Prehistory of Memory

Myths related to memory and knowledge from:
Egypt
Africa
China
Celtic
India
Norse
Greek
Mesoamerican
Judaic
A modern myth 

Cultural Origins
Every human culture contains "artifacts" or echos of the deep past that are a kind of unconscious cultural memory. One of the tasks of modern scientists and historians is to attempt to elucidate the origins of these cultural memories. For example, in Judeao-Christian culture there are rituals associated with the eating of meals. Generally, we now treat these rituals as an opportunity to openly proclaim our tribal affiliation and to "thank" the tribal deity for the food. The true origins of such rituals have become increasingly remote from everyday personal experience. These days, food is readily available, cheap, pe-processed, and wraped in plastic. For most of human existence food was pulled from the bodies of living organisms, ripped from the great circle of life, and processed by those who would eat it. Getting a meal was made possible by concentrated human effort and the aid of precious elements of one's special cultural knowledge. In most cultures there were deities that had to be propitiated or at least the spirit of the thing being eaten had to be thanked for the life it gave up to the eater of the meal. When people became city dwellers and isolated from the true source of their food, the original connections between the eater and the eaten could sometimes be forgotten and the pre-meal ritual adapted to other uses. In such ways are memories transformed through time.

How can we reconstruct a sensible understanding of the pre-historical origins of our culture? We start with paleo-anthropology and the study of the physical remains of our early ancestors, always on the look-out for evidence of something beyond the purely biological, evidence of extrasomatic elements of human culture. A large part of what we can reconstruct about our cultural origins comes from stone atrifacts, simply because of their durability. Stone tools and pottery are very important sources of information about early humans. These durable artifacts of early human times are good examples of one class of fundamental elements of cultural memory. We can go out, dig up a physical artifact, and let IT "speak" to us. The other major class of fundamental elements of cultural memory are those involving human language. There are certain stories about past times that have reached us by way of an oral tradition of story telling which was later recorded in written words. Of course, sometimes we have a situation where a story reaches us because it was recorded on a stone or clay artifact, so there is no perfect distinction between these two major classes of cultural memory transmission. But in general, the two types are separate and there is great interest in being able to discover links between these types of cultural memory. There is even the possibility of "confirmation" or "consilience" when physical artifacts can be found that match linguistic artifacts.

Language Origins.

General information on trees, water and serpents as mythical symbols of knowledge.
In the past, human knowledge had to pass from person to person through the memory of individual humans for it to be propagated on to the future. Before organized scripts for writing were developed, certain pictorial representations of natural objects such as snakes already had established meanings for members of pre-literate cultures. Within oral story telling, natural objects like bodies of water and trees acquired certain associated meanings and implications that could be relied upon by the story teller to aid in painting a particular mental picture in the mind of a listener. It is not our task here to explore all of human mythology, we are focused on memory and our attempt to understand the human mind. It is interesting to see how the basic memetic tools of myths were applied to mysterious issues like the source of cultural knowledge. The stories that pre-literate people told each other about the world were the foundation upon which more organized attempts at explaining the world were built after the development of writing.

(image source)

This image contains many of the key elements of natural mythology and symbolism. In the Western tradition of the Greeks, earth, water, air and the ethereal were basic elements. In myths, the sky and below ground are commonly domains for spirits and gods while the land is the domain of people. Trees or mountains have often represented a link between earth and sky, between the domains of people and gods. The World Tree draws its substance from the earth and the water. The fertility of the earth is often represented as a godess. The sky gods, in particular the Sun god, are often a source of knowledge, a source that people can tap by way of the World Tree. Alternatively, in earth godess-dominated cultures, springs at the root of trees or up in the headwaters of rivers in the mountains may be oracular sources of knowledge. In combinations of sky- and earth-centered mythology, the earth or even human females were often viewed as being impregnated by forces from above. Thus, a Tree of Knowledge with a female figure at its roots contains several basic visual metaphors for sources of knowledge. Of course, the ancients did not know the origins of their cultural knowledge, only that it was important to them. Naturally, they tried to relate their knowledge to the natural objects of their world. Thus, the History of Memory starts with memory and knowledge myths. If we understand the myths, we can understand the cultural foundations upon which later philosophical traditions were founded.  There are many good web sites with information about myths, and I have tried to provide links to them.  An example of a particularly useful source of information is at Robert T. Mason's web site (source).

