Mature visions, in contrast, are intensely focused on problem-solving. This gives them the ability to change the world, but only at the cost of falling out of touch with their intuitive and experiential side. They lose their nearly magical ability to synchronize human efforts, and their mystical origins are either forgotten or reduced to rote formulas.

The first mature vision came into being shortly after 200,000 years ago, when the human community was faced with a prolonged ice age that posed a threat to their very survival. As everything they had previously relied upon failed them, they lost faith in the old, instinctual ways. They turned instead to their one remaining ace in the hole — the transformation vision — and began using it as a guide to reshape the world around them.

The resulting changes in human life were sudden and profound, but they had been a long time in preparation. If recent turns of the cycle are any indication, the transformation vision would have already been starting to take on more practical aspects during the preceding 50,000 or so years.

In this, I see it as exactly comparable to the holism vision at the present moment. For the past forty years, holism has served as a utopian dream, a justification for hopes of a better world, while also inspiring practical experiments directed at bringing such a world into being. It is only now, however, as we are faced with a daunting economic and environmental crisis, that we see those experiments blossoming into fully mature technological and agricultural systems.

In much the same way, the geeks of 200,000 years ago, with their eccentric hobbies like throwing stones in the fire and brewing up strange concoctions of plant sap, would have finally found their talents and expertise in demand by society at large. They would naturally have responded with gratitude and would have done their best to come up with exactly what was required.

To some extent, that response may have been experienced as a sudden flash of higher knowledge, an instantaneous recognition that what had seemed theoretical or whimsical could be put to practical use. In retrospect, however, it looks far more like an inevitability.

Every vision grows out of a sense that what might yet come to be is superior to what is, and this gradually leads its followers to focus less on the vision itself than on the flaws they see in the world around them. As they start attempting to mend those flaws, they move away from a pure sense of wonder and towards the more activist approach that characterizes a vision in its outsider phase.

That activism makes it easy for the vision’s followers to turn to large-scale problem-solving the moment mainstream society breaks down and begs for their help. But as they shift their priorities, the vision itself is altered from a utopian dream to a practical blueprint. When that happens, it leaves a hole in the more mystical side of human life, and all the other visions are forced to adjust to take up the slack.

I’ve repeatedly used the metaphor of a Rube Goldberg machine to describe the cascading series of adjustments that occurs after an outsider vision takes on a leadership role in society. However, I’m only now starting to understand why this should be so.

The crucial factor is that we need our more mystical visions in order to be properly human. Not only that, but we need one of each type if we are to engage fully with the universe, with one another, and with our own inner nature.

Mainstream society has little use for that kind of engagement. Its chief imperative is to preserve its own integrity and authority, which it does largely through power relationships and low-level emotionalism. From that perspective, direct engagement can only be seen as a disruptive and generally unwelcome element — which is why every vision is first demonized during its outsider phase and then ruthlessly stripped of its transcendence as it begins to assume a leadership role.

The domestication of an outsider vision does not happen overnight, however, and two very interesting things occur as it is underway. One is a tug of war within the vision itself that results in the formation of an entirely new vision, assembled initially out of all the mystical bits that the outsider vision is in the course of rejecting.

The other is that a similar takeover attempt also impacts the next vision in line — but with a very different result.

As long as society is in the state of flux provoked by the failure of a dominant partnership, there is an ongoing tendency to look to the newer visions as a source of practical problem-solving. And when it turns out that the outsider vision is useful in some areas but not in others, attention inevitably turns to the vision one younger.

At the end of the 1960s, for example, it was apparent that even though a toned-down version of the chaos vision might be used to promote a more relaxed and tolerant society, it had few answers to the increasingly urgent problem of environmental degradation. The holism vision, on the other hand, was custom made for that purpose.

Up to that point, holism had been expressed in largely mystical and philosophical terms. Around 1968-69, however, getting back to nature suddenly became a hippie obsession, all but superseding the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll of the chaos vision. At the same time, holism began to take on a more practical aspect, as can be seen in the Whole Earth Catalog, with its slogan of “access to tools.”

And it wasn’t just the hippies who embraced environmentalism, but mainstream society as well. None other than Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and signed the Endangered Species Act in 1973.

For anyone who valued the mystical aspect of holism, this was taking things too far, and it’s no coincidence that the concept of Deep Ecology was first expressed in 1973. On the surface, the deep ecology movement represented an objection to the pragmatic attitude that nature should be protected only to satisfy human needs, but at its heart it was a desperate attempt to preserve the view of nature as transcendent.

Ultimately, the attempt to take holism mainstream guttered out on its own as soon as the new chaos-and-democracy partnership came together in the late 70s. Once that pairing had assumed the task of stabilizing society, there was no longer any need to turn to younger visions for solutions. For a generation to come, capitalism would be seen as the answer to everything, and when Reagan became president in 1981, environmentalism was quickly denounced as a threat to corporate profits.

By that time, however, holism had gotten a taste of both popularity and practicality, and there was no way to restore its innocence. Instead, it assumed the ambivalent status that characterizes every outsider vision. It was romantic and idealistic but also maintained an interest in practical solutions. It had been pushed to the margins of society but was eager to imagine what things might be like if it was running the show. It was supported most fervently by troublemakers and rabble-rousers, but it also displayed an ability to appeal to respectable shapers of opinion.

And now here we are, well into the next turn of the cycle, with the democracy-and-chaos partnership in disarray and holism on the verge of stepping into the center ring, surrendering its outsider status, and assuming the direction of society.

The tension between the mystical aspect of the visions and their latent problem-solving ability may be the true underlying dynamic that keeps new visions forming and the cycle as a whole moving along. On one hand, it seems that every vision is eventually drawn into meeting the needs of society at large — first tentatively, as with holism in the 1970s, and then more fully, as with holism today. But on the other, the coopting of the vision inevitably provokes a mystical pushback.

The first time round, this pushback takes the form of a romantic effort to bring the vision back to its roots. The second time, those same romantic elements are forcibly ejected and become the core of the vision’s own successor.

This scenario suggests that the beginning of the cycle must be dated not to the onset of the ice age but considerably earlier, when the transformation vision first took a more practical turn. That might have happened around 250,000 years ago, when there was a sharp but relatively brief downturn in the climate which could have made it more difficult to marvel at the endless bounty of nature and turned attention instead towards such matters as tool-making and the mastery of fire.

Whatever the specific nature of the crisis, however, it was only temporary. Once it was over, life went back to normal, and the ambitions of the transformative vision were set aside for a time. But the followers of the vision had acquired a taste for experimentation, the control of nature, and public acclaim which they would never quite relinquish. And when an even greater crisis came around, they were more than ready to come forward and accept the leadership of society.

The answer to this question is crucial to understanding what happened nearly 200,000 years ago, when the original vision of the physical world took on the moral and practical authority to lead the human community through the great ice age. In the course of that transition, it surrendered its own claims to transcendence, but it gave birth to a successor — the cosmic order vision. This launched the cycle of replacement which has continued ever since.

But why? Why was the replacement necessary?

On one level, the sequence of thought seems obvious. As people developed a greater mastery of the world around them, they became less able to perceive it as a place of inexhaustible wonder. And so they began looking to the heavens for the mystery that was no longer to be found on earth.

But why did that shift require an entirely new vision of existence — starting from different premises and arriving at different conclusions — and not merely a minor tweaking of the old one?

There are a number of ways of expressing it, but the simplest answer is that transcendence, once lost, can never be regained. It is always necessary to return to the source and start afresh.

Newborn visions are maximally transcendent. They are dreamy and mystical, and though they inspire artists and philosophers, they stand outside the day-to-day concerns of the culture.

By the time a vision enters the outsider phase, its dreams have begun to take on a more solid form. Although still utopian and idealistic, they are real enough to attract heretics and rebels — and to strike fear into the hearts of those whose fortunes are bound up with the dominant partnership.

