I'm in Love with a Vampire

I'm so paranoid these days that I'm afraid even to use titles like this, lest they become literally true, but at the same time I like having catchy titles (or at least as close to catchy as I can get) so I'll keep it.

Dear reader, be advised, there will be no magical thinking (or any thinking at all, really) in this post! This post is purely about the brain damage end of the business. Not even the gods can be serious all the time; why should we mortals, whose lives are fleeting?

I am feeling unusually happy right now. My dear husband has treated me to a surprise, and I have just had the very pleasurable experience, which I think is really remarkable considering my long history of alcohol consumption, of tasting the most perfect beer of my life: the beautiful, ruby-hued Nosferatu from the local wizards on the mistake on the lake, at the Great Lakes Brewery.

I've tried some of the Great Lakes beers before. They're all delicious (though of course expensive compared to the Natural Lights and Red Dogs of the world, but you pay for quality) and I like the clever names with a local connection. They have a bunch of them:

• Elliot Ness Amber Lager (my favorite, until I tried Nosferatu). This one is named after the famous Untouchable G-Man who became Cleveland's Safety Director in 1935, only to leave under a shadow for never managing to catch the Cleveland torso murderer;
  
  

• Holy Moses White Ale named for Connecticut surveyor Moses Cleaveland (spelling correct), who, in 1796, came to the mouth of the Cuyahoga, thought it would make a great place for a city, and then (like many another person who has come to the same spot) left and never came back;
  
  

• Burning River Pale Ale to remember the infamous episode of June 23, 1969, in which the Cuyahoga river proved to be so grotesquely polluted that it actually caught fire (but who needs clean water, if business turns a profit and politicians get a cut?);
  
  

• Moondog Extra Special Bitter which celebrates "the 1952 Moondog Coronation Ball held at the Cleveland Arena, what many consider the first 'rock and roll' concert" (explanation stolen from Wikipedia);
  
  

• Edmund Fitzgerald Porter to remember the Cleveland ore carrier, immortalized in the song by Canadian folkster Gordon Lightfoot, that on November 10 1975 sank with all hands on Lake Superior;
  
  

• Commodore Perry India Pale Ale in memory of the hero of the War of 1812, who in a battle on Lake Erie became the only naval commander in history to capture an entire British fleet.
  

Great Lakes beers tend to have a higher alcohol content than the usual proletarian swill that dominates the American boozing scene, so they pack a nice good buzz. And Nosferatu is king of the court, tipping the scales with an alcohol content of 8%!

The problem for me, apart from the cost, is that I find them very heavy and yeasty; it's like drinking liquid bread. Not that I mind it -- in fact I like it a lot -- but they knock me right out. I drink a couple of Great Lakes beers and I go to sleep and gain five pounds.

But back to the positives, Great Lakes beers are the only alcoholic drinks I can enjoy these days that still give me a buzz and make me feel happy. Everything else just makes me sick and crabby.

But that's enough of this. I am going to go suck on another vampire. Nighty night!

Alien Dreams, Part I

First an explanatory note: whenever I speak of aliens on this blog, I am using the word merely as shorthand for the various kinds of entities reported by experiencers of paranormal contact or abduction phenomena; I don't pretend to have any insight or understanding of their true origin.

I know nothing is more irritatingly tedious than listening to some fool spew on about their dreams, and I promise I won't make a habit of it here. I only set these two down because I don't recall ever having dreamt of aliens before being repeatedly exposed over the past several months to accounts of contacts and abductions, and because while I don't usually believe that dreams are anything more than internal processes of our brains, sometimes I do -- at least some dreams, and these two, particularly the second, feel to me to fall into that category.

I do understand that the most probable reason for these dreams is simply that I've been listening and thinking and freaking myself out about the subject, and so my subconscious is playing around with it and my deteriorating brain is going haywire on me and that's all there is to it; but at the same time a part of me buys into the statement often expressed by explorers of the paranormal that the more you think and search and open yourself up to these things, the more they will seek out you. Again, I understand that probably the reason they're "seeking" you is just because you've predisposed your brain to interpret everything it perceives in a certain way, regardless of what's objectively there. But then again, I can't share the absolute certainty of psychologists and materialist-rationalists that the things we perceive in altered states of consciousness are mere imaginations of the mind; such reasoning strikes me as fundamentally flawed because it is based on an erroneous assumption: alien entities absolutely do not exist, nuh-uh no way; therefore anyone who sees them has to be hallucinating, misinterpreting, or lying.

