-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: Other Altars - Roots and Realities of Cultic and Satanic Ritual Abuse and Multiple Personality Disorder Craig Lockwood©1993 CompCare Publishers 3850 Annapolis Lane, Suite 100 Minneapolis, MN 55441 612.559.4800/800.328.3330 ISBN 0-89638-363-6 255+pps — out-of-print/one edition. ----- A very interesting and excellent book. Om K --[3]-- Chapter 3 OPENING THE DOOR "It is necessary to view consciousness as we view other aspects of ourselves: the direct product of natural selection." -Richard Leakey, 1993 Whatever was going on, something like it had been going on for eons. Creating dissociation through ritualwhich may incorporate intoxicating drugs, sexuality, and sacrifice—is an ancient formula. How and where had we developed this shared cultural habit of trauma-related dissociation? Part of the answer may lie in humanity's distant past-having as much to do with the evolution of human cultural behaviors as it has to do with the occult, demons, and Satan. According to anthropologist Eli Sagan in Cannabalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form, sexuality, aggression, magic, and morality are the great parameters of human culture. These elements are all found in survivors' accounts of contemporary ritual abuse. What we call ritual abuse is an imprecise description of a complex spectrum of very different cultural and psychological activities. Since religious ritual, infanticide, cannibalism, aggression, and the sexual abuse of children seem to have existed independently and concurrently for thousands of years in a wide variety of cultures, none can be considered to be new. Abuse, Incest, and History What's new is the acknowledgment that the sexual abuse of children is now believed to be widely distributed across human societies, according to Lloyd Demause in a 1991 Journal of Psychohistory article entitled "Universality of Incest." While cultural and social restrictions may exist prohibiting certain kinds of incest in one society, they may be overlooked or ignored in others. It is important to understand that while the "incest taboo" is supposedly universal, the practice of incest is universal. Interpreting incest as "child abuse," however, is a very recent and very Western social concept. Incest can either be identified as direct, the overt sexual activity between family members other than spouses, or indirect, parents providing their children to others for sexual use. Child sexual abuse includes interfamilial incest as well as overt age-inappropriate sexual contact between children and adults, such as caregivers or persons in positions of authority over children. Sexual abuse involves sexualized kissing, genital fondling, genital-to -genital contact, vaginal intercourse, fellatio, cunnilingus, mutual masturbation, and anal intercourse. Statistics for child sexual abuse vary in the United States, but they are quite high. The numbers most commonly published show that one in four girls and one in six boys are sexually abused. Lloyd Demause reports that according to recent studies, the "corrected incidence rates" should be adjusted to at least 60 percent for girls and 45 percent for boys. Eighty-one percent of incidents occur before puberty and 42 percent occur to children under the age of seven. In these studies, abuse includes oral, anal, or vaginal penetration. Justice Department figures are alarming. The Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics says that in 1983 studies showed that nearly half of all reported child molestation cases and 20 percent of all rapes were committed by persons under the age of eighteen. Today the rate has increased. Adult child-molesters are often characterized by clinical researchers as being overly punitive, highly religious, and driven not by sexual instinct but by "overwhelming anxiety." Denying the traumatic effects of child sexual seduction and abuse becomes more difficult as study after study verifies the severity of the damage. Problems include acute anxiety, anorexia, borderline personality formations, bulimia, delinquency, depression, depersonalization, flashbacks, multiple personality disorder, promiscuity, post-traumatic stress, sexual dysfunction, and somatic reactions. And the earlier in a child's life the abuse occurs, the worse the resulting problem.[1] Incidences of child abuse in Western countries seem very high when compared to other countries. However, as Demause notes, incest and abuse are so widely accepted in other societies, including those of Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and parts of Africa, that the comparisons may be a lot closer. Old Habits If child abuse isn't new, neither is its connection to religious ritual. Anthropologists have reported that sexual rites-of-passage involving children occur in many preliterate societies. By contemporary Western standards, many of these rites would be considered extremely abusive—if not sadistically brutal. Our human propensity to indulge in ritual behavior and the tendency to perform ritualized acts to gain power and control may be linked too human cultural origins, and perhaps to our biological origins. This link has been overlooked in the growing literature attempting to explain ritual abuse. Rituals aren't a recent human development, nor are rituals exclusive to humans. But, like myth, they may convey a culture's most important values. Ritual behavior exists in many animal species. Common to vertebrates are ritual displays of aggression as a prelude to, or substitute for, combat; ritual displays to initiate courtship and mating; ritualized behavior around the construction of nests and dens. Primates, apes, and monkeys, display many kinds of complex ritual behavior in their social organizations.