THE NEOLITHIC MIND
- THE LESSONS FOR TODAY FROM THE LOST
SYMBIOSIS BETWEEN MANKIND AND NATURE
MANKIND AND NATURE AS ONE
As I passed between the great stones the rods crossed over in my
hands. My body had detected something of which I would not otherwise
have been aware, and the response was reflected in the dowsing rods that I
was holding. What my body was sensing was the energy field created by
the makers of the stone circle at Avebury in Wiltshire. It was as if I was
linking directly with the people who had built this great structure some 5000
years before - an experiental connection with the Neolithic mind that has
given much greater depth to the research that I have carried out for this
paper.
These subtle senses were fundamental to the lives of early humans, inbuilt facilities that were essential for survival and were used in innumerable
ways, including communicating non-verbally with one another, for finding
water and for detecting the earth’s energy fields for the suitable siting of
their communities and sacred constructions. Moreover recent study is
demonstrating how their profound understanding of the characteristics of
stone appear to have extended to being able to use its crystalline properties
to manipulate earth energies to create their significant spaces.
What is evident is that these forebears of ours were totally aware of
their oneness with the planet, not only at a physical level, upon which their
very existence depended, but this interconnectedness was their entire worldview governing everything that they did, described by Rodney Castleden in
his book The Stonehenge People as a “holistic view of the universe, a view
that saw no real division between man and nature, nor between earth and
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heaven” They gave particular expression to this in their sense of the
sacred, spectacular evidence of which they left behind them in the form of
stone circles and constructions.
What is remarkable is the scale of some of their constructions which,
apart from their monumental size, appear to have been designed to last
forever! For instance within the complex at Avebury, not only is there the
great circle of 98 enormous stones, the largest weighing 64 tonnes, but the
circle is defined by a 10m deep ditch with a 6m high bank which is over
1300m in circumference with an internal area of 11 hectares. This in turn is
linked by the 2.4 kilometres West Kennet Avenue of standing stones to
another part of the complex known as The Sanctuary, and a second avenue,
no longer visible, running as far in the other direction. The whole complex
of structures, which experts suggest was a major sacred centre for ritual and
worship, covers many square kilometres and includes the Windmill Hill
enclosure, the West and East Kennet Long Barrows and the monumental
Silbury Hill which is Europe's largest man made mound.
Standing 40m high, this huge construction incorporates sophisticated
earth engineering techniques which have enabled it to withstand erosion to
this day: it was created from an estimated 339,600 cu m of chalk and earth,
covers an area of 2 hectares and is considered to have taken a least 2 million
man hours to build. In his book Symbolic Landscapes, Paul Devereux,
author and researcher into the significance of the landscape to early man,
suggests that the mound was built and carefully positioned so that when
viewed from each of the major centres of the Avebury complex the
silhouette of its top coincided precisely with the surrounding horizon by
direct sight-lines, thus visually unifying this centre with the entire
surrounding landscape. “Clearly Silbury was one of the last statements of
the Neolithic builders there, it seems they wedded the sacred geography of
the existing ceremonial landscape with consummate skill.....a symbol that
united land, sky, seasons and major ceremonial sites in the Avebury
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complex.” Devereux says that for Neolithic man the landscape actually
embodied their spiritual life - as today the traditional territories of
aboriginal people embody theirs.
Avebury, and of course its other great contemporary monument Stone
Henge, are by no means unique as examples of the vision and skills of the
Neolithic builders, for their constructions are found throughout Britain to
the north of Scotland and throughout Ireland, and it is extraordinary that so
much could be achieved by a population, estimates of which vary between
one and one and a half million for the whole of Britain, for whom the
average life expectancy, calculated from the skeleton remains, was little
over 40 years. Furthermore over a period of 3000 years, as Rodney
Castleden records “the evidence points to a very long and uninterrupted
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period of peace, never since attained anywhere in Europe.”
So, how is it then that there was this period in mankind’s development
with such achievement, vision and ability? And what lessons might be
available to us from the manner in which they lived?
THE REVOLUTION OF FARMING
The Neolithic period was the crucial time of transition during which
mankind took the great step from wandering hunter/gatherers, and latterly
herder, to become settled farmers. This period is considered to have started
some 12,000 years ago in the Middle East, expressing itself thereafter in
different places at different, times with small groups in remote parts of the
world still to make this transition.
