Dear Ecolady Madrone and Ecofem,
Madrone, your analysis of teeth is delightful. I have to tell you that if
you saw what terrible things I have said to the guys, you would fall over
laughing. I am SO severe on them!
One of the myths told by men is that male hunters were dominant and made
women their 'tradeable property'. But the gatherers were females and
appear to have retrieved 80% of the human diet. The hunters were sporadic
and possibly scavengers. The women were exploring the vegetative
environment, talking and working together and evoking the social millieu.
This fits with gender paradox, rather than male dominion in evolution.
Apes are female exogamic, but bonobos, despite this, are a 'window piece'
for non-violent feminist social dreams. The sexual evolution of the human
female attests to a similar role for feminine independence in
gatherer-hunter societies, rather than male dominion. It would have taken
the cooperation of resourceful socially-adjusted males however to keep out
bands of marauding 'bad guys'. How much have things really changed?
Paleolithic culture appears to revolve around two motifs, the fertility
goddess and the shamanistic hunt. Willendorff leads to fertility religion
and agriculture. The hunt leads to meditative samadhi, transcendent vison
and the aspects of nature shamanism which deal with the vision quest.
These are excellent qualities, outside patriarchal religion, and are often
associated with a reverence for life and a spiritual reluctance to kill
more than necessary. However the record is marred. Virtually every
primitive male-dominated society appears to have wiped out the major fauna
(e.g. mammoths in the Americas), causing a food crisis.
Now none of this is taking a deterministic view, or minimizing the cultural
impact either in history or in future reconciliation. Lots of men make very
faithful monogamous partners. There are sexual differences in the brain
but they are quite subtle. We can nearly all culturally circumnavigate the
human psyche but there are differences in potentiality. These are mostly
engulfed by the individual spread in each gender, and they are not like
instinct but they can become bizarrely expressed in culture if we don't
understand the way they can effect choices and potentialities. If we don't
realize these influences, they play out their effects in other indirect
ways in the rape of the biosphere, winner-take-all greed, free-market
competition and so on. By recognising the sociobiology, we can come to
terms with culture and its impact creatively rather than reflexively.
The heart IS a lonely hunter. I AM a male hunter in the heroic mold doing
this thing. I have journeyed to the ends of the earth, wandered as a sadhu
in India and as a psychedelic shaman in the jungle to make my 'journey into
Egypt', but I don't fancy the simplistic antler cast of the male fawn, nor
the round of male sacrifice by the Goddess. Only when Solomon returns to
meet Sheba in mutual reverence, to the unpredictable glory of both do we
get the full picture.
The cultural concept of fertility works like this. We accept that
sociobiology and culture complement, and we use our evolutionary heritage
to realize the very best in the female-male relationship out of the sexual
paradox of our origins and its pearl - creative culture itself. Fertility
is human culture becoming attuned to the paradox between the genders we
possess in our original virtue, in learning to care for the unfolding
diversity of life as a an evolutionary continuum far into the distant
future. It is a profound change of reference from male technological
Armageddon to 'feminine' Immortality.
love to you all, Chris
_____________________________________________________________________________
Chaos is the Mother of Invention - Necessity the Offspring
_____________________________________________________________________________
Chris KING, Phone: 0064-9-3737599 # 8818
Senior Lecturer Mathematics Fax: 0064-9-3737457
University of Auckland E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Private Bag 92019
AUCKLAND, New Zealand.
http://matu1.math.auckland.ac.nz/~king/Preprints/book/genesis.htm
"Genesis of Eden" - Alta Vista Search
