The Triumph of the Gods

part two of: The Civilized System of Belief is Poor in Worlds


Your System of Belief is Poor in Worlds

Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's bosom ? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest. You ask me to dig for stone! Shall I dig under her skin for her bones ? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be again. You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it, and be rich like white men! But how dare I cut off my mother's hair?






The earth was sacred both as the source of life and as the receiver of the dead. She bringeth all things to birth, reareth them and receiveth again into her womb. In many parts of the world, newborn babies were placed on the ground and then picked up again to represent their birth from the womb of the earth. At the same time the ceremony consecrated them to her and ensured that she would protect them. And to this day, even in the modern industrial societies, many people still want to be buried in their native land, to return to their earthly womb.


Mother was seen to be very active. She was thought to exhale the breath of life, which nourished living organisms on her surface. If pressure built up within, she would break wind, causing earthquakes. Fluids flowed within her, and hot water came out of her springs like blood. Within her body- or was it her mind?- there were veins, some of which contained liquids and other solidified fluids like metals and minerals. Her bowels were full of channels, fire chambers and fissures through which fire and heat were emitted in volcanic exhalations and hot springs. She bore stones and metals within her womb and nurtured them as they grew like embryos, within her, ripening at their own slow pace.


With the development of agriculture, the Mother gave way to a clearer and more restricted notion of a great goddess of vegetation and harvesting. (In Greece for example, Gaia was replaced by Demeter). But women were still very closely associated with the fertility of the soil, and they played a dominant role when agriculture was in its infancy; indeed they may well have invented agriculture. All over the world, metaphors connect women with the ploughed earth, the fertile furrow. In an ancient Hindu text for example: « This woman has come as a living soil: sow seed in her, ye men! » In the Koran: »Your wives are to you as fields. » This same metaphor is implicit in our world semen, the Latin for « seed ».




Nature was traditionally idealized as benevolent Mother in images of the Golden Age. All was peaceful and fertile; nature gave freely of her bounty; animals grazed contentedly; birds sang pure melodies; flowers were everywhere; and trees bore fruit abundantly. There was no disease or strife. Men and women lived in harmony. In the idylls of pastoral poetry, nature has already been subdued: flocks graze peacefully, unharnessed by wolves and other predators; the dark forest have been cleared and fertile fields established in their place; the wilderness has given way to orchards and gardens. Nature is calm, kindly like an ideal wife... The fear of wild, untamed nature feeds the desire to subdue her, a desire at least as old as civilisation.



The Triumph of the Gods





The ancient image of the Golden Age, usually regarded as a mythic or poetic^fantasy, has recently gained a new lease of life as a result of archaeological research in southern Europe and Turkey. The origins of settled agriculture in Europe have now been pushed back to about 7000 B.C. For several thousand years, these early societies of collectors lived in comfortable and usually unfortified settlements, worshiping goddesses, making superb ceramics rather than weapons. But between 4000 and 3500 B.C. This peaceful way of life was shattered by waves of invaders whose warrior gods dethroned the old goddesses, demoting them to wives, daughters and consorts in the new male-dominated pantheons. Patriarchy and male domination replaced the older, more harmonious social order.

Meanwhile, in the Near-East, the old goddess-worshiping societies likewise came to be dominated by fortified city-states and warring empires. Violin sky-gods became predominant, the vengeful senders of thunderbolts, floods, droughts, famines; the destroyers of peoples. The same happened in India, where old relatively peaceful societies were conquered by invading Aryan warriors, with their sky-gods and horses (!). All my relations, the pattern has often been repeated, and this looks like historical evidence that our ills stem from male domination. It also supports the hope that things could be otherwise; a different kind of society actually existed and could be possible again if we replaced the values of domination and patriarchy with the consciousness of partnership and matriarchal animism, as it was in each of our people- our animal, vegetal, mineral and human people- before the white invasion came to denature our memories of life.


However, the triumph of the warriors was reflected in new stories. To start with, the primal Mother was the source of all things. She was the virgin mother, she needed no god in order to conceive, and all the gods were descended from her. For example, according to one of the early Greek creations myths, first of all mother earth (Gaia) emerged from chaos. She then gave birth to Uranus, the sky-god, as she slept. He was both her son and her lover; in the earliest Babylonian creation stories, the primal goddess Tiamat was the formless void, the deep, the dark womb from whom the universe was born; she brought forth the world by herself. The god Marduk was originally her son. But then he became the creator god, slaying Tiamat, now pictured as the dragon of chaos.




