by Peter Watson
And this perhaps is the second most interesting generalisation to emerge from our story, after the initial formulation of ideology based on the environment/climate/human conjunction: this is the determinant of what Fernand Braudel and the French historians would call la longue durée. History is in effect the narrative of humankind’s changing ideology and its continuing interaction with the environment – economic, ecological, technological.5
If this analysis is correct, then it helps us understand the very different trajectories followed in the two hemispheres. As was outlined in chapter five, the Americas are a much smaller landmass than Eurasia, even without Africa added on. Moreover the New World is, as Hegel, Jared Diamond and others have pointed out, oriented in a north-south direction rather than east-west, as Eurasia is. This orientation in itself impeded development, relatively speaking, by slowing down the rate at which plants – and therefore animals and civilisation – can spread. This was not wholly bad, of course. It meant that in particular localities many species evolved. (The tropical rainforest, for example, occupies 7 per cent of the land surface of Earth but nurtures well over 50 per cent of the animal and plant species. Because there are so many insects and small mammals in the rainforest, energy is lost along the food chain, with the result that large mammals are relatively rare – and large mammals have played a vital role in our story.)6 But the north-south orientation of the New World, in conjunction with other factors to be considered shortly, did undoubtedly slow down the development of humanity in the Americas. It was more a technical limit before anything else, but it had a knock-on effect too, as we shall see.
Alongside the general geographical alignment of the continents went an associated climatic variation, of which the most important elements were the Monsoon, the El Niño Southern Oscillation (enso), and the violent activity caused by volcanoes, earthquakes, winds and storms. The importance of the monsoon lies in the fact that, for the last 8,000 years, since the time of the last great flood, outlined in chapter two, the monsoon has been decreasing in strength. The varying strength of the monsoon and its temporal relation to the emergence (and subsequent collapse) of Old World civilisations was described in chapter five. All we need add here is that, given the domestication of cereal grasses in the Old World at about 10,000 years ago, the major environmental/ideological issue in Eurasia over that time has been fertility. The landmass, bit by bit, has been drying.
In the New World, on the other hand, the major factor affecting weather has been the increasing frequency of enso, from a few times a century about six thousand years ago, to every few years now. Besides the occurrences of enso itself, its relationship with volcanic activity, given the make-up of the Pacific Ocean (an enormous body of water over a relatively thin crust), also appears to have been important. We saw in chapter five that Meso- and South America are the most volcanically active mainland areas of the world where major civilisations have formed. Put all this together and the most important environmental issue in the Americas over the past few thousand years, which has had fundamental ideological consequences, has been the increasing frequency of destructive weather.
We cannot say with certainty that these differences were definitive, or that they ultimately account for the systematic ideological variations we shall be discussing shortly. We have already noted that in our natural experiment there are too many variables to satisfy purists. What we can say is that these systematic differences in climate across the hemispheres dovetail plausibly with the historical patterns that are observable between the New World and the Old World and to that extent may help us understand the different trajectories.
HOW AND WHY THE GODS SMILED ON THE OLD WORLD
After the geographical and climatological factors that determined basic and long-term differences between the two hemispheres, the next most important factors lay in the realm of biology – plants and animals. In the plants realm, we may say that, again, there were two main differences between the hemispheres. The first concerned cereals: grain. In Eurasia in particuar there was a naturally occurring range of grasses – wheat, barley, rye, millet, sorghum, rice – susceptible of domestication and, because of the east-west configuration of the landmass, they were able to spread relatively rapidly once domestication was achieved. Surpluses were therefore built up relatively quickly and it was on this basis that civilisations were able to form. In the New World, on the other hand, what turned out to be the most useful grain there was evolved from teosinte which, in the wild, was, morphologically speaking, far more distant from the domesticated form than was the case with the Old World grasses. Furthermore, as we now know, because of its high sugar content (as a tropical rather than a temperate plant), maize was first used for its psychoactive properties rather than as a foodstuff. On top of everything else, maize – even when it did become a foodstuff – found it harder to spread in the New World because of the north-south configuration of the landmass, which meant that mean temperatures, rainfall and sunlight varied far more than they did in Eurasia. For this reason, the development of maize surpluses was much harder – and slower – to build up. As noted, possibly only Cahokia followed an Old World trajectory at all closely. Thus the domestication trajectory of the most important New World grain was very different from its more numerous counterparts in the Old World.
