the XIX^th and XX^th Centuries. If we consider that broader linguistic studies of the same depth, exemplified by Joseph Greenberg’s Indo-European and its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, are advances that had to wait until the XXI^st Century, we see that a global understanding of the religious roots at the center of global myths is still somewhat distant. However, some works like Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path, by David Friedel, Linda Schele and Joy Parker, already map the same advances in methodology that allowed the decipherment of Maya writing, i.e. its decipherment in the context of modern Maya language, to an understanding of antique Maya religious practices in the context of modern Maya shamanistic practices. The similarity of the underground, earth and sky trilogy, accompanied by its derivation of time and cardinal points, between European, Middle-Eastern and Maya practices is hard to ignore; but future inquirers will have to go through the research. The quest is on for the roots of the social realization of religious beliefs. Since computer networks are indeed global in nature, their shared beliefs have correspondingly yet to find bases, starting with those of the human mind.

As networks of computers grow and pass human organizations in size and complexity, they’ll build their own myths, following their needs hierarchies, empowered by their sensori-motor capabilities, and accumulating memories constantly reorganized by time and experience. Their trust infrastructures will reflect their evolutionary interests, and will collide along the boundaries of their theologies. Policies arbitraged by their trust infrastructures will change as trust clouds will merge and disassociate, eventually defining broad communities of worldwide computer networks. As long as humans will remain the originators of the networks and their prime benefactors, they will instill their will through their digital representatives, the transcendent personal devices that will summarize the human needs, myths and religions to affect the dynamic behavior of all the actors of that augmented theater of life.

So, we return to our specific consideration of hands and fingers. Extending the significance of the handprints, Lewis-Williams suggests that they comprise objects of interest in their own right, not simply as the image of a hand. He suggests that handprints found in the Western Cape Province of today’s South Africa and worn smooth by ages of being touched by actual human hands indicates a ritual conveyance from handprint to the hand of the supplicant who touches it. While the object so conveyed is unknown, even as to whether it reflected physical or spiritual concepts, the ritual itself offers interesting parallels to practices expressed in the writings that form the basis of Judeo-Christian religious thought. Specifically, beginning within the earliest renditions of the Book of Genesis are found instances of the ritual known even in the current day as the laying-on of hands.

We have no more evidence to divine a connection of parietal handprints to the ritual laying-on of hands than the observation that such a connection could explain the similarity of the handprints’ environments and displays between North and South America along proven migration routes; the ritual would provide for the continuity of practice, in either physical or symbolic form. In any event, we can note the central theme of the hand in each practice; a theme that offers consistent presentation over millennia of social interaction. The ritual laying-on of hands, recorded in historical literature at least three or four millennia ago, offers a well traveled path from then to now. Throughout the history of its explicit expression, the ritual has formed the basis for conveyance of trust and authority among groups and individuals. Within the model for social ecosystems that we have suggested, it appears as a ritual through which trust is directly conveyed and hence forms the mechanism for extension of the social ecosystem across space, across time, or both. In that guise, it offers a response to the aesthetic needs of the species.

Book available at Midori Press (regular)
Book available at Midori Press (signed)
Book available at Amazon (regular)