The Origins of War

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
1

This is a multi-part exposition on a complex issue
which I will post separately as comments dictate

Part One
Developing the Courage of the Warrior

OUR WAR WITH THE LIONS

Our courage
not that of the natural fight/flight reflex,
or that of a mother protecting her young -
but that deliberate act of consciousness- of willing to put one’s life at risk, not just for the sake of the common good, but for elevating the human character above Nature into the realm of the Gods.
THAT form of courage never came easy to the timid primate psyche.

For nearly a hundred thousand generations, from 2.5 milion B.C.E to 20.000 B.C.E , Stone Age hunter/gatherer family groups lived a peaceful co-existence with Nature in the Garden of Eden.

Never crossing a neighbor’s territorial hunting boundary was instinctively obeyed. Man lived in symbiosis with his neighbor and the rest of Nature. Man learned to protect himself from the leopard and his small stature and superior cunning never made him of interest to the much larger lion. During this vast foundation period of human development the social ethic of meticulous sharing was imprinted in our gene pool as the base of family values. Other family affections were naturally expressed at their most basic level. The ethic of extra-ordinary personal courage, and its relationship to higher orders of consciousness was not required during that primitive era of human development.

The need for high courage began when we trespassed on the lions
near the beginning of the Bronze Age …

For six hundred generations, after the Stone Age ended and before the advent of scripture around 4000 BCE ushered in the Iron Age, the innocent infant psyche of the former hunter was occupied in a Bronze Age of ever-improving agricultural technological innovation and oral-based social reorganization.

Our farming ancestors took hold of Nature by the scruff of Her neck and initiated a domesticating process of pruning, harnessing, and refining Her raw stock, to a degree of such beauty and pedigree that only the original Creator Himself can truly appreciate. Over those hundreds of Bronze Age generations a more cultured, character-forming process took place.

Besides imprinting a sound work ethic, agricultural smarts and extended social commitments, our evolution of consciousness required that yet another essential virtue had to be imprinted in the human gene pool. We needed to evoke the Divine attribute of Courage. In order to accomplish this Man had to undergo the ordeal of a painful pubertal initiation and cultivate the depth and strength of personal valor.

From the start of the Bronze Age, as one wild specie after another was domesticated for our use, generations of farmers were gradually forced to protect their cultivated fields and flocks from an increasing variety of pestilent invasions. Not the least of these was the protection of their cattle herds from the predatory challenge of a monster cat that weighed six hundred-pounds. We had to face the mighty lion with little more than a bronze-tipped spear to rely on. More than any other challenge, before or since, it was the manner in which we formed ranks and fought off the prides of lions to protect our herds that made men of us.

The raw courage to face a lion charge was a vital and signifi cant aspect of human character development. Every culture on Earth had to go through the frightening ordeal of facing the lions. That essential imprint in the human gene pool should far better understood and appreciated than it is at present. (Some cultures still evoke courage today by making their sons face the bull, which is almost as frightening.) Without the evocation of raw courage in man during the Bronze Age, none of our higher ethics could have been activated. The best we could have accomplished if we had lost our herds to the lions through cowardice would have been to remain Bronze Age dirt farmers to this day.

The lion prides that once roamed the plains of Europe, the steppes of Asia and the prairies of America, as recently as 10,000 years ago, are all extinct now. All that is left of them today; all that is left to tell us that once they lorded it at the top of every continent’s food chain, are the time-blackened remains of their skeletons, preserved in peat bogs, tar-pits and shale schist beds; humble monuments scattered around the globe.

There are no markers on these obscure graves. But if there were, each would bear the same inscription, no matter where it was located: NATURE DID NOT KILL THESE ANIMALS, AS EVERYONE SUPPOSES. MANKIND EXTERMINATED THEM.

Harsh words? Perhaps. But the evidence is not to be denied. Their extinction can be directly attributed to a highly organized policy of deliberate extermination carried out by early Bronze Age pastorates. Like so many wars that were yet to come, the great battle between man and beast was fought over territorial rights. It was long and deadly, with no quarter given and no exceptions allowed. Ultimately mankind prevailed, but there were bitter as well as sweet fruits to be reaped of the victory, because it fundamentally altered the nature and character of our social structures forever after. Knowing exactly why and how we had to face the lions and the other large meat-eating predators will reveal the prehistoric origins of mankind’s supernatural development of personal courage, and provide a clue as to how human warfare first began.

As we have said, the demands of an agricultural life-style, based on linear measurements related to planting, husbanding and harvesting forced us out of the relative time frame of the old day-to-day foraging pattern. It made us roughly aware of more composite divisions in the space/time continuums that were related to seasonal growth. For agriculture to succeed, a chain-reaction of social and spiritual adjustments had to take place, both in human society as well as in Nature.

The independent family group that for 100,000 generations had been focused on engineering a highly effective Stone Age hunting technology, while at the same time being socially developed to transcend Nature via an ethic of meticulous family sharing, was now forced to include within that basic human value, the exigencies of an entirely new social and spiritual paradigm.

For the Bronze Age to be born, we had to concentrate our inter-personal efforts and focus child education on the cultivation of a sound work ethic and a host of other interdependent social reorganizations; all of them reliant on extended-family cooperation melded together through totemic identifi cation.

Our spiritual focus, previously grounded on the fortunes of the hunt and the favors of Mother Nature, now became focused on the goodwill of the male gods of the weather. The once naive animist slowly lost his intuitive connection with Nature and turned instead towards an increasing reliance on psychically gifted shamans who were able to mediate between departed ancestors and the favors of a pantheon of gods.

Our artificial move into a New Age of agricultural disciplines upset the symbiotic balance of nature. In effect, we stepped over the invisible line and began an artificial process of increasing trespass.

Contiguous with our domestication of Nature was the arrival of our struggle with pestilence and with predators of all sizes. The cultivation of the first wild cereals also required the domestication of cats, in order to keep rodents out of our grain stores. Tamed wild dogs helped to protect domesticated farm animals by keeping small predators like foxes, jackals and coyotes out of our enclosures and pens.

The panther family of cats, a far more dangerous group of predators, created a special challenge. Swine, sheep and goats were on their food chain. The concentrated scent of the penned animals was an irresistible attraction, which emboldened the cats. Dogs cannot beat off a night-raiding leopard. Stockades cannot keep it out; it can claw its way over a ten-foot high barricade while carrying a dead or dying goat in its mouth. By this time it might have gone into a killing frenzy inside the pen, slaughtering every animal trapped inside. If it happens once, it will happen again, and for the farmer whose livestock is in danger, it means war to the death.

Tracking down and taking on a large cat that on average weighs 100 pounds, with no better weapon than a bronze-bladed spear was a dangerous business, but it was eminently do-able. Leopards are solitary animals that mark out their own territory, and this solitary existence is their Achilles heel. Thus it was possible for one Bronze-Age man to handle the challenge without help. Once he had tracked down the culprit and used his dogs to tree it, he could dispatch the cat from a distance with an arrow or a javelin. It would be a tactical victory, but not a strategic one, because he would win only a few months of respite for his livestock before another leopard occupied the vacant territory, broke into its natural hunting pattern and began to raid the farmer’s enclosures like its predecessor. It was a price exacted by Nature that bush farmers had to live with, then, and now.

Prides of lions posed a far greater challenge than leopards. The only big cats that live and hunt in large family groups, they could not be treed and were too heavy to match the leopard’s ability at climbing, so they preyed on game animals that were larger and less agile than those hunted by cats like leopards and pumas. So predation was balanced to the benefit of all predators – till Man trespassed on the lion’s turf by domesticating wild cattle.

