Articles
Born to Make a Mess
Article published in the Autumn 2019 Issue of Earth Island Journal LINK
Wildness, Walls, and Civilization
Article published in 2013 in InRoads Online
Imagine that you are living on the edge of an immense valley through which flow two rivers. Imagine that you are living near this large valley about 5,000 years ago. One day you are hunting or looking for some edible plant matter. Your search has taken you far to the West of your usual territory when your eye is caught by something amazing. Far off in the distance, there rises, not a simple tent, such as you live in, nor a collection of huts, such as you have seen other tribes use, but a wall of baked clay brick 15 meters (36 cubits to you) high. The wall extends for about 400 meters on the front and, in its center is a large gate.
At a gathering of the tribes you once were among 400 other people, but most of your life has been spent in a group of about 50 souls. The settlement you have stumbled upon is the home of, the inconceivable (to you) number of 50,000 people. Thus at a time in which the whole human population of the Earth is less than three million people, 50,000 (16%) of them live here in this city.
Approximately 5,000 years ago the first true cities began to emerge. These were more than the villages of the Neolithic era. The cities were located in what is, in modern times, Iraq; in the valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. The cities were supported by a new phenomenon in human culture: large-scale, mono-crop, grain production. With these first cities a number of technological and cultural innovations appeared, including the wheel, irrigation and canal building, metallurgy, monetary systems, and writing. One such innovation, whose significance is perhaps overlooked by modern people, is the most prominent feature of the first cities, the high, permanent, protective city wall.
To be sure, humans had constructed mud, stone, or brick huts for millennia before the first cities arose on the plains of Mesopotamia, and herding people had constructed corrals to contain livestock, but never before these first cities had people walled off their settlements from nature. With the advent of the first civilizations we see, the impulse to stand apart from the environment. At the same time, in the mythology and stories of the Sumerian and Babylonian builders of the first cities, we see the emergence of a new concept: wildness. It is only after there exists a sense of separation from the natural environment that the concept of the wild can exist.
The Babylonian version or the Gilgamsesh story starts with, and, in the first use of a literary device ends with, a description of the walls of the Sumerian city of Uruk (the Biblical Erech, near the modern-day city of Warka):
“Look at its wall which gleams like copper(?),
inspect its inner wall, the likes of which no one can equal!
Take hold of the threshold stone--it dates from ancient times!
Go close to the Eanna Temple, the residence of Ishtar,
such as no later king or man ever equaled!
Go up on the wall of Uruk and walk around,
examine its foundation, inspect its brickwork thoroughly.
Is not (even the core of) the brick structure made of kiln-fired brick,
and did not the Seven Sages themselves lay out its plans?
One league city, one league palm gardens, one league lowlands, the open area(?) of the Ishtar Temple,
three leagues and the open area(?) of Uruk it (the wall) encloses.
Find the copper tablet box,
open the ... of its lock of bronze,
undo the fastening of its secret opening.
Take and read out from the lapis lazuli tablet…”*
With that line, the Gilgamesh story begins and, eleven clay tablets later, repeats the line and ends (forming, if you will, a “wall” around the story).
As modern people, we are very used to walls. Like the air we breathe, they are ubiquitous for us. Most of us are born indoors and spend the majority of our lives within walls or within the site of them, but walls are a very recent human creation. The first walled cities were the cities of Sumer, including the city of Uruk in which the Gilgamesh story is set.
Walls have one purpose, to separate. Walls are built to separate humans from everything else, including other humans. Children at play love to construct “forts,” but the play almost always evolves into the formation of groups who are inside the fort and those outside the fort. The result is typically a siege and defense of the fort.
The historical record shows a similar pattern in the development and destruction of walled cities. Often a wall is erected by an occupying or colonial group in an area in which the indigenous population is considered hostile (think of the log walls of the early forts on the American frontier, and even today, of the fire bases of the American and European troops in Afghanistan). This was also the situation of the city of Uruk; as the surrounding area was filled with native tribes of non-Sumerian, Semitic peoples who had been displaced by the Sumerians and who, in time, did indeed sack the Sumerian cities.
Beyond separating peoples, walls also separate humans (and their domesticated animals and plants) from the non-human world. Walls go beyond mere shelter from the elements. All people find ways to get out of wind and weather, including the erection of huts and tents and finding caves and other natural shelters, but the building of a city wall is an extreme measure requiring a lot of energy.
