CHAPTER 13 |
The Creation and the Fall of Man
Scientific evidence indicates that the Earth was formed about 4.3-4.5 billion mundane years ago. This equates to very nearly 12 million Chaldean divine years, each consisting of 360 mundane years. Scientific evidence indicates that man and the other primates began to separate from a common ancestor about 12 million mundane years ago. This is an interesting co-incidence, if it is indeed a coincidence and not part of a specific plan.
I am principally interested in the final evolution (creation ) of man and will now proceed to a period beginning about twelve million years ago. It will be seen from the record of volcanic activity given as figure 4 that there was an upsurge in volcanic activity that began about 14 million years ago and lasted for a couple of million years, and this is elsewhere attributed to an explosion in the Lagoon Nebula (on the cusp of Sagittarius and Scorpio.. Unlike the last six million years where this activity was global, most of that earlier period of activity was concentrated in the south-west Pacific and the vicinity of Indonesia.
Elaine Morgan 66 cites the work of molecular biologists which strongly suggests, on the basis of protein divergences, that primates from man to the gibbon share a common ancestor who lived about twelve million years ago. The final separation of man from the other primates, on this basis, would appear to have occurred about three million years ago, or about the time of the Orion Explosion.
It is generally accepted by palaeontologists, on the basis of skeletal remains, that mankind began in Africa. However, according to George Todara 67 , a molecular biologist at the U.S. National Cancer Institute, human genes resemble those of Asian primates much more than they do their African counterparts. On this basis it would seem reasonable to assume that the African findings are basically the remnants of lines of evolution that reached dead ends and died out. While those who are anxious to preserve status and were previously committed to an African origin for man will no doubt engage in the usual obstructionist behaviour that others in their position have followed in the past, there are other reasons to accept the Asian origin. Even without the evidence of Todara, we would be forced to this conclusion.
Elaine Morgan 68 puts forward evidence that, for me, irrefutably links our present physical characteristics with a prolonged period as an aquatic ape. She points out that the Earth went through a very dry period lasting millions of years, and beginning at least some ten to twelve million years ago.
By six million years ago it is well established that the Mediterranean sea had dried up and the Black sea was desiccated. If the reader cares to check back to figure 4, he or she will find that six million years ago also marks the time for the beginning of a world-wide bout of volcanic activity which preceded the present one, and which I have previously suggested may have been caused by a major cosmic disruption heading from Scorpio to Orion.
This drought, lasting millions of years, is claimed by Elaine Morgan to have driven our ancestral hominids to take refuge in the sea. On the basis of this prolonged period at the sea-shore, Elaine Morgan accounts for almost every one of those physical features which distinguish us from our near cousins amongst the other primates.
She convincingly describes how we lost our fur, except in a couple of places where we still had a need for it. She explains how we came to adopt such an unnatural and inefficient posture as to stand upright. She explains why we developed such dexterous fingers and how we had the time to experiment with the making and use of tools. She explains why rudimentary speech became essential and, and perhaps unknowingly, why it was the female who became better able to use it. She explains all those physical features of women which distinguish them from other primate females, and of the origins of what has become known as the "sex" war. She has a wonderful sense of humour and her narrative style is superb. I would fully recommend anyone who has not yet done so to read her book "The Descent of Woman". There are only three faults that I can find with her entire book.
It is these three aspects that I now propose to discuss. But I would remind the reader that we are talking about recent geological history. This has been a period where the galactic environment has been disrupted, and conditions have existed which I am convinced would favour Lamarckian evolution. In other words, within reason, what you need in the way of bodily equipment, you can frequently get. Given such a situation, it is essential to be very careful what you ask for, since you may very well be given it.
On the basis of Elaine Morgan's arguments, we can summarise the position of our hominid ancestors of about three million years ago in the following way.
Our ancestors were basically furless, naked, fully bipedal tool-using hominids with rudimentary speech, and were scattered through the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, as far as New Guinea, and possibly coastal Australia, and Asia. They were confirmed inhabitants of the coasts and islands, and were having a whale of a time in their adopted environment. They had been there ever since they being driven away from their native forests in mainland Asia by the drought and the increased pressure of larger animals and predators. By sheer accident they had found paradise. There had, of course, been a price to pay for this step that had saved them from extinction.
Losing their hair and standing upright was a small price for entry into paradise, and they no longer needed the extra speed that four legs would have given them. Losing most of their sense of smell was, however, quite another matter altogether, since this had been their primary mode of communications for millions of years beyond counting. This was playing merry hell with the male dominance system and with the mating. There were also very real problems with trying to work out just when the females were ready for mounting.
Above and beyond this, however, by about three million years ago, the ultimate crisis had developed, and they were in real danger of extinction. As for all animals that have gone back to the sea, the vagina on the female hominids had been moving inexorably forwards. Furthermore, her legs had been getting fatter and, just to exacerbate this insult to the males, she had grown a hymen to protect her sensitive parts from the beach sand. She had done all this to make life comfortable for herself, and just hadn't given a thought to the consequences. And lets face it, she wasn't very bright, and couldn't possibly have foreseen the consequences of acquiring her home comforts. In a different context which we will later consider, that argument is quite unacceptable today.
Her recent innovations were endangering the species. It was getting so that it was no longer physically possible for the males to mate with the females from the rear, in the manner confirmed by genetic memories going back hundreds of millions of years.
So the poor male was already a whole lot more distressed than Elaine Morgan suggests. His dominance structure was all upset, he could never really tell when the female were ready to mate with him, and even when he tried, it was getting to be damn near impossible for him to get in. For hundreds of millions of years, nothing like this had ever happened to his ancestors, and he knew it. I imagine that he was already showing definite signs of the "vagueness of sexual aim" that seems to crop up so often in relation to the male of our species. As far as I am concerned, he had a very good reason to be distressed. Be that as it may, scent or no scent, obstreperous females or not, life had to go on. So the males who were less scrupulous in the matter of scent; the ones who had their vagueness of aim, were the ones who sired progeny and replicated their own kind.
