bruceg
Well-Known Member
I would think Kelpies were especially fond of seaweed pasta...
Nessie doesn't exist!
- Thread starter iBrian
- Start date
littlemissattitude
Creative Thinker
Such an interesting subject. I've always wanted to believe in Nessie, of course. I just love the idea. And I'm not completely convinced that she doesn't exist. Although, of course, if there is one critter of her description there, there must be others - or else she is very long-lived.
As far as the research methods of the study detailed in the BBC story, I think this is telling:
What they don't say is that often people don't see what they don't want to see, as well. I would personally say that while such studies are interesting, they are not conclusive. After all, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," as researchers in many non-mainstream areas are fond of saying.
I also find your observations on the Ishtar Gate interesting, WHKeith. I've heard this argument for the actual existence of creatures thought to be mythological before. It isn't a bad argument, but it makes one assumption that I'm not sure is warranted. That is the argument that while we modern folks can make things up (for example all those neat life-forms in the cantina scene in "Star Wars"), those ancient folks couldn't have done so and so must have been depicting creatures as they actually saw them. But do we have any proof that those ancient people didn't have working imaginations and didn't make things up? This is not meant to be a criticism of your argument, but simply something to think about. A case in point for the idea that the ancients were perfectly capable of depicting creatures that are very unlikely to have actually existed are the Cro-Magnon cave paintings that show human-shaped figures with bird heads.
Anyway, that's my take on the matter. I don't know if it's worth the full two cents or not.
As far as the research methods of the study detailed in the BBC story, I think this is telling:
What they don't say is that often people don't see what they don't want to see, as well. I would personally say that while such studies are interesting, they are not conclusive. After all, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," as researchers in many non-mainstream areas are fond of saying.
I also find your observations on the Ishtar Gate interesting, WHKeith. I've heard this argument for the actual existence of creatures thought to be mythological before. It isn't a bad argument, but it makes one assumption that I'm not sure is warranted. That is the argument that while we modern folks can make things up (for example all those neat life-forms in the cantina scene in "Star Wars"), those ancient folks couldn't have done so and so must have been depicting creatures as they actually saw them. But do we have any proof that those ancient people didn't have working imaginations and didn't make things up? This is not meant to be a criticism of your argument, but simply something to think about. A case in point for the idea that the ancients were perfectly capable of depicting creatures that are very unlikely to have actually existed are the Cro-Magnon cave paintings that show human-shaped figures with bird heads.
Anyway, that's my take on the matter. I don't know if it's worth the full two cents or not.
WHKeith
Well-Known Member
Hi, littlemissattitude (love the handle!), and welcome to Comparative Religion!
I absolutely agree with you about modern perceptions of our ancestor's talent, imagination, and ability. One of my peeviest of pet peeves is Eric van Daniken and his ilk, who blithely declare that since modern technology would be hard pressed to reproduce such wonders as the pyramids, Teotihuacan, Baalbek, or the Easter Island statues, they MUST therefore have been built by aliens from outer space. Nonsense! We don’t give our ancestors nearly enough credit! As for their ability to make up imaginary critters, well, mythology is richly populated by everything from Cyclopes to snake-tailed sons of Athena to hundred-headed, hundred-handed giants who threw mountains at the gods. If anything, our modern age has LOST some abilities in this arena.
I certainly didn’t intend to use the carvings on the Ishtar Gate as proof of the survival of dinosaurs, nor was it my intent to suggest that the Babylonians couldn’t make up imaginal beasties. What I find interesting is the fact that of the three critters portrayed, one is real, one WAS real at the time, though it later became extinct, and one . . . well, at the very least, it suggests that the Babylonians themselves thought the thing was flesh and blood, an idea supported by popular urban legends at the time (which even made it into the Biblical Apocrypha) that the Neobabylonians had a living pet "dragon" hidden in the palace basement. I find the sirrush evocative and interesting, something to make us think and wonder, but NOT proof, certainly.
I’d like to address the bird- and animal-headed figures on the cave walls, if I may. We have very few examples of human representation in cave art. Those figures we have found all seem to depict magical themes—such as the popular image of a hand print superimposed over game animals, an apparent attempt to gain control over them or their spirits. (The single exception I can think of is an oft-reproduced picture of an exquisitely rendered wounded bison apparently goring a crude human stick figure, which is falling over backwards while a bird looks on. The human figure is so simply rendered it’s tough to tell even if it’s meant to be a man or some kind of man-beast fusion. I often wonder if it represents magic, religious belief—with the bird being the dying man’s soul, or a memorial to someone killed in the hunt.)
A fair guess at the animal-headed pictures, though, is that they represent shamanic rites. There’s a famous cave wall painting that seems to show a human wearing furs and an elk’s head and antlers, which is assumed to be the image of a shaman invoking animal spirits. It’s called “the Sorcerer” for that reason. The practice of becoming one with the spirits of the animals we hunt or fear in order to control or summon them or to placate them is very, very old, and almost certainly reaches back several tens of thousands of years into our remote past. I find this a wonderful and startlingly unexpected window into our origins as spiritual beings.
I absolutely agree with you about modern perceptions of our ancestor's talent, imagination, and ability. One of my peeviest of pet peeves is Eric van Daniken and his ilk, who blithely declare that since modern technology would be hard pressed to reproduce such wonders as the pyramids, Teotihuacan, Baalbek, or the Easter Island statues, they MUST therefore have been built by aliens from outer space. Nonsense! We don’t give our ancestors nearly enough credit! As for their ability to make up imaginary critters, well, mythology is richly populated by everything from Cyclopes to snake-tailed sons of Athena to hundred-headed, hundred-handed giants who threw mountains at the gods. If anything, our modern age has LOST some abilities in this arena.
