Oleg Kot - The Dot of Noah’s-Darwin’s - the Ark, evolution, totemism and interspecific wars. Correspondence with anthropological journals

3.2. Biblical one-year sea travel refers to extreme situations on the water. Therefore all relationship on an ark needs to be considered in the light of psychology of extreme situations. The major role is played in this case not by the individual, but collective. Consequently, the results of the voyage will be determined exclusively by collective psychology and its characteristics. This is what (Ankermann 1915—1916, pp. 586—590; Thurnwald 1917—1918, p. 1106, pp. 1118—1111) and many others noticed in totemism. They noted the deep archaism of primitive totemic psychology and emphasized the collectivism of primitive thinking that underlies these beliefs. Proceeding from this, Ankermann concludes that the psychology of the closeness of the human group to the totem could have developed in conditions of such a hunting life, in which man was alone with animals and did not possess the high technique that would raise him above them. Forty years later: “Reuterschild correctly believes that the most important thing in Totemism is the identity of the people and the species of animals, but misses another, not less important side of it – the origin from the totem. He is certainly right when he seeks an answer to the question of the origin of totemism in the thinking of primitive society. But when he sees the specifics of this thinking that totemism is rooted not in the emotions of the individual, but in the collective perception, he is mistaken, for any representations and ideas in any society are perceived only through the feeling and thinking of individuals” (Khaitun 1958, p. 129). As we will see below, in this “economist” Reuterschild was right.

3.3. The losses caused by the catastrophe ( stressors ) should provoke in a short period of time the team’s strong need for affiliation – the desire to be in a society of their own kind. Whichever like, the good, the bad, but only people. The desire to communicate not with animals in the process of feeding them, but with their family, which could compensate for the shock from the seen and irreplaceable loss.

But instead of satisfaction of this exigencies on the eight people felled down the burden on service of thousands of animal species and birds in the course of cohabitation at the increasing deficiency of communication with each other. There was a peculiar phenomenon – owing to the developed circumstances group isolation of the family of Noah smoothly and imperceptibly for them passes into personal loneliness of everyone. Communication by the formula “man ↔ animal” replaces the usual communication according to the formula “man ↔ man”. The team’s condition is approaching depression.

3.4. Soon the team of Patriarch became pity for animals and birds. A month later, many animals and birds were victims of the Neanderthals. In addition, they ached and were dying from dehydration and tribulations of sea travel. Subsequently (Durkheim 1912, p. 143, pp. 158—159; Goldenweiser 1910, p. 275; Harrison 1912, p. 123) and almost all the early explorers of the “ethnographic” school emphasized this unusually close, emotional connection between people and their totem. Courting for animals has to take away all the time: slowly but surely, the place of a person with his myriad of ragged social ties will takes up the world of animals, living according to biological laws. The status of animals will increases with each new day of the flood. The continuing inability to fully communicate with each other will only foster this. The reaction of the displacement and the repression mechanism will working against the backdrop of the deepest stress.

3.5. People in this situation will gradually start to personalize the animals. They will find by the animals a lot of human emotions and habits. The brightest impressions during feeding and harvesting for the animals will undergo a process of individualization . Stress and commotions will remove most barriers and prejudices along the way. If after a year on the water there is a death of all living things, the value of the last pairs of animals will rapidly grow in the eyes of four pairs of people. Their status will increase, and changes in human thinking become irreversible. The survivors animals will inevitably get up on one stair with the person in the eyes of the ship team. This will be the basis of a simple categorical syllogism: “a person and a animal are brothers. And the elimination of all living things can perfectly explain the “emotional value” of the latter. Sensory deprivation and maladjustment, an eternal companions of sailors, was accelerated the process of personification of animals on the ship.

One of the first this is intuitively felt L. Fison: “Do we not find here an explanation of that curious reverence shown to certain animals and things by savage tribes? and can this reverence be said to amount to “deification?” The totem has evidently no inherent sanctity. It is reverenced only by the group which it indicates; and by them, not because it is above them as a divinity, but because it is one with them, because it is the “flesh” of the body corporate whereof they themselves are parts. It is literally “bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh” (Fison and Howitt 1880, p. 169).

3.6. So, the scheme of the relationships of Noah’s family on the individual formula “man ↔ beast” and its continuation in the collective expression “Group of people ↔ Group of objects” is filling with multitude factors. Group isolation of the family at personal loneliness of each → leads to the emergence of a stable affiliation against a background of autistic fantasy (bravura) → when strengthening a role of stressors with transition to a chronic depression → includes mechanisms of supplantation negative state of the psyche ’s by means of personification (impersonation) of animals → disadaptation and sensory deprivation only increase the work’s of imagination, creating vivid eidetic images on the basis of personification → personification goes into long-term strategic personification through a series of post-traumatic syndromes or factors of existence after the Flood.

After tens of thousands of years, these two constructions “Man ↔ Beast” and “Group of people ↔ Group of objects” are still alive and reliably serves for the only goal – playback of the closed system. “We observe at the outset that totemism has two notes or characteristics: it has to do with a group not an individual, and that group is in a peculiar relation to another group of natural and occasionally of artificial objects” (Harrison 1912, p. 119).

3.7. That this fragile sequence has been kept and fixed at the level of primitive mentality, there was a need of existence of certain scenarios. The whole series of post-traumatic syndromes became them, through which people have passed after the Ark’s.

By Cpl. Andrew Johnston. Art therapy project created by a U.S. Marine with posttraumatic stress disorder.

3.8. PTSD-1 has arisen because of a difference of diets of several types of people on the Ark. The basis of the contradictions was the vegetarianism of the of Noah’s family and the meat-eating of the Neanderthal’s family on the ship.

The sense of paternalism Noah’s family towards the animals struggled with the feeling of hatred towards the “brotherly” kind of the Neanderthals. The ark was rapidly becoming a zone of conflict between the two types of people. Mental traumas in extreme situations carry very much a hard character. Many authors pay attention to the collective nature of a trauma in a natural disaster, defining it as “massive collective stress” (Kinston and Rosser 1974, p. 437). The authors found that a natural disaster, affecting the fabric of social life, destroys people’s connections and reduces the sense of community.