Race Riots…what’s your beef?
Burgers, high-speed trains and the myth of slavery
Ecological destruction and institutional racism aren’t poles apart
J Grigsby
As an archaeologist I’m interested in the roots of cultures, the beginnings of things; and I mean way back, not historically, but prehistorically - but what of the beginnings of our current situation, the race riots taking place this week across the world in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis? The world is aflame with protests against institutional racism. This is happening now and I want to write this now. So, I’m writing quickly and off the cuff, not bothering with footnotes. It’s a swift response, perhaps not thought through as much as I’d like, but hey ho.
I’m not going all the way back, though, we know the Egyptians had slaves, for instance – but I’m looking for the beginnings in western, predominantly white, European culture, so I’ll only go back about 5000 years. Can we identify some kind of idealistic beginning to this mess? And if so, what use would it be to get to the root of it? I’ll answer with an analogy: I’ve been gardening this spring I’ve come to realise that bindweed is hard to eradicate; if you pull up the plants it returns, like some insidious serpent. The question is can we root out systemic racism in the same way we can remove (with difficulty) bindweed? You can’t just pull up the visible plant; for even a tiny fragment of a root can grow another plant; it’s the same with racism; you can’t simply pull down a statue or remove a leader if the roots are endemic within the culture itself, not just where the flowers are seen growing; But we might be able to root it out if we know how it starts, how it has been prevalent in our culture for millennia; and if we can find out where we took the road down that route we might be able to remake that decision and find another way. Choose to return to the fork in the road and take the one less travelled. The path with a heart, as Castaneda’s Don Juan would call it.
I’m going to start midway through this history and work backwards and forwards from there.
To explain all of this I’ll begin with a word.
The word is Welsh. The name of the language and inhabitants of Wales. Yet it is not their name. The real Welsh call themselves the Cymru – the compatriots; Welsh is a name applied from without, by the English. It means foreigner. It also means slave. What does this say about these two neighbouring cultures? Now, it doesn’t necessarily just imply the English had Welsh slaves; their word Wealh, meaning foreigner, was certainly inherited from their continental Germanic ancestors, and may have simply come from an observation that their southern neighbours, the Latin speaking Romans and the Gauls they had conquered, said ‘Vale’ as a greeting (pronounced Wah-lay in Latin). These were the people who said Wale. The Wales. This term then became wealh, a cover-all for foreigner, any foreigner not speaking Germanic, including, when they had come to Britain, the Welsh…that is, the native Brythonic speaking populations (including the Cornovii tribe in the south-west – who lived in what the Saxon’s called Corn-Wealh – Cornwall). Now, to what extent the Welsh were driven from Britain by the English, or to what extent their geographical location was defined by how far the Romans before the English had conqured, we don’t know. To what extent Latin had replaced the British language in the lowlands before the English came we don’t know either, but what we do know is that there are only 6 Welsh loanwords in English. 6!. To put this in perspective, there’s probably near a hundred common ones from Hindi, from the Indian occupation of the Victorian and later periods, including bungalow, pyjamas, pukka. But 6? This, it is thought, is evidence of a systematic campaign to eradicate the language. Historians talk about an apartheid-like system whereby English males could marry Welsh women, but not Welsh males marry English… and no Welsh language was allowed to be spoken. The genetic studies suggest the same. Welsh genes are not eradicated, the ‘English’ of today are a mongrel race, but the language died. The Welsh blood remained, became mixed with the English, but the culture was wiped out, save for a few place names, like that for river (Afon/Avon).
We can see this cultural assassination continuing with the ‘Welsh Not’ – a wooden board hung round the necks of Welsh schoolkids in the nineteenth century (and into the twentieth) who were heard by their teacher speaking Welsh at school. It was a punishment, a degradation, aimed at eradicating the native language – and it was aped, almost to a ‘t’ – by the treatment of Native Americans in the States, with the often physical beating of their cultural roots out of them by the dominant European culture, in the horrific boarding school system.
