Posts Tagged ‘orkney’

The Neolithic Ice Age

Sunday, April 24th, 2016

(This is a substantial revision of an earlier page, april 2016)

Introduction

Our days are about ‘the global issue’, about ‘climate change’. All temporary human conflicts dwarf in comparison to the disasters we are about to bring upon ourselves and all generations to come. We are about to lose a paradise, because of our greed and folly, our short-term thinking and ignorance, we are creating a ‘paradise-lost’, forever, a living hell for posterity. We may look at human life as a murderous deal or as a great spiritual opportunity, whatever it is, we all agree on the beauty of Nature (without us). Life is a miracle, that is its entrenching beauty; we can’t get enough of it although or because we don’t understand it and we live most of the time as if we will never cease to exist; we haven’t got a clue.

To what extent we actually bother about the future of humankind is hard to say. At least we have no qualms about using all the natural resources within our grasp. We use the rarest materials and turn them into waste, we are prepared to risk immeasurable ecological disasters to squeeze the last drops of oil from the earth’s crust; our time will be loathed and cursed by future humankind, because we have wasted resources we did not even know the real value of (platinum in exhaust pipes, tungsten in batteries), all very rare metals and resources gone in the foreseeable future and no way to stop it, not to mention the ‘invisible’ biological resources and diversity dwindling at an alarming pace.
This whole (economical) attitude of short term goals and reckless exploitation brings us the waste and pollution that will eventually suffocate us probably, a process that is already visible in the smogs in Chinese and Indian cities, but will exacerbate as the oxygen production falters when the green lungs of the earth will turn into brown slime and the end of higher life must be nearing. Most of this disaster was foreseen, but we do not have the political structures that provide a quality of leadership that can absorb information and see ahead in wisdom.

To what extent the global pollution is the major agent of the present climate change may be under debate, which only means there may be other considerable natural factors that have an influence as well. For me it is a glimmer of hope that the present climate change may be exacerbated by accidental natural coincidences like planet alignments that cause gravitational friction within the liquid bodies of planets (tectonics, volcanism) and even in the body of the sun itself. I need this hope because otherwise I do not see how long-term effects of the present volume of ongoing destruction can be avoided, since the point of no return in terms of accelerating decline may well have been reached already in that case.

Although we jolly well knew that there had been changes in climate most notably ‘remembered’ as ‘Ice Ages’, still in our everyday life’s experience the climate was quite stable although the weather was a bit unpredictable in the short term but as it was, not much climate change was going on, it seemed and it was no issue. This is remarkable because the Little Ice Age, a recent 500 year long cold spell in Europe lasted well into the 19th century (1850) and was known to geo-scientists and art-historians (winter landscapes). Things are changing now that the first extremities have manifested, we are a bit more aware of the global climate, but not yet of its status embedded in the solar system, it seems to me.
Although there is still a strong and very powerful contingent of ‘climate change-deniers’ under scientists, politicians and business professionals, the wider public and media get more and more concerned; especially so when indeed now extreme circumstances are occurring in many different places and being highlighted by the media.
During my research concerning the recent Little Ice Age (1350-1850),  I came across this graph where a similar glaciation and high wind circulation occurred during a period in the Neolithic. What especially intrigued me were the relative abrupt start and finish, this abruptness was accentuated by great temperature differences, from high to low in a short while, say, less than 50 years and at the end of ‘the age’ a similar sudden change again.
I am still hoping against hope that part of this climate change has to do with an incident of geometrical (gravitational) friction in the solar system orbits which would cause a heating of the Earth’s core which would then result in an imperceptible rise in (infra-red) radiation through the crust, causing a warming of the atmosphere. Especially recent alignments of the planets may have caused stress to the Earth’s inner core (think unexpected Mt. St Helens eruption), because, if a major alignment of the Moon can trigger as much as a 2% rise in the global high-tides (eclipse), then -given that all is vibration- such major alignments of planets and corresponding gravitational friction will have affected the ‘tides’ of the molten core of our planet as well and may have produced a heat generation in excess of the normal.

Major alignments seem to be quite common, but is this a period we are in just now or is it over the complete cycle of all orbits in the solar system in general? And have all alignments the same character?  Maybe we have to deal with different time-cycles then, but still they may have their underlying influences. Cycles of 26,000 and 100,000 years are scientifically identified and just now it is confirmed that volcanic activity has a major influence on climate change and correlates with greenhouse-icehouse changes over the longer term (720 million years)
I think it is important to view big issues over long periods of time in their proper perspective, we cannot deal with climate change properly when we have a rigid, short term view on the climate. There is no such thing as ‘a stable climate’, we very well know that, but what the leading causes for the big changes that occur are, we do not know so well, although now some strong indications are present.
Our everyday weather is a result of the inherent instability of the greater climate. There seems to be a theory which links the big climate changes of the past to the Sun’s activity. The so called sun spots, which have a recurrence cycle of about 11 years, would, in a bigger picture, be the causes of the ice ages.
I believe though that the general climate changes so far are expressions not of the activity of the Sun itself but of the frictions in the solar system’s gravity and inertial fields as a whole played out in the sun. Scientists still refuse to appreciate the one-ness of the totally integrated system.

