Over the Memorial Day weekend, we all went to the L.A. Museum of Natural History. The ladies had all been previously, but this was my first excursion there. Located on (or immediately next to) the USC campus, the Museum itself is a fairly impressive facility. Its facade demonstrates the appropriate amount of age to seem authentic and its expansive grounds house a huge diversity of really impressive exhibits. I was very pleased with the entire affair.
The various wings of the museum were immense, and housed animals of North America and Africa, Native American cultures, gems and minerals (Syd's favorite room), dinosaurs and ancient mammals of various epochs...just about everything you'd hope to see and in ample supply.
One exhibit that stuck with me was a traveling feature called
The Mysterious Bog People. I had heard of the topic after seeing a History Channel program a year or so ago. The basic storyline is this:
Many parts of Northern Europe, including present-day Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, have huge sections of lands covered in bogs. They have been there for thousands of years. In the early 20th Century, the Industrial Age and the starving will of the local inhabitants inspired the draining of these bogs. Doing so uncovered a huge supply of peat moss, which had demonstrated increasing value as fuel. People began farming the bogs, draining it of water and cutting the muddy underlayers into peat bricks.
In the years of ensuing dissection of the land, local peat farmers began finding relics of the past. Sometimes it would be ancient tools -- axes and such. Sometimes it would be jewelry or coins -- some dating to Roman times. On more dramatic occasions, the bogs presented corpses. But more than just your average skeleton, these bodies were effectively mummified in the exotic elixir the bogs had concocted. Most strikingly, most of the bodies were left with clothes and hair in tact.
There is a lot of research about the bodies and other relics of what has been found. If you're interested,
check this out. I won't go into all that. What really struck me -- and what was so well done about the exhibit -- was the chronology of myth and legend that paralleled the actual timelines of the bodies given to the bog.
It turns out, the Roman intervention in the area afforded historians glimpses of the Pagan-esque rituals practiced by the local peoples. The reigning theory is that people sacrificed individuals -- many times children -- to the bogs as some sort of wish for immortality. Or transport to a timeless sanctuary. Or divine providence. As with the Egyptians, it seems, ancient peoples felt the inherent need to offer something to the Earth. Many times, that something was the ultimate gift...a life.
The exhibit did a good job of segmenting and chronicling the evolution of the peoples around the bogs -- from prehistory to Roman times and into medieval periods. I'm sure we've all felt it when dwelling on these topics, but that hazy-strange mixture of wonder, awe and deja-vu pervaded the entire afternoon. Like fixating upon the stars and the boundless abyss of space, dwelling upon the unexplained niches of history can make one dizzy with speculation.
I'm sure most people at any stage of history are largely consumed by the banality of daily life. But why does it seem that people in those ancient times led unwittingly mystical existences? Or are we simply inclined to force that perception upon them because of our need for drama and causality?
There's just such an alien sense of those periods of time, when ignorance and superstition regimented daily life. Even more, I've always been fascinated by the thought of small groups of influencers shaping history. Mystics and priests and politicians and warlords and shamans who exert blatant and/or covert authority over broad sections of humanity en route to changing human history. For personal gain or other purposes, someone (or someones) at some times, sensed their own ability to sway opinion and move the masses.
Back then, it would seem easier to mold minds by enshrouding subversive intent in myth and legend. It was the lingua franca of the times, when stars were animals and day and night themselves were personified as sentient creatures.
The thought of going to sleep beneath pitch black skies, in cold clean air, where the failing light of a campfire or torch and the stars above defined your limited perimeter of safety, fascinates me. No wonder people felt compelled to create fables to try and explain away the fear that lurked just beyond the firelight in the line of trees over there. The night was the womb of fiction.
Perhaps, when mixed with coincidence, that fiction took on mystical portent. If a body fell into a bog and a drought ended, did the local people instinctively see that as a sign? Or did a cunning elder weave a story around the incident, seizing the moment of serendipity for his own veiled agenda -- turning what was merely an unfortunate accident into a tool of subterfuge? And did those legends cultivate within families, being handed down from father to son for generations, giving families the control of villages, towns and, eventually, countries? Religions?
There is a point where that question crosses a line. A regrettable junction when simplicity and a faith in nature mutates into deceit and abuse of human weakness. When did we become herds to be conned and culled by shadowed shepherds? Was it simply a function of population? Was there a point when the truth couldn't spread fast and far enough to educate a growing sea of humanity? And when the educated batch traveled abroad, doubling back onto its itself and returning to its birthplace to find a hovel of simpletons, did they sit down at tables with a want to exploit rather than educate?
As a result, have we become conditioned toward conspiracy paranoia because of millennia of abuse at the hands of unseen illuminati? Do those same illuminati plant the seeds of stigma against that paranoia as a means of self preservation? When the truth is plainly presented, could we really deal with it? Are the DaVinci Codes and Roswells too much for us to bear? Are the Jews and Muslims unable to live with the realities of their misted histories? Perhaps their ever-intensifying conflict is not a war with each other as much as a struggle against the mounting possibility of dispelling those myths that have for so long defined them.
Truth can change everything. Who am I anyway? Certainly no one to offer anything but further speculation and misinformation. Tell me a plausible explanation yourself and I'm as apt to believe it as the caveman or cobbler that breathed the same air I do now thousands of years ago. We're all flawed, suspicious, believing, passive, terrified, angry, stupid people with a handful of exceptional offspring who discover the spectacular.
After leaving the bog people exhibit, there was a small alcove with a fountain. Passersby were encouraged to throw a coin into the water and acknowledge that the same practice that kids around the world today practice had its roots in ancient offerings to Mother Earth. Wishes to a well; coins to a bog.
My wish was to make this blog somehow more connected and conclusive. Back to the bog for me, I'm afraid.
