CIRCLES OF STONE (THE MOTHER PEOPLE SERIES) (67 page)

Zena turned to
gaze at the ledge high on the cliff where she had spoken so often to the
Goddess.  The goat was perched there, its body silhouetted against the
sky.  She raised a hand in greeting; then she steeled herself to walk
away.

All that morning
they traveled east, but just as they lost sight of the cliffs where they had
lived for so long, a man came running up behind them. His tribe was trapped in
the Mother’s chambers, he told them. They had run in there for sanctuary, but
the men with knives had followed them. 

Zena did not
hesitate.  “I must go back,” she said.  “The Goddess calls on me to
help.”

“I, too, must go
back,” Conar said.  He knelt by the young Zena.  “You must go on to
the other caves with the people who guard you,” he said gently.  “You will
be safe there until your mother and I return.”

Zena knelt beside
him, trying in vain to hide her anguish that she and her beloved daughter must
part.  “This is for you," she said, drawing from her skin bag a small
wooden statue, very old, with a big belly and full breasts.  “It was
carved long ago by those who first knew the Mother, and it has great power. You
must keep it with you always.  The Goddess lives in the statue, and She
will keep you safe as you journey through your life."

The young Zena
took it into her arms. “I will keep it with me always,” she promised, and Zena did
not doubt that it was true. Already, the ancient statue seemed a part of the
young Zena. Truly, she was blessed to have such a daughter.

She pulled the
young Zena close, hugged her as if her heart would break. Tears flowed from her
eyes, fell warm and heavy on her daughter’s cheeks.

"I grieve
with all my heart that I must leave you, my daughter, but that is the will of
the Mother. She will care for you, keep you from harm, for you are Hers.
Always, the ones called Zena, like ourselves, belong to the Goddess." 

For a moment, the
young Zena clung to her, terrified of losing her. Then her arms slowly dropped,
as if she understood that her mother belonged not to her, but to the Goddess.

Zena rose and
stood with her arms spread to the sky.  "Great Goddess, Mother of all
life, I leave the child Zena in Your care. Keep her safe, Beloved Mother, so
that one day she may fulfill her destiny as I go this day to fulfill my own.
Great Goddess, I come to You now."

For a long moment,
her eyes lingered on Zena's face. Then she turned away, to go to the Kyrie, to
the Goddess.  To her death. 

CIRCLES IN
THE SKY,
the next book in the Mother People Series, begins immediately
after
CIRCLES OF STONE
ends, as the young Zena travels east with
the men and women who guard her. Her story is as compelling as the stories of
all the other Zenas, perhaps more so, for she must undertake the awesome task
of leading the Mother People while she is still only a child. Though she is
wise beyond her years and sees the world around her with the eyes and senses of
a true seer, her behavior during these formative years is still that of a
child, with all a child’s feelings of inadequacy and inability to understand
complex emotional states. A well-developed practicality that blends oddly with
her visionary nature makes this Zena intensely human, and very appealing.

CIRCLES IN
THE SKY
is available as an e-book and will soon also be available as a
paperback. Please go to
Joan Dahr Lambert’s
page on Amazon for details.

ICE BURIAL,
the third book in the Mother People Series, will be published as an e-book in
August, 2012. It tells the story of Oetzi, sometimes called the Iceman, a 5,000
year old man found buried beneath a melting glacier in the Italian Alps. Oetzi
was thought at first to have died of exposure. In fact, he was murdered, making
his death the first human murder mystery.

AUTHOR’S NOTES 
1

Part I
:
The first Zena was a late Homo Habilis, or early Homo Erectus, human ancestors
who lived about one million years ago and had a brain size of about 900 cc.
(Human brains range from 1,000 to 1,400 cc.) They were distinctly humanlike,
but probably did not have extensive speech.

Tope's death in a
flash flood was inspired by "Lucy," a remarkably complete fossil
skeleton of an earlier pre-human type who is thought by some anthropologists to
have died in just that fashion. The scene in which Zena steps in Dak's
footprints was inspired by anthropologist Mary Leakey's discovery of early
human footprints, in which a smaller person inexplicably walked inside the
prints of another, larger companion.

Inspiration also
came from the discovery of a two-million- year-old circle of stones in the Olduvai
Gorge in Africa.  The space within the stones had obviously been used, but it
contained few of the bone and stone fragments associated with living sites.
Instead, it may be the first circle of stones built by our ancestors for
spiritual or ceremonial purposes.

Infanticide is
common among primates, and probably existed among our early ancestors as well.
Male primates are generally protective of infants born to females in the troop,
but will often try to kill infants of strange females, females with whom they
have not mated. The female then becomes sexually receptive so the male can mate
with her and get his genes into circulation.  For this reason, and because
mating brings special favors, female primates usually mate with all the males
in the troop. I believe our early ancestors had similar mating habits.  For
females especially, monogamy had no rewards.

Part II
:
The second Zena belonged to a tribe of people who were in transition from late
Homo Erectus, with a brain size of about 1,100cc, to Homo Sapiens. The
transition began about half a million years ago and resulted not just in
increased brain size, but also in extensive brain reorganization. The frontal
lobes especially became larger, permitting greater language and cognitive
facility.  The forehead became higher and more rounded, the skull larger. 
Birth was undoubtedly difficult during this period. The pelvic girdle cannot
expand beyond a certain point in animals that walk upright, because hips that
are too widely spaced make it impossible to do anything but waddle - a
dangerously slow gait in a world filled with fast and efficient predators. 
Natural selection finally forged a solution: accelerated birth.  Human infants
began to be born earlier in the developmental process and lived outside the
womb for many months before they reached the stage of maturity typical of other
primates at birth. Skulls became lighter and somewhat smaller, and were
probably more easily compressed during birth because fontanels, areas in the
skull that have not yet fused, were larger than in the past. But before these
adaptations were perfected, many females must have died trying to deliver
babies who had remained longer than usual in the womb while gaining the
maturity to be viable at birth, and whose heads, especially, were too large to
fit through the birth canal, and many infants born at the normal time must have
died because they were not developed enough to live outside the womb.

