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\title{Mimetic performance, cognitive evolution, and mixed creatures (Seminar)}
\date{25 May 2023}
\author{Deon Liebenberg}
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Recent developments in research on the possible role of mimetic communication in cognitive evolution – as a necessary precursor to spoken language – are used in conjunction with various other theories to explain the putative survival of certain forms of mimetic performance after the evolution of spoken language should have made them obsolete. Deon Liebenberg argues that such mimetic performances were perpetuated and further developed because of their powerfully adaptive nature – their ability, amongst other things, to address new forms of mental and emotional adversity that the evolving human consciousness would expose early humans to, such as the awareness of death. The persistence and further development of such mimetic performance alongside fully developed spoken language would leave a deep imprint on the evolving human mind. He argues that this imprint can be seen in widespread mythic conceptions of primordial androgyny, as well as in therianthropes, dragons, and other mixed creatures.


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Good evening everybody for this session of radical anthropology, when we are on Zoom for the rest of the term, as we’ve been the last couple week or so and today we are welcoming Dionne Leibenberg from South Africa and he’s having to endure a rolling blackout, which is why he’s appearing rather dark on his screen, but he promises that he’s gonna come into the light very shortly Dionne is a research fellow at University of Stellan, Bosch’s Africa Open Institute, and he’s currently doing a PhD in visual arts and it’s a very interesting cross-disciplinary move by Dion to apply, an understanding of myth ritual, and cognitive evolution to thinking about art, mimetic performance. So he’s talking about mimetic performance, cognitive evolution, and mixed creatures. So, over to Dion.


Good evening everybody.


Before I start talking about mimetic performance and cognitive evolution, I wanna say that there are gonna be three layers to this talk.


Firstly, I’ll talk about, mimetic performance as part of the evolution of language and how that possibly impacted on well, culture in general, and myth and ritual in particular. I don’t think the impact that it has is fundamental to myth and ritual or religion, as such, it, it plays the rather peculiar role and you’ll see what I mean by that.


As I go on the next stage, I will link what I’ve said there to, what I’ve studied previously concerning the relationship between, the human menstrual cycle and the lunar cycle, and the type of cosmologies that have evolved around that.


Thirdly, I’m going to talk about patriarchal transformations of that type of cosmology, which is really my favorite, thing to look at because, you can go into it in so much detail because everything that is recorded, most of it is in that form. okay, let me start first before I go into the, the memetic, theory.


I’m gonna start with a myth that I’m gonna come back to, in various stages.


It’s a two p myth, treated by, chlor lev straws.


In the second volume of these mythologies, it’s, called the origin of night. and I must say they, they don’t know which particular tupe speaking, society, Tolu myth. It was recorded by Ku De in, 1876 or something but it’s an incredibly, it’s an incredibly interesting myth.


Basically what happens is you’ve got, the daughter of the great snake.


She’s got married and sh but she cannot consummate her marriage because, she needs night to, to have sexual, union and there is no night there’s any perpetual daylight because her father, the great snake, keeps night, captive under the waters.


So she sends three messages in the canoe to go and fetch night from the father, and he gives it to them and says, in a sealed container, a sealed parnu and he says, do not open this palm night.


Whatever happens until you get back to my daughter, as they’re on the river, of course, they hear this sound from inside and they wanna open it and see what’s going on. And first they say, no, they must endure it.


The sound comes back, and eventually they can’t resist it, and they open it right there on the river. Immediately.


Night escapes flies out, and darkness falls for the very first time.


when this happens, the daughter of the night sees what happens, and immediately, she realized what’s happened, and then institutes the regular alternation of day and night.


but now what happens as night falls for the first time, a very dramatic event takes place you human artifacts like baskets, a basket turns into a jaguar, a man in his canoe where the paddles turn into a duck, the, the paddles become the feet and so on, et cetera, and all kinds of things becomes bird and fish and, and, and so on.


I’m gonna come back to the seal container and the great snake and the daughter, and the lack of sexual union and all those things later on.


first I’m gonna relate this, but I, I want to f I want to focus on this episode where cultural artifacts turn into natural, things. there’s another myth that’s very common in the, in Amazon, called the Wooden Bride, told by the Kube Thera and, the yy and several other societies in which, a man, he gives his daughter, as a bride to, the protagonist.


And, but this daughter, he, he calves her out of wood.


So she’s a wooden sculpture, but like Pigmalian does and, makes her come alive miraculously, and he goes off.


But he discovers that he can’t consummate the, the, the, the marriage because, the father neglected to carve, the appropriate opening of vagina.


and as Levi straws points out, this, father who neglects to carve a vagina for his daughter is playing the same role as the great snake who doesn’t allow daughter to have sex because he keeps night trapped, under the waters. And as we’ll see later, that seal container and the wooden bride sealed womb are really ho concepts okay, we’re gonna come back to that in the end.


What I want to get into now is this whole phenomenon of, cultural objects of generally culture that in myth has precedence over nature this is a very curious concept, and, you get it, in all kinds of, in its very simplest form, you get an involved sorcery where a cultural performance, a man, for instance, sticks a pun into a little effigy, a doll that he is made, that resembles his victim, or has some of the victim’s hair and fingernails or whatever, in the belief that the, the harmony does to this doll will be visited on the actual person.


So, a cultural event is followed exactly by a nat, the natural event that you believes will follow. You get the same thing in, rituals to make, to control the weather, like rain rituals, et cetera you get it in all kinds of societies at all kind of levels. You can say, and, you get it in creation myths where, the first humans or the first animals were either carved out of wood or they were modeled out of clay. In other words, they were like works of art that have presidents over the natural thing, the animal or the bird, or the, the fish or the human that they represent. so this reversal of the normal order where, through mimicry, you, you create something, you carve something or model it out of clay, or you act out the behavior of an animal.


This is reversed in this, type of way of thinking.


it is pervasive, and you even, you get it in Western society as well, Isaac Newton for decades, apparently, after he, after he published his penia mathematical, which is his great, scientific masterpiece, he searched for the plan to, the Temple of Solomon.


Cause he believed that that is the most accurate, guide to the topology of the universe. Now, that that concept that a temple is the, the archetypal form of the universe is a global concept.


You get it right there in South America, where we’re just not amongst the Kogi where, and bar, or the Yba Barka, as they call themselves, where the rich maloka or longhouse, is a model of the universe. According to the Bar Sauna’s creation myth, the universe was created by Romi Kumu, the, creator goddess out of a cassava, griddle, and three pot stands, which became the sky and the mountains in the earth.


the Kogi universe is basically, ba you could say, based on the, the temple that was created by the great mother who created all the things in the universe inside this temple, which is also a womb.


She created this in the form of ideas, images or essences, which then became the real things.


