What is a Rune

by Collin Cleary

  But if we ask where the mutations come from in the first place—where novelty comes from—Darwinian theory has no substantive answer to this. Mutations, Darwinians will tell us, are “random” or “chance.” Most non-scientists think that the theory of evolution has something to do with “progress”; with things getting better and better. But this is not the case. According to Darwinism, there is simply change, without ultimate rhyme or reason. Mutations do not happen because they are somehow “needed”; they just happen. And they do not fit into any sort of larger plan. That would buy into the sort of teleology (or “design”) that Darwinism expressly rejects.

  Teleological or theological explanations of nature all make order primary: things happen for a reason; things are tending toward the realization of some rational plan or order. For Darwinism, by contrast, chance is metaphysically primary. The ultimate explanation for things—for why mutations (or biological novelties) arise—is chance, the opposite of order, design, or intention. But for all intents and purposes, to say that something happened “by chance” really amounts to the same thing as saying “we don’t know why it happened.” And to be committed to the idea that ultimately things happen by chance (i.e., that “things just happen”) is to be committed to the idea that the universe is absurd. Thus, despite the undeniable explanatory power Darwinism has exhibited within certain delimited contexts, ultimately it is simply another expression of modern nihilism.

  The Darwinians are uncannily like the character of Socrates in Aristophanes’s comedy The Clouds (first performed in 423 B.C.E.). Socrates is portrayed in this play as a materialist and sophist. He accepts Strepsiades, an old bumpkin, as a student and attempts to teach him that it is not Zeus who thunders but the clouds themselves:

  SOCRATES: They thunder, as they roll.

  STREPSIADES: In what way, you all-daring man?

  SOCRATES: When they are filled up with much water and are compelled to be borne along by necessity, hanging down full of rain, then they heavily fall into each other, bursting and clapping.

  But Strepsiades responds to this theory with a very reasonable question: “Who is it that compels them to be borne along? Isn’t it Zeus?” Socrates has a ready answer: “Not in the least. It’s ethereal vortex.” Strepsiades’s response is amusing, but pregnant with significance: “Vortex? I hadn’t noticed that Zeus didn’t exist and that instead of him Vortex is now king.” Later, Socrates has more success with Pheidippides, Strepsiades’s son. Near the end of the play, a thoroughly corrupted Pheidippides commits the cardinal sin of beating his old father, and the following exchange takes place between them:

  STREPSIADES: Have awe before ancestral Zeus!

  PHEIDIPPIDES: See! “Ancestral Zeus”! How ancient you are! Is there any Zeus?

  STREPSIADES: There is!

  PHEIDIPPIDES: No, there isn’t, since Vortex is king, having driven out Zeus.118

  The Darwinians are in exactly the same position as Aristophanes’s Socrates (and have had exactly the same social effect, incidentally). They have dethroned God, and put Vortex—Chance, Chaos—in his place. This is literally true. At root, the typical Darwinist is committed—with all the fervor of a religious zealot—to the view that it is chance, disorder, and meaninglessness that reign supreme in the universe. But once one realizes that “chance” (like “vortex”) is a non-explanation, then the door is left wide open for another theory to supplement—or supplant—Darwinism; one that has greater explanatory power.

  And we will need such a theory to explain ekstasis, for clearly “chance mutation” will not do. O felix mutatio! To have made possible art, religion, philosophy, science, and language. Indeed, to have made possible man’s self-knowledge—and, as I shall discuss in the next two sections, the universe’s self-knowledge. No, there must be something else going on here . . . But if we must go beyond the approach of Darwinist biology, where do we look?

  In thinking about ekstasis and the mystery of how it arose, I am often reminded of the “black monolith” in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Of course, while the film leaves this mysterious and metaphorical, Arthur C. Clarke’s understanding was more literal: aliens sent the black monolith to ape-men as a “teaching machine.” I am also reminded of Heidegger’s concept of das Ereignis. In German this term simply means “the event,” but Heidegger uses it to refer to his belief that sometimes in human history there have been occurrences or shifts that may have no rational explanation. For Heidegger, the ultimate disproof of modernity’s insistence that everything is explicable lies in its inability to fully explain the contingent historical circumstances that have led to it.

