Immature Predators

Being fascinated with wars and warfare since I was a kid, perhaps inordinately so, my interest was piqued when I saw this title in a used bookstore: *Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War by *Barbara Ehrenreich. I was vaguely aware of Ehrenreich as a kind of muckraker known for biting social critiques so I worried the book might mainly be an anti-war polemic. Flipping through the pages, however, I was encouraged to see she had read and liked John Keegan, a conservative but very good military historian. Then the page flip landed on this quote:

Is it not wonderful for a man, having been born a man, to die at the hands of another man and then, with his quiver and bow at his side, lie on the ground as a corpse?

   -- Mongolian Proverb from the time of Genghis Khan

I laughed and bought the book. It would turn out to be an eye-opener and a significant influence going forward. I've read it three times.

Ehrenreich's purpose starting her research was to come up with a coherent theory of warfare, something that seemed lacking despite copious amounts of writing on the topic. I'm not sure she succeeds in a thoroughgoing sense (I think she would acknowledge she doesn't) but the open-ended exploration is what carries the book.

Looking at warfare in history, Ehrenreich observes that when men go to war, a transformation takes place. Some process, training or ritual turns the ordinary man into a solider or a warrior, in effect making him a killing monster. While this is true across cultures and time, she notes that something is lacking in modern cultures that existed in indigenous ones: A reverse process, rituals that turn the monsters back into men. 

Maori warriors returning from war cover their heads, vomit and refrain from sex as a means of becoming normal human beings again. The Taulipang Indians of South America, to get out of their warrior mode, flog each other with whips and run cords through their noses. Such rituals don't really exist for modern soldiers. When they struggle to fit back into normal life, we treat it as a pathology, a condition to be cured or treated. The Maori, on the other hand, acknowledged the psychological effect of war and made it part of their culture rather than try to eliminate it.

I find this interesting but it doesn't get at the origins of war. Or does it? That people need to be transformed in order to go into battle suggests the warrior state is not inherent, not a smooth fit to our normal existence. There's something hard to place about it.

Ehrenreich notes that human beings are odd creatures for top predators. We have no fangs or claws and we're not particularly fast or strong. It dawns on her that homo sapiens really haven't been top predators for long. In actuality, throughout most of our evolutionary history as upright hominids, we have been prey.

Mock tiger attack

The fossil evidence for this is extensive. All those human bones in caves weren't collected by other humans;  they came from large predators dragging back their kills. But you don't need to look so far as the distant past. Even today people are subject to predation in areas where large predators still roam -- lions and leopards in Africa, tigers in India and eastern Russia. In some areas, the frequency of attack can be quite high and, Ehrenreich suggests, the number of attacks are probably under reported.

Maybe that's where our paranoias, our nightmares, and other insecurities come from -- a long past where we were often hunted and killed.

Another observation Ehrenreich makes is the tendency for people to make the fighting of war a sacred endeavor. We see this in monuments, speeches, stories and films -- heroes fighting for freedom, democracy, king, country, or other lofty causes. But this "sacralization" is also kind of strange. War perhaps is necessary but why do we idolize it so much?

... it is my contention that our peculiar and ambivalent relationship to violence is rooted in a primordial experience that we have managed, as a species, to almost entirely repress. And this is the experience, not of hunting, but of being preyed on by animals that were initially far more skillful hunters than ourselves. In particular, the sacralization of war is not the project of a self-confident predator, I will argue, but that of a creature which has learned only 'recently' in the last thousand or so generations, not to cower at every sound in the night.

When our ancestors invented spears, in a blink we were a top predator. But it was like a white-tailed deer -- a naturally fearful creature -- suddenly gaining claws, fangs and a taste for meat. The deer becomes a hunter but all of its fearful prey instincts remain and the mix of impulses generates strange behavior. It doesn't move with the same confidence as a mature predator like a lion or a tiger.

