Flex Mentallo

Arnold Bocklin

Great stuff Pat! Do you have an overall impression as to scarcity? Are they all generally scarce? I seem to see the Vargo Statten books more often than anything else.

I am always excited and honored whenever he updates this, and would love to see him tell it elsewhere/ keep a copy of his research offline for later enjoyment! (thumbs u It sounds good in theory...in practice, I'm hopeful. I think all one can ask of anyone is to have an open mind. I'm just a student of these matters myself, after all. Surprisingly, it's not the words that take the time, it's matching pictures to the text that can be endlessly diverting. I put a lot of thought into that. Just how much can I layer meaning through that process? How many nuances enfold in the space between? How much tension create between words and pictures without snapping the connection? I don't think it always works - and I can happily spend hours looking for just the right image without quite knowing what I'm looking for - and then sometimes, bang, something pops up out of nowhere... or I just give up in frustration, and settle for something that doesn't quite do what I'm looking for. While a lot of the text is mine, I'm also quite happy to collage in chunks of other people's writings which I shamelessly don't bother to credit, so long as it steers us somewhere interesting. "If it works, don't fix it." If I were writing for an academic audience that simply would not pass muster. And that would stop me having all this fun. Wikipedia and other sources have also really helped refresh my recollections of books read many years ago - and then enabled me to revise and update my knowledge. And invariably, as I've said, I learn as I go. It's also interesting for me to see the way the various, multi-layered strands have unfolded, almost like excavations, hardly any of which was pre-planned! As much as anything, it has become a journey - a search really - the destination of which is uncertain but has to do with the nature of truth - and I definitely didn't plan that! I view each set of words and pictures as stepping stones. The really astonishing things turn out to be closest to what might actually have happened. We don't need Mu or Atlantis to tell a fabulous story. We have complex vanished civilizations in the rain forest, and a mythical structure perhaps as old as the human race. For example, if city-based civilizations emerged spontaneously (and more or less simultaneously) in no less than 6 locations we know about around 3500BC, what was the trigger? The story of humanity is wonderful, complex and surprising without having to be reinvented. I wonder what will happen next? .

Next

“Witzel’s opus is not simply an exercise in applying the method of historical comparative linguistics to the vast but largely disconnected research on myth and folktale that accumulated in the last century and a half. As strongly articulated is a solid knowledge of history, archaeology, and (what is new) physical anthropology, the history of food production and pastoralism, geological theories of continental drift and glaciation, and, crucially, population genetics and its links with language families. This is part of a larger movement in the humanities and social sciences to take natural and applied sciences seriously. Most explanations of myth, he shows, are monolithic and unilateral, attempts to read individual myths and comparative mythology through a single methodological lens. Witzel’s considerable armamentarium is designed to include all evidence and, as noted, time spans so vast that they have never been incorporated in the history of scholarly discussion of mythology, except by a few stray ethologists who have posited myth and quasi-religious ritual to prehominid apes. However, Witzel argues, both data collection and positive science have advanced to the point that all of these perspectives, particularly geological history and genetics, must be included in the discussion.” Frederick M. Smith, University of Iowa

It is an appealing notion that human beings have been human since the dawn, and that the sophistication of our thought has not been reliant on the intervention of romanticized mythical lost civilizations or aliens.

If technological advancement rather than the development of values is the measure of our humanity then we are in a lot of trouble.

Witzel has his detractors. There are many elements of his narrative in which he apparently piles his own assumptions on top of the assumptions of others. Regardless of whether his ideas are found to be proven or not his true legacy may be to have made comparable mythology a science which engages with other sciences.

The reason he addresses this is because Neanderthals have a deep antiquity that precedes H. sapiens sapiens. They also had burial practices that appear to have reflected symbolic thought. Even if they did not intermarry with H. sapiens sapiens, it is possible that they influenced them. The possibility of their intermarriage, however, has once again arisen as a result of recent evidence that Europeans have up to five percent Neanderthal genes.

He addresses the possibility that Neanderthals were able to speak. The current results appear to oppose this, but are not conclusive.

But he remains hopeful that the science will eventually fall into place. For example, he says “population genetics depends partly on so-far-untestable assumptions about rates of genetic drift that have not yet been established.”

Witzel issues strong warnings about his work. He constantly questions his own data. He recognizes that much of his speculation rests on suggestion rather than confirmation. The reasons are always that the corroborating sciences are thus far insufficiently developed.

Hence if the development of myth is a marker for the evolution of civilization, then civilization is far older than previously imagined. Because civilization is then mindfulness not cities or technology.

And to all intents and purposes it is as old as the race – a story that begins with events that could be as distant as 125,000 years ago, the development of modern hominids in Africa, their migration from there in about 65,000 BC, and their subsequent settlement of the entire planet - the march of hominids out of Africa, eastward along the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean coastline into Southeast Asia, Melanesia, and Australia, while another branch appears to have migrated from the Southeast Asian subcontinent northwards into China, Japan, Siberia, and the Americas, and from Southwest Asia in northerly and northwesterly directions into Central Asia and Europe. And we know this not from the study of mythology but from biology, genetics, and the study of mitochondrial DNA.

and an eventual rebirth or heaven, or a new earth.

final destruction, usually with variants on the theme of the four (or five) ages;

the emergence of local nobility and history;

the Promethean act of bringing culture, by a hero or shaman;

followed by their primal misdeed and subsequent death;

the birth of humanity,

Father heaven, mother earth, and their offspring; the defeat and displacement of current gods over their predecessors; the hidden sun revealed, after which the sun deity spawns humans; the defeat of the dragon;

It is a story of humanity's emergence rather than creation.

This mythology, he asserts, “represents our oldest complex story. It is a novel of the creation, growth, and destruction of the world, of divine and human evolution and decay, from birth to death, from creation to destruction. . . The universe is ultimately regarded as a living body, not surprisingly in analogy to the human one: it is born, grows, and finally dies”

“Worldwide similarities between individual myths are habitually explained by diffusion or by common human psychic traits (Jungian archetypes). However the current proposal supersedes these approaches as it involves a whole system of myths, notably one characterized by a narrative structure (story line) from the creation of the world to its end. This mythology has been spread not by diffusion but above all by the constant advance of humans: after their exodus out of Africa into northern Eurasia and beyond after the past two ice ages, respectively (c. 52.000–45,000 BC and 10,000 BC).”

To answer the underlying question “Why and how similarities in myth exist in distant parts of the globe?” Witzel asserts that human intelligence and mythmaking capabilities were no less 40,000 years ago than they are today; the differences are cultural.