by Peter Watson
The second phenomenon involves the well-established fact that the Pacific rim is known as the ‘Ring of Fire’, because that is where the world’s most active volcanoes are located. Volcanoes are discussed in more detail in chapter five; here, all we need to point out is that many volcanoes in the Ring of Fire are offshore, underwater volcanoes, forming part of the seabed. During underwater offshore eruptions (of which there were more than 50 in 2001–2002) solid matter – ‘land’ – would have been propelled forcefully to the surface.
A third possibility is that the myths dimly reflect the experience of ancient people who had lived among earlier inundations (say, following the Younger Dryas episode), and had then witnessed the raised sea levels decline, revealing more and more land as the waters receded.
Here, too, then, myths appear to follow history and suggest that, for some types of North American Indian at least, they did ‘remember’ in their legends an early flood, and observed the land rising as it was released from the weight of ice, as the glaciers melted, or offshore volcanoes erupted, or higher sea levels receded. The rest of the Americas lack the ‘land diver’ and ‘land raiser’ myths, though they have a rich stock of flood myths, including those with birds who fly out to seek land.
Other ancient legends would appear to offer still more tantalising glimpses into the past. For example, in his analysis of world flood myths, Stephen Oppenheimer found systematic variation in the New World. The dominant flood myth of North American Indians was the land raiser and land diver myths, as we have just seen, and these they shared with Siberians. In Central America, on the other hand, the dominant features involved super-waves, mountain-high floods, with the survivor(s) landing on the mountainside before the flood receded. These themes were shared with myths in Tibet-Burma, Taiwan, island South East Asia and Polynesia. As we shall see in more detail in chapter five this geographical distribution coincides exactly with the pattern of hurricane activity across the Pacific Ocean.
In South America the dominant flood themes stress overpopulation (the gods decided to make a flood because there were too many people on earth), drought and/or famine before the flood and the use of an ark or boat of some kind. As again we shall see in chapter five, this area is known to be among the most volcanically active regions on Earth, and is also susceptible to El Niño events, which create violent winds, associated tsunamis and can trigger earthquakes, causing great loss of life. Early peoples may well have concluded that such disasters, which killed so many people, meant that the gods thought there were too many people on Earth.
TRICKSTERS AND TOTEMS
A somewhat different myth of origin has less to do with floods than with what has come to be called ‘the trickster creator’. This character is found in Norse myths, in Africa, in New Guinea but above all in North America. The trickster creator is usually an animal, like a fox, a raven or coyote, or is half-animal/half-human, and usually creates people by some sort of subterfuge or deception. This has generally been taken to refer to shamanistic behaviour, primitive religious leaders exercising power or influence through some sort of magic, who were often thought capable of turning themselves into animals, at least temporarily.
The world-wide distribution of these myths suggests that sham-anism had evolved by the time early humans reached the Americas (see chapter three). It is certainly possible that religious practitioners could have evolved several times throughout history, in different places, but it is much less likely that the ‘trickster’ theme would have evolved several times. Could the theme of creating humans by subterfuge have evolved before early humans grasped the male role in procreation? There is some evidence that humans in the Old World discovered the male role in reproduction only when the dog was domesticated, because it was domesticated first and because among the large mammals it is the one with the shortest gestation time. The dog, the fox and the coyote are all members of the Canidae family, whose gestation times range from 52 days (fox) to 63 days (coyotes, dogs and dingoes). This possibility is discussed in more detail in chapter seven.
Paul Radin, in his study of North American Indian trickster myths (among the Winnebago, Tlingit and Assiniboine) concludes that the trickster has three primary traits – his voracious appetite, his wandering and his unbridled sexuality. Given that he is also on occasions a mix of being a god, or almost a god, or an ex-god, and at the same time a buffoon, Radin concluded that the trickster represents the spirit, or the threat, of disorder, indicating from where dangerous disorder is most likely to arise (conflicts over food and sex), suggesting that this too is a myth that stems from an experience in deep time, perhaps when the population thinned and was under threat from limited or nearly nonexistent food supplies and where the act of procreation required discipline if the tribe were to survive. It may also represent an ambivalent attitude to the gods who, in the past, had let mankind down, scarcely behaving in god-like ways. Is this a folk memory of the New World inhabitants’ precarious and constricted time in Beringia, cut off between water to the west and ice to the east?33 Is the unbridled sexuality of the dog an unconscious reference to its role in revealing the male principle in reproduction?
Of the many other myths that exist in both the New World and the Old, the most important generalisation, from our point of view, is that they support the idea that the early inhabitants of the Americas come from both inland central Asia and island South East Asia.
According to Stephen Oppenheimer, there are very few motifs that are totally absent in the New World, but there are systematic variations and these form a consistent and coherent picture. The most substantial systematic difference is a constellation of ten linked motifs not generally found in Africa, the Americas, or Central and North East Asia. Instead, this constellation occurs in a distinctive swathe (referred to earlier) from Polynesia across China, South Asia, and then the Middle East, ending in northern Europe (as far as Finland).