Animals secure in their predator status know nothing of revenge. But humans are hardly secure; our triumph over the other species occurred not that long ago, and childhood, for each of us, recapitulates the helplessness of prey.

Something in this psychological brew of predator and prey instincts, Ehrenreich asserts, encourages warfare.

We will not find the roots of the human attraction to war by searching the human psyche for some innate flaw that condemns us to harass and kill our fellows. In war we act as if the only enemies we have are human ones, but I am proposing that the emotions we bring to war are derived, in an evolutionary sense, from a primal battle that the entire human species might easily have lost. We are not alone on this planet, and we were once decisively outnumbered by creatures far stronger and more vicious than ourselves.

Yet, in a relatively short amount of time, we "won" the battle and no longer were other large animals a substantial threat to us as a species. And with the advent of agriculture and domesticated animals, we no longer even had to hunt. So who do we prey on now? Each other, naturally. And in warfare we continue our roles as both prey and predator.

Most people are not eager for war but it's a hard thing to stop once it starts. If there's aggression, there's need for defense against it. And often, to the strong, the vulnerable will look like prey.

War is like love; it always finds a way.

   -- Bertolt Brecht

Taulipang boys

Cupboard of Half-Baked Ideas: Anger

So, while I find myself stalled on other blog posts in the works, I thought I'd throw out a theme that's been clanking around my brain for a while.

Anger has a life of its own. 

Anger often seems to exist prior to something that would cause a person to become angry. It's like anger waits in the weeds, looking for justification to spring its fury

Disproportionate anger, in my experience, is pretty common. I remember the wife of a buddy going ballistic because he brought home the wrong kind of cheese. And I've flipped out over minor things myself. But anger levels are on the rise these days with ever-increasing political and cultural polarization. I see the phenomena most distinctly while participating in online discussion forums: Many people wait around for something that justifies unleashing their anger. Often the offense is quite innocuous and the angry person reads things into a post that aren't there. It's anger looking for reasons to be angry.

Such anger probably originates from individuals' personal experiences -- relationships, workplace interactions, childhood, etc. -- but at some point the anger becomes self-perpetuating. It wants to be invoked. It nudges people toward news channels, websites, podcasts and Twitter accounts that fuel it. Anger becomes a parasite that addicts the host to its venom. The media works to feed the addiction because it generates clicks and views and so promotes a growing cycle of anger. Where will it stop? Can it be stopped?

Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.

   --Mark Twain 

I tend to agree with Mr. Twain. I have a temper and it can flash intensely at times. But I don't like it. Anger constricts my thoughts and channels my imagination toward ugly scenarios. That's not where I want to be. One thing I've noticed about experiencing anger: It always feels justified.  But often enough it really isn't. Recognizing that seems to help dissipate whatever anger I'm feeling. That and the good 'ol technique of breathing deeply and sitting still for few moments.

Twain is undoubtedly correct but the damage anger can do to others is clearly considerable. While there's a lot to be angry about these days, instead of responding angrily, I try to ask myself what is the compassionate response or, more practically, what is the useful response. Flaming someone online who says repulsive things likely isn't going to accomplish much except create more wounds and fuel more anger.

I'll step off the box with a quote from an old, but rather prophetic Oliver Stone movie: *Talk Radio:

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words cause permanent damage.

Michael Wincott as "Kent" in Talk Radio

Ruffled Feathers and Lawrence of Arabia

Ever since reading *Seven Pillars of Wisdom, I've nursed a fascination with T.E. Lawrence. Something about him resonates with me. He was adventurous, philosophical and thirsted for knowledge, yet he was an introvert, had intimacy issues, was prone to sanctimony and struggled to find belonging in a world where he seemed an alien on his own planet.

Lawrence

What Lawrence is most famous for is as a leader of the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks during World War I. The effort was instrumental in bringing down the Ottoman Empire. It was a struggle chock full of colorful characters, intrigue, epic desert treks, and all the death, drama and horror of war. It ultimately ended in a colossal betrayal.