Now a poor sexually bewildered male is just what we needed if we were ever to transfer from rear entry copulation to face to face sex. No self assured male primate would ever believe that his instincts in this matter could be wrong. From what we know of the other primates, no self-assured and sane primate male could ever contemplate what amounts to an attack on a female of his species, nor could he ever permit another male to do so. According to the male's genetic memories of acceptable behaviour, front to front copulation would constitute nothing less than an attack on the female.
I just refuse to accept the suggestion by Elaine Morgan that a hominid male, in a moment of "brilliance" could possibly have conceived the idea of frontal sex. Even in his badly confused state, he couldn't willingly break such a prime directive in his genetic memory. I am sure that what happened was a far more complex than this. And there is plenty of evidence for what did happen in our race memory, or Jung's "collective unconscious". We will consider this in more detail.
I must emphasise that most, if not all, of our mythology says that it was the woman who initiated the Fall. The entire present day male folk-lore says it is the woman who catches the man and not vice versa. Women claim that it is almost impossible to convince police or the courts that they have been raped. There is this irrational certainty in the male mind that it is the woman who leads the man on, right up to the last moment and that it is only when his responses have gone into automatic control that she cries "rape". Perhaps there is a foundation of truth in this. Lets go back in time to the coasts and islands of the Pliocene era, which is when and where the event now known as the "Fall" took place.
Here is the female hominid, ready and willing for copulation and doing her very best to excite the interest of her chosen male. And this is not easy, now that the unmistakable scent cues have been lost. Finally she manages to get him away from his cohorts and, programmed by four hundred million years of experience, he naturally tries the rear-entry technique and fails. She is one of those oddities whose vagina just can't be reached from behind. Will he now, in a moment of brilliance, throw her to the ground belly up and try that way? I think not. He is more likely to shrink away in shame. It is not his problem in any case. He is already so confused that there is no way in the world that he is going to take the initiative and try out a brand new style. No, the problem is hers; she's the one with the itch; and she's the only one who really knows what she wants and is sure enough of herself to see that she gets it. And she knows how it can be done.
I consider that I am on solid ground with this statement, since we have no scientific evidence to prove that man is superior to other primates or even to other mammals in solving problems involving orientation in space. Now it is most unlikely that she sat down and reasoned out her problem from first principles, but she could have arrived at her solution by analogy.
There is an animal interaction that she most likely saw and interpreted as a solution to her problem. Suffice to say, at this stage, that she had decided that frontal sex was the solution to her immediate needs. Having made that decision, there is nothing in the world which could stop her from getting what she wanted. The males were already confused, already shamed; they were no effective opposition. What she wanted, she would have.
By a series of gestures, threats and whatever was necessary she persuaded a male to comply. But there were a couple of hitches in the plan, one's that she just hadn't allowed for at all.
Rear entry sex was one thing. At no time did you get to see your partner's face. And we must consider that facial expressions had become a vital form of communication, especially with the loss of scent. Face to face sex was a very different matter indeed. The act of copulation is essentially an impersonal matter, and the male hominid's facial expressions would not have radiated friendliness. Then there was the matter of an infringement on personal space to be taken into account; both hers and his. Add to this the absolute awkwardness of a rank beginner at this new fangled idea who, to do the job at all, would probably have to back her up against a tree, and you both end up in a pretty sorry psychological state. At the last moment she would get quite scared and want to forget the whole deal.
But its a bit late for her to change her mind now. She has finally convinced the male of what she wants, and its just too late to decide to opt out at this stage. He's not likely to believe her now, and he never will again for several million years. But his concepts of right and wrong have been badly confused; now she says she wants it, then she says she doesn't. In the past her fright would have stopped him completely, but she is no longer giving out the fear smell. He just doesn't know what to believe in this modern world, but he does know that he has broken an aeons long taboo about aggression and it wasn't really his fault. He's gotten himself a really first class psychological hang-up over this, and it will take him a very long time to fully recover.
The trouble is, its not only sex that he is having trouble with. The whole male dominance system has gone astray. There are no longer any sure-fire signals to tell him when an opponent has had enough. Speech is under volitional control and can't be trusted. Even if an opponent signals by gestures that he his beaten, those signals can't be trusted any more and there is no way of confirming that capitulation by scent.
It is only necessary to add extreme environmental stresses to this situation and you're likely to end up with a very sorry mess indeed; you'll get the first species to ever develop regular fits of madness. The extreme environmental stress that our ancestors didn't need, began at the commencement of the Pleistocene era, as a consequence of the Orion explosion.
We can now look at a full and updated version of the first fall. After so long a time, our race memory has become somewhat hazy, and the details are at times indistinct, so perhaps what I am about to say is no more than a fairy tale. Feel quite free to treat it as that, unless it stirs some distant chords in your own race memory. The story goes this way.
The location was the coasts and islands between Asia and Australia. The date was 2.5 to 3 million years ago. The actors were our ancestors, a race of bipedal, furless and not very bright hominids. They had been living in paradise, but adaptive changes to their bodies had brought about a first order biological crisis. Females had begun to be born whose sexual organs were completely inaccessible to the male penis, for the long established rear-entry technique. There can be no doubt that these unfortunates died without progeny; but even this did not stop the inexorable progress of the adaptive change. A biological crisis of ever increasing magnitude arose as an ever-increasing percentage of females just couldn't be fertilised. The race was on the verge of extinction.
Emergencies often produce a genius, and, fortunately for us, this case was not an exception. Let us look at her now. For the role she was to play, she must have been a highly dominant female. No simpering little miss would have been adequate to the task. Here she is now, sitting on a tree root, deep in anguish. She is at the peak of her esterus cycle and is just itching for what she knows is her right. And she is frustrated as all hell. If there were such a being as the Devil, she'd gladly sell her soul to him, if only he would solve her problem for her. The trouble is, there is no way she can possibly meet a being who doesn't yet exist. (The Devil was only invented much, much later, by her progeny.) Any solution to her problem has to come from her, and her alone.
