{"id":392,"date":"2009-10-09T12:15:39","date_gmt":"2009-10-09T12:15:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/apagansblog\/2009\/10\/is-ritual-necessary-for-sustainability.html"},"modified":"2009-10-09T12:15:39","modified_gmt":"2009-10-09T12:15:39","slug":"is-ritual-necessary-for-sustainability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/apagansblog\/2009\/10\/is-ritual-necessary-for-sustainability.html","title":{"rendered":"Is Ritual Necessary for Sustainability?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night Joan Marler of the
\nInstitute of Archaeomythology<\/a>
\n— gave a fascinating talk about the likelihood Europe’s first agricultural
\npeoples had developed writing 8,000 years ago, long before Sumer.  <\/span>It is called the “Danube Script<\/a>.”   <\/span>The evidence she offered was persuasive to me.  <\/span>But fascinating as this was, the point
\nMarler made about their farming is what led to today’s post.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n


\nThese early agriculturalists
\napparently farmed successfully in Southeastern Europe and Turkey for many
\nthousands of years.  <\/span>There is no
\nevidence of war, certainly none of weapon production or social hierarchies like
\nthose that came later.  <\/span>There is plenty of evidence for their living well beyond simple subsistence, with art, beautiful pottery, solid houses, and decoration everywhere.  Speaking
\nfor myself, they represented a wonderful balance between the egalitarian
\nsocieties that characterized most hunting and gathering cultures and the
\npossibilities for settlement that agriculture opened up.  <\/span>It was a balance that lasted a long
\ntime, longer than the time from Socrates to now.

They had developed a deeply
\nsustainable agriculture unlike the rape and pillage approach of modern corporate
\nagriculture, that is to farms what the ‘religious’ right is to religion.  <\/span>Based on altars and other
\nobjects found on sites where these communities existed, Marler argued they had
\ndone so by integrating farming into a ritual order – that is, by placing our
\nutilitarian need for food into a larger sacred context.<\/p>\n

Marler’s comments reminded me of
\nanother example from our own continent. 
\n<\/span>Northwestern Indians had the technology to take nearly all salmon from
\nany rivers other than perhaps the very largest, like the Columbia.  <\/span>They also had a motive.  <\/span>Dried salmon was an important trade
\ngood<\/a>  <\/span>in much of the West.  <\/span>Yet despite archaeological records of
\nsalmon fishing for at least 9,000 years, they did not do so.<\/span> They also enmeshed their fishing into a larger ritual context.<\/p>\n

I suspect we will continue to
\ndestroy our world until we, like those tribes and perhaps those farmers of so
\nmany thousands of years ago, learn to subordinate our technological power to
\nlarger contexts of the sacred.
\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night Joan Marler of the Institute of Archaeomythology — gave a fascinating talk about the likelihood Europe’s first agricultural peoples had developed writing 8,000 years ago, long before Sumer.  It is called the “Danube Script.”   The evidence she offered was persuasive to me.  But fascinating as this was, the point Marler made about their…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[109,106,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-pagan-culture","category-science-and-technology"],"yoast_head":"\nIs Ritual Necessary for Sustainability? - A Pagan's Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/apagansblog\/2009\/10\/is-ritual-necessary-for-sustainability.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Is Ritual Necessary for Sustainability? 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