Savage Theories

by Pola Oloixarac

  Part Two

  Part I of this treatise explores the ways in which the voracity of beasts formed the earliest pedagogy, and prepared the ground for the invention of war. In Part II, the odd-numbered paragraphs examine the coded prehistory—carved in stone, inscribed within the human skull—of men who shared carrion with animals, of newborns kidnapped by eagles, and of other such scenes that crystalized the shapes of what would later become the fear of God. The invention of the spoken word as a chapter in the history of chewing meat; the pacts between beasts and human hordes that had to be established before the visible could be given names. According to Johan van Vliet, these scenes of Preclassic terror are the trace remains of primordial memories: the adventures of an early primate who, in the process of becoming human, spent thousands of years as prey.

  The writings of Van Vliet defined the project of creating an ontology of human acts: a Theory of Egoic Transmissions, model for an anthropology of voluptuousness and war. Like other scribes of political ferocity (Hobbes, Luther, de Maistre, Bossuet, Stahl), in Van Vliet the natural evil of humanity is axiomatic; the beastly is the critique and the dogma. His attempt to reject fear-based stratagems co-exists in strange consubstantiation with them.

  Never before in the domain of human thought had a voice resounded with the notion that the purpose of human existence was to serve as prey, or claimed that a prehistoric scene—the little monkey-man pursued and captured by wild animals—was being ignored in the name of human pride when in fact it should be serving as a magnifying glass. Anthropological explanations of brutality and war tend to blame humanity’s fallen nature, gloating over our accursed fate. After all, God protected Cain, evil exists, the Huns triumphed. But all these histories of the birth of civilization begin, suspiciously, with tiny nomadic encampments wherein the Neanderthal family is already the stem-cell of the fatherland. By this account, inherited roles—the hunt/male, the hearth/female (cf. García Roxler, the hunter/gatherer paradigm nourishes national infra-infancy)—go hand in hand with the invention of weapons and fire, and are the most notable characters in a well-known script, one already possessed of a system of social classes, genders, and domestic rights and obligations that have persisted in various forms to the present day. This is the hunter hypothesis against which Van Vliet fought early in the 20th century, and which Augusto García Roxler came to solidify, and over-write.

  How to assign a date to the birth of fear? How to explain humanity’s obsession with fighting both the beast within, and the enemy within the beast? The primordial war between prey and predators functions like water poured or spilled into a rat maze, drowning the creatures; in the words of Van Vliet, “it is the substance that invades the memory-space of thought.”

  According to his theory, the entire external world postulates the existence of an invisible theater of war inhabited by visible actors. Leibniz hypothesized a matrix of points of view that built and completed the universe; Van Vliet in turn hypothesized that these monadic points of view are the ineradicable ghosts of future actions. There are cells in space-time that store memories of specific places, intentions, game-piece positions: history accumulates in these cells, and is transmitted to the actors through attractions, thought-ghosts, reincarnations, untimely calls from third parties: i.e. through egoic transmissions. These are indelible marks in the syntax that organizes interpersonal relationships in the universe, wrote Van Vliet: “After millions of years spent fleeing, escaping, surviving as a minor item on the menu of wild beasts, humans achieved their first incursion into the realm of predatory power through the invention of weapons.” Thus, the history of technology is written into the ecological horizon of man against beast, with man overcoming beast, becoming the predator. This paradigm shift is only one landmark on the map of thought; it is Van Vliet’s spatial syntax which connects it to the production of history. Once the I enters the coordinate system of a syntax of prey, escape is impossible. The I advances across a space dense with ghosts and purposeful geometries; this is the structure of the world, the totality of past and present points of view that pierce through space, and one another. The world is a field mined with points of view. Death—the problem of death—enters the world the moment one screams at seeing one’s sibling disemboweled. Until then, humans only slept, and changed colors as they rotted. Our hearing is such that at night we can whisper to avoid drawing the attention of the beasts; when one shouts, the very volume of the voice is the spectacle that causes or leads to death. All possible pasts can be explained through the brutality inscribed in the world’s governing syntax. To approach another, and start to tremble; to catch a subtle glimpse of the plan of attack, and count down the seconds to ambush.