We have already seen that the crux of her problem is that her vagina is totally inaccessible to the longest male penis. She doesn't fully understand this but has a rough idea of the nature of the difficulty. She is certainly very painfully aware that those stupid clumsy males just can't do a thing for her; the silly bloody fools.
It's not her fault. You couldn't possibly find anyone more willing and co-operative than she is. She has been round the lot; even condescended to approach obviously inferior type males, in the futile hope that they might be able to achieve something. But nothing has ever come of it; nothing - ever! God what is she to do now?
Her prayer is answered. In the midst of her despair, her attention is caught by a pair of snakes in what appears to be a courtship dance. Her interest increases as she sees the two snakes rear up vertically with the front part of their bodies. They sway back and forth and from side to side, all the time trying to knock or push the other one backwards. They wrestle and weave in this way for many minutes and are quite oblivious to her presence.
Now, we humans have only just discovered that the participants in this courtship are both males, and that the whole business has nothing to do with mating. But she doesn't know that. Why should she? And what she sees is the obvious solution to her difficulty - frontal sex. But to even contemplate this is to reject the instincts formed over a period of four hundred million years. Her need is great enough, and female primates are, in any case, more innovative than males. She dares a great deal indeed.
She moves up to the most dominant male in what she knows as her most alluring manner, and, by a series of gestures, she tells him what she wants him to do. He is slow to comprehend, and even slower to respond. His instincts revolt at the very suggestion. It is quite obscene. Besides, it is her problem, not his. There are still some opportunities left for proper sex, as far as he is concerned.
Perhaps she has to try several males, but, caught up in the sheer ecstasy of her discovery, she will not tolerate any thought of defeat. Eventually a male must comply, almost certainly an inferior one. This is where another difficulty comes in. The idea was good, but to put it into practice is not so easy. Neither of them had ever done it this way before, and his heart is just not in it. Still, with the picture of the snakes held clearly in her mind, she stands in front of him, weaving and pushing at him. Presumably he makes several abortive attempts from behind and starts to get very frustrated himself.
Perhaps, in desperation she even place his penis in the right place. Anyway, somewhere along the line, her aggressive display arouses sufficient sexual response, and suddenly the matter becomes his problem too. But he can't keep his penis in the right place with her jitterbugging around in front of him like some mad thing. He gets irritated, then truly angry. He reaches the limit of his ability to cope, goes berserk, pushes her up against the nearest tree trunk and, in a matter of seconds, his immediate problem is over. But, at what cost, he will soon discover. In a moment of insanity, he has ignored a first order taboo and attacked a female of his own species. This would have been bad enough in any context, but in a sexual relationship it was unforgivable. The attack is even much worse than the obscene act of frontal sex. He is left with an appalling sense of guilt for he has just committed "the original sin", an act that was to taint the human race from that day to this.
As for the female, her problems have only just begun. He frightened the very devil out of her and she feels a bit guilty about the whole matter in any case, but that would soon disappear, except for one thing. You'd think that the bungling damn fool could at least have done his job properly. Her itch hasn't gone! It's still there, almost every last little bit of it. And this is no wonder, since her erogenous zones were designed for rear entry sex, not for this new fangled frontal entry business.
And no matter how often she tries, she will never be properly satisfied in the future; nor will her progeny for the next two to three million years. But, miracle of miracles, she will at least have progeny.
Apart from saving a species from extinction, these two have chalked up a very important first in the history of the Earth. It wasn't frontal sex; a couple of other species have done that as well, though under less trying circumstances. No, what they had done, was to develop the first massive psychological hang-up ever, and there was no army of psychoanalysts to help them.
The poor silly heroic fool. She couldn't possibly have understood the true greatness and horror of her deed. All she knew, was that she was just itching for copulation, and that she would have it, one way or another. Her name was Eve, the first mother of the human race, and the long line of Matriarchs were to come forth out of her womb, and the first goddesses were her descendants.
This was the fall. I agree with Elaine Morgan that it had nothing at all to do with apples.
In this manner, feelings of guilt and dissatisfaction entered into Eden at the instigation of the serpents. All we need now to complete the picture is punishment of the guilt by a wrathful heavenly god. And this was not lacking. Guilt, unsatisfied sexual desire and the wrath of a heavenly god were all that was necessary to continually stress these poor animals and their progeny to their psychological breaking point. From now on, they could never be truly at ease. Two or three million years of this regular torment naturally forced mental adaptation at an accelerating rate, in the direction of a larger and more complex brain. The problem was a psychological one and, of necessity, required a psychological answer. This highly stressed mental adaptation was probably unique in the history of evolution on this Earth. Its outcome was mankind, a species still haunted by guilt, sexual inadequacy, and fear of the wrath of a heavenly god.
As the hominid brain developed in size, it first increased its memory storage capacity, as we see in the development of Neanderthal man. With adequate storage capacity, the data processing equipment was increased, as we see with Cro-Magnon man. Since that time, we have either gone in for more miniaturisation of circuitry, or else our mental capacity has diminished, because modern man has a noticeably smaller brain than either Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon man. Since it is quite evident that the human race has not yet solved the fundamental problems for which we grew a larger brain, I would suggest that we have miniaturised our brain circuitry in recent times.
How does mythology view these events? In terms of both Judaic and Greek mythology, everything seems to begin with a Golden Age. According to the Greek version, this was the first stage of mankind, the age of innocence. There were no bodily infirmities, and nobody had to work. Perfect happiness, truth, and right prevailed. There was perpetual spring. There were no arts, no crafts; the earth brought forward everything needed. There were no wives, no daughters, no women! Only men were on earth during this age.
At the close of this age, Prometheus (forethought) stole fire from heaven and Zeus desired to punish him by giving him a wife. So Pandora was created, the first mortal female to ever live. Prometheus, sensible to the deceit of Zeus, refused to accept Pandora. His brother Epimetheus (afterthought) wasn't so clever and he married her.
