Democritus Reformatorium Prehistoric Tribes

Pastoralist Dualism, Astrotheism and Ovotheism

Prehistoric Cults of Uraloid hunters and Sarmatoid herders
Theriototemism: belief in totem ancestors in the reincarnation of big-game mammals Monotheism: the cult of one celestial sun-god (Mazda) and one lord of the underworld (Ahriman) Ovotheism: legends of genesis from the World Egg hatched by the World Duck on the World Tree Astrotheism: myths about the ascent of a dead king to heavens as a star and the annuciation of the descent of a baby king born in his stead Nagualism: belief that a man can be slain by killing his animal double-ganger or alter ego Lupinism: belief in the wolfish ancestor of all Uralids and Sarmatids (from Latin lupus “wolf”) Excarnation: defleshing the dead body by explosing it to gluttonous vultures in the desert Exposition: burials of the dead body by exposing it to beasts of prey on a tree or a wooden scaffold Nagualism: belief that a man can be slain by killing his animal double-ganger or alter ego Vampyrism: the customs of bloodletting applied to cattle or night sleepers so as to suck their blood	Zoomorphism: belief in postmortal transformations into big-game mammals Heliotheism: the supreme celestial god (Indra, Marduk) is identified with the sun Baptism: baptising newly-born kids by sprinkling their forehead with sacred water Transmigrationism: belief in the after-death transmigration of souls into wolfish bodies Sky burials: the dead corpse is brought to a high peak of a mountain for defleshing bones Volcano burials: the dead ancestors are exposed to vultures on the top of volcanoes Dice divination: the bones of the dead are used for divination and for playing dice Lycanthropy: belief in night raiders who turn into werewolves, rape or kidnap women and suck their blood Annunciation: Archangel Gabriel’s annunciation to the Holy Virgin about her immaculate conception, the Holy Spirit appears in the reincarnation of a feathered dove who kissed the immaculate Holy Virgin
Map 1. *The evolutionary tree of religiogenesis and magic cults* (from P. Bělíček:: The Synthetic Classification of Human Phenotypes and Varieties. Prague 2018, Table 8, Map p. 24)
Pastoralist Dualism, Astrotheism and Ovotheism Small-game hunting was only a complementary subsistence activity employed by waterside fishermen, whereas big-game hunting remained the principal nutrition strategy of Ural-Altaic tribes in steppe grasslands. Their tribesmen were either of Uraloid or Basco-Scythoid stock and both shared cultural traits compatible to the Turco-Tungusoid ancestry. Their original cradle-land lay in arid regions of the Middle East and spread as far as the Gobi Desert. The infallible signs of tribal affiliation are seen in the customs of totemism, monotheistic dualism, exogamous marriages, elopements of brides, paying bride price and agglutinating language structure. Similarities in religious faiths were clearly visible in the ideas of monotheistic dualism anticipating the later switch to Islamism. In the vast areas of Central Asia this bent was difficult to judge owing to exposure to ethnic assimilation in close contacts with fishermen’s sites. The decisive proof is therefore provided by their relatives who set out on migrations to Africa and got accustomed to graze cattle on its grassy savannahs. The opposition of the good god and the evil devil is common to most African cattle-breeders including the Maasai and the Hottentots. The Hottentot Khoikhoi believers worship the good god Heitsi-Eibib and fear the evil god Ga-Gorib. The Nilotic tribes of the Maasai in Kenya divide into four phratries referred to as ‘red clans’ and ‘black clans’. Black clans deem themselves as warriors of the divine well-doer god En-Káí, the patron of the good and rain, while red tribes adore as their leader the evil-doer Esetan, the god of war and the patron of shamans.1 Their dualism developed from totemism and its higher stage animism that kowtowed to animal ancestors, lake-spirits, forest-spirits and mountain-spirits. The Bascoid branch worshipped feline totems, cats, lions and sphinxes. The Olmecs in south-central Mexico venerated feline deities in the embodiment of jaguars. Leonine sphinxes stood in front of pyramids in Egyptian Thebes but they also vexed Oidipus’ mind as enigmas haunting Greek Thebes. All their architecture, including graves, mounds, churches and town-halls, was based on stone vaulting, on dome- and cupola-shaped buildings out of large heavy megalith stones. The Greek tholos referred to Menelaos’ sepulchre as well as the town-hall in the agora of Athens. The Peruvian Quechua called it chulpa, the Beaker Folk