Authors: Wade Davis
The sophistication of the figurative art found at
Chauvet and Altamira, and at later sites such as Lascaux and Pech Merle, is
astonishing not only for its transcendent beauty, but also for what it tells
us about the fluorescence of human potential once brought into being by
culture. The technical skills, the exploitation of red ochre and black
manganese, iron oxide and charcoal, to yield a full palette of colours, the
use of scaffolding, the diverse techniques to apply the pigments, are
themselves remarkable and suggest a relatively high level of social
organization and specialization that is echoed in the genius of the Upper
Paleolithic tool kit, the elegant scrapers and blades pounded from flint.
The use of negative space and shadow, the sense of composition and
perspective, the superimposition of animal forms through time indicates a
highly evolved artistic aesthetic that itself implies the expression of some
deeper yearning.
I recently spent a month in France in the
Dordogne with Clayton Eshleman, who has been studying the cave art for more
than thirty years, ever since a fateful morning in the spring of 1974 when
he abandoned, as he put it, the world of bird song and blue sky for a realm
of constricted darkness that filled his being with “mystical enthusiasm.”
Like so many observers before him he was dazzled yet perplexed not just by
what he saw but how he felt in the sensory isolation of the caves, his
imagination suspended between consciousness and the soul of an all-devouring
earth, a “living and fathomless reservoir of psychic force.” He paid
attention not only to what was depicted on the rock, but also to what was
missing — the bison and the horse being the most commonly portrayed animals,
with carnivores represented the least. The images float in isolation; there
are no backgrounds or ground lines. Depictions of people are few, and there
are no displays of fighting, no scenes of hunting, no representation of
physical conflict.
Northrop Frye struggled in vain to assign purpose
to these works. “We can add such words as
religion
and
magic
,” he wrote, “but the fact
remains that the complexity, urgency and sheer titanic power of the
motivation involved is something we cannot understand now, much less
recapture.” Frye saw the animals portrayed as a “kind of extension of human
consciousness and power into the objects of greatest energy and strength
they [the humans] could see in the world around them.” It was as if in
painting these forms onto rock, the artist was somehow assimilating the
“energy, the beauty, the elusive glory latent in nature to the observing
mind.” We look at the animal forms with human eyes and “suspect that we are
really seeing a sorcerer or shaman who has identified himself with the
animal by putting on its skin.”
Clayton, too, sensed that the cave art did much
more than invoke the magic of the hunt. Human beings, he suggested, were at
one time of an animal nature, and then at some point, whether we want to
admit it or not, were not. The art pays homage to that moment when human
beings, through consciousness, separated themselves from the animal realm,
emerging as the unique entity that we now know ourselves to be. Viewed in
this light the art may be seen — as Clayton has written — almost as
“postcards of nostalgia,” laments for a lost time when animals and people
were as one. Proto-shamanism, the first great spiritual impulse, grew as an
attempt to reconcile and even re-establish through ritual a separation that
was irrevocable. What is perhaps most remarkable is the fact that the
fundamentals of Upper Paleolithic art remained essentially unchanged for
literally 20,000 years, five times the chronological distance that separates
us today from the builders of the Great Pyramid at Giza. If these were
postcards of nostalgia, ours was a very long farewell indeed.
The cave art marked also the beginning of our
discontent, the restless quest for meaning and understanding that has
propelled the human dream ever since. Our entire existential experience as a
species over the past 50,000 years may be distilled into two words:
how
and
why
. These are the departure points
for all inquiry, the slivers of insight around which cultures have
crystallized.
All peoples face the same adaptive imperatives.
We all must give birth; raise, educate and protect our children; console our
elders as they move into their final years. Virtually all cultures would
endorse most tenets of the Ten Commandments, not because the Judaic world
was uniquely inspired, but because it articulated the rules that allowed a
social species to thrive. Few societies fail to outlaw murder or thievery.
All create traditions that bring consistency to coupling and procreation.
Every culture honours its dead, even as it struggles with the meaning of the
inexorable separation that death implies.
