This work began almost 15 years ago when I disappeared down a rabbit hole where I was studying the origins of dragon and serpent mythologies in matrifocal cultures that came before the Indo-Europeans.  It was an art and writing project that involved my creating a book of dragons, treating the various dragons and dragon-like mythological beings as species within a genus, exploring them biologically and socially.  I became intimate with the religions, mythologies and social structures of ancient aboriginal societies and early civilizations at the root of dragon myths.  I found myself living and breathing ancient air, viewing, listening to, and feeling the world in a different way.

This alternative path features a world view that presupposes connection.  Studying ancient matrifocal society, I was introduced to an experience characterized by an immanent presence rather than a separated, transcendental god.  Interconnection is presupposed.  The individual is part of a larger process.

These themes are, of course, reemerging in contemporary times through a number of avenues, including Eastern practices, drugs, group art/aesthetics such as dance and chanting, and aboriginal spiritual paths.  I was exploring the origin of dragon myths, discovering the cultural heritage of societies that had their myths and familiars demonized by conquering patrifocal societies.  I found myself exploring origins of culture from a very non-Western frame of reference.  Studying the origins of dragon mythology led me to a study of the earliest origin of myth.  Serpents were some of the first carved images that emerged, which led to an exploration of what exactly happened when culture exploded just before, during or after the African diaspora.  Studying serpent mythology led directly to a study of consciousness and the origin of culture.

I was immersed in a different presuppositional matrix from that which characterizes most contemporary theorizing.  Presupposing that everything is connected, assuming that human evolution featured our thriving in a matrifocal context until the emergence of proto Indo-Europeans, herding societies and the larger agriculture-based communities, I found myself asking questions that I wasn’t sure had been asked before.

The question which broke things open was:  If brains had been growing smaller for the last 25,000 years and if we had been transitioning from a matrifocal to a patrifocal frame, then might there be remnants of those ancient matrifocal aboriginals featuring a larger brain and difficulty with language?  The answer was that many autistics have larger brains, their right hemisphere never having diminished in size, and they often have a neurological difficulty with speaking.

I had presupposed that humans had evolved while living in matrifocal societies.  I had also presupposed that seemingly noncontiguous disciplines might be directly connected, particularly the sciences studying mythology, consciousness, evolution, neuropsychology, anthropology and social transformation.  Perhaps most importantly, I presupposed that integrating the immanent goddess of the ancient aboriginals, featuring an experience of all things being connected, with the narrative, often split, consciousness of the patrifocal societies that followed offered a useful synthesis when seeking to understand how humans evolved and how to describe this evolution.

Those that are good with children can often think/feel like children.  To be good at theorizing human origins, I am suggesting that it is useful to experience those early evolutionary states.  This work seeks to offer useful interventions in a number of different areas.  I am hypothesizing that it is useful to presuppose connection and matrifocal origins when seeking to understand how we came to be.

In the February 27, 2009, issue of Science on page 1164 begins an article on Chinese government attempts to adjust the male/female birth ratio.  At this time, there are 120 boys born for every 100 girls.  Female foeticide has replaced female infanticide as the technique best designed to dispose of unwanted females.  Still, many baby girls are not taken to the doctor when they grow ill.  There are still quasilegal ways to dispose of children.

I hypothesize that female infanticide and foeticide are patrifocal societal tools used to maintain a patrifocal frame.  Males that don’t fit the male patrifocal ideal don’t achieve a wife and don’t pass on ideal genes.  Maintaining a high male/female birth ratio goes a long way toward encouraging long-term patrifocal societal stability.

“Bao and Li are one of four couples in their 600-person village to have espoused uxorilocal marriage, or living with the wife’s family.  Couples in some regions have opted for this lifestyle throughout Chinese history, but the practice is typically stigmatized.  By rewarding daring couples with land and public praise, Care for Girls aims to remove the stigma.  Bao says it worked:  “People don’t discriminate against you now.”  (Science, p. 1164)

The article goes…

In a dream many years ago, I was in an ancient city.  It is night and it is quiet.

I am standing by the great wall that protects the city.  It is more like a mound.  It does not rise straight up from the ground.  Still, the wall is high enough to protect the citizens.  Then, in the dream, I am viewing the city from the air, noting the great embankment making a circle around the buildings, castles, streets and homes.  In the dream, I am noticing a feature of the stones that make up the protecting walls that reminds me of dragon scales.  Looking closer at those walls, I am realizing that those are scales.  Suddenly it becomes clear to me that the great circular wall surrounding the city is a mammoth serpent, asleep, protecting the city as she dreams.

That which we seek protection from, that which frightens us most, by its very nature is the very barrier that protects us.  Our armor and the weapons that seek us are the same.  What keeps us separate is also that which most terrifies us.  Those edifices that provide us our identity are the very things that can take our…

Never has society been so capable of changing quickly as it is now.