The competition for grazing and water rights caused by our ever-growing herds displaced plains animals like antelope and buffalo. This depleted the lion’s larder and threatened his survival, because his natural prey diminished. Naturally he turned his attention to the domestic cattle that had replaced the game animals; the heavy scent of tame cattle, herded into the illusory safety of a flimsy thorn stockade for the night, was like a magnet to any hungry pride.

A pride of 20 lions needs to kill a large animal every three days or so; and no farmer, then or now, can afford to lose precious stock on such a regular basis. Once a pattern of night raids sets in, the targeted farmer faces certain ruin. It is one thing to lose a goat once or twice a year to a lone leopard and then deal with the culprit immediately. It is another thing to lose a cow or an ox every two or three days to a pride and not being able to deal with it at all.

It was apparent right from the start of the Bronze Age that man and lion could not coexist in the same grazing territory, that being so, the only option was outright extermination. So the Bronze Age farmers had to go after the large predators. It amounted to a declaration of war.

It was easier to say than to do. The crux of the problem (and the point of this argument) was that a farmer stood no chance against the lions if he went at them alone. When a lion is tracked and comes under pressure from its pursuers, it goes to ground in thick brush or hides itself in tall grass. Alone, a hunter must undertake a well-nigh suicidal stalk in search of a well-camouflaged, infuriated master of the close-quarter ambush, armed with razor-sharp claws and large fangs – a ferocious killing machine weighing at least a quarter of a ton (the now-extinct black-maned Cape lion weighed, as far as we know, anything up to 800 pounds) capable of launching a furious high-speed charge at the snap of a twig.

Even today, when armed with a modern high-powered rifl e, the prospect of facing a lion in thick cover is a frightfully intimidating one. Imagine the plight of a single man doing so with no better weapon than a bronze-tipped spear. His chances of escaping a fatal mauling were not even worth reckoning.

So it was obvious from the start that a fully disciplined company of men would be needed to meet the fearsome challenge, and that the war would take generations to win. This is no idle speculation. It is still the preferred way of the Masai tribe for hunting a lion. Not because the Masai are cowards – in fact, they pride themselves on possessing the ancient warrior virtue of courage in the face of danger to an extreme degree – but because over centuries they
have learned, at great cost in blood, that one man, no matter how brave or skilled, cannot single-handedly take on a lion with any hope of winning the contest.

So up to 40 psychologically prepared young men, armed with spears and heavy cowhide shields, form up in close ranks and systematically flush a cornered lion out of its hiding place. When he finally emerges, the die is cast: he must die. They cannot allow him to suffer wounds and then escape, leaving him too weak to kill cattle but strong enough to prey on women and children working in the fi elds. The hunters must surround him, standing shoulder to shoulder, and jointly spear him to death.

It is a tactic that the Masai have perfected over generations, and it will work smoothly enough, provided that no one loses his nerve. Any show of cowardice in such a tense situation could trigger group panic and result in a fatal mauling for one or more of the hunters. The survivors would then be left with the humiliating task of returning home not only dishonored by their failure but with the knowledge that at best the clan now faced the prospect of continued predation or, worse still, the depredations of a
wounded man-killer.

The psychological preparation required to produce a Bronze Age guild of lion-fighters, in which no member would fl inch before a charging lion, had to begin at puberty, and our early ancestors had to come up with a long term strategy by which to meet the challenge and overcome it.

The first priority was to cultivate and then instill the sort of unfl inching will that is needed to face the lions in close combat, and in order for Bronze Age clansmen to adopt a hunting methodology that could effectively handle the scourge of the prides, they were forced to completely over-haul and reorganize their social structure.

2

RITES OF PASSAGE
Cultivating the ethic of courage and instilling community commitment

Until recently, the Xhosa tribe of the Transkei region in South Africa maintained ancient Bronze Age rites of passage. Guild-age groups of boys entering puberty were sequestered inside initiation lodges for several weeks, where tribal elders conducted classes in tribal lore and spiritual instruction.

The isolation period culminated in a painful circumcision ceremony ,
conducted under intense scrutiny. Each boy had to sit immobile during the operation and not exhibit any signs of discomfort. Women were not supposed to witness the strictly all-male ceremony, but traditionally mothers and sisters would peek through the cracks in the stockade that surrounded the lodge, just to see how the boys handled the pain.

The preparation for the circumcision ceremony actually begins years earlier. At seven years of age a Pondo boy passes from his mother’s sphere of influence, into his father’s; in effect God PA replaces the Goddess MA.

The fi rst discipline imposed by the father is to make the son a herd-boy. with dire warnings about the consequences of losing any animal through a careless vigil. Instead of spending the day around the homestead doing chores for the mother, for the next seven years the male child joins other boys before dawn and helps drive the clan’s cattle and goats out to pasture in the hills, bringing them back again in the evening. During the long hours of the day out in the hills, the boys learn to throw rocks and sticks with consummate skill, make rudimentary weapons and use them to kill birds and hares, and chase away jackals and hyenas that threaten the
new-born calves and kids. During those idyllic years, most boys pass the time by making and playing rough musical instruments, singing traditional songs, engaging in mock stick-fights, and thinking fearfully of the coming rites of puberty. Being boys, they also dream of one day becoming a warrior with the courage to face a lion.

The childhood phase of the boys’ life comes to an end with the circumcision ceremony at puberty. After the operation is over, the face and body of each boy is smeared with a paste of white ash to symbolize death and rebirth; each is given a new name and then sent to survive alone in the hills for several months. An essential aspect of the ordeal is a strict injunction not to speak to another living being, or even allow oneself to be seen.

The Xhosa tradition of sending the post-operative boys to rough it alone in the hills adds another immeasurably important dimension, to the concept of a conscious altering rite of passage. Unless properly cultivated, it is human nature to take things, large and small, for granted. But three months alone in the hills, living like a hermit and foraging for food, has the distinct psychological effect of forcing the young psyche, not only to master the problems of survival and commune with Nature, but also to spend long hours in silent, and lonely contemplation on the meaning of existence.

Properly conducted in a traditional milieu, such isolation has the power to instill a profound life-long realization of the many values of human fellowship and communal cooperation. Living off the sparse and bitter fruits of the veld while homesick for the company of family, the sweet sugar harvests of the farm, tiny acts of consideration, forgotten ancestral accomplishments, all work to lend a deeper spiritual significance to life.

Taken together, they assume a special perspective and a permanent place in the psyche that can never be erased. The basic realization that we exist because of and for each other becomes a guiding principle in a young life.

(The old Xhosa proverb; “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” – a person is a person, because of other people - illustrates this fundamental understanding of self and social position perfectly.)

The net result at the end of the ordeal is a well-centered individual, at one with Nature and confident of his own identity; who possesses the ability to survive alone, as well as a personal sense of commitment to whatever period of community service his family and clan demands of him. Childhood is left behind. Initiates come down from the hills no longer as carefree boys, but as responsible adults-to-be. The profound change in their characters over such a short period of time deeply affects younger siblings, germinating within them a preparation for their own initiation.

