Preamble : The other week I was reminded of this blog's existence following a surprise visit from my niece which then led to me attempting to revive this thing with a new post (it's only been in stasis for 3 years after all..) and see if there's some life left in it. Technical difficulties prevented me from churning this post out sooner but aside from a few dead links here and there that I've fixed..I think.. everything looks fine with the blog itself so let's get started.
While wandering the net I came across a trailer for a documentary called We are Legion : The story of the hacktivists.
N.B. : The documentary is being screened at various film festivals but I have not yet found a general release date for it.
This all started snowballing for me with thoughts on Anonymous (more here) as well as the Occupy movement and their relation to mythology. In mythology it's a common theme for a hero to take up arms (and/or wits) and attempt to defeat a tyrant-king or a monster of some sort. However in the case of Anonymous and Occupy there is no singular hero, no modern Theseus or Heracles leading the way. In the case of Occupy it resonated more for me with a mob of angry villagers armed with torches and pitchforks, like the ones that take the fight to Dr. Frankenstein and the monster he created. Though of course in this case the 'fight' takes the form of civil disobediance and pitchforks have been replaced with protest signs.
I then decided to see what further connections could be found in looking at Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, I did not have to look hard at all as perhaps the most interesting link is the book's subtitle; "or the Modern Prometheus". In Greek mythology Prometheus (from pro = fore and metis = thought making Forethought/thinker) is a Titan, moreover he is a Trickster-figure. Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind which really didn't sit well with Zeus who subsequently punished him severely for it. Oh, and yes the title for this entry is a very bad pun on 'Prometheus Bound'.
Although the Promethean link applies more in relation to Anonymous than it does to Occupy for with their use of 'tricks' Anonymous shows it's dissatisfaction with how companies and/or governments or even religious institutions conduct their business and seek to change this by throwing a monkey wrench into the proverbial works.
While Prometheus may not be the typical Trickster figure he certainly shares the characteristics. Another telltale sign of Prometheus' Trickster qualities still survives today in language, as in Promethean which means: of, relating to, or resembling Prometheus, his experiences, or his art; especially : daringly original or creative. These traits are always found with any Trickster, but not all Tricksters are created equal for they can be demigods or gods, anthropomorphic, spirits, shapeshifters etc.
Regardless of what form they take a Trickster's actions will (un)intentionally reshape matters in a local, cultural or global sphere and regularly will suffer repercussions for it themselves. Some are more dark or destructive like Loki, whether from the original Norse myths or a reimagined version in blockbuster movies like The Avengers or Thor (thunder deities are previously discussed here).
Much like Prometheus, Loki was bound to a rock and suffered recurring torment. In his case it was for scheming to get another god, Balder, killed.
In Native American mythology Trickster often takes the form of Raven, Hare or Coyote depending on the region and at times they play crucial roles in the creation of mankind or they might even be the creator of mankind. Hermes is an example from Greek mythology and highlights another facet of the Trickster, that of messenger between gods and men.
There is an African trickster deity called Eshu who loves to cause trouble, in one story he manages to get a whole town in a fight just by walking along a road one day. As Eshu is walking, farmers working the fields on either side of the road notice him and later that day they meet up in the village and talk to eachother about the stranger that came by. The people that worked on one side are sure he wore a red hat while the farmers that had worked on the other side are convinced he was wearing a black hat and it isn't long before they come to blows over the argument. Eshu ofcourse had orchestrated the whole thing simply by wearing a hat that was red on one side and black on the other.
So under a multitude of forms and guises we can discover the Trickster archetype, but the constant factor is that he is an agent of change, more often than not through the chaos that follows his exploits.
Speaking of guises.. Anonymous has adopted the Guy Fawkes mask made famous through the movie V for Vendetta adapted from Alan Moore's graphic novel of the same name. You can read an interview with David Lloyd, the artist for the graphic novel, about Anonymous here.
The Trickster archetype goes well beyond the sphere of mythology, Carl Jung ofcourse came up with the archetypes in their relation to psychology but Trickster naturally is found in many other places as well.
The court jester is a good example from history and he is still found in the company of Kings and Queens in just about any deck of playing cards as the Joker.
Perhaps the best known Joker of recent times
In staying true to the archetype the Joker is the wild card, the one card the normal rules do not apply to and thus is able to shake up any game by making an appearance.
NB: There is a whole lot more to be said about Tricksters but since I don't feel like spending several hours amassing sufficient information and shaping it into a somewhat coherent write-up it will have to wait for another time.
Post Scriptum:
Synchronicity (: an acausal connecting principleoran apparently meaningful coincidence in time of two or more similar or identical events that are causally unrelated) does get funny, I'd been typing away at the above posting for a while and had already jotted down some points in the draft that I still wanted to mention and what Trickster/Joker-related video I would end this post with, like Steve Miller - The Joker. As the article was taking me a while to finish I decided to watch the movie Dark Shadows by way of a break.
Within a few minutes of starting it the first sync comes along with the torchbearing mob coming for the monster, later on I see that one of the characters is played by Johnny Lee Miller who, if you're of the appropriate age or perhaps geekiness, you will remember from the movie Hackers, which makes sync #2 .
(Full movie available online here. Hackers looks extremely dated now but there's an odd sense of prescience hanging over it. The hackers being matched against big companies and targeted by law enforcement are still current despite the movies' age. If you have some time to spare watch the movie as it is arguably a classic in it's own right.)
Now back to Dark Shadows as later still, sync number three occurred when Johnny Depp starts singing the lyrics to Steve Miller's - The Joker and this then brings me, in far too many words, to the appropriate ending of this post.
Two days ago I watched a movie called Bronson, it is based on the life of the Englishman Michael Gordon Peterson. He would later go by the name of Charles Bronson (which is how I will refer to him) after the actor known from starring in the Death Wish movies. The article I had intended to write on Bronson himself spun out of control pretty fast and turned into this behemoth exemplar that you are reading now. This entry will not be a review of the movie but will instead deal with Bronson and several other characters who achieved notoriety in their own right and who share several characteristics and peculiarities with eachother. If you have delicate sensibilities you may opt to sit this one out, if on the other hand you are curious to what several (in)famous criminals were up to you're in the right place.
