Palaeontologists in a vast desert. Large crested ridges of ancient red sand and rock formations… They remove the top layers, and reveal the skeleton of a giant snake beneath. No thicker than a man’s torso, but miles and miles long… stretching along the crest of the ridge… Sections of the remains are exposed intermittently

That was a dream I had once. It had an electric thrill about it, as if even the skeleton of this fantastic beast enlivened the dream landscape with seething energy.

I felt a surge of that reading a report about Titanoboa cerrejonesis, the name given to the recently discovered skeleton of the biggest snake known to have lived. From the steaming tropics of 60 million years ago, this beast was at least 13 meters long, “longer than a city bus … and heavier than a car”.

Link via Reality Sandwich. Creative Commons licensed photo by Doc Searls.

by Chris Knight

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

Leon Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Background to Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Human Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Predictions of Sex-Strike Theory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Origins of the Sacred

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

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

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

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

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

Myths and Fairy Tales

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: The World’s First Picket-Line

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Gyrus

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

Psychic TV, ‘Firewoman’

At first it was just the stones.

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

Some cup-and-ring carvings from Westhorton, Northumberland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Linear historical time

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

Linear eschatological time

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

Cyclical time

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

Cyclical eschatological time

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

Real time

No such thing!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Verbeia

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

The Mavilly goddess

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

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

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

Spring

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

Fire

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

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

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

The Cow and Calf rocks, Ilkley Moor

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

Milk

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

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

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

Water

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

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

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

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

Marija Gimbutas

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

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

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

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

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

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

Procreation

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

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

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

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

Vertex

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

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

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

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

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

Shamanism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mircea Éliade

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

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

The Swastika Stone carving, Ilkley Moor

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

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

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

A Norse fylfot from the Isle of Man

The Three Legs of Man

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

Bridget’s Cross

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liminality

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

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

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

Atl-tlachinolli, Aztec hieroglyph for burning water

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

Aztec ‘movement’ hieroglpyh from Teotihuatecan

An Aztec qincunx

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

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

References

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

by Gyrus

That which an age feels to be evil is usually an untimely after-echo of that which was formerly felt to be good—the atavism of an older ideal.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The following writings began as a short article written in reaction to numerous interviews I had read with ‘Satanic’ or ‘black metal’ bands (in Esoterra magazine). I got very tired of their knee-jerk social Darwinism, their philosophy of “the strong over the weak”. Metal bands will never be the best exponents of any philosophy, and Satanism shouldn’t be judged according to their interviews. Nevertheless, their simplistic view of nature’s laws (which in any case should be seen as nature’s habits) encapsulate many quibbles I have with the social Darwinist shades of Satanism, and occultism in general. There are a lot of much more enlightened strains of the ‘left-hand path’, as these writings will hint at. These strains usually attempt to transcend the left/right dualism of occult morality, a false dichotomy where self-interest and concern for others are seen to be mutually exclusive.

While I’m not a Satanist, not even strictly a practising occultist, occultural philosophies have a deep influence on my world-view and life. I read widely on these subjects, and though I love toying with ideas, maps and models for intellectual amusement, I find that I’m with Nietzsche when he says, "I do not know what purely intellectual problems are." So what began as a somewhat playful little jab at the shaky foundations of social Darwinism gradually evolved into an outpouring of the visions and intuitions that my recent experiences, research and reflection have led me to. It’s an exorcism of sorts, an attempt to externalize the insights, feelings and perceptions that I often find flooding into me, seemingly unbidden, but later seen to be exactly what I needed to shift my world-view out of a stale or narrow perspective. I find it’s only through externalizing these cascades of insight that I can make room for more to arrive.

My research is not strictly ‘scholarly’. Dreams, drugs, sex, conversations with truckers who give me lifts, synchronicity-laden trails that lead me to books I wouldn’t usually notice, trashy movies, walks in the countryside, emotional breakdowns, lazy days, playing with kids… all these play a more significant role in the evolution of my ideas than the traditional academic activities of ‘thinking’ and ‘reading’. And, when I really look at it, I can’t imagine that this is anything new. Life isn’t cut into categories in the way that the division of academia into different disciplines pretends it is. Everything influences everything else, and I think what I’m doing is just consciously recognizing this… and then writing.

That said, some of the material here is quite ‘dense’, laden with associations which might come to me, immersed as I am in it all, without much effort, but which may ask a lot more of the reader than passive word-by-word consumption. As far as this sort of writing goes, I try to tread a precarious path between making myself clear and passionately wanting to be a ‘sounding board’. I want to leave gaps, be oblique, allow space for the reader to enter into my thoughts, fuse with them to an extent, and come away with more than ‘information’. I’m not in the business of handing people complete, air-tight systems of ideas on a plate. I don’t think you can show something to someone that they haven’t already seen; but I know from my own experience that we’ve all seen a lot more than we often pretend. I want to try to help people remember this. Also, the nature of the areas dealt with here means that words can never present a view of them that is even close to being ‘complete’. All they can do is suggest, trigger, and point. Exactly what they will suggest, trigger off or point to will depend on who you are and where you are. Ideally, you’ll take more of yourself away from this than you will of me.

Many of the ideas here utterly contradict beliefs I held two years ago. I don’t doubt that two years from now I’ll be off somewhere else. As Alan Watts said, "I am not one who believes that it is any necessary virtue in the philosopher to spend his life defending a consistent position. It is surely a kind of spiritual pride to refrain from ‘thinking out loud’, and to be unwilling to let a thesis appear in print until you are prepared to champion it to the death." This doesn’t mean I don’t want people to criticize this writing. Yes, these are my present opinions, but they will change—and I only got here by having my opinions challenged, as well as ‘confirmed’ by experiences and other people. I never want this process to stop.

There are several different, but subtly related parts to these writings. I call them "meditations" because although there are clear conceptual threads weaving throughout the different sections, there is no attempt at a coherent ‘argument’. Parts of it relate to and reflect off others parts in ways I never anticipated; no doubt many of the intended resonances will fall flat. As I said before, language, being linear, just can’t accurately describe the ideas and modes of experience I’m dealing with. All I can do is spin words, my own and the sampled words of others, around these things, revealing a fragment here, a fragment there, but still leaving mere fragments. Each trying to describe the same underlying thing, each reflecting a different part of it, in the hope that a multitude of linear perspectives can come closer to representing this non-linear vision.

Firstly, there are some arguments about the philosophical underpinnings of what has come to be known as Satanism in modern occulture. This section, being the original seed-article, could stand on its own, but hopefully the reader will soon see its intimate relevance to the other meditations as they’re unravelled. Then, taking its cue from the ubiquitous urge to uncover spiritual fertility buried beneath centuries of Christian domination, there is a speculative look at the genesis of the Devil—and what lies beyond.

The Devil & The Tao

As far as the philosophical underpinnings of Satanism go, one of the best places to start is with Friedrich Nietzsche. While he had nothing (consciously) to do with Satanism, his work is frequently cited by Satanists and modern occultists, and I think more than a few Satanists see themselves as ‘Nietzschean’.

It has to be said before setting off that Nietzsche was acutely, probably painfully aware of how his ideas may be misinterpreted. He loathed the idea that people, "like plundering troops", may pick and choose titbits from his books to use for their own purposes, disregarding material contrary to their own agendas. The racist misinterpretations (far too weak a word!) of the German Nazi party are the most blatant case in point. That said, I disagree with some of his work. In the end Nietzsche was no ‘system-builder’—he erected no edifice that must be accepted entirely or fall to the ground. He was an experimentalist, and perpetually played with and revised ideas. It is in this spirit that I read Nietzsche; and here I’m looking at him with an eye to reveal a few misinterpretations less obvious than those of the half-witted anti-Semites. No doubt I’ll end up guilty of a bit of plundering myself, but I prefer judicious plunder to wilful misunderstanding.

Darwinism is the central concept to deal with. It amuses me to see ‘black metal’ bands asked in interviews if they believe in the (supposedly ‘Nietzschean’) philosophy of "the strong over the weak", "survival of the fittest"—as if this would provoke some new and interesting response! We’re talking social Darwinism here of course, but let’s look first at the biological argument.

Darwinian evolutionary theory often seems too obvious to bother arguing with, but this is precisely my problem with it. It’s too bloody obvious. The nail was whacked on the head for me when I read Arthur Koestler’s Janus: A Summing Up. Here he quotes C.H. Waddington, a critical neo-Darwinian:

Survival does not, of course, mean the bodily endurance of a single individual, outliving Methuselah. It implies, in its present-day interpretation [1957], perpetuation as a source for future generations. That individual ‘survives’ best which leaves most offspring. Again, to speak of an animal as ‘fittest’ does not necessarily imply that it is strongest or most healthy or would win a beauty competition. Essentially it denotes nothing more than leaving most offspring. The general principle of natural selection, in fact, merely amounts to the statement that the individuals which leave most offspring are those which leave most offspring. It is a tautology.

Further, Ludwig von Bertalanffy acutely observes that "It is hard to see why evolution has ever progressed beyond the rabbit, the herring, or even the bacterium which are unsurpassed in their reproductive capacities."

The so-called rationalism of modern—usually ‘socially Darwinian’—Satanism rests on very dodgy philosophical ground, simply because when you bother to try and define the terms used in the idea of "the strong over the weak", you’re invariably left with a sense of, "Yeah, and…?" It’s like saying you believe in the philosophy of "winners beating the losers". Jello Biafra nicely undermined knee-jerk social Darwinism with his quip that "the strong prey on the weak, and the clever prey on the strong"; but in the end this just begs the question. Also, orthodox Darwinism inevitably holds that humanity is the latest in life’s progressively ‘better’ attempts at creating organisms. Surely social Darwinism would hold a similar view about contemporary culture? This doesn’t sit too well with the misanthropy, and contempt for the ‘lowering of standards’ in modern society, that is prevalent among many supposed social Darwinists. If the strong really do overpower the weak, why have we been dominated for so long by such a half-assed religion as Christianity? I think many Satanists, in claiming "strong over the weak" to be a universal principle of nature, are actually trying to say, "I’m harder than you and I could have you easily." Or at least, "I could out-stare you, mate." That’s another argument. But as for universal principles—forget it. Evolution and history are far too complex and multi-dimensional to limit themselves to the strategies of a fight in a pub.

Nietzsche was definitely not a Darwinist, and had no faith in "survival of the fittest" as an ‘explanation’. For him, his conception of the "will to power" was the driving force behind all life. It is essentially a conception of creativity, and has far more to do with creative self-mastery than power over others. Nietzsche’s notion that creation must be destructive ("Who wishes to be creative, must first destroy and smash accepted values.") is often seen in limited terms. This is only the first step. The second step, often left out, is that the new creation itself must again be destroyed. And the steps go on… Zarathustra is quite explicit on this: "And life itself told me this secret: ‘Behold,’ it said, ‘I am that which must overcome itself again and again…’" The famous ‘Superman’ isn’t a concept of some inevitable evolutionary goal toward which humanity is inexorably moving (i.e. it’s not Darwinian). It’s a vision of an ideal state of being, of perfect self-mastery and perpetual re-creation, which Nietzsche believed some humans—Socrates and Goethe for example—had already, to an extent, achieved. Together with his doctrine of eternal recurrence, it’s a glorification of the moment, of total involvement in the turbulent flow of immediate experience. "Not to wish to see too soon.— As long as one lives through an experience, one must surrender to the experience and shut one’s eyes instead of becoming an observer immediately. For that would disturb the good digestion of the experience: instead of wisdom one would acquire indigestion." (The Wanderer and His Shadow)

Comparison with Taoism is illuminating. While our cultural filters place Taoism in some ‘soft’ category, and see Nietzschean values as being essentially ‘hard’, the distinction blurs when you consider the supra-cultural state to which both aspire. Nietzsche used the word ‘hard’ many times in describing ideals, as in "all creators are hard." (Twilight of the Idols) But I don’t think we can just accept this word unquestioningly. Its modern connotations evoke more of a mindless thug than a vibrant Superman. Words are subject to mutation; but even if the words themselves remain the same, their meaning is always mutating, for words are "pockets into which now this and now that has been put, and now many things at once." (The Wanderer and His Shadow)

Before considering Taoism, I’d like to follow a little tangent about Nietzsche’s ‘hardness’. I always thought of Nietzsche (before actually reading him) as some grim Teutonic beast. He was actually vehemently opposed to the Germanic temperament, which he considered mediocre (when in a good mood). He repeatedly praised the southern European disposition, that of light-heartedness, exuberance and cheerfulness. A far cry from the fashionably serious and dreary poses of many modern ‘Nietzscheans’. A key influence on this popular misconception of Nietzsche is probably that famous portrait—the furrowed brow, the dark gaze, the amazingly bushy moustache. It doesn’t do much for his philosophy of light-heartedness. I was tempted to just put this image, of a very stern and worried-looking guy, down to his frequent bouts of illness. I recently found out that I was more justified in this temptation than I guessed. Nietzsche never grew such a moustache. These amounts of hair appeared on his upper lip only during his last ten years of life, during which he was helplessly insane. He was unable to care for himself, and this responsibility fell to his sister, who allowed the ‘tache to flourish and brought people in to do portraits. Poor Freddy had no choice. This picture of an intense mad-eyed walrus is probably not how Nietzsche would have liked to have been remembered! His sister, who managed to distort his work as well as his image, has a lot to answer for.

