Ancient Ecologists

ANCIENT ECOLOGISTS

by

Wence Horak

Smashwords Edition

Published on Smashwords by:

Earth Way

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Ancient Ecologists

Copyright 2012 by Wence Horak

ISBN 978-0-9688889-8-8 e-book

ISBN 978-0-9916741-3-8 paperback

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OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR

SKY GODS AND ANGELS

Or Our Ancestors Return From Space To Earth

(an e-book and paperback)

NOSTRADAMUS DECODED

(an e-book and paperback)

DISSENT 101

(an e-book and paperback)

THE ONCE & FUTURE GOD

(an e-book and paperback)

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

PART 1 — PHYSICAL ECOLOGY

Ice Age

The Flood

Terraformation

Forests

Forest Myths

Agriculture

Fallen Gods and the Big Sleep

The Bear Cult

Centaurs and Amazons

The Forest versus The Field

PART 2 — MENTAL ECOLOGY

Ice and Fire

Learning and Forgetting

Chaos and the New Creation

Time to Wake Up

AFTERWORD

INTRODUCTION

Ancient ecologists. These two words, when put next to each other, probably sound to some as a contradiction in terms. If they do, it is merely a conditioned response imparted to us by the present educational system, which still deems the evolution of our species to be linear: From hundreds of thousands of years of pure dim-witted savagery to the first civilizations in Mesopotamia and from there straight to us and into the space.

What used to be only a hypothesis, at the turn of our century, eventually calcified into a ‘fact’ that suited imperialists and communists alike. For a long time additional theories kept polishing the stony facets of this ‘fact’, when, about twenty years ago, serious cracks started appearing in its surface. Gradually these cracks grew wider and deeper, as more and more new facts started to emerge, contradicting the old assumptions.

Today the more seasoned archaeologists and pre-historians are seriously postulating the existence of very sophisticated Paleolithic civilizations on the Eurasian continent. Their tools of trade are artifacts, bones, stones, traces of pollen and of chemical compounds, things that can be tested and re-tested in a lab. Yet, even this orthodox approach enabled them to move back, by some 10,000 years, perhaps even 20,000 years, the real beginning of our civilization.

While the focus of this book does not really move beyond the confines of time indicated above, the conclusions I was able to reach are even more startling in their implications, only one of which is that the true beginning of our civilization goes a lot further back in time. If by a civilization we understand a form of social organization, of system thinking, and of symbol creation, all implicit in the Bear Cult, then it reaches more than 200,000 years into the past.

While true that an ancient picture, or an object, is worth a thousand words, (unless it portrays an animal long considered extinct, which leaves the interpreters speechless), I chose words. Words, as they appear in mythologies, where these discuss numerous subjects, as opposed to the objects of archaeology, which are rather limited in the number of subjects they represent.

I concentrated on myths, because, in Mircea Eliade words, their function is to reveal models … or patterns of reality. Myths also appealed to my personal sensibilities, because … myth was neither sacred nor secular; it was, like art, simply a necessity of life. (M. H. Jameson). Art, of course, is a form of education, and in this respect, which is going to become more and more apparent, mythology was also an educational tool. Certainly the myth goes back to remote ages, but so too does philosophy, states Joseph Campbell, and I could not be more pleased had I made the statement myself, because it blends so nicely with the idea of education.

However, as soon as one immerses oneself in mythologies, especially if one does it along the educational line, one soon encounters diverse problems. The most crucial one is the reliability of the material encountered, because … recorded myths are always more or less marked modifications of a pre-existing text, as was noted by Mircea Eliade. The outlines of myths and tales are subject to damage and obscuration. Archaic traits are generally eliminated and subdued. The motif often suffers … a dislocation and subsequent rationalization, remarked Joseph Campbell.

Well over 2,000 years ago the Greek philosopher Xenophanes complained on the same subject: Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods everything that for men is disgraceful and blameworthy—stealing, adultery and the deception of one another.

