CHAPTER SIX
Totem and taboo organize and report 'right' and 'wrong' for the people of a culture. They control one's selves by setting up a bank of animated displacements, publicly symbolized, and preventing one's selves from disturbing the assemblage. It would seem to be a normal way for homo schizo to behave. It does not matter that the terms are reserved for 'savages; ' civilized cultures can and do employ the totem and taboo. Most of this chapter, once it moves from the opening theme, plays upon their variations.
Totems and taboos are convenient ways of repeating and organizing obsessions. They are group elaborations of the schizophrenia of original humans. Both are found in all cultures and in varying degrees of weight. In large-scale cultures they are part of religion and bureaucracy.
Taboos are sacred prohibitions, whether received directly or indirectly from divine authority. The 'Ten Commandments' include taboos. The name of Yahweh was taboo. At one time it might be pronounced only once a year. Violation of taboos is commonly supposed to have fatal results. Yahweh frequently concludes his injunctions with the phrase "... lest you die."
The totem, more strictly, is a symbolic identification of a human group with an animal or plant, which represents a divine force. Because animals (the owl, for instance) and plants (the sacred oak) were tangible, near at hand, and well-known, they could readily be fitted into the scheme of delusions; a communication system, largely imaginary, is set up between the life-form and its human patron.
In joining with a totem, a human group acquired a talisman and group representative. The totem life-form operated in the sky and on earth to the presumed over-all benefit of its sponsors. Once the sun (earth) rotated too fast; the great rabbit, said some American Indians of the Great Plains, lassoed the sun and halted it, not releasing it until it promised to go slower (perhaps the rabbit was a cometary image.) But a totem also imposed limitations upon behavior by means of taboos, rites, and penalties.
Totemism came to be a set of specialized practices with regard to a species or even a particular animal or plant. It arose with the help of certain celestial behaviors that were for various reasons interpreted as animate behaviors within the celestial environments. The important illusory behaviors of the animation in the sky are carried down to Earth and cemented by analogy to the organism's earthly behavior. Thenceforth a set of attitudes to the life manifestations are produced that give birth to totemestic practices. As the human draws apart from the 'lower forms of life, ' the totem and the taboo dissolve into sublimations.
A totem provides a complete schizotypical system: the injection of divinity into an animal denotes a cognitive disorder, a hallucination, a misplaced metaphor. The exclusiveness of the totem and its group towards other totem groups in its associated taboos reflects the schizoid aversiveness to others; the worshiping and cannibal sacrifice (sometimes) of the totem animal emerges from ambivalence; the numerous rituals and rules connected with the totem convey compulsive obsessiveness; and the secret and enduring aspects of the totem group's practices, going back to the totemic primal incident, display catatonism.
Enrico Garzilli writes of Faulkner, Joyce, Pirandello, and Gide in their searches for "the real self," notable names, to be sure, pursuing at the pinnacles of literature the primordial search for oneself within the polyego [1] . He explains that the word is the self; becoming human is to become a word. Hence the importance of such ancient expressions as begin the Gospel of John: "In the beginning was Word; and Word suffused God; and God was Word." (My rendering.) We sense here the power and control exercised in the first naming of something and agreeing upon it with others. We should understand, too, here, that "Word" is "Logos" or "the enlightened life of mind."
C. Levi-Strauss is of the opinion that "language was born all at once," thus supporting our position of hologenesis. He goes on to say that "whatever the moment and the circumstances of its appearing in the range of animal life, language has necessarily appeared all at once. Things cannot have begun to signify gradually. After a transformation the study of which has no relevance in the field of social sciences, but only in biology or psychology, a change has taken place, from a stage where nothing had meaning to a stage where everything had." [2]
This is a surprising use of the word "relevance." Once we have understood what was happening biologically and psychologically, we comprehend what was happening socially. A quantavolution introducing language must concurrently involve a grasping for logic, for control over memory, and for the social consensus on meanings from which culture sprouts. We have already spoken of what was happening biologically and psychologically: the hominid's brain was beset by delays in instinctive reactions, building special sub-centers, and displacing throughout himself and the world outside. The internal code of language was springing up and erupting here and there into public language.
According the Edward Sapir, too, language was formally complete from the beginning and existed from the beginning of man. H. Kalmus claims an "explosive" origin of speech, too, but then limits the speed to "hundreds of generations," [3] a retreat to appease the millions of years of mankind awaiting fulfillment. Speech did not occur word by word, grammatical form by grammatical form, over millions of yeas of humanization. It probably sprang up in a mixture of counting, signs, and ejaculations. Counting has been connected (through Lord Raglan's How Came Civilization?) by Seidenberg [4] with rituals, which fits the model of homo schizo well. "Counting was invented in a civilized center, in elaboration of the creation ritual, as a means of calling participants in ritual onto the ritual scene, once and only once and then diffused." Seidenberg explains that all people had religious numberings and taboos on certain kinds of counting. It is frequently imagined to be theft when one's name is counted. Today, a homologous paranoia underlies the hostility of many persons to the computer, which seems to steal one's name, carry one's number, and manipulate these and hence oneself.
A person is only created when named or announced and the creative word may have been the creative number. Marshack would seem to be moving along a similar path, with stress upon arithmetic and calendarizing (the catastrophized need to watch the skies for regularities that are hoped for, and irregularities that one must prepare for) [5] . He is also locating ever earlier symbolic forms.
Some anthropologists are proving that the chimpanzee can learn to understand words and sentences. The point of exhaustion is reached after several dozen of them are learned. If the chimpanzee has not learned to speak in its supposed eight or more million years of existence or whatever its age as a species, it is unlikely to begin now. On the other hand, if the chimpanzee had just recently been mutated, the effort might be worthwhile.
The human seems better equipped to move his tongue than the chimpanzee, but it is not the primate's tongue that prevents speech. "Basic English," a shortened selection of words for communicating in English, does well with 750 words from a possible quarter of a million. (Its problem lies in the constructions; the format or program of a language would be critical to a world tongue, and cannot be simply imperialistic.) A number of gods have as many names as would be needed to constitute a language, hundreds for every major god.
Many vertebrates and insects could manage 500 distinct sound-combinations; 9 distinct sounds might be permuted about 2 9 or 512 ways. Since words have several meanings, depending upon their context, a great many more than 512 'words' are possible. When these thousands of words are combined, many thousands of messages are possible, enough to make a lexicographer out of a sparrow.
In order to speak, an animal has to be "intelligent." This means that it must possess a sense of being an individual, a will to words, the things to refer them to, a capacity for time and recall, and an obsession for reiteration.
There is no speech center in the human brain; a large cortical area controls speech and is placed in either the left hemisphere (for the right-handed) or the right. This would suggest not only that speech is recent and non-organic in structure, but also that the will to speak is an inner necessity connected with instinctual blockage between the left and right hemispheres, and slowdowns in message transmission in other newly grown parts of the brain.
Man did not get so clever that he began to talk. He was originally so frightened that he began to ejaculate names, and to call them out obsessively, then to use them on like occasion (to compare, in effect), to admonish, to pray, and command. To his surprise, he could find others who might understand, at first perhaps only a twin, then their offspring. Nouns came first, wrote G. Vico, one of the earliest modern etymologists. And he definitely connected the earliest speech with the worship of the gods.
Following the ejaculative phase, which may have occupied only a few years, language probably entered upon a liturgical phase. Heavily depending upon exclamation, it moved to detailing situations and meanings. It undertook to express what had happened (to call the roll of disasters, so to speak), to exorcize the causes of the events, and to cover them up, making sounds of appeasement or evasion.
Much public or formal language, like liturgy, has been formal and compulsory from the beginning. It is still so, obviously in mega-societies but also in tribal societies. Maurice Bloch speaks of the deliberate and enforced impoverishment of language in traditional oratory. The language acts to control the speaker [6] . He cannot go beyond prescribed forms of speaking. Hence public speech is understandable only in the context of ritual, as Malinowski said, not by virtue solely of knowing its lexical units. The rhetoric cannot become revolutionary.