The so-called Bary-center of the solar system is its real centre of gravity, but this centre moves in and out of the body of the Sun, or maybe better to say: the Sun wobbles around this centre in a perpetual stress, sometimes more, sometimes less.
This measure of stress is depending on the planets and especially on Jupiter with its dominating mass of which the orbit coincides with the Sun spots every 11- something years. So this is my theory of hope, that the sudden warming of the atmosphere is partly due to temporary stresses in the solar system’s inertial deep-fields (rotating planets = gyroscopes).
[[It should be noted here that Jupiter is only 1/1000 the mass of the Sun, revolves in an orbit far, far away, but is still capable of causing sunspots that would cause changes in the Earth atmosphere in the shape of ‘cold spells’, which we have named ‘Ice ages’. Jupiters influence is so strong probably because it rotates so fast (imagine one rotation in 10 hours only, for such a huge body, as does Saturn btw, something that generates huge inertia-> dark matter), spins which must have extra leverage in the equilibrium of the Sun that is very dependent on at least Jupiter’s orbital rotation. This is like the stability of the Earth roation depending predominantly on the orbit of the Moon. Although the stabilizing forces are enormous, they cannot be measured, let alone felt, only calculated. This is what they erroneously call ‘dark matter’, I think.
It are these same hidden stresses that ‘kneed’ the innards of the planets and the Sun. The inertial potential of a spinning object (gyroscope) is not fully understood by science it seems to me, it is most probably related to the so-called ‘dark matter’ enigma, as I explain elsewhere. It is all a complete misunderstanding of gravity still on the side of science.]]

The Neolithic Ice Age (NIA; 3800-2900 BCE)

To understand the building activities of Stone Age Atlantic European people we do well to place them against a background of climate change as stated above and to learn from them to see our own future and future generations in that perspective and to build huge communal refuges also in times when there is no immediate need for them yet. (for instance as quarantaine for lethal epidemics).
The megalithic chamber is seen as initially a communal refuge place, or bad weather hide-out (fishermen on small islands, Brittany! dozens of chambers, Molene archipelago; for the dead?, or for the fish?), later evolving into multipurpose spaces (cosmological, clinical, healing), spaces where very seldom burials took place and where the bones were initially of those who perished in the refuge. So death is definitely related to the chambers from the onset, but survival as well; this is the cornerstone of my theory.
Burial in a megalithic chamber has as little to do with its original function as burial in a church has with the function of the church. Apart from that it is maintained here that the bones of people in the chambers are usually of those who died there and did not survive the cold spell they took refuge from. It is a totally different perspective from the archaeological paradigm of a Neolithic death-cult and it is probably with its wealth of better arguments a lot closer to the truth.

The year 3800BC is on the record as the period that severe storms started to batter the Atlantic coast of Scotland. This date coincides with the start of a glaciation that is similar in character to the one that accompanied the recent cold spell in Europe from the 14th to 19th century, known as the Little Ice Age (LIA). The here proposed cold spell towards the end of the Neolithic I have coined the ‘Neolithic Ice Age’ (NIA), lasting from about 3800-2900BC. Like in the Little Ice Age this must have meant a severe worsening of weather conditions.
For what I gathered (over the years by now) I’ve become convinced that it were extreme weather conditions along the Atlantic littoral, from Portugal to Sweden, that made people decide to build huge refuge places insulated by massive amounts of stone, the origination of the megalithic chamber, the shelter of rock ‘above-ground’, like a cave in the rock ‘under-ground’.
With their sometimes long narrow entrance tunnels they resemble animal dens and with their corbelled domes they resemble igloos. There is at present no archaeologist who agrees with me, but that is mainly because it would be too embarrassing to have to admit a totally wrong interpretation on their behalf of these chambers as iconic buildings of the New Stone Age; archaeologists have never questioned the megalithic chambers had a primarily funeral function, whereas that ‘use’ was in fact an outflow of the tragic circumstances that would develop when people could not survive a cold spell one winter and died collectively in a chamber, as I maintain. It could very well also have been custom to leave the dead where they were when their remains were found by others during a next forced use of the chamber, this could be a generation later and by people who were no relatives at all, but often places seem cleaned out. The treatment of bones in chambers is very diverse, from ordered to absolutely chaotic, and seldom interred.

Like in the Mesolithic era people were probably used to keeping bones of the dead near them in their dwelling places or even take the dead into the house, as is still done in Guadeloupe today (for instance), and also very evidently happened at Skarabrae in Orkney at the time, where two cist graves were found under house-walls. Death and burial was probably much more a domestic issue than is suggested by the ‘cult of the dead’-paradigm that holds sway over archaeology today.

