Ancestors Calling Quotes

Of all things we mortals are called upon to do, the most difficult is forgiveness; in order to truly do it, you will probably have to behave as if you already have forgiven for quite a while before you have actually done so.

Coal, oil and gas are called fossil fuels, because they are mostly made of the fossil remains of beings from long ago. The chemical energy within them is a kind of stored sunlight originally accumulated by ancient plants. Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives.

That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they'd never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind's first fine art, our original act of inspired creation. Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain. And when our ancestors finally did make their first cave paintings, what were the first designs? A downward slash, lightning bolts through the bottom and middle--behold, the Running Man. Distance running was revered because it was indispensable; it was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet. You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running, or you wouldn't live to love anything else. And like everyhing else we ove--everything we sentimentally call our 'passions' and 'desires' it's really an encoded ancestral necessity. We were born to run; we were born because we run. We're all Running People, as the Tarahumara have always known.

Out there somewhere there is a love who will never dream of calling you too much. Who speaks, like you, in poetry and candlewax and stardust. Who runs outside on stormy nights to howl at the moon. Who collects bones and sings incantation and talks to the ancestors. And that lover, when you find him or her, will see you and know you – just as you are and just as you should be. And they will say yes. Yes, you. I will go there with you. I have been waiting for this.

The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends.

Gaze detection, it’s called—our ability to sense when someone is observing us. An entire system of the human brain is devoted to this genetic inheritance from our ancestors, who relied on the trait to avoid becoming an animal’s prey.

When our ancestors were attacked at Pearl Harbor, they called it a day that would live in infamy. The day the Partials attacked us with the RM Virus will not live in anything, because there will be none of us left to remember it." -President David R. Cregan, March 21, 2065, in a press conference at the White House. Three hours later he hanged himself.

We don’t need a gown. We don’t need a stage. We are walking beside our ancestors, Their drums roar for us, Their feet stomp at our life. There is power in being robbed & still choosing to dance.

Many African societies divide humans into three categories: those still alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead. As generalised ancestors, the zamani are not forgotten but revered. Many … can be recalled by name. But they are not the living-dead. There is a difference.

Would you like more sauce, sweeting?” His fingers strangled the stem of his wineglass. She could practically hear the grapes calling for help. She hoped that was a good sign. “If you don’t cease that nonsense,” he said, “you will regret it.” “Is that so, my heart?” “What about ‘precious’?” she suggested. “No.” “‘Angel’?” “God, no.” “‘Muffin’?” In response to that, he hit the shuttlecock so hard, it sailed all the way to the back wall and thwacked one of his ancestors right in the powdered wig. She cheered. “Well done, my precious angel muffin.” “This stops,” he said. “Now.

Your Ancestors Called it Magic, but You Call it Science. I Come From a Land Where They Are One and the Same.

Curiosity is a call from knowledge.

Brother Zachariah had no reason to support the Lightwoods, but everyone deserved a second chance if they wanted that chance enough. And one of Robert Lightwood’s ancestors had been a woman called Cecily Herondale.

In this manner had fought forgotten ancestors. They quickened the old life within him, the old tricks which they had stamped into the heredity of the breed were his tricks... And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him.

Dychwelyd i wlad eich hynafiaid; gwaed yn galw i waed. Return to the land of your fathers; blood calls to blood.

The soul is not a single unity; that is what it is destined to become, and that is what we call 'immortality'. Your soul is still composed of many 'selves', just as a colony of ants is composed of many single ants. You bear within you the spiritual remains of many thousand ancestors, the heads of your line. It is the same with all creatures. How could a chicken that is artificially hatched in an incubator immediately look for the right food, if the experience of millions of years were not stored inside it? The existence of 'instinct' indicates the presence of our ancestors in our bodies and in our souls.

Think of cocaine. In its natural form, as coca leaves, it's appealing, but not to an extent that it usually becomes a problem. But refine it, purify it, and you get a compound that hits your pleasure receptors with an unnatural intensity. That's when it becomes addictive. Beauty has undergone a similar process, thanks to advertisers. Evolution gave us a circuit that responds to good looks - call it the pleasure receptor for our visual cortex - and in our natural environment, it was useful to have. But take a person with one-in-a-million skin and bone structure, add professional makeup and retouching, and you're no longer looking at beauty in its natural form. You've got pharmaceutical-grade beauty, the cocaine of good looks. Biologists call this "supernormal stimulus" [...] Our beauty receptors receive more stimulation than they were evolved to handle; we're seeing more beauty in one day than our ancestors did in a lifetime. And the result is that beauty is slowly ruining our lives. How? The way any drug becomes a problem: by interfering with our relationships with other people. We become dissatisfied with the way ordinary people look because they can't compare to supermodels.

There’s something about doing things the way our ancestors used to do them that kind of puts your heart back into the rhythm of this thing called life.

Wow,” the bobcat muttered from his desk. “Your sister’s right. Your legs really are skinny.” Toni briefly thought about swiping all the cat’s crap off his desk, but that wasn’t something she’d do to anyone who wasn’t one of her siblings. But that was the beauty of being one of the Jean-Louis Parker clan . . . sometimes you didn’t have to do anything at all, because there was a sibling there to take care of it for you. “It must be hard,” Kyle mused to the bobcat. “One of the superior cats. Revered and adored throughout history as far back as the ancient Egyptians. And yet here you sit. At a desk. A common drone. Taking orders from lowly canines and bears. Do your ancestors call to you from the great beyond, hissing their disappointment to you? Do they cry out in despair at where you’ve ended up despite such a lofty bloodline? Or does your hatred spring from the feline misery of always being alone? Skulking along, wishing you had a mate or a pack or pride to call your own? But all you have is you . . . and your pathetic job as a drone? Does it break your feline heart to be so . . . average? So common? So . . . human?” Toni cringed, which helped her not laugh.

Madness, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings . . . the men of old who gave things their names saw no disgrace or reproach in madness; otherwise they would not have connected it with it the name of the noblest of arts, the art of discerning the future, and called it the manic art . . . So, according to the evidence provided by our ancestors, madness is a nobler thing than sober sense . . . madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human.

People often think that white supremacy is a term that is only used to describe far-right extremists and neo-Nazis. However, this idea that white supremacy only applies to the so-called “bad ones” is both incorrect and dangerous, because it reinforces the idea that white supremacy is an ideology that is only upheld by a fringe group of white people.

It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.

Among the so-called neurotics of our day there are a good many who in other ages would not have been neurotic-that is, divided against themselves. If they had lived in a period and in a milieu in which man was still linked by myth with the world of the ancestors, and thus with nature truly experienced and not merely seen from outside, they would have been spared this division with themselves. I am speaking of those who cannot tolerate the loss of myth and who can neither find a way to a merely exterior world, to the world as seen by science, nor rest satisfied with an intellectual juggling with words, which has nothing whatsoever to do with wisdom.

Society has three stages: Savagery, Ascendance, Decadence. The great rise because of Savagery. They rule in Ascendance. They fall because of their own Decadence." He tells how the Persians were felled, how the Romans collapsed because their rulers forgot how their parents gained them an empire. He prattles about Muslim dynasties and European effeminacy and Chinese regionalism and American self-loathing and self-neutering. All the ancient names. "Our Savagery began when our capital, Luna, rebelled against the tyranny of Earth and freed herself from the shackles of Demokracy, from the Noble Lie - the idea that men are brothers and are created equal." Augustus weaves lies of his own with that golden tongue of his. He tells of the Goldens' suffering. The Masses sat on the wagon and expected the great to pull, he reminds. They sat whipping the great until we could no longer take it. I remember a different whipping. "Men are not created equal; we all know this. There are averages. There are outliers. There are the ugly. There are the beautiful. This would not be if we were all equal. A Red can no more command a starship than a Green can serve as a doctor!" There's more laughter across the square as he tells us to look at pathetic Athens, the birthplace of the cancer they call Demokracy. Look how it fell to Sparta. The Noble Lie made Athens weak. It made their citizens turn on their best general, Alcibiades, because of jealousy. "Even the nations of Earth grew jealous of one another. The United States of America exacted this idea of equality through force. And when the nations united, the Americans were surprised to find that they were disliked! The Masses are jealous! How wonderful a dream it would be if all men were created equal! But we are not. It is against the Noble Lie that we fight. But as I said before, as I say to you now, there is another evil against which we war. It is a more pernicious evil. It is a subversive, slow evil. It is not a wildfire. It is a cancer. And that cancer is Decadence. Our society has passed from Savagery to Ascendance. But like our spiritual ancestors, the Romans, we too can fall into Decadence.

Our own age is not one which can afford to call its ancestors savage.

There is a strange emptiness to life without myths. I am African American — by which I mean, a descendant of slaves, rather than a descendant of immigrants who came here willingly and with lives more or less intact. My ancestors were the unwilling, unintact ones: children torn from parents, parents torn from elders, people torn from roots, stories torn from language. Past a certain point, my family’s history just… stops. As if there was nothing there. I could do what others have done, and attempt to reconstruct this lost past. I could research genealogy and genetics, search for the traces of myself in moldering old sale documents and scanned images on microfiche. I could also do what members of other cultures lacking myths have done: steal. A little BS about Atlantis here, some appropriation of other cultures’ intellectual property there, and bam! Instant historically-justified superiority. Worked great for the Nazis, new and old. Even today, white people in my neck of the woods call themselves “Caucasian”, most of them little realizing that the term and its history are as constructed as anything sold in the fantasy section of a bookstore. These are proven strategies, but I have no interest in them. They’ll tell me where I came from, but not what I really want to know: where I’m going. To figure that out, I make shit up.

The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.

And their memory made them extraordinary. In them, the unconscious knowledge of ancestral behavior called instinct had evolved. Stored in the back of their large brains were not just their own memories, but the memories of their forebears. They could recall knowledge learned by their ancestors and, under special circumstances, they could go a step beyond. They could recall their racial memory, their own evolution. And when they reached back far enough, they could merge that memory that was identical for all and join their minds, telepathically.

Am I witch? I don't know. That's what they call me. They say it's because I follow the rhythms of the earth, honor the seasons, dance under the moon and seek the ancient herbal wisdom of our ancestors. "Folk Lore, poppycock, myths," they say as they sneer at the rosemary in my cup, the comfrey brewing on the stove and turmeric stains on my hands. "Western medicine and science have replaced all that nonsense," they say. They make witches out to be evil and then call me a witch because I am seeking the knowledge & ancient wisdom that the world seems hell bent on forgetting. Well, they can call me what they like, but I know I am not evil. This is what I know: I am an intuitive woman who instinctively knows that this sacred earth holds healing that western medicine will never be able to replace. I will be here holding space. I will be their witch. So, here I am- A kitchen witch sipping her Rosemary tea, mixing up her herbal potion, dancing under the moon, and fighting for the knowledge & wisdom of our grandmothers to not be forgotten.

Bear put his hand over his heart. “I just feel that something horrible has happened to a book somewhere that has my ancestors crying out in horror and pure pain.” Ski

The years are watching you now, every star you see tonight already knows your torment, your ancestors are gathered here and have nothing to give or say, Non c’andà, don’t go there.

We are busy with the luxury of things. Their number and multiple faces bring To us confusion we call knowledge. Say: God created the world, pinned night to day, Made mountains to weigh it down, seas To wash its face, living creatures with pleas (The ancestors of prayers) seeking a place In this mystery that floats in endless space. God set the earth on the back of a bull, The bull on a fish dancing on a spool Of silver light so fine it is like air; That in turn rests on nothing there But nothing that nothing can share. All things are but masks at God's beck and call, They are symbols that instruct us that God is all.

It's called evolution. You must know that. Yes, we are.' She looked up from her book. 'I would hope, though,' she went on, 'that we also have some rather more beautiful ancestors. Don't you?' --Mina

And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him.

So, ignorant of man and of the age that he calls ancient, and of the descendants following their ancestors, nature stays evergreen; indeed she travels such a long road she might as well be standing still. Meanwhile kingdoms fall, languages and peoples die; she doesn’t see. Yet man takes it upon himself to praise eternity.

As Jimmy Boggs used to remind us, revolutions are made out of love for people and for place. He often talked about loving America enough to change it. 'I love this country,' he used to say, 'not only because my ancestors' blood is in the soil but because of what I believe it can become.' Love isn't just something you feel. It's something you do everyday when you go out and pick the paper and bottles scattered the night before on the corner, when you stop and talk to a neighbor, when you argue passionately for what you believe in with whoever will listen, when you call a friend to see how they're doing, when you write a letter to the newspaper, when you give a speech and give 'em hell, when you never stop believing that we can all be more than what we are. In other words, Love isn't about what we did yesterday; it's about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after.

We danced, the way Kiowas danced, when called by our people, by our ancestors, to help each other heal.

Maybe. Maybe not. Look, the Latin name for this fish is Carcharodon carcharias, okay? The closest ancestor we can find for it is something called Carcharodon megalodon, a fish that existed maybe thirty or forty thousand years ago. We have fossil teeth from megalodon. They’re six inches long. That would put the fish at between eighty and a hundred feet. And the teeth are exactly like the teeth you see in great whites today. What I’m getting at is, suppose the two fish are really one species. What’s to say megalodon is really extinct? Why should it be?

...all the dutiful grandchildren and great-grandchildren lingering over deathbeds with digital recorders, or else mechanically pursuing their ancestors through the online genealogy sites at three in the morning, so very eager to reconstitute the lives and thoughts of dead and soon-to-dead men, though they may regularly screen the phone calls of their own mothers. I am of that generation. I will do anything for my family except see them.

feel like some sense of memory makes us attracted to places our ancestors knew, celebrate dates that were important in the past, and become drawn to people whose family once crossed paths with ours without our even knowing it. Call it psychogenealogy, or cellular memory . . . all I know is, this isn’t just chance.

But there stands the sword of my ancestor Sir Richard Vernon, slain at Shrewsbury, and sorely slandered by a sad fellow called Will Shakspeare, whose Lancastrian partialities, and a certain knack at embodying them, has turned history upside down, or rather inside out.

Vote for the ones without voter i.d. In jails or in districts without parity. Vote for the idlers and despairers who wouldn't. Vote for the women and slaves who just couldn't. Vote for your immigrant ancestors all; They're pleading that you hear democracy's call. Bring friends! Cast your ballots! Just get out and vote! Let's keep our two-century-old-country afloat. We all must stand strong, and we all must make clear: "We are here! We are here! We are here! We are here!

Are you considering becoming a creative person? Too late, you already are one. To even call somebody "a creative person" is almost laughably redundant; creativity is the hallmark of our species. We have the sense for it; we have the curiosity for it; we have the opposable thumbs for it; we have the rhythm for it; we have the language and the excitement and the innate connection to divinity for it. If you're alive, you're a creative person. You and I and everyone you know are descended from tens of thousands of years of makers. Decorators, tinkerers, storytellers, dancers, explorers, fiddlers, drummers, builders, growers, problem-solvers, and embellishers--these are our common ancestors.

A man who makes a plate or a shirt or a loaf of bread or anything our great great ancestors called a work of art, has no need to try to be sincere; all he can do is practice his craft to the best of his ability. But once he starts making useless things, how can he not be sincere?

My teachers revealed to me how traditional Islamic scholarship rests upon unbroken chains of transmission called Isnad (Literally, “to lean back on for support”—an unbroken transmission of religious authority similar to the Rabbinic concept of Semikhah) that link each student back in time through the generations to Muhammad himself. To bring my own Isnad to life, my teachers would occasionally gift me books written by ancestors in my chain, like Imam Ad-Dani who lived in eleventh-century Spain.

And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him. And his cadences were their cadences, the cadences which voiced their woe and what to them was the meaning of the stiffness, and the cold, and dark.

Man African societies divide humans into 3 categories: those still alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead. As generalized ancestors, the zamani are not forgotten but revered. Many...can be recalled by name. But they are not living-dead. There is a difference.

So next time you hear a raving demagogue counseling hatred for other, slightly different groups of humans, for a moment at least see if you can understand his problem: He is heeding an ancient call that—however dangerous, obsolete, and maladaptive it may be today—once benefitted our species.

One of my ancestors fought in the War of the Roses“, she announced haughtily, without looking round, “and in those wars you were supposed to wear a red rose or a white rose to show whose side you were on, but he was very attached to a pink rose called Lady Lavinia, which we still grow in the Hall, actually, so he ended up fighting both sides at once. He lived, too, because everyone thought it was bad luck to kill a madman. That’s what you need to know about my family: We might be pigheaded and stupid, but we do fight

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame. Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction. Ask for forgiveness. Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.

I had nature in my heart, she said. Like she did, and her mother before her. There was something about us---the Weyward women---that bonded us more tightly with the natural world. We can feel it, she said, the same way we feel rage, sorrow, or joy. The animals, the birds, the plants---they let us in, recognizing us as one of their own. That is why roots and leaves yield so easily under our fingers, to form tonics that bring comfort and healing. That is why animals welcome our embrace. Why the crows---the ones who carry the sign---watch over us and do our bidding, why their touch brings our abilities into sharpest relief. Our ancestors---the women who walked these paths before us, before there were words for who they were---did not lie in the barren soil of the churchyard, encased in rotting wood. Instead, the Weyward bones rested in the woods, in the fells, where our flesh fed plants and flowers, where trees wrapped their roots around our skeletons. We did not need stonemasons to carve our names into rock as proof we had existed. All we needed was to be returned to the wild. This wildness inside gives us our name. It was men who marked us so, in the time when language was but a shoot curling from the earth. Weyward, they called us, when we would not submit, would not bend to their will. But we learned to wear the name with pride.

