Patrick Harpur, the essential guide to Hermeticism and alchemy, author of Daimonic Reality, Mercurius and The Philosopher’s Secret Fire, is breaking his customary seclusion with a series of courses next year to be held in the heart of West Dorset.

Together with Jules Cashford (co-author of the excellent The Myth of the Goddess) and others, Patrick will host talks, discussions, films and field trips exploring soul, magic, Forteana, folklore, mythology, dreams, and other byways of the imagination. Full details can be found at The Mythic Imagination website.

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.

Romano-Celtic carving now to be found in All Saints Parish Church, Ilkley, West Yorkshire.

by Gyrus

Firewoman, river of life
Firewoman, mother and eye
Firewoman, seeding below
Firewoman, help my earth glow

Psychic TV, ‘Firewoman’

At first it was just the stones.

The north side of Rombald’s Moor, steep crags and patches of forest, towers over the town of Ilkley in West Yorkshire. Scattered over its hills are literally hundreds of prehistoric rock carvings that are still baffling archaeologists and students of the history of art. They are all seemingly abstract, dominated mainly by ‘cup-and-ring’ designs. Cup-like depressions carved into the rock, alone or clustered in groups, often surrounded by one or more rings. These rings may overlap with those radiating out from nearby cups; there may also be a straight groove running from the central cup, out across the rings.

Some cup-and-ring carvings from Westhorton, Northumberland

After checking these out for a while, I was amazed to learn that nearly identical carvings exist in Northumberland, across Scotland and Ireland, Portugal, Italy and Scandinavia. Closely related ‘primitive art’ can also be found in the Canary Islands, Africa, India, Australia, the Americas, and many others places I’m sure. Across the globe, these enigmatic designs can date to anywhere from the Stone Ages to the present day (in the case of tribal cultures still making them). The ones in Ilkley are hard to date, because of their exposure to the elements, and guesses range from Neolithic times (5000-2000 BCE) to the late Iron Age (about 500 BCE).

I was initially attracted to these markings because of their enigma. The possible significance of megalithic sites like Stonehenge seemed to me to be all mapped out, exhaustively elaborated. Yet stabs at the meaning of cup-and-ring marked rocks are generally half-hearted, quelled by a lack of reference points. Ronald Morris lists 104 possible interpretations, all extremely brief, in his book on the rock art of Galloway—from the stupidly prosaic ("stone age doodles") to the wildly improbable ("carved by lasers from outer space").

Several people have grappled with interpreting the carvings in an open-minded and intelligent way, but they are few. For good reason. We will never know what these carvings were used for. This is the bottom line of most prehistoric investigations. We’ll never know, not exactly. How you proceed from this baseline of ignorance is a mark of your own psyche. Do you not even start to delve further, dismayed by the prospect of never being able to attain certainty? Do you meticulously catalogue that which you can be certain of, sites and sizes, recurrent features? Or do you, in wilful ignorance of the evidence that exists, treat prehistoric art as some sort of Rorschach for your own mind, projecting your desires onto them to suit your own needs?

Given that you’re interested in rock art, the first option is an admission of despair, because ultimately nothing in life is certain. The second path is that of the academic, and such work is essential to any attempt at interpretation; but as an end in itself it is a petty cover-up for despair, and in omitting the realm of significance it removes genuinely human interests. The third tactic is a caricature of the independent ‘mystical’ researcher, and is how most academics would probably view my own work. But I think it has to be seen that an element of this subjective projection is unavoidable. As we have little concrete evidence about the meaning of prehistoric art, what else fills the gaps but our own minds? In the interests of ‘objectivity’, the psychology of the prehistorian is left out of academic texts. Yet they are still people, and no amount of rigorous methodology can, I believe, erase the person from the writing. The fantasy of objective science is a contradictory enterprise of reality-denial: "I want to see the world as it would be if I were not here." The reality of the situation is that you’re always there. In denying their own personal presence, many writers leave themselves (and their readers) open to an unseen subjectivity, which can either be uncovered and made part of the picture, or left to grow more powerful and malignant, eventually rigidifying into dogma.

My own personal approach is… personal. I have to experience the place I’m involved in. I spend time there and immerse myself in it, meditate and do rituals, note dreams and synchronicities. I bathe in the mystery until intuitions that make contact with intellect bubble up. I study a lot, and greatly value the work of historians and archaeologists. But I am not overly concerned with ‘methodology’. My method is: go from the concrete part of reality that interests me, that draws me to it, and branch out into whatever different directions I feel are relevant. The ‘disciplines’ I delve into—archaeology, history, religion, etymology, ethnography—are subservient to the reality I’m investigating.

A general problem for me, one left out by most academics because it prods at their own basic assumptions, is deciding where I stand in relation to history. I feel I’m moving slowly (and non-linearly) towards a radical non-linear approach. I’ve tried to trace many different things through history, mainly shifting archetypal myth-figures; and I find too many cross-cultural connections, too many links across space and time to really believe, deep down, that ‘history’ (when it embraces human experience) can be accurately represented by a straight line. Historical context is important, but a wider context exists, that of the nature of time.

‘Time’ is a single word, but what it refers to is profoundly diverse and chaotic.

Linear historical time

One day, year, century after another, ad infinitum.

Linear eschatological time

One day, year, century after another… BANG!!!

Cyclical time

Each day is created anew at daybreak; each year is, in a way, the first. The growing-older-and-dying world co-exists with the Dreamtime, where all the ancestors are still active and all myths and realities recur.

