We are Gaia's children
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We are Gaia's children in the literal sense of being born of the great womb that is Gaia. We are born of Gaia, nurtured and maintained by Gaia; we are Gaia. But humanity is also born again--for humanity, alone among the animals, has developed all the characteristics of mind, collectively and individually. Human societies show the characteristics of mind in their ever more complex social organization to their systematic use and storage of information in the form of language. |
Humankind has demonstrated the constant drive toward complex, sophisticated and energy rich forms of organization typically associated with minds. Here lies the real distinction between man and the rest of the animals kingdom. Other animals may use tools but without the organizing principle of mind, their tools are simple and do not progress over time. Other animals may use language and in cases have even been taught rudimentary human languages, but so far none have shown any sign of the continuing elaboration of meaning or the use of language to code and store information for future use. In short, only humanity has shown the continual defiance of entropy that is the hallmark of mind. The tensions between human development and Gaia's health give compelling evidence of just how much the human consciousness has diverged from its Gaian mother.
If the Gaia Mind is more than just a complex self-ordering system--if it also contains some level of consciousness, perhaps humanity has its own collective consciousness. Complicating the situation is the fact that the integral parts of the human "mind" are individual humans, each with their own mind. The separation between the one and many becomes blurred--individuals, societies, clans, or other tightly knit groups can all function as a "mind." It is a complex question, but one of increasing interest to scientists who have tackled the problem from many angles--though a comprehensive explanation remains elusive. The obvious starting point for this inquiry is Carl Jung's work on the Collective Unconscious.
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If there is a collective human mind, what is its nature? Carl Jung's concept of the collective unconscious has gotten much attention recently; it seems to hold clues to the answer. Jung believed that the collective unconscious was the repository for humankind's basic, archetypal images, those themes and images that reoccurred continuously throughout human history. Jung came to this understanding through his daily analysis of his patients. As early as 1918, Jung warned that "the blond beast is stirring in its sleep and something terrible will happen in Germany." A collective German consciousness was stirring. |
Exactly what this collective unconscious represented to Jung remains unclear; the meaning has been debated both inside and outside of Jungian circles. At one point, Jung compared it with instinct in the animal world. But instinct is itself an unclear concept, something that appears to involve an interplay of the collective Gaian consciousness and the physical reservoir of information stored in DNA. Similarly, the human collective consciousness appears to involve an interaction between physical events, information and some large current of consciousness.
In "Symbols of Transformation" Jung stated that "Natural man is not a 'self'-he is the mass and a particle in the mass, collective to such a degree that he is not even sure of his own ego. That is why, since time immemorial he has needed the transformation mysteries to turn him into something, and to rescue him from the animal collective psyche, which is nothing but an assortment, a variety performance." This is a revealing comment; substitute Gaian collective mind and it fits perfectly into our argument. And as Jung suggests, the history of religion and mythology, when read carefully, can become a revealing story of the development of the collective human consciousness.
Jung was not the first person to explore this idea. Emile Durkheim wrote about a conscience collective, "the set of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a single society which form a determinate system that has a life of its own." It has its "own distinctive properties, conditions of existence, and mode of development." It transcends the lives of individuals; "they pass on and it remains." The conscious collective is "diffuse" in each society and lacks a "specific organ"; it is independent of the particular conditions in which individuals find themselves; it is the same in different locations, classes, and occupations; it connects successive generations rather than changing from one to another; and it is different from individual consciences, despite the fact that it can be realized only through them. A "crime," therefore, is simply an act which offends intense and well-defined states of this conscience collective, a proposition which describes not simply the "consequences" of crime, but its essential property: "We do not reprove it because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we reprove it." The extent of the state's power over the number and nature of criminal acts depends on the authority it receives from the conscience collective; and this authority can be measured either by the power the state exerts over its citizens, or by the gravity attached to crime against the state. As Durkheim would show, this power was greatest and this gravity most pronounced in the lowest, most primitive societies; and it was in these societies that the conscience collective enjoyed the greatest authority.
Similarly, Freud wrote that "I have taken as the basis of my whole position the existence of a collective mind, in which mental processes occur just as they do in the mind of the individual. ... Without the assumption of a collective mind, which makes it possible to neglect the interruptions of mental acts caused by the extinction of the individual, social psychology in general cannot exist. ... And what are the ways and means employed by one generation in order to hand on its mental states to the next one? I shall not pretend that these problems are sufficiently explained or that direct communication and tradition--which are the first things to occur to one--are enough to account for the process."
Sociologist William McDougall believed that human society was like a collective mind, "an organized system of forces which has a life of its own, tendencies of its own, a power of moulding all its component individuals, and a power of perpetuating itself as a self-identified system, subject and gradual change. ... the collective actions which constitute the history of any such society are conditioned by an organization which can only be described in terms of the mind, and which yet is not comprised within the mind of any individual; the society is rather constituted by the system of relations obtaining between the individual minds which are its units of composition."
On a small scale, close knit teams often display these group behaviors. Successful athletes sometimes speak of a "sixth sense" which enables them to be in the right place at the right time; others speak of empathy and intuition. As one observer commented, "an incredible power of communication often develops between members of a team where one can anticipate the moves of the other." Organizations as diverse as armies and monastic orders use similar tactics to break down the individuals self identity and remold them into a part of the group.
Jung argues in "The Meaning of Individuation" that "... the conscious mind cannot be denied a history extending over at least five thousand years. It is only individual ego-consciousness that has forever a new beginning and an early end. But the unconscious psyche is not only immensely old, it is also able to grow unceasingly into an equally remote future." But the story may be even more complex than Jung imagined, for if consciousness is a thing that interacts with the physical world and relies on physical information, then the nature of individual consciousness may also have a history, one that interacts with the history of the collective human consciousness and with the Gaian consciousness.
Tracking the Collective Consciousness Through Mythology
Mythology offers a fascinating view into the development of the collective human consciousness. From the earliest signs of mythological wonder preserved in caves some thirty thousand years ago on through the earliest human civilizations, one great overall pattern among all cultures; a shift from a Gaian centered mythology that stressed unity between man and nature to a human centered conception of the universe. Although some theorists believe that early man was no more than a part of the Gaian collective, it is likely that the collective human mind and the individual mind were active from early on. Individual consciousness has been demonstrated in some primates and so was likely present in early humans as well.
Instead, the question is one of balance between the Gaian mind, the collective human mind and the individual mind. The earliest mythological understanding of the world shows the clear dominance of the Gaia mind. The world is a unified whole and while man is separate from the animals, he is dependent on them, lives in their world and appreciates the sacrifice of the animals he kills. The earliest god was an unnamed goddess the represented the totality of life and death. As mankind settled into agrarian communities the goddess figure continued to dominate human mythology although she became more complex and divided into multiple figures to represent various aspects of life. By the Bronze Age, around 3500 BC, a radically different mythology appeared, centering around a male, sky god figure. First appearing among the nomadic herders sweeping in off the Asian steppes, the gods gradually supplanted the older, goddess figures. The gods were tribal or national, actively defending their chosen people; the god figures represented the collective human consciousness. Along with the gods, the Bronze Age saw the development of the hero myth, another representative of the collective, in Eric Neumann's words, "the forerunner of mankind in genera." At the same time, the hero myth represents the emergence of the individual in the interplay of minds.
