CC licensed image by David Shankbone

The phone hacking scandal in the UK is moving quickly. Senior media and police resign, and the storm starts gathering around Downing Street. The immorality of the gutter press is shocking but unsurprising; their illegal dealings with the police is likewise no news to anyone half-awake. The fact that it’s all been aired in public at last, with some genuine repercussions, seems astonishing. What’s happening seems somehow far more important than a general election in terms of shaping the political landscape of this country.

But John Pilger reminds us that a far greater Murdoch scandal remains mostly hidden Down Under:

The most enduring and insidious Murdoch campaign has been against the Aboriginal people, who were dispossessed by the arrival of the British in the late 18th century and have never been allowed to recover. “Nigger hunts” continued into the 1960s and beyond. The officially-inspired theft of children from Aboriginal families, justified by the racist theories of the eugenics movement, produced those known as the Stolen Generation and in 1997 was identified as genocide. Today, the first Australians have the shortest life expectancy of any of the world’s 90 indigenous peoples. Australia imprisons Aborigines at five times the rate South Africa during the apartheid years. In the state of Western Australia, the figure is eight times the apartheid rate.

Political power in Australia often rests in the control of resource-rich land. Most of the uranium, iron ore, gold, oil and natural gas is in Western Australia and Northern Territory—on Aboriginal land. Indeed, Aboriginal “progress” is all but defined by the mining industry and its political guardians in both Labor and coalition (conservative) governments. Their faithful, strident voice is the Murdoch press. The exceptional, reformist Labor government of Gough Whitlam in the 1970s set up a royal commission that made clear that social justice for Australia’s first people would only be achieved with universal land rights and a share the national wealth with dignity. In 1975, Whitlam was sacked by the governor-general in a “constitutional coup”. The Murdoch press had turned on Whitlam with such venom that rebellious journalists on The Australian burned their newspaper in the street. [...]

Using the language of its soulmate the London Sun, the Australian derides the “abstract debate” of “land rights, apologies, treaties” as a “moralizing mumbo-jumbo spreading like a virus”. The aim is to silence those who dare tell Australia’s dirty secret.

Read the full article here.

Naturally I’ll post updates here as publication approaches (early 2012 a good estimate), but I’ve also kicked off a website for the project with a sign-up for a special mailing list dedicated to the book. The book’s title isn’t confirmed, but the site is named with rough aptness ‘Polar Cosmology‘.

So of course I have a background rosy feeling about the guy. But, while I found his recent books Life Inc. and Program or Be Programmed to be well-written, sound advice, none of it comes close to this closing keynote talk he gave at a social media conference. He says:

I got really tired of listening to brand managers talk about their “Twitter strategies,” and by the time my closing keynote came around, it felt like I had watched the corporatization the net recapitulated over the course of the afternoon.

Please watch this if you’ve not come across Douglas’ recent ideas.

You will see I want to be just to the Germans: I would not like to be untrue to myself in this—so I must also tell them what I object to. Coming to power is a costly business: power makes stupid. [...] Deutschland, Deutschland über alles was, I fear, the end of German philosophy.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1888)

One that struck me particularly was my off-the-cuff use very recently of the phrase "open source philosophy". Obviously, posting every day means you think about posting, and writing, a little more than usual, and I’d been homing in on something to describe what I like writing here, and that something turned out to be "open source philosophy". It’s obviously not strictly open source—my ideas here aren’t really presented in a way that’s that closely analagous to the nature of open source software. Like much of my writing, I’m maybe more concerned with the spirit than with the letter here. Including my wrong turns, not being too concerned about revealing various peccadilloes, disclosing (some of) my personal investments and biases… All this hopefully adds up to a flow of thinking that’s a little more accessible than traditional, professional philosophy, where the arguments have been built into daunting edifices through years of mental labour, and much of the gaffer tape and idiosyncratic, less than stable underpinnings in the foundations are hidden behind confidence and rhetorical polish.

Well, shit, that might describe me to some people! There are infinite lessons in relativity… But really, it’s an ideal, not a fully formed reality, and I’ve other concerns that pull in other directions—like sounding cool and convincing everyone that I’m right. It’s also another attempt to define my slippery self—as with my shift in section labelling here from "articles" to "essays"—and a get-out clause.

In any case, a couple of days later I’m checking out Douglas Rushkoff’s site and I see he’s got an interesting-looking recent book out, Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism. And a web project to accompany it: Open Source Judaism.

It’s an inevitability, this conjunction of libertarian concepts of software development and these long-standing human institutions of mind and spirit. It’s just odd, and nice, how first-use and first-encounter like to huddle together in time.

The technical structure of the internet, as we all know, is the prime factor in this wave of enthusiasm for "open source", for transparent collaboration, for harnessing collective intelligence. When I first got my head around building web sites in the late nineties, I was deep into some rather intensive, poetically-inclined etymological research. It’s still all in notebooks and ancient Microsoft Works files somewhere (I think), an enthusiastic amateur rumble through Indo-European languages for associations between words related to the Pole Star, centrality, naval navigation, and cheese-making (don’t ask—yet). At the time I enthused about building an openly collaborative website, dumping it all in there, and getting others with similar strange habits to add their research to the mix.

