[Entry written in response to viewing the Venus of Willendorf and the Venus of Sereil, tiny sculptures - presumed fertility talismans - tens of thousands years old. Images for both can be googled online.]

            Once upon a time, they called it myth. But now we’re sophisticated, so we call it ‘hypothesis’. This is something I’ve been mulling around in one form or another for many years. And now these perfect little ‘Venuses’ set me off. So here I am in my usual ‘serious’ writing time riffing off on some strange ‘speculation’ for the presumably ephemeral world of the blog.
            A few years ago, at the public beginnings of the various geneticist discoveries and speculations, I read that a woman geneticist had proposed that the evidence suggested a single female antecedent for all humanity. I don’t know whether the theory was exploded or ignored, or if it has gone subterranean and is gestating, as so much of long-term science tends to do. But in any case the theory added a ripple to a small rivulet.
            Before the legalists got ahold of it, the Eve myth was purely a question of the emergence of self-awareness. Just as the book says, the emergence of self-awareness is the emergence of the moral sense, including the sense of shame, guilt and doubt. It is also, of course, the source of freedom. ‘Healing’ the self-separation at the core of self-awareness is not different from the act of freedom. So it’s not about whodunit or who’s ‘guilty’. God, I presume, wanted us to be free. But, of course, he’s not a big fan of evil. So, in a sense, he has to turn his back.
            [Parenthetically,the legalists are the problem across the board. They can destroy anything, politically, culturally or in terms of religion. The Constitution justifies torture. The Koran and the Bible justify the murder of innocents and the suppression of truth. Etc., etc. Jesus, Muhammad and Moses (not to mention Lao Tse, Confucius, Chu Hsi, Gautama, Tung Shan, Linchi, Vyasa and Shankara) wanted us to stand where they stood, and, insofar as we can, see what they saw.]
            But, in any case, if this is true, Eve here serves as the mythic transmitter. To some extent, she serves the traditional mythic role of the female – as power and emotion. When we understand self-awareness,we understand that value, in experience, is not grounded in thought, but in feeling. The reflective construct encapsulates feeling, so we tend to think of it as relatively limited; that thought goes further and through a wider range of distinctions. But I would suggest that every thought begins in a specificity of feeling which is the value – the value that is subsequently abstracted and ‘evoked’ by the thought. The thought is reflexive. But the value is immediate in the feeling.
            Self-awareness begins in the isolation of power. That is, power is the first ‘conscious’ perception of the ‘self’, the recognition that my own volitional force constitutes something essentially outside the frame of the immediacy of the perceptual field. And this power is intimately related to the feeling base of value. The perception of a value in terms of the feeling is the isolation of power. In the pre-reflective immediacy, we follow the values which are intimately related to our immediate needs, and, as such, need, feeling, value and action are all more or less simultaneous. The Epicurean moment of ‘creation’ in this scenario, the inexplicable random shift, is the moment that opens the view of value as the power of feeling in the instant between perception and volition.
            In terms of the myth, then, Adam is the ‘mind’, the thinking element.Hence, he ‘names’ the animals. But Eve is the feeling, power, valuebase from which the self-awareness evinced by ‘naming’ arises.

             As a consequence, from early on, I have wondered whether women or a woman wasn’t the first to develop self-awareness.
            Self-awareness, as we know from our own personal histories, is a moment of access and an interpretive construct. No individual can or could have developed more than a tiny fraction of the whole construct. It probably took millennia to evolve anything approaching a comprehensive set of abstractions. But let’s assume a speculative situation. Let’s assumethat a woman got the first access and – accepting some experiential validity in the mythic formulation – that self-awareness was first of all an ‘initiatory’ sphere for women only. In other words – and this must have been the case in some form – that the first access, while not providing anything resembling a ‘complete’ reflective understanding of the world, nevertheless had a peculiar force as, shall we say, a ‘shamanistic’ power.
            If, initially and for the duration of the basic development, the evolution of self-awareness was limited to women, either by nature or by design, this might explain our little votive figures.

             Someof us who did hatha yoga as an individualist pursuit of body awareness– and not as power manipulation or in the collective classroom processes that are actually dance and not yoga – eventually discovered that the body is the mind. That is, not only is the body an elemental part of the storage system of memory, but the actualities of thought are also grounded in the body not only as the natural frame of cogency or unity but as the field of values as well. This ultimately tallies with the recognition that values themselves are ‘feelings’ prior to thought.
            The immediate feelings that constitute ‘the world’, however, are not necessarily located in the ‘outer’ extremities, the head, hands and feet. And since the unity itself is based on the cogency of the body, and Unity or the One is the elemental moment of the reflex, the symbol for this is essentially the torso.
            In other words, what I am suggesting here is that these votive figures are intimately related to the human desire for self-awareness at the time of the dawning of self-awareness or reflexive or reflective consciousness. Whether they were created by men or women remains moot, although my inclination would be to assume that they are created by men as votive offerings in the hope of acquiring the peculiar power developing in the women. They may also be power objects in themselves, that is, objects in which the initiatory force of self-awareness was presumably vested.
            This would also explain the common posture of the forward leaning head and the peculiar, if varied, treatment of the head itself. Although self-awareness originates in a certain perceptual understanding of the body, it also brings the sense of the self into the head, as well as the discriminative array of formal thought.

             We have to understand that the immediacy of the pre-reflective world is tantamount to the ‘psychic’. That is, if we silence the thinking mind, we will find that insight as immediate function passes beyond the apparent limits of the causal. If the women had begun to develop the reflective, but the men had not, the men would spontaneously recognize the peculiar power of the new understanding and utilize the invocatory power and understanding available to them in their desire to attain this new ‘state’.
            Presumably, they were ultimately successful.