Cyclical eschatological time

"Anyone who can read history with both hemispheres of the brain knows that a world comes to an end every instant . . . And every instant also gives birth to a world—despite the cavillings of philosophers & scientists whose bodies have grown numb—a present in which all impossibilities are renewed, where regret & premonition fade to nothing in one presential hologrammatical psychomantric gesture." (Hakim Bey)

Real time

No such thing!

All forms of time are potentially accessible. Many different gradations of these simplified categories are usually experienced in the course of a day by most people, but the subtle differences usually go unnoticed.

So history is not absolute. History as we know it is our own culture’s construct of time, our largely linear map of temporality, projected back onto the material artifacts left in the fabric of the world by our ancestors. Not to mention the psychological prejudices and models we leave unquestioned, and our lack of culturally sanctioned landmarks in the realm usually called the ‘spiritual’—a realm that was arguably a prime concern for ‘map-makers’ in prehistory. ‘Objective history’ is an illusion born of a lack of true context, our ontological context.

One of the stickiest problems in tracing mythology and religious practices through history is that of tracing influence and co-mapping meaning. Should we compare similar motifs and artifacts across time and space in our search for meaning? For example, could the rock art of the !Kung San bushmen in Africa today have any bearing upon the carvings left on Rombald’s Moor by people who lived thousands of years ago?

Things become stickier (for the linear historian) when times and places are closer together, but no direct evidence of cross-cultural interchange appears to exist. The Swastika Stone near Ilkley is pretty much identical to the ‘Camunian Roses’ in Val Camonica, Italy, and they were possibly carved within 500 years of each other. Did the two cultures that produced these designs interact? Was there a parallel, but separate evolution of the same basic pan-European design, the crossed circle? Was it coincidence? If so, is the meaning of each necessarily as separate as the carvings themselves? And do we need to insult the critical judgement of readers by meticulously pointing out the subtle differences between similar symbols, and only tentatively making comparisons? It is ironic that, because of their pedantic methodologies, texts aimed at the academic community (a most discerning and critical bunch), demand the least amount of critical intervention on the part of the reader.

I do not unquestioningly believe in Jung’s theory of ‘universal archetypes’, but I do believe in the uniformity of basic human physiology, and I think the body is one of the main aspects of the world from which maps of the spirit—shamanism, alchemy, yoga, tantra, whatever—unfold. So we may expect some recurring global motifs in art and myth, notwithstanding the infinite variations that similar body-minds interacting with different environments produce.

I also believe that we each need to ask ourselves why we are interested in these things. What do I get out of this? I have no illusions (OK, a few) that I’m trying to contribute to some ever-progressing body of human knowledge. The feeling that we’re building up an increasingly accurate and ‘truthful’ picture of the world as time goes by is part of the linear history package. Look at the ridiculous ideas held by quite intelligent people in the past, and assume that your own ideas may be equally stupid in the end.

In the end? What end? The straight line is hard to shake off…

There’s one thing I’m definitely not in this for. I don’t claim to be right. I get enough out of it already, and don’t need gaps in my enjoyment to be filled with the consensus of agreement. I have to write this, and hope some people get stimulated by it. But… "I am not interested in the academic status of what I am doing because my problem is my own transformation." (Michel Foucault) I involve myself in the conscious recognition of what I project onto the past. My theories will have a different emphasis from others’ because my transformation is different. Why shouldn’t people print for themselves a license to steal from the past, as Hakim Bey phrases it, as long as they’re conscious that they may have no ‘real’ connection to the culture they plunder, or to academic history? This is the Chaotic approach to history, the utilization of any and all human cultural artifacts for the purpose of making life now more interesting, stimulating and challenging. It can be abused by those who trivialize or entirely misappropriate other cultures, possibly affecting the general view of that culture; or by those who fail to keep a check on their ego and their connection with the here-and-now of their lives. It can also be used as the most adaptable and dogma-free map-making tool around. Flexible enough to cope with inevitable change, ontologically rigorous enough to realize it’s never right, never authoritative, always capable of laughing at itself. As a friend once said, some people would rather be right than happy.

The Badger Stone, Rombald’s Moor, looking northwest up Wharfedale

The first time I visited the Badger Stone on Rombald’s Moor, I walked alone across the moors with a map. As I crossed a small valley, clouds gathered and light rain fell. I put the map away and stumbled across the heather shrouded in mist. As I blindly approached the stone, the rain fell harder, and all I could see around me was thick white moving mist. By the time I reached it, and rounded it to see the carvings, I was too wet to care about the rain, a state which alters consciousness into a more receptive mode. Throughout my explorations of the moors, I’ve found that there has been a subtle interactivity between the land, my consciousness and the weather, as if all conspire to make me receptive to a new discovery. Standing in front of the ancient carvings on this stone, I was struck by the realization that something I considered exotic and alien, something only found in caves in remotest Australia, was actually here as well, just down the road. The rock carvings are always more impressive when they’re wet, and this, one of the most impressive set of carvings on the moor, made quite an impression on me. I did some spontaneous chanting and whirling, then walked away. As I left the stone, the mists began to clear, and the rain stopped abruptly.

Later in the year, I was writing about my idea that the Christian Satan is a demonized remnant of prehistoric chthonic snake-goddesses. Flicking through a book on folklore, I found a picture of an altar stone showing the goddess Verbeia. She holds two snakes, and now stands in the All Saints Parish Church in Ilkley. The mythic irony was too much, I had to check it out. I had only the faintest idea that she would lead me back up on to the moors, and deeper into the stones.

