Not France 4

“Were you still the hero of your myth, Uncle Wink?” Asked Sam.
“Yes. But I was in a place beyond Greek myths and Western heroes like Orion. I had landed in the ancient nursery of Eastern philosophy, and their heroes were very different. I needed to find new context and meaning.”
“What do you mean?” Millie Asked. The smell of the roast boar was mouthwatering.
“I guess I should start from the beginning.” He said. “The whole story of individual heroism traditionally evolved from the collective spiritual belief that came out of each society’s view of the natural world. And there were only four possibilities: (1) They believed they were an integral part of a perfect Divine Nature, (2) They regarded themselves as interacting independently with it, (3) They considered themselves an integral part of a fallen or imperfect natural world, or (4) They thought they were a separate tribe, struggling in a hostile wilderness.
Morality depended on culture. Culture depended on climate. Climate depended on geography.
In the beginning was the Gaia myth, although even this was Greek. The world was an organism we belonged to. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. When a Sioux took the calumet pipe, he held the stem to the sky, so the Sun could take the first puff. There was humility in that.
The essential dilemma that came with living in the perfect world of natural harmony, however, was the tension created by the need for food, and its procurement. The hunter cultures came first. We owe them the form of our bodies, and the structure of our minds. Hunters were trained in individual skills that required very special abilities, resulting in individual heroic actions that would achieve a collective benefit. Their total focus was always directed outward, to the animal. Life was the business of living by killing and eating itself, casting off death and being reborn. The hunt was the ritual of physical participation in that uniquely individual act, and ritual is the enactment of myth. Every hunt was a different hunt than the last one, a place to overcome fear.
But the hunter didn’t only slaughter the animal, he killed a messenger of divine power, and generated guilt as a byproduct. A further ritual of atonement and restoration was required, propitiation in the form of a gift or a bribe, to the deity that was being invited to do something for him. Early hunting cultures imagined a kind of animal divinity, the animal master, who sent the flocks to be killed. Power and knowledge would come by going into the forest to fast and pray, and the animal would come to teach them. An accord would develop between the hunter and the hunted, in a mystical timeless cycle of death, burial and resurrection. Thus emerged the basic hunting myth, the regenerative life myth of a covenant between the animal world and the human world, and the alleviation of the guilt. From death came life; from sacrifice, Bliss. It was the first act of worship, and the seed of religion.
And the nature of life itself had to be realized in the acts of life, in rituals of birth and death. These required special places, rite sanctuaries where boys were initiated into the hunt, and went from being their mother’s sons to their father’s sons, like the cave of Altamira, where the bull was twenty feet long, and painted so that its haunches were represented by a swelling in the rock.
These required special people, like shamans, whose power came out of a, individual psychological experience, and not a social ordination. They weren’t priests. They were poets.
The restoration rituals were usually associated with the main hunting animal. To the American Plains Indians, it was the buffalo. On the northwest coast, the salmon. In South Africa, the eland. But the Indians in northwestern Mexico would sneak up on a peyote cactus, and shoot a little arrow at it. They were spiritual hunting.”
“Is that what you were doing, Uncle Wink.” Asked Millie.
“After a fashion, Mil. After a fashion.”