Given these common challenges, the range and
diversity of cultural adaptations is astonishing. Hunting and gathering
societies have flourished from the rain forests of Southeast Asia and the
Amazon to the dry flat deserts of Australia; from the Kalahari to the
remote, icy reaches of the high Arctic; from the broad American plains to
the pampas of Patagonia. Wayfarers and fishermen have settled virtually
every island chain in all the world’s oceans. Complex societies have been
built on the bounty of the sea alone, the salmon, eulachon, and herring that
brought life to the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest.
With the Neolithic revolution some 10,000 years
ago, humans began to domesticate plants and animals. Pastoral nomads settled
the marginal reaches of the planet: the sands of the Sahara, the Tibetan
plateau, and the windswept expanses of the Asian steppe. Agriculturalists
took a handful of grasses — wheat, barley, rice, oats, millet and maize —
and from their bounty generated surpluses, food that could be stored, thus
allowing for hierarchy, specialization, and sedentary life: all the
hallmarks of civilization, as traditionally defined. Great cities arose,
and, in time, kingdoms, empires, and nation-states.
No series of lectures can do justice to the full
wonder of the human cultural experience. The very word
culture
defies precise definition, even as the concept
embraces multitudes. A small, isolated society of a few hundred men and
women in the mountains of New Guinea has its own culture, but so, too, do
countries such as Ireland and France. Distinct cultures may share similar
spiritual beliefs — indeed, this is the norm in lands that have been
inspired by Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. While language in general
tends to delineate unique world views, there are peoples in Alaska, for
example, that have lost the ability to speak in their native tongues, yet
still maintain a thriving and vibrant sense of culture.
Perhaps the closest we can come to a meaningful
definition of
culture
is the acknowledgement that each is a unique and
ever-changing constellation we recognize through the observation and study
of its language, religion, social and economic organization, decorative
arts, stories, myths, ritual practices and beliefs, and a host of other
adaptive traits and characteristics. The full measure of a culture embraces
both the actions of a people and the quality of their aspirations, the
nature of the metaphors that propel their lives. And no description of a
people can be complete without reference to the character of their homeland,
the ecological and geographical matrix in which they have determined to live
out their destiny. Just as landscape defines character, culture springs from
a spirit of place.
Over the course of these lectures I look forward
to exploring some of these worlds with you. We’ll travel to Polynesia and
celebrate the art of navigation that allowed the wayfinders to infuse the
entire Pacific Ocean with their imagination and genius. In the Amazon await
the descendants of a true lost civilization, the Peoples of the Anaconda, a
complex of cultures inspired by mythological ancestors who even today
dictate how humans must live in the forest. In the Andean Cordillera and the
mountains of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta of Colombia we’ll discover
that the earth really is alive, pulsing, responsive in a thousand ways to
the spiritual readiness of humankind. Dreamtime and the Songlines will lead
to the melaleuca forests of Arnhem Land, as we seek to understand the subtle
philosophy of the first humans to walk out of Africa, the Aboriginal peoples
of Australia. In Nepal a stone path will take us to a door that will open to
reveal the radiant face of a wisdom hero, a Bodhisattva, Tsetsam Ani, a
Buddhist nun who forty-five years ago entered lifelong retreat. The flight
of a hornbill, like a cursive script of nature, will let us know that we
have arrived at last amongst the nomadic Penan in the upland forests of
Borneo.
What ultimately we will discover on this journey
will be our mission for the next century. There is a fire burning over the
earth, taking with it plants and animals, ancient skills and visionary
wisdom. At risk is a vast archive of knowledge and expertise, a catalogue of
the imagination, an oral and written language composed of the memories of
countless elders and healers, warriors, farmers, fishermen, midwives, poets,
and saints — in short, the artistic, intellectual, and spiritual expression
of the full complexity and diversity of the human experience. Quelling this
flame, this spreading inferno, and rediscovering a new appreciation for the
diversity of the human spirit as expressed by culture, is among the central
challenges of our times.