Of course, most psychologists and materialist-rationalists, being educated, rational, and brilliant people who wish to appear educated, rational and brilliant, will happily admit that alien entities probably exist all over the cosmos; they just don't happen to exist in the one spot of the cosmos where their presence would be inconvenient for the beliefs of educated, rational and brilliant people.

Oh, if only I could bottle my self-loathing vitriol and drink it in its fermented state, what a happy woman I would be.

Anyway, to my mind it seems just as reasonable to assume (since that's all any of us are doing, whatever lies some people may tell themselves) that these entities really do exist, but that for some reason (and many intriguing speculations have been put forth) we are unable to perceive them in our conscious, waking state.

But I've wandered long enough for now. Onto the first dream, which strikes me as by far the less interesting of the two I've had.

As it begins I am surrounded in darkness, nestled snugly but perhaps a little anxiously in the darkness, and I know I am watching or about to watch a film, though not on a screen, or at least I can't detect the screen; it's as if I'm looking through a glassless window onto the real world. I have a very dim sense of seeing one or two lines of opening credits, though if I did I have absolutely no recollection of what they may have represented: peoples' names or the title of the film or whatever.

It opens on a farm in a rural area at night: ten o'clock, I seem to know, though it feels later. I am looking down upon the scene; low mountains in the distance, perhaps a lake or river, certainly there are many trees; and a starless sky with a pale-bright full moon, to which my eye is drawn. There is a dirt road, a fence I think, a large wooden building like a stable and perhaps a cluster of outbuildings. A house? I can't recall. I seem to remember smoke rising from a chimney, but can't say for sure. The impression is of utter isolation in a sparsely-populated region miles from nowhere; it is so difficult for me to remember, but it strikes me that my feeling was an odd mixture of cozy enchantment (because I'd love to live in a place like this) mingled with an undercurrent of anxiety (because I'd hate to be alone in such a place at night) that seems to be present throughout this dream.

I watch this scene for a few moments. Overall I think I enjoy it, I get a good feeling from it. I like the little quiet place out in the country. And now I am shown that the night wears on by a weird sequence of the moon. You've probably seen the kind of time-lapse shot or whatever it is where you are looking at the night sky, and the position of the moon gradually fades from one spot to reappear in another. In this case something odd happens; the old position of the moon doesn't seem to fade out so much as the moon seems to split itself like an amoeba, or perhaps turns to a box and then fades out and reappears as a peanut shape or as an orb that extrudes something from itself until it assumes a peanut shape. I seem to recall seeing a sharp black line briefly appear through the place where the two moons joined. I can't sort out in my mind now just exactly what happened with it. But in the end the moon became a pale-bright orb again, just a little lower in the sky directly beneath where it was before.

My view drifts down to a close-up of the stable. I have the sense that something needs to be done: a few simple last-minute chores, perhaps, prior to shutting the place down for the night or the season, and there's a sense of peace and completion such as I feel when being the last one out of the office at night mingled with that same underfeeling of unease, as if I want to get out of there quickly because I'm suddenly nervous being there in the dark by myself, or am afraid that someone or something might show up soon, or will show up soon. I seem to have become part of the film now, to be the person who is involved in the plot, but as I think of these things to be done somebody else comes on scene and I split back to being a watcher again; whether she's the star or a minor character I can't tell, but it's Sigourney Weaver, apparently, in a white blouse and cream-colored jeans or riding pants. She is the one who is taking care of these last-minute things, though I don't remember seeing her actually do anything. Maybe she finished up just before coming on, or maybe it gets done behind the scenes as she's there.

She gets in the car. Do I feel that we (she, me?) are now safe, or that we waited too long and are now on the brink of disaster? It's all mixed up in my head. But as she drives along, and I seem to be floating outside the car moving along with it, looking at her in profile as the night countryside speeds by in a blur, I either see or have the sense that now Richard Gere is looking at this scene as film footage frame by frame, holding a small screen in his hands and peering intently at it, and whether I'm him or there next to him or watching him as an actor in a film on my own screen I can't say. As with most of my dreams, the details afterward are horribly confused. But I know, because it seems to be the whole point of the film, that Sigourney is going to encounter an alien; I am watching for it, waiting for it, and sure enough, as I watch the blurry black background outside the car window move past frame by frame, a grayish-white blur pops into view.

