A Criminal History of Mankind (20 page)

Now it becomes possible to see the significance of the engraved bone from Pech de 1’Aźe. Its overlapping lines seem to make no sense, and strike the casual observer as a form of doodling. But if Marshack is correct, ancient man did not indulge in doodling. His art was strictly purposeful. And if Cro-Magnon art was basically concerned with religious or magical ritual, then it is a safe assumption that the same would be true of the ‘art’
of homo erectus
. In fact, if Marshack’s argument - about ‘suddenlies’ - is valid, then we would expect to find that the origins of religious ‘art’ extend back far beyond the highly developed art of Cro-Magnon man.

All this offers us one of the most interesting clues so far to the mysteries of human evolution. It offers, to begin with, an answer to Ardrey’s question about what
homo erectus
did with his enlarged brain. He used it to create the earliest form of science. Science is, after all, an attempt to understand and control nature by the use of reason. And a shaman performing elaborate ceremonies to ensure good hunting is as much a scientist as an atomic physicist searching for quarks.

Why do we find this idea so difficult to accept? It is not simply because we find it hard to believe that the ape-like
homo erectus
had fairly complex ideas: modern anthropology has revealed that many primitive people have highly complex belief systems. It is because we feel that religion is a specifically ‘human’ characteristic. It is quite impossible to imagine a horse or a gorilla having religious ideas, because they seem to have no capacity to ask questions. They take life ‘as it comes’. And reconstructions of
homo erectus
make him look more like a gorilla than a man.

Our mistake could lie in the notion that religion is a matter of ‘asking questions’. Auguste Comte said that religion is the attempt to account for the world in terms of supernatural beings. But that is typical of nineteenth-century rationalism. He imagines primitive man saying ‘What causes thunder?’ and answering ‘An angry god.’ But primitive people do not ask ‘What causes thunder?’ They simply respond to it with feelings, with intuitions.

The Taulipang’s description of the massacre of the Pishauko tribe offers an important hint: ‘A sorcerer was in the house who was just blowing on a sick man. He said: “There are people coming!” and thus warned the inhabitants of the house...’ A few minutes later: ‘The sorcerer went on warning them and said: “The people have arrived...” ‘How did the sorcerer know? It is quite impossible that he could have heard the approach of the hostile Taulipang. But primitive people take this kind of power for granted. Their shamans become shamans because they possess the gift of ‘second sight’ - or what the Highland Scots call simply ‘the sight’. In
The Occult
I have mentioned a case described by the novelist Norman Lewis: of how the Huichol shaman, Ramon Medina, sensed as soon as he came into a village that there was a dead man concealed in a certain house, and was able to locate the corpse of a murdered man hidden in a roof space. Lewis remarks that the discovery was made ‘through what is completely accepted in this part of the world - even by Franciscan missionary fathers - as extra-sensory perception.’

Even if we are inclined to discount the possibility of this kind of extra-sensory perception, it is difficult to deny the evidence for the ability of primitive people to locate water by some form of instinctive perception. The ability to ‘dowse’ with a forked twig is widely accepted today in most country areas; but the aborigines of Australia seem to be able to locate underground water even without the aid of a twig. Scientists who have investigated dowsing - such as Professor Y. Rocard of the Sorbonne - have concluded that underground water causes slight changes in the earth’s magnetic field, and that these changes can be detected by the dowser. This explanation seems logical enough, since it now seems well established that birds migrate with the aid of the earth’s magnetic field. Experiments conducted at Manchester University by Dr Robin Baker showed that human beings are also sensitive to earth magnetism; blindfolded students were driven long distances - as much as forty miles - by a circuitous route, and then asked to point in the direction of ‘home’; sixty-nine per cent were accurate within an arc of 45 degrees, almost a third of them within 10 degrees.

It is easy enough to see that the ability to find water and to ‘point’ in the direction of home must have been essential for our ancestors for millions of years, and that this explains why their descendants still possess these abilities. This, in turn, suggests answers to certain questions raised by Marshack’s analyses. He argues convincingly that the series of ‘snakey’ dots on a piece of bone are a code indicating the times of the rising of the moon. But why should our ancestors have been interested in what time it rose? They did their hunting by day, not by night. And if their aim was simply to work out when herds of reindeer or bison would begin their annual migration, then small vertical notches - such as are found on other pieces of bone - would serve just as well for a ‘tally’.

