I Man Now

TL;DR

• The Eve Theory of Consciousness predicts that the self was once taught, and that initiation is where it was taught. Ethnographies of a century ago record peoples who say so in their own words.
• In a tale from Papua New Guinea, a girl cuts a mouth for a mouthless man. He wakes saying “I got mouth now … I man now … That my name Íregíde” (Landtman 1917, p. 428).
• The Aranda of Central Australia say the first people were joined and sealed until a stranger from the north cut them apart and opened their eyes, ears and mouths (Strehlow 1907, p. 6).
• The Aranda novice learns a secret language whose word for “I” is anua, in place of the everyday jinga. The first act of his initiation is called erakintjilama, “making ashamed” (Strehlow 1913, pp. 12, 32).
• Schurtz (1902) found the same everywhere: boys who die, are reborn with new names, and come back “neubeseelt”, newly ensouled.

“My god, I got mouth now! My god, I got yarn (faculty of speech) now … I man now, my word, I man now!” — Íregíde, in a tale told by Gágere of Masingara and printed by Gunnar Landtman, The Folk-Tales of the Kiwai Papuans (1917)

What the theory predicts #

The Eve Theory of Consciousness holds that the inner “I”, the self that can name itself, was discovered late, by women first, and spread the way culture spreads: it was taught. The obvious school is initiation, the institution traditional societies everywhere used to turn children into persons. That is why, I have argued, male initiation rites diffused across the world.

A theory like that makes predictions about old testimony. If the self was once a lesson, the people who kept the lessons should remember a time before it. Their first people should be unfinished. The self should arrive with speech, a name, a reflection or a new soul, given by a rite or by a woman. The novice should be wiped clean and taught again, down to his word for “I”. Shame should come early in the syllabus. And the animal’s easy deathlessness should be remembered as lost.

The old ethnographies bear out all five. Here they are, strongest first.

Íregíde gets a mouth #

Gunnar Landtman collected the tales of the Kiwai and their neighbours in Western Province, Papua New Guinea, between 1910 and 1912. His tellers were men, “but some of them had learnt certain of the tales from women” (p. 1). Masingara is a bush village inland from the coast.

The teller was Gágere of Masingara. At Güruru lived “a man named Íregíde who had no mouth or anus.” He fed by smelling his food (p. 426). A girl named Mürke, starved by her stepmother, runs away through the swamps. Safe across a log over a crocodile creek, she cries, “I man now, I life, no more dead!” (p. 427). In this pidgin a man is a living person.

She reaches Íregíde’s house. He cannot speak; he “only muttered, ‘Hm’” and talks with signs. She mashes sweet herbs into a medicine, and that night, while he sleeps, she cuts him a mouth and an anus. A white matter pours out, “filling three basins”. She paints him, decorates him with croton leaves, and lies down as the birds begin to call. Then he wakes:

He felt a great lightness of body and looked round in bewilderment, “U, uä, uä!” being the only sound he uttered. Then he found that he could speak, “My god, I got mouth now! My god, I got yarn (faculty of speech) now, from mouth yarn he come! … I man now, my word, I man now! … I got no mouth before, you hear my talk now! That my name Íregíde, that my name big man Íregíde. I kaikai now! Thats my girl he been make good for me! That name belong that girl now Ábapli, no more Mürke.” (Landtman 1917, p. 428)

Look at the order. An animal sound; a mouth; speech; “I man now”; his own name, called out to the neighbouring peoples; and last, a new name for the woman who opened him. Later he tells her father what he had been (p. 429): “That pickaninny he open him mouth belong me. I no savy people, all same etengena (mythical beings in the bush …) I stop. I no kaikai.”

Before the cut he did not know people and lived like the bush spirits. After it he has speech, a self he can announce, and a name. A girl did it, at night, with a blade and a medicine, while he lay unconscious. The tale ends at a great dance, where Íregíde holds a torch over Mürke “to show her off.”

The girl and the blade are in every telling. If you set out to compress the Eve Theory into one scene, you would struggle to do better. The tale itself names no rite; the tales told beside it do.