Speech came promptly, but writing was not developed well until civilizations had poetry, art, religions, and social systems. A possible reason for this may also be supportive of our theory of language. It is logical that as speech is to the mouth and ear, writing is to the hand and eye. No one doubts that earliest man (or latest hominid) was as digitally adept as he was orally proficient. However, gestures, grimaces, and context could let the eye help the speaking process along.
But the hand and eye could not, like symbols, accomplish internal symbolizing or speech, which is probably what was occurring in the new creature to help him coordinate his several selves and their displacements in the outer world. That is, public speech was the extrusions of inner speech, like the small portion of the iceberg that floats above water.
Some people with complex languages do not write even today. Art of course takes the place of writing in respect to many messages from one's ancestors. A totem pole can take the place of much written history, depending upon the kind of history wanted. There is a clue here: a large society and an official class need explicit messages and records.
Until these criteria come into play, art can successfully block writing, somewhat as television blocks literacy. Art can say so much that, by comparison, the breaking down of pictures and symbols into writing may appear to be a meaningless and barren enterprise. Further, it may seem to be sacrilegious to openly admit that words are interchangeable tools. Hence writing was originally a holy profession, as in the Egyptian bureaucratic empire. It was carried over into government: "the needs of a centralized administration were a far greater impetus to the development of writing, among the Sumerians (cuneiform) as in Crete, than intellectual and spiritual needs," [7] Earliest tablets speak mostly of rations and personnel in the palaces.
But, in maritime cultures, such as the Phoenician, the pragmatic value of messages finally broke the sacred grip. Words (orally spoken) had departed so far from their origins and symbols from art, that they might be used casually in practical affairs. The alphabet was invented out of numbers, phonetics, and calendars by people who were on the move, as in boats [8] .
The invention of writing was an effective grasping for control of memory, behavior, and pragmatics. It delivered also a severe blow to the imagination; it caused massive disenchantment. It placed credit for works effectively upon the culture. No longer could one be taught by the gods, through subtle or at least mysterious parental and social transmission or from the depths of one's being, from inner springs. Besides memorization, one had exactness, repetition, a third party, an objectivity, a beginning of coolness and remoteness.
Man spoke one tongue to begin with. As he diffused from his proto-patria, his speech had reason both to change and to remain the same. If there can be found a basic set of sounds and words that is common to all of mankind today, then one would have an original language, a proof of cultural hologenesis, and an indication of the recency of human origin. Searches for the first language have been modestly rewarding, enough so to justify a greater expenditure of time and resources, especially for computerized manipulation of data. R. Fester has proposed that "there is an original vocabulary of six archetypes common to all of humanity which still today comprises the basic of every language and which at the same time provides a clearly recognizable link between all languages." The root-words of 'Pangean, ' as we might call the tongue, would be BA, KALL, TAL, OS, ACQ, and TAG. "From the moment when the genus homo left the family of lower animals, and thanks to his upright stance, both hands and senses could serve him more freely than before, the vox humana shared his further evolution to the Man of today." [9] We should, of course, disregard the makeshift ladder that Fester has thrown up here to arrive at human voicing. The words are prominent today in geography: "Indo-European, Mongolian, Phoenician, African and Ancient American geography was decidedly using the same original words."
Fester claims to have discovered that in many languages, the syllable BA pertains to human relations and subsistence; KALL appears connected with the idea of concavity and the females womb; TAL refers to clefts, to the ground, to females; OS to thresholds; ACQ to water; and TAG to height, gods, erect humans. To Malcolm Lowery, who has kindly supplied me with his translated materials, the progression by which the words related by Fester to the roots are said to drift in space and among cultures is not intelligible.
J. P. Cohane also proposed a set of root words, independently and without awareness of Fester's book [10] . These key words, he believes, were strongly religious in their original associations. Like Fester, he finds his examples to be most copious in geography. His words are also six in number, although others of equal importance seem to be present in his narrative. They are Oc (or Og) as in Okeanos, Kronos, Moloch, and an ancient Irish god, Oc; Hawwah, as in Aloha, Yahweh, acqua, earth; mana; ash/ az; tema, as in Thames, Tiamat, Athena; and Eber/ abar, as in Berber, Hibernia, Calabria, Abruzzi, Hebrew, Ares, Mars.
Scholars of linguistics seem disinclined to undertake the risky task of reconstructing the prototype language. Whorf spoke of "the story of man's linguistic development -- of the long evolution of thousands of very different systems of discerning, selecting, organizing, and operating with relationships. Of the early stages of this evolutionary process, we know nothing." [11] We can, he said, only survey the results of this evolution as they exist today. Still, Whorf was an early enthusiast for trying to trace the original ecumenical speech. Generally, the linguistic establishment has beaten back the numerous efforts to demonstrate speech affinities, regarding them as prima facie absurd. Such connections would be Gaelic with Algonkin, Chiapenec with Hebrew, Othomi with Chinese, Choctow with Ural-Altaic, these being Amerindian connections. The diffusionists have fared better in proposing Old World connections: Hamites with Semites; Sumerians with Magyars; Late Minoan with Greek; Egyptian with Hurrian; Etruscan with Lemnian; Berber with Basque, etc. Justus Greenberg says that the 750 indigenous languages of Africa were originally four families, and these were originally one, and possibly related to Hamitic, says Gilbert Davidowitz. Encouraged by the theory of hologenesis of culture, I would conclude that the search for the ultimate ecumenical Pangean language will not be in vain.
Humans of the proto-age had immediately the problem of constituting themselves deliberately into a group. The psychology of the hominid band was gone. In its place was the fearful, distracted, individuated -- even multividuated -- person. He must belong, yet not belong, at the same time. The favorite topic of political philosophers and economists -- the individual against society -- took shape.
The bond between individual and collective psychology is tight. It is both genetic and adaptive. It is fully determined. It is unbreakable. Evidence of these statements gushes from history and anthropology on the one side and from many psychological schools on the other. Just as the brain can reach to the toe to express itself physiologically, it can reach to the stars to express itself psychologically. Where it happens to reach is a cultural affair.
Just as the human is a coordinated poly-ego, so a culture, and for that matter any group, is a mega-poly-ego, that typically selects a dominating ego-pattern as its design for he behavior of its members. A special concept of organization is required to grasp that organized behavior that is an extension of patterned mind-behaviors. The genesis of external organization is in the mind( s) of individuals and their groups.
One way of expressing the holism of personal human conduct is that "private motives are displaced onto public objects." Thus, a person suffering inferiority and weakness in personal life finds superiority and strength in political activism; Harold Lasswell, following Alfred Adler, has expounded and documented this thesis [12] .
I do not limit our theory to this view or language. All men, given their brainwork problems, must feel weak. All men seek power according to their own private and cultural prescription. The distinction between private (individual) and public (social, cultural) is most usefully applied during special investigations in politics and law. The human bonding is without innate distinction. The human acts in a merged internal and external context. A fond pat on the hand can stop a pain in the toe; a political victory can let a man digest a thick steak, as I once observed in a study of Huey "Kingfish" Long of Louisiana.
There is no end to the process of 'private-public' interaction from conception to death. That means also private-cultural. The individual and the group march along, side by side, from the dawn of mankind. Both society and the individual are schizoid in origins, structure, and functions. Their behavior and forms are not always congruent; the symptomology is varied. Then it is that deviance (medical schizophrenia) is defined. The individuals seek to evade the society or change its laws; the society seeks to make the individuals conform; else it treats them for mental illness or jails them on account of their menacing or destructive conduct.
The process will go on as long as human nature retains the form which it assumed in the days of creation. There are perhaps some non-schizoid culturally created humans, who have evaded hybridization with the schizoid, the fate of most hominids. Even if there were none at all, the idea of their existence should be retained for heuristic and theoretical purposes. They would be well-trained primates, although not discernible as such. The schizoids, and especially certain schizophrenes, are religiously and politically dominant. With their obsessions, suspicious hyperawareness, penchant for symbolism, and their megalomania they control the world. That is, they try to control it; but the world is, by their own definition, uncontrollable. Homo sapiens schizotypus defines 'control, ' and is insatiably anxious for control.
