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parietal art. The timelines that he considers show that hand imprints were present from the earliest instances of such imagery. However, he suggests that a reinforcement of the genre came from the common reaction of the human nervous system to states of altered consciousness associated to the presence of shamans who served as facilitators of the myths that illuminated religious thought. The central role of myth in the creation and subsequent utility of grouping mechanisms has been an underlying constituent of this book.

While we cannot prove that the creation of myths has been constitutional to the expansion of mankind beyond the scale of the tribe’s proximity, we can certainly observe that their universality may find an explanation in the teaching through which the young are provisioned by the old and the experiences of the trusted ones are passed to the uninitiated. So, before we return to some final thoughts on the relationship of social order to computers and their networks, let’s consider that the mechanisms leading from the observation of direct causes to the constitution of myths are readily bound up in the images of hands and fingers.

The human hand is a central feature of the human sensori-motor system. As we noted in Chapter 4, few naturally occurring organic structures offer the nuance of sensory input or the finesse of motor action as the human hand with its fingers and opposing thumb. Thus, the hand is central in the establishment of metaphors of higher level communication (“Did you catch that?”). Moreover, the loss of the hand or fingers constitutes a serious blow to the sensori-motor system. Hence, the conscious removal of a hand or finger, whether actual or symbolic, would constitute a serious actual or symbolic illustration of loss to the body of the individual. Now, in some situations a person might cut a finger in the face of possible higher physical threat such as further infection of the limbs, in a way parallel to groups of humans forcing the ostracism of a person threatening its integrity and survival prospects. In the extreme, the group might demand the death of the individual, a ritual still observed in some states and countries. Conversely, the preeminence of the group, perhaps even its survival, may well demand altruistic sacrifice on the part of individuals within the group. Thus, in the same way that cutting a finger can be symbolically associated with the broader concept of sacrifice and separation in mourning and other life events, the ritual sacrificial killing of humans in societies around the world can be associated with a higher expression of societies being ready to separate from some of their own in exchange for protection for the greater number.

In Mythes et dieux des indo-européens (Myth and Gods of Indo-Europeans), George Dumézil shows on the wide scale of Central Asia and Europe the consolidation of myths under common threads of religious aggregations. For myths to form a learning basis of innovative conquest of new territories of the mind there must be shared trust in them, would it come from process or causality. For example, the shared ecstasy enforced by rituals can be reflexive of fundamental mythology rooted in religious revelation. For Dumézil, the common Indo-European heritage is the tri-partite organization of society in clergy, warriors and producers. We immediately recognize a trust-enabled policy infrastructure similar to those our study of computer organizations has generated. Whereas computers today are barely capable of associating symbolism to the treatment of threats in computer networks beyond their mechanism of exceptions, their future management of myths associated by common trust is to be expected. We have seen that the necessary mechanisms of stimuli via need hierarchies, association via metaphors, and the building of ontologies are all available today to computer networks, albeit sometimes at the frontier of knowledge.

A worldwide study of myths and religion of the depth of Dumézil’s is still to be made. Dumézil himself establishes the parallel between his studies and comparative Indo-European linguistics of

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