Racists cling to the false notion that we are separate. They refuse to acknowledge that they are connected to, and even descended from, other people of different skin color. Their egos demand that they be superior and that others be inferior. This is how they seek to justify their hatred of, and cruelty towards, others.

Hunter-gatherers no more live on the knife-edge of survival than wolves or lions or sparrows or rabbits. Man was as well adapted to life on this planet as any other species, and the idea that he lived on the knife-edge of survival is simply biological nonsense. As an omnivore, his dietary range is immense. Thousands of species will go hungry before he does. His intelligence and dexterity enable him to live comfortably in conditions that would utterly defeat any other primate. “Far from scrabbling endlessly and desperately for food, hunter-gatherers are among the best-fed people on earth, and they manage this with only two or three hours a day of what you would call work—which makes them among the most leisured people on earth as well. In his book on stone age economics, Marshall Sahlins described them as ‘the original affluent society.’ And incidentally, predation of man is practically nonexistent. He’s simply not the first choice on any predator’s menu. So you see that your wonderfully horrific vision of your ancestors’ life is just another bit of Mother Culture’s nonsense. If you like, you can confirm all this for yourself in an afternoon at the library.

We are in one galaxy called the Milky Way. When you look at the Milky Way’s next-door neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy, your telescope is a time machine taking you back two and a half million years. There’s a cluster of five galaxies called Stephan’s Quintet, which we see through the Hubble telescope spectacularly colliding with each other. But we see them colliding 280 million years ago. If there are aliens in one of those colliding galaxies with a telescope powerful enough to see us, what they are seeing on Earth, at this very moment, here and now, is the early ancestors of the dinosaurs. Are

Extremist individuals live inside every single group on the planet. Devout followers from Christian to Muslim who kill in the name of God, down to people who perpetuate a cycle of abuse from parent to child. And do you know at what point they’re labeled as terrorists?” Martini said, “When the government—” “When the news reports it. The news can take a starving refugee and make them into an invading migrant. One of my Black ancestors was photographed carrying diapers over his head after a flood. They called him a ‘looter.’ A white man was photographed doing the same thing. They called him a ‘survivor.

i will crawl for white beauty. eat my arms. barter my legs (make my thighs into altars of grief). for skin that does not drink night. hair that is not angry. body that is not soil. i place curses on my flesh call them diets. tell my ancestors they are ugly. howl at my nose until it bleeds. run my heart across my teeth, repeatedly. i am dying. to be beautiful. but beautiful. is something. i will never be. – by the time we are seven

And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him. And his cadences were their cadences, their cadences which voiced their woe and what to them was the meaning of stillness, and the cold, and dark.

Each creature has a universally unique name, a sacred identity. If you know and call them by that name, they will definitely reply.

Sadly, most white people are more worried about being called racist than about whether or not their actions are in fact racist or harmful.

Who built this tree of universe that has not stopped changing from the very minute (atomic) times undergoing many beautiful and wonderful changes; Who must eat fruits bearing from this tree? Why is that all are not eating these fruits equally without differences? What is the reason? Could someone like us plant another tree like that? Why not? The eternal that does not dry up but continues to give required fruits to the souls. This creator, is he in front of us or not? If not how does this work? Without doubt we all realize that work does not happen without a reason. Therefore, one who is giving us this variety of unlimited fruits without end in this tree of universe must be immensely powerful, with unlimited knowledge, unfathomable, have infinite empathy and having many other amazing qualities. His existence is documented in all vedas and puranas. Although he exists, the reason we are not able to witness, we have to admit is our deficiency in body, faculty and mind. Our ancestors called and praised him as “Paramatma and Sarveshvara.” We have to resolve that we will practice sadhana to be able to see Paramatma and offer to Sarveshvara with great devotion our spiritual practices, without desire for any benefits. This is called Ishwarapranidhana.

The lessons of relationship that our primordial ancestors learned are deeply encoded in the genetics of our neurobiological circuits of love. They are present from the moment we are born and activated at puberty by the cocktail of neurochemicals. It’s an elegant synchronized system. At first our brain weighs a potential partner, and if the person fits our ancestral wish list, we get a spike in the release of sex chemicals that makes us dizzy with a rush of unavoidable infatuation. It’s the first step down the primeval path of pair-bonding.

He called the place Amber, and said that it was run by a half-mad family, with the city itself peopled by their bastards and folks whose ancestors they brought in from other places ages ago.

And what about our ancestors – can they, too, continue to exist through us? Is that why, when you meet some individuals – just as with some trees – you can't help feeling that they must be much older than their chronological age? Where do you start someone's story when every life has more than one thread and what we call birth is not the only beginning nor is death exactly an end?

She was a wonder junkie. In her mind, she was a hill tribesman standing slack-jawed before the real Ishtar Gate of ancient Babylon; Dorothy catching her first glimpse of the vaulted spires of the Emerald City of Oz; a small boy from darkest Brooklyn plunked down in the Corridor of Nations of the 1939 World’s Fair, the Trylon and Perisphere beckoning in the distance; she was Pocahontas sailing up the Thames estuary with London spread out before her from horizon to horizon. been voyaging between the stars when the ancestors of humans were still brachiating from branch to branch in the dappled sunlight of the forest canopy. Drumlin, like many others she had known over the years, had called her an incurable romantic; and she found herself wondering again why so many people thought it some embarrassing disability. Her romanticism had been a driving force in her life and a fount of delights. Advocate and practitioner of romance, she was off to see the Wizard.

As the great William James put it almost 80 years ago: A man’s “Me” is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his mind, but his clothes and house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, his yacht and his bank-account (1892, p. 44). In other words, the human animal can be symbolically located wherever he feels a part of him really exists or belongs. This is important for an understanding of the bitter fighting between social classes for social status: an individual’s house in a posh neighborhood can be more a part of his self-image than his own arm—his life-pulse can be inseparable from it.

...the former King Louis XVI, who, after titles were abolished, was now simply called "Louis Capet" - a mocking reference to his distant ancestor Hugh Capet, who had assumed the throne in the year 987.

Madness, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings....the men of old who gave things their names saw no disgrace or reproach in madness; otherwise they would not have connected it with the name of the noblest of all arts, the art of discerning the future, and called it the manic art....So, according to the evidence provided by our ancestors, madness is a nobler thing than sober sense...madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human.

Conscience is strong in women. Children are very violently taught that they owe all to their parents, and the parents are not slow in foreclosing the mortgage. But the home is not a debtor's prison - to girls any more than to boys. This enormous claim of parents calls for extermination. Do they in truth do all for their children; do their children owe all to them? Is nothing furnished in the way of safety, sanitation, education, by that larger home, the state? What could these parents do, alone, in never so pleasant a home, without the allied forces of society to maintain that home in peace and prosperity. These lingering vestiges of a patriarchal cult must be left behind. Ancestor-worship has had victims enough. Girls are human creatures as well as boys, and both have duties, imperative duties, quite outside the home.

And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolf-like, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him.

Ancient philosophies were entranced by the order of the cosmos; they marveled at the mysterious power that kept the heavenly bodies in their orbits and the seas within bounds and that ensured that the earth regularly came to life again after the dearth of winter, and they longed to participate in this richer and more permanent existence. They expressed this yearning in terms of what is known as the perennial philosophy, so called because it was present, in some form, in most premodern cultures.11 Every single person, object, or experience was seen as a replica, a pale shadow, of a reality that was stronger and more enduring than anything in their ordinary experience but that they only glimpsed in visionary moments or in dreams. By ritually imitating what they understood to be the gestures and actions of their celestial alter egos—whether gods, ancestors, or culture heroes—premodern folk felt themselves to be caught up in their larger dimension of being.

Where the ice and the fire met the ice melted, and in the melting waters life appeared: the likeness of a person bigger than worlds, huger than any giant there will be or has ever been. This was neither male, nor was it female, but was both at the same time. This creature was the ancestor of all the giants, and it called itself Ymir.

You are the sun and the moon and the stars You are the force that pulls the tides You are the unrestrained howl under a wide-open moon You are the essence of what it is to dance into ecstasy You are the heat and the sex and the sweat and the burn and soft and the grace and the grit and the ocean of tears You are all of everything … Somewhere there is a love who will never dream of calling you too much Who speaks like you in poetry and candle-wax and stardust Who runs outside on stormy nights to howl at the moon Who collects bones and sings incantation and talks to the ancestors And that lover when you find him or her will see you and know you – just as you are and just as you should be And they will say yes Yes you I will go there with you I have been waiting for this

In short, the majority of men "without religion" still hold to pseudo religions and degenerated mythologies, There is nothing surprising in this, for, as we saw, profane man is the descendant of homo religiosus and he cannot wipe out his own history—that is, the behavior of his religious ancestors which has made him what he is today. This is all the more true because a great part of his existence is fed by impulses that come to him from the depths of his being, from the zone that has been called the "unconscious," A purely rational man is an abstraction; he is never found in real life. Every human being is made up at once of his conscious activity and his irrational experiences.

Everything that we know of since the Big Bang is ruled by those four forces (gravity, electromagnetism, strong force and weak force). We are all connected by these four rules..I think the pursuit of finding one law to explain the universe if science but also the pursuit of God. The Jewish philosopher Spinoza said that God did not necessarily make the universe, but that God is the universe. The unfolding of the universe is God in action. Which would mean science and math are a part of God...We are the universe. I would go so far to say that human beings, we are less of a who and more of a when. We are a moment in time - when all of our cells have come together in this body. But our atoms were many things before and they will be many things after. The air I am breathing is the same air your ancestors breathed. Even what is in my body right now - the cells, the air, the bacteria - it's not only mine. It is a point of connection with every other living thing, made up of the same kinds of particles, ruled by the same physical laws. When you die, someone will bury you or turn your body into ashes. Eventually, you will return to the Earth. You already are a part of the Earth. What better reason do we have to take care of the Earth and everything on it than the knowledge that we are of one another? The trees need our breath, and our breath needs the trees. As scientists we call that symbiosis and that is the consequence of evolution. But the natural consequences of our connections to each other - that's God to me....Life is God and my life it tied to yours and everyone's on this planet. How does this not instantly make us more in debt to one another? And also offer us the comfort that we are not alone?

The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty's ends.

The African powers, child. The spirits. The loas. The orishas. The oldest ancestors. You will hear people from Haiti and Cuba and Brazil and so call them different names. You will even hear some names I ain’t tell you, but we all mean the same thing. Them is the ones who does carry we prayers to God Father, for he too busy to listen to every single one of we on earth talking at he all the time. Each of we have a special one who is we father or mother, and no matter what we call it, whether Shango or Santeria or Voudun or what, we all doing the same thing. Serving the spirits.

Look, the Latin name for this fish is Carcharodon carcharias, okay? The closest ancestor we can find for it is something called Carcharodon megalodon, a fish that existed maybe thirty or forty thousand years ago. We have fossil teeth from megalodon. They’re six inches long. That would put the fish at between eighty and a hundred feet. And the teeth are exactly like the teeth you see in great whites today. What I’m getting at is, suppose the two fish are really one species. What’s to say megalodon is really extinct? Why should it be? Not lack of food. If there’s enough down there to support whales, there’s enough to support sharks that big. Just because we’ve never seen a hundred-foot white doesn’t mean they couldn’t exist. They’d have no reason to come to the surface. All their food would be way down in the deep. A dead one wouldn’t float to shore, because they don’t have flotation bladders. Can you imagine what a hundred-foot white would look like? Can you imagine what it could do, what kind of power it would have?It would be like a locomotive with a mouth full of butcher knives.

I had once thought that I came from a line of Gods, and I had punished myself for failing to be Godlike. But we were not Gods, and I was not the avatar for our family’s unraveling. I was just another product of inherited trauma, unresolved grief, and reactive survival mechanisms, like everyone else who came before me. We were mortals who felt ashamed when we failed to appear omnipotent. Now I see that my job was to release my ancestors from this burden, to allow those who come next the freedom to be ordinary.

an eagle's cry Listen to me! Listen! I am the Indian voice. Hear me crying out of the wind, Hear my crying out of the silence. I am the Indian voice. Listen to me! I speak for our ancestors. They cry out to you from the unstill grave. I speak for the children yet unborn. They cry out to you from the unspoken silence. I am the Indian voice. Listen to me! I am a chorus of millions. Hear us! Our eagle cry will not be stilled! We are your own conscience calling to you. We are you yourself crying unheard within you. Let my unheard voice be heard. Let me speak in my heart and the words be heard whispering on the wind to millions, to all who care, to all with ears to hear and hearts to beat as one with mine. Put your ear to the earth, and hear my heart beating there. Put your ear to the wind and hear me speaking there. We are the voice of the earth, of the future, of the Mystery. Hear us!

Human language, for us moderns, has swung in on itself, turning its back on the beings around us. Language is a human property, suitable only for communication with other persons. We talk to people; we do not speak to the ground underfoot. We've largely forgotten the incantatory and invocational use of speech as a way of bringing ourselves into deeper rapport with the beings around us, or of calling the living land into resonance with us. It is a power we still brush up against whenever we use our words to bless and to curse, or to charm someone we're drawn to. But we wield such eloquence only to sway other people, and so we miss the greater magnetism, the gravitational power that lies within such speech. The beaver gliding across the pond, the fungus gripping a thick trunk, a boulder shattered by its tumble down a cliff or the rain splashing upon those granite fragments -- we talk about such beings, the weather and the weathered stones, but we do not talk to them. Entranced by the denotative power of words to define, to order, to represent the things around us, we've overlooked the songful dimension of language so obvious to our oral [storytelling] ancestors. We've lost our ear for the music of language -- for the rhythmic, melodic layer of speech by which earthly things overhear us.

The many meanings of 'evolution' are frequently exploited by Darwinists to distract their critics. Eugenie Scott recommends: 'Define evolution as an issue of the history of the planet: as the way we try to understand change through time. The present is different from the past. Evolution happened, there is no debate within science as to whether it happened, and so on... I have used this approach at the college level.' Of course, no college student—indeed, no grade-school dropout— doubts that 'the present is different from the past.' Once Scott gets them nodding in agreement, she gradually introduces them to 'The Big Idea' that all species—including monkeys and humans—are related through descent from a common ancestor... This tactic is called 'equivocation'—changing the meaning of a term in the middle of an argument.

Honor, justice and humanity call upon us to hold and to transmit to our posterity, that liberty, which we received from our ancestors. It is not our duty to leave wealth to our children; but it is our duty to leave liberty to them. No infamy, iniquity, or cruelty can exceed our own if we, born and educated in a country of freedom, entitled to its blessings and knowing their value, pusillanimously deserting the post assigned us by Divine Providence, surrender succeeding generations to a condition of wretchedness from which no human efforts, in all probability, will be sufficient to extricate them; the experience of all states mournfully demonstrating to us that when arbitrary power has been established over them, even the wisest and bravest nations that ever flourished have, in a few years, degenerated into abject and wretched vassals.

He crossed toward me, a grin curving his mouth-then he stopped. "Should I get the other blade?" I looked at the sword in my hand. "I'm waiting for the Rake." He raised a brow. "The Rake?" Oh, right, we'd never talked about him. "He's a ghost. Your ancestor. The Bennett you're named after." "What?" Bennett laughed in surprise. "Here? When did he show up?" "Um...a couple days after you brought me here from San Francisco." "Why didn't you tell me?" "He's private. And you're both Bennetts. It'd be like...I don't know. Traveling back in time and meeting yourself." "And you call him 'the Rake'?" "Well, he's all swagger and devilish charm," I explained. "In that case, how can you tell us apart?

Most morality, thought Mma Ramotswe, was about doing the right thing because it had been identified as such by a long process of acceptance and observance. You simply could not create your own morality because your experience would never be enough to do so. What gives you the right to say that you know better than your ancestors? Morality is for everybody and this means that the views of more than one person are needed to create it. That was what made modern morality, with its emphasis on individuals and the working out of an individual person, so weak. If you gave people the chance to work out their morality, then they would work out the version which was easiest for them and which allowed them to do what suited them for as much of the time as possible. That, in Mma Ramotswe's view, was simple selfishness, whatever grand name one gave it.

In Africa every human has a spark of divine nature, and sin does not separate us from it. We are cousins of God. Every person has multiple souls, including the souls of ancestors that reincarnate through us. The purest soul is called an ori, and a person who cultivates their ori can attain divinity.

Most of all, however, these observances attack and undermine the very spirit of life within the minds of men. They afford to our Romans, from the street sweepers to the consuls, a vague sense of confidence where no confidence is and at the same time a pervasive fear, a fear which neither arouses to action nor calls forth ingenuity, but which paralyzes. They remove from men's shoulders the unremitting obligation to create, moment by moment, their own Rome. They come to us sanctioned by the usage of our ancestors and breathing the security of our childhood; they flatter passivity and console inadequacy

white person, they cannot be racist toward a white person. They do not have the power (which comes with white privilege) and the backing of a system of oppression (called white supremacy) to be able to turn that prejudice into domination and punishment in a way that a white person would be able to if the tables were reversed.

