An Essay on Violence, Tradition and Modernity

Rafael Leyre ( Rafael_Leyre@yahoo.com)       Third Edition - February 2007

The human animal

Appearance and meaning

Each animal is conscious of its world in its own complete way. A worm is not ‘unaware’ of the backside of the moon: since it lacks the question as well as the answer, it lacks in fact nothing. It is naïve to think that a snake lacks legs or a chimpanzee lacks pronunciation. None of those faculties are missing within the full existence of the animal.11 The same goes for humans. Ice Age people did not need farming, and the first Homo Erectus did not constantly fell over because his hips were maladjusted, as was often suggested by twentieth century authors. Illustrations representing the evolution from ape to modern man as a strive to ever more erect humans are misleading: every step in evolution had its own integrity. Only if we accept this integrity, artefacts can reveal a glimpse at the prehistoric world.

Primeval culture

A band of primeval humans typically consisted of around fifty members, fluctuating with available resources. Such bands lived in ephemeral villages. Individuals could decide to follow a remarkably successful hunter for some time, and consequently bands decomposed and regrouped as chances turned. Hierarchical structures were inconceivable, and thus semantics to describe gods were unavailable. Primeval hunters believed in sometimes visible and sometimes hidden beings. Shamans traced and interpreted invisible things. Sometimes magic was tried, for example to find new hunting grounds. The reading of cracks in heated shoulder blades of a prey animal (‘scapulimancy’) is testified worldwide.

Big game hunting was paramount throughout the Ice Age. The Sami of Northern Scandinavia and Russia, today forced into farming and herding today, were still big game hunters in the seventeenth century CE. Travellers have accounted how parties of men, women, children and dogs drove hundreds of reindeer in corrals of piled rocks, and slaughtered them all in blood-soaked excitement.12 In our times, only a remainder of the Bambuti Pygmies of Africa still mobilizes the whole clan to drive game into nets.

Drive hunters have little interest in demons or ghosts. Colin Turnbull recounts how a Bambuti carried home a heavy cluster of bananas from a Bantu field, without having exchanged the usual prey. The Bantu farmer had readily believed that one of his forefathers had taken the loot from the Bambuti right at the verge of the Bantu village. The Pygmies had a good laugh at the expense of the gullible farmer.13

At the end of the Ice Age, the large herds disappeared and foraging shifted to a wide variety of rodents, insects, fish, shells and plants. Collective drive hunting turned into more solitary observation and stalking, a new way of food gathering demanding its own world-image.

Primeval foragers were focused towards the outside, were rather world-conscious than self-conscious.

Reality was made up of appearances. It was laden with the unexpected, set forth in a manifold of particular, surprising experiences and recounts. Coming to terms with this environment requires careful reading of covert signs, searching for hidden relations, and marking thin threads of recurrence and resemblance in a turmoil of perceptions. This environment was too complex to ever be confronted entirely. Yet, it had a decisive impact on food, health and safety.

Each encounter was emotional, had meaning: it could be frightening, comforting or stunning. Entities could appear, change, join, get any size or any power, or hide again. In this world-image, nothing was inert. To be was to arouse, to impress, to live. To change meant truly becoming, not changing, because form nor body existed.

Everything was as rich in meaning as it was poor in reliability.

Ancient foragers re-enacted, replayed, strengthened, extended and exchanged those encounters: rhythmic repetition created an illusive universe, steadily expanded by fresh signs. Words were caused accidentally, by the need to recount - not as sounds obtaining meanings, but as meanings acquiring sounds, each meaning its own sound at its own time. Evocations grew into patterns and tokens, and into language and myths. First was art, then came words, and then came myths.

Those people were not actors themselves, but were totally predisposed at responding to the agile environment. However puzzling the behaviour of encountered entities, it was essential to make the best out of the world as it appeared; good and bad were no directives, they rather were a challenge to the forager’s creativity. This world-image was designed to provide the best possible life, nothing less and nothing more.

Animism

For a million years humans observed sounds, quiverings and other signs, and bestowed them with successive layers of meaning. The resulting world-image, roughly labelled as animism, assumes that our world is working by the anarchic forces of sometimes visible, sometimes hidden beings. Those beings are not modelled after the human example, but after carefully watched animals.

Animism knew no soul nor matter, only animals, plants, stones, anything able to raise emotions, to pose danger or to provided comfort.

If we move (are moved) without a visible being around, we imagine a power right inside our body, where the effect is felt. This power inevitably resembles powers known from the outside. Today we imagine a soul or an electro-chemical cause of those internal movements (e-movements) or sensations. Primeval humans interiorized the powers they knew. Movements of muscles and intestines were imagined as animal acts, even more so because the inner side of a gaping wound looks the same as a prey ripped open. The ancient Fins believed the mice of life turned the eyeballs. ‘Muscles’ are named after the Latin for ‘little mice’. The Irish still talk of ‘butterflies in the stomach’ when they are nervous. In Estonia life was animated by dung beetles, in Eastern Asia often by flies or bees.

The same beings impregnated women. Therefore newborns, like everything else, are more than human. They grew up as animals, with a complex, uncounted set of attributes like power, ability, trail, resistance, colour, kinship, pledge, leaning, speed, smell, menace, bearing, sound. An Australian member of the Kangaroo band can think of himself as a kangaroo, because the way a kangaroo looks on a photograph is only a very weak representation of it.

Artefacts are magically animated. Blacksmiths and other artisans are magicians, and a spear or an iron knife ‘works’ – is ‘alive’ - because of this magically initiated power.

Gift economies are based on emotions like animism. In this type of economy goods are traded for emotional credit. Such exchanges are not restricted to humans, but are also observed in communities of birds, fish and mammals. Neither are gift economies restricted to primeval society: gift exchange remains essential to maintain good relations in family, friendship, business and politics, and plays a role in romantic dating as well as in global scale politics, when powerful leaders meet and exchange presents. Pure gift economies however are only possible in affluent societies. When the balance between resources and population deteriorates, barter, currency, atonement and other practices arise to assess tradeoffs and get even.

In the Middle Stone Age animism had become a general human cultural trait, diffused as widely as the use of tools or of fire. All later philosophies, from the various concepts of the soul to Newton’s account of gravity, are derived from the animist paradigm that movements have a cause different from the moving selves.

The further growth of knowledge is rooted in the animistic world-image, because this world-image governed humanity for the very largest part of its existence. It has risen with humanity and is an inseparable essence of our being, even today. This does not mean that the animistic imagery is more truthful than other paradigms. It only means that we are better suited to make useful theories based on animism, because animism is ‘trained’ better towards the requirements of our reality. Gravity for instance was not discovered as long as Hellenistic mechanics were prevalent. It was discovered when mechanistic materialism was left (by Bruno, Newton etc.) and immaterial forces were envisaged after the model of animism.

The last remaining hunter-gatherer bands, passed down legends and their traces in myths show how animism evolved to complex world-images. We would not be able to enjoy the same actor in two different movies, nor would we be able to appreciate a novel one day and a weekly the next, nor would religion, art or science be possible, had we not inherited this gradually shaped talent to cope with the manifold, the mysterious and the incoherent.

Shamans

Sometimes a child developed a peculiar trait which betrayed the influence of powers invisible to other band members. This trait could be a harelip, epilepsy, melancholy, androgyny, transsexualism, or any other extraordinary mark or event. The child seemed to have a special talent to perceive and contact the beings that were reluctant to make themselves known to common people. The Manchu of Siberia named such persons shamans, but the same phenomenon is encountered everywhere.