We know that the moon has a powerful influence on the earth’s magnetic field - just as on the tides; it is probably this magnetic influence that causes disturbances in mental patients at the time of the full moon (and which leads us to speak of ‘lunacy’). Researches carried out by Dr Leonard Ravitz of the Virginia Department of Health showed that there is a difference in electrical potential between the head and chest, and that in mental patients there are far greater fluctuations in this difference than in normal people; the greatest fluctuations occur at the times of the new and full moon. A Japanese doctor, Maki Takata, showed in the 1940s that the rate at which blood curdles - the ‘flocculation index’ - is affected by sunspot activity. Experiments on the electrical field of trees - carried out by Harold Saxton Burr and F. S. C. Northrop in the 1930s - showed that this was also affected by sunspots. But the most significant deduction from their experiments was that living matter is somehow held together,
shaped
, by electrical fields, just as iron filings are held together and shaped by a magnet. This is the reason why if half a sea urchin’s egg is killed with a hot needle, the remaining half develops into a perfect but half-sized embryo (an experiment performed early in this century by Hans Driesch); each half contains a complete electrical ‘blueprint’ of the whole. But the astonishing thing is that the electric field should have a shape, like the jelly-mould that turns a blancmange into a miniature castle. (It is this same mould that allows certain creatures to re-grow lost limbs.) It is as if the force of life controlled matter by means of electric fields.

So there is nothing surprising in the discovery that animals are sensitive to the earth’s magnetic field; it would be astonishing if they were not. And since this field is altered by the movements of our neighbours in space - the planets as well as the sun and moon - it would also be surprising if our remote ancestors did not feel instinctively the connection between the earth beneath his feet and the heavens above his head. The sensitivity to underground water - and its electrical fields - must have been developed by our ancestors millions of years ago, perhaps in the great droughts of the Pliocene.

All of which suggests that there was no need for ancient man to ‘ask questions’ about the forces of nature; he felt them around him, as a fish can feel every change in the pressure of the water through nerves in its sides. The result must have been a curious sense of unity with the earth and heavens that
homo sapiens
lost a long time ago. Ancient man’s religion was not an attempt to ‘explain’ the universe; it was a natural response to its forces, like the response of the skin to sunlight.

This still leaves unexplained how the Pishauko witch-doctor was able to sense the approach of enemies. Modern psychical research would probably explain it in terms of telepathy. But it is important to bear in mind that the witch-doctor himself would not accept such an explanation for a moment. Throughout history,
all
shamans, witch-doctors, ‘magicians’ and witches have claimed that they derived their powers from ‘spirits’, usually those of the dead. The power to respond to earth forces - to find water or ensure an abundant harvest - is regarded as part and parcel of the shaman’s ability to establish contact with the world of spirits. We may dismiss this as primitive superstition; but again, we shall be missing the point if we think of it as an attempt to ‘explain’ the problem of what happens after death. Shamans do not ‘believe’ in spirits; they experience them - or at least, experience something that they accept as the spirit world. So it is unlikely that Neanderthal man performed burial rituals because he had decided there must be life after death. He performed them because he took it totally for granted that he was surrounded by spirits, and that these included the spirits of the dead and the spirits of nature - ‘elementals’. The same argument applies to
homo erectus
. If he made bone carvings (and possibly rock paintings, since the two seem to go together) it was because they were part of his religious rituals. And if he possessed religious ideas, then they were certainly connected with the spirits of the dead and the spirits of nature. Moreover, there is no need to assume that such ideas were a late development. If religion is a sensitivity to natural forces, then its origins probably lie in the dawn of prehistory; Ramapithecus probably had his own equivalent of ‘hunting magic’.

