Earthmother & Wolf Lore
paghat
lore" did finally convince me, mainly through Chris's analysis, that
Herodotus indeed knew of such lore in Scythian or Balkan regions, hence
the idea of a werewolf as more than religious mummery is older than the
medieval-to-Hollywood lore, though never widespread until medieval times.
Herodotus personally disbelieved the lore because he had no personal
touchstone for it. This week I was sorting through a lot of ancient
wolflore looking for authentic werewolves, & could find none. Nevertheless
Herodotus may well be evidence of a folk belief at the fringes of the
then-known world, folk belief not much different than is believed in
Eastern Europe today. I cannot find a second source that is so ancient, as
wolf lore overall leads down a completely different path, one intricately
bound up with the worship of an Earthmother herself frequently called
"Wolfish".
I. Echo of the Wolf Companion
Circe viewed men as swine, emblems of sacrifical Adonis. Yet her chief
companions on the Isle of the Dawn were lions & wolves, emblems of Cybele
& Artemis respectively, or simply of Cybele. A third century B.C.E. poem
for Cybele includes these lines regarding her rejection of the Olympian
request that she join them celestially rather than remaining of the Earth:
Great Mother! Go to the gods!
Do not roam the mountains!
Your sparkle-eyed lions
And gray wolves will be destroyed!
The resulting "war" between Zeus & his mother resulted in her demanding
half the rule of sky & earth be turned over to her -- she ruled everything
primarily so she lost somewhat -- but Zeus's rape & take-over was only
half-successful, & even he had to divide his authority among all
Olympions, whereas the half that belonged to Cybele just fundamentally
belonged to Cybele, whose association with Nature boiled down surprisingly
often to the Lion & the Wolf.
What the lion & wolf have in common is they create family units -- pride &
pack -- that resemble human family & extended-family lifestyles & which
also makes them more amenable to taming than is the case with other wild
cats or any solitary animal. Crabby solitary carnivores who meet only
occasionally to mate then go their separate ways were not easily
domesticated, & were rarely so powerfully identified with goddesses in the
way of human-family-style animals that hunt (lions & wolves) & herding
animals that get hunted (reindeer, sheep, goats, cattle) are so often
associated with the Mother as Queen of Beasts.
The anger of Cybele in having been raped by her own son is echoed in
Harpalyce ("the ravening she-wolf") who cooked her newborn son & fed it to
her father Clymenus, who had raped her. Harpalyce became Athena's owl. The
blending of the owl of Athena with the wolf of Artemis seems odd but the
owl, too, prays (hoots) to the Moon, & like the wolf is a snatcher or
slayer. The owl, however, is not domesticated (as a falcon might've been)
& tended to be solitary & was frequently identified with demonesses
(harpies, Lilith, other dark goddesses called "snatchers") & in
association with Athena reveals a dark, non-reproductive nature suppressed
by Athenean devotion but still to be found in her most frightening aspect
of Medusa. However, a positive element of wolf & owl is their capacity of
night-time vocalization, which may have been regarded as an echo of the
(feminine) voice that called forth creation.
The nymph Echo is rememembered primarily from a minor but appealing
literary tale of her pitiful love for Narcissus (who was almost certainly
originally her fertility daemon a la Attis, who shared Attis's sexual
incapacity). Echo was rather the very ancient Peloponnesian Akko or Akka
who gave the Akkadians their name, she being the same as the Cretan Kar of
a generation of divinity predating even the Titans. This is the "Voice"
that called forth creation, & who gave humanity our first written language
that permitted us, in turn, to create essentially new worlds. Echo had a
shrine by the road between Eleusis & Athens, near a bridge of the Reitoi
lakes, where virgin priestesses rested during the parade to Athens to
celebrate the Eleusinian Mysteries -- what rites honored Echo at this
station are not known (nor is much known of the Eleusinian mysteries over
all) -- but her association with virgin priestesses & her presence in
these Mysteries suggests that her former Goddess nature was still
recalled. She was also called the nymph of Mt. Helicon (home of the
Muses), the daughter of Gaea older than Zeus & Hera, but in later myth an
attendant of Hera. Her myths were also associated with Pan, who played a
song of madness over his rejection by Pthys & Syrinx, which resulted in
his ripping Echo to pieces. This is a very late-occurring addition to
Pan's mythology & if it had a particularly ancient origin it is more
likely that it was Pan himself who was torn to pieces by the frenzied
maenadic Echo, the evidence being that throughout the Peloponesses where
Echo was remembered, Pan idols were WHIPPED as a method of gaining
benefit, & Pan in the form of Marsyas was skinned alive by the Muses (&
with Echo's title Nymph of Mt Helicon identifying her as having at some
time been a Muse, or something far greater than the Muses in having been
the inspiring Muse of the First Cause or Voice that called forth
creation).
So Echo clearly had a vaster importance that is now lost, though the last
remembrance of it was in the Demeter mysteries. I would posit that her
original nature was that she echoed not just sacrificial Narcissus's
self-love, but rather she was the sound of Demeter's or Cybele's creation
of the world, & her name originally meant not merely "Voice" but "Voice of
Maker." And the sound of that voice resembled that of a wolf, very likely
related to the Near Easter Great Mother Gula who was also called Bau, the
sound of a dog, & even archaic Bau had a diminished role in Demeter's
mysteries as the clowning, dancing, erotic Baubau whose activity called
Demeter back from winter doldrums.
II. Wolf Into Earthmother's Bitches
The slaughter of Cybele/Artemis's wolves (as threatened in the poem quoted
above) is reflected in Heracle's war against the amazon queen Andromache.
This myth does not survive in literature, but there are art
representations with the key characters labeled. One of Heracles
encounters was with the amazon archer Lykopis, "She Wolf." When her last
arrow was spent she met Heracles in single combat & though defending her
queen heroically, the She Wolf was nevertheless slain.
Wolves were thought to honor the Mother Goddess because of their
propensity for howling (praying) to the Moon; & because a pack of wailing
hounds sounded not too dissimilar from wailing-women in grief-rituals for
Adonis, Tamuz, & the like. Wolves also represented protective motherliness
toward their own young, but ravening destruction against outsiders or
foes.
In Lycia, Artemis's mother Leto was regarded as having been a she-wolf.
This form of Leto had among her emblems a doubleheaded axe which was
usually Cybele's, the very axe that made bull-sacrifices. The wolf
subduing the bull, as Artemis did in the Tauric mountains, is in part a
domestication myth -- the dog corralling the cattle.
Wolfish Leto of course gave birth to twins. Rome's famous she-wolf, who
suckled the brother-founders of the city, is one more indicator of the
Mother-goddess cults with strong associations with twins & the wolf.
Dozens of other wolf myths of the Mother could be cited, & if we add in
Artemis/Hecate's bitches running in moonlight, the canine association of
the Earth Mother becomes increasingly profound.
The egocentricity of our own species likes to imagine the first pet dog
was a wolf that wandered into a Cro-magnon family's cave, wagged its tail,
and stayed. But it is more likely that early humans followed in the wake
of wolf packs, as humans followed so many other animals before
domestication. As aggressive scavengers, hominids fed on leftovers of
wolves' kills; then, as hunters, they followed wolves to the locations of
bands of elk and similar animals, and shared in the hunt. By the very
impressive human power of observation, methods of communal hunting and
even of social interaction were learned from the wolf, so that our habits
conformed more and more to the habits of wolves, rather than vice-versa.
In time, human & wolf filled the same ecological niche, meaning one or the
other must become extinct due to competition for the same niche -- unless
a bond could be achieved between species.
Prehistoric human families, living by the hunt, were generally migratory,
due to the migration of their game. As nomads, there was no division of
labor, no homelife versus camplife -- everyone was of the camp. Thus women
& men may well have hunted side by side in the Ice Age, Stone Age, and
Mesolithic. The sedate image of the permanent cave habitat is a popular
one, but false, or at best only a seasonal occurence, for stationary
family units would not have been typical until the advent of agriculture
in regions with predictable growing seasons. (In any case the
wall-decorated caves seem not to have been "homes" for families but were
the first "temples" invoking the womb of the Mother, in Europe visited
ritually, in South America used as places for the dead, but not as family
dwellings). During this same age of following various herds, domestication
of animals became almost exclusively women's occupation, beginning with
the nursing of orphaned or kidnapped wolf pups who, bonded by this manner
of rearing, became no less trustworthy than a well trained modern dog,
though profoundly mistrustful (even murderous) of strangers.
Women's domestication of wolf into wolfhound was the singular most
important advance on the hunt. Worship of the Goddess, who was by seasonal
turns nurturant & destructive, required a violent attribute. And in a time
predating warfare this violence was seen in the terror of Winter that
became a rich Spring, or the bloodness & terror of the Hunt that resulted
in plenty for the camp.
Tame wolves, & by the early Bronze Age innumerable domestic species of
dogs both larger & smaller than the wolf, could stalk, herd, and even
bring down animals that had previously been nearly impossible for humans
to safely capture. The wolf and bitch was thus associated with the
Mothergoddess early on, Dictynna being a typical example, the Great
Huntress of Crete who ran with packs of hounds. In the Classical Age the
once-distinct huntresses Dictynna and Britomartis were transformed into a
single goddess, keeper of Artemis' bitches. Women's rule of hounds is seen
acutely in the story of Acteaon, who spied Artemis and her huntress-nymphs
bathing. As a result he was turned into a stag, and Artemis hunted him
using his own dogs, which failed to recognize who they tore to pieces.
Women as dog-breeders was still typical in Hellenic times. Alexander the
Great's Maenad mother Olympias brought mastiffs with her from Illyria when
she came to Macedonia as Philip's bride. She bred & trained them for war,
used them during her many campaigns in support of her political aims &,
when her son was grown, he too used them in battle. But the first use of
the earliest wolfhounds was as guard & for hunting, not warfare. Actual
wardogs, bred upward for size, post-date even the horse -- the animal that
defined Scythian migration patterns even before domestication.
A majority of animals are most active at dusk, & many are additionally
nocturnal. The sound of night -- the owl of Athena & the wolf of Artemis
echoed the voice of the Great Mother. In the torch parades of women's
cults, in the night-long woodland orgies at which the fertility king was
sacrificed, in the establishment of animal sanctuaries & the keeping of
beasts within the temples, we see again & again the association of women
with the night & with nature. If it is true that Man (represented, say, by
Heracles) has always fought to restrain nature, to carve for himself a
place of strength from which nature & darkness are kept always at bay,
then we can begin to see why Woman is like Hecate with upraised torch &
bitches at her heal, containing all that is most fearful AND most beloved.
© paghat the ratgirl
StarOakYYZ
>From: spammers-...@my-deja.com (paghat)
Thank you! I really enjoyed that writing! I am always pleased at some of the
wonderful stuff to be found in this white box sitting on this desk :)
Namaste,
Christopher
"A spirit with a vision is a dream with a mission..."
"The fawn-eyed girl with sunbrowned legs dances on the edge of is dream."
"Charlie don't surf!"
Ashley Yakeley
spammers-...@my-deja.com (paghat) wrote:
> Prehistoric human families, living by the hunt, were generally migratory,
> due to the migration of their game.
Not necessarily. Many forms of hunting are nomadic simply because areas
tend to get exhausted of vegetable foods and animals can learn to avoid
where they might get hunted. You might be right for the people who
painted caves, though apparently salmon-fishing makes an appearance
among them too.
> As nomads, there was no division of
> labor, no homelife versus camplife -- everyone was of the camp. Thus women
> & men may well have hunted side by side in the Ice Age, Stone Age, and
> Mesolithic.
I recommend you read _The Forest People_ by Colin Turnbull, or many
other works on hunting peoples, as to the sexual division of labour in
nomadic hunting cultures. The women generally do not hunt, or else their
role is secondary, such as beating and shouting the animals into the
waiting nets and spears of the men. Instead, they gather the bulk of the
vegetable and fungal foods.
> The sedate image of the permanent cave habitat is a popular
> one, but false, or at best only a seasonal occurence, for stationary
> family units would not have been typical until the advent of agriculture
> in regions with predictable growing seasons.
Correct, though nomadic hunting bands also have (and had) families as
part of their social structure.
> (In any case the
> wall-decorated caves seem not to have been "homes" for families but were
> the first "temples"
Perhaps...
> invoking the womb of the Mother,
Unlikely. The iconography of these caves (animals, male human/animal
figures with prominent penises, abstract symbols) suggests altered
states of consciousness, interest in hunting, self-transformation into
animals etc.
Where female figures do occur, they resemble nothing so much as modern
(& earlier) pornography, as do the earlier ice-age "Venus" figures. See
"Cave Art", chap. 14 of _How to Deep-Freeze a Mammoth_, by Björn Kurtén,
for some side-by-side comparisons. Of course the erotic and the
religious are not necessarily disjoint.
You'd be more credible suggesting they were temples to the (male) Great
Bison God, though I don't think that's helpful either. Chapter 5 of _The
Dawn of Belief_ by D. Bruce Dickson is worth reading on this, he gives a
round-up of the various 'classical' and modern theories of
interpretation of paleolithic art. These include such notions as
totemism, rites of passage, hunting magic, shamanism as well as more
complex theories involving "sacred symbols that function to synthesize a
people's ethos", etc. No-one mentions "the Mother", simply because
that's not the theme of the art, animals are.