So, are the English to blame? That the name Welsh – foreigner also meant slave in Anglo-Saxon suggests the practice of slavery was endemic in English culture from the first – but it did not originate there. The Celts (if we can still use the term, historians no longer like it) and the Mediterranean cultures of Greece and Rome also had slaves – and I’m not going to try to find the ultimate origin, only to find the first obvious cultural expression. Where slavery became justified by myth.
You see there is a myth present in the Indo-European world (that is, the cultures speaking Indian and European languages) a culture that spread possibly from the Russian Steppes c 3000 BC; this culture lies at the roots of the European west, and some Near Eastern cultures, such as those of the Indian Subcontinent – and it has a founding myth that has justified imperialist military male dominance for thousands of years. It is THE most dominant myth in our current age and the most destructive myth still prevalent.
The clearest discussion of this myth is by Bruce Lincoln in his paper on the Cattle theft, written in the 70s at the University of Chicago (“The Indo-European Cattle-Raiding Myth” August 1976; History of Religions 16(1):42-65). He states how the Indo-European (hereafter IE) peoples had a core myth that lay behind their prolific expansion and success in the ancient world. It told of how they owned some cattle which were stolen by a serpent (three-headed, no less) named *ṇgWhi ‘snake’, who was expressly identified with the aboriginal peoples of the land; the IE peoples, headed by horse-riding warriors, rescued the cows and took the land, property, and women of the aboriginals in recompense for the ‘theft’. This, Lincoln says, is the imperialist myth par excellence, and has justified the taking of all lands from indigenous tribes henceforth… from the Roman invasion of Britain to the seizing of the Black Hills from the Lakotah Sioux (funnily enough the term Sioux comes from Nadowessioux, meaning "little snakes", a pejorative term given them by the Ojibwe).
Now the myth is dangerous on so many levels.
One, it expressly identifies the aboriginals with animals – i.e. the snake or monster *ṇgWhi; it dehumanises them; puts them in a ‘lower’ position than the warrior-tribes (the Arya, as they were known – yes, this was THE myth utilised by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews); just as the Jews were associated with vermin, with rats, cockroaches (note, this only works in a system that already denigrates animals – this wouldn’t work in cultures like animistic Amazonian tribes who look up to and respect animals) to kill a member of this lesser race was no more sinful than killing a beast. Two tenets stand out, then - animals are soulless objects to be exploited; and there are classes of men who are no better than the animals. These two beliefs have caused more evil than any other over the last few millennia, I would argue.
Two; the aboriginals are also often identified with darker skinned peoples. The Vedic scriptures call them Dasa or Daysu – it means stranger, and, eventually, slave…just like ‘wealh’; and sometimes been linked to Pani, demon. Now this is an historical fact, in that when the myth was carried to India, the Aryan horsemen, possibly originating from the Steppes, were lighter in skin tone than the indigenous people whose lands they wished to take, the local Dravidian cultures. The black vs white imagery in the Vedas at least does not seem to come from some deep archetypal layer of the psyche where black is dark and evil and white is light and good, but from actual physical differences. However, to ascribe qualitative differences in human worth from difference in skin tone is just biological nonsense. It’s just a biological fact that when people moved further north they lost their darker skin in order to better absorb the lower levels of Vitamin D in these latitudes. That’s it. That’s the difference between white and black biologically. There’s your white supremacy – its skin deep. But in the Vedas we perhaps see the start of ascribing human worth to skin colour -the beginning of the idea of castes, of sub-humans.
But there are other points, too:
The cattle thieving myth sees land as something that is taken in war, in hostility; this is no sense of belonging to one’s own land, its violent seizing of territory for territory sake. It is expansionist; it just wants more land. It is land to be stripped of trees and used for growing crops and keeping the herds of cows; it is the same process that sees aboriginal Amazonians turfed out their own land so the forest can be destroyed and huge cattle ranches set up. McDonalds and other pillars of the meat industry and living by a 5000-year old imperialistic myth. And as half the world starves the other thrives. And why do they think they can do it? Because this myth is rooted in the psyches of the western world. It is the founding myth of the Founding Fathers. This land is mine. And they have claimed them, like the ancient IE warlords did, by driving their (iron)horses across the face of the earth, claiming the land beneath each and every footfall…
So, the land, and its animals, plants etc are utility, commodities, their importance lies in making wealth for the few. Nature itself is to be enslaved; the aboriginals will lose their land; nature means nothing if it doesn’t provide wealth for a few dominant individuals (usually white and male).
