Symbolization
Discussion
William Irwin Thompson:
= "Symbolization, in which we have language and a tradition of artistic/sacred imagery in caves and on rocks.
The shaman exists in the shift from Archaic and ‘Ever-present Origin’ to what Jean Gebser (1991) termed the Magical structure of consciousness. But whether we wish to speak of the proto-religion of the chimps with their ritual rain dance, or humans with their mythologizing of moon and menses that I will explore in the next section, we have to recognize that religion is basic to the evolution of consciousness and the development of the brain. It is utter nonsense on the part of Professor Richard Dawkins (2006) to look upon religion as an aberration in human cultural evolution. A large brain provided the hominids with the capacity for facial recognition and pattern recognition in ranking hierarchies. It also provided them with the evolutionary surplus that could be directed to systems of explanation, and religion is nothing if not a system of explanation. It really doesn’t matter whether the explanation is fact or fiction; it is the process itself of explaining events that is important. We may, at least some of us, have outgrown the historical forms of religion that held sway from 3500 BCE to 1945 CE, and recognize now that some philosophers, such as Jean Gebser, have looked upon religion as the deficient structure of consciousness and the Integral as the efficient form carrying us forward, but religion was still an absolutely necessary stage to go through. We could not have jumped over religion, as Whitehead argued long ago (Whitehead, 1948), directly into the scientific mentality without the interval of religious faith in the inherent rationality of the universe. So I would prefer to trace the origins of religion all the way back to the cultures of the chimpanzees and bonobos."
(http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.64.853&rep=rep1&type=pdf)
The temporarity of Symbolization
William Irwin Thompson:
"In the hominization of the primates, there is a logarithmic progression in the rates of evolutionary changes. Hominization, from primate to hominin, takes place over millions of years — from Proconsul to Archaic Homo sapiens. Symbolization takes place over hundreds of thousands of years, from roughly 200,000 BCE to 20,000 BCE. Agriculturalization occurs over thousands of years, from 10,000 BCE to 3500 BCE. Civilization takes place also over thousands of years, from 3500 BCE to the fifteenth century CE. Industrialization takes place over centuries from the fifteenth to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but Planetization takes place over decades, sped up by electronics and genetic engineering — or from natural selection to cultural intrusion."
(http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.64.853&rep=rep1&type=pdf)
Male and Female Origins of Symbolization
William Irwin Thompson:
"The act of human thinking has two great sources — the production of stone tools and fibre technologies and the mythologizing of menstruation by women. To pick up a rock, examine it, and then make it correspond to the class of Acheulian fist hatchets is to engage in abstract thinking in sets. It also presents us with the incipient classes of nouns and verbs in rock selection and pressure flaking and thus the emergence of grammatical thought. To create a fibre matrix of strands and knots for baskets and skirts, such as we see on the reverse side of the statuette called the Goddess of Lespugue, is to begin to think in numbers and recurring patterns. Also, to take menstrual blood and daub it on the skin of the girl in menarche, first literally, then symbolically with mined red ochre in the dance of all the young women in the tribe (Dunbar et al., 1999, p. 128), is to mythologize a natural act in a cultural ritual and performance of symbolic thinking. Menstruation reveals ‘the wound that heals itself’ in a monthly cycle that corresponds to the lunar cycle. ‘As above, so below.’ Men, knowing the slash of the wounded animal, would be in awe of the red vulva, and a system of ‘Old Ma’s would develop to manage the awe and dread of the men in new mystery rites. Indeed, we see such a system of matristic authority in the culture of the bonobos. And most certainly we see it in the Venus of Laussel, which is daubed with red ochre, and shown holding up the lunar crescent with markings probably expressing the thirteen lunar months of the year. So the origin of the mace of the Marshall in an academic procession may not be phallic, but an older calendrical stick of the O’Ma and midwife that was adopted by males later to appropriate a prestigious symbol of the authority of the female (Thompson, 1981)."
(http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.64.853&rep=rep1&type=pdf)