When we come to understand that the chambers were refuges then things seemingly ‘inexplicable’ become a ‘matter of course’. This is so convincingly the case with the long narrow tunnel-like entrances of many ‘passage’-chambers which provide a means to keep the cold out of the perfectly insulated chambers and cells (why insulate for the dead?). The mass of stone preserves the body heat generated by the people packed together in small cells for 6-12 people connected to a high hall. (HolmPapay, 14 cells, in 20m hall, over 3m high, narrow low entrance passage some 10m long)
The long uncomfortable entrance tunnel has no conceivable use in any funeral setting, this seems to me rather clear, but archaeologists won’t give in, I know, although they won’t come with a better explanation.
This whole idea of cold weather that I have argued, does not fit the received wisdom under archaeologists that it was warmer than today in that period and it’s just not true as we will see.

Below a graph of the ice core accentuated in colours by me

memory stick sony 1 181A

Greenland Ice Core Graph, Neolithic Ice Age (central dark blue block)

What particularly interests us here is the blue period of high circulation in the middle of the graph which is evidently related to a massive increase in glaciation shown in the grey and blue blocks below the peak period, this occurred roughly between 4000 – 3000 BCE, the fourth millennium. This then is the Neolithic Ice Age. This name is chosen because this period is similar (in glaciation!) to the recent Little Ice Age (1350-1850) in dark red on the graph (extreme left). And that is really not long ago.

memory stick sony 1 258A

 

‘Little’- and ‘Neolithic’- Ice Ages

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Neolithic warm?

The picture usually drawn of the late Stone Age is one of rather benign weather several degrees warmer than today even (mind you). This remarkable consensus seems to be based on some occasional finds of the bones of fish found in Orkney (Quanterness) that cannot survive in present day water temperatures ……. , they say. The sub-tropical species, corkwing wrasse,


974x400-corkwing-wrasse-and-nest-lr2-Credit-Julie_Hatcher[1]

though, is known to stray into the North Sea today and is remarkable for its tropical colours, so a precious and possibly easy catch! This means its (rare) occurrence on the Orkney record is no argument at all for, overall, warmer weather.

The graph also shows that the climate is a changeable phenomenon and that the idea of a stable climate is a fiction, but this does not mean that human action has no influence for good or for bad. The point is we have to learn to live with sudden climate change as a real possibility. (One thing I’ve learned from my study of the megalithic stone age is that going  underground is a perfect option, for heat and cold). The graphs show that both starts of the recent Little Ice Age and of the Neolithic Ice Age were preceded by a sudden rise in temperature and then an extreme fall in a very short term.

This deterioration is comparable with, if not worse than, the Little Ice Age that ravaged Europe recently between 1350 and 1850 AD, (see the red block) of which especially the sudden extreme change at the beginning in the Middle Ages had a devastating effect on the resistance of the European people and hunger and epidemic plagues, Black Death, were rampant, decimating the population.
The graph shows clearly a new world wide advance of glaciation 6000-5000 years ago which cannot be explained other than in a drop of temperature, at least in those areas, as Orkney, closest to the major glaciations.
In the Little Ice Age, two centuries ago, the Greenland Inuit travelled to Orkney on icebergs, that is how cold it was.
The overall temperature seems not to drop as low as around 6200 BC, a notoriously cold snap in archaeology, but local conditions can differ considerably from the overall picture.
Around 2900 BC the weather was already above average again, which in fact meant the end of the use of the chambers as refuges and also the definite end of the megalithic Funnelbeaker culture in northern continental Europe, which are most probably causally connected.
It got eventually so hot in the Middle East that the Akkadian Empire collapsed, due to the drought around 2200 BC. You don’t see that in the graph. Local conditions and periods can be extreme for good and for bad.

It seems already around 4800 BC the weather deteriorated according to other graphs, then improved again, but around 3800 BC it is an established fact that the Atlantic Scottish coast got battered by severe storms; so how about Orkney?
This would not have been different for Orkney of course, close as it is to the Scottish coast ( some 20 Miles away in the south), but the Scottish Highlands had woods and sheltered valleys, whereas Orkney had only smooth hills, no caves, broad loughs and pioneer tree vegetation.

By 3000 BC though, the end of the Neolithic Ice Age, Orkney had only some scrub left, all birch, hazel and willow that had dominated the landscape of the southern isles, before the high winds came, had gone, used for housing and for fuel most probably, or just perished in the salt winds, as still today hardly any trees grow in Orkney because of the high winds. Thus, Orkney was certainly no paradise for a substantial period in the Neolithic, although it probably would have been warmer than Scottish northern Caithness where some similar chambers were built.
A telling quote from the Orcadian, Orkney’s weekly newspaper of sept’14, in a story about Orcadian women, gives a grim picture of the circumstances in Orkney during the Little Ice Age, in this case of around 1800 CE:

They used to guarantee snow, then… recalled a senior citizen: ‘From what old folk often said in my boyhood, it would appear that the winters of 120 or 130 years ago were infinitely more severe than they are now’ (1930).
For several weeks on end drifts as high as the roofs remained. There were occasions too on which occupants were snowbound, reliant on better placed neighbours to dig them out.
Nearer modern times (1870) ‘six weeks of continuous deep snow’ was the expectation and generally, experience of folk ‘some time before the New Year and always three or four weeks in March’ with obvious problems for those with animals to feed.
[Compare this with today, where hardly any snow falls on Orkney, except sometimes on the higher hills. Orkney bathes in the warm waters of the Atlantic Gulfstream, neither does the temperature ever fall much below zero in winter.]

