Altho it seems like common sense that humans have used feasting ritually for a long long time, common sense can often be misleading. So it’s interesting to see what may be confirmation of a funeral feast for a shamaness in the shadowy era between the time of the great great cave paintings and the paleolithic era, and the birth of agriculture in the neolithic era.

Consider how religious cultural behaviors such as feasts and funerals affect your own consciousness.

http://www.livescience.com/history/ancient-feast-dead-shaman-remains-discovered-100830.html

In a cave above a creek in the Galilee region of northern Israel, scientists discovered the body of a petite, elderly, disabled woman, most probably a shaman, in 2005. As they continued to excavate, they found the woman apparently was intentionally laid to rest in a specially crafted hollow between the remains of at least 71 Mediterranean tortoises, as well as with seashells, beads, stone tools and bone tools. In a separate pit nearby, they also found bones of at least three wild, extinct cattle known as aurochs.

The cattle bones showed clear signs of butchery, with the bones cracked for marrow, while there were enough tortoises to supply meat for at least 35 people. Signs of burning were seen on both the cattle and turtle remains, suggesting they were cooked.

Altogether, these large amounts of meat seen in these roughly 12,000-year-old deposits might be remnants of a ritual feast held to commemorate the dead shaman, the researchers said.

Ancient feasts

The act of sharing food communally in a feast is one of the most universal and important behaviors seen in humanity, taking center stage in everything from the Last Supper to Thanksgiving. Although evidence for feasting is common in the early agricultural societies of the Neolithic, such evidence of pre-Neolithic, pre-agricultural feasting proved more elusive until now.

“Scientists have speculated that feasting began before the Neolithic period, which starts about 11,500 years ago,” said researcher Natalie Munro, a zooarchaeologist at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. “This is the first solid evidence that supports the idea that communal feasts were already occurring, perhaps with some frequency, at the beginnings of the transition to agriculture.”

The Mithra mystery religion probably gave us December 25 as “Christ-mas”, the christian fusion of Yeshuah’s “birthday” with the older winter solstice practices of pre-christian religions.

This was a pretty good simple overview of Mithra worship, concentrating on the many Mithraem, Mithra temples, usually underground, that have been found, including many recent finds.

MITHRA – Bull Killer, Sun Lord

In later years, Christian commentators recognized similarities between Mithraic and Christian rites and were quick to condemn them. In Chapter 70 of Dialogue with Trypho, the 2nd-century Christian author Justin Martyr writes that Mithras’s worship in a cave and his “rock birth”–a frequent depiction of the god, emerging from a stone–is taken from Daniel 2:34 and Isaiah 33. The Mithraists “have no understanding” of these Scriptures, says Justin.

Justin Martyr LXXI: “And when those who record the mysteries of Mithras say that he was begotten of a rock, and call the place where those who believe in him are initiated a cave, do I not perceive here that the utterance of Daniel, that a stone without hands was cut out of a great mountain, has been imitated by them, and that they have attempted likewise to imitate the whole of Isaiah’s words?”

Daniel 2:34: “While you were watching, a rock was cut out, but not by human hands. It struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay and smashed them.”

In Chapter 66 of First Apology, Justin claims that “wicked devils…imitated” the Eucharist by creating a Mithraic communal meal. In Chapter 40 of The Prescription Against Heretics, the 2nd-century Christian writer Tertullian notes that Mithraists “celebrate also the oblation of bread and introduce an image of a resurrection.” Aside from Tertullian, however, no other ancient source scholar mentions the image of resurrection in Mithraic ritual.

Jesus was not the only deity with whom Mithras shared similarities. In the later Roman Empire, Mithras blended in with another sun god, Sol Invictus, the “unconquered sun.” Both gods appeared in the Spanish provinces around the same time, according to Jaime Alvar, an ancient history professor at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Some 1st-century votive offerings in Rome even conflate the two gods into one deity, “Sol Invictus Mithras.”

By the 5th century, Mithraism faded. However, Mithras and Sol Invictus have echoes in the worship of Jesus Christ. Martin believes the ideas of brotherhood in Mithraism and apostleship in Christianity descend from collegia, or Greek social and political clubs. “My own take is that you’ve got two religions developing at the same time and in the same place and in the same culture and they’re going to develop similar kinds of expressions, symbolic expressions,” he adds.

