This work was intended to be my doctoral thesis in Ancient History –Archaeology, but I never managed to finish it, much less present it before a panel.
Since I was eighteen, I had been taking notes on prehistoric man’s ideas about the afterlife and recording them on index cards, which is what we had back then. In 1990 I decided to use those materials to write a work describing the path the soul of the deceased must follow to reach paradise. Not within a particular cultural area, but in a common and earlier substratum, something whose existence academics do not believe in.
During my University years I had the good fortune to discover Mircea Eliade, the undisputed father of the History of Religions. I remember the moment when I saw and bought the two volumes of his Treatise on the History of Religions, published by Cristiandad, in a shop window. It was a sunny afternoon in the diocesan bookstore, located next to the rectorate of the University of Murcia and I knew that what I had just made mine was a treasure. Of the spirit, yes, but a treasure.
M. Eliade researched and disseminated knowledge from the vantage point of his vast erudition and therefore in his work the development of each concept finds support in various cultures, not just one.
He does not study Greek myths or Mesopotamian ones, but universal symbols incorporated into all mythologies, or many of them. Enraptured as I was by those readings, I was carried along by a kind of intellectual inertia and tried to apply the same method in my undergraduate thesis under the title What Is Your Name? An Approach to the Magic of Personal Names. I was already 32 years old then and had spent many years away from the University, but I missed studying, so I enrolled in doctoral courses ten years after obtaining my degree.
The panel consisted of two Assyriologists and a professor of Ancient History, who was also the thesis director (dissertation, as it was usually called). One of the first two soon went for my jugular, although fortunately in a figurative sense. My work concerned the concept of the name-soul and I was attacked in part for presenting my ideas as my Romanian idol, M. Eliade, would have done. Bearing in mind that it was not advisable to engage in an argument with that gentleman, while listening to his tirades I devoted myself to cleaning my glasses with a handkerchief, repeatedly looking through the lenses to check the progress of the undertaking. It was my way of letting him know that his bites did not intimidate me, although I remember that at some point I asked him why Mircea Eliade could do it and I could not. Literally and with that audacity. I do not remember him answering, perhaps because that seemed to him the response of a foolish student who, in the heigh of arrogance, dared to compare himself with the great master.
Although the disagreement was resolved peacefully and the work received the highest grade, the episode made me understand the rules of the academic world. In theory a thesis for an undergraduate or doctoral degree is or should be research work, but in the academic practice I know they are quite the opposite. From what I have seen, that kind of work must primarily meet the requirement of boring the flies. I know, for example, of some thesis whose content was limited to a compendium of bibliography. From what I have understood you can research, yes, but very little, within narrow limits and only to manufacture the bricks of a building that will be constructed by the authorities.
My professor and friend, sadly deceased Javier García del Toro devoted his undergraduate thesis to a catalogue of the surface lithic materials from the Eneolithic site of Las Amoladeras, at Cabo Palos. He told me of his frustration when the director of the work, the famous Gratiniano Nieto, forbade him to add a final chapter on conclusions concerning the settlement’s way of life. Apparently he told him that this was not scientific and that archaeology should limit itself to recording material remains. That is, that the observation that a flint flake is caramel-colored is perfectly scientific because the flint flake is indeed caramel-colored, although that does not help us to know more about the life of the man who made that caramel-colored flint flake by striking two pieces of the same material and color together Those who have the authority to compile those bricks and use them to build the cathedral of science are the professors and recognized authors, which does not mean that the results are satisfactory, as we shall see.
What every decent doctoral student does is humbly propose to his future thesis director one or two topics and then submit to his directives. I, when I decided to write my doctoral thesis, did none of that. From the outset I titled my future work A Topography of the Afterlife and set about writing it. I must say that those years were such an extraordinary delight for me that explaining it in words is an impossible challenge. I felt like the explorer who sets foot for the first time on an unknown territory. And just like an explorer, in those years I discovered what no one had discovered and understood what no one had been able to understand, not even the great masters and undisputed authorities. Or rather I should say that I began to immerse myself in the delightful and priceless world of knowledge and discovery.
Every key I pressed on the keyboard of that old XT computer with an iron casing that weighed like a cow, every line I completed on that primitive green-phosphor monitor, propelled me higher and higher, as if I were beginning a silent flight without an engine. I lived those months so enraptured that I thought I did not touch the ground when walking. It was as if I were levitating.
I am aware that this may sound pretentious to the point of provoking rejection, if it comes to that. But I have a secret, and that secret is my method. I already had the opportunity to present it in the paper I delivered at the First Congress of Ethnology of the Campo de Cartagena, held in the spring of 2003, I believe.
The problem with academic science is what Ortega called the barbarism of superspecialization: in other words, extreme specialization can ultimately become the very negation of knowledge. In that paper, if I remember correctly, I used as an example the incomprehensible shortsightedness of anthropologists regarding the folktale. At the University of Murcia, and I suppose everywhere else, within the disastrous compartmentalization of the sciences, the folktale has been assigned to the Department of Hispanic Philology because those who make these decisions are incapable of seeing in it anything more than a literary genre—indeed, a minor literary genre. Its content seems to matter to no one.
Yet the folktale, especially the so-called wonder tale—that is, the tale that describes the hero’s journey to an enchanted realm—is a river of anthropological information that I can only describe as a miracle, because these stories originated in prehistory and tell us about the worldview of their authors. In other words, they describe what Lucien Lévy-Bruhl called the primitive mind and explain everything that Gratiniano Nieto forbade my professor, mentor, and friend Javier García del Toro to explain.
The wonder tale therefore embodies all that spiritual content I had personally missed so much when I took part in archaeological excavations.
