injured or gone wrong in the body—a second-rate juke-box manufacturer could come up with something better, like a neon tube on the forehead that started flashing instead of us feeling agony…

Peter Meyer

Suffering is of many sorts, from pain to ennui. Where suffering has a biophysical origin, as does pain, we can already relieve this greatly by the use of opiates, in particular heroin. There is thus already no reason for anyone to die in pain; people do so still only because of the fear of supporting the use of opiates in a social environment corrupted by the evil of the "war on drugs".

This does not mean that all pain should be eliminated. Pain exists presumably because it is useful for survival, since it is a sign that some damage has been done and has to be dealt with before more is done.

As for varieties of suffering other than pain, suffering of a more psychological kind, this can never be removed from human experience because humans often fail in what they try to do, and when they fail they feel bad about it. Naturally enough.

Suffering is also often associated with love, as when someone we love acts in ways harmful to us or to themselves, or worse, dies. Maybe in heaven the objects of our love are eternal, but not in this physical world. Coming to terms with this, and with other causes of human suffering, is part of becoming fully human, or as fully human as possible within the context of the socio-historical situation into which we are born.

As for using the discoveries of materialist science to make a new human, I suspect that is an illusion. Humans did not design themselves and so cannot redesign themselves. Collectively we know very little about how things really are, and such wisdom as we have accumulated over millennia has largely been destroyed by the effects of materialism, miseducation, market economics and social enslavement. Rather than anticipating the development of a new and improved version of the species humans may consider themselves fortunate if they manage to avoid causing themselves to become extinct in the near future.

I missed a clarification of my thoughts on anti-depressants. Just as I think that anaesthetics are a valuable, if possibly ambivalent, tool in the upkeep of our physical aspects, anti-depressants and related mood drugs are surely at least useful, at times, for some people, in maintaining good mental health. The crucial point to bear in mind seems to be the fact that anaesthetics would be positively dangerous to our physical being if they could be instantiated as permanent alterations to our capacities. Nineteenth century opponents of anaesthesia claimed that pain was an essential aid to diagnosis: however unpleasant the sensation, it’s nice to know when part of your body has fucked up and needs urgent attention. Equally, the pharmacological or genetic elimination of our capacity for emotional pain would have disastrous consequences, as we blundered around unwittingly harbouring nascent neuroses, and blindly riding roughshod over the feelings of others that hadn’t registered on our one-dimensional emotional radar. But still, just as the pain of surgery is unnecessary for the success of surgery, there may be times when we would benefit greatly from the artificial dampening of emotional pain.

The author of ‘Utopian Surgery‘ is prudent enough to address these obvious issues. The gist of their response is to distinguish between the functional role of pain and suffering, and their "textures"—the actual feelings associated with them. There seems to be a reasonable point here. Its roots lay in the view that biological evolution works on slow enough time scales for our basic capacities as organisms don’t significantly differ from those of our remote ancestors. The human genome was thrashed out on the African savannah over the two million or so years from Homo habilis to Homo sapiens. However, culture, and its ever-complexifying impact on the environment and our technological "exoskeleton" of habitation and vehicles, has catapulted us along some dizzying paths. The differences between these paths and the situation of early hominids in Africa can be overestimated, but is certainly crucial in debating the issues raised by transhumanism.

In short: do we really need to feel all the pain we feel, given our current situation? Do the sensations generated by our nervous systems, evolved to enable small bands of hunter-gatherers to thrive on open grasslands, do their job of alerting us to physical or emotional hiccups just as well in our current, densely urbanised, technologically advanced situation? Or might they be doing their jobs a little too well, potentially hindering the evolution of human culture?

The information-theoretic role of our nastier emotions (jealousy, spite, etc) can in principle be replicated without their current sinister textures as bequeathed by evolution—though it may be wondered whether the "functional role" of modules mediating some of our baser feelings can’t be discarded altogether along with their vicious "raw feels". It’s hard to see what jealousy is good for beyond its tendency to maximise the inclusive fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment of adaptation. Our descendants may make the judgment that neither its texture nor functional role have any redeeming value; and may therefore elect to discard both.

It’s easy to see that, once you’re on the way to Accident & Emergency with your badly broken leg, there’s very little functional purpose for the pain—and anyone standing up for their non-functional "texture" is apt to seem a little odd to say the least. It’s harder to draw the line with emotions, I think. Maybe our social fabric is under undue strain due to outdated emotional responses; maybe an impoverished consciousness of these responses is holding us back from a healthier society. I suspect there are elements of both. The question is, who will stand up and say they fully comprehend human emotional life not only within the individual, but across its whole range of cumulative interactions in the social sphere?

It’s a truism that life is inherently insecure, and any step into the future involves risk. Transhumanists—as the people most passionately concerned with our position on the brink of self-directed evolution—should be the first people to assess and outline the risks involved in this leap. They shouldn’t defensively react to fear-mongers and end up as cheerleaders for things they don’t fully understand. Rationalism is at the heart of the transhuman agenda, and a fully rational approach would involve extensive risk assessment. In terms of the manipulation of emotional suffering, this would involve a full and honest appraisal of whether we have a genuinely rounded knowledge of this loaded, potent landscape. What of those who have consciously plumbed its depths for useable tools, the shamans? Is their alliance with the demons of human suffering purely an expedient, contigent upon their brutal environment? Or is it evidence of a very sophisticated understanding of the nature of consciousness, as the echoes of the shaman’s death and resurrection in alchemy’s solve et coagula seem to testify? Let’s bring in the experts and see what they say.

As it is, I think the transhumanist’s agenda may be pushed forward not only by rich people terrified of death, and hedonist tech-heads, but by the pressing need for drastic measures in the face of social meltdown—caused not necessarily by obsolete neural structures, but by the devastating impact of ecological catastrophes and resource depletion. There may not be time for a full risk assessment if we are to make it through the evolutionary bottleneck that such (very likely) events would create. Even outside this scenario, a "full risk assessment" may not be possible. Transhumanism, for all its rationalism, may inevitably involve leaps of faith as lacking in evidence of likely success as any shaman’s plunge into unchartered depths of consciousness. Once again I say we need dialogue: between transhumanists and those who have most thoroughly explored humanity (shamans, poets, depth psychologists, anthropologists); between rationalists and those who are still mapping the other 90% of existence; between the upstart intellect and the absurdly experienced body and ecosystem.

While I concur with the spirit of this attack on essentialism, there’s a particular aspect of Dvorsky’s post that is a transhumanist refrain that always makes me stop in my tracks, suddenly conscious of questions that don’t seem to be raised:

Fukuyama describes transhumanism as "a strange liberation movement" that wants "nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints." He goes on to state his usual argument, which is that suffering and other negative aspects of humanity is necessary in order for us to retain our human "essence" and properly function as individuals in society. He believes that without aggression, for example, that people wouldn’t be able to fend for themselves, or that without jealousy there could be no love.

As I said, I’m no essentialist. And I’m not sure about Fukuyama’s specific examples of "positive negatives". But I baulk at the casual dismissal of suffering. I have to tread very carefully here—precisely because it’s other’s refusal to tread carefully that concerns me. I agree with neither Fukuyama nor Dvorsky, and their debate seems to me to be polarised into the inevitable abstractions of theoretical polemics. As I put one foot forward, I may be attacked by transhumanists; the next step may draw fire from "bioconservatives"; it requires focus to just use both feet and walk.

So, why caution at the dismissal of suffering? Isn’t this what we’re all after from cradle to grave? Am I a masochist? A sadist? Stupid?

I was talking last night in Cambridge to a friend whose depression has been greatly helped by Prozac. Hell, one of my ex-girlfriends was one of the UK’s earliest trial subjects for Prozac use—her condition was deemed severe enough to override the early concerns regarding side-effects. Needless to say, I wholeheartedly support both the right of these wonderful people to alleviate their suffering using chemical technology, and their act of doing so.

On the other hand, I’ve never chosen to take such drugs for depression, and I’m glad I haven’t. Frankly, while I’ve slipped into some pretty vile pits of torment, I don’t think these periods have been quite debilitating enough to warrant chemical intervention. But further, while pleasure, too, has moved my life on in astonishing ways, suffering has often been the furnace in which awareness and health have been forged in my life.

The crux here is that I think the term "suffering" should be complexified. There isn’t some universal pool of categorisable emotions and feelings that can be labelled "suffering", and emptied by smiling technophiles, or solemnly guarded by narrow-minded Luddites. There are forms of suffering that are inimical to life; forms that are to pleasure as dark is to light—defining counterbalances that give pleasure meaning and, indeed, make pleasure possible; and there are forms that shift between the two, now in danger of crushing vitality, now creating possibilities for its rebirth. Delineating these forms is, I believe, part of an ongoing debate in the evolution of sentience—a crucially important debate, but equally an open-ended, probably unresolvable one. I feel that termination of the debate, proclamation of absolutist victory by any party involved, can only lead to stagnation of life.

Dvorsky dismisses Fukuyama’s appeal to the "uses" of negative emotions and traits as "flowery mumbo-jumbo". Easy phrases such as this may well have bubbled up for you as you read the last paragraph. I’ve got no stats, I’m expressing my feelings, or my feeling-toned thoughts that have crystallised through experience. Luckily, I’m not hoping to convince any governments or institutions here; I can indulge in this ineffectual little corner of the blogosphere.

However, this Stats vs. Feelings opposition brings me to what I feel is a key underlying issue. The cartoonish polarisation (which unfortunately actually forms the backdrop for real debates on these issues) goes something like this: the Transhumanist Techno-Rationalists think our intellects are perfectly fine arbiters of what forms and directions our bodies, emotions, and other "lower" functions should take; the BioLuddite, Deep Ecology folk don’t trust humanity as far as they could through all six billion of them, and insist that we bow down before the superior wisdom of Nature.

I have to confess I have a bias towards the latter, given such a two-dimensional system of choices. But the system of choices that reality gives us has quite a few more dimensions. I do have some form of reverence for nature. How could you not, given the discoveries of science? As Alan Watts always patiently points out, the incredibly subtle operations of the body, from the complex, as yet ill-understood rhythms of the heart, to the digestion of food and wonderfully sophisticated structure of the brain, are all coordinated by some level of unconscious somatic intelligence that the conscious mind has no part in. The simple fact of our existence, and further, our ability to reflect upon it, is testament to the immense complexity, durability and adaptive intelligence of nature. After a couple of millennia of science, we’re only beginning to fully comprehend the complexity of natural systems, let alone comprehend the systems themselves.

It’s a mistake, though, to allow this concession, this necessary admission of nature’s long-term superiority, to bring our intellect to its knees in impotent awe. Our intelligence is nature’s latest development, and we would be treasonous in the extreme to castrate it. It seems silly to assume that this "rational mind" department, with its R & D timeline measured in hundreds of thousands of years at best, should really be given executive power over the whole company, which has amassed an immensely rich array of creations in its four billion year history. But which company ignores its R & D department? What is needed is communication, dialogue.

The crucial line of research, from this vantage point, seems to be the investigation of the continuities—and of the importance of these continuities—between non-organic and organic matter, and between non-sentient and sentient organisms. When we say "suffering", are we referring to something that is a tragic aberration, a "fall" concurrent with the flowering of such a delicate flower as sentience? Or is it the conscious successor to part of the processes of creation and destruction that have evolved in non-conscious life and lifeless matter to enable evolution itself? (I’ll leave the question of consciousness in inorganic nature for another time, though I should note that I think it’s worth asking.)

A while back I read an interesting article by an anonymous author, ‘Utopian Surgery: Early arguments against anaesthesia in surgery, dentistry and childbirth‘. The most significant of these arguments was the contention that the fact that we suffered pain obviously reflected God’s intentions, and to circumvent this distress was to go against God. The argument is easily demolished, and it’s hard to not chip in unless—whatever your "beliefs"—you’re prepared to forgo anaesthesia for the rest of your life. I’m not. But, replace "God" with "Nature/Evolution", and physical pain with emotional pain, and my contention that some emotional suffering may be necessary to emotional evolution seems to be in danger of a similar demolition. Or: it would if I was erecting an absolutist edifice, and not a provisional, pragmatic foundation.

Alongside dialogue, between the logic of the intellect and the maturity of nature, I would add choice as a necessary part of any sane future. Most transhumanists—certainly the democratic ones—would agree with the importance of choice. I would point out to them the significance of this. It’s an admission that you might not be right, and as such should feed back into your beliefs, and help you weed out any fundamentalisms. Many people gain deep insight from intensely painful practices such as ritual scarification—and they may well see no contradiction in getting a general anaesthetic when they have major surgery. Equally, the right to use anti-depressants to combat truly debilitating conditions must be weighed against the necessity of leaving the neural gates open to allow ourselves to fall through emotionally purgative holes. Such experiences, certainly repugnant to the upstart intellect, seem to have evolved to strip away dead and dying feelings in a way that unintegrated chemical intrusions can’t hope to emulate.