Why male? Because the myth is also mysogynist.
My work over the last 20 years has been to examine this cattle theft myth for its true origins. In my Book ‘Warriors of the Wasteland’ I explained how it gave rise to a nature-hating androcentric warrior cult (to which the Grail legend was a foil, and an attempt to reverse); In Beowulf I showed how such a myth was enacted in Dark Age Europe, using Denmark as an example, and in my PhD I showed how the myth was basically a bastardisation of an earlier seasonal myth, and that it had been radically altered to suit a few men, and this had involved removing, hiding, obfuscating the presence of an original female figure in the myth.
I won’t go into it too much here as you can read it in my thesis (online) but basically a goddess has been removed from these myths; there used to be a twin god and goddess who created the cosmos, but the IE cultures distorted this older farming myth, cast aside the goddess and replaced her with a male figure (this lost twin myth makes up the bulk of the ideas behind my novel ‘The Milk of Paradise’, too, so I’m continuing with this theme even in fiction).
What I argued in my PhD was something vital and what hadn’t been seen before: the cattle theft myth which justified western imperialism was a bastardised creation myth that had NONE of the political sentiments of its later form. In Part One of my PhD I go at lengths to show that the ‘cattle’ stolen by the aboriginals and ‘rescued’ by the Arya was a symbol for the sun – and that the whole myth was about the loss of the power of the sun in the winter, the decline in fertility – symbolised as the solar-power becoming imprisoned, or abducted, in the underworld, over winter, until rescued in the spring. This power was, in Neolithic imagery, associated with the female and the cow. The rescue was at the hands of Orion, the constellation that ‘carried’ the sun out of the horizon (underworld) at midwinter, and later, spring, from out of the hands of Scorpio, the three-headed serpent of the myth. This is ultimately the origin of the Sir George and the Dragon image. It was an astronomical and seasonal myth that probably originated in the Near East or even Egypt some time from 10,000 to 7000 BC.
What the later IE cultures did was to twist the seasonal myth into an imperialistic one. Scorpio, the dragon, became identified with the people whose lands the IE horse-riding peoples desired – and just as the three-headed serpent took the sun back to the underworld over winter, so the aboriginals were seen to have ‘stolen’ the cattle and land from the Arya, who took the Orion role and ‘rescued’ it back – even though the land and cattle and women had NEVER been theirs to begin with. They took a beautiful seasonal allegory and used it to selfish ends.
Every tribesman, aboriginal or oppressed culture that the western imperialists have encountered over the past 5000 years have been demonised as the serpent, the evil in Eden that needs rooting out, so that the IE horse-lord and farmer can claim their land, chop down their trees, rape their women, destroy their language and culture, and take their land to exploit for wealth – all in the name of progress, a divinely sanctioned progress promulgated by this hideous expansionist myth.