When Pandora opened the box (some say it was Epimetheus), a host of plagues escaped to harass hapless man; only Hope remained in the box.
According to Aeschylus, Prometheus is not only the bringer of fire and civilisation to men, but also their preserver. Zeus had intended to destroy them and create a new race, but Prometheus prevented this and gave men not only the means of survival but all the arts and sciences.
The Hebrew version contains a variation of this myth. Again we have the man created first and placed in the garden of Eden. Long before woman appeared, he had been around naming all the animals. Before Eve was created, he was told `You may eat from every tree in the garden, but not from the tree of knowledge of good and evil; for on the day that you eat from it, you will surely die."
We also find "They were both naked, the man and his wife, but they had no feeling of shame towards one another."
At this stage the serpent enters, and suggests to the woman that she should eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. She ate some, then persuaded her husband to do likewise. "Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they discovered that they were naked; so they stitched fig-leaves together and made themselves loincloths."
Enter God on the scene and recriminations all round, Adam gallantly said that it was Eve's fault; Eve said it was the serpent's fault; and God got rather nasty about the whole business. He said to the serpent:
"Because you have done this you are accursed more than all cattle and all wild creatures. On your belly you shall crawl, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I shall put enmity between you and the woman, between your brood and hers. They shall strike at your head, and you shall strike at their heel.
To the woman he said:
"I will increase your
labour and your groaning,
and in labour you shall bear children.
You shall be eager for your husband,
and he shall be your master."
And to the man he said:
"Because you have listened to your wife
and have eaten from the tree I forbade you,
accursed shall be the ground on your account.
With labour you shall win your food from it
all the days of your life.
It will grow thorns and thistles for you,
none but wild plants for you to eat.
You shall gain your bread from the sweat of your brow
until you return to the ground;
for from it you were taken
Dust you are, to dust you shall return."
God is said to have made tunics of animal skins for Adam and Eve and so clothed them. God then drove them out of Eden and placed the cherubim (and a flaming sword which turned every day) to guard the way to the tree of life.
Adam and Eve had children, and these children introduced the concept of making burnt sacrifices to God. One of them was also the first murderer.
Now here is a delightful wealth of detail to get yourself lost in. At first glance it is rather embarrassing because of its apparent naivety. But is it really naive? I'll let you be the judge.
The Hebraic story doesn't specify what is meant by this knowledge of good and evil. Other Judaic and Christian traditions appear to invariably link it with the act of copulation itself. "The original sin", so it is called. This should immediately get our attention. How could the God, who created animals in the world in which we find ourselves, possibly regard copulation as a sin. He created the very concept himself, in the long, long ago. There must be more to it than just copulation. The only taboo for the rest of the animals is to combine male aggression with the act of copulation, and it is most unlikely that a separate rule would have been made, just for us.
Judaic tradition clearly blames the woman for the Fall, whereas the Greek mythology isn't so sure that it mightn't have been the man. Now that seems to be fair enough, and is quite in accord with my deductions about our origins.
Perhaps one of the most striking aspects of both myths is the outright refusal to admit that there could have been females in the Golden Age. This blatant contradiction of normal logic certainly seems to point to some neurosis. There is a certain amount of confirmation of this hypothesis in the idea that Pandora was created specially to punish Prometheus and that she brought as her dowry, a host of plagues.
The absolute insistence that everything in the garden was rosy also raises one's eyebrows. It seems to suggest that even before the fall, men were having problems of some sort; problems that perhaps had something to do with females. You could argue that I'm stretching the point a bit here, and maybe you'd be right. I don't know for sure. I'm only guessing, but it seems probable.
From what we can now surmise, this concept of the later creation of woman may technically have a grain of truth to it. If we classify the female hominid as woman only when she is inaccessible to rear-entry sex, maybe there is a real point to the myth. In that specific context, I guess that Eve did come after Adam.
On particularly interesting aspect of the Judaic myth is the introduction of the serpent or snake. This reptile traditionally has the reputation for wisdom, and it is frequently associated with fertility cults; either separately or in pairs. Now the Greek God of fertility was Hermes and, among other things, he carried a staff with two serpents twined around it. This emblem appears time and time again in fertility cults and it must have some important meaning in our race memory. We find this serpent on a staff turning up with Moses at the time of the Exodus from Egypt, but in a possibly degenerate form; only one snake.
Now lets summarise this bit about snakes. It was allegedly this snake which inspired Eve to do what she did. Earlier fertility traditions would suggest the possibility of two snakes being involved. God ,in cursing the serpent states, "On your belly you shall crawl, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life." Now that really is interesting. Was there ever a time when a snake didn't go on its belly? Theologians have all sort of bother on this matter. But we know of a time when a snake isn't on its belly and, at such a time, there are invariably two of them involved; both males; and what they do has often been mistaken for a mating dance. (It is, in fact, a ritual combat.) That part seems to fit nicely with my deductions.
Since we have brought God into the matter, let us look at what he is supposed to have said to the woman.
"I will increase your
labour and your groaning
and in labour you shall bear children."
Now that also is interesting. When didn't a woman have difficulty giving birth to a child? The answer is immediately obvious. It was a time when the child had a smaller head, way back in the Pliocene epoch, before the Fall. We seem to have here a simple statement of the future consequences of that first psychological hang-up. God goes on to say:
"You shall be eager for
your husband,
and he shall be your master."
That is a realistic enough assessment too. The woman hadn't lost the sex drive. It was the man that had gone all astray and kinky. Since he needed her a lot less than she needed him, he could afford to drive a hard bargain. To the shame of my sex, he could not only afford to, he did.
