The quest for the Holy relic of archaeology: part nine

Wolf with caribou hindquarter
Photo: Denali NPS

The caribou feeds the wolf, but it is the wolf who keeps the caribou strong.

Inuit proverb, Kivalliq region, Nunavut, Canada

It must have been decades ago when I read a Scientific American published study on the relationship between wolves and caribou, I wish I could give you the citation, but I cannot find it in a web search. It must be difficult for everyone to find because you constantly hear plans to cull wolves because they are decimating herds of various species. Long before Man came along to save them, wolves and caribou did quite well on their own. This is what happens with wolves and caribou: Wolves will descend upon a large herd of caribou and eat their fill. It is easiest for them to pick the young, the old and the injured, but they do not hold this idea as any sort of wolf philosophy, it's just the way it most often works out. If the wolves did not show up, the caribou would just keep grazing until nothing was left and then they would move away looking for another area to strip for food. The wolves keep eating and breeding and the caribou numbers keep diminishing. When the caribou herd numbers become very low, too low to be able to survive (there is safety in numbers), they will spilt up and seek out new herds to join. This has the beneficial effect of mixing genetic material and avoiding the weakening that inbreeding creates. The new combined herds are made stronger because of the extra numbers. The wolves might appear to suffer as a result of all of this but the best hunters and their offspring do better than some so the caribou also make the wolves strong. The wolves will howl and thus find distant packs to join and hunt more caribou and their genetic material is refreshed , too. The numbers of  the populations of each go up and they go down and then back up again and vegetative life gets a chance to replenish itself. A balance occurs and the entire food chain survives. Of course, we believe we could run it all better.

When you see archaeology taking on aspects of a large (herd) religion, that is, a religion manifested by its adherence to a single mode of survival and a rejection of all that is different from it, the spiritual values on which it feeds (vegetation) will become stripped away and the herd will starve to death. Fortunately, the predators will arrive (government) and reduce the numbers of archaeologists and many of these will soon move away and find other ways to express their needs, becoming independent foragers, joining amateur groups, whatever, thus mixing their genetic material (ideas) and guaranteeing their individual survival as something different (evolution). But when people successfully control the predators by getting the governments to continue to allow the herd to strip the vegetation, then the species becomes extinct. Its inbreeding and lack of new ideas weakens it until it is no more.

Nietzsche said "God is dead", but he was looking at the large "monocultural" religions who, like their agricultural correlates strips the earth of its regenerative powers. First you see the instruments of regeneration start to disappear. In religion, this is syncretism, the mixing of the genetic material of the psyche which makes it stronger. In agriculture, the bees start to vanish. The monocultural religions do their very best to kill each other off but even if only one survived, it would soon starve to death. (extinction).

"The practice of religious debate flourished in South Asia, often with great acrimony, particularly in intra-Buddhist contexts. But, in the long run, the mainstream position for both Hinduism and Buddhism is that religious diversity is inevitable, beneficial, and necessary because of human diversity. Hinduism has taken this position perhaps more seriously than any other religion. East Asia produced an equally complex and quite different family of religions -- Confucianism, Taoism, Shinto. Here the solution to religious diversity is especially interesting. Everyone, except for religious specialists such as priests, "belongs" to all the religions, calling upon each one for different needs. The idea of exclusive loyalty to one religion is rather foreign and incomprehensible to most people." 

Rita M. Gross, Religious Diversity: Some Implications for Monotheism

Curiously, the word "evolution" is absent in the above paper as it is in Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane. Whether we see evolution as Natural Selection or made more mathematically likely through epigenetic processes, we should avoid influences from neo-Darwinism which seeks to take over from nature by culling the wolves. This is the mind-set of UNESCO, national cultural property, dictatorships and Monsanto. It is better by far to "go organic".

It is said that opposites attract. This is really nonsense. It is just that opposites have less in common and a certain amount of commonality can cause both, sometimes, to fight to the death in order to win over everything that is left.That is why extreme fringe archaeology and doctrinal archaeology are really quite similar: their materialism forms itself into opposing poles and each becomes ever increasingly extreme. They are really trying to kill each other.


John's Coydog Community page