It’s still happening now with the destruction of primal woodlands in the heart of England so the rich can grow richer and ride their Iron-horses roughshod over the land in order to make themselves more money – wealth over nature; wealth over wealh; fuck nature, fuck the trees, the bats, the badgers, the glow-worms, perhaps even the spirits of the land we fail to acknowledge (though feted in most aboriginal cultures). The destruction of the Amazon, the Dakotah pipeline, HS2, fracking; these are all schemes with an aim of making the rich richer, with no respect for the environment – because nature is a commodity and we are its master. But it is this myth which is the real serpent in Eden and which needs rooting out, like the bindweed in my garden…
Endemic racism is connected, 100%, to the decline in the power of the feminine, and the disrespect for nature and indigenous culture in any form – it is all tied in to the same myth; nature and woman as a commodity to be seized, owned, raped, used, exploited; and aboriginal cultures to be eradicated, removed, as they are on ‘our’ land, land given to us by god or whoever, given by divine right… like that relentless march west over America displacing, abusing, murdering and stealing land from those already there. Manifest Destiny. All stemming idealistically from a once beautiful myth twisted, beaten out of shape – like Tolkien’s orcs, once beautiful elves malformed through torture… this myth has become so deep-rooted it is almost invisible. And now we’re setting off to space, looking for that ever expanding western horizon to grab, seize, consume, bleed dry, destroy…
By identifying the roots of the myth, however, I suggest we at least have an option. We can see how it is an aberration. We can see how it formed and how its short-sighted expansionist agenda, which certainly helped it expand (through violence and terror), may have worked to help members of its own culture survive in prehistoric times – but in the modern period, it threatens to destroy ALL life. There is not enough land to keep turning into cattle pasture, not without cutting down all the trees, the lungs of the earth (the cry ‘I can’t breathe’ echoes in my mind).
Lincoln says of *ṇgWhi that ‘Moreover, his serpentine form marks him as being in close connection with the earth. He is the aborigine, uncivilized and bound to his land, who opposes the I-E invader and meets defeat at his hands.’ Thus the native is closer to nature, and this inherent racism is also a distrust of nature. The image of Adam crushing the serpents head with his heel in the Bible brings to mind the violence against George Floyd in 2020. Horse-riding police herding up and fighting protestors… it is Sir George and the dragon again; these knights on horseback… imperialistic, fascistic; yet the dragon they’re facing is a hydra...
What’s more, McDonalds and every fast-food joint subsists on this same destructive myth; and those that eat here and then cast their litter on the ground and choke up our hedgerows and parks have literally the same disrespect for nature; the land is a commodity; it’s for rearing cows. Why should we respect or love it, they seem to say? Why pick up that trash? Someone else will do it for them – probably someone from a lower class, or a foreign worker. Someone Dasa or Daysu. Disrespect for nature and disrespect for individual lives goes hand in hand.
My book ‘Warriors of the Wasteland’ argued for a return to the older system, with a respect for nature, a return to that nature mysticism, and looked at the Grail myth, a quest to bring back that which was cast aside, the old ways of relationship with the land; the pre-IE way; a new respect for the feminine, for nature, for the indigenous, the aboriginal.
This isn’t just a pipe dream. This is a necessity if we are to survive as a species. The old perversion of the seasonal myth must be undone. Cast aside.
The time for the IE warrior on his horse, his iron-horse, be it a fast car or high-speed train, needs to be brought to an end; he cannot ride roughshod over nature anymore. The IE peoples used to let loose a horse on the land, and any land it covered, belonged to the owner of the horse. Man thinks anywhere his machines with their ‘horse-power’ can take him is his… even into space. But this is hubris and he is asking to be visited by nemesis…He cannot think himself superior to the female, or to people of colour; a biological adaptation to help the absorption of a vitamin from low sunlight cannot be the basis for this superiority; it’s so stupid its almost laughable if it wasn’t so tragic.
The old myths identified with Dasa, the Daysu, with the serpent, close to nature. That is not to be destroyed but seen as a positive thing; we need to return to our roots and embrace the land; belong to it, stop cutting down the trees, stop throwing away our burger wrappers into the hedgerows… stop eating bloody burgers to begin with; start eating plants that can sustain all people on earth, not meat that can just sustain the richest.
A new myth needs to be written, in which the Dasa steal back the cattle from the horse-lords and lead them back into the forest where they belong. But myths are made, not written; they arise from the psyche like dreams and made concrete through action.
Perhaps a new myth is arising in the blood and smoked filled streets of western cities; perhaps it is arising in the hearts and minds of young artists and dreamers, like Greta Thunberg; either way the 5000 year old myth of male dominance, of the warrior on horseback, the beef-baron with his tree-killing axe, needs to be weeded out of the Garden that is the Eden in which we live, before we kill it, and ourselves, for good. The supremacist has knelt too long on the neck of natural man. I can’t breathe. He says. We can’t breathe.