[2] By adding language to rituals, humans have taken ritual to far greater heights—and far greater depths. Primate Precursors When Jane Goodall poked around the Lake Tanganyika forest for ten years, she also poked many holes in the accepted theories of primate behavior. She reported her findings in the 1971 book In the Shadow of Man, co-authored by H. Van Lawick. Prior to Goodall's extensive chimpanzee observations, little had been known about their food-sharing behavior in the wild. Goodall's work, supported by work of subsequent researchers, showed that chimps hunted and enjoyed meat on occasion. When chimpanzees did kill, the killer, instead of behaving as he would have with fruit, shared the kill with hunting companions. This behavior was typical of the social carnivores, such as lions. Chimpanzees use rocks, sticks, and other found objects as tools. They also teach their young. These activities were once believed to separate the early hominids from the apes. Goodall observed one band of chimps go to war against a neighboring band. The war lasted three years and left "the smaller community annihilated." Others confirmed Goodall's observations.[3] Chimpanzees raid in war parties to obtain mates. By attacking smaller groups, they lower the risk of casualties—cooperative behavior their human cousins have been aping for eons. These observations suggest that such behaviors may have begun before human ancestors split from other primates. Goodall would eventually record many instances of behaviors that appeared to be rituals. She and others also reported on disturbing acts of infanticide and cannibalism. Reconstructing Ritual Just what is ritual, and why does it so permeate human behavior? Contemporary anthropological literature defines ritual somewhat broadly as any "prescribed, stylized, stereotyped way of performing some act," regardless of the act's secular or religious nature.[4] Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines it as "1 : the established form for a ceremony; specif : the order of words prescribed for a religious ceremony 2 a : ritual observance; specif : a system of rites b : a ceremonial act or action c : any formal and customarily repeated act or series of acts." Humans perform rituals within personal, social, cultural, or spiritual contexts. Sometimes many elements mix in one ritual, such as in a Christian baptism. Culturally ritualized behaviors in Western society include attending birthday parties, graduations, and proms, and celebrating religious or national holidays Under obsessive -compulsive disorder, the DSM III-R states that individual ritualized behavior may be exhibited in response to psychological and sexual needs or pathologies that have nothing to do with spiritual or social ritual, but may incorporate ceremonial elements into their personal context. Ritual seems to be an integral and ongoing part of culture. Examination of the evidence found at a broad sample of Paleolithic archeological sites shows that humans produced objects suggesting ritual behavior centered around two important aspects of human existence-sex and death. How we learned to do rituals remains a time-shrouded mystery. According to psychological theory, evidence suggests that ritual behavior in other species is related to anxiety and aggression, and may also be so for humans. Anthropologists associate ritual more with the smooth functioning of societies and groups. Rituals, in the anthropological model, mark the passage of individuals from one stage of life to another, define social roles for individuals, and serve to intensify experience in a religious context. Rituals help groups ease themselves over periods in which ecological stress (anxiety) is, or is perceived to be, high. Collective action in the form of rituals based on "social and cosmological organization" are favored because they allow the group to feel it is exercising control over uncontrollable natural events like droughts, floods, or hurricanes.