The Original Death Cult
While I was writing the previous article, I was wondering what kind of mental aberration caused the emergence of the core Sumerian mythology that rules humanity ever since it was composed. As I looked farther into the past, it became obvious that that monstrous mythology is basically totemic shamanism on steroids.
According to shamanic worldview, the world is shaped from primordial material chaos by universal animating spirit. Chaos, which represents the primordial mother, is perpetually given a fixed order by the male spirit, the universal father. The whole cosmos, constantly shaped in this manner, is then divided into three realms — upper, middle, and lower world.
Middle world is the realm of everyday life and struggle, and lower and upper worlds are two parts of one spirit realm. Upper world is the home of anthropomorphic forces that possess and impart intellectual wisdom, lower world is the home of intangible animal forces of wisdom of emotional drives, and middle world is the home of everything palpable, which, since all is animated by the same spirit, is equally alive.
Human is, then, one of many living beings of the middle world — part chaos part spirit — a lump of temporary animated matter that upon death gives its material part (“outer” material body) back to the sea of chaos while its soul, that is to say, the fragment of universal spirit (entirety of human “inner world”), departs to spirit realm or returns to its source.
There are also special individuals among humans, ones who can temporarily detach their souls from their bodies and are able to travel to spirit realms at will accessing their respective areas of wisdom. Nowadays, these individuals are generally known as shamans.
In (not so) ancient times, in order to qualify as a potential shaman, one has to undergo a sever life crisis that would cause a temporary body-soul separation. Simply speaking, one has to be called by circumstances (or fate, if you will), die and come back. Such candidate would then undergo a rigorous training to be able to manipulate that state of mind at will, while also being able to target their attention at respective areas and tasks in spirit realm.
Suffice to say, such feat was, and still is, regarded with utmost reverence. Not only for the sheer fact of apparent dying and coming back from dead, but also due to stupendous symbolic insights into human condition and world in general, which provide many practical applications.
And that’s, in essence, the core of totemic shamanism and the cultural lifestyle associated with it. Those features as I described them above were pretty much established c. 50.000–40.000 years ago, and remained basically unchanged ever since. Traditionally, this era also marks the beginning of behavioral modernity, in other words, people from back then and those of today are biologically and psychologically (more or less) the same.
However, from the standpoint of a human in 21st century, such way of life was a brutal affair far from the romantic notion of a “noble savage” or the archetype of a wise naturalist unsullied by “corrupt civilization.” In a sense, you could say that totemic shamanism was originally a cult of pain and death.
Sure, there’s no doubt that living in balance with Earth makes perfect sense. After all, losing respect for nature and blatant disregard of interconnectedness with our support system proved to be rather disastrous. But the superstitious ballast that goes hand in hand with shamanism is nothing short of a full-fledged gory horror story.
Let’s start with the fact that that shaman’s life crisis I talked about earlier is to be taken literally. Whether it was the Gravettian shamaness from the settlement in Dolni Vestonice or her (more or less) contemporary colleague from Brno, whether it was the famous Natufian medicine woman or the one whose remnants were found in Bad Dürrenberg (and are dated to a much, much later period), all of them had either serious birth defects or were handicapped (some from childhood) due to grave injury or illness.
In the case of the woman from Dolni Vestonice, “[p]alaeopathological examination of the female’s skull showed extensive pathological damage with significant asymmetry of the facial area as a result of a traumatic injury in childhood.” The man from Brno suffered for years from chronic periostitis affecting both of his legs and “the man must have been in considerable pain for years, which undoubtedly manifested itself in his psychological state as well.” In the case of the Natufian woman, “congenital pathologies were observed including the fusion of the coccyx and the sacrum, and deformations of the pelvis and the lumbar and sacral vertebrae [which] would have affected the woman’s gait (i.e., limping or foot dragging).”
But the woman from Bad Dürrenberg was a particular bundle of pain. She “had an incompletely formed atlas vertebra and associated malformations of the foramen magnum and vertebral arteries, which might have caused variants of altered states of consciousness,” involuntary muscle movements, but also e.g. vertigo — she was buried in seated position and probably didn’t move much during her life as she also exhibited “absence of distinct muscle attachments, especially on the lower extremities, which are commonly found in hunter-gatherers”. The woman had also unusual abrasion on several teeth which appear intentionally caused, and which must have exposed raw nerves.
All of the aforementioned individuals died naturally at around forty years of age, which was at that time the usual “senior age,” and their graves contained goods that clearly highlight the respect in which these people were held within their communities.
Similar respect earned also people who were sacrificed [1]. You can see this in Sunghir in the case of a spectacular burial of an otherwise healthy senior who died due to an incision on the neck, or a double burial of two heavily handicapped boys aged 10 and 12 (the first had disfigured legs but was otherwise active while the second was bedridden and had been fed only soft foods) whose cause of death remains unknown.
A similar pattern can be also observed in the case of a burial of three boys aged 16–25 in Dolni Vestonice, who were most probably relatives as all three suffered from unilateral absence of the frontal sinus (may cause frequent frontal headaches), “surfer’s ear” (symptoms include frequent inflammations of ear canal, obstructed sensation, conductive hearing loss, pain in the ear, tinnitus), and had impaction of the upper wisdom teeth.
