The Function Of Belief

[Tao_Equus]

Originally Posted by flowperson

Tao...Speaking of Pagans, I didn't click and register on your youtube link because another naughty boy label would have probably been connected with my name in cyberspace. And G-d knows I've got them plastered all over my bod already. Besides that Muslimwoman's back in the desert and would likely put me on her naughty spot should she find out about it. *shudder*

flow....

Lol....its all innocent, you do not get x-rated on youtube....didnt u know? You know fine well that I am incapable of corrupting the minds of anyone here, let alone you!! So no more excuses


Ta0

[juantoo3]

Hey guys!

I turn my head for a minute and look what I missed out on!

The conversation took a fabulous turn!

Originally Posted by China Cat Sunflower

Beauty is the universe's way of getting us to stick our beaks into its blossoms. It's the process that we really dig. Baking a perfect pie is far more gratifying than admiring or consuming it. We love, love, love the beauty of natural processes. We seek endlessly to understand and approximate what nature does. All of our arts and letters ultimately stem from that. And it's super-dee-duperty (to quote a famous purple dinosaur) cool that the naturo-sphere seems to have a built in apprenticeship program with innumerable possible entrances. Think of all the different avenues of exploration we humans are engaged in. All the ways we're studying ourselves and everything else that goes to make up our world of plants, animals , rocks , and other stuff. Every pursuit a doorway to the Momma Nature's dressing room. And all the arts and sciences, all the trades and crafts, all the philosophy and religion is connected in ways usual and unusual. It doesn't matter where one decides to matriculate because we never run out of new possibilities to explore! You can't see it all in one or several lifetimes.

Chris, you've hit on some truly interesting points, and that's not to take anything away from Flow or Tao or anybody else. I'm really glad I got involved in this discussion.

[Tao_Equus]

Originally Posted by juantoo3

Hey guys!

I turn my head for a minute and look what I missed out on!

The conversation took a fabulous turn!

Chris, you've hit on some truly interesting points, and that's not to take anything away from Flow or Tao or anybody else. I'm really glad I got involved in this discussion.

2 tru juantoo!! Chris is getting rather consistent at making wayyyy too much sense!! If he aint careful I might start calling him my Guru !!

Tao

[China Cat Sunflower]

Yes, yes, all hail me, etc... And by all means ignore that man behind the curtain!

Chris

[flowperson]

Chris...I too humbly bow to your verbose and loquacious expertise. But the old guy behind the curtain, W. Huston Smith, to my knowledge was the first in modern times to think and write about a "nature as origins of religion" perspective in his seminal book, The Religions Of Man, which was later retitled, The World's Religions.

But then he also may have sold snake oil on the side as did the character in OZ who ended up behind the curtain pulling levers.

flow....

[China Cat Sunflower]

Thanks you guys! That's really nice. I appreciate it a lot!

Chris

[juantoo3]

OK, new wrinkle, now that I have had some time to mull it over in my mind.

So, we tend to believe because "we seek endlessly to understand and approximate what nature does" and call it "beauty?" If so, then does that mean that our pre-historic ancestors...and by extension through collective unconscious, ourselves...believe killing and death beautiful? The thrust of the spear, the slice of the throat, the watching in anticipation as the blood puddles, the draining of the life from the eyes...beautiful? Red of tooth and claw, beautiful? Those skulls of real cave bears that surround and sit atop those cave altars create quite a humbling sense of decorum.



The paintings on the cave walls are predominantly of prey animals and hunts, not butterflies and waterfalls.



There may be some element of truth to my sarcasm...if we look to our collective fascination with war, blood sport and competition. Anybody with even an idle interest knows that ice hockey, American football and World Cup football are anything but sedate, even for the fans. Or what of our idolization of "gangsters" and others who use violence and murder to achieve what we feel we desire in this life?

Seems we have again returned to another one of those untouchable subjects...sacrifice and death. Which may actually be the point, at least according to Campbell.

So how do we account for these real evidences?

[juantoo3]

I posted this in the Applied Anthropology thread, but I think it may help shed a little light in this conversation too, so at the risk of being redundant:

Upper Paleolithic people were Homo sapiens sapiens like us and therefore had a nervous system identical to ours. Consequently, some of them must have known altered states of consciousness in their various forms including hallucinations. This was part of a reality which they had to manage in their own way and according to their own concepts.

This being said, we know as a fact that they kept going into the deep caves for twenty thousand years at the very least in order to draw on the walls, not to live or take shelter there. Everywhere and at all times, the underground has been perceived as being a supernatural world, the realm of the spirits or of the dead, a forbidding gate to the Beyond which people are frightened of and never cross. Going into the subterranean world was thus defying ancestral fears, deliberately venturing into the kingdom of the supernatural powers in order to meet them. The analogy with shamanic mind travels is obvious, but their underground adventure went much beyond a metaphoric equivalent of the shaman’s voyage : it made it real in a milieu where one could physically move and inwhich spirits were literally at hand. When Upper Paleolithic people went into the deeper galleries, they must have been acutely aware that they were in the world of the supernatural powers and they expected to see and find them. Such a state of mind, no doubt reinforced by the teaching they had received, was certain to facilitate the coming of visions that deep caves in any case tend to stir up (as many spelunkers have testified). Deep caves could thus have a double role the aspects of which were indissolubly linked : to make hallucinations easier; to get in touch with the spirits through the walls.

