THE DREAM CULTURE OF THE NEANDERTHALS

Guardians of the Ancient Wisdom

 

by

 

Stan Gooch

 

Inner Traditions

One Park Street

Rochester, VT 05767

 

Paper, 263 pages

ISBN 1-59477-093-X

 

 

Stan Gooch advances a speculative theory in The Dream Culture of the Neanderthals that a remnant part of the Neanderthal population fused with Cro-Magnon man, and that the Neanderthal culture was repressed, leaving bits and pieces of it to us today, akin to flotsam washing up occasionally on shore from a distant land difficult to find.

For evidence, he points to skeletons dug up from Mount Carmel in the Middle East that have strange mixed features of both Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal. He also points to those among us who appear swarthy with brow bridges projecting more than normal, who have sloping foreheads, and strong, tufted eyebrows. Of course, a more simple explanation for such appearances would be the widely fluctuating size, shape, and appearance of humans who, over a very long time, have adapted and transformed through natural selection to that which best fits a particular part of the world, climate, and food source. Of DNA evidence, Gooch cites none. And the most recent DNA evidence is that we all descended from a single tribe in Africa, and, even more striking, from a single Eve in Africa.

So is Gooch s book another in a long list of pseudo-science, pseudo-history, psuedo-analysis? Yes and no. Of more interest is his theory that sightings of the Yeti in the Himalayas and Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest are actually sightings of a remnant population of Neanderthals.

As support, Gooch starts with references in old texts, and then works forward from there. He begins with the Epic of Gilgamesh from the seventh century BCE and the description of Enkidu as the wild man of the steppes who is shaggy with hair and drinks with wild beasts at their watering hole. While this could just as easily be interpreted as a literary archetype similar to the wild man explored by the Robert Bly in his book Iron John, the other examples are not so easily explained away.

For example, Gooch cites a drawing on an ancient Phoenician bowl which shows four hominid figures entirely covered with hair and who have pointed ears and are attacking a settlement by throwing stones at it. Just mythical creatures painted on a bowl? Maybe.

Gooch also refers to the naturalist Lucretius Carus who, in the first century BCE, described an early race of humans as larger, stronger, and hairy like bristly bears. More myth? Maybe. But in the tenth century CE an Arab named Makdisi reported similar creatures in the Pamir mountains, followed by further reports in the same region in the twelfth century. From the thirteenth century, a sculpture in a French church shows a peasant with a wild man who has Neanderthal features.

The Abkhazians, living east of the Black Sea, captured a wild woman they named Zana, covered with red hair who had a flat nose and powerful jaws. Physically she was very robust. She bore children fathered by Abkhazians, and the body of one child was later exhumed by a Russian professor who confirmed it to have Neanderthaloid features. Gooch also asserts that Cossacks once captured a wild man, and that He, too, had a body covered with thick, reddish hair. He had a sloping forehead, massive jaws, a small nose and pointed ears and prominent eyebrows.

In 1784, the anthropologist Michael Wagner noted the account of a wild boy captured in Rumania whose eyes lay deep in his head, who had heavy brows which projected far over his eyes, a flat nose, a hairy body, and who walked heavily, as if he would throw himself from one foot to the other.

In 1925, a Russian general wrote an account of a wild man who had been shot by his soldiers and who was so hairy at first he thought the man was an ape. It, too, had massive jaws, a heavy brow, and pointed ears.

To all this, Gooch adds the European legends of hairy dwarfs and trolls, who have large pointed ears which he asserts are garbled accounts of Cro-Magnon s encounter with Neanderthals 25,000 to 35,000 years ago. Gooch takes the same tack with the Greek and Roman legends of satyrs and refers to the capture of a satyr brought before the Roman general Sulla in 86 BCE. For the legendary lust of satyrs as being historical fact for captured wild men, Gooch relies on the thirteenth century account from the philosopher Albertus Magnus describing the capture in Saxony of a pair of forest dwelling hairy monsters and the extreme lust of the male toward women.

These accounts are not explained away as easily as the absence of DNA evidence. What seems more attenuated, however, is the claim that the Neanderthal culture was based more on the worship of the moon, while Cro-Magnon was based on the sun. While the moon, irregular in its phases, has obviously been long associated with that which is female, and the sun, regular and predictable, has also been associated with that which is male, it does not follow that Cro-Magnon (with its supposed male element of being consciously rational) has severely repressed Neanderthal (with its supposed female element of being unconsciously intuitive). The real repression of Neanderthals more likely occurred when our ancestors killed them off.

While Gooch s speculation seems largely but not always misdirected, he does pull together a number of distinct strands of fact and theory that might demonstrate our ancestors saw something within female intuition that we have since repressed or nearly forgotten.

