Beyond the "Fringe Archaeology" — part three: anything goes

Original sheet-music from the musical
Anything Goes

One of the commonest complaints about postmodernism is that "anything goes", meaning that the postmodernist might take a specific viewpoint as the core of a particular study. One of the most dominant viewpoints that has received much support is feminism and that support has shifted so much public reaction to the topic that what might have been first thought of as an eccentric view has now become more mainstream within archaeology.

I don't think that the postmodernist is the real author of this "anything goes" method, rather, the postmodernist recognizes that many unrevealed influences can be at the core of even the most established "truths" and has decided to bring one such influence to our attention. Without the postmodernist intervention, the anything that has already gone remains unidentified and the truth might only be an apparency.

The idea that aliens from outer space were instrumental in building the Egyptian pyramids is a valid hypothesis, but calling it a theory necessitates some scientific proofs. Call me rash, but I don't believe we will see such proofs ever presented. The idea of aliens being involved with the pyramids is thus a modern mythology and can be studied as such. We could even come up with how such ideas might have evolved from reports of divine intervention and that "visitors from outer space" are a modern and atheistic or agnostic mythological equivalence to the idea of angels. The mythologist might also point out that depictions of angels are influenced by Roman depictions of the winged Victory, and that the Greek meaning of angel (ἄγγελος) is simply "messenger" and that word could be validly used in English language Biblical texts. No one need think of wings unless the text mentions them.

Another modern mythology is that none of the inhabitants of ancient Britain were called Celts. What is most curious about this mythology is that it is usually presented, not as a hypothesis (which it is), and not even as a theory, but as a fact. Its stated basis is that the word 'Celt' is not attested in literature about Britain prior to the seventeenth century. All that this proves is that British Celts do not appear in the literature prior to the seventeenth century. Of course, there is an awful lot of stuff about the Celts that we now have proof of existing that also did not appear in the literature even a few decades ago. As to whether any ancient Briton believed that he or she was a Celt cannot be proven by such an absence of evidence explanation.

Whether anything actually occurred in previous times has no bearing on whether it is, or is not, a mythology. A mythology is a set of beliefs that serve, or served, a function in people's lives and the fact of their historicity has no bearing whatsoever on the belief's validity as a mythology. The truths of a mythology are not historical, they are metaphorical. Joseph Campbell said "People are killing each other over their choice of metaphors". Not understanding the nature of mythology can be a very serious matter indeed.

Monday: what are the clues that a myth might be being labelled as a fact?

Beyond the "Fringe Archaeology" — part two: the archaeology of thought

Michel Foucault
free-use image

I was drawn to reading Michel Foucault's The Order of Things: An archaeology of the human sciences after discovering the act of classification to be a destructive activity. I had wanted to create a more detailed typological study of the coins of the ancient Celtic Coriosolite tribe of Brittany by looking at the evolution of the coin-die designs. It had struck me that the current classification was based on the observance of several very noticeable design motifs, yet the designs on the coins had a very numerous collection of motifs. I reasoned that what was most noticeable today might not have been most noticeable to an observer in the time that the coins were made: even a visually small device might have had deep significance to someone who understood its visual language. The modern classifier, having no such knowledge must stick with what is seen but not necessarily understood  — devices that are visually dominant; devices that are commonly repeated; devices that seem to be grouped together with some relationship to the chronology. All other considerations are ignored.

Thus, classification becomes like the serpent Ouroboros eating its own tail: replacing the thoughts of the creator with the thoughts of the classifier. I knew that I would have to make contact with the thoughts of the creator of the work to avoid this subjectivity otherwise I would just be seeing horses in the clouds.

It was no easy task and I almost gave up on it, but I found an important clue in a set of minor variations — a clue as to how the die engraver was thinking about the designs. If you change one element within a composition, the whole composition will change and other compositional problems will emerge, and then also have to be changed. By discovering a small section of the complete work that exhibits a chronology that can be checked against other features, and found to be true, the reasons for changes can be inferred to have been due to certain tenets: that of the art (as the series of coins expresses that art) and of religious belief (as the devices have mythological connections). I looked at these subtle changes as my Rosetta Stone.

