How we got stuck
The hunter Monmaneki and his wives teach Graeber and Wengrow a lesson

‘The Dawn of Everything’ argues that human political arrangements got stuck when divine kings and other patriarchal despots began to confuse paternal care with coercive control. Drawing on insights provided by an Amazonian myth, Chris Knight argues that the decisive changes occurred much earlier than Graeber and Wengrow suppose. Gender politics got stuck when patriarchal forms of marriage and residence took over, disconnecting women from their former freedom to choose where to live – a freedom in turn linked with the periodicity of the moon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3aUeIR16ao

Camilla: Chris is 82. He has never missed a lecture in his life. Not a lecture to students, nor a lecture at RAG. For over 40 years, he’s been here. Now this story he’s going to be engaging us with is a very notable Amazonian myth that he’s wrestled with himself for many, many moons. But it suddenly occurred to him, he never probably published the text that when he read Graber and Weingrow’s infamous, wretchedly famous book Dawn of Everything, he had an answer… Or rather, Momenecki, the hunter Momenecki and his wives had answers to the key question of their book, which is ‘how did we get stuck?’ So, Chris.

Chris: OK. Yes. Thanks Camilla. So welcome to radical anthropology. Radical. We chose that name because of kind of radishes of the way radishes are roots and we always thought it’s very important really for doing any kind of study to work out who we are, why we are now. Are going to the roots of things and trust the roots of things is how do we become human? Did we become human? What was involved in? One of the one of the most exciting events actually of recent years has been precisely the book that has been mentioning David Graber and David Wengrove. The dawn of everything. And probably more than anyone, really. Since Frederick Engels, when he wrote the origin of the family private property and the state that was, that was the book which, when I was about 17 or 18, got me going. Engels argued that there was a time when we were. Communists. In some sense, he would have acknowledged that you could not use that word. But in those days, of course, the word communism. Was quite widely accepted that early human society was in some sense sharing. And only later did we have the rise of private property, the nuclei family and the state and. I won’t go into this in any great detail, but he was very he was inspired by work by Lewis Henry Morgan working with Iroquois Indians. And he noticed that they were communistic in the way they organized their lives, their household, their property, and everything else. And he argued that the future of society, if there was a future. Would be a return. On a higher level. To the equality, liberty and fraternity of the Iroquois clan. In other words, he argued that history has worked in a spiral. Didn’t just move forward and everything. There’s kind of logic to moving away from the way we would get, but we began and then coming back to it. But on of course, on a higher level, so the future. For angles, would be resembling the communism we began with, but of course on a massively. Larger, grander scale. So one of the things to understand I think about David Graeber. Is how many deals how he dealt with obviously was a great friend of ours and of course most of you know, he tragically died during the COVID period. But this is a wonderful book that the 1^st 5000 years I remember. I was with. We were great friends actors together and he gave me the proofs before it. Been published. And when I read it, I was just a bit surprised because it starts with his view of precisely that topic. Communism and I’ll just read this out. Thinking about communism. Has been dominated by a myth, and then he makes kind of makes fun of Engel’s story. Once Upon a time, humans held all things in common in the Garden of Eden, giving the door an age of Saturn in Paladethic hunter gatherer bands. Then came the fall as a result of which we are now. Cursed with divisions of power and private property. The dream? Worse, he tells us, is David that someday, with the advance of technology and general prosperity. With Social Revolution will finally be in a position to put things back, to restore common ownership and common management of collective resources. And then he writes throughout the last two centuries, communists and anti communists argued over how plausible this picture was and whether it would be a blessing or a nightmare. They all agreed on the basic framework. Communism was about collective property. Primitive communism did once exist in the distant past, and someday it might return. We might call this mythic communism or even epic communism. A story we like to tell ourselves. Days in the French Revolution, it has inspired millions, but it has also done enormous damage to humanity. It’s high time, I think, to brush the