Two
THE WAYFINDERS
“That’s why we sail. So our children can grow up
and be proud of whom they are. We are healing our souls
by
reconnecting to our ancestors. As we voyage we
are creating new
stories within the tradition of
the old stories, we are literally
creating a new
culture out of the old.” — Nainoa Thompson
LET’S SLIP FOR A MOMENT
into the largest culture sphere ever brought
into being by the human imagination. Polynesia: 25 million square
kilometres, nearly a fifth of the surface of the planet, tens of thousands
of islands flung like jewels upon the southern sea. Some months ago I was
fortunate to join a good friend, Nainoa Thompson, and the Polynesian
Voyaging Society on a training mission on board the
Hokule’a
, a beautiful and iconic vessel named after
Arcturus, the sacred star of Hawaii. A replica of the great seafaring canoes
of ancient Polynesia, the
Hokule’a
is a double-hulled open-decked catamaran 62
feet long, 19 feet wide, lashed together by some 8 kilometres of rope, with
a fully loaded displacement of some 24,000 pounds. First launched in 1975,
the
Hokule’a
has since criss-crossed the Pacific, visiting
over the course of some 150,000 kilometres virtually every island group of
the Polynesian triangle, from Hawaii to Tahiti to the Cook Islands and
beyond to Aotearoa or New Zealand, east to the Marquesas, and south and east
to Rapa Nui, or Easter Island. Even more distant voyages have taken her to
the coast of Alaska and the shores of Japan. The
Hokule’a
carries a crew of ten, including captain and
wayfinder, two quite distinct roles. On board is not a single modern
navigational aid, save a radio only to be used in case of dire emergency.
There is no sextant, no depth gauge, no GPS, no transponder. There are only
the multiple senses of the navigator, the knowledge of the crew, and the
pride, authority, and power of an entire people reborn.
When European sailors first entered the Pacific
in the sixteenth century they encountered a new planet. Among the Spaniards
it was not Cortés but Vasco Núñez de Balboa who first stood silent upon a
peak in Darien and with eagle eyes stared with “wild surmise” upon an ocean
so vast it dwarfed the western islands, Homer’s realms of gold, and all the
“goodly states and kingdoms seen.” The poet John Keats, writing two
centuries later, imagined with awe what the first Spaniards must have felt.
Ferdinand Magellan in 1520 took thirty-eight days to round the horn, the
southern tip of South America, and with half his men dead, slipped into a
void he took to be a peaceful sea. He sailed on, and in four months upon the
water, with the surviving sailors dying by the day, he managed to miss every
populated island group in the Pacific. Finally on April 7, 1521, he landed
on the island of Cebu in what we now know as the Philippines. Magellan was a
brave man, ruthless in many ways, but also stubborn. In his desperation and
blindness he had by circumstance bypassed an entire civilization that might
have taught him a great deal indeed about the open water.
The first sustained contact between Polynesians
and the Spanish occurred three generations later, when in 1595 Álvaro de
Mendaña de Neira, following the easterly trades, came upon an archipelago of
ten volcanic islands rising as sentinels out of the equatorial sea. Before
even making landfall, he named them the Marquesas, after his patron, García
Hurtado de Mendoza, Marquis of Cañete, then viceroy of Peru. They comprised
the most isolated island group in the world, and yet were home at the time
to as many as 300,000 people who knew their islands as
Te Henua
,
Te Enata
, “the land of men.”
It was an extraordinary meeting of civilizations.
The Marquesans considered their islands to be the end of the world, the last
stop on a mythical journey that had carried their ancestors along wind and
waves from the west. Every human being was a descendant of Tiki, the first
human, and each clan could trace its genealogical history to the primordial
diaspora that had come out of the setting sun. Beyond the horizon to the
east were the lands of the afterworld, where spirits departed the body and
plunged into the sea. Thus, to the Marquesans, the Spaniards were as demons,
embodiments of depravity born beyond the far reaches of the eastern sky.
Carnal and deceitful, cruel beyond reason, the Spaniards offered nothing.