The British had promised the Arabs, if they rose up against the Ottomans, that they would have independence and the lands from Syria to the Arabian Peninsula would be theirs exclusively. But the British secretly signed the *Sykes-Picot Agreement with the French and basically divvied up the Middle East between themselves.

Map signed as part of Sykes-Picot Agreement

It was a pivotal but not well known set of events. If the British had honored their promise to the Arabs, subsequent Middle Eastern history would have been very different and likely much improved over what we have now. After the war, Lawrence and others worked hard to get the British Government to scrap Sykes-Picot and fulfill their promise to the Arabs but with little success. For a really engaging account of this period, see Scott Anderson's *Lawrence in Arabia.

After the war Lawrence worked on his memoirs which eventually became Seven Pillars. He was a hero and the book was a success but over time his reputation flagged. Many considered him loose with the truth and a fabricator of various events in his book. Contributing to this reputation was a man named *Richard Meinertzhagen who also served in the Middle East and was something of a purveyor of dirty tricks for the British Army. 

Lawrence and Meinertzhagen met on a number of occasions and shared a room together at the Paris peace conference. Lawrence didn't have a high opinion of him and wrote as much in Pillars:

Meinertzhagen knew no half measures. He was logical, an idealist of the deepest, and so possessed by his convictions that he was willing to harness evil to the chariot of good. He was a strategist, a geographer, and a silent laughing masterful man; who took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving his enemy (or his friend) by some unscrupulous jest, as in spattering the brains of a cornered mob of Germans one by one with his African knob-kerri.

Meinertzhagen

Meinertzhagen apparently didn't like the characterization and dissed Lawrence in his own memoirs, insinuating Lawrence was flighty, unreliable and homosexual. Meinertzhagen came to be known as a war hero and went on to become famous in the field of ornithology. He collected and cataloged birds from all over Asia and Africa and became a figure of scientific respectability. His seeming unassailable integrity lent credence to the notion of Lawrence as an unreliable narrator.

Nevertheless, when I read Pillars, Lawrence won me over with passages like the following which show his intimate knowledge of the Arab people. He was an archaeologist before the war and spent much time in Syria learning the Arab language, even the different dialects, and their customs.

The Beduin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God. He could not conceive anything which was or was not God, Who alone was great; yet there was a homeliness, an everyday-ness to this climatic Arab God, who was their eating and their fighting and their lusting, the commonest of their thoughts, their familiar resource and companion, in a way impossible to those whose God is so wistfully veiled from them by despair of their carnal unworthiness of Him and by the decorum of formal worship. Arabs felt no incongruity in bringing God into the weaknesses and appetites of their least creditable causes. He was the most familiar of their words; and indeed we lost much eloquence when making Him the shortest and ugliest of our monosyllables.

Compassion and insight combined with humor and irreverence toward establishment thinking made Lawrence a man after my own heart. Something made me want to trust Lawrence, though I bowed to the consensus view that he was unreliable. I viewed Pillars as more of a work of literature than history.

Then one day I was reading an edition of *The Best American Science and Nature Writing and came across an article written by John Seabrook called "Ruffled Feathers" that appeared in the New Yorker in 2006. It was about *Pamela Rasmussen, an ornithologist who in the 1990s did the major legwork for *Birds of South Asia: The Ripley Guide. Traditionally ornithologists shot bird specimens, collected their skins and stuffed them for museum collections and further study. Meinertzhagen had been one of the grand champions, collecting more than 25,000 birds, so his work figured prominently in Rasmussen's research.

But something was wrong with the specimens. The data didn't always match up and she saw evidence of tampering. Further research revealed the birds had been stolen from museums around the world and Meinertzhagen had doctored the mountings to make them look like his own work. Bird after bird that he had supposedly collected turned out to be stolen. Much of his work is now considered fraudulent. The full extent isn't known.