The idea came up once with Julian Cope, hanging in the Stones restaurant next to Avebury Henge, and he warned me against it. He had a load of etymological speculation—etymosophy he called it—in his then upcoming tome, The Modern Antiquarian, and some of our research had overlapped. I recall his reasoning being that there’s a dissipative effect in just splurging your research on the web mid-stream. I guess it depends on where you want to go with it. There’s also some sound advice on personal creativity there—allowing something to gestate for its proper time before it comes to term.

But there are new ways of generating novelty and connections emerging, not without their pitfalls and ambiguities, but certainly worth exploring. There’s been some interesting buzz recently about the free, radically open online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. A journo in Syracuse, New York, published something a few weeks ago where a librarian was quoted emphasising the lack of trustworthiness of this web resource where anyone can edit nearly anything. Communications boffin Alex Halavais set about testing the responsiveness of the Wikipedia non-system, by seeding a bunch of intentional errors. All thirteen were spotted and corrected by the amorphous collective editing process within a couple of hours. (Though please read this strong caveat before "testing" Wikipedia yourself.)

Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.

Friedrich Nietzsche

This has become such a truism to me that it is rather difficult to take on board this kind of "collective intelligence". (Nietzsche would probably have been horrified at such inflexibility of conception. Or he might have just erupted with misanthropic bile, hitting the table and shouting, "Bollocks! They’re all stupid bastards out there!") But orgs like The Co-Intelligence Institute (via WorldChanging) seem to be the tip of an iceberg that’s been steadily accumulating weight as computer networking has reshaped society and ecological research has revealed and delineated the power of sheer numbers: millions of heads are better than one.

So what about open source religion? It may be an oxymoron whose time has come. If we go back to the likely origins of religion (and much else besides), shamanism, I think even then real "open source" is impractical. The way I see it, even before the Microsofts of the human spirit, the priestly horders of divinity, came along with their coded texts and zealously guarded secrets, powers and privileges, the shaman as the "technician of the sacred", however non-elitist the social structures she was embedded in, had to keep some stuff to herself. I think part of the deal with shamanic healing is the persona of the shaman, the mask of power and knowledge.

Not that this mask or persona implies any lack of real power or knowledge—far from it. These things seem to me to be very sophisticated tools, interfaces between the shaman’s actual power and the social group, that are part of her power to effect healing and transformation. People need to believe they can be healthy again, and this slippery, almost ungraspable shift in mental constructs often needs a bit of trickery to accomplish.

An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life—may be the ultimate Poetic Terrorism. The Poetic Terrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim is not money but CHANGE.

Hakim Bey, ‘Poetic Terrorism‘

Of course Bey isn’t talking about shamanism (or is he?), but the sentiment is the same. The vitality of archaic trickster figures, and their degeneration into our Devil, "the father of lies", speaks volumes about our loss of sensitivity to the ambivalence of both lies and honesty.

So, a shaman, in a professional, socially benevolent capacity, needs to keep some cards close to their chest. But—in case you hadn’t noticed—we don’t live in a tribal society anymore. Previously secret indigenous traditions revealing their wisdom and techniques, due to a perception that our world’s up shit creek and needs any paddles that can be thrown at it, seems to be an increasingly common occurrence (despite the fear and mistrust in indigenous societies that we have dragged into shit creek with us, without a boat, let alone a paddle). The ways of the world ebb and flow, but I don’t think this flow of esoterica into the open is needing to ebb just yet—our problem is almost certainly that it hasn’t flowed enough.

The gates need to be opened, the seals broken. Let’s put our cards on the table.

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.

"Hoka Hey!" exclaims the Sioux warrior riding into battle, "Today is a good day to die." A true warrior dares to do the impossible. She dares death and she respects death, both. A story about Native American warriors puts it this way, "Warriors live with death at their side, and from the knowledge that death is with them, they draw the courage to face anything. The worst that can happen to us is that we have to die, and since that is already our unalterable fate, we are free; those who have lost everything no longer have anything to fear."1

The Path of the Sacred Warrior begins with the awareness that we are mortal beings, that we are going to die. Knowing this, we can see our lives in better perspective. Knowing this, we can act ALWAYS so that we will be able to die centered, beyond fear, at peace with what we have made from the stuff of our lives. The goal is to live our lives well in order to eventually die well, so that what is eternal about us (our Spirit?) will be set free. We must each come to terms with our own personal Deaths. For instance, I like to think that my body is offspring of an act of love between my Spirit and the Elemental world. I like to think that MY death will be a final consummation and bittersweet orgasmic consumption of that love!

The Sacred Warrior walks her path with her Death at her side. And her Death makes Herself available to the Sacred Warrior as an advisor, teacher, and friend. This relationship with her Death calls the Sacred Warrior to be who she truly is, to live her life fully and completely, to use the power-from-within. As Agnes Whistling Elk says in the story Medicine Woman, "You can only be dangerous when you accept your death. Then you become dangerous in spite of anything. You must learn to see the awake ones. A dangerous woman can do anything because she will do anything. A powerful woman is unthinkable because the unthinkable belongs to her. Everything belongs to her, and anything is possible."2

In Native American lore, stories of warriors often reveal a childhood filled with inner turmoil and outward aggressiveness. Baby warriors are keen to explore the world and they don’t want anyone or anything to get in their way. They may fight with their siblings or test the parents mercilessly. Warriors often seem to have come into life with an excess of energy. Their temperaments are fiery; their wills, strong. A young warrior who is thwarted in her physical expression will almost certainly compensate with surplus mental or emotional energy.

