Until his death in 1996, Paul Shepard was Avery Professor Emeritus of Human Ecology at Pitzer College and the Claremont Graduate School. Among his books are The Others (Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1995) and Traces of an Omnivore (Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1996).

Florence R. Shepard is professor emerita of educational studies at the University of Utah, an essayist, and author of Ecotone

(SUNY, 1994).

The Relevance of the Past

HISTORY IS NOT A CHRONICLE but a Hebrew invention about the way the cosmos works, a notion that became the accepted "word" for the civilized world. One of the problems with this version is that it does not see the past reoccurring in the present. Yet Octavio Paz reminds us: "The past reappears because it is a hidden present. I am speaking of the real past, which is not the same as 'what took place.' ... What took place is indeed the past, yet there is something that ... takes place but does not wholly recede into the past, a constantly returning present." History as written documentation of "what happened" is antithetical to a "constantly returning present," and as a result its perception of time and change is narrowly out of harmony with the natural world. Written history is the word. Time is an unfinished, extemporaneous narrative.

Prehistoric humans, in contrast, were autochthonous, that is, "native to their place." They possessed a detailed knowledge that was passed on from generation to generation by oral tradition through myths—stories that framed their beliefs in the context of ancestors and the landscape of the natural world. They lived within a "sacred geography" that consisted of a complex knowledge of place, terrain, and plants and animals embedded in a phenology of seasonal cycles. But they were also close to the earth in a spiritual sense, joined in an intricate configuration of sacred associations with the spirit of place within their landscape. Time and space as well as animals—humans—gods—all life and nonliving matter formed a continuum that related to themes of fertility and death and the sacredness of all things. During prehistory, which is most of the time that humans have been on earth, the dead and their burial places were venerated and mythic ancestors were part of the living present, the dreamtime ones whose world was also the ground of present being. Ignore them as we will, they are with us still.

The roots of history as written, as Herbert Schneidau has shown us, were formulated by the Hebrew demythologizers who created a reality outside the rhythmic cosmos of the gentiles who surrounded them and who were grounded in prehistoric, mythical consciousness with rituals of eternal return, mimetic conveyance of values and ideas, the central metaphor of nature as culture, and, most of all, the incorporation of the past into the present. Unlike history, prehistory does not participate in the dichotomy that divides experience into good and evil, eternal and temporal. Rather, it belongs to a syncretic system that accepts multiple truths and meanings and attempts to reconcile them. This state of consciousness is not due to a rational process. The mythic mind, as John Cobb Jr. has explained it, does not recognize the "separateness of subject and object" but instead sees "a flow of subjective and objective contributions ... bound together" where there is no "clear consciousness of subject as subject or of object as object."

The Hebrews, who initiated the move away from the earth and toward the historical view, did not try to reconcile opposing beliefs. Nor did they have a sense of place. To the contrary they insisted on "deracination from the spirit of place" and asserted that they were "journeyers" to the Promised Land. In the Hebrew view, the realm of the sacred was granted only to Yahweh. Objections to the oldest traditions of time and the past imply a deeper strain that has to do not with the content of history, but with a self-conscious alienation that first became evident in the Hebrews. The assault on the local wisdom of primal peoples culminated in the outwardness of nature and the inwardness of the personality.

Focusing on heavenly domination over earthly phenomena, history became an attempt to look away from earth. The Hebrews and the Greeks, who were their contemporaries and whose parallel culture in the Eastern Mediterranean shares many common features with that of the Hebrews, saw alienation as the touchstone of humankind. They understood themselves as outside the nature-centered belief systems of other peoples, whose cosmologies linked past, present, and future in stories and art with eternal cycles and sacred places. History is a way of perceiving human existence that opposes and destroys its predecessor, the mythic world, which sees time as a continuous return and space as sacred, where all life is autochthonous.

The Hebrew and Greek founders of history were not so intent on rejecting nature as they were on understanding temporal events as unique. The Hebrews, the Greeks, and, following in their steps, the Christians asserted that events are novel, uncertain, tangential, and contingent rather than embedded and structured, the result of the thoughts of a living, omniscient, unknowable God. The past was a highway on which there could be no return.

The prototype of this linear sequence of ever-new events, where nothing was repeated and to which nothing returned, was the Old Testament, a record of tribal endogamy, identity, and vision. Thirty-two hundred years later, history has grown fat with the civilized written records that replaced oral traditions and added vast secular data to religious history. This breakaway from the mythic life, which linked our species to the natural world, began when the early Hebrews rejected the nature/process stories and rites of their pagan contemporaries for the myth of a single god who, outside the world, reached into his creation, willfully deranging its rhythms, acting arbitrarily, making life a kind of novel, a history. The effort of the Hebrews to distance themselves from the sacred immanence in the natural order initiated what Cobb has called the "reflective consciousness" of humankind in the "Axial Period" (between 800 and 200 B.C.)—a transitional state of human cognition in which the archaic mind was altered and a "conscious control of symbolization and action" emerged. Although the Hebrews had begun to develop a "reflective consciousness," a state of consciousness in which they actively attempted to understand their place in the greater scheme of things, they were still locked into a kind of projection of their unconscious that symbolized subjective elements arising from a deep substratum of the mind.

The Greeks, Cobb argues, succeeded in distancing themselves from sacred immanence in the natural order through further development of the "reflective consciousness." The change of the "structure of existence," the way they envisioned the possibilities in their lives, moved from the unconscious to the conscious. In the case of Homeric Man, "the object of conscious experience ... was primordially the sensuously given world ... in which the subjective was subordinated to the objective." Out of this grew "esthetic distancing"—an ability to see beauty in the world, in nature, in the human body, and in temples and other human artifacts, esthetically pleasing forms corresponding to rational psychic...