We have almost completely lost our appreciation today for the full psychological effect of the ancient rites of passage described above, and the beneficial personal and communal values that they imposed on the pubertal psyche. In trying to re-evaluate those long forgotten rites, and couch them in modern terms, the following comments should be of concern to parents who are interested in the ethical development of their children, in conjunction with their academic achievements. A candid re-evaluation of Bronze Age rituals, which were once universally applied and which are still preserved in some parts of Africa; with a hind-sight’s appreciation of
how they were designed to instill a sense of personal worth; the fortitude to live alone with Nature, and a subsequent life-long commitment to social service; as opposed to the general unconcern and disaffection of modern youth, might well lead us back onto tried and true methods in correct adolescent development. The universal values of puberty rites of passage and wilderness ordeals still practiced in Africa, were prejudiced by the narrow mores of Victorian missionaries, who, confronted by naked breasts, polygamous marriage rites and ancestral worship, shouted out “heathens” and “savages”, saw nothing worth preserving and zealously washed away in the baptismal font much of the accumulated wisdom of pre-literate customs.

We have some residual realization of the value of those ancient rites still preserved in some of our modern rituals. The christening at birth and the confirmation of Holy Communion at puberty for example. A case can be made that the Jews, in proportion to their numbers, contribute more to human development than any other ethnic group in commerce, the sciences and the arts, primarily because of the profound impression that the ancient pubertal rite the barmitzvah places on the youthful Jewish psyche and the commitments to the extended-Jewish family that it implies.

For the vast bulk of us, the effort to focus the young psyche is mainly conducted by the State education system. Unfortunately the purely academic lessons that we receive in our school classrooms teach us very little about the level of one’s personal courage and integrity; or the debt we owe to our ancestors; or about social commitment; or how to evaluate the quality of our lives in general. We end up graduating with only a contrived view of our individual and cultural values. The knowledge we have acquired about life has come to us second hand, out of books presented by biased academics, who favor their own cultures. We no longer rely on inner strengths and wisdom that come from real-life initiation experiences in which the stoic bearing of pain is a crucial factor, or from the discomforts of wilderness ordeals, which force us to confront the basic realities of existence at a critical moment of development.

Book learning can improve us pseudo-intellectually, but never make individuals wise enough to truly take to heart the hard-won lessons our ancestors learned in the past. From a national development point of view, script-based history is invariable biased to some extent, and when compared against that of other culture’s in this shrinking world, the bias confuses the young mind – and so we end up with either an exaggerated idea of our own national values, or a cynical over view of all cultures, including our own. All of this is to the detriment of reinforcing the evolutionary imprints
of sound community commitments. The anti-septic nature of classroom-based education compartmentalizes and separates us from reality. It does not bare the individual to the self within and provide some basic criteria to measure more than just our intellectual smarts. Biased history does not unearth the common roots of our family tree, and instill within us a true sense of ancestral reverence.

Modern social analysis tends to view the human condition from the topmost branches of the family tree, looking downwards, down our noses. In the process, formative prehistoric events are lost or undervalued in the twisted and intertwined meandering of a thousand arguing cultures, all claiming exclusive rights to intellectual and religious superiority as the ‘chosen sons’. In any case, written history takes us back a bare 6,000 years, and causes us to relate only to what happened to human culture after written records started being kept. It separates us from the two-and-a-half
million years of ancestral effort and oral tradition that preceded script, where our basic ethics were initially cultivated.

All the life-lessons that our pre-literate ancestors struggled to learn in the preceding 99,000 generations of human development, are buried in the lifeless dust of archeological digs. Our prehistoric adventures are portrayed as alien events that happened once upon a time to some other species, not to us. Thus, the dynamic disciplines that we all shared together for a hundred thousand generations are not passed on.

Family and extended-family values forged in the Stone and Bronze Ages, all of which were vital to both our early and continued survival, have become idealistic abstractions that we do not put religiously into practice anymore. The diplomas we receive for passing our grades, which are no longer related to a vital rite of passage, have become just formalities. Very little personal pain and sacrifice is involved. Modern medicine robs us from bearing discomfort stoically as an investment in personal fortitude.

The challenge and honor of the warrior is no longer a personal test of courage. In war, we’d rather send in a smart bomb from the safety of a bunker and avoid actually putting our lives on the line.
In these respects script learning graduates us as pseudo-intellects. We end up clever enough at technology, but we lack the earthy wisdom of practical hindsight. Not only is our courage and endurance not put to the test at a pivotal moment in growth, but also our view of the past is superficial and truncated. And so it is rare today to find individuals of strong character.

Most of us suffer boredom in the classroom. We’re prone to cheating outrageously at examinations. The irony of all this is that very few excel academically and we do not seem to know why that is so. Divorced parents, suffering from their own eroded honor of failed commitments, under-cut their children’s trust in basic human values and weaken their personal effort.

We graduate from this twelve-year system with a distorted sense of
personal and social values. With only one or two siblings, sitting half-interested on the sideline, there is no large family audience left to appreciate and applaud. Uncles and aunts and even grandparents, increasingly removed from the family-tradition loop, rarely turn out for our graduation.

Thus instead of our teens being one of sober obligations to the future well being of the collective whole, we tend more towards independent gratification, even outright rebellion and protest.
There is no true sense of nobility in modern culture, no dynamism in our middle-class lives. The end result of all this is that our entire modern society ends up as a migratory work force of production-line workers, continually loading up our belongings in our wagons and drifting to wherever the money is. Every man is for himself, seeking his or her fortune elsewhere.

We end up without a sense of family tradition. The family estate
never achieves distinction, for we all never contribute our combined effort to building it up. We have no home pride. We have no real identity. We have no real sense of personal accountability. Our failures and shames are hidden amidst the anonymity of crowds of strangers in distant cities where our family name is not known. In the end, without personal honor and without family honor, what then is the quality of our national honor?

And if we are a superpower without international honor, what lessons are we teaching the undeveloped nations of the world? We are disliked, even hated. There are terrorist cells the world over, dying to blow us up.

Re-establishing an initiation trial, one that can evoke the ethics of personal integrity and courage at the pubertal moment, and a consequent sense of future social commitment, could well defi ne and restate our future. It is possible that through a combination of Boy Scout training and wilderness trials, army boot camps, Zen and yoga exercises, we might be able to devise, in conjunction with home-based values, a challenging modern method for focusing our young minds at a critical moment in their lives.

Instead of the current boredom of 12 years of classroom confinement and video-arcade artificiality that we are currently providing, this new formula will more holistically excite the developing psyche and instill a far more heightened state of self-awareness, intellectual brightness and personal responsibility towards future social commitments. A self-policed young psyche is quite capable of mastering a high school curriculum inside three
years.

Such a New Age youth education program would be far less costly in
terms of the massive infrastructure that is required to support, maintain and expand the current school system. It will do away with the enormous waste of childhood years that could be invested in helping the family estate to flower. It is the precise type of creative program that can be applied organically across the planet without the enormous global investment of duplicating outmoded models of classroom education in the undeveloped world, and place us all on a level, and far more exciting, playing field.

Having stated how Bronze Age societies prepared their youth to deal with the lions, let us see how they found the courage to actually face one without flinching.

3

COURAGE

An exposition on why Man needed to find and cultivate the ethic of Courage

The flow of consciousness from the Loins to the Heart
and on upwards to the highest realizations of the Mind
must first pass through the Stomach Plexus, the portal of Courage

Devising a social policy that would serve to control lion predation was the crucial factor that forced Bronze Age societies to appreciate the vital need to develop individual courage and form a military defense system early on in human character formation.
The lions made us brave. Facing their challenge turned boys into men and men into warriors. It was our initiation into courage. It gave us a psychic center to focus on, right in the middle of the solar plexus. If we had not dared to face the lions and triumphed, the world that we now know would not have come into existence.