  Thus it is that no young male Masai is allowed to touch a woman until he has darkened his spear with human blood. The Naga warrior must return home with a piece of human scalp before he can be admitted as a lover. The Karamojo youth must distinguish himself in combat before being allowed to marry. Amongst the natives of the Gulf of Papua, only warriors have the right to sex. Verbs having to do with war (hunt, kill, bleed, fight) speak of prelude to sexual relations: before penetrating the flesh of one’s own tribe, one must first penetrate enemy flesh. In this same remarkable vein, Hussman notes that the enemy scalp is of vital importance to the Cocopah warrior. He takes it to his hiding place, where he spends several days in communion with this piece of the enemy. He speaks to it “especially at night” of how to become a great warrior, and of certain special powers that he plans to bestow upon it; the interaction is “not in the form of a monologue, as he also falls silent, so that the scalp might respond.” No one is allowed to observe these ceremonies: the intimacy between a killer and his prey is incomprehensible for those who have not been initiated into these rituals. The foundation of fear and the image of humans ceaselessly devoured together propel us toward the creation of pacts in the most intimate sense of the word, wherein one lies down with the beast, wherein pieces of the enemy’s body join a conversation inherent to war.

  In his trembling handwriting Van Vliet wrote, “Scheisse, I believe that I can reconstruct the cognitive evolution of the first moments of our species, when humans wandered the earth seeking shelter from wild beasts.” He adds that, according to the beliefs of the Fon, all people are descended from a common ancestor who is half-animal, half-human. In the Fon initiation rites, each person enters into contact with his or her vodun, which possesses him or her completely; from then on, that person’s survival depends upon the relationship between the vodun’s animal and human counterparts. “Prior to the history of weapons and technology lies the silenced prehistory of blood pacts between men and beasts. The prey-predator pact marks the first strategy of war; the first theory of war involves damsels married to beasts.” When Zwa penetrated into the lands of Anzuru, he found nothing but God, tigers and the bush; then a tigress prostrated herself in front of him, and offered him her womb. Mating with savage animals has thus long had a starring role in tales of strength: only a pact with a beast guarantees survival.

  The Diary of Van Vliet ends with a section entitled Red Moon of Fon, written in or around August of 1917. In Fodder’s expedition journal we find: “The Fon were shouting as they entered our tent. They knocked things over and threw our equipment to the ground. Professor van Vliet stood motionless, watching them. The men drove him outside at spearpoint. The Professor stood with one foot in camp and the other in the black jungle. All was silence. Fischer and I covered ourselves with a dark blanket and crawled into the bushes. The Professor didn’t seem to see us. We threw a few acorns at him to get his attention, but missed. The Professor was extremely tense, scrutinizing something that we couldn’t see. Fischer slipped out from under the blanket, crept forward on all fours, tried to tackle him to the ground but the Professor would not budge. We pleaded urgently with him, We must leave camp tonight! The Professor ignored us. He stood stock still there at the perimeter of camp and said: All forms of understanding are psycholog
ical calcifications of our first encounter with the beasts. The shape of the space within which human beings move corresponds to the positions of invisible warriors. Parenthetically, I believe I now understand why my sweat production rates are so variable: these Fon are sick of us, and have decided to kill me. This result does not render my previous results invalid. My theory is progressively true.

  When Fodder and Fischer abandoned the Dark Continent, they took with them both Van Vliet’s Diary and the main log book holding the results of the experiment. In their opinion, Van Vliet was committing academic suicide. The only other possibilities were that the Professor truly believed the Fon would not allow him to escape, or that the tropical vapors had finally driven him mad. In any case, the two men knew that Van Vliet would never have liked the cold environs of Cambridge, where they had met shortly before the war broke out, and that he was too surly a man to enjoy the company of his peers, so perhaps it was best this way. They would flesh out the theory, make it legible in the eyes of the world. But leaving years’ worth of work in the hands of aboriginals who were obsessed with matches and thus potentially pyromaniacal was out of the question. The disciples decided to filch the master’s private papers on the last night they saw him alive.