entire argument. Aside, and so they were just saying it was never a time when we were particularly egalitarian, although women had more power than they did today, or there may have been moments when we were maybe communistic, but on the other hand, because. Our distinctions were so imminentative and creative they would maybe have communism for a while and then get a bit bored with it and then say, well, why don’t we have a bit of despotism? Perhaps a bit of human. And then they move into that version of. That possibility. And so you have. It seems to be kind of outdated. If you if you’ve got freedom of choice, you won’t be stuck with a thing called Communism or egalitarianism. You’ll keep switching to and fro between the two. What is the case according to this later book, that dawn of everything? Is that although once in the past we would move between alternative and political and social arrangements, something happened in the course of history. What happened is that we got stuck. And today we’re stuck in one form of despotism, the corporate capitalist form. We’re all aware of today. And it seems that there’s no way out. It would be as hard to it’s as hard to imagine, but it’s easier to imagine actually the end of the world than to imagine the end of communism. And of capitalism. Sorry and so. The question then is how did we get stuck? Why do we get stuck? And it’s when I’ve read. The. The answer to that question that I really I really scratched my head and just hardly believe what I was reading. He talks about bourbon monarchs and and James I and other kings and Queens going going back a bit, but basically, obviously pretty recent history. So he writes well. They write. Ultimately, the House of the Bourbon Monarchs like the palace of an Egyptian Pharaoh, Roman Emperor Aztec. To any or supper incaker. There’s merely a structure of domination, but also a structure of care. Where a small army of courteous, laboured night and day to attend to the King’s every physical need and prevent him as much as was humanly possible from ever feeling anything but divine. In all these cases, the bonds of violence and care extended downwards as well as up. We could do no better than put it in the words made famous by King James I of England in the true law of free. This is James the 1^st, which is quoted here as a father. Or perhaps I should read it more pompously as the father of his fatherly duty is to care for the nourishing education and virtuous government of his children. So is the king. Bound to care for all his subjects as a father’s wrath and correction of any of his children, that Offendeth ought to be a fatherly chastisement, seasoned with pity so long as there is any hope of amendment in them. So long the king, towards any of his leg. That a friend in that in that measure. As a father’s chief, joy ought to be in pursuing his children’s welfare, rejoicing in their will, sorrowing and pitying at their evil to hazard for their safety, so ought to good Prince think of his people. And then they continue. Public torture in 17^th century Europe created searing, unforgettable spectacles of pain and suffering in order to convey the message. The system in which husbands could brutalize wives and parents beat children, was ultimately. Madison Care went to be entirely separated. And seen in this like the distinctive features of the Native American. Now is like the distinctive feature that when when that prisoner came in focus so that. So the idea here is that you love your your. You love your victims, and because you love them so much and you chastise them and. Then it seems to us that you’re, it seems to us that this connection, or better, perhaps confusion. Between care and domination is utterly critical to the larger question of how we lost the ability freely to recreate ourselves by recreating our relations with one another. It is critical that it is to understanding how we got stuck. And why these days, we can hardly envisage our own past or future as anything other than a transition from smaller. To larger and larger cages. So it’s the way in which kings confuse. Care with violent coercion, including torture, is that confusion of the father’s duty to care for children involves punishment. Is that psychological confusion in the Heads of Kings. (Page 514 in The Dawn of Humanity)

So, that’s worth mentioning before I come to the picture. That in 2013, David Craber’s collaborator David Wengrove published a book called The Origins of Monsters. And it’s a book by an archaeologist describing how it was that these strange creatures, which don’t really exist by monsters. Wenger meant composite creatures, so like a man of the lion’s head. A human female with breasts but the tail of fish know that the mermaid may be a snake with a you know, the head of a, you know, an antelope, maybe humans with antelope heads anyway. Creatures. Bits of one creature that’s a human with bits of another creature. Predator, sometimes a herbivore.

