1: We never were cavemen!

Homo sapiens never chose to live in caves, they’re horrible places. Caves are only useful in extreme weather, hot or cold, and then only for a short time. But what of all the evidence of occupation over centuries, of all those middens? Well, surely the evidence is just as consistent with one, or two weeks of occupation per year?

It is an ongoing contention of this blog that the evidence we have of our ancient hunter gatherer ancestors is not in the least representative. Despite the colossal increase in finds in my lifetime, we are no further forward in our understanding than we ever were. That which is both preserved and accessible to us now, gives us a highly distorted view.

So, what of the rock art? That which is found in caves is exceptional, literally. Imagine that everyone in a hunter gatherer band was multi-skilled, every child leaving their hand print wherever it would stick. Every adult, a craftsperson of necessity, and in idle moments, using any rock face to hand, having a go at simply leaving their mark, their representation of life. Art may have once been everywhere, then eroded by time, by wind, rain, snow, ice. Unexpectedly stuck in a cave, for who knows how long, waiting for a change in the weather, short of food, short of purposeful activity, any wonder some were obsessed with the distraction of art.

I say ‘band’, by which I mean at most 150, usually no more than 100. I’m very keen on Dunbar’s social brain hypothesis, and will push it further than he intended – or perhaps just state the implications more bluntly! (Along with my own combination of old school sociology learnt in the early 1980s, later explorations of Neo-Darwinism, and the more recently emergent social neuroscience.)

It bothers me the way researchers interpret what I’ve come to regard as unrepresentative evidence. Jumping far too far ahead. We are still in the territory of speculation, of the generation of ideas. After all, we remain essentially the same people, quite capable of placing ourselves in what we know of their situation!

For our ancient ancestors time and distance were much the same thing. The future was ahead. Would they reach the horizon they could see, today? Behind them was where they had been, not just where they had slept the previous night, but where they’d left their ancestors a long way behind, who, though they may speak to them still, were always over their shoulders.

Only later did farmers build henges, when they’d lost the ability to tell the time and to navigate. Agriculture was not the key; it was permanent settlement! When you stay in one place, you must watch time, and endure the cycle of the seasons. Agriculture is a failure to adapt to natural environmental change; it is an attempt to transform the environment instead. Dominance over nature is the most dangerous of memes, a misconstruing of the role of homo sapiens as the top predators on the planet. Pursuing an end to scarcity is folly and warfare an invention of those with territory to defend.

There are no straight lines in nature and only what is a threat is ugly. Permanent settlement led to a change in psychological time which persists today. Just as for our hunter gatherer ancestors there was a time-distance equivalence; later peasant societies (subsistence agriculture) often displayed a cyclical view of time. The past repeated in a landscape that seemed to stay constant, all that could happen had happened before, all that could be known is known. But in the modern era time seems synonymous with the progressive. Everything is built upon the previous, and assumed to be an improvement. The possibility of some things being done better in the past is excluded. However, there is nothing inherently progressive about evolution, whether biological or cultural!

You only start worshiping things you are dependent on and have reason from time to time to fear. We are a social species, our greatest desire is to belong. So in modern times when forced to be alone the narrative becomes ‘no one walks alone’ or a ‘ghost on the road’ story. For me, there may have been an ancient evolved spirituality, a once shared unconscious, growing out of our fundamental nature as a social species, living in small groups and being highly dependent on each other’s skills, moment to moment.

Over your shoulder, from the past, are the ancestors from whom wisdom can be acquired and therefore their presence changes how you behave. And there is no reason to feel learning from spirits shouldn’t manifest the same way we learn from the living; mirror neurons, imitation and memetics!

The move from a grounded spirituality to a religion happens when, forced to stay in one place, the head goes up beyond the birds (who tell you what is happening on the ground) to worry about the weather and imagines it is in the gift of other-worldly forces. It is a common assertion that astronomy breaks with astrology sometime during the scientific revolution, one wonders how it ever got started. Perhaps astrological beliefs were added by permanently settled agriculturalists when they realised they were trapped, tied to the land.