Bronson, a former circus strongman and bareknuckle fighter, was arrested at the age of 22 for a robbery gone sour that netted him the grand total of 26 pounds and 18 cents. This blunder of a caper got him 7 years in prison back in 1974. This hardly seems interesting enough to make a movie about, but today at age 56 Bronson is still in prison serving a discretionary life sentence. Some of the reasons he has found himself staying 'at Her Majesty's leisure' for so long will follow shortly.
The case of Peterson/Bronson reminded me of an American called Carl Panzram (28 June 1891 – 5 September 1930) whom I read about in Colin Wilson's 'A Criminal History of Mankind' (mentioned briefly in a previous entry here).
The two of them have an apparent capacity for extreme violence and a determination of defiance to 'the system'. For Bronson this mainly means railing against the prison- and legal system but for Panzram it was the world at large. Panzram was in and out of prison starting at a very young age, often getting caught for burglary and theft. Both men had many violent altercations with fellow inmates and guards causing their sentences to be extended and exposing themselves to brutal beat-downs by prison guards. Bronson even succeeded in taking hostages several times, amongst them inmates but also guards and even a deputy governor. While he might have exploited those situations he made large, and rather odd, demands. Such as an inflatable doll, a cup of tea and a helicopter during a 1994 hostage situation. Another time he demanded Uzis with 50.000 rounds of ammo and a flight to Cuba but also a pickle and cheese and sandwich. He has been called the "most violent prisoner in Britain". His time served is now 34 years, 30 of which he has spent in solitary confinement. During this time he has been moved around to many prisons as well as asylums, the total of which exceeds 120 locations, virtually all the prisons in England. While Bronson is clearly violent and unwavering in his routine Panzram took matters even further. Bronson’s violence does not include murder and rape whereas Panzram killed over 20 people, children amongst them. He sodomized and robbed countless more and was without remorse. Panzram was arrested numerous times but managed to escape from prisons on several occasions and would immediately resume his destructive, killing and thieving travels around the country.
These men seem to be continually taunting society; they refuse to submit to laws, so we, that is, society have to deal with them. The regular course of action is to separate them from the rest of us by throwing them in jail, hoping (usually in vain) that their isolation makes them better men and if not that then at least give everyone else a reprieve of the threats they pose to the status-quo. However, the logic of caging a wild animal amongst other wild animals and then expecting them to come out tame afterwards is admittedly beyond me. Here too Bronson and Panzram are similar, their incarcerations did nothing at all to curb their violence and in fact have done quite the opposite, and both have expressed their strong aversions to their guards. By both words and deeds alike. Since 1974 Bronson has been released twice and spent a little over 100 days out of prison. After his first release he was out for nearly 60 days until he was incarcerated again for robbing a jeweller. After his return to prison he resumed his former routine of fights and hostage takings.
In the case of Bronson having him locked away in some small cell has not at all meant he has disappeared from public view. He has managed to keep us thinking about him, or people like him. He has done this by staging rooftop protests, hostage takings, numerous fights, the books he has written and most recently the movie based on his life. He remains a controversial character, while some organize protests for his release others are outraged at the spotlight he manages to find himself in.
We find a similar constellation of traits and events with another American in the person of Jack Henry Abbott (Jan 21, 1944 – Feb 10, 2002). His initial offence was forgery, but while in prison he murdered a fellow inmate which ensured a lengthy stay. And as we will later see with Panzram as well, he too was in detention centers and reform schools in his early teens. Abbott escaped in 1971 but was apprehended again after a bank robbery and was convicted to serve 19 more years on top of his previous sentence. In prison Abbott spent time in solitary confinement and it is during that time he became well read and eventually wrote a book of his own entitled; In The Belly of The Beast. Abbott had learned of the author Norman Mailer’s involvement with the murderer Gary Gilmore, it was then that he started writing Mailer. Mailer was impressed with him and thought that Abbott could be a professional writer and later he helped to convince the prison authorities to parole Abbott.
After Abbott’s release in 1981 the book was published and became a best-seller. Then, a mere 6 weeks after his parole, he killed a waiter in New York. An argument had started between the two men when the waiter had told Abbott he could not use the staff toilet. Abbott asked the waiter to step outside with him, when they got there Abbott pulled out a knife and stabbed the waiter to death.