How do these things first emerge in history? And again, when I read the book, I just could hardly believe. Was reading. Stuff according to. It all happened in the Bronze Age. And the theory is that in the Bronze Age she began to have straight forms of. Marching property. And different different property owners within lineages would have a stamp and they stamp their property as with, say, an eagle, an eagle stamp, and somebody else might have a leopard, and somebody else might have a lion. You’d have these these stamps. You use to mark your property as as yours. And David’s theory to explain the origin of monsters is that they discovered that they could mix the lion with an eagle and because the stamps were separate, the components of these monsters could be arranged in different ways. And the bureaucrats running these state societies sometimes needed to do that. And as a result, you had monsters.

Jerome: So it’s because you more variety of stamps by. No, because you have the technological ability to mix up an ego with a lion with a snake, because you have these separate stamps. And.

Erika: Become a developmental providing tool with a certain way of thinking.

Chris: Yes, it’s a form of printing. That’s right. So. So the so the markings are isolable and discrete. Combinatorial and you can combine one bit with another and say wow, you’re going. Start getting monsters.

Erika: But to drawing something you’re stubbing your like like.

Chris: That’s it. It.

Camilla: In Victor Turner’s descriptions of in Danbu masquerade Ecuador ceremony, he’s also talking about these masks made of one side is the Earth’s land and another side is a lion. And it’s kind of combined with something monstrous, but I mean, that’s the thing.

Chris: One of the criticisms I made of the dawn of everything? Was of course that it has to do with the government of everything. I think it was committed actually invented this phrase. Was a tea time of. It was far too late. The whole book about the dawn of everything is actually a talk about what happened in the apocalypse, which is far, far too late. Like the dawn. So that you know, but the others, I mean here, when we’re talking about monsters, I mean. To say that these tot totems. And all the different cave art and rock art and so on. It’s absolutely full of creatures, you know, revolving into each other, humans sending for animals, animals sending for humans. Cree. I mean to. Maybe if it was touched with a bronze. She just think. What planet is this guy on? He’s a very esteemed archaeologist.

Camilla: And director of the Institute…

Chris: Sorry, he lectures across the road here, so I’m going to get into terrible trouble for saying… thanks for saying this. I’m going to come to the myth in a moment, but the myth I’m going to be reading out is one of the key myths of Claude Levius church is marvelous and extraordinary. You know, work. Full volume study of all the myths of the North and South America in which he come to the conclusion that all of those risks amount to the end in terms of that underlying syntax. To one myth only and one of the key myths in the mess he’s most happy about. His own analysis of is called the Hunter Momenecki and his wives, and it’s a it’s a tacunal mis not too far away. Quite recently, we’ve had this astonishing. I mean, it’s called a discovery. Don’t quite understand. How it can be pulled in discovery? Note about it, but this is a rock. Piece of rock art which is about a mile long in Colombia. And. It was when it was first discovered. Obviously only about four or five years ago. The yacht just didn’t quite know what to make of it all, but luckily just recently about four weeks ago has been published in the Journal of Archaeological Anthropology. An analysis of this incredible piece of art. Which fortunately, is informed by indigenous scholars.