This paper will look specifically at the manifestation of this time of
transition in the British Isles between 7000 and 4000 years ago and the aim
will be to draw on recent writing and research, together with some personal
speculation, to provide an insight into the mind of Neolithic man, who
would not have been biologically different from us, and draw some
conclusions on the implications this might offer for today, particularly with
regard to the economic circumstances that mankind is presently
experiencing.
The period under consideration falls into what we call the pre-historic.
The danger of considering pre-history is that we impose our 21st century
mind-set upon a time of completely different psychological development
and world-view. This has sometimes lead to a totally wrong assessment as
expressed by Richard Rudgley in his book Lost Civilisations of the Stone
Age, in which he says “the prehistory of humankind is no mere prelude to
history; history is rather a colourful and eventful afterword to the Stone
Age....how great is the debt of historical societies to their prehistoric
counterparts in all spheres of cultural life; and how civilised in many
respects were those human cultures that have been reviled as savage.” He
goes on to suggest how an image of savagery has been projected on to stone
age people as a result of the barbarism and exploitation that has become so
common-place during the more recent times of so called civilisation. We
appear to be unable to conceive of a people who lived in peaceful
cooperation and complete communion with nature - particularly in respect
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to the economic aspects of their lives.
Thus to put the stone age period of mankind’s existence into context it
is important to realise that, whereas our historical period only covers about
5000 years, the ‘pre-historic’ chapter of the life of mankind on earth
stretches back for more than two million years, to the time when certain
southern apes on the continent of Africa were drawn to descend from the
trees and walk on two legs. The result of this action was of course
significant in the extreme. First it freed their hands, already highly
developed with an opposing thumb, so that these could be used for other
purposes, leading to the development of tools and the ability to attack and
kill other creatures at long range: later the heel developed to facilitate the
upright stance and then followed the gradual enlargement of brain leading,
after many hominid variations, to fully evolved homo sapiens some 100,000
years ago. Then, with the coming of the new stone age, or Neolithic period,
some of the most significant steps were taken in the development of human
social practice, heralded by the development of farming, which in turn gave
rise to the establishment of settled communities.
During this period also there was the extension of language, leading, in
due course, to the creation of the written word, mathematics and all the
developments, both sublime and demonic, that constitute civilisation. The
period also established organised practices between people and their
environment that we could describe today within the science of economics.
A TRANSFORMATION OF MIND
To appreciate the turning point that the development of farming
represented, it is necessary to gain a sense of the mental journey through
which mankind had passed. For millions of years men and women had
wandered the face of the earth hunting and gathering as the immediate need
arose. As far as one knows, in that condition, mankind took no thought for
the morrow, but lived meeting the needs of the moment - much as aboriginal
peoples do to this day. This was a dreamlike existence, innocent and
immediate, with virtually no sense of past or future and little fear of death.
Describing the people of this time E Neumann says he “swims about in his
instincts like an animal. Enfolded and upborne by great Mother Nature,
rocked in her arms, he is delivered over to her for good or ill. Nothing is
himself; everything is world. The world shelters and nourishes him, while
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he scarcely wills and acts at all...” In describing this psychological state in
his book Up From Eden, Ken Wilbur says that “at this early stage, although
the self is distinguished from the naturic environment, it remains magically
intermingled with it. The cognitive processes at this stage thus confuse not
only subject and object, but whole and part. That is, just as the subject is
‘in’ the object and the object is ‘in’ the subject, so the whole is in the part
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and vice versa.”
Wilbur suggests that the concept of magic was fundamental to early
man which he defines as a belief in the sympathetic influence exerted on
each other by persons or things at a distance. In this respect the role of the
shaman or his equivalent was central to the belief system that prevailed.
Richard Rudgley says that “the religious life....centred on the worship of the
goddess who took many forms. The earth was revered as the embodiment
of the goddess and death seen as a return to the womb of the
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earth/goddess....” which highlights the significant factor that in the life of
Neolithic man there would have been no separation from what we would
describe as the sacred and the secular, as is pointed out by the Hungarian
archaeologist Marija Gimbutas who in the introduction to her book The
Civilisation of the Goddess: the world of old Europe writes:
Previous books on Neolithic Europe have focuses on habitat, tools, pottery, trade
and environmental problems, treating religion as ‘irrelevant’. This is an
incomprehensible omission since secular and sacred life in those days were one and
indivisible. By ignoring the religious aspects of Neolithic life, we neglect the
totality of culture....Neolithic social structure and religion were intertwined and
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were reflections of each other.