Human action moved back and forth along an axis of tension between the individual and the collective or social. Self-awareness was an inescapably individualist phenomenon. Never after creation could the sense of the self be exterminated. Never thereafter, then, could the collectivity perpetually and wholly dominate the individual soul. Incessant, forcible, and imaginative attempts to do so over all of history were foredoomed to fail and still are. The split self, a source of the greatest terror, could not permit its unification by the collectivity, even though the collective achieved its great resilient strength from its guarantees to the individual that it would assuage, diminish and even cure the terror of the split. There was no returning to the mammal.
So loyalty began, built upon intrinsic disobedience. And so began authority. The story of Job, in the Bible, represents the individual trying with all of his might to subject himself to the will of Yahweh. Dreadful catastrophe, initiated by Yahweh, abetted by the Devil and by hostile humans, crushes his life-values: his loved ones, his possessions, his power, his respect, and his health. An exception stands for the sixth value, knowledge, that is not removed but is the focus of the divine assault upon Job. If only he could be mentally broken into a numbness, stupefied, then he could be defeated. He would not then respond to God.
The very failure of this last form of degradation of self is both a triumph and a negation of Yahweh. That is, all must stop short of the ultimate disaster, which would effectively wipe out creation. On the other hand, once stopped short of self-effacement, the campaign of Yahweh and the Devil is lost and the human being is restored. Job is left the victor on the scene of battle. All of his values and achievements are indeed restored. The story of Job is told as a lesson in humility; actually, it is a lesson in human arrogance: the will to control God.
Job's story might be set at the end (ca 4000 B. C.) of the age of Elohim-Saturn. It is before the flood of Noah. By then, human ideation was as complete as it was to be until the Greek skeptics, unless some civilization, of which no trace remains, had operated with a secular ideology. Technology had arrived at a level hardly exceeded until 350 years ago. At Catal Hüjük, in present-day Turkey (6,000 B. C. ?), "orderliness and planning prevail everywhere; in the size of brick, the standard plan of houses and shrines, the heights of panels, doorways, hearths and ovens and to a great extent in the size of rooms." [13]
During the age following Saturn, which may be called the age of Jupiter (Zeus, Horus, Yahweh, Marduk), the list of secondary institutions and inventions becomes long. Large scale organization or centralization developed. Millions of people were aggregated and ruled by agents and delegations of authority. Kingship; priestly, military, and official classes; record-keeping; and extensive physical properties were common. Increased domestication, breeding, and herding of varied animal species reflected a projection of human organization into the animal kingdom. Large-scale agriculture is also to be viewed in the context of an administrative organization of plants and human caretakers.
Basically, given the domineering schizoid prototype, social behavior (including language, religion, governance, art, etc.) contains varying elements of obsessiveness, catatonism, orgiasm and sublimation. The fears of the self, of the gods, and of loss of control lead to the eternally 'shell-shocked' behavior of returning to the original traumas and repeating them, both to punish oneself and to avoid punishment by others. Deviation is tabooed, except as it finds expression in momentary orgiasm and sublimation.
The only way in which language and all other inventions of customs can be developed and organized happens to be schizotypical: undeviating insistence upon repetition, the compulsion to repeat, the slavish adherence to memory and tradition, liturgies. Bleuler reports patients who will play the same musical trill or chord a thousand times and, like the esteemed citizen of the regimenting modern state, Bleuler's patient, obsessed with command automism, will mechanically obey any outside order, will imitate others slavishly, will repeat everything he hears, and, despite a lack of feelings, do all of these things impulsively or as if compelled.
This is an effective human response to a loss of instinct and the great need for new forms of control over the self and others. Organization, even as we see it today in great bureaucracies, highly rationalized, is a catatonic gripping for a non-changing world: 'If I remain perfectly still, I will escape observation, I will not be punished, and the world itself will stand still in emulation of me. ' Members of a Judaic sect freeze in whatever activity they may be engaged when the Sabbath falls and do not move until the Sabbath ends.
In its conception and supposed functioning, a typical modern bureaucracy is a marvel of deductive science [14] . It is hierarchy of power and control from top to bottom, with a division of tasks from broader to more narrow scope, down to the individual worker. It is regarded as a highly rational way of accomplishing large collective tasks. Yet this administrative grandeur is only the recognizable descendant of the first efforts of homo schizo to organize work, something he did half-aware but naturally. For the principle has been the same from then to now: an obsession upon a displaced target (god, a village plan, a hunt, agriculture) and an effusion of severe discipline, compulsively exercised and rationalized. Man has had to work in this way. The awareness of the principle, its statement in science and law, and deductionism as scientific method all trail after its spontaneous generation. In early organizations, the compulsion to reiterate was applied to external control and organization as it had originally been employed for self-control and the ordering of smaller groups. Authority was supplemented by deductive principle. Deductionism is the idea that from a general prescription may be derived specific prescriptions. That is, a statement, that all must be put in strict order, is followed by an enforcement system to ensure that no exceptions to or deviations from the order occur in individual cases.
Deduction is consistent with the association of different kinds of displacements and the compulsion to reiterate. It permits free play to authority to expand its scope of activity and its human domain. It leads to all avenues of life. It externalizes the subjective, by providing security, letting the inner self relax, and divesting the self from its preoccupations with itselves into 'objective' external occupations. It relieves the smaller social organizations of their involuted and intricate rites and rules, moving them out upon the larger stage of a kingdom.
Constructions of many types became possible. Monuments, settlements, populations, armies, and record-keeping all grew in size. A bureaucratic (usually theocratic) state might be discerned, successful in its aggrandizement of human activities, and containing within its larger order the orgiastic practices of religion and warfare, the sublimatory development of the arts and crafts, and the negativism and retardation always imminent in human populations.
Bureaucratic states might collapse from natural disaster, or from competing states, or even from long-term demoralization. Deductionism is rigid and restrictive. It puts constraints upon ambitions, social differences, and new experiences (orgiastically impelled). It is prey to apathy.
Nonetheless such social forms as the bureaucratic kingdom must be called a civilization. The surrounding and preceding forms might also be called civilizations. When, then, did civilizations begin? Civilization is premised as some condition beyond humanization. The human could not elect civilization; he was driven to it by his fundamental character; what was needed was a respite from catastrophe and a space of a few centuries.
Civilization marked no qualitative change in the human character. It is an enduring, well-grounded way of life for a large number of persons containing elaborated and sublimated second-order effects of humanization. If more severe strictures are put upon the term, no significant benefit in logic or theory accrues. Writing is civilized, but provokes no great change in human character or ideation. Deducing commandments from a generalized authority is not exclusively a civilized practice. Peacefulness is not exclusively a trait of civilization. If it were not for the catatonic motif that freezes many cultures at a first-order stage or in a 'fallen' stage, the word 'civilization' could be logically applied to all human organization.
The catatonic response to disaster may be presumed to account for a number of 'primitive' or 'retrograde' peoples and subgroups of larger populations, such that the elaboration which is the hallmark of civilization does not proceed. This catatonism is negative and refuses change. It fights the battle for world control within the person and the small clan or tribe. Its overburden of constraints, rejections, and taboos miniaturizes and trivializes. The externalized, exo-tribal culture is actually abandoned and condemned, leaving the members of the group motionless, aghast, face to face with awful eternal threat.
People built megaliths around the world, probably beginning six thousand years ago. A megalith is a worked or cut stone that weighs, say, over 10 tons, which alone or in conjunction with other stones mediates religious sentiments among the group and with the gods. The stones stand for ancestors, gods, holy circles, sacrificial altars, astronomical pointers, centers of convocation, and tombs. The efforts required to erect them demonstrate both strenuous collaborative discipline and fervid emotions. They are large to demonstrate the peak of divine fealty of which the group is capable and to stand firm against the elemental rages of nature.