The night sky might have been our original navigation aid. I’m attracted to the phenomenon of ‘double sleep’ in a natural sleep cycle, and the notion that it is natural to have a period of meditative wakefulness at night. If this were true for our ancient ancestors, then every child, perhaps unconsciously, could have absorbed a mental map of the sky, including not just annual celestial cycles but the added weekly/monthly layer of the change caused by the distance they had travelled.

A golden thread of modern religions we are told is to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Closely aligned with putting others first and centre in your life. But these ideas remain aspirations because the whole species does not cooperate. But think smaller, the band or village, the extended family, the hunting party. We evolved to operate as teams in which cooperation and competition are two sides of the same coin; you see an opening, you take it; you don’t, then give the ball away.

Such speculations as the above began in my youth when wandering across Dartmoor as part of small groups. I started to ask myself whether this landscape was really a wilderness at all, barren in parts certainty, but evidence of human activity was everywhere and had clearly been occurring over very long timescales. Even the bogs we were trying to avoid were evidence that there had once been trees. Later, I learnt from authors such as W G Hoskins that it is truly a man-made landscape, and studying Geography and Geology in sixth-form told me it hadn’t been a genuine wilderness since before the last forest grew - back at the end of the most recent ice age when it had been arctic tundra. As the climate warmed again the arboreal forest returned and hunter-gatherers came back from the south, the trees weren’t under serious threat till thousands of years later when Bronze Age farmers developed an insatiable desire for wood, not least for the making of hotter fires to produce even harder metal that could cut down even more trees, even faster.

(photo by Maria Margato 2008)

For the real story of hunter-gatherers in Devon we should turn away from Dartmoor and look out to sea, to what has become the English channel but was once a massive river plain and estuary, when the Seine, Rhine and Thames were its tributaries. The story of the decline of hunter-gatherers and the rise of agriculture after the last ice age is also one of sea level rise. From the top of Dartmoor tors, all the way to the current coastline there was dense forest, occasionally visited for resources, but not the preferred landscape. At the height of the last ice age sea levels were between 120 and 130 metres lower. And despite the forbidding nature of undersea archaeology, the whole story is there to be uncovered in the future. Our gaps in knowledge relate much to what is supposed not to have been preserved, worked wood, hide and sinew – the sorts of things preserved in alluvial river deposits, later covered by the sea.

Much of our knowledge about the Palaeolithic period is highly contested, but much isn’t and therefore taken for granted in current debates. My contention is we are a lot less further forward than we like to think. The temptation to quantify, in order to justify and maintain someone’s status, distorts much which should remain at the more fundamental level of qualitative evidence and debate.

Natural mental health (part three)

The Group Experience

We are a social species, our bodies only move relative to others, every thought and feeling has a social cue in the present moment. Emotions act like a tag, as a start and a stop to every thought, at the connection to every other thought. It happens because all sense data passes through the remaining reptilian, then mammalian structures of our ever evolving social brain before reaching the uniquely large human part, the neocortex. Our extra-large cognitive processing capacity grew as a response to the increasing size of human groups.

Natural human groups have a maximum size of around one hundred and fifty, made up of our closest genetic relatives, but with an increasing tendency to break into two from about one hundred. The size of all primate groups is directly related to brain capacity. Whilst the human brain may be capable of recognising thousands of faces, we are limited in the number of people we can feel an emotionally attachment for. We must fear strangers, for our lives depend on the group. In the past our human herd was our only social network and the group dynamics within it our principle concern, and over the better part of two hundred thousand years a collective brain evolved. Grooming - touch - forms the bonds in childhood and maturity. Leadership goes to whoever is the strongest in a particular space at a particular time, the best able automatically volunteer. With such a legacy, who's on your team? You have, in the modern world of constant strangers, perhaps three seconds to decide or feel - we need our instincts. Would you, ‘take point’ for him? Would you want him taking point for you? When you lock-on to the strongest person in a particular environment or situation you know your degree of freedom.