So I mean what you can see here is, first of all, it’s all. Red oka. Secondly, how many zigzags can you? I mean, zigzag here zigzags here, waving line here. Zigzag. What’s zigzag? It’s. It’s it’s. It’s a mathematical symbol, of course. Now the zigzags in red ocha, we have animals and we have humans. And the critical point is that the indigenous informant, if you like, the people that the algae just ask to say, what the hell does all this mean? They said well, of course in the in the distant past. People turned into animals and animals turned into people. You know, no human would just be stuck at stuck as being a human. Clearly you turn into. Maybe a different animal this time, and then clearly the animals turn into humans. And of course we know, don’t we, that all of the Welsh fairy tales are about talking, you know, talking animals and animals, you know, giving you information and humans and animals all got language and. Turn into each other so that they’re not even. I mean it’s. Like these assumptions are that we’re not stuck. In any form. So in the Dreamtime in the dawn of everything to use the title of the book the two David’s wrote, we were moving between constant. Everything was fluid and very important. Point is that even death originally was not a permanent state. I’ve actually got a sink. And yes, this is actually from David David Gray himself and his divine kingship. And he David describes a. I mean, just moving away from this area, but the astonishing thing is that actually the first I think it’s the first. Paper. I haven’t published. It was in an encyclopedia in medicine. With about Australian Aboriginal myths of the origin of death and all over the world, the origin of death has got something to do with the moon has got its ability. Moon knows how to die properly. The way to die properly is to die and then come alive again and die and come alive. The moment got that secret and what happened was that the terrible tragedy happened, which is where we are today. Where we’re dead. We’ve moved into the land of the dead. Can’t get back? We’re stuck. We’re. And we stay dead, I mean. What’s that? I can’t think of a bigger tragedy than that. And it was all because of a mistake, because we lost touch of the moon. Moon. Trying to tell maybe a hare, maybe some other animal. Is the way to die, folks. And the hare was a stupid animal. It muddled up the message. It got it wrong and as a result of that when we die, we stay dead.

Camilla: It had a grudge against the moon, misleading it and fought back. He wasn’t stupid.

Chris: Well, many of the myths say you silly fool. Now when we die, we stay there because you didn’t listen properly to the moon.

Camilla: And it’s part of the resistance.

Chris: The common theme is through disconnection from the moon. Now that we stay that when we die, we stay dead and grave in the oak on. Has another version from from the Dinka, and the reason I’m sort of feeling a bit free to float around between different routes of the world. Let me say some right at the deepest syntactical level. All of the world’s magical myths and fairy tales, it’s absolutely amazing, they amount to 1 myth only. Other words spread across the entire planet. In a single myth. Doesn’t mean the story don’t vary. Is a bit like saying all life on Earth is ever so simple. It’s DNA, DNA, DNA. You know CGTA, I mean the lessons of the alphabet. Means variety because you can you can combine. Those letters of the alphabet of dexi ribonucleic acid and countless different. So let me say so. Not saying everything is the same. He’s saying thanks to the structure of world mythology, we have all this variety, but ultimately at the deepest level. So all the wells missed are variations on a very small number of themes. So one of them. The origin of this. And so David Gray is writing here about the kingship, the Dinka version originally. The sky lay just above the earth. The two are connected by a rope, so people could clamber up and down at will. Since the living could ascend to the sky for a while before returning to this world, death was merely a temporary state, and I might go on with it. The story just simply says that actually in this case it was a woman. Woman with a. She was lifting the hell up to pound the grain and unfortunately she bumped into the sky. As a result of that, the sky separated and now it is a terrible. When we die, we’re stuck up there and we can’t get back. And that’s how we got stuck. OK. Here we have. Clear evidence, if nothing else, really, that this idea of moving between different worlds periodicity is. Including movement with the animal and human form and and therefore animals being humans are being sort of composed, actually just part of all that goes back way, way, way earlier. Than the Bronze Age. I’m now going to try and. Do this. It’s an extraordinary one of the things we have to remember is that when you write the miss down, you lose the humour and when you hear the stories being told to run, Lewis of course tells me this. People are just in stitches of laughter. Please sort of. Hear the body, adult. The body laughter involved in all this, but I’m going to try and read out this story in bits and. Do if we had lots of time. Give you all the myths to ponder. Give a workshop and then see what you make of it. I think the best thing for me to do would be to. Read out bits of the myths and then see what you think of them and what we’re getting. Just remember that following Leviticus, we’re. We’re not initially interested in what does it mean? I think lemme search is absolutely. I mean, all these myths, they mean whatever you think they mean. You can you can mean these are social and the meanings you derive from the story depend on the local. The only really kind of satisfactorily scientific approach to the stories is to not worry too much about meaning. Things but think about. Structures like mathematical geometrical patterns, which we can begin to discern. That’s what we’re looking for here.