in Britain cairn, the Russians khourgan, the Anatolians maussoleion and the Muslims masjid or mosque. The Uraloids worshipped as their totem ancestors wolves and practiced also a sort of lycanthropy, a belief in people able to turn over night into werewolves. The idea of lycanthropes and werewolves (Old Frankish wariwulf) was related closely with superstitions about noctambulant sleep-walkers turning into wolves and vampire bats. They slept in coffins and resurrected by night in order to bite live persons’ neck and sip their blood. They could be put to death only by thrusting a wooden stake through their heart. Such superstitions are centred round mythical legends about the cruel Transylvanian prince Vlad III Dracula called also Stake-Stabber (Rumanian Vlad Țepeș). However incredible it might sound, all of these legends have a realistic ground in customs of Uralic nations and their Iranised tribesmen. They learnt riding the horse and raising sheep in the southern belt of steppes spanning from southern Ukraine to the Carpathians and over the Puszta as far as the Alps. One of such sheep-herding tribes were the Wallachians settled in Rumanian Transylvania and southern Moravia, where their ancestors were known to the ancients as Volcae. Their droves may have travelled west as far as Belgium and Wales and be responsible for the spread of grazing sheep in Wallonia and Welsh hill-slopes. The Wallachians belonged to the populous stock of eastern pastoralists who prayed to wolfish deities symbolising their tribal ancestors. Their typical customs included blood-letting and blood-sipping. They did not like killing their animal nourishers and eating their meat but preferred to breed the cattle, open its veins, drink a few gulps of blood and then stop the vein with soil. This practice is evidenced reliably only in the husbandry of African cattle-breeders but it is mentioned also in Russian fairy-tales where ogresses (i.e. old women personified by Baba Yaga, who were expelled from their clan community and lived as anchoresses in seclusion) stole little kids, kept them imprisoned in the household and tasted their blood every day. Another of their customs was associated with night raids of warriors, who disguised as wolves, wore wolfish masks and made burglarious assaults upon peaceful farmers’ villages. Their chief intent aimed at kidnapping their daughters, raping their wives and thieving their foodstuffs. Their fathers and husbands usually fell prey of head-hunting. The raiders cut their heads, let them bleed into a kettle and impaled them upon a stake of the fence surrounding their hill fort. The most favourite punishment for their foes was to throw them down from a tower and impale them on a sharp stake. This is why vampires suck their victims’ blood and must be killed by stabbing their body by a wooden pole. The myths of lycanthropy arose from the practice of warriors’ secret men houses to feign in wolfish disguise evening raids on their own settlement so as to frighten kids and clanswomen. The mythology of these herdsmen’s tribes was enciphered in the Russian fairy-tale about Koshchey the Immortal (Koshchey Bessmertny), who “is called the Deathless because he cannot be killed by usual means. His death is stored in the eye of a needle, which is inside an egg, which is inside a duck, which is inside a hare, which is locked in an iron chest, which is buried under a green oak tree, which is on the magic island of Buyan, which is in the middle of the ocean.“1 The fairy-tale expresses a faith in nagualism that is called after the Nahuatl word nahuālli denoting a person’s animal Alter Ego and belief that the person may be put to death only by slaying his animal double-ganger. Nagualism assumes that every man has a fate hidden in a live animal and may be swayed by manipulating his fetish. In the Russian fairy-tale the hero may kill the bad wizard only by shooting down the duck that acts as his nagualist Alter Ego. The duck will drop an egg and breaking this egg will terminate the wizard’s life. His fate is encoded in the egg called by Uralic peoples ört ‘destiny’ and has probably a common origin with the Old Germanic Wyrde ‘fate’. The bird, egg and tree play important roles also in the myths concerning the Creation of the World. At the very beginning there was the World Egg lying in a nest on the World Tree and hatched by the World Bird (Uralian ukko ‘duck’, Russian utka ‘duck’).2		The Uralic tribes had remote kinsmen in Mongolians, Buryats, Sarmatians and probably also Assyrians and Amorites, who all had a very strong military organisation and used this for subduing populations of peaceful neighbours. Their