Finally, when a vision becomes fully mature and assumes a leadership role in society, it acquires the power to translate its dreams into actualities. In the course of doing so, however, it abandons its dedication to what-is-not-yet and becomes increasingly committed to things-as-they-are. From that point on, there is no going back, and a new vision becomes the only way to reconnect with the realm of infinite possibility.

But there’s also a deeper and less rational aspect to the story, because the heart of this transition occurs in virtually the blink of an eye. At the precise moment when a dominant partnership finally collapses, casting all existing relationships into doubt, a powerful wave of higher knowledge sweeps across the culture. This is what enables the outsider vision to cross the line from aspiration to reality — but it also does something else.

As the wave peaks, it briefly appears that higher reality may be poised to invade the world of everyday and transform all of existence. The most recent such transition came in the late 1960s, and the turning point was 1967′s “Summer of Love,” when it seemed for a few short months that the chaos vision was about to usher in a universal shift in consciousness.

That didn’t happen, of course. It never does. Things quiet down, the outsider vision repents of its adolescent over-exuberance, and a new normality takes hold.

But during that one superheated moment of anticipation, something extraordinary has occurred. Those who were at the very heart of the whirlwind have been lifted outside themselves by a fleeting glimpse of transcendent possibility — and that glimpse is unforgettable, no matter what follows.

In the immediate aftermath of that moment, the outsider vision becomes like a body in which two souls are fighting for control. This was the case with the chaos vision between about 1968 and 1976, when the practical and moral side of the vision — the side that emphasized the innate value of every individual — started coming into its own. If our own world of 2013 is at all superior to the world of 1968, it is thanks to women’s liberation and gay rights and the other empowerment movements of those years.

But during precisely the same period, the most transcendent side of chaos, the side that had been re-energized by the psychedelic counterculture, was also undergoing a final flowering. This was the era of classic rock and underground comics, of Monty Python and the Firesign Theater, of The Illuminatus! Trilogy and The Rocky Horror Picture Show and early Saturday Night Live.

It seemed at the time as though these two sides of the vision might coexist indefinitely, but that was not to be. Instead, the strange, reality-bending manifestations faded out, just as the practical, responsible side was confirming its new-found social acceptability by becoming the junior member of a restored dominant partnership.

By 1979, the only people who were still maintaining the transcendent legacy of chaos were neo-pagans and chaos magicians and similarly marginal folk. And this was possible only because their understanding of transcendence had taken on an entirely different shape — one based not on madness and the Freudian unconscious but on myth and magic and the power of the creative imagination.

But why did that have to happen? Why was it necessary for the followers of the mythic path to create an entirely new vision instead of simply stretching the boundaries of chaos?

The answer appears to lie in the fact that a vision is not simply an organized collection of data-points with bits of higher knowledge tossed in for seasoning. Instead, it is infused with higher knowledge throughout. It is an integrated system in which everything hangs together and all the parts are fractal reflections of the whole.

Or at least that is the ideal, but the human mind is not quite up to the job and therefore takes certain shortcuts to create the illusion of perfect integration. The most sweeping of these is that every vision is constructed in much the same way as a scientific paradigm or a computer language — by starting with a few simple assumptions and making them the basis of a self-consistent structure.

This method works well enough to start out with, but it eventually reveals its limitations. Every vision is the slave of its own basic premises, and it cannot be revised when those premises become stale or fall prey to the demands of plausibility. It can only be discarded and replaced by a successor.

The initial emergence of a new set of premises is always veiled in mystery. It is born out of a sudden perception of the totality of existence that strikes a few favored individuals like a thunderbolt. They transmit that perception to others in the form of art and story, and it only gradually acquires an explicit formulation of the premises that have been implicit in it from the start.

However, even if the crucial moment of inspiration is hidden, what comes before and after is far more visible.

It’s clear, for example, that each new vision draws its initial materials from the store of heresies that have been lurking around the edges of its predecessor. These heresies are tolerated by a vision during its outsider phase, when it is prepared to accept any wild notion that challenges the expectations of the dominant partnership, and they become even more prominent as that partnership collapses.

In the case of the creative imagination vision, the sources of its core assumptions — ranging from myth and Eastern mysticism to heroic fantasy and superhero comics — had existed on the fringes of chaos since the 1940s. They had not been taken altogether seriously and were often subjected to scientific or psychological rationalization, but they provided a rich lode of inspiration during the psychedelic era of the late 60s. And this same stuff became the basis of a new vision in which wizardry and the mythic imagination were as central as madness and the irrational had been to chaos.

But there is one more factor that is essential to the birth of a vision. As the outsider vision gains general acceptance, it begins to reject anything that might threaten its new-found respectability. In particular, it becomes distinctly uncomfortable with transcendence — not just the strange new premises of its successor but even its own native transcendence.

One example of this can be seen in the founding of the Special Olympics in the summer of 1968. This pivotal event reflected a radically new moral standard — a wholehearted embrace of the chaos-based insistence that every individual is unique and valuable in their own right. And yet the chaos vision had always relied on painting madmen and drunks and other eccentrics as being somehow alien and not altogether human. That was the biggest loophole it had found in the framework of scientific rationality — and now that portal was rapidly closing.

The same shift is apparent in what happened to Star Trek between its initial airing in 1966-69 and its return with Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979. The revived version was far more serious and plausible than the original, more politically correct, and a lot less ready to endorse outright wackiness. But although these changes may have represented a moral advance, the most transcendent elements of the original series had been expunged.

However, by then the torch had been passed. The return of Star Trek had been made possible by one specific event, the release of Star Wars in 1977, and that film displayed very little interest in seriousness or plausibility. Instead, it took its inspiration from myth, mysticism, and heroic fantasy. It unabashedly presented transcendence in the form of wizardry, and in so doing it left chaos far behind and sounded a bell note for the powers of creative imagination.

I thought at first that the cycles might be driven by simple culture-wide alternations in mood — swings between idealism and cynicism or rationalism and romanticism of a kind that I was familiar with from the history of science fiction. But the more deeply I looked, the more complexity I encountered. The cycles represent a seamless blending of the emotional and the intellectual, the practical and the mystical, and no one of these components is sufficient to explain the extraordinary coordination among all of them.

That is why I’ve recently started exploring the idea that we humans have certain mental capacities that are hard-wired but also flexible enough to allow for a limitless number of different ways of dealing with reality.

A few entries back, I identified two such capacities that seem to go a long way towards explaining the nature of the visions. One is a mental map-making ability that enables us to construct virtual images of the world around us and share them with our fellows. The other is an openness to the sudden, intuitive flashes of higher knowledge that bring with them a certainty that we are part of a larger reality stretching beyond the boundaries of any map.

Taken in concert, these could account for the two most obvious aspects of the visions — their ability to structure our experiences within a multi-dimensional matrix of time, space, and causality, and also their persistent suggestions that there are vast areas of reality that remain outside our experience.

But although this would explain a lot about the visions, it still wouldn’t explain the cycles. Why don’t the visions just adapt gracefully as our knowledge grows more extensive and our lives more complex? Why is there instead an elaborate round of old visions failing and new ones arising to take their place?

That question seems to demand the assumption of at least one more fundamental aspect to human nature — and I may have hit on it in the previous entry when I pointed to the plasticity of the adolescent brain.

That plasticity is well-known to brain researchers. For example, a recent study of mice revealed that “the flip of a single molecular switch helps create the mature neuronal connections that allow the brain to bridge the gap between adolescent impressionability and adult stability.” But as anyone who has watched kittens turn into cats is aware, that switchover is normally final and irreversible.

It’s possible, however, that the system works somewhat differently in humans. Although as adults we do not enjoy the extreme mental flexibility of childhood, we do retain a considerable ability to learn new things, change careers in midstream, and alter our behavior when circumstances require. What’s more, periods of particular openness to change appear to recur at regular intervals throughout our lives.