For example, in the Americas there is a relative dearth of ‘watery chaos myths’ beyond the north-west Pacific coast. Another difference is that New World myths lack almost any references to sea monsters or dragons (the one exception is an Aztec myth). In any one of the three floods referred to above, far more areas, and far more populated areas, would have been accessible to crocodiles, whose main range of activity was in Indo-China. This is confirmed by the fact that, in the myths, most dragons and serpents attack coastal peoples, not fishermen. On this reading, the dragon and sea monster stories are perhaps a deep folk memory of a plague of crocodiles that occurred when shallow coastal areas were flooded at one stage in the distant past.34 (Recall the skin scarification practices mentioned earlier among the Austronesians, which are supposed to represent the teeth marks of crocodiles.)
Besides ‘watery chaos’, first light and separation, other elements in this constellation of myths are the use of the ‘word’ by the gods to create light, descriptions of incest, parricide and use of the deity’s body parts and fluids as building materials for the cosmos. None of this occurs in New World myths, though it is common across Eurasia, where we also often find a divine couple who are bound together, and separate to create heaven and Earth, who are then mutilated and torn apart by their offspring, who use the parts of the parent deity to create the landscape (blood is used for rivers, for example, or the skull for the dome of the sky). Many myths in this constellation contain episodes of post-flood incest, usually between a brother and a sister. Sometimes the participants are aware of the taboo, at others it isn’t mentioned. This would appear to be a forceful way for primitive peoples to reinforce the memory that, after the flood and/or the Toba eruption, the race almost died out and/or was isolated (from other islands?), the population reduced to such an extent that brothers were forced to mate with sisters.
Again such myths are not in general found in the New World. Nor are there many myths of ‘land-splitting heroes’ in the Americas. In land-splitting myths, the floods are caused by sea creatures or monsters when they chipped bits of islands from continents
or from larger islands, when creating the geography of the region (this motif is widespread in Indonesia). It would appear to be a remnant of an earthquake (or, again, a flood) which may have created offshore islands or rearranged them, the resulting floods being associated with the above-mentioned plague of crocodiles.
Nor are there myths in the New World, as there are in the Old, where the world is created by the word of god. This is well known in the West from the bible, of course: ‘And God said, Let there be Light: And there was light’ (Genesis 1:3). Similar motifs are known in Babylon, Egypt, India, Polynesia and other areas of the Indo-Pacific. The emphasis on the ‘word’ may indicate the importance of language in early forms of identity.
This overall pattern is amplified by a second group of myths which are also notable by their absence in the New World. These include the ‘dying and rising tree god’, the myth of the warring brothers, and the so-called ‘moon/lake tryst’. The dying and rising tree god or spirit had a very wide distribution across the Earth, from the Norse myth of Odin to the Egyptian myth of Osiris, to the Christian story of Jesus, to the Moluccan myth of Maapitz, to the New Britain myth of To Kabinana.* Moreover, this myth overlaps in certain locations with the theme of warring brothers, or sibling rivalry: Set/Isis in Egypt; Bangor/Sisi in Papua New Guinea; Wangki/Sky in Sulawesi; and, of course, Cain and Abel in the bible. This conflict is generally taken to reflect the different lifestyles of agriculture and either foraging or nomadism – in other words, it is post-agriculture. In the moon/lake tryst the hero falls in love with the reflection of the moon in a lake.35
What matters for us with these myths is less their meaning (for the moment) than their distribution which, as mentioned above, is all but identical to the other group of ten motifs just considered. This spread is shown in map 4 and, broadly speaking, once again extends from Indonesia and Borneo, up through the Malay peninsula, India, the Arabian Gulf, Mesopotamia, the Mediterranean civilisations to western and northern Europe. This range of locations has in common that it occupies and overlaps with the great ‘East-West Corridor’ (as shown in map 1 and discussed in more detail in chapter five), a broad swathe of coastline running from the tip of Malaysia at Singapore as far west as Pointe St Mathieu, near Brest in Brittany, in France.* Is this evidence for very ancient contact between these regions? We shall see in a later chapter how east-west movement across the globe has been much easier than north-south movement.
The new synthesis of cosmology, geology, genetics and mythology is exciting but we have taken it about as far as it will go. From it we may conclude (and repeating the proviso that this is all very speculative) that one group of early humans who first peopled the Americas arrived no later than 14,000 years ago and very probably at 16,500–15,000 years ago. They shared with everyone else an experience of a global sea-borne flood and creation myths in which man is fashioned out of clay. But they showed no awareness of either agriculture or navigation, having reached the cold and limiting region of Siberia, and then Beringia, before these skills were invented (or needed). Similarly, they showed a very rudimentary awareness of a great global catastrophe, other than flood, in which the skies darkened for generations and only slowly cleared, with light preceding the sun and the moon by a very long time.
These myths concur with the genetic and linguistic evidence, that there was a later migration, possibly at 11,000 but more likely at 8,000– 6,000 years ago. It follows from this that early Americans had no awareness of the cultural conflict that gave rise to the ‘warring brothers’ myths, or the dying and rising tree god myth, which originated in South East Asia too late for it to be incorporated into New World mythology. This too suggests these people left the Sunda Shelf before agriculture was invented. The two constellations of myth motifs were arguably the most important ideas of ancient times in the Old World, shaping – as we shall see – most of the religions and traditional histories from Europe to South East Asia.