When the Jewish people entered the Promised Land as pastoralist warriors it was already inhabited by Canaanites, Philistines and other peoples. As they settled there and adopted and agricultural way of life, local beliefs were assimilated into their religion, as were many of the ancient places of power such as holly wells, sacred oaks and terebinth trees. For many generations they worshiped at the old « high places » and groves sacred to the Queen of heavens. These sanctuaries were equipped with stone pillars, altars for animal sacrifices and tree stumps known as Asherahs, the name of the ancient goddess.

The religion of the Jews resembled many others in the recognition of sacred places and times and in the offering of sacred animals. But one of the ways it differed was its insistence on the uniqueness of its God; another was through the prohibition on the making and worshiping of representations of the God. These features of Judaism were inherited by Christianity and Islam and have had profound historical effects.


In the 1st. Chapter of the book of Genesis, the primal Mother is again the formless void, the dark, the watery abyss. Unlike Marduk, God did not fight with her, but He first created by dividing- the light from the dark, day from night, the waters above from the waters below, the heaven from the earth and the dry land from the sea. When it came to the creation of plants this God evoked them but did not make them himself. They were formed and brought forth by the mother, the earth:


He said: « Let the earth produce growing things; let there be on earth plants that bear seed, and trees bearing fruit each with its own kind of seed » So it was (...)

Likewise he called forth animals from the earth, and sea creatures and birds from the waters. In theological terminology, this was not a direct but a mediate mode of creation.


Although the Judeo-Christian tradition has always emphasized the supremacy of the male God, the earth retained some of her old autonomy for many centuries. The Jews were forbidden to worship the old goddess-mother, but nevertheless the holy land remained both sacred and female. Throughout the Middle-Ages, Christians continued to regard nature as animate and mother like. Mary was Queen of Heaven, a title inherited from Asarte-Ashtoreth, the aspect symbolized in her blue, star-spangled cloak; she is lunar, like Artemis, and is often depicted standing on a crescent moon, and as Virgin Mother of God, she is heir to the ancient tradition of the primal Mother. And like the Earth Mother who gave life and took it back, she is present at death: « Holy Mary, mother of Good, pray for us at the hour of our death »




The complete supremacy of the Father was not established until the Protestant Reformation, in the 16th. Century, with the suppression of the Holy Mother's cult and the final desacradization of the natural world. The Protestant reformers were trying to establish a purified form of Christianity, rejecting the abuses of the Roman Church. Personal faith and repentance were what mattered; ritual observances, seasonal ceremonies, pilgrimages, devotion to the holy mother and the cults of the saints and angels were all denounced as pagan superstitions. The Protestants were trying to bring about an irreversible change in attitude, eradicating the traditional idea that spiritual power pervades the natural world and is particularly present in sacred places and in spiritually charged material objects. They wanted to purify religion and this purification involved the disenchantment of the world. All traces of magic, holiness and spiritual power were to be removed from the realm of nature; the spiritual realm would be confined to human beings.

This process was taken to its ultimate conclusion in the 17th. Century when nature became nothing but inanimate matter in motion, created by God and mechanically obedient to His eternal laws. Nature was no longer acknowledged as mother and no longer considered alive. She became the world-machine and God the all-powerful engineer. The material world was governed by God's laws and incapable of responding to human ceremonies, invocations or rituals; it was spiritually neutral or indifferent and could not transmit any spiritual power in or of itself. To believe otherwise was to fall into idolarty, transferring God's glory to His Creation. There was to be no attempt, even through religious means, to change the way the world operated; it should be accepted as an expression of God's will. In the influential view of Calvin, God had predestined all events from the beginning of time.


The Reformation thus prepared the ground for the mechanistic revolution in science in the following century. Nature was already disenchanted and the material world separated from the life of the spirit; the idea that the universe was merely a vast machine fitted well with this kind of technology, and so did the constriction of the realm of the soul to a small region of the human brain. The domains of science and religion could now be separated: science taking the whole of nature for its province, including the human body; religion, the moral aspect of the human soul.

This religious revolution not only helped pave the way for the development of modern science but also provided a favorable environment for the growth of technology and the acceleration of economic development. Traditional and symbolic values attached to particular places, plants and animals, were replaced by monetary values.




Ironically, the idea that nature functioned mechanically and automatically rendered God increasingly superfluous, and by the late 18th. Century, he was fading away from the scientific worldview.


