Democritus Reformatorium Prehistoric Tribes

Nanotheism, Avitheism and Plebeian Humoralism

Cults of Prehistoric Omnivorous Lappids and the Ancient Plebs of Craftsmen

Taoism: Chinese belief in determinism and the lawful pursuit of the Tao “the material way of life”

Buddhism: the Burmese and Hindu version of Chinese Taoism and its deterministic teaching

Sophistics: the Greek dialectical philosophy of plebeian preachers and lawyers

Humoralism: the Greek Hippocratic philosophy of temperaments, somatic saps and humours

Cynicism: the Greek philosophy of plebeian itinerant tramps

Stoicism: the Greek philosophy of patient suffering and pursuing the deterministic personal fate

Peripatetism: the Greek philosophy of “walking“ itinerant evolutionists and systematic comparativists

Protestantism: deterministic beliefs of plebeian democratic leaders (Albigenses, Lutheranism)

Nanotheism: belief in elfin tiny helpers assisting in the household

Tricksterism: myths and folktales about little but smart and witty animal tricksters

Cremationism: the burial rite of cremations raising the soul to heavens

Avitheism: cult of swallows, who carry the souls of dead fathers back to their homes (avis ‘bird’)

Ventotheism: cults of four winds that carry remains of the cremated dead to heavens (ventus ‘wind’)

Janusism: sculpting two-faced or four-faced figurines blowing the wind in four directions to heavens

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)

Nanotheism, Avitheism and Plebeian Humoralism

The Negrito, Pygmies and Lapps had a specific folklore telling stories about their trickster heroes defeating giant animals by clever tricks. In European fairy-tales the trickster hero of dwarfish stature was known as Jack Thumb or Jack the Giant-Killer but in earlier fairy-tales his role was always played by a trickster animal. The medieval mock-heroic epic described him as the witty Fox Renart (Reynard the Fox or Reineke Fuchs) cheating the silly bear, wolf and stork. Joseph Bédier1 and Gaston Paris2 considered this mock-heroic tradition as an expression of the Gallic sense of popular humour (esprit gaulois) and discussed its possible eastern origins in India. Enquiring into the tradition of European fables from Aesop and Phaedrus, they found surprising analogies in Buddha’s Tipitaka ‘Three Baskets of Knowledge’ from the 6^thcentury BC. They devised a hypothesis of Indian provenience of European fables due to early migrations from India.

Such theories may sound absurd until we reveal their common ground in the folklore of all short-sized Lapponoid peoples with cremation burials. Buddhists were the first Indian cult to introduce cremation and burn the dead with widows on funeral pyres. Their custom to hang the ashes of the dead ancestors on the stupa columns along main roads has striking parallels in the Roman populi Albanenses who put the ashes into columbaria on high columns along busy streets (via Appia). Archaeologists call them incinerators or Urn-Fielders and admit that they arrived in Europe with the Andronovo culture (1500 BC) from Kazakhstan and settled down as the Lusatian culture (Lausitzer Kultur, 1300 BC). Under the influence of Germanic Reihengräber ‘row graves’ their cemeteries were strewn around in rows of urn fields.

Fables about trickster animals may be traced also along migration routes of Lapponoid incinerators in America. Their distant forefathers were the Negrito in Southeast Asia, who migrated southward as far as Australia and Tasmania. Another stream continued northward as far as Canada and California where they spread the Athapascan oral folklore telling stories about the trickster heroes Coyote and Hare. These popular dwarfish heroes won over big giant animals by using witty cunning tricks.

In civilised Europe trickster tales transformed into fables, verse tales about trickster animals making fools of silly giant animals. Joseph Bédier and Gaston Paris believed that European fables had been imported from India and descended from Buddhist jatakas, gnomic stories about clever animals. European nations preserved memories of short-sized dwarfish populations (Laps, Alpines, Celts, Slaves) in myths about tutelary guardian spirits of dwarfish size. The Italic populi Albanenses were responsible for the Roman faith in lares and penates, little guardian spirits protecting the household. In Russia people worshipped dyedushka Domovoy, a dwarfish elf living under the threshold of the door and gate. Since ancient Celts and Slavs were abused by the Hallstatt people as slaves in mines, their tutelary spirits were also embodied in the permonik, a guardian spirit dwelling in mines. As the cult of dwarfish deities coincided with the distribution of dwarfish populations, it is convenient to coin for their myths a special term of nanotheism.