Dági sees himself in the water #

The next Masingara tale is set at Sásasáree, “the old home of the Másingára people” (p. 419). Dági is hairy all over, “like a cassowary or pig”. His right arm is enormously long; at night it “crawled along the ground like a snake” to steal from gardens. Two sisters catch the hand in a noose, follow the arm home, and become his wives. One night, while he lies “dead asleep”, they cut the arm to its proper length, the flesh with a bamboo knife and the bone with a shell. They shave him, paint him black with cinder and white with mud, and ornament him. “They also left a basin with water close to him in order to enable him to see his reflection on awaking” (p. 421):

Dági looked at his reflection in the water and exclaimed, “Me there, me proper man! Me got paint, plenty nice thing I got! Hallo, I all right, I man now!” (Landtman 1917, p. 421)

He boasts that he did it himself. The wives set him straight: “Oh, you gammon, you no been make himself, me two been make him.” Then they hold a great dance, and “the purpose for which the two women held the dance was to show him to everybody” (p. 422).

Read it as a rite and every part is in place: an unconscious candidate; operators who cut, shave, paint and ornament him; waking into a new body; presentation at a dance. Schurtz describes the same close to initiation: the masked men hand back “die neubeseelten Knaben tanzend und singend” (“the newly ensouled boys, dancing and singing”) to their kin (Schurtz 1902, p. 106). Both Masingara tales end with the newly made person shown at a dance. In both, women do the making.

The mirror matters. Recognising yourself in a reflection is the standard laboratory test of self-awareness (Gallup 1970). This story sets the mirror beside the newly made man, and his first words before it are “me”.

At Mawáta, on the coast, a man named Saibu told Landtman the other outcome. Ódjo, one of “the first bushmen in existence”, lives in a hollow tree and eats wood. Béro shows him water in a bowl, and “Ódjo recoiled on seeing his reflection. ‘Me there, who there underneath all same me?’” (p. 524). Béro then “had to teach him what the different kinds of food were” and how to garden, and later the two men must teach their wives how to have sex. Last, Ódjo asks whether they will “stop altogether (for ever) all same wood?” “No,” says Béro, “you me come old by-and-by.” After the reflection comes a curriculum, ending in the knowledge of death.

One more detail. In another Masingara telling, Dági’s “arms were like two enormous snakes” (p. 422). The serpent part is what the women cut away.

What makes a “proper man” at Masingara #

The two tales name no rite, but the people who told them had a cult, and its vocabulary runs through both.

The Masingara origin tale, from “some Másingára men”, begins with a woman (pp. 77–79). Ua-ógrere “was the first person who had never been born, and no one had made her.” Worms in a rotting kangaroo turn into babies; she raises them and tells them, “You fellow man now.” She has them build a men’s house, which she enters “as if she had been a man”, and there she teaches one man a secret practice for the boys, which Landtman calls sodomy, so that they will grow tall. The old ones who had risen from the worms sink into the ground at the house posts, and their voices say from below:

“Me no proper man, me come from kangaroo, worm. You proper man, me been make you.” (Landtman 1917, p. 79)

Ua-ógrere then “inaugurated a great ceremony in which a kangaroo plays an important part and which is connected with the initiation of the young men.” In a Mawáta version told by Námai, the men who refused her practice turned into birds, pigs, kangaroos, snakes and étengena, and said as they left: “You fellow man, me fellow belong devil (the spirit kind).”

Now reread the tales. Íregíde, before he was opened, was “all same etengena”. Dági, once the women had made him, cries “me proper man!” At Masingara a proper man is a person made by the first woman’s rite in the men’s house. Those who refused it stayed unfinished and went into the bush as spirits and snakes.