The story of the Tewa Cottonwood Warchief, Pohaha, illustrates this theme. Always angry when young, she rebelled when coaxed to do domestic work. Finally, her tribe consented to let her go to battle, where she distinguished herself mightily. After that, it was said, her constant anger disappeared and "she became a good woman."3 Her name, Pohaha, means "wet-between-the-legs-ha-ha" because of her habit of pulling up her dress to taunt her enemies with the fact that she was a woman! Eventually, the great Pohaha was elected "Warchief" by the elders. As War Chief, she would have to lead her people against enemies, protect them from sickness and treat them as her children. She took her charge seriously; and when she died, she left her mask and said it would represent her even if she was dead. "I will be with you all the time," she told her tribe, "The mask is me."4 The Cottonwood people keep her mask, and tell her story, to this day.

A young warrior is hard to control. But once that warrior is trusted with a challenging task, she is on her way to SELF-CONTROL. Native Americans begin the warrior-training with hunting lessons, along with basic wilderness-survival skills. They teach the young huntress a respect for her "prey." They show the young one that to learn from one’s Death (the Ultimate Huntress), one needs to develop humility, patience, and an ability to keep a clear head—or, at least, to clear one’s head, fast! The wilderness-survival training is a good idea for a Sacred Warrior—it gives her a true knowledge of her world, and of her relationship to it. It gives her Nature as her first Opponent. She learns that one cannot "compete" with such a powerful Opponent. Yet she also learns that this Opponent is a mirror to her own heart, and as such deserves respect and, even, love. From this realization, she goes on to learn self-defense and self-reliance.

Obviously, this is a path of courage. Native Americans call their warriors "Braves" for a reason. The more courage one showed, the more honored the warrior! "Braves" (both female and male) who rode into battle did not seek to kill the opposition. It was considered much braver to humiliate ("count coup on") the opposition by getting close enough to simply touch, or to capture the opposition’s ceremonial pipe, war bonnet, shield or bow.5 To kill another warrior was considered a dubious accomplishment. To kill "innocents" was considered cowardly. In ancient days, it is said that great warriors would not attack a camp, but would enter and be welcomed. They would be put up in the "enemy tipi" to rest and be fed. Then all the young warriors of the camp would come to challenge the great warrior, hoping to "count coup" but usually just lucky to hold their own. No doubt they received a few lessons in the holding.

"Capturing" (what we might call "stealing") became one of the greatest warrior feats. Since there was no idea of property, it was more like "reclaiming." This is where the White insult of "Indian-giver" originated. Entities (like horses) or places (like a forest or a plain) could not be "owned" by anyone; therefore they belonged to those who took care of them.

In the modern world, our battles are usually fought in somewhat different arenas. Many writers and re-claimers of Herstory are Sacred Warriors, realizing that "The pen is mightier than the sword". "Say you were a writer and you decided to pick Anaïs Nin as your worthy opponent. You tried to beat her in creativity and ideas. In a sense, you would use her to see yourself. You don’t want her to fail—you would lose your model. What does a medicine person want you to do? They want to give away to you until you have power so that you can become a worthy opponent to another worthy warrior."6 What IS opposition, anyway? This question is central to the Sacred Warrior’s Path. It does NOT involve contempt. It is wasteful to feel contempt for people or other entities. A Native American warrior speaking to a group of White Americans put it this way, "You people have such anger and fear and contempt for your so-called criminals that your crime rate goes up and up. Your society has a high crime rate because it is in a perfect position to receive crime. You should be working WITH these people, not in opposition to them. The idea is to have contempt for crime, not for people. It’s more useful to think of every individual as another YOU—to think of every individual as a representative of the universe. Even the worst criminal in life imprisonment sitting in his cell—the center of him is the same seed, the seed of the whole creation."7

So what is the feeling that the Sacred Warrior cultivates within herself? Detachment is important. "Everyone who wants to follow the warrior’s path has to rid herself of fixation: the compulsion to possess and hold onto things."7 It is easy to see that walking with one’s Death at one’s side can help one remember that "you can’t take it with you." Besides, a fluid warrior needs to be free of burdens, needs to be free to think clearly, and move at a moment’s notice. She also needs to be able to live in the present. In order to cultivate detachment, a warrior develops her sense of humor and a great sense of resourcefulness. These become her shields. She can feel her strong and passionate emotions and then let them pass THROUGH her. She can laugh at herself.