The individual consciousness moved into a more central mythological role between 500 BC and the dawn of the modern era. Known as the Axial Age, the period around 500 BC saw the development of a more transcendent religion and the emergence of the individual consciousness. The new religions of this age, notably Buddhism and early Christianity, emphasized the individual's transcendence of the physical world. As the individual mind took a stronger place in the balance of minds, the focus of mythology moved away from Gaia and society to a more fundamental reality. Around this same time, the Greek philosophers laid the foundations of the humanist philosophy that put man at the center of the natural world. The individual mind, through logic and observation would become the means for understanding the world. Thus, by the dawn of the modern era, the shift of balance away from the Gaia mind to the collective human and then to the individual had settled into a balance that has continued to this day.
The earliest pre-humans may have been little more than than another species within the great Gaian collective. Anne Baring (The Myth of the Goddess) writes that "the identity between animals and human animals was broken at some point in the last three million years when a new kind of thinking set humanity apart from the rest of nature." Elements of this new thinking included an embodiment of divine power in the animals that humans hunted, and a recognition of the mystery of death.
The earliest evidence of a distinct self awareness came with ritualized burials among the Neanderthals, some dating back over 100,000 years. Neanderthals, who roamed the European continent since 200,000 BC, began to bury their dead in a way that suggested the capacity to recognize death and give it the status of a mystery that required honoring rituals sometime during the Riss-Wurm interglacial period (186,000-75,000 BC). Bodies as old as 60,000 years have been found arranged in a fetal position, facing east--the direction of the rising sun and full moon--covered in flowers and sprinkled with red ochre dye. Medicinal flowers in some burials suggests the possibility of a shamanistic influence, while the burial of families together suggests an early Suttee burial.
Early hunter gatherers developed an awareness of an elemental force out of which all things came and to which all things returned. This awareness was expressed through the worship of animals, with a strong influence from the widespread experience of visionary powers of the shaman. The worship of cave bears was among the earliest religious rites and has been a remarkably consistent custom among hunter gatherer societies for many millenia. Neanderthal cave bear shrines have been found in the Swiss Alps over 7,000 feet above sea level which means they must have been put there before the last ice age around 75,000 BC. The Neanderthal shrines have bear sculls surrounded by rings of stone with long bones protruding from the mouth or eye. Joseph Campbell writes that hunter gatherers saw animals as an equivalent form of life to humans, willingly sacrificing themselves to the humans. In return the humans conducted a ceremony to convey the animal's spirit to the mother source to be born anew.
The study of surviving Stone Age cultures has shown the continuing importance to these people of a living relationship between the human world and the unseen powers of the animal world. In 1989 some Brazilian Indians who had been living undisturbed for many centuries, if not millenia, in the Amazon jungle rebelled against a proposal that they be given cattle in return for having their traditional homeland cleared. They told of a Great Chief who had dreamed their destiny from the beginning of time. With their trees and animals destroyed they would have only "cowboy dreams." Only their own animals, they claimed, who like them belonged to the forest could give them their dreams. "The animals are our brothers and the rivers are our veins," they claimed.
In Japan, a small tribe of surviving hunter gatherers still conducts ceremonies to worship the bear similar to those unearthed in Neanderthal caves 75,000 years ago. The continuance of this tradition over such long periods of time suggest that it is an idea buried deep within the collective consciousness.The fact that many scientist believe Neanderthals to be a distinct species from homo sapiens makes this even more intriguing since, if that were true, it would rule out the possibility of this behavior being physically inherited like instinct, would make cultural heritage a more remote possibility. A nascent collective consciousness, perhaps embracing several early hominid species or subspecies, could well explain the recurrence of the bear cult across species lines.
All great modes of religious orientation have had people who could directly contact the spirit world. There have been three distinct forms of mystical revelation--Shamanic, Prophetic, and Mystical, corresponding roughly with the Gaian, collective Human, and individual consciousness. Of these, the Shamanic experience is the most closely atuned to the Gaia consciousness. The shaman, or medicine man appeared in some form in neolithic and hunter-gatherer societies in all parts of the world. Some of the earliest recorded cave paintings have been interpreted as shamanistic, and similarities to surviving stone age cultures have been drawn indicating that this shamanism is the earliest and most persistent form of mystical revelation. The link between the Shaman and nature is very direct. In his classic work on Shamanism, Mercia Eliade remarks that they communed with the Great Mother of the Animals--the ancient goddess that granted men the right to hunt and to sustain themselves on the flesh of beasts. (81) The Shaman's spirit guides were animals, not human; often the shaman was initiated by animals which became his guardian spirits.
Through the use of intense concentration, physical deprivation, or chemical stimulation, the shaman achieved an altered state in which he gained powers to influence objects, foreknowledge of impending events, and medical abilities to heal sick tribesmen. Australian aborigines call this state "dreamtime" and claim that there was once a time when the whole world was dreamtime, again suggesting that early shamans were under a greater Gaian influence. The Shaman's first experience often began after a close brush with death; being struck by lightening, a fall from a height, or a life threatening illness, although in other instances shamanism was a hereditary occupation. The Shaman enters a trance state during which their "soul is believed to leave the body and ascend to the sky or descend to the underworld." They talk of a ladder, or a vine, or rope or spiral staircase, that connects heaven and earth and which they use to gain access to the world of spirits.
In many parts of the world, the shaman had to learn a secret language to use during seance communications. The secret language exists among the Lapps, the Ostyak, the Cherokee, the Yakut, and the Tungus. Among the Tungus, the shaman is believed to understand the language of all nature. Very often this secret language is actually the "animal language" or originates in animal cries. Thomas Pinkerton's study of South American shamans, suggests that they deal in prelinguistic intelligence--able to communicate directly with plants or animals. Pinkerton told of his experience with the psychedelic drug of the ayahuasca given to him by the shamans of the Amazon jungle; In my first experience with ayahuasca in the Amazon jungle, plants of the jungle did appear before me and speak, just as the Shamans report happens with them. The problem was that I did not understand their language! I knew they were giving me information but I wasn't conversant in their language and so didn't get it. ... I am especially interested in the "intelligence" of the power plants like ayahuasca. It is prelinguistic intelligence connected with transcendent realms of knowing that do not fit easily into western thought categories. In other cases, the souls of the dead are considered a source of shamanic powers, indicating a connection to the collective human mind as well as the Gaian. Sometimes, shamanic power is derived directly form the "Supreme Being" though it is transmitted through animal guardian spirits.
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Not only do shamans communicate in an animal or pre-linguistic language, but they appear to gain knowledge directly from the plants and animals themselves. Luis Eduardo Luna, writing about the shamans of the Peruvian Amazon, describes their practice of Vegitalismo, a form of popular medicine based on hallucinogenic plants, singing and dieting. Luna writes, that the shamans consider ayahuasca "a doctor," that it "possesses a strong spirit and it is considered an intelligent being with which it is possible to establish rapport, and from which it is possible to acquire knowledge and power." This may not be as far fetched as is sounds if it were the Gaia Mind these shamans were communicating with. |
The kind of communication with nature that shamans experienced may be getting more difficult as the individual and collective human minds develop. Interestingly, Martin Prechtel, a Shaman among the Mayan Indians of Guatemala, suggests that "The human mind, I found, has a low grinding sound that scares most nature away." Prechtel's comment suggests a break between the human and Gaian worlds that has developed over the millenia as the collective human conscious and individual conscious developed. Indeed, several shamanic traditions speak of an ancient time when the shaman's journey was much easier than today. Shamanism disappeared for western societies several thousand years ago. As we shall see a similar phenomena appears in the history of prophetic revelations as well.