Verbeia

Known only through a dedication to her, carved by the Prefect of the Second Cohort of Roman troops stationed in Ilkley during 3rd century CE, and her depiction on a separate altar stone (shown at top of page). The All Saints Church stands on the remains of the Roman fort. The dedication (which can now be seen in the Manor House Museum behind the church) reads: "To Verbeia. Sacred. Clodius Fronto. Ded. Prefect of the Cohort, Second Lingones." Goddess of the River Wharfe, which flows down from the Pennines in the northwest, through Ilkley at the bottom of the valley which the moor overlooks, and east to the Humber estuary. Snakes and flowing water have intimate archaic connections. The two snakes held by Verbeia probably represent the two streams that flowed from the moor in Roman times, past either side of the fort enclosure, and into the Wharfe.

The Mavilly goddess

The Roman troops stationed here were only Roman in political allegiance. Racially, the Lingones were Celtic Gauls recruited from the upper Marne in eastern France. A goddess image similar to Verbeia—she holds two snakes and has a pleated skirt—was found in Mavilly, which is in the region where the Lingones cohort were recruited from. In this area, Gaulish Celts are known to have been greatly concerned with water cults. Mavilly is only 35 miles south of the famous healing spring at the source of the Seine. Did the troops bring a goddess-related water cult with them to blend into the matrix of the Wharfedale environment?

Scholars argue against a Celtic origin for the word ‘Verbeia’. But a female water divinity holding snakes would, in nature if not in name, happily dovetail with the way in which the native Celts of northern England (the Brigantes) probably made their environment sacred. Water cults were very frequent among the Celts: they cast offerings into wells and lakes, including human heads (Celts, like the Greeks, believed the head to be the seat of life-force, as the ‘head’ of a river is its source). Romans likewise would sanctify natural features; for them, "every grove, spring, cluster of rocks or other significant natural feature had its attendant spirit. Generally the locals gave such entities personal names, but a stranger ignorant of these would refer to each simply as genius loci, ‘the spirit of the place’. Especially awe-inspiring or beautiful spots possessed proportionately powerful genii." (Ronald Hutton) Verbeia seems likely to be a fusion of existing Brigantian and imported Gaulish and Roman influences.

Sifting through languages to find the origins of ‘Verbeia’ proved to be a dizzying task. Even a firm knowledge of linguistic influences in the area at that time wouldn’t stop your head from spinning. Two possibilities: Either language, like the universe, plays tricks, and leads you around in baffling cycles which appear connected to every other cycle; or the name ‘Verbeia’, for whatever reasons, happens to be an inexplicably polysemic (many-meaninged) cross-linguistic condensation of some of our most primal intuitions about nature. Follow me…

Spring

Verbeia is often equated with Brighid, the Irish goddess, aka Bridget, Bride, Bríd or Bríg—possibly the origin of Brigantia, the goddess of the Brigantes. Bride’s Day is Imbolc, 1st February, or when the ewes start to lactate. A goddess who heralds the coming warmth of spring. The Mavilly goddess is shown surrounded by rising vegetation. The Latin for spring is ver, from which our ‘vernal’, ‘verdigiris’ (green rust on copper) and ‘verdant’ (fresh, green) come. A botanical term, ‘vernation’, refers to the arrangement of leaves in a bud. This derives from the Latin vernatio: the flourishing renewal of plants in spring, and the snake’s sloughing of skin in spring. All these spring-associated Latin words stem from the Indogermanic root √WES, meaning "to shine".

Fire

Brighid presides over fire. Goddess of blacksmiths. Brighid, from brigh, ‘strength’. Welsh bri means ‘power’, and brig means ‘hill-top’ (‘Brighid’ and ‘Brigantia’ are often translated as ‘The High One’). Ancient belief in the sacred power of hills and mountains… the lighting of fires on hill-tops at seasonal festivals… St Bridget (the Christian edition) was honoured by nuns at a monastery in County Kildare, who kept her sacred flame burning until the Reformation. The public shrine to Vesta, Roman goddess of fire, both domestic and ritual, was a sacred fire tended by the Vestal Virgins. Brighid, too, ruled over the domestic hearth, and in Gaelic Scotland her bird was the white swan. ‘Swan Vestas’ anyone?

‘Vesta’ and close-to-home words like ‘vernacular’ both derive from the same Indogermanic root as all the shining spring-like words—√WES can also mean ‘dwell, live, be’. Home and fire, dwelling and light. From the temporary base-camp hearths of the first proto-human hunter-gatherers through to the Celts and the Roman Empire, these two are intertwined.

The most famous stones on the moor are the Cow and Calf—the ‘Cow’ is a vast part of a rocky outcrop overlooking Ilkley, the ‘Calf’ is a smaller, though still large boulder that has apparently separated from the crags. The larger rock was once known as the ‘Inglestone Cow’. When Queen Victoria was crowned in 1838, "a great fire blazed on these famous stones, and Ilkley I am told, was ‘illuminated.’" (Harry Speight)

The Cow and Calf rocks, Ilkley Moor

There is a history of beacon hills in Wharfedale. During the early 19th century, when a French invasion was feared, beacon fires were tended all along Wharfedale. The beacon signal was sent from Ingleborough, over in the northernmost reaches of Ribblesdale (close to the Wharfe’s source), down via various hills, including Beamsley Beacon just north of Ilkley, on to the Otley Chevin. Perhaps the prominent ‘Inglestone Cow’ was part of this network? The Scottish dialect word, ingle, ‘fire burning on a hearth’, may come from the Gaelic aingeal, meaning ‘fire’ or ‘light’. The Mavilly goddess holds a torch as well as snakes.