> in Europe visited
> ritually, in South America used as places for the dead, but not as family
> dwellings). During this same age of following various herds, domestication
> of animals became almost exclusively women's occupation,
Perhaps, but I'd be curious to know why you think so. More likely the
men domesticated them as hunting dogs. Turnbull reports that the BaMbuti
(men) use dogs to hunt with, it would be difficult for them to do so if
they had been domesticated by someone else. Although of course their
dogs are born into domesticity.
> beginning with
> the nursing of orphaned or kidnapped wolf pups who, bonded by this manner
> of rearing, became no less trustworthy than a well trained modern dog,
> though profoundly mistrustful (even murderous) of strangers.
...
> Worship of the Goddess, who was by seasonal
> turns nurturant & destructive, required a violent attribute. And in a time
> predating warfare this violence was seen in the terror of Winter that
> became a rich Spring, or the bloodness & terror of the Hunt that resulted
> in plenty for the camp.
This doesn't characterise the religious forms of modern
hunter-gatherers, even though their hunt must logically be equally
bloody. The BaMbuti have a non-gendered Forest, which is seen as
entirely nuturing, protective and generally parental. It gives them
food, and they're grateful to it. The !Kung have a male figure called
something like '=/Gao!na', who (like the BaMbuti 'Forest') is not so
much a god as the habitat itself: "he created himself". He's 'wild', as
an animal is wild ("keeping his distance"), but nuturing to humans, but
AFAIK doesn't involve the violence, bloodness and terror that you seem
to be suggesting (although neither society lives in a climate with
winter and spring seasons).
--
Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA
<http://immanence.org/>
Animism Mailing List: <http://immanence.org/animism-l/>
paghat
<ash...@immanence.org> wrote:
Ashley, of all your interesting commentaries (mostly clipped) many
inspired thoughts & maybe I'll pick up on some of your queries & ideas
tomorrow. But time restraint causes me for the moment to focus on your
allusion to the Mbuti, which I think was imperfect at best. Though you're
right mainly that they are a peaceable enough & the few of their myths
I've read are devoid of the kind of extreme brutality that motivates much
folklore elsewhere. Although frankly, too few of their myths are available
in English to be certain one way or the other, & authors like Colin
Turnbull are almost useless in the area of folklore, & ethnographic
records of Mbuti myth as told in Mbuti language are very limited (from the
language of their neighbors rather; they seem not to speak a language of
their own though surely the did once do so). My commentary begins
underneath this unclipped bit.
> > in Europe visited
> > ritually, in South America used as places for the dead, but not as family
> > dwellings). During this same age of following various herds, domestication
> > of animals became almost exclusively women's occupation,
>
> Perhaps, but I'd be curious to know why you think so. More likely the
> men domesticated them as hunting dogs. Turnbull reports that the BaMbuti
> (men) use dogs to hunt with, it would be difficult for them to do so if
> they had been domesticated by someone else. Although of course their
> dogs are born into domesticity.
>
> > beginning with
> > the nursing of orphaned or kidnapped wolf pups who, bonded by this manner
> > of rearing, became no less trustworthy than a well trained modern dog,
> > though profoundly mistrustful (even murderous) of strangers.
> ...
> > Worship of the Goddess, who was by seasonal
> > turns nurturant & destructive, required a violent attribute. And in a time
> > predating warfare this violence was seen in the terror of Winter that
> > became a rich Spring, or the bloodness & terror of the Hunt that resulted
> > in plenty for the camp.
>
> This doesn't characterise the religious forms of modern
> hunter-gatherers, even though their hunt must logically be equally
> bloody. The BaMbuti have a non-gendered Forest, which is seen as
> entirely nuturing, protective and generally parental. It gives them
> food, and they're grateful to it. The !Kung have a male figure called
> something like '=/Gao!na', who (like the BaMbuti 'Forest') is not so
> much a god as the habitat itself: "he created himself". He's 'wild', as
> an animal is wild ("keeping his distance"), but nuturing to humans, but
> AFAIK doesn't involve the violence, bloodness and terror that you seem
> to be suggesting (although neither society lives in a climate with
> winter and spring seasons).
The first Mbuti man seen in America was Ota Benga, captured in 1904 by an
"evolutionist" who brought him to the St Louis World's Fair to display
chained in a cage, as evidence of the Missing Link & to poo-poo
Creationists. He was said to be a sub-man & was treated no better than an
animal. In his own language, his name meant "Friend." Though slave-days
were over 40 years in the past, Ota Benga was stolen away from his forest,
& never again saw his wife & children.
After the Fair, Ota Benga was transferred to the Bronx Zoo & displayed
with a "missing link" label on his cage, in which he lived with chimpanzee
named Dinah. After two years of this imprisonment, Ota Benga gave up
begging to be treated like a man, & committed suicide.
The Mbuti have not been well treated by scientists since the doom of Ota
Benga, though the harm has been more subtle. A century of sweeping
observations about their lifestyle, their very humanity, the nature of
their "shamanism" which has been largely nonsensical & reliant on European
filters -- all of which seems largely to be based on romanticism mixed up
with "friendly" racism. They have been cited by Marxist anthropologists as
evidence of the communal nature of primitive humanity; by Feminist
anthropologists as proof that primitive humanity was egalitarian rape-free
& matristic; & by proponents of shamanism trying to prove a CroMagnon
origin to magic (weirdly equating net-hunter ritual with cave-paintings --
what crap).
Few people, unless the !Kung, have ever been so profoundly exoticised &
"understood" by westerners in such wild varieties of mythic confines &
preconceptions for sociopolitical purposes baring no relationship to
African rainforest realities. They are like wax dolls changed to suit the
commentator. And this phenomenon is best compared to the successful hoax
of "the gentle Tassidy" of the Philipine rainforests, who conveyed no
culture whatsoever because they were fakes, & were OBVIOUS fakes incapable
of answering any meaningful question about their history, marriage rites,
death rites -- they couldn't answer ANYthing because they hadn't worked
any of it out. They were just some Philipino folks who took their clothes
off & said, hey, we're a Stone Age Tribe. And instead of laughing their
asses off, anthropologists bought it whole hog! And found comparisons to
the Kung, Tiwi, G/wi, & Mbuti -- how was that possible? because
anthropological understanding of the Kung, Tiwi, & Mbuti is about as
credible as their TRICKING THEMSELVES into believing the Tassidy were
real. The Mbuti may be real enough, but these Stone Age Shamanistic
Marxist Feminist Missing Link Mbuti are no more real than were the Gentle
Tassidy as devoutly believed in by gullible belly-button-watching
"scientists."
This continuing desire for westerners to view the Mbuti as a changeless
prehistoric culture surviving into the modern age is no more credible than
putting one in a cage & labeling him Missing Link until he kills himself.
It's at best western poetry & philosophy that western poets & philosophers
pretend is an African tribal people. At worst it is a softer manifestation
of the same kind of Western mentality that permitted civilized men with
rifles to hop on horseback & hunt aboriginal peoples to the ground & shoot
them as good christian sport.
Sorting out the vast amount of nonsense about the Mbuti to try to grasp
something about their mythic beliefs is pretty difficult for someone like
me with only a pile of books on African folklore & myth, & a few websites
crosschecked. The collections of folklore tend to be "retold" -- by
westerners. The anthropological stuff is riddled with wild speculation &
very little ethnographic data of any credible kind. This vast array of
nonsense said of the Mbuti would be comical if it hadn't proven so
menacing to them in the past. Even Colin Turnbull who clearly loves these
people is afflicted with Romanticism & got very little out of his
"friends" either because their traditions no longer survive in
sufficiently pure form to find them out, or because even liking him the
hunters were not going revealing close personal beliefs, & of course the
women's secret society told him nothing whatsoever.
But it appears that they worship the Great Hunter Kalisia, & his wife, who
is the Forest, & whom the Mbuti call "Mother." But in a Mbuti creation
myth Water is called "Mother" & gave birth to the First Pygmy Couple, &
the Hunter-god was a personification of the forest, with a Rain-goddess
the forest's wife, she being the moisture & life of the forest & the
instigator of marriages. Plus there's the Creator God Arebati who can
punish or assist. There is evidence that the male divinities were "brought
forward" because of contact with missionaries who didn't believe in
ANYthing female; the "undamaged" Mbuti religion seems to have been deeply
spiritual & involved honor of the Bee & the sacredness of honey -- a
sacredness nowhere in the world associated with male divinity -- so I've
often wondered what existed before missionaries induced the Ba-mbuti to
think Kalisia was foremost. Your statement of a "non gendered forest" --
well, I'd like to read something about that, since it was my understanding
the "giving forest" was either personified as Kalisia married to the Rain,
or the forest was personified as his bride. One myth tells that when the
Lightning-mother is enraged, prayers to Kalisia to interven will calm the
lightning -- & I would leap to the conclusion that the Lightning-mother
(well known throughout the Congo) was among the Mbuti an angry form of
Kalisia's bride the Rain -- hence indeed even among these peaceable people
belief in a Mother who was by turns violently destructive in storm &
lightning, & the source of all pleasantries through moisture -- but that's
my interpretation no better or worse than the multidude of other western
impositions on the simpler & sometimes contradictory tales the Mbuti tell.
One problem with the anthropological & ethnographic studies is that too
many were done by men like Colin Turnbull & even by Christian missionaries
of no particular scientific turn of mind -- who all had in common a nearly
complete lack of access to (or interest in) what women of the Mbuti did &
believed. For instance, one of the key Mbuti myths speaks of the
creator-god Arebati telling the Mabuti First Man & First Woman, after they
were born of Water, "Efe! (Pygmy). You may eat any fruit in the
rainforest, but not from this one tree. You understand? I tell you not
this tree." But Efe's pregnant wife became unreasonably hungry & was so
insistent she must have fruit of the forbidden tree. Tired of hearing her
whine for the forbidden fruit, Efe snuck up to the tree by moonlight & got
her a piece of fruit. But Moon Mother saw him do it, reported it to
Arebati, & thereafter was Death among the Mabuti who would otherwise have
lived forever.
Now MAYBE this myth existed among the Mbuti before missionaries or at
least christianized Bantus talked to them, but I seriously, seriously
doubt it. But it may well have appealed to some pre-existing Mabuti
tendency to "credit" or "blame" women for many such advancements, beliefs,
or systems followed by the Mbuti -- as in their belief that the sacred
trumpet was invented by & once possessed only by women. But heck, we can't
know what stories they REALLY told each other 150 years ago, let alone how
that may have related prehistorically! Yet so many authors have attempted
just such flights of fantasy when speaking of the origins of shamanism or
the lifestyles of Stone Age humanity somehow related to the Mbuti -- &
nonsense all.
The Menstruation & Marriage Goddess appears to be the Moon Mother, also
called Changing Woman because the moon changes. A bit is said of this
belief in Chris Knight's "Blood Relations. Menstruation & the Origins of
Culture" (Yale Uni. Press. 1991) which like most works citing the Mbuti is
as much political as scientific so who knows if it's true. In any case,
there are similar divinities honored within the "elima" or Mbuti women's
secret society.
Women's ritualistic belief systems are not well reported because viewed
mostly only at the point of dance & song which is merely a product of
belief, not its untold impetus. One signal ritual has tribal women of the
elima whipping the young groom until his back & legs & chest are welted &
dripping blood, a sadistic "game" to see if he can battle his way to the
dwelling of his bride-to-be & thereby earn merit & potency sufficient to
lay with her. No outsider-discription of this ritual has given any
insider-cultic meaning though much observational assuming has been done.
One of the Mabuti folk tales told by the net-hunters is how they obtained
their cultic equipment, notably the sacred trumpet that chases game into
the nets. This formerly belonged exclusively to women. In a great
tug-of-war with women, the hunters won it. Who knows if this tale
reflects an ancient truth or more likely something that had some difficult
to judge level of actual occurrence only within the last century or so.
But the least it tells us is that the many popularists & scholars who've
tried to draw conclusions about Paleolithic society based on a little
knowledge about net-hunting pygmy men & almost nothing about pygmy women,
well, these speculations about prehistory are in a word complete & utter
fantasy -- again, just like that little sign on Ota Benga's cage. It's
hard enough to understand the pygmies qua pygmies after a century of their
culture being altered by contact with Bantu farmers & Zaire governing
factions & French people; but to extend this imperfect knowledge backward
into the Stone Age is really a terrible, frightening error frequently made
even by scholars snared by their own Romantic racism. And Colin Turnbull
is one of the egregious commentators despite that he is promoted as a good
friend to the Mbuti who got "behind" their curtain. He did not.
More is known of the hunter-god than the lightning-goddess, for instance,
but among the Bambuti, when the lightning-goddess was annoyed & dangerous,
the hunter-god was called upon to subdue her. How he did so -- by force?
by seduction? by devotion? -- I can find no prayer or indication in
English. Some "research" on the Bambuti is almost wholly fabricated
especially that which uses the Bambuti in an effort to make statements
about the Paleolithic era which all "smoke in a hat" but a couple writers
have talen poorly gathered ethnographic sources only about the men of the
Bambuti, & invented something about prehistory which is even further
removed from reality -- including theories of ecstatic cavern worship in
temperate Europe, just one imaginative leap after another resulting in
science fiction without the comic book art. Another ridiculous modern
western myth is of the non-aggressive State Age people as "proven" by the
Kung & Bambuti -- & with equal credibility by "the gentle Tassidy" who
turned out to be a complete hoax but western mythic need to believe in
such societies made the Tassidy "real" for many years & the
anthropological work, ignorant as it turned out to be, as definitive &
conviction-filled as similar writings about the Bambuti. Well-founded
anthropological & ethnographic source materials about Africa & aboriginal
peoples generally are notoriously eratic & incredible & it is only when
such peoples begin to write about themselves that we learn much about
them. Yet the HINTS of what the Mabuti might have been like a century ago
is so very interesting one reads the crappy ethnographic reports hoping
for flashes of integrity from the reporters. But as the Bambuti & Kung
have been especially "maltreated" in literature to suit Feminist
perspectives, Missionary perspectives, Marxist perspectives, or all kinds
of isms academic or popular, it's hard to weed out anything really
sensible.