When people started living in villages and cites they lost track of the meaning that natural objects like trees and snakes once had for people.

Trees.
The ancient Mesopotanian centers of urban culture such as Sumer produced depictions of trees or poles representing the "axis mundi", or world axis. It is common to find this tree or pole depicted with a snake or pair of intertwined snakes. An association between a snake and a rod or tree is also found in later cultures such as in the Hebrew Eden myth and the caduceus. An ancient cylindrical seal from Sumer has on it a depiction of a tree with two fruits representing life and enlightenment.

Snakes and Serpents.
The Sumerian legend of Gilgemesh includes a version of an even older flood myth that is very similar to the Hebrew Noah myth. Vases inscribed with depictions such as a gigantic snake winding over the whole universe, the sun, moon and stars are older than written legends such as those about king Gilgemesh. We have inherited the idea of snake constellations from such ancient sources. When early humans watched the stars, they wondered if there were connections between celestial rhythms and the fate of people. Our Judeo-Christian roots are linked to the people of the Mideast who discovered how to use domesticated animals and grains in order to make urban life and civilization possible. These people developed in a part of the world that was becoming dryer and increasingly dependent on seasonal rains. It must have seemed natural to associate symbols of renewal like the snake with the annual movements of the stars. Other ancient depictions of snakes are in the down-to-earth context of growing plants or the figure of a pregnant woman. Snakes and their shedding of snake skin have served as symbols of the renewal of life since before writing was developed. (source)

Many carved figurines depicting a pregnant human figure have been found over a large geographical region and date into the neolithic period before urban living became common. Often on such figurines and other early works of art a simple spiral was inscribed as an additional symbol of fertility, rebirth, or life. The symbolic snake coil can be seen in artifacts from ancient American, Asian, African, Australian and European locations. Gods with snake-like features or with shields decorated with snake symbols are common in many cultures.

(Art source) "Gaia Altarpiece" by Elsie Russell.
Only part of the original is shown here with the Green Man to the left; you may need to brighten your monitor to see his face. At the center is a goddess of the earth, further to the right is a multi-headed "dragon" and a Cretan Snake Goddess. The various dieties and cults of the early people of Crete indicate their cultural relation to the neolithic people of Asia Minor.

The Green Man (source)
Images of the Green Man cn be found in hidden corners of medieval cathedrals. He was probably a popular pagan nature spirit who was inserted into Christian buildings by stone masons. Sometimes known as Jack-in the-Green in some European locations, the idea of a tree or forest spirit was widespread. Modern pagans use him as a symbol of the forest that is different from Cernunnos who is the god of the beasts of the forests. In some depictions the two are combined allowing leaves and horns to represent both the plant and animal parts of the living world. This mixed image seems to be a reflection of the modern mind, not being common before the twentieth century.

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as 'twere, the merest mask of gloom
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

According to Sumerian myths, there was a fresh water serpent, Zu and a salt water serpent Tiamat, who gave birth to the gods, two of whom were called Anu and Ea. When Tiamat is cut in half the sky and earth are formed from the two halfs. This story is similar to some stories dealing with the Norse god Odin. Persia had a sky serpent that was responsible for creating the planets. We can see that serpents were versital elements of myths, serving both in the sky and on earth. Among the diverse mix of peoples who would eventually form the Hittite empire, a serpent god, Indra, was very popular. The serpent god, Hedammu was also a popular Hittite god. Positive servent depictions existed in  many cultures, but the early Phoenician serpent god, Basilisk, could kill with its gaze like Medusa. The basilisk was not a mythological figure that would promote a positive image of the snake. An evil serpent combined with the Egyptian idea of a sun god in domination over the snake god, suggests how the Hebrews could have come to make the Eden myth a harsh depiction of the serpent. Humans depend on knowledge for survival, but knowledge can be used for all types of purposes. If knowledge is power, it must be expected that there have always been some people who would seek to use knowledge as a tool to maintain control over others. The modern idea of universal education and allowing informed people to decide for themselves about how to utilize knowledge is still contrary to many traditions based on ancient ways.