You also get that in a northwestern Australia, where Chris gave a talk on dragons a while, a couple of months ago, in which he also talked about, the olian culture of, the wk and, the Yogo giant snake and, the earth mother, the Wock sisters and so on.


now the right there, Northwestern Australia, you get amongst the unal, you get the, a giant snake who is identified with the, with the mock way, creates, different things in his mind as dream images that he projects in the form of paintings onto rock surfaces and into caves, and they then come alive and become the actual animals. But those paintings, those rock paintings, are still there in those caves, and they represent the spiritual essences of these creatures now. So you get the same, okay? There are differences, and I’m not saying they come from the same culture, but it’s very similar to the Kogi thing of these essences and if you go to Europe, we talked about Newton. Now, you also, you can talk about Plato’s philosophy, his idea of platonic form, or the platonic idea, the perfect or ideal form every living thing or entity in the universe has an ideal form in another perfect universe, which represents its perfect essence. Now, this is clearly, is basically the same kind of, it’s the same mode of thinking. It’s strikingly similar. There are of course, major differences and, good luck to Enad trying to e establish a historic link between Northwestern Australians, Amazonians and, ancient Greeks. You can’t really do that.


It means that these are parallel developments, but because they are so similar, because there is such striking detail, there must be some structure in the human mind that keeps creating the same way of thinking. And that is what I’m gonna talk about now.


I think that comes from, mimetic culture Melan Donald started a whole, a very productive field of, cognitive evolution theory. We argued that, the evolution of spoken language was preceded by, the evolution of, mimetic communication where ideas are com, communicated through gesture and mime and he argues this could have gone back 2 million years to homo rectus and said they would’ve needed it to organize, collective hunts and things like that okay, I’m not gonna go into that in detail because I wanna cover quite a bit of ground here.


The interesting thing to me is that in a collective hunt, if you act out the plan for the hunt allotting different roles to different actors and sub people, play the animals, some mime, the the different hunters and what they’re gonna do, how they will trap those animals, the, and then you get the actual hunt, and it’s a success. Now, over the years, people watching this and being part of it will realize that you have a cultural performance that always precedes the natural event, and that the cultural performance has the power of determining the natural event. Culture, in other words, has priority of a nature in this kind of thing, but in a very logical way.


What it expresses essentially is the power of the idea.


But they wouldn’t have abstract conceptions like idea, then they would just see that you do this pantomime performance, and, then the real thing happens. It’s very powerful.


Something that could not have happened before without this cultural performance is now happening so over the years, some kind of vague perception of the power of, the memetic performance would gather in the minds of these early humans.


Then wanna just briefly talk about Robin Dunbar’s, theories about, permanent bonding, how, the great apes you have social bonding is, to a large extent is created, facilitated through grooming, which releases endorphins, which your, your mind’s internal, drug that when it sets off, it makes it feels, makes you feel relaxed, and, there’s a sense of wellbeing.


It creates a bond between the groomer and the person being groomed.


The problem is that you, and that creates a stable soci.


So society where people get on and fighting is, kept to a minimum.


The problem being that there’s a ceiling to how many people you can groom before it starts invading the time you need for hunting, gathering, sex, and all kinds of other things that you need to survive and he says there are various different ways that as humans needed to expand the size of their social groups, they developed ways of, you could say, grooming at a distance and one of the most effective ways was collective summon dance, where, the, you, it’s been experimentally shown that collective c sy chronic movement like dance or rowing and so on, releases endorphins and, collective song and dance can after a long time, as in a trans dance, can even create a kind of endorphin rush, which can arguably lead to, ecstatic states. And he goes on to argue that, early immersive religion, as he calls it, is predicated on that endorphin rush to a very large degree.


now what I’m gonna talk about is something, I think immersive religion would be a later thing.


I’m gonna talk about something earlier and simpler, where, your collective dancing and the endorphins that it releases, and a sense of group bonding, the, the wellbeing that it creates, that could have been used to a certain extent to cope with crises. Because as a human mind developed, people would’ve become increasingly aware of the fact that there’s a future, a past and a present, and that there are uncertainties that come with that.


You can see that that person just died one day. I’m also going to die.


or more simply just that, human existence is very precarious. You know, that you don’t know if the next hunt is gonna be successful, there might be a drought. You know, there are all kinds of things that can go wrong. And, oh, sorry, before I go any further, the pantomime, once it was successful as a means of communication, there would be pressure on it, what you can call linguistic pressure to streamline the pantomime for ease of usage and ease of entry and access, so that you’d start using signs and actions that are abbreviated and streamlined, and they would become increasingly arbitrary and conventional or conventionalized. In other words, they’d become increasingly like normal or like spoken language, which means they will lose their iconicity. what that means is that the original pantomime, which was perceived as being powerful, would become obsolete.


And, the argument that I’m trying to make that, the, panim performance, which so resembles your vault sorcery, where a cultural performance is believed to be followed by, by an actual natural event or a real life event how would that happen? Because of the fact that, mimetic performance would lose its icon iconicity fairly rapidly, meaning that, the original pantomime would no longer exist or be perpetuated to perpetuate that perception of the power of the pantomime unless it was given another, function, which was adaptively powerful enough to make it perpetuated right into modern times. And then Donald says that there’s still lots of, particularly in the arts theater, a lot of song and dance, things like that, which is essentially mimetic a lot of fine art is mimetic, et cetera.


I think what happened is that it was combined with collective song and dance, which was to release endorphins for group bonding, to create something that could ward off, which could create a psychological, buffer to the insecurities of life. on a very simple level.


For instance, instead of just doing a pantomime, which has, a realistic function very early on, in terms of crisis and uncertainty, the perception of the power of the pantomime would be combined with the, the sense of wellbeing and security that you get from the group bonding and the occasional endorphin rush that you get from, the collective, someon dance dance. So that what you, and also, another thing that comes in here is that, the, the pantomime that you do, whether it’s for collective hunt or whatever, is essentially a piece of fiction. And, top Thompson has argued that storytelling would’ve evolved at this early stage out of panoramic, communication because it is essentially a fictional event that you are witnessing. It frees you up to create something that is entirely fictional.


And, and this means you can create a fiction which is, has a wishful fulfilling function. We still go to the, the movie or the theater to see something in which you can see your wishes come true. You know, the good guy wins. it has a happy ending.


Now, we might think that’s just nice entertainment, but it might have had a very, vital function many years back when there was no religion to promise to people there’s an afterlife or there’s a God protecting you or anything like that if you take the perception of the power of the idea, or the power of the pantomime to make the really when happen, and you perform that in the con, you combine it with collective song and dance so that people get the sense of they are boiled up by the sense of we are all dancing together, this group bonding the endorphins that are flowing.


It’s like getting drunk together or having drugs so that you, extend the, the sense of the power of your pantomime, your cultural performance.


You push it further on that emotional trajectory to become a belief that this performance can actually overcome those, insecurities of their non, not necessarily to a supernatural extent, but just push it further down the line so that everybody create, achieves a sense of, enhanced courage.


A bit like the Dutch courage of a pe, a group of people who go to the pub on a Friday night, and they, they’ve had a hard week, and they get drunk with inmates, and they get this Dutch carriage, and they feel they can face the world. It’s, it’s a way of dealing with the, uncertainties of life.


Because even if you have this powerful idea that can help you, organize a hunt and organize other things, you will know from experience, it is still a very, very uncertain thing and if you can go into that hunt with this additional confidence that, there’s something extra to this power that you experience it under the endorphin rush, that, it’s an almost magical thing.