Consider, for instance, that the average menstrual cycle of a woman is 28 days, that the cycle of the moon is 29 and days, and that some women with irregular menstrual cycles have been treated successfully by sleeping with the light on at night during certain days of the month, as if sleeping outdoors in the light of the moon itself. Add to this the fact that the average menstrual cycle of 28 days, multiplied by 13, equals 364 days one day short of a year. And that each year contains either 13 full moons or 13 new moons. To this, Gooch points out the symbolic use of the number 13 in the structure of groups in legend and myth, such as the Biblical Jacob and his 12 sons, Odysseus and his 12 companions, Jesus and his 12 disciples, Romulus and his 12 shepherds, Roland and the 12 peers of France, King Arthur and his 12 knights, the Teutonic myth of the 13 Valkyries, and the Slavic tale of Ivan who slays a dragon with the help of 12 smiths.

The significance of this number? Gooch asserts that the 13th moon of the year came to symbolize death, and thus bad luck, but that the original association with death was that the 13th moon occurred at the time of the winter solstice when the sun was reborn into the days growing longer after the solstice. The number 13 was therefore not unlucky but lucky:

The ancients better appreciated that only with the death of the old can the new appear. So new plants grow in the decaying debris of the old (and, in fact, grow more vigorous as a result), and fresh leaves appear in spring thanks to the work of the dead leaves shed the previous autumn.

 

Gooch states that moon-calendars are older than sun-calendars in all parts of the world but, when used by an agricultural society, a moon-calendar becomes useless because of its variable relation to the solar year. So it can t be used to accurately predict either solstice, either equinox, or when to plant or harvest crops.

Unlike the moon, the sun makes the same movements in relation to the Earth each year, every year. It is at once predictable and reliable.

 

This makes the point, of course, that Cro-Magnon did not necessarily repress the moon worship of the Neanderthal, but that it was slowly replaced in the late Neolithic with the advent of agriculture which required a more practical calendar based on the sun. While Gooch recognizes this argument, he strains to disprove it by showing that moon worship went underground, and it must have done so because it was repressed. For evidence of this, he refers to a medieval English church with the carving of a penis inside a stone alter, 14th century monks in Exeter worshipping a statue of Diana in the woods, and other old churches with carvings known as Sheila-na-gigs which show a squatting woman, thighs open, and genitals exposed. While Gooch may properly conclude that an ancient religion pursues its activities at the very heart of the new, his examples of underground worship are 25,000 to 35,000 years removed from the demise of Neanderthals, and he too often spins fact and theory to support his concept of repression when a more simple explanation proves more.

While it is not difficult to discount his consistent attempt to trace matters to a Neanderthal heritage, it is more difficult to discard his theories on intuition and logic. Intuition, he says, is knowing something straightaway without knowing how you know it, while logic is the process by which you get the right answer and also know why the answer is right. What he contends is that often ancient knowledge may have been based more on intuition, and it is this intuitive knowledge that Gooch ultimately focuses on.

Take, for instance, the phenomenon of ancient shrines placed directly over running water, sometimes even over a convergence of underground streams. Gooch argues that water in the form of a spring, a stream, a river, a waterfall, or waves breaking on the shore, or a downpour of rain (even a shower in our modern bathrooms), releases negative ions, something which provides us with beneficial effect. Gooch further asserts that the moon favorably influences the negative ion balance of the atmosphere. In turn, negative ions augment the production of alpha waves in the brain, something which also occurs during meditation. According to Gooch, researchers have shown negative ions improve sleep, dreams, and one s sex life.

In ancient Greece seekers would often spend the night at a shrine, in order to receive a dream from the deity . . .

 

To this intuitive knowledge the ancients also added a layer of logic placing shrines at a source of water but also on straight lines that extend over great distances but are configured to match the conscious observation of those lines which mark the winter solstice, the summer solstice, the north-south meridian, or other points of a compass which divides the horizon into 24 equal segments. Gooch s point is one of balance between intuition and logic:

To put it simply, too much objectivity damages our intuitive, subjectivity-based powers. But too much subjectivity damages our objective rationality. We need both sets of attributes . . . A balance is the equilibrium of two matched weights.

 

What he proposes for this balance is that the intuitive mind convert information into experience, and that the logical mind convert experience into information.

In the whole person these processes will take place simultaneously or more precisely, with constant oscillation between the two, as a kind of alternating current.

 

As an example, Gooch contends we should not separate such disciplines as poetry and science by dwelling on the differences between them. Instead, we should focus on their similarities, since the data of science are experienced as poetry by creative scientists; while the data of poetry are experienced by the creative poet as science.

Good advice but Gooch need not hark back to Neanderthals to make it persuasive.

 

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