Another concept arises in human consciousness with the establishment of walled cities, the concept of “wildness.” Hunting gathering societies in many cases have no concept of or word for “wildness.” If one lives in a forest or plain, hunts in a pack, forages for food, then the forest or plain is “home” what could “wildness” possibly mean when there is no other state of being for comparison. It is only with the establishment of cities and especially with the erection of walls, that the concept of wildness enters human consciousness. It is in the Sumerian Gilgamesh story that the first “Wildman” in literature appears in the form of the character Enkidu and while, in the story, the wilderness is filled with monsters and danger, we also see a level of admiration of and nostalgia for the wild in the story. The Sumerian word for the non-cultivated steppe that lay beyond the city walls and the fields surrounding the city was “edin;” the likely source for the Hebrew word “Eden,” or the original, wild, dwelling of mankind.
From the vantage point of the year 2010 CE, we still admire the wild man, the outdoors person, the survivor in the mountains, in the jungle, or at sea. We still test ourselves and find recreation (i.e., re-creation) in the wilderness.
In the mythopoetic men’s’ movement, there is great homage paid to and reverence for “the wild” and the wildman (much as, in the Gilgamesh story, the wildman Enkidu becomes the dearest companion and brother of Gilgamesh), but we should acknowledge that it is only because of our civilized perspective that we have such a concept.
Modern cities no longer have the physical walls of the ancient cities, but the walls between us and our environment are now imbedded so deeply in our psyches that physical walls of brick or stone are no longer necessary.
In his book The Master and His Emissary, Ian McGilchrist posits that modern human culture has promoted the functions of the left hemisphere of the human brain over those of the right. It is the function of the left hemisphere (which controls the right side of the body), to stand apart, to objectify, to analyze the perceptions of the environment that are fed to it by the right hemisphere. This objective view is needed for animals to make decisions about their environment such as “is this food?” “is there danger?” However the right brain does not have a direct connection to the experience of the surrounding environment. It is simply taking what the right brain (which is in connection with the direct perception of the world) provides and making value judgments about the situation. It is McGilchrists argument, simply stated, that civilization, and Western civilization in particular, that has promoted the objectification of the left brain to dominance. Thus we put our world to short-term profitable use without pity and without the sense that we are a part of and dependent upon the world we are devouring.
I contend that, at the very start of the first civilizations (that is large cities supported by grain-based, mono-crop agriculture on a large scale, “civilization” in this sense referring to “cities” not to be confused with “culture” which could also describe the ways in which any humans, including hunter-gatherer communities live) we see the moment in which the left brain as described by McGilchrist, makes its move toward dominance. It is with the construction of the walls of the ancient Mesopotamian cities that mankind seperates himself from his environment. In short, our environmental crisis starts with the laying of the first brick of the walls of Uruk.
Lastly, walls create a symbolic separation between humans and all else. A wall creates a tenemos, a ritual space, an area of spiritual tension in which some spiritual forces are invited in and others are kept out. We see the establishment of a tnemos in the rituals of many peoples, even those cultures that do not live in walled structures. Ritualists will establish a ritual area, often designated with a temporary wall for the purpose of a particular ritual. After the ritual is concluded, the tenemos is ritually broken and the ritual participants (human and spiritual) return to connection with the larger world.
What happens to a people who never break the spiritual tension, but who continue to spend their whole lives within the tenemos of walls? One may assume that what has been invited in, remains in and what has been kept out remains out, but on a spiritual level, what does this mean?
From an indigenous point of view, a ritual must have a beginning, a process, and an end. For a ritual space to be maintained permanently would invite severe spiritual imbalance and would lead to disease and madness. If a whole culture selects some spiritual forces to retain and banishes others, the resulting imbalance, disease, and madness, would predictably become engrained in the culture. From the indigenous point of view, one could argue that this is an apt description of the domesticated, modernity and industrialized civilization which evolved from walled cities of Sumer.
If our current environmental crisis is the product of the wall first established between the hemispheres of our brains and the subsequent literal walls of human civilization, where should we start to reintegrate with the world?
