Beagle wrote:
I know that it does, but I'm wondering how it came to be there. It seems like a dim racial memory of some kind.
Hi Beags
Good to talk to you again. No, in my experience, it's not a dim racial memory but a common present day phenonema.
Before I explain my reasoning, though, I should probably ‘fess up here...and then you can all drum me off the board/condemn me as a total whacko if you like. But for the past umpteen years, I have been studying shamanism. In fact, my interest in archaeology is only as a result of my interest in shamanism — and not the other way round — and during the past year, my interest in shamanism has moved out of the theory of the study and into the field, as I am now learning shamanic techniques under a recognised shaman teacher.
So anyway, it seems to me that one of the common mistakes made by archaeologists is of assuming that because there is a common motif in the ancient cave paintings — say, if there are snake paintings in caves in Africa and snake paintings in caves in America — this means that there must have been some sort of migratory activity which spread the culture. But this, imho, isn’t necessarily so. Snakes (and birds) are the most common motifs in all shamanic cultures — from Siberia to North America, from Australia to Africa, from India to South America, etc etc — and this is because the shamans travelled - and still do travel - in vision into the same extra dimensionary worlds with the help of these animal ‘spirit guides’ and, therefore, shared (and share) a common consciousness, or common ground.
Here’s a modern day example. Say, you and I both love The Simpsons. But this isn’t necessarily because I’ve been to America, where The Simpsons is made, and watched it there. It’s because you and I share a common ground, and that common ground is called ‘television’.
From Online Etymological Dictionary
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?sea ... hmode=none
"Tele:comb. form meaning "far, far off," from Gk. tele-, combining form of tele "far off, afar, at or to a distance," related to teleos (gen. telos) "end, goal, result, consummation, perfection," lit. "completion of a cycle," from PIE *kwel-es- (cf. Skt. caramah "the last," Bret. pell "far off," Welsh pellaf "uttermost"), from base *kwel- (see cycle)."
I know now, from my study of shamanism, both theoretical and practical, that shamans shared (and still do share) a ‘television’, a common vision in which the snake, or serpents play a major role.
The most respected expert on this was the late, great Mircae Eliade who was Professor of Ancient Religions at Harvard until about the 1950s. He was the first one to study, and notice and record, how similar the shamanic cultures were all over the world, and he has written a book on it called “Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy” and this is an excerpt:
“The helping spirits in animal form play an important role in the preliminaries to the shamanic seance, that is, in preparations for the ecstatic journey to the sky and the underworld. Usually their presence is manifested by the shaman imitating animal cries or behaviour. The Tungus [Siberian] shaman who has a snake as a helping spirit attempts to imitate the reptile’s motions during the seance; another, having the whirlwind as [spirit helper] behaves accordingly. Chukchee and Eskimo shamans turn themselves into wolves. Lapp [Scandinavian] shamans become wolves, bears, reindeer, fish – the Semang [Malayan] shaman can change into a tiger, as can the Sakai shaman [Malayan] and those of Kelantan [Malayan].”
and
“The Goldi, the Dolgan and the Tungus [all Siberian] say that, before birth, the souls of the children perch on the branches of the Cosmic Tree and the shamans go to find them. This mythical motif, which we have already encountered in the initiatory dreams of future shamans, is not confined to Central and North Asia; it is attested, for example, in Africa and Indonesia. The cosmological schema Tree-Bird (= Eagle), or Tree with Bird at its top and a Snake at its roots, although typical of the peoples of Central Asia and the ancient Germans, is presumably of Oriental origin, but the same symbolism is already formulated on prehistoric monuments.”
I don't know if ME knew this (as Indian studies are not everyone's cup of tea and so most researchers allude to the "mystical East" rather than actually go and get down and dirty there) but the cosmological creation myth of the Indian Vedanta is of Vishnu lying in the coils of Seshanga, the Cosmic Snake, in the Cosmic Ocean, and the Eagle/bird is Garuda.
Hope this helps.