Suddenly a million males, most of whom had been raised under the tenets of Western Judeo-Christian values but had rarely ventured beyond their hometowns, were catapulted thousands of miles overseas among strangers into a savagely primitive world of warfare stripped of the rules and inhibitions of civilization. It was a mini Stone Age war but with machine guns and flamethrowers, in which our soldiers were called upon to behave like our primitive ancestors in a reptilian state of killing for survival.

but oftener he remembered the man in the red sweater, the death of Curly, the great fight with Spitz and the good things he had eaten or would like to eat. He was not homesick. The Sunland was very dim and distant, and such memories had no power over him. Far more potent were the memories of his heredity that gave things he had never seen before a seeming familiarity; the instincts (which were but the memories of his ancestors become habits) which had lapsed in later days, and still later, in him, quickened and became alive again.

But I loved the fear—if fear it really was—and this they didn’t know, my ancestors.

It is fortunate,” Charles Dudley Warner wrote more than a century ago, “that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.

In the so-called age of ignorance before Islam, our ancestors used to form their gods from dates and eat them when in need. Who is more ignorant then, dear sir, I or those who ate their gods? You might say: “It is better for people to eat their gods than for the gods to eat them.” But I’d respond: “Yes, but their gods were made of dates.” --The Secret Life of Saeed, the Pessoptimist

One of my Black ancestors was photographed carrying diapers over his head after a flood. They called him a ‘looter.’ A white man was photographed doing the same thing. They called him a ‘survivor.

Among the so-called neurotics of our day there are a good many who in other ages would not have been neurotic - that is, divided against themselves. If they had lived in a period and in a milieu in which man was still linked by myth with the world of the ancestors, and thus with nature truly experienced and not merely seen from the outside, they would have been spared this division with themselves.

Ultimately what we inherit are relationships and our beliefs about them,” writes Aurora Levins Morales. “We can’t alter the actions of our ancestors, but we can decide what to do with the social relations they left us.” In order to understand these relationships, we need to listen to the histories that we were not told so that we can begin to remember the things buried beneath the histories we were.

Grief is the persistence of love,” Krawec writes. Indeed. Grief and love are not bound by time and space. In Indigenous worlds, Land Defenders act out of necessity and survival, protecting rivers and landscapes from destruction. They do so out of mourning for a world taken from them through centuries of colonialism. But they also do so out of love and solidarity for life that currently exists and life that has yet to be created on this planet. They are ancestors of the future, motivated by grief as the persistence of love. Grief is also about remembering, or unforgetting, the future and a history that could have been.

However, this idea that white supremacy only applies to the so-called “bad ones” is both incorrect and dangerous, because it reinforces the idea that white supremacy is an ideology that is only upheld by a fringe group of white people. White supremacy is far from fringe. In white-centered societies and communities, it is the dominant paradigm that forms the foundation from which norms, rules, and laws are created.

When we see what blood we spill, we call out to the gods, but they have forsaken us. We shout to the ancestors; only the sound of the waters answers back. We are left to the mercy which we have for each other.

Our eyes contain two types of photoreceptors for vision—rods, which help us see in dim conditions but provide no color, and cones, which work when the light is bright and divide the world up into three colors: blue, green, and red. People who are “color-blind” normally lack one of the three types of cones, so they don’t see all the colors, just some of them. People who have no cones at all, and are genuinely color-blind, are called achromatopes. Their main problem isn’t that their world is pallid but that they really struggle to cope with bright light and can be literally blinded by daylight. Because we were once nocturnal, our ancestors gave up some color acuity—that is, sacrificed cones for rods—to gain better night vision. Much later, primates re-evolved the ability to see reds and oranges, the better to identify ripe fruit, but we still have just three kinds of color receptors compared with four for birds, fish, and reptiles. It’s a humbling fact, but virtually all nonmammalian creatures live in a visually richer world than we do.

What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could ‘be like gods’—could set up on their own as if they had created themselves—be their own masters—invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy. The reason why it can never succeed is this. God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

I AM THE CAT In Egypt, they worshiped me I am the Cat. Because I bend not to the will of man They call me a mystery. When I catch and play with a mouse, They call me cruel, Yet they take animals to keep In parks and zoos, that they may gape at them. They think all animals are made for their pleasure, To be their slaves. And, while I kill only for my needs, They kill for pleasure, power and gold, And then pretend to a superiority! Why should I love them? I, the Cat, whose ancestors Proudly trod the jungle, No one ever tamed by man. Ah, do they know That they same immortal hand That game them breath, gave breath to me? But I alone am free I am THE CAT.

I am not a churchgoing man. Strangled in the vines of form and choked with ritual Christians, Sunday service held no appeal for me as a child. When my parents released me from compulsory attendance, I would never return. In my view, religion is best practiced out of doors, in nature's cathedral of miracles where spirits and the arts of heaven mingle unencumbered. The spirits were present on the tiny unmarked parcel at Mount Vernon that early autumn afternoon. Hazel and I stood for a long while in complete silence. Words would have marred, much as they misserve this inadequate telling of what we felt. We had been touched by wearied souls calling, in a language ethereal as morning mist, from the near realm that awaits us all. These were 'our' ancestors and, alone behind an old wooden outbuilding, my wife and I had wordlessly worshiped with them on that clear crisp afternoon.

Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. To these folks, poverty is the family tradition—their ancestors were day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.

When a single cat let loose a war cry, it was an unsettling sound. When two cats suddenly wailed at each other in a similar fashion, it was downright unnerving. When hundreds of them caterwauled at the same time, in a single voice, the sound alone was enough to make one feel as if the skin had been peeled from one's muscle and bone, to call up horrors inherited from ancestors long since dead and forgotten, raw terror before a deadly predator.

With the gun which was too big for him, the breech-loader which did not even belong to him but to Major de Spain and which he had fired only once, at a stump on the first day to learn the recoil and how to reload it with the paper shells, he stood against a big gum tree beside a little bayou whose black still water crept without motion out of a cane-brake, across a small clearing and into the cane again, where, invisible, a bird, the big woodpecker called Lord-to-God by negroes, clattered at a dead trunk. It was a stand like any other stand, dissimilar only in incidentals to the one where he had stood each morning for two weeks; a territory new to him yet no less familiar than that other one which after two weeks he had come to believe he knew a little--the same solitude, the same loneliness through which frail and timorous man had merely passed without altering it, leaving no mark nor scar, which looked exactly as it must have looked when the first ancestor of Sam fathers' Chickasaw predecessors crept into it and looked about him, club or stone axe or bone arrow drawn and ready, different only because, squatting at the edge of the kitchen, he had smelled the dogs huddled and cringing beneath it and saw the raked ear and side of the bitch that, as Sam had said, had to be brave once in order to keep on calling herself a dog, and saw yesterday in the earth beside the gutted log, the print of the living foot. He heard no dogs at all. He never did certainly hear them. He only heard the drumming of the woodpecker stop short off, and knew that the bear was looking at him. he did not move, holding the useless gun which he knew now he would never fire at it, now or ever, tasting in his saliva that taint of brass which he had smelled in the huddled dogs when he peered under the kitchen.

Work through the tasks together with others so that when the difficult emotions come, you have somebody to sit with. Be with someone as you let the floodwaters of history—and your ancestors’ and your role in it—wash over you. That way you don’t need to fear the waters of guilt or loss or grief. With the support of others, you can trust that you will surface, still breathing and holding on to a handful of mud with which to imagine and create something new.

What are the stars? Such questions are as natural as an infant’s smile. We have always asked them. What is different about our time is that at last we know some of the answers. Books and libraries provide a ready means for finding out what those answers are. In biology there is a principle of powerful if imperfect applicability called recapitulation: in our individual embryonic development we retrace the evolutionary history of the species. There is, I think, a kind of recapitulation that occurs in our individual intellectual developments as well. We unconsciously retrace the thoughts of our remote ancestors. Imagine a time before science, a time before libraries. Imagine a time hundreds of thousands of years ago. We were then just about as smart, just as curious, just as involved in things social and sexual. But the experiments had not yet been done, the inventions had not yet been made. It was the childhood of genus Homo. Imagine the time when fire was first discovered. What were human lives like then? What did our ancestors believe the stars were? Sometimes, in my fantasies, I imagine there was someone who thought like this: We

All modern humans are related to what scientists call "Mitochondrial Eve." This refers to our common matrilineal ancestor. She lived approximately 200,000 years ago and depending on how you estimate the length of a generation, we are only 5,000 to 10,000 generations from one another. To put it another way, each of us is a cousin of one another at most 10,000 times removed. And yes, Mitochondrial Eve lived in Africa, so, in a very real way, we are all Africans.

Friendship between tow persons, or two nations, is an unbreakable bond, a tie which cannot be cut. An honourable heart does not cast aside a friend because he is in trouble, nor even if he changes his nature and becomes a criminal. Between two nations friendship must also be eternal, else the friend is false and being false in one event was always false. And what was our crime against the Americans? The Great Change? But is it a crime to change a government? By whose law can it be called a crime? It is of no more importance, between friends, than for one to change his garment! For this lack of reason our love for Americans is changed to hate. I fear for the future! A generation is growing up here in our country which has never seen an American face or heard an American voice. What do they know of Americans except to hate them as they are taught to do? There is no hate so dangerous as that which once was love. .... - To the Americans, Communism is a crime. They will have none of it. - But why, when it is ours, not theirs? .... - I suppose this American concern with a form of government springs from their own history. Their ancestors fled from Europe to escape tyranny from their ancient rulers. Freedom was their dream. To them, therefore, tyranny is endemic in Communism. They will have none of it. It is not we who are Chinese whom they hate. It is the tyranny they imagine.

Have you forgotten me? by Nancy B. Brewer The bricks I laid or the stitches I sewed. I was the one that made the quilt; a drop of blood still shows from my needle prick. Your wedding day in lace and satin, in a dress once worn by me. I loaned your newborn baby my christening gown, a hint of lavender still preserved. Do you know our cause, the battles we won and the battles we lost? When our soldiers marched home did you shout hooray! Or shed a tear for the fallen sons. What of the fields we plowed, the cotton, the tobacco and the okra, too. There was always room at my table for one more, Fried chicken, apple pie, biscuits and sweet ice tea. A time or two you may have heard our stories politely told. Some of us are famous, recorded on the pages of history. Still, most of us left this world without glory or acknowledgment. We were the first to walk the streets you now call home, Perhaps you have visited my grave and flowers left, but did you hear me cry out to you? Listen, my child, to the voices of your ancestors. Take pride in our accomplishments; find your strength in our suffering. For WE are not just voices in the wind, WE are a living part of YOU!

Ultimately, the roast turkey must be regarded as a monument to Boomer's love. Look at it now, plump and glossy, floating across Idaho as if it were a mammoth, mutated seed pod. Hear how it backfires as it passes the silver mines, perhaps in tribute to the origin of the knives and forks of splendid sterling that a roast turkey and a roast turkey alone possesses the charisma to draw forth into festivity from dark cupboards. See how it glides through the potato fields, familiarly at home among potatoes but with an air of expectation, as if waiting for the flood of gravy. The roast turkey carries with it, in its chubby hold, a sizable portion of our primitive and pagan luggage. Primitive and pagan? Us? We of the laser, we of the microchip, we of the Union Theological Seminary and Time magazine? Of course. At least twice a year, do not millions upon millions of us cybernetic Christians and fax machine Jews participate in a ritual, a highly stylized ceremony that takes place around a large dead bird? And is not this animal sacrificed, as in days of yore, to catch the attention of a divine spirit, to show gratitude for blessings bestowed, and to petition for blessings coveted? The turkey, slain, slowly cooked over our gas or electric fires, is the central figure at our holy feast. It is the totem animal that brings our tribe together. And because it is an awkward, intractable creature, the serving of it establishes and reinforces the tribal hierarchy. There are but two legs, two wings, a certain amount of white meat, a given quantity of dark. Who gets which piece; who, in fact, slices the bird and distributes its limbs and organs, underscores quite emphatically the rank of each member in the gathering. Consider that the legs of this bird are called 'drumsticks,' after the ritual objects employed to extract the music from the most aboriginal and sacred of instruments. Our ancestors, kept their drums in public, but the sticks, being more actively magical, usually were stored in places known only to the shaman, the medicine man, the high priest, of the Wise Old Woman. The wing of the fowl gives symbolic flight to the soul, but with the drumstick is evoked the best of the pulse of the heart of the universe. Few of us nowadays participate in the actual hunting and killing of the turkey, but almost all of us watch, frequently with deep emotion, the reenactment of those events. We watch it on TV sets immediately before the communal meal. For what are footballs if not metaphorical turkeys, flying up and down a meadow? And what is a touchdown if not a kill, achieved by one or the other of two opposing tribes? To our applause, great young hungers from Alabama or Notre Dame slay the bird. Then, the Wise Old Woman, in the guise of Grandma, calls us to the table, where we, pretending to be no longer primitive, systematically rip the bird asunder. Was Boomer Petaway aware of the totemic implications when, to impress his beloved, he fabricated an outsize Thanksgiving centerpiece? No, not consciously. If and when the last veil dropped, he might comprehend what he had wrought. For the present, however, he was as ignorant as Can o' Beans, Spoon, and Dirty Sock were, before Painted Stick and Conch Shell drew their attention to similar affairs. Nevertheless, it was Boomer who piloted the gobble-stilled butterball across Idaho, who negotiated it through the natural carving knives of the Sawtooth Mountains, who once or twice parked it in wilderness rest stops, causing adjacent flora to assume the appearance of parsley.

All people, regardless of race, can hold some level of prejudice toward people who are not the same race as them. A person of any race can prejudge a person of any other race based on negative racial stereotypes and other factors. Prejudice is wrong, but it is not the same as racism. Racism is the coupling of prejudice with power, where the dominant racial group (which in a white supremacist society is people with white privilege) is able to dominate over all other racial groups and negatively affect those racial groups at all levels—personally, systematically, and institutionally. Therefore, though a BIPOC can hold prejudice against a white person, they cannot be racist toward a white person. They do not have the power (which comes with white privilege) and the backing of a system of oppression (called white supremacy) to be able to turn that prejudice into domination and punishment in a way that a white person would be able to if the tables were reversed.

Rick talked about hope as a life-sustaining force that is rooted in our relationship with the future. He wrote, “Just as our ancestors did, today we think about getting from where we are now, let’s call it Point A, to where we want to be, say Point B.

THE BEET IS THE MOST INTENSE of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious. Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets. The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip . . . The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies. The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes. In Europe there is grown widely a large beet they call the mangel-wurzel. Perhaps it is mangel-wurzel that we see in Rasputin. Certainly there is mangel-wurzel in the music of Wagner, although it is another composer whose name begins, B-e-e-t——. Of course, there are white beets, beets that ooze sugar water instead of blood, but it is the red beet with which we are concerned; the variety that blushes and swells like a hemorrhoid, a hemorrhoid for which there is no cure. (Actually, there is one remedy: commission a potter to make you a ceramic asshole—and when you aren't sitting on it, you can use it as a bowl for borscht.) An old Ukrainian proverb warns, “A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil.” That is a risk we have to take.

An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass . . . when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you’ve just been discovered, you’re all subjects of the Emperor now, he’s keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests. That was an Outside Context Problem; so was the suitably up-teched version that happened to whole planetary civilisations when somebody like the Affront chanced upon them first rather than, say, the Culture.

When He calls us to fast strength—when He drafts us into decrease—God’s purposes are clear: Remember how the LORD your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD. (Deuteronomy 8:2

But no matter how loudly we called out for our mother we knew she could not hear us, so we tried to make the best of what we had. We cut out pictures of cakes from magazines and hung them on the walls. We sewed curtains out of bleached rice sacks. We made Buddhist altars out of overturned tomato crates that we covered with cloth, and every morning we left out a cup of hot tea for our ancestors. And at the end of the harvest season we walked ten miles into town and bought ourselves a small gift: a bottle of Coke, a new apron, a tube of lipstick, which we might one day have occasion to wear.

If he says, “At least I have it in my own way!”, I answer, you do not know what is your way and what is not. You know nothing of whence your impulses, your desires, your tendencies, your likings come. They may spring now from some chance, as of nerves diseased; now from some roar of a wandering bodiless devil; now from some infant hate in your heart; now from the greed of lawlessness of some ancestor you would be ashamed of if you knew him; or, it may be, now from some far-piercing chord of a heavenly orchestra: the moment comes up into your consciousness, you call it your own way, and glory in it.

For groups that made this political transition to egalitarianism, there was a quantum leap in the development of moral matrices. People now lived in much denser webs of norms, informal sanctions, and occasionally violent punishments. Those who could navigate this new world skillfully and maintain good reputations were rewarded by gaining the trust, cooperation, and political support of others. Those who could not respect group norms, or who acted like bullies, were removed from the gene pool by being shunned, expelled, or killed. Genes and cultural practices (such as the collective killing of deviants) coevolved. The end result, says Boehm, was a process sometimes called “self-domestication.” Just as animal breeders can create tamer, gentler creatures by selectively breeding for those traits, our ancestors began to selectively breed themselves (unintentionally) for the ability to construct shared moral matrices and then live cooperatively within them.