The unreliability of romanticism mixed with racism aside, the Mother was
so ingrained among aboriginal peoples of Zaire that it would be very odd
if the Ba-mbuti were so very different.
What I'd REALLY like to see is an exhaustive Mbuti-told collection of
stories about their pantheon & folk beliefs, though it is too late for
even them to tell uncorrupted traditional tales. The Mbuti have long had
no language of their own & it is onto language that such traditions are
bound, & the great ethnographers always reported myths phonetically in the
language they were spoken in, with rough translations beneath --
unfortunately none such ever reached the Mbuti until the great age of
ethnographic folklore collecting was past. The Mbuti have for the last
eight or ten years been moved out of their rainforests en masse as the
forests are leveled or the game therein over-hunted by Bantus leaving the
Mbuti no basis for their traditional life. They now live primarily in
villages alongside Bantu & the government is helping ("insisting" rather)
this process along. The women now make a living stripping trees of bark to
manufacture sundry objects & to use large flat pieces for bark-paintings.
These artworks alas imitate weaving symbols & do not convey much in the
way of myth.
-paghat the ratgirl
Chris Camfield
one of the Spartan kings, who died I think after being walled up in a
house, was reputed to have turned into a werewolf or something of the
sort.
I don't remember if Burkert's _Homo Nekans_ touches on this at all? I
believe he discussed the worship of Apollo Lykaion in it.
Chris
Ashley Yakeley
> > (In any case the
> > wall-decorated caves seem not to have been "homes" for families but were
> > the first "temples"
>
> Perhaps...
>
> > invoking the womb of the Mother,
>
> Unlikely. The iconography of these caves (animals, male human/animal
> figures with prominent penises, abstract symbols) suggests altered
> states of consciousness, interest in hunting, self-transformation into
> animals etc.
I might also add that caves give just about the only surfaces for which
the paintings will survive to be recorded in modern times. Perhaps the
same people painted exposed rock...
Ashley Yakeley
> In article <ashley-52F1AA....@news.halcyon.com>, Ashley
> Yakeley <ash...@immanence.org> wrote:
... [snippings all over]
> But time restraint causes me for the moment to focus on your
> allusion to the Mbuti, which I think was imperfect at best.
I'm relying entirely on Turnbull's _The Forest People_, plus some
references elsewhere. I'd welcome other sources of Mbuti ethnography,
maybe Kevin Duffy's book is useful.
...
> This continuing desire for westerners to view the Mbuti as a changeless
> prehistoric culture surviving into the modern age is no more credible
> than putting one in a cage & labeling him Missing Link until he kills
> himself.
Well that's true. The attempts to draw inferences about prehistoric
culture from modern nomadic foraging cultures that I've read, such as
Dickson, look for features in common for all the cultures and always
with a host of warnings and caveats including that all of them have a
relationship with and even a certain degree of dependency to surrounding
non-foraging peoples. Goodman's _Ecstasy, Ritual and Alternate Reality_
also makes some very interesting comparisons.
Still I think that together, nomadic hunter-gatherer cultures that
survived to be written about can tell us something about the
prehistoric, if only to broaden the possibilities. For instance, I'm
suspicious of any theory that assumes any continuity of religious forms
between paleolithic hunter-gatherers and later agriculturalists, if only
because the religious forms of their modern analogues are so different.
But is it your contention that none of the ethnography we have for
hunter-gatherers can be trusted? It seems to me most of the
politically-motivated interpretations of hunter-gatherer lifeways are
made by people who merely read the ethnographies, not the ethnographers
themselves. Turnbull for instance seems to be mostly recounting his time
with the Mbuti and reporting what they told him.
...
> But it appears that they worship the Great Hunter Kalisia, & his wife,
> who is the Forest, & whom the Mbuti call "Mother."
Do you know what form this worship takes?
> But in a Mbuti creation myth Water is called "Mother" & gave birth
> to the First Pygmy Couple, & the Hunter-god was a personification
> of the forest, with a Rain-goddess the forest's wife, she being
> the moisture & life of the forest & the instigator of marriages.
> Plus there's the Creator God Arebati who can punish or assist.
I'd love to read more about this. What's your source?
> There is evidence that the male divinities were "brought
> forward" because of contact with missionaries who didn't believe in
> ANYthing female;
There is?
> the "undamaged" Mbuti religion seems to have been deeply
> spiritual & involved honor of the Bee & the sacredness of honey -- a
> sacredness nowhere in the world associated with male divinity --
Do you have ethnography suggesting that to the Mbuti the bee/honey
spirituality was specifically associated with the female? Or that it was
central spiritually?
I have heard of the men of such societies comparing honey-foraging to
courtship, being stung in order to obtain something sweet. And certainly
Turnbull reports that honey is the most prized food in the forest, only
available during a short season.
...
> Your statement of a "non gendered forest" --
> well, I'd like to read something about that, since it was my
> understanding the "giving forest" was either personified as
> Kalisia married to the Rain, or the forest was personified as
> his bride.
A perhaps unwarranted assumption I picked from Turnbull, who always
refers to the Forest as 'it'. But perhaps if the Forest can be either
your Kalisia or his bride, it might be appropriate to refer to it as of
unfixed gender. From what you've said it seems likely that the Forest is
the Forest first, with gender and anthropomorphism only tacked on later
for the purpose of telling stories about it.
... [context cut]
> In any case,
> there are similar divinities honored within the "elima" or Mbuti women's
> secret society.
>
> Women's ritualistic belief systems are not well reported because viewed
> mostly only at the point of dance & song which is merely a product of
> belief, not its untold impetus. One signal ritual has tribal women of the
> elima whipping the young groom until his back & legs & chest are welted &
> dripping blood, a sadistic "game" to see if he can battle his way to the
> dwelling of his bride-to-be & thereby earn merit & potency sufficient to
> lay with her. No outsider-discription of this ritual has given any
> insider-cultic meaning though much observational assuming has been done.
Turnbull makes no suggestion that the elima amounts to a women's secret
society, though of course he would hardly be initiated into its
mysteries if there were one. There may be no inner-cultic meaning to the
whipping, or it may be secondary to its essentially flirtateous nature
-- the girls first chase the boys with long whips, who defend themselves
with sticks, stones, and pieces of banana peel shot from their bows. As
Turnbull reports, any boys who are hit are obliged by their honour to
attempt to enter the elima-house 'defended' by the older women, who are
perfectly capable of keeping any particular boy away from their
daughters inside. Yes, the boys do get hurt in the process (and the
girls too, in the chase phase), but on reading the account it didn't
strike me as particularly sadisitic. Turnbull describes it as "on the
surface, a pretty happy-go-lucky affair" (the deeper importance being as
puberty rite and celebration of adulthood for both sexes).
Note also that the elima has both a 'mother' and a 'father' (a man) to
look after the general welfare of the girls, not especially significant
perhaps, but at least the whole thing is not an absolute taboo for men
as perhaps it would be in more sex-segregated societies such as the
Australian aborigines. Also note that Mbuti men are not terrified of
menses as are typically men from agricultural societies such as the
Bantu.
Again, more ethnography on this would be very welcome.
> One of the Mabuti folk tales told by the net-hunters is how they obtained
> their cultic equipment, notably the sacred trumpet that chases game into
> the nets. This formerly belonged exclusively to women. In a great
> tug-of-war with women, the hunters won it. Who knows if this tale
> reflects an ancient truth or more likely something that had some
> difficult to judge level of actual occurrence only within the last
> century or so.
The Mbuti women still had the role of chasing game into the nets. The
"final" ritual of the molimo seems centrally concerned with emphasising
the importance of women in the hunt. Given that Mbuti avowed the idea of
equality of men and women as a point of ethos (whatever the reality),
there's a reasonable interpretation: when a man kills an animal in a
net-hunting expedition, he gets all the glory and an extra-large share
of the meat, even though it was the beating and shouting of the women
that got it there.
> But the least it tells us is that the many popularists & scholars who've
> tried to draw conclusions about Paleolithic society based on a little
> knowledge about net-hunting pygmy men & almost nothing about pygmy women,
> well, these speculations about prehistory are in a word complete & utter
> fantasy -- again, just like that little sign on Ota Benga's cage.
I think they (some of them) have a bit more credibility when they adduce
the !Kung, the Tiwi, etc. and look for commonalities.
...
> And Colin Turnbull
> is one of the egregious commentators despite that he is promoted as a
> good friend to the Mbuti who got "behind" their curtain. He did not.
I think he got behind _a_ curtain, inasmuch as he spent time with them.
Of course it's impossible to gather all possible knowledge about a
culture: especially when considering regional variation, any one sojourn
is going to yield only one drop of the river.
> More is known of the hunter-god than the lightning-goddess, for instance,
> but among the Bambuti, when the lightning-goddess was annoyed &
> dangerous, the hunter-god was called upon to subdue her. How he did so
> -- by force? by seduction? by devotion? -- I can find no prayer or
> indication in English.
Before even considering this, I would ask, exactly what is the
relationship of the BaMbuti to these 'gods'? Are they merely figures in
legends they tell? Do they feature in any of their rituals? Do they pray
to them? Do they give thanks to them? Do they give them offerings? Do
they ask them for stuff? Do they dream about them? Do they meet them in
the Otherworld?
Such questions seem to me fundamental in any attempt to understand
religion given some folklore.
...
> Another ridiculous modern
> western myth is of the non-aggressive State Age people as "proven" by the
> Kung & Bambuti --
State Age? I'm not sure what you're saying here.
The !Kung and BaMbuti are certainly depicted as _relatively_
non-aggressive, meaning only that they generally have alternatives to
violence. Goodman adduces the horticulturalist Semai of Malaysia, who
are avowedly non-aggressive, though I haven't read the ethnography.
...
> Well-founded
> anthropological & ethnographic source materials about Africa & aboriginal
> peoples generally are notoriously eratic & incredible & it is only when
> such peoples begin to write about themselves that we learn much about
> them.
Obviously people writing about themselves is far more valuable, but
apart from that, how would you distinguish a good ethnographic report?
> The unreliability of romanticism mixed with racism aside, the Mother was
> so ingrained among aboriginal peoples of Zaire that it would be very odd
> if the Ba-mbuti were so very different.
This is a comparative argument almost as suspicious as the ones you're
complaining about. What's your ethnography?
> The Mbuti have for the last
> eight or ten years been moved out of their rainforests en masse as the
> forests are leveled or the game therein over-hunted by Bantus leaving the
> Mbuti no basis for their traditional life. They now live primarily in
> villages alongside Bantu & the government is helping ("insisting" rather)
> this process along. The women now make a living stripping trees of bark
> to manufacture sundry objects & to use large flat pieces for
> bark-paintings.
This doesn't surprise me, this sort of thing is happening to foraging
cultures all over the world. I know there's an NGO trying to stop it,
the Friends of People Close to Nature [<http://fpcn-global.org/>],
though I have no idea how successful or helpful they are.
mark...@io.com
> the idea of a werewolf as more than religious mummery
is there a difference? one man's religion is another man's devil
worship. western werewolf lore might be a negative depiction of
romanian totemism.
paghat
<ash...@immanence.org> wrote:
> The attempts to draw inferences about prehistoric
> culture from modern nomadic foraging cultures that I've read, such as
> Dickson, look for features in common for all the cultures and always
> with a host of warnings and caveats including that all of them have a
> relationship with and even a certain degree of dependency to surrounding
> non-foraging peoples. Goodman's _Ecstasy, Ritual and Alternate Reality_
> also makes some very interesting comparisons.
>
> Still I think that together, nomadic hunter-gatherer cultures that
> survived to be written about can tell us something about the
> prehistoric, if only to broaden the possibilities. For instance, I'm
> suspicious of any theory that assumes any continuity of religious forms
> between paleolithic hunter-gatherers and later agriculturalists, if only
> because the religious forms of their modern analogues are so different.
>
> But is it your contention that none of the ethnography we have for
> hunter-gatherers can be trusted? It seems to me most of the
> politically-motivated interpretations of hunter-gatherer lifeways are
> made by people who merely read the ethnographies, not the ethnographers
> themselves. Turnbull for instance seems to be mostly recounting his time
> with the Mbuti and reporting what they told him.
This is going to sadden you I suspect, as it saddens me. But if you
subscribe to a couple aboriginal newsletters you'll get used to it being a
fact that nothing about hunter-gather societies written by enthnographers
is reliable. These peoples know it all too well; we as outsiders have to
at least be suspicious.
Take the case of "the gentle Tassidy" of the Phillipine rain forest.
