FROM FORESTS AND SAFETY TO CHILD SACRIFICE
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| A stone with a history, so I hear tell, but no one has written it down yet.. |
[The story of Oedipus is part of evolutionary history. The following is a blog that tries to explain some of it. If you have read my 'Rewrite' or are just coming to it, the blog may help you to understand some of the heretofore unmentioned connections. I suspect that my 'Rewrite' should alctually be called 'Rewrite 1', because it opens the plot to other variations than mine alone.]
“A(s) a number of observers have pointed out”, so points out professor Robin Fox, author of “The Red Lamp of Incest” (U. of Notre Dame, 1983), “the multi-male system characterizes the primates of the forest, the woodland, and the tree savanna, while in the dessert the one-male system prevails.”
Professor Fox continues: “The transition from the Miocene to the Pliocene was a change from forest to dessert, eventually. Our hominid ancestors went through this transition. Therefore, they would have made a one-male group adaptation on the lines of the Hamadryas, etc., in order to survive. Here, then, is the origin of the human tendency to form polygynous families.”
Professor Fox however cautions that “we cannot simply read off our ancestral experience from the present-day organization of the dessert primates.
“For a start, it is not all that clear that our ancestors were wholly confined to the desert in the way one-male group species are today…. They may well, with their developing bipedalism, have ranged through whole series of environments, adapting to none in particular, but developing a generalized ability to a wide range of niches.”
As I pointed out in my previous blog From Forests to Democracy to Paganka Kleptocracy, the present concensus of the public, which accepts deforestation (of what forests are left), probably has its origin in the prejudice that princes, barons, and boyars instilled against forest dwellers in preference of diminishing the people of their day as descendants of peasants. The motive for fixing such a perspective, was and remains the ease with which forests are turned into a commodity, which eventually turns into commoditized money.
Whether we harp back to the epochs of Miocene and Pliocene, the forest environment safe-guarded its inhabitants from exploiting the human tendency to exchange presents from turning into one way tax collection as in our time, deforestation, and one-male harems—though the latter contributed (through periodic in-breeding) significantly toward the development of the human brain, the organ that distinguishes homo sapiens sapiens from other evolutionary developments. The likely reason why the one-male group contributed to the development of the brain was the need of the one-male association with female with child to practice equilibration. Equilibration facilitated the development of fantasy in the former, which served to delay one’s sexual responses in spite of testosterone surges, and helped more aggressive females to move themselves and their sons to the center of the male dominated social hierarchy. Equilibration contributed significantly to brain development not only for the participants, but also made a contribution to the brain development of homo sapiens as a whole.
The one-male group sexual practices were open to occasional episodes of incest, specifically, father to daughter incest. Conversely, the developing brain created a progeny that objected to the practice, hence such wide-spread incest taboos in our day. While the incest taboo aims to prevent sexual exploitation of the group by a group autocrat, it necessarily supports the happenstance that one’s sexual partner is one who consents to it.
The one-male paradise system came to an end, when the phenomenon of a large brain had spread to the entire human species and rule-governed mating was introduced.
Interestingly, this was a time when the development of the hominid multi-male sexual habits, generated in a forest habitat came to life again. As much as the phenomenon argues in support of the view that any adaptation to any environment is never wholly lost, it is also an argument that the attempt by neo-capitalists to turn corporations into individuals and hence into virtual human beings is a phenomenon of the brain (primarily among lawyers and politicians) not to be equated with the development of new set of frontal lobes, but, more accurately, with the outgrowth of a canker on the bark.
At this point the story has to take another ‘quantum leap’ and remind the reader that the females of our species did not accept the one-male groupie without some profound resentment. This resentment is manifest in one of the most profound plays of ‘ancient’ times, the Greek playwright’s Sophocles famous tragedy “Oedipus Rex” or “Oedipus the King”. Indeed, the play is so profound and insightful; it has remained pretty much a puzzle to this day.
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| Evidence of human presence. I heve moved the story of Oedipus a little bit closer. |
The basic plot of Oedipus Rex reflects the time, when the brain of the human being had become so large that its owner could no longer accept the constricted one-male government; nor could one-male contain and control the rebels (mostly younger males). In order to exert control, the one-male group system resorted to creating a particularly impressive charismatic event by superceding a more or less ordinary charismatic event like, for example, awe creating incest and respect inducing violence like hitting and biting, by nthing it with human sacrifice.
Indeed, human sacrifice (whether of enemy prisoners in the field or on temple platform) proved such an effective charismatic (scary) event that it spread throughout human society and remained in effect for thousands of years, even to our day). “Oedipus Rex” by Sophocles is a feminine retort to the one-male king wishing to create charisma by sacrificing his newborn son, Oedipus. Oedipus’s mother Iocaste, snatches her son from the arms of the child-sacrificing priest, Tiresias, and has him carried to the neighboring kingdom of Corinth, where her sister Meirope is queen without children of her own.
In due course, the priest Tiresias accepts Iocasta’s response by agreeing that child-sacrifice is an abomination; however, he demands that the abominable event is substituted or exchanged by the charisma of human self-sacrifice.
The one-male king, Laius, is outraged by this turn of events and goes off to buy a wagon full of children, who in ancient times were sometimes raised especially for sacrificial purposes. It is at this time that Iocaste arranges her son Oedipus to meet with Laius. It ensues that Oedipus, having escaped being sacrificed himself, now kills his father.
The good deed of Oedipus however requires that Oedipus agree to sacrifice himself. While we are not told the time as to when Oedipus needs to sacrifice himself, the fact that the rule of a one-man king is losing charisma becomes increasingly obvious, manifesting itself as “the plague of Thebes”. Fortunately or unfortunately [it depends on whether you believe that God (one-male) or Man (multiple-males in agreement with females) rules] Oedipus refuses to see himself as having an obligation to Tiresias’ agreement to exchange the sacrifice of children to self-sacrifice for the sake of engendering a society that goes beyond the one-male rule and may become as complex and plague riddled as ours is today.
The interpretation of Sophocles’ play becomes apparent in my rewrite of Sophocles’ work, re “Oedipus Rex Rewritten”, which presents the play not as a play about mother-son incest, but as a political play demanding a radical revision of government, the governments of our day including, which are all—in one way or another—manifesting the one-man groupie and one-man opportunist as a ‘democrat’ syndrome, though it be little more than make-believe and he, therefore, but a democrat no more than virtual.
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| The story is not a pretty one. |