It seems quite short-sighted to view pain and suffering to be as monolithic as Christian beliefs are monotheistic, and to bind the two together in history, the inevitable collapse of the latter taken as a sign of the need for the abolition of the former. If your only experiences of suffering are inseparable from those slavish monotheistic experiences of passivity, subservience and conservatism, all I can say is that your experiences are impoverished.

by Seamus ben Qin

I. Neuroscience and the Sacred?

It has been a few years now since the first inklings of what were to come to trouble my mind, how science and religion relate to each other, made their initial appearance. Accompanying my first few excursions into chemically induced "religious" states of consciousness were radical reappraisals of my views on religion and spirituality. The reactive position that I had held against religion, seen as both a mode of social control and a product of the imaginations of our pre-scientific ancestors, gave way to thoughtful inquiry and a reinterpretation of the original value of religion. If religion was not the arch foe of science, a leftover from the superstitious past, then perhaps, I reasoned, the core of religion, which I took to be its reports of nonordinary states, would fall under the jurisdiction of psychology and the neurosciences. Science and religion could be reconciled by way of the human brain.

My central idea was that somehow prophets, saints, shaman, mystics, etc. were individuals who had learned to change their brain-states at will, achieving psychedelic-like states without an external catalyst. The possibility that such altered states of consciousness could be a natural potential of every owner of a human nervous system also intrigued me. The host of questions spinning off from these two main principles took me from book to book in search for answers that satisfied both intellect and intuition.

Pioneers in the pursuit of a reconciliation between science and religion are few and far between, as it is easier in some respects to keep ones professional and personal beliefs in separate compartments. Any attempts at synthesis made between the two paradigms are often subject to attack from adherents of both sides, and the transgressor is deemed heretic by both alike. Among those major figures in this tradition, such as Jung and Teilard de Chardin, I recently came across a contemporary thinker of similar calibre. The Body of Myth, J. Nigro Sansonese’s first and only book as far as I know, has been one of those texts that has ‘accidentally’ come my way and proven to both confirm ideas that I had been musing over, and also lay out a veritable feast of related thoughts. In his own words, "a grand synthesis of science, consciousness, and myth—by means of yoga—is the goal of this book."

II. The Body of Myth

The uncanny similarities in the narrative structure of myths from human cultures worldwide led Carl Jung, and later Joseph Campbell to assert the existence of ‘universal archetypes’. Archetypes can be briefly defined as patterns of experiencing-responding to reality common to all human beings, which would result in apparently universal mythic structures. Both Jung and Campbell, however, experienced difficulty in expressing the ontological foundations of archetypes; Jung claimed that archetypes existed in what suspiciously sounded like a Platonic realm of Ideas existing beyond Time and Space, the collective unconscious. Campbell more concretely suggested that they were somehow rooted in human biology. While the posited archetypes had explanatory value, they fell short in providing a rigorous model that didn’t require some leap where ‘a miracle occurs.’ Given the abyss between psychology and biology, these vague notions, although intuitively appealing, failed to bridge the gap and remained speculative and unverifiable. What if myth was essentially a description of human biology? This notion is essentially what Sansonese suggests.

Broadly speaking, the centerpiece of his hypothesis is that myths are esoteric descriptions of the internal life of the body, which archaic humans were more experientially familiar than we are today.1 Such a bold statement elicits many questions that demand to be addressed. What relations could possibly be made between human biology and myth? What evidence suggest that archaic humans were any more privileged than we today are with a greater awareness of their own bodies? Or for that matter, that a knowledge of what is generally unconscious body activity is even possible? To answer these questions, the fundamental framework within which he makes his observations must be explained.

What is the sound of one hand clapping? The answer to this two thousand year old koan, according to Sansonese, is a reference to the resting voltage of the auditory nerve. The auditory nerve, which transmits sounds from the ear to the auditory centers of the brain,2 is always "hearing" even in the absence of external stimuli. Since any stimulation of the auditory nerve is a sound, it will register any stimuli regardless of whether its source is external or internal. The internal stimulations of the auditory nerve are the sounds of the vital activities of the body itself, ordinarily masked by external sounds; this almost imperceptible static is the sound of one hand clapping. Similarly, this "static" is registered in all of the cranial nerves linking the sense organs to their respective processing areas in the brain, so that one could in principle turn the senses in upon themselves, say for the auditory nerve to hear itself, and hence listen to the life of the body proceeding beneath the threshold of consciousness. The term Sansonese uses in referring to these magnified experiences of ones internal biological events is a heightened proprioception, and the prerequisite to have heightened proprioceptions is the ability to pass into sublime trance.3

Before we go any further, let’s examine these two new terms because of their importance and repeated appearance in Sansonese’s book. The formal definition of a proprioception is simply the awareness of one’s body. The body, by way of the proprioceptive system, is made known to the brain so that even if your eyes are closed, you can tell which direction your arms are pointed, whether you are upside-down or just feel the presence of your own body. This body knowledge is subject to radical enhancement. Imagine being simultaneously conscious of your breathing and heartbeat. Not too difficult if you meditate; in fact, you might not have to imagine at all. But add to the list the flow of blood through your circulatory system, the position and activity of the internal organs and glands, or even the firing of neurons within the brain itself. These would be examples of heightened proprioceptions.

In order to experience heightened proprioceptions, a person must be able to hold their attention in place, without allowing distractions to interfere. This requires the ability to concentrate, and when ones concentration has become profound, the state one has entered is sublime trance. Anyone who has practiced meditation knows how difficult this can be. When one first begins, it takes very little time for the mind to wander off, getting caught up in the constant chatter of the mind conversing to itself. "Discursive thought is the single greatest distraction from trance" asserts Sansonese, and it is also the main reason he cites that archaic humans entered trance with greater ease than contemporary humans. Discursive thought is exacerbated in a culture like our own full of "books, magazines and advertisements", not to mention computers, television and newspapers. This is not to assert a value-judgement on such things, but in the relative absence of such inflammatory stimuli for the chatter of thoughts, the inner life of the organism instead of the inner talk becomes more apparent. It is the constant flow of thoughts that masks the far more subtle background noise of the sound of one hand clapping.

How Sansonese views the evolution of human consciousness in light of his proprioception hypothesis also proves to be compelling, but still tantalizingly undeveloped. Just because pre-civilised humans had a greater sensitivity to the internal activities of their bodies does not mean that this ability was painstakingly developed in all individuals. Proto-shamans were specialists in utilizing techniques to train and expand this natural capacity for heightened proprioceptions. These techniques for cultivating heightened proprioception, as well as the mythic worldview in which the techniques were embedded, were for hundreds and possibly thousands of years transmitted by oral tradition. The invention of written language was the instrumental first step leading to the ‘voiceless speech’ of thought, and the gradual occlusion of internal body activity from awareness.

The emergence of early civilizations proved to instigate a novel role in the function of the human brain and nervous system. The pioneering neurologist Anthony Damasio, author of Descarte’s Error, points out that the brain’s original duty prior to the emergence of mind was to keep track of the goings-on in the various subsystems of the organism, and to assist in regulating all the body’s internal functions, along with keeping track of the environment in which the organism was situated. Awareness of these biological activities became more and more unconscious as the importance and complexity of social interactions in early civilizations exacerbated ‘voiceless speech’. Under such conditions, Sansonese asserts that the techniques for inducing sublime trance and heightened proprioceptions became systematized, using written language, under the guise of different esoteric religions. He gives as some examples the pre-Christian mystery cults, the Yoga-Sutras of Patanjali and early Christianity with it’s emphasis on gnosis, "’divine knowledge’ of the subliminal life of the body."

The question of how our capacity to experience heightened proprioceptions came to arise in the process of evolutionary development is explained by Sansonese in one of at least two major possible ways. He suggests that given the thousands of years of low technological levels, and the innate curiosity of homo sapiens, it seems quite natural that humans would be predisposed to explore in detail the experiential inner activity of their bodies. This argument could be interpreted as assuming that heightened proprioceptions are exclusive to humanity, and a product of human self-exploration. One could also argue that heightened proprioceptions are common in nonhuman animals, and this capacity was part of our inheritance as animals ourselves. Along this line of reasoning, it was only with humanity’s acquisition of symbolic language, which allowed development and communication of the techniques for cultivating these states, that humans expanded on this inherent capacity. Ironically enough, this same ability which allowed the creation of myths and oral traditions for transmitting heightened proprioceptions eventually came to dominate and occlude them. While Sansonese doesn’t distinguish between these two possibilities, I am more in favor of the latter position. I believe this is especially so considering that the majority of one’s nervous system is committed to the regulation of internal systems, and as stated above, this was the central nervous systems original function.

What does all this have to do with myth? The role that myths played for our proprioceptively inclined forebears were akin to catechisms, "lessons prefatory to initiation." An adolescent initiate, having grown up hearing the tribal myths, would have their esoteric meaning explained during initiation. Sansonese states that the esoteric meanings that myths alluded to were descriptions of heightened proprioceptions, those most important in the practical teaching of trance craft. Since Sansonese believes the techniques of raja (royal) yoga expounded in Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutras to be representative of the archaic trance craft practiced by humans in prehistory and early civilizations, his interpretation of myths draws largely from the main body of techniques and goals of the yoga of sublime trance. Implicit in his argument is that the similarity of human biology, regardless of culture, would result in a general similarity in the techniques to induce trance.

Humans have a strong tendency to interpret what is unknown in light of what is known. The example most often given in reference to archaic consciousness is that our ancestors projected human forms over impersonal Nature in order to comprehend the capricious and awesome forces around them. We don’t have to go back into prehistory to realize that modern science uses known models to comprehend what is not clearly understood. One conspicuous example is the overworked ‘brain as computer’ metaphor. On the proprioceptive hypothesis, we see the same pattern of human behavior: what is proprioceptively apprehended of internal body structures/processes is projected onto external objects that bear some structural resemblance to what is propriocepted. An apt example of this projection is in the use of animals as theriomorphisms4 of the senses. Assuming archaic humans had recognized the superior sensory acuity possessed by other animals, they would naturally associate them with the various senses. Sansonese claims that many of the associations were based on proprioceptive analogy: since the horns of a ram are fused together at their base in the same way that the optic nerves are fused at the optic chiasmus, rams would be theriomorphisms for vision. Similarly, since the horns of a bull jut out from the sides like the auditory nerves, bulls would be theriomorphisms for hearing, both attributes coinciding with astrological correspondences.

The myths that Sansonese spends the most time analyzing are western in origin; Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian myths primarily for their proprioceptive significance. Because it would be virtually impossible for me to do justice to the entirety of his densely interconnected arguments, I will set to the simpler task of explaining his basic ideas that fall more within the scope of this paper before proceeding to some of the philosophical conclusions that I’ve drawn on this theme. A central idea to his hypothesis is the experientially distinct three worlds of cognition, perception and stereognosis.5 In Greek myth, this primary division is made between the three cronid brothers, Zeus, Poseidon and Hades, who cast lots over which kingdom each would hold rulership. Thus Zeus, who ends up ruling over the heavens, is an anthropomorphism for cognition, while Poseidon and Hades are connected with perception and stereognosis respectively. The entire Greek pantheon, especially the major gods and goddesses, turn out to be anthropomorphisms of propriocepted body states particular to one of the three worlds. So Hephaestus, for example, was an anthropomorphism for diaphragmatic breathing, proper to the first world of stereognosis. That this would be the case is due to a number of factors. Linguistically, Hephaestus is composed entirely of aspirates which describe the sound of breath. In myth, his being repeatedly hurled from Mount Olympus only to return again recapitulates the up-down motion of the chest during respiration, not to mention the artwork of him on Greek pottery commonly depicting him with a set of bellows. While at first sight this might seem contrived, one should remember the tendency of humans during this time period to think in terms of correspondences.

Other myths, such as the story of Jason and the Argonauts, is, in the words of Sansonese, "a myth about internal vision, involving both root gazing and breath control." The Argo is an esoteric description of the human skull and the hero Jason, whose name is also sibilant, describes deep meditative breathing.6 The harrowing passage through the clashing Cyaenean rocks into the Black sea describes the "dizzying, disorienting and often terrifying" ascent into trance by concentrated meditation upon the frontal suture, a fissure running directly down the center of ones forehead. Success in this task leads to proprioceptions of the effects of breath within the skull itself, and particularly of the optic chiasmus, esoterically represented by the Golden Fleece.

While I will curb further explanation on the specifics of his proprioceptive hypothesis of myth I’d like to mention in passing how especially fascinating I found the application of this hypothesis to the Eleusinian mysteries, and the significance of gnosis, "knowledge of the subliminal life of the body" to early and Gnostic Christianity. Besides these two exceptional topics, my main interest in his work revolved less around myth than his occasional but insightful commentaries of direct relevance to the philosophy of mind.

III. Heightened Proprioceptions in Philosophy of Mind

What I have found most gratifying has been questioning the underlying epistemological implications of Sansonese’s hypothesis, in the attempt to resolve what appears at first glance paradoxical: that the brain should be able to know itself. Like the recursive images screen within screen in video feedback, or the experience of standing between two mirrors facing each other and looking at yourself looking at yourself ad infinitum, the notion of ones brain trying to experience itself evokes the alchemical Ouroborous as a fitting metaphor.7 The question of how the brain can know itself forces one to give thought to the observer-observed dichotomy. In experiencing heightened proprioceptions of ones brain, who would be the ‘I’ observing the proprioceptions? This is especially important to explore if one does not wish to invoke a nonphysical spiritual essence who is doing the observing, which I think is unnecessary.