2016 (photo by Nick Hewling)

One should never empathise with the unhealthy. In the context of mental health that often means refusing the anxiety and fear of others. Disgust is the natural emotional response to any danger to health, we might ‘catch’ something physically (infection, disease) or mentally we may learn (copy, imitate) something disabling (fear). The instinctive emotional response of disgust causes us to turn away. Exclusion from our group has a purpose. Ultimately, we leave death behind by walking away, the natural human group moving constantly through a landscape allows nature to reclaim the fallen almost immediately, they do not cross the river - we do.

With the success of the large human group came greater longevity, the need for monogamy and the family unit. Penetrative sex became marriage, non-penetrative sexual activity the search for high compatibility, nature’s fertility test. Extreme genetic closeness repulsed, whilst towards the edge of the natural human group were the individuals with whom one had the greatest possible compatibility. In the modern world we are staggeringly incompetent in mate selection. In mate selection it is points of similarity which attract, it is the person of the opposite sex who appears to you to be the strongest in your group who wins. Our health, living healthily, depends on us recognising and learning from what is healthy in others; the shape of the body seen from behind in movement. Natural groups inherited the instincts of their ancestors to mate in positions where the male is behind the female. Prolonged eye contact is oppositional! The strongest social bonds follow when individuals look out upon the world from the same perspective. So men follow women and women following men. Yet, in natural behaviour it is men who display, whilst women choose. 

The essential pre-condition of all social contact, of all relationships is that those present, feel safe. What we look for in others is the combination of competence and warmth, only then for achievement or the ambition to achieve. Originally all knowledge was shared because everyone learnt the multiple skill sets required for survival. At some point a division of labour began to emerge, possibly building upon different amounts of time committed to child rearing by men and women. Equally, specialisation in tasks may have been driven by technological innovation based on different levels of aptitude or a conscious decision not to share expertise. In time a collective or social consciousness gave way to an emerging ‘self’, a perception of individuals. If orientated to nature, then what others provide will be what you need; therefore it is always your degree of comfort or discomfort with the social activity of food, shelter, rest, warmth, storytelling, dance, song, sex and healing that counts. Modern society, from agriculture onward, has become characterised by de-socialisation and dislocation, an increasing inability for natural group formation.

Healing is a group process too. The roots of shamanic practice have been traced back about forty thousand years so far. It is both the oldest spiritual, and the oldest medical practice known in human cultural evolution. In our migration out of Africa the remains of the trail appear first in central Asia, whether shamanism came out of Africa much earlier, or simply spread back there, is unknown. At heart the focus of practice is not the immediate distress of an individual but that of the community as a whole, its harmony and healing. The fundamental assumption is that everything in the known (visible) universe is alive with a soul or spirit and therefore capable of transformation, whether we feel we understand it or not. Our responsibility is therefore to remember (knowledge) and respect our connection to all the people and things we know.

A shaman is the person chosen by the group (band or village) to act as messenger between the visible, known or understood world, and the invisible, unknown, or as yet unknown - or possibly unknowable, world of the spirit! Therefore in any one moment the shaman may be acting as healer or doctor; using the most fully understood medicinal remedies at the same time as presenting him or herself, verbally and nonverbally through ritual, in such a way as to have the greatest positive psychological effect on all those present. Equally, insofar as he or she is dealing with the unknown or untouchable they may act as priests. It is at this point that the way a community traditionally chooses their shaman is of paramount importance. When a shaman is seeking an apprentice the one fundamental qualification is someone who can access knowledge which is beyond the normal reach of the group. For this reason the person chosen is someone who has survived an experience which would have been expected to kill, physically or mentally, any ‘ordinary’ member community.

When discussing shamanism the convention has evolved to use the languages of central Asia, reflecting the dominance of Russian anthropology in the early 20^th century. ‘Shaman’, comes from the Tungus tribe of Siberia, translating into English as; ‘one who sees in the dark’ or ‘into the darkness’. The shaman looks at the spiritual, the emotional and the physical aspects of what we have come to call an individual’s ‘illness’, yet their explanations and treatments give primacy to the social and environmental dimension. They seek to unblock as well as remove, to retrieve the lost or wounded part following a physical or mental trauma – so that the group may (literally in the case of hunter-gatherer or pastoral nomadic bands) find their balance again and move on together to some other place.

