How archaic man learned and mastered the world (cultural-semiotic explanation)

Rozin Vadim Markovich Doctor of Philosophy Chief Scientific Associate, Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences  109240, Russia, Moskovskaya oblast', g. Moscow, ul. Goncharnaya, 12 str.1, kab. 310 rozinvm@gmail.com Other publications by this author

Archaic culture is the very first culture that developed about 30-20 thousand years BC, also called "animistic", since the main attitude of people at that time was faith in souls (spirits). The well-known philologist and cultural historian E.M. Meletinsky considers the social plan to be the main one for understanding archaic culture. "In the foreground," he writes, "is the social, that is, the introduction of dual exogamy and the resulting prohibition of marriages between members of one "half" (phratry). The flip side of the introduction of exogamy is the prohibition of incest... the biologizing concept of the origin of society in the book “Totem and Taboo” by Freud cannot be considered satisfactory. It is not the guilt of the "sons" before the murdered "father" (totem), but the possibility of exchanging women and material goods between two human groups, which opened with the establishment of exogamy, that is a prerequisite for the emergence of society" ^{[3, p. 199-200]}.  

But if we take into account that sociality is inseparable from culture, we will understand that it is impossible to understand the meaning of archaic social representations outside the cultural-semiotic approach (it is known that one of the central concepts of culture is semiotic ^{[7, pp. 89-93]}). In particular, it is impossible to understand how an archaic person learned and mastered the world around him and himself. However, how do we even know about archaic cognition? There are sources. There are aboriginal peoples who have stopped their development at the level of archaic culture, they are studied by anthropologists, semiotics and culturologists; texts have been preserved, for example, rock paintings; some works created in archaic culture have reached our time (wedding songs, rituals, clothing and weapons, etc.). However, all this is still only direct, but more often indirect consequences of archaic cognition. The knowledge and development of the world by an archaic person still needs to be reconstructed, which is a very difficult task, given the strangeness and incomprehensibility of archaic ideas.      

Indeed, here, for example, is how the archaic man understood the eclipse. "In the language of tupi,? writes E. Taylor, ?a solar eclipse is expressed by the words: "the jaguar ate the sun." The full meaning of this phrase is still revealed by some tribes by the fact that they shoot burning arrows to drive away a ferocious beast from its prey. On the northern mainland, some savages also believed in a huge sun-eating dog, while others shot arrows into the sky to protect their luminaries from imaginary enemies attacking them. But next to these prevailing concepts, there are others. The Karaites, for example, imagined the eclipsed moon hungry, sick or dying...The Hurons considered the moon sick and performed their usual sharivari with shooting and howling dogs to heal it" ^{[10, p. 228]}. How different it is from the natural science explanation based on the laws of Kepler and Newton, which even allows you to calculate and predict the onset of the next eclipse.

Or an even more strange and incomprehensible archaic understanding of marital relations as hunting. Cultural critic Natalia Yerofeeva, who investigated this idea in the article "Attempts to decipher some stable motifs of petroglyphs from different regions in the light of structural typology", illustrates it with a text from Russian wedding lyrics:

                            I killed a sable on the mountain,

                            I killed a fox under the mountain,

                            In the quiet backwater of utitsu

                            On the sand swan

                            In the terem, I'll redden the girl-soul

                            Nastasya Egorovna.

                            Sera utitsa ? my dish,

                            And the white swan is my fun,

                            Yes Nastasia is my bride

It is extremely difficult, Yerofeyeva writes, to understand where the hunt ends and the wedding begins. So, in the caroling repertoire of the Slavs, a plot situation is widespread in which a young man hunts a fallow deer (chamois, marten, fox), which turns out to be a maiden. In the Eastern Romance epic poem "Iorgovan and the Wild Maiden from under the stone", the hero goes hunting directly for the wild maiden.

Hunting rides on light birds,

He's going to woo nice girls..."

He cites Yerofeyev and linguistic analogies. In the Turkic languages ATA ? "male", "father" with the root AT ? "shoot"; ANA ? "female", "mother" with the root AN ? "game". Yerofeyev illustrates the well-known ritual of courtship and copulation as the persecution and defeat of the victim during hunting with rock paintings (petroglyphs), which depict hunters with raised phalanges shooting at the genitals of women and animals. For example, as in the petroglyph (Neolithic. Tiu, North Africa) ^[2].