Burgers, high-speed trains and the myth of slavery
Ecological destruction and institutional racism aren’t poles apart
J Grigsby
As an archaeologist I’m interested in the roots of cultures, the beginnings of things; and I mean way back, not historically, but prehistorically - but what of the beginnings of our current situation, the race riots taking place this week across the world in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis? The world is aflame with protests against institutional racism. This is happening now and I want to write this now. So, I’m writing quickly and off the cuff, not bothering with footnotes. It’s a swift response, perhaps not thought through as much as I’d like, but hey ho.
I’m not going all the way back, though, we know the Egyptians had slaves, for instance – but I’m looking for the beginnings in western, predominantly white, European culture, so I’ll only go back about 5000 years. Can we identify some kind of idealistic beginning to this mess? And if so, what use would it be to get to the root of it? I’ll answer with an analogy: I’ve been gardening this spring I’ve come to realise that bindweed is hard to eradicate; if you pull up the plants it returns, like some insidious serpent. The question is can we root out systemic racism in the same way we can remove (with difficulty) bindweed? You can’t just pull up the visible plant; for even a tiny fragment of a root can grow another plant; it’s the same with racism; you can’t simply pull down a statue or remove a leader if the roots are endemic within the culture itself, not just where the flowers are seen growing; But we might be able to root it out if we know how it starts, how it has been prevalent in our culture for millennia; and if we can find out where we took the road down that route we might be able to remake that decision and find another way. Choose to return to the fork in the road and take the one less travelled. The path with a heart, as Castaneda’s Don Juan would call it.
I’m going to start midway through this history and work backwards and forwards from there.
To explain all of this I’ll begin with a word.
The word is Welsh. The name of the language and inhabitants of Wales. Yet it is not their name. The real Welsh call themselves the Cymru – the compatriots; Welsh is a name applied from without, by the English. It means foreigner. It also means slave. What does this say about these two neighbouring cultures? Now, it doesn’t necessarily just imply the English had Welsh slaves; their word Wealh, meaning foreigner, was certainly inherited from their continental Germanic ancestors, and may have simply come from an observation that their southern neighbours, the Latin speaking Romans and the Gauls they had conquered, said ‘Vale’ as a greeting (pronounced Wah-lay in Latin). These were the people who said Wale. The Wales. This term then became wealh, a cover-all for foreigner, any foreigner not speaking Germanic, including, when they had come to Britain, the Welsh…that is, the native Brythonic speaking populations (including the Cornovii tribe in the south-west – who lived in what the Saxon’s called Corn-Wealh – Cornwall). Now, to what extent the Welsh were driven from Britain by the English, or to what extent their geographical location was defined by how far the Romans before the English had conqured, we don’t know. To what extent Latin had replaced the British language in the lowlands before the English came we don’t know either, but what we do know is that there are only 6 Welsh loanwords in English. 6!. To put this in perspective, there’s probably near a hundred common ones from Hindi, from the Indian occupation of the Victorian and later periods, including bungalow, pyjamas, pukka. But 6? This, it is thought, is evidence of a systematic campaign to eradicate the language. Historians talk about an apartheid-like system whereby English males could marry Welsh women, but not Welsh males marry English… and no Welsh language was allowed to be spoken. The genetic studies suggest the same. Welsh genes are not eradicated, the ‘English’ of today are a mongrel race, but the language died. The Welsh blood remained, became mixed with the English, but the culture was wiped out, save for a few place names, like that for river (Afon/Avon).
We can see this cultural assassination continuing with the ‘Welsh Not’ – a wooden board hung round the necks of Welsh schoolkids in the nineteenth century (and into the twentieth) who were heard by their teacher speaking Welsh at school. It was a punishment, a degradation, aimed at eradicating the native language – and it was aped, almost to a ‘t’ – by the treatment of Native Americans in the States, with the often physical beating of their cultural roots out of them by the dominant European culture, in the horrific boarding school system.