Like Bronson and Panzram he was not particularly fond of the guards, he wrote: “The pigs in the state and federal prisons… they treat me so violently, I cannot possibly imagine a time I could have anything but the deepest, aching, searing hatred for them. I can’t begin to tell you what they do to me. If I were weaker by a hair they would destroy me.” He wrote a new book in 1987 My Return. Expressing no remorse for his actions in it, instead he attributed his crimes to the government and the prison system. He also wanted an apology from society for being mistreated. In 2001 he came up for parole which was denied for his lack of remorse. His return then became a departure instead as he took his life by hanging himself in his cell in 2002. A 1988 movie Ghosts... of the Civil Dead is partly based on his life. “This world is nothing. An illusion. Death is the release.”-In the Belly of the Beast
The case of Gary Gilmore (Dec 4, 1940 - Jan 17, 1977) presents itself with striking similarities to Abbott and Panzram. He however is the only one not to write a book about himself, in his case it was Norman Mailer that decided to write on the life and death of Gilmore. Mailer's novel "The Executioner's Song" won the Pulitzer Prize and later Tommy Lee Jones would star as Gilmore in the movie version. A second book was written by Gilmore's brother and this too was made into a movie;Shot in the Heart adopting the title of the book. Gilmore spent a lot of time in reform school in his early teens. He had been caught and sentenced several times for car theft and was a repeat offender. A few years later he was arrested for armed robbery, once released he was caught for the same offence again. Despite Gilmore’s impressive IQ of 133 he was not a criminal mastermind, he managed to get caught for robbery a third time. In 1976 he was conditionally paroled but quickly reverted to his old routines. A mere 3 months after his release he killed two people in two robberies. The two victims were killed just 1 day apart, neither had resisted Gilmore but he chose to murder them regardless. In trying to get rid of the murder weapon he shot himself in the hand which would lead to his final arrest. He was tried, found guilty and sentenced to death. The death penalty came in two flavors in Utah, either by hanging or firing squad. The judge allowed him to decide which it would be and he chose for the firing squad. But the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) had different plans, they managed to get several stays of execution for Gilmore. Eventhough Gilmore did not wish them to do so. "They always want to get in on the act. I don't think they have ever really done anything effective in their lives. I would like them all — including that group of reverends and rabbis from Salt Lake City — to butt out. This is my life and this is my death. It's been sanctioned by the courts that I die and I accept that." After the first stay of execution he tried to hang himself while on death row and later made a second failed attempt. He was finally killed by the firing squad on January 17th, 1977. His last words were:"Let's do it." Like the men described above, the bizarre and horrifying life and deeds of Panzram found their way into print and onto the big screen as well. Panzram like Bronson and Abbott wrote a book while in prison, it is built on the letters he wrote to his guard Henry Lesser. (Why Panzram would write letters to a prison guard, since he hated them with a passion is described further down.) His book was published posthumously and unlike the others he did not achieve a measure of fame during his life. We come across another familiar name in that of Norman Mailer who said on the book Panzram: A Journal of Murder:"I enjoyed the real hell out of it. Panzram is one of those people who doesn't exist in your mind until you come across him in life or as here, in a book, and then he never leaves it." And conforming to the pattern of the previous criminals; James Woods plays Panzram in the 1996 movie Killer: A Journal of Murder there is also a documentary film that is yet to be released called simply Panzram.
Colin Wilson calls men like those described here ‘Right Men’. Men so convinced of their ‘right’ that when provoked, disrespected or otherwise wronged they will go to great lengths to exert what is in their eyes a just punishment without much, if any, concern for repercussions. These are not mere fits of blind rage, as Abbott’s stabbing of the waiter for instance indicates and which is also demonstrated by the contents of his second book. Of these four men Gilmore might be the exception in terms of being a 'Right Man'. The others I do consider to be legitimately typified as such.
Of himself Panzram said: “I have been a human animal ever since I was born I was a thief and a liar. The older I got the meaner I got.” As a child he was regularly beaten by his older brothers and after he had stolen from a neighbours’ house they beat him unconscious. When he was 8 he made his debut in court for being drunk. He was later send off to a juvenile reform institution for the theft at his neighbors. There he also received Christian training which he soon came to hate as well as more harsh treatment and beatings which were commonplace at the time. Of his time there he has said: “I first began to think that I was being unjustly imposed upon. Then I began to hate those who abused me. Then I began to think that I would have my revenge just as soon and as often as I could injure someone else. Anyone at all would do.”
In 1905 he managed to set fire to the institution by constructing a mechanism that worked with a delay, allowing him to be in bed as the fire started. Later that year he was released from the institution after having learned what it was the wardens wanted him to say to appear reformed in their eyes. He writes: “I was reformed all right. I had been taught by Christians how to be a hypocrite and I had learned more about stealing, lying, hating, burning and killing.”
Now 14 years old he returned home to work on his mother’s farm. He went back to school but after a failed attempt to shoot his teacher as retaliation for beatings he had received from him he was kicked out. Not long after this Carl ran away from home by boarding a freight train. During one such train ride he was raped by four hobos, this experience taught him a new way to humiliate people. Soon he was caught again for burglary and was sent to another reform institution. A year later he escaped from there together with another inmate, Jimmie Benson, travelling together for a while, robbing and burning churches as they went. The two split up after some time and Panzram travelled alone again. He had changed his name and at 16 he enlisted in the army in 1907 and it took him only 3 to 4 months to get court martialed. Previously already being penalized for minor offences, he now had broken into the quartermaster’s office stealing clothes and money but was arrested by the military police when he tried to make a run for it. He was dishonourably discharged, sentenced to 3 years hard labor and forfeiture of all pay. The Secretary of War who was required to approve the sentence was none other than future-president (from 1909-1913) William H. Taft. Years later in 1920 Panzram would break into a home and come away with loot as well as a .45 Colt, this home and gun belonged to Taft. Panzram developed a new routine, he would go to bars and find sailors and get them to come with him onto a stolen boat he was now using with the promise of employing them as crew. Soon he would get them drunk and shoot them with Taft’s gun, afterwards weighing them down and throwing them overboard elsewhere. On one such occasion, when he had two crewmembers/victims-to-be aboard they were surprised by a heavy gale whilst sailing. The ship smashed to pieces but Panzram managed to swim ashore and survive, as did the two crewmembers who probably never realised how lucky they were.
Panzram's account from his letters spans many more years and tells of many sordid affairs and brutal murders but I will not detail them all here. Other than the above he beat, robbed, raped and murdered hobos, cops, guards and children from America to Africa to Europe and back to America again. He set fire to many churches and broke out of prison several times through arson as well. Illustrating some of the prison treatment; at one time Panzram threw his chamberpot in a guard's face after which he was beaten unconscious and chained to hang from his cell door for 30 days. His incarcerations fueled his hatred for humanity thinking up grand schemes to kill people; poisoning water supply with arsenic, sinking a British navy ship to cause war between England and America to name some. To end the story on Panzram I will clarify why he started to write the guard, Henry Lesser, I will quote from A Criminal History of Mankind:
When a loosened bar was discovered in his cell, Panzram received yet another brutal beating -perhaps the hundredth of his life. In the basement of the jail he was subjected to a torture that in medieval times was known as the strappado. His hands were tied behind his back; then a rope was passed over a beam and he was heaved up by the wrists so that his shoulder sockets bore the full weight of his body. Twelve hours later, when the doctor checked his heart, Panzram shrieked and blasphemed, cursing his mother for bringing him into the world and declaring that he would kill every human being. He was allowed to lie on the floor of his cell all day, but when he cursed a guard, four guards knocked him unconscious with a blackjack and again suspended him from a beam. Lesser was so shocked by this treatment that he sent Panzram a dollar by a ‘trusty’. At first, Panzram thought it was a joke. When he realised that it was a gesture of sympathy, his eyes filled with tears. He told Lesser that if he could get him paper and a pencil, he would write him his life story.
