The Great Divide

psychoactive properties, as shown by the experiments of Claudio Naranjo, discussed in chapter twelve, hallucinogens fostered ideas of transformation , between humans and other forms of life, and of travel, or soul flight, between the middle world and the upper and lower realms of the cosmos. Combined with a society in which, because of the lack of wheeled transport, or riding, and the north-south configuration, people found it relatively difficult to travel far, the journeys to the upper and lower realms were all the more important. The sheer vividness, and the fearsome nature of some of the transformations experienced in trance, the overwhelming psychological intensity of altered states of consciousness induced by hallucinogens, would among other things have made New World religious experiences far more convincing and therefore more resistant to change than those in the Old World where, as we have seen and shall see again shortly, horse-riding and wheeled transport – carts and chariots – meant that different groups, with different beliefs, came into contact with each other far more.
    This is not to say that there were no hallucinogens in the Old World, or that they were not important. As was discussed in chapter ten, opium, cannabis (hemp) and soma were all widely used ritual substances in various regions of Eurasia. For a variety of reasons, however, the more powerful psychoactive substances gave way relatively early on to milder alcoholic beverages, whether this was because domesticated mammals needed to be controlled (riding, driving, ploughing and milking in particular needed concentration), or because the pastoral lifestyle was less communal, meaning people came together not so much for intense shamanistic ceremonies, but for more social bonding reasons, where milder euphoriants were more suitable, or because they came together to face threats from outside, when again strong psychoactive substances would have been inappropriate, while alcohol was acceptable in warrior-bonding. Beer and wine thus characterised the Old World whereas hallucinogens were more common in the Americas. This provoked a change in ideology in Eurasia, helping the relative demise of shamanism.
    In the Old World what was worshipped instead were two aspects of fertility – the Great Goddess and the Bull. Though the Bull was worshipped as an aspect of fertility, we do well to remember that this animal was more often represented by his distinctive bucrania – its head and horns – than its sexual organs. Probably this was due – as many scholars have said – to the similarity between the bull’s horns and the shape of the New Moon, added to which was the link between the phases of the moon and the menstrual cycle, especially the cessation of menstruation, which would have been noted. At this point in the history of the Old World, the Great Goddess is shown giving birth to a bull, with the bucrania emerging from her womb. Here we have a curious combination: no one can ever have seen a woman giving birth to a bull; there was clearly some confusion at this point over the mechanism of human reproduction. If the bull represented the powerful forces of nature, as well as fertility, as other scholars have maintained, these motifs may indicate that people were unaware of the real mechanics of reproduction and at that time believed instead that women were fertilised by one or other of the forces of nature, represented by bucrania. Whatever the exact beliefs, the essential thing is that throughout the Neolithic period in the Old World – whether the object of worship was the Great Goddess, the Bull, the cow, rivers or streams – the central issue was fertility, in particular human fertility.
    What we now know, but previous scholars didn’t, or didn’t pay due attention to, is that there were two threats to fertility in the Neolithic Old World. There was the weakening monsoon, which affected the fertility of all living things, but there was also the fact that the human pelvic channel had grown narrower under a sedentary, grain-based diet, as compared with a hunter-gatherer one.
    On top of all that was a developing interaction between humans and domesticated mammals that had immense ideological and economic consequences. Put succinctly and chronologically, those developments were as follows:
The domestication of cattle, sheep and goats enabled the exploitation of less good land. This brought about the development of pastoralism, as a result