RE: why are we "The Story telling apes?"
December 28, 2011 at 10:00 am
(This post was last modified: December 28, 2011 at 10:02 am by The Grand Nudger.)
The first shaman? That would be a rough one wouldn't it? It's easy to imagine that as long as we've believed in magic there have been operators. Believe there are some 12,000 year old remains in Israel though that get pegged with the distinction of "first". Trouble is, she may have been a priestess and not a shaman. The lines between what is a priest and what is a shaman are very blurry the farther back we go (it's a fuzzy sort of distinction to begin with).
Our best bet for what early shamans "saw" would probably be cave art. It's difficult though to say for certain whether this or that rock face was meant to be spiritual, practical, practice, or just art for art's sake. We know a little more about shamanic beliefs that survived long enough to be recorded, but often what was recorded was the interpretation of those transcribing it, and heavily influenced by their culture.
I supposes that's one way to look at it, course it could be that the stories we told influenced what we saw when we observed the night sky. Different cultures have different stories for the same stars. The stars are something we've spent an awful lot of time staring at, and they've been immensely useful to us, so it seems an almost universal sort of urge to describe them in a divine way.
Hehehe, we tell ourselves whatever we like Kichi.....it's not like the stars are going to correct us. Entertainment, navigation, time (agriculture/hunting), and divinity or magic. It's difficult to discuss something like this in it's particulars without focusing on a single culture.
Our best bet for what early shamans "saw" would probably be cave art. It's difficult though to say for certain whether this or that rock face was meant to be spiritual, practical, practice, or just art for art's sake. We know a little more about shamanic beliefs that survived long enough to be recorded, but often what was recorded was the interpretation of those transcribing it, and heavily influenced by their culture.
I supposes that's one way to look at it, course it could be that the stories we told influenced what we saw when we observed the night sky. Different cultures have different stories for the same stars. The stars are something we've spent an awful lot of time staring at, and they've been immensely useful to us, so it seems an almost universal sort of urge to describe them in a divine way.
Hehehe, we tell ourselves whatever we like Kichi.....it's not like the stars are going to correct us. Entertainment, navigation, time (agriculture/hunting), and divinity or magic. It's difficult to discuss something like this in it's particulars without focusing on a single culture.
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