Anyone studying brain and mind is likely to have noticed that certain things can change the speed and intensity of perception, and change the way memories of events are created and stored.

Here’s an article about this phenomenon, suggesting the the brain speeds up in times of crisis – presumably triggered by some combination of neurochemicals – to produce the “my life flashed before my eyes” and other slow motion effects of perception. The one experiment performed suggests it’s primarily a memory effect, that it is subjective not objective (primarily? or completely? further experiments needed).

Why A Brush With Death Triggers The Slow-Mo Effect

But, after a little searching, David discovered something called SCAD diving. (SCAD stands for Suspended Catch Air Device.) It’s like bungee jumping without the bungee. Imagine being dangled by a cable about 150 feet off the ground, facing up to the sky. Then, with a little metallic click, the cable is released and you plummet backward through the air, landing in a net (hopefully) about 3 seconds later.

SCAD diving was just what David needed — it was definitely terrifying. But he also needed a way to judge whether his subjects’ brains really did go into turbo mode. So, he outfitted everybody with a small electronic device, called a perceptual chronometer, which is basically a clunky wristwatch. It flashes numbers just a little too fast to see. Under normal conditions — standing around on the ground, say — the numbers are just a blur. But David figured, if his subjects’ brains were in turbo mode, they would be able to read the numbers.

The Time Blur

The falling experience was, just as David had hoped, enough to freak out all of his subjects. “We asked everyone how scary it was, on a scale from 1 to 10,” he reports, “and everyone said 10.” And all of the subjects reported a slow-motion effect while falling: they consistently over-estimated the time it took to fall. The numbers on the perceptual chronometer? They remained an unreadable blur.

“Turns out, when you’re falling you don’t actually see in slow motion. It’s not equivalent to the way a slow-motion camera would work,” David says. “It’s something more interesting than that.”

According to David, it’s all about memory, not turbo perception. “Normally, our memories are like sieves,” he says. “We’re not writing down most of what’s passing through our system.” Think about walking down a crowded street: You see a lot of faces, street signs, all kinds of stimuli. Most of this, though, never becomes a part of your memory. But if a car suddenly swerves and heads straight for you, your memory shifts gears. Now it’s writing down everything — every cloud, every piece of dirt, every little fleeting thought, anything that might be useful.

Because of this, David believes, you accumulate a tremendous amount of memory in an unusually short amount of time. The slow-motion effect may be your brain’s way of making sense of all this extra information. “When you read that back out,” David says, “the experience feels like it must have taken a very long time.” But really, in a crisis situation, you’re getting a peek into all the pictures and smells and thoughts that usually just pass through your brain and float away, forgotten forever.

If you don’t know who Issac Bonewitz is, that’s not necessarily a surprise, for he represents an earlier more idyllic time in the study of the art form of intentional religion.

(I mispelled his name – my apologies, spelling is a personal weakness. His name was Isaac Bonewits. I leave my original mispelling as evidence of my error.)

http://neopagan.net/blog/?p=259

I would say that much of the work that he ended up doing was “silly, but necessary”. Someone had to act out those intentional religion and recreated religion ideas, and he got the job.

He was a religion geek of the first order. And there are worse things to be, on this planet and in this life.

I regard his books more as curiosities and cultural artifacts than as anything that it’s important to read, but it wouldn’t hurt you to read them if you come across them, and you have any interest in the whole pagan neopagan conscious religion thing.

This could be a very rare oppurtunity to get a look at the Chauvet cave art images in a way that would be almost like being there – Werner Herzog (He made the documentary Grizzly Man) has talked his way into the cave with good cameras, and this could be really revolutionary for we students of cave art and the origin of art, symbolism, human made imagery, and the distant origins of writing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2010/apr/13/werner-herzog-cave-art-documentary-3d

Herzog has apparently been given permission to film inside the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave, a site in the Ardèche department of southern France that contains the earliest known cave paintings, dating back at least 30,000 years. Even more intriguingly, Herzog is planning to shoot much of the film in 3D.

The Chauvet cave, discovered in 1994, cannot be accessed by tourists, as the French authorities have deemed the risk of degradation to be too high, so Herzog’s film might be the only opportunity for the rest of humanity to view the site. The paintings depict lions, panthers, bears, owls, rhinos and hyenas, suggesting a vastly different fauna at the time of the paintings to that of modern France.