Around the same time Rasmussen was doing her detective work, Lawrence scholars discovered that Meinertzhagen's World War I diaries were faked. He actually wrote them in the 1950s. In them were passages disparaging Lawrence. One entry states, "I believe I was the only one of [Lawrence's] friends to whom he confided he was a complete fraud." The real fraud, it turns out, was Meinertzhagen.

Some suspect he may have murdered his wife who died in a shooting accident. Meinertzhagen was the only other person there. The police didn't investigate or file charges.

Whatever the case, Meinertzhagen's chicanery is, I think, a measure or redemption for Lawrence's reputation. But he's not entirely off the hook. Certain dates and events in Pillars don't add up with other accounts. He almost certainly told Arab leaders during the war about the Sykes-Picot Agreement but doesn't acknowledge it in Pillars. How could he? It would have been admitting to treason.

I believe Lawrence was honest, to a fault even, and was trying to get at reality as best he could in a vast maze of competing loyalties and interests. His Arabian adventure was a huge undertaking, representing essentially lifetimes of experience compressed into a few years. Not even a brain as capable as his could hold it all together and somehow capture it completely with words. He had to try to point toward the truth using an inadequate medium -- language. If the writing in Pillars sometimes has the quality of a Zen koan, then you just have to trust it. I do.

The Great Game

No, not the 19th century intrigues between Britain, Russia and other powers for dominance of Central Asia. I'm talking the "Infinite Game" which is James P. Carse's organizing theme in his book, *Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility.

I'm a gamer by nature and that's probably what attracted me to the title when I was browsing a bookstore's philosophy section many years ago. A thin little paperback with a black cover, the book opens by defining the two types of games:

A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

I bought it, devoured it in short order, and was blown away. The book somehow manages to offer a fresh perspective on the nature and possibilities of being a person in the world, and at the same time stay down to earth with little or no jargon. I've read it several times since.

Don't get me wrong; I don't want to put the book forward as scripture. Each time I read it, I see problems with Carse's reasoning. But I believe the main theme is sound and the theme has become something of a guiding principle for me in terms of how I try to relate to others, even if I often fall short of living up to it.

Everything flows from that first distinction which establishes two types of behavior -- finite play and infinite play. Finite play seeks to win, to bring things to a definitive end, and to have the titles of victory recognized in perpetuity.  Infinite play seeks to keep the game going and to pursue horizons of possibility.

The idea of infinite play hearkened back to the endless Dungeons and Dragon campaigns I played in high school and college, yet it pointed to something broader and deeper than a swords-and-sorcery role-playing game.

Carse uses a technique of defining common words which are associated with either finite or infinite play. Finite play, for example, is "theatrical," while infinite play is "dramatic." There's also "serious" compared to "playful:"

To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself.

Or "socieity" compared to "culture," or "cure" compared to "healing," or what became the Ding! moment for me: "power" compared to "strength."

Power is what you get when you win finite games. It's an entitlement that acknowledges your past victories. It's contradictory because you only have power to the extent others give it to you by recognizing your victories. No one is inherently powerful. Power is also limited to a relative few but, Carse says, "Anyone can be strong."

Strength is paradoxical. I am not strong because I can force others to do what I wish as a result of my play with them, but because I can allow them to do what they wish in the course of my play with them.

I think that passage took my breath away. It was an unveiling moment, yet so obvious when spelled out. Suddenly what I thought was strength wasn't really strength at all, and I realized I wasn't really a very strong person. Whether it was in my personal relationships, work life or discussion forums, that will-to-victory was at work, that desire to be the one who knew the most and understood the best. I was pretty good at it. But now I could see how that undercut the voices of others. I was trying to win by silencing alternative views. As Carse would say, I wasn't letting folks respond to my "genius" with their "genius," or vice versa. I was not strong.

I resolved to be stronger.

In reading the book, intellectual pursuits take on a new light. History, for example, is not about arriving at a final truth about what happened but engaging the past in an open-ended way that informs one's understanding and creativity. The approach is the same with science, music, fiction or art. I'm not looking at a Kandinsky painting to find the true meaning of his work, but to let my genius respond to his, whatever form that may take. The interaction is something new and unique. It points to a horizon of further play.

