Before Orion, Myths and Heroes

Title: Before Orion, Myths and Heroes

Description: Today Steve is joined by author Bernie Taylor to talk about his book, Before Orion. Bernie leads us through a discussion of the origin of myths, the human psyche and the birth of heroes.

Learn More About our Guest:
Bernie Taylor, author of Before Orion
https://beforeorion.com/

You can learn more about Beyond the Big Screen and subscribe at all these great places:

www.atozhistorypage.com
www.beyondthebigscreen.com

Click here to support Beyond the Big Screen!
https://www.subscribestar.com/beyondthebigscreen
https://www.patreon.com/beyondthebigscreen

Click to Subscribe:
https://www.spreaker.com/show/4926576/episodes/feed
email: steve@atozhistorypage.com
www.beyondthebigscreen.com
https://www.patreon.com/historyofthepapacy

Parthenon Podcast Network Home:
parthenonpodcast.com

On Social Media:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/atozhistorypage
https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfThePapacyPodcast

Music Provided by:
“Crossing the Chasm” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Begin Transcript:

[00:00:00] this is beyond the big screen podcast with your host, Steve Guerra. Thank you so much for joining us again today, we are talking with author, Bernie Taylor, about his new book before Orion. Bernie Taylor is an independent naturalist and author before Orion finding the face of the hero of 2017 and biological time published in 2004.
His research explores the mythological connections and biological knowledge among prehistoric indigenous and ancient peoples. We will be discussing how the hero’s journey will be used in popular culture and in films, especially in the movie star wars. Thank you so much for joining us today. Bernie Stephen, thanks for having me on the show.
And I believe that the [00:01:00] story of this hero’s journey is one that we all traveled. Now Bernie, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself for your background? Sure. I’ll kind of tell you how I fell into this. I wrote the previous book biological time, which was about how plants and animals know when to do things.
How’s a salmon known when the migrant river. The salmon node to come together, spawn how to geese know when to migrate and so on. It was a book about biological clocks. And then I asked myself the question, well, if someone must have known this before. And so I looked at a hunter gatherers. In fact, they have it in their calendars as well.
Ancient peoples from the Mediterranean, the biological clocks was how they found their food because they didn’t have Costcos the niceties that we have in our modern time. And when I was working on that, There was an image from Lusko, which the cave in France from about 17,000 years ago. And this image is of a mega loss serous.
A mega losses is like a huge elk, but just bigger and bigger rack and all that [00:02:00] sort of stuff. And this, this mega loss versus blowing out. So we can tell it by that has a huge rack. It’s in the fall, it’s running condition and it’s blown steam out it’s in the morning. So we kind of have a lot about time and place in that.
And under that Meg Gloucester’s with the blowing out the steam, it’s got 13 days. And I, I looked at that concept as it relates to the how the, um, large Angela Institute, deer, elk, how they drop their antlers and how they come together to run and an all the timing, all that sort of stuff. And it fit how hunter gatherers in native Americans targeted the deer.
And the elk was exactly the same timing as these people are doing it 17,000 years. Which makes sense because the animals didn’t change. Could you tell us a little bit why you wrote this particular book before Orion? I wrote bylaws time and I gave lots of presentations to the tribes, to scientific organizations, you know, classes, college classrooms, and so on.
And I put it on the shelf for [00:03:00] 13 years and I said, I’m going to raise my daughter who is now 16 picking off the shelf. 13 years later. I started getting with the dots. And I said to myself, well, if I’m going to find the origins of this concept of biological time, I need to go back further. And I went back 40,000 years ago in the ELCA steel cave, which has the oldest cave art or known to man, or has been at least chronicled that we can actually date.
And there’s a series of dots that run across this panel. It’s called the, the, um, the panel hands. And the one dot was dated to 40,000 years ago, five, six years ago. It was huge news. It’s a curved surface, this, this cave wall, which you can’t take a very good picture. So the media would just like, shoot a picture of the red dot and then people ask the question.
Well, what’s the red dot, you know, you know, if it was, uh, you know, running IBEX or a mega lossless, you know, they might kind of find a story. They couldn’t find the story in this red dot and it wasn’t a very good. So they ran with another image from the SA same cave system on the gallery disc. [00:04:00] And this one’s a flat panel.
You can see 80 or so dots streaming across. It’s absolutely beautiful. And well, I looked at that and I said to myself, well, let’s go working on that lots again, just like I didn’t enlist. And I also said to myself, this, this is a 10 meter panel, almost 30 feet. It’s huge. There’s gotta be more of than on this thing than dots red, these red discs and with the red district about the size of your hand, the most common animal in the Palaeolithic was the horse.
So maybe there’s a horse in there. So I go looking for the horse. I didn’t find a horse two, three years later, but before I found the horse, I found lines. I found elephants. I found. I found all these animals that were in either in Europe at the time or in Africa. And that’s how it led into this concept of before.
A big part of this buck is the hero’s journey. What is the hero’s journey? Good question. Really good question. And that ties in this whole thing before I said that there was, these [00:05:00] animals are in Europe, there’s animals in Africa, and there’s a, so then for someone traveled between the two places and I was strictly looking at this one, the.
And someone said to me, you know, you’re telling the story, the hero’s journey. And I knew the co roughly knew the concept of Joseph Campbell through, through the metaphor of the story of star wars. And Joseph Campbell said that theirs is a journey that we all take in our storytelling it’s and myths throughout the world.
He called it the model myth. And in this journey, someone leaves a place of familiarity. So Dorothy, she leaves the land. She leaves Kansas. And she goes off into her dream world. Then she goes to another place where she finds companions. We have the scarecrow with a 10 man and the cowardly lion and they help her on her journey.
And she also picks up magical ambulance and potions and things to help her and as the good witch and the bad witch and they battle each other and ultimately Darthy comes to face herself. She realizes that, you know, there’s no place like home. And so by facing that fantasy, she had of having to [00:06:00] leave.
Kansas to find the better place over the rainbow. She projected herself back to, um, to Kansas. And it’s like, that’s like a mini hero’s journey. And we, we tell this story throughout mythology and we see it in the big screens. Um, think of Lord of the rings, where Frodo goes on a journey to, to put the ring into the mountain of Mordor.
Yes. To return the ring to where it was smelted to set society. And then he goes back to his home to tell his story is very similar to the, the general theme of Darthy. And of course, we find this in star wars. Let’s back up just a little bit to get into your book. Before we talk about pop culture. You really focus in on one geographic area, that area of these caves in Southern Spain?
Probably not everybody is intimate with the knowledge of Southern Spanish, Northern north Africa [00:07:00] geography. Maybe you can set the table a little. How this area has a really specific geography. Absolutely. Well there’s I use two panels or two images in two caves. One is so-called Gorham action, which is at the rocker Gibraltar at the Strait between Southern Spain and Northern Africa.
Northern Africa would be at Morocco to one side is the Mediterranean. And the other side is the. The gallery of discs and the Al Casteel cave isn’t way north of Spain, near Bilbao. So we’re talking up the top side of the Iberian peninsula, Spain, geographically. This is. So a person in Northern Spain travels across Spain, he swims across.
We can actually show them in the image. He swims across the Strait of Gibraltar, where you find animal Marine animals, there’s dolphins seal, and then he arrives on the other side. Which has draft elephant lions with manes, which were not [00:08:00] in European caviar. So we, and the Barbary Macau, which is an animal and ape, that’s indigenous to the Atlas mountains of Morocco.