I suggest that the place to start might be in our thoughts and in the language that expresses them. Rather than seeking wildness, it is perhaps better to simply try to open to one’s ambient environment. Practice being in the world without judgment or strategy of how one might profit from it. Feel awe when you see a mountain or a great tree, but know that you are not distinct from it. Practice giving the right brain primacy and stay with images, imagination, dreams as long as you can without judgement, or putting these sensations and perceptions into words and the next time you think of the wild or of wilderness, stop and reconsider that these ideas come from a perspective that claims separation from and superiority to the world. Try to recast “the wild” as “the world of which we are a part.”
M. G. Kovacs, The Epic of Gilgamesh (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989)
The Uses of Disenchantment
By Walton Stanley
August 16, 2002
As someone who works with stories, folktales, fairy tales, and myths, and as a person with a sense of the mythic in literature and popular culture, I find that people are often awed by episodes of magic, of super-natural powers or events in these stories. We are in awe of magic powers or super strength from the feats of Heracles to the power of “the force” evident in Luke Skywalker. Audiences are consistently fascinated by episodes of “enchantment”
In 1944 a holocaust refugee named Bruno Bettelheim was given a professorship in Psychology and became the director of a therapeutic school for emotionally disturbed children at the University of Chicago.
Bettelheim went on to write an award-winning book titled The Uses of Enchantment that explored the use of fairy and folk tales to enable children to work out psychological issues, fears, and traumas through story. However, it seems the real use of enchantment was that of Bettelheim passing himself off as a psychologist and passing the book off as his original work. The American public was enchanted by him, book critics were enchanted, and the University of Chicago was enchanted.
The dis-enchanted truth was that Bettelheim held a degree in Art History and had virtually no formal training in psychology. His book, The Uses of Enchantment, was largely plagiarized, and it was later revealed that Bettelheim was abusive, physically, emotionally, and in at least one instance sexually, of the children who were his charges at the school.
We tend to think that great stories have the power to enchant. There is a great deal of focus on magical events and powers in such stories be they fairy and folk tales, science fiction, drama, or some other genre. Great stories, however, are consistently about the act of disenchantment.
Stories always revolve around a problem that sets their events in motion. This problem is almost always some kind of collective, personal, or cultural myopia, or a mass delusion. The world of these stories has somehow fallen under an enchantment and the job of the story is to disenchant the world so that life can again be abundant, lasting, just, and joyful. The story is the unfolding of the process of dis-enchantment, of awakening, of the exposing of a heretofore, invisible delusion.
In Wolfram Von Eschenbach’s telling of Parsifal, the abundance and blessing of the Grail can only be unleashed when someone breaks the enchantment of the Grail Castle by asking the seemingly simple question: “What ails thee uncle?”
In the works of Shakespeare, worldly realms stand in for the human psyche and fester under the enchantment of illegitimate rulers. For example, in Hamlet, the central problem is that a King has died leaving a perfectly capable, well-educated, thirty-year-old crown prince, but everyone in the kingdom is under the enchantment that the rightful king is the late king’s brother and not the prince. Similarly, in The Tempest the rightful Duke, Prospero has been overthrown by his brother Antonio.
The wrong king is a strong motif in British folktales such as the Maginogi. The question is one of the soul and not a political one: Is one’s soul the “king” of their life, or will the life be lived by a pretender; a persona? Two branches of the Mabinogi, an old Welsh story cycle, deal with the descendants of a king named Lyr (Branwen Daughter of Lyr and Manawydan Son of Lyr). The issue of rightful kingship is central in these stories. Shakespeare picks up the Lyr (Lear) name in his tragedy which involves a King Lear giving his kingdom to daughters and sons-in-law who flatter his ego rather than to his true and truthful daughter Cordelia. Of Shakespeare’s 39 plays, 15 deal significantly with the issue of an illegitimate. unworthy, or false king or executive (e.g., Duke, Prince, or other ruler) being in place, or with a crown in contention.
Why should we care about the power struggles of ancient kingdoms and what difference does it make to us today? In the political sense: none, but in the metaphorical sense, having the wrong king in place is an acceptance of the defeat of our own soul and the thwarting of our individual destinies. Our psychic kingdoms lie under an enchantment.