The Rider (Wassily Kandinsky)

Carse shines light on this dynamic with another pair of terms -- "explanation," associated with finite play, and "narrative," associated with infinite play:

Explanations settle issues, showing that matters must end as they have. Narratives raise issues, showing that matters do not end as they must but as they do. Explanation sets the need for further inquiry aside; narrative invites us to rethink what we thought we knew.

Wow. Yeah. Of course.

Carse's line of thought is not entirely original. You can see it in works like Martin Buber's little gem of philosophy, I and Thou, or in Carl Jung's approach to psychology. You also can see elements of Buddhism, Taoism and Sufism in Carse's ideas but he distills them wonderfully and clearly. For me it was a fascinating new way to look at the world.

The book touches on other subjects -- like sexuality, nature and politics -- viewing them in the light of either finite or infinite play. Even death is considered. For the finite player, death is the termination of play. For the infinite player, death occurs "in the course of play" and, ideally, stimulates further play among the remaining players.

Max Von Sydow plays chess with death in The Seventh Seal

Carse tends to privilege poets and storytellers, perhaps to a fault. But I don't mind because my artistic bent is to write fiction so, naturally, it's special. We're all storytellers, of course, or can be. Carse sees storytelling as the antidote to forms of discourse that seek to be recognized as truth:

Storytellers do not convert their listeners; they do not move them into the territory of a superior truth. Ignoring the issue of truth and falsehood altogether, they offer only vision. Storytelling is therefore not combative; it does not succeed or fail. A story cannot be obeyed. Instead of placing one body of knowledge against another, storytellers invite us to return from knowledge to thinking, from a bounded way of looking to an horizonal way of seeing.

With that, I'll get back to playing the Great Game (actually, I'm playing it here).

My Pagan Heart

Continuing my winter brooding as the snow piles up, turning sidewalks and streets into canyons, and warm weather into a distant memory.

I'm attracted to art, literature or film that in some way or other shows the hugeness of nature where people strive and find meaning against that backdrop. Recent examples have been the novel, *Trask, by Don Perry set in 1840s Oregon where a former trapper wants to settle land near the coast but has to find a way to come to terms with the Indians living in the vicinity; or the movie, *Meek's Cutoff, (also set in the 1840s) where the camera dwells for long moments on the stark but beautiful features of the Oregon High Desert. The characters' struggles are compelling but seem fleeting compared to the terrain they're trying to cross.

Near Vail, Oregon (Douglas Ross)

Most recently I read *The Sea Road by Margaret Elphinstone, a book that deserves more acclaim than it's received. The writing is beautiful. It's about an elderly Norse woman recounting her experiences (late 10th Century) with Leif Erikson and others striving to explore and settle the harsh lands of the northern Atlantic. The woman, Gudrid, is telling her tale in Rome to a monk who was born in Iceland and knows her language. Here's a sample:

What you say is true, but Eden was a garden with walls built around it. Adam never laid eyes on the vastness of the worlds. He never named what has not been seen and known. That's what your theologians in Rome don't see. They can't look out of the world from here; they don't know how small we are.

How small we are. Those theologians in Rome, propped up by the magnificence of their authority and architecture, could veil their smallness and pretend to be important in the grand scheme. But the veil likely would drop away if they sailed in a Viking ship along the coasts of Greenland and Newfoundland and viewed the endless vistas of ice and rock, or felt the stormy power of the polar ocean.

Whalers Trapped by Arctic Ice (William Bradford)

The Sea Road, among other things, is also about the spread of Christianity to the Norse people and the decline of their pagan practices. Gudrid is a believer in magic and miracles, considered a witch by some, and straddles both sets of beliefs, showing how both can be compelling and how both can fall short. Christianity wins out, of course, no doubt, in part, because it had become the religion of the kingly powers, but also because of its promise of eternal life and, maybe more importantly, because of its promise that people are made in God's image and are His special children -- small in size, perhaps, compared to the rest of the world, but not small in God's eyes. He sent His Son to save us.