It’s not quite a belief in the magic of vault sorcery, that you actually think, if I prick this doll, that that animal is gonna die.


But you are moving in that direction enough to keep this ritual or this collective panoramic song and dance going as, a regular routine in crisis times, or just regularly to, get people through the hard times.


Now, okay? So that gives you, that moves towards a basic type of magic ritual as you get involved sorcery it also lays the grant.


I think if this carried on from very early on for say, over a million years, or I don’t know how long it would be, that would become hardwired into the human brain, as a, an adapter strategy and the perception that culture has this sence over nature would be a fundamental feature in human thinking.


now if you then turn too much later, where you have shamans, for instance, who, one of the features of the shamanic power is the mirror ability to transform into an animal. And when they go into their, on their ecstatic flights, say, during a trans dance, now that act of transformation or metamorphosis is, is actually, almost identical to a very simple act by a mama who becomes an animal or puts on a mask and an animal skin, and then starts acting out the role of that animal and you can see other one is, could be related to the other.


but, and also, if you look at myths about the trickster, use the central denin of the mythic age in under gatherer cultures in many parts of the world, one of the central features of the trickster is that he’s a shapeshifter.


He can transform yourself into animals, into objects, into a leaf or a stone. He can become, he can change his sex, he can change species his age, all kinds of things like that.


You can see how that could be reacted back to this tradition of pantomime okay. I have to immediately say though, that, it does not, it, it explains something about where that can come from, but it cannot explain the whole idea of, what we are talking about here. When a shaman, transforms into an animal, everything, the ideas, the cosmology that goes with it, there’s a lot more to it than simply you can’t, in other words, you can’t say this is simply, something that evolved out of pantomime and that takes me to the next step in this whole, talk, which is the relationship between the, the womb and the, and the moon.


Now, this, you everyone watching it would be familiar, I think, with, Camilla, Chris and Ian’s, theories about, other relationship between the, the menstrual cycle and the lunar cycle was used in establishing a culture that’s egalitarian in which women were given support by other women to, raise, enable them to raise children with larger brains and how they were supported by their men folk ward, or roving, her males and others would be powerfully adaptive in creating, as I said, an an egalitarian human society.


this, I think, is essential to a fundamental to what it is to be human.


And, I can’t quite free-write yet how what I’ve just been saying meshes with, with this whole, idea, but I’m sure there’s a way of doing that, that it’s just gonna take more hard work. What I’m gonna talk about, and I’ll leave it more to the experts that I’m looking at here, not, ah, the light’s just going on. I can get little of these candles.


Okay. Right. That’s better actually, there’s not much, let me just put on another light. Excuse me is that better? Not really no, that’s worse. Sorry Face, we need to light in front of your face, that little one.


I can see the round one there.


Yeah I’m just gonna turn this, Yeah, that’s the one.


Yeah.


Okay. I, is that better? That’s Great. That’s good. Yeah.


Okay right. Sorry, where was I? Um, I was talking about, Kinda square, what you’ve been saying with, with the idea of the menstruation and, and no cycle.


Okay. Right. Yeah. what I’m gonna be talking about is not the sociological and political side I’m gonna talk about the cosmological side, which would have evolved, developed out of that, because I think the relationship between the lunar cycle and the menstrual cycle was developed, to create an entire cosmology. And I think this would’ve been very, powerful in facilitating the model that, the three of you have been proposing. and basically it goes like this. well, certainly women, I think would’ve been the first to, recognize the coincidence between the lunar cycle and the, the menstrual cycle and they would’ve been the first, I would imagine, to start speculating about what the cosmological implications of that could be basically the moon, in its monthly cycle, it grows to fullness, and then it weathers away and it, it dies, disappears, and is born again. The link with the, the womb and the menstrual cycle, which is about birth, that would, cast that lunar cycle in the same kind of language as one of, of birth and, and death, so that the growing and, and the the age old and growing old and then dying, also, the daily rising and setting of the moon would then be seen in the same terms as a birth, and, and, and a, a dying and that would lead to the concept of a tlu womb on Earth Mother, as you get in the, in Australian, in the, myth of uhu and, kupe.


And, also amongst the barasana, and the kogi that I’ve been talking about now this, tole womb, that would be, that would give people the very real hope that after you die, you go back to this womb of the earth mother, and, and that you are born again from that womb, like the sun and the moon, like the plants that rise again, and like the animals that hibernating animals if you are in a coal area.


So that, a belief inner immortality could very logically develop out of that, and that could be structured in all kinds of ways to facilitate and enforce, social norms, through ritual, through initiation and so on but what I wanna focus on, to get back to the thing of mixed creatures, is the fact that we’re inside, getting back to the, the shaman and to his shapeshifting. and the, the trickster.


The trickster lives in the primordial age.


Now that’s an age of shapeshifting and flux and like this son or the bushman myth of, or, mythic age or primordial age, it’s a time of, of flux. Nothing is fixed. a woman can change into a man and into an animal and, and things like that.


now that, I’ve related it to pantomime, but it also relates to the womb, because the one place where you get this, flux or this meeting of opposites, is the teluric womb, where, after you die, you go there and, death essentially meets birth, because after death, you go to what is essentially a tomb womb but you get born again. So opposites meet there the, okay, sorry. I’m mixing this up a bit before, before we get to that, the, Victor Turner, when he talks about rights of passage, he talks about the liminal phase as one of, where, which is in bet tweaks in between where, people are neither male nor female. They’re neither dead nor alive, and everything is kind of mixed like that the, your myths about prom audio ages in various cultures also give you this, thing where things are mixed. And, as I said, with the, with electric, where you can cha opposites do meat like male and female, life and death and things like that.


This, I think, has got to do with the, this teluric womb, which is a, a place where opposites meet li life meets death, daylight meets night, because the sun and the moon, all of them would be inside this womb and get born from it on a daily, monthly, and, seasonal basis and I think the signal of the yin and the yang, illustrates it quite nicely, where there’s things are in a state of flux, you get the darkness and the light, the life and the death.


All these things are mixed together. And, as they get born, they are differentiated. Now, the, the third phase in this whole thing is where you get patriarchal cultures that try and seize the power of the womb, which is not just about controlling women.


I think it’s about seizing control of the universe, because, women’s, the link that women have with the cycles of the universe, with the lunar cycle, and through that, with the cycles of the sun, the daily and the seasonal cycle of the sun and the cycles of the vegetation, and so, makes the, the, the, the female room a very powerful thing. And they want to seize that sacred power.


And, Chris has talked a lot about, in detail about the ways in which they ritual and myth try and seize that power what I want to add to that is, and getting back to that original 2:00 PM myth, there are different ways in which they do that. The, this cosmology that, that circles around the wound is one that is essentially cyclical.


It’s about circles, cycles. the first thing that patriarch cultures do is they put a stop to that cycle.


let’s go back to the two pmh, where you’ve got the long day.


