#paul shepard

[forbidden-sorcery]

What is it about the domesticated civilized world that alters the concept of self so that it is enhanced by property? My self is to some extent made by me, at least insofar as I seem to gain control over it. A wilderness environment is, on the contrary, mostly given. For the hunter-forager, this Me in a non-Me world is the most penetrating and powerful realization in life. The mature person in such a culture is not concerned with blunting that dreadful reality but with establishing lines of connectedness or relationship. Formal culture is shaped by the elaboration of covenants and negotiations with the Other. The separation makes impossible a fuzzy confusion; there is no vague "identity with nature," but rather a lifelong task of formulating—and internalizing—treaties of affiliation. The forms and terms of that relationship become part of a secondary level of my identity, the background or gestalt. This refining of what-I-am-not is a developmental matter, and the human life cycle conforms to stages in its progress. Now consider the process in a world in which that Other has mostly disappeared. Food, tools, animals, structures, whole landscapes are man-made; even to me personally they seem more made than given and serve as extensions of that part of the self which I determine. My infantile ego glories in this great consuming I-am. Everything in sight belongs to me in the same sense as my members: legs, arms, hands, and soon. The buildings, streets, and cultivated fields are all continuous with my voluntary nervous system, my tamed, controlled self.                 In the ideology of farming, wild things are enemies of the tame; the wild Other is not the context but the opponent of"my" domain. Impulses, fears, and dreams—the realm of the unconscious—no longer are represented by the community of wild things with which I can work out a meaningful relationship. The unconscious is driven deeper and away with the wilderness. New definitions of the self by trade and political subordination in part replace the metaphoric reciprocity be-tween natural and cultural in the totemic life of the hunter-foragers. But the new system defines by exclusion. What had been a complementary entity embracing friendly and dangerous parts in a unified cosmos now takes on the colors of hostility and fragmentation. Even where the great earth religions of high agriculture tend to mend this rupture in the mythology of the symbolic mother, its stunting of the identity process remains.

Paul Shepard - Nature and Madness

[mythologyofblue]

To the desert go prophets and hermits; through deserts go pilgrims and exiles. Here the leaders of the great religions have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality.

Paul Shepard

[4thsoul]

[forbidden-sorcery]

In a stratified society people are divided into classes where individual freedom is limited. Wholeness and integration diminish because of the social effects of isolation and specialized roles. Of the Neolithic period that started about four thousand years after agricultural practices began, Wilhelm Dupre says: “The individual no longer stands as a whole vis-à-vis the life-community in the sense that the latter finds its realization through a total integration of the individual—as is the case by and large in gathering and hunting economies—but becomes part of the social structure in the function and role he selects or is selected for. It is a process in which natural alienation due to the psychological make-up of man assumes lasting forms.” The endogamous, secret, competitive nature of seed and root-keeping created the kind of Neolithic High Culture that preceded civilization—a fight and defense-mindedness that emphasized cultural differences.

Paul Shepard - Coming Home to the Pleistocene

[forbidden-sorcery]

The figure of the great mother goddess is central to the food or trophic pattern that governs domestic life. After nearly ten thousand years of living with that apprehension about food and the binding force of its psychic disablement, it is not surprising that civilized people find it difficult to understand the absence of such worries among hunting-gathering peoples, making them seem careless and imprudent. The repressed distrust of the mother and the maternal earth can then be redirected onto those blithe savages, picturing them as unfeeling for the well-being of their families and coarsely inured to hunger and the other imagined afflictions of a brutish life. This scornful fantasy is easily enough projected upon the rest of brute creation, making it easier to believe that all animals are insentient.                 It is not only an abstract Mother Earth who is the victim of this psychic deformity, but all wild things. Characteristically, farmers and townsmen do not study and speculate on wild animals or "think" them in their poetic mystery and complex behaviors. With civilization, typically fewer than twenty kinds of plants and animals in one village were tended, herded, sheltered, planted, cultivated, fertilized, harvested, cured, stored, and distributed. Sacrifice and other ceremonial activity were restricted accordingly. Even the gradual broadening of agriculture to embrace many more kinds of organisms left it far short of the rich cosmos of the hunter. Civilization increased the separation between the individual and the natural world as it did the child from the mother, amplifying an attachment that could be channeled into aggression.