Nowadays we live in a desacradized world;. Of course certain ceremonies still have a religious significance, and so do certain places or certain animals and plants, such as cows for Hindus or horses for Indians... But there is nothing in the scientific worldview to support such an idea of sacredness. They are survivals from earlier epochs and their sense remains absent.

AKAtjecoutay
photos by Atjecoutay

The Civilized System of Belief is Poor in Worlds

I came to recognize that the conflict I experienced so intensely was a symptom of a slip that runs through our entire civilisation. This split is experienced to differing degrees by almost everyone. It is now threatening our very survival.

From the time of our remotest ancestors until the seventeenth century, it was taken for granted that the world of nature was alive. But in the last three centuries, growing numbers of educated people have come to think of nature as lifeless. This has been the central doctrine of orthodox science- the mechanistic theory of nature.

We have to remember that what are now commonplace assumptions were one controversial theories, rooted in peculiar kinds of theology and philosophy, believed only by a handful of European intellectuals. Through the successes of technology, the mechanistic theory of nature is now triumphant on a global scale; it is built into the official orthodoxy of economic development. It has become a kind of religion. And it has led us to our present crisis.

Science itself has now begun to transcend the mechanistic worldview. The idea that everything is determined in advance has given way to the ideas of in-determinism, spontaneity and chaos. The hard, inert atoms of Newtonian physics have dissolved into structures of vibratory activity. The uncreative world machine has turned into a creative, evolutionary cosmos. Even the laws of nature may not be eternally fixed: they may be evolving along with nature.

Simple though the idea of living nature may sound, it has profound implications. It upsets deep-seated habits of thoughts; it points toward a new kind of science, a new understanding of spirituality... an old relationship between humanity and the living world. We urgently need to find practical ways of re-establishing our conscious sense of connection with living nature. We have No Time to lose.





Matriarchal nature and the desecration of the world

Like human mothers, nature has always evoked ambivalent emotions. She is beautiful, fertile, nurturing, benevolent and generous. But she is also wild, destructive, chaotic, smothering, death dealing- the Mother in her terrifying form, like Nemesis, Hecate or Kali.
The idea of nature as a mechanical inanimate system is in some ways more comforting; it gives a sense that we are in control and gratifyingly confirms our belief that we have risen above primitive animistic ways of thinking. Nature is less frightening if she can be dismissed as a superstition, a poetic turn of phrase or a mythic archetype confined to human minds, while the inanimate natural world remains there for us to exploit.




Although the conquest of nature for the sake of human progress is the official ideology of the modern world, the old intuition of nature as a mother still affects our personal responses.
The very words for nature in European languages are feminine- for example phusis in Greek, natura in Latin, la nature in French, die Natur in German. The latin world natura literally meant « birth ». The Greek world phusis came from the root phu whose primary meaning was also connected with birth. Thus our words physics and physical like nature and natural have their origins in the mothering process.

In animist beliefs (nowadays called mythologies), the great mother has many aspects. She was the original source of the universe and its laws and the ruler of nature, fate, time, eternity, truth, wisdom, justice, love, birth and death. She was Earth, Gaia, the mother of the sun, like Nun or Astarte. She was natura, the goddess Nature and she had many other silent names and images as the mother and matrix and sustaining force of All Thing.

These feminine associations play an important part in our thinking; our conception of nature is intertwined with ideas about the relations between women and men, between animals and gods, and between the feminine and the masculine in general. If we prefer to reject these traditional sexual associations, what are the alternatives to the idea of nature as organic, alive and mother like ? One is that nature consists of nothing but inanimate matter in motion. But in this case we only deny the mother principle by being unaware of it; the very word for matter is derived from the same root as mother- in Latin the corresponding words are material and mater- and the whole ethos of materialism is permeated with maternal metaphors.

The conception of nature as a machine brings another set of metaphors into play. Many mechanists assume that this way of thinking is uniquely objective, whereas they see the idea of living nature as anthropocentric, nothing but a projection of human ways of thinking onto the inanimate world around him. But surely the machine metaphor is more anthropocentric than the organic. The only machines we know of are man-made. Machine making is a uniquely human activity, and a relatively recent one too. The 17th. And 18th. Century conception of God as the designer and creator of the world machine cast him in the image of technological man. And in attempting to see all aspects of nature as machine like, we only project current technologies onto the world supposed to be around us.



