primitive people – Harmonia Philosophica

Ancient pottery. Cooking. Dead men.

A team has developed a new method to date archaeological pottery using fat residues remaining in the pot wall from cooking. The method means prehistoric pottery can be dated with remarkable accuracy, sometimes to the window of a human life span. Pottery found in Shoreditch, London proven to be 5,500 years old and shows the vibrant urban area was once used by established farmers who ate cow, sheep and goat dairy products as a central part of their diet. (1)

Cooking.

Eating.

Dead men.

Laughters echoing in the night.

Full lives.

Hungry people.

Dust.

Silence.

Steaks smelling great.

Crying…

Who is crying?

Ask.

Who is really cooking?

(I am not afraid)

(You should be)

Hunting. Drawing. Being in oblivion. Doing art.

Visual imagery used in drawing regulates arm movements in manner similar to how hunters visualize the arc of a spear. Neanderthals had large brains and made complex tools but never demonstrated the ability to draw recognizable images, unlike early modern humans who created vivid renderings of animals and other figures on rocks and cave walls. That artistic gap may be due to differences in the way they hunted, suggests a University of California, Davis, expert on predator-prey relations and their impacts on the evolution of behavior.

Neanderthals used thrusting spears to bring down tamer prey in Eurasia, while Homo sapiens, or modern humans, spent hundreds of thousands of years spear-hunting wary and dangerous game on the open grasslands of Africa.

Richard Coss, a professor emeritus of psychology, says the hand-eye coordination involved in both hunting with throwing spears and drawing representational art could be one factor explaining why modern humans became smarter than Neanderthals. (1)

We used to be alive.

With no time to make art.

We now live void lives.

And yet, we have painting.

We find no meaning anywhere.

And yet, we are artistic.

A dead civilization.

Leaving behind paintings; celebrating a life we have lost.

We used to be Neanderthals, brute and raw. Killing by contact, not from a distance. So, they (we) did not develop art back then. Or did they? Neanderthals lived every day without wanting to leave something behind. They just lived. And this was their heritage to the world. Their signature on the fabric of existence of the universe.

Their art was their own being.

Their own agony. Their own sorrow. Their own life.

A fascinating life, lived day after day in silence.

An incredible life lost in oblivion.

Without ever being told to anyone.

An incredible story lost in time.

A work of art…

Looking at the eyes of a dying animal…

Alternative

What you do defines what you… do.

And what we do is what we define.

Simple tautologies; often ignored.

Throw the spear away.

Kill animals.

Learn how to do art.

Do art. Name everything art.

Forget how to throw spears…

Die… There is no art now. Just life…

Mental disease as a blessing. [OR: How healers are born]

In the shamanic view, mental illness signals “the birth of a healer”, explains Malidoma Patrice Somé. Thus, mental disorders are spiritual emergencies, spiritual crises, and need to be regarded as such to aid the healer in being born.

‘What those in the West view as mental illness, the Dagara people regard as “good news from the other world.” The person going through the crisis has been chosen as a medium for a message to the community that needs to be communicated from the spirit realm. “Mental disorder, behavioral disorder of all kinds, signal the fact that two obviously incompatible energies have merged into the same field”, says Dr. Somé. These disturbances result when the person does not get assistance in dealing with the presence of the energy from the spirit realm.

One of the things Dr. Somé encountered when he first came to the United States in 1980 for graduate study was how this country deals with mental illness. When a fellow student was sent to a mental institute due to “nervous depression”, Dr. Somé went to visit him.

“I was so shocked. That was the first time I was brought face to face with what is done here to people exhibiting the same symptoms I’ve seen in my village.” What struck Dr. Somé was that the attention given to such symptoms was based on pathology, on the idea that the condition is something that needs to stop. This was in complete opposition to the way his culture views such a situation. As he looked around the stark ward at the patients, some in straitjackets, some zoned out on medications, others screaming, he observed to himself, “So this is how the healers who are attempting to be born are treated in this culture. What a loss! What a loss that a person who is finally being aligned with a power from the other world is just being wasted”.

Another way to say this, which may make more sense to the Western mind, is that we in the West are not trained in how to deal or even taught to acknowledge the existence of psychic phenomena, the spiritual world. In fact, psychic abilities are denigrated. When energies from the spiritual world emerge in a Western psyche, that individual is completely unequipped to integrate them or even recognize what is happening. The result can be terrifying. (1)

See the disease as your friend.
Imbalance must be treated harsly.
Only through war can you reach balance.

Take a look at that crazy person.
Listen to insanity in a cosmos which is nothing but sane.
How can the spirits affect the body peacefully?

Shout out.
Let the pain run through your body.
You are not a peaceful creature destined to find happiness.
You are here to suffer.
You are here to die.

So that you can be reborn.

Hoopa, lost artifacts, modern nihilism…

As High Country News describes it, the Hoopa Tribal Museum is more like a borrowing library than a display museum. If you’re a member of the northern California tribe, you can check out the museum’s artifacts to use in ceremonies. Pretty cool.

There’s one strange catch, however. Some of the artifacts are poisoned, literally. Museum staff keep them quarantined in a special room because they’re not safe for would-be borrowers to handle, wear, or keep in their homes. But at least one lab is now developing a cost-effective method for cleaning the artifacts—something tribes could afford and do themselves, High Country News reports.

The poisons, including mercury, arsenic and DDT, are a legacy from European American anthropologists who took the artifacts from tribes during the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Anthropologists dipped their stolen clothes, headbands, and prayer sticks in toxic solutions to keep insects from damaging them. Then the scientists put the artifacts into glass-covered museum displays, no touching allowed. This happened not only to objects belonging to the Hoopa, but to tribes all over the U.S. (1)

However the real poison in this case is not the poison it self.
The real poison is the attitude we have towards things.
We have destroyed the meaning of living.
We have turned things into objects. (αντι-κείμενα)
We have lost the sacred nature of everyday being.
And we try to find consolation in our idolization of everyday objects.
We admired those things.
Things the tribes used just for… everyday chores!
And now we want to give them back.
As if these tribes did not know how to blend with nature, how to be one with the cosmos even if someone stole their… basket…
Who’s the real primitive?

Ceramic, hi-tech materials, the essence of progress…

Ceramic is more hi-tech than we imagine.
Its technology could be used for spacecrafts in the future with much better results than the current “advanced” materials we now have. (1)
What we consider “advanced” is not.
What we consider “old” we will some day call it “new” again.
Any progress moves us away from where we came from.
We all were once gods.
And every step forward is actually a step backwards.
Think too much and forget what you already know.
This is the motto of the era of voidness.
Close your ears.
We all were once gods.
Eating in small ceramic pots…