The biggest surprise to me was that as I began to arrange the dies in their order of manufacture based on sets of these subtle changes which proved their validity by overlapping each other, I not only began to understand the die engraver's thought processes more clearly, but also realized that what I was being left with was a total negation of the very idea of classes within a classification system. There was nothing left but the physical remains of a time period in the die engraver's thought processes. Each example of these remains was embodied within a single set of coin dies. There was no such thing as an objective class unless that class could be understood as the product of a modern classifier. The only valid units in the system were individual objects (coin dies which have left the evidence for their existence in their products). A classification system defines the classifier and the not the object being classified.

Foucault's work confirmed my suspicions, but where do we go from there? Stay tuned!

Beyond the "Fringe Archaeology" — part one: introduction

Athanasius Kircher's Map of Atlantis (c.1669)

The hikers unpacking their jeep at the bottom of the hill were oblivious to the sight of the UFO travelling from north to south along the Rocky Mountains west of Elbow Falls. The sight puzzled us: in a clear blue sky, an elliptical white light blinked visible and invisible very slowly on its silent journey south. When it was invisible, there was nothing to be seen, not even a speck in the sky. It would reappear just where you would expect it to be according to its speed. The light was too large to have been the sun glinting off an aircraft window. I did not think it was a "flying saucer", but I had no idea of what it was. Some time later, I was listening to a science radio show about rare forms of lightning when my UFO was discussed. The phenomenon had been attributed to a sort of lightning connected with the earth's magnetic field and had only been reported three times. I was pleased to know what it was: after all, thousands of people have reported "flying saucers" but very few people had seen what I saw that afternoon.

The whole experience reminded me of the Fátima sightings in 1917 which had been identified by many observers as a visitation of the Virgin Mary. Other explanations have since been offered such as a mass hallucination or an atmospheric phenomenon. UFO fans, of course, have other interpretations. No one would have thought, in 1917, that the Fátima sighting was a "flying saucer" as even the term had not been invented at that time and no one was talking much about invasions from space without referring to H. G. Wells' novel.

When people try to interpret the strange, they do so from the perspective of their time. What might have been understood as a divine event hundreds of years ago is now seen as a scientific phenomenon today, but even that explanation could be mocked by scientists in the future. We no longer think that the electron orbits the nucleus in just the same way that a planet orbits its sun. Quantum physics has moved Newton much closer to the Fátima observers than he was before.

Fringe archaeology, which is sometimes given the risky term Pseudoarchaeology by dyed-in-the-wool sceptics has become of some interest to postmodernist archaeologists. It includes not just ideas of visitations from ancient aliens and lost continents, but also divining or "witching" for artifacts and anything else that lies outside of the current academic thinking in the subject. But what of those things that are accepted today by the "expert" that will be the source of much amusement and derision by future archaeologists? Is it possible to predict what might become? Are there signals already in the accepted literature? This series will focus on these questions.

I'm back

Western saddle
Photo: Borsi112

After a rather long winter break, I'm back in the saddle again. My time off has not all been relaxation and celebration. In my ongoing quest to gain the pensions due to me I have finally run into the bureaucrat from hell  — you know the type, the person who is not only wrong and inefficient but utterly rude, irresponsible and who can never admit any fault. This time it was a Provincial employee.

Christmas dinner was at my daughter's house. I arrived with presents for her, her husband and my grandchildren together with my traditional two-bite sausage rolls and mince tarts. my son-law's mother provided the turkey and my daughter baked a ham. I also made my own turkey dinner as Safeway has had frozen turkeys on sale for 99 cents a pound for the last thirty years or longer and I can never resist such a deal. I know of nothing else that has had no price increase in thirty years and even ground beef is five times more expensive. Of course, I ended up with a lot of left-overs and made turkey soup, turkey and mushroom pies, and turkey and sweet potato pasties. Perhaps I will buy a deep freezer this year and next December will buy several such turkeys.