How did ancient people think about the origins of cultural knowledge? The word "myth" is related to the Greek concept of "muthos", which was intimately related to an act of oral story telling. Such a source of knowledge was dominant before the Greek word "Logos" became popular for Classical Greek philosophers who wanted to move beyond mysticism to more solid foundations for knowledge. Myths are realities rooted in the obscure cultural memories of a civilization. (source) This type of fundamental cultural knowledge is what Joseph Campbell describes (see his book, Transformation of Myth Through Time) as the "Wisdom Body", since this type of fundamental knowledge has often been associated with the body rather than with the conscious mind. The type of knowledge often dealt with in myths is cultural knowledge, things that a culture knows and passes from generation to generation. There is also a deeper sense of mythical snake symbols representing objects of knowledge that existed even before there were humans, what we might today call biological instincts and "the nature of the world".  Today we usually focus on conscious knowledge, knowledge by way of abstract reasoning, far removed from everyday experiences; this is the modern type of knowledge, not the major concern of early man's knowledge myths. Even if our interests lie in the domain of conscious, rational knowledge, we need to understand the relationship of this modern type of knowledge to the more basic types of knowledge that came first and still color our rational thoughts.

The Greek muthos is a transitional kind of folk tale of the era when established civilizations and cultures utilized idols and other symbolic representations of mythical entities. An older Indo-European word is sengwh, meaning to sing, in the sense of make incantations to gods or natural powers. The myths of various cultures originated in songs of an oral tradition that could be passed from generation to generation without the involvement of externalized images and idols, or by using dance as the tool for visual depiction. Of course, the oral traditions of Western Society are lost in the mysts of prehistory. We can only speculate about the prehistorical origins of the myths that have reached us by way of the written word. This kind of speculation can be aided by comparative analyses. If several cultures all have passed into writing the same mythological symbol, then there exists the chance that it was a wide-spread and important part of pre-literate human existence. It is also possible that ancient-sounding myths are really of modern origin in some cultures, having spread widely since the arrival of literacy. It is also possible that many cultures could independently invent the same myth symbols. Trees, snakes, and water are all very common elements of human existence; it is no surprise that they appear regularly in the myths of many cultures, sometimes arising from many independent cultural sources.

We can discern a type of evolution of criteria for belief and knowledge. We are still in the age of "logos" that was created by the first literate philosophers who built upon the foundation of "muthos". In reconstructed Proto-Indo-European there is an older term kred-dhe, to put trust or faith. The Latin version of this older language is credo, usally translated as: "I believe." In modern times, the idea of knowledge became all tangled up with the modern idea of truth. The old idea of truth was what seemed correct for the individual or the local tribe. By the time we reach Greek and Roman culture, human perspectives had been significantly broadened. It was not possible for literate and educated philosophers to put THEIR trust in the myths of any one people. They knew that myths were the creations of various people and not a solid foundation for making sense of the entire world, a world that is much vaster than the local "world" of any single tribe. A new idea of truth came into existence; not the truth of tribal subjectivity, but the truth of literate researchers who wanted universal, cross-cultural truths. The new criteria for truth and knowledge forced upon the early philosophers a bias away from the old criteria of subjective truth that in many ways went too far, that led to an abandonment of subjective experience as a subject of study. The Greek philosophers appreciated subjective experience as the input pathway for our knowledge, but they largely abandoned the study of subjective experience, insted looking upon it as a necessary weak link in the chain to reason and true rational knowledge that we had best use when needed, but not get too intimate with. We will pick up this thread again we turn our attention to the philosophy of memory, knowledge, and mind.