One of the panels from Chauvet – photo from the wiki.

Chauvet is the great painted cave discovery of our time, and I am really looking forward to seeing it in video form.

The Hall of the Bulls from Lascaux – photo from the wiki

One of my dreams, something I hope very much happens before I die, is that the cave at Lascaux can be videoed in extreme hi-resolution and detail, and that we will be able to see the art of the most important painted cave once again. Yes, I understand the risks, and I too worry about the damage that we have done, but still, I hope…

http://www.lascaux.culture.fr/?lng=en#/en/00.xml

Can you imagine looking at the wounded man? It sends a shiver up my spine.

Death, the contemplation and confrontation of death, the implications of death, and coping with the experience of death of loved ones and the shock of possible death for oneself, is the major impetus for esoteric and spiritual thinking and philosophy building.

That is, death is the origin of religions, and death is the origin of esoteric systems.

Death is the great question, and the great puzzle.

And the near death experience is arguably the origin of much of the content and world models of religion and esotericism.

So, it’s relevant to we explorers to consider how the near death experience works.

National geographic recently posted an article that basically restates and provides a bit of popular literature supporting an old theory, which is that the characteristic content of the NDE, visions of light, the sense of meetings with beings, tunnels, and the like may be caused or supported by a higher concentration of CO2 in the bloodstream, and presumably by a change in the oxygen/CO2 balance.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/04/100408-near-death-experiences-blood-carbon-dioxide/

James Owen

for National Geographic News

Published April 8, 2010

A model like this, incidentally, may OR may not invalidate the content.

And one thing is certain – the NDE has a huge impact on those that experience it.

But, we explorers have to be open to new information and new models, so it’s important to keep in mind that the content of the NDE could easily have a physiological and chemical origin.

Consciousness is chemical, or at the very least, has a very large and significant chemical component – this is the great unacknowledged lesson of the human onsession with the large array of psychoactive drugs, including those produced by the huge anti-depression and anti-anxiety pharmaceutical industry, those produced by the legal inebriant industries (alcohol, tobacco, and other legal inebriants around the planet), the pleasure drugs of the illegal inebriant industry, and especially of the psychedelics.

Life magazine has posted a set of Aleister Crowley photos, most of which we have all seen before, but still enjoyable to scroll thru, so take a look.

http://www.life.com/image/first/in-gallery/41262/aleister-crowley-wicked

From BOINGBOING, a post about one of the grand old pioneers of consciousness exploration, Aleister Crowley.

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/08/aleister-crowley-in.html

“Today is a special Crowley anniversary too! On this day 106 years ago, Crowley was in Egypt taking dictation from either his subconscious, or a messenger of the god Horus named Aiwass. The resulting text was Crowley’s most famous work, The Book of The Law, containing his oft-repeated rule-of-thumb: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” Love him or hate him, Crowley not only talked the talk, but he walked the walk. To celebrate the Aiwass anniversary, Life has published a gallery of images related to Crowley’s remarkable life.”.

It’s rather sad and disappointing that boingboing would call the Book of the Law Crowley’s most famous book – a sign I suppose of the inevitable corruption of religion into all aspects of self-development and the exploration of the brain, mind, and consciousness. The book of the Law is ultimately Crowley’s worst book, a piece of trite psuedo-religion, the sort of junk that is always or almost always produced by “automatic writing” and trance writing experiments.

Oh, it’s pretty enough, and fine poetry, and if you have to have religion it’s not the worst religious document on the planet. It’s just not that special, and it contributes very little.

And I say that as someone who thinks of himself as a thelemite (well, a HIGHLY modified and modernized thelemite), and who thinks Crowley was one of the great geniuses of consciousness study in the 20th century.

There are many other Crowley books that are so much better, so much more worth reading and study, that it’s one of the great tragedies of Crowley’s life (a life filled with tragedies) that for so many people the Book of the Law, and the failed religion that surrounds it, is likely to be the introduction (thru groups like the oto) to the study of Crowley.

Don’t let that be you. For better poetry, read The Book of Lies; for better theory, read Magick in theory and practice, for better training tips, read Magick Without Tears, and for an explanation of the hermetic world model that underlies much of Crowley’s work, read The Book of Thoth.