And in Killer: A Journal of Murder the book consisting of Panzram's letters, which was later to be made into the movie as already mentioned above, he says:
"If any man was a habitual criminal, I am one. In my life time I have broken every law that was ever made by both God and man. If either had made any more, I should very cheerfully have broken them also. The mere fact that I have done these things is quite sufficient for the average person. Very few people even consider it worthwhile to wonder why I am what I am and do what I do. All that they think is necessary to do is to catch me, try me, convict me and send me to prison for a few years, make life miserable for me while in prison and turn me loose again ... If someone had a young tiger cub in a cage and then mistreated it until it got savage and bloodthirsty and then turned it loose to prey on the rest of the world... there would be a hell of a roar...But if some people do the same thing to other people, then the world is surprised, shocked and offended because they get robbed, raped and killed. They done it to me and then don’t like it when I give them the same dose they gave me."
-From Killer, a Journal of Murder, edited by Thomas E. Gaddis and James O. Long, Macmillan, 1970.
Eventually Panzram was sent to Leavenworth prison, there he killed another man for which he received the death penalty. And here as well we find the remarkable occurence of notable, or at least, respectable people championing a convicted killer. And in Panzram's case one that was still promising to kill even more people, he was still looking to settle the debt that he felt society owed him. Henry Lesser had found support for Panzram through showing his letters. Without fail here we find another famous author, this time it was H.L. Mencken. Carl Panzram however did not want a reprieve and, like Gary Gilmore would later, he protested saying:
"I would not reform if the front gate was opened right now and I was given a million dollars when I stepped out. I have no desire to do good or become good." And in a letter to Henry Lesser he showed a wry self-knowledge: "I could not reform if I wanted to. It has taken me all my life so far, thirty-eight years of it, to reach my present state of mind. In that time I have acquired some habits. It took me a lifetime to form these habits, and I believe it would take more than another lifetime to break myself of these same habits even if I wanted to..." "... what gets me is how in the heck any man of your intelligence and ability, knowing as much about me as you do, can still be friendly towards a thing like me when I even despise and detest my own self."
-A Criminal History of Mankind, Colin Wilson (italics mine)
Carl Panzram was executed September 5th, 1930. As he walked onto the scaffolding to be hung he spat the executioner in the face and spoke his final words, shown below.
It has not been my intention here to blame the behavior of these men on the prison system, faulty though as it may be. To me it seems these men have made conscious choices to do as they have done. All of them were given breaks at various points in their 'careers', given chances at a normal life. Yet none of them managed to make the change. They all were intelligent enough to know better, Panzram for instance would read books by philosophers like Hegel and Kant in prison. And for Gilmore his IQ of 133 seems to not have afforded him with the capacity to envision a normal way of life for himself. Not even Abbott, despite his newfound freedom and literary success could keep himself out of trouble.
The final analysis on their motives I will leave to the reader, those that have managed to read this far anyways. And there are far more in-depth writings available for study about them, some of which I've mentioned here. My own fascination with the subject crosses disciplines as it were, these are clearly abnormal stories that alone makes on curious. Their shared traits, personally and outside influences further pique ones interest. Most notably perhaps would be that these men found support, willingly or not, through their writings which drew the attention not just of civil rights groups but that of famous writers as well. Nor are these cases the only ones of their kind; the novel by Truman Capote "In Cold Blood" and its various screen adaptations might be better known and follows the same pattern. There surely are more examples but the ones discussed here virtually came as a packaged deal and my verbosity has its limits.
The conclusion if there is one to be made. The histories of these men and those like them seem to attest that the public at large loves to hate a 'good' criminal and see them brought to justice. Yet with the same fervor it loves to see the exact same criminal set free when he manages to get under their skin. There is some type of weird paradox at work here. Rather sensibly society wishes to avoid murderers, rapists and robbers but our fascination with them causes us to pull them up close for a good view. They can achieve fame from behind bars, get married (Bronson, but divorced), write books and gain a following of enthusiasts, civil rights groups even their own guards. Perhaps it is that when they are locked up we forget for a moment the deeds that got them there and are reminded of their humanity and we wish to see them freed. But once they are free, they themselves seem to be reminded that they do not fit in with society and their regression to their old habits seems but a matter of time.
Obviously I do not have the answers to the situation of 'Crime and Punishment' and there are varying opinions as to its causes and solutions. In closing, rather ironically it is Charles Bronson alone of these four men that does not have a Death Wish.
Excuse the lack of updates, the weather has been great and I did not have much interest in compiling data for a lengthy post interspersed with the odd bad pun.
So this one will have to do and I'll get right to it...the sky is falling!
Or so one is almost inclined to believe when perusing some of the (paranormal)news sites. NASA's mission to 'bomb' the moon being one of the catalysts for panic responses or otherwise evoking outrage. The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS , is apparently going to severely annoy the Man in the Moon causing him to strike back at us. Ok ok, there is no such thing. But have a look around for some articles and pretty soon you will be reading about alien bases on the dark side of the moon and how this kinetic impact will perturb them.
It's all well and good to theorize on the reasons behind such endeavors, but rather conveniently the fact that the Moon has been impacted by spaceships since 1959 is overlooked.
Even after NASA mastered soft landings, however, the crashing continued. In the late 1960s and early 70s, mission controllers routinely guided massive Saturn rocket boosters into the Moon to make the ground shake for Apollo seismometers. Crashing was much easier than orbiting, they discovered. The Moon's uneven gravity field tugs on satellites in strange ways, and without frequent course corrections, orbiters tend to veer into the ground. Thus the Moon became a convenient graveyard for old spaceships: All five of NASA's Lunar Orbiters (1966-1972), four Soviet Luna probes (1959-1965), two Apollo sub-satellites (1970-1971), Japan's Hiten spacecraft (1993) and NASA's Lunar Prospector (1999) ended up in craters of their own making.