Male or Female?
The moon and the snake have long been associated with the life-creating rhythm of the female. Sometimes the snake is portrayed in female form as a god of the mystery of birth and death. In male rites of initiation where the candidate was seen to die and be reborn, the moon might remain a goddess figure and the serpent be used to represent a fatherly source of knowledge being passed from generation to generation. Unfortunately, ancient cultures like the Minoan in which women were prominent have not passed to us the details of their myths. These more maternalistic and communal cultures contained interesting mixtures of male (often bull) and female (sometimes snake) symbols. The duality of the sexes provides a convenient way to depict the duality of good and bad knowledge.....a male caste of priests (or medical doctors) will tend to depict females as a source of bad knowledge. (source)

The popularity of snake symbols might depend on the presence of dangerous snakes in the territory occupied by particular tribes. While some dragon figures had the body of a snake, oriental dragons are not snakes, although some scholars believe their ancestry includes input from the India naga serpent. The authors of Genesis put the Snake Goddess of the Near East under the domination the Mount Sini god, Yawheh, a figure similar in some ways to the Egyptian sun god. The snake is the source of trouble for Adam and Eve. The Snake Goddess has brought knowledge to man, but Yahweh's condemnation of the snake is a reflection of the battle of Hebrew priests against popular pagan symbols.

Tree and Serpent Worship by J. W. Lake is a recent book. A book of the same name was published in the previous century.......

"Tree and Serpent Worship: or Illustrations of Mythology and Art in India" by J. Fergusson  (1873)  (source)

S. Beal "Tree and Serpent Worship" in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1888, p. 547-48. (source)

SERPENT MYTH  by W. W. Westcott, Darcy Kuntz (Editor)

A Pelasgian (a term referring to an ancient "sea people" who existed in "Greece" before the Greeks came to the Mediterranean basin) creation myth starts with Eurynome, a universal first force that came out of chaos. Our Western mythology is dominated by the Hebrew idea of a creator. People who only know the Hebrew creation myth are often shocked by the currently popular idea within scientific cosmology of the universe arising spontaneously. Eurynome divided the sky from the waters and danced to make wind. Eurynome created a cosmic serpent named Ophion. In modern cosmology, the basic constituents of matter (fermions, bosons) were formed from high energy precursors by a process of "symmetry breaking". For the ancients, the basic elements were water, air, and the ethereal substance. The asymmetric Eurynome and Ophion produced a fertile egg from which came the sun, moon, planets, stars, earth and all the world's living creatures. In modern cosmology, the universe as we know it is composed of fermions and bosons......the 15,000,000,000 year evolutionary process that has followed the "big bang" can still metaphorically be called a kind of "hatching".

In modern mathematics, the idea of a mapping between two domains is common. A difficult problem in one domain may be easy to solve in another domain.....the trick is to find the means of transforming problems from one domain to another. Modern biology is dominated by the idea of mophogenesis.....a molecular genetic program unfolds from a hidden microscopic domain to produce the visible structure of living organisms. The coupling of celestial motions to the tides and yearly weather patterns led early humans to an exploration of the idea that all earthly events are related to celestial events. We now know that the Earth formed from stellar fragments and asteroid impacts continue to shape the evolution of life. Meteors must have seemed to be an important source of contact between the celestial realm and the human realm. The Omphalos of Delphi, a sacred stone of celestial origin, was surrounded with the serpentine coils of Python.

A near Eastern Serpent Goddess Anat was depicted as the sister and consort to Baal. Baal is found in the Bible and some of the earliest alphabetic inscriptions such as those at Ugarit. Bael was a God of Storms and Rain and Lightning, similar to Zeus and the Hebrew god. One of the key memetic engineering tasks for the Hebrew priests was to depict worship of the serpant and Baal as evil.

Other Gods associated with the Serpent include the Greek Triple Goddess of the Moon, the Underworld and the
chthonic forces of the Earth Hecate, Her priestess in Greek mythology Medea, the Mexican Coatlicue and
Coyolxauhqui, the Aztec Green Feathered Serpent Quetzalcoatl, the Japanese Uga-Jin,  the Chinese Nu Kua, the Indian
Nagas, Kali and Kundalini, the Guinea Niniganni, the Australian Rainbow Serpent Ngalijod and the Babylonian
Goddess Gula-Bau.

What about links between trees and drugs? The fruit of trees was a source of sugar that could be fermented into alcohol, which is the most popular psycho-active drug. It is an interesting twist of fate that important inroads into the molecular basis of life were made by way of extending the techniques of chemistry to the question of how fermentation converts sugar molecules into ethanol molecules. The yeast enzymes that carry out this conversion were among the first proteins studied in any detail, eventually leading to the recognition that all life processes are powered by thousands of specific proteins.

