(December 28, 2011 at 8:58 am)KichigaiNeko Wrote: mk...some thoughts running around led to these questions..
Who was the first 'Shaman'?
What did they see?
What stories did they spin to explain/ describe what they saw?
How did they maintain their place in the tribe/ family group?
Many of our "stories" are from what is observed in the night sky, knowing people as I do I am wondering just how our 'primitive' legends of what was going on in the 'heavens' above us influenced our current political and religious understanding/ misunderstandings ..today?
Recently I had cause to look up the Myth/ Legend of Mithras. On going outside (to have a cigarette) and looking up I saw the whole "legend" in the night sky with Orion and Taurus there in full view.
Please humour an old lady and I will need the expertise of orogenicman, Minimalist, padraic et al to expand my understanding of ...
Just what the fuck are we telling ourselves!
I've always imagined that many of the oldest pre-historical tales and perhaps the origin of religion comes simply from well, first learning to speak a language and express complex topics, then using that to ask questions of why things are the way they are.
When the person being asked doesn't have answer, he or she just gives whatever comes to mind just to not have to dwell on their own ignorance.
It's something many of us still do and given the relative ignorance of humans from pre-history, I can see a lot of these stories sticking through families and being told and retold until it becomes a full-blown religion or other convention that gets passed down from groups and tribes and down generation to generation.
I imagine this would be absolutely fascinating to people researching human origins of language, ancient sociology, and other related things. I would certainly be interested in it.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