Twelve years ago, I spent over a year cave-crawling the corridors of dragon mythology, reading many books on the subject.  That adventure evolved to a study of the cultures that were connected to the ancient serpent myths that spawned later dragon tales.  The serpent/dragon cycle of myths and legends began long before recorded time and extends to the present day.  China is the society perhaps most committed to the dragon as metaphor, a society famous for its hesitation to transform.

Clearly, that is changing.

Up until the present day, the stories a society would tell itself anchored that culture, offered solace to its citizens, informed an understanding of experiences society could not easily explain, providing cohesion and a clear sense of community.  Science has usurped much of the power of myth, but our compulsion to use myth or story to make sense of our world continues unabated.  Whereas the serpent/dragon stories retained power to comfort and explain for thousands of years, the stories we tell ourselves now change with economic cycles, news cycles and youtube fads.

A martial artist practices many moves many times until he or…

Watching movies since I was a kid, I’ve noticed an escalation in the fearsomeness of cinematic monsters.  Things like quicksand and skeletons were all it took to scare the bejesus out of me in the 50s.  Granted, I was a kid, but flicks for adults weren’t much more ambitious in what they used to frighten.  Though we had the atomic bomb in our lives to invest emotion into the latest film creations, what appeared on screen hardly competed with the kinds of silver screen horrors available today.

And so, perhaps, we might trace an evolution of those things we use to scare ourselves, beginning with the myths and legends from the past.

Obsessive person that I am, twelve years ago when I reviewed all the myth and legend literature I could find on dragons, I created a database with 428 incidents of dragon contact over the course of several thousand years on six continents.  Noted in the database is the dragon appearance, country of origin, date of conflict, dragon’s lair, his or her weak spot, weapon used if there was a fight, assistants used if the hero required help, and the nature of the treasure the dragon might have been…

There are many ways to kill a dragon. I counted several hundred strong-man dragon interventions in the almost one hundred books I read when I was snake-charmed by the subject. Courage, strength and cleverness were the qualities looked for in a dragon vanquisher. Many battles led to happy endings where the victor gained a wife.

Myths and legends are a little like spring garden catalogs, offering pictures of the ways a man can gain a mate along with instructions to society and its women on how to best encourage the man’s strong features. Our catalog of stories for the last few thousand years have offered guidance for the families of the women on how to pick strong, protective men for their grown-up little girls. When women began to pick their own husbands, they sought men with qualities that society respected, men with strength and streaks of independence, men who could be relied upon when dragons reared their heads.

Gilgamesh slew a dragon-like creature, a stand-in for the goddess, when records of these stories first emerged. Not just the Indo-Europeans, but Semitic, Asian and aboriginal peoples revel in these tales of acts of courage in gaining honor and a wife. Not…

The symbol of our earliest known religions, back when goddesses ruled the world, was the serpent. The goddess had several familiars or manifestations. The serpent was unique.

“The snake is life force, a seminal symbol, epitome of the worship of life on this earth. It is not the body of the snake that was sacred, but the energy exuded by this spiraling or coiling creature which transcends its boundaries and influences the surrounding world. This same energy is in spirals, vines, growing trees, phalluses, and stalagmites, but it is especially concentrated in the snake, and therefore more powerful. The snake was something primordial and mysterious, coming from the depths of the waters where life begins. Its seasonal renewal in sloughing off its old skin and hibernating made it a symbol of the continuity of life and of the link with the underworld.” Marija Gimbutas, 1989

Over tens of thousands of years, the snake transformed into the dragon. The Western dragon is the serpent demonized by Indo-Europeans who conquered goddess culture. In India, Indo-Europeans demoted serpent deities to a lower caste, suppressing the serpent gods in myth and story. Farther East, the serpent was deified and made magical by the Chinese,…

Early in our marriage, my wife, Marcia, opened a door and gave me a book by Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade. I’d read Joseph Campbell and William Irwin Thompson, so I was not unfamiliar with what Eisler was describing as she provided details of the matriarchal origins of contemporary culture. This was different. I was immediately afflicted with fascination and dived into study of the symbols of Indo-European culture. I studied dragons.

In a year and a half, I read everything I could find on dragon mythology, almost 100 books. My local library cooperatively brought in volumes from across the country. White-gloved, I paged through a several-hundred-year-old tome in a local research institute. What I couldn’t take out on loan, I xeroxed. My bookshelves buckled with the weight of rubber-band bound 8.5” x 11” copies of rare volumes from libraries near and far away.

I learned how symbols evolved as societies transformed. Dragons were an Indo-European demonization of the serpent symbol of the ancient goddess cultures. My study of dragons graduated to a study of the serpent and the snake. Further and deeper my studies took me. My attention came to rest about 40,000 years ago with the…