It is unclear what is common between hunting and marriage? And there are many similar perplexities when we get acquainted with the texts of archaic culture that have come down to us or the work of aborigines. Before offering a cultural-semiotic explanation, we will characterize, firstly, the culturological approach to the analysis of archaic cognition and development of the world, and secondly, the basic semiotic concepts ("sign", "knowledge", "scheme", "model") that we will use in this analysis.    

We will consider archaic culture in its formation, assuming that a person and a primary collective (family and tribe) have already formed. Their vital activity, as I show, is characterized by syncretism of three points: understanding (any phenomenon must be represented semiotically), understanding (only in semiotic form it is understood and understood by a person) and activity ^{[8, p. 20]}. For example, when faced with an eclipse, an archaic person was obviously scared, did not understand what was happening, did not know what to do. We will call such situations "problematic". Inventing an expression like "the jaguar ate the sun" (attacked the sun or the moon), he signified the situation, understood what was happening (the sun disappears into the jaguar's mouth), was able to act (he began to drive this jaguar away). Culture develops during the resolution of problematic situations and the invention of "semiotic means" (signs, knowledge, schemes, models). The semiotic means created in this way make it possible to resolve the following problematic situations, including those caused by the process of "semiotization". As a necessary condition for these processes, a "vision of the world", "social practices" are formed and, ultimately, when a person learns to reproduce all the processes, the first culture is formed. Now semiotic concepts.    

Sign. This concept allows, firstly, to explain why the text can be understood differently (the signs that make up it have different meanings in different audiences), secondly, how people can transmit information to each other (by broadcasting signs), thirdly, how they resolve problematic situations in which why-or it is impossible to act with objects (they are replaced with signs and instead of objects they operate with signs, while the result of the operation is attributed to the objects being replaced). The first two functions of the sign were actually indicated in the Middle Ages by St. Augustine. "Starting now to research about signs," he writes, "I say the opposite: let no one in them pay attention to what is, but only to what they are signs, i.e. what they mean. For a sign is a thing that affects the senses, in addition to species, forcing something else to come to mind… And we have only one reason to designate, i.e. to give a sign – to take out and transfer into the soul of another that which produces in the soul that which creates a sign" ^{[1, pp. 66-67]}.

The third function can be illustrated by analyzing the way in which the Australian Aborigines, not knowing arithmetic, divided the flocks of sheep into equal parts. Let's say the herd needs to be divided into three equal parts. At first, the whole herd was driven into a fenced area. Then one sheep drove the herd out of the fence, while one of the aborigines laid aside a pebble at the exit of each sheep. As a result, he formed a pile of stones in the same amount as there were sheep. The penultimate operation is to decompose this pile into three parts (one stone to the right, another to the left, the third in front of him, one to the right, another to the left, the third in front of him, and so on until all the stones in the pile run out). The last operation is reversed: a pebble is taken in one of the three resulting piles and at the same time one lamb is driven into the fence, then the second pebble and the second lamb, and so on until all the pebbles in the pile run out. The third part of the herd turns out to be in the fence. In this case, according to my classification, a pebble is a "sign?model" with which an aborigine acts instead of sheep ^{[9, pp. 45-47]}. The second and third functions of the sign are involved: since pebbles denote objects (not in general, but from the point of view of the division of the totality of objects, i.e. this content is the denotation), they allow the denotation to be transmitted to others (otherwise coordinated actions of aborigines are impossible) and replace the designated objects in the process of division.