They had no skills, no food or women, no knowledge of even the most
fundamental elements of the natural world. Their wealth lay only in what
they possessed, curious metal objects that were not without interest. But
they had no understanding that true wealth was found in prestige, and that
status could only be conferred upon one capable of acquiring social debts
and distributing surplus food to those in need, thus guaranteeing freedom
from want. The white Atua — these strangers who came from beyond all shores
— had no place in the order of life. Such was their barbaric state that
sorcery did not affect them, or even the power of the priests. So complete
was their ignorance that they did not distinguish commoners from chiefs,
even as they treated both with murderous disdain.
The Spaniards, for their part, were confounded by
an island people who appeared both gentle and merciless, often in the same
moment. Here were great warriors fully capable of ruthless violence. Yet
their conflicts were seasonal, preconceived, scheduled, and ritualized. A
single death could signal the end of battle. The Marquesans had no sense of
time, no notion of sin or shame. Their young women flaunted their beauty and
were openly sexual, and yet were scandalized and disgusted when the
Spaniards relieved themselves in public, as any normal man would do. If
sexual licentiousness titillated and confused, cannibalism and human
sacrifice horrified, as did the practice of polyandry and the impossible
irrationality of
tapu
, the indigenous system of magical rules and
sanctions that later gave rise to the notion of taboo. Yet other signs of
savagery were the glowing blue-black tattoos that covered every part of the
Marquesan male body between the waist and the knees, including the most
sensitive surfaces of the genitalia.
For the Spaniards the most perplexing question
was how such a primitive people could have accomplished so much. Entire
mountainsides and river valleys had been domesticated with monumental stone
terraces, irrigation canals, and massive platforms where thousands could
gather for ceremonial events, the feasts and celebrations that marked the
end of war or the accession of a chief. At such moments, a priest would
recite the entire mythological history of the world, hundreds of lines of
sacred verse held in the memory of a single man. If he faltered or stumbled
on a single phrase, he would be obliged to begin anew, for the words defined
the contours of history, even as they anticipated the promise of the future.
Around the platforms stretched emerald fields of taro and yams, pandanus and
coconuts. The tree of life was breadfruit, and in the cool earth the
Marquesans built massive stone pits where literally tons of the starchy food
could be stored in anaerobic conditions, an eight-month supply held in
reserve at all times, so that the people might survive even the most
terrifying and destructive of typhoons.
Pedro Fernández de Queirós, second in command of
the Spanish expedition, concluded that the natives he and his comrades met
on the beach could not possibly have been responsible for the civilization
so indelibly etched onto the land. He noted how the local women swarmed
around the Spanish ships like fish because they were forbidden by tapu from
using canoes. How could a culture that had no means of transporting its
women settle a string of islands three months distant from the nearest
outpost of the Spanish realm? How could men without benefit of a magnetic
compass, which he noted they lacked, have sailed to these islands?
Conflating myth with geography, he concluded that the Marquesas were in fact
an outpost of a great southern continent, and that the people had been
transported to the islands by an ancient civilization still waiting to be
discovered. Thus, within a month of making landfall, the Spaniards sailed on
into the Pacific, searching for this legendary land, a futile quest that
would consume the rest of Fernández de Queirós’s life.
QUEIRÓS WAS NOT
the last sailor to be misled and confounded by
the enigma of Polynesia. At a time when European transports, lacking
navigational instruments to measure longitude, hugged the coastlines of
continents for fear of the open ocean, accounts trickled back to Paris and
Amsterdam of fleets of curious vessels plying the open waters of the
Pacific. In 1616 a Dutch naval ship sailing between Tonga and Samoa came
upon a flotilla of massive seagoing trading canoes. In 1714, when a mansion
in London could be fully furnished for hundred pounds, the British
government through an act of Parliament offered a prize of 20,000 British
pounds to anyone who could solve the problem of determining longitude. Until
the invention of the chronometer, navigators relied on dead reckoning, which
made it hazardous for an ordinary ship to sail beyond sight of land. Yet in
the Pacific something exceptional was going on.