Paul Shepard - Nature and Madness

[forbidden-sorcery]

Most people most of the time in the history of civilization have lived under tyrants and demagogues, cued to despair and hopelessness. Today we are subject to progress, centralized  power, entertainment, growth mania, and technophilia that produce their own variety of “quiet desperation.” This desperation arises not only from lack of attachment to place but also from lack of kinship with the larger community of all life on earth. History is not a neutral documentation of things that happened but an active, psychological force that separates humankind from the rest of nature because of its disregard for the deep connections to the past. It is a kind of intellectual cannibalism which creates from those different from us a target group that becomes the enemy, upon whom we project our unacknowledged fears and insecurities.

Paul Shepard

[forbidden-sorcery]

The “savage mind” grasps the world in a totality of present and past with all its multiplicity and complexity. On the other hand, as Lévi-Strauss has revealed, civilized thought attempts to simplify rather than clarify the complexity of the world. It does so by unifying and seeking continuity, variability, and relativity rather than by conceptualizing new schemes, as does “savage” thought, that then become additional objects to be comprehended. Stated simply, the “civilized mind” attempts to simplify and level the world whereas the “savage mind” is not afraid to become enmeshed in its complexity. Birth and death provide the material for a rich and diverse conceptualization [such as initiation ritual]...which transcends the distinction between the real and the imaginary.” It may seem that primal thought with its spiritual depth is not scientific, but Levi-Strauss regards such thought as “a science of the concrete.” He says: “The manner in which primitive peoples conceptualize their world is not merely coherent but the very one demanded where objects are discontinuous and complex.” In treating plants and animals as elements of a message, primitive thought discerns “principles of interpretation whose heuristic value” is only recently matched in our society by telecommunications, computers, and electron microscopes and modern information theory. “The entire process of human knowledge,” he concludes, “thus assumes the character of a closed system...The scientific spirit...contributes to legitimize the principle of savage thought and to reestablish it in its rightful place.”

Paul Shepard - Coming Home to the Pleistocene

[forbidden-sorcery]

For twenty years I have had an intermittent meditation on the bear. I have come to see that the image of the bear represents far more than the animal itself, and it seems possible that the whole of the animal kingdom could be regarded as having a history parallel to the bear’s biological evolution. That history is an elaboration of figures in the human imagination in which the animals became players in the emergence of human self-consciousness.                 The noun ‘bear’ comes from an Indo-European root term that gives us many other words, such as bury, borrow, burrow, bereave, bairn, birth, bier, which have to do with death and birth. As a process, the bear becomes a verb that linguist George Ruhl has called “one of the basic verbs of the language… irreducible” to further definition. The dozens of meanings of the verb ‘bear’ conform to one of three general meanings: to carry or transmit; to give birth; and to hold to a course – each with a place in cosmology. in the rich mythology of the bear, transmitting food and spiritual blessing takes place on earth, giving birth occurs in the underworld, and holding a course refers refers to the night sky. If we suppose that these concepts and terms belong to a time when speech was in its infancy, the first glimmerings of analogy were made possible by using a limited vocabulary in multiple meanings, a time when abstractions demanded, as they still do, some reference to the tangible world. The bear was at the center of this transformation from natural history to cognitive history. The great bear was the best and richest gift of winter foods. She was the seeming virgin mother, bringing forth her young from the winter den, as though from the womb of the earth. And each bear was a traveler in 500 square miles whose timing so conjoined place and season that she seemed never to be lost and always in tune with the schedule and geography of all ripenings, hatchings, and spawnings.

Paul Shepard