[as one of the topics is the Bible and Kosher eating, I thought this part
would be especially relivant].

                RELIGION EMERGES TO LEGITIMIZE CULTURE

        Evidence of the urge to impose or subjugate is found in the
coercive rites of uncleanness taboos of incipient religion.  The eventual
subduing of the world that is agriculture has at least some of its basis
where ambiguous behavior is ruled out, purity and defilement defined and
enforced.

        Levi-Strauss defined religion as the anthropomorphism of nature;
earlier spirituality was participatory with nature, not imposing cultural
values or traits upon it.  The sacred means that which is separated, and
ritual and formalization, increasingly removed from the ongoing activities
of daily life and in the control of such specialists as shamans and
priests, are closely linked with hiearchy and institutionalized power.
Religion emerges to ground and legitimize culture, by means of a "higher"
order of reality; it is especially required, in this function of
maintaining the solidarity of society, by the unnatural demands of
agriculture.

        In the Neolithic village of Catal Huytuk in Turkish Anatolia, one
of every three rooms were used for ritual purposes.  Plowing and sowing
can be seen as ritual renunciation, according to Burket, a form of
systematic repression accompanied by a sacrificial element.  Speaking of
sacrifice, which is the killing of domesticated animals (or even humans)
for ritual purposes, it is pervasive in agricultural societies and found
only there.

        Some of the major Neolithic religions often attempted a symbolic
healing of the agricultural rupture with nature through the mythology of
the earth mother, which needless to say does nothing to restore the lost
unity. [Note - those ugly little women ("venuses") are found in mass
graves of disinterred (ripped to pieces) males.  I don't know if they're
Neolithic or Paleolithic, though] Fertility myths are also central: the
Egyptian Osiris, the Greek Persephone, Baal of the Canaanites, and the New
Testament Jesus, gods whose death and ressurection testify to the
perseverance of the soil, not to mention the human soul.  The first
temples signified the rise of cosmologies based on a model of the universe
as an arena of domestication or barnyard, which in turn serves to justify
the suppression of human autonomy.  Whereas precivilized society was, as
Redfeild put it, ""held together by largely undeclared but continually
realized ethical conception," religion developed as a way of creating
citizens, placing the moral order under public management.

        Domestication involved the initiation of production, vastly
increased divisions of labor, and the completed foundations of social
stratification.  This amounted to an epochal mutation in both the
character of human existence and its development, clouding the latter with
ever more violence and work.  Contrary to the myth of hunter-gatherers as
violent and aggressive, by the way, revent evidence shows that existing
non-farmers, such as the Mbuti ("pygmies") studied by Turnbull, apparently
do what killing they do without any aggressive spirit, even with a sort of
regret.  Warfare and the formation of every civilization or state, on the
other hand, are inseparably linked.

        Primal peoples did not fight over areas which separate groups
might converge in their gathering and hunting.  At least "territorial"
struggles are not part of the ethnographic literature and they would seem
even less likely to have ocured in pre-history when resources were
greater and contact with civilization non-existent.

        Indeed, these peoples had no conception of private property, and
Rousseau's figurative judgement, that divided society was founded by the
man who first sowed a piece of ground, saying "This land is mine." and
found others to believe him, is essentially valid.  "Mine and tine, the
seeds of all mischief, have no place with them," reads Peitro's 1511
account of the natives encountered on the second voyage of Columbus.
Centuries later, surviving Native Americans asked, "Sell the Earth?  Why
not sell the air, the coulds, the great sea?"  Agriculture creates and
elevates possessions; consider the LONGING root of BELONGINGS, as if they
ever make up for the loss.

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Karl Alexis McKinnon|I live as the beasts in the fields, rejoicing in the
SP2                 |fleshly life. I favor the edible and curse the inedible.
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