Modern accounts of shamanism still suffer from the assumption that ‘we’ must be practicing healing more effectively than our ancestors did. This is to misunderstand evolution by natural selection, biological or cultural - there is nothing necessarily ‘progressive’ about it. As a consequence the practical medicinal resources and knowledge available to our ancient ancestors tends to get down played, with many taking it for granted that the psychological and spiritual components were all they had. Unfortunately the bias of modern medicine has often been uncritically accepted by many alternative therapists – they too assume that it is only their ability at spiritual connectedness which counts, or needs to count, in any healing process. Archaeologists continue to be surprised by the discovery of bones which healed many years before death; psychiatrists remain blind to the changes in mood, emotion and pain brought about by the rapid nonverbal direct touch interventions of hypnotists.

The shaman is seeking to heal the soul, the source of the energy or power which is lost with illness or distress. They journey to the realms of the spirit in order to be guided by ancestral expertise. It is the human spirit which suffers from fear, loss, grief, abuse or trauma; it takes flight to somewhere else to survive, but at the cost of isolation from others. To bring someone back into the community of others the shaman performs soul retrieval rituals, often localised to specific areas of the body to extract the harmful energy or force. Naturally enough there are also ancestral wounds living on through successive generations, again the shaman’s practice is holistic and doesn’t try to separate mind and body, or the cultural inheritance from the biological (the epigenetic perhaps?) The only question is; what works from the past and what should be let go? When death occurs, they seek to aid the living to accept the transition of the departed to the spirit realm. Beyond the community of ancestors in the spirit world there are also powerful animal allies with whom maintaining a strong connection is also a path to health - the wolves and predatory birds which once patrolled the constantly moving boundaries of our earthly territories.

The shaman creates the scared space for healing and transformation in the face of change by calling on the knowledge of the spirit world, where all possible future outcomes are known because all possible outcomes have occurred to our ancestors in the past. To connect to the spirit world the shaman purposefully alters their state of consciousness whilst creating enough trust and relaxation in the sufferer for them in turn to let go and move to an altered state. The most ancient techniques use focusing on the breath, leading to an awareness of the changing rhythm of the heart, over which is layer the simplest of drumming. The rituals undertaken by shaman from across the world have been found to include the fundamental aspects of meditation, of massage and of yoga. When the recipient emerges from one altered state to another, what change has occurred is visible to all in their behaviour and body language.

But the shaman is only a facilitator; much restorative practice may be built into the daily activities of the group. Focused and systematic massage increases awareness of the body, its organs, muscles, systems and structures for everyone. Remote stimulation (by someone other) helps in the identification of physical and emotional pain. It feels like a natural equilibrium is being restored. Sensitive and sensitizing, good massage treatment makes you feel safe. It mimics the lost, embodied skills of social grooming. Many of our routine physical movements are unconsciously directed, but have clearly been learnt; therapeutic touch is the fast way to break old patterns and start installing new ones.

Adults are more ‘tense’ than children and have a diminished sense of fun. Just as our eyes are dependent on our hands to confirm reality, they too can be relied upon therapeutically. But massage is not immediately acceptable to everyone in the modern world, if you were not handled agreeably as a child you are unlikely to trust being handled as an adult. But, the body can often massage itself; core muscles compress and release the digestive organs with each deep breath, the slightest movement of limb muscles relieves pressure on nearby veins which maintain circulation, the arms when free to swing, relax back muscles. When tired or unwell, natural body movement becomes depressed, but then the natural massaging of the legs is inhibited by sitting too. Gravity slows circulation at the extremities. There are benefits in both the giving and receiving of massage, and always an immediate emotional pay-off in the rediscovery of the connection between touch and movement. The spinal column is the pivotal structure of all movement, yet we have come to think of the buttocks as a seat rather than the reason we can stand upright for prolonged periods. Crossing the legs undermines the spine and is often accompanied by the forward projection of the head. Muscles are a record of our feelings, yet their tension and release ought to ease stressful situations.

