The mythology of grain, or “the gifts of the gods”, as described in The Herbal Lore of Wise Women and Wortcunners, by Wolf. D. Storl, 2012, pg. 171-172:
“Staples are the staff of life. They are usually grains–grasses growing upright into light, air, and warmth that mature into nuggets of gold, capable of sustaining civilizations. Indeed, most civilizations that developed out of the Neolithic grew up on grain…”
“The staples were always regarded as the gifts of the gods, if not the body of the gods themselves: “Take, eat; this is my body, given to you…” The loaf of bread, everywhere considered holy, symbolizes the sacred bond of man to God, of the soil and sun, and of man to man (“companion” is from the Latin com + panis = “together” + “bread”; i.e., those who eat bread together). In the presence of bread (and honey) European peasants did not curse or tell untruths…”
“Only in marginal regions did tubers take the place of cereal grasses as the staple…These, too, were regarded as sacred. They were seen as gods or goddesses that had been sacrificed, buried, and turned into food tubers.”
I have also read over and over again about grain and bread becoming a substitute for earlier traditions of animal (and perhaps human) sacrifice. Often the sacrificial bread was made into the shape of an animal (or person). Descriptions of the old European religion/s often speak of the sacrifice of the grain god as well, (think Lughnasadh, and John Barleycorn), who must be killed so he can return to the underworld during winter, then be reborn in the spring. Without the sacrifice, the cycles of the seasons would be broken. People would also dress in costumes representing the grain spirits/gods, be celebrated and fed, but then afterwards the costumes would be sacrificed–burned or buried in the earth.
Also here you can see how Christianity includes an overlay of the old religious traditions. The sacrifice and the resurrection, and the use of bread to represent the body of Christ.
Perhaps the problem with agriculture is less the problem of grains, but more the problem of violently planting and taking the grains en-mass, instead of planting what we need with love and then receiving their harvest gratefully, and as a sacrament–as the flesh of our own gods?
As for the no carbs + minimal fats paleo diet, I think that Chinese medicine says that eating too many veges and not enough staples will unbalance the body’s yin and yang (too much yin/not enough yang could totally mess up your focus/health brain functioning). But I would prefer to discuss that idea with someone more educated in TCM before completely committing to it.
The mystery of agriculture’s origin seems even more impenetrable in light of the recent reversal of long-standing notions that the previous era was one of hostility to nature and an absence of leisure. “One could no longer assume,†wrote Arme, “that early man domesticated plants and animals to escape drudgery and starvation. If anything, the contrary appeared true, and the advent of farming saw the end of innocence.†For a long time, the question was “Why wasn’t agriculture adopted much earlier in human evolution?†More recently, we know that agriculture, in Cohen’s words, “is not easier than hunting and gathering and does not provide a higher quality, more palatable, or more secure food base.†Thus the consensus question now is, “Why was it adopted at all?â€
Hmmm… I was just thinking about this, and came up with my own simpler theory…
Agriculture is the practice of cultivating plants found in fields, the plants that are usually found in the earlier stages of succession. When agriculture is used shortly after the land experiences a catastrophe, and if the land is guided back to a forest after a short period, then agriculture isn’t unsustainable (in of itself).
My guess is that early horticultural societies who planted with the stages of succession found themselves in an area with frequent catastrophe (like river floodplains) and so found themselves only working with the first few stages of succession. In time they forgot about the other stages because they were so adapted to the first stage, and so, when these societies expanded outside of these areas, they simply didn’t know how to sustainably work with the land.
So more of a loss of knowledge kind of thing. But who knows, just another idea.
I can’t remember if I’ve posted this anywhere on this site yet, but it’s a really interesting article about a religion in Iraq (the birthplace of our agricultural civilization) that is older than all other religions there. In their story of Genesis (which most religions to come from that region are related to) the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil is actually wheat. Like, the ancient wheat that agriculture first began domesticating. This is the literal idea of what Daniel Quinn hypothesized about the fruit in Ishmael. Very interesting, and relates to this discussion as agriculture becoming part of the religion.
I want to digress for a minute. I find the question “Why did humans start to use agriculture?” really interesting, and will totally get to the ‘Devil Worshipper’ Yazidis article in a second, but as I started reading this thread I realized how often I wonder the same thing about what has come to be known as patriarchy. How and when and why the hell did THAT start? It makes no sense to me. Who ever thought it was a good idea? How did it ever really benefit anyone?? So far as I can tell female/male imbalance just makes things harder. It has at least that much in common with agriculture. And I feel like we’re so used to it being the norm, even if we don’t “agree” with it, that most people take it for granted that it must just be human nature—that it stems from men being assholes, for example, or violent. Whereas I’d argue that it goes against human nature and requires a ton of training and daily maintenance. This kid knows what I’m talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0w24DLClOg.