Shortly before I stumbled upon the intricacies of the cycles, Alexei and I had identified a pattern of what we called “age crises” in the careers of science fiction writers and other creative individuals. We had noticed that quantum leaps in both ability and social status seemed to occur at certain specific ages — 19, 27, 34, 45, and perhaps in the early 60′s. We also found that the protagonists of many stories seemed to be going through equivalent crises, marked by a dissolution of personal identity and its remaking on a higher level of achievement.

At some point, it struck me that the cultural cycles might reflect this same pattern of personal growth, only carried out on a collective basis. This would mean that each dominant partnership reflects the norms of the mature brain, while the phases between partnerships express a turning towards more adolescent modes of thought and action.

There are significant differences between the personal and the communal, of course. For one thing, not everyone is capable of making the switch, which is why the periods between the collapse of one dominant partnership and the rise of the next are often marked by high levels of conflict. However, I believe that most people’s brains really do rewire a bit at such times — and that there is also an increased willingness to take the ideas and attitudes of young people seriously and look to them for guidance.

This can be seen in our own culture, which is currently suffering through a protracted social and environmental crisis. The reigning system of free-market capitalism has negated the social contract which once promised a decent life to anyone who contributed their share, and at the same time it has placed absolute power in the hands of those who have much to gain and little to lose by continuing on a course of ecological devastation.

In response, world-wide protest movements have sprung up, consisting mainly of young people along with a handful of like-minded elders, and have made known their determination to resist the present system of cutthroat competition and ruthless exploitation. In place of the faltering democracy-and-chaos partnership, these dissidents are counting on the newer holism and horizontalism visions to offer a roadmap to a world of environmental and social justice.

I fully expect there to be fundamental changes in accordance with those visions over the next five to ten years. But just as with individual life crises, once the immediate problems are resolved, there will be a growing desire to return to stability, consistency, and predictability — and at that point, a new partnership will be constructed that will once more hold the adolescent brain in check.

This pattern has repeated over and over since before the start of recorded history, but the question that intrigues me is when it might have gotten started. And my best guess is that it happened following the onset of the ice age of 200,000 years ago.

Much like the present moment, that was a time when humanity was buffeted by an environmental crisis that was made deeper and more insoluble by an accompanying social crisis. On one hand, the very survival of our species was under threat as the earth grew cold, the deserts advanced, and food became scarcer and less nutritious. And on the other, as more recent history amply attests, the desperate struggle to survive would have led to a catastrophic breakdown of accepted norms of cooperation and mutual support and their replacement by a dog-eat-dog world in which only the strongest and most ruthless prevailed.

There was no dominant partnership back then to stand in the way of change, but instead there were the ancient instinctual ways that were no longer adequate. And then, as now, the answers came largely from the young people and were based on the first two visions — the transformation vision, which provided new ways of relating to the physical world, and the kinship vision, which offered a more resilient social contract.

However, if this moment of awful desperation was the very first time we needed to resort to the resources of the adolescent brain, I suspect it may have involved a more radical change in the very meaning of being human than any that have followed it since.

Our evidence for the early evolution of our own species is sparse at best. In just the last few months, a recalibration of the genetic clock has moved our oldest common ancestors back from about 200,000 years ago to perhaps 340,000 years ago or even further. But there are no fossils to fill in that vast stretch of time.

The earliest known Homo sapiens skulls date to 160,000 years ago and are all but indistinguishable from our own. Before that, there are only the relatively small-brained and heavy-browed remains of our archaic forebears. And there is no sign at all of how we got from there to here.

It seems possible, however, that we may have experienced one final burst of physical evolution following the start of the ice age. Although the details are uncertain, our DNA suggests that there was a significant population bottleneck and that everyone alive today is descended from a small group of just a few thousand individuals who barely managed to survive along the coasts of East Africa.

It also appears that the survivors of this great dieback may have been sturdier and more adaptable than those who preceded them, since once the climate warmed again, they quickly spread out across the world. They not only rejoined their long-lost cousins who had spent the long winter in the more temperate climes of southern Africa but also expanded into the Middle East and beyond.

This suggests to me that the crisis may have led to a final change in brain organization, one which gave us the ability to retain an adolescent-like flexibility into maturity and to revert to it even more strongly at times of crisis.

And that same change also enabled the visions to penetrate daily life in a way they never had before. Until then, they may have been like what is called go-to-church-on-Sunday religion — a source of inspiration and social harmony, but divorced from practical affairs and lacking the power to change the world.

But when all else had failed, the visions suddenly became the source of salvation — of new technologies, new ways of living, and new social institutions. At that point, the world began to change — and it would change over and over again.

The rest, as they say, is history.

I’ve been speaking up to now as if the lives of our earliest ancestors were devoted entirely to constructing elaborate mind-maps of their experiences and then expanding them into visions of higher possibility. However, that isn’t how people live today, and it certainly wasn’t the case then.

For one thing, not all humans are equally imaginative. Some participate enthusiastically in bringing the latest visions into being, but a larger number couldn’t care less. And even the most creative among us spend much of their time caught up in the petty round of everyday routine.

So sharp is the division that we might be said to inhabit two different realities at once — call them the realm of understanding and the realm of instinct. And this split would have been even more profound at the start, when the life of the mind was still something new and limited and the greatest part of our existence was governed by deep, ancestral rhythms of sex and dominance.

Those rhythms apparently go back to the emergence of Homo erectus, some 1.8 million years ago. That was when we committed ourselves to a ground-dwelling way of live, lost our body hair and acquired our present set of secondary sexual characteristics, and gave up chimp-like mating patterns in favor of a system of permanent pair-bonding that enabled us to nurture our big-brained offspring through an extended period of infancy and childhood.

These same instincts are still hard-wired into us, but their expression has been greatly moderated by the moral teachings of a long succession of visions, each of which has done its part to make us a little less animal and a little more human.

When the first three visions were going through their initial development, however, this moderating influence could not yet have taken hold. Even today, the newest visions exist on the margins of the culture, inspiring artists and philosophers but having little worldly impact. It is not until they give up their initial focus on transcendence and turn to more practical matters that the moral aspect becomes predominant.

As I suggested in the previous entry, the oldest of the visions is likely to have entered upon that transition soon after the onset of a major ice age about 200,000 years ago. In the process, it began to assume intellectual authority over the ancient instinctual processes of birth and death, growth and decay — and as a result, the two formerly separate spheres of human existence started to become entangled.

This state of entanglement may initially have been most apparent in the wearing of clothing, which according to recent studies of the DNA of human body lice commenced on a regular basis roughly 170,000 years ago.

As long as our ancestors habitually went unclothed, their naked bodies would have continued to send out the same simple messages that went back to the time of Homo erectus: I am fertile. I am powerful. I am young and need protection. I am old and deserve respect. But clothing inevitably modifies those messages — sometimes concealing, sometimes exaggerating, and sometimes simply redefining the raw facts of the human form.

And clothes do something else. They also serve as a canvas for the wearer to display statements about their own personality, their social status, and their beliefs about the nature of the universe.

Clothing is one of the most ancient human inventions for conveying symbolic meaning, second only to language and story. It is likely that even before the wearing of clothing became a universal custom, hunters and shamans and tribal elders had adopted distinctive garments and ornaments that expressed aspects of the earliest visions. And that symbolic function would not have vanished as clothing became a part of everyday life but would only have intensified.

Both functions, the instinctual and the symbolic, are still very much in evidence today. Our clothes shape our appearance in ways that speak to our most primal instincts, but we also use them to signify our allegiance to one or another of the current visions and to indicate those visions’ basic principles and moral standards.

For that reason, it is worth examining the relationship between fashion and the visions for any clues it can offer about the crucial changes that began some 200,000 years ago.