Milk

Brighid is also a cow goddess; she was reared on the milk of a white, red-eared cow. In Ireland, churn-staffs were fashioned into the likeness of a woman called Brìdeog, ‘Little Bride’. ‘Verbeia’ may derive from the Old Irish root ferb, ‘cattle’, making her ‘She of the Cattle’. Like the Irish Boand, ‘She who has White Cows’, goddess of the river Boyne. Like Marsa of Latvian mythological songs, "Mother of Milk, the Mother of Cows" (Marija Gimbutas), who may appear in animal stalls as a black snake. The night before I read Gimbutas’ book, where she relates Verbeia to Marsa, and suggests the ferb derivation, I was staying with friends who have two daughters. I dreamt I had breasts and was breast-feeding their two-year old.

There is strong evidence of an old calendar custom in the British Isles, around Beltaine or springtime in general, where the old fires are extinguished and new ones are lit. Cattle are then driven between two fires to divinely protect them from disease. ‘Imbolc’ means ‘purification’. Inglestone Cow… Fire-stone Cow.

Ronald Morris found three separate people in Scotland who remembered from their youth a ritual connected to cup-marks in rocks. They would be filled with milk each spring, lest the "wee folk" prevent the cattle from giving milk that summer.

Water

"Springs, wells and rivers are of first and enduring importance as a focal point of Celtic cult practice and ritual." (Anne Ross) Not far from the Badger Stone, at the top of Heber’s Gill, is a spring called Silver Well, "which it is not unlikely was an old Celtic tutelary spring, and bits of metal or other articles may have been thrown into it as offerings for protection from the saint or presiding genius of the well." (Speight)

The source of all life. We come from the ocean, we need water to live, we are two-thirds water. Verbeia, goddess of the river, bearing the two serpentine streams flowing down from the moor. They flow from the area where one finds the White Wells, a Victorian spa building. The healing powers of the spring waters on the moor here were reputed in the last century, and probably long, long before as well. Certainly the Romans were obsessed with spa baths, and there was one in Ilkley. "Verbeia may be a Latinised form of the Goidelic guerif, to heal." (Speight) Geurir is used in France with the same meaning.

(At the bottom of the bath in the White Wells today there is the familiar site of hundreds of coppers and ten pence pieces. You even find this in fountains in shopping malls. It is a remnant of the widespread Celtic practice, mentioned by Speight above, of casting offerings to water spirits into wells, lakes and rivers.)

In Niederbronn, Alsace, where in Celtic times Diana was worshipped as the Goddess of sacred wells, to this day women carry water from the mineral spring to nearby mountains. There, they pour it over stones with circular depressions to ensure pregnancy. . . . Holy wells are recorded by the hundreds in 19th century literature. In Ireland, they mostly became St. Brigit’s wells, all visited on the first day of spring. Devotees perform the rounds at such wells, washing their hands and feet and tearing off a small rag from their clothes, which they tie on a bush or tree overhanging the well. According to a 1918 written account from Dungiven parish, after performing the usual rounds at the well, devotees proceed to a large river stone which has footprints; they perform an oblation and walk around the stone, bowing to it and repeating prayers as at the well. If there are hollows or cupmarks in stones, the country people stoop to drink.

Marija Gimbutas

Ronald Morris’ survey of cup-and-ring marked stones in Argyll, Scotland, revealed that they "are nearly always carved where there is a fine open view. . . . more often than not it includes a view of sea or estuary." They are "nearly always made on parts of rock which are nearly horizontal. Thus, in southern Scotland seven out of eight sites have carved areas which are within 20 degrees of horizontal, and nearly half the carved areas are absolutely horizontal. . . . Where there is a ‘tail’ or radial groove from near the middle of the cup-and-ring (very often from the cup), in about seven out of eight cases, where there is any slope on the rock surface, the tail runs downhill." This all accords well with the Ilkley carvings, which are dominant on the north side of the moor overlooking the river, and are often clustered close to springs or streams. Before I had theorized about these glyphs, my intuitive ‘offerings’ to the Badger Stone consisted of pouring some of my drink (water or whiskey) into the cups and watching it stream down the grooves. There are some cups on near-vertical surfaces, but most were clearly meant to hold water, rain, or other fluids. Like wells, the water in cup-marks could be healing water. In regions where there are cup-marked rocks and peasant lore about them still survives, there are recurrent beliefs that water out of the cups is good for all manner of ailments, especially eye diseases.

The Greek Muses were water-nymphs, and poets drank from their springs on Mounts Helicon, Parnassus and Castalia for inspiration. To them, a poem was the water, honey or nectar of the Muses. Pythagoras gained prophetic insights from drinking spring water. Richard Onians, in his investigation of ancient Greek concepts about the body and soul, found that they believed ‘life-essence’ to be contained in a ‘seed liquid’ concentrated mostly in the cerebro-spinal marrow—"on tap in the genital and stored in the head", as Norman O. Brown puts it. They thought it came out of the body in the form of tears, sweat, and sexual fluids. Crying and sexual love are "repeatedly described as a process of ‘liquefying, melting’ . . . Aristotle tells us that the region around the eyes was the region of the head most fruitful of seed, pointing to . . . practices which imply that seed comes from liquid in the region of the eyes." Tears, sex, melting… I think of Wilhelm Reich’s ideas about bodily armour, rigid musculature softened by crying and sex. Experiences of weeping at orgasm. Tears, eyes, seed… the repressive myth of masturbation and blindness. There is an Egyptian myth of people coming out of a creator-god’s eyes. Cup-marks, rain, creation, life-force, healing…

The Slavic goddess Mokosh-Paraskeva Pyatnitsa "is the dispenser of the water of life. . . . The name Mokosh is connected with moisture, mok- or mokr- meaning ‘wet, moist,’ and her ritual was called mokrida. On the other hand, the root mok- appears as a name for stones. In Lithuanian, mokas is a ‘standing stone,’ always appearing in legends associated with lakes or rivers." (Gimbutas)