Ethnographers recorded everything they could about these Mbuti-like
peaceable Stone Age people & National Geographic for several years funded
the investigations. Turned out they were a family of Philipinos who'd
taken their clothes off & lived in the woods as a hoax. They hadn't worked
it out very well; they had no myths, no ability to make tools, no marriage
rites, no funeral methods, no traces of a language of their own, no
nothing. They were not the least bit convincing. But scientists long ago
deluded themselves about a half-dozen "commonalities" between the Mbuti,
the !Kung, the Tiwi, & the gentle Tassidy. And all these commanalities are
as justified & convincing as the non-existent Tassidy. That family did NOT
do research to find out what was needed to trick scientists. They just
took their clothes off, said almost nothing about themselves, & let the
scientists bullshit themselves into abject humiliation that the National
Geographic to this day prefers NEVER TO MENTION in their pages rather
than admit that the majority of ethnographic work on aboriginal peoples is
exactly that credible.
> how would you distinguish a good ethnographic report?
Boas's ethnnographic work in Africa & the Native Americas meets my ideal,
but he never new of the Mbuti & is not helpful on that score. His method
(as a brilliant linguist) began with learning enough of each language that
he could record stories phonetically as actually told, thereby never
imposing his own cultural blinders, then to provide a literal translation.
His work that that of many such investigators can be found in historic
publications of the Smithsonian Society. Boas would find whoever remained
alive who knew a peoples' myths -- even in the late 1800s it was too late
for some peoples, while others had only one or two very old folks who
rememembered folkways & beliefs before European persecutions, wars,
imposed exaggerations of African slaving, missionary work, & disease
eradicated cultures wholesale. Boas's works are extensive & just wonderful
& from them we can gain access to the minds of actual individuals steeped
in what are today completely lost mythic tales & beliefs. We can even make
our own culturally-blindered judgements, good bad or indifferent, & just
so long as the original aboraginal speaker is still there for reference,
it matters less what we would retell or refashion. For the Mbuti, in
English at least, it is only the refashioned impressions & often idiotic
judgements as to meaning that we have, & nothing original to the Mbuti.
Consider this: If the Nazis had succeeded in eradicating all the Jews, the
longterm plan was to preserve Prague as a sentimental relic of a vanished
people, then to write a loving history of the Jews. That's a fact. Even
hating a people's guts so much they wanted them never again to exist, this
European desire to romanticize to one's own culture's greater liking could
not be overcome even where racist feeling was completely unrestrained.
A writer like Turnbull can tell us how he saw a fire-coal preserved inside
a palm leaf or how a public dance was done. Any explanation beyond that
becomes instantly falacious unless quoted verbatim from individuals within
a tribal group who still hold some remembrance of their own diminishing
cultural beliefs. Alas the cross-pollution from Bantu, colonial,
missionary, & second-rate ethnographer contact makes it already too late
to establish what the Mbuti folkways & beliefs really were, but if any bit
of it is ever seriously recovered, it will not be done by outsiders
watching their wee friends dance. It will be done by Mbuti writers who
deep personal access to an extended family & especially elderly members
who may recall elements here & there of something that used to be. Some
Mbuti are in fact doing this now, but for European access they've been
published mainly in French rather than English, so I've not been able to
read their works.
-paghat the ratgirl
Ashley Yakeley
> This is going to sadden you I suspect, as it saddens me. But if you
> subscribe to a couple aboriginal newsletters you'll get used to it being a
> fact that nothing about hunter-gather societies written by enthnographers
> is reliable. These peoples know it all too well; we as outsiders have to
> at least be suspicious.
If you have references to articles in these newsletters, that would be
useful.
> Take the case of "the gentle Tassidy" of the Phillipine rain forest.
> Ethnographers recorded everything they could about these Mbuti-like
> peaceable Stone Age people & National Geographic for several years funded
> the investigations. Turned out they were a family of Philipinos who'd
> taken their clothes off & lived in the woods as a hoax. They hadn't worked
> it out very well; they had no myths, no ability to make tools, no marriage
> rites, no funeral methods, no traces of a language of their own, no
> nothing. They were not the least bit convincing.
Actually the Tasaday do exist as a people, Thomas Headland, author of a
book on the hoax, has a number of web-pages on the issue, see for example
<http://www.sil.org/sil/roster/headland-t/caveppl.htm>.
The hoax was that they ate purely foraged foods and had no contact with
any other people, dressed in leaves and used stone-age tools, etc. The
Tasaday in fact were hunter-gatherers, though they also traded with
neighbouring tribes for agricultural foods (including an agricultural
village less than three miles away).
The hoax was created and manipulated by a Filipino politician named
Elizalde, it wasn't something the Tasaday decided to do.
> But scientists long ago
> deluded themselves about a half-dozen "commonalities" between the Mbuti,
> the !Kung, the Tiwi, & the gentle Tassidy. And all these commanalities are
> as justified & convincing as the non-existent Tassidy.
Do you have references for this? The main hoaxed book on the Tasaday,
_The Gentle Tasaday_, was written by a reporter, not an anthropologist.
Elizalde did not allow independent scientists and anthropologists to
study the Tasaday, so I'd be surprised if you can find anything that
looks like credible ethnography. Instead, he chose nine scientists who
were allowed to visit for only a few days before making reports. The
Tasaday were then sealed off from further study for thirteen years.
> That family did NOT
> do research to find out what was needed to trick scientists. They just
> took their clothes off, said almost nothing about themselves, & let the
> scientists bullshit themselves into abject humiliation that the National
> Geographic to this day prefers NEVER TO MENTION in their pages rather
> than admit that the majority of ethnographic work on aboriginal peoples is
> exactly that credible.
Bear in mind that the _National Geographic_ is a popular magazine, not a
peer-reviewed anthropology journal. I don't think anthropologists draw
any conclusions from such a small amount of contact.
I think this is rather different from an ethnographer spending several
years with a people and reporting personal experience.
...
> Consider this: If the Nazis had succeeded in eradicating all the Jews, the
> longterm plan was to preserve Prague as a sentimental relic of a vanished
> people, then to write a loving history of the Jews. That's a fact. Even
> hating a people's guts so much they wanted them never again to exist, this
> European desire to romanticize to one's own culture's greater liking could
> not be overcome even where racist feeling was completely unrestrained.
Well Nazism itself is in part unrestrained romanticism (think their love
of Wagner). I believe Martin Buber writes about this. I really don't
think one can draw conclusions about romantic bias in anthropologists
from the Nazis.
> A writer like Turnbull can tell us how he saw a fire-coal preserved inside
> a palm leaf or how a public dance was done. Any explanation beyond that
> becomes instantly falacious unless quoted verbatim from individuals within
> a tribal group who still hold some remembrance of their own diminishing
> cultural beliefs.
Turnbull does in fact report extensively on cultural explanations that
the Mbuti tell him, though admittedly he doesn't record complete
tellings of legends. Of course it's _possible_ that the Mbuti were
telling him all about their worship of the Great Mother and Turnbull was
somehow refusing to hear it...
It's true that Turnbull reports on the Mbuti as they were in his time,
not any earlier time. Nevertheless, at that time they were a
hunter-gathering people with a certain amount of trade with agricultural
tribes. Like most every other people, their culture was functional and
appropriate for their situation. For instance, they apparently had
little interest in or use for sorcery, despite its prevalence in the
surrounding Bantu tribes.
> Alas the cross-pollution from Bantu, colonial,
> missionary, & second-rate ethnographer contact makes it already too late
> to establish what the Mbuti folkways & beliefs really were,
You seem to be assuming that such contact renders the Mbuti somehow
invalid as a culture. For all we know, the Mbuti may have always been in
contact with agriculturalists.
> but if any bit
> of it is ever seriously recovered, it will not be done by outsiders
> watching their wee friends dance. It will be done by Mbuti writers who
> deep personal access to an extended family & especially elderly members
> who may recall elements here & there of something that used to be.
Or, alteratively, it will be done by Mbuti with deep personal access to
an extended family and especially elderly members who may recall
elements here and there of something that used to be recounting these
beliefs to people who've made the effort of spending years with them in
their habitat and learning and getting involved in their culture.
This also give context, by the way, something that is frequently lost in
works that just contain pure mythology. The telling of a legend is
cultural behaviour: it may for instance be appropriate at one time and
not at another. Some legends may be attached to particular rituals, for
instance.
It's also important to note that there's no one true version of any
given legend, as Levi-Strauss pointed out: a legend consists of all its
possible variations, just because it evolves or changes doesn't make
earlier versions part of a 'true' 'pure' culture.
One also has to wonder about the idea that all the ethnographers of all
the different hunter-gatherering cultures are all being fooled in the
same ways, particularly given the emphasis fieldwork anthropolgists
place on gathering data with as little interpretation as they possibly
can.
paghat
<ash...@immanence.org> wrote:
> > Take the case of "the gentle Tassidy" of the Phillipine rain forest.
> > Ethnographers recorded everything they could about these Mbuti-like
> > peaceable Stone Age people & National Geographic for several years funded
> > the investigations. Turned out they were a family of Philipinos who'd
> > taken their clothes off & lived in the woods as a hoax. They hadn't worked
> > it out very well; they had no myths, no ability to make tools, no marriage
> > rites, no funeral methods, no traces of a language of their own, no
> > nothing. They were not the least bit convincing.
>
> Actually the Tasaday do exist as a people, Thomas Headland, author of a
> book on the hoax, has a number of web-pages on the issue, see for example
> <http://www.sil.org/sil/roster/headland-t/caveppl.htm>.
Dr Headland's complete views are in Special Publications of the American
Anthropological Association 28, THE TASSADY CONTROVERSY, with other
authors helping out. The subtext of his own editorials (no science
involved in his own bits) is really the politics of scientific cop-out
when faces are red. His own concluding article "Hoax or Not?" asks the
question not because there's any question about it being a hoax, but
because he wanted to weigh the possibility that enough was in evidence
that academics weren't a bunch of asses for believing it in the first
place. I hadn't really focused on his assertion that there was a small
family group authentically calling themselves Tassady living lives pretty
much the same as any other Philippino ethnic cluster. Which even that I
believe is an error, as the idea that 26 people could constitute an ethnic
group is absurd & is truly reaching for straws to justify the wide-ranging
mythology believed of this so-called Stone Age Tribe. Tasaday IS a
Philipino family name (I don't know that it was THAT family's name but
maybe) rather than a tribal or ethnic designation. The specific family who
posed as a Stone Age Tribe has since been recognized as Cotabato Manobo,
though once again, Molony established this in 1972 so none of this is
really knew except the scientists were kicked in their asses by Iten & had
to finally open their eyes. Molony's own career was at risk over this, &
his article in Dr Headland's book clearly hopes to salvage some "face" in
his contention taht this Manobo family of hoaxers was nevertheless a
distinct tribe & he still refuses to believe it was all a hoax -- we're
talking something like trying to show a devout Christian there is no
practical evidence of God -- facts don't matter when we're dealing with
issues of faith, & some "sciences" are so subjective (including
anthropology & psychology) as to be slightly less emperically scientific
than is voodoo. Molony's article was one of desperation.
An article by David Hyndman & Levita Duhaylungsod in THE JOURNAL OF
CONCERNED ASIAN SCHOLARS (Oct-Dec 1990 Special Philippes Issue) asks the
question, even after the revelation of hoax, "Will the 'Tasaday' be
forever exploited?" Judging by Molony, the answer is "yes indeedy." The
Philippine Congress held 6 hearings in two years on the Tasaday & because
it is still dangerous to say too much negative about the Marcos regime &
things that occurred under his reign, the Congress concluded in 1989 that
the Tasaday are a real Stone Age tribe. Politics & the power of myth
circumventing the undeniability of even the least deniable facts. And
during a google search since I don't have a lot of stuff about the Tasady
to hand otherwise, I see brand new essays on human agression/passivity, on
primitive political development, on human/environment compatibility, & on
Gaea philosophy all citing the Tasaday in recent articles having not heard
that this is poor evidence even for such poor ideas. But I see one book I
must request at the library, Jean Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation"
discussing a theory he calls "Tasaday paradox" of anthropology as
simulated false reality. Sounds like it might be about what I maddeningly
find too few people understanding. If it is I should have some more
ammunition from it.
In any case, this family of about two-dozen people total were not a tribe,
they were a family, one that lived in houses & wore clothes like all our
families; & not one thing promulgated about them turned out to be true.
Ken Macleish would be the better expert having had several weeks of direct
contact, & he to his everlasting humiliation was completely duped & chose
to remain silent thereafter. The one really good article in Headland's
anthology is by Oswald Iten, who provides such quotes direct from the
mouths of the faux-Tasaday in clear, concise phrases like, "It was a
swindle." Iten really talked to them. So when Dr Headland says they didn't
intentionally perpetuate a hoax, that's not what the "Tasaday" admitted;
they claimed to be victimized & bribed & threatened if they tried to give
up the hoax.
Some of the original members of the fake stone age tribe were unrelated,
most were of a single family, not however of an ethnic group ever
identified by anyone but Dr. Headland, whose suggestion is vague enough he
could wheedle out of it. When the hoax was revealed, several newspaper
articles quoted members of teh group, who had suffered ill-health &
torment & felt trapped by the hoax, & had been theatened with murder (they
believed by Marcos) if they stopped pretending.
The debates & essays in 1989 in SCIENCE NEWS had some few anthropologists
begging that some element of the Tasady hoax not be without basis for
themselves having being duped, but the final concensus was only this:
hoax! That it took journalists to deduce the hoax doesn't make it less a
hoax. That professioinal anthropologists published nothing against the
idea of the Tasaday (in whom they believed unquestioningly) in contrast to
the "debate" & "controversy" the journalistic revelations induced, sugests
mainly these scientists would've preferred to go to their grave not
knowing the truth -- & WILL go to their graves believing most of the same
mythic constructs about other aboriginal peoples who at least exist & so
force scientists to confront their self-deluding gullibility all the more.