Courage gave us a basic principle that our kind is willing to die fighting for. To that extent, it is one of the definitions of who we are. No other primates have it. Facing the lions was our first real spiritual test. The evocation of courage that the lions forced upon us, allowed us to eventually lift our heads and stare up at the awesome face of the Father God; to dare one day to brave His wrath and utter His name. Even baldly tell Him that He did not exist.
The story of how man found his courage has never been told before. Here it is then. All of us need to know exactly when, why and how the ethic of courage was evoked within us - and how necessary it is to keep it alive in our children.

During our arboreal ape stage the lions never bothered us. We were not on their food chain. The smaller and more agile leopard was our chief adversary. He pursued us up into the trees and cliffs. We were especially vulnerable at night; as apes we never developed the courage or the smarts to fight back. But once we took to a life on the ground the expanding intelligence of our first hominid ancestors gradually freed us from the leopard’s claws. Our sticks and stones broke his bones. Those primitive but effective
long-range missiles neutralized his fearsome power. Our firebrands kept him at bay at night. We became too dangerous for him to hunt, and as prey, our species passed from the panther’s ken. It was only during the Bronze Age, more than two million years later that he came back into our lives to pester us and prey on our flocks.

The lions, as we have seen, were different. During the Stone Age, when we were hunter/gatherers, lion confrontation was never a survival issue because we rarely brought down enough big game to threaten his survival. Though there must have been occasional encounters, our small size and supernatural intelligence never made us a factor in the lions’ survival. They were after bigger, less crafty game. We know for instance, that San Bushmen still locked into that same old Stone Age existence, rarely come into contact with the big black-maned lions of the Kalahari.

During the Bronze Age our domestication of the wild cattle, which was the lion’s natural prey totally changed the dynamics of territorial supremacy. The challenge of the lions became a prolonged fight for survival of the fittest. Mankind was forced to remove the lion from the top of the food chain or remain forever unable to progress beyond mere tillers of the soil or primitive goat and sheepherders.

Providing a satisfactory objective analysis that outlines the practical reasons behind our confrontation with the lions, a confrontation that led to their extermination, only gives us the analytical half of that evolutionary event. The underlying metaphysical dynamics that govern the laws of sustainable bio-diversity, which cannot allow one species to be arbitrarily exterminated by another without some larger cosmic purpose, poses a profound ethical question that can only be addressed intuitively. The dual nature of the human psyche, which synthesizes the physical realities of life with an underlying metaphysical ethic, indicates that the ordeal of the
lions was a spiritual trial as well as one of social evolution.

With over four million years invested in the supernatural development of human intelligence, MAN, chosen above all other specie in Nature to express the ultimate compassionate potential of Creation, was still very early on the path towards that realization during the Bronze Age. Our psyche needed further refinement: the supernatural sharing ethic established in the Stone Age was not enough in itself to allow our social structures to keep evolving into more complex unions. An ethic of courage had to be evoked in order for MAN to become more truly human.

Courage is one of the seven virtues that define human nature. It is one of our core values. It is an essential ingredient in the brewing of the divine nectar, and if we had not passed the test of courage we could never have visited our higher centers of being or experienced some measure of their divine attributes. Love without courage is merely baby stuff. Before the test of the lions, without courage, Man did not really know how to love himself or another. He couldn’t see visions of future possibilities nor have brilliant intellectual revelations. We experience those higher energies today
because our species as a whole passed the test of courage long ago and carries the knowledge of it in our genetic make-up.

Each test of courage accelerates the spin of Manipura, the chakra located in the solar plexus. When the moment of truth arrives
we experience the increased energy, as fearful snaky bands writhe and twist inside our guts, not in our brains. Sheer panic resides there, and it takes a powerful effort of mental resolution to control and focus that energy and keep the bowels and bladder from involuntary release. To put it crudely, frighten an ape and he literally shits himself. Frighten a man and he does not, because he has consciously learned how to control the involuntary release of his his sphincter muscles.

That control didn’t come easy nor accidentally. It is not a natural attribute of primate behavior. It had to be artificially cultivated, and we need to be continually reminded about how and why it was done.

In order to initiate the social re-organization that was required to deal with the lions, the timid character of our primate nature had to be transformed into one of boldness and daring. As an initiation into our Higher Being, courage binds the human family to a holistic evolutionary experience that includes our spiritual development as well as our social journey towards the farthest reaches of cosmic understanding. During the Bronze Age every young man had to become a lion-fighter before he could wed and become a father.
The battle with the lions defined the individual’s position within the social structure of Bronze Age societies.

Towards the end of the Bronze Age, lion fighting became more than just a survival imperative or mere social commitment. It defi ned the beginnings of a purely warrior culture. As the battle was slowly won and lion encounters became rarer, so did the opportunities for individual warriors to distinguish themselves above others. This in turn determined the size of their claim on communal herds, the number of brides they could buy, the size of their farms and their eventual social status as tribal elders.

Designing a social policy to deal with the lions introduced circumcision groups, warrior guilds, polygamy, the bride-price, social taboos, clan chief succession, totemic indoctrination and eventually territorial invasion and human warfare. There is an extended evolutionary rationale behind each of those societal arrangements. We need a better understanding of the factors that forced simple family groups of hunter-gatherers to gradually adopt a complex set of social contracts and eventually to initiate the dysfunctional wars that we are fighting today, thousands of years later.

It is surprising how little anthropological explanation has been given to that long and involved struggle that took place ten thousand years ago, and the depth of social re-organization and character formation that was required to deal with it. Our ignorance of entire sequences underlying our modern psyche, of profoundly influential pre-historic survival imprints, has created a serious gap in our self-knowledge.

That ignorance accentuates our current superfi cial comprehension of the basic building blocks that structure human development. This lack of practical knowledge pertaining to the precise factors that have allowed us to survive this long has created the lop-sided pseudo-intellectual educational system that we find ourselves in today. With our modern character evaluation focused almost exclusively on intellectual indoctrination we have almost succeeded in completely devaluing the pre-historic character-forming conditions that have sustained our evolutionary momentum as the dominant species on the planet.

The lion story only makes sense when we fully understand the natural ethic of territorial integrity, and why, when the battle with the lions was won, we trespassed onto our neighbor’s territory and why modern man continues the invasion. And now that it is finally being told, we must keep on retelling it to every new generation so that what occurred back then before history was written down can never be forgotten again.

4

FACING THE LIONS

Becoming Moran

Africa remains as a vast treasure house of pre-literate social and spiritual customs, with residues of living evidence of the formalities that took place in prehistoric initiation lodges. For example, in East Africa just 50 years ago the Masai were the last spear-carrying pastorates to actually be witnessed during a lion fight; the old tradition being that he who draws first blood from a lion becomes a moran, a warrior.

Lion-hunting, Masai-style, evolved with the changing world in which the tribe found itself, so that over thousands of years, as the numbers of lions diminished, the lion-hunt was gradually refi ned from a practical, nuts-and- bolts confrontation between man and beast into a spiritual ritual. The circle of fighters surrounding the lion became an arena for the display of personal valor; facing a lion without fl inching was an opportunity for an individual fighter to be elevated and attain the status of moran. Once a lion had been beaten out of its cover and surrounded, the circle of warriors
did not immediately close in to spear it to death. Instead the coup de grace was delayed so that fate could determine who would become a moran.

The instrument by which fate would make its choice was the lion itself, crouching frightened and ever more infuriated at the epicenter of a wall of shields until it chose one man to charge as its avenue of escape.

