Commemoration

The Beginning of All Things

I began the quest for my own beginnings by considering those of my country. Not satisfied with the official version of the beginning of our country, I looked deeper into the Norse sagas to find out what happened here before the arrival of the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. I was amazed to find the little-known story of a Viking princess who baptized of the shores of this nation with blood, in the year one thousand A.D., or about fifteen centuries before Columbus set sail.

As W.T. Scott retells the ancient story in the modern epic poem The Dark Sister, Freydis Eriksdottir was the bastard half-sister of Leif Erikson, and the youngest daughter of Erik the Red. Even though she hailed from a notoriously slaughterous brood, still her crimes were described in the Norse sagas as particularly heinous. Harsh, but heroic. As an outstanding female adventurer of historic proportions, I find that Freydis serves as a much more appropriately distinguished prototype of my own heritage than the supplicant Columbus.

What a lurid beginning for this shameless hussy of a country! Not only did Freydis commit America's first mass murder, shedding the blood of 35 of her own crew, brutally slaying men and women alike. She also vanquished an attack by a band of Native Americans when she bared her breasts on the battlefield and slapped at them with her broadsword - at which mad spectacle, the sagas tell us, "the Skraelings fled aghast." As well they might! And so today, are we not still haunted by the same relentlessly violent and shocking images... not only of slaughter, but of flashing weapons, bare-breasted women, and half-naked men fleeing aghast?

And who were these savage Skraelings, as the Vikings called them - these Native Americans? Was their polyglot culture the legitimate progenitor of this hysterical fantasyland it pleases us to call our civilization?

And yet, the closer I looked at the American Indian People, the more the single image seemed to break into a million different pictures... all depicting various interpretations of what it means to be "civilized." Their language, their clothing, their songs, their dances, and their stories varied widely from place to place. In some ways they seemed much alike, yet in others, they behaved as bitter enemies, battling and brutalizing each other for generations. Are Americans today reenacting the same old drama that was programmed into their racial unconscious, inevitably bearing into the future the savage seed of this nation's intemperate beginnings?

The beginning of the American Indian People is shrouded in mystery. Today, most authorities agree that signs of civilization have been found in Native American archaeological sites, placing these people throughout parts of North and South approximately twelve thousand years ago. And these were not primitive people, for their remains show us much evidence of advances in civilization even beyond those of our own, which we consider so sophisticated today. For example, today we have essentially five different ways of weaving cloth. Just as a gauge of civilization, we might contemplate the fact that twelve distinctly different types of weaves were found in one Florida archeological site dating back eight thousand years.

Nobody knows for certain where these original Americans came from, but recently developed DNA technology has provided evidence that while some of them undoubtedly crossed over the Bering Strait from Mongolia at a time when this land mass connected the North American Continent to Asia, others apparently arrived by boat after crossing the Pacific.

Thus my search for the beginnings of my civilization takes me from my own country to the Far East, and the cradle of its vast and varied civilization, centered in ancient China. The cumulative progress of Chinese culture is preserved in one ancient text as vividly as an antediluvian relic is suspended in fossilized amber.

The wisdom of ancient China is distilled in the I Ching, or the Chinese Book of Changes. More than just a fortune-telling device, this oracular system embodies a repository for the cumulative wisdom of the Chinese sages, preserving the original meaning at its core, while allowing its implications to continually unfold.

The I Ching existed before recorded history, even before written language. Originally the philosophy which is now recorded in the book was divined by the wise men casting yarrow stalks upon the ground, and their wisdom was passed on not through a written text, but orally and symbolically.

The I Ching is essentially a binary system of opposites which delineates tendencies that prevail not only throughout the physical world, but more importantly, throughout the metaphysical, social and moral realms: thus, we begin with the heavens versus the earth, the weak versus the strong, the light versus the dark, the male versus the female, the firm versus the yielding, and so forth.

In order to arrange these basic oppositions into meaningful patterns, six at a time are positioned as a set of two trigrams, each of which represents a physical image drawn from nature, along with a corresponding quality. The way the two trigrams are combined defines the states of being through which the natural elements, individuals, families, or nations might pass. These permutations, then, encompass the total of 64 possible characteristic "changes" upon which the text is based.

During the passing millennia, as Chinese philosophy advanced through several stages, each of four successive Great Sages contributed his wisdom to the I Ching. While always bearing the same significance, the texts progressively elaborated upon the implications, eventually including all the commentary of each of the Great Sages under each change. Drawing upon imagery from nature, specific observations regarding various eventualities were extrapolated from generalizations.

Originally, the simplest change was The Creative, which was assigned the number one, with the most uncomplicated possible meaning of essential passiveness. As the years passed, and language developed, the philosophy as it was expressed became more explicit, thus: "The beginning of all things lies still in the beyond in the form of ideas that have yet to become real. The Creative has power to lend form to these archetypes of ideas."