Much of this essay might be described as ‘naturopathy' a harmonious philosophy of life which does not separate mind and body or the individual from their social and physical environment, placing wellbeing within a universal order. A view that nature cannot be 'bettered' and that wisdom which has survived the longest is the most reliable. It invites us to discover how nature finds equilibrium (or homeostasis) in the body; producing vitality, creativity, regeneration and spiritual awareness. If massage can be said to have a practical objective it might be stated as achieving a confident composure without fearfulness. With that, wider ambitions are possible such as the 'rewilding' of an over-civilised society lacking in natural stimulation and strong connections with others. The parts of the body with the greatest numbers of nerve endings are the hands, feet, face and genitals. The more comprehensively these areas are massaged the more connected the recipient feels towards the giver of the massage and the world around them. Grooming is belonging. An Indian head massage; running fingers through the hair and massaging the scalp to relax the mind, boosts the awareness of all the senses. When done well it includes many ‘pressure’ or ‘acupuncture’ points - argument over what connects to what, matters little if all possibilities are covered! Similarly, to judge reflexology on whether a particular area of the foot, the hands, or ears connects directly to particular organs is a distraction, thoroughness is all.

The philosophy known as Tantra emerged as a counter to the asceticism found in traditional Hinduism, it sees sexuality as one route to enlightenment, along with other everyday earthly tasks such as eating, dancing and creative expression. Each commonplace activity is seen as a sacred act in and of itself. Tantra (meaning to manifest, expand, show, weave), maintains that sexual behaviour can expand consciousness; weaving together the male (embodiment of Shiva) and the female (embodiment of Shakti) into a harmonious whole. With the right partner, you revere them as the embodiment of either side of the deity. Sexual energy can create health and be a means to transformation. Sexual experience is a dance, but with no beginning or end, and no goal beyond the present moment; a union between a couple which is meditative, expressive and intimate. Extending arousal with many peaks of ecstasy (which may or may not include orgasm) within a single encounter is the focus, rather than sexual intercourse. Giving pleasure takes precedent. In the first instant it requires making time for each other, creating sacred spaces with an inviting atmosphere. You create ritual to develop intimacy around bathing, massaging, and feeding the other person. You pay attention to the breath of the other; pacing them, maintaining eye contact. Tantra seeks not to judge, but by maximising the simple pleasures of the day-to-day it achieves, counterintuitively, an unstructured and timeless experience. The Tantra approach may well focus on the most mundane but that includes the most fundamental. Of course the most basic of energy must emanate from the base of the spine – the most crucial functions of ‘pissing, shitting and fucking’ should, along with all else, be regulated and awakened by the breath and our core muscles through yoga, meditation and massage.

Such processes are both active and passive because they are social. They are active in the sense of being a systematic exercise of the techniques of meditation with the guidance of someone who has already had the experience; passive because ultimately it is a path that allows an individual to surrender to nature, to let go of impediments to awakening. A pathway which gives greater access to the unconscious by setting aside the ‘self’, and so allowing for selfless service within the family, the group and hence a true belonging. There is something we can call a natural mind, but it is part of a collective of brains in natural human groups.

Acknowledgments

Armstrong, K (2000) The Buddha. Blackmore, S (1999) The Meme Machine. Blackmore, S (2011) Zen and the Art of Consciousness. Ekman, P (2007) Emotions Revealed. Fitzgerald, M & Fitzgerald, J (2006) Indian Spirit. Harrison (1994) Teach Yourself Meditation. Mitchell, S (1992) Massage. Navarro, J (2008) What Every Body Is Saying. Finally, I owe much to the support and motivation provided by Leah Bracknell in her occasional blog posts and two DVDs, Yoga and You (2003) and Yoga For Life (2011).

On the 'purpose' of smoking (final teaser)

‘The shamans instructed the people that they could make other pipes and use them and that (the sacred woman) would be in the smoke of any such pipe if smoked with proper solemnity and form.’