Having become fed up with eating turkey in its various forms, I was not sad to see the last pie vanish and decided to prepare something as far removed from turkey as possible. I had always wanted to make some real Texas chili so I found a great recipe and Co-Op had all of the right ingredients including real Mexican dried chiles and the best masa farina, although I bought the beef elsewhere as I needed a lot of it and saved by buying a couple of large "family packs". I varied the recipe a little bit as I like to cook stewing beef in a slow cooker for a better texture so my homemade chili sauce was a bit too thin and rather than adding more masa farina, I spooned off the sauce and reduced it on the stove to intensify the flavours. I made it of medium hotness because I wanted to be able to taste the recipe rather than just making my mouth numb. I can highly recommend that recipe. It contains no beans, tomato or chili powder. I gave a serving to a friend who had lived in New Mexico and was familiar with real chili con carne. He took it home and let his wife and kids try it. All said it was the best chili they had ever tried. He joked about my opening chili restaurant, but I said that the cost of a bowl of good chili would come as a shock to anyone used only to the cheap canned varieties with all the beans and tomato in them, even though they are the merest ghost of the real thing. My chili did not last as long as I had hoped. Next time, I will use ten to twenty pounds of beef and freeze a lot of it.

Still no Coriosolite staters from the big Jersey hoard for XRF analysis. Trefor had emailed me saying he had hoped to be able to work on them over the Christmas break, but I had replied saying that everything slows down over Christmas whether in academia or business (save for retail, of course).

I had said that I would be continuing my mythology series next, but the next topic in the theme is going to be complicated so it will be its own series. I'm calling it Beyond the "Fringe Archaeology" and it will start tomorrow. Let me know what you think if you try that chili recipe.

Season's greetings

The Mountain Exhaled
 A winter cloud sweeps over the Victoria Glacier at Lake Louise, Alberta, Canada.

photo: Laszlo-photo

Have a happy and safe holiday and I will be back with more on the current series in early January.

Mythology — part six: personal mythologies

Piegan Medicine Bags

While the movies and other fictional media can provide us with our need for mythology by allowing us to identify with the hero and find other parallels to our own life, we also have a habit in collecting what we call "souvenirs". These can be something to remind us of a vacation or any other special moment, place or person. We don't think of such things as sacred objects, but they are the sort of thing that the Plains Indian shaman would include in their medicine bags or bundles.

In primitive societies there is no "separation of Church and State" and all things have their connections to the sacred. The feelings we have about special things are no different from what the shaman saves for the medicine bundle, they are just given another name.

As we grow older, our lives gain a meaning that is personal to us. We can call that a personal mythology. There are stages to a life well-lived. Joseph Campbell says that as soon as the movie hero wins the battle and gets the girl, the credits roll. In mythology, however, the hero's role continues past the movie endings. He returns to his people to act as elder and mentor. We tend to forget about this stage of life and Hollywood rarely acknowledges what we forget. I am sure that you have encountered many people who have become stuck in their ways and try to relive, instead, previous times of victories and personal satisfaction. Perhaps you should ask such people what the young can learn from their experiences — try to move them along a little bit. Perhaps all they need is a medicine bundle.

Mythology — part five: inspiration

"Inspiration"
Jean-Honoré Fragonard, 1769

Being married to a poet for twenty years can teach you a lot about inspiration. The first thing I noticed was that my wife included a number of archetypal and mythological images in her poems without ever having studied Jungian psychology or mythology. Although I already knew that writing poetry often presented such images to the poet and there was something about poetic forms that could contact the unconscious, watching the actual practice of poetry gave me a number of ideas about how and why this happens. My wife used both formal and free verse but the latter was frequently obsessive verse. She would spend most of her time editing her poetry and sometimes she would work on a poem for many years to get it just right: she would repeat the lines over and over to hear and note how they scanned. The rhythm was almost everything.

