Why didn't early humans who knew how to use fire, go to the trouble of questioning a myth about the reason they can make it? Why not ask about what humans did before fire was stolen? Well, here we suppose they didn't go, or they invented another myth that starts when humans get fire, before this humans don't live in this world but another one, where they don't have fire. I guess. Sounds about right.
And I have, at last, I think detected what some of the questions Taissa fired off, were about. Start with "at what point in history", did our use of fire correspond to a science? Since, you know, it took until universities and labs were built for humans to really understand the science of combustion. Well, sure, but don't make the mistake of comparing the modern version of science with what knowledge we had then, what the theories were (irrational myths! we thought fire was a living thing and we worshipped it). Knowing how to kill and skin an animal is a science. Anything we do that involves knowing something about using a tool, is a science, so that's what it was way back then.
You have my attention but can you link your observation to scientific method else you have been too casual. Alex
Ok. But first I feel that I need to ask you what your definition of science is. Then we can get to what a scientific method is.
You made me laugh out loud...which is ok the closest human is a Klm away. I suppose referring you to wiki and Karl Poppers philosophy of science would be a cop out on my part...mmm let me see...scientific method is where scientists make up nonsense like whales coming from dogs or that the universe came from nothing and they have these theories which well are only theories.... Alex
No I thought that was the point of your call for definitions...they are clear but your suggested conection is not... Anyways please go on I do not wish to sidetrack your observations...I am just here to learn. Alex
I may be away for a long while so if I don't reply to any posts it's because I am doing something elsewhere. Alex
[1/2] But that tells us precisely nothing. There is a particular stealing of fire for the sake of fascination that you are referring to. And there is, of course, the question of what fascination means in any given case; e.g., from the examples you listed↑, is Algonquin myth, and if I put the word "Rabbit" in quotes↑ it is because Rabbit is Nanahboozhoo (cf. Young↱); the mythical creature stole fire not for fascination but obligation, that is, family and communal need. Analyzing per Campbell could, perhaps, affirm fascination according to a particular definition. A consideration from your post at #386↑: Yes, "Being able to create fire though, gets woven into a world-creation myth", but you're not quite out of sequence, as such, saying, "which then gives humans living tribally a reason they exist, so a motivation to keep doing it, to honor one's ancestors etc.", although aspects of tribal justification are a downstream result. And it's true, something about your treatment of these outcomes reads like you're considering a product, the produce of labor. At some point it becomes that, but the first stories are just stories. I think of an obscsure story about a rabbit burning down a shed, maybe fifteen years ago, because that is where it ran after catching fire, itself, and, honestly, maybe after enough repetitions of watching animals actually spread fire, and seeing predators and scavengers converge to feed on burned corpses, someone figured out how to cook↑. It probably happened many times, independently of other occasions. And somewhere in there is going to be a story about how Rabbit brought fire to people. Or, y'know, just how apocalyptic would a herd of flaming aurochs have looked? Still, yes, the story becomes an explanation. The larger, tribal justification you describe emerges as a cultural result, including shared experience and, such as it is, knowledge. However— —you really do seem to be expecting extraordinary contiguity compared to what we know about history and the archaeological record. Again, the Americas: How much cultural information do you expect one generation to pass on to the next in what community of what size, fifteen thousand years ago? How many times have the stories been forgotten and reinvented, lost and re-experienced and re-mythologized? Commonality in fire mythology does not even require a quasi-Jungian common repository; rather, for generations, the living experience reiterated the same themes. But when we stop to think of even the period between the Columbian experience and, say, the Yugtun syllabary in 1900, what sort of contiguity are you expecting in the oral tradition over the course of four hundred years, say, at Haida Gwaii? It's one thing to say records can observe tribal life, here or there, during the period, but we don't really know about before; in this aspect, we might consider that when the missionaries and, later, ethnologists and anthropologists, started recording the oral history, what they got was the contemporary iteration. And therein we find a question of fascination: If the chief's daughter says this is the story her father told, and his father before, and