The Ever-Unfolding Marriage of
Loewenmensch and Venus of Hohle Fels
None of the previously described processes was happening in isolation. Population had spread throughout the Earth, not just central Europe, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, but also cultures in eastern Asia had flourished throughout the Neolithic, beginning as far back as 18,000 BC. And civilizations in Mesoamerica were beginning to independently develop – the Olmec and the Maya.
Back in northern Africa, Loewen was not content to confine himself to the animal kingdom. In Egypt he created another identity, Bes, who, with his consort Beset, fashioned themselves as Egyptian deities. They began their mission in Egypt and descended quickly south, into Nubia and Somalia. Their notoriety and following quickly spread to the middle East, into Syria, and then west as far as the Balearic Islands, primarily Ibiza. Oddly enough, the king and queen of the animal world were also idolized as the protectors of homes, families, and children.
Other ideas began to spread. Egypt’s concepts about architecture, and art, traveled north through Cyprus, Crete, Malta, into Turkey and Greece – and east to Mesopotamia. The Mesopotamians developed the earliest notions about writing – eventually more abstract than the pictographic markings of the Egyptians, they ultimately originated an alphabet – and the thinking of Gilgamesh and Hammurabi, relating to governance progressed westward after the 2nd and 1st millennia BC.
Which talk about the civilizing of society brings us to the subjects of ritual human sacrifice.
Strongly related to the more benign sounding, but extraordinarily illusory, and to this day commonly accepted notion of personal religious sacrifice; ritual sacrifice, regularly practiced into the first millennium AD in Europe, Africa, and Asia; and in Mesoamerica until the invasion of the Spanish in the 1600s AD, was simply the taking of human life by other, more powerful humans, for purposeful, but practically unsubstantiated gain. People were buried alive, stabbed with pikes through their skulls, and poisoned, among many other creatively murderous methods, for purposes ranging from ensuring the longevity of a building, to justifying the waging of war, to establishing one’s hierarchical space in some hypothetically imagined afterlife
Why is this topic so important to inject – during the time when what we designate as culture was beginning to evolve in fascinating ways throughout the world? Because during my lifetime, not to mention all human history, there has rarely been a day without war – somewhere on this planet. And war, though sometimes defensively necessary, consists of the taking of lives. It is related to our, human, attitude about the value of life – someone else’s life. And that perspective is an intrinsic piece of the construct that is characterized as civilization.