Every vision gives rise to a characteristic style which starts off vague and ineffable but takes on definition and specificity as the vision passes through the outsider stage. During that stage, the primary role of the vision is to challenge the assumptions of the dominant partnership, and its typical style is correspondingly radical and provocative. Once the vision gains consensus status, however, its style is widely adopted and loses its insurgent edge. And by the time the vision is nearing the end of its lifespan, its style degenerates into nothing more than a marker of elite authority.

In the 1940s and early 1950s, for example, the top hat and tails that had been everyday attire in the late 19th century were retained only for presidential inaugurations or to affirm the status of England’s Prince Philip at an official function. At the same time, the unpretentious male business suit served to proclaim the egalitarianism of the democracy vision. And the outsider chaos vision was finding its classic bad-boy expression in the t-shirt and blue jeans worn with a swagger by James Dean.

But when a dominant partnership fails, everything moves along a step. Between 1960 and 1980, top hats and tails vanished, business suits — now more sharply tailored — became the high-status garb of lawyers and government officials, and blue jeans were embraced as something that even presidents might wear in their off hours. At the same time, rebellious new styles like punk and goth began to express the themes of complexity, diversity, and bottom-up creativity that were central to the outsider holism vision.

There is, however, something strangely subtle and metaphorical about the way fashions represent the visions. The messages are rarely obvious and may depend on our ability to decipher complex cultural references. Older generations are notoriously unable to “get” the significance of young people’s attire.

This is in contrast with the other type of messages that we send with our clothing — those that involve straightforward assertions of sex and dominance. These are universally accessible within a culture and to a great extent also translate across cultures.

And yet even these instinctual messages have the peculiar quality of varying in a regular manner that closely tracks the rise and fall of dominant partnerships.

That regular variation was the first clue I had of the existence of the cycle of visions. In the fall of 1972, I was reading books on the history of fashion and looking for meaningful patterns, and it suddenly struck me that over the past several centuries there had been an alternation every few decades between styles that emphasized gender-based characteristics and those that downplayed them.

During a period of what I came to label “organic” fashion, clothing is designed to draw attention to female sexuality and male dominance. Women’s clothes outline or amplify the curves of bust, waist, and hips, while the ideal male form is broad-shouldered and muscular.

During periods of “geometrical” fashion, on the other hand, the preferred body type for both sexes is willowy and adolescent. Women’s clothes often fall straight from the shoulders or bust to the hips, eliminating the natural waistline and creating a rectangular silhouette. Or else the skirt becomes so widely flared as to substitute a sharply pyramidal outline for the normal rounding of belly, hips, and buttocks.

There are a number of striking points about this alternation. One is its extreme regularity. During one extended period, all styles will be organic, and during the next they will all be geometrical, without any mixing or minor oscillations. Another is that this same pattern can be traced all the way back through history, though with the phases stretching out from decades to centuries and then millennia.

And the third, and most surprising, is the intimate linkage between these alternations and the succession of visions. Every organic period without exception coincides with the era of a dominant partnership and gradually comes to an end as the partnership crumbles. And every geometrical period spans the time between partnerships — when the visions are undergoing rapid reorientation — and comes to its own end with extraordinary abruptness as a new partnership falls into place.

In the late 1960s for example, jeans for both sexes were hip-hugging and tight-legged. In the early 70s, they developed huge bell bottoms. But in 1978-79, bell-bottoms suddenly went out of fashion and were succeeded by women’s “designer jeans” that were closely molded to the female rear end.

As explained by Entertainment Weekly, “Retooling the boxy Levi’s look into formfitting pants with fancy stitching and big labels, designer-jeans makers pocketed nearly half a billion dollars in 1979. … Promising to make their wearers chic and sexy, designer jeans cost about $35, roughly twice the price of down-to-earth Levi’s. Racy TV commercials featuring flirting preteens and topless women helped them make headlines and profits.”

The extreme regularity of these alternations presents a number of puzzles, but my best guess is that they are rooted in our prolonged childhood and adolescence — a stage of life marked by an unusual flexibility of mind and willingness to learn new things.

During organic periods, we like to play at being grown up, and our highest goal is maintaining social stability. But during geometrical periods, when society is breaking down, we all become teenagers for a time, and even our clothing proclaims our receptivity to alternative possibilities and novel solutions.

There was one vision that encompassed the physical world and its plants and animals. Another focused on human society and the kinship system that held it together. And a third proclaimed the reality of the magical dreamscapes of the early shamans.

In fact, there are some peoples that appear to have gotten along perfectly well with just these three in all the long years since — most notably, the Bushmen, or San, of southern Africa, who genetically, linguistically, and culturally are closer than any other group to the human root.

According to an online summary of their culture, “Their knowledge of both flora and fauna is vast. The San categorized thousands of plants and their uses, from nutritional to medicinal, mystical to recreational and lethal. … Kinship bonds provide the basic framework for political models.”

The site goes on to describe the medicine and rain dances during which “the dancers reached trance-like, altered, states of consciousness and were transported into the spirit realm where they could plead for the souls of the sick.” It also notes that “the most important spiritual being to the southern San was /Kaggen, the trickster-deity. He created many things, and appears in numerous myths where he can be foolish or wise, tiresome or helpful.”

Certain aspects of San culture — such as bows and arrows and representational art — appear to be relatively recent and are unlikely to go back more than some 50,000 years. But even those have been incorporated into a belief system which is clearly much older.

There is a mystery about the San — but the real question, I suspect, is not why they have stayed the same but why the rest of us have changed. All of us except the San have abandoned what would seem to be a simple and functional system in favor of one that is infinitely more complex and fraught with internal tensions.

Not only have we long since set aside those earliest visions, but at some point we launched ourselves into a recurring cycle of visions of the three basic types, with each new vision being designed to address the inadequacies of its predecessor and each one faltering in turn and being discredited and discarded.

This cycle of change was already under way while we were still simple hunter-gatherers, so it can’t have begun as a reaction to new knowledge and new experiences. It appears to be more a cycle of disillusionment, in which we are not satisfied to accept our visions simply as a path to higher knowledge but demand that they solve our worldly problems as well. In so doing, we wear them out, trivialize them, subordinate them to power relationships, and drain them of transcendence. And then we toss them aside and move on.

As far as what might have prompted the initial step in that direction, I can see two likely factors — one internal and the other external.

The first factor is that there’s an inherent instability to any set of three visions. They are drawn from different areas of human experience and reach very different conclusions about the ultimate locus of transcendence. And though it appears possible to reconcile any two successive visions, the first and third in the sequence can never be made perfectly compatible — at least not without stretching one of them badly out of shape.

I suggested a few entries back that when the kinship vision arose, it was reconciled with the existing vision of the physical world by interpreting natural phenomena as manifestations of the same male-female dichotomy that is the central organizing principle for kinship. The San, for example, recognize a series of such dualities, including sun and moon, fire and water, and drought and rain.

And then, when the shamans developed their own vision of existence, it was reconciled with the kinship vision through the concept of the Dreamtime, which was conceived both as an era of animal people and magic and also as the time of the ancestors and of the creation of human society.

But there was no obvious way to make these two reconciliations come out even. Was the present world a perfect and unchanging manifestation of an implicit higher order? Or did the true locus of transcendence lie in the remote past, when everything had been the opposite of what it was now? It could be one or the other, but it surely couldn’t be both.

This wouldn’t necessarily have been a problem at first. The example of recent history shows that it’s perfectly possible for rationalism and romanticism to co-exist within the same society, or even within a single individual. But it was a potential weak spot — a crack in the eternal order of things. And when the world itself began to change in ways that could not be ignored, that crack turned into a chasm.

According to the recent revision of the genetic clock that I am following, the first modern humans appeared perhaps some 350,000 years ago. This was just about the same time as a major ice age came to an end — and for the next 150,000 years, there were only a few relatively brief and modest downturns in the climate. As a result, the childhood of our species was truly an endless summer.

