No one can deny that the collective human manifestations of war and violence have horrifyingly long historical and pre-historical antecedents in the age-old, long-continuing struggles between tribes and societies for territory and economic survival. Many believe that all war is basically fought over resources: in historical times at first over land and animals; later, the extraction of valuable minerals and metals; still later, in the petroleum age, the biosphere’s stored carbon deposits. Contemporary indications are that water may turn out to be the most bitterly fought over resource in the era of global fever-heat and climate-change into which we are moving.
The cut-throat competition of the haves and the have-nots seems to be a deeply ingrained factor in the consciousness of the human race. Just how deeply ingrained is a question of intense debate among anthropologists, historians and archaeologists. Can we transform territorial and economic competition into peaceful and cooperative co-existence? Have we ever? Is there any evidence that peaceful societies have ever existed, which would give us hope that it can be done?
Here the work of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas on the matricentric, peaceful, goddess-worshipping cultures of Old Europe, in the 8th to 6th millennia BCE, is of great importance. Although her work is controversial because it goes far beyond the accepted academic paradigms in prehistory and archaeology, I am among those who find the massive accumulation of detailed evidence in her work to be convincing in a revelatory way. Around the 5th millennium BCE, the people she calls Kurgans, with their sky and warrior gods, their horses, chariots and weapons, started emigrating from their homeland in Central Asia, perhaps in reaction to spreading drought conditions (for which there is independent evidence). Gimbutas’ work shows, convincingly to my mind, that the Kurgan peoples’ practice of invading the rich farming communities along river valleys and taking what they wanted by force of arms, was not a form of culture that could have evolved naturally out of those peaceful, artistic cultures of Old Europe. It was imposed by violence and war at first, and later by forced assimilation and intermarriage. The historical outcome of this millennia-long transformation were the mixed cultures, in which there was a ruling class or caste of patriarchal warrior chiefs and kings, and a subordinate class of farmers and other workers. Some scholars have suggested that the ancient Indian civilization, with its rigid hereditary caste structure, was similarly a product of an layering of the dominant Aryans over the indigenous Dravidians.
In my book The Well of Remembrance I show how hybrid mythologies wove together the histories and religious cosmologies of the two kinds of cultures in Europe. In Nordic-Germanic mythology as related in The Edda, the deities of the Old Europeans, called Vanir, were all associated with the land, fertility, peace and wealth, including mineral wealth. The sky and warrior deities, called Aesir, were originally the protector gods of the nomadic herders, highly dependent on sun and weather changes. The Edda poems say that war came to mankind by extension from the competitive feuding between the Aesir and Vanir deities. These myths are religious stories that tell the histories of the peoples involved. The invaders and conquerors tell their justification stories – “they stole from us,” “they started the fighting,” “our supreme god told us do this.” The conquered also tell their stories of resistance and retaliation.
And then there are the myths of peace-making and reconciliation rituals – like the Mystery Celebration of Eleusis and the creation of the Mead of Inspiration. One of my favorites is the Iroquois story of how the legendary Peacemaker (who lived in what we call the Middle Ages), persuaded the savagely warring tribes of the Eastern woodlands, using magic words, to bury the hatchet and meet in council at the foot of the Great Tree of Peace. They formed a federation of seven tribes living peacefully together that inspired Franklin, Washington and the other founders of the United States. These federations have lasted, mostly though not completely peacefully, for several hundred years. Perhaps it is time for Americans to remember the unifying and peace-making myth that is also part of our national identity, besides the themes of freedom, wealth and power that seemingly loom so large in our public discourse.
No comments:
Post a Comment