Mind-bending book

I have just finished reading The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. First, it is an astounding book and if you enjoy reading about history, anthropology and archeology, I highly encourage you to read it. My degree is in Anthropology, so it was right up my alley.

As I think about what I’ve read, I’m struck that most of the time periods they write about are millenniums before the advent of Abrahamic religions. Thus, this is our “pagan” time or it is? What I learned is that we cannot project back into the past our own sensibilities. We definitely cannot possibly fathom what our human ancestors of the Paleolithic, Mesolithic or Iron age were thinking and only have an incomplete record of what they were doing. What is known now about the ancient world of those eras is that human beings experimented with a variety of social forms. They would even have one form for a particular time of year and another for the rest of the year.

What is typically thought and taught these days is that social forms evolved from small bands all the way to cities/civilizations. This book shows that the evidence we have now turns that idea on its head.

As I thought about all that I learned in this book, I think that our Pagan religions do, to some extent, harken back to the past in terms of the diversity of our faiths and our resistance to hierarchy over all our faiths. Solitaries and covens coming together at Pagan festivals are echoes of our ancient ancestors in North America and their organizations and behaviors. It was fascinating to learn that some societies used esoteric knowledge kept among particular people as a form of social organization. Today, we have some branches of our Pagan tree that maintain secrecy as well.

However, I further see that those who started the strands that resulted in our modern Pagan faiths were truly imaginative individuals. Our modern Pagan faiths may have echoes to the past, but are a completely modern movement, shaped by our own time and places. Even to speculate what our ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman or Celtic peoples did or practiced, is already late in time for those cultures, when social forms were already starting to get "stuck." What is also fascinating about our ancient past is that the authors argue the ritual play was integral to various social arrangements, such as play kings. At the very least, this shows us how powerful ritual can be. Ritual forms done over hundreds of years can result in social changes, of one form or another.

What this book also tells us is that human beings have chosen social forms over the millenniums and some had clearly rejected such things as slavery, violence and the subordination of women. While we are “stuck” in our social forms now and have trouble imagining other ways of being, human beings in the past were capable of experimenting with other forms and changing societies to those forms.

The authors argue that in the ancient world, freedom meant 1) freedom to move around; 2) freedom to disobey orders and 3) freedom to create or transform relationships. As you can see, in our modern world, not all societies allow freedom to move around. Hardly any allow the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform relationships has great variety around the world. When we hear the term freedom being used these days, most people using it have no idea what true freedom is.

I adore books that make me think in new ways and this one was no exception.