It is remarkable that in the whole debate over smoking no one ever seems to consider why it was adopted in the first place and thought a useful activity for so many centuries. Even when comments are made about how it helps people to relax and let go of stress, this is almost always in the context of someone who is already habituated and becoming tense again because they crave the next cigarette. Equally, giving emphasis to the socially addictive nature of smoking does not address why it might once have been thought a communally beneficial activity. In the Western world anti-smoking campaigns and changes in the law have been very successful, nonetheless there remains a hard-core of perhaps 10% of the population who are prepared to go to considerable lengths, financially and physically, in order to maintain their habit. Those who want to give-up are already trying and help is available, but there is a significant minority who frame the experience of smoking in an almost wholly positive way.

There are some striking differences in smoking behaviour between individuals and across groups which tend to get lost if your focus is only on the negative health effects. Three strange anomalies have led me to ponder the purpose of smoking over the years; the association sex and smoking – as exemplified in Film Noir, the Native American’s use of a communal ‘peace pipe’ and recent neuroscientific studies on memory and embodied cognition. For this is a tale of pheromones, nicotine and aspirin; of motivation, memory and the absolving of pain.

But first my own personal tale of smoking, the individualistic and anti-social one, which has some aspects of the right answer, but by and large ends up like the ‘it’s just bad for your health’ explanation - stuck up a cul-de-sac when it comes to the hard-core smokers apparently shivering in the rain on the street corner.

I always carry fire, and the means to roll and smoke a cigarette. Since smoking in enclosed public places has been banned in the UK - and smoking in enclosed private spaces become socially unacceptable - I’m often perceived by others as either always on my way to, or from ‘a smoke’; endlessly rolling cigarettes or just simply chain-smoking. The fact is of course that I’m actually smoking less than I ever did. Like almost every smoker I’m better informed about the health risks than non-smokers; I seek to optimise, by minimising the costs and exploiting the benefits. Whilst I may be reducing my lifespan, I’m not fool enough to buy the lie that one can somehow avoid a painful death by not smoking!

The father of the first girl I kissed (she was five, blue-eyed and blonde, I was seven) had a brand new white Ford Cortina Mark 1 with red upholstery, he worked as a salesman for John Player and the doors of the car were blazoned, first with the brand logo for Player’s No.10, then for No.6. Indeed the first cigarette I smoked, age eleven (1970), was a No.6 - I was in the shop whilst a contemporary actually bought them. (The lady who lived across from us favoured Embassy at that time). The first packet I bought was ten No.10, age thirteen. I was bunking-off school at lunchtime and keeping my dinner money. I was doing it to get away from others, from authority figures and boring peers. I was buying time to get my head together. Right from the off, smoking was either about sex, or about finding personal space – outside, in the fresh air. (Oh! And my great aunt was smoking Rothmans in those days, using a traditional silver-plated Ronson lighter.)

Smoking didn’t become a regular daily habit however until I was eighteen. I did a certain amount of social smoking in pubs and with male contemporaries, but the most pleasure I knew was to be had when smoking alone with female companions. I knew it had something to do with the combined smell of them and the smoke, but beyond that…?

Another insight came about when I began to read; study and write seriously for the first time, I was in my twenties having worked at an office job for a few years. I’d never particularly cared for smoking in my own home (if I did, I almost always did so with the windows open) but now it seemed to be becoming a necessity. For there was something in the act of reading, contemplating, noting, emphasising, composing, recalling; with the need to focus intently for short periods, then break the pattern for few minutes, which was all somehow facilitated by the act of smoking.

‘But haven’t you ever tried giving-up?’ Sure, when most people tell you that you should, over more than thirty years, you kind of feel you have to try. The only time I really succeeded, for four months that is, was when I was in an entirely novel environment.

Slowly over the years as the distinction in taste between brands disappeared, along with the ability to get filterless cigarettes, it became clear I would have to get serious about being able to roll my own design in whatever circumstances I found myself.