The second crucial area where plants differed between the Old World and the New was in the realm of hallucinogens. The influence of these plants on history has perhaps not been appreciated before to this extent, but it is now clear that the distribution of psychoactive plants across the world is curiously anomalous. The figures, as we saw in chapter twelve, are that between 80 and 100 hallucinogenic species occur naturally in the New World, compared with not more than eight or ten in the Old World.
It is also now clear that hallucinogens played a large and vital role in the religious thought of the New World but especially so in Central and South America, where the most advanced civilisations evolved.
The role and effect of hallucinogens was essentially two-fold. First, they made the religious experience in the Americas much more vivid than in the Old World. Second, because of their psychoactive properties, as shown by the experiments of Claudio Naranjo, discussed in chapter twelve, hallucinogens fostered ideas of transformation, between humans and other forms of life, and of travel, or soul flight, between the middle world and the upper and lower realms of the cosmos. Combined with a society in which, because of the lack of wheeled transport, or riding, and the north-south configuration, people found it relatively difficult to travel far, the journeys to the upper and lower realms were all the more important. The sheer vividness, and the fearsome nature of some of the transformations experienced in trance, the overwhelming psychological intensity of altered states of consciousness induced by hallucinogens, would among other things have made New World religious experiences far more convincing and therefore more resistant to change than those in the Old World where, as we have seen and shall see again shortly, horse-riding and wheeled transport – carts and chariots – meant that different groups, with different beliefs, came into contact with each other far more.
This is not to say that there were no hallucinogens in the Old World, or that they were not important. As was discussed in chapter ten, opium, cannabis (hemp) and soma were all widely used ritual substances in various regions of Eurasia. For a variety of reasons, however, the more powerful psychoactive substances gave way relatively early on to milder alcoholic beverages, whether this was because domesticated mammals needed to be controlled (riding, driving, ploughing and milking in particular needed concentration), or because the pastoral lifestyle was less communal, meaning people came together not so much for intense shamanistic ceremonies, but for more social bonding reasons, where milder euphoriants were more suitable, or because they came together to face threats from outside, when again strong psychoactive substances would have been inappropriate, while alcohol was acceptable in warrior-bonding. Beer and wine thus characterised the Old Wor
ld whereas hallucinogens were more common in the Americas. This provoked a change in ideology in Eurasia, helping the relative demise of shamanism.
In the Old World what was worshipped instead were two aspects of fertility – the Great Goddess and the Bull. Though the Bull was worshipped as an aspect of fertility, we do well to remember that this animal was more often represented by his distinctive bucrania – its head and horns – than its sexual organs. Probably this was due – as many scholars have said – to the similarity between the bull’s horns and the shape of the New Moon, added to which was the link between the phases of the moon and the menstrual cycle, especially the cessation of menstruation, which would have been noted. At this point in the history of the Old World, the Great Goddess is shown giving birth to a bull, with the bucrania emerging from her womb. Here we have a curious combination: no one can ever have seen a woman giving birth to a bull; there was clearly some confusion at this point over the mechanism of human reproduction. If the bull represented the powerful forces of nature, as well as fertility, as other scholars have maintained, these motifs may indicate that people were unaware of the real mechanics of reproduction and at that time believed instead that women were fertilised by one or other of the forces of nature, represented by bucrania. Whatever the exact beliefs, the essential thing is that throughout the Neolithic period in the Old World – whether the object of worship was the Great Goddess, the Bull, the cow, rivers or streams – the central issue was fertility, in particular human fertility.