To return to Taoism… The Tao, usually translated as "way", is seen as that force which underpins, interpenetrates, and flows through the universe. Actually, "flows through" is misleading, as it conjures up images of ‘things’ as vessels through which the Tao passes. Taoism admits of no such duality. And the Tao’s primary characteristic is that it cannot be defined. A definition of it, such as "the process of the universe", may loosen our categories a bit in order to contemplate it, but categories ultimately have to be destroyed if that process is to be fully apprehended. I think Nietzsche was too suspicious or ignorant of ‘mysticism’ to fully admit it, but I suspect any Superhuman state would involve a similar destruction—or transcendence—of categories.

So what is this process, or Tao, that we’re trying to apprehend? In Nietzsche’s words, it is "that which must overcome itself again and again". Nietzsche’s conception of embracing this, of fully participating in the process of life, is shot through with an distinct emphasis on struggle—assertion, strife and conflict. Regarding modern occultural misinterpretations again, it is primarily in this sense that he intended his many references to war. Being anti-state and anti-political, Nietzsche in no way ‘advocated’ bloody economic and territorial battles between nations. He didn’t ‘condemn’ them either. Nietzsche was neither liberal nor fascist. He largely used the word "war" in the sense of resolutely striving for self-mastery without shrinking from—rather, embracing—the inevitable conflicts this quest entails. "I will not cease from Mental fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand…" (William Blake, Milton)

Reconciling this relentless struggle, which is obviously part of the path to self-perfection, with the supposed passive quiescence of Taoism, is itself an ongoing process. Of course, it’s ultimately a false dichotomy, and Christopher S. Hyatt seems to have summed it up best in his book The Tree of Lies:

The concept of surrender has become so distorted that many believe that "surrendering" is in opposition to power, sex and self mastery. This is one of the greatest lies. . . . self mastery is not possible without surrender. This issue cannot be overemphasized. Magic and Mysticism—The Will To Self Mastery and The Will To Surrender—are two sides of the same coin. . . . when power or love are taken to their extreme they become one.

The Tao is a struggle of perpetual self-overcoming—again and again. But as Alan Watts ceaselessly points out, it is a struggle devoid of ‘anxiety loops’. In fully surrendering to the flow of life, one surrenders one’s resistance to the rolling process of destruction and creation, ‘war’ and ‘peace’, that true life constitutes. Passivity is often part of this resistance, as much as frenetic anxiety can be.

Satanism and Taoism are alike in that they are both deeply concerned with the hard/soft, strong/weak distinctions. Satanism seems to emphasize and value ‘strength’, while Taoism seems to emphasize and value ‘weakness’. I feel that both may learn from each other. Taoists who have made the clichéd image of the quiescent oriental sage their behavioural ideal would do well to meditate on the Tao at work in an ocean whipped up by a tumultuous thunderstorm, and see how close to ‘nature’ they really are. Hardened Satanists, intent on fortifying their unbending will, would do equally well to take a sword to a piece of solid wood, and then to a pond. The wood will splinter and be destroyed. The pond will passively accept the blade, and effortlessly flow back to perfection once it is withdrawn.

I was made with a heart of stone / To be broken with one hard blow / I’ve seen the ocean break on the shore / Come together with no harm done

Perry Farrell, ‘Oceansize’

Satan’s Ancestry

Those who point the finger at Satan, reveal Satan. Those who fight Satan, give him power. Those who blame Satan, give him influence. Those who talk much of Satan, create him.

But those who worship Satan, tame Satan. Those who passively resist him, earn his respect. Those who accept him, diminish his influence.

And those who analyse him, learn his wisdom.

Lionel B. Snell, ‘The Satan Game’

The Christian devil, Satan, is an archetype. Whether one sees archetypes as creations of the human mind, genetically-rooted universal ‘templates’ of conscious experience, or fully independent spiritual entities, is irrelevant here. Even if archetypes are seen to be autonomous ‘beings’—gods, goddesses, demons or spirits—they are inevitably experienced by means of our own bodies and minds. Our experience of them is filtered through whatever biological, cultural and psychological structures we happen to find ourselves equipped with to make sense of the world. Thus, if we’re talking about the realms of human experience (and what else can we talk about in a useful way?), Satan may be seen to have a history, a mythical family line of descent. Certain universal facts of life, such as the processes of sex, birth & death, will be ever-present in most mythical figures; but the specific figures themselves evolve throughout human history to mirror the complex cultural interactions and upheavals that have ceaselessly manifested since the first time apes developed language, culture and myth—and became human.

In this speculative Satanic genealogy we shall obviously work backwards, climbing down from contemporary branches, down the trunk, and under the ground where the roots lay hidden. So to begin with, how is Satan conceived in contemporary culture?

Modern Christianity has lost much of the medieval iconographic vividness in its conception of Satan, as it is supposedly more ‘sophisticated’, and not given to simplistic anthropomorphisms (i.e. Satan as a reptilian, horned, cunning and wily beast-man dwelling ‘down there’ in his burning lair). The most significant manifestation of modern Christians’ concern with their Devil is in the phenomenon known as the ‘Satanic Abuse Myth’. ‘Satanic Abuse’, because the phenomenon centres around the conviction that the Western world is infested with invisible networks of evil Satanists, who ritually abuse and bloodily sacrifice people—usually children—in the service of their Dark Lord. ‘Myth’, because this conviction has uniformly been found, by government-commissioned investigations and independent researchers alike, to be false. Certain cases of abuse have been found where the perpetrators used the paraphernalia of occultism to terrify their victims into submission and silence. But not one case of genuine Satanists, occultists, or pagans harming children for the purposes of magickal ritual has ever been found. So we can see that these obscene Christian fantasies of blood-soaked orgies and child sacrifice are merely the modern version of the medieval equivalents, the witch-hunts (or of the Roman equivalent, where early Christians were accused of similar crimes…). The vividness of these modern scapegoating fantasies seems to have made the mythical figure of Satan himself less necessary. Who needs an image of a subterranean Devil on which to project your repressed fears and desires when you can conjure up such horrifying scenes of ‘actual’ human activity?

Often at the forefront of the cultural panic around Satanism was the self-styled leader of California’s Church of Satan, Anton Szandor LaVey. He seemed amused as well as indignant about the latest bouts of witch-hunt scaremongering. He knew as well as any open-minded observer that more children have suffered abuse and molestation at the hands of trusted Christian priests than have even heard of the Church of Satan. And his codes of Satanic practice are there for all to read: "Do not harm little children. Do not kill non-human animals unless attacked or for your food." (from ‘The Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth’)

But for Satanists as well as Christians the actual mythical image of the Devil has become less central. LaVey states that Satan is "a representational concept, accepted by each according to his or her needs." This seems mightily hazy without LaVey’s repeated reminders that ‘Satan’ roughly translates from Hebrew as ‘adversary’ or ‘opponent’. Satanism is based on the principle of opposition. This is usually seen as opposition to the status quo, specifically Christian morality. Satan is an emblematic concept presiding over the practice of all those wonderful un-Christian things: free sexuality, autonomy, indulgence, harmony with (instead of dominion over) nature, and anti-authoritarianism. Many Satanists seem to slip up on this last one, and it’s here that most Satanism as it stands loses my sympathies. Just as many people forget that Nietzsche’s ‘destructive-creativity’ is meant as a perpetual process, not just a one-off revolution, Satanism can often slip from being an expedient release from Christian programming into being a dogma in itself. It seems to find it hard to challenge itself as an institution. There are many parallels here with the ‘left hand path’ of politics, Marxism. Many unsophisticated Marxists still think that their beliefs could function wonderfully as they stand once capitalism is cast to the ground once and for all, not seeing that their present beliefs are conditioned by their capitalist context. If Western capitalism is ever ‘overthrown’, I think many Marxists will follow their historical predecessors and become the new despots, or just be at a loss as to what to do without ‘the opposition’. Substitute ‘Satanists’ for ‘Marxists’, and ‘Christianity’ for ‘capitalism’, and you have a wildly simplistic, but very revealing analogy.

The influence of Chaos Magick and all its kindred philosophies on modern occulture seems to be a useful counter to this tunnel vision of simple opposition. The heart of Chaos Magick is the practical implementation of Nietzsche’s vision of life overcoming itself again and again, and provides a good antidote to any sliding towards dogma, or dependence on a static adversarial figure.

To return to Satan, we can see that despite his modern transformations, the popular conception of the Devil still bears the unmistakable hallmarks of pre-industrial Christianity’s vivid image of him. He is almost always bestial. The horns and the cloven hooves are synonymous with the Devil, and a reptilian tail is often attributed to him. Related to this is his unmistakably sexual nature, often seen as a threatening or perverse sexuality, but definitely sexual. The conception of Satan as the rebel angel Lucifer is a bit of an anomaly here, and this figure seems like a more refined, sublimated and ‘humanized’ Devil, all ferality turned into stubborn pride, and sinister sexuality emerging as cunning seductiveness.

Pre-twentieth century Satanism, exemplified by people like Phillipe the Duc D’Orleans and Sir Francis Dashwood, was the domain of rebellious and hedonic aristocrats. Their repudiation of the asceticism of Christianity often involved the kind of debauchery modern Christians are eager to pin on modern Satanists. There is evidence of child murder and ritual sacrifice. Many, however, penetrated beyond frenzied opposition to the Church and discovered the intimately related, but deeper roots of Satan in pre-Christian pagan gods. Bloody sacrifice was usually part of such old paganism, and we’ll return to this later. For now it is sufficient to see that the figure of Satan cannot be separated from the nature gods of the older religions.

Modern Satanists are often quick to deny this connection as being necessary or significant, probably eager to hang on to Satan’s supposed status as a god in his own right, independent of both Christianity and nature worship. I suppose they fear the potency of their god being quelled by his being subtly appropriated into the realm of ‘neo-paganism’, derided (in some cases accurately) by Satanists as wishy-washy. But the connections are there.

For a start, it’s plain that the Christian Satan was evolved as part of the church’s expansion into pagan or ‘heathen’ lands. This process was often complicated by unforeseen overlaps between Christianity and indigenous pagan practices, to a certain extent betraying Christianity’s pagan origins. We see this clearly in Catholicized Central and South American countries, where many natives have blended the invading cosmology into their own. A vivid example of this is the fact that indigenous Mexican mushroom cults call their fungal sacrament teonanácatl, meaning ‘flesh of the gods’. Those cults which survived the Spanish conquest could easily accept the god Jesus, who offers us his flesh to eat, and his mother Mary, who became the new bottle for the old wine of Earth-Mother goddess figures. Invading Christians spreading north over Europe consciously appropriated existing pagan festivals, and built their places of worship on ancient sacred sites to win over the populace. But they still needed to weed out the more overt paganisms. So the widespread Horned God or Goddess, who presided over pagan nature worship and fertility rites, was demonised. Through the installation of dualistic categories of good and evil, and the identification of pagan gods as evil, they gave themselves permission to trample paganism into the ground, and a lot of spiritual clout with which to terrorize natives into obedience.

The greatest insights into Christianity and Satan can be gleaned from exploring the Greek god Dionysus. He is very typical of pagan nature gods: he is horned, signifying kinship with animals (like the closely related goat-god of the Arcadian pastures, Pan, another source of Satanic iconography); he is a ‘dying-and-rising’ god, reflecting the cyclic process of the seasons in nature; and he has a strong wild and untamed aspect, again like Pan, forming a bond with pre-civilised humanity. It’s obvious how Satan, Christianity’s repressed shadow, has derived from such an archetype. In its irrational suppression of sexuality, nature, cyclicity and the body, Christianity latched on to this archetype and pushed it so far away from human experience that it became alien, and we became alienated. The already feral, ego-shattering Dionysian godform became utterly evil and terrifying, a force to be held at bay at all costs.

Now things get confusing. Did not Jesus, like Dionysus, die and rise again? Both are intimately associated with vines and wine; both have been connected to the use of psychedelic mushrooms; the flesh of both is in some way eaten as part of their worshippers’ rites; and both names, according to John M. Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, stem etymologically from the same Sumerian root. There’s almost as much evidence connecting Dionysus with Jesus as there is with Satan.

It’s my feeling that we have here a crucial fork in the history of archetypes. Christianity appropriated the more abstract spiritual motifs of dying-and-rising nature gods (mainly supposed ‘life after death’) and up popped the mythical Jesus. The chthonic associations with the Earth, with sexuality and the body, were all repressed, compressed and demonised into Satan. In this division was lost all cyclicity, all the transformative and change-affirming power of nature’s process. We descended into truly profane time; linear time instead of rhythmic, spiralling, sacred time. Norman O. Brown has noted that "the divorce between soul and body [analogous to the Jesus/Satan split] takes the life out of the body, reducing the organism to a mechanism". Likewise, the conception of an extra-terrestrial, eternal time (Heaven) as sacred renders the Earth profane, and binds us to the linear track of uni-directional historical ‘progress’. We may see ourselves as moving towards this sacred time—but it is an ever-receding carrot-on-a-stick, and tears us away from omni-directional immersion in the moment. "No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn." (Jim Morrison)

In Satanism, Satan is seen as embodying the principle of division and duality, that principle without which manifestation—matter, flesh, bodies & sex—cannot occur. This is symbolized in the ‘inverted’ pentagram, where two points are directed upwards and one down. The dual realm of manifestation rules over the singular, united realm of spirit. In the ‘normal’ pentagram the spirit rules the flesh. Jesus is seen as opposing Satan, and embodies the spiritual principle of unity. So what are we to make of the actual historical beliefs and practices of the followers of these two figures? Christianity has turned out to be militantly dualistic, denying the body and ravaging the Earth, glorifying the ‘spirit’ and longing for some united heavenly kingdom. And Satanists, while obviously prioritising flesh over spirit, ego over collectivity, are inevitably involved in many practices which approach Dionysian revelry, serving to abolish individual distinction. Also, their emphasis on living for the moment instead of "spiritual pipe-dreams" could be seen to destroy the future-fixation of profane time, following Nietzsche into a whole-hearted immersion in the eternal present.