A similar severe climatic period in the Neolithic brought about the challenge to improve living conditions to survive, which paid off in numerous innovations.
The Neolithic Ice Age conditions would have caused the widespread building of survival chambers where the coastal peoples of Europe could weather the gales from the Atlantic and North Sea when these ravaged their homes and the conditions became life-threatening especially for children, the elderly and pregnant women. The average life-span was about thirty; at that age the ratio of men to women was 3:1, at the age of twenty, it was already 2:1. The survival of the whole population may have been at stake for considerable periods, the demographic situation was alarming.

It is these demographic and climatic conditions that initiated the communal effort to building the sometimes huge chambers, not some kind of, by archaeologists invented, all pervading ‘cult of the dead’. The chambers were a symbol of survival, of intense communal experience and hardship, also of loss, and naturally of growing reverence for the ancestry who built them, and sometimes perished in them; they revered the chambers the older they got, no doubt.
Imbued with the auspicious spirit of the ancestry some people brought bones of their dead to the chambers, which they may usually have kept at home. It was very rare for a person to be interred in the floor of a chamber, may be even done ‘clandestinely’, but the chambers were in no way built for that purpose; churchyards and churches are the most obvious expression of the wish to be buried near or in an auspicious and ancestral place, where relatives and other dead people are gathered, as a preferred gateway to the other world.

Maeshowe, one of the most sophisticated megalithic chambers ever built, was probably not primarily built as a place of communal shelter and storage of food as earlier chambers, although it kept the possibility of serving as such, no, Maeshowe was built for scientific, clinical and healing purposes and for the ‘storage and immortalization’ of knowledge. Maeshowe may have been earlier than or contemporary with the Egyptian pyramids, it is anyhow a conceptual blueprint in terms of embodying the state of the cosmological/scientific knowledge of the culture of its day, solidified in stone, to be preserved for posterity. Most curious of all is that its mathematics and dimensions show striking similarities with Giza in Egypt. A full blown enigma. (see pages: On Maeshowe, the Measure of Maeshowe and Maeshowe as Science-friction).

 

The Shaman and the Standing Stone

Tuesday, April 24th, 2012

The Shamans

Introduction

In the three years I have been running this website the truly innovative ideas I have launched here as regards archaeology are several. The concept of a climate change between 4000-3000 BC, coined the Neolithic Ice Age (NIA), is one such idea which then is seen as the primary reason for the profuse building of artificial caves as refuge places on the windy sea coasts of Atlantic Europe, this being a new approach to the well-known megalithic chambers, deemed burial places by all archaeologists.
Then I have argued that subsequently some of these chambers were explicitly built as maternal clinics, like Newgrange and Maeshowe or single delivery rooms like Knowth, Dowth and Cairn L, Loughcrew and that only after the Ice Age was truly over, say 2900BC, the chambers, which had lost their primary functions, became used as burial chambers (like a church can contain burials from long after its erection, however it was never built for that purpose).
So I place the megalithic chambers initially in the context of bare survival, as refuge under forbidding weather circumstances, a fortiori survival of women and new-borns, which would subsequently evolve into centres of cosmology (observers staying over at night), medicine and mathematics (Loughcrew, Maeshowe, NessBrodgar), in short, centres of learning. The alarming demographic under-representation of women (1:3 at thirty) must have had a profound impact on society with a substantial amount of ‘idle’ men with a lot of time on their hands. This is the group which must have formed the core of the work forces which brought these giant megalithic works about.
In continental Europe the end of the Neolithic Ice Age also meant the end of the megalithic culture (Trichterbecher,TRB) with its communal outlook and burial practices around 2900 BC. The individualistic, fully agrarian, axe wielding and alcohol drinking Beaker culture became dominant, the ego had triumphed and the erstwhile spiritual ‘Rausch’ got degraded into a ‘recreational Rausch’ and began conquering Neolithic Europe bringing to an end a spiritual era which would never return again.
Last but not least I claim the standing stones, be they single, aligned or in circles, were found to be lightning conductors and, placed in circles, became instrumental in triggering downpours from a thunderstorm, that is, it was a technological innovation in the long standing tradition of shamanic ‘rain-making’. The shaman is the ‘master of fire’ and impervious to it, some do even aspire to be struck by lightning, so the shaman is the perfect conductor to orchestrate a stone circle with drums, you bet, create a thunderstorm and ‘let it rain’.
On top of that I have, I think convincingly, shown that many megalithic designs are intricately geometrical and symbolize a mathematical truth which is found in the ratio of the double rainbow, 14 over 11. (Maeshowe, Brodgar, Stonehenge)
Although I had mentioned ‘rainmaking’ as relating to shamanism earlier, it is only since I have been reading more extensively about shamans that I realized that also ‘lightning’ as symbol of fire, the ‘rainbow’ as the ladder by which the shaman climbs to heaven and not to forget the ‘circle’ itself, as ring of people, are key symbols of shamanism, so I came to the conclusion that unawares I had been describing the shamanic horizon underlying the design of the megalithic buildings and that therefor shamanism is likely to be the key to the spirit of the Stone Age and its final scientific apotheosis in the Atlantic Megalithicum of the British Isles.
I once attended a ‘shamanisation’ by an Hungarian shaman, the late Joska Soos, in Oibibio, Amsterdam, and I found recently in an ‘autobiography’ of him and in his paintings an explicit confirmation of the link between mathematics and shamanism (see below). Since Soos explicitly denies that shamanism is a religion – which I sensed about the Stone Age all the way – he nevertheless sees shamanism as ‘the source of all religion’. Let us take that authoritative insight as the theme by which we can try to weave a ‘spirit of the Stone Age’ out of the above mentioned cultural threads.