  While going through those papers, Fodder felt the thin red hairs rise on his arms. Van Vliet’s notes on what would become known as Egoic Transmissions went well beyond the scope of both the experiment itself and the information he had given them before they set off—the information that had led him and Fischer to join the Dutchman as disciples in the first place. Van Vliet appeared to have compiled a list of all extant bibliographical sources regarding fatal encounters between humans and wild animals throughout the history of Africa and the Orient: records of lions besieging the Fon and their neighboring tribes for months on end; statistics on children torn apart by wild beasts; reports on the customs of the Leopard Men sect in South Africa and the military strategies designed to eradicate them—and the Crocodile Society, and the Society of Tigers—cults that had erupted throughout the continent, their members claiming to be able to turn themselves into wild beasts; chronicles of collective psychoses written in first, second, and third person; notes on children who, believing themselves to be wild animals, attacked their mothers; on women in prison who howled like wolves; on female wolves who were taken by men as concubines, and who then killed those men and escaped back to the forest to give birth; cures for those with an innate desire to devour human flesh; an inscription from the 7th century B.C. wherein a monarch declares, “I am Ashurbanipal, King of the World, King of Assyria. For my pleasure, and with the help of the god Ashur, and of Ishtar, goddess of battle, I penetrated a savage lion with my spear”; the totem from the kingdom of Amenhotep III which bears a carving in high relief narrating how the king killed a hundred and two lions; the story of Colonel Chesney, attacked by a lion he found drinking at the banks of the Euphrates in 1830; of the ten Indian soldiers attacked by a group of hybrid ligers along the northern reaches of the Karun River where it flows through the Zagros Mountains; of the one hundred ninety-three cases of fatal Panthera tigris attacks on the Maldharis tribe; reports from hunting grounds on the tundra in northeastern Russia of foxes more than two meters in length that weighed a hundred kilograms apiece and devoured intruders; tales of the sumptuous hunt of the Nawab of Junagadh that ended the life of a prince; a daguerreotype of lion-crowned Aizen Myō-ō, god of love in Esoteric Buddhism, he of the fire-red body, his six arms holding elements both human and divine—bow and arrows, bell and vajra, a lotus flower still closed tight, and in the sixth hand something invisible, known only to the enlightened; transcriptions from The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag by Jim Corbett, who only killed man-eaters, including the Mohan, the Thak, Talla-Des, the Panar, the tigress Chowgarh, and the terrifying leopard of Rudraprayag; an engraving of the profile of the tiger Champawat, responsible for four hundred thirty-six deaths; details on the elderly men and women who go to the edge of the village to die, so that the beasts won’t need to enter it to claim them; on the device, patented in Mumbai, that electrocutes tigers; on panthers who specialize in stealing sleeping children; on the army of stone lions carved to celebrate the final defeat of the Yuan Dynasty’s Mongol empire, the eunuch hero who gave the order to build them dying far from home, confident that he could reclaim his earthly glory in the Great Beyond; on rites of passage that include ritual transformation into predators.

  Throughout western Africa there is a belief that each human group contains a caste of members capable of transforming themselves into wild beasts: men who gather, take the form of lions or leopards, and chase their enemies, driving them into ambushes, leaping upon them as the sun sets. The Leopard Men cover themselves with animal hides; the members of the Crocodile Society await their victims near rivers and waterholes, hiding beneath crocodile skins. They mutilate their victims—the skin slashed open, the bodies disemboweled as if by some ravenous predator. A meticulous examination of the wounds reveals them to be clean, parallel cuts made with knives bound together to simulate a claw, and the liver and other coveted organs have been carefully extracted, with no damage done to the surrounding tissue. The delicate touch implied reveals human calligraphy made to pass for the handiwork of beasts.

  Formal records, chronicles, obituaries—Van Vliet held all forms of information in high esteem, believing each to be part of a single unifying Act. His diary was dense with bibliographical references, many of them scribbled down hurriedly during the walks he took around the encampment, or so Fodder and Fischer deduced from the sloppiness of the handwriting. Given how casually the references were dropped into the text, Van Vliet must have known them by heart.