his before that, perhaps she might attest to hearing them all tell it. Because if we had her great-grandfather's telling, how different would it be? And when it is the story his father told, and grandfather before that, and so on, the changes will reflect the times and experiences of the telling. And it's not just the myths; the general historical record of tribal culture in the Americas starts with the fixing of oral tradition, as the iteration recorded becomes more enduring and defining than those before it. At the time of the recorded telling, we get a telling from that time. Looking to Africa: When Griaule recorded Ogotommeli's recollection of the Dogon creation story, ca. 1946, the blind elder included the comment that the immature appearance of Europeans was an effect of being creatures of moonlight; Ogotommeli added that he had nothing against them, and did not feel sorry for them, and left them to their lives and destinies up north (Sproul, 50). While the origin of this point in the telling is unclear, we can easily doubt it was part of what the Dogon told themselves in the centuries spent avoiding, resisting, and fleeing Islamization. Here is a more concrete example. Coontz, in 2005— In the 1990s, sociologist Amy Kaler, conducting interviews in a region of southern Africa where divorce has long been common, was surprised to hear people say that marital strife and instability were new to their generation. So Kaler went back and looked at oral histories collected fifty years earlier. She found that the grandparents and great-grandparents of the people she was interviewing in the 1990s had also described their own marital relations as much worse than the marriages of their parents' and grandparents' day. "The invention of a past filled with good marriages," Kaler concluded, is one way people express discontent about other aspects of contemprary life. (1-2) —recalled Kaler in 1999. And if that summary helps us shape a question about the reliability of oral histories, Kaler↱, herself, drives the stake, for our purposes, even more directly: In creating a tradition of good marriages in an ever-receding past, as contrasted with degenerate marriages in an omnipresent nowadays, people in both the late 1940s and 1999 were not expressing historical truths as much as sociological ones. In this case,the truth they were expressing is that human relations, especially where they involve collaboration and accommodation between gender and generations, as marriages do, are always a source of conflict and disappointment. Talking about marriage is a way of talking about these difficulties, of expressing ambivalence and concern about the inevitable failures of others to meet one's expectations. In the 1940s, these failures centered on the disappointments of distribution, and in the 1990s, on the disappointments of sexuality, but in both cases marriage provided a unique idiom for articulating these disappointments, particularly for elders. Talking about marriage and the degeneration of marriage may be a time-honored way to talk about more general malaise and tensions, especially tensions between generations. Marriage, in other words, provides an idiom or a vocabulary through which elders can express their discomfort with their juniors, as well as a way that younger people can claim a moral high ground for themselves by aligning themselves with a supposedly virtuous past. Modern marriage and its discontents provides both the rhetorical occasion and the means through which to express general disapproval and disappointment as the social world continues to change. (549) The first blow is the instability of an oral history over a period of familial memory spanning a half-century. The second is the explicit reminder: "In creating a tradition of good marriages in an ever-receding past … people in both the late 1940s and 1999 were not expressing historical truths as much as sociological ones." If we really need a third, note the internalized priorities°, especially the pretense to "claim a moral high ground for themselves by aligning themselves with a supposedly virtuous past". And toward that, Kaler notes (547), "What may appear to be a crisis in the institution of marriage, amid widespread reports of degeneration and decay, should more properly be viewed as a constant, normal state." Which, in turn, comes right after, "The persistence of complaints about degenerate marriages, and the consistent rhetorical performances of these complaints across the generations, suggest an expansion of the notion of invented tradition." Now, marriage is what it is, and brings with it particular emotional values and stressors, but the larger point holds: The oral tradition is unstable in this most basic way. ____________________ Notes: ° See #397↑: People are irrational; I sometimes call them neurotic. Not only do we face a question of how various people and groups communicated, preserved, and passed on the information you describe, there are also questions of their priorities in perceiving, processing, communicating, and preserving information. Your presuppositions do not seem to account for this. Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Viking, 2005. Kaler, Amy. "'Many Divorces and Many Spinsters': Marriage as an Invented Tradition in Southern Malawi, 1946-1949". Journal of Family History. v. 26, n. 4. October, 2001. ResearchGate.net. 13 May 2020. https://bit.ly/3cv1QTN Sproul, Barbara C. Primal Myths: Creation Myths Around the World. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Young, Egerton R. Algonquin Indian Tales. 1903. Gutenberg.org. 13 May 2020. https://bit.ly/3ckvaMu