The individual in the center of the grave also suffered from chondrodysplasia calcificans punctata, a genetic pathology resulting in severe disfigurement. (As a curiosity, his sex was also for a long time elusive — he was initially considered to be a girl — and coincidentally, red ochre, which had been traditionally used for rituals, was found over his pelvis.)
It’s hard to imagine that when resources got scarcer one or two people in a tribe of few dozens would make any difference. Clearly they were given to nature in a form of a ritual gesture. Nothing surprising as senicide and ritualistic (human) sacrifice (sometimes even combined with cannibalism) is nothing foreign to shamanic cultures. It was the case in ancient past, continued through the Neolithic revolution and bronze age, permeated almost all (poly)theistic religions, and completely stopped, or was at least outlawed, only relatively recently. (Sacrifice as such, however, is still part and parcel of all religions. In the case of e.g. Christianity even in the form of role-playing of a human one.)
In other words, while shamanic societies are egalitarian and care equally for all members of the tribe, if some perceived notion of a looming calamity threatens the community, the old, the handicapped, and the “different” are first to be ruthlessly discarded. With due respect and reverence, but still. And the mindset, because of the dynamic mentioned above, lives happily even in this day and age.
Now, when we look for actual reasons, it’s obvious that the root of it all is the obsession with death, continuous striving to solve the mystery of the impenetrability of the “definitive beyond,” and attempts to manipulate the inevitable. And that is in turn tied to human capacity for symbolic thinking and our initial inability to live with it in a constructive manner.
When we look even farther into history, we will see that, while symbolic thinking — or (rather) conceptual metacognition — with its inevitable mystery of death apparently emerged as far back as c. 100.000 years ago (and resulted in what I’d call “pure animism”), it took more than 50.000 years for it to reach the stage of totemic shamanism (which can be considered a proto-religious institution).
The reason being, as it seams, the evolution of language. As the work of cognitive scientist Philip Lieberman implies, there is, “advanced fossil evidence, such as neck and throat dimensions, to demonstrate that […] humans from 100.000 BP [were] capable of producing many phonemes which were mostly consonants [thus] Neanderthals and early Homo Sapiens would have been able to communicate using sounds and gestures. From 100.000 BP, Homo Sapiens necks continued to lengthen to a point, by around 50.000 BP, where Homo Sapiens necks were long enough to accommodate a vertical portion to their [supralaryngeal vocal tract], which is now a universal trait among humans, […] to generate more nuanced sounds and in effect increase by orders of magnitude the number of distinct sounds that can be produced, allowing for fully symbolic language.”
So, whether there was a direct causal connection or just a correlation and some reinforcing feedback loop [2], when totemic shamanism essentially became the human mono-culture c. 50.000 years ago, the symbolic layer fully covered the whole of human direct experience. The trade-off was the capability of simulating possible future outcomes and the ability to coordinate societies via highly advanced forms of communication.
That, on one hand, allowed us to create complex civilization, but on the other, it created a separation and eventually resulted in a notion of the noble spirit-mind captured within the profane, dirty material body. And it took us roughly 45.000 years until we went full circle and got back to non-dual understanding of reality. Only now, also with added symbolic dimension and appreciation.
Naturally, proponents of inborn religiosity of humans like to argue that totemic shamanism is a reflection of our genetic traits. However, if we consider that the size of human population during the era when shamanism established itself was merely 100.000–300.000 individuals and these people were highly mobile and routinely traveled long distances toward common seasonal hubs such as Pavlov near Dolni Vestonice in Europe or Kharaneh IV and Jilat 6 in Jordan [3], I would see it simply as the result of cultural diffusion.
So, in a great twist of irony, it may be the fifty millennia of the bloody shamanic death cult, which facilitated the rise of cave paintings, writing, press, and, ultimately, internet, that will spell its own demise. After all, the next phase of cultural diffusion spreading the non-dual understanding of reality takes place right before our very eyes. Unless, of course, it’s also tied to some still unrecognized evolutionary trait, which, however, I sincerely doubt.
Frankly, I can’t wait for the results in either case.
Notes
[1] Considering the sparse archaeological record of the era (c. 5 individuals per millennium), the disproportional amount of preserved ritual burial sites (with and without shamanic paraphernalia) suggests that people at that time were usually buried on burial trees or left to decompose while exposed to the elements or to be eaten by scavenging animals (“sky burial”). Thus, the lavish burials without shamanic paraphernalia suggest another kind of reverence ritual (as opposed to a burial of a revered shaman).
[2] Considering the overall culture of Pirahã people (language, no drawing, no history beyond living memory, no supreme spirit or god, etc.), who are fully behaviorally modern, demonstrates that the complexity of language is proportional to the level of conceptual layering and thus symbolic separation. Another argument might be, “an increasing number of studies [which] seem to suggest that […] linguistic variability reflects variation in color perception.”
[3] The strongest argument among historians against cultural diffusion is assumed limited mobility of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers. However, since e.g. Aboriginal people are known to navigate vast distances — one songline marks a 3500 km (2200 mi) route — or the presence of shells “from the Indian Ocean (over 2000 km away)” was confirmed at the sites in Jordan, I consider this argument a complete non-issue.