Antti Aarne, the pioneering Finnish folklorist, summed up his ideas on the subject of a mythological variant, which he concluded takes one, or all, of the following forms: A myth may: 1. omit details through sheer forgetfulness; 2. add details, either invented or borrowed, often at the beginning or the end of the story; 3. multiply details by a favourite number; 4. reverse the roles of two major characters; 5. change a character from animal to human and vice versa; 6. add culturally specific or modifying details; and 7. be forced into further changes to keep the story consistent.

No wonder then that even such an expert student of mythology as Robert Graves once cried out in frustration: This constant shift of symbolic values makes the allegory difficult … to follow … This difficulty was often compounded by substituting a new meaning for old, forgotten words, a practice resorted often by Celts, and sometimes the original (?) meaning was distorted by punning, which entertainment was enjoyed mainly by the Babylonians and the Egyptians.

Fortunately for us, while keeping an eye out for the symbols, we did not choose the mythologies of the world to be our guides in search of a hidden symbolic meaning, but to ferret out all the information with a tangible connection to the planetary ecology. And since we are looking for facts only, the chances that we would be waylaid by distortions were appreciably reduced. At least as far as the first half of the book is concerned. However, having established the context, should point quite firmly the direction for the second half of this book.

Sifting through the collected trove, I started reflecting on the order in which the individual finds ought to be presented and the idea of the beginning of the Creation came to my mind. Then an observation made by H. B. Alexander, regarding cosmogonic myths of the Pacific Coast, attracted my attention: "… many of the creation stories seem to be, in fact, traditions of the re-forming of the earth after the great annihilation." (Quoted by Mircea Eliade in his Myths and Reality; italics are mine.) Jaan Puhvel said in his Comparative Mythology: "Creation myths form the least ancient part of The Rig Veda … and wax increasingly speculative and philosophical. (Italics are mine.) One could also add that the tormented twists of these speculations seem almost to aspire to scientific airs. By the same token, the creation of mankind from Ra’s tears, for example, is also a relatively recent addition to Egyptian mythology. We can contrast such ‘creation myths’ with the Yakuts’ belief that … the universe has always been. That, to me, would seem to be the more natural attitude of truly ‘primitive’ people, especially those who were not affected by wholesale natural cataclysms with the capacity to end the previous round of evolution, especially in a decisive, visible way. If evolution was to have been, as is still claimed, a gradual, linear progression, there would have been no need for made-up, artificial stories of creation, or rather re-creation. But there was a wholesale world-wide destruction, and it was so massive that, logically speaking, an act of new creation" had to follow. This destruction was, of course, the Flood, or a series of Floods, that took place at the closing of the last Ice Age.

Questions of meaning are often eschewed in myth scholarship. A large number of the essays treating the flood myths consist of retelling of diverse versions of the narrative. A good many merely rehash the results of previous treatises, with little or no effort to interpret the possible significance of flood myths texts, states Alan Dundes in his Flood Myths. While this assertion applies, unfortunately, to almost any subject, in this book I make an all out attempt to interpret every sensible clue that has any bearing on the topic at hand. The Flood, of course, forms the core of this subject, being a watershed where two very distinct worlds parted their ways.

The next big quote, selected for this Introduction, in turn addresses the reliability of the existent interpretations in general: The study of prehistory today is in a state of crisis. Archaeologists all over the world have realized that much of prehistory, as written in the existing textbooks, is inadequate: some of it is quite simply wrong. (Colin Renfrew.) Here we should add that in the United States, and probably elsewhere, 20 percent of all the educational material is wrong.

Reality, as most of us are aware by now, is a mental construct, which, in our case, is already badly flawed. But the more wrong information we implant in the students’ minds, the more flawed the future concept of the world could become, being disseminated by today’s misinformed students. However, when it comes to history, and especially prehistory, the interpretations of which forms the cornerstone of our reality, wrong interpretations, as well as no interpretation, could turn into a disaster, whose severity only grows with our tardiness to correct the situation.