But there is a danger in detachment. A warrior can become so self-reliant that she becomes arrogant and uncompromising. She becomes incapable of compassion. What brings the "sacredness" to the path of the Sacred Warrior is LOVE. To the Sacred Warrior, Love is felt when the heart is open. Great warriors are said to have great hearts, and even the strongest, most skilled, most dangerous warrior becomes Sacred when she puts herself in service (as a Guardian or a Champion) to a child, a needy group, a holy place, a worthy task. MOST of all, the Sacred Warrior is at the service of those who truly require her. She does this not for them, but for herself. Her love and service are free, without attachment or expectation—unconditional. She knows, perhaps more than anyone else, that to truly love is the most dangerous and most daring act a Sacred Warrior can perform. An Apache maiden, Lozen, became a powerful and respected warrior. Expert in riding and roping, she was always able to bring back enemy horses. She was dedicated to helping her people. It is said that once she found herself alone in enemy territory with a young mother and her baby. She spent several gruelling months leading them to safety, when she could have just as easily rode away by herself. As she matured in her compassion, she began to develop the uncanny ability to determine the location of the enemy, and became a welcome voice at tribal strategy meetings.9 Throughout Native American lore, there are many such stories of big-hearted Braves. While they are much admired and honored for their hunting, fighting, and survival skills, they are even more respected and loved for their compassion and kindness.

In the past, Sacred Warriors battled for the protection and survival of their tribes, and for personal satisfaction. This is still true, but in our Age, the definition of "tribe" can vary. The Sacred Warrior who travels on "A path with a heart" must find her own sacred battlefield. The fight may be for justice, or peace, or respect—whether personally or publicly. Many Sacred Warriors fulfil the Native American prophecy of the "Warriors of the Rainbow" that says, "When the Earth is sick and dying, all over the world people will rise up as Warriors of the Rainbow to save the planet."10 This prophecy is furthered by the words of a modern Native American/Eskimo who says, "Great are the tasks ahead, terrifying are the mountains of ignorance and hate and prejudice, but the Warriors of the Rainbow shall rise as on the wings of the eagle to surmount all difficulties. They will be happy to find that there are now millions of people all over the earth ready and eager to rise and join them in conquering all barriers that bar the way to a new and glorious world! We have had enough now of talk. Let there be deeds."11

Footnotes

1. Quote from Don Juan, Yaqui Medicine Man, from The Fire From Within by Carlos Casteneda, 1984, Pocket Books, Simon & Schuster, Inc., NY. [back to text]
2. Agnes Whistling Elk, from Lynn Andrews’ book Medicine Woman, 1981, Harper & Row, NY. [back to text]
3. From the book Daughters of the Earth by Carolyn Niethammer, 1977, MacMillan Publishing Co., NY. [back to text]
4. ibid. [back to text]
5. Indians of North America by Geoffrey Turner, 1977, Blandford Press. [back to text]
6. Agnes Whistling Elk, from Medicine Woman. [back to text]
7. Mad Bear, from Rolling Thunder by Doug Boyd, 1974, Dell Publishing Company. [back to text]
8. La Gorda, quoted from Carlos Casteneda’s book, The Second Ring of Power, 1977, Simon & Schuster, NY. [back to text]
9. Daughters of the Earth, Niethammer. [back to text]
10. Greenpeace literature. [back to text]
11. William Willoya, Warriors of the Rainbow: Strange and Prophetic Dreams of the Indians, 1962, Naturegraph Publishers, P.O. Box 1075, Happy Camp, CA 96039. [back to text]

Shamanism is the subject of intense debate in many arenas at the moment, and here I wish to add my own idiosyncratic views.

First off, we have to remind ourselves of the origins of the word ‘shaman’. It derives from saman, used by the Tungus people of Siberia, which means ‘one who is excited, moved, raised.’ Some think it derives in turn from an archaic Indian word meaning ‘to heat oneself’ or ‘practice austerities’; others think it comes from a Tungus verb meaning ‘to know’ (Walsh 1990: 8). It was adopted—and made into an ‘ism’—by anthropologists and ethnologists to refer to healers in various cultures who seemed to practice their art in similar ways. Mircea Éliade famously defined shamanism as ‘techniques of ecstasy’, highlighting its practical emphasis on entering altered states as a basic modus operandi. For a rule-of-thumb definition of shamanism, I prefer Walsh’s slightly broader attempt:

Shamanism can be defined as a family of traditions whose practitioners focus on voluntarily entering altered states of consciousness in which they experience themselves or their spirit(s), traveling to other realms at will, and interacting with other entities in order to serve the community.

ibid.: 11

This is a good baseline, but as anyone who has studied the matter knows, there are many other elements to some of the traditions in this "family" that, while their occurrence may not be 100% ubiquitous and uniform, are widespread enough to warrant interest. I would say that the main such elements are the three-levelled cosmology, centred on an axis mundi; a focus on nature spirits (plant or animal) as guides or helpers; ritual incorporation of zoomorphic aspects into the shaman’s identity (‘shapeshifting’, whether via costume or transformation of ‘soul-image’ during soul flight); initiation(s) via a breakdown / restructuring process; and so on.

There are too many cross-cultural parallels to document and categorize here, and this is precisely the heart of the debate around shamanism in many disciplines today: Similarity (comparison) vs. Difference (definition).

The Difference viewpoint often stems from a healthy awareness and celebration of human cultural diversity; respect for the idiosyncrasies of individual cultures is seen to be eroded by washing them away in a tide of Similarity. To me, the Difference/Similarity debate (which I’ve polarized hideously here for the purposes of argument) is comparable to the old "The glass is half empty" / "The glass is half full" illustration of the difference between pessimism and optimism. The reality of the glass’ situation is that both views are ‘true’, and they complement each other. So do Difference and Similarity, when seen as two perspectives on the same situation.