Now there is still that wretched tree to be accounted for. I'm not really happy about it at all. The myth seems to be saying that it was at some tree or other that this knowledge of good and evil was obtained. What sort of tree? What on earth does a tree have to do with it? The fruit business seems to be a bit of a red herring too, unless the hominid female was sitting there, eating a fig, when she saw the snakes. I mention figs for two reasons. `Firstly, after the fall, the two hominids are suppose to have made clothing from fig leaves. Secondly, most ancient cultures worshipped trees and, of these the fig is one of the most important. The Egyptians regarded the fig as sacred as far back as 2000 BC. In Rome, the fig became the sacred tree of Bacchus, the god of the vine. To the Greeks, the fig was equally sacred, and they constructed the Parthenon for Athena (goddess of wisdom) in honour of her invention of the fig tree. The fig tree is also associated with wisdom by the Budhists, since it is said that Budda sat under a bo tree (wild fig) for seven weeks in his quest for all knowledge .Perhaps it was against some fig tree that the first copulation between our hominid Adam and Eve took place. Your guess may be as good as mine, but there is something bothering our race memory that is linked with a fig tree, and the garden of Eden seems to be a good place to locate it.
There is another point which nagged at me once I noticed it. It's clothing. Up to the time of the Fall, our hominids had been getting along quite nicely without clothing at all. Perhaps, after the fall, they did feel embarrassed and somewhat ashamed at what they had done. Maybe this was why they made clothing of fig leaves. Everything fits OK up to this point, but no further. The bombshell is: "Why on earth did these previously contented unclad hominids suddenly find a need for fur clothing? Would you believe that it was the onset of the ice ages of the Pleistocene Era? I think that I might.
There is another point too, that seems to bear this out. Greek mythology tells us that just before the Fall, Zeus had intended to destroy mankind and create a new race. But Prometheus foiled his plans by stealing fire from heaven and giving it to men. The question becomes, "In what way was Zeus going to destroy mankind and how did their acquisition of fire stop this? Would you believe that we are once more confronted with the onset of the ice ages?
Another point of significance. Adam and Eve are reported to have been driven out of Eden by God. Now, how on earth could this happen? Not even a badly mixed up animal like man or our hominid ancestors is going to leave paradise without a yike or two. And we are not just dealing with two people, we are dealing with a whole species settled quite contentedly on the edge of a nice bountiful seashore. It would take a hell of a lot of pressure to budge me from there to a place that was accursed; a place where I would have to labour to win my food; a place which would only grow thorns and thistles for me; a spot with nothing but wild plants for me to eat. You can bet your last dollar that I wouldn't be in a hurry to move, any more than would have been our hominid ancestors.
I think that Elaine Morgan must have felt a bit irked by this exodus from the seashore too. She seemed to gloss over very quickly the circumstances which caused our ancestors to leave the seashore. It can't have been mere curiosity and the urge to explore, or one hell of a lot of "stay at homes" would have done just that. It must have been something of a world-wide phenomena. Would you believe the onset of the ice ages? At this stage, I bet you wouldn't. But just think of what happened at that time. Apart from the weather at the seashore getting noticeably colder, there were massive changes in the sea level. Beaches that had for so long been nice and shallow for great distances from shore, gradually changed their character and deep water was practically at the shoreline. The mortality amongst youngsters increased alarmingly, as more and more children drowned. The seaside even ceased to be safe for adults. Something had to be done; and it was. The migration from the seashore began en masse. I would point out that, in Jungian psychology, a steep slope, or abyss, is recognised as an archetypal warning for a very unpleasant psychological experience ahead.
Combined with these drastic changes in sea level there would also have been regular tsunami waves caused by earthquakes and volcanoes. Under such circumstances, the coasts and islands between Asia and Australia would have become nothing but a death-trap. There can be no doubt about the manner in which our hominid ancestors were driven out of Eden.
Another point about the myths that catches my attention.
Just about the fall, Prometheus has stolen fire from heaven. Now surely that is a bit hard? Or is it? Perhaps not, since the Orion explosion undoubtedly produced certain comets that could rain burning petroleum down to earth.
You will also recall that the Judaic tradition talks of some sort of angel with a flaming sword. How would you care to relate this to a not insignificant number of volcanoes erupting throughout Eden?
All in all, I think the circumstances were drastic enough to force the most determined hominid in the world away from the environment to which he had happily became accustomed.
Now the direct descendants of Adam and Eve are reported to have offered burnt sacrifices to God. The archetype for such sacrifices seems to have quite a prominent place in the murky depth of our psyche. Children have been burned alive to honour Baal; most races have, at one stage or another, practised some variant of this abhorrent ritual. The Roman Catholic Church practised it during the Inquisition; devout Budhists more recently still immolated themselves in Vietnam. Just what is behind it all?
I would suggest that our ancestors saw animals and humans being burnt by fire from heaven, and concluded that such things were pleasing to God. This idea would tie in nicely with Prometheus stealing fire from heaven. This suggestion is pretty horrible, I will admit, but how else can we account for the origins and universality of the practice. I don't believe that even man could have been insane enough to invent the idea out of nothing.
There is another point in the Greek creation myth that deserves attention. It was the less dominant brother, Epimetheus, who took Pandora as a wife. The truly dominant brother, Prometheus, would have nothing to do with her. That is interesting, for it is totally in accord with sub-human primate behaviour. It is well established that the dominant males claim sole access to the females during the peak of esterus, and they won't have anything to do with them at other times. It was only when she wasn't at her peak that the less dominant males were permitted to copulate with her, and they had learned to accept her, even in the absence of the right scent cue.
After some two to three million years, you might argue that we have bred all the truly dominant males out of the species. But this need not be so. Edward O. Wilson 69 was particularly concerned with why altruistic acts had not long ago been bred out of all life-forms. For example, a worker bee will defend its hive by stinging, an act which costs it its life. He wanted to know how suicide can be favoured by natural selection, or the survival of the fittest?