Before tackling such an immense question, it would be instructive to examine the indirectly stated propositions behind Sansonese’s proprioceptive hypothesis. Perhaps the most important is that all conscious experience of the world, our own bodies, and internal states like thoughts & feelings are elaborate constructs of ones brain and nervous system. When one looks at an object, say a tree, a person or a house, what one sees is a sensory representation of that object generated8 by their brain. This is not to deny that trees, persons, and houses exist but that how we experience them depends upon the kind of sensory organs we own and the complexity of our nervous systems. A human and a bee "seeing" the same flower will have two completely different sensory experiences, because bees see in infrared, while we see "visible" light. While there is a biological constraint on our being able to see in infrared because of the design of our eyes, this does not mean by any stretch of the imagination that we actually see everything that is "out there".9 The gist behind this arrangement is that there is a great deal of information "out there" that never makes it above the threshold of consciousness, but is within experiential access.

It should be said that the world "out there" should not be mistaken to be solely the external world, but includes also our physical bodies and the brain activity giving rise to conscious experience. To avoid confusion on this point, let me emphasize that the experience of our own body is representational. For example, one’s body representation (or body schema) can be subject to feelings of disintegration, stretching and warping under the influence of certain drugs (or illnesses like schizophrenia), despite the fact that the actual physical body is undergoing no such change. The experience of our body schemas allows us to infer that there is a physical body "out there" of which the body schema is representative. This sheds light and possible resolution onto the whole debate over the existence of a ‘soul’ in a person’s body. Instead of conceiving of souls as non-material, it’s possible that the direct experience of the normally occluded, internal life of the body in all its awesome complexity and intricacy might have been the origin of the idea of a soul or spirit within.10

Similarly, despite appearances of solidity and stability, our sensory representations of the ‘external world’ can take on a life of their own for the same reason. Along these same lines, one can also regard all of her or his conscious experiences as indirect observations of brain-states. For example, in looking at a tree one is indirectly observing the brain activity of the visual cortex that lies behind the visual experience. Watching thoughts arise and decay while meditating is an indirect observation of the brain-states responsible for the experienced thoughts. It is in this respect that I mean that physical brain-states are also "out there", projected behind our sensory experience. There are interesting implications to this proposition, albeit speculative, that relate to why animism or panpsychism were postulated by our pre-scientific ancestors, not by logical inference11 but because of experiential knowledge.

Simply put, since our brains are alive, and given that our entire sensory experience is the product of brain activity, it is conceivable that what we experience, including inanimate objects, can appear alive. In effect, the brain’s aliveness would be, so to speak, "showing through" one’s sensory representations. It is then possible to understand how yogi adepts can say that the stone they sit upon has intrinsic aliveness or consciousness, because his sensory construct of that rock is itself alive, the product of a living brain. Before dismissing this as utter foolishness, consider the aliveness of the hallucinations reported by the person with schizophrenia. The animist who talks to the forest is, likewise, talking to his own brain, or the brain is talking to itself.

This, however, is not to say that such experiences are all in ones head. One’s brain/body receive a great deal more information than what actually becomes conscious. The shaman’s "spirit familiar" can be understood to be the brain’s way of bringing to consciousness inaccessible information of the world "out there" by way of what appears to be an independent entity, but is conceivably emergent from brain activity. Given the proprioceptive hypothesis, learning to discern brain activity behind our sensory constructs could be interpreted as seeing the "spirit" behind physical appearances, which would coincide with the goals of both the Gnostics and medieval alchemists, the redemption of spirit from the prison of matter.

Another useful example comes from a ‘thought experiment’ drawing from virtual reality. In a similar way that a futuristic VR mainframe would generate not only a virtual space but also a virtual body for the user to fully interact with the environment of cyberspace, one’s brain and nervous system create a sensory construct of the body and the external world surrounding it. The difference between the two lies in the fact that (presumably) while in cyberspace, it would be impossible to directly know the physical computer activity "out there" underlying the VR construct. Following the proprioceptive hypothesis, it is possible12 to access hidden representations of very subtle activity in the physical body and brain that is commonly regarded as outside the range of conscious inspection. What would it mean, in terms of sensory qualities, to have direct knowledge of the firing of neurons in ones brain? Or the motions of the subatomic matter that comprises ones body? Without myself having had (yet) direct experiences of my own neural underpinnings, I have discovered some partially illuminating thoughts regarding this question from an unexpected source.

It is ironic that at the same time I was entertaining these admittedly speculative ideas, I came across Paul Churchland’s brief but tantalizing essay on the prospects of an "expanded introspection".13 Certainly one of the more imaginative proponents of reductionism, Churchland speculates himself that a ‘matured’ neuroscience, one that has unravelled the Gordian Knot of the mind-body dilemma, would allow a suitably trained neuroscientist to be capable of discriminating the objective neurological states behind thoughts, emotions and other mental phenomena. He uses as an analogy the discriminatory talents of an expert wine taster. In the same way a wine connoisseur can accurately guess the age and make of a particular vintage by distinguishing subtle characteristics of taste that would remain undifferentiated to an untrained person, perhaps also future neuroscientists would be able to notice and recognize such objective knowledge as glucose levels in the frontal lobes, concentrations of dopamine, activation levels of specific brain regions, and so forth. This would undoubtedly have a profound effect on language. With such capabilities, humans could by-pass the comparatively unsophisticated verbal communication, and communicate more directly the brain-states that currently have to be turned into clumsy and easily misunderstood utterances.

What an intoxicating thought! What is even more so is that just as one has to develop an awareness of something unknown before it can be influenced, knowledge of one’s brain-states logically precedes being able to manually direct one’s own neurochemistry. Again, it seems the primary concern is who would be the controlling, or observing ‘I’? The Buddhist would say that there is no ‘I’, and I (or perhaps my brain) would be inclined to agree that an answer lies somewhere in this direction. Perhaps heightened proprioceptions of the brain would experientially validate the illusion of subject-object dichotomy. Is it possible that this is what that most overburdened word ‘enlightenment’ actually refers to? I presently have only leads as to the truth value of these statements, but I trust that persistent meditation and active intellectual inquiry will slowly bring more resolution.

IV. A Closing Thought

Assuming that mind has its source in purely physical activities of the brain/body system, then we can conceive of the whole human organism as a network of semi-autonomous, but mutually interdependent "intelligences" that are constantly altering relative to changes in the internal environment of the body. Conceptually, the leap to logical acceptance of the Buddhist’s notion regarding the illusory nature of the self is made easier by this realization: we are networks of bio-intelligences, there is no neuron/neural assembly where our sense of "I" resides, there is no unchanging self, but multiple processes interweaving. Implications: by virtue of being a bionetwork in and of ourself, we should be capable of learning to mutually influence the myriad sub-networks that comprise the entirety of our physical body. With a necessary sensitivity to inherent body wisdom, one could adjust and play with potential hormonal-endocrinal configurations, or direct the micro-activities of the immune system, like having a million nanomachines at your disposal. Pushing the envelope to its limit suggest the possible human who can change sex, body-morph, self-evolve, using hir body as if it were ones own laboratory. Transhumans, New humans.

Footnotes

1. Barring, of course, so-called primitive cultures that are less influenced by modern society. [back to text]
2. In the form of electrical spikes. [back to text]
3. Called ‘samadhi’ in Buddhism. [back to text]
4. def: when animal forms are used to represent traits, ideas, divinity – compare anthropomorphism. [back to text]
5. The medically proper term for visceral proprioceptions. [back to text]
6. Also notably because of his relation to both Sisyphus, another myth describing the up-down motion of respiration, and to his great grandfather Aeolus, god of the wind. [back to text]
7. This would be the paradox of having a knowledge of the brain-states responsible for generating that knowledge of the brain-states that one is experiencing. [back to text]
8. "Generated", "created" as words describing how conscious experience "emerges" from brain activity are misleading because they can be taken for an explanation. Because our language doesn’t currently contain the proper descriptive words, I will be forced to resort to these. [back to text]
9. This is a useful term referring to the world as it exists beyond our sensory experience of it. Using the example of the flower, what we experience is a sensory representation of the flower. We can never experience it "in and of itself", Kant’s ding an sich, which is to say that we can never know the world "out there" except as a representation, but following the proprioceptive hypothesis, we can have far more enhanced experiences of what is "out there". [back to text]
10. "Behold, the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.", Luke 17:21 [back to text]
11. As has been the explanation supplied by classical anthropologists like Taylor. [back to text]
12. And apparently quite difficult. [back to text]
13. ‘Matter and Consciousness’, P. Churchland [back to text]

by Chris Knight

Every educated person since Darwin has labelled himself an ‘evolutionist’. But a real evolutionist must apply the idea of evolution to his own forms of thinking. Elementary logic, founded in the period when the idea of evolution did not yet exist, is evidently insufficient for the analysis of evolutionary processes. Hegel’s logic is the logic of evolution. Only one must not forget that the concept of ‘evolution’ itself has been completely corrupted and emasculated by university professors and liberal writers to mean peaceful ‘progress’. Whoever has come to understand that evolution proceeds through the struggle of antagonistic forces; that a slow accumulation of changes at a certain moment explodes the old shell and brings about a catastrophe, revolution; whoever has learned finally to apply the general laws of evolution to thinking itself, he is a dialectician, as distinguished from vulgar evolutionists.

Leon Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism

Until the 1980s, ideas about human origins were for the most part gradualist. It was believed that a recognisably human lifestyle began emerging some two to three million years ago, in a drawn-out evolutionary process linked with the establishment of bipedalism and tool-making. According to this way of thinking, speech co-evolved with the making of simple stone tools, becoming increasingly complex as technology evolved. Art, ritual, the organisation of kinship and other aspects of culture became more complex in the same gradualistic, piecemeal way.

Such gradualism, although still defended, has recently become a minority position. It is nowadays widely acknowledged that those archaeologists who excavated early hominid sites in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, and saw the beginnings of "home bases", "language" and "a sexual division of labour" among these bipedal toolmakers were projecting assumptions and stereotypes derived from modern culture onto the distant past.

Over the past two decades, there has been a revolution in archaeology and palaeontology, leading to the view that the earliest tool-makers, while more intelligent than apes, were involved in essentially primate-style social and reproductive relationships. Admittedly, humans were co-operatively hunting large game animals by at least 500,000 years ago. But archaeologists have found no evidence for art, ritual or other "symbolic" behaviour at such early dates. Most archaeologists are now agreed that even large-brained humans such as the Neanderthals were not leading a recognisably human or "hunter-gatherer" lifestyle. The dominant view is that anatomically modern humans emerged in Africa around 130,000 years ago and then, some 60,000 years later, rather suddenly spread across the world in an explosive process known as the "human revolution". It was during the earliest stages of this revolutionary process that symbolic art, ritual and language emerged.

The Venus of Laussel, Dordogne, France. Note the typical emphasis on the mid-body and womb region. Originally red-painted with ochre (redrawn from a photograph by Achille Weider).

Apart from one or two isolated possible art-objects, the earliest evidence for art has been found in sub-Saharan Africa, dated to around 130,000 years ago. The evidence is indirect: we don’t have the actual patterns or pictures. What we can examine are the crayons arguably used by the artists. Shaped rather like sticks of lipstick, these are brilliant red, being made of carefully selected ochres. From their shape and in the light of ethnographic parallels, it seems that they were used not for painting on rock surfaces but for body-painting.

Along with the crayons comes evidence that the same populations were mining and grinding ochre in considerable quantities, using it for a variety of decorative purposes. It seems that people were painting one another not just haphazardly but on set ritual occasions, in accordance with a predetermined schedule. Support for this interpretation comes from fragmentary notched bones, closely resembling less damaged, more recent "calendar sticks" from the same region as well as from other parts of Africa and from Europe. Archaeologist Alexander Marshack has interpreted the arrangements of notches—often numbering 28 or 29—as calendrical notations facilitating the tracking of days, years and especially moons. In Upper Palaeolithic traditions, there is a suggestion that the days around dark moon were especially important, the corresponding notches being heavily marked.

How are we to interpret all this? I have developed a model of social and sexual revolution which would predict findings such as these. I have gone beyond generalities concerning a "human revolution" and attempted to work out the details. Some may question whether this is possible in relation to events so far back in time. My point is that the key events occurred recently enough to have left a trace. Europe was populated by Neanderthals until a mere 40,000 years ago. If geologists can piece together the history of life on earth, and if astronomers can reconstruct the creation of the universe, can we not apply comparable principles and methods to the study of our own cultural past? Prehistory is not cut off from the present—it lives on in things which are observable today. In my book I focus on recurrent structures of hunter-gatherer myth, kinship and ritual. Like red shifts, fossils or tree-rings, I believe that these patterns are in principle information-rich. The challenge is to find ways of extracting that information.

Southern San rock painting. Fulton’s Rock, Drackensberg Mountains, Natal (redrawn after Lewis-Williams, 1981). According to David Lewis-Williams, the central figure is a young enrobed woman undergoing her first menstruation ceremony in a special shelter. Circling her are clapping women, female dancers and (in the outer ring) men with their hunting equipment. Two figures hold sticks; the women bend over and display ‘tails’ as they imitate the mating behaviour of elands. Among living San, such rituals are intimately connected with success in hunting. Note that each male figure has a bar across his penis. This is probably the artist’s way of marking the marital abstinence associated with menstruation and valued as a condition of hunting luck.