The Masingara telling of Dági labelled version A makes the tie explicit. It opens with that same practice, done to a boy, which “the people did not want the women and children to know of”. The boy cries out:

It was a very bad thing that the secret was let out to the women, and in consequence of that the ground began to shake, a great flood rushed in from the sea, and the people were all drowned. After that the water went back. (p. 422)

Dági is the one man who escapes, and his remaking by the women follows. So Íregíde and Dági are folk tales, set in the world of a cult founded by a woman and kept from women by men, whose betrayal drowns the world. The Masingara were also a bullroarer people, and their tales of the opened mouth and the basin mirror speak the cult’s language.

The sealed first people of Central Australia #

Carl Strehlow, missionary at Hermannsburg on the Finke River from 1894 to 1922, wrote down the sacred histories of the Western Aranda (Arrernte) and their Loritja (Luritja) neighbours in the Northern Territory of Australia. In them the first people were joined together and sealed:

“Die rella manerinja [zusammengewachsenen Menschen] lebten längere Zeit, nachdem die Erde trocken geworden war, in ihrer hilflosen Lage weiter, bis ein Mangarkunjerkunja (Fliegenfänger) … vom Norden kam und ihr Los verbesserte.”

“The rella manerinja [joined-together people] lived on in their helpless state for a long time after the earth had dried, until a Mangarkunjerkunja (flycatcher) … came from the north and improved their lot.” (Strehlow 1907, p. 6)

With a stone knife he “trennte … die einzelnen Wesen von einander, schlitzte ihnen Augen, öffnete ihnen die Ohren, den Mund und die Nase” (“separated the single beings from one another, slit their eyes, opened their ears, mouth and nose”). He separated their fingers and toes, and then circumcised and subincised them. He taught them fire, gave each a tjurunga, and bound them to keep the ceremony of circumcision. The opening of the senses and the initiation of the body are one operation, done by a stranger from the north. Even so, the Aranda “lebten im übrigen in gänzlicher Unwissenheit dahin” (“lived on in complete ignorance”) until “kamen von Norden … große Häuptlinge, um sie zu belehren” (“great chiefs came from the north, to teach them”) (p. 9).

The Loritja say the same: their sealed first people were opened and circumcised by an ancestor who “kam vom Norden” (“came from the north”) (Strehlow 1908, pp. 3–4).

Another Aranda history says what the sealed people ate. In the oldest time, “als die Menschen noch zusammengewachsen (manerinja) waren und ein elendes Dasein führten” (“when people were still grown together and led a miserable existence”), two ancestors roasted snakes and fed the half-raw flesh to the unformed people, keeping the head and liver for themselves. Then they killed “eine sehr lange Schlange mit schwarzem Kopf, njuratja genannt, die sehr giftig ist” (“a very long snake with a black head, called njuratja, which is very venomous”), and fed that to them too (1907, pp. 28–29). The roasting place became Uratangatanga, “the great waterhole in the Finke Gorge”, where another history has a great snake ancestor coil up on the bottom, and where “nach dem Glauben der Schwarzen” (“in the belief of the blacks”) it still lives (p. 50). So the unfinished people were fed venomous snake at a great snake’s home. I have argued that venom was the first sacrament of the snake cult of consciousness. This is the kind of memory that argument predicts.

Shame, a new name and a new word for I #

Strehlow’s account of Aranda initiation (Part IV, 1913) reads like the syllabus the Eve Theory would write. It begins with taking the boy, until now just worra, “boy”, from his mother’s camp:

“Diese Entführung wird als erakintjilama d. h. ‚schamhaft machen’ bezeichnet; in dem Jungen soll das Schamgefühl erweckt werden, das nach Ansicht der Schwarzen darin besteht, daß er den Verkehr mit den Frauen und größeren Mädchen meidet.”

“This abduction is called erakintjilama, i.e. ‘making ashamed’; the sense of shame is to be awakened in the boy, which in the view of the blacks consists in his avoiding company with the women and older girls.” (Strehlow 1913, p. 12)

The rite’s first lesson, by its own name, is shame. “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed” (Genesis 2:25); then “the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (3:7). The Aranda shame concerns women and Eden’s concerns nakedness, and both need the same new capacity: to see yourself through other eyes. Without the rite, the Aranda said, a boy would become an erintja “der seine eigenen Stammesgenossen ermorden und fressen würde” (“who would murder and eat his own tribesmen”) (p. 11).