Our problems in analysing these contradictions betray our present evolutionary and cultural problems. In looking at the splitting of Dionysus, we’re seeing the mythical reflections of a phase in the development of the human species where the increase of city-dwelling and changes in agriculture & economics began to erode our bond with the rest of the biosphere. City walls are the rigidification of human ego-barriers writ large. "When Christians first distinguished themselves from pagans, the word ‘pagan’ meant ‘country-dweller’. For the first centres of Christianity in the Roman Empire were the great cities—Antioch, Corinth, Alexandria, and Rome itself." (Alan Watts, Nature, Man & Woman) In our quest to urbanize our existence, to become as independent as possible from the less comfortable and benign aspects of nature, we have become lost in a mire of confusion. Witness Blake’s disgust at the industrial revolution in his phrase "dark Satanic Mills", and the fact that most of the mill owners were probably devout Christians. Protestantism has been intimately linked to the rise of capitalism by psychoanalytical historians; Satanists advocate material power. A church in Coventry recently held a service in thanks for the car industry; and Jesus advocated shunning possessions and said rich people would have a bloody hard time getting into heaven. Such confusion seems to be the price for living under the sway of false dichotomies like Jesus/Satan, spirit/matter, collective/individual, intellect/instinct.

Culture and civilization are inseparable from material technologies, and things are no less confused in the technophile/Luddite debate. The real dichotomy to be tackled here is that of harmonious/unharmonious technology. Do our tools help us achieve our desires, or do they become our desires? Do you browse the web to kill time and boredom, like TV, or use it to help you do what you want to do in the real world? Is our technology harmonious with nature? In most cases today, the answer is a painful no. We have lost the vision of the first grand tool-using age of humanity, the Neolithic, where culture, agriculture and technology were used to work with and intensify the natural environment.

Reclamation

Our Satanic genealogy has so far reached the figure of Dionysus, and if we delve further back, we find his roots in the pan-European Neolithic worship of the Great Goddess. In Greek myth, Dionysus’ mother is identified as Semele, a mortal. She was, however, sometimes equated with Ge, the Thracian form of the Earth Goddess Gaia.

The male god, the primeval Dionysus, is saturated with a meaning closely related to that of the Great Goddess in her aspect of the Virgin Nature Goddess and Vegetation Goddess. All are gods of nature’s life cycle, concerned with the problem of death and regeneration, and all were worshipped as symbols of exuberant life.

Marija Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe

Now I shall lose the interest of yet more die-hard Satanists. I think it’s possible to trace most of Satan’s aspects and characteristics back to the Neolithic (and perhaps Palaeolithic) Great Goddess. It’s true that if you gathered all available books on Goddess worship together, the vast majority of them—in their style, typography, illustrations and attitude—would probably be… well, twee. It’s obvious why the figure of the Goddess is largely consigned to the realm of New Age Pap; but I think a serious, unromantic investigation of the religious and mythical complex termed ‘the Goddess’ will uncover something a lot more challenging, vital and useful than the trite New Age-isms we’re usually presented with.

The Neolithic Goddess, like Satan, was invariably horned; the ox was one of her most revered forms. Being associated with the Earth itself she was often a chthonic (underworld) Goddess, this aspect entering Greek mythology in the story of Demeter and Persephone. It’s worth noting that Heraclitus once said that Dionysus was another name for Hades, lord of the underworld. The whole chthonic goddess & son complex is the basis for our image of Satan ruling over a subterranean Hell.

Another strong link between the Goddess and Satan is the serpent. The serpent in Genesis’ Garden of Eden is often associated with Satan, and Christianity usually extends this association to all snakes. The snake was, along with the ox, the animal most frequently associated with the Neolithic Goddess. The spiral, often symbolizing a coiled serpent, is one of the most common Goddess symbols. Archaic serpent myths from around the world are far too numerous to detail here. However, one extremely early myth (perhaps the earliest), which detours us to an extremely bizarre connection with Christianity, is well worth going into.

In his book Blood Relations, anthropologist Chris Knight proposes that human culture was the result of early female Homo sapiens synchronizing their menstrual cycles. This collectivity, he argues, empowered them to periodically ‘sex strike’ during menstruation—females basically refused sex with their partners (but possibly had menstrual sex with male kin) until the men went hunting and brought back enough meat to feed them and their children.

The full thesis is persuasive but very complex. It is enough for now to note that the hypothesized collective act of female synchrony was achieved through tidal and lunar observances, utilizing these natural, universal cycles with which widespread groups of women could ‘phase-lock’ and harmonize their own blood cycles. In the Australian Aboriginal myths of the Rainbow Snake, and its associations with menstruation, water, the moon and women, there is widespread acknowledgement that this ‘cosmic serpent’ (often androgynous) originally gave women power. Knight’s key argument is that this power is the power to periodically unite in saying ‘no’ to sex, to initiate sexual-political change (the Snake symbolizes the united body of ‘flowing’ women). At the same time, it is the powers of shamanism and magic, which Knight sees as evolving as a result of the first ‘proto-cultural’ groups of humans in Africa dispersing inland, away from their coastal origins. The females, robbed of the tide as one of their main cyclic guides, evolved moon-scheduled ritual activities—and thus symbolic culture—to synchronize social, psychic and bodily rhythms.

Somewhere along the line, as the myths and practices of many surviving hunter-gatherer tribes testify, this power was appropriated by men. Knight sees male initiation ceremonies involving cutting the penis or arm (found among Australian Aborigines and other indigenous cultures), together with the existence of extreme menstrual taboos, as evidence for a male take-over of female ritual power. One male Aborigine, speaking of their all-male rituals, told C.H. Berndt that "all the Dreaming business came out of women—everything; only men take ‘picture’ for that Julunggul [i.e. men make an artificial reproduction of the Snake]. In the beginning we had nothing; because men had been doing nothing; we took these things from women." The surviving Snake myths, propagated by all-male initiation societies, portray the Snake as threatening to women. Part of this threat is derived from myths that describe the Snake swallowing women; Knight feels that this once symbolized the power of synchronized menstruation to unite women, together ‘in the belly of the Snake’. Male initiation societies utilizing the Snake mythology may see this devouring serpent as somewhat threatening, but still desire the womb-return, unity and rebirth of being swallowed. Much as Jonah is willingly cast into the sea to be swallowed, then vomited out by the "great fish" prepared for him by the Lord God.

Knight finds hard evidence of similar ‘Rainbow Snake’ myths across Africa and South America, all related closely to tides, rain, floods, menstruation and lunar cycles. The myths perpetuate these associations, but are often configured to make women see the Snake as a threat. There are some tribes, however, whose women still draw power from the Snake, and celebrate it in menstrual rites. Knight also interprets the myriad ‘dragon’ (i.e. mythical serpent-beast) legends as remnants of this archaic mythical conception of women’s culture-forming menstrual synchrony, and of the male take-over. Many dragon myths speak of many-headed beasts (the Hydra for instance), and this is possibly an echo of the menstrual Snake which comprised many women in unison. Of course the classic dragon tale, across the world, says that valiant men rescue maidens from its clutches, destroy it, and gain power. Given Knight’s theories, there could be no clearer mythical equivalent of a male usurpation of female power: overcoming a reptilian representation of their blood-unity and menstrual ritual potency.

Now, let’s have a look at the Holy Bible. Turn to Revelations 12:

And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars:

And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.

And there appeared another great wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born. . . . [She gives birth to a sort of second Christ, and flees into the wilderness. Michael casts the dragon out of heaven. The dragon persecutes the woman, who is given eagle wings to escape.]

And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away by the flood. [Aboriginal Rainbow Snake myths are connected with great floods in Australia's past.]

Very strange to find such a twisted distortion of what may be a primal human myth of the beginning (of culture) in the ravings of a religious visionary supposedly being granted a glimpse of the end. This vision corresponds in some way to the frequent ‘male-appropriation’ myths of modern hunter-gatherers: in depicting the dragon/serpent as threatening to a woman; and in the statement that the denizens of heaven "overcame him by the blood of the Lamb" (12:11). The Lamb is Christ, and Christ is a man who bled from his arms (and, like all Jewish men, he presumably bled from his genitals, when he was circumcised as a child). Interestingly, one New Age commentator on Revelations believes that because the many-headed dragon "has several autonomous decision-making centers, [it] is therefore the very epitome of disorganization, of centrifugal or dispersive forces." (F. Aster Barnwell, Meditations on the Apocalypse) Think back to what Knight believes the original Rainbow Serpent represents, and compare.

And who was this blood-red, water-spewing, many-headed dragon? Saint John the Divine tells us that he was "that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan…". A day or so after making this Rainbow Snake-Dragon-Satan link, I started reading The Wise Wound by Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove. They take a Jungian approach to the few systematic instances of menstruating women’s dreams being recorded. Apparently, some women’s dreams at this time contain strong male figures, often threatening or sinister. Shuttle & Redgrove’s idea is that menstruation can be a time of heightened sexuality and departure from conventions for women, hence its widespread repression and extreme taboo status. They see the appearance of a compelling male figure in menstrual dreams as the appearance of the animus, a Jungian word for the masculine principle in women. Talking about the repression of menstruation leading to a "negative animus", they say: "If the woman’s menstruation is despised, that is, a deep instinctual process in her is ignored or hated, then its spirit will return with all the evolutionary power of those instinctual processes that grew us and continue to energize our physical being. You could say in this way that the Christian Devil was a representation of the animus of the menstruating woman, in so far as the Christian ethic has Satanized woman and her natural powers."

Avebury henge and surrounding monuments

I want to follow these Goddess/Serpent/Devil associations now by focusing on one specific place (which will also lead us to other areas I’m interested in): Avebury in Wiltshire, with its rich psychogeography and densely inter-related complex of Neolithic monuments.

Michael Dames has analysed the Avebury monuments, synthesizing archaeology, folklore & ethnography, to build a vision of a harmonious cycle of structures embedded in the local geography. They form a ritual landscape which reflects the cyclic narrative of the seasons and of human life. The monuments are seen to celebrate and embody the Great Goddess, conceived in the pervasive form of the Triple Goddess: Maiden, Mother & Crone. (Being three multiplied by itself, the number nine is frequently given a high status in Goddess-based religions. It seems no coincidence that modern Satanism has adopted this as its central number.)

The massive Avebury henge is approached from the south and west by two long, slightly winding stone avenues. Dames’ contention is that these two avenues are processional serpentine pathways by which young men and women approached the henge for marriage and consummation ceremonies. The men’s Beckhampton avenue, to the west, is largely destroyed. It seems significant, though, that the name Beckhampton derives from the Old English word meaning ‘back’. Dames relates this to the spine, and to Tantric beliefs in the raising of the Kundalini serpent energy from the base of the spine.

Much more evidence survives in relation to the partly intact West Kennet avenue, beginning at the Sanctuary (the name for the remains of a circular wooden temple at the southern foot of Waden Hill). Comparisons with contemporary Neolithic symbolism and ethnographic studies show that the Sanctuary (corresponding to the springtime Maiden) was probably a site for the initiation of young girls reaching puberty. This conjecture, along with the proposed serpentine nature of the processional avenue leading to consummation in the henge, is supported by Chris Knight’s research. Aboriginal mythology equates the Rainbow Snake with the ritual dance through which women collectively synchronize their menstrual periods (or with which men are united in blood-letting initiatory rituals). As the onset of a girl’s puberty is signalled by their first menstruation, Dames’ theories about the function of the Sanctuary and the symbolic serpentine nature of the West Kennet avenue stand on quite firm mythical ground.

At the henge, the male and female snake-avenues conjoin. Dames argues that the so-called ‘D’ feature within the southernmost of the two stone circles inside the henge is a representation of the tip of the phallic Beckhampton avenue snake entering the henge. This is ‘swallowed’ by the females’ West Kennet snake, whose gaping jaws may be seen to be symbolized by the southeast and southwest quadrants of the henge, the actual stones representing its teeth. The dual sexual symbolism of the serpent—penetrator and devourer—is not lost on Dames. He speaks of the Beckhampton avenue’s "commitment to bisexuality" as it approaches ritual sexual union in the henge; we’ll return to his androgynous Avebury Goddess later.

The vast stone standing at the point where the West Kennet avenue joins the henge is commonly known as the Devil’s Chair. Also in the Avebury area we have the Devil’s Den long barrow; and there are too many caverns and Neolithic standing stones in the British Isles named after the Devil to catalogue here. The demonisation of indigenous paganism that was such an integral part of Christianity’s conquest of these islands is prolifically demonstrated in such folkloric names.

In 634 CE a Christian church was built up against the west bank of the Avebury henge. On its twelfth-century font is depicted a bishop, armed with a spiked crozier and a Bible, fending off two serpentine dragons. However, the battle waged against the powerful chthonic forces of nature glorified in the Avebury monuments wasn’t some abstract war of symbols. In the fourteenth century most of the stones in the southwest quadrant of the henge were destroyed by Christian authorities trying to eradicate the many "superstitions and questionable practices" still connected with the stones. These bastards destroyed part of our heritage, in the name of Jesus.