For evolution to be true, there would have been innumerable transitional forms between different types of creatures. Therefore, for every known fossil species, many more must have existed to connect it to its ancestors and descendents [sic]. This is yet another example of evolutionary conclusions coming before the evidence. Really, the claim is an implicit admission that large numbers of transitional forms are predicted, which heightens the difficulty for evolutionists, given how few there are that even they could begin to claim were candidates. . . . Evolutionists believe that mutation provides new information for selection. But no known mutation has ever increased genetic information, although there should be many examples observable today if mutation/selection were truly adequate to explain the goo-to-you theory. . . . Adaptation and natural selection are biological facts; amoeba-to-man evolution is not. Natural selection can only work on the genetic information present in a population of organisms--it cannot create new information. For example, since no known reptiles have genes for feathers, no amount of selection will produce a feathered reptile. Mutations in genes can only modify or eliminate existing structures, not create new ones. If in a certain environment a lizard survives better with smaller legs, or no legs, then varieties with this trait will be selected for. This might more accurately be called devolution, not evolution. . . . Note that even if such a mutation were ever discovered, evolutionists would still need to find hundreds more to give their theory the observational boost it desperately needs.

The measuring rod, the unit of information, is something called a bit (for binary digit). It is an answer - either yes or no- to an unambiguous question... The information content of the human brain expressed in bits is probably comparable to the total number of connections among the neurons- about a hundred trillion, 10^14 bits. If written out in English, say, that information would fill some twenty million volumes, as many as in the world's largest libraries. The equivalent of twenty million books is inside the heads of every one of us... When our genes could not store all the information necessary for survival, we slowly invented them. But then the time came, perhaps ten thousand years ago, when we needed to stockpile enormous quantities of information outside our bodies. We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of that memory is called the library... The great libraries of the world contain millions of volumes, the equivalent of about 10^14 bits of information in words, and perhaps 10^15 bits in pictures. This is ten thousand times more than in our brains. If I finish a book a week, I will only read a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read... Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insights and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. Public libraries depend on voluntary contributions. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries. p224-233

It isn't wrong to think about your ancestors, to hear their stories and understand where they came from. And if your ancestors have been in the United States or Canada for a long period of time, it is possible that there is a Native ancestor back there. And if you have a Native ancestor -- somebody who married or moved out of their community by choice or by force -- it is understandable that you would want to know more about them, more about how they left and why...they didn't return to their communities and instead remained among the colonists....Our ancestors' communities are not always our communities, but we can build relationship with each other and honor our ancestors in that way.

On the other path stood a sterner goddess in a pure white robe. She made a quieter call. She promised no rewards except those that came as a result of hard work. It would be a long journey, she said. There would be sacrifice. There would be scary moments. But it was a journey fit for a god. It would make him the person his ancestors meant him to be.

Some 3.6 million years ago, in what is now northern Tanzania, a volcano erupted, the resulting cloud of ash covering the surrounding savannahs. In 1979, the paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey found in that ash footprints - the footprints, she believes, of an early hominid, perhaps an ancestor of all the people on the Earth today. And 380,000 kilometers away, in a flat dry plain that humans have in a moment of optimism called the Sea of Tranquility, there is another footprint, left by the first human to walk another world. We have come far in 3.6 million years, and in 4.6 billion and in 15 billion. For we are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.

I have heard firsthand about the beginning. Small small groups of you called it Original Sin. But that’s some bullshit. You didn’t come from any clay. Your ancestors never ate a magic apple. If they did, the man would eat first. If woman found the Apple of Knowledge, she wouldn’t share it. And she’d eat it in the sunshine. All the way to the core. And then look for more.

Every generation of children instinctively nests itself in nature, no matter matter how tiny a scrap of it they can grasp. In a tale of one city child, the poet Audre Lord remembers picking tufts of grass which crept up through the paving stones in New York City and giving them as bouquets to her mother. It is a tale of two necessities. The grass must grow, no matter the concrete suppressing it. The child must find her way to the green, no matter the edifice which would crush it. "The Maori word for placenta is the same word for land, so at birth the placenta is buried, put back in the mothering earth. A Hindu baby may receive the sun-showing rite surya-darsana when, with conch shells ringing to the skies, the child is introduced to the sun. A newborn child of the Tonga people 'meets' the moon, dipped in the ocean of Kosi Bay in KwaZulu-Natal. Among some of the tribes of India, the qualities of different aspects of nature are invoked to bless the child, so he or she may have the characteristics of earth, sky and wind, of birds and animals, right down to the earthworm. Nothing is unbelonging to the child. "'My oldest memories have the flavor of earth,' wrote Frederico García Lorca. In the traditions of the Australian deserts, even from its time in the womb, the baby is catscradled in kinship with the world. Born into a sandy hollow, it is cleaned with sand and 'smoked' by fire, and everything -- insects, birds, plants, and animals -- is named to the child, who is told not only what everything is called but also the relationship between the child and each creature. Story and song weave the child into the subtle world of the Dreaming, the nested knowledge of how the child belongs. "The threads which tie the child to the land include its conception site and the significant places of the Dreaming inherited through its parents. Introduced to creatures and land features as to relations, the child is folded into the land, wrapped into country, and the stories press on the child's mind like the making of felt -- soft and often -- storytelling until the feeling of the story of the country is impressed into the landscape of the child's mind. "That the juggernaut of ants belongs to a child, belligerently following its own trail. That the twitch of an animal's tail is part of a child's own tale or storyline, once and now again. That on the papery bark of a tree may be written the songline of a child's name. That the prickles of a thornbush may have dynamic relevance to conscience. That a damp hollow by the riverbank is not an occasional place to visit but a permanent part of who you are. This is the beginning of belonging, the beginning of love. "In the art and myth of Indigenous Australia, the Ancestors seeded the country with its children, so the shimmering, pouring, circling, wheeling, spinning land is lit up with them, cartwheeling into life.... "The human heart's love for nature cannot ultimately be concreted over. Like Audre Lord's tufts of grass, will crack apart paving stones to grasp the sun. Children know they are made of the same stuff as the grass, as Walt Whitman describes nature creating the child who becomes what he sees: There was a child went forth every day And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became... The early lilacs became part of this child... And the song of the phoebe-bird... In Australia, people may talk of the child's conception site as the origin of their selfhood and their picture of themselves. As Whitman wrote of the child becoming aspects of the land, so in Northern Queensland a Kunjen elder describes the conception site as 'the home place for your image.' Land can make someone who they are, giving them fragments of themselves.

Turn back. Who knows what you’ll find once you’re in that room. Not the tonic of discovery but the pall of despair when disenchantment has all but shamed every ill-stretched nerve in your body. The years are watching you now, every star you see tonight already knows your torment, your ancestors are gathered here and have nothing to give or say, Non c’andà, don’t go there.

Within two years Jones published his observations on the Sanskrit language, which pioneered the science of comparative linguistics. In his publications Jones pointed out surprising similarities between Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language that became the sacred tongue of Hindu ritual, and the Greek and Latin languages, as well as similarities between all these languages and Gothic, Celtic, Old Persian, German, French and English. Thus in Sanskrit, ‘mother’ is ‘matar’, in Latin it is ‘mater’, and in Old Celtic it is ‘mathir’. Jones surmised that all these languages must share a common origin, developing from a now-forgotten ancient ancestor. He was thus the first to identify what later came to be called the Indo-European family of languages.

Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use, and that the mere presence in the dictionary of a word like ‘living’ does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world. Whether we call the early replicators living or not, they were the ancestors of life; they were our founding fathers.

The phrase “white privilege” is not the only verbal sleight of hand used to make achievement differences vanish. Even racial or ethnic groups that arrived in the United States destitute during the nineteenth century, and were forced to live in a desperate poverty and squalor almost inconceivable today, have had their later rise from such dire conditions verbally erased by calling their eventual achievement of prosperity a “privilege.”19 The histories of Irish, Jewish, Chinese and Japanese immigrants in America are classic examples of this process—and of their achievements being verbally air-brushed out of history by simply calling them “privilege.” Even middle-class blacks today have likewise been characterized by some as “privileged,”20 even though their ancestors arrived as slaves.

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person - perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic. ... Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. I think the health of ou civilization, the depth of out awarness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.

But life is fragile. Earth’s occasional encounters with large, wayward comets and asteroids, a formerly common event, wreaks intermittent havoc upon our ecosystem. A mere sixty-five million years ago (less than two percent of Earth’s past), a ten-trillion-ton asteroid hit what is now the Yucatan Peninsula and obliterated more than seventy percent of Earth’s flora and fauna—including all the famous outsized dinosaurs. Extinction. This ecological catastrophe enabled our mammal ancestors to fill freshly vacant niches, rather than continue to serve as hors d’oeuvres for T. rex. One big-brained branch of these mammals, that which we call primates, evolved a genus and species (Homo sapiens) with sufficient intelligence to invent methods and tools of science—and to deduce the origin and evolution of the universe.

Lilith’s ability had run in her family, although neither she nor her ancestors had been able to control it. It had either lain dormant in them or come to life in insane, haphazard fashion and caused the growth of useless new tissue. New tissue gone obscenely wrong. Humans called this condition cancer. To them, it was a hated disease. To the Oankali, it was treasure. It was beauty beyond Human comprehension.

There is an ethnic component lurking in the background of my story. In our race-conscious society, our vocabulary often extends no further than the color of someone's skin - black people, Asians, white privilege. Sometimes these broad categories are useful. But to understand my story, you have to delve into the details.I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the Northeast. Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. To these folks, poverty's the family tradition. Their ancestors were day laborers in the southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and mill workers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends and family.

It is quite impossible for a man not to have the qualities and predilections of his parents and ancestors in his constitution, whatever appearances may suggest to the contrary. This is the problem of race. Granted that one knows something of the parents, it is admissible to draw a conclusion about the child: any kind of offensive incontinence, any kind of sordid envy, or of clumsy self-vaunting—the three things which together have constituted the genuine plebeian type in all times—such must pass over to the child, as surely as bad blood; and with the help of the best education and culture one will only succeed in deceiving with regard to such heredity.—And what else does education and culture try to do nowadays! In our very democratic, or rather, very plebeian age, “education” and “culture” must be essentially the art of deceiving—deceiving with regard to origin, with regard to the inherited plebeianism in body and soul. An educator who nowadays preached truthfulness above everything else, and called out constantly to his pupils: “Be true! Be natural! Show yourselves as you are!”—even such a virtuous and sincere ass would learn in a short time to have recourse to the furca of Horace, naturam expellere: with what results? “Plebeianism” usque recurret.6

The mind is at every stage a theater of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention. The highest and most elaborated mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty next beneath, out of the mass offered by the faculty below that, which mass in turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simpler material, and so on. The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest. Just so the world of each of us, how so ever different our several views of it may be, all lay embedded in the primordial chaos of sensations, which gave the mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently. We may, if we like, by our reasonings unwind things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world. But all the while the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply removing portions of the given stuff. Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! Your world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttlefish, or crab!

Even today, with all our advanced technologies, more than 90 per cent of the calories that feed humanity come from the handful of plants that our ancestors domesticated between 9500 and 3500 BC – wheat, rice, maize (called ‘corn’ in the US), potatoes, millet and barley. No noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last 2,000 years. If our minds are those of hunter-gatherers, our cuisine is that of ancient farmers.

Early naturalists talked often about “deep time”—the perception they had, contemplating the grandeur of this valley or that rock basin, of the profound slowness of nature. But the perspective changes when history accelerates. What lies in store for us is more like what aboriginal Australians, talking with Victorian anthropologists, called “dreamtime,” or “everywhen”: the semi-mythical experience of encountering, in the present moment, an out-of-time past, when ancestors, heroes, and demigods crowded an epic stage. You can find it already by watching footage of an iceberg collapsing into the sea—a feeling of history happening all at once. It is. The summer of 2017, in the Northern Hemisphere, brought unprecedented extreme weather: three major hurricanes arising in quick succession in the Atlantic; the epic “500,000-year” rainfall of Hurricane Harvey, dropping on Houston a million gallons of water for nearly every single person in the entire state of Texas; the wildfires of California, nine thousand of them burning through more than a million acres, and those in icy Greenland, ten times bigger than those in 2014; the floods of South Asia, clearing 45 million from their homes. Then the record-breaking summer of 2018 made 2017 seem positively idyllic. It brought an unheard-of global heat wave, with temperatures hitting 108 in Los Angeles, 122 in Pakistan, and 124 in Algeria. In the world’s oceans, six hurricanes and tropical storms appeared on the radars at once, including one, Typhoon Mangkhut, that hit the Philippines and then Hong Kong, killing nearly a hundred and wreaking a billion dollars in damages, and another, Hurricane Florence, which more than doubled the average annual rainfall in North Carolina, killing more than fifty and inflicting $17 billion worth of damage. There were wildfires in Sweden, all the way in the Arctic Circle, and across so much of the American West that half the continent was fighting through smoke, those fires ultimately burning close to 1.5 million acres. Parts of Yosemite National Park were closed, as were parts of Glacier National Park in Montana, where temperatures also topped 100. In 1850, the area had 150 glaciers; today, all but 26 are melted.

To an American Negro living in the northern part of the United States the word South has an unpleasant sound, an overtone of horror and of fear. For it is in the South that our ancestors were slaves for three hundred years, bought and sold like cattle. It is in the South today that we suffer the worst forms of racial persecution and economic exploitation--segregation, peonage, and lynching. It is in the Southern states that the color line is hard and fast, Jim Crow rules, and I am treated like a dog. Yet it is in the South that two-thirds of my people live: A great Black Belt stretching from Virginia to Texas, across the cotton plantations of Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi, down into the orange groves of Florida and the sugar cane lands of Louisiana. It is in the South that black hands create the wealth that supports the great cities--Atlanta, Memphis, New Orleans, where the rich whites live in fine houses on magnolia-shaded streets and the Negroes live in slums restricted by law. It is in the South that what the Americans call the "race problem" rears its ugly head the highest and, like a snake with its eyes on a bird, holds the whole land in its power. It is in the South that hate and terror walk the streets and roads by day, sometimes quiet, sometimes violent, and sleep n the beds with the citizens at night.

[Bluestone's] dark eyes, which had been focused on the blue sky outside the cellblock window, shifted to Wicklow. "A lot of white folks in these parts, their ancestors were killed in what your history books call the Great Sioux Uprising. In schools, they teach that the Dakota were savages, that we rose up against our neighbors and slaughtered them." "The Sioux--Dakota--here probably have ancestors killed by whites." "But the Dakota didn't win that war. In the end, a war is always about who wins. My people had no chance. It doesn't matter that they had every reason to be angry and desperate. They'd been lied to, cheated, starved, their land and everything on it stolen. So they fought. And they lost. But the history has been written by the whites. In Black Earth County, it's the whites who believe they were set on unfairly, cruelly, and have the right to carry all that hatred in their hearts.

You're a border kid, a foot on either bank. Your ancestors crossed this river a thousand times. No wall, no matter how tall, can stop your heritage from flowing forever, like the Rio Grande itself." "M'ijo, pale folks catch all the breaks here and in Mexico, too. Not our fault. Not fair. Just the way it's been for years. Doors will open for you that won't for me... But now you've got to hold them open for us all." - They Call Me Güero: A Border Kid's Poems

To believe with certain "neoyogists" that "evolution" will produce a superman "who will differ from man as much as man differs from the animal or the animal from the vegetable" is not to know what man is: it is one more example of a pseudo-wisdom that deems itself vastly superior to the "separatist" religions but in fact shows itself more ignorant than the most elementary catechism. For the most elementary catechism does know what man is: it knows that by his qualities, and as an autonomous world, he stands opposed to the other kingdoms of nature taken together; that in one particular respect--that of spiritual possibilities and not of animal nature--the difference between a monkey and a man is "infinitely" greater than that between a fly and a monkey. For man alone is able to leave the world; man alone is able to return to God; and this is the reason he cannot be surpassed by a new earthly being in any way. Man is central among the beings of the earth; this is an absolute position; there cannot be a center more central than the center if definitions have any meaning. This neoyogism, like other similar movements, pretends that it can add an essential value to the wisdom of our ancestors; it believes the religions are partial truths that it is called upon to paste together after centuries or millennia of waiting and then to crown with its own naive little system.

All pre-Abrahamic cultures understood the tremendous importance of remaining closely connected to the past if the present was to be invested with any spiritually significant meaning. They also understood that the most personally relevant and accessible portal to the empowering wisdom and goodness of the past was through their own direct ancestors, those who shared their particular bloodline and DNA. It was for this reason that all traditional cultures engaged in what is often called ancestor worship (pitri-puja). There is no pre-Abrahamic culture on Earth that did not honor its ancestors in one form or another. This is a very important spiritual practice and tradition that used to be practiced universally by families in the ancient past. The process of ancestor worship now needs to be revived in the modern world if we are to not lose our sacred connection with our own cultural-spiritual heritage. Ancestor worship must become a regular practice again.

You see?’ his uncle said. ‘He has nothing against what he calls niggers. If you ask him, he will probably tell you he likes them even better than some white folks he knows and he will believe it. They are probably constantly beating him out of a few cents here and there in his store and probably even picking up things—packages of chewing gum or bluing or a banana or a can of sardines or a pair of shoelaces or a bottle of hair-straightener—under their coats and aprons and he knows it; he probably even gives them things free of charge—the bones and spoiled meat out of his butcher’s icebox and spoiled candy and lard. All he requires is that they act like niggers. Which is exactly what Lucas is doing: blew his top and murdered a white man—which Mr Lilley is probably convinced all Negroes want to do—and now the white people will take him out and burn him, all regular and in order and themselves acting exactly as he is convinced Lucas would wish them to act: like white folks; both of them observing implicitly the rules: the nigger acting like a nigger and the white folks acting like white folks and no real hard feelings on either side (since Mr Lilley is not a Gowrie) once the fury is over; in fact Mr Lilley would probably be one of the first to contribute cash money toward Lucas’ funeral and the support of his widow and children if he had them. Which proves again how no man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.