We cannot help thinking in terms of metaphors, analogies, models and images; they are embedded in the language and in the very structure of our thought. Both animistic and mechanistic thinking are metaphoric. But whereas mythic and animistic thinking depends on organic metaphors drawn by the processes of life, mechanistic thinking depends on metaphors drawn from man-made machinery.
Since the earth is our immediate home, Earth was recognized before the wider domain of Nature was conceived of on a cosmic scale to include the vast expanse of the heavens. The image of earth as a mother is found in all aboriginal cultures, all over the world. In the late 19 century, this is how a man of the Wanapum tribe explained why he refused to till the ground :

Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's bosom ? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest. You ask me to dig for stone! Shall I dig under her skin for her bones ? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be again. You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it, and be rich like white men! But how dare I cut off my mother's hair?

AKAtjecoutay
Photos by Atjecoutay

Honouring the New Sacred Animals

The New-Sacred Animals


DOG is their messenger.



We are RELATED by the way of PETRO

The Great spirit of the corporate consumer movement!

OIL, GASOLINE/BENZENE, and any PLASTICS products such as polyester or poly, refined matter, all paints, raw materials or resource that has been extracted from the First and only Deity that gave BIRTH to all life on Earth, THE GREAT MOTHER and are Father the SUN.

In the past before the time of the Horse,” THE DOG DAYS” the people of the western hemisphere honoured the winged, four legged the water swimmers and the ones who crawl close to the earth as Sacred, Now as we slowly or rapidly lose touch with are pasts as most Animists/Tribal people have.



NOW Only the essences of these spiritual ways have come to exist in this, the “Consumer Movement”.
The buffalo, Eagle, bear and the Wolf
are soon to become what the Europeans have as “fairy Tales” of which was an Animist knowledge before the time of the patriarchal “ONE GOD” came to oppress the innocents of this land and all other lands.

Much like the sacred animals of the past we use the skin, flesh and most parts of the Pig, cow, hen and other so called “live stock” in our daily lives without even acknowledge the fact that they are sacrificed to sustain are” well being” there is no Honour in life and their existence, unlike the old ways of an Animist spirituality we have become generic and have lost touch with the sacred Animals simply because they are not used in are everyday lives, in a sense the essence of believe has adopted the ways of organized religion only the spirit exists not the sustenance to feed the people, one therefore follows blindly guided by an over whelming light, only because one has the desire to see who’s shining that ridiculously bright light in there face and still, one follows.



The ones who have adopted what’s left of the old ways cannot deny the fact that the sustenance to feed is missing in other words the matter does not exist in are everyday life. The Sacred Animals are not their at our disposal we have no buck skin that “WE” have hunted, spirit did not honour us with the body of the Sacred Animal to make prayer objects and buying them from a store does not count, one must go into the wild for them, or have them handed down to you from family , so we only honour the influence or a dogma, the essence of organized religion, so it is no wonder that one thinks it’s Ok or right to worship only the essence of what’s left of are Animist knowledge and to go on believing without the sustenance of matter which in the past, the ways of life had.




Now the ways of life at hand is the consumer movement and no matter how we convince ourselves or others of what is not, we are part of this movement, except for the tribes that have not yet be contacted.

We all may believe in a parallel existence or not but in relation to a sacred animal there is a physical and the metaphysical world around it, one without the other, it would ceases to exist, with the “New Sacred Animals” there is a void that needs to be filled with this co-existence, in the Animist Knowledge or the “Old Ways” the Animal, Tree, Rock or Person can only exist with its counterpart the spirit, and in the corporate consumer movement we lack our counterpart. Yes, one may think that you do have your counterpart the Eagle, wolf or whatever spirit animal that one may have adopted, but remember one does not have the sustenance or the “matter” to support a true relationship. What one does have is the Pig, Cow, Hen or the essence of the Dinosaur and other raw martial’s that has been refined to meet are needs to sustain are lifestyles, a now, there is one’s counterpart to create a true harmonious relationship between the metaphysical and the physical world of are Consumerist lifestyle, one can only and truly go on to exist by excepting that this is the reality of all are lives in this, The Consumer Movement and the New- Sacred Animals.

Kerry Red Atjecoutay of The Eight F.I.R.E.S. Society



It is at this time that the egocentric civilized race will be given a choice between two roads. If they choose the right road, then the Seventh Fire will light the Eighth and final Fire, an eternal Flame of tranquility and equality between all species, If the egocentric civilized race makes the wrong choice of roads, the destruction which they brought with them in coming to the Western Hemisphere will come back at them and cause much suffering and death to all the Earth's Inhabitants.