raids and conquests allowed them to rule as an aristocratic upper class in large empires. From hunting big game they passed to horseback-riding, cattle-breeding and finally to breeding people as serfs and slaves. Practically every heroic epic all over the world may be attributed to their bogatyrs ‘warriors’ and singers. Medieval heroic epics and romances are full of allusions to Palaeo-Mongolian mythology even if it is difficult to trace the eastern descent of their heroes. Arabs were associated with pastoralist tribes of Asia through Assyrians and their astrotheism, a religious cult of stars. The great role of stars was explained by needs of easy orientation on travels at night. In the pre-Islamic period Arabs worshipped deities Mæjram and Esus, predecessors of the Holy Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ. The Jewish legend reckoned that the birth of Jesus had been announced by the stars and the newborn baby would succeed Herod as a king. This belief suggests a strange coincidence with Tibetan Lamaism that assumes that a new Dalai Lama should be chosen by the stars from newborn babies who were born after the old Dalai Lama deceased. Jesus Christ was destined to ascend to throne as a new Dalai Lama of the Near East. Astrotheism was common to horseback-riding tribes of Asia who were related to megalith-builders of the Old World. Their peculiarities in religious feeling may be denoted as oculotheism or ophthalmotheism owing to their cult of eyes and sight. Their menhirs and steles are very schematic in representing human figures but what is never missing are pronounced circles of eyes and binocular motifs emphasised at the cost of other body parts. The Bascoids also became part of legends about one-eyed Cyclopes brandishing shields with the sun symbol. At dawn on solstice holidays they waited for the first sun-beam to light the stone array and point to the sacred treasury. The ancient Greeks called megalith-builders Cyclopes and imagined them as one-eyed giants looking like the shepherd Polyphemus. The origin of this belief is unknown but it had to do with the sun cult. Their sun gods (Ra, Marduk, Indra, Mithra) were often symbolised by the eye in a triangle with beams radiating in all directions. Megalith builders fought with lances and shields whose central point was a protuberance symbolising the sun-god’s eye. This custom probably gave rise to their repute of one-eyed warriors. Another reason was the habit of punishing defeated rivals by enslaving and blinding. The importance of eyes, sight and sun beams in the rites of megalith builders is demonstrated in Stonehenge and other ritual sites in Britain. Megalith builders celebrated spring solstice because at dawn they awaited the coming of the sun and their megalith stones were placed in such a way that they made sun beams point to sacred places with hidden treasures. Their fairytales told stories about evil-eye-casting, about bad charms enabling bad supernatural powers to harm people by casting an evil look at a person.1 Ancient Scottish incantations against evil-eye-casting have been preserved in Gaelic oral poetry: “Let God bless my eye, / and my eye will bless all I see, / I will bless my neighbour / and my neighbour will bless me.”1 The evil-eye superstitions are referred to as a side-product of apotropaic magic consisting in negative curses protecting against enchanting. They were characteristic of the Bronze Age tribes of megalith builders. In Italy apotropaic charms were known as jettatura or il fascino. One Neapolitan curse from Amalfi read as follows: “The Eye of Death, the Evil-Casting Eye, I repudiate you by holy water, oil and Jesus.” The most effective protection was seen in wearing amulets with concentring circles. These customs have lasted millennia and help to detect megalith nations in Asia as well as America. The tribes of Medes in Iran denoted such charms as chashm e bad ‘bad eye’ and Algonquin tribes in Canada as drishti.2 Extract from Pavel Bělíček: Systematic Poetics II. Literary Ethnology and Sociology. Prague 2017, pp. 50-54

1 A. C. Hollis: The Massai. Oxford 1905, p. 260, 264-5; Josef Wolf: Poslední svědkové pravěku. Praha 1970, p. 135.

1 http://russiapedia.rt.com/of-russian-origin/koshchey-bessmertny/.

2 V. N. Toporov: K rekonstrukcii mifa o mirovom jajce. Trudy po znakovym sistemam 3. Urartu 1967, p. 681; L'Arbero universale. In: Ricerche semiotice. Torino 1973.

1 Veronica Berry: Neapolitan Charms against the Evil-Eye. Folk-Lore 79, 1968, 250-6.

1 W. Mackenzie: Gaelic Incantations, Charms and Blessings of the Hebrides. Inverness 1895, p. 39.

2 R. Corso: The Evil Eye. Polish Folklore 4: 6, 1959.