Key Concepts: homo fabulus and the religious imagination

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Valentine letter from 1477 - source

It has been over a year since starting research for this book. I'm slightly closer to getting a handle on how to approach the process of actually writing it. But the research itself has swelled my heart with the discovery of beauty lurking just below the surface of the modern human experience. The depth of beauty far outpaces my ability to articulate it. What I think I'm doing with this article is asking for help. Like the fool I've set out on a quest but feel as though a fog prevents me seeing past the chasm. I don't know how far I have to go. Is there someone on the other side? Is there even another side at all? Hello! Hello! Hello! Is there anybody out there?

Yesterday I hand wrote a letter to a friend. It had been many years since I had done this. As I wrote I imagined email wasn't a thing. Then I gradually peeled back the layers of time: no phones, no cars, no electricity, paper is not a common commodity, printing is not accessible to the average person. I thought of texts I have read that were written in the pre-modern era. Books of the bible canon, The Odyssey, The Epic of Gilgamesh, some medieval writings of saints. I searched the internet for "old letters from the 1600s". It struck me how opaque these old texts can be. I get the impression the task of decoding the penmanship and the content was deferred unto the reader. Not having ready access to editing, the writer is expected to plan the writing more thoroughly. Simultaneously the reader is expected to make an effort to understand the writer's intent. The reader does the editing in a sense. Thinking about writing in this way opened me to write a letter to my friend in a liberated manner. I limited myself to saying only things I believed to be true in that moment and surrendered the responsibility of interpretation to the addressee. To put it proverbially: A bridge is built from both sides.

But writing a book seems to me be to be different to writing a letter. When writing a letter I know the audience is there and who it is. I can estimate the range and depth of their experience and interest. When writing for this book project and blog, I am launching my voice into a complete void. I've explored communication gaps in a previous article. I intend to expand this sort of exploration into a series. I will use each part of the series to zoom in on "Key Concepts" which inform my approach to the topic of music. This series can then be used as a reference that the reader can look to if they need certain ideas expanded. Hopefully this will free me up to blast past these concepts in future articles and write in a more liberated manner. The "Key Concepts" articles will appear on their own page linked at the top of the "home page".

Source: wikimedia under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.

I Invite you to join me on a journey. We will peel back the layers of time to inhabit the lives of our neolithic and pre-neolithic ancestors.

You sit by a campfire. The stars bend down over everything. They and the fire are the only source of light tonight. Nothing stands between you and infinite up. And it sears a groove into your psyche. A groove deepened and burnished by tens of thousands of years worth of nights like this one. The burps and rumbles of nocturnal animals babble out of the forest. The waves rhythmically shush them. You poke at the fire. The branches crackle. Sparks race to reach the infinite up. The fish is cooked now. Smoke and steam carry their promise of life to your heart who surges with reverence for the dots in the sky that marked the arrival of this school of particularly delicious fish. The dots are a fifteen thousand year clock. Remember that deep groove. It teems with stories. Wisdom gifts from the ancestors. You offer a breath to the hot blackened fish. The embers on the stick stabbing it through glow in approval. You tenderly peel back the crispy skin. The steam dances and as it dies your desire manifests. Striated as the sea from whence it came, the meat communes with you and you with it. Wave upon wave of star brought boon softens your tongue. You killed the fish. With your inner magic you rebirth the fish as yourself. Without the stories you don't get the clock. Without the clock you don't get the fish. Without the fish you don't get you. The stories, the stars, the fish, you, are sacred.

As a pre-neolithic person, "thinking" of the stars as alive and communing with you in the now and here isn't an amusing intellectual exercise. The stories and the wisdom of the stars and the ancestors are religionized for posterity. You live the stories. You are the stories. Your embeddedness is a matter of life and death. If the Darwinian jargon is your jam then here, have at it. Our modern arms-length scientific designation for the human animal secretly recognizes all of this I'm talking about. "Sapiens" in the homo sapiens classification means "wise". Therefore homo sapiens = man of wisdom. There's your biological argument for the utility of religious imagination.  Archeological evidence is piling up. The consensus view of our ancestors' lives is undergoing revision upon revision. We are finding sophistication further and further back in our ancestors' history. There is indeed a Darwinian explanation for the religious imagination. Just know that this explanation does not dismiss religious imagination as a vestigial appendage. Rather it underscores it as essential to human survival through very long periods of time. This is what I mean when I say "religious imagination". I mean it as a primary human feature.

For all its brilliant utility the Darwinian model lacks enough verve to properly plug into how humans truly experience life. We are more than wise. We are vehicles for the legacy of wisdom. We carry this legacy forward by being the stories that ensconce us in the world. I propose then that we classify ourselves in a manner fitting of our nature. The latin for story is "fabula". This word ends up giving us "fabulous" whose etymology roots down in a meaning much better suited for what humans are. That is: "rich in myth". Would anyone in their right mind reject the designation homo fabulus*"? 

If you want to rescue the soul of the world then look at humans and see homo fabulus. Look at people line up to buy tickets to Star Wars and see them tithe to an institution in exchange for stories about what it means to be. Look at a crowd of individuals all headbang to the same beat in front of musicians in costume and see the performers assuming god forms to the benefit of a community bathing in divine presence. Look at Greta Thunberg's face painted on the sides of large buildings and see a virginal innocence canonized to sainthood via pious martyrdom. Look at you and see that your fundamental nature will not be displaced by the wonders of GPS, refrigeration, tetanus shots and ballistic missiles.

The stories of our ancestors have been built layer upon thousand year layer. Super compacted mythopoetic sediment. These are the sorts of intensely dense knowledge legacies that the human network will mine to evolve through crises. Just as our ancestors successfully did many times over. Our stories will be jailbroken by individuals for personal enrichment, healing and transformation. A Guarani shamaness once said that the prayers her people pray are teachers. Our story is not words to read or recite. It is the ancestors teaching us. It is the target of reverence of homo fabulus who is in turn the embodiment of the story.

These boons are yours to have. Go forth and be fabulous!

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More on this and adjacent topics.

1: Carl Jung and the spiritual problem of the modern individual

2: Mythopoetics of extra sapiens. This guy has incredible content on youtube. I hope he generates more or writes a book.

3: Graham Hancock discussing the importance of the Gobekli Tepe archeological dig. Ignore the interviewer's dumb questions.

4: Here is a playlist with a full series of lecture from U of T professor Jordan B. Peterson discussing the fundamental importance of religious imagination.

5: Interview with Rice University professor Jeffrey Kripal about what happens when people have experiences that wrench them away from their operating assumptions.

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Footnotes:
* I removed the "o" to make it look more latin-y!
** If my latin is shit, I don't care. I'm playing.