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.

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 on to describe attempts to adjust male/female ratios by intervening in the intransigent patrifocal social structure.

“The demographers realized that reversing the trend would require a major cultural shift.  Undermining the patrilineal order, they suspected, might do the trick.  With Marcus Feldman, Zhu and Li surveyed two counties in China where historically loose clan structure had led to a high percentage of men living with their wives’ families.  Both uxorilocal counties had a normal sex ratio at birth and low female child mortality.  Moreover, matrilineality seemed to provide the same benefits as patrilineality: ‘We found that daughters provided economic and emotional support to their parents equal to that of sons,’ Li says.” (Science, p. 1165)

Researchers in China have discovered that social structure is directly related to male/female birth ratios.  What other features may these unique, less patrilineal provinces reveal?  Perhaps there are additional advantages to relieving oneself of allegiance to a society heavily dependent on the concept that males are more valuable than females.  I suspect that there are positive economic repercussions.

The Chinese culture is unique in more ways than can be counted.  Whereas in the West until this last century matrifocal tendencies were demonized along with the serpent, a major symbol of the old goddess religions, in Asia the serpent was assimilated and deified.  In the East, matrifocal values were never totally repressed.  Asian spiritual paths revere the power of the female while seeking balance between the two hormonal archetypes.

The distance that the Chinese culture has to go to begin to respect the rights of women and arrive at a balance that provides bonuses to all may not be as far off as many think.  Though there are many societal habits to be adjusted, there is a spiritual infrastructure that allows for the emergence of the unique.  China is seeking profound industrial and commercial innovation and a primary position in the world’s economies.  By focusing on birth ratios as the symptom of a restraining frame of reference, the peoples of China may have a high quality source of information on how close they are coming to acquiring a useful reference for the new global economy.

Patrifocal societies may be both useful and beautiful in a world that requires and rewards stable societies that can survive over long periods of time.  Now that our global cultures are integrating, innovation is king.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then China’s new matrilineality may be the mother of innovation.

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 identity away.

This is the paradox of being human.  Becoming separate, we acquire split consciousness and self awareness.  What most terrifies us is the loss of that isolation.

I started this work a dozen years ago, seeking the origin of the dragon myth.  I followed hundreds of dragon tales and their telling on six continents through a hundred books over a year and a half.  Deep into the exploration, I found myself studying serpent myths, myths of the great goddess.  These dragon tales were rooted in these serpent stories from ancient societies that preceded the patrilineal invaders that retold them.

Finally, lingering over Marija Gimbutas’s hypothesis regarding human matrifocal, paleolithic origins, discovering Christopher Marshack’s moon calendar interpretation of ancient serpent carvings on rock, antler and bone while integrating anthropologist Chris Knight’s hypothesis of female-driven human social evolution, I found that a new origin story began to form.

Whereas Western society is founded upon the Indo-European, male viewpoint that the fittest survive, the new story precedes the Indo-Europeans, predating Darwin, Adam Smith and men with swords.  The new story is how we discover that there is no enemy and that we are all connected.  The new story recognizes the wall as also the answer to the riddle of our separate self.

It is in dream that our deepest truths lie sleeping.  I seek a theory of evolution that integrates dream with waking life.

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 she can exhibit spontaneous flexible creativity when responding to an opponent.  An ability to adjust quickly to novel circumstances has everything to do with practicing a wide variety of techniques so that a large selection of behaviors is available when the environment demands a unique response.

Western and now world culture is practicing mythology, like a martial artist practices kicks, in ways unimaginable even 75 years ago.  Commercials experiment with myth and story, looking for a message that snags.  Successful communications are reproduced by competitors until the effect wanes.  Another variation emerges.  Several myths-as-advertising cycles are running concurrently at any time.  Countless demographic subgroups are being targeted and tracked as what is most effective reaching those subgroups keeps demanding revision.

This is like a martial art of story telling, using words as a weapon, except the new moves keep getting invented.  Instead of practicing a tradition, we have evolved a martial art that practices novelty.

TV, song, print, video and gaming and film find themselves modifying in response to an audience demanding more and move novelty in what it experiences.  At the same time, media guide their audience to crave more change.

Runaway sexual selection is an evolutionary process whereby mate selection encourages the exponential increase of extreme features over generations through time.  Usually it is the male selected for something specific, for example, an Asian fish’s long tail.  The female becomes selected for her ability and compulsion to make that selection.  Over generations, the male’s tail becomes longer and longer, the female more discriminating.