So, are the English to blame? That the name Welsh – foreigner also meant slave in Anglo-Saxon suggests the practice of slavery was endemic in English culture from the first – but it did not originate there. The Celts (if we can still use the term, historians no longer like it) and the Mediterranean cultures of Greece and Rome also had slaves – and I’m not going to try to find the ultimate origin, only to find the first obvious cultural expression. Where slavery became justified by myth.
You see there is a myth present in the Indo-European world (that is, the cultures speaking Indian and European languages) a culture that spread possibly from the Russian Steppes c 3000 BC; this culture lies at the roots of the European west, and some Near Eastern cultures, such as those of the Indian Subcontinent – and it has a founding myth that has justified imperialist military male dominance for thousands of years. It is THE most dominant myth in our current age and the most destructive myth still prevalent.
The clearest discussion of this myth is by Bruce Lincoln in his paper on the Cattle theft, written in the 70s at the University of Chicago (“The Indo-European Cattle-Raiding Myth” August 1976; History of Religions 16(1):42-65). He states how the Indo-European (hereafter IE) peoples had a core myth that lay behind their prolific expansion and success in the ancient world. It told of how they owned some cattle which were stolen by a serpent (three-headed, no less) named *ṇgWhi ‘snake’, who was expressly identified with the aboriginal peoples of the land; the IE peoples, headed by horse-riding warriors, rescued the cows and took the land, property, and women of the aboriginals in recompense for the ‘theft’. This, Lincoln says, is the imperialist myth par excellence, and has justified the taking of all lands from indigenous tribes henceforth… from the Roman invasion of Britain to the seizing of the Black Hills from the Lakotah Sioux (funnily enough the term Sioux comes from Nadowessioux, meaning "little snakes", a pejorative term given them by the Ojibwe).
Now the myth is dangerous on so many levels.
One, it expressly identifies the aboriginals with animals – i.e. the snake or monster *ṇgWhi; it dehumanises them; puts them in a ‘lower’ position than the warrior-tribes (the Arya, as they were known – yes, this was THE myth utilised by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews); just as the Jews were associated with vermin, with rats, cockroaches (note, this only works in a system that already denigrates animals – this wouldn’t work in cultures like animistic Amazonian tribes who look up to and respect animals) to kill a member of this lesser race was no more sinful than killing a beast. Two tenets stand out, then - animals are soulless objects to be exploited; and there are classes of men who are no better than the animals. These two beliefs have caused more evil than any other over the last few millennia, I would argue.
Two; the aboriginals are also often identified with darker skinned peoples. The Vedic scriptures call them Dasa or Daysu – it means stranger, and, eventually, slave…just like ‘wealh’; and sometimes been linked to Pani, demon. Now this is an historical fact, in that when the myth was carried to India, the Aryan horsemen, possibly originating from the Steppes, were lighter in skin tone than the indigenous people whose lands they wished to take, the local Dravidian cultures. The black vs white imagery in the Vedas at least does not seem to come from some deep archetypal layer of the psyche where black is dark and evil and white is light and good, but from actual physical differences. However, to ascribe qualitative differences in human worth from difference in skin tone is just biological nonsense. It’s just a biological fact that when people moved further north they lost their darker skin in order to better absorb the lower levels of Vitamin D in these latitudes. That’s it. That’s the difference between white and black biologically. There’s your white supremacy – its skin deep. But in the Vedas we perhaps see the start of ascribing human worth to skin colour -the beginning of the idea of castes, of sub-humans.
But there are other points, too:
The cattle thieving myth sees land as something that is taken in war, in hostility; this is no sense of belonging to one’s own land, its violent seizing of territory for territory sake. It is expansionist; it just wants more land. It is land to be stripped of trees and used for growing crops and keeping the herds of cows; it is the same process that sees aboriginal Amazonians turfed out their own land so the forest can be destroyed and huge cattle ranches set up. McDonalds and other pillars of the meat industry and living by a 5000-year old imperialistic myth. And as half the world starves the other thrives. And why do they think they can do it? Because this myth is rooted in the psyches of the western world. It is the founding myth of the Founding Fathers. This land is mine. And they have claimed them, like the ancient IE warlords did, by driving their (iron)horses across the face of the earth, claiming the land beneath each and every footfall…
So, the land, and its animals, plants etc are utility, commodities, their importance lies in making wealth for the few. Nature itself is to be enslaved; the aboriginals will lose their land; nature means nothing if it doesn’t provide wealth for a few dominant individuals (usually white and male).