Then the names change at every stage. Greased and painted he is andaribana, “the one rubbed with fat”; after circumcision, wongilja, “the one with the wound”, and then rukuta, “the hidden one” (pp. 12–26). Soon after circumcision the men show him that Tuanjiraka, whose roar he had feared, is a whirled slat of wood, and swear him to keep the secret (see Not Spirits, but Men on the Bullroarer Atlas). The speech ends: “erilknibata lakina ntama tunkunalaka”, “Wie die Vorfahren, so bist auch du jetzt ein Mann geworden” (“Like the ancestors, you too have now become a man”) (p. 26).

Then the hidden rukuta must learn a language (p. 28):

“Ferner muß der rukuta eine Geheimsprache ankatja kerintja lernen … Es ist schwer zu entscheiden, ob sich die Aranda diese Geheimsprache selber ausgedacht haben, oder ob sie die … Wörter von der Sprache eines weit entfernten Stammes herübergenommen und nur umgeformt haben.”

“The rukuta must also learn a secret language, ankatja kerintja … It is hard to decide whether the Aranda invented this secret language themselves, or whether they took over the words from the language of a far-distant tribe and only reshaped them.”

His guardians drill it into him daily with a formula, “Unta … aretna arbuna tnauai”, “you shall call … by another name”. In seclusion he may speak with men “nur in der Geheim-Sprache” (“only in the secret language”) (p. 33). The word list opens with the pronouns (p. 32):

The novice gives up his “I” and is handed another. His secret “we two” is literally “I-you”. The southern Loritja drilled their novices the same way, and their list turns the everyday ngaiulu, “I”, into ngankulu (pp. 54–55).

In The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Pronouns I proposed the primordial pronoun postulate: we have had pronouns for as long as we have been self-aware, so the spread of “I” tracks the spread of the self. Most of the world’s first-person singular forms carry an n or ŋ, far more often than chance allows. Here, in two neighbouring Central Australian languages, are first-person pronouns taught to boys at initiation, and both, anua and ngankulu, carry the nasal. Strehlow, who knew nothing of the pronoun question, suspected that the secret words came from a far-distant tribe. For the Loritja “I” we can now say where it came from. Ngankulu is the respectful “I” of the Western Desert, the form a man uses when speaking within hearing of his mother-in-law (Dixon 1980, p. 61), and W. H. Douglas noted that this careful speech was also used during initiation ceremonies. The novice is not handed a random code word. He is handed the “I” of restraint and respect, the self that knows it is being heard. Around Warburton Ranges, when a man named Ngayunya died about 1950, his name put the everyday ngayu- under taboo, and for some ten years the whole community said nganku- for “I”. A taught “I” can become everyone’s “I” within a generation. That is what the postulate needs.

The rite also gives him a second self. When he is grown, his grandfather shows him the tjurunga of his totem ancestor with the words:

“Nana unta mburka nama; nana unta iningukua.” — “Dies ist dein Körper, dies ist dein zweites Ich (iningukua).” (“This is your body, this is your second I.”) (Strehlow 1908, p. 80)

The iningukua is regarded as his twin (1913, p. 12 n. 3). One Aranda sacred place even keeps an ancestor’s self-declaration as its name: Anutjia, “ich bins” (“it is I”), “so antwortete einst ein jerramba (Honigameisen-)Vorfahr” (“so a honey-ant ancestor once answered”) (Strehlow 1920, p. 16).

Shame, new names, a new “I” and a second self: every item on the Eve Theory’s list is here, in one ceremony, in the words of the men who performed it.