Anyway, back to agriculture…I just wanted to point out this stray but related question. Imbalance makes life harder, not easier, whether you’re talking about food production or patriarchy (or a number of other related things that aren’t immediately occurring to me).
That aside, there are a lot of theories on this idea. I just started reading The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, which attempts to blame the written word for the advent of patriarchy. I’m a few chapters in and still doubtful, however, there is so much food for thought within the book itself in this regard that I think it’s certainly a valuable book to read. I’m considering starting a thread dedicated to it. Perhaps it would be a good book club book.
I really think this female/male imbalance thing is at the heart of a lot of rewilding concerns. I may need to move this over to a new thread, I don’t know.
In “The Story of B” Daniel Quinn talks (through B) about how “we are not humanity,” how people aren’t innately crazy, it’s just this one crazy megaculture. I agree. But so many people feel like humanity is innately flawed, crazy, destructive—some rewilders seem to feel this way based on discussions I’ve read. Obviously that’s pretty fundamental. That kind of perspective is going to affect everything.
And then there’s this feeling that men are really at the heart of the destructiveness, not just because they hold more power but also because there’s something inherently uncaring and violent about them. That video of the toddler with the pinata (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0w24DLClOg) feels so bittersweet to me because I can imagine what kind of bullshit he’s going to have forced on him from all directions on account of being a boy. That nature of his that is so clearly on display in the video is going to be thrashed, and he’ll have to build up all kinds of weird structures around himself to handle it.
And I think this question of balance of feminine/masculine energies (for lack of better language) is at the center of what’s off with our relationship to the earth. Our relationship to ourselves and each other and the earth. Because it’s all the same stuff. That toddler is connected. He was born that way. He is inherently predisposed to hug Spiderman and not beat Spiderman. That’s the way I see it. He was born a lover but will be told to fight, and a lot will depend on him developing a certain amount of self-hatred. Whether or not he’s consciously aware of it.
Making us hate ourselves is pretty fundamental to upholding this insanity we exist in.
Also, as cliche as it is to point out, the parallels between human behavior toward Mother Earth and women in general seem worthy of attention. She is here to produce for us. We’ll MAKE her produce for us. We don’t trust her processes, so we’ll impose our own. We’ll control her. We’ll till her. We’ll own her. We’ll turn everything upside down: Eve was born from Adam, not the other way around. Soooo weird.
Why? Where did this attitude come from? I mean…what the hell. This “feminine” quality is part of ALL OF US, female and male, human and other-than-human; it’s not like it’s just coming from women. It seems to me there must have been some major upheaval in mindset and disconnection from the heart. Like something blew us into pieces and we’ve been working to collect parts of ourselves ever since.
Unfortunately, I think that is one of the legacies of fundamentalist Christianity. I read something posted recently by a close acquaintance (and Baptist) that every single human is inherently wicked and evil. What a horrifying view of mankind!!! I know they were simply trying to find some sense in/perspective regarding some of the horrible things happening in the world, but I could not bear to live with such a belief in my heart. No matter what people are doing to each other and to the world and other-than-humans, I must believe that all such harm is simply a mistake and/or a sickness, and if only the sickness can be addressed, that beneath that, humans–like all life–are actually inherently beautiful and good.
I’d like to formalise a little bit on a thought experiment i’m having sometime when i have a few minutes.
1/ we all know agriculture was “invented” in middle-east, and then spread across the globe over a number of millenia. Therefore agriculture is not necessarily a logical consequence of a climatic catastrophe, it’s more the spread of a paradigm from a small seed (pun :P)
2/ very quickly, an agricultural group/society would have gotten a sense of property/land ownership. It is near impossible to cultivate any parcel of land with the knowledge that somebody will come and reap the fruit of your labour.
3/ this would have put agriculturalist in stark opposition to nomadic hunter-gatherer, whose hunting ground would have been reduced by societies ready to fight for “their” land. The nomads will choose the simplest solution, which is to nomad somewhere else.
4/ In ecological terms, hunter-gatherers would have had their “habitat” reduced by competition from agriculturalists.
5/ to compound the process, agriculturalist societies would need to invent laws (property rights?), therefore some sort of hierarchy (those in charge of the law being de facto above the peasants). The one on top of the society will very quickly realise that conquest war and larger fields will give him a hedge on the chieftain of the agriculturalist city/nation next to him.
