Martin Gantman

Tag: Art

  • On Civilization 9

    The Ever-unfolding Marriage of

    Loewenmensch and Venus of Hohle Fels

    At a certain point, around the time of the conversion from matriarchies to patriarchies, roughly around 3000 BC, Loewenmensch, recognizing the complexities of the evolving world, decided to cleave his (their) dual personalities and separate into Loewen (lion) and Mensch (human). He (They) trekked to his (their) familiar ritual spot, beneath the dense trees and cool filtered light of the Black Forest, quiet and secluded, and began his (their) transformation.

    Morphosis

    Inaudibly, they transitioned through their separate identities, their original selves disappearing into the inaccessible past; morphing through various forms until settling on manifestations appropriate to their evolutionary time. Lion preemptively assumed his role as king of the animal realm, and Mensch appropriated his position as king of the human world.

    Lion decided the animal world would remain as hunter/gatherers. Their society became a system of natural struggle and contest. It derived its hierarchies through battle, with Lion as king, through its differences in personal traits, tactics, and physical ability.

    The human world, ruled by Mensch, ultimately emerged as a system of property and possession. As societies became denser, a system of artificial order and regulations was developed that governed the behavior of individuals, not only to influence the conduct among human relationships, but also to preserve the logistical systems, related to property, that had been set in place. These systems eventually came to be protected by groups of enforcers that were created and organized by Mensch and later rulers. Initially selected by the populace, the order of rule later became familial, passing from son to son (and sometimes daughter), until such times when factions of greater strength overwhelmed the rule in place.

  • On Civilization 8

    The Ever-unfolding Marriage of

    Loewenmensch and Venus of Hohle Fels

    One of the curious aspects for me, about the span of the 12,000 years of the Neolithic period, the beginning of the warming of the Earth, was the transfer of power from matriarchies to male dominated societies. As you can see, almost all the guests at the Loewenmensch-Hohle Fels wedding were women. These are women who had been immortalized in clay and stone over tens of thousands of years. They were representative at the beginnings of settlements in the river valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile valley, the Indus Valley, lower Turkey, and France and Germany.

    The Wedding Guests

    There is very little we know about the images of these women, and particularly about who it was that created these images or what was their motive. Another thing we don’t know about is the power relationship between men and women during that early time. Most societies appeared to be matriarchal, but when the hunter-gatherers began to accumulate into settlements, then into villages and small cities, the image of the male as the dominant gender, in terms of leadership in the society, began to emerge. We do know that there is little to no image record of men in society from about 35,000 BC until, perhaps, around 3,000 BC, except for the painted hand prints that you see on many of the cave walls in France and Germany and Indonesia. But these first images, beginning in the third millennium BC, did generally represent men in power positions.

    The New Leaders ca 2,600 BC

    Some speculate that the aggressive tendencies of men, which had previously been spent on the hunting grounds, began to manifest themselves within the leadership structure of the new communities. These men became known as kings, and pharaohs, and priests, and shaman, and emerged throughout the world, not only in Europe and Africa and middle Asia, but also in eastern Asia and meso-America; ultimately reducing the number of matrilineal societies to about 20% of all cultures.

    The Transfer

    This shift in power I have been discussing, based theoretically on the supposed innate male traits of assertiveness and aggression, recalls one of my favorite images. It is the one image on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, where Michelangelo (allegedly) places Eve, within the somewhat possessive and protective crook of god’s arm, and god, sporting his familiar stern visage, points at a somewhat docile and lethargic Adam as if challenging or daring him to arise and take Eve.

  • On Civilization 7

    The Ever-unfolding Marriage of 

    Loewenmensch and the Venus of Hohle Fels

    Tools and Weapons

    The difference between a tool and a weapon is intention.

    Very roughly, about 3 to 4 million years ago, tools were created. Over time these tools began to be honed and made more efficient to better fit the various purposes for which they were intended: hunting, foraging, cave-crafting. But it took, again very roughly, 2.5 to 3.5 million of those years, until 400,000 years ago, to arrive at the idea of being able to convert or re-craft those elementary tools into forms that could be specifically identified as objects intended as weaponry.

    4,000,000 BC

    Still, until the end of the Ice Age (with some exceptions), approximately 12,000 years ago, people seem to have generally found ways to exist in relative harmony. It wasn’t until, because of the warming Earth (although other reasons are also being put forward), people began to preference agriculture over hunting, and to establish various forms of settlement: to gather into townships, and tribes, and colonies. It was at this time, subsequent to the reign of the mother-goddess, and within the time frames of the Egyptian Loewenmenschen, that mass confrontation began in earnest.

    At this late time, weapons began to become increasingly more efficient at taking the lives of animals and people. For 3 to 4 million years weapons had very slowly become more efficient for their purposes, but after that time of 3 to 4 million years, it took only another 12,000 or so, relatively a moment, to escalate these rough tools and crude weapons into mechanisms that are capable of enormous destruction and mass annihilation.