But soon after 200,000 years ago, a new ice age set in, and the long summer came to an end.

There are no glaciers in Africa during an ice age, but the climate turns significantly colder and drier. The deserts and grasslands expand at the expense of the rainforests, which contract and almost vanish. Under the most extreme conditions, only a narrow strip along the coast may remain hospitable to human life.

That was the case during the coldest phases of the most recent ice age, the one which began about 75,000 years ago. And the ice age before that, which lasted from roughly 200,000 to 130,00 years ago, was, if anything, deeper and more extended. That would have posed a brutal threat to a human community that had until then been steadily expanding and growing more secure.

Some researchers believe that our species became all but extinct during that time, barely hanging on along the coasts of southern Africa, where there was a unique abundance of resources.

This has been criticized as an overly extreme scenario, and it does seem more probable that humans would have survived in a number of separate refuges. For one thing, there is DNA evidence of a prolonged split between the ancestors of the San in southern Africa and the ancestors of all other modern humans — a split which is likely to turn out when the dates are more securely pinned down to have coincided with the ice age.

What strikes me most strongly, however, is that a combination of both these lines of argument could provide a satisfactory explanation for the puzzling origin of the cycle of visions.

Let us suppose that the proto-San, with the good fortune to inhabit the last really hospitable corner of the continent, were able to preserve their ancient way of life — and with it, the original system of the first three visions.

And let us also suppose that at least one other human community, probably located further north along the East African coast, also managed to survive the great cold — but with more difficulty and only by undergoing a number of changes.

Some of those changes were probably biological, since most present-day people are larger-bodied and more robust than the San. But we were already fully human and able to react as humans always do to crisis, which means that the majority of adaptations would have been technological — probably involving greater mastery of fire, the use of cooking to extract more nutrients from available resources, and the invention of clothing.

And that would have had a profound effect on the system of visions.

In recent times all scientifically-based visions have undergone a narrowing of focus as they mature and take on responsibility for the preservation of society. They give up their claims to transcendence and become both more theoretical and more practical.

That is what happened to the scientific materialism vision in the early 1800s, when the practice of science became professionalized and closely tied to the ongoing Industrial Revolution. It’s about to happen to the holism vision, just as soon as the world gets serious about climate change. And I believe it must have happened for the first time some 200,000 years ago, when people discovered they were no longer living in a world that supplied all their material needs and realized they would have to get inventive and show some hustle in order to survive.

As part of that change in emphasis, the original scientifically-based vision would have shifted from an image of static perfection to one of constant change and malleability. It would have become what I was calling it in entries a few years back — the transformation vision — and it would have focused both on natural processes of growth and decay and on the human ability to bring about useful changes for our own purposes.

That original image of perfection would not simply have evaporated, however, since it was a reflection of higher knowledge. Instead, visionaries and dreamers would have turned their attention in a new direction — away from the earth and towards the heavens, where the sun, moon, and stars maintained their unvarying courses, even as the world below changed out of all recognition. And as one vision gave up its transcendent aspirations, a new one would have been born.

That’s only half the story, though. The other half is about the larger community coming to recognize the lack of magic in its life, missing it, and longing for its return.

There is a pattern to the birth and development of each new vision which has held true throughout recorded history and almost certainly goes back to the very start. The similarities are particularly strong among visions of a common type, so I feel confident in asserting that the first inner experience-based vision came out of the same needs and desires as every one since.

Two factors appear to be crucial in leading up to the birth of an inner experience vision. One is that every such vision arises out of a period of intense skepticism, when belief in spirits and magic has come to seem primitive and childish, rationality is the highest goal, and even religion is devoted to philosophical speculation or maintaining social norms, rather than direct mystical experience.

The other is that this hyper-rationality stirs up an equally intense nostalgia for the old stories of supernatural beings and powers. That nostalgic revival opens the way for a flowering of new magical tales which attempt to restore plausibility to the old materials, thereby producing a set of fresh rationales for the old shamanistic beliefs. And that, in turn, makes possible a revival of genuine shamanistic practices.

There was just such a tension between rationality and nostalgia in the late 1600s and early 1700s. The previous several centuries had been an era of unquestioning belief in magic and spirits, often accompanied by great fear and fanatical witch-hunts. During the final decades of the 1600s, however, not only did the witch-hunts peter out, but the entire belief-system that had sustained them was rejected as gross superstition.

At the same time as faith waned, however, nostalgia increased — as can be seen in the widespread popularity of literary fairy tales and the first Western translations of the Arabian Nights. By the middle 1700s, it was even possible for a geek eccentric like Horace Walpole to deliberately cultivate a taste for the art and architecture of the Middle Ages.

Walpole never expected that his passion for the “Gothic” would be widely shared, but when he published his pseudo-medieval ghost story The Castle of Otranto in 1764, it caused a sensation. Largely as a result of this one book, European culture was plunged into a feverish pursuit of the romantic, the outré, and the occult that would last for the next century and a half.

In the preface to his novel, Walpole had explained apologetically that “miracles, visions, necromancy, dreams, and other preternatural events, are exploded now even from romances.” But over the next several decades, all those things would make a triumphant return, first in fiction and then in the experiments of would-be occultists. And in the 1840s, there was an extraordinary outbreak of genuine shamanistic phenomena in the form of the spiritualist movement — whose practitioners not only claimed to receive messages from the dead but manifested a range of inexplicable psychic talents.

Spiritualism appeared plausible to hard-headed Victorians because it presented itself as scientific rather than religious, but it was unable to adapt to the increasingly rigorous materialism of the early 20th century. By the 1920s, it was in decline, as was the more general occult movement that had followed it in the late 1800s. And by the late 1940′s, the supernatural wonders of the 19th century were as discredited as those of the Middle Ages had been in the Age of Reason, and Western society was headed into another phase of extreme rationalism.

Just as before, however, the extreme hyper-rationalism of the 1950s and early 60s provoked an outbreak of romantic fantasy, along with a longing for magic and the supernatural that is still nowhere near its culmination.

The ability of human being to turn their belief in unseen things on and off as easily as flicking a light switch is a considerable mystery to me — but it does seem to happen again and again.

The previous occurrence was in the era of classical Greece and Rome, when belief in the old gods was collapsing and giving way to abstract philosophical systems and purely formal state religions. A limited belief in the old spirit realm persisted for a time, but with the establishment of Christianity and other world-religions, even that was rejected. Although it’s conventional to think of the Dark Ages as a time of ignorance and superstition, quite the opposite was true.

According to Wikipedia, during this period “the Church did not conduct witch trials. The Council of Paderborn in 785 explicitly outlawed the very belief in witches, and Charlemagne later confirmed the law. Among Eastern Christians belief in witchcraft was regarded as deisdemonia – superstition – and by the 9th and 10th centuries in the West, belief in witchcraft had begun to be seen as heresy.”

Yet at exactly the same time — between the 700s and the 1100s — a romantic appreciation for the old supernatural stories was taking hold, first in the Middle East, where the tales of the Arabian Nights were being assembled, and a little later in Europe with the craze for Arthurian romances.

In the late 1100s, just as this literary romanticism was reaching its peak, the ancient supernatural beliefs also began to make a comeback. During the next century, Albertus Magnus not only accepted natural magic, alchemy, and astrology as real but saw them as capable of being put to positive uses. His student, Thomas Aquinas, followed him in part but was more concerned with asserting the reality of demons and condemning sorcery as evil.

These two contrasting approaches would set the tone for the next 400 years, influencing both the occult mages of the Renaissance and the fanatical witch-hunters of the 17th century.

The pattern is harder to discern further back in time, but the same thing appears to have happened in the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age. It seems clear that in the orderly agricultural societies of that period, shamans had given way to official priesthoods and religion was devoted to observing the movements of the heavens, maintaining social order, and conducting elaborate spectacles to impress the populace.