That they are often isolated from their quarries or sources, have been reconstructed again and again, have been abandoned by or remain from a disappeared culture, and are fallen, split, and cracked indicate that the fears of their builders were well-founded. The builders were dispersed or annihilated. When recently the megaliths were rediscovered and studied, they were considered mistakenly to reflect a peak level of technology of their builders. Actually, many of them may represent the work of marginal surviving elements from civilizations that peaked at higher technical levels but whose centers were eradicated.
The Olmecs of the Mexican lowlands used basalt quarried from eighty miles to the North to build their monumental sculptures. Single stela and single heads weigh from forty to fifty tons. "The scale of the operation required dwarfs that of Stonehenge and speaks for an authority of great power at La Venta, backed by potent sanctions." [15]
Gerald S. Hawkins examined the famous Nazca ground tattoo of lines for stars, planets, sun and moon alignments and found none. "The line complex was not built to point to the sun, moon, stars, or planets. Astronomically speaking, the system is random." [16] But, if the Nazca lines are very old, we could expect them to be nonsensical by current retro-reckoning in astronomy, for there is evidence that the Earth has tilted during human times. Thaddeus M. Cowan, a psychologist and archaeoastronomer, writes that Old World proto-astronomers
"... were primarily concerned with significant solar and lunar events as they appeared on the horizon.... Indian lore suggests a variety of ways the stars can be regarded (individual stars, groups of individual stars, patterns). Similarly, the mounds might be seen as following the same course (conicals, chains, effigies)." [17]
That is, to the Amerindian, the mounds and stonework were templates of the constellations and sky events, therefore measured large (though subjectively) and mostly not even fully visible from the ground and to the workers. Probably this is behind the Nazca drawings too, with their spectacular drawings of dragons and a large bird.
Since the megaliths were all constructed before the Earth and sun had achieved their present orientations, none of them preserve their original orientations. At best they point roughly towards some anniversary position of the sun, moon or stars, such as the spring equinox. They were not the best instruments, either, of their times and culture. Whatever the orientation and cyclical repetition that they counted and measured, a simpler, more manageable, and finer measure was within the builders' capabilities.
The megaliths were religious. The Arc de Triomphe in Paris was built to celebrate a concatenation of heroic and historic deeds, not to be simply a convenient traffic divider. It was oriented to the sunset of the victorious December 2nd Battle of Austerlitz, also Napoleon Bonaparte's Coronation Day. So too the megaliths were erected, not to count months or praise the dead, but to commemorate the past, to celebrate survivorship, and to control destiny.
The first task of the split-self was to recollect itself and gain control of itself and others. How it did so became the paradigm of governance ever thereafter. The workable mechanism incorporated the overflowing stored fear, the gods associated with its origins and still operative in the sky and on earth, and the four patterns of behavior, all of which could be brought to bear upon the problem of self-control and the control of others, lending the person a tolerable balance of mind and behavior while identifying with and yet subverting the gods and accomplishing the pragmatic functions of existence in a much more developed and technical way.
All of this appears rational and fully intentional only in retrospect. Most of it occurred as the reaction and response of a new species of being to continued applications of great internal and external stress. The bearers of the new human culture were not all members of the new humanity. Whatever the combinations of mutation and potentiation, schizotypical leaders were present from the beginning, who, in order to adapt themselves to the new life, had to seek the adaptation of the others. They possessed all the tools of leadership that have ever since been possessed, namely symbols, ideology, force and goods, in the same order of importance, all tied together in the drive to control and organize the environment according to a teleological, if delusional, form.
The predominance of the delusional, aggressive, symbolist character in governance began then and continued ever after. Human food production, and the useful arts and crafts could not move forward without qualities of leadership removed from the actual specialization of tasks, no matter how important and vital they seemed in themselves. Control and power in the self and in the group were their preconditions. Therefore priests were the governors, and hunters, planters, and workers the governed. In a later elaboration, god-kings assured the society a personalized succession from the gods under covenants and constitutions; these the priests contrived to tie human governance to the order and disorder of the skies. The universal presence of generalized, rather than specialized, leadership is knotted to the principle of the total cohesion of culture, earlier described. Since the culture is holistic, so must the culture's leadership be holistic.
The basic political institutions are but two, the republic and the monarchy. All human organization resolves into a combination of these. The republican is of hominid origin and was the logical first form of human organization. The monarchies originate from the catastrophes following creation and the relentless evolution of homo sapiens schizotypus.
By the time of the first extant historical records, ca. 5200 B. P., past ages and past god-kings had reigned and retired. Now there came, in what is conventionally regarded as the first dynasty of Egypt, a consolidation and a worship of the sky-god Horus (Jupiter) and the Pharaoh as divine king. But this unifier of Egypt built his rule upon a congeries of small kingdoms each with its own divinities and cosmogonies. It is said that in the control of the Nile waters (perhaps after the Saturnian flood) lay the appeal for the unification of Egypt. More important as a cause was the aggressive force unleashed in the aftermath of disaster. Just as the divinity of a king is proven by his internal absolute power, and that proof is rendered necessary by a natural (divine) destruction of the previous power of the prior dynasty and rule, so is his divinity proven by his ability to master foreign societies, in emulation of the universal omnipotence of the king in the sky. The Pharaoh incarnated Horus.
The sequence of rulership tended to proceed from disaster to survivorship to monarchy to republic and then through the same sequence repeatedly, over cycles of varying duration, until the cycle became a self-fulfilling prophecy, or Plato's tyranny, aristocracy, democracy and so back to tyranny, aristocracy, democracy and so back to tyranny, a law of politics. This could be rationalized, without the recollection of primeval catastrophe, as 'the way man's mind worked' and 'how societies changed. ' Even to this day, the cycle tends to occur. The chaos that typically ends democracy is laid to libertinism, rather than to the subconscious primordial feelings excited by a rule of liberty.
The end of democracy, that is, comes not from what happens but from an increasing feeling that 'man is getting away with too much, ' and that the gods will respond by devastating man. So a tyrant arises, plays god, restores order, and people hope that their expiation and sacrifices of their liberties will be punishment enough. Usually the occasion for the crisis of the regime and the revolution of the government is something resembling a catastrophe: a natural disaster such as a drought, a hurricane, crop failure, economic depression, or a crushing defeat by a hostile army. The function of authority is to support the structure of the human mind that was erected upon the dire events that brought the human mind into being. Authority is the formula that encompasses the three control-needs -- the control of the self, which is paramount; the control of the gods; and the control of the environment, including other people.
The world may be believed to consist of an objective reality but that objective reality is a product of an uncertain mind. The objectiveness of reality consists of a mind that perceives itself and therefore perceives the need to define reality, plus an agreement of many minds that reality is as it is. Both come from the shared structure and discipline of the newly create humans.
But the mind is uncertain of this absolute reality and human society is an endless struggle to set up and maintain this reality against the indecisiveness of human instinct and the discrepancies of perspective, both genetically and experientially caused.
The bonding consists of a) the projection and identification of the mind with all of these together, b) the obsession (repetition compulsion) as a glue of the binding, c) the deductive principle as the method of moving through time and space and dealing with all three components while moving, d) the lesser principles of catatonism, orgiasm, and pragmatics that are intrinsically incapable of ungluing the binding formula of authority, unless and until the mind is destroyed. That is, not only was chaos the primeval cloud-world, formless and kaleidoscopic, but also chaos was his non-recollectable existence to which he could not return, and feared, and therefore would not wish to go back to.
Men have always cherished the hope that the gods would cease to torment them. One of the most brilliant inventions to bring this about was the 'covenant' of the lord. The gods would promise to perform certain tasks and refrain from harming people provided that the people would worship them properly and behave in certain ways as well. In the Bible, Elohim and Yahweh introduce at least seven covenants. One is with Adam and Eve, another with Noah, others with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and David. Several of these followed upon natural disasters. A new constitution, so to speak, was handed down from the throne.