The statement above is not a sudden bolt of lightning from a blue sky, but something the myths, in my opinion, were designed to prevent, but due to the subsequent corruption, which sprang from the magical fault, also mentioned by them, failed to achieve. Corrupted or distorted mythologies, the educational material of the ancient days, led to wrong concepts of reality and these, in turn, to some pretty gruesome social practices and rituals.

Mistakes are, of course, liable to happen. The main problem though, when a species makes a ‘mistake’, with its concept of reality, is inertia. Once any such concept becomes established, it takes terribly long before someone asks the crucial why of it. Yet, as incredible as it may seem, most of the current societies, over the last couple of thousand years, had hardly bothered to ask that little question. Fortunately for us, things had changed somewhat in that department lately and … the climate of thought of the present time … asks not ‘what happened in history’, but why? (Don Brothwell and Eric Higgs in 1963.) We could not agree more. On the other hand, the problem of that short little question is not as easy as it may appear.

A society has to allow, even to encourage its members, to ask this uncomfortable question: Why? It also has to have people capable and willing to ask it, which premise goes back to the cultural values and the concept of reality of such a society. In this one we seemed to have … learned all the answers. It is the questions that we do not know. (Archibald MacLeish.)

But do we really want to know, to hear questions relating to the fragility of our existence, of our current concepts? How do you, for example, ask socially correct questions about evolution?! As implausible, or as contradictory as it may seem, it should be the ecologists asking many of the questions about evolution today. Are they? Not to my knowledge. They all seem to be intent on maintaining the status quo, just like the rest of the society is, albeit for qualitatively different reasons. It is laudable of them to protect nature as much as they can, but the reason why they assumed such an attitude can also be traced back to our concept of reality that not only presupposes a linear evolution, but even strongly implies, and sometimes states outright, that the evolution had been more or less completed. Even if this assumption is made almost exclusively about human species, people also assume that if man, being the latest arrival onto the evolutionary scene, had stopped evolving, so have the rest of the ‘lower animals’, who were at it much longer than us.

Yet nothing could be further from the truth, because the evolution, as far as can be objectively surmised, is speeding up at an incredible pace, and especially so since the emergence of the Homo sapiens. In fact, as I am going to demonstrate, man himself had already been a co-creative participant of the evolution in the past.

Evidently some mythology of a broader, deeper kind than anything envisioned in the past is now required … stated Joseph Campbell. This might very well be, but I am virtually certain, the core of the ancient myths, once properly reconstructed, could fulfill the same role. According to some psychoanalysts, mythology is psychology misread as cosmology, history, and biography. In my opinion, the bulk of mythology is misread ecology, with 99 percent of it originating in the post-Ice-Age era, with the Flood. Yet those mythologies, which were committed to writing, were last transcribed only some 3,000 to 4,000 years ago, their original message severely fragmented and mainly forgotten, at their individual sources. However, in their totality the myths, as you are about to see, can still render a convincing message.

While I set out only to find clues about the planetary ecology in myths, once my research was completed, I realized, to my significant consternation, that all, or almost all the myths, converged originally on one point. That point, the message which I unlocked with the ecological key, really spelled out a different word: evolution; and namely that the evolution of our species is not linear.

From the mythopoetic language, in which this information is coached, that transforms the gods and goddesses of life into the gods and goddesses of death, that speaks of life in death, of living in a dream state, of the reduction of senses, of half-beings, dismembered giants, disappearance of the gods, etc., etc., we can hear, repeated over and over, in numerous metamorphosis one fact: humanity had progressed substantially in its evolution, at least five times, only to suffer as many partial regressions.

As it turned out, the planetary ecology, whose study was my primary goal, only became a part of the larger picture. Eventually I decided to write the book in two parts, devoting the first one to physical ecology, and the second to mental ecology.

The first part is pretty straightforward, relying basically on direct quotes from various myths, which hardly need any symbolic interpretation. The combined message does not leave any doubt: substantial portions of the land mass had to be terraformed, after the Flood(s) completely submerged large portions of what formally used to be a dry land and devastated the new coastlines, deep inland, while the retreating glaciers left the land denuded to the bedrock. Because of the destruction caused on the land, and the loss of land mass equivalent to a continent with a tropical or semi-tropical climate, the ancient ecologist had to act swiftly, otherwise the oxygen loss would have become crippling, perhaps permanently. In a language identical to many myths, the sky was being ‘lifted’, following its collapse after the Flood.