[5] Securing food, avoiding or contending with death, dealing with sexuality, marriage, and the birth of children-these are time-honored areas around which, even today, center a great degree of stress and anxiety. Whether anxiety is the only reason ritual activity revolves around such areas in so many cultures depends on the observer's point of view. Still, it is difficult to argue that ritual doesn't assist in dissipating or neutralizing anxiety and stress when it is used to prepare for, or ease, periods of transition. Rituals and Reasons Thirty thousand years ago, a Cro-Magnon's genius for artistic expression produced the world's first representation of a pregnant woman—a small carved figure every art history and anthropology student knows as the Venus of Willendorf. According to Brian Fagan in People of the Earth, dozens of Venuses, often referred to as fertility figures, have been found throughout Europe, and have been associated with cult practices that spread over much of Upper Paleolithic Europe. Twenty-seven mammoth skulls arranged in a circle were found in Siberia. As Jelisejevici reported in Maller-Karpe in 1966, a female figurine was buried at the center beneath several partially worked tusks and a pile of bones. Life provided few options until the late Paleolithic. By then our ability to craft sophisticated tools and weapons, clothe and shelter ourselves in relative comfort, and feed ourselves within comfortable margins had been established. Nevertheless, it was probably as obvious to ancient humans as it is to us today: more food was good—less food was bad. Lack of food creates anxiety. Prolonged lack of food results in starvation and decline in a group's birthrate. When dead hunters weren't replaced quickly enough, the group was in jeopardy-creating more anxiety. Whatever could be done to ensure more food lessened anxiety. Understanding humankind's obsession with ritual behavior lies in understanding why humans became human. This, the eternal question of anthropology, may never be answered. Examining evidence and the several existing anthropological hypotheses, however, allows us to draw some working conclusions. Culture and Cooperation Remains of a species with modern human characteristics were found in Germany in 1856. Named Neanderthal for the site where they were found, archeologists soon discovered similar remains throughout Europe and the Middle East. Because Europe was the most technologically advanced civilization in the nineteenth century, it was assumed after publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, at least by those Europeans who considered themselves educated and "scientifically enlightened," that human life had started in Europe and evolved from European antecedents. Evolution into Homo sapiens was generally believed, by the 1900s, to be fairly rapid-as evolutionary time is counted. Estimates varied, but none placed even our earliest ancestors at much more than 100,000 years old. By 1975 protohuman remains dating over three million and possibly as far back as five million years had been uncovered in Africa. Each new find generated raging controversies. Were we vegetarians? Hunters? Scavengers? Opportunistic omnivores? Were we aggressive or cooperative? Current scientific consensus says that early humans, although aggressive, channeled their tendencies toward aggressive behavior. According to Sagan in Cannabalism, they cooperated, developing cultural adaptations to handle environmental changes. Skulls, Stones, and Ritual Bones Scientists are constantly adding information and refining the processes of dating human and protohuman remains. Homo sapiens sapiens, our species, appears less than 50,000 years ago, but archaic Homo sapiens, and possibly even Homo erectus, who preceded us by 1.5 million years, had in all probability established patterns of cannibalism, some of it possibly involving ritual. Discovered in Zhoukuodian, China, were forty Homo erectus crania. Just skulls—no body-bones. The base of each skull, the foramen magnum, had been chipped open to remove the brain in the same way headhunters do in New Guinea and Borneo today. A 200,000,year-old skull bearing the same mark was found near Steinheim, Germany. Eleven Solo man skulls, all with the brains extracted, were found in Java. At Ehringsdorf, an early Neanderthal skull showed the same method of brain extraction. Five hundred Neanderthal bones showing marks where the meat had been cut off were found at Krapina near Zagreb, Croatia.[6] Early human remains that suggest rituals involving cannibalism show up with some consistency. Professor Blanc discovered a 55,000-year-old Neanderthal skull in a mountain cave on his own estate near the coast at Monte Cicero, sixty-five miles northwest of Naples, Italy. Located in a chamber of the cave, clearly separated from the "living quarters" and centered in a circle of stones sat the skull of a forty-five -year-old man, which is old in Neanderthal terms. In People of the Earth, Fagan reports that death was caused by "one or more violent blows to the (right) temple." The foramen magnum (base of the skull) was "considerably enlarged." Two theories have been put forth explaining the death. One suggests the Neanderthal was the victim of a mercy killing. As an old and respected tribal member, his foramen magnum may have been enlarged to clean out the brain, perhaps to let his spirit out so his remains could be venerated. Neanderthals are known to have cared for their sick and aged. Ritual murder and ceremonial brain-eating, according to R. Tannehil in Flesh and Blood: A History of the Cannibal Complex, is the more generally accepted interpretation. This theory takes as evidence ethnographic observations of the ritual customs of certain tribes in New Guinea that still practice enlarging the foramen magnum to remove the brain for ceremonial consumption.