Shamanism

30,000 year old West-European cave painting of a shaman

There can be no doubt that the shaman has come down to us from deep in the Stone Age, that the shaman, in an important sense, is the spirit of the Stone Age, all over the world. Although the shaman was of the highest authority in the community, they usually were a ‘primus inter pares’, a ‘first among equals’ in daily life and up until this day, in those rare communities in Siberia, where the ‘original’ shaman still exists, this is the case. The spirit of equality and compassion is very strong in the shamanic society and symbolizes the egalitarian character of the Stone Age, since both men and women were shaman.
The shaman is in a sense the Ur-typ, the arche-type, of the enlightened personality, the truly ‘inspired’ teacher, the accomplished human being, and whatever their many baffling skills, it is the healing of body and mind, the restoring of harmony to the soul, be it individual or communal, which is their essential function, their ‘raison d’etre’ (reason of being). The shaman is there to help and cure others, that is what they are chosen and educated for, he or she is originally a ‘chosen-one’. Their spiritual training of seclusion, celibacy and meditative practices, lies at the root of yoga and meditation, their spiritual flight is at the heart of our dreams, their ‘Rausch’ (trance) has produced visions, medicines, arts and sciences, they are the masters and magicians of the mind, the sufferers of every human illness, the seers of future and truth; in their extra-ordinary practices they need the help from the spirits of animals, the spirits of trees and of rocks and sometimes they engage with the dead, indeed. This extra-ordinary personality was the spiritual refuge for Stone Age society; it’s a world where the Mind rules supreme.

A heavy way

Only few are called upon to become shaman, it is a heavy way and only few possess the personal integrity to deal with the power they can wield over others; if a shaman makes a (moral) mistake it can mean their own death. The essence of the shaman, and this is their deep humanity, is that her or his life itself is a sacrifice to the community, because to become a healer they have to go through great ordeals of body and mind themselves, so as to be thoroughly purified and free from ego and selfish motives to serve the ‘world’; they must be prepared to face death for the well-being of others without harming others. Where do you find that today? Only in the highest teachings on selflessness in our religions.
We see that this highest ideal of self-sacrifice for the ‘benefit of the whole’ comes straight from the shamanic ethics, that is, from the Stone Age.

No doubt there have been evil shamans as there are evil thinkers, but the essence of the general occurrence of both these types of teachers is that they use the gifts of their extraordinary or superior insights for the good of all, not for the greater glory, power and advantage of themselves and their kin. The profound compassion embodied in the shaman is the most solid proof of the sincere humanity of Stone Age society, thus all the prejudice in talk of ‘barbarian practices’ is obviously blown out of all proportion when set against the essentially ego-less altruism of the shaman, as a moral role model of his age. It is in the ‘outstanding otherness’ of the shaman, that we can understand the basic equality of the Stone Age society, its natural caring for the fellow human, its purity of intentions, its purgations by psychotropic substances, processes in which there are no spectators only participants, where the family or the community as a whole become the healing agent guided by the shaman, be it man or woman, as the medium, as the messenger of the Beyond. This can only function when all barriers between people fall away and this can only happen where egos dissolve and equality arises as the source of healing harmony in humanity.

Equality

When we do not grasp the profoundly egalitarian spirit of the Stone Age, the personal sacrifice of the shaman and the highly communal emotional cohesion, which during deteriorating weather conditions was further fostered in the long spells of hardship when they were sometimes packed together in the refuge spaces, collectively surviving forbidding circumstances, with a lot of patience and forbearance, (communal chambers became huge in Orkney, several of them 20m inside), if we do not see the spiritual purity and humanity of their society, then all our imaginations about life in those ‘halcyon’ days start from a biased ‘primitive’ perspective, a misunderstanding, if not a caricature of ancient human beings, the very people we descend from.
The equality of the Stone Age, as evidenced in the communal burials of people of all ages, is best gauged in the equality between male and female shaman, this is the root of the egalitarian society and why shamanism cannot be called a religion. Religions are institutions based on collections of moral stories and prescriptions, ‘received and passed on’ by enlightened male teachers, usually put down in scriptures, guarded and ruled by men, inside male bastions also known as monasteries. Women have traditionally no role of substance in religion, this is so all over the world; a priestess occurs only in a shamanic setting.
It is this hierarchical social inequality between male and female which justifies all inequality in society. ‘Inequality’ is a state of mind, it is the ego, which is urged to stand out and triumph (hero), but on the other hand also ‘equality’ is a state of mind, it is without ego, it is the union with the One as the source of compassion and ‘enlightenment’, which is a female aspect. Shamanism has all the characteristics of the female, religion has none.
So where did women lose equality along the way, one may wonder?

