The worldview throughout the period of the Great Migrations had been animistic. The whole realm of nature was animated by spirits. During the later stages of this period, nature, while still animistic, was more and more seen as female – represented by the Venus figurines found in the 35,000-year-old caves of Cro-Magnon Man. Now with the dawn of the Neolithic era 14,000 years ago, the feminisation of nature became increasingly focused in the Mother Goddess, worshiped by these early villagers as the fruitful giver of life and of all that was needed to sustain them. She would become more central still in the worldviews yet to emerge in the civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Crete. We have no record of the names by which she was known prior to the invention of written language 5000 years ago – but some that were recorded after that date are Nammu, Utu, Inanna, Ishtar, Iahu, Astarte, Kali, Isis and Matrona. In ancient Greece they called her Gaia.
By whatever name, she was the bountiful goddess Earth – the mother and nourisher of life, and receiver of the dead for rebirth. She was not the supernatural creator of nature, but the creative force of nature itself. All nature was alive, engaged in the creative-destructive dance of life and death. Nature loved and raged at her human children, giving them ample reason to love, fear, and respect her. The plants and animals belonged to her. The forces of nature – sun and moon, winds and seas, mountains and rivers – were members of her holy family. The universe was not a mechanism as we think of it today, but a vast dramatic enterprise manifested primarily in the seasonal cycles on which these early farmers had come to depend. And it was all an expression of the abiding presence of the Great Mother.
The oldest-known man-made place of worship, dated to 9000 BCE, was the hilltop sanctuary of Gobekli Tepe in what is now southeast Turkey. And Jericho, one of the earliest Neolithic villages, grew up about 8000 BCE around a still-earlier shrine to the mother-goddess, where she was venerated through the offerings of fruits and flowers. From that time, and throughout the Neolithic era, she was many goddesses rolled into one – guardian of childbirth, dispenser of healing, fount of prophecy, lady of the beasts, giver of life and death – all different facets of a single power. But above all she was the goddess of fertility.
The miracle of the planted seed and fruitful earth, wherein death is transformed into life, was, to the Neolithic villager, the great mystery. And the myth that grew up around this mystery yielded a practice that would remain at the core of human culture for thousands of years – the practice of sacrifice. The thinking went like this. As rotting vegetation gives rise to new shoots, so death must be the giver of life. And if that is so, then the way to increase life is to increase death. Hence, in all planting cultures, we find the rites of human sacrifice by which this primal mythic scene is enacted literally.
The sacrifice, moreover, had to be a blood sacrifice, because blood was the substance of new life. According to the Neolithic understanding of reproduction, it was not the male semen but a transformation of blood that caused pregnancy. Observing that the menstrual blood flow continues each month except when the woman is pregnant, it must be this withheld blood that is being converted into new life – an idea supported by the obvious fact that the loss of blood leads to death. Just as the earth needs rain to bring forth crops, so the Great Mother needs blood to bring forth new life. Such is the logic behind the rites of human and animal sacrifice. The way to appease the Great Mother is to give her what she demands – blood! And invent a precise way in which to do it – ritual! In this way we can cooperate with the Great Mother to ensure fertility and life itself.
Over the course of time, human sacrifice became replaced by animal sacrifice – a change related in the Biblical account of God demanding that Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac and then changing his mind to allow a ram to be sacrificed instead. Later still, barter sacrifice became acceptable, as in the ritual of chopping off one’s finger joints. “I give you this joint,” ran a Crow Indian prayer to the Morning Star. “Give me something good in exchange.” But whatever the sacrifice, the intent was always the same – to appease the Great Mother or whatever deity was appropriate to the occasion.
The same thinking influenced the burial rituals of this time. As life springs from death in the plant world, so it is in the human world. The dead are buried to be born again. So this is the first era in which we find ceremonial graves as a common practice.