Tall tales in our cultures have become the subject of the human compulsion to appraise and embrace, to sexually select just about everything in our experience.  Except humans don’t require copulation to experience satisfaction that a decision between two options was satisfying.  The stories we tell each other, the grounding myths of our culture, have themselves become the subject of our craving for novelty.  Without being consciously aware of what we have been doing, we have become sensitive appraisers of reality, like the female mate of a long-tailed fish craving long-tailed males.  We are moving at astonishing speed into a completely relativistic frame of reference.

We have prepared ourselves to experience profound change at an extremely rapid rate.  Having abandoned the established myths, rejected most of the old stories and demanded new stories at increasingly rapid speeds, we have made ourselves available to any future we could possibly devise.

Could our future possibly offer the option of experiencing the world without story?  Is it possible that in the future, the veil of myth and story will fade and we will consciously be able to choose myth or no myth?

To be able to respect, experience and appreciate the networks that we are a part of–biological, societal, personal–we need to be able to let the scales fall from our eyes.  We are now more facile with story than we have ever been.  Just in time.

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 protecting.

Searching “bow and arrow,” I learn that eleven dragons were killed by an arrow (34 by sword), seven dragons lived in lakes (36 in caves), and that dogs assisted in the harassment of dragons on nine occasions.  More dragons were killed from blows to the head and throat than any other part of their bodies.  One dragon’s vulnerable spot was his butt.

One of the things that jumps out at me when clicking through the entries is how easily these “monsters” were dispatched.  Back when you could get bubonic plague, when half the children died before adulthood, when there were constant wars, disease, starvation, major dental issues and extended families living at home, stories of relatively easily vanquished monsters were no doubt appealing.

Not so today.  We live in a golden age of monsters.  They don’t go without taking lots of humans with them.

I’ve always thought Gene Roddenberry was best when a danger was diffused by taking the Enterprise and its heroes directly into the mouth of the beast instead of fighting or withdrawing.  Star Trek loved third options.  In myth and legends, humans either slew or withdrew from dragons.  I’m sure that on Star Trek, some third choice would have been uncovered.

Taming dragons, embracing the monster, is a storyline that has emerged more with time.  E.T. championed the concept.  That scripting keeps evolving.  And so now twin monster concepts accompany us on tube and screen: terrifying, civilization-eating titans balanced by the other as ally.

We are deep into the conceptual transition that involves each of us individually facing the truth that we ourselves, and our societies, are our own worst enemy and our best friend.  Monsters evocatively fleshing out both polarities help us to exercise our imaginations.  Imaginations exercised, we are empowered to make the choices and develop the strategies to make the changes necessary for a peaceful world.

If life were a movie, the monster has arrived.  The scientist has just told us she is pregnant.  Next move, ours.

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 incidentally, dragon slayers were crushing symbols of the old societies, the demonized serpent and the social structures that these symbols represented.

In goddess cultures, children were often raised by mothers and mothers’ brothers because they frequently had no idea who their father really was. Women controlled procreation. The exchange rate for acts of valor was depreciated by the fact that the man received no family in exchange for his courageous actions. To achieve the opportunity to have children, men had to impress the women in other ways. Women were not looking for the high testosterone guy who could fend off other tough guys, collect lots of stuff and make sure his wife did not dally around while she took care of the kids that he was sure were his own. Women were not looking for providers.

I am suggesting that before the Indo-Europeans, if a man sought a mating opportunity, he would have to dance his way into her heart. It is back when the women were strong and the men were good looking.

Well, those days are back again.

In just a little more than a single generation, there has been an extraordinary transformation in the criteria that a woman uses to pick a mate. We’d have to go back 6500 years, before the Indo-Europeans came barreling out of Southern Russia, to see anything like what has emerged of late. A host of factors have contributed to the transformation, including high divorce rates, high percentages of women employed in the work force, women with higher educations, increased leisure time, fewer children, children not dying of diseases, women not dying in childbirth and having children later in life. These are all factors contributing to a resurgence in an autonomous, self-assured female population confident that goals can be achieved without relying upon a dragon-slayer husband.

Add to that how few dragons there are left to slay. Strength and cunning are little needed in modern society, certainly far less than when life was arbitrary, short, cruel, brutal, etc. Many of the most successful men today are dancers of the mind, pattern manipulators, technical specialists, men that can find ways to be paid to encourage cooperation. Women are rejecting macho, seeking mucho. Mucho attention. What women want now is a man that offers a better quality of life in the form of a man that can contribute to her feeling loved and strong.

