The Power of the Herd (21 page)

Then the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.”

It's important to note that Abel doesn't engage in blood sacrifice, instead offering what he considers the most desirable parts of animals culled for his own sustenance. Cain's pride is visibly wounded, but God takes the time to explain his decision, encouraging the planter to follow a different path, foreshadowing some difficulties and temptations arising from this lifestyle over time.

Cain, however, takes the rejection personally. Unwilling to accept the drawbacks of his “career” choice, let alone change his behavior in response, he decides to get rid of the competition, luring Abel out to the field. In a fit of rage, Cain attacks and kills his younger brother, then lies when God asks him where Abel is.

“I don't know,” Cain replies
in this classic passage: “Am I my brother's keeper?”

“Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground,” God reveals, whereupon he punishes the first murderer, not by executing him, but by making it clear that the land “will no longer yield its crops” for Cain, essentially forcing him to leave his sedentary life and “be a restless wanderer on the earth.”

Eventually, Cain does settle down again, “in Nod, east of Eden,” where he marries, and builds a city named after his son Enoch. Yet the pastoral approach refuses to die out completely. Eve has another son, Seth. And even in Cain's line, the nomadic perspective emerges generations later, when his great-great-great-great grandson Jabal becomes
“the father of those who live in tents
and raise livestock,” marking an exciting era for all sorts of innovations: Jabal's brother Jubal becomes “the father of all who play stringed instruments and pipes,” and their half brother Tubal-Cain forges “all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron.”

Back in the 1990s, when I was researching the domestication of the horse and the subsequent development of the ancient Eurasian horse tribes, I came across a number of intriguing books about other pastoral cultures and the benefits of this lifestyle in general. Daniel Quinn's award-winning novel
Ishmael
and Jim Corbett's brilliant yet lesser-known nonfiction work
Goatwalking
were particularly creative and insightful. Both cited the Cain and Abel story as marking a significant turning point in humanity's cultural evolution. In this sense, Cain's impulse to murder his sheepherding brother and build the first city represents the lethal animosity nomadic peoples have experienced in the presence of sedentary cultures since the beginning of civilization.

Quinn's fictional narrator discovers this bit of wisdom while engaging in telepathic debates with a gorilla who discusses the “Leavers,” the hunter-gatherers,
who live in harmony with nature, and the “Takers,” the city dwellers, who arose with the agricultural revolution and aimed to conquer all other life-forms, destroying many species in the process. The book doesn't distinguish between a hunter-gatherer approach and the nomadic pastoral lifestyle, which as I mentioned in
chapter 5
, was an innovation that grew out of settled agricultural communities. The Bible
does
recognize Abel as Cain's younger brother, however, adding to the accuracy of this tale as a vehicle for retaining the memory of prehistoric events through eons of oral tradition.

While Quinn's novel artfully teases the modern mind with the first tendrils of a nomadic perspective, Corbett's 1991 book offers more specific information on the psychospiritual effects of pastoralism.
Goatwalking
resurrects Abel's wisdom by describing the profound realizations the author himself gained from wandering through the Arizona desert with herds of milk goats, engaging in the nomadic lifestyle for extended periods of time. Through this effort, he reconnected with the original meaning of the sabbatical, the ancient Jewish tradition of renewing the land — and most important, its people — by letting the ground “lie fallow” every seventh year.

The idea of the sabbatical, presented in the book of Leviticus, stems from a series of messages Moses received from God shortly before his people entered the Promised Land. After they were liberated from Egyptian slavery, the Jews, as you may remember, were sentenced to wander aimlessly through the desert for engaging in an embarrassing episode of idolatry. From a nonsedentary perspective, however, this wasn't so much a punitive move on God's part as a
necessary
correctional effort. After living with the ultimate pyramid-building, slaveholding city dwellers for untold generations, the demoralized, disempowered tribes of Israel would have needed to reawaken their rusty pastoral skills before they were capable of reinstating their unique culture in the Promised Land. Otherwise they might have built their own version of Egypt in Canaan. So they were compelled to meander through the wilderness, vagrants without a home, until they reclaimed Abel's wisdom and realized that nature was
designed
to nurture when treated with trust, affection, and respect.