It’s perpetual daylight. Now, that concept you get throughout the Americas, you get it in Africa, you get it elsewhere in the world, where there’s, it is, presented in various ways, often as perpetual daylight, also often as a day time of, perpetual life of immortality, an endless summer. And often in, moral terms, it’s seen as a time of perfect idyllic paradoxal existence.


There’s no cruelty, there’s no death, no murder, no evil, no night, no disease and then a seal container is opened, and night floods out, or death escapes from this container, or disease escapes from the container, as in the barina myth and from then on, we live in this sorry, veil of tears, where you have the differentiate the automation of day and night life and death. and by the way, sex and death normally enter the world at the same time during this mythic event that changes from that time of perfect, patriarchal ide idyllic existence to the prison veil of tears now the point I wanna make there is that, that, primordial age, idyllic age, the it is presented in terms of, what what is idyllic about. It is presented, is defined by its sheer lack of, of periodicity.


It is the lack of periodicity that gives you everlasting life that gives you a blissful everlasting summer, everlasting youth lack of evil, lack of disease.


So, I would argue that that is a patriarchal strategy that denigrates the womb and the cosmic power and the social power and functions of the womb, as it is related to the moon in one swoop, patriarchal culture by blocking up that womb, making it without a vagina, they give you a perfect existence in which none of that stuff exists. The vagina doesn’t exist in some, myths, it’s women that don’t exist or others. It’s simply sex that doesn’t exist.


And, once, a vagina is created, death often comes into existence as well as, and the automation of day and night. So this denigrates the, the power of the womb, you get an alternative, you might say, but there are alternative myth in which you have, a primordial age, which is an endless night or the long night and this is an, the exact is often the, mirror image of the long day in that it is a time of endless suffering of, vast, overwhelming mortality, where people, are constantly dying from a attack by all kinds of things, even crickets and, and grasshoppers, so that they prefer to just commit suicide on mass.


you can also say that the, visions of hell, it, it’s like a long night, like night trapped by the great snake under the waters is like an underworld where night is trapped. That underworld could be like an underworld where death is trapped, or where the, the souls of the dead are trapped, and they can never be reborn again.


The old belief in going to the womb so that you can be reborn as been cut off, it’s been sealed off, so that that womb to which you are welcome back by the great mother becomes an endless nightmare of, of hellish suffering and, so yeah, so it, so that they’re, the, the, that kind of long night in many myths is also often blamed on women, because unlike the long day where there is a complete lack of sex and everything is imminently chased, the long night is often a time of excessive sexual abandon and where women very typically in Amazon have sex with a monster snake, who is also a giant penis and as Levitra points out, south, sorry, south American myths elaborate in all kinds of highly creative ways on this whole, all the possibilities of this giant snake penis and the woman who is, has got this wide open womb that can receive this monster snake penis, and this reprehensible reprehensible alliance between this snake penis and the woman is then normally brought in, in by your heroic, patriarchal dragon slayer, or by her fines, who discover her having this Leon liaison, and they kill the snake and cut him up. And in, in one case, the snake is, in the one, in the one with the, the snake.


The men don’t have penises, which is an inversion, as Levi straws points out of women not having vaginas.


But the point in this case is that, the snake is cut up by the demi urged, and the pieces are handed out to men as individual penises.


So that this giant penis, which at the, which w facilitated this uncontrolled wild sex with women during the long night, is now domesticated for marital use, under strict law of patriarchal rule in, the second age, the normal age. So once again, the womb and the sexual functions there have, are denigrated, because patriarchal control is needed to, impose order and differentiation and moral values on, the functions of the womb, as well as the penis and so on, right? So, okay, I’m seeing, I’m just almost going over time there. I just wanna quickly, There’s no rush, Dan, just carry on. Good for another 10 minutes, whatever you want.


Okay. So the, so yeah, so that is, so the seal container, by sealing off the vagi, taking away the VA vagina, you stop all these periodic cycles, which are central to, I wouldn’t say women’s power, but to the, the power that controls the egalitarian society.


Men can con seize control of that and start creating a very different type of society where domination is the, order of the day. And it leads to, well, I think straight to what we have today.


and, but the older egalitarian thing is so much still with us that we, we still in all kinds of ways, long for it, the anarchist of the 19\textsuperscript{th} century, that was central to their vision, which by the way, was also central to early modernist art of the oven. God, Picasso was a, died in the wool anarchist in his bison on days.


He, he edited a anarchist journal, in fact, now anarchism, it’s not this gun-toting bomb slinging wildey, maniac that of popular belief. They, their beliefs were not that similar, not that different from Christian beliefs in, in the sort of egalitarian society where harmony, is basically rules where people respect each other and so on.


But enough about that. I wanna go back to the, you have the seal boom. another, this gets us back to the snake, the, the great Snake Chris has shown, very persuasively that, the, menstrual, rock art in Northwestern Australia, the menstrual flow, the rainbow snake is very much identified with that menstrual flow that comes out of the, the wombs of these women in these paintings.


now, and the rainbow snake, yo in that case is his name, but rainbow snakes all over the world are normally androgynous, and they’re normally chimerical. In other words, they have other body parts that belong to other animals. and this is important, it gets us back to the origin of the torque.


the, firstly, the androgynous part, let’s talk about Yolanda Yoong is, is also, is a snake, but it’s also a monster, a penis as the, as the, the munk, openly state. however, there is a male and a female yoon, and, but it is the female yoon that swallows the wak sisters, and then stands erect like a fellas touching the heaven heavens, but is also appears to be pregnant. Now, the, the Munk have, they have circumcision, but they also have a sub incision ritual, which the, the penis is slit at the base, and that slit represents a bleeding vagina. In other words, it’s like a sealed wound that is now opened up, and it’s menstrual blood coming out of there and that sudden size penis is directly identified with Yoong, who is, androgynous. so this is a way in which the men appropriate the function of the womb. And how they do, they use androgyny as a concept to use upp, the, the power of the womb, because the, you can also see that in the, the, the monster snake himself, the rainbow snake, who swallows, the, the wock sisters, when celebrants enter the dancing ground, the dancing ground is the shape of the dancing ground represents the body of the earth mother, kupe, it also represents the body of, yogo the snake, celebrants enter the womb by, by entering the dancing ground, they enter the womb of the earth mother, but also they enter the belly of the snake. So the belly of the snake is a, with a womb of the earth mother, and in different myths about earth, mothers all over Australia.


the, the earth mother, she has a, well, I’m not gonna go into the detail.


I just wanna say that the, the snake, the monster snake, is a, as, l r Hyatt, he, he says that this monster snake is a penis that swallows like a vagina. And I think that that’s a very important point, because this monster snake u ups, the of the earth mother in swallowing, the celebrants, and then giving birth to them again, instead of giving birth to them, they are vomited up again. That is, an, an homology for giving birth and that is a way for the men to be able to usurp the role of the womb by doing that now, so getting back to ritual creatures, firstly, pantomime just gives a, a very basic, foundation for this thing of, metamorphosis where you can change into all kinds of different creatures.


a [unknown] or a dragon is almost like it combines the, the whole sequence of the mama where you can change from one animal to the other. The, the dragon is all those changes seen at once, you could say. But, it takes two stages.


