Out of Our Minds

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

  More recently, historians have scrutinized and sometimes approved the theory that witchcraft is a social mechanism – a self-empowering device that marginal people deploy when institutions of justice fail them or are simply unavailable to them. In recognition that witchcraft is a delusion, other scholars focus rather on the persecution of alleged witches as a means to eradicate socially undesirable individuals – again in default of courts and laws capable of dealing with all the disputes that arise among neighbours. The distribution of witchcraft persecutions in the early modern West supports this explanation: they were intense in Protestant regions but relatively infrequent in Spain, where the Inquisition provided an alternative cheap recourse for poor or self-interested denouncers who wanted to launch vexatious proceedings against hated neighbours, masters, relatives, or rivals untouchable by due process. Persecutions indeed seem to have proliferated wherever judicial institutions were inadequate to resolve social tensions. In origin, however, witchcraft seems adequately explained as a perfectly reasonable inference from the idea of magic.

  Is witchcraft a thing of the past? Self-styled practitioners and followers, allegedly a million strong in the United States, now claim to have recovered beneficent pagan ‘Wicca’. Along a modern writer’s odyssey through the pagan underground, she admires a body snatcher, visits ‘Lesbianville’, identifies witches’ ‘cognitive dissonance’, and parties among lifestyle pagans with ‘animal bones used as clever hairpins, waist-length hair and nipple-length beards’. A single joke, endlessly repeated, lightens the pathetic litany: every witch seems to have a comically incongruous day job, including tattoo artistry, belly dancing, and baking scones. Little else is characteristic among the witches, other than nudism (because of ‘a belief that the human body can emanate raw power naked’), a faith in ‘consecrating’ sex, and the absurd claim that Wiccans uphold a pagan tradition unbroken since the Bronze Age.50

  The variants, it seems, continue to multiply. But, understood at the most general level, as the ability of a person to do harm by supernatural means, belief in witchcraft is found in just about all societies – a fact that pushes its probable origins way back into the past.

  ‌Placed in Nature: Mana, God, and Totemism

  Mana – for those who believe in it – is what makes the perceived world real. A further, deeper question is, ‘Is it valid?’ Not, ‘Is the idea of mana the best way to understand nature?’ but, ‘Is it a way clever minds can reasonably have devised to match the facts?’ It might help if we compare it with a modern paradigm that we use to explain the same facts. While we distinguish fundamentally between organic and inorganic matter, we do think of all matter as characterized by essentially similar relationships between particles. Quantum charges, because they are dynamic and formative, resemble mana in as much as they are a source of ‘force’ (though not of a purposeful kind, such as mana seems to be in most versions). In any event, on the basis of this chapter so far, mana is fairly described as an intellectually impressive concept.

  A further question arises: what, if anything, did thinking about mana contribute to the origins of an idea we shall have to consider in due course (as it is among the most intriguing and, apparently, most persuasive in the world): the idea of a single, universal God? Missionaries in nineteenth-century North America and Polynesia thought God and mana were identical. It is tempting, at least, to say that mana could have been the idea – or one of the ideas – from which that of God developed. A closer parallel, however, is with some of the odd or esoteric beliefs that still seem ineradicable from modern minds: ‘aura’, for example, which figures in alternative-health-speak; or the elusive ‘organic cosmic energy’ that proponents of the East Asian-influenced ‘new physics’ detect everywhere in matter;51 or vitalist philosophy, which intuits life as a quality inherent in living things.

  These notions, which most people would probably class as broadly religious, and which are almost certainly false, are nevertheless also scientific, because they arise from real observations and reliable knowledge of the way things are in nature. Comparative anthropology discloses other equally or nearly equally ancient ideas that we can class as scientific in a slightly different sense, because they concern the relationship of humans to the rest of nature. Totemism, for instance, is the idea that an intimate relationship with plants or animals – usually expressed as common ancestry, sometimes as a form of incarnation – determines an individual human’s place in nature. The idea is obviously scientific. Evolutionary theory, after all, says something similar: that all of us descend from other biota. Loosely, people speak of totemism to denote almost any thinking that binds humans and other natural objects (especially animals) closely together; in its most powerful form – considered here – the totem is a device for reimagining human social relationships. Those who share a totem form a group bound by shared identity and mutual obligations, and distinguishable from the rest of the society to which it belongs. People of shared ancestry, suppositious or genuine, can keep track of one another. The totem generates common ritual life. Members observe peculiar taboos, especially by abstaining from eating their totem. They may be obliged to marry within the group; so the totem serves to identify the range of potential partners. Totemism also makes it possible for people unlinked by ties of blood to behave towards one another as if they were: one can join a totemic ‘clan’ regardless of the circumstances of one’s birth: in most totemic societies, dreams reveal (and recur to confirm) dreamers’ totems, though how the connections really start, and what, if anything, the choice of totemic objects means, are subjects of inconclusive scholarly debate. All theories share a common and commonsense feature: totemism spans the difference between two early categories of thought: ‘nature’, which the totemic animals and plants represent, and ‘culture’ – the relationships that bind members of the group. Totemism, in short, is an early and effective idea for forging society.52

  Despite animism, totemism, mana, and all the useful resources people have imagined for the practical conduct of life, distrust of sense perceptions carries dangers. It induces people to shift faith to sources of insight, such as visions, imaginings, and the delusions of madness and ecstasy, which seem convincing only because they cannot be tested. They often mislead, but they also always inspire. They open up possibilities that exceed experience and, therefore, paradoxical as it may seem, make progress possible. Even illusions can do good. They can help to launch notions that encourage endeavour in transcendence, magic, religion, and science. They nourish arts. They can help to make ideas unattainable by experience – such as eternity, infinity, and immortality – conceivable.