The Masai lion-fighting spear is close to six feet long. The broad sword-like blade is over two feet in length. It has a cutting edge on both sides, designed to inflict maximum arterial damage as it slices through muscle and tissue. The sharp blade is fitted into a short wooden shaft, just wide enough for a handhold, with its lower end consisting of an iron spoke, four feet long. The hunter’s back-up weapon would be a simi, a short sword hung at the waist in a buckskin scabbard, and he would have an iron-hard shield of
ox-hide, almost six feet long, to provide protection for his entire body.

Originally the Masai warrior’s weapons and equipment were somewhat different, but over hundreds of generations as lion fighting gradually became a highly formalized ritual in tribal life, they evolved to suit the changing fighting techniques.

When a pride of lions attacks a Masai boma (cattle enclosure) and kills a cow, young boys are immediately sent out to surrounding manyettas to call the lion-fighting guild together. In the meantime the male lion of the pride is tracked down and his sleeping place located, and the trackers then keep tabs on his movements.

Once the guild is assembled, the fighters spend considerable time in personal preparation. It is highly possible that one or more of them will die when the lion is finally cornered. A man must look his best when he faces death. They bathe their bodies, then oil their hair and skin with lion fat and red ochre They help each other to braid elaborate ocher hair styles, and adorn themselves with jewelry and lucky talismans.

When all are ready, a squad of some 40 armed fi ghters, ranging in age from 14 to 40, assemble in ranks and then trot off across the plains to the thicket where the lion is lying up. The group tests the wind direction and decides on the open space towards which the lion must be driven. Then they surround the thicket, advancing slowly, making a low humming sound while beating the fl ats of their spear-blades against their shields. As they draw nearer the gaps in the ranks close, so that a wall of shields surrounds the
thicket. Confused by the noise, the lion eventually bursts from his last scrap of cover, and the hunters move in, shoulder to shoulder, trapping it in a six foot high wall of shields. Alarmed and angry, the lion winds himself up for action, his tail flicking back and forth and teeth bared in a fearsome snarl that turns into a series of frightful roars.

For both man and beast the moment of truth is at hand, and the lion charges. In one or two quick bounds he leaps with extended claws and wide-pen fangs directly onto the man blocking his line of escape. The selected man must immediately jab the rear of the spike to ground and aim the spear blade directly at the lion’s descending chest. As the lion’s body drives into the blade the man falls backwards and sinks beneath the weight of the beast now on his shield. He then reaches for his simi and begins stabbing the lion, while at the same time the others rush forward and sink their
spears into the lion.

In theory the lion should be killed without harm to anybody. In practice it is rare that at least one of the hunters is not mauled and left with a serious injury, especially if the chosen man fl inched at the last moment and missed the heart as the lion descended on him. Even when thrust to the heart, a lion still has up to a minute of furious life left in him, enough time to wreak enormous damage. A raking blow from one paw is enough to tear the shield out of the prostrate hunter’s desperate grasp and fling it 40 yards away, leaving him fully exposed to the savage embrace and skull crunching
jaws.

As a living witness to the enormous effort in self-control and sense of personal honor exhibited by the Bronze Age psyche, there is an official report from a British District Commissioner who witnessed and attended to a wounded Masai after a hunt. The moran, no more than 16 years old, sat dripping blood on the carcass of
the lion, his chest cage ripped so wide open by a single swipe of the beast’s claws that his heart could be seen beating inside the bloody cavity, a near fatal wound by Western standards. But the boy did not move a muscle or make a sound while he was being sewn up.

The only certain elements in a Masai lion hunt are that the lion itself will surely die, that group honor will be upheld, and one or more men will become moran.

The reason why our war with the lions has not been told and celebrated by every society on Earth today is because it happened in an early moment of human evolution. The fight for territorial rights took place near the dawn of the Bronze Age, as much as fifteen thousand years ago. The story of that great battle was never carried forward orally in any of our mythologies, because it was not the feat of any single hero or single social group at any
single moment in time. Every man of the early Bronze Age was involved in that fi ght as it raged for untold generations all across the planet, wherever lions roamed and preyed on our herds.

There are a thousand epic tales that have been told and retold about ancient warrior heroes and their bold deeds, about the great battles and wars that they fought in. We relish telling them; but there is not one story about the initiation of courage in our very first warrior, or how courage eventually became distorted and ended up with men warring unreasonably against each other for something less than honor.

The lions hold that lost key to the bottom drawer of our war chest.
Pubertal peer groups circumcision ceremonies, initiation ordeals, the establishment of military regiments and the wars of men against men all stem directly from early Bronze Age lion-fi ghting tactics and survival strategies. There is no other single episode in our history that so comprehensively defines the basic values of the extended family and the emergence of a militant nature in man.

Our ignorance regarding that primitive era disconnects us from our early ancestors. It leaves them in a dark cave, portrayed as brutish club-wielding louts, devoid of personal honor. They seem unrelated to us, and through that unfamiliarity, give us false license to crudely scoff at and vilify them as savage barbarians and pagan idolaters.

This crucial gap in our self-knowing robs us of a reverential ancestral attitude, and humble appreciation for the extreme hardships of their period, and the inestimable gift of raw valor that they imprinted into our gene pool. Not only are we are all poorer in spirit for not honoring their memory, but the lack of intimate familiarity with pre-industrial phases of social development seriously distorts our post-colonial relationships with the oral-based agricultural societies struggling in Africa and elsewhere today.

We simply do not recognize Third World cultures as parts of our extended family who are continuing to experience the same formative evolutionary encounters that we once did. We need to realize that they are struggling to transcend precisely the same pre-literate limitations that we also experienced when the Romans fi rst arrived in Britain two thousand years ago.

This fact does not make them any less than us. With help they can avoid our mistakes, and when the time comes for their 15 minutes in the sun they can flower to a height even greater than ours.

African cultures themselves also need to realize that the West did not achieve its current position of world leadership without paying dearly for it. They must remember that western cultures served for eighty generations as serfs beneath the feudal lords’ castle walls. They, too, fought off the lions. They, too, suffered child labor into the 20th Century. Neither side has yet learned how to regard each other as family. We have to acknowledge that we all share equally in our evolutionary struggles, and that the incongruities of our different stages of development are the result of evolutionary
circumstances, not simply the outcome of colonial exploitation.

Consequently, at a cost of untold billions of dollars, with no clearly defined understanding of the logical sequence of human evolution or the significance of what an Age change impresses on the collective consciousness, our well-intentioned efforts to assist Third World people have been almost entirely misguided.

For the past 40 years we have tried to inject sophisticated Nuclear Age economic policies and democratic ideals into a Bronze Age milieu that has yet to experience its own full cycle of Iron Age disciplines and the national values they imprint. They need to experience the same essential phases of industrial craftsmanship, scriptural indoctrination and national identification that Westerners have gone through.

The net results of our ignorance in world leadership in Africa and elsewhere has been anti-colonialism, racism, tyrannical dictatorships, one party rule, mass genocide, mass starvation, and a massive AIDS pandemic. Six hundred million people in Africa, without national scriptures or national identities of their own, are confused by artificial political boundaries and pseudo-intellectual colonial moralities; with no solid foundation of industrial craftsmanship to build a sense of national self reliance on, in the
struggle to find position in a highly competitive modern world.

These hard facts emphasize just how much the evolutionary pre-conditions of our foundation Ages, and the cultural values they forced us to adopt, continue to determine human relationships and the wars we engage in today.

The lion saga opens up a Pandora’s box of those forgotten values. It reveals just how little we understand the evolutionary pre-conditions that drive us, and how important that understanding is today.