This, the universal Christ who, in grace and love, holds all things and all people and all creatures in that grace, is what gives me hope in this world. The universal Christ, who is not a colonizer, who does not seek after profit or create empires to rule over the poor or to oppress people, is constantly asking us to see ourselves as we fit in this sacredly created world. It is what my Potawatomi ancestors saw when they prayed to Kche Mnedo, to Mamogosnan, and is what our relatives still see when they pray today, a sacred belonging that spans time and generations and is called by many names. Today, it is what I continue to see in my own faith—not a Christianity bound by a sinner’s prayer and an everyday existence ruled by gender-divided Bible studies and accountability meetings but a story of faith that’s always bigger, always more inclusive, always making room at a bigger and better table full of lavish food that has already been prepared for everyone and for every created thing.

There have been a lot of Smedries over the centuries," he said, "and a lot of Talents. Many of them tend to be similar, in the long run. There are four kinds: Talents that affect space, time, knowledge, and the physical world." "Take my talent, for instance," he continued. "I change things in space. I can get lost, then get found again." "What about grandpa Smedry?" "Time," Kas said. "He arrives late to things. Australia, however, has a Talent that can change the physical world--in this case, her own shape. Her Talent is fairly specific, and not as broad as your grandfather's. For instance, there was a Smedry a couple of centuries back who could look ugly any time he wanted, not just when he woke up in the morning. Other have been able to change anyone's appearance, not just their own. Understand?" I shrugged. "I guess so." "The closer the Talent gets to its purest form, the more powerful it is," Kaz said. "Your grandfather's Talent is very pure--he can manipulate time in a lot of different circumstances. Your father and I have very similar Talents--I can get lost and Attica can lose things--and both are flexible." "What about Sing?" I asked. "Tripping. That's what we call a knowledge Talent--he knows how to do something normal with extraordinary ability. Like Australia, though, his power isn't very flexible." I nodded slowly. "So...what does this have to do with me?" "Well, it's hard to say," Kaz said. "You're getting into some deep philosophy now, kid. There are those who argue that the Breaking Talent is simply a physical-world Talent, but one that is very versatile and very powerful. There are others who argue that the Breaking Talent is much more. It seems to be able to do things that affect all four areas. Legends say that one of your ancestors--one of only two others to have this Talent--broke time and space together, forming a little bubble where nothing aged. Other records speak of breakings equally marvelous. Breakings that change people's memory or their abilities. What is it to 'break' something? What can you change? How far can the Talent go?

Exploring all I could find, often with reckless dedication, I devoured the philosophies and theologies of animistic and shamanistic traditions. Hungrily I began learning: how to feel connection with the wind and the waves, how to hear the songs of the land and the stories of the ancestors, how to dissolve into darkness and ride the thermals of light. Slowly I discovered how these traditions are still alive, not just in lands that, with a mix of disquiet and envy, Western cultures call primitive and uncivilized. Returning to the islands of my ancestors, with wonder and relief, I found animistic religions in the rolling hills and flowering gardens of Britain. To my surprise and delight, I found too that here my passion for science was as nurtured as my soul’s artistic creativity. There was nothing in quantum physics or molecular biology, or the theories of the physiology of consciousness that could negate my growing understanding and experience of sanctity. I found the power of reason here, naturally inherent within the language of a religion.

The parents of a child provided, on average, half the content of that feature; the grandparents, a quarter; the great-grandparents, an eighth-and so forth, all the way back to the most distant ancestor. The sum of all contributions could be described by the series-1/2 + 1/4 +1/8...-all of which conveniently added to 1. Galton called this the Ancestral Law of Heredity. It was a sort of mathematical homunculus-an idea borrowed from Pythagoras and Plato-but dressed up with fractions and denominators into a modern sounding law.

must be said for the “Latter-day Saints” (these conceited words were added to Smith’s original “Church of Jesus Christ” in 1833) that they have squarely faced one of the great difficulties of revealed religion. This is the problem of what to do about those who were born before the exclusive “revelation,” or who died without ever having the opportunity to share in its wonders. Christians used to resolve this problem by saying that Jesus descended into hell after his crucifixion, where it is thought that he saved or converted the dead. There is indeed a fine passage in Dante’s Inferno where he comes to rescue the spirits of great men like Aristotle, who had presumably been boiling away for centuries until he got around to them. (In another less ecumenical scene from the same book, the Prophet Muhammad is found being disemboweled in revolting detail.) The Mormons have improved on this rather backdated solution with something very literal-minded. They have assembled a gigantic genealogical database at a huge repository in Utah, and are busy filling it with the names of all people whose births, marriages, and deaths have been tabulated since records began. This is very useful if you want to look up your own family tree, and as long as you do not object to having your ancestors becoming Mormons. Every week, at special ceremonies in Mormon temples, the congregations meet and are given a certain quota of names of the departed to “pray in” to their church. This retrospective baptism of the dead seems harmless enough to me, but the American Jewish Committee became incensed when it was discovered that the Mormons had acquired the records of the Nazi “final solution,” and were industriously baptizing what for once could truly be called a “lost tribe”: the murdered Jews of Europe. For all its touching inefficacy, this exercise seemed in poor taste. I sympathize with the American Jewish Committee, but I nonetheless think that the followers of Mr. Smith should be congratulated for hitting upon even the most simpleminded technological solution to a problem that has defied solution ever since man first invented religion.

Your task is to vibrate with love to the best of your ability. Love your friends and love yourself, be nurturing and harmonious, and be at peace. This in itself is a great feat, one most of your ancestors never quite semed to achieve. However some of them did pass the test, creating what you would call Utopia. Where does Utopia dwell? Could Utopia dwell in the time line of Earth that you know? Is it possible to build a Utopia? Or would it simply arise of its own nature because of a natural tendency to rise to a higher frequency?

We need to get beyond our ignorance of the other. We need to move beyond the thinking that white privilege means that all whites live a privileged life. This perspective ignores the reality of class in this country. The plight of poor whites was largely ignored until the last presidential election. According to the 2013 data from the US Department of Agriculture, 40.2 percent of food stamp recipients were white; 25.7 percent, black.4 What’s Their Story? We would do well to hear and learn from the stories of whites, especially those who share the common struggle of poverty and marginalization. In Hillbilly Elegy, J. D. Vance shares his story of growing up poor: “To these folks, poverty is the family tradition—their ancestors were day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.”5 When we understand the details of the other’s story we realize that we have much more in common than we ever imagined.

The histories of Irish, Jewish, Chinese and Japanese immigrants in America are classic examples of this process—and of their achievements being verbally air-brushed out of history by simply calling them “privilege.” Even middle-class blacks today have likewise been characterized by some as “privileged,”20 even though their ancestors arrived as slaves. Achievements are a threat to a social vision and a political agenda based on that vision, and so are often kept off the hypothesis-testing agenda by adherents of that vision. Redefining words is a key part of that process. Worse yet, children who are currently being raised with the kinds of values, discipline and work habits that are likely to make them valuable contributors to society, and a source of pride to themselves and to those who raised them, are called “privileged,” and are taught in schools to feel guilty when other children are being raised with values, behavior and habits that are likely to leave them few options as adults, other than to live at the expense of other people, whether via the welfare state or through a life of crime, or both.

What do you do when your greatest accomplishments lead you straight down the path of an even greater fear? Instead of summoning his faith and standing firm to see the deliverance of his God, Elijah retreats. And in his escape from his geographical surroundings, he begins to back down from the boldness that has characterized his whole ministry up to this point. When he came to Beersheba in Judah, he left his servant there, while he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness. He came to a broom bush, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. “I have had enough, LORD,” he said. “Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.” Then he lay down under the bush and fell asleep. (1 Kings 19:3–5) Now I’m confused. Verse 3 says he was running for his life. Yet verse 4 says he asked God to kill him. Which one is it? Are you looking for life support, Elijah? Or shall God send the angels of euthanasia? One of these things is not like the other. The more I studied this text, though, and considered the context of Elijah’s despair and compared it to similar feelings I’ve experienced under much less duress, the more I got it. Although the text says Elijah ran for his life—and I’m sure that’s how it appeared—it seems like something deeper is going on. In fact, I’m not sure Elijah was running for his life at all, at least not in the sense we would use that phrase. I believe Elijah was actually running from his life. You see, it had been a long, lonely three years for Elijah. Did he survive the drought? Undoubtedly. And through him God won the battle with a unanimous decision. But winning can be as exhausting as losing. Sometimes the pressure of success can drain you at an even deeper level than the frustration of failure. Elijah knows Queen Jezebel doesn’t have the power to call on her gods and end his life. If she had, he’d have been buried beside his bull back on the mountain. So it’s safe to assume that his greatest fear at this point isn’t dying. His greatest fear is living—and having to fight yet another agonizing battle. Jezebel’s threat is ultimately impotent, yes. But that doesn’t make it ineffective. Because fear often finds its power, not in our actual situation, but in what we tell ourselves about our situation.

The ascent of the soul through love, which Plato describes in the Phaedrus, is symbolized in the figure of Aphrodite Urania, and this was the Venus painted by Botticelli, who was incidentally an ardent Platonist, and member of the Platonist circle around Pico della Mirandola. Botticelli’s Venus is not erotic: she is a vision of heavenly beauty, a visitation from other and higher spheres, and a call to transcendence. Indeed, she is self-evidently both the ancestor and the descendant of the Virgins of Fra Filippo Lippi: the ancestor in her pre-Christian meaning, the descendant in absorbing all that had been achieved through the artistic representation of the Virgin Mary as the symbol of untainted flesh. The post-Renaissance rehabilitation of sexual desire laid the foundations for a genuinely erotic art, an art that would display the human being as both subject and object of desire, but also as a free individual whose desire is a favour consciously bestowed. But this rehabilitation of sex leads us to raise what has become one of the most important questions confronting art and the criticism of art in our time: that of the difference, if there is one, between erotic art and pornography. Art can be erotic and also beautiful, like a Titian Venus. But it cannot be beautiful and also pornographic—so we believe, at least. And it is important to see why. In distinguishing the erotic and the pornographic we are really distinguishing two kinds of interest: interest in the embodied person and interest in the body—and, in the sense that I intend, these interests are incompatible. (See the discussion in Chapter 2.) Normal desire is an inter-personal emotion. Its aim is a free and mutual surrender, which is also a uniting of two individuals, of you and me—through our bodies, certainly, but not merely as our bodies. Normal desire is a person to person response, one that seeks the selfhood that it gives. Objects can be substituted for each other, subjects not. Subjects, as Kant persuasively argued, are free individuals; their non-substitutability belongs to what they essentially are. Pornography, like slavery, is a denial of the human subject, a way of negating the moral demand that free beings must treat each other as ends in themselves.

Taxonomy, also called systematics, is the science-based hierarchical classification of the world's species. The area had traditionally been an obscure academic discipline dominated by erudite and professional dons who would memorize and interpret thousands of Latin species names. Advances seldom made the newspapers and caustic disputes lingered in the dust scientific literature for generations. That academic innocence would be lost forever when precise taxonomic recognition of species and subspecies came to be the basis for protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Well,I appreciate the offer, Senator, but I'll drive myself.See you over the canapes." "Then, I'll ride with you," he said amiably. "We don't want to put any more carbon monoxide in the air than necessary. Shall I put that in the car for you?" Shelby took a firmer grip on the box as her hold in other areas started to slip. It was the damn serious smile and those thoughtful eyes,she decided. They made a woman feel as though she were the only one he'd ever looked at in quite that way. "Alan," she began,a bit amused by his persistance. "What is this?" "This..." He leaned over and captured her mouth with his, lingering until her fingers threatened to dig holes in the stif cardboard she held. "Is what our ancestors would have called a siege," he finished softly. "And MacGregors are notoriously successful at laying siege." Her breath shuddered out to merge with his. "You don't do badly at hand-to-hand combat either." He chuckled and would have kissed her again if she hadn't managed to step back. "All right." Shelby thrust the box into his arms, considering it a strategic move. "We'll carpool.I don't want to be condemned as an air-polluter.

The creation of new symbioses by mergers on a crowded planet is called symbiogenesis. And we might call all aspects of its study “symbiogenetics”—the science of normative symbioses, the word commanding respect because of its apparent coinage from genetics; in fact, I derived it directly from symbiogenesis, though the connotation is a good one. Although this type of evolution sounds bizarre—a monstrous breach of Platonic etiquette in favor of polymorphous perversity—it is now confirmed by genetic evidence, taught in textbooks. It is a fact, or what the French philosopher of science Bruno Latour and the Belgian physicist-turned-philosopher Isabelle Stengers, not putting too fine a point on it, would call a factish. Nonetheless, although symbiogenesis—the evolution of new species by symbiosis—is now recognized, it is still treated as marginal, applicable to our remote ancestors but not relevant to present-day core evolutionary processes. This is debatable. We are crisscrossed and cohabited by stranger beings, intimate visitors who affect our behavior, appreciate our warmth, and are in no rush to leave. Like all visible life-forms, we are composites.

In his publications Jones pointed out surprising similarities between Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language that became the sacred tongue of Hindu ritual, and the Greek and Latin languages, as well as similarities between all these languages and Gothic, Celtic, Old Persian, German, French and English. Thus in Sanskrit, ‘mother’ is ‘matar’, in Latin it is ‘mater’, and in Old Celtic it is ‘mathir’. Jones surmised that all these languages must share a common origin, developing from a now-forgotten ancient ancestor. He was thus the first to identify what later came to be called the Indo-European family of languages.

But what’s worse than that is the slaves who identified with their masters, as if the slaves’ value as human beings depended on what the masters were like. What they were like was evil! They were called “masters” because they owned human beings! And we slaves were ready to fight each other over which of the lowdown filthy dogs who owned us was the best! But it wasn’t the slaves’ fault. Like Douglass wrote, slaves are like other people. When you think about it, it’s a wonder more black folks didn’t fight with one another instead of fighting against the white man the way Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, David Walker, and a whole lot of others did. While you’re busy shaking your head thinking they were stupid, ask yourself this: are we any better today? Black people put on the uniform of the U.S. military, our masters, and go to Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and anywhere else Uncle Sam tells us to go, and fight and kill yellow-skinned folks and brown-skinned folks on behalf of the United States, our masters—just like slaves fighting other slaves. Meanwhile, back home, one out of every half-dozen blacks is locked up for committing the same drug crimes as white dudes who walk around free. What’s wrong with that picture? Then you’ve got blacks in police uniforms out there arresting other innocent blacks. Blacks in America really need to study the Jews in Germany. Those Jews never thought they were part of Hitler’s system, most of them never sided with the people oppressing them. We do. We go to war. What kind of abomination is that? How many blacks go to war because we can’t find a job, and are willing to kill or be killed just so we can feed ourselves and our families? But remember, our already-free Maroon ancestors risked all of that just to free others. Getting back to Frederick Douglass, it’s like he said: Slaves are like other people. Too many of us have that slave mentality. It can take a lot to get past that, but a lot of us have, and Frederick Douglass was one.

We are the chosen ones. In each family there is one who seems called to find the ancestors, to put flesh on their bones and make them live again, to tell the family story and to feel that somehow, they know and approve. To me, doing genealogy is not a cold gathering of facts but, instead, breathing life into all who have gone before. We are the story tellers of the tribe. All tribes have one. We have been called as it were by our genes, Those who have gone before crying out to us: Tell our story! So, we do. In finding them, we somehow find ourselves. How many graves have I stood before and cried? I have lost count. How many times have I told the ancestors you have a wonderful family? You would be proud of us! How many times have I walked up to a grave and felt somehow there was love there for me? I cannot say. It goes to pride in what our ancestors were able to accomplish. How they contributed to what we are today. It goes to respecting their hardships and losses, they’re never giving in or giving up, their resoluteness to go on and build a life for their family. So, as a scribe called, I tell the story of my family. It is up to that one called in the next generation to answer the call and take their place in the long line of family storytellers. Excerpt from the poem The Story Tellers attributed to Della Joann McGinnis Johnson

Several primate species have communication systems of considerable sophistication. Gelada baboons have 22 different kinds of call, and gorillas have been recorded using some 30 different gestures.34 One of the best studied animal communication systems is the repertoire of alarm calls uttered by the vervet monkeys of East Africa. Vervets lead a perilous existence, at constant risk from eagles, leopards and snakes, and they possess a distinctive warning call for each. When researchers record one of these calls and play it back to other vervets, the monkeys reliably scan the skies in response to the eagle call, look down at the ground at the snake call, and leap into bushes at the leopard call.

Some would call him an ape, but he is almost as different from a real ape as he is different from a real man. His people dwell far to the east, in the mountains that fringe the eastern frontiers of Zamora. There are not many of them; but, if they are not exterminated, I believe they will become human beings in perhaps a hundred thousand years. They are in the formative stage; they are neither apes, as their remote ancestors were, nor men, as their remote descendants may be. They dwell in the high crags of well-nigh inaccessible mountains, knowing nothing of fire or the making of shelter or garments, or the use of weapons. Yet they have a language of a sort, consisting mainly of grunts and clicks. “I

I got a bone to pick with you, Zhang. You can turn into an eagle and a bear?” “And an elephant,” Hazel said proudly.” “An elephant.” Percy shook his head in disbelief. “That’s your family gift? You can change shape?” Frank shuffled his feet, “Um, yeah. Periclymenus, my ancestor, the argonaut, he could do that. He passed down the ability.” “And he got that gift from Poseidon,” Percy said. “That’s completely unfair! I can’t turn into animals!” Frank stared at him. “Unfair?! You can breath under water and blow up glaciers, and summon freaking hurricanes! And it’s unfair that I can be an elephant?” Percy considered. “Okay, I guess you got a point, but next time I call you totally beast....” “Just shut up,” Frank said.