There it is! I think, and I may feel exultant at having seen it or calmly assured by what I had known was going to happen, but I'm certainly not scared or concerned in any way. The film slows even more now and I watch as the blur clicks horizontally closer toward Sigourney -- although the car was moving from left to right, and the alien blur, as I recall, did not appear at the right side of the screen and work its way to the left as you would normally expect if she were driving toward something on the roadside; as I recall the blur appeared suddenly in the middle of the screen and seemed to move toward the right faster than the car did, or maybe kept pace with the car. Still no fear. And the film slows down even more, because we want to get a really good look at this alien, and apparently in the mechanics of this dream the more you slow down the film the clearer and sharper the objects it captures will be. I am excited, athrob with anticipation; I want to see the alien!

So the film slows to a stop, and there it is, clear as a bell, staring right into the car, its elongated head and huge black eyes and tiny mouth slackly open like a confused old man's, the neck so thin and short that it's barely not even there, thin as thread, and I think I see a long flexy arm, maybe its right arm stretched impossibly behind its back to reach around on its left side toward the car window, and though I was expecting to see its face and, as I thought, prepared for it, the sudden clarity of it huge and looming at the window scared the bejesus out of me and I burst awake with a scream or some kind of violent convulsion that woke my husband, who is a dead-snoring log sleeper.

Unlike some scary dreams, the fear of this one immediately dissipated as soon as I realized I was awake and had been dreaming. It wasn't until I started meditating over it there in the dark night and conjuring up visions of them trying to get at me through wormholes in the realm of sleep that I began to work myself into a state.

I certainly don't expect anyone to see any usable significance in what is surely just another dream. But for whatever pittance it may be worth, you are welcome to it.

Why I Keep My Thinking to a Minimum

In my case it's like trying to drive a nail with my breasts. It hurts and the results are unsatisfactory. And now it can even make me fat:

"Caloric overcompensation following intellectual work, combined with the fact that we are less physically active when doing intellectual tasks, could contribute to the obesity epidemic currently observed in industrialized countries," said lead researcher Jean-Philippe Chaput at Laval University in Quebec City, Canada.

Now I don't pretend that I really understand any of that; I tried, but my jeans started to feel tight and it seemed wiser to abandon the attempt.

I can now appreciate, though, why legitimate science refuses to so much as consider silly sky fairy subjects like UFOs: what intelligent, rational, level-headed scientist would waste time on a nonsensical phenomenon for which there is nothing more than trace evidence, radar responses, and thousands of eyewitness reports (or, to use the proper scientific terminology: mass hypnosis, delusions and lies, and in any event eyewitness testimony is completely invalid anyway) when fascinating answers to the real mysteries of the ages are to be obtained by watching college kids work on computers and scarf tater chips?

As many a parabnormally-minded person has long known: if only we could make UFOs, ghosts, or cryptozoology as lucrative a pursuit as the weight loss industry, the Jean-Philippe Chaputs of the world would grab their laptops and microscopes and hurl themselves shrieking onto that fabulous El Dorado gravy train in the manner of, as the elegant phrase has it, stink on a monkey.

Not that I have anything against Dr. Chaput or his work; I am sure he's a fine human being and a scrupulous researcher, and of course all scientific discovery is worthwhile. I just like to bitch.

And now I drink a draft of the magical brew from my cup and uncloak my mind for the ravishment of the oracular god. HEAR AS YOUR PRIESTESS REVEALS THE ULTIMATE MYSTERIES WHICH WILL BE PROVEN BY SCIENCE AT THE END OF TIME:

1) everything makes you fat; and

2) everything also causes cancer or otherwise kills you.

The full horrifying article is available here.

Because I'm Drunk and Annoyed and Reading the Internets at 2:00 in the Morning...

Dear Forum Poster:

No one has any business taking you seriously if you:

• use a Greco-Roman pseudonym (on edit: uh-oh -- but then again, I rest my case)
  

• treat Shakespeare like he matters more than any other great writer of the past 400 years
  

• use the phrase: Wow. Just. Wow.
  

• use the word sheeple
  

• can't discuss contemporary sociopolitical issues without making references to obesity, waddling, Wal*Mart, sixpacks, etc.
  

• can't discuss contemporary sociopolitical issues without making references to Hitler and the Nazis
  

• think you're saying something profound by posting song lyrics.
  

Dude, You Just Stepped in Some Bigfoot

As I am writing this, the much-ballyhooed Georgia Gorilla press conference, scheduled for today, has yet to burst its bombshell upon the world; but based on the little commentary I have read, and the pictures I have seen...

I confess that I believe (some of the time) in the wisdom of the people (that is to say, folklore) which acknowledges that tiny bands of large hominids, unknown in the taxonomies of scientists, really do exist in unhumaned places like the white emptiness of the Himalayas and, elusive as the corpse of D.B. Cooper, in the black, shaggy wilds of the Pacific Northwest.