We are fortunate in that the very region in which anatomically modern humans evolved includes the former range within sub-Saharan Africa of the Khoisan peoples, among whom ritual traditions have been preserved with exceptional fidelity. The Khoisan, often known as "Bushman" peoples, have continued to body-paint with red ochre up until the present. Among the greatest of their ceremonies is the "Eland Bull Dance", performed to celebrate a young woman’s first menstruation. The ritual, timed by reference to the changing phases of the moon, is staged mainly by women, perhaps with help from a few older men; they dance in circles around the girl, who is secluded in a specially made hut. Paradoxically, the girl is now constructed as "male", and said to be of an animal species—typically, she is the "Eland Bull". Around her, the dancing women act out the mating behaviour of eland cows, pretending to copulate with the "Eland Bull" inside the hut. Like riotous, orgiastic carnivals everywhere, this dance is simultaneously sacred and hilarious, the performers frequently collapsing in laughter. The dance is these peoples’ major ritual, being regarded as essential to fertility and success in the hunt. An important point is that while "animal sex" is being acted out, ordinary human sexual intercourse is temporarily suspended.

During the celebrations, the menstrual flow of the secluded young woman is conceptualised as "bull’s blood". The ochre body-paint used by the dancers is the same blood. Unity in such shared blood can be conceptualised as a form of "communion". The flowing of "animal" blood which is simultaneously "human" finds expression in religious rituals the world over, an example being the divine sacrifice central to Christianity. Like members of ritual congregations everywhere, Khoisan women periodically assert that "some things are sacred". To be precise, they declare themselves to be sacred whenever their "bull’s blood" is flowing. In my book, I have used the metaphor of "action on the picket-line" to explain how, back in the evolutionary past, rituals of this kind first arose.

Background to Revolution

A revolution does not happen unless there are forces resisting it. What could these have been? For certain academic Marxists, merely to ask such questions seems disturbing. There cannot have been a class struggle in this period, long before the emergence of classes. So how could there have been social conflicts intensifying to the point of culmination in revolutionary change?

The answer was hit upon long ago by Frederick Engels. Writing in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels argued that the dynamic driving the emergence of human morality and solidarity must have been sexual. Since his own words have been so comprehensively ignored, it is worth quoting Engels at length on this. Noting that in "animal societies", wider forms of solidarity are recurrently undermined by male sexual possessiveness and jealous rivalry, Engels comments:

From this it becomes apparent that animal societies have, to be sure, a certain value in drawing conclusions regarding human societies—but only in a negative sense. As far as we have ascertained, the higher vertebrates know only two forms of the family: polygamy or the single pair. In both cases only one adult male, only one husband is permissible. The jealousy of the male, representing both tie and limits of the family, brings the animal family into conflict with the horde. The horde, the higher social form, is rendered impossible here, loosened there, or dissolved altogether during the mating season; at best, its continued development is hindered by the jealousy of the male. This alone suffices to prove that the animal family and primitive human society are incompatible things; that primitive man, working his way up out of the animal stage, either knew no family whatsoever, or at the most knew a family that is nonexistent among animals. So weaponless an animal as the creature that was becoming man could survive in small numbers also in isolation, with the single pair as the highest form of gregariousness, as is ascribed by Westermarck to the gorilla and chimpanzee on the basis of hunters’ reports. For evolution out of the animal stage, for the accomplishment of the greatest advance known to nature, an additional element was needed: the replacement of the individual’s inadequate power of defence by the united strength and joint effort of the horde. The transition to the human stage out of conditions such as those under which the anthropoid apes live today would be absolutely inexplicable. These apes rather give the impression of being stray sidelines gradually approaching extinction, and, at any rate, in process of decline. This alone is sufficient reason for rejecting all conclusions that are based on parallels drawn between their family forms and those of primitive man. Mutual toleration among the adult males, freedom from jealousy, was, however, the first condition for the building of those large and enduring groups in the midst of which alone the transition from animal to man could be achieved. And indeed, what do we find as the oldest, most primitive form of the family, of which undeniable evidence can be found in history, and which even today can be studied here and there? Group marriage, the form in which whole groups of men and whole groups of women belong to one another, and which leaves but little scope for jealousy.

For Engels, then, there are no parallels or continuities linking early human life with primate sexual politics. Rather, the relationship is one of negation and contradiction. Engels, like Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, was a dialectician, not a vulgar evolutionist. This has been forgotten by academic anthropologists as well as by Marxists for most of this century.

Following Engels, my book argues that genuinely human social relations could have been established only as primate-style male dominance and sexual monopolisation of females was resisted and eventually overthrown. The privatising strategies of males had to be curbed and transcended. The reproductive forces had to be emancipated—brought under collective self-ownership and control. This was eventually achieved, in a momentous process of revolutionary change leading to what Engels termed the "primacy" of fully human, fully cultural women in the "communistic household".

In highlighting the contrast between genuinely human social life and the lifestyle of apes or of our precultural ape-like ancestors, Engels quotes the missionary Arthur Wright’s description of a communistically organised Iroquois (Native American) longhouse. Engels’ aim is to show how women, by living together and supporting one another, could exercise power in relation to their sexual partners:

Usually, the female portion ruled the house…. The stores were held in common; but woe to the luckless husband or lover who was too shiftless to do his share of the providing. No matter how many children, or whatever goods he might have in the house, he might at any time be ordered to pick up his blanket and budge; and after such orders it would not be healthful for him to attempt to disobey. The house would be too hot for him and… he must retreat to his own clan….

Women’s power, in this account, was based on their solidarity, enabling them to rupture their marital relations when this seemed necessary. This is the essence of sex-strike theory. The earliest culturally organised women were no-one’s private property. Even when married, they had sufficient autonomy to enable them to say "No", rupturing the sexual bond.

It is important to understand the difference between a scientific theory and a description. A scientific theory is not an attempt to make a plausible story out of the known "facts". Rather, a good theory, when it first hits the streets, seems bizarre and perhaps even crazy. It has little to do with "the facts" as previously understood. This is because the facts it relies on go well beyond the narrow range of familiar ones which have been selected for special attention by the older theories and debated again and again. When a scientific revolution occurs, "the facts" now brought centre-stage are those which previously seemed anomalous. Often, they come from disciplines earlier supposed to be unconnected. "The facts" as a whole are now reconstructed out of the novel theory, having been ignored previously or considered irrelevant because they didn’t fit. Regardless of whether it is correct or not, the "sex-strike" theory of human cultural origins is a model of this kind. It is not a description of facts generally known, but instead a surprising theory which, if true, would change the way we look at the whole of human history.

The theory was first outlined in my book, Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture, published in 1991. Some of it was wrong—particularly many details about dates and places, which are forever changing as new discoveries are made. In some respects, the theory itself was more fundamentally wrong, most notably in those passages where I discussed the biology of menstruation and its significance as a signal. In my book, I pictured menstrual bleeding as a biological "no"-signal; I now realise that this was a mistake, and that on Darwinian grounds we would expect menstruating females (as opposed to pregnant or breast-feeding ones) to be especially attractive to philandering males driven to maximise the number of females they can get pregnant. In view of all this, the theory has had to be substantially modified and improved; for this I am particularly grateful to my colleagues Ian Watts and Camilla Power of University College London. What follows is an abbreviated outline of our theory in its present form.

The Human Revolution

Symbolic culture was established as brain size maximised during the later stages of human evolution, from around 400,000 to 100,000 years ago. The contradictions which led to revolutionary transformation can be traced ultimately to the fact that complex learning depends on large brains; these need time to develop. Besides involving an unusual degree of infant helplessness following birth, such brains also need a prolonged childhood in which sufficient learning can take place. The evolution of large-brained Homo sapiens therefore brought with it dramatically intensified childcare burdens. If these were not to defeat the mothers who were primarily responsible, it was vital for evolving females to ensure that the opposite sex contributed more support than had ever been contributed by male primates, including hominids, before.

Unlike most other mammals including primates, the human female has evolved to resist the philandering strategies of dominant males. A successful male philanderer needs to "save time" on fertile sex with any one female, getting his timing right. In the human case, the moment of ovulation is concealed; a male cannot tell which is the correct time. However, in any group of a dozen females living in conditions of natural (that is, non-contraceptive) fertility, around three are likely to be cycling, signalling this by menstruating.

Sexual bonding with a cycling female, unlike sex with a pregnant or nursing mother, can result in a pregnancy. For this reason, a Darwinian would predict that philandering males would target cycling females, as opposed to pregnant or nursing ones. However, the same Darwinian theory would predict female coalitionary resistance to such philandering. Once a female is pregnant, she needs support, and especially provisioning support. We would expect her to resist male attempts to abandon her in favour of some cycling female in the vicinity. In fact, we would expect mothers to "gang up" to prevent the privatisation of menstruating (imminently fertilisable) females. Mothers, sisters and also male relatives should logically surround such females, bonding closely with them from the moment of menstruation onwards. Whenever one woman was menstruating, we would expect all the other women in the neighbourhood to join with her, displaying the same visible signal at the same time. This would amount to a simple form of "ritual" involving community-wide body-painting with blood or blood-substitutes on occasions when menstrual blood was flowing. Males attempting to privatise selected menstruating females would now be prevented from doing so. Using shared blood to indicate their unity and solidarity, women would resist male attempts to pick and choose between them.

Rock-engravings from Pilbara, Australia. Age uncertain but probably recent. Top: Upper Yule River. Figures dancing, with vaginal flows. Bottom: Cape Lambert. One of many Pilbara scenes of figures linked by genital streams. Here, both figures may be female and the stream conjoining them a shared menstrual flow (redrawn after Wright, 1968).

Females were now in a position to put such blood-symbolised solidarity to good economic use. To appreciate the contrast with primate behaviour, it is worth recalling that when a male chimp has hunted and caught a prey animal, a female will often approach him and—if she is in oestrus—present her swollen hindquarters. If the male is interested, the female may obtain a share of his meat, which she will begin eating on the spot, perhaps while copulation is still proceeding. Naturally, if a second female arrives at the kill-site, she will be in competition with the first for the male’s favours. This strategy, which recalls "prostitution", generates inter-female rivalry rather than solidarity; it also prompts males to compete against one another in using meat to entice females to approach for sex. Females who are pregnant or burdened with young dependents are left out in such a system: being relatively immobilised and also less attractive to males, they are not in a position to solicit meat in this way.

By contrast, once they had established their menstrual rituals, human females were in a position to begin transcending the logic of prostitution, replacing it with the beginnings of sexual morality—that is, collective determination of "right" and "wrong" in matters of sex. The strategy of bonding with menstruating females meant shielding such females, keeping males away from them. In effect, it meant forming a "picket line" around them. Whenever blood was flowing, it was as if all the females in each coalition were simultaneously menstruating and jointly signalling "no" to males. The result was that instead of chasing after meat-possessing males, females could begin making the meat come to them. The trick was in essence quite simple. Whenever blood was flowing, females signalled "No!", sustaining such "strike" action until their sexual partners had made themselves useful by collectively going hunting and bringing back the meat. Any would-be dominant male who tried to obtain sex anyway, regardless of his efforts in the hunt, met with a wall of collective hostility, generated by the logic of the situation.

It was in this way that the figure of the dominant male philanderer was decisively overthrown and an egalitarian social and sexual order was established. As against male attempts at privatisation, females had now secured social ownership of their own reproductive organs, social control over their own bodies. The economic benefits were immense. From now on, mothers had no need to travel endlessly from site to site within a restricted range. No longer did they have to disperse in order to forage in small groups, each abandoning camp within a day or two once local resources had been exhausted. Many of the heaviest burdens of travelling and foraging had now been transferred to the opposite sex. With males now motivated to hunt over a wide range, mothers could rest more and co-operate more effectively in larger domestic units. Since well-provisioned camps could now be occupied for perhaps weeks or even months on end, it was worth investing time and energy in their construction—erecting shelters or complex dwellings, perhaps with elaborate, structured hearths. In the archaeological record, one of the most characteristic signatures of the "human revolution" is in fact just this—the novel appearance of well-defined base camps occupied continuously and ringed by far-flung specialised temporary activity sites such as quarries, butchery sites or hunting blinds.

Predictions of Sex-Strike Theory

To test the sex-strike theory of cultural origins, it is first necessary to elaborate its predictions. Females signalling ‘no sex’ to males would be expected to mobilise male kin (sons and brothers) in self-defence against any threat of rape or harrassment. Faced with outgroup male resistance, females should also augment any publicly displayed menstrual blood (real or cosmetic) with bodily displays of their inappropriateness as sexual partners for human males. Since courtship ‘ritual’ in the animal world involves signalling ‘right species/ right sex/ right (fertile) time’, we would expect systematic reversal of these signals as the signature of sex-strike. Females should therefore signal ‘wrong species/ wrong sex/ wrong time’. We would expect culture’s primacy over nature to be asserted through such reality-defying ritual ‘metamorphosis’.

It need hardly be stressed that for human females within coalitions to signal that they are in fact males, of a non-human species and all simultaneously menstruating will be a fantasy not easy to convey. To overcome listener-resistance, such signalling will therefore be amplified rather than "whispered". Getting the message across will involve effort, repetition and explicit body-language or pantomime. Women will pretend to be what they are not—namely males, and animals. In our view, the construction of such "collective representations" involved asserting the potency of the first "gods".