What Marx called the great catastrophe of the Industrial Revolution was not a catastrophe at all; it brought about a tremendous improvement in the conditions of the people. Many survived who wouldn’t have survived otherwise. It is not true, as Marx said, that the improvements in technology are available only to the exploiters and that the masses are living in a state much worse than on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. Everything the Marxists say about exploitation is absolutely wrong! Lies! In fact, capitalism made it possible for many persons to survive who wouldn’t have otherwise. And today many people, or most people, live at a much higher standard of living than that at which their ancestors lived 100 or 200 years ago.

Once he has recognized his invisible guide, a mystic sometimes decides to trace his own isnlld, to reveal his spiritual genealogy, that is, to disclose the "chain of transmission" culminating in his person and bear witness to the spiritual ascendancy which he invokes across the generations of mankind. He does neither more nor less than to designate by name the minds to whose family he is conscious of belonging. Read in the opposite order from their phenomenological emergence, these genealogies take on the appearance of true genealogies. Judged by the rules of _our historical criticism, the claim of these genealogies to truth seems highly precarious. Their relevance is to another "transhistoric truth," which cannot be regarded as inferior (because it is of a different order) to the material historic truth whose claim to truth, with the documentation at our disposal, is no less precarious. Suhrawardi traces the family tree of the IshrlqiyOn back to Hermes, ancestor of the Sages, (that Idris-Enoch of Islamic prophetology, whom Ibn rArabi calls the prophet of the Philosophers) ; from him are descended the Sages of Greece and Persia, who are followed by certain �ofis (Abo Yazid Bastlmi, Kharraqlni, I;Ialllj, and the choice seems particularly significant in view of what has been said above about the Uwaysis}, and all these branches converge in his own doctrine and school. This is not a history of philosophy in our sense of the term; but still less is it a mere fantasy.

But the strains of the doleful song stirred such powerful nostalgia for lost loves and for things lost over the course of one's life and for lives, like my grandfather's, that had come long before mine that I was suddenly taken back to a poor, disconsolate universe of simple folk like Mafalda's ancestors, fretting and scurrying in the tiny vicoli of an old Naples whose memory I wanted to share word for word with Oliver now, as if he too, like Mafalda and Manfredi and Anchise and me, were a fellow southerner whom I'd met in a foreign port city and who'd instantly understand why the sound of this old song, like an ancient prayer for the dead in the deadest of languages, could bring tears even in those who couldn't understand a syllable.

A bunch of people from one tribe boldly went into the land of another tribe looting, pillaging and raping and they brought back food, clothing and women as souvenirs of victory and they called this valor and patriotism. And the stories of these exploits would be passed on through generations as some sort of heroic saga. And nobody would question it, for questioning those stories would mean questioning the tribal traditions, which would be an act of treason. Now my question to you, the thinking human of a modern world is - this kind of behavior may have been accepted in those days as uncompromisable tradition when our ancestors were nothing more than mindless savages, but does such tribalism make any sense in a civilized abode such as ours!

Unlike ancient Israel, America is not a covenant nation. God has made no promise to our physical ancestors that guarantees our national status. If Israel had to fulfill the conditions for divine blessing, even though God had covenanted with them as His chosen people, America certainly has no inviolable claim on the blessing of God. As long as unbelief and disobedience to the Word of God color the soul of our nation, we simply cannot expect the blessing of God. Israel didn’t get it in her unbelief. But for those of us who are Christians, the covenant blessings do apply. “If you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Gal. 3:29). All the promises of salvation, mercy, forgiveness of sins, and spiritual prosperity are ours to claim as long as we remain faithful to God. That is why the spiritual state of the church in our nation is the key to the blessing of the nation as a whole. If God is going to bless America, it will not be for the sake of the nation itself. He blesses the nation, and has always done so, for the sake of His people. If we who are called by His name are not fulfilling the conditions for divine blessing, there is no hope whatsoever for the rest of the nation. On the other hand, if the church is fit to receive God’s blessing, the whole nation will be the beneficiary of that, because the Word of God will be proclaimed with power, God will add to His church, and spiritual blessings of all kinds will result. And those are the truest blessings of all.

Do you know what a humanist is? My parents and grandparents were humanists, what used to be called Free Thinkers. So as a humanist I am honoring my ancestors, which the Bible says is a good thing to do. We humanists try to behave as decently, fairly, and as honorably as we can without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. My brother and sister didn't think there was one, my parents and grandparents didn't think there was one. It was enough that they were alive. We humanists serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community. I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, "Isaac is up in heaven now." It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in heaven now." That's my favorite joke. How do humanists feel about Jesus? I say of Jesus, as all humanists do, "If what he said is good, and so much of it is absolutely beautiful, what does it matter if he was God or not?" But if Christ hadn't delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I'd just as soon be a rattlesnake.

And by the early 1970s our little parable of Sam and Sweetie is exactly what happened to the North American Golden Retriever. One field-trial dog, Holway Barty, and two show dogs, Misty Morn’s Sunset and Cummings’ Gold-Rush Charlie, won dozens of blue ribbons between them. They were not only gorgeous champions; they had wonderful personalities. Consequently, hundreds of people wanted these dogs’ genes to come into their lines, and over many matings during the 1970s the genes of these three dogs were flung far and wide throughout the North American Golden Retriever population, until by 2010 Misty Morn’s Sunset alone had 95,539 registered descendants, his number of unregistered ones unknown. Today hundreds of thousands of North American Golden Retrievers are descended from these three champions and have received both their sweet dispositions and their hidden time bombs. Unfortunately for these Golden Retrievers, and for the people who love them, one of these time bombs happens to be cancer. To be fair, a so-called cancer gene cannot be traced directly to a few famous sires, but using these sires so often increases the chance of recessive genes meeting—for good and for ill. Today, in the United States, 61.4 percent of Golden Retrievers die of cancer, according to a survey conducted by the Golden Retriever Club of America and the Purdue School of Veterinary Medicine. In Great Britain, a Kennel Club survey found almost exactly the same result, if we consider that those British dogs—loosely diagnosed as dying of “old age” and “cardiac conditions” and never having been autopsied—might really be dying of a variety of cancers, including hemangiosarcoma, a cancer of the lining of the blood vessels and the spleen. This sad history of the Golden Retriever’s narrowing gene pool has played out across dozens of other breeds and is one of the reasons that so many of our dogs spend a lot more time in veterinarians’ offices than they should and die sooner than they might. In genetic terms, it comes down to the ever-increasing chance that both copies of any given gene are derived from the same ancestor, a probability expressed by a number called the coefficient of inbreeding. Discovered in 1922 by the American geneticist Sewall Wright, the coefficient of inbreeding ranges from 0 to 100 percent and rises as animals become more inbred.

He smiled and pulled the ugly white fichu from her neck. She blinked and looked down at the simple, square neckline of her bodice as if she'd never seen it. Perhaps she hadn't. Perhaps she dressed in the dark like a nun. "What are you doing?" He sighed. "I confess, I find your naïveté perplexing. How have you arrived at the advanced age of six and twenty without having anyone attempt seduction upon yourself? I'm of two minds on the matter: One, utter astonishment at my sex and their deaf disregard for your siren call. Two, glee at the thought that your innocence might signal that you are indeed innocent. Why this should excite me so, I don't know- virginity has never before been a particular whim of mine. I think perhaps it's the setting. Who knows how many virgins were deflowered here by my lusty ancestors? Or," he said as he deftly unpinned and tossed aside her apron, "maybe it's simply you." "I don't..." Her words trailed off and then, interestingly, she blushed a deep rose. Well. That question settled, then. His little maiden was really a maiden. "What?" "I think it's you," he confided, pulling the strings tying her hideous mobcap beneath her chin. She made a wild grab for it, but he was faster, snatching the bloody thing off- finally, and with a great deal of satisfaction. She might've deprived him of a wife that it'd taken him half a year and a rather large sum of money to entangle, but by God, he'd taken off her awful cap. And underneath... "Oh, Séraphine," he breathed, enchanted, for her hair was as black as coal, as black as night, as black as his own soul, save for one white streak just over her left eye. But she'd twisted and braided and tortured the strands, binding them tight to her head, and his fingers itched to let them free. "Don't!" she said, as if she knew what he wanted, her hands flying up to cover her hair. He batted them aside, laughing, pulling a pin here, a pin there, dropping them carelessly to the carpet as she squealed like a little girl and backed away from him, trying frantically to ward off his fingers. He might've taken pity on her had he not just spent an hour on a freezing moor, wondering if he was going to find her dead, neck broken, at the bottom of a hill. Her hair came down all at once, a tumbling mass, tousled and heavy and nearly down to her waist. "Wonderful," he murmured, taking it in both hands and lifting it.

What a tragedy it is when one trusts the jealousy of his friends. What a tragedy it is when one trusts the values of a society built to trap souls within its system. What a tragedy it is, when one is afraid to oppose the protective love of his own family, rooted in the fears of the ancestors. What a tragedy it is when one is afraid to contradict his own thoughts, rooted in his own traumatic experiences. What a tragedy it is, when men and women of religion, are afraid to think. What a tragedy it is, when men and women of science, are afraid to feel. What a tragedy it is when we call that life and glorify spiritual death as if it was a trophy. For the one who lives must battle such things inside his own nature, and will never be able to share victories with those who are too frightened to awaken.

The transition to agriculture began around 9500–8500 BC in the hill country of south-eastern Turkey, western Iran, and the Levant. It began slowly and in a restricted geographical area. Wheat and goats were domesticated by approximately 9000 BC; peas and lentils around 8000 BC; olive trees by 5000 BC; horses by 4000 BC; and grapevines in 3500 BC. Some animals and plants, such as camels and cashew nuts, were domesticated even later, but by 3500 BC the main wave of domestication was over. Even today, with all our advanced technologies, more than 90 per cent of the calories that feed humanity come from the handful of plants that our ancestors domesticated between 9500 and 3500 BC – wheat, rice, maize (called ‘corn’ in the US), potatoes, millet and barley. No noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last 2,000 years.

But overprotection is just one part of a larger trend that we call problems of progress. This term refers to bad consequences produced by otherwise good social changes. It’s great that our economic system produces an abundance of food at low prices, but the flip side is an epidemic of obesity. It’s great that we can connect and communicate with people instantly and for free, but this hyperconnection may be damaging the mental health of young people. It’s great that we have refrigerators, antidepressants, air conditioning, hot and cold running water, and the ability to escape from most of the physical hardships that were woven into the daily lives of our ancestors back to the dawn of our species. Comfort and physical safety are boons to humanity, but they bring some costs, too. We adapt to our new and improved circumstances and then lower the bar for what we count as intolerable levels of discomfort and risk. By the standards of our great-grandparents, nearly all of us are coddled. Each generation tends to see the one after it as weak, whiny, and lacking in resilience. Those older generations may have a point, even though these generational changes reflect real and positive progress. To repeat, we are not saying that the problems facing students, and young people more generally, are minor or “all in their heads.” We are saying that what people choose to do in their heads will determine how those real problems affect them. Our argument is ultimately pragmatic, not moralistic: Whatever your identity, background, or political ideology, you will be happier, healthier, stronger, and more likely to succeed in pursuing your own goals if you do the opposite of what Misoponos advised.

Scrooge has some interesting literary ancestors. Pact-makers with the Devil didn’t start out as misers, quite the reverse. Christopher Marlowe’s late-sixteenth-century Doctor Faustus sells his body and soul to Mephistopheles with a loan document signed in blood, collection due in twenty-four years, but he doesn’t do it cheaply. He has a magnificent wish list, which contains just about everything you can read about today in luxury magazines for gentlemen. Faust wants to travel; he wants to be very, very rich; he wants knowledge; he wants power; he wants to get back at his enemies; and he wants sex with a facsimile of Helen of Troy. Helen of Troy isn’t called that in the luxury men’s magazines, she has other names, but it’s the same sort of thing: a woman so beautiful she doesn’t exist, or, worse, may be a demon in disguise. Very hot though, as they say.

Cordelia – “Why so rough?” Aral – “It’s very poor. It was the town center during the time Isolation. And it hasn’t been touched by renovation, minimal water, no electricity choked with refuse.” “Mostly human,” added Peoter tartly. “Poor?” Asked Cordelia bewildered. “No electricity? How can it be on the comm network?” “It’s not of course,” answered Vorkosigan. “Then how can anyone get their schooling?” Cordelia “They don’t.” Cordelia stared. “I don’t understand, how do they get their jobs?” “A few escape to the service, the rest prey on each other mostly.” Vorkosigan regarded her face uneasily. “Have you no poverty on Beta colony?” “Poverty? Well some people have more money than others, but no comm consuls…?” Vorkosigan was diverted from his interrogation. “Is not owning a comm consul the lowest standard of living you can imagine?” He said in wonder. “It’s the first article in the constitution! ‘Access to information shall not be abridged.’” “Cordelia, these people barely have access to food, clothing and shelter. They have a few rags and cooking pots and squat in buildings that aren’t economical to repair or tear down yet with the wind whistling through the walls.” “No air conditioning?” “No heat in the winter is a bigger problem here.” “I suppose so. You people don’t really have summer. How do they call for help when they are sick or hurt?” “What help?” Vorkosigan was growing grim. “If they’re sick they either get well or die.” “Die if we’re lucking” muttered Veoter. “You’re not joking.” She stared back and forth between the pair of them. “Why, think of all the geniuses you must missing!” “I doubt we must be missing very many from the Caravanceri.” Said Peoter dryly. “Why not? They have the same genetic compliment as you.” Cordelia pointed out the – to her -obvious. The Count went rigid. “My dear girl, they most certainly do not. My family has been Vor for nine generations.” Cordelia raised her eyebrows. “How do you know if you didn’t have the gene-typing until 80 years ago?” Both the guard commander and the footman were acquiring peculiar stuffed expressions. The footman bit his lip. “Besides,” she pointed out reasonably, “If you Vor got around half as much as those histories I’ve been reading imply. 90% of the people on this planet must have Vor blood by now. Who knows who your relatives are on your father’s side. Vorkosigan bit his napkin absently. His eyes gone crinkly with much the same expression as the footman and muttered, “Cordelia, you really can’t sit at the breakfast table and imply my ancestors were bastards. It’s a mortal insult here.” “Where should I sit? Oh I’ll never understand.

No doubt it often happens that a child possesses qualities of his ancestors which were perhaps missing in his parents, or even two or three generations back; however, this is another heritage, a heritage which is known to us as such. I might express this by saying that a soul borrows a property from the spheres of the jinn, and a more concrete property from the physical world; and as it borrows this property, together with this transaction it takes upon itself the taxation and the obligations as well as the responsibilities which are attached to the property. Very often the property is not in proper repair, and damage has been done to it, and it falls to his lot to repair it; and if there be a mortgage on that property that becomes his due. Together with the property he becomes the owner of the records and the contracts of the property which he owns. In this is to be found the secret of what is called Karma.

The conduct of affairs, for the Rationalist, is a matter of solving problems, and in this no man can hope to be successful whose reason has become inflexible by surrender to habit or is clouded by the fumes of tradition. In this activity the character which the Rationalist claims for himself is the character of the engineer, whose mind (it is supposed) is controlled throughout by appropriate technique and whose first step is to dismiss from his attention everything not directly related to his specific intentions. The assimilation of politics to engineering is, indeed, what may be called the myth of rationalist politics. And it is, of course, a recurring theme in the literature of Rationalism. The politics it inspires may be called the politics of the felt need; for the Rationalist, politics are always charged with the feeling of the moment. He waits upon circumstance to provide him with his problems, but rejects its aid in their solution. That anything should be allowed to stand between a society and the satisfaction of the felt needs of each moment in its history must appear to the Rationalist a piece of mysticism and nonsense. And his politics are, in fact, the rational solution of those practical conundrums which the recognition of the sovereignty of the felt need perpetually creates in the life of a society. Thus, political life is resolved into a succession of crises, each to be surmounted by the application of "reason." Each generation, indeed, each administration, should see unrolled before it the blank sheet of infinite possibility. And if by chance this tablula vasa has been defaced by the irrational scribblings of tradition-ridden ancestors, then the first task of the Rationalist must be to scrub it clean; as Voltaire remarked, the only way to have good laws is to burn all existing laws and start afresh.

