The old, deep stuff has always fascinated me — and the older and deeper, the better. The Walter de la Mare poem which I loved as a child and from which I took the motto for this blog goes on to say, “Very old are we men / Our dreams are tales / Told in dim Eden / By Eve’s nightingales.” It’s those tales of dim Eden that I’m always straining my ear to catch.

The first group of entries below was written from 2001 until a few weeks after I started this blog in 2009 and expresses a dawning realization that the artists, inventors, and urban designers of prehistory were as thoughtful and methodical in pursuing their goals as any contemporary innovator.

Those which follow were written in 2009-11 and trace the human adventure from roughly 200,000 years ago to the end of the Paleolithic, while also incorporating certain aspects of the theory of history as a cycle of visions that underlies this blog as a whole.

More recently, I have embarked on a new series of entries that will draw these materials more fully into this theoretical framework and will then continue the story through the last 10,000 years. Those entries can be found listed under the heading Dance of the Visions 2.0.

Introduction: The Ancient Wisdom of Shamans and Alchemists

• The Horizons of Prehistory
• The Invention of the Neolithic
• The Ancient Alchemists
• The First Urbanites
• The First Alchemists Were Masters of — Glue
• Of Hollow Bone Flutes and the Imperative to “Be That Empty”
• Geeks at Work

 
The Old, Old Days Back in Africa

The Algorithms of String

Female Magic

The Invention of Society

Yet Another Example of Ancient Tech

Mind on the Edge of Chaos

 
How We Ventured Out into the Wide World

• The Bottleneck and the Great Migration
• The Great Migration Revisited
• A Matter of Depth
• Killer Apes — or Not?
• Conscious Control
• The Mysterious East
• The Denisovans

 
Of Spirit and Cosmic Order

• The Old Ones
• Spiritual Energy
• The Great Disillusionment
• Cosmic Order and Cosmic Insecurity
• Among the Spirits

 
The Ice Age Ends and the World Changes

• A Lost World
• Food Forests
• Times of Great Fear
• The First Global Civilization
• The Spectre of the Past