Unraveling the riddle of the structure and properties of complex carbon-containing molecules was a tricky task for chemists. One famous mystery was the structure of circular molecules, of which the fermentable sugars are a good example. Kekule was familiar with the idea of molecules as linear chains of atoms linked by chemical bonds. He claimed that a dream vision inspired him to recognize the possibility of circular chains of atoms. He reported a dream involving a chain of atoms that turned into a snake vision in which a snake began to eat its own tail, forming a ring (see Uroboros).

Carl Sagan's book, The Dragons of Eden, explores some aspects of the Eden Myth in terms of human evolution. Sagan suggested that large preditory reptiles may have been the origin of human interests in dragon and snake myths. Few such animals remain in existence today, and those only in remote locations, possibly because humans have exterminated them. Primates do have an inate sense of fear of snakes, which would tend to make them popular and memorable characters in myths.

Sagan emphasized the key aspect of human brains, that they are slow to mature, allowing for little in the way of innate knowledge, but providing the basis for learning after birth. Sagan suggested the possibility of a fundamental insight within the Eden knowledge myth, the idea that human knowledge comes at the price of big brains and painful births.

Another insight concerning human knowledge that is mentioned in passing within Genesis comes in the Babel legend. The God of Genesis seems to enjoy playing tricks, and creates multiple human languages in order to keep humans divided. The role of language as a medium of exchange of human knowledge is a key issue that comes right down to the focus of modern scientific research into memory and the mind.

Another interesting tale in Genesis involves dreams and their interpretations. Are dreams true sources of knowledge, even about the future? Joseph's dreams are related to us in these terms. Now, Egyptian influences are strong in Genesis. It is clear that the Hebrews lived for many centuries under the influence of Egypt. It is interesting that Joseph lives in the heart of Egypt and has children by the daughter of the priest of the sun god Re (Ra). The story of Joseph centers on being able to see into the future and prepare for famine. For the arid region inhabited by the Hebrews, famine would usually mean drout and land scorched dry by the sun. We have here a close relationship between humans, the sun, knowledge, and survival. Is the Hebrew One True God a Sun God? The first thing in Genesis is God creating Light. Sometimes it is said that the Sun was not created until a later point, after the Earth, but the creations of the fourth day were really just the stars and the seasons. As told in Genesis, it is through the dream vision of Joseph that Pharaoh comes to dominate the Hebrews, setting the stage for Moses.

 The dragon is a universal motif linked to various cultures of humanity for 5,000 years. The word dragon comes from "derkesthai" (Greek: to glance dartingly) which, in a Hindu tradition, was the hungry look of the very first being when its fiery spirit was born out of the abyss of water.   The Dragon's Eye symbol stands for the balance of love, power and wisdom. Triple triangles are associated with the Goddess and the nine Muses.

        Cultures the world over speak of dragons when explaining the creation of the earth. Tiamat, the Babylonian dragon, gives birth to the gods. We can imagine that when they learned to write during their Babylonian captivity, Judaic writers took pains to put the serpent into a negative role within the Eden myth in an attempt to subordinate all competing gods to the One True God. Interestingly, the male human figure of Moses was also built-up as the source of judaic knowledge of good and Laws. It must have been a real struggle to maintain a culture with no idols within the heart of a humanity bubbling with age-old pictorial symbols that had great meaning for people. The Egyptian Ureaus headdress stands for  the serpent, " The Oldest of the Old," who existed before heaven and earth. The Aztecs have Quetzalcoatl, the feathered snake god, and Coatilcue, the snakegoddess-earthmother. Greek myth tells of the rivers being formed by Typhon gouging the earth during its battle with Zeus.

        Composite creatures are most often the divinities of water sources, the "genius loci" or animating principle of rivers, lakes, and seas. Celtic lore has salmon-dragons and Bride, the serpent-goddess. French lore has the Dracs, Tarasque, Amphitere and Campchurch.

        Europe has the Amphisbaena, the Wyvern and Hippocampus. Australia has the Bunyip and Japan has the O-Gon-Cho. Some are like mermaid snake-humans such as the Naga in India, the Makara in   Cambodia, the Lamia in Libya, and the Yamaga in Africa.