Since I accept the verdict of folklore, I believe that it is quite possible, especially in light of the continuous diminishment of the American wilderness, that the body of one of these creatures could eventually be found.

I would love, really love, for their existence to be proven, though in the end, objectively, it would amount to nothing more than the discovery of yet another animal previously unkown to science (I'm aware of a speculation that these creatures may be at least partially paranormal, but personally I don't find that speculation persuasive for no other reason, really, than that I simply don't have any interest in believing it). As we continue to tear up the jungles and probe and poison the oceans, previously unknown animals are discovered frequently enough that we have ceased to be shocked by it. What's the big deal?

And yet "Bigfoot" isn't just another animal. For reasons I don't have the energy to explore, he has long since become wrapped up in the same kind of wide-eyed fraudulent kookery that, accidentally or not (I believe the answer is a bit of both), has long since come to infest and discredit every aspect of the paranormal. Because of this, otherwise rational and intelligent people who don't bat an eye when a new frog or butterfly or flower is discovered, and who would probably lay down money on the odds that more frogs, butterflies, and flowers are still out there waiting to be discovered, lose their heads and become all giggly and illogical at the thought that a large primate could thus far have escaped the net of the zoologists.

Regan Lee has been tracking the obsession that a certain branch of the fundamentalist materialist-rationalist orthodoxy appears to feel for this subject, an obsession which, in my opinion, is rather unwise since it seems to me that of all "paranormal" phenomena the existence of an unknown primate is the easiest to prove, and the most likely to be proven: again, it is simply the discovery of another unknown animal. But because of the heaps of subjective baubles with which we've all loaded this particular animal, its discovery would be interpreted as a mighty vindication of the "Woo" community and an intellectual Stalingrad (in the German sense) for the "Reality-based" one.

The oracle slurred by your priestess: when weaving your security blanket, do not choose the thread most likely to unravel.

If a large hairy hominid ever were discovered, I believe it would be interesting and very instructive scientifically (if you consider psychology a science) to monitor the reaction of certain fundamentalist materialist-rationalists. It is said by them that they would accept the discovery with the same placid equanimity with which they welcome any evidentiary revelation that furthers our understanding of the world we live in.

I don't buy it. Not for a second. It is my suspicion (and I'm willing to wager my drinking of booze on it, so convinced am I that I'm right) that our hypothetical psychologists would be recording not gentlemanly smiles of complacence, but symptoms of depression, denial, and anger. I half expect that, if a Sasquatch body ever really were found, that some particularly distraught reality-based anthropoid would take it upon himself to strap on a pack of dynamite and jihad himself upon the offending carcase, obliterating the shattering of his cozily manageable world in a fiery Jahannam of blended primate parts.

But I don't think he'll need to be joining the Academy of the Illuminated Martyrs just yet. After an initial flush of excitement it seems to me, as to most other people in the paranormal community, that based on what has been released thus far, unless this story turns out to have a super-shocking Twilight Zone twist at the end it can't possibly be anything other than a hoax -- and apparently not a particularly skillful one.

Saturday morning update: press conference "inconclusive"; blood in the water; if these fine examples of the blessings of democracy really do turn out to have a body now, I'll stop drinking. The hoaxing process is fascinating to me, particularly the point at which it gets away from you and stops being fun; the thought of lawyers intrudes, and you have to keep juggling faster and faster to keep the wolves from your door.

The Hungry Gods, Part III

(This post is a continuation of The Hungry Gods and The Hungry Gods, Part II)

I distinctly remember reading or being told once, years ago, that human sacrifice developed after animal sacrifice, when someone came to the conclusion that since the life of animals like goats and bulls were desireable to the gods, how much more delectable must be the life of the most precious animal of all? and ever since I've operated under that assumption. But the scholarship in my recent reading takes the view that the earliest sacrifices were human, and that animal sacrifice developed afterward as a way to satisfy the rituals without having to kill somebody. Echoes of this are believed to be preserved in stories like biblical Abraham sacrificing Isaac (who at the last moment was saved by the appearance of a goat), or of the Greek Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia (who in earlier accounts was killed, but in later ones was saved and replaced with a deer).

The author of I, Claudius, British litterateur and reputedly somewhat dodgy classicist (and mushroom-eater) Robert Graves, wrote an extensive explication of Greek mythology in which he sees in nearly every human male who gets looked at crosswise the memory of the ritual murder of a sacred king, in the days before animals were on the menu. My advice to impressionable teenagers and children is to steer clear of this book. It's been nearly twenty years since I read it and I still remember the feeling of sickening horror that seeped into me as I digested account after account of kings being torn apart, beheaded, burned alive, shot full of arrows -- and that's only the first half of volume one. Nor am I the only one to feel this way, judging from the reviews on Amazon and my college classics professor's remark still preserved in my dusty notebooks: It's a nightmare work. It can get to you if you're not careful. It really can!

