The necessity of this lifestyle didn’t depend entirely on the evolutionary era; it depended also on things like individual temperament, terrain, and circumstance.

This made me think of this passage from Tao Lin’s Trip (2017), about the historical roots of what we today call ‘patriarchal society’:

Around 7,000 years ago…various groups of dominator-style people from the north…began to invade the Goddess-worshipping civilizations in the south, first in the Near East, then in Anatolia, and, spreading west over millennia, throughout Europe. They worshipped male deities, rode horses and war chariots, were hierarchic, patrilineal, patrilocal, and pastoral, and had lighter skin and were bigger than those in the south. They associated black with death, unlike the preexisting people in Europe and Anatolia—Old Europeans—who viewed black, wrote Gimbutas in The Language of the Goddess (1989), as “the color of fertility, the color of damp caves and rich soil, of the womb of the Goddess where life begins.”

It only made sense that those who, at some point, developed the most advanced tools survived.

Tools employed, firstly, against Nature; later, once tools of transportation were developed, against each other.

Before the steam engine and cars, horses were the first land transport.

Just think about that a sec: muhfuckers hoofing it around, hunting for berries and shit, tryna hit that watering hole or whatever; then one day some savage wrangles tf out of a horse and, suddenly—boom! That watering hole mish ain’t shit! Pull up on a bison right quick with that drive-by spear shot.

This an inevitable, Promethean shift.

But Tao was pointing out the flipside of it: Northern, fairer-skinned folk, dealing with harsher conditions only the most savage didn’t die in, naturally, became savager. Those who survived at least, which was sorta case in point.

Had to deal with gnarlier conditions, and so were pushed, by the survival instinct, to develop the necessary means.

And Necessity, above all, for better or worse, was what pushed people into new patterns of Action.

Made sense these distinctions would reflect deifically: when Father Sun was present most of the year (Southern, equatorial peoples), people worshipped the Mother; when Mother Nature was wilding out most of the year (Northern/Nordic peoples), people had to fight back. In order to survive. And so worshipped the savage, masculine, paternal forces. To get em through!

I loved reading this from Tao, fucking with all these classic, esoteric, female-worship-type historical texts.

Bc we did, culturally, associate black with death, with the unknown, with night.

And that quote, framed how it was, forced you to consider why.