We are indeed important, says the Christian message. This is something Nordic paganism didn't offer. There was little sense of attaining salvation. The gods were remote and volatile. Death in battle was among the highest glories. Suffering was the human lot in life. One couldn't count on anything in paganism. Not like Christianity where you could follow a set of strictures that would necessarily lead to heaven. This world may be miserable but the next one will be bliss (as long as you're faithful and do the right things).

So what is attractive about paganism? I think ultimately it's the sense of nobility that the heroes attain in their struggles in the wide world against fickle fate. They are able to lead exemplary lives in the face of misery and death, which, I think, means coming to terms with your own mortality, your own limitations, your own smallness. The mice that roared, so to speak. In that vein, pagans also had a sense of seizing the moment: Let's get what we can out of this life while we have the chance. The Norse pagans lived in the world knowing their existence was temporary and their actions weren't aimed at the abstract and uncertain promise of heaven.

In The Sea Road, Gudrid describes ghosts and spells, demons and omens which serve to show how these ancient people thought. But there's no sense that she's credulous, more that the supernatural terms are what she has at her disposal to describe her experience of the world. It makes for a rich metaphorical brew and I enjoy that kind of use of the supernatural in a novel or film.

I admit I yearn a little for sorcery -- with its ritual, mystery and power (I'll always have a soft spot for Lord of the Rings and Dungeons & Dragons) -- but I crossed the spiritual Rubicon a long time ago and there's no going back. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't be able to swallow the pill of belief, whether pagan, Christian or otherwise. Yet those old pagans still have the power to excite my imagination.

A Little Nietzsche on a Cold Day

             Edvard Munch Portrait

Grim winter has taken hold of the Twin Cities. After temperatures dipped to an unearthly -30F, we got a brief, freaky warm spell followed by freezing rain, then back to the deep freeze, then snow to hide the treacherous coating of ice. It's during such cold and gloomy times, when I'm feeling down or overwhelmed by the world, that I reach for the comforting words of Friedrich Nietzsche. Specifically, I read the inspiring opening paragraphs of his essay, *On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense:

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history"—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.

One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it. But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that he floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world. There is nothing in nature so despicable or insignificant that it cannot immediately be blown up like a bag by a slight breath of this power of knowledge; and just as every porter wants an admirer, the proudest human being, the philosopher, thinks that he sees the eyes of the universe telescopically focused from all sides on his actions and thoughts.

Ah, goes down like a warm cup of tea. 

Okay, so, maybe Nietzschean nihilism is an acquired taste. 

Yet the passage is a good antidote to intellectual hubris which on me tends to accumulate like barnacles on a ship. It offers appropriate perspective whenever I might be tempted to believe I'm in possession of The Truth. The Truth is that reality is far vaster than any ideas I have about it, far vaster then any ideas anybody has about it. Keeping this in mind grounds me, helps keep my relations with others on an equitable plane, helps me be compassionate even though I'm not an overly compassionate guy by nature.

Of course Nietzche intended to jolt folks with his bleak humor, tweak something people suspect in their bones but don't want to think about. Many might be horrified by the suggestion of ultimate pointlessness, but I do think there's some optimism to be salvaged: The great thing about being small compared to the rest of reality is that there's always something to discover, always an opportunity to improve one's understanding. If I actually possessed The Truth, no further growth would be possible.

And the truth contained in the passage, I think, invites us to be creative about how we go about finding value and meaning in life. There are some interesting possibilities to ponder. One approach I'll likely touch on in future posts: *Finite and Infinite Games.

Meanwhile I'll wrap another blanket around my shoulders, furrow my brow, and sip more hot tea.