You can read more about that here. Even ignoring that the Moon is regularly impacted by meteoroids. One of the other concerns mentioned often is that NASA will be breaking 'space law' with the crashing of LCROSS into the Moon's surface. Right here on good old planet Earth there are frequent detonations of explosives in rock quarries etc, these are not considered acts of war either to my knowledge. And this appears to me as being essentially the same thing. Oh and LCROSS carries no explosive payload.
A lot of the sites discussing this topic talk about the impact creating a 5 mile crater, this appears to be the result of misquoting sources and the same error being repeated. To illustrate the error, from the same source as quoted above, "Researchers expect the impact to gouge a crater ~20 meters wide and throw up a plume of debris as high as 40 km." (emphasis mine) Which is a far cry from 5 miles (1600 meters = 1 mile). The scheduled impact should take place on October 9th and is visible from Earth by telescope.
In the extremely unlikely event that we find ourselves enmeshed in a galactic war by October 10th you may leave your 'I told you so'-comments here. Until then you can check out these videos.
My apologies, you can rinse out the aftertaste of REM with the next video.
Alright, bear with me (excuse the pun) because we’re making a rather quick leap from Middle Paleolithic Europe (+/- 300k to 40k years ago) to Late Paleolithic Asia(+/- 40k to 10k years ago).
Close to Beijing in China is the cave system of Zhoukoudian, alternatively spelled as Choukoutien. These caves, called the Dragon Bone caves (where have we heard that before?), have been excavated by archaeologists since 1921. The site was inhabited as long as 700.000 years ago as determined from the fossils found of Homo Erectus, the most famous of which was dubbed Peking Man. In the cave called the Upper Cave remains of Archaic Homo Sapiens, Early Modern Humans, have been found as well as a variety ornaments. Estimated age of these fossils has been set to around 30.000 years old. The combination of the fossils, their dates and location support the theory that Homo Sapiens in the area could have taken advantage of the land-bridge that connected Japan to the mainland of Korea some 15.000 years ago during the glacial period.
These people then started what is now known as the Jomon culture around 12.000 years ago. Eventually the Yayoi people coming from China displaced the Jomon culture. Modern Japanese are descended from both Yayoi and Jomon but the ancestry of the Ainu is still being researched and debated. These Ainu, that have lived in Japan and also in Sakhalin, that’s now part of Russia for thousands of years are the focus of this second instalment. The Ainu do not look like the average Japanese or Asian person. In fact they may not belong to the Mongoloid race at all. For a long time the Ainu have been a marginalised culture and officially they were not even recognized by the Japanese government as an indigenous people until 2008.
When genetic testing was performed on them it was discovered that they belonged to Y-haplogroup D.
It is found today at high frequency among populations in Tibet, the Japanese archipelago, and the Andaman Islands, though curiously not in India. The Ainu of Japan and the Jarawa and Onge of the Andaman Islands are notable for possessing almost exclusively Haplogroup D chromosomes, although Haplogroup C chromosomes also occur among the Ainu at a frequency of approximately 10%, similar to the Japanese.
Not wanting to turns this into a paper on genetics I’ll not delve further into that specific side of things here, but it should illustrate that Ainu are rather unique and present a problem in determining their ancestry that has not yet been settled. There is a fair amount of information to be found on it however, if you feel like untangling the DNA strands.
Most of the pictures here of the Ainu are taken between 1880 to 1930. In the time when westerners came upon them while travelling around Japan and became intrigued by tales of strange, extremely hairy folk living on the island of Hokkaido in Japan. They don't however have inordinate hair growth, the males simply stop shaving after a certain age. Rumours and superstition probably took care of the rest. The Ainu had been living in a manner that had gone virtually unchanged for millennia. Aside from perhaps the addition of trading and some domestication of animals and metal tools their mode of life was like that of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherer people. But what has also carried over from those times to the present is their mythology, and the central character of that is the bear.
“Particularly instructive and well reported is the instance of bear cult of the Ainu of Japan, a Caucasoid race that entered and settled Japan centuries earlier than the Mongoloid Japanese, and are confined today to the northern islands, Hokkaido and Sakhalin--the latter now, of course, in Russian hands. These curious people have the sensible idea that this world is more attractive than the next, and that godly beings residing in that other, consequently, are inclined to come pay us visits. They arrive in the shapes of animals, but, once they have donned their animal uniforms, are unable to remove them. They therefore cannot return home without human help. And so the Ainu do help--by killing them, removing and eating the uniforms, and ceremonially bidding the release visitors bon voyage.”
Joseph Campbell, Myths to live by – p.33
A great many rituals are, or were originally, intended to appease the gods or at least waylay their wrath or vengeance. The Ainu beliefs have some similarities with the Shinto (Way of the Gods) religion of Japan. ‘Ainu’ means human, as opposed to ‘kamui’ (compare to Shintos kami) which means spirit. Everything that is not 'ainu' is thus 'kamui', so there are kamui of nature, animals, plants and objects. In the Shinto religion reverence for life and paying proper respect to all things spiritual is of great importance. The same we find here in the Ainu with this wonderfully complex yet basic ritual. What this ritual and its accompanying belief allow for is that they are no longer just killing sacred life and damning themselves in the process of survival. Instead they are performing a service of reciprocal nature to the animal. What was at some stage guilt or fear of retribution is transformed into a life-affirming ceremony where the victim is now the sacrifice as well as the deity, he is both dinner and the guest of honor.
Now while I wish I came up with that all on my own, I took a page from the book of Joseph Campbell, literally. So here is him filling you in on the rest of it.