Mythologies of agrarian societies
The emergence of settled agrarian societies around 10,000 B.C. marked the beginning of a more sophisticated and diverse mythology as human understanding of the world around them grew. Mythology became more complex and varied, but the same progression can be seen everywhere; a steady move away from a nature-centered imagery (Gaia consciousness), toward a distinctly human understanding of the divine. While hunter gatherer mythology existed within the matrix of nature, early agrarian societies moved toward a more human imagery, beginning with the myth of the Great Mother goddess--a stylized female figure that represented the totality of life and death, whose statues were found throughout the neolithic world.
| The Neolithic goddess culture lasted some three millenia before undergoing profound changes during the Bronze Age beginning around 3500 BC. The Mother Goddess differentiated into many distinct goddesses representing the many facets of life and death, then, with the coming of powerful city-states, the Goddess was overthrown by male God, typically a thunder-throwing sky God. At the same time nature was reduced to a prop or tool for an increasingly human centered mythology. |  |
Agricultural society developed 10,000 years ago in three widely separated locations; the middle east, around the river valleys of the Tigress and Euphrates, the lush, rain forest regions of southeast Asia, and the areas of central America and the Peruvian highlands. Joseph Campbell comments, "The concurrent appearances in three parts of the world greatly distant from each other--Middle America (from Mexico to Peru), Southeast and Southwest Asia--c 10,000 B.C., of signs, not only of incipient agriculture, but also of matching mythological innovations, cannot be readily explained." This simultaneous development is called convergence and has been noted in many other instances. The Acheulian hand axe was developed in widely separate parts of the Stone Age world with such widespread similarity in the details that chance development seems unlikely. Great pyramids were built in ancient Egypt and pre-Colombian America with remarkable agreement in design. Similarities in pottery design from 5th and 6th century BC Egypt, Persia, India and China, studied by the Italian historian Ignazio Masulli, led him to believe that there was no reasonable explanation for the similarity of their design; direct contact between these cultures is dismissed by archeological research, while functionality should have allowed for a much wider range of design. Modern society has given similar examples of simultaneous discovery; the most celebrated being the simultaneous and independent discovery of the calculus by Newton and Leibniz, the simultaneous elaboration of the mechanisms of biological evolution by Darwin and Wallace, and the simultaneous invention of the telephone by Bell and Gray.
The Neolithic development of agriculture was a revolution for human civilization. In the words of Anne Baring; "humanity was released from the need to live in complete accord with what nature offered or withheld and now learned to participate in the mysterious processes of growing....a new spirit of conscious co-operation between human beings and their world was born." The mythological implications of this revolution developed slowly. The early agrarian cultures worshiped a goddess figure that represented the generative and regenerative powers of nature. The old sense of unity with nature was retained within this goddess image; "a perception of the universe as an organic, alive and sacred whole, in which humanity, the earth and all life on earth participate as 'her children'." Figures of the Mother Goddess appear in shrines and graves throughout Old Europe and the Middle East from around 6000 BC to 4000 BC.
As a representative of nature, the Goddess took many forms. Some forms of the goddess represented individual aspects of the generative power of nature; bird goddesses were givers of life, well being, and nourishment, while the snake goddess represented the renewal of nature through its seasonal cycles. But, as death is a part of renewal, the snake goddess also came to represent death. The neolithic era viewed death as part of the process of life and therefore just another aspect of the goddess, though. by Judeo-Christian times, the snake, by introducing death to mankind, had become the symbol of evil. In all three of the early areas of agriculture, this mystification of death as part of the cycle of nature led to ritualized human sacrifices, representing the dual nature of the gift of life--an eternal being is given to life in this world and temporal lives are returned to an eternal being. The sacrificial ritual came to be seen as necessary for ensuring that the life would be renewed.
The agrarian revolution brought a new image to the Neolithic age--the Goddess of Vegetation who was the guardian of the sowing and reaping of grain for millenia afterwards. There was no distinction between the goddess who brings life and the goddess who brings death, as there was to be in the Bronze Age. The Great Mother Image represented the totality of life and death. A common image was the bird Goddess as the bringer of life. A composite image of woman and bird, the Bird Goddess was a primordial creatrix that endured as an image for some 25,000 years from the thirtieth to the fifth millennium BC. The serpent was another common image, with its quick and fluid shape and movement. It came to symbolize the dramatic power of waters beyond, beneath and around the earth, and appears in many different mythologies as the creative source or generator of the universe. The image of the uroboros--the serpent with its tail in its mouth forming a closed circle represented in many cultures the primordial waters encircling the earth.
In isolated centers dating as far back as 7000 BC and in places as far apart as eastern Europe, southern Turkey, Egypt, Palestine, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley, a unified Neolithic culture existed. During the Copper Age, between about 5500 BC and 3500 BC, a Megalithic culture across Europe demonstrated a new command of engineering, geometric and astronomical skills. Giant stones were raised to form circles, alignments and burial chambers--perhaps the earliest display of religious monuments. Alignments in Brittany contain as many as 3000 upright stones laid out in lines over two miles long. Stone structures in England were laid out elaborate planing; the stones of Avebury were laid out in the shape of a giant serpent. The Island of Malta contains the remains of some thirty temples. Eliade comments that the megalithic cult appears to include not only a certainty of the soul's survival, but above all, confidence in the power of the ancestors and the hope that they will protect and help the living.
The picture emerging from archeology is of a single cultural matrix that underlies and related all these different areas to each other. The homogeneity of this culture over such great distances suggests the emergence of a collective human consciousness being accessed by all of these separate areas. In Old Europe, this civilization flowered undisturbed for 2,000 years from 6500 to 4500 BC, until it was disrupted by the arrival of nomadic tribesmen from the East. Archeologist Marja Gimbutas has dubbed these peoples the Kurgans. They were the first wave of many nomadic peoples who would sweep out of the Asian steppes for thousands of years to come. Like subsequent nomads, such as the Semitic peoples, they worshiped sky gods who wielded the thunderbolt and the axe, and rode the horse. Much of the mythological imagery of the agrarian peoples lived on, however, and only gradually gave way to a new ways of seeing things during the era of the city states.
The Bronze Age (3500-1250 BC) saw a new expansion of knowledge, most significantly in the development of written language, a revolutionary new form of political organization in the city-state, and an explosion of new mythologies. While the Mother Goddess of the Neolithic remained the dominant image of the early Bronze Age, new gods and goddesses appeared who took their being from the original primordial Goddess. By the middle of the age, male gods came to dominate, explicitly overthrowing or slaying the ancient mother goddess. Concurrently, the shift to a human centered mythology accelerated; man moved from being a part of the Gaian whole to being her master. In addition a new mythology of the hero evolved--possibly from the more ancient hunter mythology--adding a new dimension to the story; not only was the collective human consciousness pushing out the ancient Gaian consciousness, but the individual consciousness was beginning the process of finding it's place in mythical understanding.
Early Bronze Age cultures developed many stories of the Goddess, but one story appeared throughout the Near East and continued to echo in the mythologies of later cultures. The goddess becomes separated from the one she loves, who dies or seems to die, and falls into a darkness called 'the Underworld'. The goddess descends to overcome the darkness so that her loved one may return to the light and life may continue. The earliest of these stories involves the Sumerian goddess Inanna who visits her sister, Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld. Ereshkigal fastens the 'eye of death' on Inanna and she hangs like a carcass on a hook for three days. Her companion Ninshubur sends help to plead for Inanna's release and she she restored to life, but must send her consort, Dumuzi, to take her place. In Babylonia, it is Ishtar who must travel to the underworld to awaken her son-lover, Tammuz, from his sleep in the darkness.