Why male? Because the myth is also mysogynist.
My work over the last 20 years has been to examine this cattle theft myth for its true origins. In my Book ‘Warriors of the Wasteland’ I explained how it gave rise to a nature-hating androcentric warrior cult (to which the Grail legend was a foil, and an attempt to reverse); In Beowulf I showed how such a myth was enacted in Dark Age Europe, using Denmark as an example, and in my PhD I showed how the myth was basically a bastardisation of an earlier seasonal myth, and that it had been radically altered to suit a few men, and this had involved removing, hiding, obfuscating the presence of an original female figure in the myth.
I won’t go into it too much here as you can read it in my thesis (online) but basically a goddess has been removed from these myths; there used to be a twin god and goddess who created the cosmos, but the IE cultures distorted this older farming myth, cast aside the goddess and replaced her with a male figure (this lost twin myth makes up the bulk of the ideas behind my novel ‘The Milk of Paradise’, too, so I’m continuing with this theme even in fiction).
What I argued in my PhD was something vital and what hadn’t been seen before: the cattle theft myth which justified western imperialism was a bastardised creation myth that had NONE of the political sentiments of its later form. In Part One of my PhD I go at lengths to show that the ‘cattle’ stolen by the aboriginals and ‘rescued’ by the Arya was a symbol for the sun – and that the whole myth was about the loss of the power of the sun in the winter, the decline in fertility – symbolised as the solar-power becoming imprisoned, or abducted, in the underworld, over winter, until rescued in the spring. This power was, in Neolithic imagery, associated with the female and the cow. The rescue was at the hands of Orion, the constellation that ‘carried’ the sun out of the horizon (underworld) at midwinter, and later, spring, from out of the hands of Scorpio, the three-headed serpent of the myth. This is ultimately the origin of the Sir George and the Dragon image. It was an astronomical and seasonal myth that probably originated in the Near East or even Egypt some time from 10,000 to 7000 BC.
What the later IE cultures did was to twist the seasonal myth into an imperialistic one. Scorpio, the dragon, became identified with the people whose lands the IE horse-riding peoples desired – and just as the three-headed serpent took the sun back to the underworld over winter, so the aboriginals were seen to have ‘stolen’ the cattle and land from the Arya, who took the Orion role and ‘rescued’ it back – even though the land and cattle and women had NEVER been theirs to begin with. They took a beautiful seasonal allegory and used it to selfish ends.
Every tribesman, aboriginal or oppressed culture that the western imperialists have encountered over the past 5000 years have been demonised as the serpent, the evil in Eden that needs rooting out, so that the IE horse-lord and farmer can claim their land, chop down their trees, rape their women, destroy their language and culture, and take their land to exploit for wealth – all in the name of progress, a divinely sanctioned progress promulgated by this hideous expansionist myth.