Between 4000 and 5000 BCE, we find the first evidence, especially in the Middle East, of fortified walls being built around these hitherto peaceful, goddess-worshiping villages. They were an unsuccessful defense against invading waves of nomadic hunters who came from desert regions in search of a better life and who brought with them their warring male sky deities. These invasions were the first expression of large-scale violence among humans. The conquering tribes, ruled by men and their male gods, stayed to form more complex social orders, strip women of their equal status, pursue their competitive interests, and build their kingdoms. As the villages grew into warring city states, the dominant cities so extended their control and imposed their customs on the surrounding territory as to become centres of power and government in what would become the great civilizations of Sumer, Assyria, Persia, and Egypt – ruled of course by male kings and pharaohs who had been anointed in their role by none other than the gods themselves. But that’s another story that we’ll leave for the next post.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Friday, October 15, 2010
The Neolithic Revolution
For more than 90% of our species’ existence, from the time of our emergence in Africa 200,000 years ago until as recently as 14,000 years ago, we lived as hunter-gatherers in small familial bands. During that entire span of time, changes in our worldview and lifestyle were minimal. We made modest advances in technology from primitive hand axes to bone-tipped spears and harpoons. The so-called Great Leap Forward of 60,000 years ago saw a breakthrough into syntaxed language and a more symbolic mode of thinking. And our exodus from Africa at about the same time required us to adapt to some dramatically different climatic conditions. By 30,000 years ago, our developing cognitive abilities had found expression in the representational art and Venus figurines with which we decorated our caves in Europe. And we were by then beginning to bury our dead with something resembling a religious mode of consciousness. But we were still just nomadic Stone Age hunter-gatherers, dressed in animal skins, living for the most part in caves, and maintaining a precarious existence in a world animated by nature spirits whom we did our best to keep happy.
Now all that was about to change – dramatically! Beginning about 14,000 years ago and gaining momentum quickly over the next few millenia, the Neolithic Revolution marked the single greatest transition in human history. We went from the only life we had known as wandering hunter-gatherers to that of settled villagers tending crops and herding domesticated animals.
We can only guess at how it began. We had already discovered a cooperative hunting partnership with dogs. Now, in northern Europe, as early as 12,000 BCE, we formed a different kind of partnership with reindeer – raising and herding them in exchange for their milk and meat. About the same time we seem to have noticed that the pits and seeds dropped along our habitual tracks were sprouting into the very plants that we worked so hard to gather. Aha! What if we deliberately planted these seeds and then stayed around to harvest their fruit? And instead of hunting down wild animals, what if we could domesticate them to our mutual advantage? Then we could have milk and meat and wool whenever we wanted.
It was an idea whose time had come. Comparatively quickly we went from nomadic to semi-sedentary to settled. We moved from simple gathering, to planting seeds with a pointed stick, to cultivating the ground with a hoe, and eventually to turning the earth with an ox-drawn plough. We evolved from simply planting seeds to selecting the best seeds from each harvest, to storing the harvests against times of need. In short, we added to our prowess as hunters the know-how required to grow reliable food supplies, raise captive animals, and, where climate and soil permitted, organise ourselves into self-sustaining villages.
Muraybet is the earliest known such agricultural-based settlement. Located on the banks of the Euphrates in what is now Syria, it was occupied from 12,500 to 9500 BCE by villagers who left behind evidence of their domesticated plants, harpoons and fish-hooks, flint-bladed sickles for harvesting, mortars for grinding, and the ever-present goddess figurines. Jericho, in what is now the West Bank of Palestine, is another example. Today it is the one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world – but its origin as a Neolithic village, built around an earlier shrine to the mother-goddess, dates to 9000 BCE. From sites such as these the revolution quickly spread to North Africa and northern Mesopotamia, to Asia and India by 8000 BCE, and finally to North America by 2500 BCE. In all these locations we find an expanding cultivation of plants and the domestication of animals such as dogs, sheep, goats, cattle, oxen, and pigs.
Farming quickly led to the production of surplus food, and with that to growing population centres. By 9000 BCE, we were living in villages of 200, and by 5000 BCE in cities of up to 10,000 residents. Swelling populations in turn required a form of social organisation and control more complex than that of simple hunting bands. Just as eukaryote cells evolved nuclei and animal bodies evolved brains millions of years earlier, so our expanding human communities now required some way of organising themselves and managing their complexity. One solution was the ascription of ruling power to a monarch. A king’s tomb at Eynan, a dozen miles north of the Sea of Galilee, dated to 9000 BCE, is the earliest yet found.