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In Egypt it is the Goddess Isis who must resurrect her brother-husband, Osiris, who had died at the hands of their brother, Seth. Isis reassembled his dismembered body and revived him to become the Ruler of Eternity in the underworld. Later their son Horus battled with Seth for three days and nights. After vanquishing Seth, Horus visited Osiris in the underworld and gave him his eye which had been torn out in the battle. This act revived Osiris to eternal life. |
These resurrection myths became intertwined with and symbolic of the death and rebirth cycles of the crops that fed these early civilizations. Osiris represented the Egyptians' grains, wheat and barley. Like the gain which cycles through death and rebirth, Osiris died and was resurrected again. Yearly festivals celebrated Osiris' resurrection during the rising of the Nile and the rebirth of the grain. The plants begin to grow when the soul of Osiris rises; they are the soul of Osiris 'speeding upwards.' Osiris as the grain god was mirrored around the world in gods such as Attis, Dionysus, the corn-mother of northern Europe and the rice mother of the East Indies all of whom die and are reborn to insure the rebirth of the crops. Eventually these myths came to hold meaning for the individual as well, as apparent in the Christian story of death and resurrection to ensure immortal life for each individual. The process involved a fundamental move away from the cyclical view of nature in the hunter gatherer universe where life returned eternally to this world, not another.
Bronze Age mythology also gave us the first myths of the hero. The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh is the earliest hero epic and, along with the Descent of Innana, was the most influential of Bronze Age myths. Gilgamesh is the part god-part human king of Uruk. In the course of his adventures, Gilgamesh and the wild man Enkidu, who was sent by the gods to challenge Gilgamesh, kill Humbaba, the demon Humbaba and cut down the great cedar forest that he guarded, spurn the sexual advances of the Goddess Ishtar and then kill the Bull of Heaven she sends in revenge. But the gods take their revenge by killing Enkidu and Gilgamesh is thrown into despair at the prospect that he too will die. He tries, but fails to gain immortality, then retrieves a plant that will make him younger only to have it stolen by a snake. In the end he returns to Uruk, aware of his mortality but still marveling at the monuments to his accomplishments.
| Gilgamesh is the first explicitly human myth--almost entirely separated from the identity with nature that characterized the Neolithic. When Gilgamesh cuts down the great cedar Forest to build the walls and gate of Uruk, it is an implicit statement of man's dominion over nature such as would become the staple of classical religions. It is also the first myth to show tension between the individual and the collective in humanity. Gilgamesh fights with the gods, who have by now become more of a reflection of the higher human whole than of nature. And having lost the concept of eternal rebirth in nature, but not having the concept of a collective human heaven, Gilgamesh experiences the existentialist fear of death. |  |
By the beginning of the Iron Age (ca 1250 BC), the hero myth became more universal and uniform. The hero was a "solar hero" (in Eliade's words) who is "assimilated to the sun; like the sun, he fights darkness, descends into the realm of death and emerges victorious. The Canaanite Baal, son of 'the Bull El', father of the gods, was the slayer of the serpent, the devouring dragon of darkness and chaos. As in the older goddess myths, Baal descends to the underworld and is rescued by Anat, his sister and consort. In this case the old goddess mythology, with its ties back to the ancient Gaian centered myths combines with the newer male and human centered hero mythology. Even the old testament contains echoes of these older myths. In Psalms, Yahweh overcomes the "Leviathan, the piercing serpent...the dragon that is in the sea." A more "modern" version of the myth is Beowulf. Though ostensibly set in a Christian culture, Beowulf is a secular myth with a purely human man achieving fame and power through his own deeds.
The Hero mythology represents a complex mix of motifs that demonstrate the intricate tensions and interplay between the Gaian, collective Human and individual consciousness. One one level, the earliest hero myths represented the emergence of a human centered, sky god culture overcoming the more ancient, Gaian centered goddess culture. Anne Baring writes, "Symbolically, the struggle between hero and serpent-dragon represents the power of human consciousness to gain mastery of instinctual and unconscious patterns of behaviour, to rise 'out of nature' and, at the same time, out of tribal, collective attitudes and patterns of behaviour that endlessly repeat the unquestioned beliefs of the past." While Baring 's comment highlights the hero as an individual consciousness, the relationship between the individual and the collective was an intricate intertwining in this time period. As Erich Neumann writes that the hero is a person of greater wisdom, power or strength who breaks new ground for his society and thereby offers a model for them to emulate. The hero is the "forerunner of mankind in general," leading the collective consciousness, but ultimately serving it. It has only been in recent history that the hero has gained near total separation from the collective--even opposition to it. The "anti-hero" represents the complete separation of the individual from the whole. Ironically, recent history has seen a renewed interest in Gaian sensitivities even as the connection with the collective human sensitivities continues to fade.
In the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age the shift from a Gaian centered goddess mythology to a human centered mythology of gods was explicitly and forcefully completed. The first example of this came in Babylonia around 1700 BC when the previous creation myths were replaced with The Seven Tablets of Creation., which were recited every spring in Babylon for the next thousand years. The Seven Tablets tell the myth Eluma Elish, the story of the Goddess Tiamat, a throwback to the ancient goddess myths, who is vanquished by her great-great-great grandson, the lord god Marduk. In this story, the gods are brought into being by the primal mother and father, Tiamat and Apsu. But the new generations of gods disturbed Apsu with their clamor and he plotted to destroy them. When the younger gods became aware of the plan, they killed Apsu and took his minister prisoner. After this Tiamat turns from a life-giving mother to a death-dealing dragon, giving birth to a monster brood of serpents. The gods set up a throne for Marduk, giving him sovereignty over the whole world. Marduke conquers Tiamat; half of her body becomes the sky and half becomes the earth, then Marduke creates man to be at the service of the gods. The defeat of the serpent goddess marked the end of a culture and the end of the Neolithic way of perceiving life--as a unity with Gaia.
By the middle of the second millennium, B.C. new mythic understanding first reveal in the Eluma Elish, the new socio-economic order the developed with empire states, along with a more sophisticated understanding of the workings of the heavens resulted in an outburst of mythical creativity. The universe came to be seen as having a divine rhythm to it, a preordained plan. In another display of convergence, widely separated cultures developed similar variations on the same mythic themes between 1500 and 1200 BC, and these new mythic developments laid the groundwork for the world's modern religions. The new mythic model had humans ruled by a male deity. Rather than the interdependence of the Gaian model, the new paradigm emphasized mastery and control--especially control over nature--which found its strongest manifestation in the warrior culture. The new mythology also reflected the growing sense of individuality. In Baring's words, "men (but not women) discovered a greater ability to determine their fate and to win the acclaim and devotion of other men. Their king or leader--the outstanding individual--personified this new sense of identity."
The earliest scriptures from the world's modern religions were the Hindu Rg-Veda, the Zoroastrian scriptures of the Avesta, and the Mosaic books of the Old Testament. The exact dating of these works is difficult to pin down but it appears most likely that they all date to within a few hundred years of each other--from around 1500 to 1200 BC. Most of these earliest scriptures came from nomadic herding peoples, aryan or semitic, who had developed a powerful warrior culture. The Avesta and the Rg-Veda appear to derive from Aryan nomads. The language of the earliest Zoroastrian writings is close to that of the Vedas and much of the mythology is recognizably the same. The two religions represented a split among the Aryans, however, and their mythology diverged significantly.