The newly ensouled, the world over #

Heinrich Schurtz’s Altersklassen und Männerbünde (1902) surveyed men’s societies across the world. He states the content of initiation plainly: through the rite the boy “erhält selbst einen neuen Geist, er stirbt und wird wiedergeboren” (“himself receives a new spirit, he dies and is reborn”) (p. 102). The rebirth is marked by a new name: “In Australien sind es meist die alten Männer, deren recht mühsames Geschäft es ist, jedesmal neue, bisher noch nie gebrauchte Namen zu finden” (“In Australia it is mostly the old men whose laborious task it is to find new names, never used before, each time”) (p. 106). This new spirit, he wrote, “in den verschiedensten Teilen der Erde wiederkehrt” (“recurs in the most varied parts of the earth”) (p. 355).

His examples show the wiping as clearly as the gift. Near Boma on the lower Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo), novices wake from a mock burial unable to recall “des eigenen Namens” (“their own name”) and receive a new one (p. 102). Among the Alfurs of Ceram (Maluku, Indonesia), after the priests announce the children’s death with bloody spears thrust through the temple walls, they return after three months “ohne Sprache und Erinnerung, bis sie als Neugeborene wiederum unterrichtet sind” (“without speech or memory, until they are taught again as newborns”) (p. 104, after Bastian). Taught again as newborns: that is the Eve Theory’s mechanism, stated in 1902.

In the Ndembo society of the lower Congo (DR Congo and Angola), the reborn were Nganga, “the knowing ones”, and everyone else Vanga, “the unenlightened” (Webster 1908, pp. 174–175). The newly reborn ran wild, and the explanation Schurtz relays is “Sie sind eben wieder Kinder geworden, die Gut und Böse nicht unterscheiden können!” (“They have simply become children again, who cannot tell good from evil!”) (pp. 434–435). The knowing ones are set against those without the knowledge of good and evil, which is the serpent’s promise in Genesis 3:5: “ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

The Powhatan of Virginia, in the United States, gave the purpose of the wiping in their own words (Robert Beverley, 1705). The candidates drank wysoccan, “a preparation which the Indians said took away their wits altogether.” Some English said it was a trick of the elders to seize the boys’ property:

“But the Indians detest this opinion, and pretend that this violent Method of taking away the Memory, is to release the Youth from all their childish Impressions, … so that, when the young Men come to themselves again, their Reason may act freely, without being byass’d by the Cheats of Custom and Education.” (Webster 1908, p. 57)

The drink wipes the child’s mind so that the young men can “come to themselves”.

Jane Harrison, the Cambridge classicist, drew the conclusion in Themis (1912). The person of her “totemistic stage” had “never clearly said that ’this is I’. … He has not yet fully captured his individual or his human soul, not yet drawn a circle round his separate self” (p. 121). And grammar, she argued, shows that number arises “not by multiplication of an original ‘I’ but by selection and gradual exclusion from an original collective ‘we’” (p. 471). The “I” is late, and carved out of the group.

The skin that was not shed #

The last prediction is a Fall. If people once lived without a self, they also lived without the knowledge of death, and many traditions remember losing immortality. The Kiwai lose it through a skin.

Sido is the great culture hero of the Kiwai of the Fly estuary in Papua New Guinea. His two mothers were twins “grown together back to back”, and he split them apart with a wooden tool (Landtman 1917, p. 109), an echo of the Aranda opener separating the joined people. Then, as Námai of Mawáta told it:

He wanted to change his skin in the same way that a snake does. The skin opened at the top of his head, and just as he was coming out he was seen by some boys and girls, who said, “Oh, Sido he come out now!” Immediately he drew himself back. (Landtman 1917, p. 110)

In Íku of Ipisia’s telling, Sido meant all people to do the same after him, and he rebukes the children who watched: “You fellow make him people no good, every people, every place.” On the same page a woman named Móle-ége, who made people out of worms, shows them how to live forever: “Skin he break here, chuck him away old skin, man he come out, new skin he come, no more old.” They kill the pig she told them to keep alive, and the gift is lost. As in Eden, the first people break a woman’s command, and death follows (compare She Who Brings Death).

