Democritus Reformatorium Prehistoric Tribes

Geminism and Daphnephorism

Prehistoric Cults of Piscivorous Fishermen and Neolithic Lake-Dwellers

Ichthyototemism: belief in totem ancestors in the reincarnation of fish, dolphins, amphibians and reptiles

Monotheism: the cult of one celestial Apollonic sun-god and one satanic underworld god (Belzebub)

Stelarism: erecting upright stelae, menhirs and effigies in honour to prominent warriors (from Latin stela “upright pillar, stele or effigy”)

Petrotheism: worshiping sacred stones embodying heroes in stone alleys of menhirs (petra “rock”

Cataclysmism: myths about the Great Deluge, a flood, whose survivor Noah was the first human

Tengrism: the cult of the Turkic and Mongolan sky-god Tengri, Japanese Tenrikyo, Polynesian Maori Tangaroa and Samoan Tagaloa; in India they equal to Tara and Telugu Thalli, Telangana

Totems: Pelasgoid totems were the wolf (Apollo), bear (Diana), swan (Leto) and dolphin (Delos)

Ichthyomorphism: belief in postmortal transformations into fish, dolphins, amphibians and reptiles

Purificationism: rites of purification in water, baths, wells, spas, fountains or mikve

Hydrotheism: baptising newly-born kids in water and burials of the deceased in sea depths

Ursinism: cults of the bear impersonated by the Moon godess Diana/Artemis (Latin ursus “bear”)

Geminism: cults of twin children (Greek Dioskuroi, Roman Gemini, Polish Lel and Polel)

Anthism: Pelasgoid flower cult common in Crete, among Polynesian seafarers and Uto-Aztecan poets

(from Greek άνθος, anthos “flower”)

Daphnephorism: the Pelasgic rite of the laurel bearers, daphnephoroi, in honour of Apollo’s twin Diana

Ochreous consecration: the dead bodies were consecrated by hematite ochre paint

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)

Pelasgoid and Tungusoid Cults

European populations of lake-dwellers were ranging from the Black Sea to Bulgaria, Macedonia, Coruntania as far as the lake country intersecting the Swiss, Italian and French borders. Their bloom culminated with the rise of the Chasséen, Polada and Lagozza cultures (4500-3500 BC). A long time later their spread was continued by colonisations of La Tène people, who headed northward for Belgium, Cornwall and Ireland. The native aborigines welcomed them as the nation of Fir Bolgs or Tuatha Dé Danann. Judging from the physical constitution of Chancelade man, anthropologists denote them as Tungids and associate them with nomadic fishermen with tepee tents.

Beside Pelasgian and Cretan mythology their memory was preserved best in Irish folk tales. Their look exhibited black long hair and pale whitish complexion. It was described faithfully in the marine style of Cretan vase painting in Knossos. Irish tales saw them as graceful noble semigods who loved blossoming fruit trees and wherever they came they planted cherry-trees. Homer and the ancients remembered them as acorn-eaters1 and this custom remained typical also of the Uto-Aztecan tepee-dwellers in North America.

Acorn-eating was corroborated as a common diet in coincidence with twin myths also for the Proto-Latini in ancient Italy. Descent from the Latini is suspected plausibly also in the fates of twin brothers Romulus and Remus. They were sent by the king Amulius down the Tiber river as floater-boys. They were suckled by a she-wolf, i.e. a lupine animal that was celebrated as Apollo’s guardian tutelary spirit. Sacrificing extramarital children of temple priestesses to gods and sending them down the river in a basket as floater-boys was a common motif in folktales but it was abundant also in ancient myths of prehistoric nomadic fishermen.

The Greek aristocracy worshipped as their chief god Apollo, a son of the swan goddess Leto. His twin sister was Artemis famed in Italy as the huntress Diana symbolised by the bear. Their family’s totem symbols comprised the swan (Leto, Delos), the wolf (Apollo), the bear (Diana) and the laurel leaf crowning Apollo’s mistress Daphne. Her name is audible also in their favourite type of divination called daphnomancy. It consisted in predicting the future by burning leaves of bay laurels. The importance of laurels for religious cults is clear from fact that their priests were called daphnophores.

The sun-god Apollo based his glory on his victory over the dragon-like monster Python. Its role in Pelasgian mythology is ambivalent because by kinship he was consanguine to Pythia, the chief prophetess of oracles in the Apolline temple at Delphi. Both of them may have belonged to a Pelasgian shamanist subclan entrusted with black magic and funerary obsequies. Pelasgian dynasties ruled in Sparta and Arcadia, whose earlier name was Pelasgia. The Spartan king Tyndareus married Leda and fathered twin brothers Castor and Pollux. In Greek myths they won heroic repute as Dioscuri, while in ancient Italy they were celebrated as Gemini. They were brothers to the pair of beautiful twin-sisters Helen and Clytemnestra.