In the case of our hominid ancestors, the question can be rephrased: How can dominant male genes be passed on when the dominant males refuse to mate?" The answer appears to be that it doesn't matter, so long as there are brothers who will. It is all tied up with the future replication of genes. Your body can be thought of as a colony of cells, whose behaviour is largely determined by the genes they contain. There is a close similarity between the genetic structure of near kin, so eventually, something virtually identical to the dead individual's genetic structure can be reproduced in the offspring of his kinfolk.
I wonder if we have premonitions of this concept, or even a genuine understanding of it, in the Jewish law, that if a man dies without progeny, it is his brother's responsibility to fertilise the dead man's wife.
Before we go into detail of the sorry state of affairs that existed from time to time during the two or three million years after the Fall, lets take one last complete look at the psychological state of our hominid ancestors not too long after that event. With all due respect to the ladies, we will take the gentlemen first.
You're really and truly in a sorry mess. You just don't know if you are coming or going any more. You used to know with certainty just who was friend and who was foe. The language of scent had never lied. There used to be an established dominance structure and you knew exactly where you stood. That has gone-all gone. These days you could easily make a mistake and get all hell beaten out of you for your stupidity. Even if you thought you had an enemy down and out, you couldn't be sure of him like you once could. Now you never really knew; if you turned your back on him, he might pick up a lump of wood or a stone and clobber you one.
With this disappearance of the language of scent that gave certainty about the intentions of others, the trickster had appeared on the scene. It is perhaps highly relevant that a white monkey is still a frequent archetypal expression of the trickster, according to Jungian psychology. And what better example of a white monkey could you find than our furless hominid ancestors. Perhaps the only safe policy to adopt these days was to kill whoever looked as though he might be an enemy. Till now, the aggression taboo, preventing you from attacking somebody giving off the fear scent, had been absolute. But there was no scent these days and you could never be sure.
As if all of this uncertainty wasn't bad enough by itself, there had been a right miserable foul-up with your sex life too. The females never smelt ready for you any more and they had gotten all out of shape. A poor male couldn't get inside them the right way any more. The only way you could make it was with this new-fangled system that some screwball of a dame must have dreamt up in a nightmare. My God, she must have hated males. They had even gone and grown a shield over their vaginas, just to keep you out.
If you were a dominant male, you had entirely lost interest in the whole misbegotten brood of females. You knew for a certainty that they were never ready for you any more. This just didn't make sense because, over a period of hundreds of millions of years, nothing like this had ever been heard of. You turned to displacement activities such as hunting and inventing weapons and so forth, just to relieve your tension and frustration's.
If you were a subdominant male, you still mated with the females, but, my God, it was a lousy set-up for you too. You didn't know where you were. Right up to the very end, all the visual signals would say, "Welcome, welcome". Then, just at the last minute, when you were in, you'd get a confused lot of signals that seemed to say "Stop it, stop it! You're scaring hell out of me." Obviously there was something wrong with your performance, but you didn't know what it was. And you didn't have all that much self-confidence in the first place. After all, you were born a sub-dominant male, even if you did now seem to have all the girls to yourself.
With this sort of thing going on, you no longer felt like doing your thing in front of the whole troop. Let's face it, you were quite ashamed of it all. And, by hiding away to do it, you were depriving the youngsters of the tuition that they so badly needed and that formerly had been their right. When their turn came, they were often even worse at it than their elders.
No matter what sort of male you were, what you needed more than anything else at this very moment was a new language, a language which gave you back your old certainty about the intentions of others. Furthermore, you desperately need to be able to think things out in some nice quiet spot, away from the hurley- burley of the troop.
What you most certainly didn't need at this very moment was to be driven out of your familiar territory into a completely new environment; that was traumatic itself; but to have fire and rocks flung down at you from the skies; to have the ground shaking under your feet; to have lightning bolts of previously unheard of ferocity come whizzing at you from all directions and those horrendous claps of thunder; to have fire and molten rock come belching out of the earth at you; to have the sky regularly darkened so you couldn't see what you were doing; to find that things were getting mighty cold and you had nothing to wear; you didn't need any of these things, but you most surely got them. And what on earth could any reasonable primate conclude after all this? There was only one possible answer.
Somebody up there in the sky sure as hell didn't like you. And you knew why, too. It was all the fault of those blasted females with their new-fangled ideas. It made you hate their guts. Like many of your descendants who came after you, you had to have somebody as a scapegoat, and you couldn't bear that the scapegoat should be you.
And it wasn't you, was it?
You weren't to know that what was happening was a perfectly natural phenomena associated with the solar system's passage into an unstable zone of the galaxy and, that it had nothing at all to do with you personally. Like everyone with a guilty conscience, you were sure that just everybody was against you, and especially that cranky rock thrower up there in the sky. You saw burning naptha fall on animals and consume them. OK, if that what the bastard up there wants, you think, I'll burn animals for him. Maybe that will get him off my back. It doesn't. You see babies consumed in the same way. OK, if that's what he wants, you'll give them to him to.
That's not successful. Is he never satisfied? Well if he wants women, he can have them; you are not at all keen on them any more in any case. And if you're going to sacrifice women, the best of all are virgins. They've got that indecent device for keeping men out. They must hate men's guts, or they wouldn't have grown it. Let them burn. Why should you care, just as long as that cranky bloke up there gets off your back and gives you the peace and quiet that you are so desperately need to sort out your problems. Even if he wants some men, so what; you will make very sure that it isn't you. And, if you are the dominant type, you will make very sure it isn't you. You may even persuade some of those other bloody fools that their deaths will all be for the glory of the troop, or some god, o r even for a volcano; anything for a bit of peace and quiet. You're not to know just how long you will have to wait for that peace and quiet that you so badly need.
