To: Retort From: GS [Elaborating his theory, Geoffrey Sea locates the emergence of classical shamanism and its technics (eg the invention of theoretical geometry) in a polycultural, polyglot, "fertile crescent" stretching from Vancouver to Lake Superior in the period following the extinction of North America's mega-fauna. IB] I'm honored that Martin has commented, as I regard his Black Athena as an exemplar of scholarship. I don't actually think we disagree, as I don't deny that the Greeks drew very much from Egypt and from Semitic cultures, and apologize if I implied differently. The question is what they drew from the various sources. Allow me to address the matter historiographically, as Martin did in his book. The granarians, including especially orthodox Marxists, constructed a model of the development of civilization that was striking in its linearity and adherence to "progress." That sparked a counter-movement, which erred in the direction of non-linearity and regress or pure relativism. In this view, suggested by Martin's examples of megalithic art from all sorts of places and times, with no suggestion of relationship or coherence, we are dealing not with the advancement of culture and technique but with universal attributes of humanity -- all people at all times in all situations can be artistic, religious, inventive, awed by nature, etc. A corresponding trend in the study of shamanism sees shamanism as merely an _expression_ of these human universals, and that is why, it is argued, we can find elements of shamanism on every continent in all time periods. A recent book on shamanism by my friend, the Ohio archaeologist William Romain, carries this approach to an extreme. That is very different from my interest and approach. I am interested in that discrete form of shamanism which we might call classical shamanism or perhaps better Tengrism, which is readily definable ethnographically even if its specific history remains unclear. Tengrism, to appropriate and expand that term, had a beginning and a course of diffusion, resulting in those very bizarre trans-Pacific parallels explored by de Santillana and more recently by Bereznik. A former bad assumption was that it had to have started in Asia and spread somehow to the Americas, because that was the default assumption, rooted in the very designations of Old and New worlds. Very recent advances in genetics, linguistics, and archaeology allow us to now correct that bad assumption. Tengrism started in North America after the glacial retreat. It then spread to Asia and to South America. If the dating of Göbekli remains at 11,500 BP, it's probably too early for the diffusion I am talking about. I know how hard it is to date such sites, however. If the age come down to around 7,000 years, then it could well be part of the Tengrist expansion. The defining characteristics of Tengrism or Tengrist shamanism are too numerous to list, but Dodds did well when he identified the Greek debt to shamanism as consisting of three essential beliefs: 1. The transmigration of souls (animal and human spirits transmigrate after death along a specific route and involving specific destinations) 2. The shaman's ability to follow the transmigration route during trance or dream states. 3. The shaman's ability as dependent on his bodily purification which in turn depends on dietary restriction (the reason so many of the Greek shaman-philosophers became vegetarian). These core beliefs can be called atheistic, pantheistic, or monotheistic in the sense that all spirits are constituents of one godhead or that the true god is to be found within. The meaning of the Turkic root sham is "inner light," with related words in Semitic, Indo-European, and North American languages. Tengrists are not concerned with "gods," but rather with the souls of living beings. A commonalty is that the language of theology does not translate well into the languages of Tengrism. I would agree, and I think Dodds would have agreed, that the Greeks took their explicitly polytheistic pantheon primarily from Egypt and the Levant. But the essence of Greek science, mathematics, and philosophy that gave Greece its trademark anti-authoritarianism was shamanistic, and the chief vehicle for shamanistic development was the Pythagorean cult. I started in this direction after discovering from my own analysis of geodetic triangles that the ancient Ohioans not only employed the "Pythagorean" Theorem, but employed it in a more sophisticated manner than the Greeks or Babylonians. (The Ohio Indians treated square roots as integers, so a permitted "Pythagorean triple" for them would be 1, square root of 13, square root of 14). The archaeoastronomer and philosopher Bob Horn then suggested that I re-read E.R. Dodds, as part of our mutual effort to understand what the Ohio earthworks were about. And that was a crucial re-reading, because it then became clear how both geometry cults, Greek and Ohioan, emerged and developed in order to solve the same basic problem, which was the physical mapping of the post-mortem transmigration route of the soul. This is why you get the first "theoretical" geometry in both locales. (And while the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Mayans also had some "advanced" mathematics, they were all doing something quite different, involved more with calendar creation and astronomical prediction.) Another clarification -- I am not so Ohiocentric as to think that Ohio was the birthplace of this movement. The evidence suggests that Ohio didn't become especially important until around 1000 BC, which is relatively late in the scheme of things. Ohio was one place where the dispersed Tengrist empire blossomed; Mexico was another; Korea, China, Sumeria, Persia were others, etc.) If we search for a birthplace of this movement, linguistic analysis backed by genetic modeling would lead us to a "fertile crescent" that stretches from the Pacific coast of North America, around Vancouver, through the Canadian plains to Hudson Bay and Lake Superior. It was in that large region, connected by canoe routes, that the four largest linguistic families in North America had their origin, around the same time in the early to mid Archaic period. That location also makes sense in terms of later diffusion patterns. As to what caused the genesis of the most important religious movement the world has ever known, there are two good guesses. First, people had to radically adapt to a situation unlike any they had known, with the mass extinction of North America's megafauna. In this sense, Tengrism was a perfect ecological creed, rooted in a deep respect for animal life. (Materialists take comfort.) Second, it is possible that in this region, a great mixing of cultures occurred, with the descendants of trans-Bering migrants meeting with ex-Polynesians traveling up the Pacific coast, and/or the descendants of ex-European "Solutreans" who survived in enclaves around the Great Lakes. Both possibilities are controversial, but that would certainly explain why there was such a profusion of new language families in a population previously believed to be small and homogenous. To be clear, I do not at all believe that classical Greece and classical Ohio were in contact, though they were contemporaneous. I do believe that some remarkable similarities, especially in the development of theoretical geometry and astronomy, resulted from a common ancestry, and that key common ancestor is to be found in the cultural ferment that was happening in western and central Canada in the early to mid-Archaic. The geometry-astronomy cults that shared this lineage were distinct from the types of math and astronomy practiced in the grain-centered societies. In the latter, astronomy never developed beyond the observational, because the only goal was to predict celestial events and refine the calendar system. In the Tengrist lineage, the goal of geometry and astronomy was quite different; it was to plot the transmigratory flight path for celestial travel, and to create ground markers for the guidance of that journey. This required an entirely different relationship to the heavens, and we see in both the shamanistic Greek and Ohio cults that celestial bodies are not deities as much as landmarks along a trail, which leads on to the modern view. The President of Kyrgyzstan is an avowed Tengrist, who has proposed Tengrism as the "national ideology" of his newly independent country -- certainly a ray of light. --Geoffrey |