Agriculture, a female revolution

In my analysis the whole Neolithic agricultural revolution is female in character, because it springs from the female side of the hunter-gatherer society, that is, from the gatherers, the women. To this day it are usually women who have and tend herb-gardens and we know that all early medicine is based on herbs and plants. Our Ur-typ of this female preoccupancy with herbal concoctions is, of course, the witch. She even flies like the shaman on her broom. Hunting and gathering is initially a state of ‘pursuing and taking’ from nature (male), whereas nurturing herb-gardens and nourishing animals (ducks, geese, goats) is a state of ‘giving, caring’ (female), so in effect it was a deep cultural revolution which took place and at first this gave women the upper-hand, they became the masters of the house and its direct environment, while the men ‘worked’ for them and their offspring in a secure and comfortable setting. Instead of ‘killers’ men became ‘carers’, instead of free-roaming, he had to manage a schedule, he started to manage time; many men psychologically never really took to the change, they have always remained hunters.
Hunting is not ‘working’, of course, otherwise it wouldn’t be a sport of the elite. Hunting and fishing is the male in his erstwhile free and pristine independent natural state, which he lost since the Stone Age and is still desperately trying to revive in the few ‘free’ hours that are left to him.

It has often been wondered why, for heaven’s sake, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle which was so much less labour intensive and cumbersome than agriculture was ever given up for the sedentary agricultural lifestyle. The answer in my view is clear, it was: the women. The women brought this about, they wanted a husband-man (husbandry) with a farm and a permanent shelter (house) for their children, no longer the exhausting life with a hunter without a home, than a feeble hut and sometimes even nowhere to go. So it was the preference of women which made young men go out into the woods with their axe and clear the land, build a firm wooden house, wait for local women to appear and start a family. And so it spread and came about (There seems to be genetic evidence for this scenario)

Master of the house

So agriculture was a female revolution and brought unwittingly a take-over of domestic power, the woman became the master of the house(hold) and had under most circumstances her man nearby; it became a success as we see today. In the Stone Age women languished in an alarming minority of 1 to 3 males at about 30 years of age, on average the end of their short lived lives. They lost their infants and own lives at an abominable rate under exhausting circumstances and with insufficient comfort to recover. Today though nearly everywhere women get older than men and are in the majority. Taken that it is a bare 10.000 years on the hundreds of thousands preceding, that is a resounding success for women.
Losing his dominance in the family life and the control of his transient ‘hut’, seeing women taking over on the domestic front, the male ‘conspired’ successfully to regain his dominance outside the house in the communty and did it by building himself the bigger house, where he and his ‘brethren’ were the boss again, he built himself the ultimate house, he built himself a ‘temple’, and he convinced woman that this was not for himself and his dominance, but for the ‘gods’ (his gods) and their dominance.
This gender inequality is the root of all social inequality and the bastion of male superiority in society. This is the paramount reason why religion is different from Shamanism, why the priest is just a shadow of the shaman, why women are banished from spiritual authority, why mysticism and morals are no longer at the heart but at the periphery of society. Religion is a male message, an urge to convert, a conviction of being right, of embodying the ultimate truth etc., shamanism has none of it, because it is from the heart not from the head, because it is rooted in compassion with fellow humans, whereas religion usually does not practice the compassion it preaches.

What I want to stress is that shamanism can be seen as the genealogy and evolution of the human mind, but also of its compassion, breaking free in susceptible individuals, where it manifests itself as, indeed, the ‘soul’ of the human condition, be it male or female. Undergoing and managing the hidden powers of the mind, that is the extraordinary importance of shamanism and the cause of its resilience and resurgeance in our age. It is an endangered wisdom which should not go lost.

Information

‘Information’, ‘getting information’, are terms often used with respect to the ‘spiritual flight’ of the shaman which gives it an unexpectedly modern flavour. We read the shaman moves into ‘the other world’ to retrieve ‘information’, on how to heal a sickness, help a community, or do fortune-telling, or any other ‘incredible’ thing these shamans do in the eyes of an ‘ordinary mortal’. By encountering the spirit of a medicinal plant, for instance, the shaman, during the ‘Rausch’ (trance), gets ‘information’ by its spirit on how to use the healing qualities of the plant, this way they gain knowledge by, what seem to us, ‘supernatural’ means.
But then, if scientists, artists, composers find creative solutions given them in their dreams for free without the ‘supernatural’, would then not the shaman, the tireless worker and expert on dreams, be the most well-placed to retrieve even more knowledge at will, just by being ‘extremely natural’ about it all? This is more than likely precisely the way the most precious of knowledge has originally been gained by mankind, through mind-altering plants and fungi, producing extraordinary insights and revelations on plants, animals, the cosmos and themselves. A prodigy is born, not made, a prodigy is a shaman, a shaman is a chosen-one, a genius, answering a fateful call, without much choice. If it were common there would be more genius in humankind.