The transition to agriculture began around 9500–8500 BC in the hill country of south-eastern Turkey, western Iran and the Levant. It began slowly and in a restricted geographical area. Wheat and goats were domesticated by approximately 9000 BC; peas and lentils around 8000 BC; olive trees by 5000 BC; horses by 4000 BC; and grapevines in 3500 BC. Some animals and plants, such as camels and cashew nuts, were domesticated even later, but by 3500 BC the main wave of domestication was over. Even today, with all our advanced technologies, more than 90 per cent of the calories that feed humanity come from the handful of plants that our ancestors domesticated between 9500 and 3500 BC – wheat, rice, maize (called ‘corn’ in the US), potatoes, millet and barley. No noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last 2,000 years. If our minds are those of hunter-gatherers, our cuisine is that of ancient farmers. Scholars

Did dinosaurs sing? Was there a teeming, singing wilderness with all the species thumping around, tuning up for the next millennia? Of course, dinosaurs sang, I thought. They are the ancestors of the singing birds and cousins to the roaring crocodiles…turns out, no. Turns out the syrinx, the organ that produces birdsong and the larynx, the organ that produces operatic arias, didn’t evolve until after the dinosaur extinction event…Some dinosaurs blew air into their closed mouths and through nasal cavities into resonance chambers, which we see in fossils as bony crests. They made the forest echo with clear, ominous tones, eerily like a cello. I have heard it in recordings scientists made of the sound they produced when they blew air through crests constructed to mimic lambeosaurus’s. Some dinosaurs cooed to their mates like doves…turns out that even if dinosaurs didn’t sing, they danced. There is evidence in vigorous scrape marks found in 100-million year old Colorado sandstone. From the courting behavior of ostriches and grouse, scientists envision the dinosaur males coming together on courting grounds, bobbing and scratching, flaring their brilliant feathers and cooing. Imagine: huge animals, each weighing more than a dozen football teams, shaking the Earth for a chance at love. What the story of the dinosaurs tells me is that if the earth didn’t have music, it would waste no time inventing it. In birds, tantalizing evidence of birdsong is found in 67-million-year old fossils, marking the first know appearance of the syrinx. Now the whole Earth can chime, from deep in the sea to high in the atmosphere with the sounds of snapping shrimp, singing mice, roaring whales, moaning bears, clattering dragonflies, and a fish calling like a foghorn. Who could catalog the astonishing oeuvre of the Earth? And more songs are being created every year.

It cannot be effaced from a man's soul what his ancestors have preferably and most constantly done: whether they were perhaps diligent economizers attached to a desk and a cash-box, modest and citizen-like in their desires, modest also in their virtues; or whether they were accustomed to commanding from morning till night, fond of rude pleasures and probably of still ruder duties and responsibilities; or whether, finally, at one time or another, they have sacrificed old privileges of birth and possession, in order to live wholly for their faith—for their "God,"—as men of an inexorable and sensitive conscience, which blushes at every compromise. It is quite impossible for a man NOT to have the qualities and predilections of his parents and ancestors in his constitution, whatever appearances may suggest to the contrary. This is the problem of race. Granted that one knows something of the parents, it is admissible to draw a conclusion about the child: any kind of offensive incontinence, any kind of sordid envy, or of clumsy self-vaunting—the three things which together have constituted the genuine plebeian type in all times—such must pass over to the child, as surely as bad blood; and with the help of the best education and culture one will only succeed in DECEIVING with regard to such heredity.—And what else does education and culture try to do nowadays! In our very democratic, or rather, very plebeian age, "education" and "culture" MUST be essentially the art of deceiving—deceiving with regard to origin, with regard to the inherited plebeianism in body and soul. An educator who nowadays preached truthfulness above everything else, and called out constantly to his pupils: "Be true! Be natural! Show yourselves as you are!"—even such a virtuous and sincere ass would learn in a short time to have recourse to the FURCA of Horace, NATURAM EXPELLERE: with what results? "Plebeianism" USQUE RECURRET.

His development (or retrogression) was rapid. His muscles became hard as iron, and he grew callous to all ordinary pain. He achieved an internal as well as external economy. He could eat anything, no matter how loathsome or indigestible; and, once eaten, the juices of his stomach extracted the last least particle of nutriment; and his blood carried it to the farthest reaches of his body, building it into the toughest and stoutest of tissues. Sight and scent became remarkably keen, while his hearing developed such acuteness that in his sleep he heard the faintest sound and knew whether it heralded peace or peril. He learned to bite the ice out with his teeth when it collected between his toes; and when he was thirsty and there was a thick scum of ice over the water hole, he would break it by rearing and striking it with stiff fore legs. His most conspicuous trait was an ability to scent the wind and forecast it a night in advance. No matter how breathless the air when he dug his nest by tree or bank, the wind that later blew inevitably found him to leeward, sheltered and snug. And not only did he learn by experience, but instincts long dead became alive again. The domesticated generations fell from him. In vague ways he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down. It was no task for him to learn to fight with cut and slash and the quick wolf snap. In this manner had fought forgotten ancestors. They quickened the old life within him, and the old tricks which they had stamped into the heredity of the breed were his tricks. They came to him without effort or discovery, as though they had been his always. And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him. p21

Training—training is everything; training is all there is to a person.  We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own; they are transmitted to us, trained into us.  All that is original in us, and therefore fairly creditable or discreditable to us, can be covered up and hidden by the point of a cambric needle, all the rest being atoms contributed by, and inherited from, a procession of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adam-clam or grasshopper or monkey from whom our race has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed.  And as for me, all that I think about in this plodding sad pilgrimage, this pathetic drift between the eternities, is to look out and humbly live a pure and high and blameless life, and save that one microscopic atom in me that is truly me :  the rest may land in Sheol and welcome for all I care.

In Erikson’s words: “A meaningful old age…serves the need for that integrated heritage which gives indispensable perspective on the life cycle. Strength here takes the form of that detached yet active concern with life bounded with death, which we call wisdom…” The notion of integrity connotes the ability to tie together, to relate to others outside oneself. Erikson thought that the perspective of an older person is based on a new definition of identity, which could be summarized in the sentence “I am what survives me.” If toward the end of life I conclude that nothing of myself is likely to survive, despair is likely to take over. But if I have identified with some more enduring entities, my survival will provide a sense of connection, of continuity, that keeps despair at bay. If I love my grandchildren, or the work I have accomplished, or the causes I have championed, then I am bound to feel a part of the future even after personal death. Jonas Salk calls this attitude “being a good ancestor.

But on the Y chromosome, the studies found a pattern that was strikingly different. In East Asians, Europeans, Near Easterners, and North Africans, the authors found many Star Clusters with common male ancestors living roughly around five thousand years ago.18 The time around five thousand years ago coincides with the period in Eurasia that the archaeologist Andrew Sherratt called the “Secondary Products Revolution,” in which people began to find many uses for domesticated animals beyond meat production, including employing them to pull carts and plows and to produce dairy products and clothing such as wool.19 This was also around the time of the onset of the Bronze Age, a period of greatly increased human mobility and wealth accumulation, facilitated by the domestication of the horse, the invention of the wheel and wheeled vehicles, and the accumulation of rare metals like copper and tin, which are the ingredients of bronze and had to be imported from hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away.

I feel like I’m on holy ground here, do you?' she called to the crowd through her mic. 'Special spot, special spot,' somebody called back. They were not wrong: what happened here in a mountainous backwater of a colonial outpost had gathered enough momentum to shift the course of history. Shepherd told the story of the anonymous woman who was said to have started the first trash house fire on the night of December 27, 1831. 'Yes, it led to her death,' she said, 'but it gave birth to abolition within the British Empire. I’m going to rename her tonight. Guess what I’m going to name her? ‘Fire.’ Tonight we christen ‘Fire.’ This time we want to have the flames of passion in our hearts. As I look across the hills, I can almost see the fires lit in 1831. I believe the hills were joyful that night as they witnessed our ancestors stand against oppression and torture.' Her voice rose: 'Ancestors, we see you! We hear you every time we sing or dance. Everything we do, the roots are in what our ancestors did to survive.

Human beings are really bad at loneliness. We’re not built for it. People have been attracted to tribes of like-minded others ever since the time of ancient humans, who communed in close-knit groups for survival. But beyond the evolutionary advantage, community also makes us feel a mysterious thing called happiness. Neuroscientists have found that our brains release feel-good chemicals like dopamine and oxytocin when we partake in transcendent bonding rituals, like group chanting and singing. Our nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors used to pack their village squares to engage in ritualistic dances, though there was no practical need for them. Modern citizens of countries like Denmark and Canada, whose governments prioritize community connection (through high-quality public transportation, neighborhood co-ops, etc.), self-report higher degrees of satisfaction and fulfillment. All kinds of research points to the idea that humans are social and spiritual by design. Our behavior is driven by a desire for belonging and purpose. We’re “cultish” by nature.

Man is comprised of an organism, which is to say an organised form, and of vital forces, as well as a soul. The same may be said of a people. The national construction of a state, while taking account of all three elements, for various reasons of qualification and heredity can nevertheless be chiefly based upon a single one of these elements. In my opinion, in the Fascist movement it is the state element that prevails, coinciding with organised force. What finds expression here is the shaping power of ancient Rome, that master of law and political organisation, the purest heirs to which are the Italians. National Socialism emphasises what is connected to vital forces: race, racial instinct, and the ethical and national element. The Romanian Legionary movement instead chiefly stresses what in a living organism corresponds to the soul: the spiritual and religious aspect. This is the reason for the distinctive character of each national movement, although ultimately all three elements are taken into account, and none is overlooked. The specific character of our movement derives from our distant heritage. Already Herodotus called our forefathers “the immortal Dacians”. Our Geto-Thracian ancestors, even before Christianity, already had faith in the immortality and indestructibility of the soul – something which proves their spiritual drive. Roman colonisation introduced the Roman sense of organisation and form. Later centuries made our people miserable and divided; yet, just as a sick and beaten horse will still show traces of its nobility of stock, so too the Romanian people of yesterday and today reveals the latent features of its two-fold heritage. It is this heritage that the Legionary movement seeks to awaken. It begins with the spirit: for the movement wishes to create a spiritually new man. Once we have met this goal as a “movement”, we must then awaken our second heritage – the politically shaping Roman power. The spirit and religion are thus our starting point; “constructive nationalism” is our point of arrival – almost a consequence. Joining these two points is the ascetic and at the same time heroic ethic of the Iron Guard.

The people we find truly anathema are the ones who reduce the past to caricature and distort it to fit their own bigoted stereotypes. We’ve gone to events that claimed to be historic fashion shows but turned out to be gaudy polyester parades with no shadow of reality behind them. As we heard our ancestors mocked and bigoted stereotypes presented as facts, we felt like we had gone to an event advertised as an NAACP convention only to discover it was actually a minstrel show featuring actors in blackface. Some so-called “living history” events really are that bigoted. When we object to history being degraded this way, the guilty parties shout that they are “just having fun.” What they are really doing is attacking a past that cannot defend itself. Perhaps they are having fun, but it is the sort of fun a schoolyard brute has at the expense of a child who goes home bruised and weeping. It’s time someone stood up for the past. I have always hated bullies. The instinct to attack difference can be seen in every social species, but if humans truly desire to rise above barbarism, then we must cease acting like beasts. The human race may have been born in mud and ignorance, but we are blessed with minds sufficiently powerful to shape our behavior. Personal choices form the lives of individuals; the sum of all interactions determine the nature of societies. At present, it is politically fashionable in America to tolerate limited diversity based around race, religion, and sexual orientation, yet following a trend does not equate with being truly open-minded. There are people who proudly proclaim they support women’s rights, yet have an appallingly limited definition of what those rights entail. (Currently, fashionable privileges are voting, working outside the home, and easy divorce; some people would be dumbfounded at the idea that creating beautiful things, working inside the home, and marriage are equally desirable rights for many women.) In the eighteenth century, Voltaire declared, “I disagree with what you say but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.”3 Many modern Americans seem to have perverted this to, “I will fight to the death for your right to agree with what I say.” When we stand up for history, we are in our way standing up for all true diversity. When we question stereotypes and fight ignorance about the past, we force people to question ignorance in general.

On these lands, in both the occupied places and those left to grow wild, alongside the community and the dwindling wildlife, there lived another creature. At night, he roamed the roads that connected Arcand to the larger town across the Bay where Native people were still unwelcome two centuries on. His name was spoken in the low tones saved for swear words and prayer. He was the threat from a hundred stories told by those old enough to remember the tales. Broke Lent? The rogarou will come for you. Slept with a married woman? Rogarou will find you. Talked back to your mom in the heat of the moment? Don't walk home. Rogarou will snatch you up. Hit a woman under any circumstance? Rogarou will call you family, soon. Shot too many deer, so your freezer is overflowing but the herd thin? If I were you, I'd stay indoors at night. Rogarou knows by now. He was a dog, a man, a wolf. He was clothed, he was naked in his fur, he wore moccasins to jig. He was whatever made you shiver but he was always there, standing by the road, whistling to the stars so that they pulsed bright in the navy sky, as close and as distant as ancestors. For girls, he was the creature who kept you off the road or made you walk in packs. The old women never said, "Don't go into town, it is not safe for us there. We go missing. We are hurt." Instead, they leaned in and whispered a warning: "I wouldn't go out on the road tonight. Someone saw the rogarou just this Wednesday, leaning against the stop sign, sharpening his claws with the jawbone of a child." For boys, he was the worst thing you could ever be. "You remember to ask first and follow her lead. You don't want to turn into Rogarou. You'll wake up with blood in your teeth, not knowing and no way to know what you've done." Long after that bone salt, carried all the way from the Red River, was ground to dust, after the words it was laid down with were not even a whisper and the dialect they were spoken in was rubbed from the original language into common French, the stories of the rogarou kept the community in its circle, behind the line. When the people forgot what they had asked for in the beginning - a place to live, and for the community to grow in a good way - he remembered, and he returned on padded feet, light as stardust on the newly paved road. And that rogarou, heart full of his own stories but his belly empty, he came home not just to haunt. He also came to hunt.

Given that at all times, so long as there have been human beings, there have also been herds of human beings (racial groups, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches) and always a great many followers in relation to the small number of those issuing orders - and taking into consideration also that so far nothing has been better and longer practised and cultivated among human beings than obedience, we can reasonably assume that typically now the need for obedience is inborn in each individual, as a sort of formal conscience which states "You are to do something or other without conditions, and leave aside something else without conditions," in short, "Thou shalt." This need seeks to satisfy itself and to fill its form with some content. Depending on its strength, impatience, and tension, it seizes on something, without being very particular, like a coarse appetite, and accepts what someone or other issuing commands - parents, teachers, laws, class biases, public opinion - shouts in people's ears. The curiously limitation of human development - the way it hesitates, takes so long, often regresses, and turns around on itself - is based on the fact that the herd instinct of obedience is passed on best and at the expense of the art of commanding. If we imagine this instinct at some point striding right to its ultimate excess, then there would finally be a total lack of commanders and independent people, or they would suffer inside from a bad conscience and find it necessary first to prepare a deception for themselves in order to be able to command, as if they, too, were only obeying orders. This condition is what, in fact, exists nowadays in Europe: I call it the moral hypocrisy of those in command. They don't know how to protect themselves from their bad conscience except by behaving as if they were carrying out older or higher orders (from ancestors, the constitution, rights, law, or even God), or they even borrow herd maxims from the herd way of thinking, for example, as "the first servant of their people" or as "tools of the common good." On the other hand, the herd man in Europe today makes himself appear as if he is the single kind of human being allowed, and he glorifies those characteristics of his thanks to which he is tame, good natured, and useful to the herd, as the really human virtues, that is, public spiritedness, wishing everyone well, consideration, diligence, moderation, modesty, forbearance, and pity. For those cases, however, where people believe they cannot do without a leader and bell wether, they make attempt after attempt to replace the commander by adding together collections of clever herd people All the representative constitutional assemblies, for example, have this origin. But for all that, what a blissful relief, what a release from a pressure which is growing unbearable is the appearance of an absolute commander for these European herd animals. The effect which the appearance of Napoleon made was the most recent major evidence for that: - the history of the effect of Napoleon is almost the history of the higher happiness which this entire century derived from its most valuable men and moments.

There are no silly or inferior people; or people whose destiny is to be poor or to barely survive. There are, though, many that have bought into the lies of this world, internalizing and accepting as truth the horrible “You can’t”. And as they believe they can’t, they transmit it to others and “manifest” it in their lives. But THE TRUTH, the only absolute truth is that every human being is special. Each and every one of us is a soul that is growing and evolving. A soul on a mission! To find and fulfill this mission, and not only to work tirelessly to accumulate material things, THAT IS SUCCESS! If you've ever doubted how special you are, and the immense value you have for the world, you just have to do a historical analysis, and think about the thousands of people who had to live before you, only for you to be born! Think of your ancestors: they survived a thousand tragedies so you could be here and read this book. Do not kid yourself: life in this world has been harsh! Your ancestors had to fight against enormous odds, and only the strongest, fittest and special survived. The weak perished... But not your grandparents, great-grandparents; great-great-grandparents and the ones before. You come from a bread of Champions! You descend from the greater ones! From those who crossed seas and conquered lands… From those who beat pest, hunger and war. From those who kept going ahead despite the persecutions… From those who weighed anchors to go on great adventures... And thanks to them, success runs in your blood… You are destined to success! You are called to live a meaningful life!

So when people ask you where you're from, you won't have a one-word answer for them. Some people, the kind who use cosmopolitan and migrant as insults, will call you rootless. They will call you inauthentic. They will tell you that you lack some important anchor to the earth, that your loves and attachments have less force than theirs because of all the journeys in our family's past. When they say such things, remind yourself that they, too, are migrants, even if they've forgotten it. The human story is one of continual branching movement, out of Africa to every corner of the globe. When people talk of blood and soil, as if their ancestors had sprung fully formed from the earth of a particular place, it involves a kind of forgetting. Place is not nothing, and you need to understand that many families have histories that are unlike ours. There is something noble about staying put and building, something worthy of respect. Buy there is also something noble about the nomad who carries a whole world in a suitcase. You were born here in New York, int he middle of a February snowstorm, and so this city will always be yours. Perhaps, if we move again to one of the other places whose names your mother and I have murmured to each other across the kitchen table, you may not grow up thinking of it as home. I'm writing to tell you that you don't need to worry about this. It's not a loss or a lack. Your experience is no more or less authentic or beautiful than a person who lives on land their ancestors have farmed for generations. It is different. You can learn from such people. And they can learn from you.

