Consciousness in the ancient past
Reading Charles Foster’s book Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness, I find this:
We’re wild creatures, designed for constant ecstatic contact with earth, heaven, trees and gods, and wonder why lives built on the premise that we are mere machines, and spent in centrally heated, electronically lit greenhouses, seem sub-optimal.…
And then this:
“Their sense of self wasn’t as intrusive and tyrannous as ours.”
I‘m not sure why I keep being drawn to the ancient past. It seemed a time about which very little, really, could be known. Lots of speculation, of course, and edifices of theory from a few artifacts. The cave in Indonesia, with its paintings believed to be well over 40,000 years old, kept popping up.
I wonder what consciousness was like back then?
From my reading, I’ve come away with the sense that it had been much larger, that it took in much more. I’m not talking about “intelligence” now, the thing techies are so enamoured of, but something more ancient: awareness. We called that ancient time “the Stone Age” as a kind of slur, but everything discovered about sapiens in this ancient past revealed creatures more knowledgeable about the Earth than most humans today, certainly more skilled in surviving.
And more conscious. Perhaps a better way of saying that would be “conscious of more.” To ancient humans, the natural world was more alive than we, with our modern consciousness, seem to be able to understand or experience.
This was the time, anthropologists believe, when the symbolic had begun its presence in the lives of sapiens; and their world, wrote Foster, had become “hugely more complex and resonant than it had been.” Paleontologists called this period the Cognitive Revolution, and it happened in the blink of an eye, as archeologists measure time: 70,000 to 40,000 years ago. “A world that had been merely chemical had become alchemical,” Foster writes. “Just because something was invisible according to the laws of optics and visual physiology didn’t mean that it didn’t exist.…Human dead were anointed with ochre and sent on their journey with food, weapons and objects of merely sentimental or aesthetic significance. The animal dead were appeased.”
Something had happened. What, exactly, though, wasn’t entirely clear.
Foster spent a good deal of time talking about shamans. Archaeological evidence showed that shamans were a big feature of this time. This was the upper Paleolithic — when “human symbolizing and religion and the other things that shout out ‘I am’” began, he writes.
The Indonesian cave painting, with those lines connecting us two-leggeds with the four-leggeds, seemed to be a record of shamanic journeys. San tribesmen in Southern Africa 150 years ago had told an anthropologist that these kinds of images — which turn out to be a fairly standard feature of painted caves — simply depict shamans returning from spirit journeys where they’ve traveled within the bodies of animals.
Shamans, all over the Earth.
Foster came to the conclusion that these journeys “were themselves the cause of consciousness.” He insists that this “isn’t the wild theorising of self-justifying acid-heads: it has a respectable place in archaeological libraries.” Pollan mentions it, too, in his book on psychedelics. And powerful shamans in Indigenous cultures across the Earth were still doing this, I’d read.
As I searched to understand consciousness, what stuck with me, after all my reading, was that in this long-ago time — and even now among people living today much as they had in that time — we had a very different relationship with the other living things of our wet-life Earth. To sapiens back then, all life was conscious; it was clear we were all connected, dependent on each other.
It always came back to the plants and animals.
In the ancient past, when we lived as hunter-gatherers, we knew ourselves as one of the many animals that we lived among. Animals and humans could talk to one another. Like us, they had souls. All the old stories taught this.
“I carried with me the feeling I’d acquired from listening to the old stories, that the land all around me was teeming with creatures that were related to human beings and me,” wrote Leslie Marmon Silko, of the Tarahumara culture in the eastern Sierra Madres of Chihuahua, Mexico.
Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote that we should “look to our teachers among the other species for guidance.”
“Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live,” she says. “They teach us by example. They’ve been on the Earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out.”
But if this were true, if all creatures were conscious, how could we kill and eat them?
Indeed, indigenous people still worried about how to justify this. “Human food consists entirely of souls,” the shaman Aua had explained to a researcher in the 1920s. “All the creatures that we have to kill and eat, all those that we have to strike down and destroy to make clothes for ourselves, have souls, souls that do not perish with the body and which must therefore be pacified lest they revenge themselves on us for taking away their bodies.”
And so, I read, most indigenous cultures still followed rituals that would appease the spirits of the other life they had to sacrifice in order to live.
They “sometimes see themselves as still not quite separate from the animal world,” and “regard us as a kind of people whose separation may have become too complete.”
