Comment by tor825gl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tor825gl | Hacker News Reader

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This wisdom is preserved for us in the story of Esau and Jacob. Esau was a hunter and Jacob was a farmer. When hunting went badly, Esau's desperation for protein, which Jacob could guarantee a supply of by cultivating lentils, was such that he gave up his whole birthright in exchange for the food.

The era in which humans chose whether to continue with a hunter gatherer life or join the new farming communities also seems to have influenced the stories of Adam and Eve ("cursed is the ground because of you; through toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it will yield for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your bread") and Cain and Abel.

Some have also suggested that archaic prohibitions against eating the food of fairies were a taboo designed to warn off young people from leaving farming or herding groups and joining hunter gatherer communities. They would be 'enchanted' by the easy going lifestyle but then end up hungry and sick.

The need to spend hours every day working a field, in a season when food was plentiful, in order to prepare for another season 6 or 9 months away, must have been a huge cultural crossroads, possibly a bigger break from our close animal ancestors than tool making, and its influence is still with us. Rules around not eating animals who are needed to supply milk and to reproduce the herd similarly cast a long shadow.

That is a very interesting take. Would you mind sharing some sources, preferably academic, that discuss the topic of agrarian/hunter-gatherer relations and its influence on historical stories and myths?

Some academic sources:

- The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture by Jacques Cauvin (1994/2000)

- Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos and the Realm of the Gods by David Lewis‑Williams & David Pearce (2005)

- Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth by Walter Burkert (1972/1983)

- Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion by HC Peoples et al. (2016)

- Subsistence: Models and Metaphors for the Transition to Agriculture by H. Starr (2005)

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Myths didn’t juts reflect the shift, they were also one of the cultural tools that made the shift psychologically possible.

For instance, the H&G worldview is cyclical (time repeats) but the agricultural worldview is linear. H&G myths emphasize eternal returns, cycles of creation and destruction, spirits of rivers, trees, animals. Agricultural myths introduce beginning of time, progress, destiny, apocalypse.

As animals became domesticated, their spiritual status from H&G mythology declines, while the status of plants and land rises under agriculture. There’s agricultural symbolism in Christ’s body being bread and his blood being wine.

The shift the agriculture produces surplus, property, inheritance, kings, priests, and so myth arise to justify social structures that don’t make sense in nomadic foraging bands.

Sacrifice is an agricultural logic. Classic pattern: god dies, god’s body becomes food, eating is communion. It is directly agricultural: plant dies when harvested, seed is buried (like a corpse), resurrection in spring. Sacrifice becomes cosmic agriculture.

The Garden -> Exile story is a pattern we see in Genesis (“By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread”) but also in Greek mythology; Kronos’ Golden Age changes when Zeus forces humans to work.

In H&G, the trickster gods (Coyote, Raven, Loki, Anansi) are central, but with damaging they become dangerous, marginalized, punished because agriculture requires law, calendar, taboo, not chaos.

Thanks for this!

Another pattern might be that, whereas oral culture matched the 'sufficient unto the day' ethos of hunter gatherers, writing reflected the new agricultural process of carefully building up and storing for the future. Rather than a neutral technological innovation, it embodied the psychological shift.

This make me think of Into the Wild. Its cultural appeal may come from its resonance with those ancient cautionary tales.

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