Her researches also emphasise the significance of the position of the
feminine within Neolithic society saying that “our ancestors developed
settled agricultural communities, experienced large growth in population,
and developed a rich and sophisticated artistic expression and a complex
symbolic system formulated around the worship of the Goddess in her
various aspects.” She goes on to suggest that this was a matrilineal society
and that in all probability the female played an equal, if not leading, role in
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communities.
But the move into the Neolithic phase of human development and the
introduction of farming required a fundamental psychological shift and this
is perceptively illustrated by Emilios Bouratinos in an essay Consciousness
and the Snare of Civilisation - a Reappraisal of Human Evolution, in which
he suggests that this alteration of behaviour is caused by the manner in
which the human ‘engages reality’. He divides up human evolution into
two main stages, first as a wanderer and then when mankind becomes
settled:
The wandering phase ...either as hunters or fruit gatherers for the greater part
of this long period or as animal tamers, breeders and herders for a much
shorter period, human beings incessantly roamed the earth. They move as
dynamically as she, live by her rhythms, co-operate with her and in some
ways, contribute to maintaining her ecological balance. They are content to
merely experience life...the settling phase, starts with the discovery of
agriculture and extends to our times. People now settle in specific regions
amenable to farming in the beginning and to craftsmanship later. They begin
to conserve and rationalise most of the things they get involved in. Not only
do they cultivate permanent areas. They construct permanent dwellings and
permanent institutions. No longer are they satisfied to live. They live to
obtain satisfaction. And they secure this by gradually transforming nature
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into a tool. They create civilisation as we know it .
The way in which the wanderer ‘engages reality’, which constitutes
99% of mankind's time on earth, Bouratinos calls self-releasing
objectification which he describes as:
Consciousness as a tool for adaptive focusing...(which) produces incisive,
spherical and continuous awareness. Things, relationships, situations are
mentally objectified only to the extent that practical need justifies it. After
their usefulness passes, conceptions are psychologically released. People live
in the eternal present. Included are the dead which the wanderer considers
just as present and subject to the same needs as the living.
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The way in which settled man ‘engages reality’ he calls self-locking
objectification which began with, or possibly brought about, the discovery
of agriculture.
What the settlers do to survive is different in quality - if not entirely opposite
to - what the wanderers do. The former are in constant movement. The
latter install themselves permanently. The wanderers need to overview
continuously a broad spectrum of factors. The settlers need to overview
those alone that are pertinent to their farming activity. This is how the road
to science and technology was paved...Above all, where human beings
previously considered the partial in the light of the whole, they now consider
the whole in the light of the partial. Whereas under the influence of selfreleasing objectification they understood things to the extent they experienced
them, after its demise they experience things to the extent they understand
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them..
One further feature of the life of mankind through its wandering period,
which is being presented by leading researchers in this area of study, is that
he was, to a very large extent, egalitarian. In his essay The Evolution of the
Deep Social Mind of Humans, Andrew Whiten, Professor of Evolutionary
and Developmental Psychology at St Andrews University, quotes the results
of an extensive survey which demonstrated that “hunter/gatherer society can
generally be described as egalitarian. Egalitarianism means social equality
and hunter/gatherers cooperate to achieve this and such equality is
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manifested in a number of ways.” These findings were based upon
research amongst extant hunter/gatherer communities throughout the world
and through archaeological observations which confirm the universal
practice amongst early man, which is not found in primates and other
animals, of the sharing of meat after a hunt amongst all members of the
group, and also by the lack of any evidence of a hierarchical structure in any
of the evidence studied.
Giving substance to the supposition that early man communicated
telepathically Professor Andrews says that “such people mentally penetrate
other minds and are in turn mentally penetrated by them. The minds of
such a society are deeply interwoven in a manner unprecedented in
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evolution.”
With the psychological shift from the life-style of the wanderer to the
settled farmer came a totally new concept of time, the former being
subject to what is described as the cyclical and seasonal sense of time,
against the new settled lifestyle described by Ken Wilbur:
But the world of farming is the world of extended time, of making present
preparations for a future harvest, of being able to gear the actions of the present
towards significant future goals, aims and rewards. The farmer works not only in
and for the present, as does the hunter/gatherer, but also in and for tomorrow, which
demands an expansion of his thoughts and deeds and awareness beyond the simple
present, and a replacement of immediate impulsive discharges of the body with
directed and channelled mental goals. In short with the advent of farming men and
women entered an extended world of tense, time and temporal duration, expanding
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their life and consciousness to include the future.