[2/2] There are the distortions in word of mouth. Sometimes, a group dies out and its oral tradition is lost. But there is also this: Place the stones in a circle of twelve to contain the fire spirit. Gather the proper leaves and wood that will satisfy the needs of the fire spirit. Rub the sticks together to invoke the fire spirit. Feel the heat as the fire spirit comes into this world. See the fire spirit manifest and consume the offering of proper leaves and wood. That is not precise, of course, compared to whatever story someone told. But, still, it is akin to what would manifest. Why twelve stones? Because that is what worked the first time. Or maybe an affinity emerges when the real principle is to complete the circle. But why complete the circle? To contain the fire. Why the proper leaves? At first it was a coincidence of whatever burned. Fire spirit? It's not just the heat in the sticks. In our modern era, it's not just a line from a movie that fire can look like a living creature; it breathes, eats, excretes, reproduces, and even responds to stimuli in predictable ways. And while you and I know it's not alive—well, okay, so, there was this weird moment a couple years ago, when California was suffering flaming tornadoes, and a meteorologist in my corner of the world set people to headscratching when he pointed out that California used to be on fire a lot, back before American settlement. And, really, it was an, Okay, and? moment, as such; y'know, timing is everything. But I think of it now because, sure, we can only imagine the stories the Wukchumni of 3000 years ago could tell about when the sky did that loud flashing thing and delivered fire into the forest, and, sure, they didn't necessarily have flaming EF3s chasing them around, but there used to be a lot more trees in the San Joaquin Valley. Some years were probably more spectacular than others. And now you're very close. These posts take a while to write, sometimes. I didn't mean to leave you hanging. Trust, me, I was fascinated, staring at a map, last night, realizing that the Dogon, driven off the Niger River at Mandé, stayed back away from the river when they moved eastward into Burkina Faso, a point they repeated when they later fled northward to Bandiagara. There is some subtlety in their decisions. So, it's not quite— —that difference, but, still, I would point out that even three thousand years after writing arrived, the great philosophers of Greek time managed to figure out that something fell to the ground or rose into the air because it had falling or rising properties. Say what we will about four humors, it took until Cardinal Cusanas in the fifteenth century to figure the importance of measuring cardiac pulse against time; universal gravitation apparently required a seventeenth century Rosicrucian queer. In the Americas, some people managed spectacular architecture without a proper writing system. But when it comes to teaching children how to use fire, or build a longhouse, or ventilate a kiva, yes, even an irrational human can understand what to do, if not why. The why is the science. But how do people explain the science? That's what I mean about being out of sequence: The vocabulary they would use would reflect their more superstitious view of the world around them. To wit: What explanation is that? The thing about fascination is that I can very nearly see it, according to a basic definition, by the time we get to polished floors at Göbekli Tepe—okay, why are they polished? The architectural innovation of the T-pillar megaliths is impressive, but in explaining their construction to one another as they went, what explanation was it? We're talking seven to nine thousand years before the philosophy of falling properties. The pillars, which appear at Nevalı Çori and other fertile crescent sites, might be the oldest known megaliths, and are now viewed as human representations. Nonetheless, some of the artwork, ca. 11 kya, is subtle. Moreover, given the likely trends described at similar sites, and the prospect of a complex cult center among hunter-gatherers, the explanations were likely animistic. Fascination, as such, seems a later result. Still, when we circle back 'round to your question, "Why invent a mythical explanation, when the ordinary one is perfectly acceptable?" it really is hard to figure what you expect that ordinary, perfectly acceptable explanation was. Would you prefer a socioeconomic discussion of slavery? Writing systems? By the time we get to ancient Greece, maybe? Were we up to the four elements, then? Oh. Five. Aristotle and aether. But especially among oral traditions, which are more fixed in their recorded forms than they ever were as spoken, what questions do you expect