If human sacrifice really did precede animal sacrifice (and I don't dispute the scholars), to my mind this pretty effectively torpedoes the kindergarten-level rationalist approach I've been trying to use in looking at the subject. It's no longer a case of "here, take some of our wheat and leave us the rest" or "share a meal with us to nourish yourself in the afterlife dear grandfather" or "how can we cadge a mutton dinner out of the tribe?" It's a case of somebody somewhere (and not just in one isolated place either) coming to the conclusion that in order to make things right somebody has got to die.

Even so I cannot entirely abandon my infantile attempts at rationalism. I can imagine cases of starvation, in which cannibalism was a desperate last resort and the guilty or horrified survivors tried to rationalize it with the invention of a ritual -- if early person felt guilt and horror about such things. But then the question is: why continue the ritual when it was no longer necessary? Was ancient person forced to resort to cannibalism all the time? Or did he just discover that, like Alferd Packer, he liked it?

I can imagine someone, an outlaw or outcast perhaps, or maybe a stranger, perishing or being killed and left to lie on the ground. Perhaps the corpse has seeds in its stomach or in a bag, and as the body decomposes and springtime comes the seeds sprout; or perhaps it is left to lie in a patch of some wild food plant and the fertilized plants grow better where the body lay; or perhaps carnivores or scavengers come after it and are harvested by the hunters; and so people come away with the idea that the death of a man produces food.

Perhaps food is scarce and somebody is making himself obnoxious, complaining about being hungry or stealing food from others. Someone else flies in a rage and kills him, perhaps unintentionally, but now there's a bit more for everyone else to eat and the tribe is saved.

I am sure you can imagine more scenarios, but the scenarios are not really the crucial point. The crucial point is to resolve two big questions:

1. Why would human sacrifice perpetuate itself?
   
   
2. Why would human sacrifice perpetuate itself everywhere?
   

It seems to me that human sacrifice can only perpetuate itself if people believe they are gaining something from it. It seems to me also, from the very little I know of "primitive" peoples, that they don't make a habit of killing themselves off on a regular basis, apart from possibly extracting very little ones from the mouth pool during lean times Of course everyone is perfectly happy to kill off folks from other tribes, and maybe this is what fed the earliest sacrifices -- though I wonder, in those ancient times, if there were really all that many different tribes crawling over each others' feeding grounds.

If, as in my second and third scenarios, people believe that killing someone produces food or leaves more for others to eat, you can see why sacrifice would perpetuate itself. People need to eat continually, and so someone would have to die on a regular basis. But wouldn't there have been a time beforehand when the people could remember plants growing and animals being caught without somebody needing to die? Wouldn't they, as hunter-gatherers, ever migrate to richer pastures in which they had spilled no blood, but were none the poorer for it? Maybe once you've stared starvation in the face and are miraculously saved by a corpse you forget everything that comes before or after, and as an evolutionary tactic with your god-gene brain adopt the idea that inventing a corpse produces food.

But then this begs the question of how you move away from human sacrifice once you've been practicing it for a while. If you've come to believe it's producing food for you, or doing anything else of importance for you, who'd be the first one foolish enough to say, "hey, let's try just killing a goat instead and see how that works?" And who in the group would go along with that? "Sure, let's take a chance on angering the god and STARVING TO DEATH!"

It also begs the question of how the god gets into it, or indeed where gods come from at all. Would early person, completely integrated into nature, concoct a fantasy that some invisible sky being made plants and animals for men to eat? Would he not be more likely to assume that plants and animals were just there? I have a hard time remembering much of my very early childhood, but I don't recall, in playing outside amidst the grass and the trees, or in looking at the sun or the moon or the snow or the storms, ever having the idea that anybody made them; they were just there because that's how the world was.

Granted, if you're taught something as a child you'll grow up believing it and will propagate that belief to your own children -- unless, of course, you take the other traditional course of indoctrinated children and rebel utterly against the belief. But whatever course you choose, someone, somewhere, still must have originated the belief that was passed on to you, and the belief must have been deemed acceptable by a large enough percentage of the community to be worthy of passing on. I doubt early people were any keener to buck the consensus than their 21st century descendants.