A thousand years later, Confucius contributed his characteristically poetic elaboration to the compilation of thoughts on the first change: "The winds pass and the rain does its work, and all individual beings flow into their forms."

Going from the specific to the general, the most recent commentary expounds thus upon The Creative: "The course of The Creative alters and shapes beings until each attains its true, specific nature, then keeps them in conformity with the Great Harmony."

The I Ching preserves a sophistication of thought characteristic of civilization dating back to about 2,000 BC, which is roughly the same time that was first calculated as the origin of Western mankind, based on Biblical texts.

While the Chinese were finding their origins within the development of their philosophy, the search for the beginnings of our own Western civilization began in efforts to "count backwards" through the generations of individuals listed in the "begats" of the first five books of the Bible.

This quaint method of reckoning the time of our origins, resulting in a birthdate of modern civilization of approximately 2,000 BC, generally sufficed until the advent of the modern archaeologist. The most notable progenitor of modern archaeology was Heinrich Schliemann, a middle-class European industrialist who was smitten with a dream that he was to unearth Troy, that ancient fortress which was still half-shrouded in the mists of myth and fable along with the centaur and the unicorn. Despite the skepticism which obviously confronted him, he persevered, journeying to the ancient site and eventually actually unearthing the ruins that indeed appeared to be those of Troy.

The ruins excavated by Schliemann were subsequently excavated further, and as is now known to be the case with most ancient cities, it was discovered that there was another Troy, and then yet another Troy submerged underneath the first one.

Schliemann's quixotic figure may have been the first to seek out the beginnings of civilization by unearthing ruins and studying them, but he was certainly not the last. The search for the origins of this hodge-podge of arts, history, language, technology and information that we call our civilization has taken us to new levels of understanding how we got here, although ultimately of course, the truth about our origins remains a mystery.

Just to briefly mention a few of the highlights as we look back over early Western history, within the thousand years before Jesus walked the Earth, we find that King David ruled in Jerusalem, Buddha rose in India, Cyrus captured Babylon, the Classical Age of Greece began, the Roman Republic was founded, Alexander the Great defeated Darius, and Hannibal challenged Rome... while meanwhile in China, the Great Wall was begun.

In very round figures, we can say Chinese civilization began about two thousand years before Christ, about the same time as that of the Indus Valley, while Egyptian civilization began about three thousand years before Christ, and the Minoan civilization arose in Crete a few hundred years after that.

Of course, the advanced Australopithecus, which was the first being that could be considered manlike, existed in Africa as much as two million years ago. It took another million years of evolution to produce homo erectus, and finally, after another 900,000 years, Neanderthal appeared. Even though two million years of evolution had elapsed, Neanderthal and Australopithicus were virtually indistinguishable. Their standard of living could not be considered civilized, as they were still using stones for weapons and tools, and they very likely lacked the power of speech as we know it.

The beginnings of Western civilization in the so-called Fertile Crescent have been traced back to the ancient nation of Sumer, and the spadework of archaeologists yielded the ruins many great ancient cities, along with proof positive of an advanced civilization reaching back to approximately 4,000 BC. Below those ruins was found virgin soil. Nothing had been built there before. Joseph Campbell marvels in The Masks of God: "With stunning abruptness... there appears in this little Sumerian mud garden... the whole cultural syndrome that has since constituted the germinal unit of all the high civilizations of the world."

While it took primitive man-like creatures some two million years to learn to sharpen their stone tools instead of using them as they were found, here we see homo sapiens less than 50,000 years from Neanderthal, walking on the moon. How is it that we were able to advance so rapidly? Is it because evolution inexplicably started to run faster? Or could it be possible that we were, as the Old Testament and other ancient sources claim, created by the gods and placed here on this earth to serve them?

This is the thesis of The Twelfth Planet, a fascinating book by Zecharia Sitchin, which offers extensive documentation of the theory that the beings we recognize as the gods of the Greek and Roman pantheons were actually ancient astronauts, who appeared in the land of Sumer and instructed mankind in astronomy, astrology, music, technology, law, language and religion, thus creating out of the raw material of homo sapiens a thoroughly human race which is capable of fulfilling their labor requirements and maintaining the systems that would enable its continuance. And thus today we exemplify a civilization that perhaps was not evolved or invented by our kind, but brought down to us from the stars.

And so as we attempt again and again to pierce the veil concealing the deepest and darkest secrets of our origins, we find one mystery inevitably replaces another, which conceals yet another... and just as we can never reach a conclusive conclusion to our quest, so we can never cease beginning the beginning again and yet again.