Astral Codex Ten meetup in Playa del Carmen
Come visit Mexico
I will host the Astral Codex Ten meetup in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, on September 25th. Now, 33% of my readers already subscribe to ACX. The other two-thirds should carve out an hour, go to the park, and read Meditations on Moloch pronto.
Vectors of Mind is currently read in 68 different countries (!), so it’s a bit of a long shot that you will be in town. However, readers have an open invitation to grab a drink if they are ever in the area. My friends and family need a reprieve from rare snake facts 🐍🐍🐍
So as to not spam you with a separate September Subscriber Post, here are some links I wanted to share and a question for the group about the old European Goddess. Real post coming soon.
Linx
The Power of Myth
Joseph Campbell is known for the monomyth, but he also goes in for something close to a mono-ritual. In the Power of Myth series he describes one version in Papua New Guinea. After days of ritual, a young woman is selected to induct each of that year’s initiates into manhood. One by one, each young man enters a log cabin for his first (official) sexual experience. When the last boy is joined in rapturous embrace, the supports are withdrawn, the logs drop, and the couple is killed. As Campbell explains:
“The little pair are pulled out and roasted, and eaten right that evening, enacting the myth in its essential character. You can't beat that, and the truth; that's the sacrifice of the Mass."
The similarities, he says, may be the result of diffusion. Highly recommend the whole series. If cannibalism isn’t your thing, check out the Goddess:
Early humans had to become more feminine before they could dominate the planet
The paper argues that humans have behaviorally and craniofacial feminized in the last 50,000 years. Nice fit for the Eve Theory of Consciousness (EToC)! The reviews are public, and I want you to guess the first peer comment. Wait a moment and think. Okay, it’s quoted below the plot.
“In considering this model, I was struck by the possibility that perhaps both the biological and behavioral definitions of “feminization” used here are culturally embedded in Western notions of masculine/feminine and thus not necessarily good measures of social change.”
The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe
Speaking of good fits for EToC, there is Marija Gimbutas’s theory of the Upper Paleolithic matriarchy. My understanding is that archeologists tend to consider it ideologically motivated, and it’s fallen out of favor. In it, she mentions that only 3-5% (!) of Neolithic (~12kya to Bronze Age) sculpture is male. Does anybody know of a more recent estimate? Seems like the type of thing that should be updated since 1991 when she wrote the book. At any rate, it is remarkable that 10,000 years before the Bechdel Test, women were the leading characters in mobile art.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249179303_Self-Representation_in_Upper_Paleolithic_Female_Figurines
not sure it it explains Barbie's feet tho
One other thing -- an alternative (epigenetic rather than genetic) hypothesis to that proposed by Cieri as to the relatively recent origin of the apparent feminization of human skulls. Repetitive acute exercise raises the basal level of growth hormone (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12457419/), especially in the young and female. Elevated growth hormone levels are known to cause acromelagy, one symptom of which is greater brow growth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acromegaly). It therefore seems possible that the less active lives of agriculturalists might be the critical factor in controlling the human skull changes remarked upon by Cieri, and not his hypothesized reduction in testosterone levels or cellular androgen receptor concentrations. (Given some some of the human social behavior increasingly exhibited over the last three years or so, and still being actively exhibited, no way am I convinced humans are more docile and circumspect in regard to interpersonal relations than were our hunter-gatherer ancestors.)