But I confess I have a hard time believing that early people, out of whole cloth, just stitched together the idea of invisible superheroes in the sky who made things work. It's easy to imagine a scenario in which one person might do it; maybe he's schizophrenic and sees things. Maybe a whole tribe eats a bunch of whacky mushrooms and sees crazy things flying all over the place. But we're still left with the question of how belief in the invisible supermen spreads itself to human tribes everywhere. Are we to assume that missionary work went over better in those days than it's ever done in recorded history? Even if you have mind-blowing mushrooms to distribute? (well, okay, the mind-blowing mushrooms might persuade some folks, I mention no names).

My personal theorizing over this is hopeless bunk. I know nothing about it. And while I can't claim to have read about the subject in detail, I feel justified in saying that, of the little I have read, about 99% of it is also hopeless bunk. So why am I even bothering? I should just shut up.

But I can't shut up just yet. One theory does appeal to me very strongly. I first saw it raised in conjunction with some comments on the strange visual descriptions in Homer (the author apparently not buying into the old tradition of Homer being blind, which might account for strange visual descriptions); it has since popped up once or twice elsewhere. I'm ignorant of everything but the shallowest shape of it (perhaps the reason it appeals to me so much, since I need most things to be shallow):

The brain of early person worked differently than our brains work today. His way of perceiving the world was constitutionally different from ours.

Like I say, I don't know whose idea this is, or anything about the argument really; but even the sketchy outline of it rings true to me -- and it offers a solution to the questions over which I've been chasing my tail. The concept of gods and spirits could have developed universally early on, could have called forth serious responses like human sacrifice, because early person, as far as his mind could tell, was literally experiencing gods and spirits as a reality as concrete as the herbs he ate, the deer he chased, or the rain that fell on his head.

Most of us nowadays do not hear the voices of burning bushes or see shades coming up from the underworld because our brains do not use the same filters that were given to early man.

Of course this does not necessarily mean that gods and spirits are real (although I do believe, usually, that the numinous exists, and that it can still be perceived by at least some of us, at least ephemerally); it only means that early man's brain was forming certain impressions of the world around him -- impressions that may be beyond our reach today.

I think it is likely that our rationalist-materialist approach to things may well have been beyond the capabilities of early man, try as he might to grasp them. The filters are different. Why would science and technology progress but slightly for thousands of years, then suddenly shoot into the stratosphere over two centuries? Although it is fashionable in some quarters to attribute the technological stagnation of the past to a belief in sky fairies, belief in sky fairies is no inherent obstacle to the employment of science, as is proven by the works of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans (please remember that I am reined in by my western bias, I do not mean to slight anyone elsewhere).

But then again, who has a better understanding -- a more visceral, instinctive, and intimate understanding, a real understanding -- of the world we live in?

The naked savage who is a part of it, who lives, eats, drinks, sleeps, poops, mates, and dies in it? Who has to learn every detail of it, to recognize every hint of benefit and every whisper of danger, or he dies right quick?

Or the modern feeble thing in a sterilized lab-coat, festering with allergies and neuroses, sitting in an ergonomic chair in a climate-controlled flourescent chamber, peering through spectacles into a microscope for twelve hours straight and letting a box of plastic and silicon do nine-tenths of his thinking for him?

The modern feeble thing asserts that he does. Sometimes he gets really angry, pathologically angry, if you suggest there's anything he can't understand.

I've been around modern feeble things when the air conditioning broke. My impulse is to side with the howling cave painter.

I think the modern feeble thing lives in a magic bubble of Newtonian corn syrup and ego. I think he is one poke away from disaster. Some people think a great big poke is coming soon. I hope not, because I'm a modern feeble thing myself and don't want my cozy little bubble to be popped.

At first I thought I was rambling again, hugely rambling, but now it feels like somehow or other I've gotten to the place I needed to be, because after three long incoherent posts on this subject I've finally managed to stumble upon the core premise with which I should have begun.

At times it is -- depending on my mood -- my suspicion, belief, or even intuition (or perhaps just varying degrees of wishful thinking) that early person was tapped into the raw existential truth of life on this planet in a way that we cannot begin to conceive. I believe early person, while he almost certainly lacked the capacity to explain it or reason it out, had a much deeper awareness of how humanity and the rest of the planet interact with each other. Without understanding the details of their arguments, I tend to side with those who speculate that the evolutionary advantages in the development of the human brain involved more than just the ability to invent tools and language. I believe the human consciousness may hold, or may once have held, gifts and powers that millennia ago were chained up in a chest and shoved under a pile of junk in the attic. Perhaps the contents of the chest moldered away long ago and it is not possible now for us to recover anything more than the empty chest, or at most a lingering whisper of the fragrance of whatever was in the chest.