Yet there are also indications that the Late Neolithic was marked by a flowering of fanciful story-telling that produced the earliest versions of our familiar myths and fairy tales. And around the start of the Bronze Age, there was a sudden eruption of powerful new beliefs in cosmic deities and in the divine kings who were their chosen confidants.

However, there’s more to this pattern than a recurring sequence of ups and downs. The ancient stories themselves are passed along from one such flowering to the next.

Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which helped spark the current turn of the cycle, has its roots in both Walpole’s passion for pseudo-medieval fantasy and the great Arthurian romances. The literary fairy stories and tales of the Arabian Nights, which delighted early 18th century Europeans, were not only a legacy from the Middle Ages but had their own roots in the fairy tales of the Late Neolithic. And those mythic tales of “once upon a time” were reworkings of the tales of the Dreamtime that were told in Africa long before we humans set out to carry them across the world.

But if this pattern holds true all the way back, then those Dreamtime stories themselves must have been based on even earlier sources. And that raises the question of what could have possibly come before these seemingly most ancient of all human stories.

I believe I may have accidentally stumbled upon the answer to this question a few entries back, when I suggested that the very first supernatural stories originated as tales the half-mad proto-shamans told of their hallucinatory encounters out in the wilderness.

Neither they nor their audiences would have perceived these accounts as distinct from the more mundane adventures of the hunters and gatherers. But as time went on, and such encounters were no longer everyday occurrences, these oft-repeated tales would have turned into stories of once upon a time — evocations of a magical era of tricksters and culture-bringers, talking animals and supernatural presences.

And as even more time passed and human society came to be dominated by the equivalent of 18th century rationalists, Dark Ages monotheists, and Neolithic priesthoods, these ancient tales would have begun to be viewed skeptically, dismissed as stories for children, or perhaps even condemned as outright falsehoods.

But as soon as that happened, the local equivalents of J.R.R. Tolkien or Horace Walpole would have sprung up to defend and preserve them, insisting that they were worth maintaining both for their own sake and because of the longings they aroused for things unknown.

And eventually, out of the tension between the rationalists and the romantics, there would have come a brilliant integrative leap with the ability to satisfy both parties — a sudden realization that the old stories could still be accepted as true given one simple assumption.

That single crucial premise was the idea that long, long ago, at the beginning of all things, the nature of the world had been completely different, even the exact opposite of the way it was now. And, moreover, that it had been the task of the legendary personages of this Dreamtime to bring order out of chaos and establish the norms that had ruled human life ever since.

That leap of understanding for the first time created a map of reality that included not only the present moment but also the remote past. And with that radical alteration of perspective, the third vision fell into place.

It relies on just a few basic assumptions: That the first true humans possessed a mental map-making ability that enabled them to construct structured visualizations of the world around them. That as the human population expanded, this same ability was applied to devising elaborate kinship systems that could regulate the interactions among individuals and groups. And that the resulting focus on abstract relationships brought with it a mastery of formal categories and rules that came to be applied to the physical world as well.

The first two visions to come out of this process were the prototypes of all the scientifically-based and socially-based visions that have followed over the long centuries since. But there are also visions of a third type — those based on inner experience — which operate very differently and cannot be explained as simply another form of map-making.

Inner experience is not susceptible of being pinned down like our experience of the physical world. It shifts and fluctuates and may differ radically from one individual to another. It cannot be reduced to categories and laws like the stuff of our social relationships, because it is wild and willful and defies expectations. Yet at the same time, it displays certain consistent themes, and shamans and wizards have always been able to swap stories, find common ground, and provide guidelines for their disciples.

There were proto-shamans among us from the start, and they must have played a crucial role in the development of the first two visions. Without their access to higher knowledge and the sense of the unity of all things that it brought with it, those initial visions would not have been possible. But their wisdom was embedded in the visions they helped formulate, and they did not yet have a vision of their own.

A number of things must have happened to change that. The most important would have been that as the human population increased and became more securely established, the first two visions would have progressively grown less transcendent and more matter-of-fact.

For those of us who are not natural shamans, the intuitive flashes of higher knowledge are triggered most strongly at moments of crisis, when we are faced with unfamiliar situations and life-and-death decisions. And the earliest period of human history, when we were few in number and subject to many external threats, would have provided one crisis after another that forced us to improvise wildly and react in unison.

But once the human community was well stabilized and no longer in danger of being wiped out by famine, disease, or sharp-toothed predators, those kinds of spontaneous responses would no longer have been necessary. Our unparalleled knowledge of the natural world, together with the capacity for unified action built into our kinship systems, would have sufficed to carry us through any challenges we might encounter.

As a result, the proto-shamans, rather than being essential for survival, may have become something of an embarrassment — the crazy aunts and uncles who had no sense of social propriety, said and did things that no normal person would say or do, and seemed to live in a world of their own.

But precisely to the extent that they were marginalized, those proto-shamans would have begun to gain a sense of self-consciousness and a discrete identity. In a world where the human species had always formed an undivided whole, with a single identity and a single will, some small number of individuals would have started to perceive themselves as different. And they would slowly have become aware that what made them different was they they had their heads full of the damnedest stuff — dreams and visions and unexplored possibilities — that nobody else seemed to recognize.

People like that have been responsible for the emergence of every new inner experience vision in recent times, and there is no reason to think it was any different at the start. If anything, it would have been immeasurably stranger and more powerful the first time around, because it took the form of an unprecedented awakening and gave rise to unfamiliar social tensions.

Once the process was underway, a couple of other factors would have furthered the development of a distinct shamanistic identity. One would have been population growth, which may have made human society in general more ordinary but also meant there were enough weirdos wandering around that they could find each other, hang out together, and start exchanging notes.

It’s also possible that the properties of hallucinogenic plants were discovered at this time, making it possible for those who experimented with them to regularize the visionary experience, clarify its nature, and start establishing common terminology.

But whatever the exact details of the process, the results were dramatic. Instead of proto-shamans, who might occasionally encounter spirit beings in the wilderness and take them for a part of the natural landscape, there were the first true shamans — people who recognized their experiences as occurring within themselves and were determined to study them and understand their meaning.

As one aspect of their growing self-awareness, instead of simply trying to convince their less perceptive fellows of the truth of their strange hallucinatory experiences, they would have begun to develop methods of leading others to share their mythic perceptions of reality by way of story, song, and dramatic performance.

Over the last few years, some fascinating studies have been carried out on the subject of brain synchronization. In one experiment done at Princeton, a woman was recorded telling the same story both in English and in Russian while an MRI scanner recorded her brain activity. These recordings were then played to listeners who knew only English, and though the Russian version had no effect, brain scans showed that “when the woman spoke English, the volunteers understood her story, and their brains synchronized. When she had activity in her insula, an emotional brain region, the listeners did too. When her frontal cortex lit up, so did theirs. By simply telling a story, the woman could plant ideas, thoughts and emotions into the listeners’ brains.”

In a related study carried out in Berlin, pairs of guitar players were wired up and given a piece of music to play in harmony. The investigators found that “when the musicians had to actively coordinate their playing, that is especially at the beginning of a sequence, the signals from frontal and central electrodes were clearly associated — not only within the head of one player, but also between the heads of the duet partners.”

“When people coordinate actions with one another,” the scientists concluded, “small networks within the brain and, remarkably, between the brains are formed, especially when the activities need to be precisely aligned in time.”

This human capacity for “neural coupling” is clearly very ancient. It may have been part of the suite of changes in brain functioning that marked the appearance of our own species. Or it might have had its roots among our more archaic ancestors — but if so, it would have been greatly enhanced by the flowering of language and story-telling among the first modern humans.

A capacity for synchronization of thought and action no doubt played a vital role in enabling us to live in larger groups than our forebears and explore wider territories while still maintaining a high degree of social and intellectual coordination. However, it might also have had the negative effect of enforcing a rigid adherence to a narrowly-drawn consensus reality.