But with the sense of time, as Wilbur describes, comes a dominating new
feature into the life of man - an awareness and fear of death:
I think...that a basic and profound expansion of consciousness allowed man to
picture the future more clearly, and thus plan and farm for it. At the same time,
and for the same reason, he also apprehended his own mortality more vividly, and
this forced him to project his existence through the future so as to meet himself
tomorrow....besides being able to picture the future through an expanded mentality
he needed to picture that future actually lying ahead of him, as a promise that death,
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would not touch him now.
Thus it is that as mankind enters the stage of settled communities, so there
appears the first evidence of funerary rights and the building of what have
been assumed to be tombs. But whilst the presence of human remains by
many of the constructions that have been left to us by the Neolithic people
has led archaeologists to assume that they are tombs, this could well be
another incidence of imposing an idea from our own culture and belief
system upon prehistoric man. It could well be that they had other primary
functions as is implied by Richard Rudgley when he says that the earth was
revered as the embodiment of the goddess and death seen as a return to the
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womb of the earth/goddess. So possibly, as well as being structures at
which the dead were buried they were also very sacred spaces.
For instance the design of the long barrows, which are assumed to be for
burial purposes, often comprise long empty mounds with a narrow entrance
at one end to a small chambered area which, some suggest, represent the
female form, the entrance being the vulva leading into the womb and that
rather than burial chambers these were in fact primarily places of initiation
in which members of society were required to pass through rites of passage
signalling a stage of individual maturity - a universal practice in cultures
past and present.
This was certainly my impression on visiting the West Kennet Long Barrow
at Avebury which is entered through two large upright stones that lead into
a group of small chambers which have all the characteristics of meditation
cells that I have seen in cave monasteries in India.
There is another model that is gaining support today that can help us to
comprehend mankind’s psychological change in this period and this is by
relating it to the right and left hemispheres of the brain, and in his book The
Alphabet versus the Goddess medical surgeon Leonard Schlain suggests that
the crucial change that took place at this time was the switch from the
dominance of the right hand - holistic, nurturing, creative and feminine
hemisphere of the brain - which governed the perceptions of wandering
early man, to that of the left - dualistic, linear, analytical and masculine
hemisphere of the brain - which has dominated mankind’s thinking and
behaviour since the coming of settled communities.
The survival and then success of humans required that evolution set aside an area in the
newly enlarged brain in which the concept of time could be contemplated free of the
holistic and gestalt spatial perceptions of the earlier mammalian and primate brains. The
appreciation of linear time was the crucial precondition of linear speech. A conversation
can be understood only when one person speaks at a time. In contrast, one’s right brain
can listen to the sounds of a seventy-piece orchestra and hear them holistically. Time
and sequence are the very crux of the language of numbers; it is impossible to think of
arithmetic outside its framework. I propose that the left hemisphere is actually a new
sense organ designed by evolution to perceive time.
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In due course, following the Neolithic period, the use of the linear
aspect of the left hand side of the brain led to the invention of the alphabet
and writing: however, the crucial factor that arose from the change from
wandering to becoming a creature that lived in settled and stable
communities, and the resulting psychological change that took place, was
that the intimate interconnectedness between mankind and the world around
him began to be lost. As with all these changes there is no definite
moment, nor a general change for all people at once, but a tendency had
started that created a new mind-set that gradually transformed the world in
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which mankind lived and made possible the economic practices of today.
THE BIRTH OF ECONOMICS.
By drawing on recent research and opinion, an attempt has been made to
illustrate how and why fundamental psychological changes took place when
mankind made his great transition from wandering to settled life. From this
it will be seen that for the greater part of its time on earth mankind has
existed in a simple paradisiacal state, in which condition, as Emilios
Bouratinos describes, people lived in the eternal present. This also appears
to have been an egalitarian, non hierarchical and peaceful condition.