The significance of water and stones extends down into the rites of divine kingship. Pagan British kings usually had to symbolically wed the goddess of the land. Even as late as the 17th century, England’s King James said, "I am the husband, and all the whole island is my lawful wife." Gerald of Wales (12th century) said that in County Donegal, for his feis (inauguration), the king would bathe in water then stand barefoot in a footprint carved in rock, or sit on a stone to be handed his rod of office. The feis site of the Irish king O’Donnell in western Ulster was used until the end of the 16th century. It is a rock with the holy well Tobar an Duin at its foot, where the king probably bathed. In early Scottish history the fort of Dunadd, in the Kilmartin valley of Argyll, was one seat of the kingdom of Dalriada, "and upon the summit of the fortress the modern traveller can still find the carved footprint. Next to it in the rock surface is a bowl-shaped hollow and a splendid figure of a wild boar . . . A ruler placing his foot in the print would be gazing north straight at the ancient row of megalithic monuments." (Hutton) "In Scandinavia engravings of human footprints are common—especially near the cupped stones. On the Bunsoh stones, indeed, footprints and cups are found together." (Herbert Kühn)

The king gains his power from his union with the goddess of the land, symbolized by his immersion in her waters and his body’s shallow, but significant, penetration of her stones. Paul Devereux, in a persuasive book that links divine kingship back to shamanism, quotes a !Kung man talking of his trance experiences: "When people sing. . . I dance. I enter the earth. I go in at a place like a place where people drink water. I travel a long way, very far. . . . You enter, enter the earth, and you return to enter the skin of your body. . .". For the San people, snakes are significant because they enter the earth, go underground, like themselves when they go on ecstatic journeys.

J.D. Lewis-Williams suggests that rocks are ‘veils’ between this world and the spirit world, and that rock art is the destruction of this veil. "In many cultures, the shaman in his trance passes through the rock into the spirit world, and to communicate what had happened in the trance, the shaman depicts what had happened on the other side on the rock. . . . The Hupa of America have a concept of spirits responsible for precipitation that live in the rock, and are known as ‘Mi.’ In addition, several contemporary shamans have acknowledged that the rock art is a marker for where a shaman could enter the rock." (Grant S. McCall)

Procreation

The belief systems of the Australian aborigines, whose rock and totem-shield art is often compared to cup-and-ring markings, may be one of the most useful tools we have to approach the meaning of European petroglyphs (rock carvings). The Australian continent is their Bible; the earth, the physical landscape, embodies their spiritual understanding of the world, contains their history and knowledge. "Preliterate peoples are at pains to identify with their land as if it were a physiological or psychological ‘echo’ of themselves." (James G. Cowan) Body and earth, psyche and landscape.

Some hunter-gatherer tribes, like archaic humans, do not see sex and birth as cause and effect. To explain birth, beliefs about the origin of children from the earth evolved. The spirits of unborn children dwell in the land, in rocks and pools, waiting to enter a receptive womb. Even after the connection between sex and birth is made, many, like the aborigines, favour the idea of earth-conception as ultimately essential to the creation of a child. Rocks or pools "bore the spirit that would vitalise the baby. It therefore seems likely that the purpose of cutting a circular cup in the surface of a rocky outcrop was to liberate a spirit and so ensure a complete and successful child-birth. . . . At some later date a ring would be circumscribed about the cup to guarantee a second child, and in this way, as the years passed, the ring systems built up." (George Terence Meaden) This idea holds that the interlinking groups of cups and rings depict inter-family bonds. The ‘spirits’ released by carving the cup may have been those of ancestors as well as unborn children, for ancestors are frequently the source of divinatory and magical knowledge in shamanic cultures. For aborigines, the two types of spirit are interchangeable, as each person is a reincarnation of an ancestor.

Two apparent survivals of these notions in modern times. The Christian doctrine of baptism: a baby’s soul is not ‘saved’ (and may as well not have one as far as hardcore Christians are concerned) until it is baptized, with holy water from a cup-shaped font. And the folklore of the stork, which carries babies from marshes to drop them down the chimneys of expectant parents.

The ‘caged spirit’ theory of cup-marked rocks does not ‘explain’ all the carvings, but no one ‘explanation’ will. The carvings were probably used by different people through time for different purposes; by different people across space for different purposes; and almost certainly by the same people for different purposes. Our culture and our psyches, outside the frames and boundaries of ‘art’, are conditioned to assign singular meanings to symbols. Before dictionaries, words were a lot more elastic. Proto-linguistic symbol systems such as hieroglyphs were even more amenable to polysemy, the existence of many meanings. Further back in the development of symbols, petroglyphs take us into a realm of signification almost alien to the industrialized west. Their meanings seem abstract and vague until they are bound to the concrete feelings and bodily, non-verbal perceptions they refer to. And many meanings happily co-exist, emanating from the same symbol without being stifled by fear of paradox.

Vertex

Middle English hwerfen, ‘turn, change’. Spelt in The Ormulum by Ormin (12th century Lincolnshire) as wharfen. The variations are endless: hweorfa, ‘whirl, what is hastily turned around’; hweorfan, ‘a turning, winding round’, cognate with Norse hvarf, ‘a sharp bend’; Old Norse hwerfi, ‘bend, crook’. Among these words is certainly the origin of, or a major influence on ‘Wharfe’, which turns and winds along the valley floor before and after Ilkley.