The Kiwai men’s rite, the moguru, carries the same loss. Its founder Marunogere wanted a pig kept alive, and his son shot it: “Suppose you kill him that pig, by-and-by everybody he dead. … I been make you fellow life-thing, I want you fellow keep him all time: man no dead” (p. 342). The dead pig was laid in the men’s house and the “new boys” were initiated. In another version his aim was to “make people come long life”, and before the pig, “instead of the mat he used a live snake which after the ceremony was let loose in the bush” (p. 344). The rite was founded to give deathlessness, and its first sacred object was a living snake.

Genesis tells the same loss through a tree: the man who knows good and evil must be kept from the tree of life, “lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever” (Genesis 3:22). The Kiwai tell it through a snake’s skin. In both, the first humans were offered a life that renews itself and lost it.

What the testimonies add up to #

From the Fly estuary to the Finke River, from the Congo to Virginia, the same events recur. Sealed first people are opened with a blade, by a woman at Masingara and by a stranger from the north in Central Australia. The opened person speaks, says “I”, takes a name and sees himself. The rite repeats the opening for every child: it shames him, wipes him, renames him, gives him a new “I”, and returns him to his people at a dance.

Schurtz saw the pattern and despaired of explaining it: an explanation “die unseren Ansprüchen an Logik und Deutlichkeit genügt, wird wohl überhaupt nicht zu finden sein” (“that satisfies our demands for logic and clarity is probably not to be found at all”) (p. 355). Strehlow could not tell whether the novices’ language was invented at home or carried in from far away.

The Eve Theory answers both. Schurtz’s “new spirit” was meant literally: what the boys received was a self. Strehlow’s secret words did come from far away, and the first of them is “I”. The tellers were remembering something. When Íregíde says “I got no mouth before, you hear my talk now,” and an Aranda elder tells a boy that he has become a man like the ancestors, they describe a passage that someone, once, made for the first time.

The peoples who kept the initiation rites remembered a time before the self, and described the rite as the place where the self is given: a mouth opened, a name, a reflection, a new word for “I”, a new soul.

Sources #

1. Landtman, Gunnar. The Folk-Tales of the Kiwai Papuans. Acta Societatis Scientiarum Fennicae 47. Helsingfors: Finnish Society of Sciences, 1917. Introduction, p. 1; Ua-ógrere, no. 9, pp. 77–80; Sido and Móle-ége, nos. 34–36, pp. 109–110; Marunogere and the moguru, pp. 341–344; Dági, no. 365, pp. 419–422; Íregíde, no. 368, pp. 426–429 (Gágere, Masingara); Ódjo, no. 477, p. 524.
2. Strehlow, Carl. Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien. Edited by Moritz von Leonhardi. Veröffentlichungen aus dem Städtischen Völker-Museum Frankfurt am Main. Frankfurt: Joseph Baer, 1907–1920. Part I, Mythen, Sagen und Märchen des Aranda-Stammes (1907), pp. 6, 9, 28–29, 50; Part II, Mythen, Sagen und Märchen des Loritja-Stammes (1908), Vorwort and pp. 3–4, 80; Parts III–V (1910–1920), University of Adelaide Digital Library: IV.1 (1913) pp. 11–12, 26–33, 54–55; V (1920) p. 16.
3. Schurtz, Heinrich. Altersklassen und Männerbünde: Eine Darstellung der Grundformen der Gesellschaft. Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1902. Pp. 102, 104, 106, 355, 434–435.
4. Webster, Hutton. Primitive Secret Societies: A Study in Early Politics and Religion. New York: Macmillan, 1908. Pp. 57 (after Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia, 1705), 174–175.
5. Harrison, Jane Ellen. Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912. Pp. 121, 471.
6. Gallup, Gordon G. “Chimpanzees: Self-Recognition.” Science 167(3914) (1970): 86–87. doi:10.1126/science.167.3914.86
7. The Holy Bible, King James Version. Genesis 2:25; 3:5, 7, 22.
8. Bullroarer Atlas. “Not Spirits, but Men: The Lie Told About the Bullroarer.” Record: “Masingara turtleshell roarer.”