So, a hunter called Momenecky goes through a succession of marriages. First, in a hole in the ground, he passes a frog who turns into an attractive young woman. In the story. And he’s ******* into this hole and the the frog said, oh, what a lovely pipe penis. Having ****** on her and got her pregnant. They had to take her home and feed her on her favorite food. Diet consisting of black beetles. Can you say what kind of marriage is this? When the Hunter’s out in the wild ****** on the hole, finds a worm, she turns into a beautiful Cuban. He takes her home with two basically contrasting types of marriage. Among hunter gatherers and others natural. That means, of course, the man has to visit his sweetheart, his bride, and stay there to have sex if he wants anything else, he has to come back to his sisters. But for sex, he certainly has to stay there. And then of course, there’s patrol local. Take the woman home with you. This is clearly a version. Of which type of manage? That’s right, yes. So so back at home, the Hunters mother sees The Beatles and exclaims why does my son soil his mouth in such filth? She throws away the beetles and puts hot Peppers in their place. When the frog wife burned her mouth on the Peppers, she turns back into a frog and hops off, returning later to steal back her baby from her mother in law’s arms. Now what we notice in all of the myths. Is that in order to distance yourself? You turn into an animal and when you become intimate with somebody, you turn back into a human. When humans are intimate with each other. They’re they take that human form and the way to say I’m off is to turn into a wild beast.

So that’s what she does when she’s fed up with it. I mean, and of course, what’s going on here is that the woman is now not with her own mother. With her mother-in-law, who doesn’t get. The mother-in-law doesn’t get that she needs to have black beet black beetles. That’s not. Some hot Peppers and of course, it’s when the frog turns into. A monkey when she burns her lips that she hops off in front for. But it has to return date of steel like a baby from a. In. So it’s actually stealing the baby. That’s how the myth puts it. Of course, when you think of. You think? How can a mother steal a baby? It must be that the mother-in-law, as asserted some rights in the woman’s baby, have to do an act of stealing in order to return to what obviously is her baby right. Having seen an alapako bird high up in a palm tree, ask her for a drink of palm wine. The bear becomes a pretty girl. Offers him a drink. He takes her home where his mother objects to her feet. The point is that. Arapako birds. They have lovely feathers, but they have great long toes with really long curved nails. So the mother-in-law thinks, why would he want a woman? That’s OK, she’s pretty. But what about her feet? So again, offended, she turns back into a bird and leaves plants next century. The hunter is out hunting when an earthworm over whom he is defecating. Takes a fancy to his penis, so he’s sitting on an earthworm. The Earth one says. What a lovely. And obviously she does have to make a man happy, and she turns into an attractive young woman. But a. Like he takes her home, where she gives birth to a child. The worm girl works in the garden, clipping the roots of weeds just below the surface of the ground. So to the worm, she knows how to do the wedding, so right as I go to clip, clip, clip, clip, clip with her lips, and it’s a brilliant method for. The wedding. But of course, the ways take a bit of a while to wilt and dine through that method of. The wedding. So seeing the weeds still standing. And not realizing that they will soon will the mother-in-law accuses her of being idle and with a sharp edged shell, cuts off her lips just beneath the surface of. She can no longer speak properly. And disappears and sucking sucking image. This is but again the mother-in-law gets everything. She’s actually the worm is really industrious, hard working, but she’s accused of being lazy and. The consequence of this clipping is that she she she’s silence. Can’t speak properly. Moment I keep out hunting again when he notices macaws flying. He shouts at them for some maze beer and later finds them a cool girl waiting for him. Having sipped her beer, he takes her home. His mother gives her a pile of corn cobs from which to brew more beer. The girl succeeds in making large quantities using 1 cup alone. On seeing so many unused cups, the mother in law’s skills have. Eagerly, the girl changes back into macaw and climbs to the roof of the house. So I mentioned that Claude levy strokes method. To. For sort of patterns, maybe these sorts of patterns zigzags so. Probably best if I kind of give some feedback from you in terms of the kinds of wives that mom and dad obtained and brings back home. What is? Can you notice a sort of pretty geometrical pattern? The first wife is. A frog in a hole. The second wife is anatapuko. Up in the trees. The third wife is a worm and the fourth wife is a Makall. What’s the geometry?