    Today

    Coincidentally, this is the era to which the term: “beginnings of civil(ization),” begins to be applied.

    There is what we, at this present time in history, consider a dark aspect of the human psyche that, even now, seems to have little difficulty being able to justify the purposeful ending, or taking, of another life, or other lives. It has always been thus. But it is possible that the onset of accumulation in the new settlements: the storing of foodstuffs and other perishables, and the ensuing creation of economic imbalance and difference, rather than nourishing an inclination to share, might have intensified our inherent propensity toward, among other things, personal desire, selfishness and greed.

  • On Civilization 6

    The Ever-unfolding Marriage of

    Loewenmensch and the Venus of Hohle Fels

    Gobeckli Tepe, Turkey

    Meanwhile the mother-goddess returned home to Turkey, to Göbekli Tepe. It was almost as if she had said, “Enough of the caves and the crude huts made from the bones of deceased mammoths. Get me a Pritzker architect and build me a proper edifice!” And in that time, around 10,000 BC, almost 12,000 years ago, slightly before the beginnings of the accumulation of peoples around Jericho, and other Palestinian locations, and 7,000 years before the first of the Egyptian pyramids; she built a massive structure of tall shaped columns and large open spaces.

    She sat alone in her throne, except for the foxes perennially at her sides, amid her developing creation, and pondered the difference between this immense building and the environments of the people with whom she had just been celebrating in lower Germany, her friends Hohle Fels and Loewenmensch.

    There are questions about the primary purpose of her creation. It was obviously a religious ground, but some suggest even more, a skull worship – an homage to death – as there have been found skulls and other skeleton parts encased within the columns and other elements of the structure.

  • On Civilization 5

    The Ever-unfolding Marriage of

    Loewenmensch and Venus of Hohle Fels

    Loewenmensch – Hohle Fels Egypt

    I want to take a moment to skip ahead several thousand years, only temporarily, just to make a point about the spread of culture, and its impact on civilization.

    It appears that in the 2nd to 3rd millennia BC, the Loewenmensch-Hohle Fels family continued to have prominent visibility and wielded immense leverage in places of power, particularly, at this point, in the royal halls of Egypt. These cousins, direct descendants of Loewenmensch and Venus: Loewenmensch (known as Sphinx of Giza), Loewenmensch (Sphinx of Senrusret III, and Loewenmensch.Hohle Fels, attained near-divine stature in Egypt during this time.

    Of course, there were kings, and emperors, and pharaohs who exerted pragmatic control over the populace – even priests who seconded these rulers and ran fiefdoms of their own. But, as the above family portrait shows, there are families who continue through time, like the Capetians, the Kahns, and the Rothschilds in different eras, who, behind the scenes, have had, and continue to have, significant impact and influence on the trajectories of civilizations.

  • On Civilization 4

    The Ever-unfolding Marriage of
    Loewenmensch and Venus of Hohle Fels

    Over the next 20,000 years the descendants of Leowenmensch and Venus, seeing off the last of their Neanderthal friends, and the ending of the Ice Age, expanded west and east, conjoining with other groups in the fertile valleys of Europe and along the flowing rivers of the middle East, as well as in northern Africa.

    They lived, sometimes, in huts made from the bones of the carcasses of the mammoths, their early brethren, who were also becoming extinct due to the extreme change in climate. The women shared coequally with the men in accomplishing the food gathering and preparation, if maybe not the child rearing; and the families did not reside as individual units, but coexisted in groups, giving question to the assumed timing and the previously accepted application of the designation, civil(ization).

    They did not war, as had occurred hundreds of thousands of years before, as there was plenty; though there became signs of the beginnings of individual accumulation and, perhaps, greed.

  • On Civilization 3

    The Ever-unfolding Marriage of
    Loewenmensch and Venus of Hohle Fels

    The Honeymoon

    They honeymooned in the black forest, along the banks of the rivers; the Enz, the Kinzig, the Nagold, and the Murg. They were watched over by the vogelherd, thus safeguarding the continuation of the saga of homo sapiens.

  • On Civilization 2

    The Ever-unfolding Marriage of Loewenmensch and

    Venus of Hohle Fels

    The Wedding Party

    The wedding party consisted of the bride attended by her friends from Willendorf; Dolni Vestonice, Moravia; and Gobekli Tepe, in Turkey. Also in attendance, from Turkey, was their mother goddess from Catal Huyuk.

    Loewenmensch was seconded by his coterie of friends from the Vogelherd.

  • On Civilization 1

    On Civilization:

    The Ever-unfolding Marriage of Loewenmensch and Venus of Hohle Fels

    The Wedding Ceremony

    The marriage of Loewenmensch (born 38,000 BCE) and Venus of Hohle Fels (born 35,000 BCE), and officiated by Hammurabi, King of the Babylonians.

     

    The inception of a new project by Martin Gantman

     

  • First Downtown L.A. Tricycle Rental