The Zoroastrian mythology further developed the sense of struggle between good and evil that surfaced in the Eluma Elish, and for the first time gave humanity a specific role in the conflict. As articulated by the prophet Zoroaster, Zoroastrians believed in a supreme being called Ahura Mazda, from whom Zoroastrian seers received direct communication of holy scriptures. Ahura Mazda created two other beings, Ormuzd, the source of all good in the world, and Ahriman, the source of all evil. The two were engaged in a mortal struggle from which good would eventually triumph. Zoroaster called upon humans to join the conflict on the side of Ahura Mazda though the practice of "good thoughts, good works, and good deeds." The ultimate victory of Ahura Mazda would not be accomplished by human assistance, but by the advent of a messiah-like figure, the Sashyant. The struggle would last six thousand years, followed by the resurrection and judgment.
Zoroastrianism and Hinduism represented a fundamental split in the way humanity viewed conflict and opposites. Hinduism and subsequent eastern religion viewed opposites as the yin and yang, existing in harmony, while to Zoroastrians they were good and evil; irreconcilable opposites, eternally at war with one another. Hindus viewed history as great cycles taking the natural cycles that had informed earlier religions and transferring them to a much larger stage. Zoroastrians, on the other had, viewed mankind's state as a fall from grace, a steady downhill slide resulting from the conflict between god and the devil. Individuals who did not repent would be cast into a hell while those that did would be resurrected after the eventual triumph of good.
The earliest of Hindu scriptures, the Rg-Veda (perhaps written as early as 1500 B.C., with some elements dating back even farther), also contains some echoes of earlier mythologies. Indra, a sky god who held the earth and heavens apart, was the most frequently mentioned god of the Vedas. He was the most nationalistic and the most anthropomorphic and like Marduk of the Eluma Elish, he slays a great serpent, thus releasing the seven rivers and allowing humanity to live. But even with these similarities, the Vedas move well beyond the earlier mythologies. The Creation Hymn of the Rg-Veda demonstrates a new dualistic tendency that would mark subsequent religions; the farther they moved out of the original Gaian understanding, the more they began to look deeper for the original source of all things--including Gaia. The Rg-Veda makes a very modern declaration; "Who knows truly? Who here will declare whence it arose, whence this creation? The gods are subsequent to the creation of this. Who, then, knows whence it has come into being?" A thousand years later, Taoism would develop on these questions.
The earliest Jewish scriptures , which were also being composed at roughly the same time (perhaps 1300-1200 B.C), derive heavily from Zoroastrian mythology, but they make one important change; they complete the transformation of religion from Gaian centered to human centered. The earthly creation is explicitly for the benefit of man and he is given dominion over nature even in his fall. The Zoroastrian influence on Jewish scriptures is quite clear. While the dating of scripture becomes difficult since scholars have identified at least four authors of the Old Testament, the Yahwehist, who is responsible for the Eden story, may have written after the Babylonian captivity which would directly explain the Zoroastrian influence on the Old Testament. The books of Moses refined the Zoroastrian fall from grace cosmology, having primordial man living in a Garden of Eden paradise, only to be expelled after eating of the fruit of knowledge. Elements of the Eden story echo earlier mythology as well. The Tree of Life was an ancient symbol of the Goddess appearing all over the ancient Near East, Egypt, Crete and Greece. The Tree of Life had also been linked with the serpent or dragon for over 1,000 years prior to Genesis. The importance of the books of Moses in the evolution of human mythology comes from their final break with the hunter-gather's Gaia-centered view of nature. Unlike Zoroaster, who saw nature as sacred, the God of Moses gave man complete dominion over nature.
The first great religious scriptures showed a major philosophical split developing between eastern and western religions--the question of whether good and evil were yin and yang complements or whether they were irreconcilable opposites. The study of ecology has made the concept of balance easy to understand; Gaia as a system keeps nature in a remarkable state of balance, not only among all species, but also through system-wide feedback loops that circulate the necessary chemicals needed to maintain life. Harmony is essential to the preservation of life. How, then, do we explain the Zoroastrian conception of the fall from grace, and the irreconcilable battle of good and evil?
It can be argued that the mythology of the fall comes in part from the separation of the Human collective consciousness from the Gaian consciousness. Anne Baring writes that "the deeper layers of the soul were suddenly deprived of a life of participation with creation and of an instinctual perception of the unity of life governed by divine law, which had been understood for thousands of years through the image of the goddess." On a deep mythical level, humanity may have grasped its split from the Gaian harmony. Psychologist Erich Neumann explains the mythologies of the paradise as an "image of a lost stage of childhood, a symbol of irreparable loss" associated with the development of the individual ego and its split from the group consciousness. But not only was the individual ego splitting from the whole, the collective human consciousness was disengaging from the Gaian consciousness.
There is a clear sense of loss that has appeared between the time of the Gilgamesh myth and the Zoroaster/Old Testament myths. Gilgamesh, too, searched for knowledge and immortality. Yet when he journeys to find Utnapishtim, the only human granted immortality, he is not censured for it. His conflicts with the gods come from personal conflicts--his rejection of Innana, not from any act of sin. Gilgamesh is not denied immortality or youth, he loses them through his own weakness or inattention. In general, one feels that mortality is his destiny, not the result of evil. There is the beginning of a sense of loss compared to the time when humanity existed within the eden of the Gaia mind and life, death and rebirth were all part of the cycle, but it is not as fully realized as in the later myths.
Erich From writes that "with this knowledge the original harmony with nature is broken. Man begins the process of individuation and cuts his ties with nature. In fact, he and nature become enemies, not to be reconciled until man becomes fully human. With this first step of of severing the ties between man and nature, history--and alienation--begins." In our framework, we might rephrase this that the separation of the collective human consciousness from the Gaia Mind was the first incidence of alienation for human, while the growth of the individual mind and its independence from the collective human consciousness represented the second great alienation.
The Hebraic books of Moses, offer the most explicit reading on the subject. In the books of Moses, man fell from grace in the Garden of Eden, a perfectly harmonious world where death was not known and all needs were met. Eden, much like Gaia, had a place for all species to exist in rough harmony, their oxygen, water and food provided for them by Gaia herself. In Gaia, individual death meant returning to the whole. Man's fall came from eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, given to him by the snake (the ancient goddess of death), so that he could "be like God." The theories of mind show us that knowledge--information--is the essential keys to the development of mind, and that, as mankind developed his own systems for processing information, he developed his own collective consciousness, so that man did indeed "become like God" and move beyond the garden of Gaia. The Hebrew God, who had given man dominion over nature, also set man up in conflict with nature. The myth of the Garden of Eden is a perfect metaphor of man's relationship with Gaia.
As people were settling into agrarian societies, shamanic revelations began to be supplanted by prophetic relations. Unlike the Shaman who received knowledge from nature, the prophet spoke directly to God, and as the mythological symbols changed from images of nature to human images, so also did the communication with the gods become centered on human affairs; tribal or national concerns. In short, it seems that prophetic relations were increasingly a matter of delving into the collective human consciousness rather than into Gaian consciousness.
A key work that documents this process is Julian Jayne's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, although Jaynes offers a different view of why it occurred. Jaynes argues that the hemispheres of ancient man's mind operated separately and that the verbal section of the right hemisphere very literally caused people to hear the words of his gods, somewhat in the same manner that schizophrenics hear voices today. Jayne's hypothesis is controversial and totally unnecessary for our purposes. Rather than explain prophetic relations with some physiological change in the brain, we can explain it as another example of the evolving balance between minds; Gaian, collective human, and individual. Just as shamanic revelations have their locus in the Gaian collective, prophetic revelations show the ascendance of the collective human mind.