It is my suspicion (some of the time) that early man did not invent gods and spirits out of whole cloth, but that he was describing and reacting to something that really was there for him, something that he could perceive as solidly as the herbs, the deer, and the rain. I suspect (some of the time) that all of the mess, nonsense, and fraud that man has been heaping up in his religions since long before the reign of Akhenaten originates not from further elaborations on a fanciful conceit of the cavemen, but from a loss of understanding and involvement with the entities or energies that glided around caves and groves but were either shut out from or chose not to enter irrigation ditches and the stone halls of palaces.

In short, I am proceeding from the premise that early person developed and perpetuated the concept of sacrifice because something was there to accept the sacrifice.

Now I must pause and regroup. More to come!

The Hungry Gods, Part II

(This post is a continuation of The Hungry Gods)

First an explanatory note: whenever I speak of gods on this blog, I am usually using the word as shorthand for some kind of numinous (or at least a "not-like-us") presence. I don't pretend to have a clue as to what that presence really may be: supernatural or extradimensional beings, extraterrestrial or cryptoterrestrial visitors, a unifying energy force or cosmic consciousness, an advanced human civilization, a hallucination, or nothing at all.

So many mysteries lie buried in the depths of time. How can anyone determine at this late date how the first stirrings of religion made themselves felt in humankind? In my last post I assumed that the ritual of sacrifice was developed by the earliest people, but this may not be true. Perhaps sacrifice is not conceived until society develops some small system of food surplus, through the pastoral herding of animals or the rudiments of agriculture. Perhaps it isn't conceived until the city priests see a way to extort food and treasure from the nameless masses who aren't known to them and before whom (and behind the swords of the temple guards) they don't feel any guilt about amassing wealth. In any event, once someone hit on the idea, how did it spread? Is it something that each tribe discovered on its own in its own time, or did it travel by word of mouth, or did one of those strange telepathic broadcasts occur similar to which, as I've read, a successful new behavior in one bird seems to be instantly adapted by the rest of its species in the area?

Who can say? I think it is extremely difficult to discover the thought processes of the earliest people. I wonder sometimes how close even the most insightful and rigorous professionals can come. The concept of living as early person did in perfect animal union with nature is completely and utterly alien to our minds. At bottom we are supposed to be the same product -- but perhaps not, for who knows how the parings of natural selection and the influence of bizarre meddlers like toxoplasmosis have messed with the recipe over 200,000 years or more? Perhaps even the last remote stone-age persons discovered over the past century in the jungles of the Amazon or the South Pacific are significantly different from original person. But even if we are identical chemically to him, certainly our psychological and intellectual configuration (at least in everyone who is not an isolated stone-age tribe) must diverge significantly from his by the tens of millennia of cultural accretions and transformations that human beings have made in the way we understand and interact with our environment. Surely the compulsion to eat must be a fundamental human instinct, innate and unchanging regardless of when and where one lives; yet I have to imagine that the brain of a cave painter or a Bushman or a Pottawatomie, who deep down in the core of his being never knows where his next meal is going to come from if it comes from anywhere at all, interfaces with his instinct in a profoundly different way from those of us here in the illustrious and enlightened West who deep down in the core of our being cannot conceive of our next meal not being a 5-minute drive from the supermarket or the Burger King.

But as usual I am rambling everywhere except where I meant to go. Whoever is responsible for evolving the idea, the original intent seems clear: sacrifice must have been conceived originally as some kind of payment, compensation, consideration, or the like, to a mystical power who could not be compelled in hopes that the power would be persuaded to do or not do something; just as in our own time struggling shopkeepers pay protection money to strongarm men, or 90% of a sheepflock is sheared to the bone in winter to support the 10% who own 90% of the pen and control the wolves. I make these comparisons because the usual assumption, at least among us laypeople, is that early person, with his unenlightened childlike booga-booga mind, must have feared the inscrutable, ineluctable, arbitrary power of the gods he imagined infesting the world around him. But this may not be so.

I admit I don't know much about "primitive" person, but from the little I have picked up the suggestion is that cultures who are much more attuned to the natural world, like pagan barbarians or 17th century American Indians, feel rather less surprise and dismay over nature's harsh surprises and realities than do people who have started to move themselves out of nature. Also I have read numerous commentaries from antique whites who interacted with the unconquered peoples of the Americas or the Polynesias and were amazed at the equanimity shown by the darker people in the face of death. Not that the native people wanted to die, but they did not feel the irrational terror of it that civilized folks do. So I think it is possible that perhaps early person was perhaps less frightened, or at least more accepting, of the powers of the gods than we may give him credit for.