It is a condition of life that human beings are separated from their destinies. The traumas we endure, be they physical or social bullying, abuse, violation, violence, poverty, degradation, classism, sexism, racism, oppression based on gender or sexuality, or simply making our way fitting into human society, cause us to put up defenses of one kind or another. These defenses take the form of personas; adopted roles that an individual takes up to try to find safety. The role may be one of dominance (e.g., the tough guy, the jock, the popular girl, the bully), or one of submission (the shy person, the bookworm, the nerd),they may feature expansive energy (extroversion) or a contraction (introversion), but no matter which persona is chosen, it is a disguise and (at least initially) a form of protection or a “body-double” for the soul. The soul, however, must eventually assume the throne of our lives by deposing the personae. The process of deposing personae and the ascension of the soul to power in the psyche is initiation.
Indigenous societies tend to have cultural techniques to cook off these personas and reconnect the soul of the individual with its purpose in this life and with its unique gifts to the community. While we are familiar with adolescent rites of passage, it is the case that initiations are not a once-in-a-lifetime event.
Like the thousands of reincarnations and the accumulation of karma in Hindu and Buddhist traditions, personae are frequently being reborn. To keep the soul in power, people must go through many initiations throughout their lives. They may also be initiated into medicine societies that complement the soul-gifts they carry. As indigenous peoples carry knowledge in the oral tradition, stories are the recipes of these initiations. Stories are images and metaphors set as mnemonic devices for the rites or process of disenchantment and for the liberation of the human soul.
While great stories provide a recipe for the re-animation and liberation of the human soul, simply hearing a great story will not break the enchantment (just as reading a recipe will not satisfy a hunger).
By engaging with the images, and asking what they mean for us, finding our place in the story, we begin to see steps that may be taken to break calcified paradigms and stubborn delusions. The soul starts to engage with the metaphors and images in the story and through this engagement, becomes activated, awakened, and restless.
Story is spoken in a soul language and questions for the soul arise in the telling of a story:
“Have I given away my gold?”
“Did I pick up the gold feather of the firebird? “
“Am I under the earth in a place of ashes?”
“Am I riding a shaggy pony?”
These questions are in the metaphorical language that engages and awakens soul. The same questions can be asked in the clinical language of psychotherapy (“Have I failed to take responsibility for my own happiness?” Have I taken on a challenge?” “Am I depressed?”), but such non-poetic, non-metaphorical, language tends to engage our reason rather than our soul. When reason is engaged, we tend to cycle into rationalizations (that is inventing “reasons” for the situation).
In engaging the image, carrying out the prescribed action designated in the metaphor, we can discern a ritual path to follow, and we know that, rather than being pathological, our condition is a step along a well-worn path toward freedom and wholeness.
By staying with the image in the story, we can then proceed to acknowledge our place in the story and to ritualize it. Because we know, from the story, what the next stage is going to be, we can then ritualize the story and, when appropriate, mark our passage to a new phase of the story.
Enchantments Under Which We Live Today
We have been discussing the personal form of enchantment that involves the manifestation of personas, but, beyond such individual enchantments, whole cultures can fall under an enchantment. When stories and their images are not sufficiently worked through; when a story becomes an unconscious paradigm, the curtain of enchantment can fall over a culture.
What form does the enchantment take? Whether or not we hold Abrahamic religious beliefs, there is an ubiquitous underlying belief that stems from the Genesis story of a time of innocence and of paradise that we have lost and will, one day, regain through progress, or, if we fail to progress sufficiently, our species will be exterminated as a punishment for our wickedness.
You will hear echoes of this unconscious paradigm from hard core rationalist atheists, from environmentalists (among whom the purification of the Earth through the extinction of humans is a weirdly popular notion), from religious and non-religious progressives, from political and Christian conservatives, from Silicon Valley techno-visionaries, and from others, all laboring under the same unexamined story: the myth of progress, perfectibility, and a return to a lost paradise.
Arising from the lost paradise and progress paradigm is the idea that humans are separate from the other beings on the planet and that our species stands at the apex of evolution. As superior beings, the world is a trial we must navigate the goal being to overcome biological death in some way and to attain a god-like immortality.
Immortality is the core of our enchantment. There are numerous tactics to attain it. One tactic is to invest in an “afterlife.” This is typically an eternal paradise, and its shadow side is a realm of eternal darkness, and torment. Some traditions have established waiting rooms as well in which beings reside until their destination is sorted out. The afterlife overcomes the mortality problem to some extent in that it grants us all a kind of congenital immortality, so that while we will die in this world, we will simply step into another. In so doing, we will no longer need our animal body and will live in eternal bliss.