Knowledge. I show that biological power is based on "signal behavior" (signals, unlike signs, do not designate, but are the first part of behavior in a certain situation ^{[9, p. 147]}), "social power" in the primary collective is semiotic. The question is, how did the expression "jaguar ate the sun" become overbearing? Let's imagine a situation that was plausible enough for those times. A total eclipse begins, the sun disappears and night falls. The leader of the team must inform the team members what is happening and what to do. But he himself is traumatized and does not know, the situation is catastrophic for him, you can lose power. Suddenly, the leader remembered how the other day a huge jaguar attacked a small child from behind the bushes. Fortunately, the men returning from hunting saw what was happening and began to shout and shoot at the jaguar out of fear. Suddenly, the jaguar abandoned the child and disappeared behind the trees. Something closed in the leader's head, he shouted "shoot up, the jaguar attacked the sun, he started eating it." The members of the team, accustomed to obey implicitly and trust the leader, began to shoot up and tried to see the jaguar. Imagination helped: they realized that the sun was disappearing into the jaguar's mouth, and he himself was hiding behind the passing clouds. He puts together a new vision ? "vision-understanding", a person learns to see (imagine) what is not physically there, but there is, because the leader informs about it. In other words, knowledge is formed: with the help of signs, in the context of the action of a power organization, it is reported about an object that actually exists (jaguars live in the forest, they have been seen), which in this case must also be seen (recreated by imagination). Isn't that right, dear reader, now you are using my help and your imagination to recreate the situation of the formation of the narrative "jaguar ate the sun"? Knowledge presupposes a fundamental doubling of objective reality: once it exists really in experience and semiotically, another time ? in the context of a power organization only semiotically based on imagination. Signs and power relations allow this new objective reality to be activated and broadcast.

A modern person, accustomed to the objectivity of scientific knowledge, can say that "after all, there is no jaguar in the sky" and therefore expressions like "the jaguar ate the sun" are not knowledge. However, we are not talking about a modern, but about an archaic person who unconditionally believed the leader and was convinced of his rightness, the eclipse really stopped (the jaguar retreated). It was more important that the members of the primary team learned to act in concert on command, which worked out a hundredfold in important situations for the team (hunting, teamwork). In this respect, expressions that force us to recreate a second, parallel objective reality can be considered real knowledge.

Schemes. One can look at the formation of knowledge in another way: the knowledge created during the resolution of problem situations set a new reality that allows you to understand what is happening and act. This structure can be called a schema. I define the latter as a semiotic construction (invention) that makes it possible to solve a problematic situation, sets a new reality, and allows you to act in a new way. ^{[8, pp. 57-70]}

Naturally, the archaic man did not yet realize that he was creating schemes, but Plato already introduces this term and even in the Timaeus discusses their purpose, calling the schemes an "image", and the knowledge related to them a "plausible myth". "But in every argument," Plato writes, "it is important to choose a beginning consistent with nature. Therefore, with regard to the image and the prototype (Plato calls ideas the prototype. ? V.R.) it is necessary to accept this distinction: the word about each of them is akin to the subject that it explains. About an immutable, stable and conceivable object, and the word must be immutable and stable; to the extent that it can have irrefutability and indisputability, none of these properties can be absent. But the fact that it only reproduces the original image (i.e., relative to the schemes. ? V.R.) and is only a semblance of the real image, and it can be said no more than plausible. After all, as genesis relates to birth, so truth relates to faith. Therefore, do not be surprised, Socrates, that we, considering in many respects many things, such as the gods and the birth of the universe, will not achieve complete accuracy and consistency in our reasoning. On the contrary, we should rejoice if our reasoning turns out to be no less plausible than any other, and moreover remember that both I, the reasoner, and you, my judges, are just people, and therefore we have to be content with a plausible myth in such matters, without demanding more" ^{[4, p. 433]}

Model. An example of modeling in an archaic culture can be considered the division by the Australian aborigines of large subject aggregates into equal parts. Here the pebbles are not only signs, but also models that allow you to divide pebbles instead of dividing objects. Let's compare the archaic understanding of an eclipse with the New European one in natural science (the explanation of an eclipse is the arrangement of planets in space on one straight line, described by the system of Kepler-Newton equations). An eclipse as an attack on the planets of a celestial jaguar allows you to understand what is happening and act, a natural science understanding not only to understand and act (naturally differently), but also to accurately calculate when an eclipse will occur. The archaic scheme of the eclipse completely defines its object (the celestial jaguar), the natural science model assumes, firstly, the presence of the modeling object in nature independent of the model and its preliminary study, and secondly, such a study of it that grasps the structure of the modeling object within the framework of the principles of natural science cognition. As a result, for a certain context set by the natural science approach, the knowledge gained on the model (for example, the calculation of the place and time of the eclipse) can be attributed to the object of modeling and confirmed in the practice of engineering type (by coming to this place at the time specified by the calculation, we will indeed be able to observe the eclipse). 

