The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

We know that the moon has a powerful influence on the earth’s magnetic field – just as on the tides; it is probably this magnetic influence that causes disturbances in mental patients at the time of the full moon (and which leads us to speak of ‘lunacy’). Researches carried out by Dr Leonard Ravitz of the Virginia Department of Health showed that there is a difference in electrical potential between the head and chest, and that in mental patients there are far greater fluctuations in this difference than in normal people; the greatest fluctuations occur at the times of the new and full moon. A Japanese doctor, Maki Takata, showed in the 1940s that the rate at which blood curdles – the ‘flocculation index’ – is affected by sunspot activity. Experiments on the electrical field of trees – carried out by Harold Saxton Burr and F. S. C. Northrop in the 1930s – showed that this was also affected by sunspots. But the most significant deduction from their experiments was that living matter is somehow held together, shaped, by electrical fields, just as iron filings are held together and shaped by a magnet. This is the reason why if half a sea urchin’s egg is killed with a hot needle, the remaining half develops into a perfect but half-sized embryo (an experiment performed early in this century by Hans Driesch); each half contains a complete electrical ‘blueprint’ of the whole. But the astonishing thing is that the electric field should have a shape, like the jelly-mould that turns a blancmange into a miniature castle. (It is this same mould that allows certain creatures to re-grow lost limbs.) It is as if the force of life controlled matter by means of electric fields.

So there is nothing surprising in the discovery that animals are sensitive to the earth’s magnetic field; it would be astonishing if they were not. And since this field is altered by the movements of our neighbours in space – the planets as well as the sun and moon – it would also be surprising if our remote ancestors did not feel instinctively the connection between the earth beneath his feet and the heavens above his head. The sensitivity to underground water – and its electrical fields – must have been developed by our ancestors millions of years ago, perhaps in the great droughts of the Pliocene.

All of which suggests that there was no need for ancient man to ‘ask questions’ about the forces of nature; he felt them around him, as a fish can feel every change in the pressure of the water through nerves in its sides. The result must have been a curious sense of unity with the earth and heavens that homo sapiens lost a long time ago. Ancient man’s religion was not an attempt to ‘explain’ the universe; it was a natural response to its forces, like the response of the skin to sunlight.

This still leaves unexplained how the Pishauko witch-doctor was able to sense the approach of enemies. Modern psychical research would probably explain it in terms of telepathy. But it is important to bear in mind that the witch-doctor himself would not accept such an explanation for a moment. Throughout history, all shamans, witch-doctors, ‘magicians’ and witches have claimed that they derived their powers from ‘spirits’, usually those of the dead. The power to respond to earth forces – to find water or ensure an abundant harvest – is regarded as part and parcel of the shaman’s ability to establish contact with the world of spirits. We may dismiss this as primitive superstition; but again, we shall be missing the point if we think of it as an attempt to ‘explain’ the problem of what happens after death. Shamans do not ‘believe’ in spirits; they experience them – or at least, experience something that they accept as the spirit world. So it is unlikely that Neanderthal man performed burial rituals because he had decided there must be life after death. He performed them because he took it totally for granted that he was surrounded by spirits, and that these included the spirits of the dead and the spirits of nature – ‘elementals’. The same argument applies to homo erectus. If he made bone carvings (and possibly rock paintings, since the two seem to go together) it was because they were part of his religious rituals. And if he possessed religious ideas, then they were certainly connected with the spirits of the dead and the spirits of nature. Moreover, there is no need to assume that such ideas were a late development. If religion is a sensitivity to natural forces, then its origins probably lie in the dawn of prehistory; Ramapithecus probably had his own equivalent of ‘hunting magic’.

And what of the human – or animal – sacrifice that always seems to be a part of primitive religion? Why did primitive man feel the need to make offerings to the spirits? Here we can only point to a well-established fact: that throughout the history of magic, at all times and in all cultures, man has believed that magic is carried out with the aid of spirits. And from ancient Babylonia to modern Brazil, he has also believed that the spirits must be paid with certain ‘offerings’, which must be accompanied by an extremely strict ritual. As I have described in my book Poltergeist, the modern Brazilian ‘spiritist’ believes that the spirits wish to continue tasting the pleasures of this world: food, alcohol, sex, a good cigar, and will perform certain services – such as poltergeist hauntings – in return. The western mentality finds such beliefs absurd; but if we are to understand primitive religion, we must recognise that they can be found in every culture at all periods of history. If homo erectus performed human sacrifice in the Chou-kou-tien caves, then we should at least give consideration to the notion that magic is far older than homo sapiens.

All this, then, would explain why Cro-Magnon man was preoccupied with the phases of the moon, and why the earliest science in Sumeria was astronomy. It was not the result of intellectual curiosity about the stars, or an attempt to create a seasonal calendar for agricultural purposes. (In Egypt the Nile itself was the best of all calendars.) It was a development of religion – of man’s sense of involvement with the forces of the earth and the powers of the heavens.

Cro-Magnon man also seems to have continued the practice of human sacrifice – at least, signs of cannibalism have been found at Cro-Magnon sites near Chou-kou-tien. This should not be regarded as evidence that our immediate ancestors were prone to cruelty or aggressive violence – any more than Jewish ritual slaughter is evidence of sadism, or the Christian eucharist of cannibalism. Religious sacrifice is performed in a spirit of self-effacement, in the service of the gods. It stands at the opposite extreme from criminality, which is an expression of individual self-assertion.

At a certain point in history, man began to lose this sense of involvement with the gods. According to Wells, this was when he first became a city dweller; but we have seen that this is not entirely accurate. Three thousand years after the foundation of the first cities, the king of Sumer still regarded himself as no more than a servant of the gods. So did his people. In History Begins at Sumer, Samuel Noah Kramer writes: ‘Sumerian thinkers… were firmly convinced that man was fashioned of clay and created for one purpose only: to serve the gods by supplying them with food, drink and shelter.’ It was a long time before the inhabitants of these temple-cities turned into Wells’s ‘jostling crowds’, and crime ceased to be the exception and became the rule.

How this came about deserves to be considered in a separate chapter.

THE DISADVANTAGES OF CONSCIOUSNESS

One day in 1960, at precisely ninety seconds before midday, a young student named Klaus Gosmann walked into a block of flats on the Tuchergarten Strasse in Hersbruch, near Nuremberg. He was a quiet, serious young man, known to his few acquaintances for his deep interest in mystical theology: his daydream was to find a job as pastor at some quiet little country village, where he could lead a life of dedicated service.

He chose a flat at random and knocked on the door. A young man opened it. It was thirty seconds to midday. Gosmann said: ‘Sir, I wish to ask you a question and I shall not repeat it.’ ‘What?’ ‘Your money or your lives?’ At that moment, the bells of the local churches began to chime midday, making a deafening noise. Gosmann drew a revolver from his pocket and carefully shot the young man in the heart. The man’s fiancée, who was looking curiously over his shoulder, began to scream. Gosmann shot her through the head. Then, before the bells had finished chiming, he turned and walked home. There he wrote up the story of the murder in his diary. He was pleased that he had timed it to a second – so that the bells would drown the shots – and that he had remained perfectly calm and controlled.