The !Kung and Kundalini

For instance, I am very struck by the similarities between descriptions given by the African !Kung San people of their entry into trance states, and the experience sought by Indian tantrikas practising Kundalini yoga. Tantrikas say that the Kundalini Sakti, a feminine ‘serpentine’ life-force lying coiled and dormant at the base of the spine, rises up the spine when aroused, eventually uniting with Siva at the crown chakra (Mookerjee &amp Khanna 1977: 21). The experience is usually one of an "explosion of psychic heat" (ibid.: 193). The !Kung San hold that n/um (usually translated as ‘spiritual energy’ or ‘potency’) is stored in the pit of the stomach or base of the spine. The process of prolonged rhythmic dancing and singing, during their healing rituals, ‘boils’ the n/um, causing it to ascend up the body. The peak of the trance—full visionary consciousness, associated with soul-travel—is attained when the boiling n/um reaches the skull, inducing a state known as !kia (Gyrus 1998).

It would take truly awesome powers of difference-based thought to ignore these parallels! Yet the very similarities between these experiences, mediated via the traditions of entirely different cultures, can be used to highlight the idiosyncrasies of each. For example, the !Kung !kia experience is brought about in a way that is communal and physically frenetic, and !kia itself is directly associated with active travel into visionary realms. Kundalini yoga is often a solo effort, practised by few in society. It does not normally involve much physical movement (except perhaps in sexual yogas), and the peak of the experience is seen to be one of blinding light or perceptual union with the environment. Traditional yoga frowns on the active participation in visionary realms. It is mysticism, not magic. These differences are of interest to the ‘human sciences’, looking at varied cultural responses to similar phenomena in human experience. An analysis of the differences between Kundalini yoga and !Kung trance practices will shed revealing light on the respective cultures they occur in (e.g. yogic non-attachment to, or avoidance of active visionary journeys may be related to the values of India’s socio-religious structures, in contrast to those of the !Kung).

Difference and Similarity are related and complementary; each draws meaning from the other.

First-hand research

The similarities seem to be of more interest to those in the West practically engaged with the ranges of human consciousness—magicians, occultists, psychonauts, whatever you like to call such folk. The manifest parallels between different cultures’ spiritual traditions are of interest to people who are attempting to recover a working relationship with these processes, within a culture which has lost all traditions dealing with such matters. Parallels may be used to try to uncover starting points, some ‘baseline maps’ of possibilities for human interaction with the more esoteric aspects of the body and environment. They may be also used to shed light on spontaneously occurring, often very unsettling experiences that cannot be usefully framed in Western paradigms.

The latter use of cross-cultural comparisons is precisely what has helped me, and many others in our culture, gain perspective on shattering personal experiences. Mine was a very disturbing experience with psychoactive chemicals, where I felt an ‘essential force’ rise up my body and threaten to burst out the top of my skull into a swirling vortex I saw in the sky. I felt like a was dying. Subsequently I learned—much to my relief!—that there are other ‘types’ of dying that are not comprehended by our literal-minded, ecstasy-free culture.

Participatory interest in shamanism is, of course, responsible for much of the term’s abuse. It also holds the key to a more sophisticated and—in the deepest sense of the word—scientific understanding of shamanism.

The abuses of the term in this area a largely to do with our own culture’s lack of ecstatic religious traditions, and with our domination by consumerism. The first leads to a fragile or non-existent ‘ecstatic cultural identity’, hence a tendency to vampirize and distort other cultures. As the magician Phil Hine said in a recent interview, "I think we have to be very careful when we appropriate chunks of living magical traditions, otherwise it’s Western imperialism all over again. The West has take their land, their culture, their dignity, and now we’re coming back for their spiritual beliefs." (Gyrus 1998) The second factor here—consumerism—leads to distortions in popular perceptions of shamanism. The less marketable aspects of shamanism (e.g. torturous initiation rituals, genuine sorcery, a deep concern with death and dissolution) are naturally edged out of popular accounts and workshops sold to middle-class self-discoverers.

What were you on when you wrote that?

As far as the academic community is concerned, there is of course the strong suspicion of ‘less than sober’ modes of experience impinging on research. There has been a perpetual crisis on the fringes of academia since the 1960s around this issue, and it will simply have to come to terms with the full implications of altered states of consciousness (and thus consciousness itself) if it is to have any hope of remaining relevant to genuine human knowledge.

Recently, in British Archaeology, archaeologist Paul Bahn made an oblique attack on the MA course in rock art at the University of Southampton, which is at the forefront of ‘shamanic’ research in this area. He sees such research—and specifically the idea that some rock art motifs may result from visions in altered states—as a "bandwagon . . . largely born of the drug age and the New Age phenomenon…" (Bahn 1998).

Bahn seems to think that those who take on board the shamanic hypothesis are excluding all other interpretative possibilities. In my view, they are merely redressing the balance. Not every study of rock art has to deal with every possibility; people are, by and large, astute enough to blend singular perspectives into the wider picture. And when one hugely important area of interpretation is lacking in the field, there is space for some specific focus on it, to fully drag it into the interpretative spectrum.