You need the matriarchal stage where you have the state of flux within the womb to correct the sense of, sorry. This is one thing that I, I kind of skipped over. Prime audio wholeness, where when you enter, the, I must apologize. Let me just go back.


I’m gonna go to Africa now, but it’s the same in Australia where we’ve been, when a sun or a bushman menstruate, starts menstruating the, they do the elan dance, and the whole group enters through a portal into the first age, which is this age of flux.


It’s an age of primordial wholeness, where everything is in a state of flux.


Nothing is differentiated yet now this stage of primordial wholeness in some cultures, like the, the Bushman culture emphasizes the state of flux where you can change your from one six to the opposite sex from one species to another.


you can change your age and all kinds of things like that. Other cultures.


in North America, for instance, levy straws talks about primordial wholeness. He doesn’t use that term.


He talks about the continuous, he talks about a regression from, a state, a differentiated state, which he calls the discreet to the continuous and it talks about, myths of creation or cosmo guard myths, a progression where you go from the continuous to the discreet, like the, the Tupe myth.


A state of cont continuous daylight is differentiated to become, is is cut up to become discrete, alternating units of night and day in the same way spatial differentiation takes place when, say a primal snake or giant is, cut up and the universe is created from the body parts, like the head becomes the sky, the body becomes the earth, and the eyes become the heini bodies and so on. you get these, the same process either through temporal or spatial terms where primordial ness is differentiated, or the continuous is cut fragmented to become discrete units, of day or night or heni bodies’, sky and earth and things like that okay, so, yeah, so the, the mixed creatures like the dragon, it, it rep, you’ve got, this, the mixture of the sexes. It’s androgynous.


You get mixture of different species and then you also get the thing that often this dragon, like in the Babylonian myth, is cut up. And, the Euro maric, cuts up this female dragon who is, she’s not androgynous, but, Billy is teaming with androgynous figures, and also with chimerical figures that combine the body parts of all kinds of animals. And she’s cut up in from these body parts.


He creates the heaven and the Earth. so that differentiation, the separation of the continuous, which is represented by the continuous form of the snake, very, admirably, that creates the differentiated patriarchal universe.


Right? So, in other words, to, talk about a mixed creature like a dragon, I’ve had to go through three different, stages in evolution. And I, I just wanna say again, the first stage and the second stage are not necessarily sequential.


I’m not saying that the stage in which the cosmology or, and the, the culture evolving around the womb and the moon is a later development than the, the panoramic one. I think they two that combined at what stage in how they actually combined, I, haven’t been able to figure out, but you get those two and then what is definitely a later stage is the patriarchal one, where the matriarchal thing is, is transformed and, and turned against women so that men can control the narrative, to use a contemporary, cliche.


Okay. Right. I think I hashed it a bit of the end there, but, I think that kind of wraps it up. Give me a drink.


Thanks. Thanks, Dale.


That covered an amazing amount of ground going from one area of myth to another. It was, full of, full of material there, very rich and I, I should think that’s, at least us three, but other people will have some things to, to say about it who would like to come back first with any questions or comments? Anybody? Chris, you keep jumping in and out. I dunno if you wanna start, Chris Is, it’s, it’s, it’s unusual for me to keep jumping out, but I do keep jumping out.


Yeah. Sorry.


did you, do you wanna say anything there to, to help, Theon try to bring it together? I dunno. Yeah, I dunno.


Okay. I mean, absolutely marvelous di I would say, nine to 9.7, something absolutely with you, really brilliant and there are some sort of ambiguities, I suppose, some places where I think the argument could go your way or, kind of the way. So for example, when I looked at the home, if the wives of the sun and the moon, it seemed to me that the, the, the, the, the male view was of a risk actually of, of fixity. In other words, seems to me that there was a kind of feeling that once women had been prevented from going back to their kin, their blood every month, that loss of periodicity might involve endless summer, fixed summer. And in order to prevent the disaster of endless dry, endless heat, endless sunlight, you have the sun dance. Where of course, the men, kind of replicate some of the things which occur in the myth. Namely, they’re suspended between heaven and earth they’re bleeding from their breasts by pulling these huge sort of, skulls of bison around and by bleeding, they’re trying to ca to cause the rains to come, and blot out the sun.


So this sun dance, a famous sun dance, it’s of course a rain dance.


So I’m just, when you are saying that the male ideal is for fixity eternal life an eternal happiness and eternal good and get rid of the bad, I actually, I agree with you. I mean, I think, I think the, I think cause that’s the result of it all, we do get this fixity, the patriarchs are forced to kind of celebrate it. But that, but it’s al also pretty clear to me that where, when, when the rituals are being performed, mostly the real fear is per or precisely the consequence of this fixity in terms of like, when you die, you may stay dead, for example. And, so, and, and when it’s summer, it may stay summer. And of course so that, so there’s a terrible fear I think that patriarchy, does what it, of course it actually does, which is sort, stop the, the fundamental clock, which is kind of the mean, has been the meaning of life since life on this planet began. We are on earth, sun, moon system. And as soon as you, as soon as you start producing like embassy on, no one seems to have an off switch.


That’s a sign that we’re burning up the planet.


But it seems to me that the patriarchs who construct these myths have actually always been at least part of their bra, part of their brains, I suppose, aware of this downside of their own, of their own rule.


So that’s just one thing. I mean, it’s not some other, other little minor points it’s actually, I may have made a bit mis misleading in blood relations, but if you read it more, if you read it carefully, I’m, I, I do try to make a distinction between the, the, the, the yk, the murk, the way they bleed, which is through the arm.


They cut a hole in the arm and further south in the, in the, in the central desert area where they do the sub incision is ac actually, the murk don’t do, they don’t bleed in the penis, they bleed from the arm.


But I know it’s incredibly minor point and it’s of no special, special theoretical, special theoretical interest. But I mean, there are one or two other things. I mean, I, I, you, I, I’ll just say one thing. I mean, as far as I’m aware, trickster stories mentioned that they have happy endings. I’m not sure that’s true.


I think that trickster stories have the most absurd endings quite, quite often.


In some ways, they’re kind of, everyone laughs cause the tricks has made an absolute fault of himself and, and stuff.


But I’m not quite sure that the happy ending idea quite works with hunter gatherer tricks of things. There’s certainly a lot of laughter, but the end, the endings are all, can be any, any which way round. And they’re, and of course the humor is pretty dark, the kind of dark humor. It’s not, it’s not, certainly not anything. I, I’m, I’m sure you’d agree with me though.


It’s nothing like a Hollywood style happy ending, but it, but it’s pretty put that way and, and that, sorry. And just one more point.


It’s just that, okay, and this is, I suppose the main point is, yes, I, I was very heavily influenced by Merlin Donald, the making of the modern mind.


All that stuff is really had a profound influence on me.


It was a brilliant lot of work and, and so on. But, of course, what’s missing really is why, given that animals need reliability in their signals, why the whole point of animal signaling is, is the listeners are looking to be sure they’re not being tricked.