Shaman and the standing stone (part 2)

Apart from the fact that the Atlantic Megalithicum culture put so much energy in big stones, megaliths, they appear to have been actually very fond of stones in general as is again and again shown in the ‘uselessly’ small neatly polished stone axes found at the Ness of Brodgar and several mace-heads as well, sometimes small stones seem to have no practical function at all and are just extremely smooth and nice in the hand, the ‘nature and feel’ of the stone is the essence of its specific ‘healing influence’, you’d say. A lot of people today still believe in the healing influence of stones, a very old belief, no doubt.

The megalith

Putting the stone upright was honouring it and making it enter the world of man, who go upright. Everyone who ‘encounters’ a big standing stone knows it has an enormous ‘presence’, which is its ‘uprightness’, it has been singled out, been chosen to stand in the world of man, but it could not get there on its own, that is its mystery. Where do you come from, what are you doing here? In Holland the megalithic boulders come from the glaciers of Scandinavia, a thousand miles away carried by the glaciers of ice-ages. The more foreign a stone is to its environment (no living rock in the whole of Holland), the more magic and enigma it is bound to exude. Where do you come from? It could be, and this holds especially for the single standing stones, that it was raised where a shaman had been hit by lightning, or lightning had hit the ground, marking an auspicious place in the subtle power grid covering the upper surface of the earth. It could be. Nobody believes standing stones were placed at random and nearly everyone who knows sufficient places and gives it a thought will conclude that it usually enhances the power of an already special place by singling it out, giving it focus; a spot to experience the whole environment. I am pretty convinced that the triad lightning-shaman-standing stone is a valid one, that the standing stone through its ‘sun-spirit’ can be seen as a bridge between Us, the Underworld and the Beyond. The standing stone is associated with the energy of the Sun as well as of the Earth, but also with the spirit of male and female reflected in its shape.

Cult of the dead?

In Japan, where shamanic Shinto animism has reigned from time immemorial, spirits reside in the house preferably in the upper corners of a room. So the buttresses with their standing stones in Maeshowe, when pictured flat-topped and level at 10 Megalithic Feet height (2.96m), would provide an abode for the ‘cardinal spirits’ at the cardinal points of the central space of the building, North, East, South, West……, which figure prominently in shamanic invocations.
In the shamanic animistic worldview every block of stone in a building has a spirit (animus), how much more when these are upright stones like the buttresses in Maeshowe and all the other standing stones, aligned in line or in circle at given points in the landscape. The spirit of the stone though is not the spirit of the dead, it is the spirit of the stone. But since spirits are essentially equal (because all is One -which also explains the natural enlightenment and equality of the shamanic society) and since spirits are interchangeable, no doubt the spirit of the dead can enter the stone and find a temporary abode there. When you touch the stone and hold it for a while it may tell you its wisdom, like trees do. So that stone circles were places where shamans could convene the spirits of the dead, is plausible, but is it a cult of the dead? No, it is shamanism, and in shamanism everything is ‘alive’ and ‘spirited’, so how could it be a cult of the dead? The shaman communicates, as we say, with the spirits of the dead and many other spirits, that are very much ‘alive’ and no one with any knowledge of shamanism will judge that it is a cult of the dead, although the dead can play an important role in it, like they can in our own lives. We see the same ‘entering the sphere of the dead and of spirits’ in Tibetan Buddhism with a different emphasis, but in many of its cultural manifestations close to the shamanic tradition; but no one can seriously call Tibetan Buddhism a cult of the dead.

Listening to trees

We know it is not given to just anyone to listen to a tree (let alone talk to it), but this does not mean that we have some kind of superior rational understanding, when we think it is nonsense. That attitude of ‘rationalist science’ and the prevailing general ‘common sense’ in its wake, that attitude of ‘knowing’ something about the profound mystery of life is just preposterous, if not really stupid, and certainly one of the biggest spiritual deficiencies of modern day ‘scientific’ Western culture. It stems from the all-pervading materialistic scientific interpretation of reality, of which of course the Big Bang is the ultimate symbol. That ‘superior’ rational interpretation though always immediately breaks down as soon as it cannot explain phenomena outside its own reference frame, the mystical, the magical. Scientists ignore these facts or simply don’t believe them or, worse, ridicule them, as if they know something about the mystery of life. (I hope this site will provide a start for a vocabulary and logical framework which is able to translate also the ‘inexplicable’ in a consistent ‘logical’ description, because in my view all and everything that can be talked about can descriptively be brought back to a common ground.)
We know the druids revered the oak and its mistletoe and no doubt listened to the holy trees in their sacred groves, but we know also from Caesar that they were of the opinion that writing ruins the memory of man, so all knowledge should be memorized, not written down. Unfortunately there is great wisdom in those words, on the one hand their knowledge is lost, because not recorded, on the other it seems indeed the power of the human mind has deteriorated and that that is the reason why educated Stone Age people have the edge over most of us and our scientists today. Like druidic pupils also the shamans went through a long schooling and of course this was all memorization and direct experience, no reading and writing.