It’s still happening now with the destruction of primal woodlands in the heart of England so the rich can grow richer and ride their Iron-horses roughshod over the land in order to make themselves more money – wealth over nature; wealth over wealh; fuck nature, fuck the trees, the bats, the badgers, the glow-worms, perhaps even the spirits of the land we fail to acknowledge (though feted in most aboriginal cultures). The destruction of the Amazon, the Dakotah pipeline, HS2, fracking; these are all schemes with an aim of making the rich richer, with no respect for the environment – because nature is a commodity and we are its master. But it is this myth which is the real serpent in Eden and which needs rooting out, like the bindweed in my garden…
Endemic racism is connected, 100%, to the decline in the power of the feminine, and the disrespect for nature and indigenous culture in any form – it is all tied in to the same myth; nature and woman as a commodity to be seized, owned, raped, used, exploited; and aboriginal cultures to be eradicated, removed, as they are on ‘our’ land, land given to us by god or whoever, given by divine right… like that relentless march west over America displacing, abusing, murdering and stealing land from those already there. Manifest Destiny. All stemming idealistically from a once beautiful myth twisted, beaten out of shape – like Tolkien’s orcs, once beautiful elves malformed through torture… this myth has become so deep-rooted it is almost invisible. And now we’re setting off to space, looking for that ever expanding western horizon to grab, seize, consume, bleed dry, destroy…
By identifying the roots of the myth, however, I suggest we at least have an option. We can see how it is an aberration. We can see how it formed and how its short-sighted expansionist agenda, which certainly helped it expand (through violence and terror), may have worked to help members of its own culture survive in prehistoric times – but in the modern period, it threatens to destroy ALL life. There is not enough land to keep turning into cattle pasture, not without cutting down all the trees, the lungs of the earth (the cry ‘I can’t breathe’ echoes in my mind).
Lincoln says of *ṇgWhi that ‘Moreover, his serpentine form marks him as being in close connection with the earth. He is the aborigine, uncivilized and bound to his land, who opposes the I-E invader and meets defeat at his hands.’ Thus the native is closer to nature, and this inherent racism is also a distrust of nature. The image of Adam crushing the serpents head with his heel in the Bible brings to mind the violence against George Floyd in 2020. Horse-riding police herding up and fighting protestors… it is Sir George and the dragon again; these knights on horseback… imperialistic, fascistic; yet the dragon they’re facing is a hydra...
What’s more, McDonalds and every fast-food joint subsists on this same destructive myth; and those that eat here and then cast their litter on the ground and choke up our hedgerows and parks have literally the same disrespect for nature; the land is a commodity; it’s for rearing cows. Why should we respect or love it, they seem to say? Why pick up that trash? Someone else will do it for them – probably someone from a lower class, or a foreign worker. Someone Dasa or Daysu. Disrespect for nature and disrespect for individual lives goes hand in hand.
My book ‘Warriors of the Wasteland’ argued for a return to the older system, with a respect for nature, a return to that nature mysticism, and looked at the Grail myth, a quest to bring back that which was cast aside, the old ways of relationship with the land; the pre-IE way; a new respect for the feminine, for nature, for the indigenous, the aboriginal.
This isn’t just a pipe dream. This is a necessity if we are to survive as a species. The old perversion of the seasonal myth must be undone. Cast aside.
The time for the IE warrior on his horse, his iron-horse, be it a fast car or high-speed train, needs to be brought to an end; he cannot ride roughshod over nature anymore. The IE peoples used to let loose a horse on the land, and any land it covered, belonged to the owner of the horse. Man thinks anywhere his machines with their ‘horse-power’ can take him is his… even into space. But this is hubris and he is asking to be visited by nemesis…He cannot think himself superior to the female, or to people of colour; a biological adaptation to help the absorption of a vitamin from low sunlight cannot be the basis for this superiority; it’s so stupid its almost laughable if it wasn’t so tragic.
The old myths identified with Dasa, the Daysu, with the serpent, close to nature. That is not to be destroyed but seen as a positive thing; we need to return to our roots and embrace the land; belong to it, stop cutting down the trees, stop throwing away our burger wrappers into the hedgerows… stop eating bloody burgers to begin with; start eating plants that can sustain all people on earth, not meat that can just sustain the richest.
A new myth needs to be written, in which the Dasa steal back the cattle from the horse-lords and lead them back into the forest where they belong. But myths are made, not written; they arise from the psyche like dreams and made concrete through action.
Perhaps a new myth is arising in the blood and smoked filled streets of western cities; perhaps it is arising in the hearts and minds of young artists and dreamers, like Greta Thunberg; either way the 5000 year old myth of male dominance, of the warrior on horseback, the beef-baron with his tree-killing axe, needs to be weeded out of the Garden that is the Eden in which we live, before we kill it, and ourselves, for good. The supremacist has knelt too long on the neck of natural man. I can’t breathe. He says. We can’t breathe.