But note how the route from catastrophe to theocracy to monarchy to individualism is pursued. First there is chaos: no promises are binding. Friedrich Nietzsche, predecessor to Freud in the discovery of the 'unconscious, ' writes in the Genealogy of Morals that the human was originally simply a fickle animal. Somehow the creature had to be severely chastised in order to give it a memory. For the keeping of promises was the basic condition of humanization and civilization. Surprisingly, Nietzsche does not take the leap to catastrophism, inasmuch as he thought that some immense event must have happened to cause mankind to acquire a memory. He says that he cannot think of anything more severe than the punishment that would be dealt out to persons who did not keep a bargain in early tribal commerce.
Tribal commercial promises, like many another cultural trait, are traced by the quantavolutionist to the by-product, the fall-out, from the great reality of chaos and creations: 'You made us; you have destroyed us; do not do so again; we must believe you will not; we have this specific assurance from you, your self-binding covenant; promises must be kept (we hope) and therefore we shall kill any among us who violate your covenant; further we will punish anyone who violates any promise that he makes, and go to war over broken promises; so all contracts shall be sacred in your name. ' Thus I would imagine the genesis of contracts.
Then as egalitarianism progressed, the laws came to regard a great many contracts as made between equals, rather than handed down as in the beginning. So the sanctity of contracts, which the American courts for a long time expounded with holy fervor, goes back to the times of reaction and destruction, to fear, and to the magical coupling of the sacred and the profane so as to reinforce the sacred. The pragmatic element of the contract is of course great; there is no gainsaying Nietzsche there; but the catastrophized essence is there too.
As in other areas, the catastrophized behavior works itself out in a highly sublimated and indirect form. The 'rationality' of the 'contract law' is on the one side. The famed penchant of Jews for 'arguing with El, ' 'legalism, ' and 'bargaining' derived in part from their catastrophized anxiety over whether a new covenant would be pending and what the words of the last covenant really meant.
On the other side, the aboriginal idea runs rampant. The Zealots of the first century after Christ are a case in point. They believed a terrible calamity would soon overcome the world and wipe out all but a few good Jews. Then a new covenant would have to be confirmed by Yahweh. St. Paul extended the time, and modified this idea into a belief in the Judgement Day. But the early 'millennialist' sects are imitated from time to time today.
And a close homology is afforded by the 'Cargo Cult' sects of the Pacific Islands; there, property and promises are dispensed with, in a fatal pause or age-breaking, during which a people awaits the coming of a great ship or (now) airplane carrying the goods of life promised by a sacred ancestor.
We noted how the Greeks handled the problem of promises. Their gods were full of not-so-valid promises, possibly because they were so full of obligations and interconnections. Whence their gods were deemed fickle, not at all like Yahweh. But, recalling the passages of Proclus on the bonds of Jupiter and rings of Saturn, one notes the covenant there [18] : Jupiter is the paramount god of law and order in the universe. He binds himself as well as others to obey his own laws. So the Greeks were not so far off the mode of humanity.
Not much in the way of pragmatic life routines is exclusively male. G. P. Murdock surveyed the part played by women and men in the economic and household activities of 224 societies. [19] . Only the pursuit of sea mammals and major hunting were never exclusively the task of women. But neither were they anywhere usually done by women. Nor were they ever a function shared by the two sexes. Females like the goddess Diana of the Hunt were exceptional. I attribute this not to the muscular ineptitude of women, but rather to unconscious male sexual jealousy of large beasts, and a general lesser aggressiveness in the less schizoid female, as I have explained in my accompanying volume on human nature today.
It is impossible for the human, given both the catastrophic and the physiological structure of the mind, to divorce his major concerns, to segregate them intellectually, mythically, verbally. One must impart congruity and cohesion to any important experience. He will put all experience into context, through unconscious processing by way of the catastrophized memory or through partially conscious analogizing and philosophizing. Important natural events will be related to sex, food, tools, violence, and death. Each will have, in its symbolization and in his mind, something of every other. Human sexuality is exponentially more complex that primate sexuality and reflects, with all other life-values, the circumstances of creation and the aftermath.
Truly and simply, events of the primeval period were seen to resemble hominid organs and practices. Making sense of the sky events and their effects, with their super-potency, called upon the new mechanisms of the mind to an ever-increasing extent, a shocking extent, until finally sexual behavior, like all other behavior, came to be a secondary derivative from imputed sky practices.
The origin of sexuality thus was attributed to the sky gods. Hence much that could relieve disaster-anxiety, the true primal fear, was forced into human sexual behavior. From that time onwards, sex was no longer the indigenous and instinctive product of the mammalian species but was the example and instruction of the gods. From the very beginning of humanity, sexual practices, like all other life and culture, were integrated and deduced from the behavior of the divine.
Therefore, those practices which in the light of humanitarian science appear to be savage or brutal were in fact instrumentally rational and functional for the new creature. Self-consciously, he and she did not care for what was natural to animals, but wanted what was possibly divine.
All manner of sexual practices and linkages of sex to other life areas came to be invented and institutionalized. In the earliest dynasties of Egypt, four-directional compass points are indicated by phalluses. Single and double-phalluses are carved as heads of batons, possibly for pointing during ceremonies and for other magical purposes; these are found in the French Upper Paleolithic sites. They are also found drawn on cave walls. Both the paleolithic Cromagnons and the Egyptians draw a picture of heaven overarching earth: the first as a bull over a female, the second as a sister over a brother (see Chaos and Creation, figure 15). The drawings are so close in spirit that they may carry Cro-Magnon man down to the Old Kingdom of Egypt. A parallel occurs in Minoan Crete where Dedalus fashions a metal cow to house King Minos' wife so that she can cope with a white bull that has attracted her. These are to be interpreted not as the exaltation of sexualism as a human drive but to the divine imposition upon sex of the rule of heaven, nature, and gods.
The concept of sexual perversion dwindles when confronted by the complexity of sexuality. The Princess Palatine, wife of the brother of Louis XIV of France, in one of her frank letters describes her homosexual husband's attempts abed to fecundate her by masturbating first with holy medals of the Virgin. (The scandal of the deed and of the letter itself, which was omitted in a celebrated edition published in 1981 -- and this is scandalous, too [20] , -- invites comparison, say, with the public holocausts of sinners of the same culture in church squares before the 'god of peace and forgiveness, ' as described and surveyed in contemporary publications.) The sacred and the profane, the obligation and the evasion, merge like wrestlers, like the symbol of the Yin and Yang. Still, public madness defines private sanity.
It is from the interpretation of divine behavior that cults of virgins and eunuchs originated and were perpetuated throughout the world. Peter Tompkins thinks that the loss of its tail by a comet identified with Venus may have originated these cults and perpetuated them practically to our day [21] . It was through the fear of the sky gods that punishment was ingrained in individual and collective behavior too, and that extremes of both impotency and furious rape came to be responses to every major and minor expression of the high energy forces.
Violence unleashed is everywhere given a sexual form and rests with the human psyche thereafter. Sex is a screen for, and release of, the primordial fear built up by catastrophic genesis and experience. No culture has escaped the process from the beginning of human time. The more obvious violent aggression associated with human sexuality is paced by sublimated sexuality. The catatonic response to disaster reflects itself in sexual frigidity and impotence, with their hundreds of individual and collective manifestations. Catastrophized obsessiveness is reflected in the frequent fixation upon the pornographic. Unlike primates, humans have developed a prolonged coitus and frequent coitus, again as types of compulsive-obsessive behavior. Human females secured a perpetual weak rut, after an instinct blockage arose against the imperative primate rut period.