A second tactic involves using technology to extend life indefinitely. We can see this story in current notions such as the “singularity” a state in which humans and human consciousness becomes integrated with machines and will thus no longer be subject to the biological frailty of our animal bodies. Again, we will no longer need our animal body and will live in eternal bliss.
An intermediate tactic is to amass wealth, resources that, in theory, make us invulnerable to the whims of “nature.” While securing a plentiful food supply is a natural impulse for animals, humans have gone well beyond any reasonable level of resource hoarding. The accumulated wealth of an average billionaire could provide a sufficient living to that person for 10s, or even 100s of thousands of years. Given that billionaires are not immortal and have normal human lifespans, amassing this level of wealth and the personal hoarding of such mass quantities of resources can only be seen as a disease.
Overall, these are all variations on the myth of paradise and progress toward regaining it. The idea being that we humans belong in an Eden in which we need do no work and enjoy eternal pleasures. Through “progress,” we will eventually regain this paradise. Another variation on this myth is that of Armageddon. In this version, most people are wiped out through war, famine, disease, or a combination of all three. Of course, a select contingent of humanity will either survive (and bring about paradise), or, in some versions, this select group is transported to eternal bliss while the rest of humanity is obliterated. Armageddon or apocalypse is simply a violent and elitist version of the progress to paradise idea.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the image of an Eden or lost paradise. It is probably a mythic recapitulation of the wholeness we might (f we are fortunate) experience as infants in which all our needs are provided for and nothing is expected of us. We have (if we are lucky) a sense of belonging, of oneness, of being unconditionally loved and provided for. However, when adult human beings attempt to bend all of creation to their own comfort and to enslave and exploit all around them in an unconscious effort to gain God-like immortality and personal salvation (i.e., the perpetuation of one’s persona, one’s unchecked ego), then the lost paradise myth forms the basis of a dangerous entitlement.
Let us imagine for a moment, a different story; a paradigm in which humans are one species of animal in a complex community of life. Imagine that, for the sake of the community of life to continue, humans must fill a particular set of functions within the community.
Biologists can describe for us the impact of non-human life forms. They can tell us the function of woodpeckers in maintaining forest health. They can explain how beavers impact their environments. They are even coming to understand the networks of fungi that support forests and grasslands and the interdependencies of various plants, bacteria, animals, and fungi have formed.
However, what role do humans play in this scenario? We have told ourselves that we somehow sit outside of it. Indeed, even environmentalists see our species as a kind of universal parasite without a role in any ecosystem except that of despoiler.
In truth, there is no pristine wilderness untouched by humankind. This is the old fantasy of Eden (just another enchantment). Humans have become well-established throughout the planet. Our ecological niche is not (as some would have us believe) that of parasite and destroyer, quite the opposite. When humans function within our niche in an ecosystem (that is functioning in the way people had done for about 250 million years, or until about 5,000 years ago and as indigenous peoples did, and in some cases, do function today), humans create a more complex, more diverse, more resilient environment wherever they go.
Humans have an uncanny ability to move about, to adapt to an enormous variety of climates, altitudes, aridity and rainfall extremes, and biomes.
Humans are the animal that messes about with the world. We move through all land and seascapes on the planet. We conduct prescribed burns. We encourage a wide variety of food species and not just for ourselves, but we also enrich our environments for other animals and for other plants. Biologists and anthropologists are discovering, over and over in widely disparate locations, that what was thought of by colonizers as miraculously abundant “virgin land” was the product of millennia of indigenous interaction and husbandry. Blinded by the Eden myth, colonizers failed to see the efficiency and abundance of indigenous relationship with the land and seas and set about deforesting, plowing, leveling, draining, damming, and creating a sham Eden through one narrow form of agriculture and later (to further escape the physical realm and the burden of labor that monocrop, invasive farming entails) turned to mechanization.
The result of failing to take up our species’ role in our environment, to live under the enchantments of human exceptionalism, of endless progress, of a quest for immortality, are becoming dangerously clear.
In the current episode of our story, there is trouble in the land. Life is becoming less abundant, injustice reigns, and false kings have seized the seats of power. Our world has fallen under an enchantment. Let us begin the hard work of disenchantment through the power of the stories we tell and a careful examination of the images that hold us in their thrall. If we are unaware of the myth in which we are living, the myth will live our lives for us.