I saw that there was little difference between the shaman beating a drum and the poet reciting the work in progress. Both would experience the rhythm presenting an idea, most often as a single word, which would be imbued with feelings of numinosity. In transcendental meditation, the order is different: It starts with a highly charged word or sound given as the mantra and the repetition of that word delivers the formerly unconscious material surrounding it. Maslow called such incidents "peak experiences". After many years of writing poetry, my wife gained an ability to detect such peak experiences in what others wrote or spoke about and was thus able to translate other people's experiences into poetic forms. She describes this process in her account of what inspired her poem Anne. A friend of Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote to her after its publication to say that she had read the poem to Anne while its subject was on her death bed, further confirming that she "had got it right".

What inspiration provides is maintained by evolution: the story teller keeps to mnemonic rhythms and sounds and the repetition delivers the suitably imbued material which will then resonate with the same material in the collective unconsciousness of the listener. The poem survives by delivering its numinosity and being remembered and repeated, thus. It becomes a meme. I don't think that the stories came out of religious beliefs, I think that the religious beliefs evolved from the stories and they gained their power from that numinosity that surrounds, and makes significant, certain parts of the unconscious.

Mythology — part four: historicity

Herodotus

Apart from indulging in trivia, about the most useless question you can ask about a story from mythology or religion is whether a particular event actually happened, or on what historical event the story is based. For critical purposes, such a question would be like critiquing the playwright over the quality of the sets at a performance of the play. The events are just the props, the play's the thing. The story-teller, after noticing too many blank stares at the mention of the name of a long-dead historical figure, starts to use someone similar from popular history. A shaman might start the proceedings with a couple of stage tricks, not to attempt to prove anything, but just to set the mood  — like lighting incense, or hearing dramatic music start to play in the movie as the heroine asks "Is there anybody there?". No one at the movies storms out yelling "dramatic music never starts whenever I'm in danger!" What works best is what works for tonight's audience, not for one fifty years ago.

In the beginning was the spoken word. Then we started writing everything down and writers gained a sort of immortality by insisting that their words be quoted as "Smith says...", instead of "Smith said...", even though Smith might have been dead for centuries. As religious texts came into being, in a different reality, they also became historical texts. The historian is always interested in the time that the text was written, even if the text is on a historical subject. The history is the answer to questions that were meaningful to people contemporary to the historian. So the historian would judge a religious text by how its lessons were received by the people at the time it was penned. From this information (as far as it is possible to discover), the historian can then translate the metaphors and idioms that would be too stale to be fully understood today into new forms that preserve the intent of the original author to be understood by the audience of the original time and place.

While finding religious texts so translated is not that easy, you can compare very different translations of Aristophanes' comedies: a strict word for word translation will not allow you to experience the play as if you were at its premier. It's comedy value depended on being just on the "'naughty" side of acceptable to the audience at the time, so certain things were said as euphemisms. A translation using modern idioms and, again, just on the "naughty" side of acceptable can still deliver the sort of audience response that Aristophanes wanted. To understand the religious texts, look for the metaphors in the events that are described, the historical is just set design and need only be judged against the understanding of its original audience. The truth that is written about is pretty well always given in metaphor. How could it be otherwise?

Mythology — part three: truth

"Truth"
Jules Joseph Lefebvre. 1870

Whenever you watch actors in a movie you know you are not watching reality, but if you focus too much on that fact, you won't enjoy the movie much. We suspend our disbelief and react as if we are seeing reality. Our enjoyment of the movie is enhanced if we can identify with any of the characters, or see familiar behavior or personalities. If we are watching a historical drama and see some anachronism, it annoys us not because it is a false detail, but because it takes us out of the imagined time. A drama is appreciated more if the problems of the characters would be problems for us, too; we like to see our own hopes portrayed on the screen; what would we do in that situation?. Yet, we also like to see what is alien to our experience in science fiction or movies set in distant cultures where people have values different from our own. Even here, though, there can be identification or comparison with ourselves.

