-Caveat Lector-
See Micrea Eliade, *Shamanism*, for some mindblowing stuff on the similarity
of shamanic beliefs and practices in virtually all "native" cultures. Also,
what you're suggesting here looks like the thesis of Julian Jaynes' *The
Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind*. If you can
excuse a reductio ad absurdum, Jaynes argues that the "gods" of peoples like
the Sumerians were in fact the rational side of their minds trying to break
through. Neal Stephenson, in *Snow Crash*, proposes that the
pre-consciousness Sumerians were like (well this is my metaphor, not his) an
old pre-Macintosh Apple computer, with no hard drive and any program you
wanted to run on floppy disk. The *me* so jealously guarded by the gods were
programs which you downloaded from the temple whenever you wanted to perform
a particular task. Stephenson suggests that Enki was in fact the first
fully-conscious human being... Thus, in a very real sense, we created our
selves by sacrificing ourselves: "Three days I hung upon the Tree,/Myself a
sacrifice to myself", as the Old Norse *Havamal* has Odinn say of his
(probably shamanic) ordeal to learn the secret of the runes. Eden/Dilmun was
Paradise precisely because we were--as far as our experience went--incapable
of doing anything for ourselves and had to rely on Someone Else (the other
hemisphere of our brains) to tell us what to do. Becoming fully conscious,
with the ability to discern right and wrong, good and evil, automatically
meant expulsion from Eden, from the Golden Age, because we had begun to
integrate the "gods" into our everyday thought processes. That's a very
rough summing up of some extremely difficult material, but hopefully it will
make some sort of contribution to the discussion (which, BTW, is one of the
most important threads, IMHO, that I have seen raised on CTRL).
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Das GOAT [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Sunday, October 17, 1999 9:54 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: [CTRL] Sitchin's "Sumerian Astronomy" (origins)
>
> -Caveat Lector-
>
<snip>
> One is that these "beings from Beyond" originated in human SUBJECTIVE
> experience, in "shamanic" circumstances like the Australian aboriginal
> Dreamtime, wherein early man's embryonic intellectual capacities
> --abstract
> IDEAS, for example-- could manifest to him in a SYMBOLIC form,
> semi-independent of the perceiver's ego because from, in effect, his
> "higher"
> self, not yet realized or converted into controllable thought patterns,
> i.e.,
> "reduced" to abstraction. The use of psychedelics might account in part
> for
> this ... A shaman-leader who was "possessed" by one of these "entities"
> arising from his own unconscious mind, who behaved as an "oracle" or
> "medium"
> of such a sub-personality,
> would naturally cause others more ordinary to believe in the OBJECTIVE
> PHYSICAL existence of such entities, "somewhere," at "some time," in some
> World BEYOND ...
> I'd bet good money that the kind of "tribal" communities evident
> everywhere
> in non-
> urbanized societies outside the "mainstream" leading to "Civilization,"
> with
> their "totemic" systems and with "shamans" as "priests," are what preceded
> the earliest known form of social organization in Egypt and in Sumer -- a
> loose-knit collection of urban centers, each of them devoted to a
> different
> deity, the pattern of the whole --the relationships between them--
> apparently
> modelled after some "cosmological" order --
> simply a more sophisticated evolution of the older totemic
> clan-and-phratry
> system.
>
<snip>
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