  ‌Imagining Order: Ice Age Political Thought

  Visions also craft politics. The political thinking of the Ice Age is barely accessible, but it is possible to say something in turn about leadership, broader ideas of order, and what we might call Ice Age political economy.

  Obviously, the societies of hominids, hominins, and early Homo sapiens had leaders. Presumably, by analogy with other apes, alpha males imposed rule by intimidation and violence (see here). But political revolutions multiplied ways of assigning authority and selecting chiefs. Ice Age paintings and carvings disclose new political thinking – the emergence of new forms of leadership, in which visions empower visionaries and favour charisma over brute force, the spiritually gifted over the physically powerful.

  The cave walls of Les Trois Frères in southern France are a good place to start reviewing the evidence. Priest-like figures in divine or animal disguises undertaking fantastic journeys or exerting menace as huntsmen are evidence of the rise of wielders of unprecedented power: that of getting in touch with the spirits, the gods, and the dead – the forces that are responsible for making the world the way it is. From another world in which ours is forged, shamans can get privileged access to inside information on what happens and will happen. They may even influence the gods and spirits to change their plans, inducing them to reorder the world to make it agreeable to humans: to cause r
ain, stop floods, or make the sun shine to ripen the harvest.

  The shamans of the cave walls exercised tremendous social influence. For the favour of an elite in touch with the spirits, people would pay with gifts, deference, service, and obedience. The shaman’s talent can be an awesome source of authority: the hoist that elevates him above alpha males or gerontocratic patriarchs. When we scan the caves, we see a knowledge class, armed with the gift of communicating with spirits, emerging alongside a prowess class, challenging or replacing the strong with the seer and the sage. Enthronement of the gift of communicating with spirits was clearly an early alternative – perhaps the earliest – to submission to a Leviathan distinguished by no feature more morally potent than physical strength.

  In consequence, special access to the divine or the dead has been an important part of powerful and enduring forms of political legitimacy: prophets have used it to claim power. On the same basis churches have pretended to temporal supremacy. Kings have affected sacrality by the same means. In Mesopotamia of the second millennium bce, gods were the nominal rulers of the cities where they took up their abodes. To their human stewards civic deities confided visions that conveyed commands: to launch a war, erect a temple, promulgate a law. The most graphic examples – albeit rather late – appear in Mayan art and epigraphy of the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries ce in what are now Guatemala and neighbouring lands. Rulers of eighth-century Yaxchilán, in what is now southern Mexico, can still be seen in carved reliefs, inhaling psychotropic smoke from bowls of drug-steeped, burning bark-paper, in which they gathered blood drawn from their tongues with spiked thongs (if they were queens) or by piercing their sexual organs with shell-knives or cactus spines. The rite induced visions of ancestral spirits typically issuing from a serpent’s maw, with a summons to war.53

  For the last millennium or so of the Ice Age, cognitive archaeology reveals the emergence of another new kind of leadership: heredity. All human societies face the problem of how to hand on power, wealth, and rank without stirring up strife. How do you stop every leadership contest from letting blood and unleashing civil war? More generally, how do you regulate inequalities at every level of society without class conflict or multiplying violent acts of individual resentment? Heredity, if a consensus in favour of it can be established, is a means of avoiding or limiting succession disputes. But there are no parallels in the animal kingdom, except as Disney represents it; and parental excellence is no guarantee of a person’s merit, whereas leadership won in competition is objectively justifiable. Yet for most societies, for most of the past – indeed, until well into the twentieth century – heredity was the normal route to high levels of command. How and when did it start?

  Although we cannot be sure about the nature of the hereditary Ice Age power class, we know it existed, because of glaring inequalities in the way people were buried. In a cemetery at Sunghir, near Moscow, perhaps as much as twenty-eight thousand years old, an elderly man lies buried with prodigious gifts: a cap sewn with fox’s teeth, thousands of ivory beads formerly sewn onto his clothes, and about twenty ivory bracelets – rewards, perhaps, of an active life. Nearby, however, a boy and a girl, about eight or twelve years old, moulder alongside even more spectacular ornaments: animal carvings and beautifully wrought weapons, including spears of mammoth ivory, each over six feet long, as well as ivory bracelets, necklaces, and fox-tooth buttons. Over each child mourners sprinkled about 3,500 finely worked ivory beads. Such riches can hardly have been earned: the occupants of the grave were too young to accumulate trophies; at least one of them suffered from slight deformity of the lower limbs, which might have impeded her efficiency in physical tasks, or her general admirability as a physical specimen of her kind.54 The evidence is therefore of a society that distributed riches according to criteria unlinked to objective merit; a system that marked leaders for greatness from childhood, at least.