To me, what follows marks a particularly fascinating moment in biblical history: On the eve of the Israelites' entry into Canaan, God decides to
collaborate
with his creation. Knowing full well that some members of these tribes would prefer, like Cain, to settle in one place, till the soil, and even build cities, he compromises with them, searching for a way to help them maintain balance. His solution involves, of all things, requiring people to keep at least some connection with the nomadic pastoral lifestyle, one that exercises the mutually respectful
interdependence
of human and nature, as opposed to the conqueror's
human-over-nature mentality. Those who knew how to thrive in the wilderness would also be less prone to help others amass great wealth at the expense of personal freedom, and more likely to flee if things got out of hand and tyranny began to rule the land.

So, in addition to outlining all sorts of laws governing proper social behavior, the book of Leviticus introduces the idea of the
sabbatical,
a divine edict specifying that, every seven years, the people are obliged to shirk their workaday responsibilities and literally
go feral.

As a consequence of killing his brother and building the first city, Cain forgot the meaning of the Sabbath and lost his connection to the redemptive powers of nature, Corbett observes. Yet some manifestation of divine intelligence kept trying to jump-start humanity's memory, at times by compelling receptive individuals to leave the city, sneak out of the palace, or put down the plow and just start walking. Moses climbs Mount Sinai, receiving the Ten Commandments and later introducing the sabbatical. Lao-tzu, the Buddha, and Muhammad all spend significant time alone in nature before accessing their profoundly influential visions. Jesus wanders through the desert for forty days and forty nights before he returns to civilization, urging others to drop their fishing nets, abandon their businesses, and simply follow him to… God
knows
where. It's important to realize, however, that through this act the carpenter from Judea would have been reinforcing centuries of tradition. Judaism, until very recently, was remarkable in its long-standing commitment to ensuring that the entire population experienced the nomadic pastoralist's recipe for renewal, connection, and catharsis on a regular basis.

“For millennia,” Corbett emphasizes in
Goatwalking,
“Semitic peoples have called wilderness ‘God's land,'
distinguishing it from settled areas possessed and remade to fit human plans…. The sabbath day is a time to quit grabbing at the world, to rest, and to rejoice in the Creation's goodness. During the sabbath year all are to cease making their living agriculturally, supporting themselves instead from the land's spontaneous, uncultivated growth. Debts are to be canceled and slaves are to be freed. Land ownership also reverts on the jubilee year [every seventh seven-year cycle]; no one shall permanently subjugate the earth or another person.”

Part history, part philosophy, part law treatise and ritualistic handbook, the Judeo-Christian Bible also promotes collaborating with nature as a way of strengthening connection to spirit — explicitly in partnership with animals, no
less. And this is where the story gets
really
interesting. Recent scientific studies suggest that living closely with their herds, rather than simply communing with the scenery, offered a developmental advantage to the people who undertook this lifestyle, increasing courage, trust, compassion, sociability, adaptability, and personal empowerment through a variety of hormonal and behavioral changes initiated and reinforced by the human-animal bond itself.

The fact that we've lost sight of these benefits in modern times marks yet another cycle of Cain's forgetfulness. It's not a moral failing. It's a pitfall of the sedentary, city-based lifestyle. Enslaved by ambition, we've pulled out all the stops this time, becoming a culture of obsessive overachievers, leading to a host of stress-related illnesses and greed-related acts of violence. But there are still pockets of the nomadic pastoral lifestyle scattered across the earth, and they do, in fact, hold the memory of something we can't afford to lose.