In practice, facing the lions turned boys into teens and eventually it made us men. It turned hunter/farmers into warriors, and ultimately it made us lovers, composers, merchants, scientists and philosophers.

Facing the lions was a pivotal prehistoric event that belongs equally to each of the three Great Houses of homo-sapiens: Mongol, Aryan and Negro. Every society alive on the planet today was directly involved in that long war. As such it needs to be shared among us all.

To return briefly to the Masai, traditionally lion-fighters remained bachelors into their forty-second year before they received the head-ring of a tribal elder; their long social service entitled them to part ownership of the clan herds and the right to barter cattle as a bride-price to obtain wives and start families of their own.

Polygamy thus became an integral factor in all Bronze Age social structures. It was a survival imperative, resulting directly from the need to maintain standing guilds of unmarried lion-fi ghters specially trained and deeply committed to civil service. Without this social re-organization we would never have overcome the challenge of the lions. Our species would still be without courage.

Because the Bronze Age is defined by oral-based social intercourse, we have no written records of essential social contracts that were entered into during the six hundred generations that we invested in that formative period of our Second Estate, and the oral history of that time in Europe and Asia has long been gone from human memory.

It is evident from the domestication of wild cattle in pre-historic Europe and Asia, together with the extinction of the lion prides that Bronze Age societies engaged in that long battle, that humans won the predation challenge and then progressed onwards from there.
Africa supplies us with living evidence and the exact details of how it happened.

What we really need to keep reminding ourselves about, is that our
long struggle against the lions initiated the cultivation of manly courage in the development of the human character. Where pain and the possibility of death during self-birthing evoked womanly fortitude and a woman’s sense of personal honor, so did the prospect of death in the lion’s embrace bring about a masculine appreciation of personal honor.

Thus, the self-assured, animistic, monogamous , timid, sharing Stone Age hunter and family man was transformed into a circumcised, shamanistic, clannish, polygamous, honor-bound, Bronze Age farmer/warrior.

By the time the lions were defeated, circumcision rites, bachelor guilds, polygamy and internal economic exchange systems based on the amount of cattle paid for young brides were all entrenched social customs. With all the young men now idle, a gradual return to a monogamous social system might well have transpired if a new point of focus had not presented itself.

As human population kept expanding, man began to trespass on man. War between men lay on the horizon.

5

I’m all for other’s cultures n’all, but those that live by nothing but rituals have waaaaaay too much time on their hands, waaay too much - ritual means holding on/grasping, and doesn’t that stand in the way of progression…?

6

THE ORIGINS OF HUMAN WARFARE

“And Cain rose up against Abel his brother and slew him”
Petty clan vendettas escalated into:
National wars
World wars
Mass genocide
and Weapons of Mass Destruction

After the lions were conquered, domesticated herds grew in numbers and strayed across clan borders. Territorial disputes between brother clans escalated into militant confrontations.

This meant that former lion fighting guilds had to reform and devise new protective tactics. The broad-bladed lion-fighting spear was transformed into a slim javelin meant for throwing. The future community commitments of pubertal initiates were re-focused and re-assigned into communal service as border policemen. As populations expanded and border clashes increased in intensity, clans invaded each other’s territory and fought for hegemony. In succeeding generations cattle raiding and hostages held for ransom became part of the Bronze Age economic equation. With the fortunes of one group or the other waxing and waning, clan vendettas became as much an entrenched way of life as lion fighting had been earlier in the Age.

Smaller clans survived through marriage alliances with larger clans; fealty payments of cattle and concubines served to hold together shifty relationships for a generation or two. But the more crowded the land became, so too did the conflicts intensify. Totemic superiority became more entrenched.

For the first time in creation, intra-species aggression of an escalating nature entered the cosmic equation. Nature’s ancient code of honor was broken. Billions of years of natural evolution, governed and protected by the universal ethic of territorial integrity that barred each species from warring on itself, had come to an end.

The cause of it all was a once-timid primate who had come down from the trees, equipped himself with self-made tools and arms and taken his first infant steps along the road of changing the natural order of things. He perfected the hunting art and learned to share. He domesticated Nature and learned to farm. He cultivated the courage to face a lion … and then turned his arms and courage against his own kind. A limited degree of human warfare had begun.

Wealth and power among the larger clans gave rise to a sense of totemic pride and social prestige. Clans interpreted their success as the “special favors” secured of gods by their ancestral spirits, symbolized and enthroned at the top of the clan totem pole - just as religious symbols were in later times. The innate guilt of trespass was buried in the consciousness and artificially assuaged via totemic assertion. If the neighbors were weaker, it was obvious that the gods were not with them. In this primitive mind-set, mankind gradually lost his love for neighbor and Cain excused himself from the sin of murdering his brother.

Clan vendettas never evolved in regional isolation. Every Bronze Age society across the planet ended up feuding, head-hunting, concubine abduction, rape, ransom, cattle-raiding, totemic supremacy … it was pandemic. And the situation got more chaotic as the Age came to a conclusion.

Petty warfare is the Bronze Age heritage of every culture on the planet. Why and how things turned out that way for all of us needs to be seen in the larger scheme of human development. Although it was obvious that a farm-based economy could no longer support the burgeoning populations of the late Bronze Age and that mass change was a logical next step, we will show that mankind’s seemingly godless trespass on his neighbor, and the mass shift of consciousness that followed, had profound evolutionary meaning and purpose that goes far beyond superficial conclusions.

As contended repeatedly in this work, one of the basic tenets of the Psyche-Genetic theory states that - although a New Age paradigm is required each time the environment comes under increased stress due to population pressures and a bankrupt occupational contract – this does not automatically result in a mass change of consciousness. A spiritual intelligence underlying logic also needed to be evoked in order to assist population groups to graduate into ever-larger social cooperatives and develop more advanced technological occupational constructs – thus allowing more people to occupy less space and thereby relieve environmental stresses.

We have discussed how the lion challenge made us form guilds of lion fighters, which in turn became warrior regiments who engaged in clan vendettas. Now let us discuss how petty clan warfare escalated into outright war and how that initiated a New Iron Age of national industry and scriptural orthodoxy.

In a Bronze Age matrix of fixed custom and oral-based indoctrination, mass change could not be initiated through any existing form of social negotiation. Though loose federations were formed between one or more clans, the force that held them together was never strong enough to break down an entrenched clan-centered mindset and to coalesce into a national consensus of thought and direction. Each clan had an ancestral lineage; its own clan totem and its own oral tradition. Each claimed an exclusive right to divine origin. That imprinted belief in its own exceptional destiny formed the foundation of each clan’s collective identity; a ny further evolution of social consciousness was faced with an impregnable psychological barrier that, unlike any physical boundary, could not be invaded and held to ransom.

Men refuse change on principle, no matter how chaotic conditions are. Before a New Age consciousness could come into being some form of supernatural intervention had to manifest itself in order to break the mold: the birth of an entirely new vision, a new age of thought, a new form of social government, a new method of economic distribution; a more embracing spiritual focus had to be initiated among an entire population and put into single-minded action.

This time, making the social transition from clannish farmer to national industrialist would be far more abrupt and infi nitely more traumatic than the change from hunter to farmer. In order to effect an accompanying spiritual change, a pantheon of pagan gods, and an oral-based mind-set of totemic superstitions and shaman mediumship had to be replaced by the rigid dogma of script-based indoctrination. The collective psyche had to be extended beyond communication with dead ancestors. It had to be re-focused and forced to bow to the supreme power of a single jealous wrathful Godhead, and a new spiritual contract between birth and death had to be drafted and administered by ordained scribes. But before the new scripture could be initiated, a more immediate force than the written word needed to be born: a Messiah, to smash down the clan totems and announce the new creed.