I suspect that our species did begin to fall into precisely that trap at a certain point — and that the only thing that saved us was a small group of people who were both strange enough and strong-minded enough to stand outside the consensus and gradually turn the hivemind in their own direction.

People of that sort can exercise an extraordinary power over their fellows. They tell stories so bizarre, and yet so strangely compelling, that their audience hangs on every word. They act out their narratives in dramatic form until the listeners feel as though they have experienced them in their own persons. They get the entire group singing and dancing in unison. And as they do, they quite literally “plant ideas, thoughts and emotions into the listeners’ brains.”

As I’ve noted previously, the archaeologists keep seeking the Holy Grail of “behavioral modernity” — that elusive moment when our ancestors started acting more or less like us. They’ve recently moved the goalposts back a bit — to about 75,000 years ago, when the first examples of visual art appeared in South Africa, along with a number of striking technological innovations — but they still seem unwilling to concede that people who lacked those things could have been fully human.

However, we humans typically invent new things only when we need them — and the need for artifacts of a particularly tangible sort may simply not have been present any earlier.

Since the late 19th century, advances in art and technology have been regarded as automatic by-products of reaching a certain level of mental capacity. But what if that isn’t true? What if human development has been guided at every step by dreamers and visionaries who have been doing no more and no less than what is called for to keep the rest of us moving along the path?

In that case, everything we lump together as “culture” and consider the highest form of human accomplishment would amount to no more than an accumulation of devices for keeping the herd in motion. And it was the first true shamans of 200,000 or more years ago who initiated the process — and did so quite consciously and with a fair inkling of the outcome.

Back then, our ancestors possessed a single, unified vision of existence, which they considered to be a perfect reflection of the world around them. In those days, the map truly was the territory, and the map in each mind was identical to the map in every other. Even the world of their dreams was indistinguishable from the world of everyday, and they lived in both simultaneously.

Of course, this single world-vision was not fixed or static but was constantly being amended and enhanced. Much like the internet today, it was subject to a constant, ongoing process of discovery, collaboration, and mutual reinforcement. But the changes were collective ones and it remained a unified vision — until the point came when it was shattered beyond repair.

The source of the problem was the very success of this new experiment in being human, which inevitably led to population growth and an expansion into unfamiliar territories. What had once been a tiny, isolated group of a few hundred close relatives now consisted of thousands of people spread out across a wide area, with each sub-group encountering a slightly different geography and a unique distribution of plants and animals.

They naturally adapted by altering the maps in their minds to match the world outside. But once they did, instead of a single, indivisible vision there was now a multitude of slightly different visions. Instead of a single language, there were hints of distinct dialects with new words being invented to describe local conditions. And because they were no longer able to gather around a common campfire and iron out the differences, those variations took hold and intensified.

And when the diversity became too great to be denied, the Dreamtime was broken.

But although broken, it was not lost. Indeed, it has never been lost. There were still proto-shamans with access to higher knowledge — and the message of higher knowledge is always that true reality is single and undivided, no matter how fragmented it may appear to our limited perceptions.

That message, and the quest it sparked to recover the hidden unity behind all surface appearances, has powered the cycle of visions ever since. Throughout human history, they have followed on one another’s heels, each one aiming to reclaim the lost perfection of the Dreamtime and each succeeding for a time before fragmenting and collapsing in turn.

Of course, no one ever sets out deliberately to invent a new vision. The process always starts intuitively, with the search for a solution to what seems to be a practical problem. And the immediate challenge as the human family became increasingly diverse and scattered was to establish a more expansive basis for affiliation and mutual support.

Modern humans had a good basis for this, in the form of a highly inclusive sense of mutuality. This put them well ahead of their archaic predecessors, who were apparently not equipped to interact on a regular basis with more than a few dozen members of their own species.

According to an article which appeared last winter in New Scientist, “The size and distribution of archaeological sites shows that Neanderthals spent their lives mostly in small groups of five to 10 individuals. Several such groups would come together briefly after especially successful hunts, suggesting that Neanderthals also belonged to larger communities but that they seldom made contact with people outside those groupings.”

The piece further notes that Neanderthals “almost certainly lacked the cognitive abilities for dealing with strangers that evolved in modern humans, who lived in larger groups numbering in the scores and belonged to larger communities in the hundreds or more. They also established and maintained contacts with distant groups.”

Another article from earlier this year argues that “the superiority of Homo sapiens was in their social organization, which developed during the Middle Paleolithic period between 200,000 and 35,000 years ago. This ‘modern’ social organization is characterized by the maintenance of personal relations despite the absence of the persons involved, and over long distances.”

These two descriptions are intriguing for the hints they give of a map-making ability that was flexible enough to apply not only to the natural world but also to far-flung social relationships. However, they are also limited, in that they seem to take human social complexity for granted, as an automatic outcome of our superior “cognitive abilities,” rather than as something that had to be worked out one step at a time over an extended period.

They also overlook the fact that when our species first appeared, there would have been no strangers and no long-distance relationships — just one small group of true humans, all of them children of the same great-grandmother.

No doubt we already possessed the ability to number our acquaintances in the hundreds rather than the dozens, but there would have been no call yet for complex social organization. And once there were enough of us to need such organization, we would have been well beyond the point of making a further evolutionary leap. The basic human skill-set was already firmly in place, and everything that has come since has been built on those capacities.

That is why the problem of maintaining long-range social relationships was solved — for better or worse — by upgrading the map-making ability that we had originally developed to deal with our physical environment.

No one can know every single plant and animal in their environment on a first-name basis, so we categorize them and formulate rules to apply to those categories. And in much the same way, we developed methods for dealing with large numbers of people in terms of categories and rules, rather than as unique individuals.

In kinship systems of an archaic type that still survive today, many of those categories are designed to resolve problems of authority. For example, it may be laid down that any elderly man should be addressed as “grandfather” and respected as one would respect one’s own grandparent.

The most pressing issues, however, have to do with sexuality. On one hand, sexual tensions are a leading source of interpersonal conflict. On the other, stable marriage arrangements can not only reduce those tensions but also provide a basis for mutual support between families. For those reasons, control of sexuality underlies the greatest elaboration of rules and taboos.

Devising a system to override the unruly nature of human sexual attraction could not have been easy, but little by little — perhaps over many generations — it was accomplished. The ancestors of today’s computer hackers were eager to rise to the challenge of constructing an intricate set of abstract categories and the rules by which they operated. And an equally eager network of rowdy old grandfathers and grandmothers was ready to crack heads to enforce its use upon their wayward grandchildren.

But at the same time, all that invention would have been carried out under the guidance of higher knowledge.

Any kinship system embodies a set of formal, mathematical relationships, but the glue which holds it together is each individual’s implicit sense of oneness with the entire human community. Whenever we lose that sense of oneness, we become as isolated and fragmented as Neanderthals. But as long as we maintain it, we know ourselves as one people, no matter how far we have wandered or how altered we may be in appearance.

So the kinship vision would have been based from the start upon a perception of the human community as a single and undivided whole. This enabled it to counterbalance the fragmentation of the older vision based on the natural environment. People living in different locations might have different mind-maps of the world around them — but they could now share a single, unified map of a social order in which they all played a part.

Once again, it became possible to believe that the world of their minds was the same as the world around them and that the world of one mind was identical to that of another.

However, the new vision did not simply replace the older one. It also attempted to restore its wholeness by raising it to a higher level of abstraction.

All kinship systems, no matter how complex in practice, start off with a set of simple, gender-based dualities: Male vs. female. Father vs. mother. Father’s kin vs. mother’s kin. And so forth.

These same dualities are also used in archaic societies to make sense of the natural world, with all the great forces of nature being defined as male vs. female: Fire and water. Drought and rain. Sun and moon. Death and life.