they should have asked? And if a given myth considers that? What are you looking for? Were they cold? Yes. Did the food suck? Yes. Was it dark? Well, when Raven opened the box with the sun inside, that was apparently something different. But that's also a different myth. Still, the point is that some myths do consider such things. So, yes. What, realistically, did you expect? Still, if we wind back in this thread, we might observe (#325↑) you noting, "Most religions include fire and creation mythologies." And while cave paintings as veneration is not an unreasonable discussion, so, sure, before humans had fire, they likely had to come from somewhere. Toward that, though, consider your own note, "Eventually world-creation myths started to show up", suggesting a significant development in philosophical thought. The underlying question represents its own sort of progress in human thought and social experience. Throughout, you're hitting various marks, as with your conjecture: But in #330↑, you propose, "So now all that we need is an explanation as to why a fire-stealing myth replaces the (more rational) history of fire use by ancestral humans", and there is a vantage from which the first response is to wonder, "What do you mean? Why do you need that explanation?" The problem with that response, of course, is that it doesn't define the problem. What seems so awry about your proposition has to do with these questions of sequence and contiguity. How much of what information is supposed to be passed on through oral tradition, over what period? The vocabulary that is not animistic and suffused in mystery comes later, but the communicated knowledge must stabilize in order for that to happen. The explanation you require is that the myth did not "replace" a more rational telling of history, but, rather, is the history told. The more rational history is conceived later. And in that context, there is a perspective by which it occurs to note, comparatively, the modern context of actual replacement of history with mythopoeia. That is in many ways a larger political question, though, and history will someday tell, in its way, what is actually happening now. Some are forgetting their own lives and lifetimes in order to justify the history they assert. And while it is difficult to project what we will be able to see from the perspective of our own living futures, retrospection from beyond our time will find the oral history a catastrophe, and the primary source record its own sort of archaeological challenge, seeking useful data in layers upon layers of noise. What will emerge will be a testament to fascination with self, and we can only wonder what story will people tell when humans finally achieve some manner of decent mastery of themselves. Actually, we have a hint, but that can be another discussion.
I think I may have mentioned that during the Paleolithic, cultures were very similar, or at least the archeology seems to suggest this. It stayed much the same for tens of thousands of years. Why didn't the diaspora evolve different myths, about the origin of fire use? Well, ok, it did to some extent, but all the fire-stealing myths look very similar, the same tale but moderated by retelling over millenia. Australia was colonised by migrating humans about 30 k years before North America. Why believe that these two groups independently put their own fire-stealing myth together? It makes more sense that there was an ancestral, more ancient myth which got tailored to suit, surely? The last known instance of migration is that of the Polynesians into the Pacific. In their mythology Maui is the mythical being who stole fire; in the Maori of NZ mythology, Maui also fished one of the islands out of the sea while standing on the other. Now that's adaptation.
No, what to do with the materials, the recipe, is the science. It's something a human knows about and it works, the result is the same for everyone who does it "properly". Can you recall an adult explaining to you as a child how to set a fire? Did they explain the science of combustion, or mention that fire is a spontaneous chemical reaction between oxygen in the air and cellulose fibres? No? What did early humans consider was the reason why they knew how to make it? I would say that reason was simply: "because we're human", an explanation which satisifes a question. Like the question they might have asked themselves about why the stars at night look fascinating, and why they can make out animal figures up there; the reason why is the same reason as above. So the "ordinary explanation"--our ancestors learned how to make fire and passed the knowledge (the science) down to us--might not have worked for them because it's less interesting, not fascinating enough. Perhaps. To your last para: you seem to be hinting that mythologies are still powerful enough today, or recently, that humans still prefer them over an actual history. I say, yeah. Probably. All said, I like reading Campbell (both Jeremy and Joseph); I don't necessarily prescribe to every theory put forth. Joseph Campbell is good, but today his works seem somewhat dated or out of date altogether. But anyway, that's history . . .