Socrates

After having Socrates denounce ‘writing’ in his dialogue with Phaedrus, Plato wrote: ‘The first prophesies were the words of an oak” and he goes on to state about ‘the people of old’ that they thought it rewarding ”to listen to an oak or a rock, so long as it was telling the truth.” Socrates even lectured Phaedrus for not heeding the words of an oak, as if it were not the content of the words which mattered, but who they were related by.
You would never have thought this would come from Socrates or Plato, would you, and where do these oaks and rocks come from you may wonder, maybe Wales or Brittany? Or is Plato talking of the people of old in general as: all the Shamans, the innumerable enlightened-ones preceding the Buddha, the Immortals absorbed in the eternal Tao?

Patience
The state of knowledge that I attribute to the Stone Age is based on the assumption that they discovered the cycles of Sun and Moon, had to make calculations and records to do this, mastered prediction of eclipses, found the ratios between square and circle and derived the double rainbow proportion.
Patience is the key to this knowledge and to all the countless lost crafts of the past, it was after all a different state of mind, where time did not count and perfection was the norm. Already the audacity to dare start charting the night sky, given the tools they had, is awe-inspiring by itself. (Did you ever look up at the stars and imagined you had decided to understand and make sense of what you are seeing?) Night after night making observations, or waiting for the sky to clear in the North, generation upon generation memorizing the assembled knowledge.
Discovering after hundreds of years the intricate cycle of the moon must have been a momentous event, for which there was every reason to cast such knowledge into stone so as to never ever let it go lost. To this spirit we owe the great scientific megalithic works, also those of Giza, where the spirit of the great healer and architect Imhotep would hover over the work force.

European shamans

In the late eighties I attended a ‘shamanisation’ by the Hungarian Joska Soos in Oibibio in Amsterdam. He used Tibetan singing bowls in his performances. Soos tells us in an auto-biography how he was ‘born with the caul’, auspicious, and coming from a shamanic family background. He was educated by the shaman Tamas Bacsi who indeed listened to the rustling birch for predictions and exposed himself to lightning (to no avail). Lightning is the symbol of the power of the shaman: they control fire and are impervious to it.
In the context of this website Soos has some interesting experiences to share in that he tells how he as a kid had a profound vision on the nature of reality which he describes as follows in ‘I don’t heal, I restore the harmony’ p.39: ‘Then I did experience the mathematical structure of the micro- and macro cosmos and it were mathematical structures and fabrics of power-lines like you’ve never seen. This was not Euclidean mathematics, this was something completely different and they moved, they were alive. The one changed into the other and the differing mathematical figures were space and time at once. I felt space, time and light, the white light”.

I feel very much at home with such a description because it so closely describes the mathematics and ontology I propose in these pages. It was ‘alive’, it ‘moved’, it was ‘complementary’ as one moves into the other and there was the ‘white light’; so then we are ‘at home’.

In Soos’s adagium on healing we recognize the shamanic humbleness as: ‘it is not me who is doing the healing, I just put things back in the right place, the healing happens from the restored harmony of the soul itself”.

When we see Soos’s pictures it is obvious this deep early ‘revelation’ stayed with him all his life and evolved into light-beings and singing bowls.

The use of circles, half circles, straight and parallel lines remains part of Soos’s way of expressing the ‘Beyond’ and what he ‘sees’.

What I want to argue is that just as the shamans were capable of retrieving ‘information’ from a plant or tree they would have been able to ‘supernaturally’ retrieve information about mathematical rules and physical laws by producing circles and making geometric connections between the standing stones in the circle. This way they could not only physically enter the geometry of the circle, but in their ‘Rausch’ connect to the cosmic (mathematical) spirit of the design, which was revealed in ‘eternal’ ratios of numbers, held in patterns.
According to Soos the polar star is object of a cult in shamanism, because as central star, circled by all the others, it is ‘the great door to the Divine’. But also the Great Bear is singled out and revered. Do we call this religion? Or better shamanic cosmology? (I have argued elsewhere that the engravings in Newgrange and Orkney recumbent stones depict the Polar star and the Great Bear, see Skara Brae and Science)
Even more striking in my view are the descriptions of space by this old shaman Tamas Bacsi. The universe is full of tiny holes, he said, the cow, your hand, full of tiny holes. “You look at the sky and then you will see the little coloured holes which you can go into and enter a different space, a different existence”.
It certainly combines well with my concepts of space-pixall, zero-point, zero-dimension and pure light. As Soos relates his actual experience of the holes 30 years later, he describes something which I experienced myself several times long ago, that space is an aggregate of coloured sparks, that it is indeed granular and full of light. This experience is the basis of my certainty that my concepts are sound, I’ve ‘seen’ it, so to speak. Also Tibetan ontology has ‘sparks’ and ‘space-particles’ as fundamental concepts.

It may be clear that I have been inspired again by ‘the people of old’ where it comes to their piercing insights and intimate feeling for ‘reality’. I always come away wiser when I let them be wiser than me, that is also the best way to let them come close. The silence of the Stone Age has still a lot to tell us.

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