6/ then come the imperial wars of the antiquity as a consequence of the above, and spread of the agricultural model through land grabs and conquests.
7/ no hunter-gatherer clan could possibly assemble enough men and “industry” to face the imperials in a straight battle. Therefore their territory was doomed to shrink into nothingness…
Hello Mona Rose! Peace to you
My heart bleeds when i hear something like this. I am Christian (Catholic). In our christian denomination, we have diametrically opposed view to that of your acquaintance. We believe each and every human, however wounded, is child of God, and therefore son and daughter of love, and called to love eternally.
Hi Peter. Yes i’ve heard that one before. It is very interesting to put the curse of eating that fruit in perspective with the civilisation change that happened
=> “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life”
here i’m reading men became farmers
=> “It will produce thorns and thistles for you”
Constant battle against the weeds. Another consequence of being a farmer.
=> “with painful labor you will give birth to children.”
archeological records apparently show a shrinking of the pelvis in agriculturalist societies. Pain when giving birth would another consequence of eating the forbidden fruit?
=> " Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked"
all primitive hunter-gatherers were a lot less covered than we presently are
the paleo diet has changed a lot since the mainstream-influenced original work of Lorain Cordain. “Low fat” is actually harmful, and i’m not surprise you’d get brain fog. FYI, cholesterol is a very important hormonal precursor for sex hormones and is highly concentrated in brains, which is mostly made of fat. :o
Nowadays, most people who are seriously into palo would understand that it would be wrong to feed oneself only from steak. In fact, if you wanted to emulate our ancestor’s diet, you would need to eat raw liver, bone marrow, bone broth, collagen-rich meat, eggs, brain, offal, etc. That diet would be high in saturated fat, and low in lean protein (i’ve heard of some primitive tribes feeding steak to their dogs and keeping the fat-rich meat).
And animal-only diet would only be relevants for people of innuit ancestry, which is not the majority of us. Our ancestors would have had a fair amount of root starch in the summer/fall, leaves, wild fruits (which are low in sugars), nuts, etc.
This is the sort of approach i’m having now. Like you i did try the lean meat only approach and that wrecked me a bit. But with a high animal fat diet i’m having more clarity than i ever had. ;D ;D
With regards to this idea, as well as the main question, I have an idea that agriculture may have arisen as a need for a more readily available starch source. This could also have something to do with the fact that the area where agriculture arose was once more fertile and had more water than it does today. In the Northwest, for example, animal fats and proteins, and even greens and berries, seem to be more readily available than starches. Acorns must be gathered, but instead of just being dried like berries, they must be shelled, ground and leached to produce something edible. Other starch sources include roots, generally more prevalent in areas of the Interior Northwest as well as areas up north like Northern Vancouver Island where springbank clover and other roots were essentially cultivated. Roots, while perhaps more readily edible than acorns, still require pit cooking and aren’t as easy to pick as berries. They also aren’t as plentiful as the acorns of the oak prairies farther south. Is it possible that oaks, which I believe grew and do grow in the Middle East, and maybe even roots provided a food source until climatic changes forced new adaptations? This may explain the sudden rise of wild grains being cultivated, a more readily available food source that didn’t need to be dug (but did still need processing). Starches are also very important to the human diet and there may be a genetic predisposition to crave them. Once some people discovered that they could amass grain and control other people, well, the rest is kinda history.
This is an amazing question! I don’t know the answer but according to the archeological data, the human brain has gradually shrunk in size ever since the Neolithic Revolution 10000 years ago.
Now a days it is smaller than it has ever been in history, despite what our teachers tell us about stupid cavemen having small brains. Our nomadic ancestors, like the ancient Lakota natives, had some concept of what would happen if you farm the land and were wise knowing it would be destructive. That’s why I’ve heard the wild native Americans say things like ‘when men start farming the land they grow old fast and die young’ and why some of the last elders of the ancient way like Sitting Bull refused to farm the land. All the violent and corrupt tribes I know of like the maya, Aztec and Iroquois were territorial farmers. I was watching a documentary on Ayurveda and they said thousands of years ago, before civilization in India began, there were holy men in the Himalayan mountains who oversaw the first towns being built and were concerned for humanity’s future. I don’t think they could have predicted everything. In fact the Vedas say the Earth cannot ever be destroyed by people. Not to be pessimistic but the effects are now clear like mass overpopulation, pollution, deforestation, desertification, extinctions and ultimately the earth quickly becoming too destroyed to sustain us or any life. To brush the surface of what’s happening, before Europeans came here 1/4 trees used to be chestnut. 50% of the lakes in the us are extremely polluted and 50% of the life in the ocean has gone extinct in the past 55 years. More people die everyday now from polluted water than starvation and violence combined. It’s been estimated that around 40% of ALL deaths world wide are caused by pollution. Water is more important than food. The native Americans predicted food running out too. Looks like the native Americans had the most high, divine wisdom, that the world will be destroyed if humanity keeps going down whitemans road of technology. Peace and God bless!
