Democritus Reformatorium Prehistoric Tribes

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

Ichthyomorphism: belief in postmortal transformations into fish, 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

Transmigrationism: belief in the after-death transmigration of souls into bodies of animals

Hepatomancy: divination from animal livers and drawing roentgen images with intestines

Circumventism: the rites of circumventing sacred rocks and walking around their foothills

Phallic cults: applying phallomorphous pillars as milestones

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)

Turanic, Turcoid, Cymbric and Dravidian Beliefs

Turcoid seaside fishermen (nomadic fishers, ichthyophagues).

Distribution: Etruscans, Phoenicians, Khmers, Malays, Dayaks, Polynesians).

Microlithic industry: manufacturing tiny flakes inserted into sickle shafts.

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

Contour cave rock-painting, petroglyphs on rocks and cliffs: cave paintings of hunted animals with the figures of shamans negotiating their expenditure.

Roentgen rock-painting: cave pictures of animals with transparent intestines.

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).

Exophagy: head-hunting, consuming the dead rival’s blood and heart. The Zande knife-throwers in Africa were also denoted as Niam-Niams owing to their cannibalistic practices. The Malaysian Dayaks and Papuans of New Guinea were known as head-hunters bragging of beheaded human trophies. Strabo described the customs of Cimbrian pirates at Cumae near Naples in Italy: they cut off the victim’s head and let it bleed into a kettle.1

Ichthyothanasis: Polynesian seafarers desired to be devoured by a shark so that after death their soul might reincarnate in the body of a strong predator fish. `

Petrotaphy: Hebroids and Mediterranean fishers buried their dead in artificial rock-hewn caves and laid their dead on benches in side-niches.

Hero cult: skilful hunters and warriors with rich trophies were deified as gods.

Forcible hermitage: over-aged elders were ousted out of the horde as hermits.

Bargained enthrallment: children were sold to the rival warrior in exchange for saving the defeated man’s life.

Cults: the priest haruspex and his collegium of haruspices dissected the dead corpses, inspected livers and prophesied the future according their condition.

Hepatoscopy: inspecting the liver and entrails of killed animals and enemies.

Hepatomancy (haruspicy, iatromancy): divination by inspecting the liver of sheep, ovicaprids and poultry. It was a special case of extispicy (Latin extispicium) scrutinising the entrails of killed and sacrificed animals. Haruspicy (Etruscan haruspicina) was performed by the Etruscan priest haruspex and his assistants haruspices.

Hermetic medicine: iatromancy (from Greek iatromantis ‘medicine-man’, ‘physician-seer’) was primarily based on dream interpretation.

Theogony: the world created by fetching the mainland from under water depths.

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 Strabo: Geography. Book V Chapter 4. 1, 240, p. 427.