[7] Why the ritual eating of the brain? We can only speculate. But exocannibalism with magical expectations may be the result of the concept, "Eat enemy, take power." Ceremonial usage of skulls as altarpieces continues today in some contemporary occult rituals.' Certain Tibetan Buddhist ceremonies require the use of a cup made from the human cranium. Bones of Roman Catholic saints, including skulls, occupy places of honor in or beneath cathedral altars. For at least 500,000 years, perhaps to ensure the fertility of tribes and the herds they preyed upon, humans practiced ritual behaviors-some involving cannibalism. Lower Paleolithic Neanderthals hunted, buried their dead, practiced rituals and cannibalism, but produced no pictorial art. Though anthropologists have no general consensus, some believe Neanderthal society, before complex language evolved, may even have been based on ritual. Crates, Caves, and Ritual Graves Different cultures attach different values to the same objects. Different people within a culture may attach different significance to the same object-at different times. One Sunday in October 1969, a Jesuit priest traveling in Micronesia appropriated a waist-high rectangular wooden object from the M.V. Nareau. Constructed with nails and metal straps, the object served as an altar for an open-air Roman Catholic religious ritual held on the island of Ponape. Two hours later the same wooden object, now holding a pig in the back of a Japanese pickup, was carted down to the waterfront. That evening a drunken Gilbertese seaman from the M.V. Nareau used it as a shelter from the rain. Dawn found the Filipino chief engineer of the old copra boat liberating the object to store cans of kerosene. It was secured on the M.V. Nareau's fantail. Another Jesuit priest circuiting the diocese of the Caroline Islands diocese then appropriated the same object for a makeshift altar a few days later near the atoll of Moch. Should the rectangular wooden object be considered an altar, a pig-pen, a temporary shelter, a kerosene storage container, or a packing crate? Events like these illustrate why making assumptions about ancient behavior based on a few remains is the difficult professional business of anthropologists-not journalists. But it seems fair to wonder if it's possible that ritual human sacrifice eventually became a cultural asset, an acquisition upon which many cultures became dependent? Painted on a cave wall near Ariege is a half-human, halfanimal figure French anthropologists have dubbed le sorcier: the sorcerer. Is this figure a shaman or an animal god? We'll probably never know. But his magical appearance tells us he must have been important. The artist, clutching a torch, had to crawl hundreds of feet through subterranean darkness to paint his image. This was a secret place, a place of worship perhaps, where select members of the band might have come to conduct their rituals. Do at least some of these early human remains, ritual sites, graves, and scattered works of cave art allow us to conclude that there is a linear panhuman linkage with ritual abuse as it is practiced today? No. Scattered archeological clues must only be interpreted as suggestive—not conclusive. But what's interesting is that there are clues. What does seem certain is that humans today, as in the past, enjoy and create, ritual around many nonspiritual activities. This attraction seems to have been formed hundreds of thou. sands of years before recorded history. Equally certain is that individuals in many contemporary cultures have a strong attraction to ritual, magical belief, and in some cases, sacrifice. Several elements of spiritual ritual have withstood the tests of time and the shifting sands of culture. Their meanings, however, may have been transmogrified. Psychological post-mortems are inconclusive. Still, traditions have a curious tenacity of their own. Throughout Central Europe, men who hunt for sport proudly display the inconspicuous-looking canine teeth of the roebuck or deer. They claim it gives them good luck. Questioned, nobody seems to recall just where or how the custom started. Some respected elder, an uncle, or grandparent said the custom was very old. Cro-Magnon. hunters also prized this same trophy. pps. 31-42 --[notes]-- Chapter 3 1. J. Goodwin et al. Sexual Abuse: Incest Victims and Their Families, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Yearbook Medical Publishers, 1989). 2. R. Leakey and R. Lewin, People of the Lake: Mankind and Its Beginnings (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1978). 3. E. Linden, "Bonobos' Chimpanzees with a Difference, National Geographic 181 (March 1992), 46. 4. Frank R. Vivelo, Handbook of Cultural Anthropology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), 188. 5. P. R. Sanday, Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System (Cambridge UP, 1986). 6. R. Tannahil, Flesh and Blood: A History of the Cannibal Complex (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975). 7. Ibid. 8. P. Lieberman, E.S. Crelin, and D.H. Klatt, American Anthropologist 74 (1972), 287-307. 9. R. Tannahil, Flesh and Blood: A History of the Cannibal Complex (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975). --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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