> The hoax was created and manipulated by a Filipino politician named
> Elizalde, it wasn't something the Tasaday decided to do.
>
> > But scientists long ago
> > deluded themselves about a half-dozen "commonalities" between the Mbuti,
> > the !Kung, the Tiwi, & the gentle Tassidy. And all these commanalities are
> > as justified & convincing as the non-existent Tassidy.
>
> Do you have references for this?
Reference for what? Just about any book from the 1970s through much of the
1980s that addresses the idea of survival of stone age peoples as communal
& egalitarian will cite foremost the Tassaday & Kung, without questioning
either; as is the case with most science these books rely on secondary
sources but in the case of the Tasaday the sources were so patently false,
you cannot at this late date blame the sources, who were not the least bit
convincing. The same kind of second-hand repeated assumptions about the
Mbuti are the ones that made their way into 1970s books on anthropology
that embraced the Tasaday unquestioning, even though you could see them in
the National Geographic special stumbling to make up lies or evasions
about family unites & burials & marriage & never really making up anything
at all -- the "scientists" said this was evidence that stone age people
had no culture at all, rather than "what a bunch of hooey, NO *culture*
was ever THAT void of content."
> Bear in mind that the _National Geographic_ is a popular magazine, not a
> peer-reviewed anthropology journal. I don't think anthropologists draw
> any conclusions from such a small amount of contact.
> I think this is rather different from an ethnographer spending several
> years with a people and reporting personal experience.
First of all, throughout the 1970s peer-reviewed "science" on the Tasady
appeared in such journals THE PHILIPPINE SOCIALOGICAL REVIEW, in
ECOLOGICAL FOOD & NUTRITION, in THE PHILIPINE JOURNAL OF SCIENCE, besides
in the 1976 anthology FURTHER STUDIES ON THE TASADAY; in CULTURAL
ANTHROPOLOGIY VOLUME III. The Peer-reviewed journals in The Netherlands,
France, & Germany ran articles on the Tasaday in the 1970s -- I can't read
these languages but by all reports nobody was suggesting a hoax world-wide
western anthropologists found they could shape the derth of proof into
proof of anything they already wished was true. Joseph Campbell uses the
Tasaday as proof of some very bad theories about the Neolithic era in a
bizarrely fabrication-filled book called MYTHOLOGIES OF THE PRIMITIVE
HUNTERS & GATHERERS in which he similarly abuses incorrect information
about the Mbuti & Kung & the Andaman islanders. A dozen books I've read
(undoubtedly a great many more than that) single-authored books or
mutli-authored anthologies on anthropology & ethnagraphy had chapters on
or citations of the Tasaday to "prove" certain points about modern
primitives &/or Stone Age peoples &/or human propensity to agression
disproven by the gentle Tasaday -- I'm sure you've read some of this
material yourself if you think about it. By the end of the 1980s these
citations begin to disappear, but the same assertions continue only
limiting the citations to the Tiwi, Kung, & Mbuti with, I content, NO MORE
CREDIBILITY THAN WHEN THE "PROOFS" INCLUDED THE TASADAY.
Rather than making a "controversy" of the Tasaday per se -- there is no
controversy, they were just a hoax -- the real controversy should be
acknowledged as being the attitudes of "civilizaed" scientific researchers
against aboriginal peoples that would permit them ever to have swallowed
whole-hog a lot of unconvincing bullshit labeled Gentle Tasaday -- from
which peer-reviewed essays were generated on Tassay diet & importance of
the banana, on ethnographic economy, on herbal knowledge (as if they had
any such knowledge), & all kinds of other specialized topics focused
sometimes exclusively on the Tasady, far more commonly with the Tasaday
included among broader "observations" that were never observed.
But as for your "Bear in mind" idea, if it were true only journalists &
photographers had collected this information, we can all bear in mind that
nine-tenths of the few credible ethnographers have brilliant
individualists often trained by no one but themselves; some were painters
or sailors rather than scientists in any trained sense; while academics
with scholarly credentials usually just copy each other & rarely live
close to the source, relying more on the reports of oddballs, sailors, &
explorers who became obsessive enough to give up any semblance of normal
life such as professors aspire to. If you start deciding ethnographic
reporters & government-appointed ethnographers & society-funded
independent investigators & photographers & artists & sailors are all
across the board NOT the "real" ethnographers, you end up with nothing but
a couple professors who've never left a classroom & are least expert of
all. But yes, that's exactly the sort -- the least expert professor -- who
as commonly as anyone else promulgate falacious arguments about aboriginal
peoples' "Stone Age" connection.
National Geographic funds ethnographic investigations & are NOT just a
popular source, but a primary source, & the work of Ken MacLeish did for
them on the Tassady was regarded as "scientific." At the University of
Hawaii there's a crackpot Professor Lawrence in the Department of
Linguistics who is working on a the Prehistory of the Tasaday, & at the
same university the National Geographic documentary on the Tasaday is even
today part of the Anthropology of War class without acknowledging it as a
hoax but uses the Tasaday as evidence (along with films & books about
Semai & Mehinak) that man may not be inherently violent at the primitive
level. And while that looks absurd that they're still using the tapes
today, in the past it made perfect sense, as you over-state the division
between academic & public (or institutional & private) anthropological
work.
Really, in retrospect, some of the best evidence that the Tasaday were
fake was reported by MacLeish himself in the early 70s & should not have
come as a surprise to anyone. MacLeish for instance knew that these very
individuals had formerly been meat-traders so the assertion that they were
gatherers only couldn't be right; he noted they did not know how to make
stone tools but nevertheless believed them when they said they knew how
until a couple years before he got there; & several other things he
likewise reported correctly but refused to see the meaning. MacLeish did
not rush in take some photos & leave; he was there for many weeks among
the so-called Stone Age Tasaday & filming was done only toward the end of
that investigation. He's a good source, including for showing the Tasaday
weren't real. Even Nance noticed such things as the bamboo utensils the
faux Tasaday used were made of commercially grown bamboo not locally
obtained, & wondered about it without making a realistic conclusion.
Virtually everyone who looked into the Tasaday could not help but notice
the whole show was riddled with incredible holes, incongruities,
contradictions, & falsehoods -- yet each & every one of them, before Iten
that is, decided it HAD to be true because the lie fit so many
preconceived (& equally false) notions about primitive peoples the world
over. And many anthropologists DID show up on the island to investigate
the Tassiday & if waylaid by government officials who would not let them
into the forest, were nevertheless treated grandly & given tapes of the
Tasaday speaking their so-called dialect (thus making it easy to prove
what nobody bothered to prove, that it was NOT a unique dialect) &
articles & photographs & happy slaps on the back, occasionally even an
interview with some poor chap wearing orchid leaf loin covering just for
the occasion.
So too there was purportedly ongoing work by a group of accredited
scientists funded by the Philippine government -- regarded sufficiently
"scientific" at the time. The closing off of the pretend-tribe to rival
scientists is par for the course & is currenlty being done in areas of
Brazil today, under the excuse of harming tribal peoples' lifestyles by
constant outsider badgering, all the while little is done about their
lands being clear-cut, overhunted by nontribal people, or slashed & burned
by invasive farmers.
Once the hoax was revealed it took two years befor the National Geographic
to admit even in a quick paragraph that the Tasaday were "largely" a hoax.
NG has mostly tried to sweep it under the rug rather than learn from it &
rely more on aboriginal sources about aboriginal people, which they will
never do. Nudy pictures of little darkskinned people is a money-generating
business for scientists, adventurers, & magazine publishers alike -- &
only white people are supposed to profit by it.
I remember when the hoax was fresh & believed by everyone; I doubted it
instantly from MacLeish's own reports. But being a college kid & no expert
I had to bow to the insistance of my elders that the Tasady were real; but
I asked immediately, "They don't make tools, they don't tell legends, they
don't have marriage rites or death rituals -- all things enquired after &
receiving blank stairs -- my baby sister could make up a better story than
this one."
The brain rushes & there's more I could say but my "don't waste all your
time on UseNet" timer just dinged, so I have to go waste some time on
something else.
-paggers
Ashley Yakeley
...
> A dozen books I've read
> (undoubtedly a great many more than that) single-authored books or
> mutli-authored anthologies on anthropology & ethnagraphy had chapters on
> or citations of the Tasaday to "prove" certain points about modern
> primitives &/or Stone Age peoples &/or human propensity to agression
> disproven by the gentle Tasaday -- I'm sure you've read some of this
> material yourself if you think about it.
But no first-hand ethnography based on anything more than a few weeks
restricted contact, right?
> By the end of the 1980s these
> citations begin to disappear, but the same assertions continue only
> limiting the citations to the Tiwi, Kung, & Mbuti with, I content, NO
> MORE CREDIBILITY THAN WHEN THE "PROOFS" INCLUDED THE TASADAY.
...because those cultures were also faked?
You seem to be saying that one cannot trust the ethnography of any of
the hunter-gatherers because it's possible that any of them might be
hoaxes perpetuated by powerful politicians as per the Tasaday. Is there
evidence that the Mbuti that Turnbull writes about were a hoax? Is it
likely? Are there hoaxed first-hand ethnographic works about the Tasaday
comparable to those by Marshall, Turnbull etc.?
Take some assertion by Felicitas Goodman, for instance that the
alternate reality of hunter-gatherer cultures is inhabited by an
all-encompassing spiritual essence. If we don't trust her, we can
examine the ethnographic works she cites. But now apparently these
cannot be trusted either, because of the possibility that all or most of
the ethnographers were manipulated by quasi-governmental plots as were
those who first wrote about the Tasaday. The situation seems very
similar to the faking of evidence that scientists in many fields are
occasionally guilty of: it calls into question any theory that relies on
the faked evidence, but does not in general invalidate the entire field
just because one cannot rule out the possibility that any given
scientist lied. Generally, the theory gets revised so it's no longer
dependent on that 'evidence', or else it loses credibility.
Your earlier argument that anthropologists have an in-built romantic
bias of some kind I think had more going for it, Nazism excepted.
Certainly unlikely interpretations abound among authors who've never so
much as talked to any of the people they're writing about (note this
class includes _almost all_ archaeologists and historians). And it's
never possible to entirely discount one's own culture even in immediate
interaction with another. But I'd like to think serious bias is
detectable on reading or at least in cross-checking ethnographers
researching the same people...
But if first-hand ethnography in general cannot be trusted, what does
this mean for history, archaeology or the study of mythology? How can
one draw any conclusions at all about, say, the remains of an ancient
temple or some scattered artifacts when we cannot even talk to the
people who made them, let alone spend several years living with them?
What does this say about 'early ethnographers' such as Tacitus and
Herodotus? Or mythologists such as Ovid?
What would you think of Turnbull if he had merely listed beliefs and
legends of the Mbuti without any cultural context? Or if without any
contact at all he had merely found a molimo-trumpet somewhere and
interpreted it as a 'baton' symbolising the Great Goddess, as per
Gimbutas?
paghat
<ash...@immanence.org> wrote:
> In article <spammers-die-pagha...@soggy70.drizzle.com>,
> spammers-...@my-deja.com (paghat) wrote:
>
> ...
> > A dozen books I've read
> > (undoubtedly a great many more than that) single-authored books or
> > mutli-authored anthologies on anthropology & ethnagraphy had chapters on
> > or citations of the Tasaday to "prove" certain points about modern
> > primitives &/or Stone Age peoples &/or human propensity to agression
> > disproven by the gentle Tasaday -- I'm sure you've read some of this
> > material yourself if you think about it.
>
> But no first-hand ethnography based on anything more than a few weeks
> restricted contact, right?
>
> > By the end of the 1980s these
> > citations begin to disappear, but the same assertions continue only
> > limiting the citations to the Tiwi, Kung, & Mbuti with, I content, NO
> > MORE CREDIBILITY THAN WHEN THE "PROOFS" INCLUDED THE TASADAY.
>
> ...because those cultures were also faked?
Now you're just being silly. Intentionally because you're just joshing
around? Or really that dense? If I tell you Cherokees used to make
marshmallows out of dog vomit, & my proof is that the divine marshamallow
of the Yimyibbne people of a volcanically warmed tropical valley in
Antarctica still make marshmallows out of dog vomit, & everyone believes
it for a couple decades until it is suddenly realized the Yimyibbnes do
not exist, that does NOT mean Cherokee marshmallows really were made out
of dog vomit unless it can be shown that the Cherokee also do not exist &
never have existed. The Tassaday fiasco tested many scientists on AS MUCH
EVIDENCE as is usually available; articles appeared in peer-reviewed
journals some based on visits, others on reports, others on audio
recordings as it true of 99% of such science, & no one questioned the
authenticity until Oswald Iten started putting the obvious together
correctly. And the ease by which scientists of such subjective sciences
dupe themselves into continuing to believe whatever it was they started
out believing in the first place, only shows that subjective sciences like
anthropology & paleoanthropology are forever nine parts science fiction &
with any luck perhaps as much as one part fact. And the shared samenesses
of diverse aboriginal peoples widely distributed around the world was
something predicted by Victorian romanticists without evidence, & was
later "proven" by subjective evaluation of discovered peoples, evaluations
that remain to this day in essence Romanticism. If Romantic blinders were
kept always in place, a feeble hoax like the Tasaday could never have been
perpetuated. And when one reads what has been written of the Mbuti & Tiwi
one finds all the same flaws & impositions & thinly based evidence whether
first-person observation by an outsider, or later evaluations based on
these first-person reports. Unless one is a Boaz or a Curtin collecting
first-person reports from the peoples themselves, without intrusion of
interpretation, what is largely being reported are Western myths about
aboriginal peoples. The Tasaday prove that even with nothing in front of
them the least bit credible, the same evaluations will always be made
because western myth about aborigines is as immutable as christian belief
in Jesus. A thousand people will show up to see the virgin mary weeping in
the rust-stains on the side of an abandoned refrigerator in a field --
they'll all see the same miracle just like anthropologists always see the
same evidence of prehistory, or egalitarianism, or matriarchy, or
nonaggression in man, or whatever else they "believed" beforehand had to
be there in the faces of aboriginal peoples, & therefore they saw it. The
falsehood of this "visioning" becomes most extremely clear when what was
observed was a hoax, but it is just as false in the romantic portraits of
actual peoples especially when they've not been permitted (as Boaz &
Curtin permitted) to speak for themselves.