‘Verbeia’ has always been related to ‘Wharfe’, and a trip back to the ver- words in Latin gives us, if not a confirmation of the link, at least some fruitful and irresistibly fascinating associations. Many of our own ver- words come from the Latin vertere, ‘to turn’. ‘Vertebra’ means ‘something to turn on’, describing the backbone’s interlocking pivotal structure. ‘Vertex’ is ‘the highest point’; in anatomy it refers to the crown of the head, where hair spirals. Latin vertex literally means ‘that which turns’, but can refer to ‘top, crown, summit, pole, whirl; whirlpool, eddy’. Properly it refers to the turning point, especially the Pole Star, around which all the others turn. ‘Vertical’ stems from these associations—straight up to, or down from, the crown or summit. ‘Vortex’ is a variant of ‘vertex’. Dictionary definition: ‘a mass of whirling fluid, whirlpool or whirlwind; a system viewed as swallowing up or engrossing those who approach it’. ‘Whirl’ is related to the Old Norse hvirfill, ‘circle’; and, along with ‘twirl’, relates to the Gaelic Tuirl, ‘to descend suddenly, to come down rapidly with a gyratory motion’. ‘Vertigo’ is from Latin vertigo, ‘whirling’, again from vertere.

The closest word I’ve found to ‘Verbeia’ in any language is from Anglo-Saxon, which couldn’t have influenced the Roman altars in Ilkley—they invaded Britain after the Romans left. Nevertheless, the word wer-bære is ‘a weir where fish are caught’, which keeps the river connotations, as well as the idea of turning, as weirs (and wharves) redirect the flow of rivers.

‘Verse’ is another vertere word, because at the end of a line of poetry, one ‘turns around’ and starts a new one, unlike the linear flow of prose. Countless -verse words in English express contrary direction: converse, perverse, inverse, reverse, you get the idea.

Vertere itself comes from the Indogermanic root √WERT, ‘to turn, become’. Also root of the Old English wyrd, ‘destiny, fate, that which happens’. Sanskrit vrt means ‘to turn, turn oneself, exist, be’.

Shamanism

Brighid, patroness of poets & writers, healers & doctors, and of blacksmiths. Goddess of fire. She appears to be a late pagan distillation of the core elements of archaic shamanism.

The shaman is the original poet, the tribal myth-maker who pulls up a ‘secret language’ from the depths of ecstasy, the hidden roots of language.

The shaman is the healer par excellence, the witch-doctor.

A Yakut proverb says that smiths and shamans are from the same nest. Shamans often meets a smith during initiatory trances, who dismembers and then re-forges the shaman’s body in his furnace. Both smiths and shamans are respected and often feared in Siberian tribes, because both possess esoteric transformative knowledge.

Most importantly, both are masters of fire. "Mastery over fire . . . is a magico-mystical virtue that . . . translates into sensible terms the fact that the shaman has passed beyond the human condition and already shares in the condition of ‘spirits.’" (Mircea Éliade) Firewalking, eating hot coals, generating ‘inner heat’ for magical use, melting snow with will, drying wet sheets wrapped around the body while sat outside in freezing weather… Many tribes express magical power in terms of heat; Hindus call powerful divinities jvalit, ‘possessing fire’; Indian Mohammedans in communication with God become ‘burning’. The !Kung dance for hours around a fire to awaken num, a primal life energy that rests at the base of the spine and in the pit of the stomach. When it ‘boils’, it ascends the backbone, and when it reaches the skull, the shamanic kia trance occurs. Those experiencing kia can feel compelled to leap into the fire or handle the glowing embers.

Verbeia’s equation with Brighid is poetically supported by her forest of linguistic associations: verse is the ‘turning’ form of poetry; we have the Goidelic guerif, to heal; both these aspects are deepened by her undoubted link with spring waters, inspiring and healing. Her fiery nature should be obvious by now.

Further, Verbeia’s possible links to all the spiralling vertere words echoes one of shamanism’s most basic features. The Centre of the World, the World Tree, Mountain or Pole, the shaman’s path to the lower and upper realms of the other world. Through kundalini yoga, and the Greeks’ cerebro-spinal ‘life-force’, this may be equated with the human spine. Raise the kundalini serpent to the crown chakra, through the vertebrae, past the crown of the skull, where hair spirals round in a vertex.

One impulsive evening I went up to the moor and spent the night alone at the Badger Stone. While drifting off, I opened my eyes suddenly and was startled beyond belief. One star in the sky was motionless, and all the others were drifting rapidly north across the sky. This persisted, as I stammered and reeled, for about 10 seconds. Then, in a gratefully received shift of perspective back to reality, I realized that the single ‘star’ was a satellite arcing across the sky. My mind, for some reason, had played the ‘relative motion’ trick you often get on trains, where the station appears to be moving when the train sets off.

This is one of the few cards from the ‘Vertical Oracle’ divinatory deck that arrived from Antero Alli shortly after I finished this writing. Make your own connections! For more info, see Vertical Pool.

Later that week, I was playing with a toy planetarium at a friends’—a small light over which you place a clear perspex hemisphere with all the constellations marked on it. I put it in a dark cupboard, and played with it by spinning the dome around. Instantly the memory of dream (probably inspired by the shifting stars experience) from a night or two back flooded into me, and I had to stop turning the dome because of the dizzying memory rush. In the dream I was out in the open, and the entire night sky was revolving around one star above me, which was surrounded by bizarre light formations. Inspired by this, I searched out beliefs about the stars, particularly the Pole Star.