As farming became more efficient, some members of these towns and villages could occupy themselves with concerns other than food production. They learned to spin yarn and weave cloth, fashion flint tools and weapons, mould decorative pottery and religious figures, build mud-brick buildings and wooden furniture, make musical instruments and lead others in worshiping their deities. By 6000 BCE we had developed clearly defined specialist classes – craftsmen, priests, administrators, etc. Just as insect colonies depend on the performance of specialised functions, so it is too for human communities beyond a certain size and level of complexity.
The Neolithic town of Catal Huyuk in Turkey exemplifies the peaceful lifestyle of such communities. There is no evidence of fortification, warfare, conquest, slavery, or significant social inequality. Men and women worked as partners. Women’s roles were no less important than men’s. There is even evidence that those in need were provided for from public stores of food or from the goddess's temple gardens.
However idyllic that may sound, life was not all candlelight and roses (or whatever the Neolithic equivalent of that may have been). They faced floods, droughts, malnutrition, and epidemics unknown to their hunter-gatherer forebears who had enjoyed a more nutritious diet and considerably less risk of famine. The downside of farming was that we became dependent on a smaller variety of crops that could fail; the downside of living in larger population centres was that we became vulnerable to infectious epidemics. The upside was that such challenges pushed us to be more inventive. We learned to extract medicine from plants, store food against times of need, agree on rules for sharing land, create canals to bring water from the river to our fields, and build boats to trade with neighbouring towns and villages.
All these revolutionary developments are linked to a very different sense of time. Prior to this era, we had wandered the earth, gathering and hunting as the need arose, with little or no thought for tomorrow. But the world of farming is the world of extended time. It requires making preparations for a future harvest, investing effort now for the sake of long-term goals, delaying present impulses to reap a future reward. This is a quite different mode of consciousness. It ushers us into a non-present world. Now we imagine the future with anticipation and anxiety, and confront our mortality with a deeper shudder. So this is the first era in which ritual burial and ceremonial graves became common practice.
This era corresponds to a stage in our individual development (age 7 – 12 years) that I call The Responsible Participant. Erik Erikson defined the key developmental task of this stage as “Industry versus Inferiority.” Children now work hard at being responsible. They are keen to share and cooperate – to join with others in being productive. Indeed the desire to be productive supersedes the whims of play. They are eager to learn and develop more complex skills. They now grasp calendar time and have a much better understanding of cause and effect. Jean Piaget described this as the “Concrete Operations Stage” during which the child engages in concrete problem-solving. Thinking is logical, but not yet abstract. The child can now imagine future scenarios, but his focus remains practical and concrete. Interestingly, belief in animism declines during this stage, though remnants of it may continue into later years.
All these developmental features are clearly expressed in what emerged during this Neolithic era of our collective history. It was a peaceful and productive time – akin to what Freud called the “latency period” in our individual development – the calm before the testosterone-crazed storm of adolescence that was soon to erupt in the ensuing age of Civilizations and Empires.
Now all that was about to change – dramatically! Beginning about 14,000 years ago and gaining momentum quickly over the next few millenia, the Neolithic Revolution marked the single greatest transition in human history. We went from the only life we had known as wandering hunter-gatherers to that of settled villagers tending crops and herding domesticated animals.
We can only guess at how it began. We had already discovered a cooperative hunting partnership with dogs. Now, in northern Europe, as early as 12,000 BCE, we formed a different kind of partnership with reindeer – raising and herding them in exchange for their milk and meat. About the same time we seem to have noticed that the pits and seeds dropped along our habitual tracks were sprouting into the very plants that we worked so hard to gather. Aha! What if we deliberately planted these seeds and then stayed around to harvest their fruit? And instead of hunting down wild animals, what if we could domesticate them to our mutual advantage? Then we could have milk and meat and wool whenever we wanted.
It was an idea whose time had come. Comparatively quickly we went from nomadic to semi-sedentary to settled. We moved from simple gathering, to planting seeds with a pointed stick, to cultivating the ground with a hoe, and eventually to turning the earth with an ox-drawn plough. We evolved from simply planting seeds to selecting the best seeds from each harvest, to storing the harvests against times of need. In short, we added to our prowess as hunters the know-how required to grow reliable food supplies, raise captive animals, and, where climate and soil permitted, organise ourselves into self-sustaining villages.