Several articles about the mental differences between lucky and unlucky people have come out recently, all apparently triggered by the book the author of this current article is trying to sell. However, the ideas involved are worth thinking about for esoteric practicioners and explorers, so I picked this article as an example of the bunch, and suggest you give it a quick read.

The executive summary is that lucky people have mental traits that leaves them open to NOTICING possible openings that they can take advantage of for their benefit. I’ve snippeted out the mental traits as presented in the article below.

You may be able to quickly see why I mention these ideas – they involve yje way the brain and mind work, AND CAN BE TRAINED. They point at the phenomenon of selective perception, which is an incredibly important subject for the esoteric explorer to study and keep in mind.

But there’s another less obvious (on the face of it) reason to mention luck. If you hope to have success in your pursuit of meaning and “enlightenment”, you have to be damn lucky. Most people are, frankly, not so lucky. They are so focused on trying to see what they have been told to look for, that they forget to look at what is actually there, they miss the crucial clues, they fail to think for themselves and free themselves from the fictional storylines passed along in books and in popular mythology and “enlightenment culture”.

They are unlucky.

Don’t be unlucky. Stay relaxed, and look with relaxed eyes at the world and at yourself.

From the article:

“And so it is with luck – unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.

My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3304496/Be-lucky-its-an-easy-skill-to-learn.html

These are the traits of lucky and unlucky people:

• Unlucky people often fail to follow their intuition when making a choice, whereas lucky people tend to respect hunches. Lucky people are interested in how they both think and feel about the various options, rather than simply looking at the rational side of the situation. I think this helps them because gut feelings act as an alarm bell – a reason to consider a decision carefully.

• Unlucky people tend to be creatures of routine. They tend to take the same route to and from work and talk to the same types of people at parties. In contrast, many lucky people try to introduce variety into their lives. For example, one person described how he thought of a colour before arriving at a party and then introduced himself to people wearing that colour. This kind of behaviour boosts the likelihood of chance opportunities by introducing variety.

• Lucky people tend to see the positive side of their ill fortune. They imagine how things could have been worse. In one interview, a lucky volunteer arrived with his leg in a plaster cast and described how he had fallen down a flight of stairs. I asked him whether he still felt lucky and he cheerfully explained that he felt luckier than before. As he pointed out, he could have broken his neck.

As some may know, the archaeological site once called Catal Huyuk, now usually called Catalhoyuk (usually said to mean “forked mound” or a double mound) is an interest of mine, kind of a hobby. The most well known manifestation of that hobby is my old article “Catal Huyuk: The Temple City of Prehistoric Anatolia“.

That old article starts with an image that is often described as the oldest map in the world, the “catalhoyuk map” – altho I describe it differently, I call it one of the oldest known examples of a “landscape painting”. Here’s a bad example of the image:

All along there has been a lot of disagreement about this image. Mellart’s book ‘cleaned up’ a lot of the badly damaged murals and wall paintings uncovered during his rushed old-style excavations, and frankly, it’s very hard to tell exactly what the wall paintings actually show. The common interpretation, that the shape on the wall represents the volcano now called Hasan Dag in an eruption (thus making the painting a landscape, and implying that the squarish cells painted in black underneath are an image of the town), has been questioned before.

And now from a cartographer an article that makes a good simple presentation of the arguments for the idea that the catalhoyuk wall painting isn’t a map NOR a landscape.

Why the World’s Oldest Map Isn’t a Map

It’s short, has some good illustrations, worth your time if you have an interest in ancient cultures.

Relevant to brain studies, behavior studies (smell and molecular communication play a larger role than most people realize in behaviors and experience), and the popular topic and theme of ‘vibration’ in the esoteric culture materials… How a new science and industry of scent chemicals is evolving from chemists and biologists applying a theory of smell based on molecular vibration.

Scent is an interesting topic, and a fruitful field for further study for we students of the mind. We use scent cues like perfumes and incenses as a basic part of our ancient and modern technologies of consciousness as tools to shapes moods and experiences and expectations. I predict that a lot of significant discoveries about the role of scent and smell in the brain and consciousness will be made this century, maybe even some really revolutionary discoveries – such as, for example, scent being one of the triggers for ‘feelings of energy in the body’, a subjective phenomenon familar to most people who’ve tried meditation or other training.