Contrary to conventional belief, a savior doesn’t come to glorify himself as God and have us grovel at his feet with threats of eternal damnation if we don’t recognize his divinity. Mass change comes when the consciousness of one of us is evoked and inspired with a vision of future possibilities.

If the timing and circumstances are precisely right, this person becomes a supernatural agent in the employ of evolutionary forces, and initiates an Age change at a critical moment of mass stress, and thereby helps to elevate MAN’s consciousness to a new height of being.

The particular social circumstance of the birth of a messianic message takes place in relation to the depth of perception of the collective consciousness; this determines the manner in which the bearer must accomplish his mission – as a lover of peace and reason - or as a wrathful monster of war and terror.

Those inspired messiahs who appeared at the end of the Bronze Age in order to change the mind-set of warring clans locked in vendettas and totemic superstitions, appeared without exception, in their wrathful aspects, and brought with them death and destruction. They accomplished their missions by smashing down totemic supremacy, putting millions to death, over-riding oral-based traditions, reorganizing social structures and preparing the collective psyche for an era of scriptural indoctrination and national industrialization.

We are a hundred generations removed from the last time we experienced such a momentous act of evolution, and none of it is on written record. In order to grasp the comprehensive nature of such a mass shift of consciousness, without documented evidence to rely on, and appreciate why total war, initiated by a wrathful warlord, had to be employed in the graduation of human consciousness, we have to make allowances for several basic
psychological premises.

At its most fundamental level, a sustained change in consciousness can only be effected when confidence in oneself, in one’s personal level of control, in one’s entire social support system, including one’s faith and belief in a beneficial spiritual guardianship, has fi rst been shaken and then utterly destroyed.

Sustained ruthless cruelty on a mass scale can accomplish a total collapse of confidence. Deliberate man-initiated cruelty offends a basic cosmic principle. It shakes the psyche which has been directly exposed to it. Utter heartlessness, manifested in premeditated torture, with any hope of help, gone, undermines the very core of our being. When one’s entire family – wife, children and infants - are massacred in cold blood right before one’s eyes, with no recourse to a higher power in sight, belief in life itself fades; nothing else, no protecting chief, no totem god, holds any intrinsic value.

The process of dissolution, once subjected to the forces of total annihilation, plunges the psyche into a period of loss and darkness. The terror of chaos strips the psyche of its separate identity. It is no longer the objective observer. It is no longer in control. It is no longer free to disengage. The being is caught up in chaos and falls into a void of hopelessness in which the old ego slowly dies. When there is no principle left to stand on and only the void looms, change must ensue.

Order returns gradually. Time for healing is needed. Hope springs eternal. A rebirth takes place in a new social milieu that operates under fresh and more complex rules. The new Being is based on a broader insight into its former naiveté and a more sober understanding of the meaning and purpose of an on-going existence that demands a higher set of principles.

When this individual change takes place on a mass scale, it defi nes the rules for a New Age and a new beginning. The brutal transformation of mass change that took place at the end of the Bronze Age, as clan vendettas became more chaotic, holds the key to a more dramatic understanding of subtle nuances behind the evolutionary purpose and the inevitability of the forces that drive it.

As social stresses build and chaos looms, tradition has always called for the return of a Messiah.

Because there is no written record of the mass change of consciousness that took place in Europe and Asia more than six thousand years ago, before writing was invented, all the above would be mere conjecture - if it were not for the fact that, almost two centuries ago, in Zululand, we have a record of that precise moment in human history, which duplicated the exact moment of synapse between two Ages of contrasting consciousness.

Three adventurous native traders from England were shipwrecked in 1823 on the shores of Natal and lived for several years among the amaZulu. They were the first Europeans to come in contact with them. They had no larger idea of the traumatic evolutionary events that they were actually witness to, but they left detailed records in each of their diaries, of what actually transpired during the bloody eleven year reign of Shaka, the founder of the Zulu nation.

The evidence provided in the next chapter is as close as we will ever get to relive the prehistoric history of Europe and Asia during the moment of an Age change. As you will see, we would be hard-pressed to deny the commonalty of human events and social circumstances that the story of Shaka reveals. He was the embodiment of the wrathful messianic warlord that we have alluded to; the bastard son of a minor clan chief, born at the right time in the right circumstances - selected by fate as the instrument of a mass change in Zulu consciousness.

7

the origins of war?

life itself.

life IS war. every second of every day. war, conflict, aggression personified, aggregated, enmassed unto itself in larger and larger forms. domination as control, as life’s desire for growth and survival.

war, as a way of culling the weak, refining to the higher purity. evolution, selection of strength, of power… of the means to strength, the means to power-- i.e. the means to life, to living; living in a hostile environment requires strength and power.

war as the means, and never the end; but, sometimes, inevitably, an end.

8

THE BLACK MESSIAH

Shaka Zulu was a monstrous genocidal messiah of the 19th Century, a pitiless tyrant who put much of what is now South Africa to fi re, sword and stark terror. He was a prime exponent of the concept of “shock and awe” long before the wordsmiths in Washington DC thought of the term.

Shaka’s self-imposed mission was to put an end to the endless petty vendettas waged by the clans and tribes of what later became known as kwa-Zulu, or Zululand, and create a single nation led by the Zulu clan. By the time his own people assassinated him out of fear for their own lives, he had succeeded, although at terrible cost. He had exterminated literally scores of the surrounding tribes, emptied huge tracts of land of their inhabitants and condemned an estimated two million people to death by starvation and exposure.

Generally speaking, petty chiefs’ sons like Shaka, driven into exile at a young age by rivals for the chiefdom, were the only individuals in Bronze Age societies ever to escape totemic indoctrination. These individuals then grew to maturity without a programmed sense of clan identity. Consumed by hatred and revenge, they brooded over a larger sense of their destiny, awaiting the opportunity to return and claim their rightful heritage.

This could only be accomplished with the help of outside enemies of the home clan, or by way of alliances with families within the clan which were seeking a regime change. Forced to defend himself and his dynasty against the exiled son’s challenge, the clan chief in turn, had to make new alliances. Thus petty clan vendettas and border clashes would escalate into actual warfare.

If the personality of the youthful warlord leading the invasion was strong enough, and if the war was devastating enough, he could consolidate his victory to make his power absolute and lasting; he would then seize total power by turning his victorious army loose on the whole country and crushing the remaining clans. If, at the same time, Bronze Age agricultural economies were already under strain because of over-crowding, with an evolutionary need for national industrialization able to provide a livelihood for the increased numbers, such war-born nations could be sustained long enough, through dynasties of tyrannical rule, for a binding Scripture to emerge that would serve to consolidate the federation into a national focus of religious industry. Thus when dynasties ended, as they inevitably must, the nation would remain
and not revert to petty clanism.

The life of Shaka and his successors follows this general pre-literate route. His story reveals the precise circumstances of how wrathful messiahs employed as indispensable tools by universal forces of change, were able to further the evolutionary imperative and initiate a mass change of human consciousness by the ruthless imposition of force.

This mass change of the social and spiritual order of Bronze Age cultures served not only to unify clans into powerful nations but also to break regional marriage taboos and assist the cross-fertilization of the species. New generations had to migrate off the land and congregate in cities. There, they were forced to initiate a New Iron Age of occupational contracts, which were based on a broader national mind-set of industrial craftsmanship and improved technological development.

