by Colin Wilson
In The Temple in Man he uses another image. If we say ‘walking man’, we envisage a walking man, but in a vague, abstract way. But if we see a picture of a walking man—even a hierogylphic—he becomes somehow real. And if the walking man is painted green, then he also evokes vegetation and growth. And although walking and growing seem completely disconnected, we can feel the connection in the picture of the green man.
This power of the hieroglyphic to evoke a ‘reality’ inside us is what Schwaller means by ‘the possibility of personal comprehension’. It rings a bell, so to speak.
He tries again, in the same book, in a chapter on the Egyptian mentality, to explain himself. Our modern method of linking ideas and thoughts he calls ‘mechanical’, like a lever attached rigidly to some gear. By contrast, the Egyptian mentality is ‘indirect’. A hieroglyphic evokes an idea, but it also evokes dozens of other connected ideas. And he tries to explain himself by a simple image. If we stare at a bright green spot, then close our eyes, we shall see the complementary colour—red—inside our eyelids. The westerner would say that the green is the reality, and the red some kind of illusion dependent on that reality. But an ancient Egyptian would have felt that the red is the reality, because it is an inner vision.
It is important not to misunderstand this. Schwaller is not saying that external reality is an illusion. He is saying that symbols and hieroglyphics can evoke a richer, more complex reality inside us. Great music and poetry produce the same effect. Keats’s lines:
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores
somehow evoke a rich complex of feelings, which is why Eliot said that true poetry can communicate before it is understood. Ordinary perception merely shows us single things, deprived of their 'resonance’. A simple parallel would be a book, which is a solid object with a rectangular shape; this is its ‘external reality’. But what is inside the book can take us on a magical journey. The reality of the book is hidden, and for a person unable to read, it would merely be a physical object.
When we look at this in the light of what has been said above about the left and right brain, we can see immediately that a hieroglyphic is a picture, and is therefore grasped by the right brain. A word is a succession of letters, and is grasped by the left brain.
Is Schwaller saying simply that the Egyptians were ‘right brainers’ and we are ‘left brainers’?
He is, but there is far more to it than that. He is saying that the Egyptians possessed a different kind of intelligence from modern man, an intelligence that is equal, and in many ways superior. He calls this ‘innate intelligence’ or ‘intelligence of the heart’. It sounds like the kind of doctrine preached by D. H. Lawrence or Henry Miller, and to some extent it is. But there is far more implied than either of them realised. In spite of their ‘intelligence of the heart’, both writers saw themselves essentially as modern men, so their criticism of the twentieth century often sounds negative and destructive. Neither seems to be aware of the possibilities of a different way of seeing.
One of these is obvious. If we think of what Manuel Cordova learned in the forest of the Amazon, we can see that it involved learning about certain ‘powers’ that sound almost mythical—to begin with, the power to participate in the ‘collective unconscious’ of the tribe. Observe that Cordova was able to see a procession of birds and animals, and that he saw them in far more precise detail than in ordinary perception. The chieftain had somehow taught him to make active use of his right hemisphere, which in turn was providing far more richness (more associations) than ordinary visual perception.
It would be a mistake to think of telepathy as a ‘paranormal’ faculty. With a series of experiments in the 1960s, Dr Zaboj V. Harvalik, a physicist at the University of Missouri, placed it on a scientific basis. To begin with, Harvalik was intrigued by dowsing—an ability that seems to be possessed by all primitive people. Observing that the dowsing rod—a forked twig, with the two prongs of the fork grasped in either hand—would always react to an electric current, he came to suspect that dowsing is basically electrical. He drove two lengths of water pipe vertically into the ground, 60 feet apart, and connected their ends to a powerful battery. As soon as the current was switched on, the dowsing rod reacted by twisting in his hands. He tried it on friends, and discovered that they could all dowse if the current was strong enough—say, 20 milli-amps. A fifth of them were able to detect currents as low as 2 milli-amps. All of them improved steadily with practice.
He also noted that people who seemed unable to dowse would suddenly ‘tune in’ after drinking a glass of whisky; the whisky obviously relaxed them, preventing ‘left brain’ interference.
Harvalik discovered that a strip of aluminium foil wound round the head blocks all dowsing ability, again demonstrating that the phenomenon is basically electrical (or magnetic).
A German master dowser named de Boer was able to detect currents as low as a thousandth of a milli-amp. He could even detect the signals of radio stations, turning around slowly until he was facing the direction of the station. Harvalik could check his accuracy by tuning in a portable radio in that direction. Moreover, de Boer could select a named frequency to the exclusion of others—rather like our ability to ‘tune in’ to different conversations at a party.
When someone invented a magnetometer sensitive enough to detect brain waves, Harvalik wondered if a dowser could also pick them up. He would stand with his back to a screen in his garden, with earplugs in his ears, and ask friends to walk towards him from the other side of the screen. His dowsing rod could pick up their presence when they were ten feet away. If he asked them to think ‘exciting thoughts’—for example, about sex—this doubled to twenty feet.2
So it would seem that dowsing is simply a faculty for detecting electrical signals. But how does the dowsing rod detect them? It seems that some part of the body (Harvalik concluded that it was the adrenal glands) picks up the signal, which is then passed on to the brain, which causes the muscles to convulse. The striped muscles concerned are under the control of the right brain. Dowsing—like telepathy—is a right brain faculty.