Christianity, especially in rural areas with a deep pagan tradition, can never entirely purge itself of the past. In the parish church of Ilkley, West Yorkshire, there is a stone carving which is usually identified as the Romano-British goddess Verbeia (above). In her hands she holds two writhing snakes, resembling the famous Minoan snake goddess statuette found in Knossos, Crete. Verbeia is said to be goddess of the River Wharfe, which flows through Ilkley, forming the familiar goddess-serpent-water associations. However, one historian of Ilkley believes the goddess is only superficially associated with the river itself, and was once associated with the brooks flowing down from springs on the famous neighbouring moorlands. On these moors are numerous prehistoric rock carvings, stone circles, and traces of human settlement dating back to 7000 BCE; Verbeia is probably a survival of more ancient myths in the area. The historian notes the double snake symbol’s connection with healing (look at the British Medical Association’s symbol), and the long-standing reputation of the moor’s waters for healing properties, which survived into Victorian times, when a renowned healing spa was set up near the edge of the moor.

In Dames’ ritual landscape cycle we move from the henge southwards to the awe-inspiring Silbury Hill, a flat-topped conical mound of earth which stands as the largest man-made Neolithic structure in Europe. Known to have been built progressively over many years, added to each August (harvest time), it seems likely that this was the Neolithics’ vision of the pregnant Earth Goddess made flesh. Natural breast- and belly-like hills and mounds were commonly worshipped in many archaic cultures, but the emergence of agriculture signified the rising importance in human participation in nature. Silbury Hill—the Mother Goddess labouring to give birth to the year’s crops—is a monumental testament to a culture whose technology still harmonized with nature, working mythically and practically at precisely the same time.

Excavations have revealed that at the core of Silbury lies a circular wattle fence and stacked layers of turf forming an inner mound. The wattle fence has exactly the same diameter as the Sanctuary, and most projected reconstructions of the wooden temple at the Sanctuary reveal it to be identical in size and form to the inner Silbury mound. Silbury, then, is a fractal reflection of the Sanctuary, which is replicated within and then magnified eight times in the total mass of the Silbury mound. The springtime Maiden has matured into the life-giving Mother of the harvest. A careful study of Dames’ investigations into the harmonic fractal resonances within the Avebury complex (all monuments being based around natural units of measurement taken from the springs feeding into the revered River Kennet) is capable of pushing the rational mind beyond itself into a deep, awe-full respect for the powerful visionary precision of this ‘primitive’ culture.

Of course, being the most provocatively sensuous and voluptuous of all the Avebury monuments (go there!), Silbury failed to escape the demonisation of Christian folklore. There is a legend that the Devil was once on his way to attack Marlborough (just east of Avebury) by dumping an apron, or spade full of dirt on the town. The bishop of Marlborough apparently stopped him at the last minute; the Devil dropped his load, and Silbury Hill was formed.

The last monument in the cycle, before it completes a total gyration and feeds back into itself at the Sanctuary, is the West Kennet long barrow. It is located just southeast from Silbury and almost due east from the Sanctuary. This multiple burial chamber is the Goddess in winter: the Crone, the death-dealing Dark Goddess found (and so often repressed) in many religions. The barrow is constructed—like other European Neolithic burial chambers—to render yet another form of the Goddess’ body. You go in through her stone vulva, and enter a small corridor with five small adjoining womb-tomb chambers.

Despite its belief that faith in the Lord Jesus Christ will automatically transport his followers to an eternal realm of happiness, love & old friends on dying, Christianity is terrified of death. Most systems of belief promoting a simplistic, personal and linear form of immortality are—they deny death. "Hell, Luther said, is not a place, but is the experience of death, and Luther’s devil is ultimately personified death." (Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death) Again we see that Christianity has ruptured, repressed & demonised the cyclic processes of nature. To cultures harmonized with the seasonal rounds, death precedes life just as death follows life. The Avebury cycle, where each distinct monument participates in the unified ritual landscape, suggests a culture where the principle of division has not yet been separated from the principle of unity; death is part of life.

The barrow was built around 3250 BCE, and remained open until around 2600 BCE, when a huge stone forecourt was erected, and the chambers were packed with a mass of chalk rubble, organic material, and bits of bone and pottery (resembling the chalk, soil and vegetable layering found in the core of Silbury, whose foundations are contemporary to the sealing of the barrow). During its ‘active’ time, the barrow was almost certainly used for ritual as well as burial purposes. Dames points out that "the belief that the living can find meaning and reality within putrefying chaos was once widespread", and rightly notes the possible parallels with Tantric practices.

The loving Goddess of Creation has another face. As she brings man into time and his world, she also removes him from it. So she is his destroyer as well. No-one can be a successful Tantrika unless he has faced up to this reality, and assimilated it into his image of the nature of the Goddess. There are many rituals, some of them sexual, carried out among the corpses in real (or symbolic) cremation-grounds, which bring this necessity forcibly home to the practising Tantrika. There, in the red light of funeral pyres, as jackals and crows scatter and crunch the bones, he confronts the dissolution of all he holds dear in life.

Philip Rawson, Tantra: The Indian Cult of Ecstasy

We can never know the exact nature of the rites enacted in the West Kennet long barrow, but many of skulls and thigh bones from the dead buried there were found to be absent. The obvious explanation for this is that they were used in Neolithic rituals, probably at the nearby causewayed camp on Windmill Hill, northwest from the henge, where many individual skulls were found. Dames notes that "the widespread use of skull and femur in fertility rites was maintained down to classical times, when the rotting flesh fell off to reveal the clean tools of a new sexuality, with skull acting as female container, encompassing the thigh bone-phallus." I’m also reminded of the use of skulls and thigh bones in various ‘left-hand path’ (i.e. frowned upon) cultic practices in Tibet. It’s clear that any study of Neolithic Goddess-orientated cultures will fruitfully profit from comparisons with non-mainstream Asian religious beliefs.

The Snake Goddess

A few years ago, shortly after I had become interested in paganism, but well before I began any of the above research, I had a very bizarre dream. I dreamt I was an actor in the process of making a film whose director was a very sinister and shadowy figure. There was an unnerving atmosphere on the set, and I kept finding small, partially hidden pentagrams and other similar symbols—sewn into the undersides of cushions and so on. I became convinced that the script and set were devised so that the specific motions and gestures the unwitting cast made during filming would have the equivalent effect of a ritual to evoke the Devil. In the half-dream hypnopompic state before fully waking up, I had the distinct sensation of physical pressure around my anus. Dream logic convinced me that this was in fact Satan. I was vaguely disturbed during the following day, but the dream quickly faded into the past.

Earlier this year, I was writing something about the idea that dreams and vision states are in fact the perceptual flip-side to interior bodily sensations. The two realms can be seen as two different ‘channels of perception’ conveying information about the interior processes of the human organism, from visceral energy streams to the sub-molecular goings-on in the brain. Going to sleep one night, having just finished the section on this particular subject, I had a hypnagogic experience that seemed to confirm my theory, and shed revealing light on the dream of the Devil a couple of years before.

I was in a pretty low state, and half-heartedly (pathetically actually) called on the Earth Goddess to visit me in my dreams that night. Soon after, I found myself getting up from the bed and walking across my room. I was suddenly overpowered by incredibly intense body sensations, and felt my mind ‘blacking out’ as if I was fainting. I instinctively ‘knew’ that this was the power of the Goddess overtaking me, and tried hard to surrender to it as I fell down (‘trying hard’ in these situations is a classic mistake!). I found myself lying on the floor, a huge lump obscuring my vision in my right eye. I heard the woman who lives across the hall from me trying to get in. My fall must have been loud, I thought. I took the lump on the right side of my face to be a result of the fall, and desperately tried to work out how I could get up to open the door and let the woman in. I couldn’t move, and feared that I’d really injured myself. At the same time I became aware of rattling noises in my kitchen. There was a distinctly female presence in there. Then I snapped out of it—I had been half-dreaming. I was still in my bed, and the ‘lump’ was a bit of the duvet against my face. I instantly connected the two instances of female presence, one seemingly trying to help me, with my vague plea to the Goddess.

Suddenly, immense surges of energy began to flow around my body, intense and strangely familiar streamings that pushed me into a delicious and frighteningly precarious balance between waking and dreaming. Then I felt pressure around my anus… and what followed can only really be described as being fucked by the, or at least a Goddess. A stupendous thrust of energy rushed up me, and I was immediately propelled into a highly vivid and intense lucid dream. I was flying high above a scintillatingly real landscape, a deep blue summer sky above me, a daytime sky yet dotted with stars. Part of the subsequent dream involved fishing a demonic-looking pike out of a lake—this seemed to be the culmination of a series of intense dreams I had recently had about seeing fish swimming underwater. The pike, once on land, turned into a cute brown seal.

I awoke from the dream after escaping from a very nasty situation by flying straight up through the building I was in, bursting through each floor successively and waking with a jolt on blasting out the top. It didn’t take much meditating on all the sensations and symbols to realize I had almost certainly just experienced a bizarre manifestation of the Kundalini serpent energy.

The Kundalini serpent is envisioned in traditional Tantric yoga as being a coiled-up (spiral) reservoir of normally untapped psychosomatic energy, stored in the Muladhara, or base chakra. The base chakra is located in the perineum, just in front of the anus. Kundalini is a goddess at the same time as being a spiral snake energy. Kundalini Shakti is the female principle to Shiva’s male principle in Tantra’s erotic cosmology. The goal of Tantric practice is to awaken the dormant snake Goddess through various yogic methods, causing her to surge up the body and ecstatically unite with Shiva at the highest chakra. This rising can be seen clearly at either end of my dream (and body)—both in the energy thrust up me from my perineum just before sleeping, and in the climactic flight through the floors of a building, eventually out of the top, into waking consciousness.

Many insights (and a tremendous feeling of well-being) flooded through as a result of my Kundalini dream. Firstly, there was the gnostic confirmation of my theories about Satan being (for me at least) a demonised remnant of a primal serpentine Goddess. My dream of a few years ago was undoubtedly the same Kundalini phenomenon, distorted by the Christian cosmology virus, and undeveloped. It seemed to be a ‘confirmation’, rather than being an experience induced by my research, because the Kundalini dream reflected so precisely back onto a dream I had long before any of my research began. And at the time of the second dream, although I had been looking into Goddess myths, I had not really looked at Kundalini. The fish symbolism seemed to flesh out my feeling that the Kundalini phenomenon is the prime model for looking at this experience. In Indian mythology, the fish symbolizes Kundalini’s most primitive form. Interestingly, early Christians represented Jesus (eternal opponent of the serpent Satan) with a fish symbol. Jesus opposes fish to serpents in Matthew 7:10—perhaps yet another example of divisive Christian mythologizing.

Kundalini has been connected by Gene Kieffer (a president of the Kundalini Research Institute in New York) to the UFO contact experience, after personal psychic activity that involved both phenomena. This connection and the sensations I experienced of pressure around the anus (or nearby perineum) inevitably brought to mind the infamous reports from supposed UFO ‘abductees’, who believe themselves to have been improperly probed up the arse by bug-eyed scientists from other planets. Are we looking here at spontaneous Kundalini vision states, either distorted through confusion or overlaid with a space-age clinical myth-structure?

My current belief that visions and the body’s energy processes are complementary has given me a rough rule of thumb in understanding mythology: all the most resonant and meaningful myths will reflect some aspect of biology and evolution. As Shuttle and Redgrove say in The Wise Wound, "mythology and physiology are only two sides of the same thing, which is alive." Of course, evolutionary theory and the physical sciences can be seen as yet another myth-structure; and seen in this way they should, if they are to relate to the general human experience of life, somehow echo the more primeval and recurrent mythologies and archetypes of our cultural ancestry. The idea that the Kundalini serpent, which ascends the spinal column, is the psychosomatic evolutionary force in the human body, can be seen to relate to the fact that we are vertebrates. Our common evolutionary inheritance, along with all mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fishes, is that we have a backbone. We have all physically relived the evolutionary journey of bodily mutation as we gestated in our mother’s wombs. Human embryos, in their earliest stages of development, are successively indistinguishable from fish, reptile, bird and other mammal embryos—at one stage, recognizable gills emerge, and then atrophy.

Our individual lives begin in the amniotic ocean of the womb. Organic life on Earth began in the oceans. And humanity itself may have emerged from a partial return to the ocean. Many anthropologists believe that humans evolved on the shores of east Africa, as hominid apes returned to a semi-aquatic lifestyle. This is seen to account for our hairless bodies, the layer of buoyant fat beneath our skin, and possibly our upright posture (a distinct advantage if you’re trying to keep breathing whilst wading through deep waters).

It seems quite fitting that Indian mythology should symbolize evolutionary power through the snake, the skeleton of which is basically a backbone, and the fish, the original spine, which still inhabits life’s womb.

Any form of anal stimulation contains the possibility of ecstatic spiritual experience. Phil Hine has pointed out that Ramakrishna experienced Samadhi whilst having a dump on more than one occasion, and this is interesting in relation to Martin Luther’s so-called Thurmerlebnis ("experience in the tower"), a revelation about faith that was to inaugurate Protestant theology. The ‘tower’ was where the toilet was located in Luther’s Wittenburg monastery. "This knowledge the Holy Spirit gave me on the privy in the tower." (Luther) In his analysis of Protestantism in Life Against Death, Norman Brown hones in on the centrality of the Devil to Luther’s theology, and on the ‘anality’ (a Freudian term needing no explanation, for once) of the Devil. He documents Luther’s numerous associations of the Devil with ‘filth’, ‘blackness’ and foul odours, and notes his methods of counter-attack to the Devil’s assaults—at one revealing point he threatens to "throw him into my anus, where he belongs." These scraps of information, the traditional location of the base chakra, and my intuition that Satan may be related back through history to a primeval serpent goddess, seem to be no coincidence.