  Now, I am willing to accept the idea that certain things may be inexplicable—with the exception, however, of those that I can explain. And I do believe that ekstasis is explicable. Talk of alien intervention, Ereignis, or even God will not do, however. “God” is more uplifting an explanation than “chance” (and it does have the advantage of making order primary, rather than disorder—which, I shall argue, is the more reasonable position). But ultimately it is really no more clarifying than “chance.” “It’s chance” means “things just happen for no reason.” “God did it” means “things happen for a reason, but we can’t understand it.”

  To be sure, there are mysterious, abrupt “shifts” in the evolutionary record. One of these was the so-called “Cambrian explosion” (an example dear to the hearts of the advocates of “intelligent design,” a theory I do not endorse). This was the rather sudden appearance, about 542 million years ago, of most of the major animal phyla. Upper Paleolithic Europe was, in effect, the “Cambrian explosion” of human prehistory. But such events are neither miracles, nor chance occurrences. They make perfect sense if we understand that nature itself is moving toward something—that the whole of which we are a part has ends of its own.

  Man is, of course, a part of nature. But, as I have discussed, it seems that in us nature has given rise to a curiously unnatural being. We are of nature, but separate from it at the same time. We are capable of negating the nature in us (and the nature outside us) and transcending it. Consider: doesn’t the fact that nature has given rise to an “unnatural” being like us make “nature” itself (or existence itself) seem awfully peculiar? It seems to suggest that there are mechanisms at work in nature that have gone unfathomed by the scientific theories that currently reign. It suggests, in fact, that existence itself may have certain larger “purposes” that we have not yet comprehended.

  Ekstasis can be explained by biology—or, more broadly, science—but only if we go beyond the narrow confines of Darwinism and consider a new way of looking at things. The next section will return to the topic of ekstasis, this time considering how the possession of it can be used to situate man “in the scheme of things,” vis-à-vis the rest of nature. This will set the stage for a consideration, in Section Seven, of the meaning and purpose of nature, of the whole itself.

  6. ALL & NOTHING

  In my account of ekstasis, I have drawn principally on two philosophers: Heidegger and Schopenhauer. And Hegel has been peeping out at certain points in my discussion (he will have a much bigger role to play very soon). But the truth is that the ideas I have been expounding in this essay have deep roots in the Western tradition, and are much older even than Hegel.

  To advance my argument about ekstasis and human nature a step further, let’s briefly consider Aristotle’s account of the soul in De Anima. Actually, Aristotle speaks of three “souls” in us: the vegetative soul (characterized by the appetitive and nutritive “plant functions”), the animal (sensory, locomotive functions), and the rational. It is the rational soul or intellect (nous) that makes us uniquely human, of course. Nous is conceived by Aristotle basically as a kind of receptacle that receives the intelligible forms (or essences) of things without their matter.

  But in order to be able to do this without distorting the knowledge it receives, Aristotle argues that nous must have no form or essence of its own. In short, the defini
ng part of the human being is nothing. He tells us, further, that “actual knowledge is identical with its object” (430a21): when nous takes in a form or essence it becomes that thing (because, again, nous has no form of its own). Thus, although in our innermost or highest being we are nothing, we have the potential to become all things.

  Consider now what Pico della Mirandola has to say in his Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486). He tells us that after God had created all the planets, stars, and beasts he felt the desire to fashion some sort of being that was capable of knowing and appreciating creation itself. Rather than endow one of the other beasts with this power, God created mankind and—in a sense—gave him no nature at all. Instead of having a fixed nature like the other creatures, God made man capable of acquiring knowledge of and imitating all other created things. Here, of course, we can discern an echo of Aristotle’s conception of nous, which is capable of knowing all because it itself is nothing. Pico held that when man uses his intellect to know the universe, he achieves a kind of communion with God and the angels.