They’re looking for a reliable signal, heart, fake signal, wonder what circumstances and why exactly did, faking it, that that’s what ESUs is. It’s, it’s like pretending to cry, pretending to laugh, pretending to be upset, Sort of at all. The problem with that, like how and why would become remotely possible for Great Eight? Okay, fake it and of course my argument is that right from the very part, this been Macy moved in both directions at once. Toward, on the one hand, evidence Shall, Chris, shall I, shall I try and see it? Because you are breaking up a lot. Oh, Chris, just laugh.


Yeah I think, Are you, are you able to say it? Cause you’re breaking up? Look.


Well, I’d just say the last bit. I mean, my, my model was that right from the very start, as women to the opposite, It’s not working. Shall I try and pick it up? Yes. Yeah.


yeah, I think, I think what I was gonna say something similar to what Chris is just trying to say, but I hope you can hear me. Yeah, yeah, I can hear you. Yeah.


So I think Chris’s model, which we’ve been working with for this last two or three decades, has this idea of the relationship between ritual and speech and that the two things kind of have to volt ritual speech co.


So even though Merlin Donald is talking about Menes going to Iconicity and Conventionalization, okay, that’s just one side of it.


The other side of it will go to a crystallization of very elaborate of, of elaborated ritual signaling. And Chris has characterized those as, on the one hand, very cheap, on the other hand, very costly, but you kind of need the both of them to talk to each other. So then I, I would not, agree with an idea that the pantomime is obsolete.


It is an obsolete, it’s absolute vital matrix, the speech to be reliable and trustworthy.


Another person who says this also is rap rapport.


Roy Rappaport very strongly brings, brings that, that over.


yeah. And yeah, what, what else were you just gonna say on Rich or Chris? You, there was another bit there.


Am I, am I still audible? Yeah, you are at the moment.


Can you hear me? Yep. Yeah, I mean, I, my own view, you, is that I, you are saying everything I need to say, but I sort of felt that many, many moments, there are more concise, integrated ways of saying it.


So for me, as soon as you’ve got the females resisting male alpha male dominance by dancing and singing with their, with their blood, they’re already turning into animals you don’t need a sort of separate explanation for this, these mixed creatures as you’re calling, and it must already be happening and already as lead animals and they’re, they’re exactly, you’re beautifully put.


They’re already acting out in a model that the real hunt, which is secondary. So just as you say, you make a wooden, a wooden woman before you have a a a real, a real woman or daughter, this is, this is what happens. Women in order to get meant to go hunting, they act up being bleeding, say zebra, and then of course you want the actual zebra to bleed. But when the, when the actual zebra bleed, you want, the women want okay, men to be respectful of that zebra and it’s blood, just that, like they’re respectful of those women. Otherwise, the men may not bring the meat back to get cooked. So I, I I, I, I felt sometimes we needed to have been working together more frequently, more, more regularly cause you’ve gone many ways wider and further than I have with your explorations, but in some cases I thought you could have kept the simplicity of your models in a way which I sometimes felt we were in danger losing.


Okay, thank you. No, that’s, I, I’d love to work more on that, with you.


Can you hear me? Yes, yes. Sorry. I mean, yes, Absolutely.


Absolutely. Yes, yes. Yeah I mean, as I’m sure, Sorry, you could try turning off your camera to help the sound.


I probably said enough to be honest. Yeah. I’ve said enough.


Sure. Okay. We, we can pick it up can I, any, anybody else who’d like to come, come up to, with something for Dion? Do you wanna go in Ian? Yeah. Studying Dior’s pieces anyway, recently, It’s, yeah, it’s just, it’s just one point I’d pick up, fairly early on in your talk, you were saying sort of good luck to anyone trying to trace historical connections between these commonalities that you’re identifying in Africa, in Amazonia in Australia and in a sense, doesn’t that come down to a conception of history and its depth, particularly in the last 30 years, we now understand that we became a symbolic species, by which I mean shared fictions of the kind you are talking about in Africa, relatively recently, somewhere 150, 200,000 years ago, didn’t leave Africa until, or at least on modern representatives.


They have all the DNA of migration out of Africa in the last 70,000 years.


Now we’ve already got evidence for, well, let’s, let’s put it another way. The fir the, the hallmark of our migration out of Africa is the habitual use of red Oka, wherever it’s regionally available, um the first occupations of Australia, of, of, Americas. And of course, when we move into Europe and, and, and replace the Neandertals, this is what we see sort of habitual use of red oca in, in, presumably primarily in ritual performances. And of course, we have a theory about, about what those performances were about in terms of, Um, what they were referring to this logic of female coalitions and, and, and so forth. But more recent, I mean, that’s been sort of fairly speculative, but We can now see sort of deep time depth in more specific, symbolic cultural traits. Like, for example, the use of ostrich eggshell beads in ex in maintaining exchange relationships over vast distances in southern Africa going back 30,000 years or, or, or changes in bead shapes, sort of indicating commonalities between east and, and, and southern Africa going back 50,000 years. And the rock art specialists in, in Australia sort of identifying the rainbow snake and that cosmology going back six to 10,000 years so it is legitimate, it’s increasingly legitimate to talk about deep history.


So that, that’s, that’s not saying that a lot of what what you’re saying is, is kind of, I, I, I’m not sure if I’d use the word hardwired, but it was certainly part of the package that we took out of Africa in the first place. So in a sense, why, why shouldn’t we treat that as deep history? I think that’s, and, and yeah, I’ll leave it there.


Yeah, no, thank you. I, I ag I agree with what you said. I must just let me, I think I said it rather crudely what I meant was that the kind of elaborate sophisticated levels of, say platonic philosophy and kogi cosmology, and, the unal cosmology, the, the deep history, it would’ve transmitted basic ideas, up to a certain point, but beyond that point, it would’ve, it would’ve had to develop independently. So it would be a combination of, a transmitter tradition and, parallel developments and that there must be some element of, a hardwired, a structural predisposition to, um see, culture as having this priority over nature, although it would be transmitted culturally as well. You know, every time, um it, it’s, it’s in things like architecture, celebrations, art, there’s this implicit message that, somehow this work of art is more important than the thing that it represents and so on. So it’s actually a, it’s a complex and layered, issue. But you, I’m glad you pointed that out. I, I didn’t mean to say that it’s completely, just a hardwired thing, but I just, what I meant was it’s some of the finer details, are, are definitely not part of the same tradition.


Sure. Okay. Anybody else? Or, we’ve lost Chris again. maybe just pop in there by, I’ll come, come back to you, Mike. I’ll just pop in there, by saying, yeah, we, we slightly with our model, we slightly oppose any idea which Levy STRs had that myths are representations of structures of the mind, because we prefer an explanation that the myths are, are, see, are in some sense, mirroring pantomime sequence, which becomes ritualized sequences, and they’re mirroring a process, a social process, rather than something that’s kind of fossilized in brains. And that, that this is a much more dynamic, much more flexible, especially when you think of, of hunt gatherer mythology, the way that metaphor is so flexible, one thing turns into another to another yeah, I, i, I kind of respect what you’re saying about nature, culture of nature, because that’s always been a, a very fundamental opposition in, in so many cultures.