THE INSTRUCTION OF PTAHHOTEP Instruction of the Mayor of the city, the Vizier Ptahhotep, under the Majesty of King Isesi, who lives for all eternity. The mayor of the city, the vizier Ptahhotep, said: O king, my lord! Age is here, old age arrived. Feebleness came, weakness grows, Childtike one sleeps all day. Eyes are dim, ears deaf. Strength is waning through weariness, The mouth, silenced, speaks not, The heart, void, recalls not the past, The bones ache throughout. Good has become evil, all taste is gone, What age does to people is evil in everything. The nose, clogged, breathes not, Painful are standing and sitting. May this servant be ordered to make a staff of old age, So as to teil him the words of those who heard, The ways of the ancestors, Who have listened to the gods. May such be done for you. So that strife may be banned from the people, And the Two Shores may serve you! Said the majesty of this god: Instruct him then in the sayings of the past, May he become a model for the children of the great, May obedience enter him, And the devotion of him who speaks to him, No one is born wise. Beginning of the formulations of excellent discourse spoken by the Prince, Count, God's Father, God's beloved, Eldest Son of the King, of his body, Mayor of the city and Vizier, Ptahhotep, in instructing the ignorant in knowledge and in the standard of excellent discourse, as profit for him who will hear, as woe to him who would neglect them. He spoke to his son: Don’t be proud of your knowledge. Consult the ignorant and the wise; The limits of art are not reached, No artist’s skills are perfect; Good speech is more hidden than greenstone, Yet may be found among maids at the grindstones. If you meet a disputant in action, A powerful man, superior to you. Fold your arms, bend your back, To flout him will not make him agree with you. Make little of the evil speech By not opposing him while he's in action; He will be called an ignoramus, Your self-control will match his pile (of words). If you meet a disputant in action Who is your equal, on your level, You will make your worth exceed his by silence, While he is speaking evilly, There will be much talk by the hearers. Your name will be good in the mind of the magistrates. If you meet a disputant in action, A poor man, not your equal. Do not attack him because he is weak, Let him alone, he will confute himself. Do not answer him to relieve your heart, Do not vent yourself against your opponent, Wretched is he who injures a poor man, One will wish to do what you desire. You will beat him through the magistrates’ reproof. If you are a man who leads, Who controls the affairs of the many, Seek out every beneficent deed, That your conduct may be blameless. Great is justice, lasting in effect, Unchallenged since the time of Osiris. One punishes the transgressor of laws, Though the greedy overlooks this; Baseness may seize riches, Yet crime never lands its wares; In the end it is justice that lasts, Man says: “It is my father's ground.” Do not scheme against people, God punishes accordingly: If a man says: “I shall live by it,” He will lack bread for his mouth. If a man says: “I shall be rich' He will have to say: “My cleverness has snared me.” If he says: “I will snare for myself,” He will be unable to say: “I snared for my profit.” If a man says: "I will rob someone,” He will end being given to a stranger. People’s schemes do not prevail, God’s command is what prevails; Live then in the midst of peace, What they give comes by itself.

We see three men standing around a vat of vinegar. Each has dipped his finger into the vinegar and has tasted it. The expression on each man's face shows his individual reaction. Since the painting is allegorical, we are to understand that these are no ordinary vinegar tasters, but are instead representatives of the "Three Teachings" of China, and that the vinegar they are sampling represents the Essence of Life. The three masters are K'ung Fu-tse (Confucius), Buddha, and Lao-tse, author of the oldest existing book of Taoism. The first has a sour look on his face, the second wears a bitter expression, but the third man is smiling. To Kung Fu-tse (kung FOOdsuh), life seemed rather sour. He believed that the present was out step with the past, and that the government of man on earth was out of harmony with the Way of Heaven, the government of, the universe. Therefore, he emphasized reverence for the Ancestors, as well as for the ancient rituals and ceremonies in which the emperor, as the Son of Heaven, acted as intermediary between limitless heaven and limited earth. Under Confucianism, the use of precisely measured court music, prescribed steps, actions, and phrases all added up to an extremely complex system of rituals, each used for a particular purpose at a particular time. A saying was recorded about K'ung Fu-tse: "If the mat was not straight, the Master would not sit." This ought to give an indication of the extent to which things were carried out under Confucianism. To Buddha, the second figure in the painting, life on earth was bitter, filled with attachments and desires that led to suffering. The world was seen as a setter of traps, a generator of illusions, a revolving wheel of pain for all creatures. In order to find peace, the Buddhist considered it necessary to transcend "the world of dust" and reach Nirvana, literally a state of "no wind." Although the essentially optimistic attitude of the Chinese altered Buddhism considerably after it was brought in from its native India, the devout Buddhist often saw the way to Nirvana interrupted all the same by the bitter wind of everyday existence. To Lao-tse (LAOdsuh), the harmony that naturally existed between heaven and earth from the very beginning could be found by anyone at any time, but not by following the rules of the Confucianists. As he stated in his Tao To Ching (DAO DEH JEENG), the "Tao Virtue Book," earth was in essence a reflection of heaven, run by the same laws - not by the laws of men. These laws affected not only the spinning of distant planets, but the activities of the birds in the forest and the fish in the sea. According to Lao-tse, the more man interfered with the natural balance produced and governed by the universal laws, the further away the harmony retreated into the distance. The more forcing, the more trouble. Whether heavy or fight, wet or dry, fast or slow, everything had its own nature already within it, which could not be violated without causing difficulties. When abstract and arbitrary rules were imposed from the outside, struggle was inevitable. Only then did life become sour. To Lao-tse, the world was not a setter of traps but a teacher of valuable lessons. Its lessons needed to be learned, just as its laws needed to be followed; then all would go well. Rather than turn away from "the world of dust," Lao-tse advised others to "join the dust of the world." What he saw operating behind everything in heaven and earth he called Tao (DAO), "the Way." A basic principle of Lao-tse's teaching was that this Way of the Universe could not be adequately described in words, and that it would be insulting both to its unlimited power and to the intelligent human mind to attempt to do so. Still, its nature could be understood, and those who cared the most about it, and the life from which it was inseparable, understood it best.

[W]e can calculate our way into regions of miraculous improbability far greater than we can imagine as plausible. Let's look at this matter of what we think is plausible. What we can imagine as plausible is a narrow band in the middle of a much broader spectrum of what is actually possible. Sometimes it is narrower than what is actually there. There is a good analogy with light. Our eyes are built to cope with a narrow band of electromagnetic frequencies (the ones we call light), somewhere in the middle of the spectrum from long radio waves at one end to short X-rays at the other. We can't see the rays outside the narrow light band, but we can do calculations about them, and we can build instruments to detect them. In the same way, we know that the scales of size and time extend in both directions far outside the realm of what we can visualize. Our minds can't cope with the large distances that astronomy deals in or with the small distances that atomic physics deals in, but we can represent those distances in mathematical symbols. Our minds can't imagine a time span as short as a picosecond, but we can do calculations about picoseconds, and we can build computers that can complete calculations within picoseconds. Our minds can't imagine a timespan as long as a million years, let alone the thousands of millions of years that geologists routinely compute. Just as our eyes can see only that narrow band of electromagnetic frequencies that natural selection equipped our ancestors to see, so our brains are built to cope with narrow bands of sizes and times. Presumably there was no need for our ancestors to cope with sizes and times outside the narrow range of everyday practicality, so our brains never evolved the capacity to imagine them. It is probably significant that our own body size of a few feet is roughly in the middle of the range of sizes we can imagine. And our own lifetime of a few decades is roughly in the middle of the range of times we can imagine.

We ought to recognize the darkness of the culture of death when it shows up in our own voices. I am startled when I hear those who claim the name of Christ, and who loudly profess to be pro-life, speaking of immigrants with disdain as “those people” who are “draining our health care and welfare resources.” Can we not see the same dehumanizing strategies at work in the abortion-rights activism that speaks of the “product of conception” and the angry nativism that calls the child of an immigrant mother an “anchor baby”? At root, this is a failure to see who we are. We are united to a Christ who was himself a sojourner, fleeing political oppression (Matt. 2:13–23), and our ancestors in Israel were themselves a migrant people (Exod. 1:1–14; 1 Chron. 16:19; Acts. 7:6). Moreover, our God sees the plight of the fatherless and the blood of the innocent, but he also tells us that because he loves the sojourner and cares for him so should we, “for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Deut. 10:18–19). We might disagree on the basis of prudence about what specific policies should be in place to balance border security with compassion for the immigrants among us, but a pro-life people have no option to respond with loathing or disgust at persons made in the image of God. We might or might not be natural-born Americans, but we are, all of us, immigrants to the kingdom of God (Eph. 2:12–14). Whatever our disagreements on immigration as policy, we must not disagree on whether immigrants are persons. No matter how important the United States of America is, there will come a day when the United States will no longer exist. But the sons and daughters of God will be revealed. Some of them are undocumented farm-workers and elementary-school janitors now. They will be kings and queens then. They are our brothers and sisters forever. We need to stand up against bigotry and harassment and exploitation, even when such could be politically profitable to those who stand with us on other issues. The image of God cannot be bartered away, at the abortion clinic counter or anywhere else.

Or, in your case, as wide. Wait. Did you just say Gandalf?” “He is the founder of our order, and the first of the Five Warlocks. He comes from afar across the Western Ocean, from Easter Island, or perhaps from Japan.” “No, I think he comes from the mind of a story writer. An old-fashioned Roman Catholic from the days just before First Space Age. Unless I am confusing him with the guy who wrote about Talking Animal Land? With the Cowardly Lion who gets killed by a Wicked White Witch? I never read the text, I watched the comic.” “Oh, you err so! The Witches, we have preserved this lore since the time of the Fall of the Giants, whom we overthrew and destroyed. The tale is this: C. S. Lewis and Arthur C. Clarke were led by the Indian Maiden Sacagawea to the Pacific Ocean and back, stealing the land from the Red Man and selling them blankets impregnated with smallpox. It was called the Lewis and Clarke Expedition. When they reached the Pacific, they set out in the Dawn Treader to find the sea route to India, where the sacred river Alph runs through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea. They came to the Last Island, called Ramandu or Selidor, where the World Serpent guards the gateway to the Land of the Dead, and there they found Gandalf, returned alive from the underworld, and stripped of all his powers. He came again to mortal lands in North America to teach the Simon Families. The Chronicle is a symbolic retelling of their journey. It is one of our Holy Books.” “Your Holy Books were written for children by Englishmen.” “The gods wear many masks! If the Continuum chooses the lips of a White Man to be the lips through which the Continuum speaks, who are we to question? Tolkien was not Roman. He was of a race called the hobbits, Homo floresiensis, discovered on an isle in Indonesia, and he would have lived in happiness, had not the White Man killed him with DDT. So there were no Roman Catholics involved. May the Earth curse their memory forever! May they be forgotten forever!” “Hm. Earth is big. Maybe it can do both. You know about Rome? It perished in the Ecpyrosis, somewhat before your time.” “How could we not? The Pope in Rome created the Giants, whom the Witches rose up against and overthrew. Theirs was the masculine religion, aggressive, intolerant, and forbidding abortion. Ours is the feminine religion, peaceful and life-affirming and all-loving, and we offer the firstborn child to perish on our sacred fires. The First Coven was organized to destroy them like rats! When Rome was burned, we danced, and their one god was cast down and fled weeping on his pierced feet, and our many gods rose up. My ancestors hunted the Christians like stoats, and when we caught them, we burned them slowly, as they once did of us in Salem. What ill you do is returned to you tenfold!” “Hm. Are you willing to work with a Giant? I saw one in the pit, and saw the jumbo-sized coffin they pried him out from. What if he is a baptized Christian? Most of them were, since they were created by my pet pope and raised by nuns.” “All Christians must perish! Such is our code.” “Your code is miscoded.” “What of the Unforgettable Hate?” “Forget about it.

One can take the ape out of the jungle, but not the jungle out of the ape. This also applies to us, bipedal apes. Ever since our ancestors swung from tree to tree, life in small groups has been an obsession of ours. We can’t get enough of politicians thumping their chests on television, soap opera stars who swing from tryst to tryst, and reality shows about who’s in and who’s out. It would be easy to make fun of all this primate behavior if not for the fact that our fellow simians take the pursuit of power and sex just as seriously as we do. We share more with them than power and sex, though. Fellow-feeling and empathy are equally important, but they’re rarely mentioned as part of our biological heritage. We would much rather blame nature for what we don’t like in ourselves than credit it for what we do like. As Katharine Hepburn famously put it in The African Queen, ”Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.” This opinion is still very much with us. Of the millions of pages written over the centuries about human nature, none are as bleak as those of the last three decades, and none as wrong. We hear that we have selfish genes, that human goodness is a sham, and that we act morally only to impress others. But if all that people care about is their own good, why does a day-old baby cry when it hears another baby cry? This is how empathy starts. Not very sophisticated perhaps, but we can be sure that a newborn doesn’t try to impress. We are born with impulses that draw us to others and that later in life make us care about them. The possibility that empathy is part of our primate heritage ought to make us happy, but we’re not in the habit of embracing our nature. When people commit genocide, we call them ”animals”. But when they give to the poor, we praise them for being ”humane”. We like to claim the latter behavior for ourselves. It wasn’t until an ape saved a member of our own species that there was a public awakening to the possibility of nonhuman humaneness. This happened on August 16, 1996, when an eight-year-old female gorilla named Binti Jua helped a three-year-old boy who had fallen eighteen feet into the primate exhibit at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo. Reacting immediately, Binti scooped up the boy and carried him to safety. She sat down on a log in a stream, cradling the boy in her lap, giving him a few gentle back pats before taking him to the waiting zoo staff. This simple act of sympathy, captured on video and shown around the world, touched many hearts, and Binti was hailed as a heroine. It was the first time in U.S. history that an ape figured in the speeches of leading politicians, who held her up as a model of compassion. That Binti’s behavior caused such surprise among humans says a lot about the way animals are depicted in the media. She really did nothing unusual, or at least nothing an ape wouldn’t do for any juvenile of her own species. While recent nature documentaries focus on ferocious beasts (or the macho men who wrestle them to the ground), I think it’s vital to convey the true breadth and depth of our connection with nature. This book explores the fascinating and frightening parallels between primate behavior and our own, with equal regard for the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The Tale of Human Evolution The subject most often brought up by advocates of the theory of evolution is the subject of the origin of man. The Darwinist claim holds that modern man evolved from ape-like creatures. During this alleged evolutionary process, which is supposed to have started 4-5 million years ago, some "transitional forms" between modern man and his ancestors are supposed to have existed. According to this completely imaginary scenario, four basic "categories" are listed: 1. Australopithecus 2. Homo habilis 3. Homo erectus 4. Homo sapiens Evolutionists call man's so-called first ape-like ancestors Australopithecus, which means "South African ape." These living beings are actually nothing but an old ape species that has become extinct. Extensive research done on various Australopithecus specimens by two world famous anatomists from England and the USA, namely, Lord Solly Zuckerman and Prof. Charles Oxnard, shows that these apes belonged to an ordinary ape species that became extinct and bore no resemblance to humans. Evolutionists classify the next stage of human evolution as "homo," that is "man." According to their claim, the living beings in the Homo series are more developed than Australopithecus. Evolutionists devise a fanciful evolution scheme by arranging different fossils of these creatures in a particular order. This scheme is imaginary because it has never been proved that there is an evolutionary relation between these different classes. Ernst Mayr, one of the twentieth century's most important evolutionists, contends in his book One Long Argument that "particularly historical [puzzles] such as the origin of life or of Homo sapiens, are extremely difficult and may even resist a final, satisfying explanation." By outlining the link chain as Australopithecus > Homo habilis > Homo erectus > Homo sapiens, evolutionists imply that each of these species is one another's ancestor. However, recent findings of paleoanthropologists have revealed that Australopithecus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus lived at different parts of the world at the same time. Moreover, a certain segment of humans classified as Homo erectus have lived up until very modern times. Homo sapiens neandarthalensis and Homo sapiens sapiens (modern man) co-existed in the same region. This situation apparently indicates the invalidity of the claim that they are ancestors of one another. Stephen Jay Gould explained this deadlock of the theory of evolution although he was himself one of the leading advocates of evolution in the twentieth century: What has become of our ladder if there are three coexisting lineages of hominids (A. africanus, the robust australopithecines, and H. habilis), none clearly derived from another? Moreover, none of the three display any evolutionary trends during their tenure on earth. Put briefly, the scenario of human evolution, which is "upheld" with the help of various drawings of some "half ape, half human" creatures appearing in the media and course books, that is, frankly, by means of propaganda, is nothing but a tale with no scientific foundation. Lord Solly Zuckerman, one of the most famous and respected scientists in the U.K., who carried out research on this subject for years and studied Australopithecus fossils for 15 years, finally concluded, despite being an evolutionist himself, that there is, in fact, no such family tree branching out from ape-like creatures to man.