Here X is the simulated object (for example, a flock of sheep), ? is the operation of replacing the simulated object with the model M (pebbles), the symbol ? and the horizontal arrow ? denotes operating with the model (dividing the set of pebbles into three equal groups), Ma is the transformed model (the third part of the pebbles), ? is projecting the model onto the simulated object X' and its construction (creation of a third of the herd using pebbles).

It may seem that in order to build a model, you need to know how the modeling object actually works. It is unlikely, as is known, for example, the Ptolemy model of planetary motion was also quite accurate for its time. And calculations can be based on various considerations, including experienced ones.

"Those who are unfamiliar with the methods of calculating eclipses and other phenomena – we read in the article "Ptolemy in the 1st century A.D. accurately predicted eclipses for six hundred years on the basis of a flat stationary Earth" – tend to consider the correctness of such calculations as weighty arguments in favor of the doctrine of a spherical Earth and Newtonian philosophy in general. One of the most pathetic manifestations of ignorance of the true nature of theoretical astronomy is the question so often asked: “How is it possible that the system is false if it allows professors to calculate the time of solar and lunar eclipses to a second for hundreds of years?”The assumption that such calculations are an integral part of Newtonian or any other theory is completely unfounded and extremely erroneous delusion. If we take any theory as a basis or discard them all, the same calculations can be made." ? Dr. Samuel Rowbotham, "Searching Astronomy, the Earth is not a ball!".

"The Chaldeans predicted eclipses three thousand years ago with such a degree of accuracy that modern calculations are only seconds better, because we have beautiful clocks that they did not have. Nevertheless, they had a different theory of the structure of the universe from ours. The fact is that eclipses occur with some exact regularity, just like Christmas and birthdays, every few years, days and minutes, so anyone who has records of eclipses for thousands of years can predict them as well as the best astronomers, without any professional knowledge."  ? Gerard Hickson, "The Overthrown Kings" ^[6].

The fact is that the model is groped through consistent criticism and refinement of schemes that can grasp (ask) in different ways the structure of the modeling object. Yes, in the archaic culture they mostly built schemes, but there were also models. Example, medicine. At first, these were schemes: the disease was understood as a temporary exit of the soul from the body (it became hot, or cold, or the soul wanted to eat).

"The Karen in Burma," writes Telor, "run around the patient, wanting to catch his wandering soul, "his butterfly," as they say, like the ancient Greeks and Slavs, and finally, as it were, throw it on his head... This “la", that is, the soul, spirit, genius, can be separated from the body to which it belongs. As a result, Karen tries very hard to keep him with her, calling him, offering him food, etc. The soul comes out and goes wandering mainly at a time when the body is sleeping. If it is delayed longer than a certain time, the person will get sick, and if forever, then the owner of it will die... When Karen begins to get sick, yearn and get sick due to the fact that his soul has flown away, his friends perform a well-known ritual over the patient's clothes with boiled chicken and rice and conjure the spirit with well-known prayers to return to the patient again" ^{[10, pp. 270-271]}.

This is, of course, a pure scheme. But in some tribes, shamans have taken away that "food", including herbs and decoctions, which helps to recover from certain diseases. In this case, the scheme of the disease, but together with the experienced knowledge of drugs, already works as a model. Even more interesting, as we will see, is the archaic model of marital relations.

Let us now turn to the cultural-semiotic interpretation of the formation of archaic culture, explaining at the same time how a person comprehends and masters the world. The following problematic situations start the process of formation (today we would call them "anthropological"). At a certain stage of development, a person who switched completely to semiotic behavior found that he did not understand what a person's death was, what a disease was, dreams and rock carvings of animals and people created by himself (they are visible, but they are not), and also what should be done in these cases? He resolves these problematic situations by inventing a scheme of the soul (respectively, a sign and knowledge of the soul). The archaic soul had three properties: it was understood as a carrier of life (the one who has a soul is alive), had a house (for example, a person has a body), from which it could, like a bird from a nest, come out, but also come back, finally, the soul does not die, it always exists. On the basis of such a scheme (it was designated in the language as "bird", "butterfly", "shadow"), a person was able to solve these four problematic situations. He understood death as the departure of the soul from the body without returning, illness as a temporary departure with a return, dreams as a journey of the soul during sleep (or, for example, the soul of another family member came to a person), rock carvings as evocation of the soul itself (after all, the image was created by the person himself, as a result he saw animals and people, but without their bodies). According to these interpretations, the person acted practically. For the soul of the deceased person, since she was left without a home, the collective built a new permanent house ? a burial (grave), where everything that the soul needed to continue life (weapons, clothes, food) was carried. Or a temporary house, for example, back in the early twentieth century, the Khanty and Mansi carved a wooden idol from the crown of the house where the deceased lived, into which, according to their beliefs, the third soul of the deceased person inhabits (the first went to live in the ancestral land, the second in a permanent burial). There are two more houses for the dead: the "land of the dead", in which a person continues to live as before, and the "tree of life", on the branches of which birds were depicted-the souls of deceased people.  

