The Ever-unfolding Marriage of
Loewenmensch and Venus of Hohle Fels
Tag: Homelessness
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On Civilization 23
The Ever-unfolding Marriage of
Loewenmensch and Venus of Hohle Fels
The empire known in history as Rome had disintegrated as a result of its own entropy, internal flaws, and the infiltration of uneducated northern Europeans. The candles lit by Cleisthenes and Pericles and Aristotle and Socrates and Plato have painfully extinguished. The establishment of social division: royals/priests; farmer peasants; serfs/vassals/slaves, slowly became institutionalized into a structure that, today, we can begin to recognize and relate to. This all began approximately 1,500 years ago.
Mensch and Hohle Fels with Charlemagne The areas of academic knowledge: research in science, philosophy, literature, and the arts were confined into the dominant church and ultimately became “Christianized.” Some say the church, at least, maintained progress in these areas of study; ideas that had begun in the middle east, developed in Greece, and continued by the Romans. Others might question why this activity was not shared outside the walls of the church.
Mensch and Hohle Fels with Justinian I 
Mensch and Hohle Fels with Umar I 
Mensch and Hohle Fels with Tai-Tsung Meanwhile, Mensch and Hohle Fels maintained estates in Paris, Rome, Constantinople, and Baghdad. They partied across the continents: in the courts of Charlemagne, the Byzantine palace of Justinian the Great, with the Islamic Caliph Umar I, and the Emperor of China, Tai-Tsung. They took time to travel the various rural roads, admiring the beauty of their natural landscapes; taking little notice of the vassals and serfs cultivating these lands for others’ benefit. They had little memory of their dank and laborious lives in the dark caves of Bavaria and its relation to these workers. After all, that had occurred more than 30,000 years ago.
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On Civilization 22
The Ever-unfolding Marriage of
Loewenmensch and Venus of Hohle Fels
It was nearing the end of that time that most of the world, for some reason, refers to as BCE (Before the Christian, or Common, Era), but that we are now labeling BP (before the present). The time I am relating to now is roughly 3,000 to 2,500 BP. Mensch and Hohle Fels were traveling along the eastern Mediterranean, taking time to muse about the changes they had seen since their coming together, some 25,000 to 35,000 years before – they had lost track by now.
One may wonder why Hohle Fels and Mensch are still on the scene of this disjointed narrative; but as we all have begun to discover, history is very much about what has been written (and by whom), and Hohle Fels and Mensch just happened to have found an author who is insistent about continuing to write them in. Ergo they endure – in addition to Bes, nee Leowen, and all their descendants.
As case in point, about the indeterminacy of the historical record, so much is made about Athens being the birth place of democracy, a loosely defined, or understood, term even now. But there is increasing evidence of deliberative assemblies elsewhere on the planet, before Athens took up arms and recreated itself. It occurred in towns and villages and cities throughout Mesopotamia; like Kish and Uruk and Babylon – and in the independent “republics” of India. The noble, and sometimes common, populace having voice in, and selecting, their leaders, including their kings and priests.Yes, those kings and priests often assumed monarchical powers. They made laws and took decisions about bringing the populace to war (sometimes dependent upon voter consent) – and often recreated themselves as gods. But it is also true that there were village councils and voting mechanisms that set these leaders on course; an idea that may have later navigated its way toward Greece and helped switch on the lights inside the heads of Cleisthenes and Pericles.
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On Civilization 21
The Ever-unfolding Marriage of
Loewenmensch and Venus of Hohle Fels
By 1500 BP (before present) a total population of about 200 million people was spread around the Earth. The night, when it was clear, was lit only by the moon – and the infinity of stars that spread across the unfathomable black sky. There was fire by this time, but it took little to light a room or a pit. The fire had no effect on one’s ability to explore the evening cosmos.
What, when one was awake, did one do to pass the time during these dark hours? The food time was finished. There were yet no books – even for the few who were able to read. One could watch the moon, for hours, as it traversed its visible limits. They could peruse the stars – these flickering dots of light that spread above them in a panoply of sizes and colors. They could connect dots, imagine patterns; give names to those shapes, and create fables and narratives that they used to help model their lives.As the villages grew into towns, then into small cities; evening social life increased, but the ability to view the omnipresent heavens was little diminished and no less fascinating. They learned to use the lights in the sky to tell time, to form calendars, and to guide themselves, in boats, across the oceans to other lands, where they began to form new civilizations.
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On Civilization 20
The Ever-unfolding Marriage of
Loewenmensch and Venus of Hohle Fels
Hohle Fels and Mensch set themselves atop the party table as the Earth trembled and the world as they had known it broke apart.
It was about 2,000 to 2,500 years ago that people in disparate civilizations began slowly piecing together a process of thinking that was paradigmatically different from how they typically assessed the world. Even Bes, nee Leowen, standing at a distance overlooking the god’s daily party, couldn’t believe his eyes. The world had cracked, and logic had entered the domain of hominids.
Some like to say that the study of logic began in southern Europe, specifically Greece. But as we have seen with so many other societal changes, practically none of them occurred in isolation. There is evidence that similar thinking had also occurred and been shared by Mesopotamians and Indians and Egyptians – and even in the short-lived Moist school in China, though Chinese philosophers, primarily following Confucius, developed a sense of morality based on tradition rather than logic.
It is truly difficult to imagine the immensely threatening and cataclysmic change in approach to lives that this idea brought to civilizations immersed in the belief and faith that omnipotent beings and non-beings would provide appropriate answers for their critical situations. The conflict between faith in primarily utopian or chimerical entities, and decisions based on deductive logic, is one that still rages over 2,000 years along; and continues to instigate and engage civilizations and cultures, factions within cultures, and individuals in sometimes violent opposition.