Incidentally, the independent researchers I know with extensive experience of psychedelic chemicals have been the first to point out holes in and exceptions to the theory of ‘entoptic’ geometric imagery influencing abstract glyphs in rock art. Actual experience of altered states, far from inducing a blinkered approach to theories about them, often leads to the most sophisticated approach (it’s called knowing what you’re talking about!).

The fact is that Bahn is perceiving more ‘shamanism obsessed’ research around him than there actually is (though he’d have a field-day with this article!). His accusations of projection and obsession merely reveal his own obsession with denouncing a new area of research. It is plain from his comment quoted above where the roots of his obsession lay: in the same soil that nourishes tabloid anti-drug hysteria, and the Thatcherite-Reaganite view that "it all went wrong in the sixties".

The Invisible College

He is right to be cynical about the ‘New Age’, but for the wrong reasons. In the eyes of someone like Bahn, the most intelligent, erudite and responsible modern student of psychedelic shamanism, totally unconcerned with the ‘New Age’, would fall into the same category as the flakiest, vaguest, fad-driven hippy. Naturally, people with little experience of Western subcultures end up not seeing past the images of drug culture, paganism and occultism that break through into the mainstream media. The Bahns of this world pose no threat at all to the ‘unseen’ (i.e. unmediated) explorers in this area—they will carry on regardless of popular perceptions. Indeed, their cultural ‘invisibility’ is in a way the core of their strength, as their research remains uncontaminated by mass-mediation, consumerism, and the vested interests of professional research. But the more conservative elements of academia do stand in the way of fruitful cross-fertilization between the cutting edge of academic research into shamanism / altered states and participatory research into these areas. In other words, they block the development of an integrated approach to the exploration of first-hand spirituality, past and present.

Of course, it is only academia that can lose. As I said before, those of us who are personally (and not necessarily professionally) committed to rediscovering ‘hands-on’ religion will carry on regardless. And the barriers that stop academics from reaping the benefits of ‘knowing what you’re talking about’ are not there to stop occultists, pagans and users of psychedelics from drawing on academic research for a more balanced, integrated approach.

The Vortex

The Strid gorge, West Yorkshire

Near Bolton Abbey in West Yorkshire is a section of the River Wharfe called the Strid, where the current narrows down between rocks to form a foaming torrent. Folklore collected in late nineteenth century tells of a certain shadowy beast, known as a ‘water kelpie’, which may appear here (Bogg 1904a: 189).

This water fiend generally presented itself to the belated traveller in the shape of an old shaggy-haired pony near to some well-known crossing place on the bank of a river. But woe to the traveller who, to escape the discomfort of getting a wetting, unsuspiciously mounted the supposed steed! It instantly sprang with a wild shriek of laughter into the deepest whirlpool, without giving its human victim any chance of dismounting.

Bogg 1904b: 348

Cup-and-ring carvings on the Panorama Stone, Ilkley Moor

When I first read this passage, its ‘shamanic’ resonances immediately leaped out at me. I was well aware of the reasons why. Firstly, my experience of nearly being sucked into a vortex in the sky—which I had subsequently gained perspective on through researching shamanic experiences—had led to a deep awareness of the association of vortex-like images with entry into otherworlds. The whirlpool is a good example of a naturally occurring vortex, and my research into shamanism had made me aware that shamans often use bodies of water as ‘entrances’ (see Halifax 1979: 61 for a !Kung example).

(Incidentally, I had come to see the possibility that cup-and-ring motifs may be associated with this phenomenon about nine months before I learnt that respectable academics were also considering this—see Bradley 1997: 54.)

Secondly, many years ago I had a dream in which I saw a brown horse pierced by a spear and fall to the ground. Then I was astride a winged white horse, flying up across the sea into the sky. Six months later I read Mircea Éliade’s Shamanism for the first time, and was amazed to learn of a Siberian shamanic rites in which a horse is slain so that the shaman may enter the otherworld and use the horse’s departed soul as a steed in that realm.

More recently, I had been sent an article by Angelo Fossati dealing with Iron Age petroglyphs in Valcamonica, Italy (Fossati 1994). He discusses a depiction of a ‘labyrinth’, incorporating three human figures and a bird (below), relates examples in early European mythology of birds acting as guides for those entering the otherworld, and then details how the horse superseded the bird as the main guide of this type in European myth.

These elements—the vortex-entrance, the horse as a ride/guide to the realms beyond it—resonated strongly for me with this little folktale of West Yorkshire. We may also note the liminal location of the water kelpie’s appearance.

Does this mean I see it as a ‘genuine’ linear descendent of classical shamanic practices in the area? About as much as I take my various dreams and experiences as evidence for me being a shaman! I am interested here in what is usually known as the ‘psychology’ of myth. Psychologically speaking, I see the nature of this Yorkshire water kelpie as emanating from the same regions of human consciousness that are the focus of shamanic exploration. If nothing resembling the classical definition of ‘shamanism’ ever existed in Wharfedale (which I find hard to assert as an absolute statement), the origin of the water kelpie would be ascribed to local ‘imagination’. Imagination was, in this case, probably put in the service of cautioning people, especially children, about the very physical dangers of this part of the Wharfe. But it is precisely this region—the human imagination—that is consciously entered, and explored in a spatially manifest form (‘the otherworld’) by the shaman. And the imagination / otherworld is ultimately non-local in nature.