  It looks, therefore, as if heredity were already playing a part in the selection of high-status individuals. Genetic theory now provides sophisticated explanations for a matter of common observation: many mental and physical attributes are heritable, including, perhaps, some of those that make good rulers. A system that favours the children of self-made leaders is therefore rational. The instinct to nurture may play a part: parents who want to pass their property, including position, status, or office, to offspring are likely to endorse the hereditary principle. By creating disparities of leisure between classes, specialization frees parents in specialized roles to train their children to succeed them. Above all, in political contexts, the hereditary principle conduces to peace by deterring competition. It removes elites from conflictive arenas and corrupting hustings. For the sake of such advantages, some states still have hereditary heads of state (and, in the case of the United Kingdom, a partly hereditary legislature). If we must have leaders, heredity is, by practical standards, no bad way to choose them.55

  In our attempt to understand where power lay in Ice Age societies, the final bits of evidence are crumbs from the tables of the rich. Though feasts can happen spontaneously when scavengers stumble on a carrion bonanza or hunters achieve a big kill, the usual focus is a political occasion, when a leader displays munificence to mediate power and forge allegiance. Because they involve a lot of effort and expense, feasts need justification: symbolic or magical, at one level, or practical at another. The earliest clear evidence is in the remains of deposits of plants and prey dropped by diners at Hallan Çemi Tepesi in Anatolia, about ten or eleven thousand years ago, among people who were beginning to produce food instead of relying wholly on hunting and gathering. But there are suggestive earlier concentrations of similar evidence at sites in northern Spain nearly twice as old as Hallan Çemi. At Altamira, for instance, archaeologists have found ashes from large-scale cooking and the calcified debris of food perhaps from as long as twenty-three thousand years ago, with records of what could be expenditure scratched on tally sticks. Analogies with modern hunting peoples suggest that alliances between communities may have been celebrated at such occasions. Male bonding was probably not the pretext: if it were the feasts would be served far from major dwelling sites to keep women and children at a distance. In early agrarian and pastoral societies, by contrast, chiefs used feasts to supervise the distribution of surplus production among the community, and so to enhance the feast-giver’s power or status or clientage network, or to create ties of reciprocity between feasters, or to concentrate labour where feast-givers wanted it. In some instances, at a later stage, privileged feasts, with limited access, defined elites and provided them with opportunities to forge bonds.56

  ‌Cosmic Order: Time and Taboos

  Specialized, privileged elites, who enjoyed the continuity of power that heredity guaranteed, had time to devote to thinking. We can detect some thoughts that occurred to them, as they scoured the heavens for the data they needed in their jobs. In the absence of other books, the sky made compelling reading for early humans. In some eyes, stars are pinpricks in the veil of the sky through which we glimpse light from an otherwise unapproachable heaven. Among the discoveries early searchers made there was a revolutionary idea of time.

  Time was one of the great breakthrough ideas in the history of thought. Most people share St Augustine’s despair at his inability to define it. (He knew what it was, he said, until someone asked him.) The best way to understand it is by thinking about change. No change, no time. You approach or reflect a sense of time whenever you calculate the possible effects of connected processes of change – when, for instance, you speed up to escape a pursuer or capture prey, or when you notice that a berry will be ripe for harvesting before a tuber. When you compare changes, you measure, in effect, their respective rates or pace. So we can define time as the rate at which one series of changes occurs, measured against another. A universal measure is not necessary. You can measure the passage of a raindrop across your windowpane against the movement of your clock – but in default of a clock you can do so by the drifti
ng of a cloud or the crawling of a creature. As we shall see in chapter 4 (see here), Nuer tribespeople calculate the passage of time according to the rate of growth of their cattle, while other cultures deploy all sorts of irregular measures, including changes of dynasty or of ruler or ‘when Quirinius was governor of Syria’. The Lakota of North America traditionally used the occurrence of each year’s first snowfall to start a new ‘long count’.57

  Still, if you want an unfailingly regular standard of measurement, look to the heavens. Congruities between the cycles of the heavens and other natural rhythms – especially those of our own bodies and of the ecosystems to which we belong – made the first systems of universal timekeeping possible. ‘The sight of day and night’, Plato said, ‘and the months and the revolutions of the years have created number and have given us a conception of time.’58 The cycle of the sun, for instance, suits the demands of sleep and wakefulness. The moon’s matches the intervals of menstruation. Kine fatten with the march of the seasons, which in turn the sun determines. Celestial standards are so predictable that they can serve to time everything else. Star-time – the cycle of Venus, for instance, which occupies 584 years – is valued in cultures that favour long-term record-keeping and big-number arithmetic. Some societies, like ours, attempt elaborate reconciliations of the cycles of sun and moon, while others keep both sets of calculations going in imperfect tandem. As far as we know, all peoples keep track of the solar day and year, and the lunar month.