And what of the human - or animal - sacrifice that always seems to be a part of primitive religion? Why did primitive man feel the need to make offerings to the spirits? Here we can only point to a well-established fact: that throughout the history of magic, at all times and in all cultures, man has believed that magic is carried out with the aid of spirits. And from ancient Babylonia to modern Brazil, he has also believed that the spirits must be paid with certain ‘offerings’, which must be accompanied by an extremely strict ritual. As I have described in my book
Poltergeist
, the modern Brazilian ‘spiritist’ believes that the spirits wish to continue tasting the pleasures of this world: food, alcohol, sex, a good cigar, and will perform certain services - such as poltergeist hauntings - in return. The western mentality finds such beliefs absurd; but if we are to understand primitive religion, we must recognise that they can be found in every culture at all periods of history. If
homo erectus
performed human sacrifice in the Chou-kou-tien caves, then we should at least give consideration to the notion that magic is far older than homo sapiens.

All this, then, would explain why Cro-Magnon man was preoccupied with the phases of the moon, and why the earliest science in Sumeria was astronomy. It was not the result of intellectual curiosity about the stars, or an attempt to create a seasonal calendar for agricultural purposes. (In Egypt the Nile itself was the best of all calendars.) It was a development of religion - of man’s sense of involvement with the forces of the earth and the powers of the heavens.

Cro-Magnon man also seems to have continued the practice of human sacrifice - at least, signs of cannibalism have been found at Cro-Magnon sites near Chou-kou-tien. This should not be regarded as evidence that our immediate ancestors were prone to cruelty or aggressive violence - any more than Jewish ritual slaughter is evidence of sadism, or the Christian eucharist of cannibalism. Religious sacrifice is performed in a spirit of self-effacement, in the service of the gods. It stands at the opposite extreme from criminality, which is an expression of individual self-assertion.

At a certain point in history, man began to lose this sense of involvement with the gods. According to Wells, this was when he first became a city dweller; but we have seen that this is not entirely accurate. Three thousand years after the foundation of the first cities, the king of Sumer still regarded himself as no more than a servant of the gods. So did his people. In
History Begins at Sumer
, Samuel Noah Kramer writes: ‘Sumerian thinkers... were firmly convinced that man was fashioned of clay and created for one purpose only: to serve the gods by supplying them with food, drink and shelter.’ It was a long time before the inhabitants of these temple-cities turned into Wells’s ‘jostling crowds’, and crime ceased to be the exception and became the rule.

How this came about deserves to be considered in a separate chapter.

THE DISADVANTAGES OF CONSCIOUSNESS

One day in 1960, at precisely ninety seconds before midday, a young student named Klaus Gosmann walked into a block of flats on the Tuchergarten Strasse in Hersbruch, near Nuremberg. He was a quiet, serious young man, known to his few acquaintances for his deep interest in mystical theology: his daydream was to find a job as pastor at some quiet little country village, where he could lead a life of dedicated service.

He chose a flat at random and knocked on the door. A young man opened it. It was thirty seconds to midday. Gosmann said: ‘Sir, I wish to ask you a question and I shall not repeat it.’ ‘What?’ ‘Your money or your lives?’ At that moment, the bells of the local churches began to chime midday, making a deafening noise. Gosmann drew a revolver from his pocket and carefully shot the young man in the heart. The man’s fiancée, who was looking curiously over his shoulder, began to scream. Gosmann shot her through the head. Then, before the bells had finished chiming, he turned and walked home. There he wrote up the story of the murder in his diary. He was pleased that he had timed it to a second - so that the bells would drown the shots - and that he had remained perfectly calm and controlled.

Gosmann committed four more murders during the next seven years. One was of a bank director - again at precisely midday - from whose desk Gosmann snatched a few thousand marks. Another was of a doorman in a bank he had just robbed - the man was reaching to his pocket for his glasses when Gosmann fired. And to obtain more weapons, Gosmann shot the widow who ran a gun-shop in Nuremberg and her twenty-nine-year-old son. His next crime was his undoing. In July 1967, he snatched the handbag of a woman in a department store; when she screamed he fired at her but missed. He also fired at a store official who chased him and hit his briefcase. Beaten to the ground, he was thinking; ‘How ridiculous - it can’t be happening.’ He fired one more shot, killing the man who had chased him. Then he was arrested.