1970 Geloof en Wetenschap : Orgaan van de Christelijke vereeniging van natuur- en geneeskundigen in Nederland - pagina 119

A. H. ESSER

91

First, most of our imagery is unconscious, a concept easy to accept if one thinks of dream imagery which is often alien in form, but almost always relates to the waking state. Second, our earliest images, based on the immutability of structures of our physical environment and our group life, do not have easily identifiable counterparts in our contemporary world. In fact, our current „understanding" of territoriality and dominance hierarchy resulted from our initial observations of territorial behavior and peck order in birds, followed by the self-reflections stimulated by these observations. The original images of territoriality came about because man's behavior related to a physical territory, possibly in the family life stage, (as one of today's apes, the gibbon, shows) and certainly in the group living stage. Determined by the absence or presence of more dominant or submissive group members, the original images of dominance behavior came into being at that stage of our evolution in which we had to learn to live with strangers (or nonfamily members) while going about utilizing our resources. Possibly, this stage may be represented in the organization of small rodents, as John B. Calhoun convincingly argues (2), certainly it is fully comparable to the group organization of todays baboons or rhesus monkeys. The beginning change in the territorial image, reflected in the formulation of the Mosaic laws, can be considered an important stage in our cultural evolution. The Israelites were led out of bondage to the Promised Land. The images they had as slaves in their immutable Egyptian location had to be changed radically. A new identity had to be created for the Jews, the resultant uncertainty in their spontaneous behavior had to be counteracted. The rules of a God-given natural tribal order softened the blow caused by the loss of the familiar environment. At the same time, an exclusive dominance hierarchy was established by advocating that the monotheistic religion was the only guarantee for survival in a satisfactory manner. It is interesting to note that in Kilayim, (a later elaboration of the Sha' atnez principle, on the mixing of seed, etc.), the rules against mixed planting are more stringent for Israel than those to be used abroad — a derivative of territorial images. Also, the strong exhortations to kill other tribes living in Israel at the time, reveal an

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