Jaynes finds evidence that people heard the voices of their gods as early as the ninth millennium BC, in the city of Wadi en-Natuf in Israel, from 9,000 B.C. where a king was found buried with his head propped up by rocks with evidence that the tomb was an active site, perhaps a place of worship. Jaynes suggests that the people of the city heard voices from the dead king. By the seventh millennium BC, cities were arranged around "god houses" while kings were being buried as though they were still living and many were referred to as gods. In both ancient Assyrian texts and among the Aztecs, the dead were referred to as gods. The Greek poet Hesiod wrote in the 8th century BC of a golden race of men who preceded his own generation and became "holy demons upon the earth, beneficent, avatars of ills, guardians of mortal men." Later, Plato refered to heroes who, after death, became the demons that tell people what to do. Jaynes takes all of this as indications of an active, verbal presence of the gods.
In many early societies, Jaynes argues, voices were heard coming from statues that represented the gods. Cuneiform literature often refers to god-statues speaking and kings consulting them The Old Testament book of Ezekiel also describes Babylonians consulting statues. In the new world, sixteenth century Spanish observers reported of the Mayans that "the unhappy dupes believed the idols spoke to them and so sacrificed to it birds, dogs, their own blood, and even men." The first reports of the conquistadors in Peru wrote in shock of devils speaking to the Aztecs thought their statues; "in the temple [of Pachacamac] was a Devil who used to speak to the Indians in a very dark room which was a dirty as he himself." The conquered Aztecs told the Spanish that their history had begun when a statue in a ruined temple of a previous culture spoke to their leaders, commanding them to cross the late and to carry the statue with them wherever they went--a story reminiscent of the Israelites carrying the Arc of the Covenant with them across the Sinai desert, hearing the disembodied voice of god. Sometimes the voices came from other sources besides statues; Moses heard it from a burning bush while the Chandogya Upanishad tells of a student being instructed by a sacrificial fire.
These verbal gods did not last, however, and after a time all Mediterranean or Middle Eastern societies reached a point when the gods no longer spoke. Toward the end of the second millennium, B.C. the epic literature and cuneiform tablets begin to record, for the first time, accounts of gods forsaking their peoples. The book of Deuteronomy records that Moses was the last prophet whom the lord spoke to "face to face." The gods, who had previously been heard in the great temples erected to them, now retreated to the silence of a distant heaven. The Sumerian epic Atrahasis told that:
The people became numerous ...
The god was depressed by their uproar
Enlil heard their noise,
He exclaimed to the great gods
The noise of mankind has become burdensome ...
The observation of Atrahasis is remarkably similar to that of the the modern Shaman, Martin Prechtel--nearly four millenia later--that the human mind had a low, grinding noise that scared the voices of nature away--reinforcing the hypothesis that there was a shifting balance between Gaia mind, collective human mind and individual minds. Significantly, the disappearance of verbal communication with the gods coincided with the appearance of evil demons and the idea of evil in mythology. Once again, the idea of evil coincides with the gradual alienation of the individual mind from the collective.
As the divine voices faded, they were for a time replaced by Oracles, mediums who could enter a trance state and speak for the gods. As early as the seventh century B.C. Assyrians record the use of oracles, but the most famous were the oracles of Apollo at Delphi beginning in the fifth century BC and lasting for a thousand years. The oracles were young women--in the early days the daughters of poor farmers--who were selected to be the supreme priestess. After inhaling the fumes of burnt laurel leaves, or perhaps chewing on the leaves, the priestess answered questions from kings or freemen, decreed about relations with other nations and rulers, which laws to enact, the causes of plagues or famines, the best trade routes, which cults were agreeable to Apollo, and doing so with such authority that even Plato called Delphi "the interpreter of religion to all mankind."
In the last centuries before the birth of Christ Jewish Rabbis often experienced what they called a bat qol (literally, "Daughter of the Voice"), a form of inspiration that had replaced the more direct prophetic relations. Rabbi Yohannan ben Zakkai had heard such a bat qol confirming his own mission on the occasion when the Holy Spirit had descended upon him and his disciples in the form of fire. Similar communications can be found in the New Testament as in the voices from above calling Jesus the Son of God.
The primary difference between the shamanic revelation and prophetic revelation is that prophetic revelation dealt with distinctly human intermediaries. By this time the gods were distinctly human, but they were not universal gods--they were highly partisan tribal gods--smiting the enemies of the tribe, setting out rules and restrictions for the tribe. William McNeill's seminal history of medicine, People and Plagues, points out that many of the biblical restrictions--decreed by God--had valid health reasons behind them suggesting that, as with shamanism, the prophetic gods gave access to medical secrets for the benefit of the people. One of the functions of minds--whether Gaian, Human or individual--is the storage and processing of information. This has also been one of the most important reasons for mystical relations between the individual and these greater minds.
The Development of World Religions
Another burst of theological creativity occurred around 500 BC. The time between 800 and 200 BC has been called the Axial Age. All the main regions of the civilized world developed new religious ideologies that have continued to be important to the present--Taoism and Confusionism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, and philosophical rationalism in Europe. Zoroastrianism and Judaism evolved a new, more transcendent monotheism. In many ways these cultures developed along parallel lines, even where there was no commercial contact. While the emergence of the world's classical religions might seem like a consolidation of the influence of the collective human consciousness, the developments of the Axial Age actually showed a strong emergence of the individual. Spiritual thought after 500 BC explored the nature of the individual's relationship to the divine plan; in the words of Karen Armstrong, "the development of the individual conscience." The appearance of modern religions demonstrates the ongoing search for balance between the individual and the collective.
Hinduism underwent a major change by the end of the fifth century BC. The gods declined in importance, superseded by the religious teacher. A new body of writings, the Upanishads, appeared; by the end of the fifth century BC, there were some 200 of them. The Upanishads evolved a distinct conception of godhood that transcended the gods, to be found intimately present in all things. Within the individual, this eternal principle was called Atman, and was something that could not be completely explained rationally. The individual could come to an understanding of the eternal and transcend the physical world by following the path of the Yogi, who would leave his family and abandon all social ties and responsibilities to seek enlightenment.
| The most famous teacher who took this route to enlightenment was Siddhartha Guatama, the Buddha, around the year 538 BC. The Buddha taught that the individual's goal was to transcend the cycle of death and rebirth and to achieve Nirvana. This transcendence,was available only to those who withdrew from society and pursued a long, arduous path, perhaps over many lifetimes. Buddhists rejected the desires of life as causing all suffering and strove to remove themselves from desire. In contrast to the Middle Eastern religions, Buddhism did not hold to the image of a human deity. Instead, the Buddha himself became a more important figure to the religion than the gods. Buddha did not deny the gods but believed that the ultimate reality of Nirvana was higher that the gods. Around the same time, in China, Lao Tsu wrote the Tao Te Ching which expounded a similar transcendent view of man and nature. |  |
In Greece, between the fourth and sixth centuries BC, Plato, Aristotle and Pythagoras developed a philosophy that was in some ways similar to the eastern religions, but that emphasized rational thought as the way to get to the truth, thereby laying the groundwork for modern science. In the sixth century, Pythagoras , possibly influenced by ideas from India, transmitted via Persia and Egypt, argued that the human soul was a fallen, polluted deity trapped in a cycle of rebirth. The soul could only be liberated by means of ritual purifications by which he could achieve harmony with the ordered universe. Plato developed this reasoning further. Plato also believed in the existence of a divine, unchanging reality beyond the world of the senses, that the soul was a fallen divinity, but that it could be purified through the reasoning powers of the mind.