A band wants a shaman in the manner a blind person wants a guiding dog, and therefore the child is left no choice but to immediately start the elaboration of his or her talent. During a period of exile with severe deprivation (which reminds of Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad,... ), the new shaman develops a magical quality that is totally alien to his or her band. What followed was only possible if the novice was banished from his safe, trusted community. Unknown entities arose from the desert, and the novice was, at first, powerless against the turmoil of haunting emotions. Like the others it was still unable to drive back frightening images, or to hold tightly to images of consolation. This world was frightening to the bones, a nightmare going on for days. But if all ended well, the new shaman found the power to to keep upright amidst the terror and to tame the mad multitude, and returned to the band as the master of its own imagination, a conqueror of the inner domain.

Despite claims of many audacious authors, genuine shamans are not educated to their task by anyone, nor instruct followers. They possess a power, out of which other crafts - medicine, physics,… - will emerge in the course of cultural evolution.

Out of a physical defect, pressed into lonely suffering, the shaman discovered an inner reality still unknown to world-conscious foragers. Inside the grottos of his or her mind, the shaman dealt with wild demons, and forged the new, astonishing capability to summon imageries by deliberate choice. Although opposed by organized religions as rivals, shamans still play their part in most farmer communities, and their traces can be discerned in religions and myths on all continents.

Shamans animate gatherings by dancing and singing, enter in trance or lose consciousness, and awake with stories about the invisible and directives for hunting, remedies for illness, solutions to danger. Their spectacles provide suspense, laughter, fantasy and significance.

Since the very beginning of the human intellectual enterprise, they fully exploited the power of imagination, if necessary defying restraints imposed by tradition, sometimes leading a band out of unprecedented disasters by calling for daft action when no way out seemed possible. The shaman’s society demanded messages from the unseen, new remedies. The response was often dreadful and certainly full of trickery, but the power of hope overruled all doubts.

Deceit lies at the origin of autonomous thinking. The only escape from an unknown ordeal could be fraud which sometimes turned out right, and only trial and error could separate futile from useful ideas, and cause the evolution from fraud to knowledge.

Often shamanistic remedies are barbaric as the performances are gross, for instance when a human sacrifice seems to be the last resort to escape a catastrophe. This happened for example in Chile where a shaman (machi) was convicted for sacrificing a child. In 1950 CE a five-year-old boy, at the time staying with his grandfather, was murdered to halt a flood. Patrick Tierney had the opportunity to interview the child’s mother a few years after the shaman was tried:

“The machi sent for the boy. And what could my father say? The machi demanded the boy because he didn’t have a father and a mother. After all, I wasn’t there. And the machi promised that if they sacrificed my boy the ocean would stop rising. [the boy] told his grandfather he wouldn’t be lazy any more in watching the sheep […] but since his grandfather had already turned him over to the machi, they just took him and did it. They say the boy cried an awful lot for help, because they killed him by cutting off his arms and legs.” 14

Totems

Some beings - animals or others - caused extraordinary emotions. This led to the belief that a special relation was possible between a human and an other being: the totem.

Children of the Australian Euahalayi-tribe are informed by their medicine man about the identity of their yunbeai. Whoever eats his own yunbeai will die. Any injury to his yunbeai also hurts the person. When in great danger, it is possible to assume the shape of the yunbeai. K. L. Parker heard from an old Euahalayi man:

when he was going to a public-house he took a miniature form of his yunbeai, which was the Kurrea-crocodile, out of himself and put it safety in a bottle of water, in case by any chance he got drunk, and an enemy, knowing his yunbeai, coaxed it away.

The bush soul of the West African coast has the same function. It may be a leopard, a fish, a tortoise, or any other wild animal. James Fraser wrote:

Unless he is gifted with second sight, a man cannot see his own bush soul, but a diviner will often tell him what sort of creature his bush soul is, and after that the man will be careful not to kill any animal of that species, and will strongly object to any one else doing so.15

A Meso-American Indian ready to receive his nagual went into the forest to sleep. The animal that first appeared in his dreams or in his sight when he awoke, was his particular nagual. When this man died, his nagual also died - and vice versa.

Other personal totems recorded by anthropologists are the manitou of the Algonkins, the ari of north-east Australia, the atai and tamaniu of Melanesia, the augud of Torres Straits, the kinajek of Tlingit, the oubarre of West Australia, the sulia of British Columbia, the nyarong of Borneo and the tamanous of the Twana Indians.

The Greek personal demon, the Roman genius, the Christian guardian angel and the Islamic jinn are totems in origin. Roman military deities, as most gods, had their own genii. When Christianity engulfed the Roman legions, those genii turned into the Christian ‘Holy Ghost’, and allowed the composition of the dogma of the ‘Holy Trinity’. This dogma says that there exists only one god, but that this god holds three different personalities: a father, his son and his ghost. In this way totemism saved Christian monotheism.

Snakes

Among the many exceptional animals snakes have still distinct qualities. Living close to earth with almost no body at all, vanishing and reappearing through cracks to the dark beneath, gifted to kill with just one small bite and to cast off their old skin, they might apprehend better than anyone the roots of life and death. A tale of the Blackfoot of the North American Plains says their maker wanted to be mortal as everybody else. He asked a village woman to mate with a rattlesnake, and was born as the sun, enjoying death each nightfall.

Power over death suggested also power over the opposite, immortality. For ages, humans have dreamed of discovering the snakes’ secret to slough their parching skin of age. In a four thousand years old Mesopotamian legend, King Gilgamesh took on a long voyage in search of the plant of youth, but a snake stole it from him while he slept. Since then snakes can slough their old skin. When Gilgamesh awoke and discovered his loss, he mourned:

For whom have I travelled?
For whom have I suffered?
Everything is lost for me,

The snake, the lion of the earth, will live.

A thousand years later, scientists studying plants and animals in the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon were still searching for the same plant of yought, and the authors of the bible expressed their aversion to this blasphemy by having Adam and Eve thrown out of the Garden of Eden before the snake could guide them to it:

The man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever. Therefore the Lord sent him forth from the Garden of Eden.16

The snake, guardian of the precious plant of life, was the companion of Aesculapius and appears on the emblems of medical doctors until our days.

Living snakes of the most dangerous kind still provoke awe on religious gatherings. Today cobras are used in such exhibits in India and Burma, pythons around the African lakes, and rattlesnakes in the U.S.A.

Demons

When humans started to classify beings, only exchange of observations over wide areas could distil science from legends and fantasies. The Indian author of the Chandogya Upanishad classified life forms following their manner of procreation, omitting all occultism, in ‘that which springs from an egg, that which springs from a living being, and that which springs from a germ’.17 But in most places demons remained part of reality. The Zoroastrian priests of Persia divided nature in dangerous animals, poisonous plants and malevolent demons on the one side, and of useful animals and plants, and benevolent demons on the other side. Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, unable to always tell legends apart from nature, described the lethal confrontations between elephants and dragons.

A Roman mural from the first century CE, exposed in the Paris Louvre Museum, shows a subtly painted vineyard foliage, wherein small birds frolic around. At a closer look, the birds are really tiny winged toddlers with bows and arrows, amors. In medieval times a bat could also be a ‘young devil’. The difference was hard to tell while the beasts fluttered around, and witches have been executed because the inquisitor discovered a little devil hurrying near, alarmed by the cries of their victim.