This all suggests (and still speculating) that the period between 11,000 and 8,000 years ago on the Sunda Shelf was very problematical, entailing several catastrophes which both expelled many people and gave rise to powerful myths among those who remained. As Johanna Nichols has said, there was a major rupture between the people who headed north, eventually to colonise the New World, and those who remained, or headed back west, to form part of the civilisations of Eurasia.
In fact, what the distribution of myths enables us to say is that, just as Johanna Nichols identified four large language phyla across the world (see above), so there are four large ‘phyla’ of myths, though with a somewhat different distribution. These four areas encompass, first, Africa. For our purposes, Africa can be largely set aside: the continent features as the starting point of a journey for humankind where the main episodes of interest take place elsewhere. And this is reflected in Africa’s myths of origin about which, as Stephen Belcher says, ‘No generalisations are possible.’ Tricksters are found in myths right across the continent, as are giants and ogres; snakes are common and most myths take place in a rural, village environment, and concern hunting or cattle herding (the latter, therefore, are of rather recent origin). Baboons and chimpanzees feature, often as early forms of human being; sky gods and the moon are also quite common but none of the patterns we shall be attaching importance to exists in African myths. The second area is the long swathe of cultures from northern Europe through the Mediterranean and Middle East, India and South East Asia and on to island South East Asia (the great East-West Corridor); the third area encompasses northern Asia (China, Siberia, Japan, Korea); and the fourth comprises the New World.36
In general, two broad conclusions may be drawn from this brief survey of myths, one concerning the New World, the other the Old World. In the New World the very ancient myths (such as the watery creation of the world) tended to be superseded by those that forced themselves on people by their experiences in the American continent itself – land divers, land raisers, tricksters, violent tsunamis. This is an early indication of a trend or theme we shall see more of as the book proceeds: the role that extreme weather – storms, hurricanes, volcanoes and earthquakes – plays in New World ideology. In the Old World what draws our attention is the distinctive distribution of the watery creation myth, the use of the ‘word’ to create light and the dying and rising tree god set of myths. Dying and rising refers to fertility, a dominant issue in Old World ideology that, as we shall see, did not have quite the same importance in the New World. The spread of these myths, from the ‘corner’ of South East Asia, up through China and across India into the Middle East and west and north Europe, following what we shall be calling the great East-West Corridor, shows that this route was in use very early on. It would have a profound effect on the development of Eurasia in all senses – ideologically, commercially, technologically. There was nothing like it in the New World.
• 3 •
SIBERIA AND THE SOURCES OF SHAMANISM
The final matter to consider before following early humans into the New World is a specific region of the Old World that the migrants had to pass through before completing their Great Journey. This was the region immediately to the west of the Bering Strait: Siberia. As well as being remote, cold and empty, Siberia is the home of shamanism, a phenomenon that will play a large role in our story.
Although it has been called into question lately, most anthropologists accept that shamanism is a hunter’s religion, and probably the earliest evolved manifestation of religious activity, spiritual discipline and medical practice, and which seems to have been in existence in prehistoric times across a wide swathe of the Eurasian landmass. Sham-anism is even depicted in cave art – for example, at Trois Frères in Ariège, in the French Pyrenees, south of Toulouse, where a figure seventy centimetres high displays antlers, owl’s eyes, lion or bear’s paws, a fox’s tail, and is wrapped in an animal skin which almost conceals an erect penis (see figure 1).1
Shamanism is primarily concerned with the need to take the life (of animals
) in order to live oneself and reflects an early cosmology, an equilibrium achieved by the idea that one has to pay for the souls of the animals one needs to kill in order to survive, and where the shaman flies to the owner of the animals to negotiate a price.2
In hunting societies, the main belief is – and was – that ‘All that exists lives’.3 We are surrounded by enemies, ‘invisible spirits with gaping mouths’. A second belief is that the cosmos exists on a series of levels – six, seven or nine, as the case may be – all linked by a ‘world tree’ or pillar or mountain, and where the shaman’s primary ability is – and was – ‘soul flight’ which enabled him, in a trance (an important element), to travel between the different levels of the cosmos in order to perform feats that would benefit the community. A third belief was that people had multiple souls and that dreams were evidence of one or more of these souls leaving the body, and going on journeys. Illness resulted when these souls could not for some reason rejoin their bodies (possibly because ill people found it difficult to sleep, or alternatively were so exhausted by their illness, and slept so deeply, that they couldn’t remember their dreams). And it was part of the shaman’s function, again in trance, to go on a soul journey, find the missing or lost soul and lead it back to the ill person’s body, restoring that body to health.4 These soul journeys often involved crossing menacing landscapes, in which the shaman was either dismembered or reduced to a mere skeleton, and for that reason shamans underwent special initiation procedures, having to spend a considerable period in the wilderness, surviving on their own and making the intimate acquaintance of the landscape and the wild animals, developing his (or, more rarely, her) survival skills. The activities of the shaman tend to concentrate on matters that, though important, are erratic: illness, weather, predators, prey.5