What we now know, but previous scholars didn’t, or didn’t pay due attention to, is that there were two threats to fertility in the Neolithic Old World. There was the weakening monsoon, which affected the fertility of all living things, but there was also the fact that the human pelvic channel had grown narrower under a sedentary, grain-based diet, as compared with a hunter-gatherer one.
On top of all that was a developing interaction between humans and domesticated mammals that had immense ideological and economic consequences. Put succinctly and chronologically, those developments were as follows:
The domestication of cattle, sheep and goats enabled the exploitation of less good land. This brought about the development of pastoralism, as a result of which these kinds of farmers spread beyond village life and became more dispersed. This dispersal in turn had an effect on religious ideology, a move beyond shamanism. Among pastoralists the calendar was less important, because domesticated mammals give birth at different times of the year, unlike plants which, particularly in temperate zones, are more directly linked to the cycle of the seasons. (Cattle can give birth at any time of the year, goats in winter or spring; with sheep it depends on how near the equator they are – in temperate zones, sheep lamb in spring but in warmer climates the lambing season can extend throughout the year. For horses the natural breeding season is May to August.)
A further aspect of domesticated mammals is that their whole life takes place above ground, as it were. Unlike plants, which need to be sown in the soil, and spend some time out of sight, before re-merging in a different form, animals are less mysterious. In a pastoral society the underworld is less important, less necessary, less ever-present. Together with the relative absence of hallucinogens, this development made the netherworld far less of an issue in the Old World than in the New.
This may have had other consequences. Although people in the New World never developed the wheel, for good reasons, they did have the concept of roundness – they had rubber balls for their ball games, they sometimes formed balls out of human heads or captives’ bodies, which they rolled down pyramid steps, and the combatants in boxing games fought with purely spherical carved stones in their fists. Furthermore, New World peoples undoubtedly witnessed the sun and moon in the day and night sky, and eclipses of both, without ever appearing to consider that the Earth itself was spherical. This is surely because, in a predominantly vegetal world, with the experience of the netherworld so vivid (and other ‘realms’ so accessible via hallucinogens), ‘flatness’ and layers were much more obvious than roundness. Not travelling great distances, particularly across the sea, aided by useful winds, they had less chance – and were therefore less prepared – to experience the world as a spherical object.
The domestication of the horse had a number of different consequences. It accompanied the development of the wheel and the chariot and led to riding. These were enormous advances, adding to the mobility of men and women in Eurasia, aiding in particular the creation of palace states, far larger than most of the New World states because the horse and chariot allowed larger territories to be conquered and then held. In the same way, the wheel and cart meant that more goods could be carried further, boosting trade and the prosperity and exchange of ideas that went with it. These factors all came together from time to time in great wars, which also displaced peoples, languages and ideas across vast areas in large numbers. The Old World was mobile in a way that the New World was not.
Horses and cattle in particular are large mammals, valued for their power. That power, however, meant that, as well as being useful, they were potentially dangerous. In such a context, the regular and frequent use of mind-altering substances was hazardous. A shaman in trance could not have handled a horse or a cow, let alone a bull. On top of that, as dispersed populations developed the habit of coming together for spouse selection, marriage, and to resist threats from outside (now greater, because wealth in the form of domestic mammals could be stolen as land couldn’t), people were driven away from hallucinogens, which offered powerful, vivid (and at times threatening) but private experiences, and were led instead towards alcohol, which offered milder, euphoriant communal social-bonding experiences. This was a major move beyond shamanism.