One last go at what human science actually is: You learned about the science of fire-making when young. No doubt you also learned, or were instructed, that fire can be dangerous, that you need to be careful and keep it under control. The science is this knowledge of making and control, of fire. You don't need to be told what fire is, that is fairly obvious, it kind of announces itself . . . So once this knowledge is yours. asking yourself why you know has an obvious answer. Asking yourself why you should use this knowledge, rather than forgetting about it, also kind of has an answer. None of the why questions changes the knowledge of making and controlling fire, in the least. Science is another word for knowledge.
The zodiac, that is why twelve.. it's significance goes back a long way arguably the animals in many cave paintings were related to the zodiac. There is a zodiac reasoning why Jesus had 12 followers and born on 25th December died on a cross and rose after three days...how many brothers for Jospeh? It was not that twelve worked there is much more to it than that. Nice work ..pleas continue. Notes. Martin Sweatman and his stuff. Alex
You may like this. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...FjARegQIAhAB&usg=AOvVaw1Bvk48N9abYlz7YiCYaVhh Alex
In Maori (which actually means either "people", or "normal" depending how it's used), the word whakapapa means history; usually attached to a tribal context. Like most words in Maori it's a compound, maybe with some contraction, maybe not. Anyways, the word whaka by itself translates variously as "canoe", "voyage", "carrying". etc. (very loosely, I'm not a 19th century British linguist). The word papa is a repeat-word, it's the word pa repeated; this generally signifies the plural case. A pa is a place Maori used to fortify and live inside, but generally it means "place", in terms of more generally, or loosely, a place to plant kumara. So whakapapa loosely translates as "a voyage from place to place", i.e. a history; also this is their art, the singing and dancing rituals (the haka, the powhiri, . . .) all tell a story about whakapapa. You will most likely find the word in a Maori-English dictionary translates as "genealogy". So the journey from place to place is occupied by ancestors. How did the Polynesians who colonised the place, know how to get there? The trial and error theory doesn't sound all that satisfying, they knew the Pacific was easy to get lost in. But back to the other part about being in a place you can plant something, like yams or kumara. The word plant is sometimes used in English, to mean assume a stance. Where does that one come from do you suppose? The word has Latin (hence also Greek) origins. The Latin word for a stand of young (recently planted) trees is plantarium. In Maori, the word for tree is tane, but this also means a young man. footnote: I planted my feet this morning.
A headnote on the scientific theory thing. Our tool-making implies that we could predict what would happen to rocks when we hammered them together, the flaking techniques that got better, over time, implies that there was a scientific theory. All a scientific theory is, is one that says if you do A you get B, reliably. You get a predictable result. And it has to be testable, you have to be able to apply the theory. What the early theories couldn't predict was how or when the tools would improve. They didn't factor in that humans were evolving, becoming "handier" and more dextrous, if not yet able to play the piano or sax.
Well, sure, but in this case↑, it's twelve because that's how the song goes↱. Oh, in re December 25: When the first Christmas was celebrated, that's when the Winter Solstice occurred. Precession has moved the calendar four days, since then. Last time I heard a date, Jesus' actual birthday would be something like July 2, per a corresponding astronomical event. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Click to down that medicine and dig yourself, baby.
Don't know if anyone else here is into Tim Finn's Waiata album, or the Finn brothers in general. The dictionary meaning of waiata is 'traditional' song, but waha also means to sing or singing (the language is flexible). Waha i ata means song of the dawn (you guess that ata means dawn or morning), so that means it's birds. Birds are, you know, animals. I see a tradition linking humans to animals, where singers become birds, or maybe the birds become humans, or maybe it doesn't matter which, as long as something happens.