Recent studies have shown that the Neolithic people would have been heirs
to a far greater range of human achievement than earlier anthropological
writings have suggested. Over its long time of gradual evolution and
change mankind would have developed a deep understanding and mastery
of all the materials available for his use. Foremost would have been the use
of stone in all its forms, but most particularly flint which could be fashioned
into weapons for killing and preparing animals for food, and axes for felling
and working timber. There would have been a deep knowledge of all the
possible uses of wood and of all forms of growing plant, for food, tools and
for physical protection from the elements. All the uses of animal products
would have been exploited, bone, horn, sinew, skin, hair, fur and wool; the
curing and transformation of raw skin into the infinitely versatile material
leather is known to have been mastered a million years ago and there is
evidence in the Neolithic flint mines of antlers making very functional
digging implements. The weaving of cloth and carpets from animal and
plant products were skills mastered throughout the majority of early peoples
worldwide. Survival depended upon being expert in hunting, fishing and
gathering of edible plants and berries and later the skill of taming and
herding animals. Clay pottery was used extensively. In fact modern
research is now demonstrating that a vast range of skills and
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accomplishments had been achieved by prehistoric man.
The settlers of the British Isles who brought the skills of agriculture from
continental Europe would have come to almost totally forested islands, no
doubt inhabited by some hunter/gatherer people. Only a few thousand
years would have passed since the retreat of the Ice Age and the temperature
was known to be some few degrees warmer than it is today. The
countryside would have been teaming with game, including wild boar, deer
and cattle, and transforming the forest into areas suitable for agriculture
would have been done in the traditional manner, still used in other parts of
the world, of felling and burning. Generally the fertility of the soil cleared
in this manner only produced worthwhile cereal crops for about three years,
after which new areas would have to be cleared. What is noteworthy is the
facility that had been developed in the use of stone tools to achieve these
clearances, which in due course created the open landscape with which we
are familiar.
No doubt the new system would have operated alongside the traditional
methods of hunting, fishing and gathering until sufficient areas had been
cleared to comfortably support the now growing populations. There is
evidence of a number of setbacks through which the population had to
survive, but nonetheless it clearly gave rise to a remarkably advanced form
of society in which specialist craftsmen arose, mining for flint was
undertaken and trading took place, but most significantly it freed its
inhabitants sufficiently for what was probably the major motivation of their
whole life - giving expression to their awareness of their spiritual
interconnectedness with nature. This would have been done by seasonal
rituals and celebrations and by creating permanent marks on the landscape
by the construction of the great henges and enclosures.
The economic way of life of the settlers in these shores is described in great
detail by Rodney Castleden. With regard to flint mining he says that mine
shafts were sunk on the South Downs above Worthing as early as 6300
years ago and that this was not just a local service “but the large quantities
of flint delivered to surrounding regions, some even to the [Scottish]
highlands, show that the miners were not working on a subsistence level:
they were deliberately and systematically over-producing, generating a
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surplus for gifts, barter or trade.”
This mining production was supported by axe factories throughout Britain
from Cornwall to the highlands of Scotland:
Axes were exported over an astonishingly wide area ...some of the stone was carried
hundreds of miles to find its market...(and) one way in which these long distances may
have been covered is by a large number of short-distance exchanges. The communities
are segmentary, small-scale and self-organising, each small tribal territory running its
own economy and its own social system, even though there seems to have been
widespread cultural uniformity. In this view the cultural landscape of the early Neolithic
is seen as a myriad of cellular units, each territory only a few miles across yet not
dependent on an external authority or leadership. The people of each territory met their
neighbours in adjacent territories to exchange goods, news and ideas.
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It is very possible that longer journeys were made along the ridge ways such as Icknield Way which runs across the southern half of England or by
sea. There was an established network of roads and tracks, both ridgeways
on the high ground and on the low ground, although of the latter there is less
evidence save for the discovery of sophisticated timber trackways that have
been preserved in areas of soft ground. It is assumed that the majority of
travel was on foot, there being no evidence of horses, oxen or wheeled
vehicles being used.
The Neolithic people were proficient in the use of water transport: indeed it
would have been the means by which the new settlers reached the islands of
the British Isles from continental Europe. Various forms of boat would
have been used, including dugout canoes hollowed out of tree trunks,
simple plank boats and skin framed ships of a size sufficient to take a
reasonable cargo, livestock and several crew, suggesting that river and sea
transport was used, possibly in preference to the overland routes. A
demonstration of this mastery of water was the transportation of the 82
bluestone uprights weighing up to 4 tons, and the 40 lintels, destined for
Stone Henge, which it is assumed were transported from the Preseli
Mountains in South Wales by sea from Milford Haven to some point on the
coast of Wessex, possibly even on the south coast travelling with this cargo
around Lands End. There is evidence of a considerable number of active
ports throughout the country, usually in river estuaries.