Their funeral customs tended to apply incineration and burn the dead husband on the pyre together with his widow. They believed that after death souls fly with blowing winds to the heaven and in every spring they return in the embodiments of birds. This belief may be referred to as avitheism (Latin avis ‘bird’) and it may be related to Greek ‘ventotheism’ (Latin ventus ‘wind’). The Greek Hellenes prayed to wind deities (Aeolus, Boreas, Eurus), the ancient Romans adored wind deities Venti, the Hindu believed in the Hanuman’s father acting as the wind god Vayu and the Chinese worshipped the wind god Fei Lian.

Striking analogies are found between Roman and Indian cremation rites. The Negritos put the ashes of their dead ancestor into woven sacks and hung them on tent-poles of their lean-to and semidugout dwellings. Buddhists in India built stupa columns along busy roads and put the ashes on their top. The Roman populi Albanenses deposited their ashes into columbaria and on top of columns erected along via Appia and other busy roads.

Buddhism started as a popular mendicant sect of poor travelling preachers similar to Muslim dervishes or Greek sophists and cynics. In the Middle Ages the mendicant tradition of beggar philosophers was revived by Italian Minorites (Franciscans), English Lollards and Czech Taborites. They spread protestant discontent whenever the poor artisan townsfolk rose up to public protest and street rebellions. The medical doctrine of travelling preachers and cynic beggars concentrated on the theory of four secretory saps that circulate in the human body (gall, bile, blood, slime) and determine four humours or temperaments (sanguine, melancholic, choleric and phlegmatic temperament). This philosophy of humoralism (from Latin humor ‘sap, liquid, humidity’) allowed Democritus, Hippocrates and Gallen to found a new cynic tradition in Greek philosophy, science and medicine. Plutarchus applied its tenets for a typological analysis of human temperaments and characters. He took this method over from Theophrastus and his Peripatetic School at Aristotle’s Lyceum. If Aristotle and Theophrastus anticipated Darwin’s evolutionism in the realm of animals, their fellow-lecturers Dicaearchus of Essene, Duris of Samos and Phanias of Eresus anticipated historism in humanities and drew evolutionary outlines of ancient Greek sciences. They were the first to adopt the historical, comparative, typological and sociological approach that proved to be a reliable foundation of modern sciences.

Besides influencing ancient sciences and medieval Protestantism, philo-sophical humoralism continued to inspire traditions of popular realistic literature. Hippocrates’ idea of various social types, characters, temperaments and humours was inherent in many ancient popular genres, comedy, carols, iambography as well as Aesop’s fables and Pseudo-Homeric mock-heroic epic. The Middle Age saw their continuation in medieval bourgeois satire, La Fontaine’s fables and commedia dell’arte. In modern times its inspiration did not perish but flew into a large stream of all modern artistic realism. Its key idea was developed by Breughel, Rablais, Balzac, Brecht and Hašek and consisted in the comédie humaine, in the social typology of human characters seen from the viewpoint of popular humour. This philosophy permeated Ben Jonson’s ‘comedy of humours’ as well as Molière’s ‘comedy of manners’. It united Horace’s satire with the tradition of Lazarillo de Tormes’ picaresque novel and modern realistic prose.

Extract from Pavel Bělíček: Systematic Poetics II. Literary Ethnology and Sociology. Prague 2017, pp. 45-47

1 Joseph Bédier: Les fabliaux; études de littérature populaire et d'histoire littéraire du moyen âge. Paris: É. Champion, 1893, 1925.

2 Gaston Paris - Bruno Paulin: Les fabulistes latins. Paris 1972.