Here I present a very general sketch of the phase-map of sentient relation with the dead. It begins with an ancestor whose sentience is essentially animalian, and proceeds into the development of metpahoric modes of hypostasis through common relations first with corpses, and then with artifacts representing lost or desired relations.

 

1: Prolonged Preservation of Corpses:

Complex emotional bonds lead to preservation of the corpse, at first in the hope of reanimation, and then as a fixitive token of re-membrence. The speed of change and cognitive demands of group and personal survival would tend to rapidly flush away formal memory in favor of the needs of the moment. Maintaining the corpse thus functions to ‘re-mind’ a living member of the relationship with the departed member. This evolves into a relational hypostasis involving self, group and departee.

But carrying a corpse around fails for a variety of reasons including disease transmission, complexity of protecting the corpse, and rejection within the local the socia based on inappropriate signaling activity from the conservator. Once the corpse is relatively decomposed, it falls apart, and can no longer be maintained without a container, and (in my opinion) this behavior began before we could commonly craft or use such artifacts. Thus, ‘a natural container’ was sought where the corpse could be guarded, and thus a memorialrelationship could ensue.

 

2: Static Placement of Corpses:

If a group has established static locality, this behavior might naturally arise as an emotional response to the basic desires expressed in mourning. The place and corpses must be at least marginally attended, so that the ‘re membering’ of the place and its meaning continues to occur across generations. In the earliest manifestations this may have been as simple as a carnal ground, cave area, pond, or other distinguishable cache. Later, when we had more formal housing, corpses could be sustained in dwelling areas, or a separate unique dwelling purposed for the dead. While in close proximity the could be ‘adorned’ and included in common activities as though participating through the hypostatic vehicle of the hard remains.

 

3: Enhancement of Corpses:

Complex handling of corpses begins, including adornment in some cases. Various relational behaviors such as preserving only the skull (or some other portion), enjeweling eye-sockets with stones, &c are adopted according to unique local histories and circumstance. The creation of semi-formal tombs or marked cairns was probably an elaboration based on experience with having a static and re-visited location for dead members. Only long after representational cognition had become common would it be possible to craft adornments such as garb or masks, etc.

 

4: Doll making:

In some cases this was probably an addition to existing modes of funerary memorialism. Some cultures who had established territories probably developed funerary arts such as primitive corpse enhancement and tombcraft. In more mobile cultures, tokens would have been the obvious replacement for proximity to corpses or tombs. Beginning as simply as a rock or stick, possibly with a shape similar to the shape of the animal. This habit was later elaborated when we became capable of artistic embellishment and thus capable of carving dolls from wood or stone, fashioning them of mud, etc. These dolls could be carried, referred to as local (pretending locality through the doll), included in activities such as eating or sleeping, and were used in general to enable the relations to be maintained ‘close at hand’ rather than only in the place where the corpse or memorial was located. These then, were the first portable hypostasis of persons.

 

5. Hypostatic ‘uptake’

Ongoing relations with extrinsic caches evolves comparatively rapidly once emotional entities become bound with ordinary natural objects and dolls. As having complex emotional relationships with things grows more common, new relational potentials arise in which novel forms of relational hypostasis can be developed and sustained. Here the precursors to ownership, theft, and ‘rights of possession’ find their primitive genesis.

Filial ownership of tokens slowly emerges as an arbiter of status or credentialling in the groups, and damage to the tokens would possibly be experienced as equal or more profound than damage to living members. This is a phase of explosive evolutionary development in a new cognitive dimension, and many of the most elemental shapes of our representational habits are remnants of modes vehicles exposed during this phase, which we recapitulate in person, during childhood.

We consider here a phase before the arisal formal languaging, where an object could confer upon its posessor unique ‘personalized’ power and various modes of ‘credentialling authority’. For example, a member carrying a bear-claw could be considered ‘violent enough to take on a bear’ — without needing any of these labels or complex language. The token of the claw, then, was probably sufficient ‘language’ at first — and extremely direct. Similarly, the family who bore and preserved a leader would be endowed with authority by possession of the corpse and artifacts belonging to the departed member.

These new relational abilities progressed in a variety of cognitive and relational dimensions culminating with the development of language, a cognitive toy of separative hypostasis. From there, gestural languages probably led to noisy emphasis, and that noisy emphasis became, eventually, something akin to words.

 

6. Bicameral Hypostasis

In the beginings of this phase we adapted so dramatically to the common experience of extrinsic caching strategies that we began to acrrue imaginal precursors, and it is here we come to the birthplaces of myth and religion. These are, in general, vastly distorted re-translations of a phase of our evolution we cannot imagine, for there is no modern equivalent of of a bicameral society of animals.

The animalian sense of self has been riven, and a whole section of awareness is in the process of becoming explosively hyper-reflective — the power to imagine or inwardly simulate self and circumstance is being born. But why? In part because the simulative skills we accrued in relating with extrinsic objects gets ‘re-reflected’ back onto the living world, and this causes secondary and tertiary ‘super-reflection’, which I refer to as transentience. The experience is explosive, and probably more than uncommonly disasterous. With the new modes of relation available come many new and extremely subtle threats, particularly the threat generally referred to as ‘idolatry’.

Our species was ‘invaded’ by a ‘not locally sourced’ intelligence, and this biocognitive invocation resulted in direct experiential contact with a multi-plenum of many phase-scales of intelligences. What happened was akin to a cognitive explosion brought on by the assembly of an incredibly adept sentience-antenna. Each animal of in the group of animals represented not an individual, but a unique instance of an entire planet.

During these phases we began to acquire the potentials of living hypostases — as we bathed in the relational-ness of a sentient universe, planet, and local ecologies, we become so adeptly ‘reflective’ of the profound diversity of our world and experience that our species was ‘transformed’. Our consciousness became the local ‘focusing-body’ of the entire history and intelligence of the cellular and animalian planet, and though we appear to have forgotten this, it remains true in our every moment and phase of history.

 

7. Contact Loss / Attempted Integration