Evocation of souls by creating images (rock paintings, masks, small sculptures, tattoos) allowed us to begin to communicate with souls ? to make requests to them, to bring gifts (the origins of sacrifice). At least half of the incandescent images are smeared (masks and sculptures are perforated). This allows us to suggest that a person has learned not only to summon souls, but also to send them back to where they came from (by destroying the works he created). That is, a sacred cult is beginning to take shape.

But no less important was the next step and process ? the extension of the soul scheme to natural and social phenomena. For example, a river flows, fish live in it, it can spill and wash away a hut or drown a person in a whirlpool. Is not a living being, therefore, she has a soul. The same applies to the sun, moon, stars, wind, earth and other natural elements. What is the psychological mechanism here? Approximately the same as in the process of inventing circuits.

Why, for example, a person asked a question, a river or a wind then help a person, then punish, i.e. there is a real problem situation. Man resolves it by inventing schemes of the soul of the river and wind, and thereby considering them as living beings (as "spirits"). Well, then it becomes clear to him what to do ? to summon these souls and make sacrifices to them. For example, the Australian aborigines evoked the soul of the wind (the spirit of the wind), depicting it with a spiral pattern (a spiral wind twists sand or dust). "It was customary for all Slavs to feed the wind with bread, cereals, and meat. Each nation had its own traditions of appeasing the wind… The ancient Aztecs believed that the wind god Eyecatl set the Sun and Moon in motion. Round temples were erected in honor of the wind god, because he did not like corners…There were interesting rituals on the territory of North America. So, the Chorti Indians used a lasso to catch the north wind, which brings diseases and evil, and tied it up…According to legend, one day an old woman came to Solomon and asked him to punish the wind that scattered the flour she had just bought. Wise Solomon, not wanting to blacken God in the eyes of people in the face of the wind, laid the blame and compensation for damage on the sailors who that day prayed to Heaven to send them a strong tailwind ..." ^[5]

The process of inventing schemes describing social phenomena is more complicated. Let's consider a few cases. Obviously, the problematic situation for a person was the comprehension of the similarity of people in the primary collective, their involvement in the family or tribe. For example, how to understand this involvement for a son and a deceased father or a deceased grandfather? A new scheme is being invented. Where did the soul come from to the son? Isn't it from the father, and to the last ? not from the grandfather? And don't all members of the tribe have common souls, passing from the dead to the born? In other words, the new schemes contained a new property ? souls could move from one house (body) to another.

An even more difficult problem situation is the comprehension of the birth of children. A mother has her own soul, but where does her child's soul come from? Even when the connection of pregnancy with intimate relationships was noticed (when Australia was discovered, tribes were met for whom this connection was still unknown), it was still unclear for a person the appearance of the child's soul in the mother's body. Petroglyphs suggest how, in the end, this problematic situation was resolved.        

The result of a successful hunt is the death of the animal, therefore, his soul left the body and went to the land of the dead. Then the hunter is a kind of shepherd, distilling the soul from the body of the animal to the land of the dead. The result of an intimate relationship, on the contrary, led to the appearance of a child in the mother's body and, consequently, his soul. Again, it turns out that now the husband (groom) distills the soul in the opposite direction ? from the land of the dead to the body of his wife. There is not much left, which happened ? to identify hunting with marital relations, the husband (groom) with the hunter. This story is depicted in different versions in thousands of petroglyphs. You can guess why there are so many of them. Probably, these petroglyphs were created in order to support both hunting and marriage. After all, as we noted above, the schemes set the reality perceived by an archaic person as reality, as what really is.