Hence the emergence of the autistic.

High testosterone females mating with low testosterone males created the foundation for matrifocal society, the goddess cultures. Vanquished for several thousand years, this societal hormonal constellation is making a major, sudden comeback. High testosterone males mating with low testosterone females, though still a powerful current in contemporary culture (visualize Republican), is a current on the wane. Three forces are converging, creating an environment where the autistic is returning, except that the world is not exactly prepared for his and her return.

High testosterone females produce maturational delayed, low testosterone males and maturational accelerated, high testosterone females. Maturation rate is determined on a day six weeks before birth, ~230 days after conception, based upon the mother’s hormone levels. Male decelerating maturational delay, in combination with other variables, can lead to autism. For females, maturational acceleration can have the same result.

Choosing our mates in an ancient fashion draws from the past, favoring types of individuals with physiological/neurological features born perhaps over 100,000 years ago. Our challenge and opportunity is to provide an environment where those features can mature

“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, yet stripped of its matrifocal origins. Destroyed, subjugated and assimilated, serpent-worshipping goddess peoples live on in their symbol’s transformations.

There is perhaps no better symbol for our species evolution than this symbol of ancient culture, a symbol that has experienced an evolution of its own.

Still, there are other ways to trace the meandering path of our societal history than by the stories and symbols that those peoples leave behind. You can explore those ancient people themselves, the original serpent people. These are the people we call autistic. We are going back in time to before the African Diaspora, when language was still an unfamiliar art. Unfamiliar to the males. It was the females that learned to speak first.

There are four times as many autistic males than autistic females. This disparity is a riddle that has stumped investigators for many years. Approaching societal evolution as a winding serpentine path of physiological/neurological transformations, we can trace changes in hormonal constellations that reveal a history of our species. That history suggests that autistic females are even more ancient than autistic males. To find females not yet facile with language requires further windings back in time.

Autism is the evidence of our evolutionary origins, back when language was brand new. I’m not suggesting autistic people are less evolved than contemporary, normal people. It seems to me that our evolutionary future has more than a little to do with the gifts that the autistic bring us from the past. I am suggesting that our bodies are riding a roller coaster, serpentine time machine that is bringing into contemporary times peoples from the past. Autistic males from perhaps 75,000 years ago, autistic females from maybe 150,000 years ago. There are four times more males than females because the further back in time you go, the less frequently those people can emerge.

Three powerful factors have converged to draw these people to us from ancient times. 1) In the past 25 years, there have been radical changes in sexual selection as our concept of the ideal partner has transformed. Western females now select for characteristics that an autistic male features to an extreme. 2) As racial and ethnic barriers dissolve, the children reveal features closer to the last time the divergent branches were the same. 3) Environmental factors are compelling massive maturational delay.

We have not evolved down any kind of straight path but have wondered back and forth as criteria for the perfect mate has changed. That pathway has been indelibly etched within our genes. These three factors have sent us tumbling into the past to create babies with long histories before they’re born.

Our stories tell us much of how we were created. The symbols, like maps, reveal the path. Our oldest stories and images go back to Africa. But now, like the aboriginal stories, our past and our future are feeling like they are converging. It’s as if we are entering mythic times where the brand new is also, literally, the unutterably ancient. The ancient Ouroboros, as a symbol, makes sense again.

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 emergence of the first snake images on stone.

Humanevolution.net provides detail on what came next. Mind ripped open and universe poured in.

Symbology, primatology, anthropology and the study of human origins, biological transformation (concentrating on neoteny, sexual selection and Lamarckian principles), and medical conditions characterized by maturational (autism, Asperger’s, stuttering) differences sang together in a chorus describing how life unfolds. I danced to the music month after month–reading unremittingly–until the music made me nuts. Feeling crushed by the weight of my flight-to-imagination response to unremitting insight (not much of me was left in the real world), I withdrew from my studies to devote myself to starting a seemingly unrelated profession, web design.

Perhaps the most difficult thing about writing is the need to choose one thread from the vast, interconnected, non-narrative nature of experience. Life is not story. Story is what we make when feeling compelled to make things make sense, as opposed to letting things be real. Story does not convey the multileveled, ever-present nowness of multifaceted, interconnecting patterns.

Evolution is not just about transformation over time, a sort of horizontal frame. Evolution is about what’s happening in the vertical now. The dragon acted as the opportunity to note the patterns. Yet the doorway can be anything, at any time.