Many traditions, from male Aboriginal initiation ceremonies to Aleister Crowley’s magick, recognize the power of sodomy to elicit altered states of consciousness, but this is mostly ignored in our own culture due to the extreme taboo associated with anal eroticism (and with altered states themselves). This taboo is clear in homophobia, but is equally present in heterosexuality. Often, sodomy is not merely tabooed, but actually illegal—such is the continuing power of old Judeo-Christian restrictions over modern secular prohibitions. Perhaps (as far as our own culture is concerned) the strength of the taboo against sodomy, and not necessarily the physical act in itself, accounts for its potential to induce powerful spiritual experiences. Spirituality is, at heart, a breakthrough into a wider realm of consciousness, and is thus frequently associated (as in Tantra, Chaos Magick and Satanism) with breaking the conventions and laws that inevitably shape consciousness. The danger here, as ever, is that of becoming obsessed with the breaking of a single restriction. Once a restriction is overcome, new and different restrictions may fall into place. For instance, a Satanist who has endeavoured to break the traditional Christian taboo against rational self-interest and ego-gratification may find him or herself liberated in many ways. Eventually, though, this process of liberation may restrict that person from expressing spontaneous selflessness. The path of liberation has no end.

Sodomy, then, may well be a powerful step on the path of spiritual and sexual liberation, but rigid correlations and associations may eventually become obstacles. Regarding the association of the base chakra with the anus, Phil Hine has cautioned against the idea that chakras, or energy centres, have literal physical locations: "I’m working on a body-alchemy centred approach to the chakras at the moment, and the muladhra, for me, relates to one’s physical sensation of the here & now. A great deal is made of the muladhra being the ‘seat’ of Kundalini-shakti—but again, too many people have interpreted Kundalini stuff in terms of getting away from the body, towards some kind of rarified ‘spiritual’ state. My own feeling is that the Tantric perspective is less about ‘awakening kundalini’ as though it were something static, and more about ‘becoming aware’ of kundalini’s living presence in, and around us. This necessitates, of course, a change in how we perceive ourselves, and the world we are enmeshed in." (personal correspondence) Hine’s first ‘Kundalini’ experience involved an influx of energy coming down his body. This ‘contradiction’ of the traditional experience can also be seen in Reichian therapy. Wilhelm Reich’s theory of bodily ‘armour’ (rigidified musculature, seen to be arranged in sections like the head, throat, chest, etc.) corresponds well with the chakra system. But in opposition to the yogic assertion that one must work from the bottom up when opening the chakras, Reich advised therapists to work from the top down in undoing armour.

So, anal eroticism is merely one of many gateways to sexual and spiritual ecstasy. And while individual proclivities and specific cultural circumstances channel erotic bodily energy through particular pathways, any broad overview must take into account a holistic view of the body. The many ‘maps’ of the body, from the chakra system to Freud’s anal, oral and genital organizations of sexual energy, are all ultimately limited. The least limited map of bodily energy, the map under which all others may be subsumed, is that described by Freud as ‘polymorphous perversity’ and by mystics as ‘oceanic consciousness’. It is the chaotic, spontaneously self-organizing state a baby experiences before the narrower maps of its culture impose themselves on its body—and which anyone may experience in ecstatic release from cultural boundaries.

In Love’s Body, Norman Brown has pointed out that the human body, in its deepest levels, is not as linear and static as our culture’s vision of it suggests. There is a profound interconnectedness and interpenetration at work. The main component of our linear vision of the body is the divided polarity of the head and the groin, the brain and the genitals. But… "The word cerebral is from the same root as Ceres, goddess of cereals, of growth and fertility; the same root as cresco, to grow, and creo, to create. [Richard] Onians, archaeologist of language, who uncovers lost worlds of meaning, buried meanings, has dug up a prehistoric image of the body, according to which the head and genital intercommunicate via the spinal column: the gray matter of the brain, the spinal marrow, and the seminal fluid are all one identical substance, on tap in the genital and stored in the head." An aspect of this ancient model can be seen to derive from agricultural fertility symbolism. In corn, the seed is literally in the head of the plant.

Further, echoing our discussion of Kundalini, Brown remarks: "The classic psychoanalytical equation, head = genital. Displacement is not simply from below upwards; nor does the truth lie in simply reducing it all downwards (psychoanalytical reductionism). The way up is the way down; what psychoanalysis has discovered is that there is both a genitalization of the head and a cerebralization of the genital. The shape of the physical body is a mystery, the inner dynamical shape, the real centers of energy and their interrelation…" The ‘genital organization’ of sexuality, where the genitals are the prime channel for sexual energy, is seen by both Freud and Reich as the ‘healthy’, ‘normal’ mode of eroticism in humans. Neither could conceive of a culture that could withstand the dissolution of this pattern and support groups of polymorphous humans, people for whom sexuality pervades their entire body, and thus their whole lives. Evidently we’re still a long way off from such a culture, but it seems important to recognize that anything less is a limitation of our potential for generating, using and exchanging energies. Brown’s refutation of purely genital sexuality applies equally to all forms of restricted eroticism or spirituality:

Erect is the shape of the genitally organized body; the body crucified, the body dead or asleep; the stiff. The shape of the body awake, the shape of the resurrected body, is not vertical but perverse and polymorphous; not a straight line but a circle; in which the Sanctuary is in the Circumference, and every Minute Particular is Holy…

The Androgyne

Most striking, perhaps, is the sexual ambiguity of the goddess in my dream. She was definitely a feminine presence, yet the rising snake-energy nature of her conjunction with my body put her in the cock-bearing masculine role. This perception was given a bit of consensus validation when I visited a friend in Brighton, who I hadn’t related my dream experience to. He was skimming through another piece I wrote relating to the World Tree being seen as the spine up which the Kundalini serpent rises. Out of the blue, he said, "Oh yeah! I had a Kundalini thing once when I was tripping, lying on the ground at a festival. It was like being fucked by Mother Earth." (I had related the Kundalini goddess to the Earth goddess myself—I had an strange experience of energy rushing up into me from the ground at a Dreadzone gig months before my dream. Also, the base chakra, where the Kundalini serpent is traditionally seen to be coiled and dormant, is connected in the chakra system to the earth element.) On the same journey, I visited a friend who I did tell my dream to. He quickly related it to an experience he had had while on mushrooms next to a vast boulder in the place where the sarsens (local sandstones) used to build the Avebury henge were taken from. He experienced it as a bolt of energy penetrating him from below, and nicely called it "an amphetamine pessary up the psychic jaxxee."

The Goddess is an hermaphrodite.

In Neolithic thought, maleness was an aspect of the universal being, or vessel, which was regarded as female. How could it be otherwise, if she truly encompassed everything? An architectural expression of this view is often found in Indian temples, where the overall form displays the feminine creative shape, based on the womb cell which contains the Lingam or male element.

Michael Dames, The Avebury Cycle

On Windmill Hill near Avebury, the oldest structure to be found is a cluster of 32 pits dug around 3700 BCE. Dames points out that this pit grouping can be seen to form the outline of a goddess figure, squatting with upturned arms in the traditional stylization of a woman in labour. The pit corresponding to the vulva is "the largest and most fully furnished of all the pits", containing pottery, worked flint flakes, hammerstones, and sarsen balls similar to others found beneath Silbury. However, if one does take the formation to be a squatting goddess, two of the central pits clearly form a penis shape. A small chalk slab, known as the Windmill Hill amulet, found in an adjacent ditch, bears a design similar to the pit goddess, and also displays lines apparently describing a phallus. Hermaphroditic motifs can be seen in two other carved chalk figurines found on the hill, and Dames also notes an androgynous Neolithic figurine found in Somerset and a Bronze Age goddess figure with a beard which was found in Denmark.

The heretical Knights Templar reputedly worshipped a ‘demon’ named Baphomet, most famously depicted by Eliphas Lévi as a goat-headed half-human deity, clearly male and yet breasted—with two intertwining snakes rising from his lap (an important image in Tantra). Baphomet was naturally taken by the Church to be Satan. The Templars were accused of Devil worship and sodomy, and in the early fourteenth century King Philip IV of France had 54 of them arrested, tortured and killed on heresy charges. Satan himself sometimes has shades of androgyny. Phil Hine has informed me that Robertson Davies, in his collection of short stories High Spirits, holds Satan to be an hermaphrodite. And the figure of the Devil in a seventeenth century drawing called Witchcraft (left), by Claude-Françoise Menestrier, clearly has big dangling breasts.

Dionysus, familiar to us here as precursor of the Jesus/Satan split and son of the Earth, was raised by women, often jeered at for his effeminate appearance, and referred to by a king in a text by Aeschylus as "man-woman". Alain Daniélou presents copious documentation, in his book Gods of Love and Ecstasy, that Dionysus is almost precisely equivalent to the Indian god Shiva—from whom we may also derive another traditional aspect of Satan, the trident, which is closely associated with Shiva. One of Shiva’s principal aspects is the Ardhanarâshvara, the hermaphrodite. "The Prime Cause may be conceived as masculine or feminine, as a god or a goddess, but in both cases it is an androgynous or transexual being."

In Siberian shamanism, as in many shamanic traditions, ritual bisexuality is held to be a sign of sacred power, of dealings with other worlds. Daniélou also notes that the Etruscan prophetess wore a phallus attached to her girdle. Kucumatz (inset), the supreme god of the Quiché Indians, is androgynous, both father and mother of all creation. Jewish mysticism elaborates on the creation myth of Genesis in the idea of the primordial androgynous being, Adam Kadmon, a perfect reflection of the divine (see Genesis 1:27—"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."). S/He is split into Adam and Eve to form humans.

Androgynous figures in mythology represent a state of diversity-in-unity and unity-in-diversity that transcends the apparent opposition of sexes and genders. They are vivid, bodily images of a recurrent spiritual impulse to unite, but not leave behind the ecstatic interplay of opposites—without which unity would be a bland mess, with no contrasts, dynamism or fun. This impulse can be seen more abstractly in the Taoist yin-yang symbol, and the coincidentia oppositorum, or union of opposites, in medieval alchemy. Referring to androgynous motifs in mythology, Mircea Éliade says that this "nostalgia for primordial completeness . . . is found almost everywhere in the archaic world."

So what does this mean for us? A recognition that, potentially at least, gender is less a barrier than a permeable membrane (to paraphrase Carol J. Clover in Men, Women & Chainsaws), and that this membrane may be a gateway to magickal consciousness. Whatever the sexual orientation involved, truly ecstatic sex (ritualized or not) can lead to a psychic intertwining and transmutation of sexual identities. Even in (or maybe especially in) the exploration of the extremities of sexual difference, this potential may emerge. As Chris Hyatt says, opposites taken to their extremes become one. Or—as in the yin-yang symbol, where at the extreme of dark yin we find light yang emerging, and vice versa—the opposites become each other.

I once went to a talk by two practising process-oriented psychotherapists (therapy based on the work of Arnold Mindell), and the woman there responded to a question about Freud by deriding his ‘oppressive’ theory of ‘penis-envy’, the idea that women are all screwed up because they haven’t got that all-important cock. Later in the talk she got round to talking about sexual experimentation, and expressed tingling excitement about the possibilities raised by strap-on dildos. Now, I think Freud was pretty ridiculous in a lot of his thinking—but not always because he was necessarily wrong, just distorted and one-sided. The pendulum’s swung right across to the other side in many feminist circles, where ‘penis-envy’ is refuted because it’s ‘oppressive’, and then men’s ‘womb-envy’ or ‘menstrual-envy’ is given as an explanation for why men are all screwed up. Hang on! Learn from the androgyne. Maybe both these ‘envies’ exist. And maybe we can ditch that word ‘envy’, and all its associations with eternal frustration. Both Freud and the fundamentalist feminists base their theories on the supposedly unchangeable biological foundation of our sex. But these immutable biological ‘envy’ theories just seem to me to be signs of a lack of imagination. Change ‘envy’ to ‘desire’ and cross-dressing or role-playing may be sufficient to transcend biology, for a time, with enough imaginative energy. Strap-on dildos for women and arses in men need a little less imagination. Still further, there are the presently available surgical techniques of transexualism. And if the permanence of this step scares you off, perhaps soon the intelligent and creative application of new technologies, such as virtual reality or nanotech biomechanics, could offer us unlimited exploration of our inherent sexual plasticity and mutability.

Flesh

It is evident that certain rites and practices of ancient Shivaism or Dionysism, such as human sacrifices, could not be contemplated nowadays. Perhaps I should have avoided mentioning them, as they could easily be used as a pretext for rejecting the whole of Shivaite concepts, but, in my opinion, it was necessary to do so because they reflect tendencies of the human being and aspects of the nature of the world, which it would be imprudent to ignore. They form part of our collective unconscious and risk being manifested in perverse ways if we are afraid to face up to them.