Captain James Cook, arguably the finest navigator
in the history of the Royal Navy, was the first to pay serious notice. When
he landed in Hawaii, his flagship was met by a flotilla of 3,000 native
canoes. At Tonga, he observed that local catamarans could cover three
leagues in the time it took his ship to achieve two. He encountered men from
the Marquesas who could understand the language of Tahitians, though nearly
1,600 kilometres separated these islands. On his very first voyage in 1769
he met in Tahiti a navigator and priest, Tupaia, who drew a map from memory
of every major island group in Polynesia, save Hawaii and Aotearoa. More
than 120 stones were placed in the sand, each a symbol of an island across a
span of more than 4,000 kilometres from the Marquesas in the east to Fiji in
the west, a distance equal to the width of the continental United States.
Tupaia later sailed with Cook from Tahiti to New Zealand, a circuitous
journey of nearly 13,000 kilometres that ranged between 48 degrees south
latitude and 4 degrees north. To his astonishment, Cook reported, the
Polynesian navigator was able to indicate, at every moment of the voyage,
the precise direction back to Tahiti, though he had neither benefit of
sextant nor knowledge of charts.
Cook and his naturalist, Joseph Banks, who both
learned Tahitian, recognized the obvious cultural connections between the
distant islands. Linguistic evidence suggested to Banks that the people of
the Pacific had originated in the East Indies. Cook, too, was convinced that
the settling of Polynesia had occurred from the west. From Tupaia he had
learned certain secrets of the winds, how to follow the sun by day and the
stars by night, and he was enormously impressed when the navigator described
in detail sailing directions from Tahiti to Samoa and Fiji, south to
Australia, and east all the way to the Marquesas. But he never could quite
convince himself that these journeys had been purposeful. He knew the fury
of the Pacific, and had encountered a group of Tahitians who, helpless in
the face of a headwind, had drifted hundreds of kilometres off course, only
to be marooned for months in the Cook Islands.
Thus began a debate that spun over the waters for
almost two centuries. Who really were these people? Where had they come
from? And how had they reached across an ocean to settle these impossibly
remote and isolated lands? In 1832 the French explorer Dumont d’Urville
classified the peoples of the Pacific into three categories. Micronesians
inhabited the small atolls of the western Pacific north of the equator.
Melanesians dwelt in the “dark islands” of New Guinea, the Solomons,
Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Fiji. Polynesia encompassed what remained, the
“many islands” of the eastern Pacific. Micronesia, named for the size of the
islands, and Melanesia, named for the colour of its inhabitants’ skin, were
both arbitrary designations. They linger to this day despite having no
historical or ethnographic justification. But in distinguishing the people
of Polynesia, Dumont d’Urville recognized what every captain’s log had
recorded: There was effectively a single cultural realm of closely related
languages and shared historical vision spread across an entire ocean, with
the most extreme points separated one from one another by a distance equal
to twice the width of Canada. That the Polynesians had occupied these
islands was self-evident. Explanations for how they had done so exemplified
what the poet Walt Whitman meant when he wrote that history is the swindle
of the schoolmasters.
As early as 1803, citing the impossibility of
sailing east into the prevailing winds, Joaquín Martinez de Zuniga, a
Spanish priest stationed in the Philippines, identified South America as the
place of Polynesian origins. A little while later, John Lang, an influential
clergyman in the early days of the Australian colony of New South Wales,
first suggested the notion of “accidental drift,” accepting that Polynesians
had settled the islands from the west, but only by chance, hapless sailors
blown off course, fishermen who went out for food only to stumble upon new
lands. This notion of serendipitous diffusion defied logic — after all, what
fisherman takes to sea his entire domestic tool kit, chickens, pigs, dogs,
taro, bananas, yams, not to mention his family — but as an explanation it
had the convenience of acknowledging historical facts while denying
Polynesian people what we now know to have been their greatest achievement.
Accidental drift, championed in particular by a New Zealand civil servant,
Andrew Sharp, was not laid to rest until the early 1970s, when a series of
sophisticated computer simulations, based on naval hydrographic records of
wind and currents, concluded that out of 16,000 simulated drift voyages from
various points in eastern Polynesia, not one had managed to reach Hawaii.