If the previous chapters in this essay have sought to be fairly scientific in their approach to visionary experience and symbolic cognition, with this chapter upon a Palaeolithic social reality we reach a threshold where we begin to treat our themes in more speculative and imaginative ways. In this meditation, the epiphany of a female proto-deity coalesces out of our previous discussions, and perhaps the first link between the 'otherness' of vision (one of our initial questions) and the evolution of symbolic cognition is made. Of course, throughout this and future speculations, we seek to remain honest about the fact that they are speculations and not truth, but in doing so we may find - at length! - that we arrive at a fascinating new image of the human being...
I am also delighted to announce that the delightfully illustrated book of this essay is now available on pre-order, via this link: 'ON VISION AND BEGIN HUMAN: Exploring the Menstrual, Neurological and Symbolic Origins of Religious Experience'. Release date for the book is November 1st 2015.
I am also delighted to announce that the delightfully illustrated book of this essay is now available on pre-order, via this link: 'ON VISION AND BEGIN HUMAN: Exploring the Menstrual, Neurological and Symbolic Origins of Religious Experience'. Release date for the book is November 1st 2015.
Our journey so far has been a strange and twisting road, involving the raising and subsequent shattering of a Classical Image of a World-Beyond-Worlds, the realisation that our perception of 'hidden realities' and visionary textures is primarily founded upon the structures of our neurology, and we have discovered that the apparently cold, directionless and blind processes of Darwinism do not lead us into a kind of existential desolation, but towards a human image endowed with strange beauty and blessed with a lively sense of the sacred, albeit one radically modified from the traditional definitions of that word. In so doing we have now have the capacity to do something which perhaps few other humans have been able to do since the end of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the majority of human populations: gaze into the eyes of the first human proto-deity and see in her primordial yet counter-intuitive visage apparitions of the whole complex of associations under discussion.
...it probably didn't happen exactly like this,
but let's just say, for a moment, that it did...
but let's just say, for a moment, that it did...
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