But I’m not sure that we concur about the levee stroke’s kind of hardwiring on the brain so much as this is coming out of a shared, I agree with parallel development, a shared process that, that so many cultures ha retain that either that process or the memory of it and, and, and yeah. That, that may be the way it works.


Yeah, I think I can go along with that I personally, I always, I used to oppose Levi sources, approach the same thing. I, I tried to explain it in terms purely of, cultural transmission and, but as I carried on, I just got more and more respect for his way of thinking. And, and then I started trying this, and I thought, okay, I think this could work. But, I agree with what you say. I, I, I, I’m much happier actually, with a more dynamic approach, with something is, deeply grounded in the culture, and it is transmitted endlessly over time but as I say, what do they call a gene? Cultural evolution theory does propose that, the cultural landscape, determines, the evolution of the human mind. And, so it is something to bear in mind there could be an element where it, but yeah, it does become a kind of a black box thing where, I mean, we, not brain surgeons.


We don’t actually know what’s the structure of the human mind.


so, yeah. Yeah. No, but yeah, thanks. That’s, that’s a Good point. I, I think it would take more than a million years to completely transform the innate internal architecture of the human brain to, to make it impossible for a myth to do this thing, but quite possible to do.


The other thing, I I, I I, and of course the critical point is that ritual is inherently conservative because I mean, I was, I’ve been heavily involved in, in Sambo over this part of the world, and it’s just that every time, even today, I, I, I was part of helping get to get, samba as part of political activism way, way, way back in 1967. And, and it, and it just came outta my college actually. We had about four different numbers, and wherever I go, anywhere in the world actually, and then certainly any demonstration out of here, however much everything’s changed, you’ve always got, hedgehog ache, welfare state, four different numbers and it’s just the reason, it’s very simple.


It’s just because everyone wants to pray something which everyone else knows, and anything new, what half the people won’t know it.


So there’s a huge pressure against any kind of innovation.


Okay Mike, you had your hand up.


Yeah. Yes. Thank you I had a, to clarify the relationship between the concepts, you mentioned the oneness and then, of there was like a stage of fem, and then you mentioned something, some appeared to be a stage of, and being androgynous and did, did these come in different stages at different times? In what order would they have come in? Um, yeah, the, I think the last two, the, the feminine and then the, yeah, the, what I argue is that the androgyny of, say the, the rainbow snake, I’m not saying that’s the first use of, of ritual androgyny or mythic androgyny, but it plays an important, clearly plays an important role, I think, in patriarchal culture, as a, as a strategy to, us up the womb where men ritually, pretend to give birth and or where they, they, flaunt, a kind of a zas womb in front of the women. And, as they do in somewhere in Australia, this is something that would be a, a later stage than the, the feminine stage. but the feminine stage, where you have everything circling around the, the lunar cycle and the, the menstrual cycle is not necessary.


A middle stage that is preceded by the, panoramic, stage.


Those are, I see them as, two things that somehow, mesh together. As I said, I, I haven’t figured out how or when, that would’ve happened and I’d like to, to talk to you people a lot more to try and,  about that. yeah.


Okay. Anybody else wonder? Mike, did you wanna come back, or is that okay? Yeah, I would say that what you just said reminds me, Zeus giving birth, putting the baby in his thigh.


So that seems, seems to be a hint of that.


Yes, typically, or, yeah. And like, Athena is born from Zeus’s, brain, from his, he his head, so that his brain is effectively like a womb it’s, but, and I think it indicates that the, the male creativity in his mind is the counterpart or the, kind of the answer to the creativity of the, the female womb.


cause Athena being the, the goddess of culture and wisdom and, and all those things. yeah.


j well, Chris, you had spoken Jacob, did you wanna have some have something and then, Yeah I just on that, my concern with, with that part of the, the lecture was, that it’s putting the agency into the male of the species and so once you have the abstraction of, female reproductive power and potency, and that connected to the moon into universal cosmic potency, that’s saying that’s when the men came in and st stole it with these myths.


It’s neglecting where the abstraction came from first, and why, and the pressures environmentally why those, why those, abstractions were necessary and who they were for. and so the rainbow snake before it was, appropriated was for the female coalition to protect all women by taking menstrual blood and applying it to everyone, whether they’re menstruating or not, to create, a blanket abstraction of female potency of you do not cross this line that then also protects the children. So, so then we’re looking at agency and human culture coming from a different part of humanity, which, if we’re looking at where, where do we go from here, I think changes our focus but it, it seemed very, male focused in terms of culture coming from men also the example of hunting, and that my mesis came from learning how to hunt. That’s, that’s a group of men creating culture and again, we’re, we’re not looking at what the women are up to and what the children are up to, and the environmental pressures to grow those giant brains and the resources necessary to do that, and the resources being social as well, creating coalitions and how do you create coalitions, or you have to have an abstraction so that, that seemed to be, that’s where Reg really could inform the connection to get to the patriarchal counterrevolution.


Right. Thanks. Thanks, Greg. Yeah, that’s good yeah. Did, did that make sense, Dan? Um, Yeah. Yeah. The, I, let me just think, the, yeah, look, it’s, what I was saying that the, the patriarchal, thing, cosmologies are transformations of, well, I suppose one could call an amnio centric, cosmology so, and, it’s not, yeah, it’s not an abstraction. I mean, I, I didn’t go into all the details, but, that would’ve been, yeah, based on observations of lunar cycle, menstrual cycle and ordering human society around these cycles in, in various ways, very concrete ways.


hunting is just one aspect of that.


But obviously when males, try and take over the system, they will emphasize the hunt.


and the, yeah, the, the, the, lemme just think the, I use the example of a, collective hunt in the memetic part, just because that’s when Martin Donald, the, he talks about you could, organize a hunt, and that’s where you would, do a pantomime of a specific animal and, and so on, where, Whereas, of course, the perfect example is the Eland bull dance, where the girl is menstruating and around that girl who’s menstruating are the women dancing as Eland, and the blood is being constructed to, to draw the eland for the hunt and it’s also in time with the cycle of the moon so we, there have the entirety of the picture of the, the menstrual blood, the lunar cycle, and the pantomime in its full kind of full-blown ritual aspect, with the whole of, of qua society or other Sam Group society organized around that ritual so I think, yeah, it, Donald was just falling into the usual patriarchal tendency to take the hunt. But of course, who needs the hunt is, is the women on the picket line who need to get men to do the hunt and it’s, so, it’s not so much about directing people which way to go as directing people in terms of social relationships and potential conflict between women and men, over who’s gonna feed the kids.


I just, just to say, I’m sure you’d be interested to know from the work, the, the fieldwork of, Jerome Lewis with Ben Jelly, that when they’re hunting really large animals, it’s called a women’s hunt and a women’s hunt is entirely managed by the women and what they do beautifully corresponding to your, your opening part of your talk, they do a sort of model of the actual hunt. The women, the women do, the women sing yi while in a kind of trance, and they know exactly where the large animal could be.