Once locked into quantavolutionary theory, sexology can initiate new theories for sexual problems or deviations. The cultural relativity of sexual practices can be explained even while the universality of the catastrophe-sexuality nexus is admitted. For example, Saturnian and Bacchanalian orgies are deviant sexual as well as economic, organizational, religious, and physical (anti-hygienic) outbursts. They introduce and celebrate the end of the world in infinite series. Once reinforced and lent new meanings by the sky gods, human sexuality entered upon the social scene vigorously. The simple dashed line at varying angles ( | ) is most common in cave art; it is generally adjudged to be a phallic symbol and certainly develops in that direction. The female vulva is also common (Ñ). The ankh (see below) symbol of (comet) planet Venus is common and may even be found in the New World as a diffused or independently invented symbol. It has been a religious symbol in Egypt and in Christian areas for millennia. It is frequently used as a genital symbol, bisexual or androgynous, and may be related to the Greek 'phi' (f) a fire sound, that was used as a sexual symbol by itself.
ankh:
A variety of architectural forms have been given sexual as well as heavenly associations. The pyramid (D), the megalith and obelisk (shown below), the tomb in several forms, and the Greek temple (shown below) are suggested as primeval sexual symbols carried into the highest civilizations. (The Temple resembles a triangular female symbol resting upon male pillars. Naked and unashamed 'lingam' and 'yoni, ' monumentally constructed, are found in India and elsewhere.
Obelisk:
Greek temple: Thus may be explained the most incomprehensible of interconnections: the religio-politico-sexual. Creation events were seen to resemble actual sex organs and practices. This happens by the basic delusion that gives objective realism to signs and symbols. The superpotency of sky events and disastrous high energy forces might be controlled, it appeared, by controlling their close cousin-referents in society -- sexualism. The rituals, sacrifices, elaborations, and sublimations then begin.
Among the Navaho Indians, women sit on their legs, and men sit crosslegged. Why? They say that in the beginning Changing Woman and Monster Slayer sat in these positions [22] .
Manu, the Noah of India, was delegated by the gods to be the recreator of all creatures after the great flood. "In a desire for offspring he practiced worship and austerity." He "practiced severe and great self-mortification..., while he stood on one foot with his arms raised. With bent head and eyes unblinking he performed awesome austerities for 10,000 years." [23]
"We must do as the gods did in the beginning," says an ancient Hindu text. But not only the Hindus believe and act so. Every known religion does the same, whether it is the belief system of a great civilization or of an isolated small tribe.
And not only is it the religions that aim to repeat the behavior of the gods in the beginning. All social forms of activity are saturated with the emanations of this principle. In Timor, when the young rice sprouts, a specialist on agricultural myths is brought in to spend the night in the fields reciting the myths about the origins of cultivated rice [24] . Every activity seeks to follow its earliest principle.
The bearing and baptism of children, marriage, the rites of adolescence, and death -- sexual relations, family relations, work relations, -- governments, companies, armies, athletic teams: no activity can escape its beginnings.
Ballgames are played all over the world. They are just games, people say, and they may even say that so-and-so invented the game of baseball or whatever the ballgame is called. Not so. Every invention is in a continuity. Every game goes back to primeval religion. Every game is a game originally of the gods. The human players of athletic and parlor games are exhilarated by their unconscious replaying of divine roles in catastrophe and so are their spectators.
Thus the Olmecs of ancient central America played a ball-game and had courts built with religious carvings and paintings all around where the game was watched [25] . This was about 1500 B. C., and is attested to in recent excavations of their ruins. Their myths are clear as to what they were doing. They were imitating the games of the gods as they saw them in the sky, bloody disastrous games in which the losers, though they be gods, were killed. And so the Olmecs played their games with human skulls in the beginning, and the players who lost were killed and skulls became the balls for the next games. To shrink from these ancient practices, and take refuge rather in a supposed calm rationality of the sciences may be comforting, but is self-deceiving.
No one can escape the conduct of the gods in the beginnings. Not even the secular mind of the scientist. For even while asserting his distrust of the supernatural and legendary, the scientist uses a language, a numbering system, and forms of organization derived from the celebration of what the gods did in the beginning. Science is built upon the nature of homo schizo; it does not come from outer space. The bulk of science comes from heightened self-awareness, the wide span of human displacements, the causal connective mimicking of instinctive stimulus and response, obsessive attention, suspiciousness, associations retrieved by naming, and imitating with arithmetic addition the sequential processing in the consciousness' (dominant ego's) control of attention. Scientists constitute a corps of disciplined self-controllers engaged in these schizoid practices. Furthermore, like a snail moves with its shell, the scientist carries his shell of culture as he goes about his work.
An Einstein will trust that "nature does not play dice," a scientific fiction that perhaps is not as reality-based as the cosmic fiction of early man, who went back to the beginnings, when the gods were playing ball. In India the game of dice may have begun, say Santillana and Dechend, with the gods, "who go around like... casts of dice." [26] Indeed nature plays dice. The Hindus also played a game called 'planetary battles. ' 'Nature, ' of which Einstein speaks, is an idealization of Zeus, who maintained law and order, despite his rapscallion son, the planet-god Hermes (Mercury) who was always traveling about and bringing luck to dice-throwers.
What causes this compulsion to connect all activity to its origins in the primordial conduct of the gods? A compulsion to repeat an event, say the psychiatrists, of whom Freud may have been the most eloquent and original, is caused by the traumatic nature of the event to those who experience it. What, then, was so shocking about the events of the beginning? And how can we be traumatized today by events so ancient that they slip off the pages of recorded history?
Now again, unanimously, the fossil voices of the dimmest past speak; the events were the awful behavior of the gods when they created mankind. They tore apart the elements of nature to fashion this new creature. They drenched the world; they fired it; they tore up the earth; and they stormed the atmosphere. The human creature was made from the elements in a time of great stress. He was born to great fear and abject servility to his makers. He was born with a compulsion to repeat his birth throes. The birth of every infant, as in the theory of Otto Rank, is the primal trauma of the person; the birth of mankind is the primeval trauma of humanity.
I explain in an accompanying volume my doubt that the word 'sublimation' is scientifically useful. It refers always to a displacement; hence what is said about the one is to be said about the other. Therefore, while I retain the word in these passages, the word 'displacement' can be read into them equally well.
The gestalt of creation inaugurated for the new person a kind of incessant civil and foreign conflict, one in which his resources were over-extended internally and externally. He could not keep himself in order without ordering the world outside, a generally impossible task but one to which he was now biologically committed. But, as it happened, his most effective ally was his external enemy, society and culture, including gods. These are all non-existent delusions, and hallucinations when they 'command' one, but nevertheless interpose true ordering principles of conduct into the behavior of the inveterate warrior. In effect they tell him that he must 'sublimate, ' and teach him how to do so.
Sublimated behavior is commonly understood as an unconscious substitute in socially accepted form for impulsive behavior that would be condemned. The substitution appeases the unconscious while it performs its overt function. Primevally, sublimation begins in the overt function. Primevally, sublimation begins in the distraught circumstances of self-awareness, as amnesia and recollective memory begin.
When the anxious species is born and asks of itself an impossible measure of control, it begins by reacting against the memory of its harsh experience, which is soon submerged ('forgotten'). The memory is still active and sets up a ghost pain against the recurrence of the experience. Consequently, the memory lends itself in translated and disguised form to unrecognized expressions. It is carried back to the surface of the thought and activity, where it is enacted and reenacted in disguise. It is used in a solemn rite, or played with as a toy, a game, or a comedy. Thus, as was described, ball games became sacred, dramatic events, which reproduced the battles among the celestial hosts, with skulls as balls, and beheading as the price of defeat. As in heaven, so on earth. Control is established; the memory functions in a displaced setting, exuding the energies of the response that it demands but cannot perform frankly.
Only a theory that human nature is schizotypical can explain the vast and ramified character of sublimation. Students of language, myth and art, in their diligent search for principles, have discovered that myriad delusive and distorting guises can surround any event. Yet sublimation occurs not only in linguistic and artistic life-areas, but also in all areas of technology.
The original traumas and mental distortions of humans required all things in the objective world to be processed through the schizoid world and there given some of their meaning and forms. Beautiful church liturgies, children's fairy tales, methods of combat, designs of tools, and systems of philosophy abound in examples.