Uroboros
 The tail eating snake Uroboros, is the circle of life eating life, the World Stream, the Milky Way, (where dragon images are involved in  four constellations). The first Hexagram of the I Ching is "The Creative" - the ascending dragon. Taoists revere the dragon as the spirit of "The Way" who brings  eternal changes and guards the flaming pearl of spiritual perfection. In China, dragons are emblems of royalty, guardians of the spirits of the ancestors. Stories from  China and Japan frequently connect them to pearls, the treasure of the ocean, and the moon, the pearl of heaven.

Eastern traditions feature courtesies paid to dragons such as the Indian story of Buddha who honors the Naga king and queen who reared him, and the story of the Zen priest who continued his devotion to the dragon who turned into Kuanyin, the Goddess of Compassion. The Hindu dragon  goddess that sleeps in the lotus at the base of the spine is Kundalini the Coiled. When she is understood, she will climb to the forehead where illusion will fall from the inner eye to reveal the Golden Embryo of Life.

In Western lore the dragon is a symbol of greed, a monster to be slain by a hero, such as the  firedreake in the Scandinavian tale, Beowolf. The tales often mention veils and mirrors (beyond the allusion to the hidden, unconscious nature of humans that strikes us as being veiled, in some cultural traditions, serpents could only be locked at in mirrors if one wished to avoid a Medusa-like effect, see basilisk) and both  Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung describe these legends as metaphors for the battle against self doubt, the vanquishing of the shadows of the self, the triumph over one's own internal chaos. We can picture the origins of civilization in a battle between two forms of knowledge:
1) unconscious, inate, and ancient cultural traditions
and
2) the modern type of knowledge, rationally developed and defended by rationalizations.
It is certain that dragons are images of transformation, moving from the blindness of old cultural ways to the maturity of new ways. See Francis Huxley's "The Dragon: Nature of Spirit, Spirit of Nature" or additional perspective.

Only some dragons which are seen as serpentine. The classic European dragon looks more like a mammal, like the typical Griffin, although some Griffin figures border on having a snake like posterior. The Egyptian and Chinese dragon concepts depict them as serpents, as does the Greek.

Krishna of India is shown on ancient sculptures and stone monuments with his heel on the head of a serpent. In the ancient temples of India the image of Krishna is sculptured sometimes wreathed in the folds of a serpent which is biting his foot, and sometimes treading victoriously on the head of a serpent. The ancient Persians had the tradition of a virgin, from whom they predicted would be born, or would spring up, a shoot, a son, that would crush the serpent's head, and thus deliver the world from sin. Both the serpent and the virgin are shown in their zodiac. The wide reach of the Persian Empire would certainly have brought influences from India to the Mideast, other earlier influences are also possible, particular by way of trade between the Semitic Akkadian Empire and the Indus Valley.

In an ancient Etrurian story, instead of the son, it is the woman herself who stands with one foot on the head of a
serpent biting a twig of an apple tree to which an apple is suspended. Its tail is twisted around a celestial globe,
reminding us of the dragon of Revelation hauling down one-third of the stars with his tail (Rev 12:4). In the Etrurian
zodiac, the head of the virgin is surmounted with a crown of stars—doubtless the same legend from which John
borrowed his metaphor of a woman with a crown of twelve stars on her head (Rev 13). The Regina Stellarum (Queen
of the Stars) spoken of in some of the ancient religions is the same fable. The myth of Achilles being vulnerable in the
heel, as related by Homer, might be a remnant of the same tradition.

The Serpent Spirit in West African Story of Creation (source)
The world was created by Nana-Buluku, the one god, who is neither male nor female. In time, Nana-Buluku gave birth to twins, Mawu and Lisa, and it is they who shaped the world and control it still, with their fourteen children, the Vodou, or lesser gods. In the begining, before Mawu had any children, the Rainbow Serpent, Da already existed--created to serve Nana-Buluku. Because Da cannot stand heat (or cold, snakes are cold blooded), the creator made the ocean for the serpent to live in. And there Da has remained since the begining of time, with his tail in his mouth.