Until the rise of contemporary medicine, demons were the entities thought to cause feelings, emotion, ailment and distress. The Greeks for example used the word eudaimonia, today translated as ‘happiness’, but which literally means ‘good demon’ (eu-daimonia). The following Sumerian prayer is as familiar in its emotion as it is unfamiliar in its imagery:

In the street my friend would not talk to me; he bent his head down [..]. If it pleases you, my god, allow me to soothe your angry heart, so that your spirit will be assuaged. May the mackim demon that perpetrates evil be ripped apart, so that he will flee my body. May the asag demon be extirpated from my limbs, so that my dark days will become bright.18

The invention of mind and the death of matter

People usually think of mind and matter as opposites, even with a separate beginning. Creationists and materialists largely agree that matter existed on its own until the advent of mind breached the cosmic silence. There is for example little difference between Genesis:

God created the heaven and the earth; [and] the beasts of the earth after his kind; [and] man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.19

And this materialist counterpart:

Organic nature grew out of dead nature; living nature produced a form capable of thought. First, we had matter, incapable of thought; out of which developed thinking matter, man.20

Yet to us mortals there is no matter without mind, and no mind without matter. The imagery of dead matter on the one side and mind-beings on the other is conceived in the course of our cultural evolution.

Until some point in the Old Stone Age there was no difference between living beings and dead objects, nor between body and mind, nor between flesh and spirit. Matter was simply that which matters. All things were either erratic entities inflicting fear, hope, pain or ease, or they were unnoticed and inconceivable. Imagination was crammed with those entities: there was nothing but them, no vacuum between them and no space around them. They filled the invisible and the visible, the inner and the outer domain. There was no dead matter.

Life and death

A hunter ripping open an animal often found a heart still beating or convulsing, embedded in blood like his own. Some realized that the movements felt in their breast where akin to this heart. It was the living heart that jumped for fear or hope, and broke away for anger or challenge. It was difficult to grasp how this animal and the heart within stopped moving. In the hunter's world-image, the only instance of motion coming to an end, and thus the only theory available, was the silence when a prey had escaped. Death was the fleeing from the corpse of a mover animal, and this animal fled to escape the grim agony of death. In this imagery pain did not come with dying, but was its very cause, which posed the problem to Saint Augustine how a sinner could endure the pain of eternal hell-fire without loosing his soul.

The famous Plotinus, who lived in the third century CE, dedicated his life to explain the etherical nature of the human soul. But when he died near the coast of Campania, his friend Eustochius saw a snake hurrying away from under his bed.21

Throughout antiquity the heart remained the seat of life. The brain of an Egyptian Pharaoh was pulled out through the nose and discarded as a formless, colourless slime, but his heart was carefully embalmed and preserved. In Ancient China, the word for heart, Xin, became the name for ‘mind’. In Sanskrit the world for heart or breast, hraday, also means intelligence. The Vedantas spoke about ‘the ether within the heart, and in it there is the person consisting of mind.’22 The Bible reprimands the Jews continually about the evil thoughts they conceive in their hearts.23 To Roman philosophers the breast remained the place of the ‘counsel which we call the mind, and that cleaves seated in the midmost breast.’24

In the seventeenth century CE, Descartes, to many the founder of modern science, still imagened how our movements were caused by animal spirits:

Now in the same proportion as the animal spirits enter the cavities of the brain, they pass from there into the pores of its substance, and from these pores into the nerves. And depending on the varying amounts of which enter [..] some nerves more than others, the spirits have the power to change the shape of the muscles…25

Moving animals lived on as demons and devils, as bringers of disease or misfortune, and eventually as electric pulses and as laws of physics.

The raven and the bull

Most scavengers fleeing a carcass when spotted were candidate mover animals. Raven (or crows) especially were birds of life, and therefore became companions of shamans, gods and witches. A nineteen thousand years old drawing discovered in the the deepest part of a cave in the village of Lascaux in southern France, is the oldest testimony of this bird of life.

The drawing shows a Bull which is speared in the abdomen, but which has already wounded to death his killer, a bird-headed man with upright phallus. There is also a herd of seven rhinos leaving the scene: one drawn, accompanied by six dots. On the same wall is also the intriguing picture of a bird sitting on a spear which is heading down. This bird is a double of the hunter’s head.

The hunter is represented in a clumsy way compared to the more accurately pictured animals. For a long time in prehistory depicting humans was difficult, unnecessary and frightening. It was difficult because the features of a face were hidden behind its emotional display, the only, irreproducible, aspect that mattered. Still today art students turn their plaster model upside down in order to see proportions undisturbed by emotional content and to rule out, as it were, the subjectivity of the subject. Depicting humans was, generally speaking, unnecessary as long as there was no reason for coercion. It was also frightening, because to paint a living being was to kill it in some way: the artist used dead animals for models, and even made prints with dyed corpses.

Less refined than the many colourful paintings along better accessible walls in the same labyrinth, the scene with the raven and the bull was a scripted revelation rather than an attractive tableau. The difficult access reveals that only by exception a chosen individual was guided to this inner sanctum, with only a quivering fat lamp to light their footsteps. During this penetration weak stains of light glided along the walls, exchanging series of painted creatures like images crossing the earth's mind. At the end of this corridor the novice was lowered down on a rope in the deepest crack, towards the threshold of the underworld. Then a hollow voice recited the most secret song, elucidating the scene. The bird of life left the dying hunter while sitting on his last launched spear, because what animated the hunter – his phallus still bears on it - also had animated his weapon. The raven anxiously searched for a new host, but since the Bull was dying and other animals had fled, the bird of life had no other option than to give in to the call from the dark beneath.

This cave painting reminds of the Egyptian Ba and Akh, both originally depicted as birds of life. In Egypt Pharaohs were guided to a narrow, dark shrine at the heart of the temple to hear a frightening voice out of nowhere, uttering guidance. In the ruins of the Kawm Umbu temple one can still see a secret entrance, used by the priests to perform such oracles.

The painting also reminds of the Assyrian legend of Enkidu, a man roaming with wild animals. His awesome sexual lust – the hunter’s erection - took a temple prostitute a week to satisfy. One day Enkidu killed the Bull of Heaven, and was banned to the underworld, where bird men awaited him.

There is also a resemblance with a myth from Vedic India in which the sun god Mitra sacrificed a Bull, which is the moon (Soma).

In ancient Persia, Mithra killed the Primeval Bull at creation. Mithra was reborn into a human child, each year at winter solstice, to ease human suffering. This celebration later became Christmas.26

Finally, a myth of Roman times recounts how the sun god sent a raven to Mithras with the command to slay the White Bull, which is the moon. The association of the Bull of Heaven with the moon is frequently encountered and is reasonable: the the waxing crescent can be imagined to be bull’s horns. The legend of the Primeval Bull has played an uninterrupted part in the world-image of Eurasia and Africa. Contrary to Greece, Rome and the West, the moon is masculine in the Indian, Persian, Semitic and Arabic idioms.

The churchfathers called the followers of Mithra 'miserable wretches of human kind, who consider that God utters his voice by the raven and the jackdaw, but says nothing by man.’27 and 'the crow, they say, knows God, and the raven likewise, and they possess gifts of prophecy, and foretell the future.’28 Yet ravens were not only the companion of Apollo and Odin, but also of the prophet Elijah, of Saint Paul the Hermit, of Saint Vincent and of Saint Benedict.