Freud once wrote in Totem and Taboo that "the neuroses on the one hand display striking and far-reaching resemblances with the great social productions of art, religion and philosophy, but on the other hand they have the appearances of being the caricatures of them. One might venture the statement that hysteria is a caricature of an artistic creation, the obsessional neurosis a caricature of a philosophic system."
In all three cases, the reverse is more accurate. The nomenclature is irrelevant. For instance, hysteria is regarded here by Freud as a poor artistic creation, whereas actually the art is a sublimation of hysteria. All three highly regarded sublimations are founded upon the primordial madness that says in its first gestalt: fear, remember, control; and, when external controls move against one, sublimate!
In the eight century B. C., Hesiod wrote a combined philosophy, theology, and poem, containing what may be elements of a correct cosmogony. Gods and muses and humans transact in a highly metaphorical and figurative drama. Between the reality and his mythology lay an enormous collective pain, felt by a people who had not better way of confronting the terrors of existence and the traumas of their history. It is so, too, when a schizophrenic patient gives a fully pseudo-mythical account of an event that contains within it an accurate report that he is too pained to tell about 'as it really happened. ' There is a sad irony here that the more he succeeds to sublimate, the worse the diagnosis of his illness. But is he not a 'pathological liar'? He is that, too, except that his lies are embellished in a fashion close to what society will accept as myth or as a work of art. When Gustav Mahler composed the "Song of the Earth," he was a neurotic who was contemplating suicide, but meanwhile he was also communicating to his audience, the society, a message in a modified 'modernized' language that they would grasp on the brink of their own madness. His song, his neurosis, his suicidal intents -- these were all himself trying to cope with his depersonalization; but the audience would say, 'somewhat mad, but sublime. '
Shakespeare has joined together the transacting elements in a few lines of A Midsummer Night's Dream:
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman; the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name...
What we would conclude here is that sublimation is but whatever is socially acceptable, now or later, in homo schizo's methods of handling his displacements. Everyone, not artist and scientist and humanitarian alone, sublimates at work and play, in love and indignation, in common speech, yes, in dreams asleep and awake. One must sublimate, and always has sublimated since the earliest generations when a modus vivendi had to be established among the schizo clan.
A common textbook example of sublimation was provided us by William James, who suggested that sporting contests functioned as substitutes for warfare. A weaker surrogate is afforded the spectators, and perhaps even weaker is that tendered to the masses who watch the sports on television. The problem of warfare is much more complex of course [27] . The infantryman usually hates war. Why should he need a substitute? Whereupon we begin a painstaking unraveling of the web of war, attacking the knots of displacement; projection; paranoia; aggression; tradition; authority; habitude; greed; loot; rapine; prestige; exhilaration; gambling; remote and indifferent pilots, missiles, and generals; racism; economic competition; self-destructiveness; the armageddon-complex; and so on until all the knots are untied and not much is outside of war except a few rules of the Geneva Convention which beg us not to kill prisoners, and certainly not to eat them, as now and then has been the case. Achilles wanted to eat his slain enemy Hector and Hector's mother, well, she wanted to chew Achilles' liver [28] .
Cannibalism has also had to be sublimated, rendered by frontal cultural attack into a taboo in most cultures, a nauseating abomination, but then also built into the most symbolic and elaborate rites, as in the Eucharist of the Christian Catholic religion.
The suppression of cannibalism must be one of the most successful and important sublimations that mankind has ever achieved. Cannibalism is not unnatural to humankind or else it would not seem so repulsive and dreadful. Further, it would not be so commonly discoverable in sublimated form among religions in the world. The major question is, in fact, not whether, but how we came to be numbered among the rare species who have eaten their own kind.
The theory of homo schizo here offers three reasons. The first is that a creature that can fear and hate itself, and can transfer this ambivalence to others and gods, can sternly rationalize the eating of others, which symbolically includes itself and the divine. Second, the practice, which has psychic and religious justification, has had upon many occasions a pragmatic or calculated effect; people who would otherwise starve upon the occasion of near extinction from natural disasters, including famine, flood, and radionic plagues, would eat whatever came to hand. Third, relations for some time with others of one's band and tribe would include a stratification between homo sapiens and hominids. A logic of divine ritual sacrifice, made urgent by protein starvation, could be confirmed by primeval considerations of eugenics, population control, animal husbandry, and invidious racism. Cannibalism was restrained and sublimated very early because it was self-threatening; one was ingesting other egos of an uncontrolled kind except under rare stable ego conditions. As with psychogenic mushrooms, you have to be a bit crazy to eat them and you become distinctly crazy afterwards.
Anthropologists have long suspected earliest humanoids of cannibalism. From Ethiopia (Valley of the Awash River), the Bodo hominid skull has, upon reexamination, been adjudged a victim of ritual defacement and scalping at least, with a probability that it had been treated anthropophagously [29] . These operations which use tools, are human, whether perpetrated by Bodo man or by related hominidal or human types.
Nowhere to our knowledge was cannibalism more widely practiced than in the Aztec empire prior to the Spanish conquest. The Aztecs placed "war and its corollary, sacrifice, at the very center of their universe... the one and eternal order." [30] Tens of thousands of prisoners were taken, nourished, sacrificed, and eaten every year.
Gert Heilbrunn calls cannibalism "The Basic Fear," and writes that the infant is born cannibalistic and projects its impulses upon the environment as his persecutor. "Phylogenetic and human ancestral reflections in conjunction with psychoanalytic data point to the ever-existing threat of passive cannibalistic incorporation as the basic danger" felt by the new organism [31] . He finds cannibalism widely spread among historical human groups and sublimated very often in modern groups.
Let us now turn to anthropophagism in its most sublimated form. We begin with the warning of St. Paul (Epistle to the Corinthians, XI, 29): The Christian who enters upon communion without comprehension "eats and drinks his own damnation." For the Christian is partaking of Christ. The text of the Gospel of John recites the startling words of Jesus, which shocked even his disciples, and this text is repeated by the priest at the moment of Consecration in the Mass:
Most truly I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in yourselves. He that feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has everlasting life, and I shall resurrect him at the last day; for my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. He that feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood remains in union with me, and I in union with him.( 6: 53-6)
Henri Fesquet explains what occurs in the Eucharist:
The communion, is it cannibalism? To judge by its intent it is undeniably so. It proceeds through a murder, a sacrifice, through manducation, and through the classic symbolism: uniting a person with another whom one loves, and appropriating his qualities. To eat God is to make oneself divine. But the sacrament is more than cannibalism. It surpasses and sublimates it. It is disconnected materially from the cruelty of the killing, granted that, without Golgotha [the mount of crucifixion], there could be no Eucharist, which directs the separation of the flesh and the blood. Besides, the raw material of the Eucharist, the bread and wine -- two products of the earth -- gives it a cosmic dimension, actually a pantheistic one. The vegetable kingdom, among other things, precedes the animal kingdom and, in a sense, engenders it; by means of the Eucharist, the cycle of creation begins once more. That the presence of Christ is total (" real" in the bread and the wine as Catholic theology maintains) gives to the incarnation an exquisite prolongation and deprives the embodiment, the cannibal effect, of all its cruel character. Here, the violence of love is made silent, decent. The consecrated hosts and cups of wine, these there will always be, everywhere and for everyone. It is the superior gesture of tenderness. The mean which Jesus conveyed to his friends achieves a universal character. It is the virtue of Christianity, which traversed the grounds of the religion that came before it, to have adopted the better of them, to have purified their rites and broken down the barriers of races and nations [32] .
The Eucharist might be compared with an entry in the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci where he wanders from his point, which is to do honor to virtuous persons. They
deserve statues from us, images and honors; but remember that their images are not to be eaten by you, as is done in some parts of India, where, when the images have according to them performed some miracle, the priests cut them in pieces, being of wood, and give them to all the people of the country, not without payment; and each one grates his portion very fine, and puts it upon the first food he eats; and thus believes that by faith he has eaten his saint who then preserves him from all perils [33] .