Who’s in control?

We can see a failure to understand the common underlying source of mythical and cultural artefacts in the rock art and shamanism controversy. Much of the debate centres around whether or not this or that motif was directly inspired by geometric hallucinations. But even if a certain motif was just ‘imagined’, and associated with things more mundane than altered states, it would still, by definition, owe its creation to the human imagination. Problems arise when we try to pinpoint the exact way in which a motif emerged from this pregnant realm—was it hauled out, or did it fall out?

Here we reach the key distinction between ‘shamanic’ and ‘non-shamanic’ motifs, in both art and myth: the former are voluntarily encountered and actively related to. The latter ‘bubble up’ into consciousness of their own accord, but frequently still resemble shamanic motifs in form, if not in the way humans relate to them. The water kelpie is an entity that is, according to the tale, ‘misinterpreted’ as a real animal, and seems to possess a slightly demonic, malevolent nature. To me, this demonstrates a manifestation of a common shamanic phenomenon that

1. is initially taken to be ‘real’ because it is not encountered voluntarily, with awareness, and
2. seems to be beyond control and malevolent because, again, it is not approached with conscious intention.

Again, it matters little to the ‘psychological’ view whether anyone ever "actually" encountered a water kelpie, voluntarily or otherwise, or whether the beast is a simple ‘nursery bogie’ used to warn children of the river’s physical dangers. The form of the tale, even if it never ventured outside the human brain (which seems unlikely), still reveals the way in which shamanism can reflect the mind’s methods of organizing imaginative / mythical reality.

The voluntary nature of shamanic activity is stressed to distinguish it from mere mental breakdown. And indeed, modern magic also stresses that ‘intention is the key’. But, as any shrewd anthropologist or practising magician knows, human brushes with the otherworld are a little more complex. It appears to me, from my research into traditional shamanism, that intention and control are often factors that only come to the fore during and after shamanic training, or formalized rituals. A shaman’s initiation is frequently terrifyingly out of control. The otherworld initially bursts into the human world, not vice versa. The experience is only directed away from the anchorless processes of schizophrenia by cultural convention and recognition of shamanic potentiality, ripe for training.

And I find it hard to believe that all shamans reach a point of total ‘control’ over their universe. They may stress their personal power as part of their method, or to induce faith in the people they heal, but I like to bear in mind the words of Huichol shaman Don José Matsúwa:

The shaman’s path is unending. I am an old, old man and still a nunutsi [baby] standing before the mystery of the world.

Schultes & Hofmann 1992: 138

Modern magicians are also coming to recognise the limits of control over the world:

Magick is defined as: causing change to occur in conformity with will, expanding your achievable reality, the pursuit of power, and so on. All these definitions presuppose control as the central theme in magick. This is all fine and good, but it illustrates that magick cannot address issues outside of the sphere of control. These are issues that are usually chunked up into mysticism . . . This is a mistake, because half of our quality of experience is dependent on our ability to let go, stop worrying, stop controlling and enjoy. . . . Therefore, magick can be seen as the pursuit of power, via the dynamic tension between ecstasy and control.

Lee 1997: 13-15

I strongly suspect that most shamans would concur with such a view, if we get behind their professional bravado, and the cultural differences in our ways of mediating power, ecstasy and control.

We can see the control/ecstasy polarity in our comparison between !Kung trances and Kundalini yoga. The first is seen as ‘shamanic/magical’, the second as ‘mystical’. This is a useful distinction on one level; but does it mean that !Kung medicine men never experience the free-flow ecstasy of the Indian Tantrika? I feel it merely means that !Kung social structure, incorporating fully communal, actively shamanic ceremonies, allows the experience of ‘uncontrolled’ ecstasy to be subtly blended into the very fabric of their shamanic experiences. It is not compartmentalized and placed on a pedestal, as in much ‘mysticism’. As Lee says, "Control is the basis of magickal structures, defining one’s will in a given situation, but without ecstasy it doesn’t go. Without a tank full of gnosis, the magickal vehicle will not run." (ibid.: 14)

So, the issue of control in shamanism is not as clear-cut as academic accounts imply. In contemporary society, we know from the testimony of many individuals (and I know from personal experience) that involuntary experiences of the otherworld do not necessarily lead to mental illness, as definitions of shamanism often presume. Whatever ontological validity you ascribe to reports of ‘abduction by aliens’, they are clearly as real to many of the people who experience them as a traditional shaman’s journeys are to him or her. And again, they derive from the same regions of consciousness.

Patrick Harpur (1994) has made convincing comparisons between tribal puberty initiations, spontaneous shamanic initiation in the otherworld, and modern accounts of ‘UFO abductions’. These frequently share a similar structure:

• isolation from community/’reality’;
• the infliction of pain and possibly bodily mutilation;
• the transmission of esoteric knowledge to the initiate, shaman or ‘abductee’;
• and return to a world that is never quite the same again!