Rolling cigarettes is a craft skill and it disappears as soon as you stop practicing it. As a hand/eye coordination activity it goes to the core of human mental mapping. The learned, physical and psychological habits are in essence the same thing. Smoking that ‘tailor-made’ cigarette is also a skill, keeping it alight and getting a fast hit of nicotine when and where you want it. But of extra psychological importance is the direction and flow of the hand gesture whilst holding the cigarette. This somehow needs to be coordinated with the hit, the visualisation of the thought and the felt emotion that goes with – all within an environment of other people, or the physical landscape you are moving through. If you doubt this, simply turn out the lights and watch the pattern the burning end of a cigarette makes in the darkness.

photo by Nick Hewling

The way one explains smoking to oneself changes over time of course. For many years the idea of smoking as a ‘displacement’ activity seemed to make sense - an unacceptable emotional response (to oneself or the social group you are with) causes a rise in anxiety, which is then channelled and relieved by the next drag on the cigarette. (A displacement activity is one of the ‘defence mechanisms’ identified by Freud, but which were only formally categorised and developed by his daughter Anna, before making their way into many psychology textbooks!) But that’s a very individualistic explanation, at the very least it needs a social dimension, one which can account for the way smoking behaviour signals to others around you, the way it both attracts and repulses, creates and encloses personal space.

Enthusiasm for Freudian psychology hit its peak in 1940’s America, coinciding with the high point of the Hollywood genre known as Film Noir (films of the night, as it were), such movies crept into my psyche when they became a staple of the weekend TV schedules from the 1960’s onwards. They were inspired by ‘hard-boiled’ paperback crime novels and characterised by night-time locations with street lighting that cast deep shadows across endless alleyways. They were usually shot in black and white, although all were monochrome in tone. The plots didn’t offer a happy ending, the male characters ‘had seen it all’ and the females ‘would just as soon kill you as love you’. Of course everyone smoked, the women too – either because they were thought liberated, or conversely ‘not as good as they should be’ depending on your point of view! In the absence of explicitness, smoking choreographed flirtation, seduction, sex and its aftermath. You couldn’t smell her or touch her, but you could smell the smoke and feel the husky breath as it brushed the back of the neck! Smoking is capable of starting, stopping and regulating sexual arousal.

photo by Nick Hewling

Hollywood was also responsible for promoting a highly white, western ethnocentric image of Native Americans. An image extrapolated from a very short period of history, the middle and late 19^th century. In this story-line the native is an accomplish warrior on horseback, and when a truce finally comes, smoking is seen as somehow all about a ‘peace’ pipe. I guess the authorities only sat down with their adversaries when they considered themselves to be partaking in peace negotiations! On the other hand:

‘In the long ago the Lakotas were in camp and two young men lay upon a hill watching for signs. They saw a long way in the distance a lone person coming… When the person came close, they saw that it was a woman and when she came nearer that she was without clothing of any kind except that her hair was very long and fell over her body like a robe. One young man said to the other that he would go and meet the woman and embrace her… His companion cautioned him to be careful… But the young man would not be persuaded and met the woman… His companion saw him attempt to embrace her and there was a cloud closed about them… In a short time the cloud disappeared and the woman was alone. She beckoned to the other young man and told him to come there and assured him that he would not be harmed…

When he got there, she showed him the bare bones of his companion… The young man was very much afraid, but she told him that if he would do as she directed, no harm would come to him… She then directed him to return to camp and call all the council together and tell them that in a short time they would see four puffs of smoke under the sun at midday. When they saw this sign they should prepare a feast, and all sit in the customary circle to have the feast served when she would enter the camp, but the men must all sit with the head bowed and look at the ground until she was in their midst. Then she would serve the feast to them and after they had feasted she would tell them what to do: that they must obey her in everything; that if they obeyed her in everything they would have their prayers to the Wakan Tanka answered and be prosperous and happy...