Collective violence need not proceed across territorial boundaries. The killing and eating of members of one's own group, particularly of those somewhat different, physiognomyically and mentally, and without foresight to arm and attack first, could occupy a normal place in the career of the homo schizo band.
We recall that the deceased and digested are often relatives, at the least of very similar kind, although, for that matter, there would be a general animism operating by displacement and projection to make many mammals one's relatives and even totems. The general animism would only serve to make the killing and eating of one's own kind less remarkable.
At what point would the practice cease and guilt be felt? For cannibalism, soon; for war, never. As evident hominids diminished in number, homo schizo would find himself battling with and dealing with his speaking and aggressive kind almost entirely. Identifications would become closer and closer until one was eating "oneself." This should stop most cannibalism. Further the years of easy human hunting would be over; other animals were easier to kill; improved weaponry played a part in this switch of practices.
Now then the cannibal victim can be identified with oneself (seeking esteem) and one's gods (requiring sacrifice). The outcome would appear to be sacred cannibalism, reserved more and more for ceremonial occasions and anniversaries. Thereafter any promiscuity in eating human flesh would become tantamount to a crime against the gods and spirits; a taboo would be born.
Prisoners were first sacrificed and eaten, then simply sacrificed. Ultimately animals were sacrificed and eaten; this practice would be less thrilling but more reliable, since, for other reasons, prisoners of the right kind were not always available. Like infant sacrifice, prisoner sacrifice is more disturbing when other means of controlling the gods are less threatening to poly-ego stability (I must stress that this poly-ego stability is not an absolute, objective state; rather it is a cultural balance uniquely fashioned with the individuating traits of the person.)
Meanwhile collective violence continued unabated, enhanced indeed by social growth. Primates do not wage war. Female primates do not even kill game. Baboons fight, and one band will live apart from another, trespass upon another's territory, and engage in a melee when challenged; instances of a baboon being severely injured or killed in such warfare are rare. Strange individuals are usually chased away by a band's 'citizenry, ' but on occasion adopted.
They do not foresee war, plan war, reenact or celebrate the anniversaries of war, or train for war. The hominids behaved like primates. Warfare is peculiarly human and naturally emerges from the schizoid traits of self-awareness, memory, group-shared symbols, projection, and the limitless search for the impossible goal of control over the self, gods, others and the environment, staked by endless fear. Aware of oneself, and fearful of it, the person recalls the creators in subservience, propitiation and terror. As the creators do, so does he. The wars of the gods have always been in his mind as models of behavior. Even Christians carry along a war of god and the devil, descendents of Horus and Seth in Egypt, Jupiter and Lucifer (Phaeton) in Greece and Rome, Tezcatlipoca representing both in Aztec Mexico, according to Brundage [34] .
If culture appeared promptly upon humanization, then warfare and other forms of collective violence may have roots in the same process. I say 'may' rather than 'must' because warfare and other human practices might be considered most important as effects, yet maintain no essential connection with the dynamics of human nature. If such were to be the case, we should rejoice, inasmuch as collective violence might then be more readily extirpated from culture.
It is pointless as well as impossible to survey here the voluminous literature on human conflict from several major scientific fields [35] . Suffice to say that no culture, anywhere, is surprised at collective violence, whether internal or external, and, to that degree, a natural quality is indicated for it. However, nowhere does the practice of collective violence bring on, except in individual cases, the physical revulsion that cannibalism often excites when it is experienced or reported. Taboos against taking up arms, for 'just' cause of course, are rare.
Ethologists, naming K. Lorenz, Arbrey, and Björn Kürten as instances, often claim that man was originally a cannibal warrior. Iränäus Eibl-Elbesfeldt finds warfare in prehistoric societies and in hunting and gathering cultures today [36] . Kürten's theory, that man was originally two or more kinds of primate of generalized brain and instincts who struggled with each other, gives us a lead to pursue. An early human band, composed of homo schizo or dominated by the type, would be in continuous contact with unaffected hominid bands. The culture gap between the two species would be wider than their appearances might suggest. Even though cultural assimilation had to recommend itself to homo schizo, and he tried in the earliest times to accommodate hominids in his 'table of organization, ' there would occur internal rebelliousness and flight. The neighboring hominid bands would have no means of understanding nor wish to learn that they might become docile enough to appease homo schizo, and find a place in his expanding territory. Thereupon, they would become targets of aggression by homo schizo, who would kill some, break up the band, and acquire the more docile as slaves who would join his 'breeding farm. '
Successful violence encourages more violence. So the practice of war would be common and energetic. Relative to other sources of labor, sex, breeding, and control, bands composed entirely of hominids or almost so would be most lucrative. And as we said above, they were an excellent source of food. Peking man, homo erectus, along with other types of man, have presented some fossil evidence of cannibalism. The food would be both hunted and farmed.
If the human felt at ease with himself, whether or not he controlled the world, it is doubtful that he would so persistently engage in the most risky of enterprises -- collective violence. Enough has been said in this work and elsewhere to stress that the problem of 'feeling at ease with oneself' is no matter of a decent meal and a good night's sleep, but it is the greatest and most persistent human predicament. Contributing to its recalcitrance to therapy is its embodiment in the central nervous system, where to suffer and inflict suffering is tolerable and even appeasing and the urge to control extends beyond sight, beyond the grave, into the skies.
C. G. Jung would make of this the eternal celebration of a destructive archetype, developing out of the eternally split condition of the soul. The archetype is "that which is believed always, everywhere, and by everybody," and if it is not recognized consciously, then it appears from behind in its "wrathful" form, as the dark "son of chaos," the evil-doer, as Anti-christ instead of Savior -- a fact which is all too clearly demonstrated by contemporary history [37] . Moreover, the natural storms amidst which hominid was mutated into man and which occurred throughout his earlier history added to his fright and stressed his already biologically catastrophized nature. In every disaster some people run about proclaiming the work of the "Evil-doer" --"The Evil One," one Alaskan 1965 earthquake survivor called him. All institutions and cultural practices are permeated by natural catastrophes. Their effects upon mankind would be fully apparent in history and psychology were it not that mankind already displayed and carries similar effects in his nature -- 'white on white, ' disaster upon disaster.
2. Introduction to M. Mauss, Sociologie et Anthropologie, Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1968.
7. M. I. Finley, Early Greece, London: Chatto and Windus, 1970.
8. Cyrus Gordon, Before Columbus, 103ff.
9. Sprache der Eiszeit: Die Archetypen der Vox Humana, Berlin: Herbig, 1962, 31, 6.
10. Cohane, The Key, N. Y.: Crown, 1969, is directly comparably with Fester.
11. B. L. Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality, Cambridge Mass: M. I. T. Press, 1956, 84.
12. Power and Personality, N. Y.: W. W. Norton, 1948.
13. W. A. Fairservis, Jr., The Threshold of Civilization, N. Y.: Scribner's 1975, 143.
15. Michael Coe, "Mesoamerican Astronomy," in Aveni ed., op. cit., 89.
16. Gerald S. Hawkins, "Astroarchaeology: The Unwritten Evidence, ' in Aveni, ed., op. cit., 89.
19. "Comparative Data on the Division of labor by Sex," 15 Soc. Forces (1937), 551-3.
20. See L'Express, Paris, Nov. 1981.
22. Mircea Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1954.
23. "Manu, Ur-Napischtim, and Noah," U. of Chicago Mag. (Winter 1975), 10ff.
27. Cf. Quincy Wright, The Study of War, Chicago: U. Chicago Press, 1965.
30. Burr C. Brundage, The Fifth Sun: Aztec Gods, Aztec World, Austin: U. of Texas press, 1979, 217.
31. 3 Jour. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn. (1955), 44-450, 464.
33. Quoted in K. R. Eissler, Leonardo da Vinci, London: Hogarth, 1962, 262.
35. Q. Wright, op. cit. W. D. Hamilton, in Fox, op. cit., 133ff.
36. The Biology of Peace and War, 1975, trans. N. Y.: Viking, 1979.