which updates thinking on the opioid addiction theory of why ag got started. Ran comments:
I used to think large complex society was simply a mistake, and now I think it’s a really interesting transition that still has a long way to go, and to do it right we need more and better ways to alter consciousness. (Aug 15 post)
Haven’t read it yet so can’t comment.
Looking at the rest of this thread though (finally!) I thought I’d mention a few things. On the assertion that Inuit and other northern tribes lived almost exclusively on animal fats & proteins, a friend sent me this article:
which begins:
to dismantle the myth of the Inuit and the Masai who supposedly ate no starch, no fibers and no prebiotics.In fact, those cultures did eat animal starches and animal fibers. Unfortunately, unless one does their own hunting and eats part of their kills raw, those animal starches and fibers are all but missing from a modern low carb diet.
From: Principles and issues in nutrition: Yiu H. Hui, Ph. D., p.91 (1985)Eskimos actually consume more carbohydrates than most nutritionists have assumed. Because Eskimos frequently eat their meat raw and frozen, they take in more glycogen than a person purchasing meat with a lower glycogen content in a grocery store. The Eskimo practice of preserving a whole seal or bird carcass under an intact whole skin with a thick layer of blubber also permits some proteins to ferment into carbohydrates.
Dr. Hui is being kind when he uses the term “fermented” to describe the ancestral preservation techniques for Igunaq and Kiviaq, which are typically enjoyed during the Winter months when food is scarce. A more accurate description would probably be “rotting” by anaerobic digestion in an environment too cold to facilitate full decomposition. […]
The carb-yielding processes used sound absolutely disgusting, but are apparently considered a delicacy and essential for building the right body tissues, strength and stamina for living in such a cold climate. Don’t know how prevalent these techniques would have been in lower latitudes
Otherwise forestrunner asked:
You might be interested to read this paper from oak expert David Bainbridge which feeds into the topic discussion quite nicely: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4313131 (I can email a pdf of the whole thing if you don’t have access to jstor)
In the abstract he writes:
Interest in and research into the origin and development of agriculture has increased sharply in the last twenty years, yet all of these studies have missed the common link between the areas where agriculture may have begun-the acorn. All three areas considered of significance to date-the Middle East, middle China, and Mexico-are, or were once, characterized by oak woodlands. The experience in California, where ethnographers and anthropologists have been able to study a fully developed balanoculture (from the Greek balanos-acorn) reveals the primacy of acorn use and the complex interaction between people and oak woodlands. The California balanoculture was in fact a very successful agroforestry system that prospered for thousands of years. Balanoculture provided the stable communities necessary for agriculture to develop. The lower time and work cost associated with acorn use suggests agriculture may have evolved as acorns became more scarce from the decline in the oak woodlands brought about by the adverse human impacts resulting from overgrazing, fuel cutting and cutting for timber, and field burning, exacerbated by climatic fluctuation. A reevaluation of the record is in order: agriculture may perhaps be better considered a regressive rather than a progressive evolutionary event.
I think oaks would probably provide a more reliable source of starch than grains, even competing for overall yields per acre. The only problem is the tendency to have ‘off’ years, which can be circumvented by storage or possibly pruning techniques. You note the energy cost in processing, but this has to be measured against the costs of annual ploughing, weeding, watering, harvesting, threshing, winnowing, grinding etc. which the grains require to make them a viable foodstuff (further processing like sprouting or fermenting are also needed for nutritional reasons). And they also have years of failure which routinely lead to famines in the absence of any back-up plan or leftover stored grain, and of course you have the problems of soil erosion, nutrient exhaustion and the diseases which monocultures are prone to - none of which are problems to remotely the same degree with oak or other tree-based systems.
I’m still not seeing any benefits to the rise of ag, indicating a social/religious coup of some kind or the pharmacological reasons discussed above which got the infernal ball rolling. Bring on the roll-back!
Still have to finish “The Story of B,” though!