Aristotle (384-322 BC) took this idea a step farther by emphasizing the importance of logical reasoning. Aristotle believed that man could understand the universe by applying logical reasoning--the beginnings of the western scientific method. But Aristotle understood the balance between the individual and the whole, believing that no individual was able to attain an adequate conception of truth but that everybody could make a small contribution to our collective understanding. Aristotle did not reject religion and mythology, but his concept of god was a distant one. God was the unmoved mover, who had not created the world and who could not even contemplate anything inferior to himself such as man. The world, in essence, was strictly the province of the individual. The Greeks represented the beginnings of the humanist tradition, putting man at the center of nature, a major step away from middle eastern theology, but still in the same continuum that saw a gradual but inexorable move away from nature as the center of the divine to man--the transcendence of the collective human mind over the Gaia mind.
The Middle Eastern religions that has seemed the bastion of the collective human mythology also underwent a transformation during this time. The god of the Israelites would also transform into a transcendent power beyond the individual's everyday life. Gone was the god of Jacob who would appear as a stranger and wrestle with Jacob--unable to master Jacob until he touched his inner thigh, causing Jacob causing Jacob to be wounded. The god of Isaiah was now revolted by animal sacrifice while previously he had demanded them. The prophets had discovered the overriding duty of compassion, which would become the hallmark of all the major religions of the Axial Age, and which was the mark of the individual consciousness. Yahweh was now a figure of transcendent power; "he had all the nations in his pocket." And as always this transcendence brought signs of alienation; the prophecy of Isaiah began with the lamentation, "Israel knows nothing, my people understand nothing." Like the Hindu sages, Jewish prophets were now solitary figures. Amos was on his own, he had broken with the rhythms and duties of his past. Armstrong remarks, "Amos had not been absorbed like the Buddha into the selfless annihilation of nirvana; instead, Yahweh had taken the place of his ego and snatched him into another world."
The Axial age strikingly displays the development of the individual consciousness. In the words of Ewert Cousins, "Whereas primal consciousness was tribal, Axial consciousness was individual." The Upanishads identified the atman, the transcendent center of the self. The Buddha charted the way of individual enlightenment; the Jewish prophets awakened individual moral responsibility. "This sense of individual identity, as distinct from the tribe and from nature, is the most characteristic mark of Axial consciousness."
A final convergence, reflected most notably in the simultaneous development of early Christianity and Mahayana Buddhism, completed the process of humanizing the divine and extended it to to all individuals, not just a select few. The Gospels clearly show that Jesus had certain divine powers, but time and again, Jesus promised his disciples that if they had faith they would enjoy these powers too. If fact, all men of good will who laid themselves open to God without reserve would be able to do anything he could do. The apocryphal Gospel of Thomas demonstrated the belief that the divine was located within each individual. In verse 24, the disciples ask; "Show us the place where you are, for we must seek it," to which Jesus replies, "There is light within a person of light, and it shines on the whole world." Again, the disciples ask, "When will the Father's imperial rule come?" And Jesus answers, "It will not be said, Look, here! or Look there! Rather, the Father's imperial rule is spread out upon the earth and people don't see it."
The disciples preached that the prophets had foretold the day when God would pour out his Spirit upon mankind so that even women and slaves would have visions and dream dreams. This day would inaugurate the Kingdom of God when God would live on earth with his people. Paul developed this insight by arguing that Jesus had been the first example of a new type of humanity. Jesus had been the new adam, the new humanity in which all of humanity must participate. Paul never called Jesus "god." He called him "the Son of God" in its Jewish sense: he certainly did not believe that Jesus had been the incarnation of God himself: he had simply possesses God's "power" and "Spirit," which manifested God's activity on earth and were not th be identified with the inaccessible divine essence..
The force of this idea diminished after Christianity became then state religion of the Roman Empire, but it became central to the Mahayana school of Buddhism. Though the Buddha had spent his life preaching the Way so that humanity could achieve enlightenment, the monks of the early centuries locked away in monestaries seeking enlightenment for themselves, quite oblivious to the general public. Around the same time as Christ, Mahayana Buddhism moved away from the idea that Nirvana could only be found after lifetimes of intense practice. During the first century AD a new kind of Buddhist hero emerged: the boddisattva, who followed the Buddha's example and put off his own nirvana, sacrificing himself for the sake of the people. Now, nirvana was conceived as being everywhere, only people did not see it, a doctrine so similar to early Christianity that some people have suggested Jesus may have spent his early years before his ministry in India.
In the early second century AD, the Void School appeared which insisted that ultimate truths could only be grasped intuitively through the mental disciplines of meditation. Buddhists who adopted this philosophy believed that everything we experience is an illusion. The Absolute was avoid. Nirvana, therefore, was a void, and since the Buddha had attained nirvana, he had become identical with the Absolute. From this there developed the concept of bhakti (devotion) to the Buddha and the bodhisattvas, a concept quite similar to the Christian devotion to Jesus and the disciples. In Hinduism at the same time a similar welling up of bhakti centered around the trinity of Brahman, Shiva and Vishnu as three symbols of a single, ineffable reality. While the development of the bhakti represented a move away from some of the more esoteric aspects of the respective religions, they reflected a deep-rooted popular need for some kind of personal relationship between the individual and the ultimate, and for that reason reflect the growing importance of the individual in the ever more important balance between the Gaia mind, the collective human consciousness and the individual.
Sometime during these centuries, a distinctly new form of revelations emerged--the mystical revelation. Unlike shamanic revelations with their animal spirit guides and revelations of knowledge of nature, and prophetic relations with their communications from ancestors or tribal gods, mystical revelations appear to connect with something more basic and universal. In the words of Jess Byron, the mystical revelation is a radical, trans-sensory metamorphosis. Often entirely non-verbal, the mystical revelation is typically characterized by brilliant, super-natural light, a tremendous feeling of peace and joy, and a sense of the oneness of all things. Beyond that, however, the experience is typically interpreted by the individual in terms of their own particular social and religious tradition; something eminently understandable given that the experience is so transcendent of human experience as to be beyond words.
While the three kinds of of revelation may overlap, with characteristics of one showing up in the others, there is a clear historical divide between the three. The shamanic mode of revelation is characteristic of pre-agricultural societies. It persists to today, but typically in the most underdeveloped areas--though shamanism has gained some popularity among new age searchers in the west. Prophetic revelations were important during the early millenia of settled agrarian society but faded after that, though the the institution of the oracle survived a good millenia, and isolated visions, notably those of Jesus and the Virgin Mary continue to this day.
The Mystical revelation, being more amorphic and more subject to reinterpretation into contemporary terms, is harder to pin down historically. Richard Bucke, in the classic work Cosmic Consciousness, counts the Buddha and Jesus Christ among the first examples of mystical revelation, though the case here is made from inferential evidence rather than direct testimony. But the next example, just shortly after the life of Jesus, was Saint Paul, who, on a journey, was knocked to the ground, experienced a light above the brightness of the sun and heard unspeakable words--all of the characteristics that separate the mystical experience from the shamanic or prophetic.