Tungusoid lakeside fishermen (pisciculturalists, ichthyophagues, sea people)

Leptolithic: Levalloisian and Aurignacian long thin flakes serving as knives.

Piscithanasis: after death common humans turn to fish or rock.

Piscimorphism: human beings are depicted as various species of fish/snakes.

Piscigenesis (ichthyogenesis): all fish were created from dead human bodies.

Creation of fish (A2100-A2139).

Creation of fish and other animals (A2100-A2199).

As far as religious beliefs are concerned, prehistoric nomadic fishermen professed piscimorphous totemism adoring water creatures, fish, reptiles, serpents, amphibians, dragons and other waterside species. Most folktales of prehistoric waterside fishers told trophy tales about catching an enormous fish. As they did not distinguish the species of fish and humans, they conceived their fishing expeditions as fish-to-fish duels. When they tackled the topic of exogamous marriage, it became clear that abductors of brides belonged to the stock of nomadic fishermen. Later their kinsfolk underwent anthropomorphisation and neighbouring fishermen began to be called as ‘fish in human form’. Australian boomerang-throwers dubbed them as ‘man-fish’.

Marriage to fish in human form (B654, B612.0.1, Ireland, India, Congo).

Marriage to amphibia in human form (B655).

Such tales adopted the optics of unilateral piscimorphism. Tribes catching the fish were depicted from outside as water monsters while the ethnic identity of narrators was neutralised as a human race. Particularly speaking, there were two distinct types bearing the label of female and male exomythium. Kinsmen related legends about either boys who caught, kidnapped and married a piscimorphous bride, or about girls who were abducted and wedded by piscimorphous or snake-like husbands. Since piscimorphous physiognomy was no match for humans, fishermen preferred amphibian and serpentine totems.

Totemistic metamorphoses: after removing tattooing supernatural marital partners from Microlithic nations transformed to common human beings:

Transformation: fish to man (D370, India).

Fish cleaned by girl becomes man (370.1, Ireland).

Transformation: eel to person (D373, Tonga, New Hebrides).

Twin myth: Apollo and Artemis (Diana), the Dioscuroi Castor and Pollux, Helen and Clytemnestra, Aegyptus and Danaus, Pelias and Neleus, Roman Gemini, Romulus and Remus, the Polish twin ancestors Lel and Polel.

Heautoscopy: hallucination of ‘seeing one's own body at a distance’.

Petrotheism and Ichthyophagous Transmigrationism

The Oceanic and Polynesian folklore tells myths about the cultural hero Tagaro (Maori Tangaroa, Tahitian Ta'aroa, Samoan Tagaloa), who brings fire and teaches people how to catch fish. This hero has one or several twin brothers, whom he kills in order to punish them for their feeble and lazy mind. Their names seem to be derived from the Altaic god Tengri, who killed his bad twin brother for his clumsy interventions in wonders of creating the world. The twin myth was imported by the Turcoid and Tungusoid fishermen from the Middle East, the very heartland of their race and languages. It contained all the tenets of the Palaeo-Altaic dualism, a faith worshipping the good god of Heavens as an antipode to a bad god Satan-Sheitan dwelling in the underworld. Most pastoralists all over the world profess a sort of dualist faith opposing the good god of heavens (Hebrew Jehovah, Persian Ormuzd or Ahura Mazda) to his bad brother or eternal adversary (Hebrew Satan, Muslim Sheitan, Persian Ahriman).

The names Tengri, Tagaro and Tagaloa refer to the earliest ancestor of the Tungus fishermen’s tribes. Tagaloa was worshipped by the brotherly phratry of Tungus fishermen with lambdacisms and l-plurals, who settled down as the Chinese Dungans, the Taiwanese and the Tagalog in the Philippines. The Telugu in South India were their distant kinsmen but came with a different branch through Afghanistan. On the other hand, Tengri and Tagaro were adored as divine ancestors of Turks and all Palaeo-Turcoid tribes speaking languages with r-plurals. The tribes of their descendants (Etruscans – Tyrrhenes, Iberians, Hiberni, Kimmerians – Cimbri) belonged to two stocks of the ancient Sea Peoples plundering the southern seas with piratic raids. Owing to their subsistence, fishing livelihood, and waterside post-dwellings the ancients called them ichthyophagi ‘fish-eaters’ or ‘piscivores’.