To the North American Lillooet, ravens were bringers of death. The Celtic god Raven (Brân, etymologically linked with ‘brain’) helped those who carried with them his cut off head. Following the Jewish Talmud, Adam and Eve learned how to bury the first human corpse (their son Abel, murdered by his brother) from a raven:

Adam and Eve, sitting by the corpse, wept not knowing what to do, for they had as yet no knowledge of burial. A raven came up, took the dead body of its fellow, and having scratched at the earth, buried it thus before their eyes. Adam said, “Let us follow the example of the raven,” so taking up Abel’s body, they buried it at once.29

The Koran agrees with the Talmud: ‘Allah sent a raven, who scratched the ground, to show [Cain] how to hide the shame of his brother’.30

Reflection

Primeval foragers were spectators in a theatre with many actors; primeval labourers repeated the same monologue over and over in a fading world, and slowly the strokes of their sickles carved new contours to our minds.

Where people started to dominate each other’s lives, attention shifted from the environment to fellow humans and eventually to the self. In the new paradigm self-consciousness, until then a rare magical skill of shamans, pushed back world-consciousness. Images of deceased notables were less easily forgotten, and disturbed dreams and thoughts. The more a deceased had been lovable or frightening, the more intense the haunting:

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub.
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come…31

Those images - ‘ghosts’ or ‘spirits’ - were totally different from the animist movers in our guts: each of them looked exactly like one particular person. Ever since the New Stone Age, people tried to understand what those spirits are, and where they came from.32

The first widespread theory was that spirits were deceased people awaiting their final death, and in the mean time needed food, caring and consolation. Just like other humans they had their moods, and could either help whoever pleased them, or disturb those out of faveour. Sometimes they were given a place in the house, or were buried under a heap of stones to protect them from scavengers, and the heap growes with the civilization up to sanctuaries like the Egyptian Pyramids. Their abodes could also be difficult accessible caves, or remote islands or secluded valleys.

Spirits appearing in dreams must have left their bodies behind. And indeed, when one person appears in the dream of another, both bodies are usually motionless. From the observation that ghosts evidently passed through walls, it was concluded that their substance was thin like morning haze, which has no reflection while the bank behind it brightly reflects in the water. Therefore Hindu gods, vampires, Muhammad, and Persian gods if they are masculine, cast no images.

Since spirits could leave their bodies, it was not too difficult for onetime animists to imagine that a person was not animated by animals, but by his own thin double. One spirit, fitting in the body like a hand in a glove, could move every detail of the body. Unpredictable animal movers became superfluous. The body was just a glove puppet, and living bodies a cheap performance. Only the spirit within was alive.

Now the world was no longer a living world, and death was no longer a flight of life. The universe became an almost infinite mass of dead matter, where the heirs of spiritism survived as miraculous sparks in the dark.

Sleepers can die if awakened too soon, because their spirit might be absent. This is known among various tribal societies and was also known by the ancient Greeks. Jamblichus relates that Pythagoras once was seen at the same moment in Metapontum and in Croton. Herodotus relates how, interestingly also in Metapontum, the famous poet Aristeas was found dead on the floor. An accidental traveller, returning at that moment, related that he had just met the poet miles away. When his funeral was in preparation his body vanished. After seven years Aristeas reappeared and – typical an ancient Greek – claimed a statue. Similar stories are found in Pliny and Appolonius. Hermotimus of Clazomenae used to leave his body and roam far away, bringing back amazing stories to his audiences. One day, when his spirit was abroad, his enemies deliberately committed his body to the flames, after which the people of Clazomenae built a temple for him. Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, credits the same Hermotimus for the theory that reason is present in all beings throughout nature.

In the ancient Indian Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the theory that the ghost of a sleeper wandered around was refuted by observation: although the dreamer remembers to have been in another place, others never saw him there:

People may see his playground but himself no one ever sees.33

This critical remark is followed by the comparison of various theories, and the conclusion is that the person asleep is ‘self-illuminated’. In other words, the sleeper sees only what he projects himself:

And when he falls asleep, then after having taken away with him the material from the whole world, destroying and building it up again, he dreams by his own light. In that state the person is self-illuminated. There are no chariots in that state, no horses, no roads, but he himself sends forth chariots, horses, and roads. There are no blessings there, no happiness, no joys, but he himself sends forth blessings, happiness, and joys. There are no tanks there, no lakes, no rivers, but he himself sends forth tanks, lakes, and rivers. He indeed is the maker.34

The mind is not a wandering ghost, it is fastened to the physical person. Following quote recycles the animistic bird of life to illustrate a more intelligible theory:

As a bird when tied by a string flies first in every direction, and finding no rest anywhere, settles down at last on the very place where it is fastened, exactly in the same manner, my son, that mind, after flying in every direction, and finding no rest anywhere, settles down on breath; for indeed, my son, mind is fastened to breath.35

Spirits not only appear in dreams. Reflections, in ponds, metal and mirrors, are spirits. Shadows are reflections, and spilled blood is a moist, sloughed off shadow.

Individuals can be harmed in their shadow or reflection. Central-Asian shamans carry a mirror in which they can see the dead. The ancient Chinese, Egyptians and Japanese use magic copper mirrors against dangerous spirits. For some Congo tribes it is very rude to step on a married wife’s shadow, and in Polynesia, one could be executed for touching the shadow of the chief. In many cultures persons pay attention that their shadow does not fall in pits, with special attention to graves, or under a dog (or its shadow).

Gods dreaming us

If our dreams are real, then the world we live in might be the dream of a god.

In India Prajapati was said to have imagined his too attractive daughter Dawn, and life arose out of his semen, spilled all over earth. In late Vedic times, thinkers believed the universe was nothing but a thought of Brahma:

There is one eternal thinker, thinking non-eternal thoughts.36

In one myth the Egyptian Ptah created even himself: ‘I brought my own name into my mouth as a word of power, and I forthwith came into being’. Next Ptah created all other things by calling their names one by one. The Egyptians of the Middle Kingdom assigned the same power to Ra.

The Bible echoes this vision:

The Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth;

by understanding hath he established the heavens.
by his knowledge the depths are broken up

and the clouds drop down the dew.37

Universal self or individual soul

People can converse about their thoughts - they are not confined to their own minds. Words are spoken and heard, and whoever hears them can try to see what they mean. Our imagination is a house with many guests.

The Upanishads tried to discover the substrate of this communal thinking. Both breath and fire had been tried, but the four elements fell short to solve this riddle. Eventually a fifth element, the omnipresent and invisible38 ether was invented:

Ether is better than fire. For in the ether exist both sun and moon, the lightning, stars, and fire. Through the ether we call, through the ether we hear, through the ether we answer. 39

But the sum of all minds could hardly be just another dormant element. It was just fair that the sum of all minds was itself made of mind. The sum of all thinking selves had to be a Universal Self (Brahman). This Universal Self is not a god. It remains a profound but natural theory:

The Universal Self is the same as the ether which is around us; and the ether which is around us, is the same as the ether which is within us. And the ether which is within, that is the ether within the heart. That ether in the heart is omnipresent and unchanging.40

Not long after the Persian armies invaded the Indus valley, this theory appeared in the writings of Anaxagoras, a Persian subject who lived in Athens. Anaxagoras wrote about the Nous, ‘the thinnest of all things and the purest which has all knowledge about everything,41

Plato has Socrates complaining in Phaedo that he 'heard someone who had a book of Anaxagoras, as he said, out of which he read that Nous was the disposer and cause of all'. Socrates studied the work because he expected that 'if mind is the disposer, mind will dispose all for the best.' Of course he ended up disappointed, because he wished for something more humanlike at the top of the universe. Brahman and Nous are natural phenomena. They don't care.