“Hunting is holy,” Barry Lopez had written in Of Wolves and Men. “It is not viewed in the same light as an activity like berry picking. Game animals are holy. And the life of a hunting people is regarded as a sacred way of living because it grows out of this powerful, fundamental covenant.” Because of this, every hunting society today still followed rituals in preparing for a hunt, wrote Lopez, rituals which sealed the agreement that the animal “will be given to the hunter by dwellers in the spirit world as long as the hunter remains worthy.”
All over the world, Lopez wrote, aboriginal people sought “to achieve a congruent relationship with the land, to fit well in it.…. The dream of this transcendent congruency included the evolution of a hunting and gathering relationship with the Earth, in which a mutual regard was understood to prevail.”
“Mutual regard” and “harmony” were terms I ran into over and over as I read about this.
“Natural harmony required all species, be they human, hamster, hummingbird, snake, or scorpion, to respect each other’s roles in the natural world,” novelist Tony Hillerman had written. His fictional Navajo policeman Jim Chee “saw no more justification in pretending to ‘own’ a pet than he did in human slavery. Both violated the harmony of the system and thus were immoral.”
Just as it was hard for us to really imagine living on the Earth with almost nothing artificial, I felt it was almost impossible for us to grasp the kind of relationship sapiens must have had with other animals long ago. Kimmerer had made the point that they were our teachers and we learned from them, but I didn’t really grasp that fully until I read something written by Ilarion Merculieff, of the Aleuts of the Pribilof Islands, who called himself one of the last of his people to experience a “true traditional upbringing.”
“I was allowed to walk the six miles from the village out to the bird cliffs, even as a very young child,” he wrote. “There, I could be in the midst of the tens of thousands of migratory seabirds that came to the island to breed: Thick-billed and Common Murres, Red and Black-legged Kittiwakes, Tufted and Horned Puffin…
“I noticed how thousands of birds darted diagonally, up and down, left to right and right to left, flying at different speeds and in different directions simultaneously without ever even clipping another’s wing. In my six-year-old mind, I decided that the only difference between those birds and myself was that they drew upon a vast field of awareness rather than an intellectual thought process (although I did not use such words at the time),” he wrote.
Merculieff decided he too wanted to be like a bird, so “after months of effort, I developed the capacity to maintain this state of ‘awareness without thinking’ for several hours at a time. That was when the magic happened: I could sense many things I’d never experienced before, and my world expanded enormously.”
He felt he now understood how his ancestors had “received their spiritual instructions for living,” he continued — “reciprocity with all living things, humility, respect for all life, honoring Elder wisdom, giving without expectation of a return to self, thinking of others first.” Those principles had guided his ancestors in sustaining their communities for thousands of years, he wrote.
Foster would refer to this as “the general attitude of deference to the natural world,” which he called a “defining characteristic” of sapiens of the upper Paleolithic. Lopez saw it in Eskimos today, he wrote. They “sometimes see themselves as still not quite separate from the animal world,” and “regard us as a kind of people whose separation may have become too complete.”
So I find myself startled when I come upon a recent article about Indigenous people in the Amazon, and read that the Indigenous guy responsible for helping them “cracks open the boiled skull of a monkey with a spoon and eats its brains for breakfast as he discusses policy.” Is this what Indigenous people also do? There’s “bush meat,” after all. Are these animals being prayed over, or is that our Western sentimentality which sees them that way?
Further in the article I read this:
Indigenous people…are the ninjas of this forest, and are as protective of it as they are at home in it. They fish piranhas and hunt, butcher and cook birds, monkeys, sloth and wild boar to eat.
It is almost impossible today to live within a reality that understands Earth as mediated by spirits, where every action has consequences. It is almost impossible to allow ourselves to believe that our greatest work is to maintain harmony with the plants and animals in our lives, to understand the reciprocity demanded of every living creature in order for life to function. But if we could, we might yet save the Earth.
Back then, people knew that not having the right spirit of humility, by getting “above ourselves,” we could incur disaster. But we seem to have forgotten that. At least the creator gods had. Forgotten, or didn’t care.
It seemed from what I read that Indigenous cultures today still mostly believed that the Earth was alive, conscious, and that we were but part of that consciousness. This belief has in modern times been termed “animism” and labeled a religion by anthropologists, but I wonder if “religion” is not really what it is. It seems more basic to consciousness than religion. That was simply our modern post-Enlightenment way of understanding and labeling it.
It really does seem that consciousness is something emanating from the Earth — not a fanciful way of imagining things, but reality. Back then it had been much stronger in us than it was now. It was seeping away now.
Back then it had been strong, because all of us — plants, animals, us — had been part of — in love with — each other.