We must now ask: How could sex-striking females prevent males from secretly eating their own kills out in the bush? Drawing on the signalling configuration already in place to prevent such cheating, women could exploit the natural fact that hunted game animals visibly bleed. This would have been difficult without a previous history of ‘symbolic’ menstruation, establishing that red colorants of one kind could substitute for colorants of another. But given such a tradition, the blood of the hunt as a public, communal construct would have signalled ‘menstrual blood’, the symbolism of this prompting the same avoidance. In hunter-gatherer cultures to this day, women’s blood is recurrently considered to be mystically linked with the blood of game animals.

Women could benefit economically from blood taboos only if, with the hunt’s success, they could now remove visible blood from raw meat. Being focused around campsites, women were the most reliable custodians of cooking fire. With such fire under domestic control, women had an important resource complementing the efficacy of blood taboos. Men who had just killed a game animal were inhibited by the blood from eating it. To remove its ‘rawness’, they had to bring the meat home to be ‘cooked’—whereupon it passed into female hands. Given such arrangements, cheating by hunters should have been minimised, reliable provisioning permitting the formation of relatively large and stable residential groups.

To prevent highly mobile males from sexual cheating (pretending to go hunting while really looking for sex), we would expect females to maintain synchrony not just locally but across the landscape. Each strike, in other words, would have had to be a general one, implying phase-locking to a universally accessible external natural clock. The only clock of appropriate periodicity is the moon. This compounds the statistical ‘improbability’ of the sex-strike model, making it easier to test. The whole system can only work if collective hunting is a periodic work/rest activity governed by a monthly on/off rhythm, with the proceeds of each large, ceremonially prepared ‘special’ hunt augmented during the rest of the month with food from less organised kinds of foraging/scavenging.

Lunar time is most simply structured through bisection, yielding a waxing and a waning half of each month. A strike is an all-or-nothing event, either ‘off’ or ‘on’, giving two possibilities: ‘on’ during waning moon while ‘off’ during waxing, or vice versa. Action during waning moon would schedule the climax of hunting, butchering and transportation within the darkest portion of each month. Since this would limit the effective day length available to complete these activities, we predict the reverse polarity—strike action during waxing moon, climaxing with the return of the hunt by or around full moon. As ‘on’ switches to ‘off’ at this point, fires are lit, meat is cooked and marital relations resumed. Ritual signals cross-culturally should reflect this binary on/off logic, ‘on’ coinciding with crescent moon, ‘off’ with the moon’s waning.

A model Ice Age hunting community’s ritually structured schedule of work and rest. In addition to daily, seasonal, and other periodicities, life normatively alternates to a fortnightly rhythm, switching between a ‘production’ phase of ritual power (initiated by menstrual onset, continued into hunting, butchery etc. and terminated as raw meat is transformed into cooked) and a corresponding ‘consumption’ phase of surrender or relaxation (beginning with feasting and celebratory love-making, terminated as meat supplies run low and the next menstrual onset approaches). The thick black line signifies the dominance of blood-relations whilst blood of any kind is flowing. The switch to white at full moon connotes cooking fire’s lifting of the taboos associated with ‘rawness’ or visible blood, allowing feasting to proceed and marital partners to conjoin.

Sex-strike theory in this way specifies mythico-ritual time as basically lunar; it also predicts periodic female inviolability as a discernible focus of early hunter-gatherer ritual traditions. Ritual potency more generally is predicted to display everywhere a characteristic signature, revealing its ancestry in menstrual inviolability. Power should be switched ‘on’ by one set of mutually interchangeable signals, ‘off’ by another:

This is a tight set of constraints. It means, for example, that a menstruant (‘on’) may amplify ‘blood’ by signalling ‘hunger’, ‘kinship intimacy’, ‘gender inversion’ and/or ‘animality’ (all ‘on’). But she cannot enhance her potency by being seen in bright light, on dry ground, with her marital partner or by a cooking fire (all ‘off’). From one culture to another, political factors will naturally alter ideological meanings, that is, the positive or negative valuation of terms. Menstruation, for example, may appear as ‘supernatural potency’ or as ‘pollution’ according to women’s political status. But through all such variation, we expect ritual traditions relentlessly to define menstrual potency as incompatible with feasting, strong light, cooking or any other signal from the ‘off’ column. We term such formal consistency—unchanging across all cultures and all historical periods—the time-resistant syntax of symbolic ritual and myth.

We now have a testable model of the origins of symbolic culture. Find a single myth, ritual or system of religion from any part of the world which violates any of the above predictions, and the model falls. A culture which said that women should cook meat while they were menstruating would confront us with a problem: it should never happen. Likewise, we don’t expect anyone to believe that meat cooks well while loud noises are being made: noise, being linked with blood, should be bad for cooking. These are very precise predictions, albeit unfamiliar and seemingly bizarre. At the time of writing, this theory is becoming widely known and debated. Criticisms have been made, but no-one has been able to come up with evidence contrary to the model’s predictions. In fact, the evidence has been accumulating that the theory is right. Should this be confirmed, it would allow socialists to reiterate in a new way what many of us have suspected all along—that the picket line is the source of all human morality and culture.

Origins of the Sacred

A strike transcends the identity of those involved in it. Insofar as a sex strike can extend indefinitely—being as omnipresent as menstrual synchrony or the moon’s light—then in embodying this power, each woman stands for something transcendental. She stands for her sisters, who may be potentially limitless in number. And if men respect this power, then although they need acknowledge no divinity, there is present here at least something of the formal structure of religious deference to "higher beings".

Let us re-examine the characteristics of these women. What powers do they really possess? And in what respects do these powers resemble or differ from those which, in more developed, complex social systems, will become thought of as those of "the gods"?

These women cannot magically strike men dead—but they can certainly exclude them from sex. To that extent, men can be rendered impotent at a stroke. No prayers are offered to these women, but men do strive to please and to be included when the time for love-making arrives. No-one offers them bloody animal sacrifices—but men do hunt and bring back game. While these women may not literally live in the sky or in the underworld, it is nonetheless true that when menstruating, they are in a world "set apart". They may not literally be half-animal, half-human. But they dance as if they were animals, identifying their menstrual blood with the blood of the hunt. These women are not immortal—they do not die and then resurrect themselves, nor undergo reincarnation, nor flit between heaven and earth. But their strike is periodically renewed, as is their life-blood which flows from generation to generation. Moreover, in menstruating they do seem to accompany the moon to its own temporary death, moving into another realm from which they later return. Admittedly, these women are ordinary human beings. They are subject to gravity and to the other ordinary laws of physics. They cannot levitate, nor fly magically through the night, nor be in two places at once, nor have eyes which probe into all corners simultaneously. Yet during each menstrual ritual these women’s potency is indeed that of their strike—which, like any strike, does make its presence felt everywhere at once, transcending space, as if possessed of a thousand ears and eyes.

Dance and trance in San rock-art. Manemba, near Mutoko, Zimbabwe (redrawn after Garlake, 1978). Dance with apparently menstrual and perhaps lunar connotations. The distended stomachs indicate ritual potency, corresponding with the !Kung San notion of n/um. The figure releasing a flow may once have held a crescent-shaped ornament like that of her companion, but this area has now exfoliated.

There is much, then, that is "goddess-like" about the menstrual sex-strike. Admittedly, to use such language is to apply a later cultural category—that of developed religious ideology—to a situation in which it is not yet applicable. It can be conceded that to begin with, there are no shamans, no priestesses, no temples. The social world is not divided into mortals and immortals, nor are humans divided into lay people and those who are "set apart". Unlike in developed religions, there are no specialists in the sacred life: all humans are involved in the solidarity of the sacred community during one phase of the lunar cycle, and then released from it in the next. All take turns in being "set apart" and reunited, in "the other world" and in this. If there are priests and priestesses, everyone is such—at least for a part of each month. If there are goddesses and gods, everyone can at the appropriate time participate in their identity and power—which is no more than the "sacred" strength and solidarity of human beings themselves. Each of these points of contrast is significant, and each underlines why it would be confusing to speak of "religion" as present already when symbolic culture first emerged. But it would be an over-simplification to state simply that sex-strike theory has no room for religion—that humans initially acknowledged no transcendental power. What we can say is that men and women initially respected no power other than the moon-linked, blood-washed, periodically-asserted sanctity and inviolability of menstruating women linked in solidarity with one another and with their offspring. This gives us a springboard from which the world’s religious and magical traditions can be derived.

Myths and Fairy Tales

In all the world’s magical myths and fairy tales, the culture-generating picket-line can be discerned as the central motif, albeit coded in a variety of ways. The stories tell of "death" followed by "rebirth". The "death" in question is of a special, magical kind, interpretable as the taking of strike action while menstrual blood is flowing.

In addition to explaining "death" and "rebirth", sex strike theory allows us to account parsimoniously for the remaining themes and motifs central to magical myths and fairy tales the world over. Among the best-known are the following:

1. Marriage to animal brides or bridegrooms;
2. Metamorphosis or "skin-change";
3. Dragon-slaying;
4. The stealing of ritual power from ancestral women;
5. The stealing of ritual power from monsters, giants or dragons.

In male initiation rites—which have often been described as rituals of "male menstruation" —men violate women’s menstrual space, take over their sex strike and "steal" from women the symbolic potencies associated with their blood. Dragon-slaying myths mirror the same theme. That is, the "dragons", "giants" or "monsters" which mythological culture-heroes slay and from whom they steal their power are code-terms for the "many-headed" menstrual sex strike which men succeed in vanquishing. The myths exactly mirror the rituals. This explains why dragon-legends are so bound up with themes of fire and blood, birth and rebirth, marriage and threats to marriage, masculine sexual potency and the origins of male ritual power.

In other words, although women’s sex-strike can be viewed positively—as a manifestation of "goddess-power" (the relevant goddesses usually being associated with snakes)—it can also be viewed negatively. Under such circumstances, it takes the form of many-headed monsters, giants, ogres, gorgons and so forth. The sex-strike’s dependence on menstrual bleeding then appears as the monster’s thirst for "blood". Its incorporation of women and children into its own sphere of blood-solidarity becomes the monster’s "swallowing" of its helpless victims. Entry into the sex-strike and subsequent emergence from it becomes coded as "death" which is followed by "rebirth". "Wrong species" pantomime, linking menstrual blood to the blood of game animals, becomes coded as "marriage" to an animal bride or groom. Emergence from the sex strike, followed by marital love-making, then becomes coded as the "animal bride’s" slaughter or loss of power—or, sometimes, as its sudden skin-change or metamorphosis. In such stories, as the spell is broken, the loathsome "frog" or "beast" or "monster" to whom a young woman has been wedded is at last revealed as a handsome prince.

In many stories, the most fearsome of all the monsters is a many-headed, blood-red, coiling, woman-loving "snake" or "dragon". Continuous, undulating, flowing like a stream, all-swallowing, death-dealing and, finally, skin-changing and death-defying, this monster is a paradoxical creature. Like the moon as it waxes and wanes, it is a unity of opposites—arguably the oldest symbol of world-changing revolutionary potency and dialectical unity to have been preserved. It lives in deep waters, yet travels through the sky. It is the lowest of creatures, yet darkens the heavens with its immense wings. It is reptilian in form, yet lusts after human brides. It is of uncertain gender—sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes both at once. It demands periodic sacrificial tribute in the form of animals or marriageable virgins. When angered, it sends floods, spits lightning and blasts or devours whole communities. It is cyclical, coiling around its victims. It may have many heads—perhaps seven, a hundred or a thousand. It guards an immense treasure—gold, silver, the moon, a magical spring, a beautiful princess. It withholds this treasure from men until it is slain. But it is ultimately impossible to kill—it has numerous "heads" or "lives", or it keeps resurrecting itself, or it joins together its severed parts. It is linked (especially in eastern traditions) with weather-change, and particularly with storms and thunder. It represents the "dark" forces, as opposed to those of "light". It is the enemy of romantic love, carrying off virgins to the world beyond.

Cyclicity, alternation between opposite phases or states, periodic emergence from a watery abode—such are obvious characteristics of the menstrual stream. A snake’s claimed ability to escape death by changing its skins is linked in primitive cosmologies with menstrual "skin-changing" as an indicator of womankind’s fertility and child-bearing "immortality". The dragon’s many heads, its immense size and its winged, serpentine form nicely capture the essence of any flying picket. Its uncertain gender matches the fact that women are anything but "feminine" when on strike; for the duration of the action, sexual distinctions are transcended in the union of all blood-kin, whether male or female. The dragon’s association with eclipses reflects the normative dark-moon moment for menstruation to occur. The accompanying storms, thunder and floods speak of women’s bloody repudiation of marital relations at this time. The demand for tribute echoes the basic point of going on strike—which is to secure tribute from men in the form of game animals. The periodic seizure of maidens followed by their withdrawal from marriage needs no special explanation. To all this, it should be added that even when claimed to be dead, the world-dragon should still be feared. It may be merely sleeping, its coils embracing the globe, vengefully biding its time. According to one rumour, it is not extinct but awaiting the Millennium—whereupon it will stir with the force of an earthquake to reclaim its legacy.

