5. Neanderthal and the divided self

The First Archetypes are the symbols of the divided self. Their story is from deep prehistory. Everything from that far back is stored in jars of collective memory that crack, shatter and are reassembled over the generations, until the missing pieces outnumber the intact.

Neanderthal woman, Cro-Magnon man.

Above is a visual manifestation of the divided self: Root People on the left, Tool Makers on the right. These First Archetypes are best known in our current era as the related human species, Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon. Most people know that the Neanderthal died out 25,000 or more years ago, leaving behind remnants of their DNA in our Cro-Magnon genes. The preparations for their long awaited biological resurrection in the 21st century brought a lot of turbulence down on the heads of Lucky Jim Swan, Rudy Monteverdi and especially Geneva Farewell and me, Peter Chaff, in Geneva Farewell.

The Sirians are the ones who have been awaiting the return of Neanderthal. As Caretakers of inhabited planets in the nooks and crannies of our neighborhood of stars, they were dismayed when the Neanderthal stock disappeared. They had introduced these hybrid humans on Earth in the hope of stabilizing the voracious Cro-Magnon culture and guiding our evolution from Predator to Caretaker . But the Neanderthal vanished after a few hundred generations of interbreeding with the Cro-Magnon. Sirius evidently lost interest in us after that. They left us alone for 25 thousand years, sent us a brief musical message in 1986, and haven't been heard from since. (The silence from Sirius is deafening in my world. Their musical message hasn't even reached you in yours.)

Left by Sirius to sort themselves out, our Cro-Magnon ancestors (shown here) leaned heavily on their natural gift for tool-making to see them through. From wood and bone to stone and bronze, they put the materials around them to use. They would not go down without a fight! Their push to mastery marks the onset of the divided self. A side effect of this division was the gross distortion of the human gender continuum into a binary model based solely on reproductive organs at birth. Much turbulence ensued from that .

Meanwhile Neanderthal persisted in our collective imagination as the phantom half of the First Archetypes and the lost paradise of blood unity. For a century or more after the discovery of their fossils in 1856, every effort was made to degrade Neanderthal to the status of subhumans who died out because they were. The demise of Neanderthal lurks in hidden segments of our deep memory as the scandal of a family homicide. It was our first colonial disaster.

Ardyth, my Uncle Grigor's partner, knew a lot about this primal human tragedy. She describes it on page 157 of JL's Geneva Farewell:

"[E]very human being -- red, yellow, brown, black and white -- misses the Root People. Our deepest values were learned from them, so the stories say. They moved east when they were driven out of their homeland by the Tool Makers. Only a few thousand of them were left, and then those remnants died out. My ancestors wandered across the land bridge to this continent to look for more Root People, but there weren't any here. Thousands of years later the Tool Makers showed up looking for trade routes to the east and fresh sod to bust."

Ardyth had access to indigenous oral memories. In her version of the story, the white-skinned races that colonized Neanderthal homelands in Europe and the Middle East are the cutting edge of the divided self, the flowering of Tool Maker culture in all its savage glory. (A more detailed version of Ardyth's story is the subject of my next post.)

Ardyth, like Monteverdi, is a Translator. A Translator's root archetype is the Bodhisattva iwho foregoes nirvana to help others find their way. To find the source of the divided self a Translator has to sift through the 500-year period when Europe and Anglo-America were raising Tool Maker culture to the level of a global military and religious empire.

The ancient Greek stand-ins for the Root People and Tool Makers are Apollo and Dionysus. They are the sons of Zeus. Apollo is the god of peace and order. Dionysus is the god of appetite and militancy. Apollo and Dionysus are not opposed to one another, they are two parts of a whole. But there is a tension between them, the tension of the divided self. Wherever there is mortal family strife in the world's oldest stories, such as between Cain and Abel, the First Archetypes are the inspiration.

As with everything in our sublimely incomplete multiverse, the story of the Root People and the Tool Makers is not over. In recent years geneticists have successfully mapped the Neanderthal genome. Our larger-brained human sibling is ripe for rebirth to help put right what went wrong. Rudy Monteverdi expresses it this way on page 42 of JL's Geneva Farewell:

"Is it not imperative that those of us whose genes hold the remnants of this precious lost heritage come together to put the brakes to the runaway train of Cro-Magnonism?"

This was Monteverdi's mission in Geneva Farewell. It still is, and I am still with him.