Muraybet is the earliest known such agricultural-based settlement. Located on the banks of the Euphrates in what is now Syria, it was occupied from 12,500 to 9500 BCE by villagers who left behind evidence of their domesticated plants, harpoons and fish-hooks, flint-bladed sickles for harvesting, mortars for grinding, and the ever-present goddess figurines. Jericho, in what is now the West Bank of Palestine, is another example. Today it is the one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world – but its origin as a Neolithic village, built around an earlier shrine to the mother-goddess, dates to 9000 BCE. From sites such as these the revolution quickly spread to North Africa and northern Mesopotamia, to Asia and India by 8000 BCE, and finally to North America by 2500 BCE. In all these locations we find an expanding cultivation of plants and the domestication of animals such as dogs, sheep, goats, cattle, oxen, and pigs.
Farming quickly led to the production of surplus food, and with that to growing population centres. By 9000 BCE, we were living in villages of 200, and by 5000 BCE in cities of up to 10,000 residents. Swelling populations in turn required a form of social organisation and control more complex than that of simple hunting bands. Just as eukaryote cells evolved nuclei and animal bodies evolved brains millions of years earlier, so our expanding human communities now required some way of organising themselves and managing their complexity. One solution was the ascription of ruling power to a monarch. A king’s tomb at Eynan, a dozen miles north of the Sea of Galilee, dated to 9000 BCE, is the earliest yet found.
As farming became more efficient, some members of these towns and villages could occupy themselves with concerns other than food production. They learned to spin yarn and weave cloth, fashion flint tools and weapons, mould decorative pottery and religious figures, build mud-brick buildings and wooden furniture, make musical instruments and lead others in worshiping their deities. By 6000 BCE we had developed clearly defined specialist classes – craftsmen, priests, administrators, etc. Just as insect colonies depend on the performance of specialised functions, so it is too for human communities beyond a certain size and level of complexity.
The Neolithic town of Catal Huyuk in Turkey exemplifies the peaceful lifestyle of such communities. There is no evidence of fortification, warfare, conquest, slavery, or significant social inequality. Men and women worked as partners. Women’s roles were no less important than men’s. There is even evidence that those in need were provided for from public stores of food or from the goddess's temple gardens.
However idyllic that may sound, life was not all candlelight and roses (or whatever the Neolithic equivalent of that may have been). They faced floods, droughts, malnutrition, and epidemics unknown to their hunter-gatherer forebears who had enjoyed a more nutritious diet and considerably less risk of famine. The downside of farming was that we became dependent on a smaller variety of crops that could fail; the downside of living in larger population centres was that we became vulnerable to infectious epidemics. The upside was that such challenges pushed us to be more inventive. We learned to extract medicine from plants, store food against times of need, agree on rules for sharing land, create canals to bring water from the river to our fields, and build boats to trade with neighbouring towns and villages.
All these revolutionary developments are linked to a very different sense of time. Prior to this era, we had wandered the earth, gathering and hunting as the need arose, with little or no thought for tomorrow. But the world of farming is the world of extended time. It requires making preparations for a future harvest, investing effort now for the sake of long-term goals, delaying present impulses to reap a future reward. This is a quite different mode of consciousness. It ushers us into a non-present world. Now we imagine the future with anticipation and anxiety, and confront our mortality with a deeper shudder. So this is the first era in which ritual burial and ceremonial graves became common practice.
This era corresponds to a stage in our individual development (age 7 – 12 years) that I call The Responsible Participant. Erik Erikson defined the key developmental task of this stage as “Industry versus Inferiority.” Children now work hard at being responsible. They are keen to share and cooperate – to join with others in being productive. Indeed the desire to be productive supersedes the whims of play. They are eager to learn and develop more complex skills. They now grasp calendar time and have a much better understanding of cause and effect. Jean Piaget described this as the “Concrete Operations Stage” during which the child engages in concrete problem-solving. Thinking is logical, but not yet abstract. The child can now imagine future scenarios, but his focus remains practical and concrete. Interestingly, belief in animism declines during this stage, though remnants of it may continue into later years.
All these developmental features are clearly expressed in what emerged during this Neolithic era of our collective history. It was a peaceful and productive time – akin to what Freud called the “latency period” in our individual development – the calm before the testosterone-crazed storm of adolescence that was soon to erupt in the ensuing age of Civilizations and Empires.
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