Amazons and a Novel Idea

During my lunch breaks I often browsed the Barnes & Nobel Bookstore in downtown Minneapolis (now, sadly, closed). One day in 2016 while perusing the history section, I spotted a book titled Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women in the Ancient World.* I didn't buy it immediately -- woman warriors are hot and all but I figured the book would be overly speculative and sensational. Yet whenever I returned to the store, it seemed to beckon. Eventually I broke down.

The purchase marked a turning point for me, not only sparking a fascination with ancient history, but stimulating an idea and an obsession that ultimately turned into my first (and only) finished novel.

As for the author, Adrienne Mayor, she is a respected scholar and writer of a highly regarded history, The Poison King.*

Amazons, of course, are the menacing warrior women that appear frequently in Greek literature and art. Sometimes they're depicted as strange, savage aliens; sometimes as tragic heroines. Many of the major heroes -- Heracles, Theseus, Achilles -- encounter Amazons during their adventures. Often the hero meets an Amazon queen in battle, kills her, then regrets it afterward in a tearful death scene, thinking he could have loved her instead.

Achilles kills Penthesilea

The consensus was that Amazon myths had little or no basis in actual history. The ancient historians didn't give them credence except Herodotus but he was considered unreliable in that regard. There was no archaeological evidence of an Amazon kingdom and no evidence that women fought as warriors in any substantial way. The myths were a product of the Greek imagination, a counterpoint perhaps to the way the fiercely patriarchal Greeks tended to keep women separated, suppressed and out of sight. All those women on vase paintings decked out in armor and wielding spears were just figments of men's dark, erotic fantasies.

But wait.

Scattered throughout the Eurasian plains are burial mounds known as kurgans and hundreds have been excavated over the last couple of centuries. In them were the remains of a nomadic people the Greeks knew as Scythians. Nearly all appeared to be warriors who were interred with weapons, armor and other objects of their lives. Naturally, these warriors must have been men.

Then DNA analysis came along and researchers applied it to the skeletons. Oddly, some were female. Probably just a fluke, a couple of exceptional individuals maybe, or possibly they were buried with armor and weapons for ceremonial reasons. As more of the remains were analyzed, more were discovered to have been women. And not only were they buried with armor and weapons, they had battle wounds to show their bona fides -- holes in their skulls, great cuts in their limbs, and so on. These women were indeed combatants and turned out to represent about 30 percent of the warriors found in the kurgans.

Thirty percent. Even if you allow that female remains may be over represented in the kurgans for some reason, it still means the Scythians were employing significant numbers of women as warriors. And, since the Greeks were in contact with the Scythians since at least 800 BCE, they almost had to be the source material for the Amazon myths. (Which isn't to say the myths don't remain erotic fantasies.)

Who were these Scythians? What was their culture like? Mayor suggests it was highly egalitarian, at least in regards to gender relations. She points to things found in the graves that aren't weapons or armor, things like spindle whorls. 

In Greek society, only women spun thread. But in the Scythian burial mounds, spindle whorls were found with the male warriors as well as the female. All Scythians, it seemed, spun thread.

~

My imagination swirled. I began to wonder what a truly gender-egalitarian society would look like. I wasn't sure, but it would be fun to explore the possibility. 

This line of thought converged with another that I'd indulged for some time: What if you could go back in time and see what actually happened? How much of "history" would turn out to be wrong? A lot, I think.

Then it hit me: Castaways from the 21st century are hurled back 2,500 years and end up in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains not far from the Black Sea. After a wilderness adventure, they end up in a Greek colony on the coast. The main character is a woman and finds life with the paternalistic Greeks hard to bear. Later she hooks up with a band of Scythians who are more to her liking.

This was the beginnings of a plot. It would be an action-adventure story that would give readers a look at two contrasting societies -- the Greeks, whose culture is much like our own (despite recent progress); and the Scythians whose ways might seem weird even to modern liberal sensibilities.

I was energized and I had much work to do.

[Edit: The book is published and available *here.]