If you are a female, you are not quite so badly off, in some respects. Sure, there are some bad tempered males around. But you have grown used to that by now. All this thunder and lightning and so on is simply terrifying, but you don't have much of a guilty conscience so you don't think it is aimed at you. There is really nothing much you can do about it, except produce babies like mad. And that is not nearly as easy as it sounds these days. The males you want just aren't interested. They've gone queer all of a sudden. You can't arouse their interest, no matter how hard you try. This has never happened before to your ancestors-ever-not since the world began. All you've got left to work on are simpletons; a pretty miserable sort of bunch too. They can't satisfy you, no matter how often you get them to try. You've made them do it too, time after time, time after time, and you still got no satisfaction. But your instincts keep telling you that there is something in it for you, if only you keep trying. So you do. You never really give up hope; and, like Pandora, that is all that is left for you right now.
Those bloody-minded males have gone mad. They're killing each other off right and left. This has never happened before in the history of the earth. They're burning animals; babies too; even women and men; all to placate that blood thirsty character they think is up in the sky. You despise them for their stupidity, but, for the sake of the children to be, you've got to put up with what ever they do. They mightn't be much, but they're the only males you have got. You try to humour them; you introduce all sorts of sub-routines into the courtship so as to make copulation more exciting and pleasing to them; anything to arouse their interest. Somewhere along the line, you invent cosmetics, perfumes and clothes, just to make the poor fools sit up and take notice. But you never really get the full satisfaction that instincts tell you is your right.
You've never been worried too much about the dominance structure of the troop either; that was more a male concern. But you fervently wish that those psychotic simpletons wouldn't start beating up you and the kids, just because they were beaten up by a stronger male. It is not fair at all; and this too, never once happened to your ancestors - not in over four hundred million years. You don't know what the world is coming to either; but you do think its about time that things took a turn for the better. Like the males, you too will have a mighty long time to wait before things begin to improve.
I think that this outline is a fairly good approximation to the psychological state of our ancestors, not too long after the fall. It is far from a pretty picture, and not particularly flattering to anyone, but our past has not been one unadulterated sequence of joys. If it had been, Homo Sapiens would never have evolved.
You will notice that it was the males who were more affected by the events of the time. This was inevitable, since it was they, and they alone, who had broken the aggression taboos, no matter who had caused them to do it. They were quite psychotic. What they badly needed, needed more than anything else, was to protect themselves from their guilty consciences and the terror around them. And they did. They retreated into themselves and surrounded themselves with a set of laws and customs to minimise the impact of three terrifying experiences in particular; a wrathful heavenly god; the trickster; and contact with women. The result was a form of calm that resulted from retreat into one delusion of security after another, a situation which remains almost unchanged to the present day, about two to three million years later.
The more dominant males set themselves up in an analogue to monastery life and began to explore both their minds and the universe, well away from the disturbing influence of women.
The women, moreover, got heartily fed up with the entire troublesome breed of psychotic males, and established the first matriarchal society, thus paving the way to human civilisation, a civilisation initially solely dependent upon the inventiveness of women. So began the first extended culture of humans, a civilisation created by women for the benefit of women and in which the lesser males who stayed with them were definitely second class citizens, and barely tolerated by the women.
In this manner, the concept of matrilineal descent became ingrained into established custom and was not seriously challenged till a reasonably integrated male god arose in the corridors of time.
The matriarchs developed a set of laws for themselves, a set of laws ingrained into their male offspring from the cradle to the grave. Only the women had the right to issue arms ; this was an obvious early step. It was absolutely taboo to kill kin, and the three Furies were created to punish transgressors. The definition of kin was obviously limited to the matrilineal concept, as can clearly been seen even as late as the writing of the "Eumenides" by Aeschylus. There was no real blood guilt if a wife killed her husband, but there assuredly was if a son killed his mother, or say his sister.
A prime taboo was obviously the shedding of any female blood at all, and this merely required an enforcement of the pre-existing male genetic memory. There was a problem with this, however. With the emigration from the seaside, the new-fangled female hymen didn't get worn before puberty like it used to. For a male to use his penis or any other means to pierce this hymen involved the shedding of female blood, and was thus an outright aggression under circumstances where male aggression was totally unacceptable. A variety of precautions was adopted to safeguard against this breech of taboo, ranging from ritual piercing of the hymen in a temple on sacred objects to the custom that required newly married women to go to the temple and first offer themselves to strangers. The latter alternative transferred to a stranger the blood guilt, rather than have it fall on the husband. A variant of this approach was the "droit de seigneur" where it was the duty of the Lord of the Manor to take upon himself the bloodguilt that arose in the deflowering of all newly married women. This approach, in its original form, also gave each woman the chance to get a child by a top class male, a not unimportant refinement.
As Elizabeth Gould Davis 70 points out so clearly, the taboo against sexual intercourse with a menstruating woman is obviously a matriarchal invention, as are a number of other sexual taboos.
With all these precautions by the matriarchy and the "monks", matters were starting to settle down nicely and would not have taken all that long to be sorted out when "the sons of the gods saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; so they took for themselves such women as they choose." All hell broke loose once more.
Have I left anything out? Oh yes, I did, didn't I. I forgot to say that when our ancestors were driven out of the first Eden, as a direct consequences of those drastic changes in sea level and due to volcanic activity, they obviously went to Australia: the first Heaven (haven); the second Eden; the triple island continent of Mu. And that was were most of them stayed, in comparative security, till the time of second creation and then the time of the first flood.
That was where the first civilisation of human kind developed, and where our female ancestors were taught certain of the arts and sciences by the sons of the gods. These sons of the gods were obviously some of the monks who had sorted themselves out psychologically, well enough to permit them to consort again with females. They would obviously be more attractive than the second grade males that the women were used to.
Long after I had originally completed this chapter, I made a fascinating discovery in the ancient Hindu "VYMAANIKA - SHASTRA", a book 62 essentially about the ancient construction of electrically driven aircraft. In chapter six it refers to the Hindu tradition of the four ages of humankind.
The first age, the Krita yuga, began about 4.32 million years ago (or a one thousandth part of a "Day of Brahma"). It lasted till about 2.592 million years ago when a new era, the Threthaa yuga began (almost at the time of the Orion explosion).
