The Great Divide

of which these kinds of farmers spread beyond village life and became more dispersed. This dispersal in turn had an effect on religious ideology, a move beyond shamanism. Among pastoralists the calendar was less important, because domesticated mammals give birth at different times of the year, unlike plants which, particularly in temperate zones, are more directly linked to the cycle of the seasons. (Cattle can give birth at any time of the year, goats in winter or spring; with sheep it depends on how near the equator they are – in temperate zones, sheep lamb in spring but in warmer climates the lambing season can extend throughout the year. For horses the natural breeding season is May to August.)
A further aspect of domesticated mammals is that their whole life takes place above ground, as it were. Unlike plants, which need to be sown in the soil, and spend some time out of sight, before re-merging in a different form, animals are less mysterious. In a pastoral society the underworld is less important, less necessary, less ever-present. Together with the relative absence of hallucinogens, this development made the netherworld far less of an issue in the Old World than in the New.
This may have had other consequences. Although people in the New World never developed the wheel, for good reasons, they did have the concept of roundness – they had rubber balls for their ball games, they sometimes formed balls out of human heads or captives’ bodies, which they rolled down pyramid steps, and the combatants in boxing games fought with purely spherical carved stones in their fists. Furthermore, New World peoples undoubtedly witnessed the sun and moon in the day and night sky, and eclipses of both, without ever appearing to consider that the Earth itself was spherical. This is surely because, in a predominantly vegetal world, with the experience of the netherworld so vivid (and other ‘realms’ so accessible via hallucinogens), ‘flatness’ and layers were much more obvious than roundness. Not travelling great distances, particularly across the sea, aided by useful winds, they had less chance – and were therefore less prepared – to experience the world as a spherical object.
The domestication of the horse had a number of different consequences. It accompanied the development of the wheel and the chariot and led to riding. These were enormous advances, adding to the mobility of men and women in Eurasia, aiding in particular the creation of palace states, far larger than most of the New World states because the horse and chariot allowed larger territories to be conquered and then held . In the same way, the wheel and cart meant that more goods could be carried further, boosting trade and the prosperity and exchange of ideas that went with it. These factors all came together from time to time in great wars, which also displaced peoples, languages and ideas across vast areas in large numbers. The Old World was mobile in a way that the New World was not.
Horses and cattle in particular are large mammals, valued for their power. That power, however, meant that, as well as being useful, they were potentially dangerous. In such a context, the regular and frequent use of mind-altering substances was hazardous. A shaman in trance could not have handled a horse or a cow, let alone a bull. On top of that, as dispersed populations developed the habit of coming together for spouse selection, marriage, and to resist threats from outside (now greater, because wealth in the form of domestic mammals could be stolen as land couldn’t), people were driven away from hallucinogens, which offered powerful, vivid (and at times threatening) but private experiences, and were led instead towards alcohol, which offered milder, euphoriant communal social-bonding experiences. This was a major move beyond shamanism.
In this way, pastoral nomadism emerges as one of the ‘motors’ of Old World history. This is because of its inherent instability as a way of life, because the weakening monsoon caused the drying of the steppes – the natural home of pastoral nomads – meaning that they could no longer subsist as easily in their traditional fashion, and must disperse still further and invade the settled societies at the edges of the great grasslands. The predominantly east-west nature of the Central Asian steppes ensured that peoples and ideas travelled right across Eurasia. Since weather was more important to the nomads than vegetal