In The Sleeping Beauty, the picket line takes a slightly different form. In place of a dragon coiled around a princess, we encounter a thorny hedge which performs the same function. The decisive action is triggered as Beauty reaches puberty, whereupon she "pricks her finger". As her magical blood flows, she "falls asleep". Thorns grow up around the whole palace and its grounds, encircling and secluding Beauty for a hundred years. All within the kingdom fall under the same spell; it is as if time itself stood still. Within the palace grounds, every gardener, footman, cook, scullery boy and stableman is, like the princess, on strike. Ardent young men attempting to penetrate through the barrier of thorns fall victim to the same witches’ "curse". Impaled on the spikes, their pallid bodies serve as a lesson to others: Never cross a picket line! Only at the turn of the century is the action called off, whereupon the thorns turn to fragrant flowers and the hedge spontaneously parts, revealing a wide path. At this moment, young men are at last allowed through. Stepping over the sleeping palace staff, the first lucky suitor makes it to the princess. He kisses her on the lips, awakening her. As she rubs her eyes, her parents and the entire population wake up at the same time. There are joyful celebrations—and, throughout the kingdom, normal duties including marital relations are at last resumed. They all lived happily ever after.

This tale, then, like its numberless counterparts, is information-rich. Properly decoded, it tells us about the origins of culture. Whenever menstrual blood was flowing, women went "on strike", obtaining backing from their male kin and remaining on strike until their demands had been met. In my book, I show how even to this day, all collective hunting among hunter-gatherers has to be preceded by a period of ritual celibacy which it is women’s duty to enforce.

Conclusion: The World’s First Picket-Line

The central message of anthropology, interpreted in this way, is that music, dance, art, religion and indeed all symbolic culture was born on the picket line. Mobilised through body-painting, dance and song, solidarity in strike action enhanced men’s and women’s consciousness, as if making them more intelligent. Action on the picket line produced new forms of intimacy, bringing the participants’ cycles into synchrony, enabling women to experience their body-clocks as a source of collective strength. "Females" became "women" when, supported by their sons and brothers, they established their own pride, their own dignity, their own power. Signalling defiance in their own shared blood, they asserted the principle, central to all the world’s religions, that some things are sacred. But this was not religion as it is known in class societies. Instead of being communicated via a priesthood, divinity was first established by ordinary women, backed by their male kin. "God" was the potency of the culture-generating strike—the inviolability and transcendental force of the world’s first picket-line.

A possible problem for Marxists is that neither Karl Marx nor Frederick Engels said that all culture was born on the picket line. This is true. Having said that, it is remarkable how much of the theory was anticipated by the founders of Marxism over a century ago. Sex-strike theory locates the origins of culture in the emergence of labour. It says that without strike action, there was no labour in the human cultural sense. Using a stick to fetch berries into one’s mouth is not labour. Eating berries is consumption—not production. Production of food means that others are doing the eating—there has to be circulation and exchange. Suppose there was a primitive "society" in which males went out hunting but ate the meat selfishly out in the bush, leaving females and their dependents to fend for themselves. No matter how complicated the hunting weapons used, this would still be "consumption", not production. An implication of sex-strike theory is that weapon-use became "labour" only at that point when collective "sex-strike" action took effect. It was this which ensured that the meat obtained through hunting was rendered "taboo" to the hunters themselves, entering into a system of circulation and exchange.

In the course of cultural origins, the rule against rape was to a genuinely human lifestyle what the inviolability of the picket-line is to revolutionary communism. It was the first cultural rule, the one to be established at all costs, and the foundation on which all other rules were to be built.

I make no apology for drawing on the findings of "selfish gene" Darwinism in order to arrive at such conclusions. Marx did the same thing in his own time: he took classical political economic theory—which was clearly being used to justify the existing system of class oppression—and instead of ignoring it, looked into its internal contradictions. He was able to make revolutionary use of it. Modern Darwinism looks at human sociality in the pre-cultural period and sees parallels everywhere with bourgeois economics. It is powerful precisely because of this—because it claims to show that the predatory and competitive realities of contemporary capitalist society are rooted in "nature".

My view is that behaviour motivated by the requirements of "selfish" genes really is what drives Darwinian evolution. There is no point in denying that. The important thing is that our species became human by transcending that logic of nature. The chief value of the study of human origins, from this perspective, is that it enables us to challenge that popular prejudice according to which revolution is futile because "you can’t change human nature". Anthropology demonstrates, firstly, that early life was communist. Secondly, it teaches us that revolution lies at the very heart of what we are. Far from it being the case that "no revolution can change human nature", everything distinctively human about our nature—above all, self-consciousness, speech-competence and our capacities for symbolically regulated co-operation—are precisely the products of that immense social, sexual and political revolution out of whose travails we were born. Culture, based on solidarity, reconstructed our "nature" completely. That is what the human revolution achieved, and why it is so important to claim it as the beginning of our revolutionary heritage. We won the revolution once. We can do it again.

The Path of the Sacred Warrior heals the Spirit. The Path of the Sacred Clown heals the Soul. And the Path of the Shaman heals the Body. The Body? Haven’t most of us been conditioned to believe that the Body is somehow inferior to the Spirit, to the Soul?

America’s Elders—the Native Americans—have always taught that the Body, our personal connection of substance and spirit, is sacred. An ancient song of the Salish Women’s Society runs:

Who cannot love her Self cannot love anybody.
Who is ashamed of her body is ashamed of all life.
Who finds dirt and filth in her body is lost.
Who cannot respect the gifts given even before birth
Can never respect anything fully.1

A Shaman’s Path begins with her own Body and involves the generation, control, storage, channeling, exchange, and release of energy. Principles recently "discovered" by modern scientists have been known to Shamans since ancient times, for example: Entrainment ("If two rhythms are nearly the same and their sources are in close proximity, they will always lock up, fall into synchrony.")2; E=mc² (the interchangability of energy and matter); and Wave/Particle Theory (Energy can travel in either waves or particles). A Shaman perceives her Body as a luminous cluster, a sacred act, a whirling act of power and beauty. Exploring her Body, she becomes a specialist in vibration, harmony, and balance. Curious to bridge other dimensions, her awareness reaches out like a lightning rod. When that awareness is illuminated, her own Body grounds the energy and releases it into the Earth so that it does no harm.

Some scientific principles have not yet caught up with shamanistic knowledge, for instances, the principle of Gravity. A modern-day Shaman puts it this way, "The earth is calling to you. It has something for you. This great creature upon which we live wishes to give you its energy to empower your life." Westerners shun this gift. They call it GRAVITY and think it’s a force that wants to pull us down to the center of the earth. Instead, be like a tree, sinking roots down into the earth’s magnetism. Reach out with your branches and leaves for light and air from above!"3

The image of a tree is a great model for Shamans. A Tree is a very efficient energy-being. It uses every bit of energy and wastes none. The wood of a tree is a conductor of energy from both below and above; and as such, is often used by the Shaman to conduct her awareness upon journeys of discovery. A drum, made from hide stretched over wood, becomes "the shaman’s steed." Gourds, rattles, and other rhythmic devices can also be used as energy conductors. The Shaman tunes into the rhythm and rides it to other worlds! Then the rhythm brings the Shaman back to this, her beloved Earth. "Like a living tree, the shaman is rooted deep within the earth, reaching and growing into spirit."4

Shamans heal themselves (and serve as a healing catalyst for others) in three main ways:

1. Removing blockages in the energy flow;
2. Balancing and centering; and
3. Attunement and harmony.

Shamans are described as having keen intelligence, a perfectly supple body, and an energy that appears unbounded. Their memory and self-control are above average; and their bright eyes reveal a shy cunning. Often, their inner power advances with their age; and they display great strength, flexibility, and stamina throughout their elder years. As Old Ones (a term used with utmost respect by Native Americans), they can perform amazing acts of balance and agility. Often, they are splendid artists (especially abstract/mystical art), musicians, dancers, poets, singers, craftswomen who use their art to bring the spirit to earth. All these qualities proceed from years, even lifetimes, of suffering, sacrifice, and impeccable effort.

As shamans, the women in many tribes perform in all ways that male shamans are known to. They perform healings, hunting ceremonies, vision quests and the guidance for them, acts of psychokinesis, teleportation, weather direction, and more. In the various tribes according to each one’s custom, the shaman also creates certain artifacts—clothing, baskets, ornaments, objects to be worn in pouches or under skirts or sewed into belts. She officiates at burials, births, child naming and welcoming into this world, menstrual and pregnancy rituals and rites, psychic communication, manipulation of animals, metamorphoses or transformations. She does much of this through dancing and chanting, and a large part of the method, symbols, significances, and effects of her shamanic efforts are recorded in the stories she tells, the songs she sings, and the knowledge she possesses. Much of this knowledge she transmits to others in ways that will be of use to them, and much of it she keeps to herself, teaches in formal settings to her apprentices, or shares with other shamans.5

Acquiring shamanic power involves a kind of death/rebirth experience. It involves letting go of the self, eliminating habits that make up the personality, dispensing with the "self-dialogue," getting out of the way and letting the universe do the talking. When the Shaman traditionally dies to herself, she is born into the larger community of the Tribe of the Cosmos as a representative of Earth. "Essentially, a woman’s spiritual way is dependent on the kind of power she possesses, the kind of Spirit to whom she is attached, and the tribe to which she belongs. She is required to follow the lead of the Spirits and to carry out the tasks assigned her. Native American stories point to a serious event that results in the death of the protagonist, her visit to the Spirit realm from which she finally returns, transformed and powerful. After such events, she no longer belongs to her tribe or her family, but to the Spirit teacher who instructed her. This makes her seem ‘strange’ to many of her folk."6

Seeking the Body’s wisdom, a Shaman continually centers herself in her womb, her belly, or her solar plexus, NOT in her head. The lower center brings her to a better foundation from which to move. It also anchors her runaway thought processes and brings her to an attunement with the Body of the Earth. In order to use her own energy efficiently, the Shaman must become flexible, fluid. To do this, she must confront the blockages of fear stored in the Body. Her task is to melt the blocks of fear with the energy that she generates; indeed, the word "Shaman" literally means "to heat oneself."7 As the rigid form is consumed, the flowing form is released; this is the meaning of transformation. It is a return to the liberating simplicity akin to the primal nature of wild animals, young children, and our earliest Earth-ancestresses. Freedom comes from letting go and learning to trust in one’s Body to find its own vibration, balance and harmony.

I find myself happier and happier as I get older. I am simply freer of conditions. This entails making voluntary sacrifices. Sacrifice comes from the words ‘to make sacred.’ My shamanic life is a whole life of making sacred, seeing everything as sacred… Even garbage is sacred.8

The initiation of a Shaman is no easy affair. However, as one budding Shaman was told, "The most beautiful jewel is tempered in the hottest fire and dipped in the coldest water."9

Power is strength and the ability to see yourself through your own eyes and not the eyes of another. If a person has power, as women do, and she doesn’t use it, power will sit within her and have no place to focus. It is then that power becomes twisted and evil. It can turn against the person who has called it. If a person backs away from her power (for example), she will develop back problems and all sorts of physical ailments.10

A person may be a potential Shaman if conditions such as these exist in her life: Her birth is peculiar, special in some way. Perhaps it is difficult, even traumatic. As a child, she experiences some element in her life that sets her apart from other children. She may simply be left to herself, or there may be disabilities and restrictive situations. She feels somehow different than the norm. Sometimes there are long illnesses, fevers, seizures, even brushes with death. Because of this isolation, or simply because she is gifted, she comes in touch with a subtle world that is foreign to most of her peers, and her psychic talents flourish. Importantly, she also misses out on vital portions of the acculturation process, leaving her to feel that she doesn’t quite fit in.

At a certain point, the psychic energy peaks almost unbearably. If met with hostility or abuse (as usually happens in a world that lacks understanding), the potential Shaman may turn the energy in on herself, or outwards, becoming hostile and abusive to others. Some conditions such as Multiple Personalities, Mental Retardation, Dyslexia, Sexual Disorientation, Hallucinations, Hebephrenia, Schizophrenia, and Delusions can be the result of this "twisting" of the psychic flow. Sociopathic or psychopathic behavior, addictions, behaving in a such manner that one is literally "crossed-off" by society—all these can become the path that leads to the shamanic initiatory crisis.

This is not to say that an initiate cannot receive help. If she is sincere in her desire for healing, she will find the proper catalysts and midwives for birthing the Shaman in herself. In the ancient tribal ways, she could find an experienced Shaman in her own community to explain what was happening to her, and ease her way a bit. This older, wiser one would give her exercises that would train her to control the degree and timing of "opening the flower of her awareness."11 These might include instructions in meditation, lucid dreaming, self-hypnosis and visualization, recognizing energy fields, practices with sound and color, ritual-making, sand-painting, crafts of various kinds, trance-dancing, etc. She would also be taught how to protect herself from unwanted psychic and physical intrusions. Techniques such as purifying, blessing, boundary-making, shield-making, and acquiring guardian allies would be part of such instruction. Grounding techniques would be stressed as the initiate worked with plant, animal, and rock medicine.

In modern times, however, the help may come from strange directions, indeed. For example, the contemporary Plains Indian Shaman, Tayja Wiger, was born into an extremely hostile, abusive urban environment with no exposure to tribal ways. Society called her blind, crippled, retarded, insane and delinquent. She was institutionalized in reform schools and mental institutions. All this time, she prayed for healing. The psychiatrists didn’t understand her Shamanic tradition (which she often expressed subconsciously), but they did help her to find the time, space and resources that she needed for her to be able to heal herself. Her intense focus on self-healing propelled her through the dark tunnel of fear and anger to a place where she could let go, in love, trusting the Universe. Now, she is sighted, physically sound, intelligent, sane and working as a Shaman; "healer, ordained minister, counselor and laughing friend of the Light."12 Her story is an inspiration to us all!

