Maybe its the Ego itself that is the source of all this. What do you make of Julian Jaynes thesis..?

Any culture that obsessively reiterates a motif or a theme or an image in its works of art is trying to work something out that is difficult or that has caught it and tangled it up somehow. Take the Mesoamericans, for instance: the central image of this civilization is that of a great beast, jaguar, demon or monster with open jaws inside of which a human being, usually an ancestor, is struggling to emerge. This means that Mesoamerican civilization was swallowed up by its regression to the bestial level of the instincts and the cult of shamanism with its animal-oriented and astral-plane influenced demonology. This is a civilization that did not have a problem with technology, for it was, comparably speaking, very low tech. Instead, the primary problem which beset it was that of dealing with the astral plane and struggling to retain their humanity and individuality against being depersonalized and disintegrated by astral forces.

In the opening image of the movie A.I. on the other hand, we are treated to an analogous image that functions in a similar way for us: a woman’s face is opened up to reveal that she is actually not really human at all, despite appearances, but is a cleverly manufactured robot simulacrum of a human being. Here the celluloid image is an X-ray into the central problem that our civilization is finding it difficult to deal with and that is the problem of the machine.

Perhaps we find the nomadic wanderer attractive — at least unconsciously — because it offers us a glimpse of the freedom that we do not have being chained to mortgage, credit card debt and nine to five jobs. The wanderer is a vision of a human being who comes into the System from outside and because he is not part of the System or captured by it, he can see the situation more clearly of those who are trapped within it, and therefore can act more objectively as a savior figure.

I wrote in my review of Star Trek on this site about our culture’s continued movement toward domesticating us with cradle to grave control of every aspect of our lives, while the heroes in our movies are going in the opposite direction, toward the undomesticated individual warrior.

This valorization of the undomesticated individual warrior has not always been the case. Indeed many of the Westerns of the 1950s were about settling down. In the 1954 movie, Vera Cruz, Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster play mercenaries in Mexico. Lancaster’s character, while charming, enjoys killing and wants the gold (the MacGuffin) for himself. Cooper’s character fights to make money to recover his ranch lost while he was serving in the Civil War, and wants to give the gold to the virtuous rebels. Virtuous is the man of the land.

The most important Western is, of course, Shane. Here the free roving cattle ranchers who hate fences die, their gun fighter (Jack Palance) dies, and the gun fighter hero, Shane played by Alan Ladd, probably dies. The peaceful farmers live on.

In the classic westerns, if the gun fighters were heroes, they were reluctant gun fighters, longing to get back to the land and a good woman. A mythology to redomesticate the soldiers returning from World War II. That ends in the 60s with the Sergio Leone’s Westerns staring Clint Eastwood.

Unlike his brother, Wolverine is a reluctant warrior, but he is a warrior, and at the end of the movie, he is without a woman, without a home, and without memory. A pure warrior.

So I return to the question that I posed in my Star Trek essay: if we are all in communitarian agreement on the domestication of our once independent natures, why are our movies going in the opposite direction?

I always like to invoke Oscar Wilde whenever discussions of masks occur:

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. “

Masks are fascinating stuff. The oldest surviving masks in the world are from Neolithic Palestine, where we find masks made out of stone that seem to resemble skulls. The first masks thus probably represented ancestral spirits of the dead. And at about the same time we have the practice at Pre-Pottery Neolithic Jericho of adorning skulls with plaster and cowrie shells for eyes which is obviously part of an ancestor cult. But it is possible that mask-making took its origins from such adorning of the skulls of the dead.

I like to think of mask-making — still evoked at Halloween –as fundamentally connected with the cult of the dead and wearing the faces of dead ancestors.

http://www.masksoftheworld.com/NoAmerica/Native%20American%20Mask%20Kwakiutl.htm

Evolutionary scientists have identified this trend among species..”convergent evolution”. Sheldrake’s morphogenic (genetic?) field seems to be the applicable cultural model. I always felt that the reason so many cultures developed ceremonial architectures that resembled pyramids was because they were just looking to nature for a model and the obvious inspiration was the Mountain. I don’t know if there was ancient trans-pacific naval travel though. Seems like Rapanui was as far as the Polynesians were able to settle. What’s clear to me is that even if these peoples did not communicate directly in “meat space”, they did share a spiritual realm and probably interacted freely within this dimension.

I know you are writing a book about the Cult of the Dead…
I was always fascinated by the DMT experience that McKenna described and his conclusion that the entities he encountered were probably spirits of dead people. This is satisfying somehow..it’s very sad to think of death as so final and devastating. We always want to forge a connection to eternity and escape the limits of our mortal bodies. Futurists believe that we will soon be able to download our consciousness into an infinite realm of Aeonic light…but to me this strangely Gnostic techno-topian singularity seems oxy-moronic. The manipulation of material through techne has never produced anything but more or different material.

I’m currently teaching a World art class and just assigned a project where the students had to compare the Tatanua mask rituals of New Ireland to the Kwakiutl masks of the Pacific NW. It’s very interesting to me that two cultures so distant in time and space have evolved such a similar method of worship with regards to their ancestor spirits. I’m sure this could be said of countless other cultures and tribes that engage in animistic and totemistic practices.

The Pre-Columbian religion of the Americas was largely polytheistic, shamanistic, and animistic with the exception of the Inka, who’s sun-orship and theocratic style of governance starts to resemble something more henotheistic if not monotheistic. Makes me think of the other great proto-monotheist figure, Akhenaten. I wonder what specific cultural factors have allowed the consolidation of spiritual and ideological power beneath the umbrella of a spiritual mono-culture and away from the more heterogenous practices that come before them ? More importantly, what allows these cultural practices once established to resist spiritual variety with such great tenacity ? Any thoughts ?