It seems that the "groom-hunter" narrative is a typical scheme, because the understanding of intimate relationships as the activity of the groom, distilling the soul, completely fits into the logic of "schematization". However, at the same time, this narrative describes a real intimate relationship, which, under favorable circumstances, still ends with the birth of a child with a soul. It turns out a hybrid education ? both a scheme, if we are talking about the soul, and a model, if we mean real intimate relationships.

Like all subsequent cultures ("Ancient Kingdoms", ancient, medieval, Renaissance and Modern times), archaic culture stood on two "whales" ? semiosis and technology. It seems that the technique cannot be based on diagrams, only on models. But this is not the case. Here is one vivid example.

The famous Norwegian traveler, archaeologist and writer Thor Heyerdahl in the book "Aku-Aku. The Mystery of Easter Island" tells about the rise of a huge totem spirit sculpture by the aborigines. The headman of the village located on the island called eleven young people and began to command their work.

"Their only tools were three round wagons – wooden logs, the number of which was later reduced to two, and a lot of boulders and stones gathered around <...> The figure's face was buried in the ground, but the headman's people managed to bring the ends of the logs under it. Three or four people hung on their other ends, and the headman lay flat on his stomach and began to put small stones under his head. When eleven guys were loading the ends of the logs with force, it seemed to us that the figure was shaking a little or moving a little, but in general nothing seemed to change, only the pebbles became larger <...> When evening came, the giant's head rose a whole meter above the ground, and the resulting space was densely packed stones... On the ninth day of work, the giant was lying on his stomach on top of a carefully laid out tower, the height of which reached three and a half meters from the ground <...> On the eleventh day, they began to transfer the giant to a standing position, for which they again began to build up a stone slide, this time under the face, chin and chest <...> On the seventeenth day, an old wrinkled woman appeared among the long-eared ones. Together with the headman, she laid out a semicircle of small stones on a huge slab in front of the statue, where the giant was to be erected. It was pure magic... the headman tied a rope around the giant's forehead and tied it with tripwires to stakes driven into the ground from four sides. And now the eighteenth day of work has come. Some began to pull the rope to the shore, some people slowed down for another, others gently pushed the figure with a log. Suddenly the giant began to move visibly. The command sounded: “Hold on tight! Hold on tight!"The giant rose to his full mighty height and began to tip over, the tower was left without a counterweight, stones and huge boulders fell down with a noise <...> But the colossus calmly swayed in a standing position and remained standing" ^[11].

Before the ascent of the Tour, Heyerdahl many times asked the headman, who from his grandfather (and he from his father) knew the secret of lifting and moving stone monoliths, to tell how his ancestors did it. And every time the headman answered: "the spirits themselves got up." Apparently, the headman could not imagine that a totem spirit could be forced to do something against his will. You can ask and persuade people to help, but not force them. What, from the point of view of the headman, were the technical actions selected, probably for many decades, to raise the monolith? Magical actions that incline the totem spirit to help a person. In addition, the shaman offered a sacrifice to the spirit and directly asked him to get up. 

Again, on the one hand, a scheme (persuading the totem spirit to stand up), on the other ? a model of the technical process (making levers, slipping stones of different sizes under the monolith, etc.). When an archaic person noticed the effect of some of his actions (hitting a stone, lever action, cutting or stabbing effects, warming or cooling), he explained this effect by the fact that such an action affects souls (spirits). In this sense, all ancient technologies were magical and sacred. What, from a modern point of view, looks like an ancient technique, for an archaic person is a way of influencing the souls of sacred beings.

The archaic culture existed for about two tens of thousands of years. First, a person, comprehending his states (death, illness, dreams, "artistic" vision), invents an anthropological scheme of the soul. Then, on the basis of this scheme, extending it to new situations, he creates schemes of natural elements and social phenomena, reviving the corresponding phenomena. As a result, he finds himself in a new world that he created himself, surrounded by souls and spirits. However, now he knew what he could do with them?make sacrifices, summon, send them back. Turning schemes into models, the archaic man acted quite effectively for his level of development. In turn, schemes and models include signs and knowledge in their composition, which is a necessary condition for the translation of these schemes and models, as well as actions with them that ensure the resolution of problematic situations.