In this way, pastoral nomadism emerges as one of the ‘motors’ of Old World history. This is because of its inherent instability as a way of life, because the weakening monsoon caused the drying of the steppes – the natural home of pastoral nomads – meaning that they could no longer subsist as easily in their traditional fashion, and must disperse still further and invade the settled societies at the edges of the great grasslands. The predominantly east-west nature of the Central Asian steppes ensured that peoples and ideas travelled right across Eurasia. Since weather was more important to the nomads than vegetal fertility, and because they lived on milk, blood and meat, their gods were sky gods – storms and winds – and horses. Their religious ideology was very different from those of the more settled societies and the endemic conflict between nomads and settled peoples was both destructive and, in the long run, creative.
The virtually continuous conflict introduced into Eurasian history over 2,700 years, from 1200 BC to AD 1500, by the fact that highly mobile pastoral nomads were at all times more or less threatened by climatic factors (the weakening monsoon and the drying steppe) was one factor in bringing about the end of the Bronze Age, the destruction of the great palace states created on the back of the horse-drawn chariot, and eventually provoked the great spiritual change known as the Axial Age, the great turning away from (man-made) violence and the epochal turning in, which produced a new ideology, or morality, and culminated – this time among the pastoral nomadic Hebrews – in the idea of monotheism. It was, according to Daniel Hillel, the fact that the nomadic Hebrews wandered between so many different ecological habitats, that gave them the idea of one overarching God that governed all environments.
Greek rationalism, and Greek science, in particular the Greek concept of nature, partly brought about by a close examination of domesticated mammals and how their nature compared with human nature (whether they had souls, whether they had morals, whether they had language, whether they could suffer, chapter nineteen), when adapted to the Hebrew idea of a single, abstract god, eventually gave rise to the Christian idea of a rational God, who favoured order in the natural world, whose own nature could be gradually uncovered at some point in the future because He favoured order. And this idea, of the possibility of progress, of God r
evealing himself gradually, by means of linear history, as was outlined in chapter twenty-two, helped to create many of the innovations that would enable human-kind to explore the Earth via its great oceans.
The many and varied tribes of pastoral nomads emerging on and then escaping from the central Asia steppes continued in the millennium-and-a-half after Jesus Christ. It assisted and hindered the east-west movement of goods and ideas, but above all maintained Eurasia as a landmass across which there was much rapid movement. The horse also proved to be a vector for the transmission of disease (the plague) across the same landmass, which had the dual effect – again in the long run – of promoting the wool industry in the north of Europe, the sheep providing the substance of the first great industry in the world, but also forced the inhabitants of the western Mediterranean to look for alternative routes to the East, where so many spices, silk and other luxuries came from. Together, these factors helped open up the Atlantic.
Again, we must emphasise that these developments were separated in time, location and ultimate effect; there was no inevitability about them – each of them, although they all involved domesticated mammals, was quite discrete. In a sense this is a meta-narrative of history but it is by no means a straight line, or even a line at all, more a series of punctuated events linked only by the involvement of domesticated mammals.
A further point is that most of this activity in the Old World took place in temperate zones (between seven degrees north and fifty degrees north), that is to say where the seasons were pronounced, where the planting and growing periods were carefully delineated. The seasonally characteristic nature of essentially fertility worship contributed to the organised nature of what was early religious life but it also had a far more important ideological corollary: it worked. The simple biology underlying a religion where fertility was the central issue, in temperate zones, was that – sooner or later – vegetation started to grow again. The cycles of planting and growth didn’t invariably work, of course, when drought or rain bringing floods or other factors interfered with the rhythm (the bible’s ‘fat’ and ‘lean’ years) but, essentially, far more times than it failed, fertility worship worked. In pre-literate societies, against a weakening monsoon, rituals would have grown more elaborate, and priests may have lost some credibility now and then but, by and large, until the development of monotheism and more abstract deities, largely removed from the seasons, fertility religion in temperate zones was a fairly predictable affair. Furthermore, the domestication of plants and animals took some of the fear out of life – fear of famine, for instance, though dependency on fewer varieties of plants carried its own risks.7 It is in the nature of fertility worship that you want plants to grow, you want animals to give birth, you want something to happen. And, ultimately, the gods smiled on humankind.