Alain Daniélou, The Gods of Love and Ecstasy

Going right back to where we started, let’s recall that the primary manifestation of the modern Church’s concern with the Devil is its fantasy of rampaging Satanists or pagans sacrificing animals and children to the Dark Lord. Modern human sacrifice is largely a myth; however, I see no reason for doubting that animal sacrifices occur, though not necessarily just by ‘Satanists’ (note Anton LaVey’s 10th Satanic Rule: "Do not kill non-human animals unless attacked or for your food."). Almost all religions have a deep, intrinsic history of animal sacrifice, and some still practice it. The Massai of Kenya and Tanzania, though nominally Christian, continue to practice blood sacrifice. So do followers of Santeria, a combination of African religion and Christian symbolism, in the States. They regularly ignore U.S. laws (which prohibit the killing of animals except in licensed butcheries and for animal experimentation) in order to practice their religion. The chief contemporary practitioners of ritual sacrifice seem to be Christians themselves, who slaughter and eat tens of millions of turkeys every year as part of their celebrations of the birth of their god.

Human sacrifice also has a long history. It seems to be the main element of Neolithic Goddess cultures that most modern popularisers of Goddess religions have neglected to deal with. Joseph Campbell has said that "human sacrifice is everywhere characteristic of the worship of the Goddess in the Neolithic sphere"; Avebury is no exception. Dames details many instances of human sacrifice in Neolithic Avebury: a prehistoric urn full of human bones was found in the southern inner stone circle of the henge; an adolescent male was found in the foetal position, with all bones broken, within the Sanctuary; other young men have been found buried along the West Kennet avenue. One was found with a thigh-bone jammed into his jaw—sexual/fertility symbolism which involves these sacrifices in one of the primary concerns of the Avebury monuments, the success of the crops. Dames speculates that the sacrificial victims could have actually been honoured to play this part: "For the victims, the opportunity to end their lives in physical incorporation with the Great Serpent [the West Kennet avenue] may have been regarded as an awesome privilege, an ultimate union with the godhead—son and parent united in divinity." The overwhelming holism of the surviving monuments seems to suggest that life for these people may well have been so unified, and death so deeply intertwined with life in their psyches, that young men could have felt their death to be a privilege, an opportunity to spill their life-blood into the ground and magically give life to the crops and the community—as well as return to the womb of the Earth-Mother.1

The idea of sacrifice, bloody or not, is at the heart of human religious life. Its basis is surely the food chain—the interdependence of all life on all other life, the fact that nothing lives save by another’s death. Alain Daniélou has called blood sacrifice "the sacralization of the alimentary function", that is, the ritualisation of killing and eating. "The whole universe is really only food and eater." (Brihat Aranyaka Upanishad) "The world as sacrifice; this world as food; to be is to be eaten." (Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body) If the world is conceived of as one divine body, the process of life is divine autophagy—self-eating. It seems that all religious sacrifices may be derived from the recognition of this fact. Most practices are distorted to a greater or lesser degree, but the original function of sacrifice was probably part of the human urge to intensify the processes of nature. Vegetarianism and veganism do not negate the fact that life thrives on death—only an unmagickal, unholistic view of life would hold that plants are not living creatures like the rest of us. And while modern technology makes vegetarianism viable for us all (and meat-eating cruel, relying as it does on modern techniques of slaughter), the symbolism of sacrifice and blood are rooted in the consumption of animal flesh.

What do we actually mean by ‘sacrifice’? The dictionary definition is "the act of giving up something valued for the sake of something else more important or worthy." Alan Watts says that it is an act which makes something holy (sacer-facere), arguing that "sacrifice is only accidentally associated with the cessation, death or mutilation of the offering because it was once supposed that, say, burning bulls on an altar was the only way of transporting them to heaven." (Nature, Man & Woman) This idea is used to stress that ‘sacrificing’ one’s sexuality to God does not mean chastity, because if you’re not fucking, there’s nothing there to ‘sacrifice’, or ‘make holy’.

These two definitions, ‘giving up’ and ‘making holy’, seem to be at odds—you can’t make your cake holy and eat it—until we look at Shivaite (Shiva-worshipping) practices that forbid anyone to eat any flesh that is not the result of a ritual sacrifice. "One should not eat the flesh of living beings without killing them oneself, i.e., taking a conscious part in their slaughter and making the gods a party to it, since the world which they have created and uphold is itself a perpetual sacrifice." (Daniélou) In a system where "the gods must be offered the first-fruits of the harvest, the first mouthful of all nourishment", this practice makes an offering—gives something up—as well as making the act ‘holy’. In killing for food in the name of Shiva, the sacrifice forms a ritual intensification of nature, of divine autophagy. As in Dionysian rites, the animal is seen as a manifestation of the god, with whom the worshipper communes through the act of eating. You are what you eat. The pagan origins of the Christian communion should be plain. "Eating is the form of redemption. Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you." (Brown)

The practice of Shivaites, of only eating what you yourself ritually kill, seems diametrically opposed to the systems of hunting and eating taboos anthropologists have discovered among hunter-gatherers. Chris Knight postulates a primitive ‘own-kill’ rule: "Culture starts not only with the incest taboo, but also with its economic counterpart in the form of a rule prohibiting hunters from eating their own kills." One’s ‘own blood’, in both senses of blood lineage and totem animal blood, is forbidden. This ‘rule’, he argues, is demonstrated by the fact that their exist so many methods of getting around it. Rules are there to be broken; their boundaries, and thus the rules themselves, are defined by how they are circumscribed. The ways of getting around this rule can be seen in its application only to a man’s ‘first kill’; in tribes where you can eat your own kill provided you apologize to the animal’s spirit; and in customs where you symbolically offer your kill to someone else first, whether it’s another person or a god. Knight sees the latter as the basis of most ‘sacrifice’.

His reason for postulating this ‘rule’ is that his model of the origins of human culture sees the first proto-human apes involved in an evolving system of menstrual, sexual, hunting and economic taboos. We looked earlier at how Knight envisions culture as emerging from women synchronizing their menstrual periods. Tied up to this is the idea that the time of menstruation, the dark moon, would be immediately followed by hunting trips, as the moon waxed. Because proto-human females were more burdened by their offspring (human infants take a lot longer to mature), they needed to secure a sure supply of food for themselves and their young. In short, they needed to make damn sure the males didn’t go off hunting, scoff the lot while they’re away, and only come back with scraps (as often happens in groups of apes). Knight believes that part of the women’s menstrual ‘sex-strike’ (against procreative, ‘domestic’ sex at least) involved a growing system of associations between menstrual blood and the blood of game animals. The taboo against ‘domestic’ sex during menstruation would be psychically linked to a taboo against eating raw, bloody flesh. In Knight’s model, the women control the fire hearth, and thus it is only through presenting their kills to the women that the men can have cooked flesh, free of the tabooed blood. This way, food for the women and children is assured. Survivals of this taboo system are found in most contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes. To take one example, hunters of the Urubu tribe in the Amazonian basin may not bring deer into the village. The hunter deposits his kill at the edge of the clearing, and sends a woman to get it. The Urubu believe that "a hunter who brought his own game into the village would be punished with a terrible fever and become kaù, crazy." Californian Indians even have a special verb, pi’xwaq, which means "to get sick from eating one’s own killing".

Knight’s model is interesting in that so many ecstatic nature-based religious cults directly contravene these postulated ‘primeval taboos’. "Ancient Shivaite or Dionysiac ritual does not allow the cooking of the flesh of the animal victim, which had to be captured after a chase, torn apart and eaten raw." (Daniélou) If prohibitions against eating raw meat form part of the basis of human culture, these later ritual practices may be seen as counter-cultural forces. They evolved during times when human life was beginning to be urbanized, and ‘culture’ was becoming something very alienated from nature. Shivaism and Dionysism all stand against conventional civilization, and aim to ecstatically commune with the natural forces and spirits of the land.

Humans irrevocably evolved into cultural beings in eastern Africa long ago. Some development beyond animal existence was obviously necessary for ‘culture’ to exist at all; thus the raw/cooked, nature/culture, animal/human oppositions. But when the rural/urban opposition arose, as the great cities of Europe, the Middle East and Asia formed, something was slowly lost. Evolution was turned back on itself as human culture, a profound outgrowth of nature, began to isolate and alienate itself from its source. "The Dionysiac rite takes its followers back to a primitive stage, which is the antithesis of the city cults in which the victim is eaten cooked. Here we find a very ancient contrast between the two concepts of food and its associated rites. When Dionysus is himself the victim of the Titans who put him to death and boil and roast him, his being cooked implies that Dionysus, as the god of Nature, is the victim of the gods of the city." (Daniélou)

The menstrual blood and animal blood connection also reveals the second source of sacrificial blood symbolism: menses, the blood which women shed every month as part of their bodily fertility cycles. This may be the original ‘human sacrifice’, in that menstruating women ‘give up’ their womb-lining and their unfertilised egg.

It is possible that shamanistic practises of possession by articulate and helpful spirits originally came from the upsurge of energies at the period. There are indications that these spirits were sometimes seen not only as animals, but as the spirits of unborn children. That is, the blood of the period would come instead of the pregnancy, and the blood spoke with the spirit of the unconceived child. A distressing development of this would be in the rumoured cults where children were aborted for magical purposes: there would be no need for this in a menstrual cult where the natural energies were listened to by women aware of their existence.

Penelope Shuttle & Peter Redgrove, The Wise Wound

Throughout history, many diverse groups have been accused of child murder or ritual abortion: Dionysian cults, medieval witches, early Christians, Jews in Nazi Germany, Satanists (and non-Satanic pagans) in the modern West. The widespread repression of menstrual power seems to be a good explanation for the projected fantasies that such accusations usually are.

Throughout Aboriginal Australia, there is no other way to arouse the Rainbow Snake than by bleeding, whether this is menstrual blood or the blood of men who cut themselves. The Snake is summoned by and attracted to blood. Perhaps this archaic myth-logic is the origin of the reasoning behind the modern occult theory of blood. Talking of larvæ, or elemental spirits, Eliphas Lévi, a nineteenth century French occultist, says that "such larvæ have an aërial body formed from the vapour of blood, for which reason they are attracted towards spilt blood ["hence come the histories of vampires", he says later] and in the older days drew nourishment from the smoke of sacrifices." In connection with this, he notes that "according to Paracelsus, the blood lost at certain regular periods by the female sex and the nocturnal emissions to which male celibates are subject in dream people the air with phantoms." (Note that Paracelsus includes semen along with menses—both are in some sense ‘unborn children’, and both are highly valued in most sex-magickal traditions.) Blood is seen in such occult theory to contain the ‘life-force’ of the organism, and spilling the blood is thought to release this energy—usually to ‘feed’ a god or spirit, so that it can be manifested, or empowered to do the sorceror’s bidding. Such sacrifice is part of many voodoo traditions.

Christopher Hyatt and Jason Black, in Pacts with the Devil, concisely reveal the modern double standards surrounding the issue of animal sacrifice.

Recently, on a national new broadcast, there was a segment taped in New York. The video showed ranks of cages containing sheep and chickens, with NYPD officers standing with military solemnity in front of them. The police, the commentator informed us, had just "rescued" these animals. Not from torture or some other form of lingering abuse, but from a place where a major Santeria festival was about to be celebrated. What was to be the fate of these livestock animals? They would be killed expertly and quickly by a Santero, the blood given to the Orishas as a gift, and most likely (depending on the ritual) the animals would be cooked and eaten that same evening by the men women and children at the celebration.

They point out that we live in a society where someone could be sat at home eating a steak (from an animal cruelly, sometimes slowly killed in a slaughterhouse), spy someone living next door swiftly killing a chicken as part of a ritual, and run terrified to the phone to inform the police about this ‘Satanist’, even if the ritualist ate the chicken later for dinner. Who is more humane? Hyatt & Black also note that all ‘kosher’ meat, drained of blood while a rabbi says a blessing, is by definition ritual sacrifice; yet this is legal. Now, I’m wholly and unreservedly against any animal being killed if it isn’t eaten (unless in self-defence). When it is eaten, I think this falls into the category of personal choice. It’s not my business if people want to eat animals without cruelty. Likewise, it’s not my business if they want to use the animal’s death for spiritual purposes before they eat it. Or if they want to kill it cleanly, then rip it to shreds and eat it raw with their bare hands.

What Hyatt & Black show is the hypocrisy surrounding blood sacrifice in modern culture. I wonder how many fundamentalist Christians involved in spreading the anti-pagan ‘ritual sacrifice’ scam sit down at Christmas and happily chew the cooked flesh of poultry kept in appalling conditions and slaughtered profanely. Given the choice, I would rather the turkey’s death formed part of a Santerian ritual, and its flesh eaten afterwards by people fully conscious of its demise—and of the sacredness of life and death.

Blood

When I first read the evidence for the ‘own-kill’ taboo in hunter-gatherer tribes—which in some extreme cases extends to hunters believing that even having seen their food alive would lead to bad hunting luck—I thought immediately of the modern meat industry. Now we haven’t the slightest chance of seeing the creature we’re eating in its living state. But this modern taboo merely serves to isolate meat-eaters from the reality of death (as one would expect in a Christian-based culture). For hunter-gatherers, who still kill, even though they may not eat their own kills, the reasons are a bit more complicated, and a little less alienating.