The second part is somewhat more intricate, because there I had to find my way through a mine field of, at first, seemingly confusing, or nonsensical symbols. But once I recognized the validity of my interpretative key, most of the difficulties have vanished and for the first time the symbols of sleep, fire, Moon, Sun, snakes, winter kings, Bear Cult, Centaurs, Amazons, etc., finally made a coherent sense and congealed in a unified field of prehistoric mythology. However, finding the key itself was almost analogous to a myth on the subject: where is the magician’s soul: in this box you find a key that opens a box somewhere else, etc.

Understanding, perhaps more intuitively than rationally, the level of sophistication and the amount of empirical knowledge that went into creating the acupuncture and I Ching system on the one side, and the incredibly clever design of a boomerang, already utilized by the Neanderthals, or the intricate concept of the stone hand axe, known from long before the Neanderthals, I have always held the rather ‘naïve’ assumption that the people of 100,000 years, or 300,000 years ago, were not all that different from us in the mental sense. (Today, perhaps, we represent a mid-point between the mental swings of the past.) This assumption, which, at best, would be labeled an evolutionary heresy, allowed me to think of the ancient people within a framework of the contemporary mental activities, conditioned, of course, by different circumstances, which would have eventually provided them with adequate understanding of the natural processes taking place around them. Basic knowledge of ecology does not really require more than curiosity, combined with a keen talent for observation and comparison, as well as reliable oral tradition of such phenomena, not to say of written records of the same.

While this might seem rather far-fetched to some of you, at least one tradition speaks of a presence of a university, since perhaps 15,000 years ago, which would also suggest a presence of such before the global cataclysm. Furthermore, this form of skill was lost several times during our historical period as well, for centuries at a time, including the one after the fall of Rome, which was not nearly as shattering event as the one circa 15,500 years ago.

What follows now represents an overview of my research into the records of these apocalyptic events, as recorded in myths. Its relative brevity reflects my own impatience with ponderous tomes and my inclination to make complex material as cohesive and readable as possible.

PART 1

PHYSICAL ECOLOGY

ICE AGE

Every 300 million years, or so, climatologists tell us, Earth experiences a glacial period. The very first one started some 800 million years ago and lasted about 200 million years. The next one occurred between 350 and 250 million years back. The current one began about four million years ago. And that, interestingly enough, is the time when the first humanoid species, the Australopithecus, appeared on this planet. At about the same time progenitors of modern animal species that we, for one reason or another, associate with life of the contemporary man, started to appear as well in their present form. These included horses, camels, cattle, bison, pigs, deer, bears, wolves and dogs, even rats, mice and numerous other rodents.

Within the past glacial period we have the ability, albeit somewhat limited, to pinpoint the individual ice ages and the corresponding interglacial periods. Climatologists, like any scientists, feel compelled to present their knowledge as an exact science. And any exact science has to be able to demonstrate that the subject of its study obeys a certain set of rules, or laws, whose understanding would enable them to describe the processes involved and to predict its future behaviour.

The best the climatologists were able to come up with, is the Milutin Milankovich’s theory that postulates a 100,000 year long cycles for the ice ages, correlated by two (or perhaps three) shorter cycles, roughly of 20,000 and 40,000 years duration.

But this theory is still very much a product of the Old Science, still too obsessed with the seeming mechanics of nature, such as cosmic dust, geometry of the path this planet is ascribing around the Sun, the inclination of this planet, (the tilt of the polar axis), and the energy output of the Sun.

Yet, we know that since about three billion years ago, when the first life appeared on this planet, the Sun’s energy output has gone up by some 30 percent, while the average surface temperature has decreased from about 21°C to the present 15°C. (As peculiar as it may sound, the climatologists cannot agree on even such a seemingly ‘simple’ question as this