“We have a number of detailed accounts of the ceremonials, and even now one may have the good fortune to witness such an occasion. The bears are taken when still cubs and are raised as pets of the captor's family, affectionately nursed by the womenfolk and allowed to tumble about with the youngsters. When they have become older and a little too rough, however, they are kept confined in a cage, and when the little guest is about four years old, the time arrives for him to be sent home. The head of the household in which he has been living will prepare him for the occasion by advising him that although he may find the festivities a bit harsh, they are unavoidably so and kindly intended. "Little divinity," the caged little fellow will be told in a public speech, "we are about to send you home, and in case you have never experience one of these ceremonies before, you must know that it has to be this way. We want you to go home and tell your parents how well you have been treated here on earth. And if you have enjoyed your life among us and would like to do us the honor of coming to visit again, we in turn shall do you the honor of arranging for another bear ceremony of this kind." The little fellow is quickly and skillfully dispatched. His hide is removed with head and paws attached and arranged upon a rack to look alive. A banquet is then prepared, of which the main dish is a chunky stew of his own meat, a lavish bowl of which is placed beneath his snout for his own last supper on earth; after which, with a number of farewell presents to take along, he is supposed to go happily home.
Now a leading theme, to which I would call attention here, is that of the invitation to the bear to return to earth. This implies that in the Ainu view there is no such thing as death. And we find the same thought expressed in the final instructions delivered to the departed in the Ainu rites of burial. The dead are not to come back as haunts or possessing spirits, but only by the proper natural course, as babies. Moreover, since death alone would be no punishment for an Ainu, their extreme sentence for serious crimes is death by torture.
A second essential idea is that of the bear as a divine visitor whose animal body has to be "broken" (as they say) to release him for return to his other-worldly home. Many edible plants, as well as hunted beasts, are believed to be visitors of this kind; so that the Ainu, killing and eating them, are doing them no harm, but actually a favor. There is here an obvious psychological defense against the guilt feelings and fears of revenge of a primitive hunting and fishing folk whose whole existence hangs upon acts of continual merciless killing. The murdered beasts and consumed plants are thought of as willing victims; so that gratitude, not malice, must be the response of their liberated spirits to the "breaking and eating" of their merely provisional material bodies.”
Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By p.33-34
Some other important facts to mention are that the Ainu consider the bear to be a mountain god which has led some to argue that this may have been why the cave bear skulls are found high in the mountains as well. Furthermore the Ainu preserve all the skulls of the sacrificed bears, so too we have seen in the caves of Europe, but here they are put up for display on poles. Also during the bear feast the goddess of Fire, Fuji, is invited to join the celebrations and in the Neanderthal caves as well as those of Zhoukoudian, fire hearths been found.
There is one final interesting connection with the Ainu and bears. The Ainu brought a breed of dog with them which is known the Ainu-ken but the Japanese call it Hokkaido-Ken. This dog has been with the Ainu since their arrival in Japan and is important enough to them to receive the same burial a human gets.
You would not say it by looking at it but this dog has the ability to take down brown bears, it manages to do this by climbing on the bear’s back and then biting down into its neck until it leaves or possibly dies. It also helps the Ainu with catching salmon.
To summarise: between the Neanderthals and CroMagnons of Europe and the Ainu of Japan I think there is a fair amount of material available to support the notion that mythology and mankind developed side by side from the beginning. There exists of course a great variety of ancient mythologies, but few (that I can think of) that date as far back as that of the cult of the bear.
When was it that mankind started to devise ideas about matters beyond the sphere of physical existence? What gave rise to mythological thinking? Before trying to answer those questions, let me first clarify what I mean when I say 'mythological thinking'. I am not here referring to myth as meaning something false or untrue. Instead I am referring to myth and mythology as being patterns of thought and belief which constitute an intrinsic and accepted part of the world view, if not the whole world view, of those that the particular myths belongs to.
Mythological thinking is thinking that extends past that which we can see and touch and into matters that go beyond the earthly and yet are experienced as/believed to be entwined with it. Mythological thought is invariably accompanied with rites and rituals. Examples of such are burial rituals, totems and the use of talismans and rites of passage (eg. childhood to adulthood or marriage). It would be erroneous to assume that mythology belongs only to ‘primitive’ cultures, for even to this day rites and rituals are common occurrences in all cultures.
Joseph Campbell once said “Mythology is other peoples’ religion.” He is referring here to the tendency that we hold our own adopted views as truth and those conflicting or different views of others as untrue. Therefore they are relegated to the realm of mythology. However in so doing we miss the point altogether, but more on that another time. I’m using the quote here also to point out that mythological thought and religious thought are essentially synonymous. But let’s get back to looking at the proposed origins of mythological thinking.
Several years ago I was reading in Joseph Campbell's, Myths to Live By how the earliest evidence for this emergence of mythological thought is found with the Neanderthals. “Our first tangible evidences of mythological thinking are from the period of Neanderthal Man, which endured from ca. 250,000 to ca. 50,000 B.C.; and these comprise, first, burials with food supplies, grave gear, tools, sacrificed animals, and the like; and second, a number of chapels in high mountain caves, where cave bear skulls, ceremonially disposed in symbolic settings, have been preserved. The burials suggest the idea, if not exactly of immortality, then at least of some kind of life to come; and the almost inaccessible high mountain bear skull sanctuaries surely represent a cult in honor of that great, upright, manlike, hairy personage, the bear."Joseph Campbell, Myths To Live By p32
Now I am well aware that the above is speculative in nature but it is informed speculation. Moreover there is little else we can do when interpreting such archaeological findings since obviously the Neanderthals left no written history for us. It may well be that this is not yet convincing enough for you so here’s a more detailed look into the Neanderthals, bear worship and the first known burial sites of hominids. By the end you will see how we can link the pre-historical to modern times.