When we also recollect Grimble’s porpoise caller inviting the porpoises to a feast, it also seems clear that this form of ‘magic’ (involving telepathy) is also a right brain faculty.
If dowsing and telepathy can be explained scientifically, then it becomes possible to understand how the Stone Age shaman was able, by drawing bison or deer—and so setting in train the process of ‘association’ described by Schwaller—somehow to influence their movements and ensure success for the hunters.
All this places us in a position to begin constructing an ‘alternative history’.
In a Time-Life book called Early Man, there is a kind of pull-out chart showing man’s evolution from the ape-like Dryopithecus and Ramapithecus, through Australopithecus and Homo erectus to modern man. The problem with such a chart is that it gives us the idea of some steady progression, by means of natural selection and survival of the fittest, that led inevitably to Homo sapiens sapiens.
The objection to this picture is that it makes it all seem a little too | mechanical. This is why Cremo’s Forbidden Archaeology offers a timely reminder that it is not the only view. By making the startling assertion that anatomically modern man may have been around for millions of years, he at least causes us to question this mechanical view of evolution. (Again, it must be emphasised that the ‘mechanical’ view is not ‘Darwinian’; Darwin was never dogmatic enough to claim that natural selection was the only mechanism of evolution. It is only his neo-Darwinian followers who have hardened it into a dogma.)
Let us, then, begin formulating our alternative history by supposing that Mary Leakey may be correct in suggesting that a man who walked erect and looked ‘human’ may have walked the earth at the time of Lucy and the First Family, three and a half million years ago. She also noted that she had studied a period of half a million years in the Olduv
ai Gorge during which there was no change in the tools. Man remained unchanged because he had no reason to evolve. Most of his energies were taken up merely staying alive.
Then why did he start to evolve with such speed that the event is known as ‘the brain explosion’?
It is almost impossible for modern man to put himself in the position of a creature with no civilisation, no culture, nothing but the nature that surrounded him. Even the Amahuaco Indians described by Manuel Cordova lived in huts and used spears and bows and arrows. But they can at least give us an idea of what it must be like to live in daily and nightly contact with nature. Cordova’s Indians read every sign of the forest—every sight and sound—as we read the morning paper. And our remote ancestors must have possessed the same capacity in order to survive.
We have to imagine them surrounded by unseen presences, some visible, some invisible. And we have to picture them in closer contact with nature that we can begin to conceive. Schwaller de Lubicz tries to convey some sense of the awareness of primitive man—although he is admittedly speaking of the ancient Egyptians: ‘... every living being is in contact with all the rhythms and harmonies of all the energies of his universe. The means of this contact is, of course, the self-same energy contained by this particular living being. Nothing separates this energetic state within an individual living being from the energy in which he is immersed...’
In other words, Schwaller sees primitive man—and animals—immersed in a sea of energies like a fish in water. It is as if he is a part of that sea, a denser knot of energy than that which surrounds him and sustains him. Schwaller speaks of neters, an Egyptian word usually translated as ‘god’, but here meaning something closer to an individual energy vibration:
...in every month of each season of the year, every hour of the day has its Neter; because each one of these hours has its own character. It is known that the blue morning-glory blooms at sunrise and closes at midday like the lotus flower... certain fruits require the afternoon sun in order to ripen and to colour... A young pepper plant, for example, leans towards the burning sun of the morning, which differs from the cooking sun of the afternoon... we will draw the conclusion that a relationship exists between the fruit, for example its taste, and the sun of its ripening, and, for the pepper plant, between the fire of the pepper and the fire of the sun. There is a harmony in their ‘nature’.
If a good gardener plants his cauliflower on the day of the full moon, and a bad gardener plants them at new moon, the former will have rich, white cauliflower and the latter will harvest nothing but stunted plants. It is sufficient to try this in order to prove it. So it is for everything that grows and lives. Why these effects? Direct rays of sunlight or indirect rays reflected from the moon? Certainly, but for quite another, less material reason: cosmic harmony. Purely material reasons no longer explain why the season, even the month and the precise date, must be taken into account for the best results. Invisible cosmic influences come into play...3
I have quoted at such length because Schwaller here not only provides an insight into the Egyptian state of mind, but into the reason why primitive man paid such attention to the sun and moon. This is why he made perfectly spherical stones and sun discs, and why later he buried his dead in circular barrows. The sun—and the moon—meant infinitely, more for him than it can for modern man.
Schwaller makes another central point that is as valid for early Homo sapiens as for the ancient Egyptians: that they took life after death for granted. Life on earth was only a small part of the great cycle that began and would end in another world. Spirits—nature spirits and the spirits of the dead—were as real as living people. The elaborate burial practices of Neanderthal man make it clear that he also took life after death for granted, and the suggestions of ritual cannibalism make the same point—for the cannibal intends to absorb the vital principle of his enemy. We can say that the holes in the skulls found in the Chou-Kou-Tien cave, which suggest that Peking man was a cannibal, also suggest that he believed in spirits.