Another skill that was well developed was the production and distribution
of pottery. From the British Isles there are examples of a wide variety of
styles being produced, some lasting for as long as 1500 years. Once again
from the areas that these have been discovered it is evident that their
distribution was wide spread from their place of manufacture.
It is not know whether these flint miners, craftsmen and traders were fulltime specialists or farmers who divided their time between tending their
fields, and carrying out these tasks. But what is clear, from the phenomenal
numbers of man hours required to build the great enclosures, is that
somehow society was so ordered that time could be made available for these
activities. It would be reasonable to assume that the new phenomenon of
surplus that was now being created through farming and the various
manufacturing and trading processes, was used to support those who
participated in these essentially sacred acts - both the priestly order and
those who laboured to create the monumental structures. Rodney Castleden
suggests that all economic activities were closely involved with sacred ritual
and had a significance beyond the material function that they fulfiled. “We
can also imagine that great trading expeditions, like all the activities
associated with farming, hunting, fishing and religion, were woven into the
seasonal rhythm of the community life. We can also imagine that the
adventures took on a powerful spiritual significance way beyond their
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obvious practical value..”
From what has been described above we can see that now all the essential
elements of economic activity were present. However, because of the
holistic mind-set of the Neolithic peoples, one must assume that the manner
in which they related to nature, the seasons, the elements and the land itself
would have been quite other than that upon which our lives are based today.
It can be conjectured that at this point there was no concept of personal
property - neither was it that everything was ‘owned’ in common, the
concept of owning and possessing did not arise but everything was available
to all. This, it is to be assumed, would have been the same with regard to
the use of land bearing in mind that all sources of life sustaining benefit
available would have been looked upon as a gift from the prevailing deity.
However, beyond the unexpected achievements of this period, something of
even greater significance was taking place in the transition of mankind’s
mind-set.
What I would like to suggest is that the importance of the Neolithic period
was that it partook of both the mind-set of the wandering hunter/gatherer,
described by Emilios Bouratinos as a condition that produces “incisive,
spherical and continuous awareness” as well as that of the farmer “...
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different in quality - if not entirely opposite to...the wanderers.” This
Neolithic transitional period gave rise to a period of almost unique
fulfilment for the human in which these two mental conditions, which
represent the two fundamental aspects of the brain, the right and the left
hemispheres, were in balance leading to what the authorities quoted in this
essay consider to have been a period of peace and happiness in which
mankind lived a fulfiled existence in which music, song, dance and sacred
ritual played a central part.
In due course, however, this balance was lost.
THE LOSS OF INNOCENCE AND THE RISE OF CIVILISATION.
Various factors would have contributed to this but Leonard Schlain, in
The Alphabet versus the Goddess, suggests that this loss of balance took
place when the reverence for a female all providing goddess was forced
to give way to the dominance of the masculine and warlike god, that has
ever since presided over our paternalist civilised societies. This, he
maintains, was primarily caused by the entry of literacy and the written
word into human communities, which emphasised the linear left hand
side of the brain to the detriment of the holistic, nurturing and creative
right hand side:
For several thousand years, every people throughout the Fertile Crescent venerated a deity
who personified the Great Goddess. When we speak of this area as the ‘cradle’ of
civilisation, we tacitly acknowledge the superior role the feminine principal played in the
‘birth’ of modern humankind.
Then, the Great Goddess began to lose power. The barely legible record of
the earliest written accounts beginning about five thousand years ago provides
intimations of Her fall. Her consort, once weak and inconsequential, rapidly
gained size, stature, and power, until eventually he usurped Her sovereignty.
The systematic political and economic subjugation of women followed;
coincidentally, slavery became commonplace.
In their attempts to solve the mystery of the Goddess’s dethronement, various
authors have implicated foreign invaders, the invention of private property,
the formation of archaic states, the creation of surplus wealth, and the
educational disadvantage of women. While any or all of these influences
may have contributed, I propose another: the decline of the Goddess began
when some clever Sumerian first pressed a sharp stick into wet clay and
invented writing. The relentless spread of the written word, and then the
alphabet, into the social intercourse of humans initiated a fundamental change
in the way newly literate cultures understood their reality. It was this
dramatic change in mind-set, I propose, that was primarily responsible for
fostering patriarchy.