The power of Athens and Rome was built on slavery as nowhere before. Under this rule the distinction between who toiled (the working body) and who commanded (the immaterial mind) eventually pushed the mind from the heart to the head. Plato pointed out that the head was a sort of watchtower overlooking the quarries of civilization:

so in the vessel of the head [the gods] first of all put a face in which they inserted organs to minister in all things to the providence of the soul, and they appointed this part, which has authority, to be by nature the part which is in front.42

The senses had to be duplicated to make the theory fit: ‘the soul views some things by herself and others through the bodily organs’.43

The shift of the mind from heart to head allowed that ‘warm’ feelings were separated from the ‘colder’ intellect. Shortly after Harvey discovered the role of the heart in the blood circulation, in the midst of the European scientific revolution, a French nun had a vision of Jesus Christ showing his bleeding heart. This inspired Catholic laity and Jesuit priests to the creation of the cult of the Sacred Heart of Christ, and led to the building of the Sacré Coer (church of the Sacred Heart) in Paris. The heart was now the seat of religious feelings and morals, as opposed to the unfeeling and amoral rational mind. Today we still speak about ‘knowing by heart’ and ‘a broken heart’ while we see the brain as the unpitying organ of ‘pure’ reason.

But the most important effect of the new preminence of the head was that good and evil became synonyms of respectively soul and body. Like a slave the body always tried to escape its duties; like a master, the soul was always right. The body wanted to fraud and fornicate; the soul strived to purity and restraint. The soul was pure, while the body was bestowed with sins. ‘The works of the flesh,’ wrote Saint Paul, are ‘adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies.’44

To Orphics, Platonists and Gnostics the soul was no longer part of a human, but a heavenly being captivated in a gruesome carcass. The world of ghosts had become the only real world. The physical world was of a lower order, like the dirty labourers who dwell in it: ‘the only being which can properly have mind is the invisible soul’.45

No religion has ever been able to make such a dangerous philosophy very popular, but chances grow whenever life becomes more troublesome. In mainstream Christianity and Islam, only divine grace or mercy can cure sin and save the body. Therefore the individual soul waits for the resurrection of their matching corpses at the End of Times, because not the soul lives forever, but the complete, renovated human.

In the Corpus Hermeticus Hermes Trismegistus assured that a soul without the mind 'can neither speak nor act':

For often times the mind doth leave the soul, and at that time the soul neither sees nor understands, but is just like a thing that hath no reason. Such is the power of mind.’.46

Since Tertullian fulminated against the followers of Anaxagoras for separating the mind from the soul,.47 churchfathers made the mind a captive of the soul, no longer free to roam the world of ideas. Together with the soul, the mind would be punished with ethernal hellfire for inappropriate thinking.

How exactly this foolish situation met its challengers we might never know. Too many books have been burned, too many thinkers silenced. In Abassid times Persia became again a turntable of knowledge. Persians like Alfarabi and Avicenna, Persians who studied among others Greek, Indian and Chinese works,48 taught that there is one universal intellect encompassing all minds. With Averroes, an Arabian scholar at the court of Córdoba and a student of Avicenna, the Nous became the subject of a fierce debate in Medieval Europe. More will be said on this below.49

If we accept that the knowledge we arrived at today can not possibly have been accumulated by other means than exchanges crossing civilizations and continents as long as humanity exists, the concept of a universal mind is the most adequate theory of knowledge imaginable. This theory is however more than an account. For all those longing for modernity, and for the whole suffering humanity, it is a profound consolation that we all take part in one communal mind encompassing all times and places.

The human brain

Thinking is an involuntary process, and in a sense always happened just before we arrive. To have a thought, on the contrary, is a resolute act. We do not have a thought as the outcome of a rational process, but because we decide it is suitable to us at that moment in time. That our thoughts are the result of a rational process is one of those suitable thoughts, and the lesser reasoning is involved, the more justification is spawned afterwards.

It is very easy to predict the thoughts of someone born in a Catholic, Muslim or Hindu country, or of someone born in the USA or in China: out of need of social comfort, the overwhelming majority takes on the beliefs of the nurturing milieu. To make daily life possible we agree to the laws of whatever land we happen to be born in, and to be accepted and valued in a group we pick up its prevailing convictions. Fearing distress or hoping for advantages, we justify wrong to some extend, while we loudly scorn wrongdoings in distant places. To maintain a good name and a good conscience we condemn injustice, up to a trade off between risks and benefits. And if things go wrong once in a while, we can always summon to our defence the benevolent demon called the Spirit of the Age.

But such a life is of no value for a human being, John Stuart Mill wrote:

He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgement to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision. [It] is possible that he might be guided in some good path, and kept out of harm’s way, without any of these things. But what will be his comparative worth as a human being?50

To leave comforting prejudices behind might hurt more than flesh-cutting shackles, but it is the only path to a better life.

The brain is one of those strange organs that animals have to improve living. As all of living nature it evolves by the game of trial and error. We select, colour and frame experiences, in order to seek or avoid their recurrence. This goes on as long as we live, constantly adapting our imagination to new circumstances, and it only slows down when high age makes our muscles rigid and our imagination slow. When it comes to a standstill, we die.

Our brain has developed over thousands of times the lasting of any natural experience. Its complexity is cumulated by beings which, by adapting to their environment, changed this environment in such a degree that they had to adapt again, and as a result again influenced environment. Species take part in the environment of each other: life has one common past. We are possible because other species are. We are just another unique animal.

The brains of a fly, of a snail or of a brilliant scientist have all the same mission: to bring old and new sensory pulses together, and derive from experience the best reaction for optimal living, nothing else. But, John Locke wrote:

We shall not have much reason to complain of the narrowness of our minds, if we will but employ them about what may be of use to us; for of that they are very capable. And it will be an unpardonable, as well as childish peevishness, if we undervalue the advantages of our knowledge, and neglect to improve it to the ends for which it was given us, because there are some things that are set out of the reach of it [..] The Candle that is set up in us shines bright enough for all our purposes. 51

All what is in our head at any moment – even the image that anything is in our head – has been tinted, made an image, is imagined. Those images can be valuable, or nonsense, or even harmful. Descartes imagined an inner space, and made his most important discoveries while roaming in it; he also imagined an eternal soul without extent or matter, and then believed that this, of all images, was the only thing one can ever be sure of. I think, therefore I am thought.52

To exist is to inhabit an environment

The founder of Jainism, Mahavira, is reported to have said:

One who neglects or disregards the existence of earth, air, fire, water and vegetation disregards his own existence which is entwined with them.

It is pointless to describe living beings separated from their surrounding world, or to reflect upon ‘being’ as an independent subject matter. To be is to be some thing some way; it is to act with and within an environment, and this environment is an ongoing process of change and exchange.

Humans and other animals need to exchange water, food, air, sound and images. When we drink a glass of water, this water has poured from innumerable sources, and streamed down to the sea through countless but always different landscapes; it has been swept up from the sea by winds caused by the earth’s rotation caused by the explosion of our galaxy, and rained down to drench deserts, prairies and forests before it welled up from yet different springs. And part of it it will return in this perplexing roller coaster of being only a few hours after we drank it. Each of us carries a few water molecules which one time were part of the living body of Tutankhamen, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus…53 Heracleitus has said that you cannot step twice in the same river, because the water is always renewed. But not only the water, also the bather is new at every trial.

We cannot raise a question or make an assertion without exchanging with our environment. Even when we believe to express transcendent truth, the words that form our thoughts, the air that makes our voice sound, the movements of our lips and the ink on the sheet of paper before us, are borrowed from the environment that streams along. If we were made of a different substance than the rest of nature, we would know and feel it beyond reasonable doubt. Such a crucial structure at the centre of or awareness could never become an undecided subject of dispute between believers and disbelievers.