Amongst various archaeological sites where remains of Neanderthals have been uncovered there have been those that contained what appear to be burial sites. In a cave at Shanidar in Iraq one of those sites included large amounts of pollen in the immediate area around the body, indicating that the dead were ritually buried. However some scientists claim that the pollen comes from flowers that burrowing animals had collected and stored. Another site is found in the Atapuerca mountains in Spain. There they have uncovered the earliest known European hominids. Particularly in "Sima de los Huesos" (translated : pit of bones) a great amount of, yes you guessed it, bones have been found. Bones belonging to 30 different specimens of Homo Heidelbergensis have been identified. Along with these remains many animal bones have found; foxes, wolves, lions and bears. There is a debate as to whether these remains have been buried there or as the competing theory goes, that natural causes account for their presence there.
While most likely the disagreements like those described above will continue, as seems to be the case with most discoveries, I shall leave the final word on that to the experts. However I am quite certain that the ritual burial answer is a very possible and, with the scientific data, also a very probable reality. It serves my purpose therefore to indicate that there have been more than one type of hominid to bury their dead. And in the case of H. Heidelbergensis also extending this practice even further back in time than H. Neanderthalensis.
Aside from the burials there is the matter of Neanderthals taking care of members of their group that were injured or debilitated. Here too the site at Shanidar is a good example. A skeleton designated as Shanidar 1 his skull bears evidence of massive trauma and likely blindness in the affected side of the head. Examination determined he was only able to use one arm, possibly he suffered from partial paralysis and his right leg was crippled. His age is another distinguishing feature, being around 40 years of age would have made him a geriatric in modern terms. All this points to the group having a social awareness and taking care of those that could not do so themselves. Also the cave at La Ferrassie in France was an important discovery, yielding one of the most complete skeletons and leading to the discovery that the Neanderthals were not as different anatomically from modern man as was previously thought.
There remains one more point and that is that of the bear skulls. When discoveries of cave bear fossils (Ursus speleaus) first started to be described in the 18th century they were thought to have belonged to dragons or even unicorns. Exemplary of this is Drachenhöhle (Dragon’s Cave) in Austria, discovered by soldiers during WW I. Fossils, stone tools and open hearths were discovered there. The finding of cave bear fossils became so prolific at a time that they were simply used as phosphates for industry and obviously destroying a lot of potential evidence in the process. Also the earlier discoveries and following excavations in the 1900s were not conducted as carefully as present day archaeological digs are. But nothing we can do about that now, it's all in the past. (OK that was bad, I apologize) In Switzerland in the Drachenloche (Dragon's Lair) cave the remains of more than 30.000 cave bears have been found. This seems like a very high number, but the time span during which cave bears could have lived there can account for the high number of fossils. Given the fact that bears regularly die during hibernation for example and by just having a single or several deaths a year over the course of many thousands of years this comfortably accounts for such numbers. At the Dragon’s Lair cave not just cave bear fossils were found but also tools made and used by hominids. Now while just the presence of both at the same cave is not proof in itself of bear worship the way that the skulls were found seems to indicate that this was the case. Some of the cave bear skulls appear to have been specifically arranged. Either in their orientation; skulls all facing same direction, or composition; the skulls had the limbs positioned under them or bones placed through the eye socket.
"In a chamber of the Drachenloch in Switzerland, a stone cist had been built to house stacked bear-skulls: piles of sorted long bones were laid along the walls of the cave. Another heap of bones contained the skull of a bear through which a leg bone had been forced, the skull resting upon two other long bones, each bone was from a different beast."
J.M. Coles, E. S. Higgs (1969): The Archaeology of Early Man, New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969, p. 286-287.
But Neanderthals were not anatomically modern humans, they were archaic homo sapiens, just like H. Heidelbergensis and neither of which were direct ancestors of us. They did however have similar brain size to modern humans and one could therefore assume they at least had the potential to achieve the same level of thought as anatomically modern humans could. The archaic humans and anatomically modern humans (the Cro-Magnons) co-existed in overlapping time and space. The oldest discovered Cro-Magnon made figurines include zoomorphic/anthropomorphic ivory carvings belonging to the Aurignacian period. The Lion-Man figure (shown below) that was discovered in Germany is a great example and it is dated to be around 32.000 years old.
So there we are, archaic humans and anatomically modern humans both with evidence that indicates the development of mythological thinking and rituals. But I did say I was going to link this to modern times didn't I? I will, in part 2.
As one of the impressive natural phenomena thunder and lightning have been ascribed to the domain of many different deities by many cultures since time immemorial. But just where do all these different gods come from and are they really all that different?
Everyone will be familiar with the image of Zeus hurling thunderbolts at mortals and deities alike for overstepping their boundaries or meddling in divine affairs. But while Zeus may be the most well known he is but one such example and far from the oldest. Usually the deity of a specific pantheon that has control over thunder and wields the lightning bolt as a weapon is also the head of that pantheon; Zeus as ruler of Olympus being case in point, although he did have to overthrow the Titans first but that is where the thunderbolt came in handy. They are also invariably male deities. While for instance solar deities can be male or female in various cultures, the thunder deity is always a god and never a goddess.
The Greek Zeus was the same as the Roman Jupiter, also head of the pantheon, and this applies to the Etruscan Tinia as well, both a result of syncretism. Syncretism in mythology is a form of assimilation, occuring when different cultures adapt one anothers' deities or and equate them to their own.
Zeus likely originated in the Hurrian deity Teshub. The Hurrians in turn probably borrowed him from Hattians who called him Taru and the Hittites used the name Tarhun. The Hurrian, Hattian and Hittite peoples inhabited northern Mesopotamia, (present day Anatolia , Turkey). Teshub’s origin myth is closely resembled by that of Zeus. Teshub was often depicted with a triple thunderbolt and a mace or axe. And it is the axe that also stands in relation to various other thunder deities. Of particular interest here is the double-headed axe, which is also called a labrys. The African thunder deity Shango from the Yoruba religion is associated with a labrys. The Minoans of Crete in particular often made use of symbolic axes of this type. Though the word labrys is not Greek but possibly Lydian in origin. There is no surviving mythology from Lydia (also present-day Anatolia, Turkey) save for various characters of Lydian origin that appear in Greek mythology, such as Omphale who is given a labrys by Hercules, a son of Zeus.