Paleolithic Cave Paintings and Rock Art in France

Animals are often drawn without any care for scale, in profile. They can be whole or just represented by their heads or forequarters, which is enough to identify them. Their images are often precise, personalised and identifiable in all their details (sexes, ages, attitudes), whether they be Magdalenian bison in the Ariege or Aurignacian lions and rhinos in the Chauvet Cave, 18,000 years earlier. Scenes are rare and certain themes are absent, like herds and mating scenes. Paintings and engravings are thus neither faithful copies of the surrounding environment nor stereotypes.

As to humans, whatever the culture and diverse as they may be, they always seem to be uncouth and unsophisticated, mere caricatures. This is also a constant feature that stresses the unity of Paleolithic art.
The artistic abilities of the painters and engravers cannot be questioned. They deliberately chose to represent vague humans, with few details or deformed features.

A particular theme is that of composite creatures, at times called sorcerers. Those beings evidence both human and animal characteristics. This theme is all the more interesting as it departs from normality. It is present as early as the Aurignacian in Chauvet. It can be found in Gabillou (fig. 7) and Lascaux 10,000 years later or more and it is still present in the Middle Magdalenian of Les Trois-Freres, nearly 20,000 years after its beginnings.

Paleolithic Cave Paintings and Rock Art in France

Wall images are perfectly compatible with the perceptions people could have during their visions, whether one considers their themes, their techniques and their details. The animals, individualised by means of precise details, seem to float on the walls ; they are disconnected from reality, without any ground line, often without respect of the laws of gravity, in the absence of any framework or surroundings. Elementary geometric signs are always present and recall those seen in the various stages of trance. As to composite creatures and monsters (i.e. animals with corporal attributes pertaining to various species), we know that they belong to the world of shamanic visions. This does not mean that they would have made their paintings and engravings under a state of trance. The visions could be drawn (much) later.

Trying to get into touch with the spirits believed to live inside the caves, on the other side of theveil that the walls constituted between their reality and ours, is a Paleolithic attitude of mind which has left numerous testimonies, particularly the very frequent use of natural reliefs. When one’s mind is full of animal images, a hollow in the rock underlined by a shadow cast by one’s torch or grease lamp will evoke a horse’s back line or the hump of a bison. How then couldn’t one believe that the spirit-animals found in the visions of trance - and that one had expected to find in the other-world which the underground undoubtedly is - are not there on the wall, half emerging through the rock thanks to the magic of the moving light and ready to vanish into it again. In a few lines, they would be made wholly real and their power would then become accessible.

Cracks and hollows, as well as the ends oropenings of galleries, must have played a slightly different yet comparable part. They were not the animals themselves but the places whence they came. Those natural features provided a sort of opening into the depths of the rock where the spirits were believed to dwell. This would explain why we find so many examples of animals drawn in function of those natural features (Le Roseau Clastres, Le Travers de Janoye, Chauvet (fig. 14), Le Grand Plafond at Rouffignac).

Paleolithic Cave Paintings and Rock Art in France

[Tao_Equus]

Hi Juantoo,

You do bring to the thread a dynamic of aesthetics my assertions failed to touch upon. I still stand by the idea that this function originally developed because of sex and say that what you point at is as a result of the emergence of abstract thought developing in early humans. You make a good point that there are no butterflies, waterfalls nor flattering portraits in early cave art and your pastes from the other thread show that through the longevity of this type of art it showed amazing consistency. A reflection of largely stable cultures back then perhaps?

The emergence of abstraction very likely did give rise to the emergence of supernatural beliefs. But surely this was a side effect. Abstraction is a tool of the brain that allows foresight, logic, planning and all the other faculties mankind developed as a requirement of moving very rapidly out of Africa into a wide variety of habitats. Adaptability created abstraction for survival not to ponder God. Theism tends to turn it round the other way yet we can see looking to the very beginnings of primitive beliefs that we drew all we knew from what we knew. Not what we did not know. As beliefs developed over time they grew more complex and drifted ever further from the natural environment from which they stemmed. With the emergence of permanent settlements and the gradual divorce from wider nature, and new tools such as record keeping, they developed quickly into wholly anthropocentric edifices of thought. The human history of art shows very clearly the evolution of the supernatural to be just that, an evolution. Very strong evidence for saying religion is not gifted on man by a divine entity, but is solely the product of our imaginations? I think so.

Tao

[greymare]

same

[greymare]

Originally Posted by Snoopy

Maybe we're just splitting hairs over "root" (Australian slang, grey!).

Did Beethoven spend a lifetime creating music just to impress the ladies?

s.