No matter which theory we embrace to relieve our existence: without salt we would have no muscles; without muscles we would have no language; without language we would we be inapt to create theories, and in our dumbness we could not even be enlightened or inspired.

Reality

Out of exchange with the environment we construct an image of our world. This image is unfinished as long as exchange goes on. Absolute, unchangeable truth is the sclerosis of a world-image.

Philosophers have sometimes questioned the existence of a real world separated from our selves. George Berkeley for instance wrote:

It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects, have an existence, natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding.54

We can know objects only by the power of our understanding. Consequently, it is the only way they can exist: talking about other objects is nonsense. But our understanding is not a flickering beam of light, it is an integral and continuous part, even the carrying out of our being. Berkeley mixed up when he continued:

For, what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations? and is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these, or any combination of them, should exist unperceived?55

In the previous quote, Berkeley admitted that we perceive houses, mountains and rivers, but in the next sentence those houses, mountains and rivers become spirits and sensations. First the objects of our understanding are things that are built, climbed over and travelled across at great effort, and the next we know those things are nothing but unreal delusions. This contradiction, also found in Parmenides, Plato and Augustine, is too obvious to be a neutral and accidental mistake. To confuse hard objects with their vaporous apparition pertains to religious ideology. It is meant to disqualify our daily reality in favour of an higher goal.

The real world is not something hidden behind a smokescreen, it is the reality of our ongoing exchange, grasped with our indispensable imagination. With this imagination we continuously try to find suitable schemes to impose on this reality. Like ancient Navajos we can imagine a little man looking through our eyes; like Descartes we can imagine an even smaller man looking at a projection in a cavity of our brain; or we can keep busy forever by imagining living ghosts and dead matter and make all sorts of mishmashes with them. But all there is is a living, changing environment in which we take part.

Whoever is still confused could send a letter to oneself with any content. When it arrives a few days later and the content is unchanged, the world clearly is real. We obviously partake in various chains of exchange, even if the major part is out of sight. We can only try to grasp those links by our imagination, and constantly renew our projections and predictions by trial and error, as we have done as long as we exist.

This is no materialism, because it does not answer the question of what the world is made. That question is false, because for the world to be made of something, there must be something to be taken from outside this world. If the world is everything - and why would we call it the world if it was only some god’s fish-bowl - then it is made of everything. This is the simple answer the oldest Upanishads already new.

We are pebbles polished by an endless stream, and our essence is on the outside, where we are touched by this stream. This does not imply that we are herd animals, because exchange does not require similarity. But even stranded in the most lonely place, we can but think with the sentences and emotional displays of the society we come from. When we leave our homeland we drag its image behind us like nomads carry the parts of their tents. The most solitary hermits see themselves through the eyes of their distant followers, and draw their courage from the community they seemingly left behind.

Astonishing chaos

The root of thinking is astonishment. If nothing would happen, there would be no awareness. Therefore our reality can only be the sum of endlessly moving, changing, interacting and transforming encounters.

Many people take an evidently stable world for granted. We can hardly believe that the world was totally different only a short time ago, and can not imagine that soon everything will have changed. We are surprised when we encounter something exceptional, but a snake with one head is really as astonishing as a two-headed snake. If our memory would be completely blanked out and would have lost its capacity to absorb, the usual should not exist any more, and we would be surprised and terrified every second of our existence.

In this torrent of change, kings and priests claim eternal power by means of persistence myths. Yet in all ages scholars have been amazed by the diversity and transformation of being.

The Indian Upanishads reveal a notion about existence that travels through animals, clouds, humans and various other aspects of the universe. Contrary to the popular notion of reincarnation, this is no creepy story about ghosts popping out and in bodies, but it is the observation of beings with some reminiscence of primeval animism:

Then the sacrificer, having become air, becomes smoke, having become smoke, he becomes mist, having become mist, he becomes a cloud, having become a cloud, he rains down. Then he is born as rice and corn, herbs and trees, sesamum and beans. From thence the escape is beset with most difficulties. For whoever the persons may be that eat the food, and beget offspring, he henceforth becomes like unto them. Those whose conduct has been good, will quickly attain some good birth, the birth of a Brahmana, or a Kshatriya, or a Vaisya. But those whose conduct has been evil, will quickly attain an evil birth, the birth of a dog, or a hog, or a Kandala. On neither of these two ways small insects and worms are continually returning of whom it may be said, live and die. Theirs is a third place. Therefore that world never becomes full.56

The Chinese Tao-te-ching evokes the fundamental multiplicity of being in a beautiful verse:

Tao produced one, one produced two, two produced three.

Three produced the myriad things.

The myriad things leave obscurity and embrace brightness

and come to harmony by material force. 57

The wu hsing, the ‘five movers’, are the counterpart of the four elements known west of the Himalayas. Those elements are rather a classification of matter we see around. While the Indian elements are enduring building blocks of reality, the Chinese elements move and revolve between heaven and earth, without ever ceasing, hence they are named ‘movers’ (hsing). A fragment from the Shu Ching (‘Book of History’) from the second millennium BCE, evokes those changes:

The first hsing is water; the second is fire; the third, wood; the fourth, metal; and the fifth, earth. Water soaks and descends; fire blazes and ascends; wood becomes crooked and straight; metal yields and changes; earth is sowed and in-gathered. That which soaks and descends becomes salt; that which blazes and ascends becomes bitter; that which is crooked and straight becomes sour; that which yields and changes becomes acrid; and from seed-sowing and in-gathering comes sweetness.58

When the Zoroastrian scholars of Persia tried to take hold of this astonishing universal diversity, they arrived at the conclusion that every appearance in the universe must have an individual image called fravashi, originally meaning ‘growing force’. Fravashi exist for everything existing, in the past, now and in the future. They explain why combinations of the four Indian elements, well known to the Zoroastrian scholars, did not produce an infinite number of random monstrosities, but most of the time delivered beings in an enormous variety of yet so scrupulously pre-designed forms, all fit to subsist wherever they show up.

A Persian (Avestan) litany of hundreds of incantations shows that humans, but also sky, the waters, earth, plants, animals, heavenly bodies, souls, heroes, the prophet Zoroaster, the highest god Ahura Mazda himself, have their individual Fravashis:

They come on this side, they come on that side, never resting [..] We worship their Fravashis. We worship all the waters; We worship all the plants; We worship all the good, strong, beneficent Fravashis of the faithful. We worship the waters by their names; We worship the plants by their names; We worship the good, strong, beneficent Fravashis of the faithful by their names. Of all those ancient Fravashis, we worship the Fravashi of Ahura Mazda. 59

The Shinto religion of Japan knows a concept of innumerable singled out powers named Kami.

‘Shinto’ literally means ‘the way of the spirits’ (the word stems from the Chinese ‘shen tao’), and not ‘the way of the gods’ as is usually claimed.60 The difference is important as Shinto is a world-image closely related with ancient animism and spiritism, and therefore perceives all imaginable entities as forces. Sometimes it is said that entities are ‘blessed’ by spirits, but this dualistic vision is not it in accord with genuine Shinto.

There exist no material and immaterial entities. In the animistic way of thinking, entities have their own power. Since everything is ‘inspired’, or better is ‘inspiration’, to talk about a god in the authoritarian sense is nonsense, possibly dating from the eight century CE, when for the first time divine origins were claimed by the Japanese emperors.

Kami are gods as well as stones – not only gods or stones in general, but each individual god and each individual stone as well. Kami also are evil, the sun, goodness, ancestors, spirits, plants, animals, beings of the water and the water, beings of the air... 61 Continually new Kami are discovered through meditation.