To name some other examples: In Gaul and Britain there was Taranis, here too the name can be traced to Tarhun/Taru. But also Thor and his hammer (which is also called an axe at times) Mjöllnir, in Germanic/Nordic mythology. Thor, known also as Donar, from which are derived 'Donner' meaning thunder in German and the English word thunder itself. From India we have the god Indra* and in Japan there is Susanoo as the god of storms. It is not solely by the attributes that these deities are connected, many of their respective myths have close resemblances with their counterparts. Teshub/Tarhun fights and kills Illuyanka, a great serpent-dragon. Zeus at one points wages a hardfought battle against Typhon a Titan whose upperbody is that of a man and his lower halve that of a serpent. While Indra has to do battle with Vritra, another evil serpent deity and Thor clashes with Jörmungand the giant sea serpent. Even Susanoo fights and kills a serpent-dragon, Yamata no Orochi, the Eightforked Serpent.
In both Tarhuns and Zeus' battle they lose the first encounter. Zeus' sinews are cut and taken by Typhon into his mountain and Tarhun loses his eyes and heart. Also their lost bodyparts are retrieved by intermediaries, after the return of which they again face the serpents and finally defeat them. (The giant serpents are another ubiquitous mythological element which likely will be featured seperately here at another time.)
A further commonality lies in the meaning of Vritra, ‘the enveloper’ and Jörmungand is so large that he encircles Midgard with his body. If we look further into these stories some other related details appear. The number 3, and its multiples, being one such detail. For instance Indra has a three-headed elephant as a mount and Vritra himself has three heads. In one of the stories Vritra has 99 castles that Indra destroys while fighting the serpent to release the primordial waters that he had stolen.
Thor, when fighting Jormungand at Ragnarok, will kill the serpent but will be poisoned by the serpent and then die himself after having taken 9 steps. While Thor is not the head of the Nordic pantheon, the deity that most resembles him is. The god Perun from Slavic mythology is the chief god and wields thunder and lightning.
Perun rides a goat-drawn chariot and carries an axe or hammer that when thrown returns to his hand, all of which goes for Thor as well. Further their respective mythologies include the oak as being important to them and their ability to level mountains. Also like Thor/Donar the word ‘perun’ today still means thunder/lightning in the slavic languages. Both these deities are traced to have originated from Perkunas a Baltic thunder deity. Here too we find the goat-drawn chariot, the axe, the oak-tree and mountains connected to the deity. Similarly the name survives in common usage in Lithuania and Latvia as a word for thunder. Yet Perkunos is not the proverbial ‘pater familias’ of all these deities, for that we need to go even further back in time to the Proto-Indo-Europeans.
The Proto-Indo-Europeans (PIE) date to the Bronze Age or the late Neolithic. This an area of history that is fairly foggy. The currently accepted ideas are mainly arrived at through a combination of comparative linguistics and archaeological data from the Indo-Europeans as well as tracing genetic groups and distribution. What does seem certain is that the PIE had a sky deity called Dyeus Phater, meaning Sky Father. It also becomes clear that Dyeus gets turned into Zeus by the Greeks and Dyeus Phater into Jupiter by the Romans. The concept of Sky Father is wide spread and occurs in many mythologies, the Egyptians being a notable exception. And while the term is of considerable antiquity it continues to find contempary use in the Vedic religion as Dyaus Pita.
Since we are now on the Eastern side, here are some more words on Indra.
Indra’s weapon is called a vajra in Sanskrit and dorje in Tibetan which means thunderbolt and diamond and is symbolic for spiritual power and indestructibility.
It’s name is also lend to the Diamond Cutter Sutra, a 9th century copy of the Sutra is the oldest known printed book in existence, which at the end reads:
Thus shall you think of this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.
There are other sky/thunder deities in just as many cultures and they all have different inflections where they occur but I think the above should be sufficient to illustrate the commonalities between them and their likely origin in Dyeus Phater.
Chaiten volcanic eruption May 2008 -click picture to enlarge
“How the West was Lost” is a 90-minute documentary on the emergence, evolution and ultimate decline of the Western movie genre. Now while I’m not a great fan of westerns I was drawn to this documentary on account of it being presented and written by Rich Hall. Rich Hall, formerly part of Saturday Night Live and currently a comedian based in the UK. He is one of my favorites so I shelved my non-affinity to Westerns for the duration and gave it a viewing.
Hall is quite the grouchy, darkly humorous but intelligent character and he stays true to form here. We start off with Rich Hall becoming annoyed at an arrogant ‘know-it-all’ brat while he’s trying to read his paper. Their encounter serves as the kickoff point for the documentary.
Rich Hall: “You said the Western was dead, well that might be true, but the day it started dying is the day it got interesting. And you and I are gonna discuss what killed it.”
The Brat: “OK, I get it. This is a documentary... like ‘An Inconvenient Truth’."
Rich Hall: “No, that was a PowerPoint presentation. This is film history.”
More than just a chronology or anthology of Western movies the documentary takes us on a journey through of a variety of backgrounds, literally and figuratively. Moving from Tombstone to stretching desert roads, saloons and tourist traps we are presented with the historical West and the fictional, a variety of well-known actors and their characters and from directors to US presidents. We are told of where, according to Hall at least, American culture intersects with Westerns and of how the western genre changed in line with changes in the culture or as the directors themselves changed. We are shown a great many clips from Westerns but also historical footage. Aside from Rich Hall himself there are several experts chiming in such as a historian, a gun expert and a film historian. All in all it’s an entertaining watch for when you have a bit of time to kill.
If I did a good enough job of selling it, you can watch it right here as an 11-part playlist. Update: Video is no longer available on YT unfortunately, the only other place I can still find it online requires downloading and installing a codec, which I don't recommend.
And if I didn't manage to convince you to watch the documentary, don't worry, I won't leave you empty handed. Here are clips of two routines performed by Rich Hall at the Apollo in London.
Hope you enjoyed that since if you didn't I would think that a)you've undergone a lobotomy, or b) you should get one.
