Our Patriarchal History : The All-Conquering Cowboy

Cowboys and Indians:
History's relentless cattle drive

...the thing we know as 'history' is just the continuing mechanism of the Indo-European cowboys stealing the livestock, the culture, and whatever else they want from what’s left of the Goddess driven producers of plenty.

By Carl R. Hultberg / The Rag Blog / January 7, 2010

Out on the broad grasslands, the mounted cattle herders come into contact with the Stone Age foragers long tied to the land. Some of these indigenous people may have also adopted the horse as a form of transportation, but they do not domesticate other animals; they hunt and fish, do a little scratch agriculture and move on.

The tough cattle drivers are also nomadic, using great wagons to haul their lives about. The cow punchers are not part of the established farming settlements, though they borrow what they need from that culture and, of course, are known to steal cattle. The farmers are momma’s boys, Goddess worshippers, their harvests and livestock easy prey for the ruthless, sky God worshipping cowboys. Yes, this is a very old, familiar story.

But this old West show is really the story of Western humanity, still today acting out an endless range war.

The original horse-mounted cattle driving people were from the Steppes of Russia and the Ukraine. Their predatory activities, aimed at the pioneer matrilinial farming cultures operating from the Danube to the Dnieper river valleys circa 3800 BCE became what we know as ancient history which slowly evolved, eventually producing our modern culture.

The language of these original Russian cowboys, reconstructed as Indo-European, was the basis for most Western languages as well as Persian and Indian Sanskrit. Indo-European thought permeates our literatures and philosophies through the structure of their language. Their gods and mythologies led to our Western religious ideas. They were where we came from.

As the original all-conquering Patriarchs, everything about the Indo-Europeans, especially their birthplace, has been highly sought after by modern male competitors. Ever since the British discovered the Vedas and the common Indo-European language factor when they conquered parts of India in the 1700s. The Nazis searched for the legendary Hunza people in Tibet in the 1930s, hoping to find the long lost blue eyed, blonde haired proto German race. The skinheads in Idaho still cling to these ridiculous racist theories, calling themselves Aryans hardly noticing that the inhabitants of the Islamic Republic in Iran are doing the same thing. (Iranian = Aryan.)

Maybe -- in the eyes of the male God -- being part of the original all conquering European mantribe, the Indo-Euros, could be as good as, or even possibly trump, being one of the original Israelites, for whom He wrote the big Book. That seems to be the way the male mind works. If there is any legitimacy to the male dominant cultures we see in operation around the world, it must be through an original connection to the first male race, the one olde man God made His original covenant with. Primitive. To this day, extremely primitive.

But thanks to the studies of archeology and linguistics, we now know that instead of just one basic human principal and one basic unified human experience, there are actually three human types and three separate human histories.

The first human type was the forager. He and she traveled all over the world eating roots, wild fruits, and grains, trapping and killing animals, fishing for their food. These people were relatively easy to get along with. They had no basic responsibilities other than keeping up with the cycles of Nature. Labor was divided between the sexes on a fairly equal basis. Men hunted and fished, creating biodegradable technologies and personal clan animal loyalties to facilitate those activities. Women gathered wild foods, prepared meals, raised children and developed technologies like weaving, potmaking, knotting. People existed and evolved like this for 100,000s of years.

At some point, probably in the Middle East, agriculture was developed. Also certain animals were domesticated. Although it is probably safe to say these were female cultural innovations, being part of the gathering non-hunting part of the male/female labor divide, we can probably never be sure. What is known is that as early as 8000 BCE farmers, the second great human type, were operating in Anatolia (modern Turkey), moving into Greece and eventually, a few thousand years later, into the Balkan regions of Europe. If there ever was a Goddess worshipping culture among human beings, these inhabitants of Old Europe would have been it.

Images of female authority and bounty are everywhere in the archeological evidence. Although we assume they possessed no written language, they none the less used their knowledge of Nature and proto-science to create many new varieties of domesticated plants and animals. The same ones we use today to sustain us.

So farmers were very different from the foragers they had evolved from. Instead of the life free from all obligations except understanding Nature, the farmer had a slew of responsibilities. Just preserving seed grain and young livestock for future use or trade was an enormous shift in human behavior from the immediacy of hunting and gathering.

Maintaining foodstock genetic modification projects that spanned generations of husbanders and cultivators would seem impossible without written records, from our modern competitive points of view.

But then again, we have been trained through our languages to think like the male dominant Indo-European usurpers, the third type of people, not the original Goddess worshipping pioneer farmers.

The Indo-Euros were a hybrid. Their horse and cattle currency (the first) became our world of stocks and bonds. Their attempt to create a stable culture based on useful elements within the Goddess farming experience without surrendering their male dominance and male lineage projection is still the script to the movie we all get to act in every day.

There just has to be a way to be a successful ruthless competitor promotion driven materialist spiritual community service oriented family man (or its female equivalent). The proverbial square peg in the round hole. Got a bigger hammer?

If only we could find the original homeland of the Indo-Europeans, maybe then we’d come to understand what it was in their vision that set us on this course of endless animal sacrifice, male dominance, materialist competition, human warfare, and eco-destruction. The trouble is all we have left from the I-E is the language they bequeathed to us. And, of course, the way of thinking that goes with it. What we would find if we discovered the original “Aryan” homeland could only be that the Indo-Europeans and the male reverent way of thinking they passed on to us are the explanation for why we will always find it difficult to contemplate female origins for human culture.

What was it we were talking about? I got distracted while dreaming about Conan the Barbarian again. The hope for humanity is that we will finally stop worshipping the Cowboy and go back to worshipping the Cow. The male urge to strut and kill has a natural outlet. It is called hunting and it goes back just about as far as we do as a world presence.

But this has gone way beyond hunting, and the male domain is now the entire experiential base of humanity. The human female urge to nurture and protect no longer has a viable outlet. There are few if any surviving female lineages. We are all patrilieal cowboy predators now.

Yet are there still situations where the historic benefits of our original female enculturation remain apparent? A garden, or perhaps a kitchen or a school. The naked statue of Woman as Justice, still holding the scales outside the courthouse, the judges with their wigs and robes. Faint echoes.

The cowboy tries to straddle the impossible horse. The foreknowledge of the Matriarchs is now an endless field of plunder and exploitation. The farm is a factory that poisons the people, the animals and the land. Industries that derived from simple home technologies now strip the world of its resources and create endless piles of useless waste. The land, the air and the sea are all fished clean purely for the male ideal of perfect domination.

Population continues to peak as Patriarchs create people solely as possessions, even if they are ultimately unwanted and must be abandoned, incarcerated or exterminated. The ill advised biproducts of unadulterated human male animal success are everywhere.

Men refuse to agree. How can they? They are not designed to agree, only to compete for favor. So how can men and the women who think like them be satisfied controlling the species when they know, unconciously, what they do will ultimately crush Humanity?

When do we finally dare break free from the staring contest with Conan the Indo European and look at last at the Neolithic villages where the Motherlode of humanity’s wealth and knowledge was actually first unEarthed?

Look again at the terra cotta figurines of the large ancient women... now what do you see?

[Carl R. Hultberg's grandfather, Rudi Blesh, was a noted jazz critic and music historian, and Carl was raised in that tradition. After spending many years as a music archivist and social activist in New York's Greenwich Village, he now lives in an old abandoned foundry in Danbury, New Hampshire, where he runs the Ragtime Society.]

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