Perhaps too the first gods were not lords of terror and destruction blazing down off the mountain the way they do now to massacre everyone they can get their hands on, but helpful little approachable gods who didn't try to pass themselves off as omniscient, omnipresent, or omnipotent but who could be counted on to help you out to the best of their ability; the same kind of gods whose echo is heard in the spirits of the ancestors, in the lares and penates of the Romans, and in Catholic saints.

In fact now that I am on the subject I recall reading once (probably in a long-discredited work by an anthropologist who himself has long since been gathered to the bosom of his fathers) that the earliest numinous presences to whom humans paid homage were not gods but the spirits of ancestors. And now it becomes clear to me. Probably my earlier assumption is wrong. In the beginning sacrifice was probably not conceived as a bribe, but as an act of love and duty, in the same way that (as one example) modern Mexicans, still honoring the ancient traditions of the Mesoamerican Indians, bring food and gifts to the cemeteries on the Day of the Dead.

Certainly, by far the majority of sacrifices that I've come across in my reading took the form of food. In part this could be because at the lower stages of human development food was about the only commodity available to give. But probably I'm trying to think too much, and that never works out well. At bottom it's probably no more complicated than the simple recognition that the numinous, like babies or old folks or pets or flocks, needed to be fed.

So what do the gods like to eat? If they're cooking for themselves, says Homer, Ambrosia and Nectar. But humans can't make that, so when humans do the job the gods have to be content with human food. Occasionally the old books mention libations of wine, milk and honey, beer perhaps; occasionally they mention shewbread, grain-offerings, cakes. Personally I would be the wine and cake kind of goddess myself. But far and away, when the gods gather to feast at the table of man, they are going to be dining on meat. Over and over and over again the folks in the Mediterranean world (which I base my thinking on because I am most familiar with it, though I realize people elsewhere may have done things completely differently) go on record as offering up bulls, heifers, calves, rams, ewes, lambs, kids, doves, and so on, to satisfy the hunger of the gods. Sometimes parts of the animal are burnt and the gods are believed to feed on the savor of the smoke; sometimes the blood is spilled onto an altar or allowed to soak into the ground and the gods are believed to absorb that. I've read some commentary that the difference depends on whether the presence inhabits the sky or the underworld, but if memory serves the accounts themselves are not consistent: sometimes YHWH gets smoke, sometimes blood; and the same is true for Zeus or Apollo. I could be remembering wrong, or maybe the difference has to do with the ritual in question, or maybe I'm just not understanding it right.

Sometimes (depending on the ritual) humans are permitted to share the meal, sometimes not. But the god is always getting fed.

In the biblical story of Cain and Abel the point is explicitly made that grain offerings just don't cut it. YHWH, apparently, prefers to be a carnivore (which is perhaps not surprising, considering his Old Testament behavior). I see no reason to argue against those who say this story symbolizes, or mythologizes, a conflict between agrarian and pastoral peoples; it rings true to me that it does. But at the same time, everything is so layered that I am not sure it is right to discard a more literal interpretation. I admit I am making assumptions for which I have no good grounds, but my assumption is that, usually, a myth or symbol, rather than being invented out of thin air, attaches itself in the human subconscious to an actual object or event, though of course in the telling the original object or event may become exaggerated or distorted; and so, because of this assumption, I proceed on the idea that this mythologized account of farmers and herders at odds is affixed to the memory of an actual incident in which a farmer killed a nomad, or one brother killed another in a fit of passion, or (since I can believe almost anything) a god evinced some sign of reacting better to a bloody banquet than to a vegetarian buffet.

I suppose the life force of an animal is judged (at least in the consciousness of us fellow animals) to be more potent than the life force of a plant, and thus more invigorating for the god; and that is why animals are deemed to be a more effective offering. If plants perceptibly screamed and writhed when they were cut, perhaps there would have been no difference in the olden time between offering the gods a salad or a steak.

I was going to suggest that maybe meat was harder to get or more expensive than grain or drink, or perhaps people liked it better, so it was preferred because the ritual allowed the celebrants to have a justification for eating it; but the fact that in some rituals the celebrants were not to touch the meat weakens this idea.

Suffice it to say that the gods must eat, and we humans must feed them.

We humans must feed them.

Something literal and horrifying emerges from these words. Listen closely: do you catch that little whisper? It is the whisper of a darker truth -- the echo, centuries old, of the shrieks that once pealed from Tenochtitlan's bloody heights and the abominable vale of Ben-Hinnom.

More to follow, I hope.