In the Krita Yuga,righteousness was fully established and adhered to implicitly by men." The men were inherently noble-born and were possessed of remarkable powers....They were virtuous men and men of learning and wisdom....in the Krita Yuga, or first epoch, the ancients say, there were none of the three classes of Vimaanas (aircraft)." During the Krita Yuga, men were said to have been ascetics, which is in keeping with my deductions about the need for the dominant males to separate from women, and engage in displacement activities.
Then, almost together with the Orion explosion, a new Era began.
"Righteousness became limp of one foot. "It served with 3 feet only, and grew gradually less efficient. So men's minds became dense, and the conception of Vedic truths and anima and other super-sensory powers, became scarcer."
"Perceiving this, God Mahadeva, desiring to confer the power of understanding the Vedas properly on the Dwijas, or brahmins, kshatriyas, and vysyas, graciously descended on earth in the form of Dakshinaamurthy, and through the instrumentality of Sanaka and other appointed sages, classified the Veda mantras, and then bestowing his benedictory glance on the worshipping Munis or ascetics, he blessed them with the gift of Vedic perception. And then to ensure that they were properly receptive, he embraced them and entered their hearts and illuminated their memories."
Pleased with their receptiveness, divine Dakshinaamurthy, favouring them with a benign glance, and with smile on his face, said to them, `Till know you have been known as "Munis" or ascetics. Henceforth, having by my grace attained insight into the Vedas, you shall be known as "Rishis" or seers. You will cultivate the Vedas, and winning her favour, and approaching the Great God Easwara by Yogic Samadhi, ascertain His mind, and by His and my grace, rising to the pinnacle of intellectual vision, became adept's in the meaning and purport of the Vedas, for the benefit of mankind."
Then those munis or seers, enshrining in their hearts God Mahadeva in the form of Dakshinaamurthy, produced the Dharmashaastras or ethical codes, epics, chronicles, manuals on rituals, treatises on the arts and sciences, ritualistic and sacrificial codes, in conformity to the Vedas, and propagated them among men."
The third epoch, the Dwaapara Yuga, began about 1.296 million years ago. In this epoch, men became more carnal, and righteousness became less and less prevalent amongst humankind. [According to Encyclopaedia Britannia, one calculation on a stone at Palenque (Central America - Mayan) leads about 1.25 million years into the past. One wonders if the Mayans also recorded the tradition of the beginning of the Dwaapara Yuga. We have no true knowledge of when the Mayas (or their predecessors carved this stone, but evidence is readily available to show that homo sapiens was in Central America about 50,000 years ago, so agreement between the Maya and the Hindus is potentially exact.]
The final and worst age of all is the Kali Yuga, which began about 432,000 years ago. In another place I have used time honoured techniques to suggest that the era of the original Enoch ended about 345,000 years ago, when God "took" him alive to "heav-en". His era would have begun about 476,000 years ago, and, during this era certain coded writings suggest that a major, technologically advanced war took place. This war presumably signalled the beginning of the Kali Yuga. The Hindus, to this day, link the war of Mahabhrata with the onset of the Kali Yuga. Recent commentators suggest that the Mahabhrata refers to atomic warfare.
According to A. Woldben 71 the ancient Hindu Vishnu Purana refers to the Kali Yuga.
Enough of the final epoch, the era of the Kali Yuga. Have I still left something out? Goodness me, yes I have. I should also have mentioned that the Christian rite of Baptism by total immersion in water is intended is to remind us of the aquatic birth of the human race. Let me now quote John the Baptist as recorded in Luke, chapter 3 :
"I baptise you with water;
but there is one to come who is mightier than me."
"He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with
fire."
The significance of a baptism with water followed by a baptism with the Holy Spirit and fire should be evident to the reader. The human species, or at least its progenitors, went through a physical rebirth in the sea beginning some 12 million years ago. This was followed by a very fiery spiritual or mental rebirth, attributable to the Orion explosion, beginning a bit less than three million years ago. Evidentially, the God of Israel was and is aware of these matters.
Conclusion
A few concluding comments on the creation and the fall will now be given in my capacity as an independent engineering consultant.
God, the ultimate creative spirit of the ancients, whatever else may be said of him, is just. He may be utterly ruthless in carrying out his purposes, but he is just and honest. He could never have proceeded so far with the creation of the universe if he did not have these essential characteristics required of a good engineer. His creation speaks for him, to those with the eyes to see.
Given such a creator, it is unthinkable that he would not permit challenges to his design. After all, no matter how competent he may be, he cannot afford to waste the time to foresee any and every tiny detail that has a faint possibility of going wrong.
I personally believe that every creature in the universe is entitled to challenge the established order of God's design. If they can sustain their challenge, I expect that the new concepts will be incorporated into the grand design. If they cannot sustain their challenge, then, depending upon their motives, the consequences to themselves may be severe.
Over the last three million years, two major challenges have been launched against the Creator's design.
The first such challenge was made by the female hominid in the first seaside Garden of Eden when she challenged the concept of rear entry sex for her kind. The second challenge was issued about 200 000 years ago by the sons of Belial, when they opposed the government established by the Creator, and sought self aggrandisement, and dominion for themselves.
The challenge of the female hominid is clearly sustainable, since no creature can be expected to act beyond its capabilities. She had a very serious problem, and she solved it to the best of her abilities. Her solution led to much grief, but it also led to the creation of free-willed beings.
Woman, you are worthy of my deepest respect. I am truly delighted that you did what you did. Can you ever forgive me for once having been such a squeamish, pontificating, ignorant fool? I have looked on our mutual past and grieved for that which is truly to be grieved. I have looked on our mutual past and laughed for joy; for I would much rather that I was reborn from the depths of madness, than not have been reborn at all. I rejoice that I am what I am.
The challenge of the sons of belial is quite another matter, a matter for which there will likely be a very heavy price to be paid. Their rule on this Earth has led to the opposite of what they once claimed so vehemently that they would achieve.