Tribal people believe that becoming a Shaman is a matter of destiny; and that if a destined person resists becoming a Shaman, she will become more and more immeshed in her own problems. The story of Sky Woman, a Shaman of the Ojibway Tribe, illustrates how a womon who courageously responded to a crisis embraced her own shamanic destiny. Born into a family that was disturbed by violent parental disagreements, Sky Woman fled from this chaotic situation at 9 years of age and wandered in the northern woods for a long time until a search party found her. Among her rescuers was an old woman who loved her and took care of her, and became her adopted grandmother.

They lived together happily for many years until one day, the Grandmother got very sick. Sky Woman was afraid. While she took care of her Grandmother and watched over her, Sky Woman fell asleep and had a dream. She dreamed someone gave her a rattle and other things Shamans use when they heal, and said to her, "Try this on your grandmother. She might get better." When she awoke, Sky Woman made a little rattle and started to do the things the dream showed her. When she finished, the old womon seemed brighter. Sky woman kept on with her work until her grandmother was up and around. Then, other people heard about her and came to her for help. She became a travelling healer.13

Following her inner guidance, Sky Woman later remembered that in her youthful wanderings, she had been guided and instructed by her Guardian Spirits for her life’s work. Her loving compassion for her Grandmother was what catalyzed her own transformation. Her Spirits guided her but SHE CHOSE OF HER OWN FREE WILL to follow them.

Modern-day Shamans have learned from the mistakes that Shamans of the past have made. Keeping what works, they’ve thrown the rest away. They have let go of arrogance and embraced simplicity. They are not afraid to frolic and have fun. They have made a commitment to serve the life-force; they draw strength and unity from that commitment.

It has been said that the first Shaman was Grandmother Fire. She is the true ancestress of all Shamans. It also has been said that the first Shaman invented sex. The Shaman is self-erotic, in love with her own Body and with the Body of Earth. She heats herself, burning off the dross, centering herself in her own luminosity. She radiates well-being and self-confidence. Her leadership emerges out of a passion for life and is sustained by balance. The Shaman’s heat is a centerfire around which a community naturally gathers. Her heat is engendering; and her own gender can hold and transcend the tension of opposites, giving her the ability to operate with success in whatever world she finds herself. Just by being, a Shaman gives comfort by proving that change is possible.

Healers state that it is love that heals, yet it is so difficult for many to release the fear and anger that lodge in the subconscious mind in order to be able to ACCEPT that love. Now it is time for all of us to cleanse our lives, then turn ourselves inside out for all to share.14

Love is a word for transformation. And there are many beings worthy of our love. It does not have to be a man you seek. When you say, ‘I love you,’ you are saying, ‘I transform you.’ But since you alone can transform no one, what you are really saying is, ‘I transform myself and my vision.’ I am always living in the lodge of love and I share it with you.15

Footnotes

1. Daughters of Copper Woman by Anne Cameron, 1981, Press Gang Publishers, Vancouver, BC, p. 62. [back to text]
2. Planet Drum by Mickey Hart and Frederic Lieberman, 1991, HarperCollins Publishers, NY, p. 17. [back to text]
3. Movements of Magic by Bob Klein, 1984, Newcastle Publishing, CA, pg. 8. [back to text]
4. In the Shadow of the Shaman by Amber Wolfe, 1989, Llewellyn Publications, St. Paul, MN, p. xiii. [back to text]
5. The Sacred Hoop by Paula Gunn Allen, 1986, Beacon Press, Boston, MS, p. 207-8. [back to text]
6. Ibid., p. 257. [back to text]
7. Shamanic Voices by Joan Halifax, 1979, E.P. Dutton, N.Y., p.3. [back to text]
8. Ruth Inge-Heinze, in Shapeshifters: Shamanic Women in Contemporary Society, 1987, Viking Penguin Inc., N.Y., p. 62. [back to text]
9. Leilah Tiesh in Shapeshifters, p. 36. [back to text]
10. Agnes Whistling Elk in Flight of the Seventh Moon by Lynn V. Andrews, 1984, Harper & Row, San Francisco, p. 130-131. [back to text]
11. Channeled from my Spirit Teacher, "Butterfly Woman". [back to text]
12. Birth of a Modern Shaman by Cynthia Bend and Tayja Wiger, 1987, Llewellyn Publications, St. Paul, MN, p. 8. [back to text]
13. The Shaman: Patterns of Siberian and Ojibway Healing by John A. Grim, 1983, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK, p. 121-125. [back to text]
14. Bend and Wiger, p. 6. [back to text]
15. Agnes Whistling Elk, in Flight of the Seventh Moon, p. 156. [back to text]

In the summer of 1995 I paid a visit to Carn Ingli, a sacred mount on the southwest coast of Wales. Expecting visions.

After five weeks hitching around Britain visiting friends, I arrived in the town neighbouring Carn Ingli and, deciding to escape the swarming tourists, found a secluded valley and camped alone in a grassy pasture. For five days I prepared myself, quitting smoking, invoking dreams, exercising, meditating, bathing in a stream and hanging out with some cows. My wild imagination had run amok in the gradual approach to "The Hill of the Angels" (the ruins of a fort on top of Carn Ingli, viewed from the side, bear a close resemblance to an angel lying down, wings outstretched). I planned to stay up there for three nights, taking mushrooms on the third. Whatever was to happen, I expected it to be major.

The night before setting off to the site, I experienced one of the most intense, terrifying and revelatory dreams of my life… A visit to ‘Necropolis’ (the underworld as an abandoned car-wreck dump site, complete with a wizened old psychopomp, infested with insidious entities)… An epic mythical detective quest to investigate disturbing transmissions from distant stars… A heroic effort to align and synthesize Mayan and Egyptian myth-structures… and a dramatic confrontation with my Frozen Self. I awoke with a start, still acutely aware of the felt presence of powerful entities with dubious intentions.

My cynicism and distance reasserted themselves as I gradually adjusted to waking consciousness through the day, but underneath I was jittery and expectant, primed for the worst, and the best, all pushed together into explosions. I walked across fields and moors for about five miles in the blazing heat; my only desire at this point was to reach the peak for sunset. Getting lost at one point, I semi-fancifully called on some nearby ravens to guide me—Bran ("raven") being the Celtic protector of travellers. The raven flew in the direction I was going anyway, so I pressed on, though taking wrong turns and backtracking all the time. Finally I reached the peak, the sun glowing deep red over the Irish Sea… and a raven perched on St Brynach’s rock, as if to say, "Where the fuck have you been?"

Now, one of my main reasons for doing my hiking trip in the first place was to sleep at sacred sites and note my dreams. I visited Glastonbury Tor, finding the usual bunch of continental hippies, weekend crusties and plain weird fuckers gathered there, playing drums and comparing didges. I tried to find out who I may be uncomfortable about going to sleep around, should any of them stay in the tower as well. And yes, the one guy I instantly pegged as dodgy decided to stick around after everyone left. He was obviously tripping, and was being more than just trippy-weird (I found out later that everyone else left because of him). I tried to go along with him when he started chatting, but out of the blue he threw in the fact that he’d just been inside for 9 months. "Dealing?" I asked, hopefully. "Nah. I broke someone’s fingers. It was ‘orrible in there…" (his eyes drifted over the landscape) "…really ‘orrible." I tried to carry on with the small talk as best I could after this little bombshell, but eventually decided to pretend to be asleep in the hope that he’d go away. But no—he sat next to me, talking to himself. "That landscape looks so still… so peaceful…" he muttered. "It almost looks… dead." Bollocks, thought I. A grade A nutter. Dreaming on the Tor was thoroughly cancelled.

After I had set up my tent on Carn Ingli, I was exhausted and hyped at the same time. I grabbed some food and sat around being utterly awed by the starry sky above me, resplendent in the absence of Britain’s deep orange urban light pollution. Gradually, the wind started to gather strength. By the time I was ready to crash, my bubble tent was being battered like a paper bag pinned to the ground. I went outside for a while, to shelter behind a large rock, but was too overawed with… fear of the stars to sleep outside. I got about one hour’s sleep that night, and very vaguely remembered a dream of being led down a spiral staircase by two children talking about bicycles. Something was trying to keep me away from the ‘major’ dreams and visions I was seeking at sacred sites. You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes… It was only later that I found my experiences had directed me away from what I thought I wanted—a ‘visionary’ journey of some sort—toward something much more revelatory and much closer my true goals: my body.

While trying to get to sleep that night, massively irritated, exhausted, and with more than a hint of self-pity at my lack of ‘success’ in my quest, I mulled over various things. They were mostly personal, but my thoughts often strayed into various experiences not immediately special to me. As I was going over the events of 9th October 1994, the anti-Criminal Justice Bill protest in Hyde Park, something hit me, and I started crying. I cried and cried, overtaken by a powerful sadness. My radically heightened state of mind (due to sleep deprivation, isolation and the buzz of the site) put me very close to my experiences again…

Stuck on a coach, on one side the red-faced riot police, loaded on rotten testosterone, on the other side the protesters, behind iron railings, screaming at the pigs to fuck off because they were not needed. Every five or so minutes the police charged the crowd. Those people trapped on the police side of the railings, people just trying to reach their coaches, were indiscriminately battered. A young teenage girl was bashed with a riot shield. A very drunk guy was standing on the pavement in front of the police, arms outstretched and loudly imploring them to just go away. He got a big stick in the face, splitting his nose. When the police retreated he stayed there with his arms outstretched, blood gushing from his nose. You could see "WHY?" coming from his lips, if not from his eyes. On our trapped coach, we had to watch these people being battered, and we could do nothing. Some clear-headed guy outside disabled the coach’s fuel line, keeping it there as a vague barrier between the crowd and the soldiers (our driver wanted to go, leaving some of the Leeds people in the middle of all that shit). But essentially we were helpless. The whole experience shook us all up savagely. When I got into bed that night, for some reason, I genuinely felt as if I couldn’t trust my body to carry on functioning if I left it and slept.

In a way, though, I expected Carn Ingli to fall through. Disturbed by my ungrounded, groundless expectations and anticipations as I approached the mount (mostly centred around UFO phenomena), I did a tarot reading to gauge the under- and overcurrents around my heading to the mount. The spread I used was divided into three layers, corresponding to the upper-, middle- and under-worlds of the shamanic cosmos. I decided to pay particular attention to the top layer, as I associated UFOs and angels with the upper celestial realms. I can’t recall the specific cards now, but there they were, three lined up together, screaming the same divinatory meanings at me: over-active imagination, glamour of esoteric practices, self-delusion, need for emotional discipline…

A weight fell off my shoulders, and I knew that I was going on from that point with much more down-to-earth intentions—healing, grounding, etc. So all through my week of preparation in the valley, I called on Mother Earth to give me dreams. It was an experiment in belief—previously I had kept a cynical distance from most mentions of "Mother Earth". But here, I made up a very simple invocation to Her which I repeated every night before sleeping. I received immensely powerful dreams, containing blatant ‘hints and tips’ about my healing processes. But then my final dream in that valley was, unexpectedly, intensely cosmic. Here was one of my first lessons. The most outrageously bizarre and seemingly alien dimensions lie at the core of the most earthly, human, bodily dimensions, if you dig deep enough. Spirit is the heart of matter.

So I left Carn Ingli with the growing realisation that I wasn’t going to get anywhere going up. I had to go down first. You can’t hop and skip straight up into the celestial realms that are the obsessive focus of so much so-called ‘spirituality’ in the New Age. I had already, unwittingly, journeyed to the lower realms in my guided tour of the Necropolis ("city of the dead"—the underworld, of course, is seen in shamanism as the realm of the spirits of the dead), and now it seemed that I should re-connect with the physical world, to begin to end my alienation from the world I live in, or rather am part of, a world seen in much traditional occultism as somehow ‘lower’. How blinkered…

I headed north, and camped in a valley near Snowdonia. Trees with huge, exposed, twisting roots, boulders covered in moss, fern-filled meadows with sheepish sheep and giant dashing dragonflies, mountains on all sides and a gurgling stream passing by… There was nowhere more earthly. I took mushrooms, more than I usually do, but the trip was nearly transparent. I just wandered around in the woods and meadows, utterly at ease with being a body that is part of the earth. Apart from an intense experience sitting against a tree, no ‘revelations’. Just the subtle yet powerful feeling of being bonded to the landscape, feeling my being, which is my body, as an inextricably enmeshed part of the web of matter-energy around and within me.

Politics is the externalization of emotions.

Timothy Leary, Info-Psychology

As with most experiences, especially ones so unstructured, my time in Wales only began to make sense later. Of course, one can make many different ‘senses’ out of the same set of experiences. My views on what happened are no different to those on any other events in that they are governed by my present state, and what at first seemed like a series of events which occurred to constructively force me to realize my limitations and destroy my illusions can, filtered through a negative mood, easily slip into seeming like—no, being—a gradual and cowardly retreat from intensity, smoothed over by various rationalizations and rock lyrics. But certain vaguely intuited notions still fill me when I review the above events, whatever my current state. These perceptions involve treading the narrow line between useful psychic cartography and delusions of grandeur, between an invisible tradition refusing to recognise boundaries between the individual and their environment, and a dangerously hazy expansion of the ego. Literal-mindedness must be left at the door, together with the idea that metaphors must distance one from reality, and a hazardous but revealing path between must be followed.

