“All interpretations of myth have been formed in accordance with the ideas prevalent at the time of the interpreters.” [Lang, 1887]
In a very distant past, the spirits were created to give humans an edge on the manifestations of nature they could not explain. The functions attributed to the spirits provided explanations that allowed humans to integrate what they did not understand to the knowledge they already possessed, within the logical framework acquired by each community.
While women, in the very early stages, seemed to have controlled the forces of magic and their spiritual component, men, at one point, took this dominance away from them. Developing means of communication and rituals to interpret and translate the messages of the spirits, men have established an exclusive relationship with them, and by monopolizing all paths that led to their world, they have become their unavoidable intercessors.
The functions attributed to the spirits, and the mysteries they explained reveal the manner these populations saw the world and the problems they were confronted with, mirroring at the same time the solutions they could logically endorse. Fulfilling one another in a near-perfect symbiosis, every conquest of humans’ knowledge, every new element added to the pyramid of their wisdom was withdrawn from the mysteries of nature, and eliminated from the panoply of the powers granted to the spirits.
Of the many mysteries that nature shelters, one that has particularly affected and obsessed men is the discrepancy existing between the procreative function nature has attributed to women, and the apparent absence of any significant role men play in this process. A source of incomprehension and of frustration for them, they experienced this imbalance as an injustice that motivated their quest: not knowing who they really were, they attempted to acquire what they did not have. Dividing the world between the powers that they could control, and those from which they could not escape and to which they must submit, they circumscribed the essence of women to its bare minimum and extended the influence of their gender by taking control of all feminine attributes they did not possess.
On the one hand, not being able to remove from the female realm the fertility they embodied, men empowered the spirits to rule over its processes. While minimizing the importance of women’s role, they endowed themselves with a procreative function that they did not have before.
On the other hand, while condemning all specific aspects of female physiology, they took over its symbols and invested them with a purely masculine content. The Sambia boy, for example, is taken away from the world of women and enters the world of men because of the blood he loses – mirroring girls’ first period – and the spermatic milk he swallows – a male counterpart to breastfeeding [see Appendix Blood Rituals].
In addition, by activating the menstrual flow through sexual intercourse man became the chief instigator to female fertility, expanding this way the scope of his power while further reducing the importance of her natural attributes.
Redistributing and reinterpreting the equilibrium imposed on them, men challenged the natural order in which they could not find their place. With the spirits, men have invested themselves with a transcendent power that compensates for the immanent powers possessed by women.
With time, spirits will animate the whole of nature, making of its different components a unified and homogenous world. Ultimately, a holistic vision of the universe will arise that will characterize the weltanschauung of the primitive world: “The savage draws no hard and fast line between himself and the things in the world. He regards himself as literally akin to animals and plants and heavenly bodies; he attributes sex and procreative powers even to stones and rocks, and he assigns human speech and human feelings to sun and moon and stars and wind, no less than to beasts, birds, and fishes.” [Lang, 1887, I, 47; see Appendix Lang, Of the unity of the animate and inanimate world] This conception of the world represents the extremely stable context in which Paleolithic populations lived for millennia. It also forms the heritage with which they enter the next important phase of their history, the Neolithic era. In the following part, we will see that the “Neolithic Revolution” and its innovations – plant and animal domestication, sedentarization, the first architectural steps, and the discovery of paternity – will not directly affect the lifestyles of the people involved in its processes. On the contrary, the Neolithic era prolongs most of the norms and values inherited from the preceding period. Strikingly, men’s role will remain subdued in most domains, women still representing the economic and social core around which the life of these populations revolves. It is only at the end of this period that the deterioration of environmental and climatic conditions combined with the introduction of new technologies will favor the advent of a male-dominated society from which the masculine civilization will thrive.