I certainly didn’t intend to use the carvings on the Ishtar Gate as proof of the survival of dinosaurs, nor was it my intent to suggest that the Babylonians couldn’t make up imaginal beasties. What I find interesting is the fact that of the three critters portrayed, one is real, one WAS real at the time, though it later became extinct, and one . . . well, at the very least, it suggests that the Babylonians themselves thought the thing was flesh and blood, an idea supported by popular urban legends at the time (which even made it into the Biblical Apocrypha) that the Neobabylonians had a living pet "dragon" hidden in the palace basement. I find the sirrush evocative and interesting, something to make us think and wonder, but NOT proof, certainly.
I’d like to address the bird- and animal-headed figures on the cave walls, if I may. We have very few examples of human representation in cave art. Those figures we have found all seem to depict magical themes—such as the popular image of a hand print superimposed over game animals, an apparent attempt to gain control over them or their spirits. (The single exception I can think of is an oft-reproduced picture of an exquisitely rendered wounded bison apparently goring a crude human stick figure, which is falling over backwards while a bird looks on. The human figure is so simply rendered it’s tough to tell even if it’s meant to be a man or some kind of man-beast fusion. I often wonder if it represents magic, religious belief—with the bird being the dying man’s soul, or a memorial to someone killed in the hunt.)
A fair guess at the animal-headed pictures, though, is that they represent shamanic rites. There’s a famous cave wall painting that seems to show a human wearing furs and an elk’s head and antlers, which is assumed to be the image of a shaman invoking animal spirits. It’s called “the Sorcerer” for that reason. The practice of becoming one with the spirits of the animals we hunt or fear in order to control or summon them or to placate them is very, very old, and almost certainly reaches back several tens of thousands of years into our remote past. I find this a wonderful and startlingly unexpected window into our origins as spiritual beings.
littlemissattitude
Creative Thinker
Thanks for the warm welcome!
It is definitely a fair assumption that those bird-headed humans are indeed related to shamanistic practice. I think my point was that even if these depictions in cave paintings are semi-realistic or realistic depictions of shamans using props to enhance the experience of becoming one with the animal they are hunting or to invoke the animal's spirit, the use of the props to begin with is an exercise in imagination.
I think what it all comes down to is that I heartily disagree with those scholars who have proposed the idea that the human mind did not really become "human" in all aspects until very late in history. I had a social psych professor state flatly one time that humans did not gain an imagination as we conceive of it until late in the Middle Ages. I just don't know how anyone can look at all the art and all the literature that came before that time and think that. Also, there was a book that came out in the 70s, I believe, that proposed a similar argument. Made a splash at the time, but I don't know how seriously it was eventually taken. Anyway, the idea is out there in some form that ancient people did not think like us. From the evidence that I've seen, I can't agree with that.
Just my two cents.
It is definitely a fair assumption that those bird-headed humans are indeed related to shamanistic practice. I think my point was that even if these depictions in cave paintings are semi-realistic or realistic depictions of shamans using props to enhance the experience of becoming one with the animal they are hunting or to invoke the animal's spirit, the use of the props to begin with is an exercise in imagination.
I think what it all comes down to is that I heartily disagree with those scholars who have proposed the idea that the human mind did not really become "human" in all aspects until very late in history. I had a social psych professor state flatly one time that humans did not gain an imagination as we conceive of it until late in the Middle Ages. I just don't know how anyone can look at all the art and all the literature that came before that time and think that. Also, there was a book that came out in the 70s, I believe, that proposed a similar argument. Made a splash at the time, but I don't know how seriously it was eventually taken. Anyway, the idea is out there in some form that ancient people did not think like us. From the evidence that I've seen, I can't agree with that.
Just my two cents.
WHKeith
Well-Known Member
And an excellent two cents they are, too. I remember the theory you're talking about--or maybe it's a related concept. I seem to remember it surfacing in the late '80s. The idea was, if I recall, that humans didn't have a true sense of individuality. As you say, they didn't think the same way we do. The author used changes in literary form, I believe, to advance his thesis that some sort of change in the very nature of human thought and self-identity occured around 1200 to 1000 BCE. I think the idea was that humans possessed a kind of group mind, though I could be wrong about that.
Utterly ludicrous. One need look no further than the Code of Hammurabi to see that people thought and acted pretty much the way they are today. Or . . . consider the spectacular change in Egyptian art with the reign of Akhenaten. Egyptian art was extraordinarily formalized and followed exacting rules; with Akhenaten, about 1450 BCE, many of the formalizations remained, but suddenly the figures depicted were warm, softer, loving, gentle, *human*--I'm thinking of a tablet depicting Akhenaten and his wife, who is tenderly touching her husband as little hands of life-giving energy beam down from the disk of Aten. After the heretic Akhenaten was murdered, Egyptian art went back to the old style.
A paradigm shift in art or literary forms do NOT signal a difference in human intellect.
Utterly ludicrous. One need look no further than the Code of Hammurabi to see that people thought and acted pretty much the way they are today. Or . . . consider the spectacular change in Egyptian art with the reign of Akhenaten. Egyptian art was extraordinarily formalized and followed exacting rules; with Akhenaten, about 1450 BCE, many of the formalizations remained, but suddenly the figures depicted were warm, softer, loving, gentle, *human*--I'm thinking of a tablet depicting Akhenaten and his wife, who is tenderly touching her husband as little hands of life-giving energy beam down from the disk of Aten. After the heretic Akhenaten was murdered, Egyptian art went back to the old style.
A paradigm shift in art or literary forms do NOT signal a difference in human intellect.