Zena herself was
Homo Sapiens, born before this balance was achieved. Her brain capacity was
probably greater than that of people today, and she could be thought of as an
early genius. Zena was unusual in another way: she was the first woman to
develop the ability to conceive before an existing child was weaned. Like other
primates and hunter gatherer women today, our female ancestors normally gave
birth every four or five years. About ten thousand years ago, probably due to
increased body fat and decreased mobility, the capacity to give birth at more
frequent intervals spread through the population, with profound consequences
for human fertility.

The Big Ones Zena
and her tribe encountered are a remnant population of a pre-human type called
Australopithecus Bosei, a large, omnivorous creature that eventually died out.

The Fierce Ones
are another remnant population, called Australopithecus Africanus, which also
died out.

Part III
:
The third Zena was Homo Sapiens, often known at this stage as Cro-Magnon, and
lived between 50,000 and 35,000 years ago. She and all the others in her tribe
would have been indistinguishable from ourselves. Cro-Magnon artists created
the magnificent painting on the cave walls in France and Spain.

Gunor and his
tribe were Neanderthals, who lived at the same time. They had light hair, often
reddish, though they are often mistakenly depicted as swarthy in illustrations.
They lived in the north, where light skin was adaptive because it absorbed more
sun. Neanderthals were short and stocky and unusually strong. Scientists today
believe they were intelligent and capable of speech, although they may have had
trouble pronouncing certain vowels. One of evolution's great mysteries is why
Neanderthals disappear from the fossil record about 30,000 years ago. Some
scientists believe they were killed off by Homo Sapiens, but today
interbreeding, as suggested in this book, is the favored hypothesis. The other
suggestion made in this book is that they never developed the adaptations to
the enlarging brain that saved Homo Sapiens from extinction.  Neanderthal
skulls were larger and heavier than our own; if they continued to grow without
the life-saving adaptations of accelerated birth and lighter bones
, birth may eventually have become almost impossible. 

The figure Kalar
asked Lett to carve was the first example of the large-breasted, wide-hipped
"Venus" figures that abound in archeological sites in early Europe. 
Their purpose was not pornographic, as some (usually male) scientists
suggested, but was instead spiritual, a way of thanking the Goddess, or asking
for Her help.

Similarly, Conar's
painting of the bison that saved Zena was the first of the many superb cave
paintings discovered in France and Spain.  No one knows what inspired the
paintings, though many believe they were related to hunting activities.  I
believe they were instead gifts to the Mother that expressed a profound
appreciation for the wondrous abundance of life She had created. The fact that
there are few paintings of the animals most often hunted seems to support this
theory, as does the fact that many of the paintings are found deep underground,
not where people lived but in special chambers where storms and extremes of
temperature did not affect them.  As gifts to the Goddess, they were meant to
last. 

Hand prints are
also often found on the cave walls. New research suggests that they are female
hand prints (because of their small size) and that it was females, not males,
who created the magnificent art works we so admire today. The women may have
left the handprints as their identifying marks  It is also possible that the
prints were made not for some profound purpose, but for fun, to entertain the
children while their mothers painted.

The fierce hunters
from the north are based on pre-historical evidence showing that bands of
invaders periodically came from the north to devastate the peace-loving,
Goddess-worshiping people who lived in southern Europe. The raids continued for
thousands of years and ultimately destroyed the Goddess. Why the northern
hunters were so violent, in contrast to Goddess-worshiping societies, is a
question with profound significance today.  Zena and her people understood
intuitively what science is now beginning to confirm: that people who have been
bullied or abused as children are at risk of becoming violent adults, and that
only intensive remedial efforts can repair the damage. In scientific terms, the
damage is real - repeated abuse leads to changes in brain circuitry for two
neurotransmitters that regulate aggression. Zena's people also believed what
cross-cultural studies and contemporary experience confirm: that children who
are raised in a violent culture will tend to become violent themselves, that
young men, especially, are at risk of becoming violent,
and
that an
occasional individual may be innately violent and incapable of empathy, and
cannot be changed. Tron was one of these. 

AUTHOR’S NOTES
 2

The Mother
People
really did exist. They lived in southern Europe and in what is
now known as the Fertile Crescent, as evidence meticulously unearthed by
archeologists shows, for many thousands of years. Their findings also show that
the Mother People lived by the ways of the Goddess, the ways of peace and compassion
and respect for all that lived on the earth.

Evidence also
shows that waves of invaders from the north seeking new sources of food and
game decimated these peaceful societies. The men with knives, the Mother People
called them. For these invaders, violence was a way of life. Some killed and
raped and pillaged everything in their path; others took over the Mother
People’s territory, one village at a time, and imposed their own beliefs.

The Mother People
had few defenses against these onslaughts. They had no weapons, no knowledge of
fighting. All they could do was cling to their beliefs and worship the Goddess
in secret. Their last stronghold was Crete, and after that we hear little of
the Mother People. Or do we? In fact, evidence of their continuing presence is
everywhere in Europe especially, in the thousands of circles of stone, cave
paintings and small statues of what is now known as the Virgin Mary, and the
magnificent standing stones whose enigmatic meaning still eludes us today.

And after that? The
Mother People did not disappear. Many of them took to the sea and traveled as
far as North America. Some came by way of the Bering Straits, as the history
books tell us; others chose a route along the western coast of Europe, from
there to Iceland and then Greenland and the east coast of Canada and into a
place we now call the United States of America.