As a general example of how the own-kill rule functions in hunter-gatherer societies, let’s look at what is commonly known as ‘totemism’. Say there are several clans of hunter-gatherers living in the same area. Each clan has a ‘totem animal’. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say that there’s the bear clan and the deer clan. Now, the own-kill taboo would work here by preventing the bear clan from eating bear flesh and the deer clan from eating deer flesh. Each clan would be responsible for the hunting and killing of their own totem animal, and for supplying the meat to the other clan. The own-kill rule therefore functions as part of a reciprocal gift-giving system of exchange. Such exchange systems form part of the basis for human culture and language. Sharing and swapping necessitates communication and agreed-upon behavioural guidelines; and the evolution of such guidelines and communication likewise facilitate more intricate systems of exchange. There is strong evidence that most hunter-gatherers link (or rather identify) this food taboo/exchange system—of which there are countless variations—with incest taboos. Thus, the Arapesh of Papua New Guinea equate the taboo against eating one’s own kill with the taboo against incest. When asked about incest by an anthropologist, a man from the Arapesh tribe said, "No, we don’t sleep with our sisters. We give our sisters to other men and other men give us their sisters."

Not all hunter-gatherer exchange systems are based on inter-tribal marrying that is so male-dominated, as many early anthropologists tried to claim (to vindicate current patriarchy). But whoever controls inter-marrying between tribes, matrilineal kin and totem animals are equated as being tabooed for a very simple reason: they are one’s own blood. "To speak of someone as ‘my own flesh’ means, in many languages of the world, that the person is a close relative, usually by ‘blood’." (Knight) To many tribes, whose word for ‘flesh’ is often the same or similar to their word for ‘kin’, this is more than a figure of speech. Malinowski, speaking of the Trobriand islanders, observed that when men learn that a sister has given birth, they rejoice, "for their bodies become stronger when one of their sisters or nieces has plenty of children." Likewise, a similarly concrete feeling of bodily connectedness is expressed by the Buandik of Australia when talking of totemic animals. When forced by hunger to eat such an animal, "he expresses sorrow for having to eat his Wingong (friend), or Tumung (flesh). When using the latter word, the Buandik touch their breasts to indicate close relationship, meaning almost part of themselves."

In fact, the evidence suggests a cross-cultural pattern in which totemic food avoidances [and incest taboos] are in some sense avoidances of the self. If one’s ‘taboo’ or ‘totem’ is not one’s ‘meat’ or ‘blood’ or ‘flesh’ in the most literal sense, it is at least one’s ‘spirit’, ‘substance’ or ‘essence’. And the crucial point is that the ‘self’, however conceived, is not to be appropriated by the self. It is for others to enjoy.

Chris Knight, Blood Relations

‘Avoidance of the self’ shouldn’t be taken in the modern sense, like ‘running away from yourself’. Implied here is an avoidance of the isolated ego. The hunter-gatherers’ gift-giving and exchange systems imply a commitment to extending the unity an individual feels between hirself and hir clan or totem animal. This unity is felt so strongly that it need not ‘feed on itself’ to bind itself together—it can (and must) be shared with others. It spills over, forming reciprocal inter-tribal bonds of interchange.

Looking back to Shivaite ritual sacrifice, the eating of one’s own kill could be seen as an attempt to regain some personal identity in societies where individuality is suppressed and compromised not to maintain kinship and transcendent blood-unity, but to support an oppressive and unhealthy social structure. However, since the whole point of Shivaism is to transcend the individual, and commune with nature, perhaps new psychic structures are involved. As I said before, Shivaism is counter-cultural. Maybe as the original cultural systems became corrupted in crowded cities, the only tack available to oppose this corruption was to oppose the principles it was based on—however socially useful and healthy they may have been in the past.

I haven’t come across any information about sacrificial practices among hunter-gatherer tribes who practice the own-kill rule, and see common blood as the great unifier. But the whole idea of feeling yourself to be one with animals and other people—in a very tangible way—seems to me to have a strong bearing on blood sacrifice. Sacrifice, in the sense of "giving up something valued", would be truest if one lived with this feeling. Offering the blood (as life-force) of an animal to a spirit would mean much less if the animal involved wasn’t felt to be part of one’s own body. If this feeling was present and real, the sacrifice would truly be a sacrifice.

Following this logic, why bother with animals or other humans at all?

And as Deities demand sacrifice, one of men, another of cattle, a third of doves, let these sacrifices be replaced by the true sacrifices in thine own heart. Yet if thou must symbolize them outwardly for the hardness of thine heart, let thine own blood and no other’s, be spilt before that altar.

Aleister Crowley, Liber Astarte vel Berylli

Crowley made exceptions to this ‘rule’ (as he had only one real rule, the often misunderstood "Do What Thou Wilt"); but the concept presented here—spilling one’s own blood as a sacrifice—has interesting resonances. It echoes the idea expressed earlier that menstruation may be the original ‘human sacrifice’. Chris Knight sees the emergence of all-male initiatory societies, involving self-mutilation and the spilling of blood, as a usurpation of female menstrual ritual power and solidarity. While we should obviously endeavour to release menstruation from the repression it has suffered—and all the evidence points to it being the most repressed and stigmatized human bodily function in history—the practice of ritual blood-letting in men today need not carry any of the associations with stealing women’s power that it may have had in the past. I can imagine many a strident feminist deriding men cutting themselves as suffering from ‘menstrual envy’. Well, we’ve already looked at this—I wouldn’t consider it ‘envy’ so much as a desire to partake of the other sex. It is some sort to equivalent of women gaining erotic pleasure and insight through using strap-ons.

It seems that the aboriginal populations who travelled across the Bering Straits from Siberia—those who were to become the native peoples of the Americas—developed the sacrifice of ritual blood-letting further. In his essay, ‘A Fashion for Ecstasy: Ancient Maya Body Modifications’, Wes Christensen details Mayan practices of tattooing, piercing, and blood self-sacrifice. As well as men mutilating their genitals, the piercing of the tongue was common, in men and in women. As Christensen says, "The psychological equation of the penis and the tongue needs little reiteration." His view is that the practice of "pulling spiny cords through holes in the tongue" may have been important for female Mayan ritualists: "If the wounding of the Male expresses the desire to own the magically fertile menstrual flow by mimicking it, the symbol seems less important than its function of linking the opposing forces of mother/father, sky/earth in one ritual practitioner. This way of looking at the rite is less male dominated, as well, as it allows for the pervasive influence of women in the ritual life of shamanistic village life. The tongue sacrifice, then, is the woman sorceror’s rite—a rite in which she symbolically imitates the male to achieve the same equilibrium."

Genesis P-Orridge, who was involved in quite extreme spontaneous self-mutilation as part of his performance art activities in the seventies, has been performing rituals for nearly twenty years, and claims that he never does one without cutting his skin. "I have to make at least one cut on myself, and it has to be a cut that will scar, no matter how small." (Re/Search: Modern Primitives) Obviously, scarification requires care, precision, and knowledge of how different parts of the body will react to incisions. But it could form part of the prime effort underlying all mysticism: overcoming subject/object dualism. Alan Watts has described this in terms of the idea, or feeling, that one is an individual ego contained in a "bag of skin". ‘I’ (the subject) am inside, and you and everything else (‘not-I’, the object) are outside. The skin is seen as the limit-point between these realms. Most people would see this as ‘common sense’. However, as Watts stresses, the skin is as much a bridge as a barrier. Many different forms of energy and matter—sweat, heat, sound vibrations—constantly cross this bridge, though we are usually unaware of it. We are inextricably bound up with the ‘outside’ world, to such an extent that we cannot exist without it. ‘Out there’ thus forms part of our identity, and our true body is the entire universe. "Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling—a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world." (Freud, Civilization and its Discontents)

And yet the illusion of the skin as an impassable physical and psychic barrier persists. Thus, cutting the skin could be a very powerful way of shattering this illusion. Scarification can be a form of ego-dissolution. For a start, pain is an intense physical stimulus, and can serve to heighten consciousness. Spiritual practices such as flagellation, bodily restriction, ritual scarification and piercing amply testify to the potency of pain as an intoxicant. In the practice of self-scarification, this alteration of consciousness could shift one’s perception of the wound from being some ‘symbolic’ link between the inner and outer realms to being the concrete link which both physics and primitive tribes insist that it is.

Further, this theory opens up an understanding of many bizarre and perverse phenomena in human behaviour. Schizophrenics frequently lacerate their skin, something usually associated with mere self-destructive tendencies. But if we see this as self-destructive in terms of an attempt to overcome the illusion of separate individual existence (the isolated self, or ego), the practice of spontaneous self-mutilation can be seen as part of the healing process that many radical psychiatrists claim schizophrenia actually is. The ‘split’ in schizophrenia isn’t the popular caricature of ‘split personality’ (which is found in multiple personality disorders), but the split between inner and outer, the retreat of the individual from the outside world. My own view is that this split is not an aberration found only in the ‘mentally ill’, but the standard psychic stance of ‘normal’ modern humans. Ego-dissolving catalysts like intense sex and psychedelic drugs wouldn’t be subject to the repression that they are in our culture if this wasn’t the case. Schizophrenia is thus the shock and confusion of spontaneous liberation from our aberrant ‘normality’, a descent into the depths of the psyche, an intensification of the inner/outer split through which one discovers the illusory nature of this division.

It is not schizophrenia but normality that is split-minded; in schizophrenia the false boundaries are disintegrating. . . . Schizophrenics are suffering from the truth. . . . Schizophrenic thought is "adualistic"; lack of ego-boundaries makes it impossible to set limits to the process of identification with the environment. The schizophrenic world is one of mystical participation; an "indescribable extension of inner sense"; "uncanny feelings of reference"; occult psychosomatic influences and powers; currents of electricity, or sexual attraction—action at a distance. . . .

Dionysus, the mad god, breaks down the boundaries; releases the prisoners; abolishes repression; and abolishes the principium individuationis, substituting for it the unity of man and the unity of man with nature. In this age of schizophrenia, with the atom, the individual self, the boundaries disintegrating, there is, for those who would save our souls, the ego-psychologists, "the Problem of Identity." But the breakdown is to be made into a breakthrough; as Conrad said, in the destructive element immerse. The soul that we can call our own is not a real one. The solution to the problem of identity is, get lost. Or, as it says in the New Testament: "He that findeth his own psyche shall lose it, and he that loseth his psyche for my sake shall find it."

Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body

The Divine Body

‘The Goddess’, like all forms of deity, seems to me to be much more than the ‘personification’ of natural forces, or aspects of ourselves. As the previous discussion of personality and ego-consciousness shows, this is because my conception of a ‘person’ or ‘individual’ is, at root, gradually evolving beyond the atomistic and divisive conceptions I have been indoctrinated with. Our conception of divine personifications will (or should) change along with changes in our conception of personality. Since we can’t safely shift overnight to a chaotic, flux-based state of being, the traditional view of deities will still persist to an extent, as useful focuses for attention and energy; but just as any sexual channels must be subsumed under a broader polymorphic map, lest we become obsessed with any one channel, our relationship to ‘deities’ should be encompassed by a much wider conception of divinity. My brief teenage flirtation with Christianity collapsed mostly because I found the mental idea of God as an old bloke with a beard in the sky hard to get round—and very, very silly. I don’t intend to let my present relationship with the Goddess fall prey to similar abstractions. Indeed, the foundation of my interest in this area is the shattering of abstract, monolithic, other-worldly conceptions of divinity.

Much as my ideas are preoccupied with balance, my present conviction that our ‘physical’ experience is the basis of all ‘mythology’ automatically places a distinct difference, an imbalance in emphasis, between those first two all-powerful beings we encounter—our parents. The physical root of my being is the fusion of a part of my mother with a part of my father, but this explosive cellular union is followed by nine months of incredibly rapid growth and development as part of my mother’s body. Even after physical separation occurred at birth, my mother was probably more or less my ‘world’ for the first months of life, depending on circumstances. Freudianism seems to be right in saying that the primal shock of existence is separation from the mother, first physically and then psychically. I’ve no idea why this is the way things are, but such is the case, and I usually point this out to anyone whose knee jerks in dismissal as a reaction against the idea that the first human conceptions of divinity were female. Now, I think this view is overly simplistic, and should be tempered by the above discussions about androgyny and ego-consciousness, but let’s explore it a bit and see what comes up.

Our earliest level of experience of this world is the experience of being unified with our mother in the ocean of the womb. Our nutrition and blood circulation in foetal existence depends utterly on our connection with our mother’s body via the umbilical cord. We are separated at birth, the umbilical severed, but the new world we are delivered into, the ‘external’ world, is in a sense another womb. "Birth is to come out of a womb; and to go into a womb." (Brown) The idea that the material world is our mother is found in archaic Earth-Mother beliefs; in psychoanalysis, where exploration of the external world is seen as a symbolic exploration of the insides of the mother, where "Geography is geography of the mother’s body" (Brown); and in language, where the word ‘matter’ derives from the Latin mater, mother.

Tantric cosmology sees the ground of existence as the union of the male and female principles, Shiva and Shakti. The manifest world is the product of their interplay, where Shiva is the static principle of consciousness and awareness, and the female Shakti is the dynamic principle of energy and manifestation. This is very similar to the Vedic idea of maya, or illusion. The ‘material’ world is seen as an illusion weaved by the goddess Maya (incidentally, this was also the name of the Buddha’s mother), behind which lies the non-manifest reality of cosmic consciousness. We can also relate this back to the idea that Satan rules the world of manifestation—"The Devil is the lord of the world" (Luther)—and God rules the ‘non-material’ realm of the ‘spirit’. Tantra’s Shiva-Shakti cosmology is much more holistic, and does not treat the web of matter weaved by Shakti as ‘illusory’ in the sense of something to be overcome, some cosmic deception that inhibits us. It is seen as the basis of our spiritual quest, the ‘raw material’ with which we should work to transmute ourselves and the world.