Their myths loved dreaming about hooking a shark or hunting down the skull of a strong warrior. Another goal granting the highest bliss was being swallowed by a shark or killed by a strong warrior because it guaranteed a posthumous transformation into the body of a strong predator. This philosophy of reincarnation and transmigrationism was typical of ancient beliefs professed by most tribes of nomadic fishermen. It rested in ideas of after-death life giving human souls a chance to survive by transforming into an animal body. The Palaeo-Mongolian races never held elderly persons in high esteem and in times of starvation they expelled them into the wilderness. The Eskimo set them on a floating floe while the ancient Jews exposed them in the desert so that they might fall prey to carrion vultures. The seafarers deposed their dead by sinking their corpse down into sea depths. The Dravidians, who are akin to the Old Indian Sivaists, burnt them and threw their ashes into the river. They all worshipped the water element and used it in a wide variety of purification rites. Christians inherited them in the rite of christening and, as is obvious from Empedocles’ Katharmoi ‘Purifications’, their clear vestiges were present also in Pythagorianism.

The Palaeolithic tribes of nomadic fishermen recruited from the races of Turcoid and Tungusoid ancestors settled north of the Euxine and east of the Caspian Sea. The original homeland of the Tungids may have lain in areas occupied later by their remote relatives Volga Bulgars and Polovtsians. From here they set out on long westward travels as the Leptolithic culture of Aurignacian stamp about 33 000 BC. It was characterised by long blades and knives used as scrapers or sabre-like cutting weapons. Cutting weapons were typical also of Palaeo-Turcoid fishermen developing microlith cultures with small flake tools inserted into a wooden shaft. They fathered a lot of ethnic groups (Magdalenian, Ahrenburgian, Maglemosian, Sauveterrian) due to long migrations in all directions. The Natufian culture (12 000 BC) was probably of greatest import for cleaving the Semitic group in the Near East.

The prehistoric art of Magdalenian fishermen and small-game hunters set an exquisite example of cave paintings peculiar to most microlith cultures. They were undoubtedly created by shamans, who used anagogic magic for instructing hunters in strategies how to conduct tomorrow’s chasing game. Their prehistoric art depicting hunting scenes consisted almost exclusively of cave paintings, petroglyphs engraved in rock overhangs and drawings in sand. Fishing subsistence was obviously complemented by hunting small game that focused on antelopes and ovicaprids. Since they inhabited caves or cliff-dwellings and buried their dead in rock-cut graves, they regarded such environment also as a natural refuge for their cults. Besides rock-hewn burial caves microlith cultures deposed the dead in the sea. They put them into a dugout canoe and let them float down the river. Oceanic fishermen’s mythology dreamt about being eaten by a sort of predator fish so that they might spend posthumous life in its reincarnation. The most legendary of their heroes died a tragic death by metamorphosis into a rock. They considered rocks as fossilised deities and practiced petrotheism conceived as a rock worship (Latin petra ‘rock’). They also build stone stelae over famous warriors’ graves and heaped stones on their tumuli.

The ritual roots of ancient petrotheism have been preserved well in Islamism. Its cultic centre is found in Mecca and its sanctuary Ka'aba made out of granite. Its origins are elucidated in the Qur'an that codified heathen beliefs of the Near East into a dogmatic ecclesiastic doctrine needful for feudal societies. Like the New Testament it was heir to the Jewish Tora and Moses’s Genesis. The earliest Hebrew ancestor was Abraham, who founded the tradition of burying tribesmen in sacred rock-cut caves. When his wife Sarah died, he bought a piece of land and cut the first sacred burial cave in its rock. His Islamic alter ego in the Qur'an was Ibrahim celebrated for founding the cuboid sanctuary Ka'aba ‘cube’ in Mecca.

The ancient Hiberni in Ireland, Eburones in the Rhineland, Iberians in Spain, the Hebrew in the Levant and the Gebru tribe settled near Teheran descended from cave-dwellers, who got accustomed to live in cliff-dwellings and rock-cut caves along the Mediterranean seaside coasts. Later they made a transition to summer abodes but did not forget to bury their dead in rock-cut funeral caves as was common to the Eburones, probable descendants of the Seine-Oise-Marne culture. Petrotheist indulgence in rock environment simply stemmed from their custom to live and bury the dead in the sacred land of rocky cliffs and rock overhangs. A typical illustration of their architecture can be seen in cliff-dwellings accessed by a vertical shaft branching into horizontal corridors with side niches and benches serving as sleeping-berths for the quick as well as the dead.

Extract from Pavel Bělíček: Systematic Poetics II. Literary Ethnology and Sociology. Prague 2017, pp. 48-50

1 Thomas Heine Nielsen - Hans-Joachim Gehrke: Arkadia and its poleis in the Archaic and Classical periods. Göttingen : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, cop. 2002, p. 71-2.