Mystical revelations have come in all the major religions, though mystics have at times been suppressed by the church as a threat to their authority, and despite diverse religious traditions, some basic elements can be found in all mystical schools. The mystical revelation reveals a reality beyond the material world, uncreated and all pervasive--but beyond the reach of human knowledge and understanding. Approaching that reality generally means disengaging from your ego and attachment to the physical world, while gaining this reality brings a sense of peace and unity. In the Gaia-Human-Individual model, the mystical revelation is clearly an individual phenomenon, and it illustrates the seeming contradiction that the more the individual mind frees itself from the influence of the greater minds around it, the freer it is to explore the mysteries that transcend those minds.
The Individual and the "New Age"
The philosophy of a "New Age" of human development represents the near complete emergence of the individual mind out of the shadows of the Gaia Mind and the collective human mind. Central to any New Age philosophy is the belief that the individual is moving toward a higher level of consciousness, through both social and personal transformation, and toward a direct connection with the divine. New Age philosophy is quite a bit older than most people realize, growing out of a new awareness of the individual that appeared in the eleventh century A.D. In his monumental study, "Western Attitudes toward Death," historian Philippe Aries writes that "beginning with the eleventh century a formerly unkown relationship developed between the death of each individual and his awareness of being an individual. Today it is agreed that between the year 1000 and the middle of the thirteenth century "a very important historical mutation occurred," as a contemporary medievalist, Pacault, expressed it."
Perhaps the first distinctly New Age thinker was Joachim of Fiore (AD 1135-1202). After two visionary experiences, Fiore developed a vision of history that, in the words of Michael Grosso, "anticipates modern evolutionary models of consciousness. For the medieval prophet, the next step in human evolution was a step toward greater consciousness." For Joachim, Christ was the turning point in humanity's climb toward its likeness to God; and where Joachim broke with the past was that he believed that a new stage was possible. Christ was not the final human archetype--a social norm higher than the established church was possible on earth. Joachim's implication was clear; the established church was dispensable, a new age --a Third Age as Joachim called it--and a "New People" would follow. While Joachim was vague on specifics, Saint Francis of Asisi (1181-1226) and his followers provided a more concrete view of the new man's role in the universe. Some thirteenth century Franciscans saw Joachim's vision of a Third Age as a call to action. In 1254 a book appeared at the University of Paris titled Introduction to the Eternal Gospel, written by Gerqad of Borgo San Donnino. Gerad foresaw an imminent new age, the dawn of the Era of the Holy Spirit, with Saint Francis as the new messiah. In the new society, the old sacraments and theologies would become obsolete. The New People would possess a new inner authority, an esoteric "spiritual intelligence" that would enable them to decipher the occult pattern of politics and history.
It was this last sentiment that demonstrated the mythological flowering of the individual to his fullest extreme--with no need for either the human or the Gaian collective. The individual would directly with the absolute and would receive moral authority from this absolute. From Joachim's philosophy there arose the heresy of antinomianism--literally, "against the law"--a repudiation of all moral norms. Some groups proclaimed that they were beyond good and evil, the most radical believed that once a person had reached spiritual perfection, they could do things customarily thought wrong by everyone else. An antinomian cult known as the Free Spirit emerged around 1200 and spread across Northern Europe, lasting for five centuries. This cult of mystic individualism exalted in a ways of life unrestricted by human conventions. The Free Spirits espoused a philosophy of pure amoralism, reasoning that once they had achieved a union with GOd, they could do no wrong. As one put it, "Nothing is sin except what is thought of as sin." Or another--"One can be so united with God that whatever one may do one cannot sin."
The New Age philosophies represent the full flowering of the individual mind as an active system in the complicated mix of minds that make up Gaia. As with other independently functioning minds, the individual not only seeks its own homeostasis, it seeks its own improvement and further development. Often it does so in ignorance of the other minds around it. Just as the collective human mind has propelled humanity to a level of development that endangers the Gaian whole, so the individual, at times, can feel propelled by its own development into course harmful to those around it. A true twentieth-century antinomian, Charles Manson, believed himself to be Jesus Christ, his actions above archaic morality. According to Susan Atkins, a Manson disciple, the motive for their killings was "to instill fear into the pigs and to bring on judgment day which is here now for all." But, ultimately, this form of mental represents an isolation within itself, not a transcendence to the ultimate.
Humanity and the Archean Cyanobacteria: a comparison
The great sweep of mythological history has not been uniform--it has come in many strands and variations--but the same basic pattern shows up everywhere. The overriding pattern in human mythology is a steady shift in the location of the divine from nature--outside of man--to something either synonymous with human society or within the individual. This is exactly the sort of shift that the one would expect given an emergent, distinct human collective consciousness, along with the interplay of an evolving individual mind . But the development of distinct, autonomous minds has also brought disruption to the harmonic homeostasis the Gaian system had enjoyed for hundreds of millions of years. As far back as the legend of Gilgamesh, who cut down the cedars of Lebanon to build his city wall, man has set out to change the face of nature. In particular the western tradition; humanist, individualistic, and man-centered, became the source of the great scientific and materialistic development that would lead humanity to its current predicament where man's striving threatens the very Gaian mother we emerged from.
Humanity has steadily moved out of the Gaian harmony toward its own separate consciousness. For the first time in four billion years a species has acted with jarring and dangerous disharmony to the system as a whole. Our own drive toward complexity and homeostasis has led to the building of complex societies that crowd out the rest of nature, pave it over, drive it to extinction, and clog it with our wastes. In a sense, human history can be compared with the very first world builders, the cyanobacteria of Archean times--among the very first life forms on earth--which were instrumental in creating the Gaian environment.
The earliest forms of life were various kinds of bacteria, possibly living in underwater volcanic regions where they could use sulfur rich waters to create energy. These most primitive of ecosystems had no need for the complex circulatory systems that characterize the Gaian system today; they simply utilized the chemicals readily available. By at least 3.5 billion years ago, the first bacterium evolved that used photosynthesis to create energy, the cyanobacterium. These bacterium were able to use water and carbon dioxide and release oxygen. In this process, water and carbon dioxide, with sunlight, produce sugar and oxygen. On the early Earth, the oxygen produced by photosynthesis would have been taken up, via seawater, by the iron and sulphur in the rock through which the hydrothermal systems operated, and also by the iron and sulphur in material eroded from land areas. As the oxygen producing cyanobacteria spread, the entire planet underwent dramatic oxidation. By 1.8 billion years ago, hydrogen rich iron, uranium, and sulfur-bearing minerals at the Earth's outer crust practically disappeared. They were replaced by oxygen rich forms. But the oxygen was poison to the cyanobacterium, so they were banished from the surface areas of the planet, existing today only in environments where there is no oxygen, such as marine muds and warm geysers.
There is a surprising similarity between the cyanobacteria and mankind. The bacteria fed off chemicals already present in the environment and spewed out what was for itself a toxic waste. Humanity is using up natural resources stored away by Gaia for millions of years and spews out polluting waste. Since humanity does not cycle them through the system, it faces a crisis when the materials are used up. Like the cyanobacteria, man is producing wastes which are toxic to himself, although unlike the bacteria, these wastes are also toxic for much of the environment as well. The main difference is that the cyanobacteria were terra forming, while man is Gaia forming; we are not only altering the planet and its resources we are altering the Gaian system and the intricate system of homeostasis it had achieved. The human collective is beyond being just another species, it is a whole new system that must find its own balance--its own homeostasis as well as to find how to balance its system with the ancient Gaian system. Will we, like the cyanobacteria, poison the environment for ourselves and pave the way for some successor, or will we regain our balance with our mother Gaia? The future history of humanity depends upon the answer to this question.
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