> You seem to be saying that one cannot trust the ethnography of any of
> the hunter-gatherers because it's possible that any of them might be
> hoaxes perpetuated by powerful politicians as per the Tasaday.
You can't believe that, as the way you've worded it is a complete lie.
Have you actually READ Oswald Iten? You seem to have found odd ways of
dismissing every journalist, photographer, & scientist & relied instead on
mere editorials by Dr. Headland who intentionally created a false illusion
of "controversy" either so his anthology would be more salable or so that
poor blighters like Molony wouldn't have their careers smashed due to
their profound gullibility which CANNOT be blamed on a dictoator or on one
Philipino Harvard graduate who played the game exactly as these scientists
wanted it played. It took a journalist like Iten to uncover the truth
because scientists were absolutely dead-set on remaining blindered. And
they remain blindered now, whether they aboriginal group they misrepresent
exists or not.
I have posted thrice now (& I think fairly clearly) that the Tasaday give
good evidence of how science works across the board in "judging"
aboriginal peoples. Aboriginal peoples complain about this repeatedly --
in publications like the Cree Nations Magazine, First Perspective,
Wotanging Ikche, or The Aboriginal Times, or the most overtly political
regional AIM newsletters, & newspapers like the Ojibwa News (the only 100%
independent aboriginal newspaper in North America) or the International
Native News. But being neither scientists nor popularizers they are not
usually regarded as expert on themselves until or unless they make it to
some university & absorb what white professors have decided is true of
them. Your argument against this seems to be that "real" scientists didn't
observe the Tasaday (but they did), or did not publish peer-reviewed
science on the Tassaday (which they did), or that anthropological studies
based on photographic, & that printed, & audio material is not the common
method of drawing conclusions (but it is), & that photographers &
journalists are not integral to serious anthropological research &
education in major universities (yet they are) -- struggling under a lot
of mythic notions of your own you're failing to see the obvious, just like
scientists failed to realize a single family group living ten minutes up a
footpath into the jungle had no chance whatsoever of being an authentic
stone age tribe.
Anthropologists developed theories about prehistoric peoples midway in the
Victorian era (by charming thinkers seemingly inspired by dime novels &
proto-marxism) then during the great age of Victorian exploration they
kept finding "lost races" that proved they were right -- complete
fabrications about peoples they met & reported on. The Tassaday hoax shows
that the process is still in force. Develop a theory about prehistory that
can't be proven one way or another, find a modern aboriginal group -- any
that hunt or gather will suffice, though why germanic homeless winos
making subsistance livings on downtown San Francisco streets don't count
is anyone's guess -- then view that group through rose-tinted glasses that
prove the pre-existing theory. The theory can be about prehistory & define
the aboriginal group as though they were missing links; or it can be
social, political, economic, cultural -- but always more about OUR way of
viewing than about what is actually there. At the most extreme end of this
process, the aborigines don't actually have to be real to be sufficient
evidence of the pre-existing theory. Or it can be a single example of a
Mbuti displayed in the Bronx Zoo with a "missing link" label on his cage
until he is driven to suicide (Oto Bengi existed; he WAS displayed as a
missing link animal that could speak; he did kill himself rather than live
on in captive desperation -- the real Ota Bengi, & the fake Tasaday, truly
inform what the science of observing aborigines is really about).
If the tribe or race, such as the King or Mbuti, actually does exist, &
even if they do not commit suicide over being misrepresented, the science
is nevertheless just that subjective, colored by preconception & western
belief systems, & largely incorrect. I certainly don't claim to be
guilt-free in my own speculations & I published an article circa 1978 that
cited the Tassaday & G/wi as evidence of a certain idea I held at the time
about the nonagression of humans. But over time I've learned to
distinguish what is outsiders playing with ideas (hopefully not invariably
demeaning & destructive ideas) & what is credibly gathered material in the
unfiltered voice of the people themselves. Turnbull does not provide that
good type of evidence for the Mbuti but writes in a purely Romantic tone.
It reads very much like a Victorian travelers report, which can be very
good, but every time a paragraph veers into speculation it can be relied
upon to be false. I saw this, therefore this, are rarely genuinely
inevitable.
-paggers
Mark Gerard Miller
[snip]
> I. Echo of the Wolf Companion
>
> Circe viewed men as swine, emblems of sacrifical Adonis.
[next sentence moved up]
> The wolf and bitch was thus associated with the
> Mother茆oddess early on ...
These two sentences remind me of a book I am writing. Well, all I have
written so far is the title: "Men Are Pigs, Women Are Bitches."*
*Copyright 2000, Mark G. Miller
[snip]
> So Echo clearly had a vaster importance that is now lost, though the
last
> remembrance of it was in the Demeter mysteries. I would posit that her
> original nature was that she echoed not just sacrificial Narcissus's
> self-love, but rather she was the sound of Demeter's or Cybele's
creation
> of the world, & her name originally meant not merely "Voice"
but "Voice of
> Maker." And the sound of that voice resembled that of a wolf, very
likely
> related to the Near Easter Great Mother Gula who was also called Bau,
the
> sound of a dog, & even archaic Bau had a diminished role in Demeter's
> mysteries as the clowning, dancing, erotic Baubau whose activity
called
> Demeter back from winter doldrums.
Echoes of the Logos in this part of paghat's essay. The dictionary says
nothing about the etymology of "Echo" as being "Voice of the Maker." It
says the IE root is *wag, "to cry out." The *wag conflates nicely with
the wagging tail of a dog, though.
But really, paghat, are you not pulling our legs with the
name "Baubau"? Come on. Also, this erotic, clowning, dancing character
sounds a lot like a male type persona to me, if you didn't make her
(him?) up. The Clown is the anti-King, not the anti-Queen. It's
awesome, though, if there was such a female entity.
Mark
--
\/ ___
/\ /\ / + \ |-+-/ .
_/ .\/ \_/ \o----|-|
\__/
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Ashley Yakeley
> > > By the end of the 1980s these
> > > citations begin to disappear, but the same assertions continue only
> > > limiting the citations to the Tiwi, Kung, & Mbuti with, I content, NO
> > > MORE CREDIBILITY THAN WHEN THE "PROOFS" INCLUDED THE TASADAY.
> >
> > ...because those cultures were also faked?
>
> Now you're just being silly. Intentionally because you're just joshing
> around? Or really that dense? If I tell you Cherokees used to make
> marshmallows out of dog vomit, & my proof is that the divine marshamallow
> of the Yimyibbne people of a volcanically warmed tropical valley in
> Antarctica still make marshmallows out of dog vomit, & everyone believes
> it for a couple decades until it is suddenly realized the Yimyibbnes do
> not exist, that does NOT mean Cherokee marshmallows really were made out
> of dog vomit unless it can be shown that the Cherokee also do not exist &
> never have existed.
But that's not what's happened, is it? To use your tendentious example
it's more like some ethnographer spent years with the Cherokee
describing just how they made marshmallows out of dog vomit having seen
it repeatedly, and then after the Yimyibbnes are exposed as a hoax with
no more than a few weeks of actual first-hand study, you claim that all
dog-vomit-marshmallows in any ethnography are inherently suspicious, and
that whoever spent time with the Cherokees must be guilty of Romantic
filtering and should not be trusted, because, hey, the Yimyibbnes were a
hoax.
> The Tassaday fiasco tested many scientists on AS MUCH
> EVIDENCE as is usually available;
Too bad for them, the fact is there was never anything that looked like
a long-term first-hand study. I'm not particularly interested in what a
'scientist' has to say unless they have evidence I can check myself. I'm
sure I would have been fooled too: nevertheless it merely reinforces
what should already have been suspected, that one can't learn very much
about an entire culture in a few weeks.
...
> And the shared samenesses
> of diverse aboriginal peoples widely distributed around the world was
> something predicted by Victorian romanticists without evidence, & was
> later "proven" by subjective evaluation of discovered peoples,
> evaluations that remain to this day in essence Romanticism.
But there isn't a lot of shared sameness as evinced by modern
ethnography, instead it suggests that human culture is almost
unimaginably diverse: anthropologists have however claimed various
patterns across cultures widely separated. Clearly such patterns would
amount to shared samenesses of diverse aboriginal peoples widely
distributed around the world: are you suggesting that all such claims
are to be declared Romanticism simply because the Victorians predicted
them?
> If Romantic blinders were
> kept always in place, a feeble hoax like the Tasaday could never have
> been perpetuated.
I don't see how Romanticism has much to do with it. My first suspects
would be scientific laziness, a "publish-or-perish" culture in academia,
and low standards for scientific journals.
...
> Unless one is a Boaz or a Curtin collecting
> first-person reports from the peoples themselves, without intrusion of
> interpretation, what is largely being reported are Western myths about
> aboriginal peoples.
This is mistaken. While reports by the people themselves are the most
valuable, if one wants to find out how a people live there's no
substitute for actually seeing it yourself. But even in first-person
reports from the peoples themselves there's always intrusion of
interpretation: the anthropologist chooses what is worth recording and
what is not, and which informant to listen to, the people may find
themselves making stuff up off the top of their head to satisfy the
insistence of the funny white man, or they might misrepresent what
actually happened to make themselves or their people look better, or
they may complain that their stories are being stolen and deliberately
mistell them, or else feel uncomfortable that these stories are
considered important or meaningful outside some particular context, or...
By the way, even then this doesn't rule out the possibility that culture
in question is a hoax of some kind.
...
> A thousand people will show up to see the virgin mary weeping in
> the rust-stains on the side of an abandoned refrigerator in a field --
> they'll all see the same miracle just like anthropologists always see the
> same evidence of prehistory, or egalitarianism, or matriarchy, or
> nonaggression in man,
...or Great Mother worship...
> or whatever else they "believed" beforehand had to
> be there in the faces of aboriginal peoples, & therefore they saw it.
There's really not a lot one can do to disprove this, it's what
science-philosophers call 'unfalsifiable'. If an ethnologist says she
observed that the Bushmen bands don't have chiefs as such but instead
have headmen whose role is barely distinguished, it _might_ be
prejudiced vision of egalitarianism, or it might be genuine. Since the
only way of finding out is to live with the Bushmen, or at least ask
them, and since you are discounting participatory ethnography
altogether, apparently there's no such evidence that could convince you.
Perhaps you'd be convinced by a native-language recording of a Bushman
discussing it in describing his culture, though without several
different views I for one would want to also see how it actually worked
out.
...
> > You seem to be saying that one cannot trust the ethnography of any of
> > the hunter-gatherers because it's possible that any of them might be
> > hoaxes perpetuated by powerful politicians as per the Tasaday.
>
> You can't believe that, as the way you've worded it is a complete lie.
It actually makes little difference, I accept that the people who
studied the Tasaday were fooled. Let me rephrase it:
You seem to be saying that one cannot trust the ethnography of any of
the hunter-gatherers because it's possible that any of the cultures
might be completely faked.
...
> I have posted thrice now (& I think fairly clearly) that the Tasaday give
> good evidence of how science works across the board in "judging"
> aboriginal peoples.
No, you have given good evidence that scientists, particularly those who
rely on the reports of others, can be fooled. You have, in fact, given
the same example three times; modern anthropology is not a monolithic
entity, any given ethnographic report must be judged on its merits. This
is doubly ridiculous given the amount of internal dissent and competing
theories in anthropology.
You're quite welcome to post it a few more times, and I don't doubt you
will, but it's probably not going to show anything more.
...
> Your argument against this seems to be that "real" scientists didn't
> observe the Tasaday (but they did),
Well I was mistaken, a better argument would be that no-one, 'scientist'
or not, spent more than a few weeks with them. If other people wish to
use that as evidence for their theories, that's their risk to take. This
isn't unreasonable, actually, one simply has to accept the possibility
that that evidence may turn out to have been faked, a possibility that
happens to be greater the less evidence one has.
A theory that cites the Tasaday is not necessarily shown to be dubious
if there's also good evidence for it without them. That anthropology can
never be absolutely certain of anything is unfortunate, but inevitable;
that science is full of published papers based on thin evidence is a
real problem, but it doesn't automatically invalidate those prepared
more carefully.
I think every science has had its share of hoaxes, faked data and just
plain stupidity, as well as intelligent, reasonable theories that turn
out to be wrong. You're putting far too much weight on (apparently one
account of) one incident. Actually, I'm surprised you're not applying
the same standard to archaeology, where you can still find scholars
believing in, say, peaceful neolithic matriarchies apparently guided by
only their own Romantic prejudices and despite plenty of evidence to the
contrary.
...