Christine: A spiral in the sky.

Chris: Thank you, Christine. High, low, high, low, high, low, high. And there’s another thing going on as. Another contradiction isn’t there, and it’s like a kind of. Productivity work ethos. Contradiction in the story, because each time the wife is hard working but mistaken for being lazy by her mother. OK. And then in terms of like what Levy says would fall me elementary code, in other words. Evening. There’s a nice alternation between opposites because the first husband gives his wife. The ****. The first wife gives him lovely palmide. The third wife he sits on. He’s giving her ****. What’s going? It’s just like we have food. And what’s the opposite of? I would say probably ****. And in terms of drink, what’s the opposite of nice palm wine? I would say ****. It’s hard to think what mom and giving these wives a partnership. It and **** and the mother-in-law who doesn’t understand anything at all about what you know about the, you know, the creativity of her daughter. So we get these contradictions and as things are going up and down, up and down between one world and another, so we begin to see. A kind of structure. And we kind of know in a way in advance. Where everything’s going to end because we know that all these stories are kind of versions of the origin of deaths. We’re going to get zigzag, zigzag, zigzag and then the ropes. The rope is cut. So think of the Tower of Babel. You know, humans are trying to reach heaven, you know, and. Certainty and they. Do. Stay down. You know, so the the tower connecting heaven that is is starts to crumble. And of course, because of all the different anguish that all forms of gather, there’s so many stories which are Jack and the Beanstalk, the English ***** story, of course, is about a Beanstalk you go. And down up and. Up and down between this one and the other, and then the bean stalks cut. Then and then you have this situation. The sky is the sky. The SES test is test. Life is like you can separation and the zigzagging has stopped. So there used to be a periodicity, a cyclicity of movement, and then earth and sky life and death and animal and human, all these features. You know they separate and that is what getting stuck is all about. Get you get stuck in. You get stuck as an element when you get stuck, sticky and so on, but it’s to deal with the movement between the two is disconnected with kinship and merit. Woman lives where a man lives. We can’t know you with and these fundamental categories of kinship. So we’ve got to. The McCall. Who’s making large quantities of beer using just One Cup? Of. She’s got repeat this last bit on seeing so many unused cups. Mother-in-law skulls have for. Angrily. And it always happens as you move away, you turn into an animal angrily. The girl changes back into a macaw and climbs to the roof of the house before flying away. She cries to her husband if he loves her, he should follow her. She instructs him to look for a Laurel whose splinters when the trunk is axed. Smash into the water. To become fish when the log has been hollowed out, he should get into the canoe which he has made and swallow her down the river. So just to repeat that, there’s a certain color, Laurel, you chop it, you make splinters, the splinters fall into the water. Let me turn it to fish. And you keep dropping it this tree until you’ve got your canoe and then you get inside the canoe, who Sprint has produced all these fish and you go after Liverpool girl down the river. So Mom and he’s actually keen on this wife. He searches desperately until he finds that Laurel. Each day when he returns home from working on his canoe, mom and Eric, he brings so many fish with his lazy brother-in-law, decides to spy on him to discover his secret. But this ruins the magic. Of course, when somebody else is looking at your secret, it’s not. Particularly the magic disappears. Comes to public. So the sprinters stopped turning into fish, guessing that his brother-in-law must be nearby mom. He asked him for help with his canoe. They completed launch it into the river, while his brother-in-law stands in the shadows. And he ticks the canoe over him. His victim strengthens the knight underneath in the dark. Singing and crying, I think we’ll probably have to wait a bit before we can count. What now is going on here with Splinter’s falling into the river and taking into fish, but levy stress does say. That. That he’s successfully decoded the native of his brother-in-law, the one who breaks the spell by spying on his his own brother. Is it? It is under under