  After a few months in Seville with no word at all from the Professor, Fodder and Fischer threw themselves across the Atlantic. Keeping their scarlet antecedents tightly under wraps (in college both men had flirted with the socialism of Shaw) they sought political asylum on the east coast of the United States; no sooner had they been reborn as Americans than they were separated and sent to obscure universities in upstate New York and central Virginia, respectively. They stayed in touch during the interwar years, each keeping the other informed regarding echoes of the master’s voice they had detected—echoes which from the beginning were already growing faint. They also put themselves to work finding a publisher for Moonless Writings, that being the English translation of Maanloos Geschriften, the only text of Van Vliet’s that would ever be made known to even a minuscule part of the Western world.

  In the course of their correspondence, Fischer discovered what he thought was a way to pull Van Vliet’s theory back from oblivion. He saw that the Theory of Egoic Transmissions could be organized around a “childhood trauma” the human species had suffered, a primordial experience long since repressed. The persecution suffered by the earliest hominids lived on, carved in the depths of the species; it had influenced the evolution of the human brain, and thus the organization of culture as a celebration of the passage from prey to predator. (For Fischer, the very existence of fear as a mental phenomenon had guided the physical evolution of the brain.) This primordial trauma—not that of having been predators, as Freud had recently suggested in Totem and Taboo, but that of having been prey—explained the human fascination with transforming ourselves into predatory beasts, as well as our instinct for war and our talent for violence. The theory could now, at a single blow, both (1) present itself as a novel approach that would refute part of the theory of psychoanalysis; and (2) posit violence as a positive human attribute, and fear as the biological root of human behavior.

  Fischer was exultant as he finished his letter to Fodder. Sadly, his intuition did nothing more than speed the project along toward its inevitable end. Why did Fodder grumble as he read and reread his colleague’s proposal, unable to believe his eyes? To answer this, one must look to a line of bordellos located on rue Dauphine in Paris, where Fodder and Fischer began their éducation sentimentale in the year
1913, back before the prohibition of absinthe. Like other intellectuals of their time, Fodder and Fischer enjoyed the art of bordello conversation; they mocked the theories of the father of psychoanalysis and his attempts to create a new god consisting of sex. Perhaps if the phrase “childhood trauma” had been put in quotation marks, Fodder’s reaction would have been different, but what occurred in Fodder’s eye now was the twitch of one who sensed a betrayal. “How does this strike you, my dear friend.” (Dear friend! The very phrase made Fodder squirm.) “Borrowing the notion of childhood trauma from the Freudians would thrust our ideas into the theoretical context that is currently on everyone’s lips. It would excite the interest of the Freudians themselves, and even more so that of their detractors, guaranteeing our theory both enlargement and stamina.”

  Why was Fischer’s solution such an obstacle for Fodder? After all, Fischer had found a market where the consumption of their theory could take place. The size of that market would grow thanks to the insertion of the subject of sex as its medical pièce de résistance, accelerating the theory’s rate of adoption and thus swelling their share of the intellectual field.

  Fodder didn’t answer the letter. Instead, he simply waited for his disgusted look to project itself into the deck of possible Fodderian reactions that Fischer would be shuffling through. After several weeks Fischer sent a telegram: “Joining forces with an extant (if incipient) theory is exactly what we need. In memory of the Professor.” Fodder threw it in the fire and ranted about Fischer throughout dinner.

  For Evelyn—Fodder’s wife—theories such as psychology-as-prehistory and the cyclical ritual transformation of humans into wild beasts (wherein it was beyond dispute that the gods created by religion represented the trace remains of the animals with whom primitive humans formed pacts in order to survive) were of little interest; she made a show of agreeing with him completely, trusting that this would be enough to get him talking about something else. Emboldened by his wife, the following morning Fodder sent Fischer a telegram: “You’re asking me to make my tiny sect part of a sect that’s even tinier. To what do I owe such an honor?” Fischer responded immediately: “So what? At the very least we’d be having this argument in an auditorium that wasn’t totally empty.” Fodder replied: “No.” Fischer answered: “My seminar on Van Vliet was just canceled. I have lots of spare time.” Fodder invited him to come for the weekend, and Fischer caught the first available train.