The application of that kind of abstraction to the physical universe marked the birth of science. It meant that the fragmentation of the world of things no longer mattered, because people were now living in a world of universal laws, and all the varying mind-maps could be seen as local reflections of a more complete and perfect original.

At the same time, it marked the birth of philosophy — and of the peculiarly human tendency to regard the maps in our minds as realer and truer than the world around us.

It might seem strange to talk of science and philosophy as existing 300,000 years ago — but it shouldn’t. We may have fancier tech toys these days, and a larger knowledge base to draw upon, but our map-making capacity was fully present from the start, and with it the ability to meditate upon the riddles of existence. Compared to that, all the complex intellectual systems we have elaborated since then amount to no more than bells and whistles.

To address these questions, it’s necessary to take a step back and start with the purely anatomical changes that may have first separated us from our archaic ancestors.

When you compare the skeletons of modern humans to those of archaic humans such as Neanderthals, the most obvious difference is that we are significantly leaner and longer-legged, as well as being generally taller.

That change would have offered an evolutionary advantage, because it enabled us to get around faster and further and draw upon the resources of a much larger territory. However, we would have been unprepared to benefit from it without a simultaneous expansion in cognitive skills.

If you’re going to take lengthy excursions away from home, after all, you need to start off with a pretty good idea of where you’re going and why, along with the safest and most direct way to get there and back. You also want to be able to calculate your timing, so that you don’t show up a week before the berries ripen or a month after the annual antelope migration.

In other words, you’ll operate most efficiently if you have a sophisticated map-making ability that enables you to orient yourself in both space and time. And there is a second major difference between archaic humans and ourselves — a change in the architecture of our skulls and brains — that may reflect the development of just such an ability.

The capacity to construct complex mind-maps would have allowed our earliest ancestors to do things that had never been done before and utilize the resources of their environment to the fullest. It’s no wonder that they were able to out-breed, out-compete, and eventually assimilate every other human species.

But they would also have found themselves increasingly dependent on the accuracy and completeness of their mind-maps — much as we now find ourselves depending on the superior map-making capacities of our cellphones. And that would have created problems once they ran up against the limit of how much information can be carried in an individual’s memory.

The most obvious way to get around that limitation would have been through a significant expansion of language. Not only does naming and categorizing everything you encounter make it easier to keep track, it also enables you to share your knowledge with the rest of your band.

That kind of information exchange would have served as a powerful survival mechanism. It spread the knowledge acquired by every individual throughout the group as a whole, so that none of it was lost if one person died or forgot an important detail. It also made the foraging efforts of the group more efficient, because its members weren’t constantly reduplicating each other’s efforts.

And it would have had an even more interesting side-effect, in that the members of the group would have become the possessors of a communal mind-map. They would have been constantly contributing to it, competing to come up with new names for objects and locations, working to maintain it as a single coherent structure, teaching it to the young, and even coming to define their group identity in terms of it.

They would also have begun exchanging information in the form of stories. Because emotion enhances memory, narrating your experiences in dramatic form is the most effective way of getting them to stick in both your own mind and those of your audience. As a result, story-telling would have become a standard feature of everyday life.

As the years and generations went by, the most exciting adventures of the hunters and the most rewarding discoveries of the gatherers would have been remembered and retold over and over. In the process, they would have taken on the familiar shape of a standard plot-line — a worthy goal, dangers and challenges to overcome, a successful conclusion, and a triumphant return to share the boons with one’s fellows.

Inventing all of this for the very first time would have been supremely exciting, entertaining, and rewarding. But even though the earliest mind-maps and the stories that went with them provided the basis for the visions that were to come, they were not yet there — because they included only known things and not intimations of higher possibility. That final step would require the addition of higher knowledge to the mix.

The sudden hunches and intuitive flashes of higher knowledge are a mystery even today, and it is impossible to say for sure just when and how they got started. My best guess, however, is that they might have been a by-product of the same brain reorganization that underlies our map-making ability, appearing initially as an eccentric side-effect that turned out to be surprisingly useful.

The most serious disadvantage of relying on the detailed mind-maps of ordinary knowledge is that they may be highly effective at dealing with familiar things and events and yet fail miserably when confronted with the novel and unexpected. Under exceptional conditions, and particularly at times of crisis, sticking rigidly to an existing map is a real handicap. That’s when the flights of higher knowledge become essential.

But pursuing the dictates of higher knowledge can also be a dangerous business — and never more so than at the start.

A study carried out a few years ago concluded that our sudden intuitive flashes are the result of a temporary mental destabilization during which our brains briefly operate “on the edge of chaos.” At these times, freewheeling cascades of neuronal activity enable the brain to “adapt to new situations, by quickly rearranging which neurons are synchronised to a particular frequency. But they can also get out of control, and the more responsive we are to novel situations, the closer we may come to the ‘fine line between genius and madness.’”

This conclusion goes hand in hand with numerous other studies which have found that highly creative individuals are more likely to suffer from mental disorders — particularly schizophrenia and bipolar disorder — or to have a family history of such disorders. And that, in turn, is reminiscent of the observation that traditional shamans regularly begin their career by passing through a “shamanistic crisis,” which to the outsider can appear indistinguishable from madness.

It seems likely that at some very early point in our species’ history, we acquired a capacity for barely-controlled madness, with those in whom this capacity was strongest being inclined to hear voices or hallucinate supernatural figures that offered guidance for the group as a whole.

If that was the case, however, the wild men and women in whom the shamanistic propensity was strongest could never have formed more than a small minority.

There’s no doubt an ideal balance in such things. Too many madmen and prophets and the entire society lurches out of control. Too few and you become a stick-in-the-mud culture and lose all ability to adapt or change. The fact that we’re still here today suggests that we’ve managed to maintain the balance successfully for over 200,000 years.

But there’s a significant challenge in running a two-track society of that sort, which is that the relatively small minority of those with the prophetic gift may encounter serious problems in getting the majority of sober map-makers to pay attention to their warnings and inspirations.

And that’s where the visions come in.

Just like the hunters and gatherers, the first proto-shamans would have gone out on quests and returned with gifts and stories. But instead of boasting of the prey they had killed or the predators they had escaped, they would have described visionary encounters with spirit beings. And instead of bringing back food or practical information, they would have provided wisdom, glimpses of higher possibility, and instruction in being more fully human.

It is no coincidence that the trickster figures of our oldest stories are described not only as incorrigible pranksters but also as culture bringers who taught their fellows how to stop being animals and adopt the ways of humankind. Those tricksters are our own earliest ancestors and, give or take a few fantastic embellishments, the things they are said to have done really did happen.

Unlike more workaday stories, however, those of the proto-shamans could not be duplicated or verified by others, and the strange beings and events which they described could not easily be woven into the communal mind-map. At most, there might be a vague acknowledgement that spirits dwelt in the wilderness and uncanny things might befall those who ventured there.

However, there were other ways for the stuff of higher knowledge to be interwoven with ordinary reality. One was centered on the proto-shamans themselves, who often acquired unusual powers such as healing and rain-making. Another — which was more abstract and may have taken longer to develop — was through an understanding that all anomalous and inexplicable events were the result of either magic or the spirits and as such required the aid of a shaman to resolve.

No doubt the shamans themselves promoted both these beliefs — perhaps even encouraging them with a bit of trickery — for the sake of getting people to pay attention to their more serious messages. And the resulting understanding of existence, which combined hard science, genuine magic, and blatant flimflam, became the foundation of the very first vision.

The other project is a more extensive undertaking that Alexei and I have been working on together — a book on the subject of higher knowledge, which should be completed some time next year. Even though my end of it is based largely on material that has already appeared at this blog, there’s quite a bit of rewriting and rearranging involved, and I’m finding it very demanding of time and attention.

I do, however, have a new blog post underway that picks up where the previous one left off, with the question of how the cycle of visions got started in the depths of prehistory. I hope to have it up after we survive Sandy and then get back to posting every 2-3 weeks.