The Turko-Tatars, like a number of other peoples, imagine the sky as a tent . . . In the middle of the sky shines the Pole Star, holding the celestial tent like a stake. The Samoyed call it the ‘Sky Nail’; the Chuckchee and the Koryak the ‘Nail Star.’ The same image and terminology are found among the Lapps, the Finns, and the Estonians. The Turko-Altaians conceive the Pole Star as a pillar; it is the ‘Golden Pillar’ of the Mongols, the Kalmyk, the Buryat, the ‘Iron Pillar’ of the Kirgiz, the Bashkir, the Siberian Tatars, the ‘Solar Pillar’ of the Teleut, and so on. A complementary image is that of the stars as invisibly linked to the Pole Star. The Buryat picture the stars as a herd of horses, and the Pole Star . . . is the stake to which they are tethered.

Mircea Éliade

Macrocosm is reflected in microcosm for such peoples, who identify the Sky Pillar with the pole in the centre of their yurt or tent.

Ancient Saxons called the Pole Star Irminsul, termed ‘the universal column which sustains all’, and passed the idea of the ‘Pillar of the Sky’ or ‘Pillar of the World’ on to the Lapps of Scandinavia. Similar concepts survive in Romanian folklore. For Chuckchee and Altaian shamans, the Pole Star is a hole in the sky through which they pass into the upper levels of the spirit world.

The Swastika Stone carving, Ilkley Moor

My attention shifted from these findings to the Swastika Stone. Nine cup-marks in a cross formation, surrounded by a whirling swastika groove, with a curious appendage to one arm. The north-south line of cups is aligned to less than a degree off magnetic north—pointing straight at the Pole Star. This connection was thrown a bit by the fact that the swastika appears to rotate in a clockwise direction, whereas the stars in the northern hemisphere go anti-clockwise round the pole, rising in the east and setting in the west. But if it was meant to be some sort of connection between the earth and the sky… Try pointing your finger and making an anti-clockwise circle in the air, following the stars. Imagine you are drawing a rotating disc. Now move your hand, the disc, downwards until you are looking at the ‘other side’ of the disc, looking down your finger instead of up it, but keeping it moving in the same direction. It will now appear to be moving clockwise. If the stone describes the base of a Sky Pillar, extending down from the Pole Star to the ground, the clockwise motion of the swastika makes perfect sense—it maps the motion of the stars down onto the rock. Cup-and-ring petroglyphs may be seen to echo the same image. The groove or ‘tail’ becomes the Sky Pillar, the cup the Pole Star, and the rings the paths of the revolving stars.

(I should note here that I’m not moving towards the general idea that cup-and-ring patterns are maps of stellar constellations. Perhaps some involved rudimentary attempts at this, but no one seems to have found accurate correspondences in any existing patterns. They seem to be more to do with the sky as an access point to alternate realities.)

The swastika is a near universal symbol that should be reclaimed from the Teutonic boot-boys of the mid-20th century. It is found in Buddhism and Hinduism, on goddess-related artifacts from Bronze Age Greece, and in British Celtic metalwork from the 1st century BCE. As a petroglyph, it is found in abundance in Val Camonica, northern Italy. Here there are 16 carvings almost identical to that near Ilkley, and 68 others with differing arm orientations, all spread over 27 rocks. They date from the 7th to the 1st century BCE. The symbol is also found in Sweden, along with many other designs based on the so-called Celtic Cross, the wheel with four spokes. "Across the Romano-Celtic world, from Britain to Czechoslovakia, the wheel was the symbol for the sky, representing either the sun alone, or the whole turning heaven." (Hutton) Most interpreters, indeed most surviving religions who still use it, see the swastika as a sun or fire symbol. Its connection with fire-oriented cults is strong, but the Ilkley carving is oddly positioned if it has anything to do with sun worship—it faces squarely north into the Wharfe valley. One possible sun connection exists, though. The ‘appendage’ cup, in relation to the central cup, is roughly aligned to the summer solstice sunrise in the northeast. The groove around it forms a sort of hook shape which, if turned in the same direction as the ‘spin’ of the swastika, would haul the solstice sun across the sky.

A Norse fylfot from the Isle of Man

The Three Legs of Man

On the Isle of Man a Norse cross from around the 10th century was found standing in a groove in a large round stone in a churchyard. At its bottom is a fylfot, or swastika-like design, incorporating four spirals bound together. Of course, the national symbol of Man, the Three Legs, is a three-legged swastika.

Bridget’s Cross

February 1st in Man, until recently, was Laa’l Breeshy, ‘Bridget’s Feast Day’ (‘Wive’s Feast Day’ in northern England). A parish church, a nunnery, and no less than seven of the ancient keeils or cells on the Isle are named after the Irish saint. A favourite form of Bridget’s Cross, central to Imbolc folk-rituals in Ireland, suggests a swastika.

Oddly, the Bible gives us a link between stones and ascension into the sky. Check out Genesis 28:10. Jacob spends the night in a place where he gathers stones together for pillows. "And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it." Vastly impressed by this place, he sets his pillow-stone up as a pillar, and anoints it with oil. He names the place Beth-el, ‘sacred stone’.

"Throughout the world, certain images of ascent were used—the shaman’s spirit could rise on smoke, ride along a rainbow, travel up a sunbeam and so on. But from northwest Europe to Tibet none was more ubiquitous than the ladder. . . . It shows the remarkably universal aspects of shamanism, then, that the image of a human figure atop a ladder occurs also in southern African rock art." (Devereux) The Zulu word form -qab associates trance-states with ascension and art: ukutiqabu, ‘recovering from fainting’; ukuqabela, ‘to climb to the top of a ladder, tree or mountain’; ukuqabela, ‘to paint’.

Ladder-like carvings on the Panorama Stone, Rombald’s Moor, opposite St Mary’s Church

In some cup-and-ring designs on Rombald’s Moor, the single groove ‘tail’ becomes a ladder-like image. The interlocking cup-and-rings may be series of levels of the spirit world penetrated by a shaman’s consciousness. These varied and sometimes messy patterns evoke shamanism still evolving, humans repeatedly grappling with deep trance states, plumbing the depths behind and ascending the heights above the rocks, attempting to haul descriptions of their journeys back to the earth.

