What Was Human Consciousness Like in the Paleolithic? Review Part 1 of Morris Berman’s Wandering God

History is largely the written documentation of the past. As such, it only goes back a few thousand years because writing only goes back a few thousand years. Most of the lived human story, however, has been unwritten — it goes back around 200,000 years ago when anatomically modern humans appeared on set.

That’s right, the brains and bodies of the humans who ate, slept, thought, and shagged 200,000 years ago are basically the same as the brains and bodies we schlep around today. Although similar in that respect, there’s one major difference: our basic mode of consciousness.

What was human consciousness like in the Paleolithic (say 200,000–10,000 years ago)? There’s one (popular) camp led by Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade and others that basically says it was drenched in myth, religion, and altered states of consciousness. Although commonly accepted, is it true?

Historian and cultural critic Morris Berman doesn’t think so. His reasoning and his alternative is worked out in his 2000 book Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality.

Berman is skeptical of a myth- and religion-drenched Paleolithic in which:

“the mundane world is regarded as inferior, and human beings, via certain kinds of occult practices, can become like gods.”

The question of human consciousness

The past half-dozen or so posts on this blog have been dedicated to a slow reading of the first two books of Morris Berman’s trilogy on consciousness.

Each book in this series has taken a look at the development of a certain kind of consciousness and its effects on the broader culture from a historical, psychological, and anthropological perspective.

• The Reenchantment of the World, the first book, was about the rise of scientific consciousness in 16th/17th century European, its problematic effects (i.e. disenchanting the world), and the potential to “reenchant” the world.
• Coming to Our Senses, the second book, was about the neglected role of the body in fashioning western culture and history, and about how integrating the body more consciously into culture (literally “coming to our senses”) may lead to a more somatically healthy future.
• Wandering God, the third book, is about the development of vertical consciousness, its effects on (mostly western) history, and the alternative promise that a “nomadic consciousness” might hold.

Wandering God: a broad overview of the entire book

Wandering God was written in a similar way to hunter-gatherers collecting berries and meat. Rather than a single-minded focus on proving one airtight argument, it collects together three broad themes:

1. The Horizontal World: hunter-gatherers, paleolithic consciousness, “paradoxical consciousness”, world-presence, egalitarian structures (political, social, economic)
2. The Vertical World: settled farmers, neolithic consciousness, the “Sacred Authority Complex”, world-views, hierarchical structures (political, social, economic)
3. The Nomadic World: nomads from a historical and anthropological point of view, “intellectual nomads” like Ludwig Wittgenstein

These three broad themes bring up a few questions:

• What was the horizontal world like?
• Why did the horizontal world change into the vertical world?
• What is the vertical world like?
• What role does the nomadic world play in this shift?
• What does it mean to have nomadic consciousness? To be an intellectual nomad?

These themes and questions get carried and explored across the 200+ pages in the dense yet readable text. One of the central threads running through it is the claim that the horizontal world was “better” in some ways.

As Berman writes:

“…I do believe that HG [Hunter-Gatherer] life was more congruent with the multiple aspects of human Being — spiritual, political, somatic, environmental, and sexual (and perhaps even intellectual) — than the civilized form of life that followed it. The irony of civilization is that the SAC [Sacred Authority Complex] promises a better life yet delivers one that is probably worse.”

Over the next few posts, we’ll explore that in depth. But first, let’s get a clearer picture of the horizontal world by looking at what paleolithic consciousness is.

This post will look at one part of the horizontal world, namely, paleolithic consciousness.

Back to consciousness: What was it like in the Paleolithic?

To probe the question of what human consciousness was like in the Paleolithic era, it can be helpful to break down that term “Paleolithic consciousness” a bit.

Paleolithic refers to the time between 2.6 million years ago and 10,000 years ago. This further splits up into the Lower, Middle, and Upper Paleolithic. Berman is mostly concerned with the Middle and Upper (roughly 250,000 to 10,000 years ago).

Although “consciousness” is notoriously hard to pin-down with a concise definition, for our purposes, an awareness of the internal self and external environment is fine.

Putting that together, “paleolithic consciousness” is about the awareness of self and environment that existed from 250,000 to 10,000 years ago. In the first part of the book, Berman is concerned with defining what that awareness was like and what kind of world it was embedded within.

The Mythico-Religious View of Paleolithic Consciousness

The “mythico-religious” view of what consciousness was like in the Paleolithic comes from scholars like Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Mircea Eliade, alongside some New Age writers and r ock art theorists.

This view sees paleolithic consciousness as centered around magic, shamanism, and non-ordinary states of consciousness. Although it’s true that contemporary hunter-gatherers are interested in those three things, it doesn’t necessarily mean that tribes 50,000 years ago were.

Berman has two problems with it.

1. It violates the principle of parsimony by making simple explanations unnecessarily complicated.
2. It assumes religion is (and has always been) a necessary part of human life.

In its place, Berman argues for a “paradoxical” mode of consciousness.

“Instead, what was dominant was a more horizontal spirituality, a persistent ‘secular’ tradition that is a lot less exotic, but that, because of its obviousness (and our own fascination with the exotic), has escaped our attention.”

The Paradoxical View of Paleolithic Consciousness

By “paradoxical consciousness,” Berman means:

“…a diffuse or peripheral awareness, which can be characterized as being ‘horizontal’ in nature (…) not characterized by a search for ‘meaning’, an insistence of hope that the world be this way or that. It simply accepts the world as it presents itself, and in that sense, it would seem to require a very high level of trust. One does not ‘deal with’ alienation (the split between Self and World) as much as live with it, accepting the discomfort as just part of what is.”

The “paradox” quality of it comes from the fact that it never sits still. It’s moving between categories of self and other. Berman describes it as being “simultaneously focused and unfocused” in a state of “utter watchfulness” that is “paying equal attention to everything all at once” because it understands that “the moment that is fully experienced lasts.”

Paradoxical consciousness has to do with “holding contradictory propositions, or emotions, simultaneously; sustaining the tension of this conflict so that a deeper reality can emerge.”

Those “contradictory propositions” are Self and Other. These two separate experiences haven’t always existed. They emerged at a specific time in history and they also emerge at a specific point of our individual psychological development.

The experience of both of these together, Self and Other, is existential awareness.

Existential awareness

Although we take it for granted, existential awareness, or the “perception of having a self separate from the environment” emerged at some point in human history. True, the exact point is pretty much impossible to identify, but it was most likely during the paleolithic era — say around 100,000 years ago for convenience.

Before that point, humans had “animal alertness” — they responded, like any other animal, to their surrounding external environment. After that point, something else emerged — an internal “I” that was separate from the external environment.

That mix of animal alertness of the external environment and self-awareness of the internal environment is what makes up existential awareness. At that moment, humans became aware that they were somehow separate from the environment. It was a moment of identity — I am this separate internal environment.

Also, it was a moment of alienation — I am not that external environment. Switching between both is something we’ve been dealing with ever since.

To Wrap It Up

Paleolithic consciousness basically amounts to Animal Alertness + Existential Awareness. It was a kind of diffuse or spread out (‘horizontal’) awareness that shifted back and forth between the two.

Rather than ascending to a sacred world above, this paleolithic awareness was deeply embedded in the world as it presents itself in the moment. Berman (borrowing from Walter Ong) describes it as World Presence rather than World Views.

This definition of paleolithic consciousness is an essential part of the broader Horizontal World that Berman unfolds throughout the book. In the next post, we will take a deeper look into that world.

Originally published at https://flownotes.xyz on December 23, 2021.