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Schlain goes on to quote the French anthropologist Claude LeviStrauss who said “There is one fact that can be established: the only
phenomenon which, always and in all parts of the world, seems to be linked
with the appearance of writing...is the establishment of hierarchical
societies, consisting of masters and slaves, and where one part of the
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population is made to work for the other part”. Schlain’s book further
suggests that with the decline of the goddess and the coming of the alphabet
came the formation of the archaic states, the creation of surplus wealth, the
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invention of private property and the educational disadvantage of women.
Although ascribing it to a different cause Richard Rudgley says that at
this time “The Stone Age philosophy of Old Europe, with its emphasis on
cyclic time and holistic social and ecological thinking, was pushed aside as
the new ideology gained ascendancy. The beliefs of Old Europe survived
as an undercurrent but the foundations of a new and savage civilisation were
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beginning to be built.”
Perhaps this was the point at which the basis of our present economic
situation was established. It came about in this fundamental
psychological shift from the holistic, nurturing, non-hierarchical, creative
and feminine dominated world-view, to that of the dualistic, linear,
forceful, hierarchical and masculine dominated one. Undoubtedly it was
this that made possible the quite astonishing and positive achievement in
terms of creativity, wealth production and learning, leading up to the
scientific achievements of today. However it also created conditions in
which the negative features of slavery, cruelty, territorial struggles,
hierarchically structured communities and economic injustice was able to
thrive - conditions that are very familiar to us in this age.
THE EMERGENCE OF ‘MINE’ AND ‘YOURS’
Once the change in mind-set had occurred, the manner in which the new
social structures manifested in various communities would have
depended upon prevailing cultural traditions, however it might be
speculated that in general the steps towards our present condition of
social injustice progressed as follows.
After the psychological shift, described above, there would have arisen
for the first time the concept of private ownership which, under a holistic
mind-set, would not have existed. Because of the new settled life style
the phenomenon of surplus production over need would have arisen.
Initially the surplus would have been accepted as coming, as did all
wealth, as a gift from the prevailing deity and in his paper Metaman and
the Sacred Money Scam, Fred Harrison describes this surplus as the
sacred income, which would have been “needed to support the shaman,
the medicine woman, the wise leader”. He goes on to say that “Today
there is a technical term for that primordial surplus income. It’s the
economic rent of land and natural resources...” He then goes on to
describe how “somewhere on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, in
the civilisation of Mesopotania, someone bequeathed us the great switch:
the sacred income of the community was privatised.” This, he describes
as “the most barbaric act in the history of our species, the basis of all the
27
acts that disgrace the pages of our history”.
The actual processes and forms that followed what became an almost
universally adopted switch would have varied from society to scoiety, but
with few exceptions there was the expression of the same features - the
denial to the community the benefits of the sacred surplus or the
economic rent of land and natural resources, and the expression of
cruelty and injustice, so that today it is almost universally assumed that
cruelty and economic injustice are features of human nature.
This essay has attempted to demonstrate that they are not and that
mankind’s natural condition - that which has been its great strength
through its long time on this earth - has been one of mutual support and
sharing. What has taken place during this relatively short period of
civilisation, compared with mankind’s total span of existence, has
happened as the result of a psychological, and hopefully temporary
imbalance resulting in, as the title of this essay suggests, the crucial but
devastating in its consequences loss of symbiosis between mankind and
nature. One of the most crucial results of this was succinctly expressed
by the neoplatonist Renaissance philosopher Marcilio Ficino in one of his
remarkable letters:
God ordained all the waters of the world to be in common for creatures of the
water, and all the earth for creatures of the earth. Only that unhappy being,
man, divided what God had united. He confined his dominion that was vast
by nature, to narrow limits. He introduced into the world ‘mine’ and ‘yours’,
the origin of all strife and evil.
28
Since then this negative aspect of human activity has been played out and
the human propensity for barbarism has been demonstrated in the most
horrific manner, most significantly in recent months. Mankind’s
behaviour, through the tools of destruction that it has invented and its
unchecked destruction of the natural world, is now even endangering its
future existence on the planet.