The Institution of denial

Obama is a politician for the Capitalists...And as ONE can see what the Capitalists have done to the Indigenous peoples the Animals and the Earth and if ONE can not see this then the stupidity of "civilized Men" will continue and it does not matter if ONE disagrees, the evidence is there,, Its time to SOBER up and smell the stance of STUPIDITY - ONE!




I tend to look at myself from a political perspective, hoping to justify my condition by treating it as a challenge to the ameriKKKan way. I am an instrument of sabotage, a lose part in the national machine, a misfit whose job was to gum up the works. No one could look at me with out feeling shame or anger or pity. I am living proof that the system had failed, that the smug, overfed land of plenty was finally cracking apart - And with you we can OBomba them with DECEPTION... Then we can proceed to take ALLah there libertys - ALLah this and ALLah that is all we ever wanted.... PLEASE!!!



Considering this, could it be that our perception of civilization as a final, grand stage of human social evolution may somehow be faulty? Could it be that this way of life we call civilization may in fact be a wrong turn? One ground-breaking anthropologist who has called into question the standard interpretation provided by the likes of Encylopedia Britannica, has written:

Indeed, most of what we have learned to think of as our cultural evolution has in fact been interpretation. Moreover…this interpretation has more often than not been the project of the still prevailing dominator worldview. It has consisted of conclusions drawn from fragmentary data interpreted to conform to the traditional model of our cultural evolution as a linear progression from “primitive man” to so-called “civilized man”… (Eisler__)

In other words, the Brahmans who write our cultural mythology have shaped the facts to fit the conclusions; they have interpreted history to fit their idea of evolution from primitive culture to advanced culture, thereby reinforcing the idea of superiority of modern civilization—no matter how much that view conflicts with what is known of human civilization and its history.
“There are whole disciplines, institutions, rubrics in our culture which serve as categories of denial."

Green is the Color of Money | dotSUB

Green is the Color of Money | dotSUB

The air is fresh with the sweet scent of buffalo grass

The air is fresh with the sweet scent of buffalo grass. As you look to the horizon you can see all that is natural, walking without being disturbed, till you reach your migrational destination...

Just over 500 hundred years ago there was a force that impeded our direction, a force that has gone down in the Euro-American history books as the greatest conquest of civilized man... According to my point of view that would be rape, murder, disease, theft, lies and the unnatural occupation of my homeland.

Genocide is the political purgative of Euro-American progression and I personally am a survivor of this policy. But the attempt was unsuccessful: still we survive and live among those who were brought from Europe who now call the Americas their homeland.

The residential schools were one of the attempts to re-educate the Indigenous for this reason: the invaders inability to exterminate the tribal people. So to “save the man you must kill the Indian”. Up until the time of my mother and father, the last generation of residential school survivors- (but not the only ones-) those Indian children have been systematically de/re-programmed, battered, sexually abused, humiliated into submission and, at times, killed for resisting their forced brainwashing.

In present days, approximately 50,000 children are missing. This is the result of the residential school policy implemented by the US and Canadian governments under the care of the Roman Catholic Anglican Protestant and other churches.

Kerry Atjecoutay became aware of this truth from his parents, There, he heard stories of some of the atrocities that the Church had committed. Guided by the Duty of Memory, he courageously started to lift the veil on the complete history of what happened to the Native children in the Christian Residential Schools. Today, Kerry Atjecoutay is looking for answers: why this happened, how this happened, and where are the bones of these lost children. In this spirit, along with other concerned people to bring about a symbolic healing of the Church and the children that suffered under its “care”.

The Indigenous people are waiting for the Church authorities to recognize their participation and responsibility for the Genocide.

Animist Knowledge Association (animist espace) is honoured to be given the confidence of organizing their campaign and accepts this responsibility with conviction. With the supervision of Kerry Atjrcoutay, we will rally support in Switzerland, particularly in Geneva, where we will propose public conferences (Association House), projecting documentaries on genocide,. Together we will hold vigils in front of the United Nations. We also will propose a public debate at Animist Espace.

All propositions are welcome, and we are expecting your engagement and strong support for this major cause. Regarding in this direction, you are invited to join the organisation at ANIMISTespace, 4 rue Louis-Aubert, 1206 Geneva.
Thank you to confirm your presence at kredatjecoutay@yahoo.ca

In the spirit of Pontiac

Animist Knowledge Association AKA