Kami are contemplated one by one, un-summarized, as if strolling through a lane where each leaf on a tree and each quivering spot of sunlight or shadow benevolently blesses the walker. Whoever contemplates Kami is silently drawn into awareness of the unbound shower of altering existence. The world is a kaleidoscope of expanding, ever turning and reshuffling entities, leaving the meditating person at rest by the broad stream of being. A Shinto prayer calls upon

the 800 myriads of celestial Tami, the 800 myriads of ancestral kami, all the 1,500 myriads to whom are consecrated the great and small temples in all provinces, all islands and all places in the great land of eight islands, the 1,500 myriads of Tami whom they cause to serve them. 62

The endless diversity and transformation which is the essence of the universe, is at odds with the need for organization of civilizations.

Only a structured, hierarchic universe is able to justify a hierarchic society.

No kings without humans, no kings without gods: kings are in between both. In order to feign similarity with immortal gods, they put on the name of their predecessors and wore their clothes, bounded through forefather cults and joined mythologies.

Kings had one foot in the cosmic order, and the other resting on lower humanity. On their pinnacle the relation of kings with their subordinates is one of control and terror. In the Mahabharata prince Yudhishtira is educated with a book named 'the science of chastisement’:

the divine Lord cheerfully said unto the deities having Indra for their head, these words: “for the good of the world and for establishing the three ends of man I have composed the science of speech! Assisted by chastisement, this science will protect the world….” 63

In the Mahabharata and in the Bible gods fear that they might become degraded to humans - a fear well understood by clerks and kings of all times. But there is an important difference between both texts. The clerks who wrote the Mahabharata express the mentality of older forefather cults: when things go wrong not men will triumph, but gods will become mortals, and eventually disappear behind the hundred years horizon.64 Genesis, on the other hand, was written by clerks shocked by Babylonian scientific and technological progress. The gods in their text express the fear that men will become their peers by discovering the immortality drug, or by building a tower reaching to their dwellings.

Most civilizations lacked the audacity to proclaim absolute cosmic stability, and were satisfied to occupy only a delimited land of order. The remaining part of the universe was no longer a fountain of diversity and transformation, but became dark chaos, the frightening anarchy of nature, cosmic entropy. This chaos was like a sea or an ocean: a restless foam stretching not only around and below earth but, as rainfall demonstrated, also above the sky. From the last millennium BCE on benevolent more and more gods became evil demons dwelling in this chaos.

Amidst this chaos (the own) civilization could be an island lifted from the bottom of the sea or the corpse of a mythical animal. In myths from Africa (Egypt, Mali), Asia (India, China, Japan), Greece and Polynesia it was the inside of a cosmic egg, often with the sky for upper half shell and the sun for yolk.

Greek myths call the primeval ocean Chaos (‘Yawn’). She mated with Eros out of boredom by, and so produced the cosmic egg.

The Chinese called the primeval ocean Hun-Tun, incorrectly translated with the Greek word ‘chaos’. Professor Fung Yu-Lan has proposed the far better ‘Primitivity’.65 The following Tao myth is often interpreted as a story about the cosmic egg. However, a cosmic egg never dies. It is better to imagine a primeval stew - a cosmic soup - wrapped in a wonton roll, a word derived from the primeval ocean Hun-Tun:66

The emperor of the South Sea was called Shu [fast, brief, change] the emperor of the North Sea was called Hu [furious, sudden, uncertainty] and the emperor of the central region was called Hun-tun [soup, primitivity]. Shu and Hu from time to time came together for a meeting in the territory of Hun-tun, and Hun-tun treated them very generously. Shu and Hu discussed how they could repay his kindness. “All men,” they said, “have seven openings so they can see, hear, eat, and breathe. But Hun-tun alone doesn’t have any. Let’s trying boring him some!” Every day they bored another hole, and on the seventh day Hun-tun died. 67

In many myths the primeval ocean, the threatening, uncontrolled outer world, was embodied by an enormous monster. This monster wanted to throw the whole universe in chaos (and did so every few centuries) and only kings, clerks and gods could save the world. Often myths define the beginning of their civilization as a victorious battle with this monster. In the Middle East it is called Tiamat, Leviathan or Yam, which is also the Hebrew word for ‘sea’. Marduk killed Tiamat and installed the world in his carcass, and Yahweh ‘didst divide the sea by thy strength: thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters. Thou brakest the heads of Leviathan in pieces…’68

Animals and humans

The fabric we paint our image on is a living animal. It has the same eyes, the same number of toes and fingers, and the same kind of heart, lungs, sex and brains as mammals, birds and reptiles. We know this and try to hide it. Most biology textbooks have considerable paragraphs on what separates humans from animals, because we need such assertions once in a while. But unfortunately, all species have distinct qualities: whoever points out what really separates us from other animal species, only stresses that we really are one of them. By highlighting our differences from other animals, and not from oak trees or granite rocks, we admit our relation.

One or two million different species live on earth, because life blindly revealed that amazing abundance of ways to be lived, while a manifold was tried and failed. There is no contest, no jury, no reward. Every living species is an astonishing success in living the life it has grown into - it was never challenged otherwise.

Seeds of many plants are designed to be transported by animals, and molluscs move around while sitting on crustaceans; parasites live their whole life in intestines, and the female of the Japanese blood fluke lives her whole life within her males’ body; humans keep numerous animals, from song birds to fighting dogs, for company. People and animals inhabit the same space, even up to women breast-feeding animal suckling, as in Polynesia, among the Guaharibo of South-America, during the Greek Bacchanalia and so on. A minority of animals is welcomed as companions, beasts of burden and food stock, or as defenders against the remaining majority, an overwhelming number of rodents, insects and parasites.

Animals in human communities live under human morals. We know of eighty convictions of animals – either death sentences or excommunications - in Europe from the twelfth until the fourteenth century CE.

In the Swiss canton Chur a plague of may bug grubs damaged the fields. The insects did not appear when convoked, and as a consequence a legal representative was assigned. The verdict stressed that all Gods creatures have the right to live, and banned the insects to the wastelands. A similar action was prosecuted against Spanish fly. The judge, mislead by the small size of the beetles, invoked their youth as an extenuating circumstance. Caterpillars were banned in the region of Valence in 1585 CE, and in Auvergne in 1690 CE. A French fifteenth century lawyer, Barthélémy Chassanée, was famous for his effective defence of rats.

Pigs were burned alive in 1226 CE in Fontenay-aux-Roses, and in 1268 CE in Paris. Sows were hung in 1349 CE in Châtillon, in 1366 CE in Falaise, in 1408 CE in Saint Mihiel and in 1499 CE in Josaphat. All were accused of child murder, since unwanted newborns were often fed to sows, which are much larger than boars and have an upsetting appetite. If the killing was ever discovered, the pig was blamed and punished accordingly.

Sexual intercourse of humans with animals was feared because it could lead to the birth of repugnant and dangerous demons. In 1565 CE a mule and his master were convicted for fornication. First the feet of the animal were cut off, and then both were burned alive together. In 1679 CE a lonely woman and her dog were hanged for the same crime in Massachusetts.

Not only do animals live under human rule; occasionally humans also live with animals. The oldest recorded cases, the wolf children from Bayern and Hesse, date from 1344 CE. In 1661CE hunters in Lithuania found a bear child, fighting with teeth and nails to resist capturing. In 1672 CE a sheep child was found in Ireland, and a bull child in Bayern. Another bear child was found in Lithuania in 1694 CE. In 1719 CE two children where found in the Pyrenees, jumping from rock to rock like wild chamois. In 1767 CE a third bear child was found in Hungary. In 1993 CE, the news agency AFP reported the discovery of a boy living for fifteen years among a herd of buffalo in Ivory Coast.