“Settled people,” Corbett observes, “work relentlessly
to remake and possess the earth because they can live only in man-made habitats where they are subjugated and used by whoever controls the land. In contrast, nomads take life sabbatically, as a gift from ‘God's land.' Rejecting Cain's way, the prophetic faith recalls its nomadic origins when making its offering of first fruits, beginning with the words, ‘My father was a cimarron Aramean' (Dt 26:5). From Tibet to Morocco, Kazakhstan to Baja, nomads identify with the cimarron, the domesticated animal that goes feral, the escaped slave who knows how to be at home in God's land[,] …opening nomadic consciousness to insights unknown to peoples who worship owner-masters because they can live only within the man-made world's make-believe boundaries….Learning to live by fitting into an ecological niche rather than by fitting into a dominance-submission hierarchy opens human awareness to another kind of society based on equal rights of creative agency for all.”

Judeo-Christian philosophy has always been, and forever shall be, in conflict with civilization as we know it, creating a pesky incongruous feeling, a kind of nagging sandpaper of the soul, in any sincerely religious person forced to disrespect the earth by custom, circumstance, or the next paycheck. In the same book outlining the practice of the sabbatical, God makes it perfectly clear that “the land must not be sold permanently, for the land belongs to me. You are only foreigners, my tenant farmers” (Leviticus 25:23). And what landlord, after all, would knowingly lease a fine estate to a group of people planning to strip it, gut it, sell off its assets, and fill the large gaping hole with toxic waste and smoking garbage? In this sense, oddly enough, the Old Testament coincides philosophically with traditional Native American beliefs on respect for
nature and the absurdity of buying and selling property, as no mortal man can truly own God's green earth — or rocky stretch of desert, for that matter.

It's time for
us
to compromise and collaborate with the divine for a change, to find ways of consciously integrating the twin innovations of Cain and Abel, accessing the benefits and lessening the weaknesses or inconveniences of both. God, after all, didn't execute Cain, surely seeing a stroke of genius in the eyes of that profoundly aggressive, deeply troubled soul — namely, a gift for technological and artistic advances that would have stirred a hint of hope and perhaps even pride in this vast yet compassionate intelligence.

Made in the image of our creator, we are, after all creatures designed to create, perfectly capable at this point in our development of reinventing ourselves and our society — if, unlike Cain, enough of us are willing to look at the destructive aspects of our lifestyle and change our behavior in response.

Adopting a nomadic pastoral lifestyle is no longer practical. Forming mutually respectful relationships with other species, on the other hand, is fully possible. Increasing research suggests that animal-assisted educational and therapeutic practices are both transformational and healing, helping people master the advanced human-development skills crucial to leadership and innovation. Translated into a twenty-first-century context, Abel's wisdom involves recognizing that animals not only nourish and protect us physically, they help us develop psychologically and socially through brain-altering biochemical responses and mutual behavior modification. The human-animal bond is one place where science, history, and religion firmly intersect — and inform one another. As myths and spiritual texts from around the world insist, horses, dogs, cats, and other domesticated companions are gifts from a creative intelligence that has been rooting for us all along.

We just haven't fully unwrapped the package yet.

Fossil records suggest that wolves were the first animals to be tamed and transformed — thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of years before other animals. Theories about how this happened abound, though everyone assumes it was a long, slow, precarious process. But a groundbreaking study at a Siberian research facility shows that the main physical and behavioral hallmarks of domestication could actually have been achieved in a single century —
if
a tribe of ancestral animal lovers had purposefully bred individuals who were less aggressive, less fearful, and more willing to engage with members of another species for reasons other than sustenance.

This evolutionary shortcut, of course, would have required a group of less aggressive, less fearful
people
who were interested in engaging with another species for reasons other than fur or sustenance. But the human side of the equation was actively suppressed in a Soviet geneticist's incredibly efficient experiment involving semiwild foxes. In 1959, Dmitri Belyaev launched a study to test whether animals with specific behavioral traits might become more amenable to domestication if they were bred to each other over numerous generations. Most researchers were interested in the physical characteristics common to domesticated animals: increased or decreased size, increased reproductive frequency, and pedomorphosis, the retention of juvenile traits by adults, including rounded skulls and floppy ears. The latter innovation was especially intriguing to Charles Darwin, who notes in his
Origin of Species
that
“not a single domestic animal can be named
which has not in some country drooping ears,” a feature that isn't found among mature wild animals except the elephant.