‘Abductees’ often have no knowledge of shamanism, and no history of ‘mental illness’. Yet the parallels are astounding.

I once interviewed a woman (Gyrus 1995) who described her experience of smoking the potent hallucinogen dimethyltryptamine (used by many indigenous shamans in various organic forms). She was "grabbed" out of her initial experiences on the trip by an unseen force, and "landed in this dimension, and I wasn’t free, I wasn’t able to control where I went." Conveyed into the middle of a "grid-like structure", she was then reassured by an unmanifest "male entity". Told that she would find the following events frightening, but also that it would all be good for her, she proceeded to have each limb, one by one, ripped off and replaced. While each limb was off, "all this stuff ran out… I felt all my troubles, my aches and pains, my paranoias, come out." Then she "felt this mad feeling again, going up through my little toe, and it crawled all the way up my leg, and up through my body, and it felt like when it hit my heart, there was a massive explosion . . . I’ve just never felt so amazing in my life. It felt like a complete cleansing process." Needless to say, she felt healthier, happier, and more psychically potent than ever for months to come! I asked her later if she had read anything about shamanism before this experience, and she hadn’t; it was only afterwards that she encountered anthropological literature on the subject, which helped her understand her trip. Evidently there’s something unprecedented and very interesting going on here, something touching deep levels of human consciousness.

The inter-disciplinary parallels I’ve drawn here are obviously just the tip of the iceberg. For those committed to the rigorous slicing-up of life for the purposes of a professional career in gaining and dispensing knowledge, the weight of these parallels are a cumbersome burden; hence they are rarely even picked up. Those interested in all aspects of human experience need to be careful when confronted with such parallels, as they can lead into an interminable maze of intellectual associations. The way out of this maze is to discover the paradoxically idiosyncratic and universal nature of direct spiritual experience. Through this we can see, first-hand (scientifically), just how Difference and Similarity gain there meaning from each other.

We always need to remember what ‘shamanism’ really is. It is a modern Western conceptual construct, developed out of comparative anthropology. In our discussions, we shouldn’t forget that we define it, and are therefore at liberty to redefine it to suit the purposes of whatever form of research we are undertaking. Surviving indigenous ‘shamanic’ traditions will continue interacting with spirits in their own ways, whatever arguments transpire in academia about how a certain Siberian word may apply to them; modern magicians (and unsuspecting non-magicians) will do likewise.

Look again at Walsh’s definition of shamanism. In that form, it could easily apply to newly emerging traditions in Western society (with possible complexities around the definition of ‘serving the community’—we have no unified ‘community’, so this definition will, for us, always be subject to mutation and debate). Also, note that Éliade’s definition of shamanism can lead to the misleading idea that most young people in Britain are involved in this tradition every Friday night!

Very few modern magicians define themselves as ‘shamans’, simply because they are acutely aware of the historical and socio-cultural background to the term. However, they know that there is some inner congruence between their own activities and those of shamans throughout the ages, as there is between shamanic motifs and an amazing variety of human mythical constructs.

As a rough rule of thumb, I see the following distinctions in terminology:

shaman

A specific term that can only be validly applied to individuals within indigenous traditions.

shamanism

A Western construct used to reflect the astounding parallels between such traditions across the globe, and presumably throughout history.

shamanic

An adjective that may be used to draw attention to elements of myth, folklore, art, and hypothesized or actual spiritual activity that can be associated with motifs found in shamanism.

Emphasis on diversity must not become a new monolithic creed in our awareness of ourselves. I feel it must be balanced against the somewhat unfashionable idea of a unity underlying human consciousness. The ‘bathwater’ in this idea is its rigidity, its lack of feel for multiplicity; the ‘baby’ is our common human axis mundi. Let’s not throw out our own centre.

References

• Bahn, P., 1998. ‘Stumbling in the footsteps of St Thomas’, British Archaeology no. 31, p. 18.
• Bogg, E., 1904a, Higher Wharfedale, Petty & Sons.
• — 1904b, Lower Wharfedale, James Miles.
• Bradley, R., 1997, Rock Art and the Prehistory of Atlantic Europe, Routledge.
• Éliade, M., 1989, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Arkana.
• Fossati, A., 1994, ‘L’acqua, le armi el gli uccelli nell’arte rupestre camuna dell’età del Ferro’, Notizie Archeologiche Bergomensi no. 2, pp. 203-216
• Gyrus, 1995, ‘Amy’s DMT Trip’
• — 1998, ‘The San & the Eland’, Towards 2012: part 4, The Unlimited Dream Company.
• — 1998, ‘An Interview with Phil Hine’, Towards 2012: part 4, The Unlimited Dream Company.
• Halifax, J., 1979, Shamanic Voices: the Shaman as Seer, Poet and Healer, Penguin.
• Harpur, P., 1994, Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld, Viking.
• Lee, D., 1997, Chaotopia! Magick & Ecstasy in the PandaemonAeon, Attractor.
• Mookerjee, A. & Khanna, M., 1977. The Tantric Way, Thames and Hudson.
• Schultes, R.E. & Hofmann, A., 1992, Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing and Hallucinogenic Powers, Healing Arts Press.
• Walsh, R.N., 1990. The Spirit of Shamanism, Mandala.