a canoe? A lot noise. And maybe, says the two brothers, whenever you get these conflicts between brothers, they’re always the sun and the moon got a canoe. The moon is at the back of the steering sun’s in the front. And here momene is so upset that his brother-in-law that he tips the. And that’s an eclipse. You’re in the dark making a noise. And let me just get a lot of these things beautifully right? Very, very compelling. Very convincing. Next day, the two men. Chips of woods turning into fish and pretty important initially. Battling of course. And I suppose I should just stress, this is a marvellous thing about living stress. Whatever your people complain about it, the point is what she says is that if you can’t understand something in a myth, it’s your problem. Every detail counts. Every little tiny detail of a myth which has been passed down the generations is there for a reason. About. Think about it. Think about it. Put yourself in the shoes of the storyteller. Know something about their culture. And if and if you think, oh, this looks like an absurdity, let me just see us. All of these stories are kind of long sequences of absurdity part upon observity upon observity. Observing isn’t just. The things we aren’t literally true, but they’re deeply true. In another in a in. In a more fundamental sense, any mess is an extraordinary creative, enormously extended metaphor. And it. It is pretty important to understand these stories. But you can only do it in terms of each. In other words, let me say it’s just one story on its own. Will be a little bit of a challenge to understand, but the more versions, the more variations of these seem to see the more convincing it all becomes. I think I think at the end. The day labor services. Conclusion that we have one single miss embracing the entire, you know, planet is very convincing. Is. Know that our problems with his some of his starting points anyway next day. Yeah. The two men drift downstream monumentally at the stern and his brother-in-law, seated at the prow, so mum and his steering and his brother in law’s doing. Of paddling. As they approached the McCall Girls Village, the people come out to greet them. The girl hides behind the crowd. Turning into a monan bird will come hopefully come back to the monan bird later on Mon. My neck is brother-in-law, purchased on his sister. So don’t forget, Marmaduke is following his his his. My poor wife and and. On the on the landing at the canoe approaches is. His worship brother. Momentarily, the canoe drifts away before tipping up perpendicularly, so it drifts along like that. So we have moon here, sun here, drifting on this way, and then it’s it turns up and it goes vertical. So many of these stories. Imply a kind of horizontal plane of action followed by a vertical plane, and this story is no exception, and it’s not too difficult to see that the horizontal plane has got something to do with a sort of remnant of an egalitarian arrangement. And when it’s everything gets vertical. All you know, rehab at these top down relationships between between people and other than hierarchical relationships is always something of that going on. And the canoe drifts away before tipping up perpendicularly, whereupon more menacing turns into an icab bird and perches on the necorgos other shoulder. There’s the empty canoe lifts toward the lake. Turns into the aquatic rainbow snake. Restaurants work for the periodic sporting of fresh the umm the canoe turned into the snake, which is, which is the fertility of fish. So we have this. So to begin to connect those two things. The wood of the canoe. Is A is a fertility of the fish and the sprinter to the canoe. Is the abundance of fish. Beginning to see that parts of the story are kind of connecting up. And finally, nearly at the. Now Mom and Nicky marries a girl belonging to the same people as himself. So most managers of course are. You have to marry a stranger. Otherwise it’s incest. And of course, I’ve already explained that when people are distant from you, they are animals. Of course you have to marry an. Otherwise, if you marry a human, it’s about to be incest because the category of human means your immediate neighbors, everyone, everyone’s an animal. But you could have married these animals. An animal in the coming intimate with you that they resume their course. Assume their human form. But now he’s now he’s made it done something different. He’s. Marries a girl belonging to the same people. Her fishing technique is to divide herself at the waist. Leaving her lower body on the riverbank.