RESTORING THE BALANCE
How might this be resolved? At the beginning of this essay the question
was asked whether there are any lessons that we can learn from the
Neolithic mind which led, it was suggested, to a period of unsurpassed
peace, happiness and fulfilment. The lesson clearly is that there must be
this balance between the holistic, nurturing, creative and feminine
dominated aspect of the mind and the dualistic, linear and masculine
dominated aspect. This is beautifully expressed, and an optimistic way
forward outlined, by Emilios Bouratinos in the conclusion of his paper
quoted above:
We are in a position to re-sensitise ourselves to the practice of self-releasing
objectification that is still very much alive in us - when we realise that we need to. More
importantly we are in a position to achieve this re-sensitisation without discarding any of
the intellectual, technological or organisational advantages we gained since the inception
of civilisation. Through self-releasing objectification we can even develop these
advantages further, tailor them to a more qualitative way of living and find ways of
discarding the more dangerous tendencies that have followed in their wake.
Nevertheless, how to re-sensitise ourselves to self-releasing objectification
will require lots of perseverance, lots of mutual respect - and lots of ingenuity.
In other words it will require going into what Jonas Salk calls ‘metabiological evolution’. This new type of development will no longer involve
survival of the fittest, as did biological evolution. It will involve ‘survival of
29
the wisest.’
What an opportunity presents itself to mankind today. If only the
extraordinary achievements of technical discovery and organisation could
be matched by an equally inspired understanding and implementation of
social justice, then a world could be created in which happiness and
fulfilment might once again flourish for all people. But, as suggested
above, for this to come about it will be necessary to “realise that we need
to” and then resort to “lots of perseverance, lots of mutual respect and lots
of ingenuity”, not to mention wisdom. This essay suggests that the
Neolithic age offered the key which is the rebalancing of the two
complementary features of the mind, which would once again bring about
the restoration of the symbiosis between mankind and nature.
Neolithic Mind References
1 Rodney Castleden, The Stonehenge People, London: Routledge, 1987 p. 156.
2 Paul Devereux, Symbolic Landscapes, Glastonbury: Gothic Image Publications, 1992
p. 150.
3 Rodney Castleden, The Stonehenge People, London: Routledge, 1987 p. 217.
4 Richard Rudgley, Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age, London: Century Press, 1998
p. 1.
5 E Neumann. The Origins and History of Consciousness, Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1973
6 Ken Wilbur, Up from Eden, Wheaton: Quest Books, 1996 p.45
7 Richard Rudgley, Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age, London: Century Press, 1998
p. 17.
8 Marija Gimbutas, The Civilisation of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe,
London: Thames & Hudson. 1991 Preface p. X.
9 ibid Preface p. X.
10 Emilios Bouratinos. Consciousness and the Snare of Civilisation. Essay in Network
published by the Scientific and Medical Network. Issue No. 72. April 2000.
11 ibid
12 ibid
13 Professor Andrew Whiten The Evolution of Deep Social Mind in Humans, Paper
published in The Descent of Mind: Psychological Perspectives on Hominid Evolution
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
14 ibid
15 Ken Wilbur, Up from Eden, Wheaton: Quest Books, 1996 p. 94.
16 ibid p. 95/6.
17 Richard Rudgley, Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age, London: Century Press, 1998
p. 17.
18 Leonard Schlain, The Alphabet versus the Goddess, London: Allen Lane the Penguin
Press,1998 p. 22/23.
19 ibid p. 3.
20 Richard Rudgley. Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age. Century Press, London 1998
p. 261.
21 Rodney Castleden, The Stonehenge People, London: Routledge, 1987 p. 70.
22 ibid p. 76
23 Emilios Bouratinos. Consciousness and the Snare of Civilisation. Essay in Network
published by the Scientific and Medical Network. Issue No. 72. April 2000.
24 Leonard Schlain, The Alphabet versus the Goddess, London: Allen Lane the Penguin
Press, 1998 p. 6/7.
25 ibid p. 3.
26 Richard Rudgley, Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age, London: Century Press, 1998
p. 18.
27 Fred Harrison, Metaman and the Sacred Money Scam, London: The Othila Press,
1997 p8/9
28 The letters of Marcilio Ficino, Volume 1, Letter No 73 to Angelo Poliziano, London:
Shepheard-Walwyn, 1975 p. 119.
29 Emilios Bouratinos. Consciousness and the Snare of Civilisation. Essay in Network
published by the Scientific and Medical Network. Issue No. 72. April 2000.