Any kind of ritual indicates a level of intelligence beyond the merely animal. A ritual symbolises events in the real world, and a symbol is an abstraction. Man is the only creature capable of abstraction. So if Peking man indulged in ritual cannibalism, this would already seem to suggest that he was truly human. And since it is hard to imagine any kind of ritual without communication, then we also have to imagine that he was capable of speech.
In an earlier chapter, we dealt with the suggestion that the ‘brain explosion’ might have been due to the development of speech, pointing out that this theory also requires us to explain what primitive man had to say. The suggestion of ritual cannibalism—and therefore of religion—provides an answer. Peking man had no need to ask his wife, ‘Have you done the washing up?’ But if he lived in the rich and complex world suggested by Schwaller de Lubicz, in which every hour of the day had its individual neter or vibration, and in which the sun, the moon and the spirits of the dead were living presences, then language had, so to speak, an object on which to exercise itself.
Peking man provides us with another clue. In 1930, Teilhard de Chardin visited the Abbé Breuil in Paris and showed him a piece of blackened bone. ‘What do you think that is?’ The Abbé examined it, then said: ‘It’s a piece of stag antler, which has been exposed to fire then worked with some crude stone tool.’ ‘Impossible!’ said Teilhard. ‘It’s from Chou-Kou-Tien.’ ‘I don’t care where it’s from,’ said Breuil. ‘It was fashioned by man—and by a man who knew the use of fire.’
The piece of antler was about half a million years old. And since it was carved with a tool after it was burnt, we must presume it was deliberately burnt first. So Homo erectus used fire.
We cannot suppose that he knew how to make fire by striking flints together—that seems to be supposing too high a level of sophistication. In which case, we have to assume that he supplied himself with fire when he saw a tree struck by lightning—or some similar phenomenon—and then kept it burning permanently, presumably by assigning someone in the group to keep it alive. And this notion of keeping a fire alive, for year after year, would obviously provide the ‘fire-keeper’ with a powerful sense of motivation and purpose. And since purpose makes for evolution, we have yet another possible contributory reason for the ‘brain explosion’. Peking man, apparently, had both fire and some kind of religious ritual.
Schwaller makes the important point that Egyptian science, Egyptian art, Egyptian medicine, Egyptian astronomy, must not be seen as different aspects of Egyptian life; they were all aspects of the same thing, which was religion in its broadest sense. Religion was identical with knowledge.
The same must have been true for the descendants of Peking man. They had moved from the merely animal level to the level where knowledge could be pinned down in some kind of language. To see a tree or a river or a mountain as a god—or rather a neter— would be to see it in a new and strange light. Even today, a religious convert sees the world in this strange light in which everything looks different. Shaw makes a character in Back to Methuselah say that since her mind was awakened, even small things are turning out to be big things. This is the effect of knowledge. It brings a sense of distance from the material world, and a sense of control.
Yet Neanderthal man was religious, and he still vanished from history. This can be for only one reason: that the being who supplanted him had an even greater sense of precision and control. No doubt Neanderthal man had his own form of hunting magic; but compared to the magic of Cro-Magnon man, with its shamans and rituals and cave drawings, it was as crude as a bicycle compared to a motor car.
This sense of precision and control is illustrated in a story told by Jacquetta Hawkes in her book Man and the Sun (1962). She points out:
The absence of any solar portrait or symbol in Palaeolithic art may not mean that the sun had absolutely no part in it. A rite practised among the pygmies of the Congo warns against any such assumption. Frobenius was travelling through the j
ungle with several of these skilful and brave little hunters when, towards evening, a need arose for fresh meat. The white man asked his companions if they could kill an antelope. They were astonished at the folly of the request, explaining that they could not hunt successfully that day because no proper preparation had been made; they promised to go hunting the next morning instead. Frobenius, curious to know what their preparations might be, got up before dawn and hid himself on the chosen hill-top. All the pygmies of the party appeared, three men and a woman, and presently they smoothed a patch of sand and drew an outline upon it. They waited; then, as the sun rose, one of the men fired an arrow into the drawing, while the woman raised her arms towards the sun and cried aloud. The men dashed off into the forest. When Frobenius approached the place, he found that the drawing was that of an antelope, and that the arrow stood in its neck. Later, when the hunting party had returned with a fine antelope shot through the neck, some of them took tufts of its hair and a calabash of blood, plastered them on the drawing and then wiped it out. Joseph Campbell adds, The crucial point of the pygmy ceremony was that it should take place at dawn, the arrow flying into the antelope precisely when it was struck by a ray of the sun...’
It is easy to see that the Cro-Magnon hunter, using this kind of technique, would feel like a modern big game hunter using a high-powered rifle with telescopic sights. By comparison, the older magic of Neanderthal man must have seemed as crude as a bow and arrow.
This, I am inclined to believe, was the reason that Cro-Magnon man became the founder of civilisation. His command of ‘magic’ gave him a sense of optimism, of purpose, of control, such as had been possessed by no animal before him.