The ‘invisible tradition’ I refer to can be seen in the Hermetic axiom of sympathetic magic, "As above, so below." The micro reflects the macro, or, in a more extremist doctrine, the individual contains the universe. It can also be seen in Wilhelm Reich’s political analyses: his attempts to explain mass movements such as fascism in terms of the sexual repression and character structure of a society’s individuals eventually dissolve the boundaries between the personal and the political—a move which is always the founding leap of any radical political stance. Many latter-day Reichians view the therapeutic process as essential to the process of becoming politically aware, and often vice versa. The above quote from Timothy Leary neatly expresses the standard Reichian political analysis, but one cannot dissolve boundaries and expect a one-way flow… We are involved in a seamless and highly complex web of interrelations, a web which will resist all attempts at reductionism.

Man’s sexual organization and his social organization are so deeply interconnected that we cannot say which came first, but can only assume a simultaneous evolution (whether sudden or gradual) of both.

Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death

Reductionism, which is often inaccurately seen as a sin unique to materialists, stores its sorcerous explaining-away powers in language, in words like "just", "nothing but", and "merely". Whether the ‘real and only cause’ posited is political, social, material, psychological or spiritual, the reductionist removes dynamism and wonder by sweeping all phenomena under a single word-carpet. The reductionism endemic in Western academia is environmental determinism, rife in behaviourist psychology and unenlightened (i.e. most) left-wing politics. They would say that emotions are the internalization of politics, and set about trying to amend social structures, still burdened by crippling internal conflicts. The ‘head revolution’ of the sixties challenged this reductionism mightily, but clumsily left another one behind. To be fair, a close reading of most of the thinkers whose work helped shape the consciousness of that era, like Leary, Alan Watts and Norman O. Brown, reveals a very subtle understanding of the interdependence of organism and environment. But that marauding demon, Popular Consciousness, leapt on the attempts to counter behaviourism and redress the balance, and blew them up into facile ideas about the mind creating reality. "As above, so below" should not imply causation, and neither should "As below, so above"; in the end we’re just describing correlations.

As we shall see, an understanding of the organism-environment field has begun to emerge spontaneously in various sub-cultures, informed by scattered doctrines, myths and manifestos, but largely just happening. We may look backwards now and then, and see what is happening. Hopefully we can hone and sharpen our processes until the gap between happening and awareness narrows and narrows, and they eventually become the same thing.

Yet another fragment of the ‘invisible tradition’, exceptionally relevant to our present story, is the ancient fertility cult belief in the connection between King and Land. The Fisher King myth is perhaps the best known portrayal of this principle. The health and vitality of the King is seen as intimately related to the fruitfulness of the Land, and when the Fisher King is wounded and begins to decline, the Land becomes the barren and blasted Wasteland. Only the Grail, accompanied by the grail question asked by the archetypal quester Parsifal, the Fool, will heal the King and thus the Land. Although we still have an unsophisticated reliance on one-way causation here, we can discern in this myth the belief in the identity of the individual and their environment. The doctrine that the body contains the universe, as seen in Tantric yoga and Christian mysticism, is made a bit more homely and embraceable by narrowing the environmental area down to the surrounding land, and the interdependence of organism and environment is made visibly total.

Of course, historically and mythologically, it is the King alone who manifests this intimacy with the Land. The tribe’s survival depends on the fertility of the Land, and this in turn depends on the potency of the King. The King can thus be seen as a representation of the Divinity, or divine forces, believed to govern the natural world. Here one may begin to discern the genesis of the Fisher King story as a nature myth, dramatizing the cycle of the seasons, and the ease with which this myth-structure has been often been Christianized. Jesus is a remnant of the dying-and-rising vegetation god-form, previously appearing as Dionysus, Osiris and Tammuz, only this guy has been emasculated, stripped of all his earthy bio-energy and vegetal associations (apart from the odd remark about vines and, some say, craftily encrypted references to sacred fungi). Like the King figure as the representation of supernatural forces on which the Land, and thus the tribe’s survival, depends, Jesus is seen as the fleshy form of God, on whom our knowledge of God, and thus our ‘salvation’, supposedly depends.

When play dies it becomes the Game.
When sex dies it becomes Climax.

Jim Morrison, ‘The Lords’

But all this means nothing to us, approaching the third millennium, if we see the myth in literal terms. It seems that the ‘King as representative of fertility god’ myth, which once blended with the reality of human political institutions, now only possesses vitality if it is internalized, and seen as personal myth. And even then we must abolish the monarchy. Fading elements of the view that the country’s welfare depends on the personal qualities of its leader remain here and there, haunting the media machinations of our illusory democracies, but the kingship principle is, hopefully, in its death throes.

Norman Brown, in Love’s Body, has equated the centralized, person-alized political structure of monarchy, obviously going hand-in-hand with patriarchal monotheism, with the Freudian model of the genital-centred organization of individual sexuality. Bearing in mind the essentially bodily nature of both sexual and emotional energy, we can look back to Leary’s quote and once more widen our view of this subtle intertwining of individual and environment, body and society, sex and politics. Sexuality which focuses all pleasure in and through the genitals, though not bad, is the personal pole of the spectrum which finds monotheism and monarchy at its collective end. The reliance of the tribe on the King / vegetation god for crop success, the reliance of Christians on Jesus, sore and crucified, for a guaranteed good time after they pop their clogs—indeed, any collective situation based on the reliance of the Many on the One—all find their microcosmic correlate in the narrowing of eroticism down to cock and cunt.

Even this is repressed, leading many, including Reich, into the trap of believing that we have only to un-repress genital sexuality and social repression will crumble. Actually, we must go the whole way through: rediscovering the polymorphous perversity of the infant, who experiences erotic pleasure throughout the body; dissolving our political systems, the decaying left-overs of imperialism, into a truly decentralized anarchism; realizing that this process is the modern rediscovery of ancient social structures known as ‘voluntary association’ or ‘partnership society’, a process of stone-age feedback; and also intuiting that the personal and the collective processes equate—the recovery of the bodily anarchy of childhood mirrors the re-emergence of social patterns from deep in the race’s infancy.

It seems obvious now that as we move into this transitional phase, between the collapse of monarchical consciousness and the possibility of the resurrection of polymorphous consciousness, the interdependence of the body and the land will begin to manifest in the mythic mind of the individual. We all become kings, and our dreams, visions and body sensations intertwine with social turmoil, political upheaval and the land’s consciousness. It comes and goes, flowing into unnerving sensations of being a fractal microcosm of society or nature, and ebbing back into the alienation and lack of connectedness that we have been conditioned to think of as ‘normal consciousness’.

For myself, it was a gradual realisation that weaved together my re-experiencing of the Hyde Park riot, the sadness and frustrated anger I felt, together with the direction (flesh-wards) in which my initial disappointment at Carn Ingli led me. It has long been known that figures of brutal, repressive authority—like, say… the police—function perfectly as dream symbols for the internal mechanisms of repression in the body, the blocks and knots binding and impeding the fresh streams of energy that may infuse our reality with eroticism and a sense of play. Eros: a sexuality no longer imprisoned between the legs and in the bed, but defining our experience of the world.

For most people, cocooned in their homes and hypermarkets, the police remain dream figures. They are occasionally seen, feared and revered on the street, but they largely appear on the TV dream-screen, pinning those unruly sociapaths to the tarmac… and here and there at night, deep inside… if anyone ever dares to brush against the forces that pin them down. It was surely my brush with riot cops, and the intense feeling of uselessness and redundancy I felt trapped on a bus watching them batter protesters, that meshed with my psyche and led me to feel I couldn’t trust my body to carry on as I slept. I also look back at the suspicious guy on Glastonbury Tor, who had just emerged from prison, and wonder if he was part of my world’s attempt to bring my alienation from my body to light, to pull my emerging unconscious into consciousness though dream logic. Suspicion, lack of trust, is a major symptom of alienation, and the walls of repression within us wither our trust in our bodies, ourselves, just as surely as the emerging police state in Britain attempts to instil in us suspicions about other people. Social alienation goes with alienation from our bodies.

However, we must not lose sight of the desperation that the Tory government’s policies imply [feel free to substitute Labour in here, it's still happening - Gyrus, 2002]. We may at the moment be moving out of a police state. As William Burroughs has wisely commented, a fully functioning police state needs no police force: the enforcement of law through brute force simply means that the more subtle methods of population control have failed. Following the same logic, many schools of therapy, as well as the archaic tradition of shamanism, see the emergence of traumatic symptoms, disease, or madness as the first step on the perilous road to true health. This, then, is the famous ‘Grail question’: it is the emergence of the act of questioning itself, an awakening to awareness of the real situation, which inevitably involves intense pain, turbulence and confusion. The barren Wasteland, the stale and tentative equilibrium maintained by repression (both social and bodily), is shattered by the questioning of authority and the riotous emergence of the unconscious, our true body.

It is often argued that the attention paid to the sections of the Criminal Justice Act dealing with the restriction of the free festival and rave scenes unfairly overshadow the rest of the Act. But as far as our present investigation goes, these are surely the most revealing. Punk was epitomized by the tactic of forcibly provoking the authorities into reaction. The most basic structures of repression were lured into view by an angry generation, post-hippy cynicism seeing through the superficial non-violent crust. The lazy comfort of the repressed body is jolted by annoying and painful symptoms.

The conservatives are actually right in seeing the rebellion of the young as a disease; but, like the West’s allopathic approach to medicine, they are dangerously wrong in seeing disease as necessarily destructive and in need of blind suppression. Now we see increased police powers and legal provisions brought in, without much direct provocation, to try to stop people having a good time. Moves have been made in the past, under various pretexts, to limit sub-cultural gatherings, but the eighties saw quite a comprehensive legitimization of youth culture, and a parallel drop in clashes between the counterculture and the law. Bigger and better venues, and the mass media’s assimilation of the postures of rebellion helped to quell the energy of the disease, acting like a big hit of pain-killers, but the disease found a new, surprising outlet. This time, through unbridled optimism. A reaction against the smarmy cynicism bred by the Thatcher years, the late eighties saw many various threads of counterculture which had been growing since the sixties all converge and synergize. Ecstasy was a prime catalyst, and it is no accident that one of its main effects is to polymorph the body, creating a vibrant charge of largely non-genital sexuality at raves. Getting off with someone was replaced by getting off on everyone else. And the anarchic dis-organization of free parties, dotted around the countryside in disused warehouses and airfields instead of shackled to the easily policed city… surely this unnerved the conservative consciousness, which panics if anything cannot be readily tracked and monitored.

All this inevitably led to a new attitude towards politics, or at least a proliferation of attitudes previously only rarely met, and practised even less often. Disillusionment with political representation fades away like an unsatisfying orgasm, and all parts of the body politic stir, becoming restless with their desire to speak for themselves and feel their own feelings for themselves. While political activism remains hard and usually dangerous work as ever, recent trends have attempted to transform this work into a form of play. "Neither work nor leisure", as some graffiti on a bridge in Leeds proclaims. The Criminal Justice Act has effectively united previously separate strands of the underground, and the outburst of imagination and creativity in protest culture is testament to a convergence of hedonism and activism, the body and society, the party people and the politicos. Party politics. A playful attitude devoid of the work ethic, a contempt for commitment coming from anywhere other than from within—no more grim-faced dutiful action borne of guilt. Of course, there are still plenty of hedonist hangers-on at protest sites, sitting around rolling up and drinking strong lager while trees go undefended. But something is in motion that will hopefully sweep these elements into insignificance.

I said before that we are all in the process of becoming kings and queens, but as we do it will become clear that we have been living a lie—because we always have been kings and queens. Those public figures who, in whatever way, fulfil the role of leader, the country’s cock, are there because we want them there. We authorize the authorities. Unable to personally bear the weight of the world, we live vicariously through those we elect as representatives. The King is also a scapegoat, as in the Celtic tradition of killing a king who becomes maimed, to keep the Land fertile. As in Jesus, who carries away all our sins for us by his suffering on the cross…

Political society articulates itself and produces a representative; and is then ready for history; tragedy; even as the chorus, the dance group, articulates itself and produces the hero, the dying god. . . . More and more they differentiate him from themselves, make him their vicar. Their attitude becomes more and more one of contemplation. More and more they become spectators, of his action. Theatrically speaking, they become an audience; religiously speaking, they become worshipers; he becomes a god. Gradually they lose all sense that the god is themselves.

Norman Brown, Love’s Body

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

Frank Zappa

And now we must wake from the dream, the nightmare of history, give up shifting responsibility onto the political actors we cast on the historical stage. Let an actor in the White House cease to be an irony, and become a truth about our illusory existence, our passive spectatorship. Let the energy in our bodies give us pleasure and excitement all over; fill us with the reality of immediate experience; bring an end to the burden we place on our cunts and cocks, allowing them free play along with the rest of our flesh and feeling; stop our perpetual postponement, our wait for the grand climax of the show; help us live now, at one with the land, together with all the other kings and queens… gods and goddesses.