Isnt this just typical, get a group of guys together and soon enough it all comes down to sex. LOL. Fair Dinkum!!! All Ican say is unless you are really hungry and downright randy dont go to Taos when you are invited for lunch. You might get more than you bargained for. LOL Personally, I think most of what happens in society is purely for sex (reproduction). Generally, most women dress up get all "puffed and fluffed" to attract the male of the species. Men like to be "manly" and do blokey stuff to attract females. There is NO mystery to that. But as you get older and llife isnt necessarily about reproducing other things get more interesting. Still looking.......

[flowperson]

Hi...As I pointed out elsewhere here, the self identification of the human spirit with observed phenomena of nature was a common theme among very ancient people. We all started out as Pagans. In Europe, this was predominantly a matter of assuming the persona of animal spirits in the pursuit of transcendence and a joining with the elements of nature. The occurrence of these artistic representations of these joinings and transformations in caves was symbolic of a rebirth of the human spirit in the form of animal spirits within the womb of mother nature.

N. American Natives also followed this path as did most of the people of those times who subsisted upon the rewards of the hunt. Rock art in the southwest U.S. and in N. Africa also demonstrated this tendency. I agree that this process was evolutionary, but was not necessarily the forerunner of organized religions. This transition took place most clearly among the agrarian tribes beginning about 10,000 years ago. This was the period of time in which people began to settle in communities to raise crops, and others remained nomadic and continued their animal centered existence whether through hunting and/or herding. One may see this separation of origins by studying archaeological evidence of the offering of blood sacrifices versus grain offerings at holy sites.

For example, at Hebrew ritual sites one sees a division of focus of these two origins. The grain offering was in the form of bread loaves placed upon the altar in the holy of holies. The blood offerings were made outside of the tabernacle/temples upon the horned altar in the courtyard. This implies an inside/outside dichotomy within the whole, at least in the roots of Judaism. Blood offerings associated with the animal spirits were to be kept outside of the holiest portions of the tabernacle/temple, whereas plant offerings were recognized to be less destructive spiritually and were allowed in the holiest precincts of worship.

My two cents.

Grey... I don't have very much to do on Sunday afternoons these days other than to think too much. Sorry, it's just my nature me loove .

flow....

[Snoopy]

Originally Posted by greymare

Isnt this just typical, get a group of guys together and soon enough it all comes down to sex. LOL. Fair Dinkum!!! All Ican say is unless you are really hungry and downright randy dont go to Taos when you are invited for lunch. You might get more than you bargained for. LOL Personally, I think most of what happens in society is purely for sex (reproduction). Generally, most women dress up get all "puffed and fluffed" to attract the male of the species. Men like to be "manly" and do blokey stuff to attract females. There is NO mystery to that. But as you get older and llife isnt necessarily about reproducing other things get more interesting. Still looking.......

Just trying to empathise with your lingo, grey!

I think to correlate all aesthetics with mating is to grossly debase it. Aesthetics can be a means of bringing about and maintain social order, in the widest sense of aesthetics (e.g. architecture, ritual, design, urban structure).

s.

[greymare]

Originally Posted by flowperson

Hi...As I pointed out elsewhere here, the self identification of the human spirit with observed phenomena of nature was a common theme among very ancient people. We all started out as Pagans. In Europe, this was predominantly a matter of assuming the persona of animal spirits in the pursuit of transcendence and a joining with the elements of nature. The occurrence of these artistic representations of these joinings and transformations in caves was symbolic of a rebirth of the human spirit in the form of animal spirits within the womb of mother nature.

N. American Natives also followed this path as did most of the people of those times who subsisted upon the rewards of the hunt. Rock art in the southwest U.S. and in N. Africa also demonstrated this tendency. I agree that this process was evolutionary, but was not necessarily the forerunner of organized religions. This transition took place most clearly among the agrarian tribes beginning about 10,000 years ago. This was the period of time in which people began to settle in communities to raise crops, and others remained nomadic and continued their animal centered existence whether through hunting and/or herding. One may see this separation of origins by studying archaeological evidence of the offering of blood sacrifices versus grain offerings at holy sites.

For example, at Hebrew ritual sites one sees a division of focus of these two origins. The grain offering was in the form of bread loaves placed upon the altar in the holy of holies. The blood offerings were made outside of the tabernacle/temples upon the horned altar in the courtyard. This implies an inside/outside dichotomy within the whole, at least in the roots of Judaism. Blood offerings associated with the animal spirits were to be kept outside of the holiest portions of the tabernacle/temple, whereas plant offerings were recognized to be less destructive spiritually and were allowed in the holiest precincts of worship.

My two cents.

Grey... I don't have very much to do on Sunday afternoons these days other than to think too much. Sorry, it's just my nature me loove .

flow....

dont be sorry flow, its what we love about you. besides, i like eavesdropping on these intelectual discussions, " me n my lot neva did much book learnin"

[flowperson]

Originally Posted by greymare

" me n my lot neva did much book learnin"

Yeah Grey, but I'll wager that you could write a book or two about the things that you and your lot do know. We each have our own knowledge and talents. The trick is doing something with all that which may benefit others my dear.

flow....