Atlanta tri-weekly journal. [volume] (Atlanta, Ga.) 1920-19??, 1922-11-07

one reads the great ages Of the patriarchs
VINO lived before the flood as lunar months
instead of years, Methusaleh and the others
are reduced to credible length of life. But
with agriculture began the difficult task Of
squaring the lunar month with the solar year;
task which has left it's scars on our calen-
dar today. Easter shifts uneasily from year
to year, to the great discomfort of holiday
makers; it is now inconveniently early and
now late in the season because of this ancient
reference Of time to the moon.
And when men began to move with set
intention from place to place with their ami
mails and other possessions, then they would
begin to develop the idea Of other places in
which they were not, and to think of what
might be in those other places. And in any
valley where they fingered for time, they
would, remembering how they got there, ask,
How did this or that ether thing get here?"
They would begin to wonder what was be-
yond the mountains, and where the sun went
when 1t set, and what was above the clouds.
The capacity for telling things increased
with their vocabulary. The simple individual
fancies, the unsystematic fetish tricks and
fundamental tabus of Palaeolithic man began
to be handed on and made into more con-
sistent system. Men began to tell stories
about themselves, about the tribe, about it's
tabus and why they had to be, about the world
and the why for the world.
The Coming of Tradition
tribal mind came into existence, tradi-
ton. Palaeolithic man was certainly more Of
free individualist, more of an artist as
we'll as more of a savage than Neolithic man.
Neolithic man was coming und II prescription;
he could be trained from his youth and told
to do Things and not to do things; he was
not so free to form Independent ideas of his
own about things. He had thoughts given to
him; he was under a new power of sugges-
ton. And to have NOR words and to attend
more to words is not simply to increase men
tai power; words themselves are powerful
things and dangerous things Palaeolithic
mans words, perhaps, were chiefly just
names. He used them for what they were.
But Neolithic man was thinking about these
words, he was thinking about a number of
things with great deal of verbal confusion,
and getting to some odd conclusions. In
speech he had woven i net to bind his race
together, but also it was net about his feet
Man was binding hi self into new and larger
and more Efficient combinations, indeed, but
at a price.
One of the most notable things about the
Neolithic Age is the totaI absence of that free,
direct artistic impulse which was the supreme
quality of later Pal. .olithic man. We find
much industry, much skill, polished imple-
ments pottery with conventional designs, CO.
operation upon all sorts of things, but no evil
dence of personal creativeness Self-suppres-
sion is beginning for men. Man has entered
upon the long and tortuous and difficult path
toward life for the common good, with all
its sacrifice of personal impulse, which he is
still treading today.
Certain things appear in the mythology of
manki again and again. Neolithic man was
enormously impressed by serpents-and he
no longer took the sun for granted. Nearly
everywhere that Neolithic culture went, there
went disposition to associate the sun and
the serpent in decoration and worship. This
primitive serpent worship spread ultimately
far beyond the regions where the snake is of
serious practical Importance in human lie.
Copyright, 1929 1t