Then she disappeared as a mist disappears so that the young man knew that she was Wakan. He returned to the camp and told these things to the people and the council decided to do as she had instructed the young man… In a few days they saw four puffs of black smoke under the sun at midday, so they prepared for a feast and all dressed in their best clothing and sat in a circle…

Every man bowed his head and looked towards the ground. Suddenly the women began uttering low exclamations of admiration… Then the woman entered the circle and took the food and served it, first to the little children and then to the women and then she bade the men to look up. They did so and saw a very beautiful woman dressed in the softest deerskin which was ornamented with fringes and colours more beautiful than any woman of the Lakota had ever worked… She told them that she wished to serve them always; that they had first seen her as smoke and that they would always see her as smoke. Then she took from her pouch a pipe and willow bark and Lakota tobacco and filled the pipe with the bark and tobacco and lighted it with a coal of fire.

She smoked a few whiffs and handed the pipe to the chief and told him to smoke and hand it to another. Thus the pipe was passed until all had smoked. She then instructed the council how to gather the bark and the tobacco and prepare it, and gave the pipe in to their keeping, telling them that as long as they preserved this pipe she would serve them. But she would serve them in this way. When the smoke came from the pipe she would be present and hear their prayers and take them to the Wakan Tanka and plead for them that their prayers would be answered.

After this she remained in this camp for many days and all the time she was there everyone was happy for she went from tipi to tipi with good words for all. When the time came for her to go, she called all the people together… She stood in the midst of the circle and when the fire had burned to coals she directed the shaman to place on it the sweetgrass. This made a cloud of smoke and the woman entered the smoke and disappeared… The shamans instructed the people that they could make other pipes and use them and that (the sacred woman) would be in the smoke of any such pipe if smoked with proper solemnity and form. Thus it was that the Beautiful Woman brought the pipe to the Lakotas.’ Finger, Oglala Lakota - quoted by Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald (2006) Indian Spirit.

Above we have the devastating combination of the scent of a beautiful, near naked women, walking around an open wood fire (pheromones) and the communal smoking of tobacco (nicotine) mixed with the bark of last season’s growth on the willow (aspirin) – in other words; motivation, memory and pain relief.

How so? What the nicotine released by smoking does is slightly speed-up the natural formation of new neural pathways in the brain. Pathways or new memories are created by the progressive insulating of new connections between brain cells with white matter (myelin) to the point where the pathway is relatively unaffected by the cell activity around it. Somehow nicotine at a synapse attracts myelin. Smoking aids brain mapping, but is also painful, perhaps through the destruction of existing connections or simply because greater speed and efficacy means many more electrons are jumping around! Equally the gestures made by the arm that holds the cigarette - almost like a pencil - will force other connections, which in turn may have originated far off in some other part of the brain.

However much mental mapping is ‘assisted’, using nicotine to force connections can only be useful if it is purposeful and selective - if our way of smoking is entirely routine it could only reproduce and entrench existing ways of being. If smoking is considered, both individually and collectively, as one of the many tools that assist memory (through inter-generationally oral, pictorial or written history), then what? Well, haven’t our guesstimates of the longevity of oral history grown massively in recent years?!

So what of the elusive pheromones, long known to be somehow crucial to both sexual attraction and compatibility but about which researchers have often appeared to stumble over – with their desire to examine your three-day old T shirts, rather than going for the more obvious crotch?!

photo by Nick Hewling

Only a few months before writing this it was quietly announced that humans do indeed, as long suspected by a few, have as good a sense of smell as many other mammals, but as with other neuroscientific issues, the real way in which we are fooled is by the tiny amount of data that our overwhelmingly unconscious brain can put up into consciousness at any one time. We can sense thousands more smells than those we are habitually use to - it is more a question of what we, and/ or society are willing to be aware of. Not to mention that such an insight makes the association of smoking with a loss of smelling ability - well, just another nonsense really. Smell provides the most basic of orientations and baselines for navigation in a natural way in our social world and is perhaps of most importance in aspects of sexual selection.

One of the ideas that modern academic enquiry cannot tolerate is that things were done better in the past, that the answers are already out there! But the ultimate deception is when health becomes synonymous with longevity, with living as long as possible a good ‘in and of itself’, where a painful death is thought to be avoidable.

Further reading:
Nicotine withdrawal
Teenage brains
Nicotine as cognitive enhancer
Nicotine - Wikipedia .