> Develop a theory about prehistory that
> can't be proven one way or another, find a modern aboriginal group -- any
> that hunt or gather will suffice, though why germanic homeless winos
> making subsistance livings on downtown San Francisco streets don't count
> is anyone's guess -- then view that group through rose-tinted glasses
> that prove the pre-existing theory.
There are plenty of people doing this, of course, but few of them make
an effort to actually spend any serious time with a culture or even make
a half-decent reading of those who have.
> If the tribe or race, such as the King or Mbuti, actually does exist, &
> even if they do not commit suicide over being misrepresented, the science
> is nevertheless just that subjective, colored by preconception & western
> belief systems, & largely incorrect.
I'm not sure that the notion of 'correct' ethnography is particularly
meaningful, and certainly no anthropologist believes in objectivity
anymore (or if they do, they're fools). I'm sorry if that causes you
despair for the entire field. What one should expect of ethnography, and
social science in general, is that it be as far as possible free from
bias. You might think that, say, the recording of legends in their
original languages is categorically superior to participant observation
in this matter, but against that is the loss of cultural context
relating to the telling of myths. A (somewhat) exaggerated analogue
would be coming to the conclusion that Christians in America worship
Santa Claus based on some fieldwork that consisted entirely of
collecting mythology.
...
> But over time I've learned to
> distinguish what is outsiders playing with ideas (hopefully not
> invariably demeaning & destructive ideas) & what is credibly
> gathered material in the unfiltered voice of the people themselves.
Between those should be placed credible reports of the behaviour and
beliefs of a people from those who spent years living with them and
participating in their culture as much as possible.
> Turnbull does not provide that
> good type of evidence for the Mbuti but writes in a purely Romantic tone.
> It reads very much like a Victorian travelers report, which can be very
> good, but every time a paragraph veers into speculation it can be relied
> upon to be false.
There isn't all that much speculation in Turnbull's book; where there
is, he tends to frame it as ideas that occured to him, not 'obvious'
conclusions. Nor does it seem Romantic or Victorian to me. What it reads
like is a straightforward account of the time he spent with a group of
people with a culture quite different from his own, including many of
the things about themselves that they told him. Perhaps you'd prefer a
well-ordered general overview of some aspect of a culture with little
reference to personal experience as per Margaret Mead, certainly that
gives a stronger illusion of objectivity.
You seem to be falling into the trap of "they seem too happy, they must
have been misrepresented", or perhaps his account doesn't fit in with
your own ideas of what a hunter-gatherer culture should look like. But
before I can adduce other ethnographies of other cultures, that might
also suggest a pattern in some cultural feature, you would declare the
whole class of participant observational ethnographies somehow
"Romantically" biased or otherwise suspicious rather than accept the
possibility that they might have something credible to say.
Ashley Yakeley
> I have posted thrice now (& I think fairly clearly) that the Tasaday give
> good evidence of how science works across the board in "judging"
> aboriginal peoples. Aboriginal peoples complain about this repeatedly --
> in publications like the Cree Nations Magazine, First Perspective,
> Wotanging Ikche, or The Aboriginal Times, or the most overtly political
> regional AIM newsletters, & newspapers like the Ojibwa News (the only 100%
> independent aboriginal newspaper in North America) or the International
> Native News. But being neither scientists nor popularizers they are not
> usually regarded as expert on themselves until or unless they make it to
> some university & absorb what white professors have decided is true of
> them.
This needs to be placed in the context of the essential silencing of
American Indians in American culture. When anthropologists represent
them to the rest of America, it doesn't matter how good a job they do,
how accurate they are, it's still an outrage if only because the
ethnography appears as a substitution for the missing American Indian
voice, where it should be an entirely secondary adjunct. Those
ethnographies might still be valuable, but the complaints are still
valid: broader American culture has no right to consider the
ethnographies the 'primary' representation of a people who should
rightfully have their own participation.
It wouldn't surprise me if many American Indians would prefer no
ethnography about the own cultures, no matter how good, if only so their
own voices are more likely to be heard and they might actually be
allowed to represent themselves in the American culture they are
theoretically supposed to be a part of. In a sense it's not the fault of
the ethnographer that their own ethnographies are palatable to the
broader culture while the people themselves are not, but it may mean
that even the best ethnography is politically inappropriate. Even then,
good ethnographies can tell us things.
This is a bit different from faraway cultures such as the Bushmen or
Mbuti, their ethnographies are not necessarily of any higher quality,
nor can they have a voice in the broader culture of the audiences of
anthropology short of emigrating (carefully selected collections of
testimony obtained by white anthropologists notwithstanding), but nor
are they likely to feel aggrieved by not having their own cultural voice
in a land they don't live in.
It's also different from some of the excellent ethnographies done on
subcultures that are part of the researcher's own broader culture: these
are not necessarily any less 'filtered' than any other ethnography, but
the people of these subcultures mostly do not feel they are the victims
of hundreds of years of systematic cultural exclusion, so there's no
cause for outrage. For instance, I was reasonably impressed by Tanya
Luhrmann's study of the English pagan scene, back when I was living in
Cambridge. While it has its flaws, I think she represented the
subculture well, giving some of us a voice (if only vicariously) rather
than denying it, and providing occasional insights that might only ever
occur to someone coming from the outside. It's true that she never
really "got it", but it's arguably too much to expect anthropologists to
really go native, even when that's actually possible.
sheela...@webtv.net
"Baubau"? Come on. Also, this erotic, clowning, dancing character sounds
a lot like a male type persona to me, if you didn't make her (him?) up.
The Clown is the anti-King, not the anti-Queen. It's awesome, though, if
there was such a female entity"
To Mark,
You can read about Baubo in Winifred Milius Lubell"s "Metamorphosis of
Baubo". She is very real, and very, very female. She has a Japanese
counterpart in the Goddess Uzume, who lures the Sun Goddess Amaterasu
Omi Kami out of a cave with Her erotic dancing.
Sincerely,
Diane
Mark Gerard Miller
Thanks, Sheelaghnagig. Um, this is kind of delicate, but you might want
to pull your dress down a bit.
Mark Gerard Miller
sheela...@webtv.net wrote:
> "But really, paghat, are you not pulling our legs with the name
> "Baubau"? Come on. Also, this erotic, clowning, dancing character
sounds
> a lot like a male type persona to me, if you didn't make her (him?)
up.
> The Clown is the anti-King, not the anti-Queen. It's awesome, though,
if
> there was such a female entity"
>
> To Mark,
>
> You can read about Baubo in Winifred Milius Lubell"s "Metamorphosis of
> Baubo". She is very real, and very, very female. She has a Japanese
> counterpart in the Goddess Uzume, who lures the Sun Goddess Amaterasu
> Omi Kami out of a cave with Her erotic dancing.
>
> Sincerely,
> Diane
Hi Diane. Would you mind typing in a few sentences about the nature of
Bobo's clowneries and japeries? I am very interested in humor among the
deities. Thanks! From what I've read about Uzume, it was the simple
exposure of her breasts and pudenda that set the 800 deities to
laughing, arousing the curiosity of Amaterasu.
sheela...@webtv.net
Bobo's clowneries and japeries?"
from "The New Book of Goddesses and Heroines" copyright 1997 by Patricia
Monaghan:
Baubo: Her name means "belly" and Baubo was the Greek goddess of belly
laughter, the kind that indecent gestures and suggestive jokes provoke.
Baubo was sculpted as a headless and limbless body, with genitalia
forming a bearded mouth and her breasts staring like eyes. She was the
sister or double of Iambe, the goddess of indecent speech, and a similar
story is told of both: the weeping Demeter, searching the earth for her
lost Persephone, reached the costal town of Eleusis and there, convulsed
with sorrow, sat down by a deep well. Baubo came to draw water and,
touched by the goddess' sorrow, tried to console her. But Demeter
refused her sympathy. So Baubo lifted her skirts and exposed her vulva.
Demeter's sorrow was broken by a smile; the sterile earth stirred; soon
Persephone returned...That such a minor character should have had such
power over the great goddess seems unlikely to some who contend that
Baubo is really a form of Hecate...
"I am very interested in humor among the deities."
as you may have guessed, i am very interested in "self display".
sincerely,
diane
Ashley Yakeley
<mg...@msn.com> wrote:
> From what I've read about Uzume, it was the simple
> exposure of her breasts and pudenda that set the 800 deities to
> laughing, arousing the curiosity of Amaterasu.
Right (except that there are '800 myriad' kami, I think a 'myriad' is
supposed to be 10,000 or 100,000). The tale is recounted in the
_Kojiki_, book 1, chap. 17.
Ama-terasu-opo-mi-kamï is sulking in a cave after her brother
Paya-susa-nö-wo-nö-mikötö desecrated her hall and rice-paddies and
finally dropped a pony that had been skinned alive into the sacred
weaving-hall from a hole in the roof, terrifying a weaving-maiden into
accidently striking the shuttle against her genitals and dying (or
possibly it was Amaterasu herself who was injured this way). All the 800
myriad kami are assembled outside...
Amë-nö-uzume-nö-mikötö dresses up, stamps on an upturned bucket, became
divinly possessed, and exposes her breasts and genitals. All the kami
laugh, and Amaterasu wonders what's going on, given that the land is
supposed to be dark without her. Uzume says: "we rejoice and dance
because there is here a deity superior to you". Two other deities bring
out the mirror (made earlier in the story), and, curious, Amaterasu
comes out of the cave towards the mirror. Immediately one of the deities
extends a sacred rope behind her, saying "you may go back no further
than this". Apparently this renders her unable to return to the cave.
Then the land becomes light, and finally all the kami get together and
decide to expel Susanowo.
So it's not clear that Amaterasu even sees Uzume dance, if anything she
seems far more interested in herself and her reflection, or the idea
that the rest of the kami might be having fun without her: nevertheless
Matsumura [a Japanese scholar presumably] compares the dance to Baubo
before Demeter and also Iambe before Demeter in the Homeric hymns.
The divine possession is also very interesting, Japanese religion has
shamanic roots and even today retains an essentially animistic
character. Another scholar, Torii, apparently claims the whole
concealment myth is essentially shamanistic.
Check out Donald Philippi's translation of the _Kojiki_, he includes
plenty of fascinating notes on alternate versions, various theories on
meaning and origins, and general explanation. I'd strongly recommend it
to anyone interested, as far as I know (not knowing any Japanese) it's a
good translation.
Mark Gerard Miller
What other self-displayers are there in mythology?
This sub-thread reminds me of a R. Crumb-type cartoon from around 1970
that I saw in a head shop when I was a boy. A guy walks into a bar,
pulls out an emormous penis, flops it onto the bar and begins to brag
about it to this other guy. He says something to the effect, "Look at
what a big [member] I have!" The other guy takes out a big cleaver and
chops it off about halfway down. It was the most horrifying thing I had
seen to that time, perhaps even unto the present day.
Just now I showed the above paragraph to a friend and said, "Should I
post it?" She said, "Go ahead!" I said, "What do you care! What about
the other people?" She said, "Oh, I'm sure the other weirdos would
enjoy it, too." I said, "No, they're normal." She said, "Of course
they're not normal. You can't be normal and post shit on the Internet
all day long."
Mark Gerard Miller
Ashley Yakeley <ash...@immanence.org> wrote:
[snip]
Thanks!
Mark
karmathri...@my-deja.com
sheela...@webtv.net wrote:
> "But really, paghat, are you not pulling our legs with the name
> "Baubau"? Come on. Also, this erotic, clowning, dancing character
sounds
> a lot like a male type persona to me, if you didn't make her (him?)
up.
> The Clown is the anti-King, not the anti-Queen. It's awesome, though,
if
> there was such a female entity"
>
Paggy's fond of making her own "facts" up, aren't you Paggy ? Just take
her with a pinch of salt - most of what she claims to know is utter
fallacy, or delusions. It's the pills you see - a sad but unavoidable
side-effect of certain prescribed drugs.
Mark Gerard Miller
Well, it turns out paghat was right on the money with Baubau and I was
wrong. But if she were on prescription medications for a mental
condition, of which I have no knowledge, would that be cause for
compassion or ridicule?
Mark
--
\/ ___
/\ /\ / + \ |-+-/ .
_/ .\/ \_/ \o----|-|
\__/
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
sheela...@webtv.net
oh i didn't mean just in mythology but in general. off the top of my
head i can think of Coyote who was always showing off his schlong and
Inanna. also there are Isis statues where she is lifting her skirt.
obviously i am taken with the Sheilagh na Gig--who isn't found in
mythology. and i have two squirrel monkeys who show their erect penises
when they are pissed off. the book i mentioned "the metamorphosis of
Baubo" has a bunch of these kinds of things from myths and folklore.
--diane
Ashley Yakeley
sheela...@webtv.net wrote:
> obviously i am taken with the Sheilagh na Gig--who isn't found in
> mythology.
Ron Hutton (_The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles_,
pp308-314) reckons they're Christian decorations intended to show the
consequences of sexual sin, on the grounds that they're generally pretty
ugly by medieval (and modern) standards, and that they're almost all
carved on churches. Apparently they spread out from Aquitaine around
1050 and reached England sometime in the next century.
[above paragraph copied from a post I made two years ago]
Mind you, Frigga can be found carved on churches in Germany, and also
Odin's two ravens, so pagan iconography is not impossible on a Christian
church.