  The basic Western self-understanding from Aristotle to Heidegger—really, from Parmenides to Heidegger—is that man is the mirror of nature. Our Being is to reflect Being. Thus, we are potentially all. Furthermore, every philosopher from Aristotle to Sartre has to some degree or another sensed a very important implication of this: that somehow our special place in nature, to be the being that gives voice to all of Being, makes us the apex, perfection, or completion of nature itself.

  We can see that Aristotle makes man the apex of nature in two ways. First, we recapitulate within ourselves the rest of nature, in possessing the appetitive and nutritive functions (plant nature), and the sensory and locomotive (animal nature). Biologically, we comprise the whole, but step beyond it at the same time. We step beyond it in being capable of having the idea (or ideas) of the whole come to be in our intellect. This—plus the fact that Aristotle thinks nous must be incorporeal—leads him to claim that man is part beast, part god. Through man, a natural but supernatural being, nature comes to consciousness of itself. (As I will discuss in the next section, this implication of Aristotle’s ideas would only be made explicit by Hegel.)

  It is in the caves of Europe in the Upper Paleolithic, through the emergence for the first time on earth of representational art, that man first showed himself capable of grasping the essence of things—of, as Heidegger would say, “bringing Being to a stand.” And remember what Aristotle has taught us: actual knowledge is identical with its object. Through ekstasis, in grasping the essence of the things they painted (or carved), man became possessed by them. Man “became” the animals he represented. But this grasp of the animal essence is a dual “act” of knowing the other, and knowing oneself: man finds himself in the animal, and he finds the animal in himself.119

  We can now also see why it is entirely plausible to think that shamanism may have been practiced in Europe at the time the cave paintings were produced. The reason for this is that shamanism involves, in part, identification with animals or the “spirits” or “souls” of animals. But this just means the absorption by the shaman of the animal essence or Being. Thus, the Upper Paleolithic “bringing to stand of the Being of things” may not have been a purely contemplative activity, in which man simply opened to and gazed upon essences. Instead, our ancestors may also have believed that knowledge is power: that through the grasp of essence we do not simply know animals, we can acquire their power as well. (Of course, this standpoint would have been impossible if it did not rest upon a more basic standpoint of openness to Being—the capacity for simple wonder in the face Being, without any other purpose in mind.)

  However, I completely reject the idea that the images in the cave are records, if you will, of shamanic “trips,” as Lewis-Williams asserts. Instead, they may be usefully compared to the images in churches. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, for example, was the result of Michelangelo’s drive as an artist to create images of sheer beauty. At the same time, he was well aware that those images would function as aids to religious devotion (or, let us say, to spiritual awakening) for those who worshipped in the chapel.

  Similarly, the images in the caves are, as I have argued, expressions of the artists’ desire to convey, in as aesthetically pleasing a form as possible, the essences of the animals depicted. At the same time, we must come to grips with the fact that these images were painted in remote caves. It is quite plausible to think that these caves may have been the scenes of shamanic “incubation,” with the torch-lit images on the walls of the caves serving as aids to the shaman.

  It is unlikely that we will ever be able to determine whether this hypothesis is correct—that shamanism happened in the caves, and that the art played a role in it. But this is actually of no real importance, for we can be reasonably certain about something of far greater significance: it is in these images that we find human beings for the first time becoming, as I have said, the mirror of nature. Shamanism, if it occurred in the caves, would simply have been a magical inflection of this “mirroring.”

  Bataille writes of the cave artists:

  These men made tangible for us the fact that they were becoming men, that the limitations of animality no longer confined them, but they made this tangible by leaving us images of the very animality from which they had escaped. What these admirable frescoes proclaim with a youthful vigor is not only that the man who painted them ceased being an animal by painting them but that he stopped being an animal by giving the animal, and not himself, a poetic image that seduces us and seems sovereign.120

  There is much that is profound in this statement—but it is only partially correct. In the cave paintings we find man transcending animality, but also finding himself through it. The shamanic identification with the animal would be yet another form of this.