A Tale of Two Bows

I was practicing with my new bow at Wirth Park's* archery range when a large pickup pulled up and a very tall man got out (taller than me and that's tall). Short-cropped hair, camo jacket and wrap-around sunglasses -- all signs of someone with a conservative bent. He hauled a big black case to the picnic table and unpacked what to my eyes looked like a contraption -- a high-tech compound bow. It was late September and he was likely there to tune up for the deer hunting season. I said hi, he nodded and I continued shooting.

Only a few weeks earlier, out of curiosity, I had purchased a primitive recurve bow known generally as a horse bow. The style originates from the bows used by horse nomads of the Eurasian steppe -- Turks, Mongols, Huns, Alans, and back through time to the original horse nomads: Scythians.* I was writing and researching a novel that involved Scythians and I wanted to get an idea of what it was like to shoot one of their bows.

The bows were called "composite" because they were made with a combination of wood, bone, horn and sinew. The limbs for my bow were made of fiberglass but, by all accounts, the shooting characteristics were similar to the ancient bows. I found it a challenge to shoot. There's no ledge to rest the arrow on so you have to use your hand, and there's nothing to aim with so you have to shoot instinctively. My early efforts were awful but I was starting to get the hang of it. No one was going to confuse me with Robin Hood but at least I was hitting the hay bale.

The tall man attached a couple of things to his bow and made adjustments with a screwdriver.  He set up his own target 40 yards away and began to shoot. Instead of pulling the string back with his fingers, he used a triggering device designed to provide crisp, consistent releases. This is standard for compound bows.

A compound bow uses a system of pulleys and cables to change the nature of the draw. With a traditional bow, the further you pull back the heavier the draw. A compound bow's draw is the opposite, heavy at the beginning but light at the back. This allows people to shoot stronger bows and reduces fatigue.

The tall man's initial groups were tight and became even tighter after he got his sight zeroed in. I started to feel a little silly as I worked to keep my arrows within a two-foot circle at 25 yards. But I kept at it -- breath from the stomach, focus on the target, draw, pause, release. Between volleys he watched me with, I  assumed, some amusement mixed with derision. I finished my volley and we both walked to our targets to retrieve the arrows.

"What kind of bow is that?" The tall man asked.

I explained and handed him the bow to look at.

"Jesus, it's so light," he said. "Damn, that's a cool bow."

"Not quite as accurate as yours," I said.

"No, but you make me feel like I'm cheating," he said.

We went on to have a good conversation about bows and hunting and other stuff. He pointed out, correctly, that the arrows I was using weren't stiff enough. Later I bought stiffer arrows and my accuracy improved.

~

Technology is seductive and the compound bow is a good case in point. The time and effort needed to shoot accurately with a primitive bow is considerable. With a compound bow, even a relative beginner can become reasonably accurate in a short time. The modern compound bow is about reducing human elements to a minimum in favor of mechanical precision. It's a marvel of ingenuity.

But something is lost in the experience. Shooting a primitive bow has a way of opening the mind because you're forced to use more of it and use parts that reside below the level of consciousness.

In thinking about this kind of thing, I've come to believe that whenever technology replaces a skill, it represents a diminishment. The threat is that as technology advances, the human animal grows less capable and ever more dependent.

I don't want to dis technology and be a crotchety Luddite. The question is how do you distinguish good tech from bad? The electric guitar, I would argue, is good tech because it opens up a world of musical possibility that otherwise wouldn't exist, yet it doesn't replace guitar-playing skill. But that's a clear-cut example. Most technologies are in some measure both enhancing and diminishing (computers, smart phones, the internet, automobiles and so on).

So what do we do? Do we go along for the ride -- let our skills shrink to a handful of vocational specialties (if even those can't be replaced) and move toward becoming little more than entertainment absorption organisms? I don't have an answer. Maybe the marginalization of humanity by technology is a natural and inevitable development. I, for one, intend to resist and keep shooting my horse bow until they pry it from my cold, dead hands.