“You don’t have what it takes to be an archaeologist,” the great prehistory professor Ana María Muñoz had reproached me as we worked away under the blazing sun that summer, laboring in a 14-by-6-meter excavation trench at Baena. I had just finished my first year of History, and the doctor was indeed right, because, as in other excavations, there at the Iberian-Roman settlement of Hiponuba, something was missing: the soul. Beads from necklaces, cooking pottery, and the occasional stray bronze coin were all that this field yielded. I do not remember seeing any terra sigillata or Campanian pottery, although my memory may be failing me.
Yes, the folktale did indeed originate in the remote depths of prehistory. But not in the Neolithic, as Vladimir Propp maintains; rather, in the distant mists of the Paleolithic. This is demonstrated by a particularly revealing tale collected by Afanasiev in Siberia. A girl named Vasilisa goes to the witch Baba Yaga to ask for an ember because the fire in her home has gone out. The apparent triviality of the motif should not prevent us from grasping what it is telling us: that at the time when the tale was born, only sorcerers knew the secret of how to make fire. And this takes us back to a truly early stage of our history.
It is genuinely incomprehensible to me why the great Vladimir Propp, whose authority in the field of folklore is as indisputable as that of Mircea Eliade in the History of Religions, insists on placing the origin of folktales in the Neolithic, when his principal body of work was based on Afanasiev’s collection.
To give you an idea of the chronology involved, the earliest Neolithic is documented at the Natufian level of the tell at Jericho (around 8,000 BC), whereas the earliest evidence of controlled fire known to us is associated with Sinanthropus pekinensis, a pitecanthropoid. In other words, he lived even before the emergence of Cro-Magnon man. Even if we accept that his fire may have resulted from lightning, initiates learned to control it at unknown but extremely remote points in time.
And here you already have a preview of what this work promises to be: an amateur contradicting the masters and authorities.
In the end, I believe that this frustrated attempt at a doctoral thesis was my revenge against the aridity of archaeology, or, if you prefer, my path toward the spirit and thought of prehistoric humanity.
In 1993, I submitted a first draft of 500 pages spread across three volumes to that professor—so upright, so strict, so rigorous, and someone who had placed so much faith in me. I remember my disappointment when I opened the returned envelope and saw that he had rejected it. I was sitting at my desk in the law office I had just opened on Garrigues Street in Valencia, and I scarcely gave the attention it deserved to his numerous corrections, underlinings, and critical notes. And that was the end of it.
At the time, I was beginning to become involved in filmmaking, and despite my youth, I could not manage so many disparate commitments simultaneously: the law firm, the films, and the thesis.
An entire lifetime passed before I felt that the time had come to return to the work and publish it as a book outside the University. Revising the old manuscript became tedious because the scientific rigor required of what was intended to be an academic work demanded that every piece of information be properly substantiated, and the text contains well over a thousand footnotes. The draft was not nearly as finished as I had believed, because, to my despair, many passages drawn from cuneiform tablets, folktales, or collections of field anthropology appeared without citations.
Of the three volumes of that draft, I was able to recover only two. I never found the third and most important one, because it contained the final conclusions, as well as the connection between the extensive discussion and megalithic culture, which I consider one of the most important contributions of what I have already begun to call my former doctoral thesis.
Something similar happened with the CD on which I had stored the word-processing files in the antiquated WordPerfect format. Finding it after so many years was a miracle, but, incomprehensibly, the final chapters were missing as well, so I was forced to write them again.
Only during the final stages of the rewriting did I make one last discovery that I believe turns the work into a complete and coherent whole. Reading Frazer’s Folklore in the Old Testament became, for me, a new gateway into the world of miracles, and I believe it led me into that strange solitude one feels when one is the only person who has understood everything—or almost everything.
Yes… being the only one certainly flatters one’s vanity, but it also means being alone.
I was highly motivated when this work was, or was intended to be, a doctoral thesis. But now that I have decided to publish it as a book, and therefore without the narrowness of vision and academic constraints, I confess that I feel liberated.
Nevertheless, since I began studying and writing it with such enthusiasm, the world has changed—or rather, it has been trivialized. Today, reading more than two paragraphs in succession already causes unbearable fatigue to the new citizen, driven by an obsession with immediacy, buffeted by haste, and more accustomed to receiving ideas through images than through the written word, because images are faster.
As a lawyer, I have suffered repeated and deeply painful betrayals, yet they never prevented me from continuing to defend the weak. When I stopped to consider why I did this, I concluded that I was fighting neither for money nor recognition, nor even for those vulnerable people whom I knew would sooner or later turn against me, but for the idea of justice.
What I was doing was not something between my clients and me, but between myself and the idea of justice, presumably in more or less the same sense as Kant’s categorical imperative.
In the same way, I know that almost no one will read this book. And in the same way, I care very little about that. Once again, this is not a matter between the readers and me, but between myself and knowledge.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, can surpass the ecstasy I have experienced through this work, with every discovery and every conclusion, and that alone is sufficient reward for me.
But if you are going to read it, I warn you: your eyes will be opened and your consciousness will expand.
If you read it and ever find yourself standing before the Soto dolmen in Trigueros, Huelva, what you will see will be much more than a funerary mound. You will see the worldview of its builders.
If you read it and visit the great Chalcolithic necropolis of Los Millares, in Santa Fe de Mondújar, Almería, you will understand why, in those other burial mounds, the passageway is divided into three sections by perforated slate slabs.
The archaeologists do not know. The professors do not know. The authorities do not know. But you will know.
If you have heard about what happened in the Garden of Eden and are aware that God created man, then, when you read this book, you will understand why He used clay as his raw material rather than any of the other materials available to Him, such as stone or wood.
I guarantee you that there is no professor, academic, or scholar who knows the answer. But you will.
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