An elephant could be in you, another large animal. They know exactly where it’s Traveling, like shaman’s cross, And they, and they, they travel to where it is and they tie up its spirit, they kill its spirit, and then they say to the men, okay, we’ve done, we’ve done the basic stuff. You go finish you go finish the job there To kill the animal.


So, so right from the beginning, and that’s why Melon Donald is so kind of, I mean, that that is the problem. I think Jacob’s right? We, we, we are now in a position to go beyond most of these patriarchs levy Stress’s obviously been number one patriarch, but me, Donald, up to a point as well.


We go really way beyond those people because actually the, the hunting itself was organized by women right from the start.


There’s no way men could have organized hunting under conditions where in order to get sex, you’ve gotta sort of fight with other men and, and try to get your ha I mean as soon as you got females making themselves available to the dominant male, the dominant males would be fighting each other ever sex until women sort that one out, there’s no way men could organize a damn thing. And so I I’m just saying there’s a lot of beautiful ethnography now coming.


Mona Finnigan’s another one, of course, with a, with a benelli, so, yeah but I’m sure you’d be, and I, I suppose I’ll, although I agreed with Jacob, I’ve, I’ve felt a little bit nervous. Hang on a bit, Jacob.


It’s DE’s not really championing patriarchy here. I mean, de and, and There, there isn’t much doubt that the, the whole thing about this, eternal night or eternal day, the worry about fixity and the, um and the acquisition of female reproductive potency, that these are no question patriarchal transformations. Absolutely.


Right. And that virtually all those Amazonian or Melan Australian stories and many African stories too, or there’s a lot more give and take with the African stories, that they, they, they have to be taken on those terms that they are patriarchal transformations but in rag, we, we really do believe that they’re talking about a time that actually was before where it was not so patriarchal where women had a, a great deal more.


They were the ones responsible for turning the cosmos, essentially yeah, Just can’t have saying briefly, I won’t be long committed. Just let me say this, this has cause the critical point that Levi, the critical mistake in Levi says is to imagine, was to imagine that all those Amazonian myths were about the origins of culture, the transition from nature to culture. There were obviously, I’m, I’m sure you agree with this, there were nothing to nothing of the, all those, But the origins of male control over culture, the origins of patriarchy, much more recent thing, which they knew about cuz they were doing it.


The origin of culture is quite a difficult scientific topic, which, Ian is a specialist in. But this, and never says completely wrong to think that the myth or anything about that.


But just one other little point is that when you talked about how the women were, like being, thinking about the moon, thinking about it rising and setting, again, I’m, I’m thinking goes beyond women, just noticing that the moon’s set in the evening and rose in the morning, or wait, it’s also about noticing so many people say that it’s all about observing the moon. to me, women really did kind of live sort of and die and live and die because every time you went into this menstrual darkness all together, singing for your lives in the dark, becoming one you really were immortal is that you couldn’t die.


Cuz you’re in a community, the individual death doesn’t matter.


But of course when you come outta that, then you’re in a different domain where you are much more likely to be an individual, and of course the individual can die, but the community can’t and so I think it was more than just observing the moon, sort of going through death and resurrection.


It wasactually a really lived experience of dying and coming alive again through ritual. And so that’s, again, it’s a, it’s a question of whether, how material is, we want to be Levi, me, Donald, at the end of the day, I think all patriarchal ideologies are mentalists.


They all have mind ever matter. They all, to some extent denigrate the body and for me, we need to put the body back there first as I think marks and angles did in their own up to the point as far as they could, but certainly that’s what we need to do. We need to put the body first and Richard is very much bodily, of course, it’s you, you actually have to do it. Just thinking about it is nowhere near enough.


Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, Yeah. I’m, I’m not suggesting you disagree with any of this, and I re I would want to emphasize, I, I feel huge amounts of solidarity with you, MD and I think, I think it’s very hard to find any, any real serious points of disagreement and I, I really welcome it. It’s, it’s absolutely brilliant what you’re doing. I fantastic stuff.


Thank you very much.


Jacob, do you wanna go again and we’re gonna wrap it up. So yeah. Jacob, guys, yeah, Just quickly to, to, Chris just said, and just to clarify that I, I, I don’t, I’m not, I wasn’t taking an, an attack, that this was a patriarchal talk, but just to add that, before the counterrevolution of the male, myth that there was an establishment of a previous myth, and I think blood relations establishes that very well and I’m thinking in terms of Andrew LA’s trickery and sacrifice, which really lays out, at first there was an abstraction of, female blood and ritual potency and with that abstraction creates the opportunity for the men’s coalition to then take that abstraction without actually having, the capacity.


So then you have all of these ritual bleedings, that’s what I meant by that, that word abstract but that, that I think the talk is very strong and that, and that I was just trying to add something to it so thank you very much.


Yeah, You’re welcome.


Have we got anybody else we’d like to chip in? Um, otherwise we, we’ll probably, decide to wrap up and to say thank you very much to Dionne for that fascinating exploration of, mythology. And I, I think there’d be a great deal of commonality in our thinking probably kind of, as Chris says, kind of make it a little more economical in terms of the similarities, like the Victor Turner’s structure, anti structure, second creation, first creation with Keeney and Keeney and, and also the trickster as a kind of algorithm of the entire process of periodicity is, is the way that I tend to think about trickster but yeah, they’re all representations of something highly similar.


There was this, this lunar cosmology is, is my view, but  that because you, you’ve read, you read some of myself from the, the articles on source cosmology, we got, oh, mark Piza, you wanted to have one last word and Yeah, sorry, I just wanted to ask Chris if he could, say a little more clearly cuz he had wifi problem about, mimesis being both, or, or involving, signaling that’s honest in animals but becomes fictional in humans because that’s close to what I’m working on it and maybe I misunderstood.


Well, you have, you have a, a group of you making, make, making a noise and if you meet, re resist if you meet with resistance, right? The re the re the listeners don’t want to hear it. You have to, you have to amplify, repeat, add some song and dance multicolor the display. On the other hand, if your listeners need what you’re saying and, and don’t put up any resistance, your signaling goes in the opposite direction in into like efficiency, cheap, quick shorthand instead of this huge display.


So Marilyn, Donald tended to think that sort of automatically when he got me messes, you’re gonna, you’re gonna move towards, an increasingly efficient language like system.


But my argument is if women are saying to men, no sex, that’s not a message the biological human male wants to hear. And, and, and this, you can’t just say, no, darling, not this evening.


You’re gonna have to put up quite a song of dance to get the males bloody will understand no sex until you go and get it to zebra. Come back with it, think about it. So, and it’s only that, it’s only that success in that endeavor, this powerful ritual endeavor that will produce inside the group sufficient trust for the pressure towards cheap co low costing in namely words to even have any meaning at all.


Words would be completely useless in, in with, in the, in the rainforest with chimpanzees because they’re, they, they, they are cheap.


They’re just, were, they’re cheap words, and you need a lot of trust to take any notice of them and the trust would come from the costly signaling.


Thank you so much to Dion for the talk.









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The Ted K Archive





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Deon Liebenberg

Mimetic performance, cognitive evolution, and mixed creatures (Seminar)



25 May 2023


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