This mass change of consciousness had to be cemented by the introduction of national scriptures which served to break down individual totemic claims of divine descent and unite citizens under a single Godhead, and a learned priest-caste had to evolve within each culture to interpret these sacred writings. Dogmatic scriptures held Iron Age nations together, through religions composed of mystical ritual threats of excommunication and promises of eternal spiritual suffering to all non-conformers.

The personal story of Shaka and the goal of his mission are, in this sense, the story of every despot who ever fathered a nation. Relating his story and explaining why the particular circumstances of his moment in time allowed him to act the way he did, and succeed in his mission, allows us a greater understanding of the motivating factors that initiated our third great Age change, thereby forcing our ancestors into more complex systems of social unity.

Shaka ’s story begins in 1780. He was born as the bastard son of a minor chieftain. His father, Sensangakhona (The Rightful Doer), was the chief of the amaZulu clan, one of the smaller of the 80 clans of Nguni-speaking pastorates and millet farmers, which had migrated out of Central Africa some 500 years earlier, to settle the fertile coastal regions of today Kwa-Zulu-Natal Province.

Born out of wedlock, Shaka festered with the shame of his birth, and from the age of six he and his mother were forced continually to flee from paid assassins hired by the relatives of Sensangakhona’s other wives, who feared his eventual succession to the chieftainship. The flight of the boy and his mother, Nandi, did not end until they eventually found a permanent haven under a chief named Dingiswayo, head of the large and powerful Mtetwe clan. Here Shaka grew to maturity, and he was to prove that Sensangakhona’s other wives had been right to fear him. His long flight from clan to clan had broken the hold of totemic indoctrination and freed his young mind to focus on dark thoughts of revenge. This deprogramming of an individual’s psyche is a crucial factor that initiates the messianic mission of a ruthless warlord - especially that of a chief’s son who dreams of a vengeful return and who has the potential, by right of royal birth, to attract others to his cause.

So Shaka ended up loyal to no one but himself, dreaming a terrible dream of total revenge, a dream that was eventually to propel him to paramount power. He distinguished himself as a fearless warrior, ending up as commander- in-chief of the Mtetwe regiments. When Dingiswayo was assassinated by a rival clan chieftain, Shaka avenged him and then led his victorious regiments further afield. He went on to seize total power over the entire region, killed his father, and mounted the Zulu throne atop a pile of the smashed skulls and broken bodies belonging to members of his clan, who previously, had insulted him and his mother and driven them into exile.

He ruled for 14 years, from the ages of 27 to 41, during which time he smashed the totems of 80 clans and forced them all to become part of the amaZulu. His regime was characterized by absolute personal power and mass fear based on unremitting psychological warfare. The slightest opposition to his will spelled instant death. Not even those closest to him knew who would be executed next. Life and death depended on his whim. A mere wave of his fi nger was all it took for the amapisi, the executioners, to raise their clubs and splinter a comrade’s skull or break the bones in his body; a moment’s hesitation on the part of an executioner spelled his own death.

It is hardly to be wondered at that Shaka was permanently paranoid about assassination plots. His spies were everywhere. No one knew if his or her neighbor was a secret informant, and arrest on suspicion meant torture as a matter of course. During mass assemblies he cunningly employed witchdoctors to “smell out” any group that might be contemplating his assassination; even the slightest suspicion was enough for a man to be impaled alive on a stake outside one of the royal kraals, after which his family would be clubbed to death and the corpses thrown to the vultures and hyenas. A hands-on despot, Shaka himself was not averse to personally smashing infants to death against the ground.

Shaka waxed rich from his bloody rule, because everything that had belonged to the slain men – personal wealth, concubines, and cattle – were confiscated and went into the royal treasury. At one time his seraglios housed 5,000 concubines and the royal herds numbered in the tens of thousands.

At the height of his reign Shaka could field an army, of 50,000 warriors. Ten regiments were barracked at his various royal kraals, each of which was strategically placed throughout his kingdom, to guard both the king’s person, his seraglios and his huge herds. Each of his dead father’s wives were stationed with the regiments as colonels in charge. His mother Nandi, was Colonel-in-Chief - Indlovukazi – “Great She Elephant “. The army was ruled by savage discipline, with death the punishment for most offenses. Any warrior who showed the slightest sign of fear on the battlefield was instantly killed; on Shaka’s command, a warrior was expected to instantly execute himself by impaling himself on his own spear.

The midlands of what was later South Africa shuddered under the weight of Shaka’s remorseless heel. Whole tribes fled before his impis, or regiments, forcing yet other tribes to fl ee as well. People were displaced from their lands and herds, by the hundreds of thousands, leading to famine. Landless tribes collided with one another and fell like dominoes, while behind them the Zulu impis rampaged, raping, looting, burning and killing.

The malign ripple effect convulsed tribes into movement hundreds of miles away. It was a new Dark Age that became known as the “Mfecane” - meaning “the crushing of people” - and by the time it was over an estimated one million people had died from genocide and mass starvation.

There were no lengths to which Shaka would not go to maintain his steely grip on his subjects. When Nandi died he forced the entire population into a year of mourning and fasting, during which tens of thousands of his subjects died of hunger. Those who could not force tears out of their eyes to mourn his mother had their skulls splintered. It was an ultimate act of tyranny, which was to lead to his assassination less than a year later.

In just 14 terrible years Shaka single-handedly destroyed fi ve hundred generations of entrenched oral-based tribal customs, totemic indoctrination and superstitious taboos. The 80 Nguni clans – once fiercely independent clans, each intensely proud of its heritage and certain that it was of Divine descent - lost all sense of their former identity and trembled in fear of Shaka ’s wrath, so terrified of him that they feared even to utter his name aloud.

And so a monstrous black messiah who preached not of eternal life but instant death ushered in a New Age of national consciousness and fathered the Zulu nation we know today.

The story of Shaka is indicative of a universal unifi cation impulse that characterizes the nature, not only of man, but also of all organic colonies. The brutal ambition that drove Shaka was the same one that drove other individuals like Atilla, Alexander, Ghengis Khan, Napoleon and Hitler to amass armies and set out to crush smaller unions and make them their own. Totemic indoctrination was transcended by sheer intimidation. Military invasion, mass genocide and torture served to unify the Bronze Age clans of Europe and Asia and lay the pre-literate foundations of the nations that we know today.

Brutal dynastic power can only hold sway for so long, and disunity might once again have prevailed, if where not for the timely introduction of a powerful metaphysical inspiration – the invention of scripture. Nationhood was cemented by the gradual introduction of national scriptures that united all the clans behind a single powerful Godhead, and a learned priest caste had to evolve within each culture to interpret the sacred writings of the new God. The oral-based traditions of former Bronze Age clans, each with conflicting totemic claims as to the exclusive divinity that once held them tightly bound together, were over-powered by religious rituals and the mass recitation of dogmatic creeds - with dire threats of eternal excommunication if the creeds were broken. Thus it was that the profound influence of written Word with its doctrinal mystique, claimed an artificial hold on the budding intellect of the specie. It was an Iron Age hold that would be challenged some two hundred generations later, by the next New Age of scientific argument and religious protest.

Shaka was in the process of initiating the same age-changing process in Southern Africa when European colonials arrived to witness it less than two centuries ago. Colonialism helped to accelerate the Age change in Africa just as the Romans did in Britain, 2,000 years earlier. They brought in the Christian scriptures and used their armies to force the Zulu nation into subjugation.

The next chapter explains in greater detail why no Age change can be sustained unless the social contract of the new paradigm includes a corresponding evolution of spiritual disciplines.