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On Civilization 17
The Ever-unfolding Marriage of
Loewenmensch and Venus of Hohle Fels
They gathered in the Valley of the Gods, as they did in the late afternoon of every day. All the gods and goddesses who represented devotees of the major world cultures and civilizations. They discussed the demands and the problems, the tragedies and the controversies that were brought to them that day. And they partied, drank from their various nectars, relaxed, and loved. Sometimes they included friends from the human world. Mensch and Hohle Fels could be seen there from time to time.
In my opinion “religion” is a word that everyone thinks they understand, but for which there is no universally accepted definition. It’s a non-word – simply a space-filler for ideas that we cannot fully explain nor comprehend. Spiritual is another of these words. The use of such words implants exclusive codes within dialogs, as well as discourses, around religion – not just the esoteric ideas that have been embedded within various religious practices, but also the popular conversation around which religious practice revolves.
The interesting thing about religious practice in the second and first millenniums BC, was that people had a much closer relationship to their gods than generally do practitioners today. Their gods were less abstract and more defined – more approachable. They had human personalities and failings. I can imagine, for example, Greeks, gods and citizens alike, sitting around a long, very long (as there were many gods in those times) holiday table, celebrating their mutual merriment – with wine provided by Dionysus.
It seems that this period, roughly the last 2,500 years BC, was the time when our penchant for creating and relying on the unknown imaginable increasingly developed.
A continuing project by Martin Gantman.
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On Civilization 15
The Ever-unfolding Marriage of
Loewenmensch and Venus of Hohle Fels
The “cradle of civilization” rocks – and rocks again
During my lifetime there have been well over 250 military actions around the world, from incidental incursions to a world encompassing war, a war during which, alone, an estimated 50,000,000 people lost their lives. That is the same number as the population of the entire world in 1000 BC.
Except for Mesoamerica, where, of course, there was a paradigm of institutionalized violence, and some parts of China, the thing that occupies most of one’s attention about the so-called cradle of civilization between 1700 and 600BC is that there was almost continuous war.
What is it about the issue of war, and particularly attaining control and possessions through violence, that is so confusing to me? Compare the 50 million people that populated the world in the 2nd millennium BC to the approximately 7.7 billion people that occupy the Earth today. What was the problem? Was there not enough land and resources to support everyone? I know some authorities actually state, as an explanation, that some of that land was not as productive, but still . . . . .
There are so many theories that hypothesize why folks, and these theories mainly, but not exclusively, attribute to men, initiate and participate in wars that it is embarrassing to try to repeat, or to summarize, or even to rationalize all of them. These theories try to explain why people obtain control and attempt to seize what others have by invoking Darwin’s name, or Freud’s name. There are the intra-personal and intra-communal power theories, the sexual power theories, and the “they have more than us” theories. All of these theories try to explain the tendency to acquire possessions through violence. While most of these positions I have read seem to have a rational and convincing basis, the aggregate of all of these theories causes one to consider that we are still in an area of rampant speculation about why people decide to go out and maim and kill and corral more slaves – particularly why farmers and artisans agreed to become soldiers and hoof it out there for tens and hundreds of miles, crossing rivers, climbing over mountains, and particularly getting exposed to life-threatening harm.While there is some very new, but uncorroborated, evidence of a possible gene related to empathy in humans, that potential was not in evidence in the political leaders of the late bronze age. Any tendency to share was overwhelmed by the attitude of taking.
Is there an actual human penchant toward violence and war within us; that killing others is an inherent part of our being, and that trying to alter that propensity is a wrenching and perhaps improbable achievement? If so, I must consider the possibility that I have had it wrong all these years; that peace may not be a viable option. Perhaps I have to look at this from the other side – that war is natural and acceptable, and that violent taking, in the final analysis, is a status quo of relating. Perhaps it is only the fear of personal loss that inhibits me from accepting the positive aspects of gaining through violent action – though changing that, for me, is probably another improbable achievement. -
On Civilization 14
The Ever-unfolding Marriage of
Loewenmensch and Venus of Hohle Fels
I feel I have lingered too long on what was the immense metamorphosis that occurred during the late Neolithic and early bronze age periods in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and I have been eager and impatient to move on to the so called “gilt” age of ancient Greece; however it appears that the road to Greece was significantly paved with the salt water of the multitudinous sea lanes that traveled to and from the Mediterranean island of Crete.There is evidence that homonids traveled to Crete as early as 130,000 BC. Possibly that is how the ancestors of Loewenmensch found their way, on wooden rafts, to Crete, then to the European mainland, and eventually to southern Germany, where they lived in the caves, hunted and gathered, and where, ultimately, Loewenmensch and Hohle Fels met and married.
Minoan Trade Routes The Cretan, or more popularly Minoan, culture, which began in 7th century BC, but evolved more fully in 3000BC, was a significant link between Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Mycenae, later called Greece. They were the center of trade across the Mediterranean, from the Euphrates to Spain and from Egypt to Italy, and became the first significant European civilization, surviving from about 2500 to 1200BC.
They created art, tools, and a language script called Linear A, which to this date has not been deciphered. Linear A led to the Mycenean script, Linear B, which was the forerunner of the eventual classical Greek alphabet. Though it was a socially layered society, it was possibly matriarchal, and a primarily peaceful one until its decline instigated, primarily, by several periods of natural disaster.