If this shamanic idea holds water, the dating of the moor’s petroglyphs poses problems for the orthodox study of their significance. Most of the comparable Italian and Scandinavian glyphs are dated to the late Bronze Age or the Iron Age, the latter half of the 1st millennium BCE. Was there a Celtic or proto-Celtic shamanism that continued the traditions of much older cultures? Cup-and-rings appear in Neolithic tombs in Ireland. Paul Bennett, a local researcher who knows the moors here better than anyone I’ve met, believes the Swastika Stone could date to 2000 BCE or earlier—and its complexity suggests that the simpler cup-and-rings are even earlier. People lived on Rombald’s Moor from as early as 7000 BCE, so this is entirely possible.

More perplexing of all is the complex of shamanic associations constellated around Verbeia’s possible etymologies. Possibly language playing tricks, but they’re compelling tricks, evoking the vertical pillar up to the Pole Star… the ascent into the sky vortex, ‘a system viewed as swallowing up or engrossing those who approach it’… the vertebrae of the spine, the vertiginous whirling motion of a fiery climb to the vertex…

Liminality

I approached the Badger Stone once to do a brief ritual. As I neared it, it started to rain. I was reminded of my first visit, but I tried to shift my attention back to the present to focus on my ritual. After I started, I was soon forced back to the present. The rain pelted harder and harder, the wind grew more fierce, and at the peak of the ritual the rain turned into savage hail. It was blowing hard from behind me, hurting my head, and coming in at an almost horizontal angle, creating a tunnel-like effect before me—and an extremely conducive state of mind! I wound down, and the hail returned to rain. I left the site, and the rain stopped.

When the sun rose after I had the ‘shifting sky’ experience, just before it cleared the clouds on the horizon, it started to rain lightly. I jumped up to run for cover, but decided to stay and see the sun up with some chanting. It was beautiful. Glowing sun bursting up, gentle rain, and behind me a magnificent rainbow. I finished chanting, left, and the rain stopped. I kid you not.

Memories of these experiences shouted for attention when I read Ruth Whitehouse’s book on cave-based cults in Neolithic central Italy, Underground Religion. The apparent sacred significance of water in ‘abnormal states’ (stalactites and stalagmites, bubbling or hot water, steam) to these people led her to recognize the importance of ‘liminal’ (marginal, borderline, cross-over) states in their beliefs. Cave mouths, between dark and light… stalagmites, hard water… steam, gaseous water… and ultimately the shaman, between this world and the other, a mediator. For numerous shamanic cultures, the rainbow is a prime liminal phenomenon, produced in the conjunction of sun and rain, fire and water, bridging the gap. Fire and water. Brighid. Verbeia. Why should they preside over such contradictory elements?

Atl-tlachinolli, Aztec hieroglyph for burning water

The Aztecs, according to Laurette Séjourné’s Burning Water, believed that liberated consciousness could only be achieved through an internal bodily battle, a "blossoming war". Victory is attained through the union of opposites; the Aztec "vision of Earth as Paradise is based on the concept of the dynamic harmony between water and fire." Their hieroglyph for the "blossoming war" is called atl-tlachinolli, from atl, ‘water’, and tlachinolli, ‘something that has been burned’. This symbol always accompanies Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent, the Aztecs’ mythic originator. Bird-and-snake figures are frequent in myths across the globe, and probably represent the union of chthonic earthly realms (snake) with the skies above (bird). The Aztec symbol for the union of heaven and earth is the cross, perhaps the most basic possible representation of liminality (cross-over). The quincunx (a cross formed by five points, the four cardinal points and a centre) is "the most frequently occurring sign in the Meso-american symbolic language." The number 5 represents the centre, the point where heaven and earth meet, and the quincunx also symbolizes the heart, "the meeting-place of opposed principles". Curiously, one of their symbols for the Fifth Sun (or Era), the Sun of Movement, the Era of Quetzalcoatl, the unifying "Law of the Centre", is a swastika-like glyph.

Aztec ‘movement’ hieroglpyh from Teotihuatecan

An Aztec qincunx

How all this spiritual cartography relates to human experience is crystallized for me in the Aztec vision of the heart as the centre, where opposites unite. We are impoverished if we can only feel one emotion at a time. All pure emotion, I find, is profoundly ambiguous. Polysemic. Anger and exhilaration, joy and bittersweet sadness, sexual bliss and terror, tender love and fear, weeping at orgasm… ‘Emotions’ are the words and concepts we tack on to the chaotic flows of psycho-biological energy around the body, flows which have no anchors and no true boundaries.

Potent emotion, when cut loose from judgement and prejudice, becomes ecstasy.

References

• T.A.Z. by Hakim Bey
• Foucault edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman
• The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles by Ronald Hutton
• Upper Wharfedale by Harry Speight
• The Language of the Goddess by Marija Gimbutas
• Pagan Celtic Britain by Anne Ross
• The Origins of European Thought by Richard Broxton Onians
• Love’s Body by Norman O. Brown
• The Prehistoric Rock Art of Argyll by Ronald W.B. Morris
• The Rock Pictures of Europe by Herbert Kühn
• One Medium, One Mind by Grant S. McCall
• Shamanism and the Mystery Lines by Paul Devereux
• The Aborigine Tradition by James G. Cowan
• The Goddess of the Stones by George Terence Meaden
• Shamanism by Mircea Eliade
• Burning Water by Laurette Séjourné