• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

And that brings me back to my earlier point about The Stones being called “fags” by the angry male element in the audience. There is a story to be told about “the boys who serve the women” and “the boys who serve the men.” Some might think the Stones serve the men, but I would beg to differ. You’ll see. It looks like human civilization may be a lot older than we had long believed. Well, really there’s no “may be” about it. Civilization just is a lot older, and people who think otherwise are kidding themselves. Recent discoveries in Asia Minor indicate that highly organized communal human life goes back to 10,000 B.C.E. (that’s 7,500 years older than the pyramids, and 7000 years older than Stonehenge). Google the names “Gobekli Tepe” or “Nevali Çori” and see what you find.

The world of the “ancient” Greeks is, by comparison, only yesterday. We may have had civilization before 10,000 B.C.E., but we don’t have evidence right now. It’s a murky topic. After all, even by the most conservative estimate, there have been “modern humans” (in the biological sense of the word) for at least fifty thousand years, and perhaps much, much longer. It isn’t reasonable to think the humans, with brains and hands and voices just like ours, would just hang fire on the savannah all that time. They had big brains. They got bored. They needed some entertainment. They started beating on things. What Charlie Watts does so well isn’t that much different. (Is it just me, or does Charlie bear a resemblance to those fanciful models of Neanderthal man? You know the scientists now say that some Neanderthal DNA survived in us from cross-breeding, especially in northern Europe …)

Once you have the groove, you also have the dance—humans had excess energies and we were dedicated to getting that out of our system. One good way to do that is sex, but even that gets old after a while (for everyone except Bill Wyman). No one knows just how the dance and the music became the ritual, but it seems likely that the ritual involved sex from the outset. If it were not so, it would be hard to explain why it took so many centuries to discourage the fertility cults—I say discourage, since they weren’t destroyed. There are still plenty of devotees of the degraded forms of these cults, in case you haven’t noticed the existence of many thousands of “gentlemen’s clubs,” and a billion-dollar pornography industry. I’m not at all certain I would call the debauchery of the Stones tours a “degraded” version of those cults, but rather more of an upgraded resurgence.

The fertility cults also sometimes involved death, at least by the time we can document things. Whether sacrifice is an original impulse among humans we do not know, but the ritual practice of human and animal sacrifice is very, very old. Some authorities, following Freud, say it’s a basic impulse and they find analogies even among the chimps these days. Others say it isn’t so, but everybody agrees that humans and animals were sacrificed in the frenzy in many of the most ancient cultures. You’ll be hard pressed to compartmentalize the sex and the death as you regress into more ancient and more primal versions of these rituals—and that may explain why we don’t like to look at this and think of it.

Not knowing what to do with our extra energy leads us to be diabolically creative with our nimble hands and big old brains. A French thinker (widely read by philosophers, sometimes in secret) named Georges Bataille (1897–1962) named this extra energy “the accursed share” (or la part maudite if you’re feeling fancy) and he also expounded in most uncomfortable clinical detail the proximity of death and sensual desire. He’s a scary read. Go do it, by all means, but maybe not late at night when you’re alone.

I’m in Need of Some Restraint

The story of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis is a classic account of how human sacrifice was gradually replaced with symbolic sacrifices. Human sacrifice in the part of Mesopotamia Abraham left (the city-state of Ur) was already extremely old; the area had