A Sigh made Stone 4

Everyone was full of cousin David’s wild boar. It was dark now, and the Milky Way starstream was beginning to fill in the sky.
“So why did people start to think that nature wasn’t perfect?” Millie asked.
“Agriculture.” Said Uncle Wink.
“Why was that?” Asked Sam.
“As hunters became planters, as tribal communities became progressively liberated from an immediate daily interdependence on the natural world (and the word ‘progress’ is sardonic here), culture changed, and spirituality evolved into specialization, the more removed from the immediate consequences of Nature, the more arrogant and elitist.
For planters, the teacher was the plant world, identical in its life sequences with the life of man. There was no such thing as a self-contained individual in the vegetable world. The shamans were out of work. Life came out of rot.
Planter mythology was different than Hunter mythology. The cultivation of the plant, planting the seed, the death of the seed and the coming of the new plant, was inwardly turned. The neuroanatomy was different.
In the Great River valleys, hunting man gave way to goddesses of fertility, and only when the plow was invented did men once again take over agriculture, making metaphorical furrows in the earth.
The rise of agricultural surplus resulted in the birth of Western civilization. The ability to concentrate protein stores, in Semitic goats and sheep, or Indo-Europeans herds of cattle, allowed the beginning of the invasions, in the fourth millennium BC. They were killers, they had warrior gods, and all their cartwheels were for conflict. In the Book of Genesis, Jacob’s tribe exterminated the Canaanite city of Shechem.
Their geography shaped the image of their divinity. Out in the desert, nature was corrupt, and fallen. Under one sky in one world, they only needed, and could only imagine, one deity. In the Garden of Eden, when man ate the duality fruit of the forbidden tree, he was expelled, and Nature was no longer a manifestation of divinity, but a corruption of the world. Plant boy Cain, the crop farmer, killed flint boy Abel, the herder, like it was a range war in the Wild West. Only to the white man was nature a ‘Wilderness’ and only to him was the land infested with ‘Wild’ animals. To us it was tame… When the very animals of the forest began to flee from his approach, then it was for us that the ‘Wild West’ began.
And the problem with Yahweh was that he forgot he was a metaphor. He was a jealous anthropomorphic deity, a gaseous vertebrate purveyor of sword and death. The natural gave way to the supernatural, settled village wastelands where people lived inauthentic lives, directed by functionary clergy, ‘serving the community.’ The shaman experience was regarded as that of a clown.
The myths of birth and death were replaced with the resurrection myth of a savior. Someone, rather than some animal, had to die in order for the next generation to survive. The unforgiving monotheistic world of Jews, Christians, and Moslems, had arrived. The entire equatorial belt of the planet became a frenzy of sacrifice- vegetable, animal and human, and Nature was culled from the meaning of life.”
“Is that what happened where you were in India, Uncle Wink?” Asked Sam.
“Oh no, Sammy.” He said. “Nothing like that at all.”