Children can reach a stage where they can both believe and not believe in such things as Santa Claus at the same time, but they also have the idea that adults only indulge in a single reality and don't imagine that theatres can be full of adults "pretending" that what they are seeing is real, or that it is both real and unreal to them at the same time.

The good storyteller, in ancient societies, knew what their audience liked and believed and would include these things in their performance, just as Bob Hope would do when on tour: the audience would hear pithy comments about some local event they had heard talk of at the office that day. Even in literate societies, there were many people who could neither read nor write and the storyteller and priest, both, were the source of cultural knowledge for such people. The priest would also adapt to the congregation in the manner of the story teller. I am sure that societies have existed where we would have difficulties in deciding whether a particular person was a priest, elder, or a storyteller.

Syncretism is a term used by mythologists to describe how beliefs can undergo modifications to better fit into prior beliefs, and myths and stories pick up local flavors as they spread. In, largely, non-literate societies, religious belief never strayed far from the common experience and folk belief and it was thoroughly integrated into every aspect of daily life.

The Greek Mystery cults like Dionysianism, and Orphism, and related philosophies such as that of Pythagoras and the druids forbad the use of writing, not just for stated reasons such as that writing makes the mind lazy, or so that the mysteries can be preserved at increasingly more elite levels but also, I am sure, that beliefs or truths could continue to be current.

Whenever religious information is put into texts, this information becomes frozen in time and also becomes history. As such, it can then become treated as any historical text: some might say a particular text is accurate, others might disagree. The body of evidence is all texts. Some religions might restrict certain texts from their official canon according to prevailing beliefs at the time and label them as heresy. The historian compares these events and changes in texts relative to their time and place as recorded in other sorts of texts. The historian knows that history is not what happened, but what was written about what happened. Truth is relative to circumstances and the truth owes as much to the human question as is does to its answer.

So where did all of those people go who saw their story teller's work ripped from experience and pasted into a book? They had lost their mythological space where everything could be both right and wrong at the same time; the space where they could see their own lives, loves and aspirations projected into multiple futures; a place where higher, poetic, and metaphorical truths were all that mattered. I think we all went to the movies.

Mythology — part two: stories

Exciting stories
Carl Gessler, 1866

Long before writing was invented people told stories and those stories evolved over time. The characters in the story might change as new heroes emerged and old heros were forgotten. Not only did details of the story change over time, but what was mostly remembered and passed along was that which resonated with something in the collective unconscious. If a story element happened to contact a very highly charged part of that unconsciousness, then the effect could be rather dramatic: at the very least, a feeling of numinosity could ensue and at the extreme, that numinosity could trigger synchronicity whereby contact with an archetype is reflected by a incident experienced in reality.

After writing was invented or adopted by people, some of these stories were written down and became frozen in time. Only in fairly recent history were old written stories modernized, and then, it was a conscious act to do so. The changes were more likely to omit archetypes than to provide more because the changes were conscious decisions.

Over time, the storyteller might use verse, repeated phrases, and alliteration to act both as mnemonic devices and to provide "rest points" whereby the story can continue while the storyteller thinks of what will come next.

The stories that lasted longest were full of archetypal imagery and created many feelings of numinosity. It was these stories that brought about myths that were finally incorporated into religious stories because of that numinosity.

Nowadays, many people believe that the most archetypally loaded stories (almost always very old and evolved stories) told of historical truth while other people who might either have experienced alternative versions applied to different histories or might have the sort of personality type that avoids the inward-looking contact with the archetypes will call them "fiction" or attribute to them efforts to understand reality. So what went wrong and how bad was it? We will look into that tomorrow.