Several years ago I had a look at the image on the 14th century church
of St. Mary and St. Andrew in Whittlesford, Cambridgeshire. It was too
late in the day to photograph it, or else I didn't have a long-enough
lens, but the leaflets I picked up show a drawing of it: a naked woman
possibly pointing to or holding open her vulva, and a human-headed male
animal approaching her. It was carved on a lintel-stone over a window on
the south side of the tower, and was rather worn (like, 600 years).
I did notice that the same church had a bricked-up north door,
apparently fairly common for churches of that period, for which I
haven't heard a good reason for apart from the idea that they were
bricked up to stop the congration from hailing Woden in the form of the
North Wind.
Francis Cameron
Yakeley <ash...@yakeley.org> writes
>I did notice that the same church had a bricked-up north door,
>apparently fairly common for churches of that period, for which I
>haven't heard a good reason for apart from the idea that they were
>bricked up to stop the congration from hailing Woden in the form of the
>North Wind.
The North Door was considered the Devil's Door - but I like your
explanation too ..
--
francis freespirit
Oxford, England
D.D.
"Francis Cameron" <fra...@topdeck.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:UrAylGAf...@topdeck.demon.co.uk...
Door, why put in a North Door to begin with?
D.
Chris Cottrell
D.D. <mars...@charter.net> wrote in message
news:sv3ss4f...@corp.supernews.com...
Pardon any ignorance on my part, but weren't directional doors (north,
south, east, and west) in position in religious edifices that pre-dated the
arrival and/or establishment of christianity? And wasn't the north door in
particular associated with the crone/goddess in the north/earth-element
direction? So after the christian leaders had enough foothold on the 'loan'
and 'sharing of the original regional religion's edifice, the christian
leadership banned use of and ordered the bricking up of the north door to
discourage its use for magickal (ergo devilish) use? Or have my sources
been 'fanciful' without warning me (as this is the explanation the americans
have been fed)?
'Thenie
claudia
Ashley Yakeley <ash...@yakeley.org> wrote in message
news:ashley-CE177B....@news.halcyon.com...
> In article <10452-39...@storefull-146.iap.bryant.webtv.net>,
> sheela...@webtv.net wrote:
>
> > obviously i am taken with the Sheilagh na Gig--who isn't found in
> > mythology.
>
> Ron Hutton (_The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles_,
> pp308-314) reckons they're Christian decorations intended to show the
> consequences of sexual sin, on the grounds that they're generally pretty
> ugly by medieval (and modern) standards, and that they're almost all
> carved on churches. Apparently they spread out from Aquitaine around
> 1050 and reached England sometime in the next century.
>
Hmmmm..Aquitaine..
Maybe they were supposed to be Eleanor. She was a pretty Hot Babe.
Francis Cameron
<mars...@charter.net> writes
>
>"Francis Cameron" <fra...@topdeck.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
>news:UrAylGAf...@topdeck.demon.co.uk...
>> In article <ashley-CE177B....@news.halcyon.com>, Ashley
>> Yakeley <ash...@yakeley.org> writes
>> >I did notice that the same church had a bricked-up north door,
>> >apparently fairly common for churches of that period, for which I
>> >haven't heard a good reason for apart from the idea that they were
>> >bricked up to stop the congration from hailing Woden in the form of the
>> >North Wind.
>>
>> The North Door was considered the Devil's Door - but I like your
>> explanation too ..
>> --
>> francis freespirit
>> Oxford, England
>>
>Don't mean to be flippant - if the North Door was considered the Devil's
>Door, why put in a North Door to begin with?
Good question. I take it that to begin with it was OK to have a North
Door and then later the fashion changed and they bricked it up.
>
>D.
Francis Cameron
Cottrell <MTN-...@prodigy.net> writes
>Pardon any ignorance on my part, but weren't directional doors (north,
>south, east, and west) in position in religious edifices that pre-dated the
>arrival and/or establishment of christianity? And wasn't the north door in
>particular associated with the crone/goddess in the north/earth-element
>direction? So after the christian leaders had enough foothold on the 'loan'
>and 'sharing of the original regional religion's edifice, the christian
>leadership banned use of and ordered the bricking up of the north door to
>discourage its use for magickal (ergo devilish) use? Or have my sources
>been 'fanciful' without warning me (as this is the explanation the americans
>have been fed)?
I don't want to pass judgement, but you just may be right in thinking
your sources are 'fanciful'. All the Christian churches I have seen have
their altars in the east because the earliest buildings were adapted
from those used for sun worship. The priest celebrating the Mass first
thing in the morning, faced the rising sun. So no door there.
Incidentally I often find a substantial power point of earth energy at
the place in a church where the east-west axis is crossed by the north-
south doors (even when the north door is blocked).
Ashley Yakeley
"claudia" <SP...@rulez.com> wrote:
> > carved on churches. Apparently they spread out from Aquitaine around
> > 1050 and reached England sometime in the next century.
> >
>
> Hmmmm..Aquitaine..
> Maybe they were supposed to be Eleanor. She was a pretty Hot Babe.
I think she was several hundred years after 1050.
--
Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA
Francis Cameron
<su...@lspace.org> writes
>All this talk about church doors made me look at the one we got married
>in umpty-ump years ago... the main entrance to that church *is* the
>North door. Is this unusual then?
No. It's quite usual to find churches with a 'big' West Door for special
purposes plus smaller doors on the North and/or South. Some don't have
the big West door because the church tower is at that end of the
building. Some, but by no means all, churches had their North doors
blocked up at some stage in the past. I'm not able to say when. There
are Norman churches, for example, where the North door is in regular
use, but 'younger' churches where it has been blocked.
Chris Mitchell
>All this talk about church doors made me look at the one we got married
>in umpty-ump years ago... the main entrance to that church *is* the
>North door. Is this unusual then?
>
Well there you go then, Suzi - just goes to show how the evil North
door turns god-fearing Christians into pagan heretics!
;-)
--
Chris Mitchell,
Bristol, England.
http://www.zaalberg.freeserve.co.uk
claudia
Ashley Yakeley <ash...@immanence.org> wrote in message
news:ashley-4CFFB0....@news.halcyon.com...
> In article <nVuI5.12791$rD3.6...@newsread2.prod.itd.earthlink.net>,
> "claudia" <SP...@rulez.com> wrote:
>
> > > 1050 and reached England sometime in the next century.
> > >
> >
> > Hmmmm..Aquitaine..
> > Maybe they were supposed to be Eleanor. She was a pretty Hot Babe.
>
>
1122-1204.
You really took that seriously, huh?
Thorn
>
> No. It's quite usual to find churches with a 'big' West Door for
special
> purposes plus smaller doors on the North and/or South. Some don't have
> the big West door because the church tower is at that end of the
> building. Some, but by no means all, churches had their North doors
> blocked up at some stage in the past. I'm not able to say when. There
> are Norman churches, for example, where the North door is in regular
> use, but 'younger' churches where it has been blocked.
Would this possibly be connected with the notoriuos 'window tax' 18thC I
think that charged taxes on the number of windows, it may have been the
number of doors that drew a tax so if a building had more than two the
extra got blocked. I'm guessing though I don't know.
Ashley Yakeley
"claudia" <SP...@rulez.com> wrote:
>
> Ashley Yakeley <ash...@immanence.org> wrote in message
> news:ashley-4CFFB0....@news.halcyon.com...
> > In article <nVuI5.12791$rD3.6...@newsread2.prod.itd.earthlink.net>,
> > "claudia" <SP...@rulez.com> wrote:
> >
> > > > carved on churches. Apparently they spread out from Aquitaine around
> > > > 1050 and reached England sometime in the next century.
> > > >
> > >
> > > Hmmmm..Aquitaine..
> > > Maybe they were supposed to be Eleanor. She was a pretty Hot Babe.
> >
> > I think she was several hundred years after 1050.
> >
>
> 1122-1204.
> You really took that seriously, huh?
Why not? It can't be taken humourously.
Francis Cameron
<silvert...@ntlworld.com> writes
think it extremely unlikely ..
Thorn
> >
> >Would this possibly be connected with the notoriuos 'window tax'
18thC I
> >think that charged taxes on the number of windows, it may have been
the
> >number of doors that drew a tax so if a building had more than two
the
> >extra got blocked. I'm guessing though I don't know.
> >
> Full marks for a very ingenious suggestion! But, and I hate to say it,
I
> think it extremely unlikely ..
See I knew I should've had more sense than let Gwydion sell me his
unused theories <grin>
--
Bethan (BMW)
Anyone can count the seeds in an apple, no one can count the apples in
a seed -anon
Chris Cottrell
Francis Cameron <fra...@topdeck.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:$R+YLhAn...@topdeck.demon.co.uk...
Found at http://www.3dglobe.com/fs/gate.htm :
The stones at Stonehenge are arranged such that on Midsummer's Day a man
standing at the centre of the monument and looking at the opening between
two to of the outer circle of standing stones can see the rising sun pass
directly over the upright Heelstone, outside the monument.
The Stonehenge has it's main entrance facing the North-East direction.
Midsummer's Day was an important occasion for the people who built and used
the Stonehenge. As late as the 1st century AD, when the Romans came to
Britain, the Celts, under their priests, the Druids, were still using
Stonehenge as a temple for sun-worship, and it was once believed that the
builders of the monument nearly 2,000 years earlier had the same purpose in
mind.
Churches in the medieval period often carry out baptisms in the north wing
of the church with the north door open. This is to drive away evil spirits
to the North.
Another theory is that there is a hole in the North or called "Northern
Lights". This allows `dangerous' levels of cosmic rays to fall to the earth
and thus any prolong exposure to the cosmic rays may lead to skin diseases
like cancer.
-'Thenie
Chris Cottrell
From http://www.witchvox.com/holidays/samhain/1031_lore_door.html :
Many old shamanic Pagan traditions held the North-or the North Star-to be
the hub from which their energies came. Because of this association of the
North with Pagan practices, many old Christian churches eventually walled up
openings on this side of the building to prevent the "devil' from entering.
An old folk story about this practice is related by Doreen Valiente in "An
ABC Of Witchcraft."
"In the old days, when attendance in the Church was more or less compulsory,
people who secretly adhered to the Old Religion, in other words those who
were Witches, made a point of coming into the church by the north door, and
taking their seats close to it."
Archaeologists can effectively date a pre-Christian burial in the British
Isles because of the north-south alignment of the remains. Christians were
buried in an east-west position.
-'Thenie
Francis Cameron
Cottrell <MTN-...@prodigy.net> writes
>As late as the 1st century AD, when the Romans came to
>Britain, the Celts, under their priests, the Druids, were still using
>Stonehenge as a temple for sun-worship, and it was once believed that the
>builders of the monument nearly 2,000 years earlier had the same purpose in
>mind.
The bigger the myth, the longer it takes to die. Yesterday afternoon I
had the great good fortune to hear Aubrey Burl talk on the subject of
Stonehenge. By the time the Romans came to Britain, Stonehenge had been
abandoned for a thousand years.
sheela...@webtv.net
the following Goddesses listed under "Bawdy Women and Lewd Jokers":
Baubo, Hit, Iambe, Sheila na Gig, Siduri, Tlazolteol, Uzume.
Here is Hit's story
"In the Caroline Islands of Micronesia, this name was given to an
octopus goddess. Hit's daughter was sleeping with one of the gods, who
already had a wife in heaven. The sky woman followed her husband,
trying to drag him away from his mistress, but Hit began dancing lewdly.
So erotic was her performance that the sky woman fainted from
excitement and had to be carried back to heaven. Each time she tried to
stop her husband's intercourse with the octopus' daughter, Hit began
dancing again, thus allowing for the conception of the hero
Olifat."----copyright 1997 by Patricia Monaghan
Mark Gerard Miller
> as you may have guessed, i am very interested in "self display".
>
> sincerely,
> diane
Hi Diane. You might be interested in reading the book "Shame, Exposure
and Privacy," by minister and clinical psychologist Dr. Carl D.
Schneider. I keep a copy in my bathroom. Here is an excerpt:
"The sexual associations of the shame words in several languages
underline the relationship between being uncovered, or exposed, and
shame. Thus, 'the shameful parts' is an expression, albeit obsolete,
for the sex organs. 'Shame' itself also meant at one time 'the privy
members, or " 'parts of shame,' " that is, the genitals. 'Impudent'
means shameless, while 'pudic' and 'pudenda' refer to the genital
organs. Similarly, we have 'aidos/aidoia, pudor/pudenda, honti/parties-
honteuses, Scham/Schamteile': in each of these pairs, the first word
means shame, the second word -- related to the first -- refers to the
sexual organs.
"Behind the biblical expression 'the shame of their nakedness' lies the
assumption that the exposure of that which should be covered is
shameful."
This brings to mind Sts. Pudens and Pudenziana. From Barbara Walkers'
Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets:
"Naive Christian canonization of the symbolic genitalia of Rome's God
and Goddess ('pudenda'). According to the Christian legend, Pudenziana
was the usual virgin convert, a daughter of Pudens, a wealthy
patrician. Peter and Paul lodged in the house of Pudenziana on their
(mythical) visit to Rome. With the help of a holy man named Pastorus
(Shepherd), St. Pudenziana soaked up the blood of Christian martyrs in
sponges, which she hid in a well. This tale was often cited to account
for the numerous bottles of martyrs' blood used as healing relics in
countless churches.
"The well with its holy blood is the yonic 'pit' ('puteus') in the
Forum, where the spirits of blessed ancestors dwelt. The Shepherd
Pastorus was a form of the Psychopomp or Conductor of Souls, sometimes
called the Shepherd of Stars."