We are, at present, part of the Earth. This planet doesn’t ‘stop’ at the ground we stand on—its true boundary is the outer edge of the atmosphere, and we are thus inside the Earth. And, like the human body, the Earth’s body doesn’t really ‘end’ in an absolute way at its boundary, or skin. The atmosphere, like the skin, is a bridge as well as a barrier, mediating the transmission of many forms of energy and matter—most notably light and heat—between the planet and the solar system, and the rest of the universe.

The transition from seeing our human mother as our Mother to seeing the world, or the Earth, as our Mother, is central to initiatory rites. In many tribal societies, pubescent initiates are isolated from their biological families. Mothers often grieve, seeing the initiation as a literal death of their child—and the birth of an independent adult. Many initiations take place in subterranean environments—caves or holes in the ground—from which the initiate emerges as a child of the Earth. It is from such underground wombs that mythologies involving the labyrinth as an initiatory complex emerge. In cultures where male-only initiatory societies emerged, the process often became a way of appropriating the power of the mother, and reveals another example of ritual androgyny:

"The young man is put into a hole and reborn—this time under the auspices of his male mothers." Male mothers; or vaginal fathers: when the initiating elders tell the boys "we two are friends," they show them their subincised penis, artificial vagina, or "penis womb." The fathers are telling the sons, "leave your mother and love us, because we, too, have a vagina." Dionysus, the god of eternal youth, of initiation, and of secret societies was twice-born: Zeus destroyed his earthly mother by fire, and caught the baby in his thigh, saying: "Come enter this my male womb."

Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body

To a certain extent, though, all this is still abstraction. The transition from a ‘biological’ to a ‘spiritual’ mother is as useless and alienating as the Christian spiritual Father concept if our cosmic parent is envisaged in terms of an abstract deity. The importance of ‘rebirth’ is in the rebirth of awareness, the emergence of a feeling that we are fused with, and part of our environment. For the foetus, the fusion with the mother is an obvious fact that is not recognized with conscious clarity, because of an undeveloped sense of awareness and the fact that no other state has been experienced. Our fall from union seems to facilitate—via contrast and separation—a heightened awareness of reality, through which subsequent re-union with the environment may be experienced with greater intensity, "For I am divided for love’s sake, for the chance of union." (Crowley, The Book of the Law)

Since we are dealing with the relationship between human consciousness and the environment, one of the most important areas of interest here is what is commonly known as earth mysteries. This is the investigation of human interaction with the natural landscape in terms of spirituality, especially regarding sacred sites, whether these sites occur naturally or are constructed. There is usually a dualism at work in the investigation of sacred sites, with the scientific disciplines of archaeology, anthropology and ethnography on one side, and paganism, psychology and spirituality on the other. The ‘subjective’ side (pagan investigators interested in the past and present use of such sites) is necessarily full of speculation and assumptions—my own writings included—but it does hold the key to approaching an understanding of stone circles, burial complexes, standing stones and all other such sites. That is, the function of sacred sites cannot be understood without an understanding of (which must include an experience that approaches) the mind-set of the people who built them. This task is probably impossible if taken to be a ‘perfectible’ scientific project, but we have much greater access to archaic states of consciousness than we are led to believe.

In trying to convey the idea that the LSD experience can access different modes of consciousness from along the evolutionary line, Timothy Leary quotes the German anthropologist Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt, offering it for comparison with documented accounts of LSD sessions. Von Eickstedt is trying to describe his idea of the spiritual attitude of australopithecines, our early ancestors:

In the way of experience there is dominant, throughout, a kaleidoscopic interrelated world. Feeling and perception are hardly separated in the world of visions; space and time are just floating environmental qualities . . . Thus the border between I and not-I is only at the border of one’s own and actually experienced, perceptible world.

In other words, for pre-hominid apes, and for the earliest humans, the definition of personal identity could be expressed as: I am my experience. This obviously includes the perceptible landscape, so any sacred sites and constructions that predate the evolution of ego-psychology in human cultures should be considered in these terms. This intertwining of human identity and nature is given a more roundabout, but somewhat fuller expression by Chris Knight in Blood Relations:

In this scheme of things [that of Australian Aborigines], human and natural cycles of renewal are mutually supportive and sustainable through the same rites. The skies and the landscape are felt to beat to human rhythms. Everything natural, in other words, is conceptualised in human terms, just as everything human is thought to be governed by natural rhythms.

. . . There seems no reason to discount the Aborigines’ own belief that in their rituals they were drawing upon natural rhythms and harmonising with them to the advantage of their relationship with the world around them. It was not that man was dominating nature; but neither was it that human society stood helpless in the face of nature’s powers. Rather, human society was flexible enough and sensitive enough to attune itself finely to the rhythms of surrounding life, avoiding helplessness by replicating internally nature’s own ‘dance’. Nature was thereby humanized, while humanity yielded to this nature. If the hills felt like women’s breasts, if rocks felt like testicles, if the sunlight seemed like sexual fire and the rains felt like menstrual floods, then this was not mere ‘projection’ of a belief system onto the external world. This was how things felt—because given synchrony and therefore a shared life-pulse, this was at a deep level how they were.

Naturally, the experience of a psychedelic trip does not reproduce the actual mind-set of archaic humans. For us, a trip stands only in relation to our everyday, ‘normal’, experience of the world, and is quite different from the continuous, everyday experience of, say, a Neolithic Avebury resident, for whom such a world-view would be ‘normal’. Nevertheless, such experiences, induced by chemicals or otherwise, should stand as the cornerstone of our understanding of sacred sites—and pre-civilised culture in general. And in any case, we shouldn’t be interested in trying to replicate the mind-set of archaic humanity. Individual initiation isn’t a simple one-way ‘return to the womb’, but a more highly evolved sense of omni-directional unity that follows the experience of division. Similarly, any attempt to re-engineer our culture’s experience of the environment, inspired by prehistoric and existing ‘primitive’ cultures, should be a return to a similar point, but higher up on the evolutionary spiral. "We are not interested in a return to the primitive, but a return of the primitive, inasmuch as the primitive is the repressed." (Hakim Bey)

My conception of the Goddess, then, has less to do with a visualized representation of a vast cosmic woman, ox, or serpent than it has to do with my immediate, moment-to-moment experience of the world I am part of. Even in my Kundalini dream, the ‘presence’ of the Goddess was an intuited fact, not a confrontation with a manifest form. The two instances of feeling Her presence were both experiences of intense body sensations and energy rushes, accompanied by the self-evident dream-conviction that this was the Goddess. In waking life, this perception arises very much along the lines of Phil Hine’s idea that Kundalini is associated with "one’s physical sensation of the here & now". This sensation is not a narrow feeling of mundanity, not the dissipation of mystery and numinosity that is usually associated with the apt phrase "down to earth". It is exactly the opposite: a sense of the intense completeness and fullness of each moment; a paradoxical but perfectly natural feeling of being totally grounded, yet adrift in a vertiginous whirlpool of possibilities.

A related point that interests me is that investigations into the function and purpose of archaeological artifacts are nearly always governed by the sacred/profane dualism. Is this antler-pick just a common tool, or did it have ritual significance? Are these cave paintings just ‘art’ (in the modern, profane, sense of ‘representation’), or were they part of a system of hunting ‘magic’? It’s clear that somewhere the rigid distinction between the ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ arose. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be in the present situation where for most people the ‘sacred’ only exists in church on Sundays (if sacredness exists at all). According to Alan Watts, ‘profane’ didn’t always mean irreligious or blasphemous. It merely signified "an area or court before (pro) the entrance to a temple (fanum). It was thus the proper place of worship for the common people as distinct from the initiates, though here again the ‘common’ is not the crude but the communal—the people living in society. By contrast, the sacred was not the merely religious but what lay outside or beyond the community, what was—again in an ancient sense—extraordinary or outside the social order." (Nature, Man & Woman)

Judging from this, the sacred/profane duality arose as a result of the increase in human populations. Beyond a certain point, it seems that the full power and mystery of existence, as felt by the earliest humans, could not be a constant fact of everyone’s experience if "social order" was to evolve. Even beyond this point, it can be seen from Watts’ argument that the sacred/profane distinction didn’t necessarily mean that everyday experience was utterly bereft of spiritual significance. This spiritual poverty, this rigid division of life into the sacred and profane (in their modern senses), has only been the norm of human experience for several hundred years, if that. And in their historical accounts, modern scientists have been projecting this division back in time for far too long. A re-vision of anthropology and archaeology is overdue, necessary and, I feel, imminent.

It seems ridiculous that anyone could assume that prehistoric humans sectioned life into neat compartments, mundane and extraordinary, profane and sacred, with anything like the rigour and inflexibility that the modern West does. Only affluent cultures, where day-to-day survival is not really a pressing issue, can even afford such a distinction. For pre-civilised (i.e. before cities) societies, where existence was dynamic and unstable, life depended on crops and crops depended on weather, among other things. For pre-agricultural societies, life depended on the gathering of food and the hunting of animals, which are subject to even more unstable factors. And these things, agriculture and hunting, were the prime focus for ‘religious’ activity. Gods and goddesses of the hunt, gods and goddesses of the Earth and crops dominated their relationship with the divine. What we consider the ‘mundane’ bits about life, like fuelling our bodies and keeping warm, were for these people projects loaded with importance and significance. In such a society, there’s nothing more significant than staying alive. Thus food, shelter, hunting, farming, communication, the sharing of knowledge and skills, all were imbued with what we would consider ‘spiritual’ significance.

The figure of the shaman, "technician of the sacred", stands as the first step in the progressive division of life into the sacred and the profane, but the first shamans could only have stood "outside the social order" in a shallow sense. Early shamans would have depended on the social order for basic support and a purpose for their path’s numerous trials, and the society would have depended on them for communication with deities and spirits, or forces of nature—more often than not for the governing and aiding ‘mundane’ projects like hunting and farming.

In short, life was a unity. Everything depended on everything else. The body was divine, and experience of the body included the environment. For ourselves, living in a culture where the dominant spiritual institutions have insisted not only on separating themselves from everyday life, but directing their spiritual aspirations outside this world, it’s evident that a new vision of spirituality more directly concerned with life, the Earth, our bodies and survival is needed. We cannot live on bread alone, but I don’t want to try to live without it. It’s no coincidence that it took an affluent society like our own, where day-to-day existence is taken for granted, to produce a device capable of utterly destroying the biosphere.

Footnotes

1. [2008] After reading Timothy Taylor’s The Buried Soul, I’m glad I couched this part in suggestive rather than definitive language. Taylor deftly exposes the naivety of many recent theorists who try to whitewash suffering in the ancient world with arguments similar to Dames’. While Taylor’s arguments are important, I still think it’s important to imagine that attitudes may be radically different in ancient societies, and to not settle on a definitive judgement either way unless evidence is blatant. [back to text]

Books Used/Sampled

• Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
• The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche
• Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche
• Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist by Walter Kaufmann
• Janus: A Summing Up by Arthur Koestler
• William Blake: Selected Poems edited by P.H. Butter
• The Tree of Lies by Christopher S. Hyatt
• Pacts with the Devil by S. Jason Black & Christopher S. Hyatt**
• The Devil’s Notebook by Anton Szandor LaVey
• The Secret Life of a Satanist by Blanche Barton
• The NOX Anthology: Dark Doctrines edited by Stephen Sennitt*
• Towards 2012 part II: Psychedelica edited by Gyrus
• Life Against Death by Norman O. Brown*
• Love’s Body by Norman O. Brown**
• Nature, Man & Woman by Alan Watts*
• The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe by Marija Gimbutas*
• The Avebury Cycle by Michael Dames**
• Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture by Chris Knight**
• The White Goddess by Robert Graves
• Tantra: The Indian Cult of Ecstasy by Philip Rawson*
• The Tantric Way by Ajit Mookerjee & Madhu Khanna*
• Kundalini, Evolution & Enlightenment edited by John White
• Magick by Aleister Crowley
• The Book of the Law by Aleister Crowley
• Re/Search: Modern Primitives edited by V. Vale & A. Juno**
• The Holy Bible edited by the Christian Church
• Meditations on the Apocalypse by F. Aster Barnwell
• The Supernatural by Colin Wilson
• The Wise Wound: Menstruation & Everywoman by Penelope Shuttle & Peter Redgrove**
• Men, Women & Chainsaws by Carol. J. Clover
• Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions by John (Fire) Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes
• Yoga: Immortality and Freedom by Mircea Éliade
• Gods of Love and Ecstasy: The Traditions of Shiva and Dionysus by Alain Daniélou*
• Dictionary of Gods and Goddesses, Devils and Demons by Manfred Lurker
• Secrets of Mayan Science/Religion by Hunbatz Men
• The History of Magic by Eliphas Lévi
• The Psychedelic Reader edited by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Gunter M. Weil
• Dead City Radio by William S. Burroughs (spoken word album)
• T.A.Z. by Hakim Bey (spoken word album)

* recommended in relation to the ideas discussed in this essay
** bloody essential

Related Films

• The Wicker Man directed by Robin Hardy
• The Divine Horsemen by Maya Deren
• Videodrome by David Cronenberg
• Crash by David Cronenberg
• Santa Sangre by Alejandro Jodorowsky
• Carrie by Brian de Palma
• Alien3 by David Fincher
• The Exorcist by William Friedkin
• The Last Temptation of Christ by Martin Scorcese
• Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola
• The Hunger by Tony Scott
• Picnic at Hanging Rock by Peter Weir
• Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Henry Levin