  Now, Bataille goes on to note something else of very great significance: “In effect, prehistoric man depicted animals in fascinating and naturalistic images, but when he wanted to represent himself, he awkwardly concealed his unique, distinguishing features beneath those of the animal he was not. He only partially divulged his human body, and he gave himself an animal head.”121 Bataille is referring to a number of famous cave images which are clearly anthropomorphic, but have various animal features.

  These images, in fact, dramatically illustrate the point I have been making: in the cave art, we see man finding himself in the animal, and finding the animal in himself. Human (or humanoid) figures in the caves are relatively rare: the animal images greatly outnumber them. But when the artists turned to depicting men like themselves, they drew those men as identified with animals. Why? Because, remember, art reveals essences. And it is the very essence of man to mirror nature, to identify with it.

  But something else is also going in these images. Consider the famous “sorcerer” of the Trois Frères Cave. This image is some 75 centimeters high. It is partly an engraving, partly a charcoal sketch. The figure is clearly humanoid, but it has the head of a stag, with antlers, an owl’s face, wolf ears, a chamois “beard,” a horse’s tail, and bear paws. Its lower limbs, its posture (it appears to be dancing), and possibly its genitals indicate that it is humanoid.122 (The technical term for such a figure, by the way, is “therianthrope.”) This is certainly man seeing the animal in himself, or vice versa. But I suggest that it is something else besides: it is man seeing himself as Lord of the Beasts, as the apex of creation.

  In the cave, man dimly (or, perhaps, not so dimly) sensed what Aristotle made clear: that man recapitulates all of nature in himself. In so doing, at the same time he transcends the merely natural. He combines all creatures within himself; he is all things. Thus, he occupies a privileged position in nature, reigning over all as the highest terrestrial being. Part beast, part god. And we see this motif running throughout the history of religion and mythology.

  We see it in Cernunnos, the horned god. In the famous horned figure on the Gundestrup cauldron, who holds in his hands the golden, solar t
orque and the serpent, symbol of the moon which waxes and wanes, as the serpent sheds its skin. All things, all opposites, come together in him. We see it in Pashupati (compare the famous “Pashupati seal” of Mohenjodaro to the figure on the Gundestrup cauldron). These are all echoes of the sorcerer of Trois Frères, and the other, similar figures that we find in cave art. We see the principle involved here in the biblical assertion that God gave man dominion over all the beasts. And again in the microcosm-macrocosm correspondence, closely associated with mystical and esoteric philosophies (but also implicit in philosophers like Aristotle and Hegel).

  In the cave art there is even a dim recognition of an evolution of natural forms; and of the idea that later forms are prefigured in earlier ones. Often the “basis” for a painting will be a fold or crack or bump in the rock. These shapes reminded the cave painters of the shapes of animals, and so entire paintings would be built around them. We see the same phenomenon at work in the thinking of the Hindus, who believe in the spontaneous appearance of lingams (phallic symbols) in nature, such as the famous “ice lingam” of Amarnath in the western Himalayas. As Hegel famously wrote, “God does not remain petrified and moribund, however, the stones cry out and lift themselves up to spirit.”123

  Of course, the therianthropes are not the only examples of the depiction of the human form in cave art. As I mentioned much earlier, human stick-figures abound. These have been the source of a great deal of puzzlement. Leo Frobenius wrote: “It is to be noted that in almost all pictures of this kind the representation of the animals has been carried out with great care, while the human figures are exceptionally sketchy.”124 And Bataille observes that the human drawings are “nearly all formless and much less human than those that represent animals; others, like the Hottentot Venus, are shameless caricatures of the human form.” And he describes the human stick-figures as “childish.”125