Detailed reports only exist of a few cases. Peter van Hameln was abandoned by his father in the woods near Hanover. After one year he reappeared at his parents’ door, but was beaten and chased away. Found at the age of thirteen he was displayed as a curiosity at the court of George I. In 1801 CE a French physician published the study of an eleven-year-old boy found running naked and wild in the woods of southern France.69 Two Indian girls lived for many years in a family of wolves, until captured in 1920 CE. The children were brought to an orphanage in Midnapoor. Both had callosity on hands, elbows, knees and feet. Active mostly at night they scared people with loud and long howling, and devoured living chickens. Harper’s magazine and Scientific American featured their story.

The power of our mind is not its capacity for truth, but its capacity for hope

We can not align our thoughts unhindered. Thoughts are carried around in osmotic brains, picking up images while passing by, forgetting some on the side, often unaware and never able to have it all fit together. We can only think one sentence at one moment. We don’t know if our thoughts are as consistent as we like them to be, no matter how hard we study, close ourselves off, chant professions of faith, or cry convictions aloud. Mind is meant to mind, intended to transform, it is our device dedicated to change. It is possibly the most fluid faculty in the universe, even more fluid than water or air. Like the wind it can never be brought to an end, completed or settled, unless it dies. John Milton referred to this fluidity of knowledge when he pleaded against censorship in the English parliament:

Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool…70

Our osmotic brain is as important to humans as muscles to worms or gills to fish. Inconsistency is our mental ear. If our brain had been a sort of hardened crystal bowl with immutable reflections of eternal spirits, humans would have perished a long time ago. Unquestionable knowledge is poison in a world of shifting environments and unpredictable challenges.

A tapestry of minds

The strength of our minds is at the outside: they only serve if joined together, and their power is proportionate to their discrepancy. Only exchanged thoughts can work, and working thoughts are changing thoughts. Ice is not the real water.

Our minds produce a picture together, like the knots of a tapestry or the pixels of a photograph; but unlike those knots or pixels, each mind is a pixel in many pictures at once, and can reflect each full image on its own.

It is better to say that each mind is like one of the millions of droplets composing a rainbow. Each droplet has all the colours of the whole rainbow in it, but from its own spot projects only one definite colour onto the eye. As the drop falls its colour changes, but at the same time a new drop takes its place and casts the old colour anew. While the entire rainbow falls, drops hastily exchange colours between them to keep the total image unbroken. Like no one can take a bath in the same river twice, no one can look at the same rainbow twice. This does not mean that rivers and rainbows are unreal, as Parmenides and Plato asserted, it means that change and exchange are fundamental to reality.

Diversity and transformation is the essential law of nature, and of human culture in all times. It is absurd to declare oneself solemnly to be Catholic, Muslim, Communist and so on. At most, this reflects our submission to a group of people at that moment in time. Unless we are super-human geniuses, we cannot know for sure if we really comply with all the judgements and imaginations held by that group of people. And if such a super-human would exist and submit fully, he cannot know for how long, because unless he gets brain-death on the spot, he will reconsider his submission every hour. A profession of faith does not reflect the possession of well defined ideas, but the submission to a raving pack of prehistoric scavengers.

History of philosophy presents a long series of ingenious thoughts, but in the course of many centuries dedicated minds have rather added to their variety than to their convergence, and never put forward one final unified theory. Ironically, the more a philosopher claimed to unify philosophy in one unshakable system, the more contradiction and debate he provoked. Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel both claimed to create an all encompassing world system, and as a consequence brought about numerous contradicting schools.

Our head is no camera that, if well adjusted, generates sharp photographs of truth.

Karl Jaspers wrote that ‘we can ask primal questions, but we can never stand near the beginning’.71 Likewise we can try to approach absolute truth but can never reach or hold it, like directions of wind are nowhere and yet indispensable. The Truth of authority and religions is not as much ‘what really is’ as it is ‘what befits our imagination’. And this imagination is dispersed over small compartments with narrow entries: in one compartment we can appreciate a truth that we dismiss in another, following circumstances, without ever noticing or caring.

Truth can only be an attribute of doubtful reality; statements claiming to be truth themselves should never be trusted. Often the most unlikely, obscure and fuzzy statements are named truth, while likely, simple ones are just put forward.72 The more truth is doubtable, the more it is called a crime to doubt it, and many have been put to death for the crime of doubting unbearable nonsense.

The simple reality that our mind is not given by a higher being, but is imagined by ourselves, is difficult to match with ideologies that claim solid truth to be their inherited privilege. But the Guardians of Truth adapt their eternal wisdom every hundred years, or else are flushed away by the stream of change.

The geometricians

The erroneous concept of innate knowledge follows an ancient tradition, difficult to eradicate because it implies the supremacy of a spiritual world over matter or, politically, sacred supremacy over submitted toilers. Its Eurasian version stems from Persian rulers who inspired Plato, who passed it on to the church father Augustine and to the prophet Muhammad.

In seventeenth century Europe the Elements of Euclid of Alexandria, an African scientist living around 300 BCE, was portrayed as the work of a Greek genius, who only needed the definition of a point, a line and a circle to prove a vast geometrical universe of propositions, thus building up a fabulous construction of huge insight, created only by meticulous thinking, the power of the mind.73

But even the most abstract mathematics can only be the application of trained procedures derived from experience, or of a search by trial-and-error for new procedures. The Elements of Euclid is a clever compilation of accidental and casual knowledge of engineers, architects and arms builders in Asia, Africa and Greece. The knowledge had been accumulated, directly or roundabout, during centuries of massive trials, experience and exchange of practice, accelerated first when Cyrus, and again when Alexander shattered the borders that separated civilizations and caused the emergence of a new meta-culture. Euclid himself named many of his sources and did never conceal that his famous work was a compilation.

Fooled by this misrepresentation of Euclidean geometry as the pinnacle of the pure deductive mind, René Descartes interpreted the methodology of the Elements, derived from the handling of complex engineering projects, as a new and powerful method that would lead scientific speculation to its summit:

Those long chains of reasoning, very simple and easy, of which the geometricians use to arrive at the most difficult demonstrations, allowed me to imagine that all things knowable to men are linked in the same manner, and that, as long as nothing is taken for truth which is not and if the correct order of deductions is followed, nothing can be too difficult to be discovered. 74

A few years after Descartes, Benedict de Spinoza wrote his Ethics demonstrated in geometrical order, a work demonstrating the relation between God, man and universe by nothing but genuine brain work in the style of the Elements.

The ten year younger Blaise Pascal – or his relatives – demonstrated to be fooled by the same neatly arranged deductions when claiming that he had discovered the first thirty-two propositions of the Elements at age twelve all by himself, without any preceding knowledge of mathematics.

A century later Immanuel Kant geared up to cause a complete revolution in metaphysics ‘after the example of the geometricians’.75

Yet there is are no theories devoid of experience, and no future without the unexpected. Albert Einstein wrote that:

Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world; all knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it. Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality. 76

We might have forgotten the genesis of certain knowledge because it happened too long ago, or because our brains are too small, but all knowledge is generated during trials to attain an enjoyable existence in between the origin of life and the present day. No clerk can step aside this frame and fly away on the wings of metaphysics, seemingly detached from all earthly worries but always returning with new theories about eternal truth and universal power.