Cheese and Spirituality, Part 2: The Great Dispersal

 

In Part 1 of Cheese and Spirituality we looked at the reasons why it makes sense to include spirituality within the interpretive framework used to evaluate cheese history. In this post, we will explore the intersection of the history of cheesemaking with that of spirituality, commencing in southwest Asia at the dawn of the Neolithic. We will then follow evidential trails as Neolithic first farmers dispersed far and wide following the 6200 BC climatic event.

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By the late stages of the Paleolithic, the powerful imaginative capacity and advanced cognitive abilities displayed by Homo sapiens seemed to portend that humankind was now poised for cataclysmic advances, which indeed took place as the Neolithic dawned. That is why the story of cheesemaking can be thought of as commencing around 11,500 years ago when human imagination burst forth in an unprecedented manner at Göbekli Tepe. Imagination would soon inspire first farmers to become cheesemakers.

In addition to its stunning monumental architecture, Göbekli Tepe is noteworthy for the complex spiritual iconography that was etched into the massive stone pillars of the temple complex, which included images that depict death and danger, images representing a menagerie of animals that were viewed as somehow sacred or transcendent, and images that seem to be related to fertility and birth. Clearly, this was a communal space of gathering that attracted Paleolithic hunter-forager bands from far and wide to observe spiritual aspirations likely associated with death, birth and the investiture of transcendent sacredness upon the animal world. These aspirations were obviously compelling enough to inspire the monumental effort needed to erect the temple complex.

As framed out previously in the “In the Beginning...” post, the discovery of agriculture occurred at about the same time and in the same approximate region as the Göbekli Tepe site, which soon led to the revolutionary Neolithic sedentary farming strategy that included small-scale livestock herding, dairying and cheese and butter making, as inferred from various evidential proxies. From that point forward, evidence of a linkage between milk, cheese, butter and spirituality begins to appear in the archaeological record.

The first direct evidence of said linkage occurs shortly after the onset of pottery technology during the 7th Millenium BC. Pottery quickly led to the fabrication of ceramic butter churns, which are still used today by some traditional pastoral cultures. It is important to note here that the onset of ceramic butter churns in the archaeological record should not be interpreted as the discovery of butter making but rather as a technological advancement of a process long established that now left an unequivocal signature in the archaeological record. Almost certainly, butter making took place well before pottery technology came on the scene, with churning carried out using animal (goat) skins (as is still widely practiced in many traditional pastoral communities). Animal skins, however, leave no permanent trace in the archaeological record.

The most interesting sidebar of pottery churns is that by the 6th millennium BC, the archaeological record also contains miniature votive butter churns recovered from Neolithic community shrines. The widespread occurrence of votive churns provides strong evidence that butter had attained sacred status during the early Neolithic and was used in cultic worship rites across southwest Asia by this time. A particularly stunning example of a butter-spirituality connection is the reported finding of a miniature butter churn that is supported by a female goddess figurine, a fertility goddess. The archaeological context of these votive butter churns strongly suggests that they were generally dispatched to secure the fertility of the milking flock, and probably to secure human fertility as well. Again, the churning of butter and the investiture of spiritual transcendence on butter making almost certainly precedes the onset of pottery technology, perhaps extending back to the origins of butter and cheese making.

Furthermore, cheese almost certainly held a similar sacred status alongside of butter, although evidence of such is more difficult to glean archaeologically until much later. As noted previously, acid coagulated and acid-heat coagulated cheese and butter oil were produced together as co-products from yogurt using a traditional technological sequence still used today in pastoral nomadic communities. Both butteroil and cheese were essential to stave off the ever-present threat of crop failure, starvation and death, and they were both products of milk and therefore associated with birth and fertility. Thus, one can infer with reasonable confidence that both butter and cheese were considered worthy of sacred veneration from at least the 7th millennium BC, and probably much earlier in the Neolithic.

The continued sacred status of dairy products over time became evident as southwest Asian communities dispersed hither and yon in response to the 6200 BC climatic event. For example, an intriguing migratory surge that commenced with a maritime crossing of the Aegean Sea from northwest Anatolia to the Balkan Peninsula, and which then followed the northern Mediterranean rim of Europe westwards is worth considering here. Eventually, when this surge of Anatolian refugees reached coastal Iberia, a migratory spur detached from the coastal movement and turned northwards through France, reaching the Atlantic coast of Brittany near the southern entrance of the English Channel by around 5000 BC. This train of refugees then crossed the English Channel and settled in southern England by around 4000 BC, where they soon commenced construction of the Stonehenge complex.

Recent studies suggest that cheese and /or butter were employed in cultic practices associated with Stonehenge, possibly indicating the cultural conservation of the cheese and spirituality linkage by the former Anatolians as they moved across the European continent. It seems plausible that these refugees from Anatolia retained a cultural memory of the sacred status of cheese and butter, and perhaps even an ancient memory of Göbekli Tepe. This in turn leads one to wonder whether other ancient circular rings of standing stones found in Ireland and in sites on the Eurasian steppe also share connections with Neolithic Near East spiritual practices involving dairy products. At this point, however, I am not aware of any evidence to support this hypothesis.

Meanwhile, back in southwest Asia, migrations out of the Fertile Crescent southwards following the 6200 BC event gave rise to two of humanity’s first great civilizations, the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations. By the 4th millennium BC, cheese and butteroil had become important elements in the religious practices of both Egypt and Sumer. In Egypt, for example, cheese was included in the provisioning of aristocratic tombs for the afterlife, a practice that is archeologically identifiable over a 2000-year span of time during the Pharaonic dynasties. Especially noteworthy in Egypt was the investiture of transcendent sacredness upon the cow, as evident in the beloved Egyptian bovine deity Hathor, who represented maternal care and fertility and who, according to Egyptian myth, suckled the pharaohs.

The sacred status of the cow in Egypt has broader implications in the western Judeo-Christian cultural context. For example, the Hebrew Scriptures in the book of Exodus records that the Israelites, newly liberated from 400 years of servitude in Egypt, impulsively fabricated a “golden calf” at Mount Sinai when they lost confidence in Moses and the Lord of Hosts to lead them safely to the Promised Land. It is perhaps not surprising that the Israelites, following the example of the Egyptian culture that had surrounded them for 400 years, projected their deep fear of future demise onto the cow, the ultimate Neolithic “plan B” insurance policy for survival when all else fails. A future Cheese and Spirituality post will examine Shavuot, the Jewish Feast of weeks, which is sometimes referred to as the dairy festival because dairy foods, which were associated with the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, are traditionally eaten as part of the religious celebration, especially cheese items.

To the east of Egypt, milk, cheese and butter played major roles in the communal religious rites and monumental temple worship practices of the Sumerian civilization of southern Mesopotamia. The extensive archeological record of Sumer is presented in detail in the book “Cheese and Culture” and will not be repeated here except to reiterate that dairy products in Sumer were routinely employed in temple cultic rites and played a stunning role in the mythology that underpinned the sacred marriage rite and fertility rites, often portraying dairy products using poetic sexual imagery. Indeed, milk, cheese and butteroil underpinned both the spiritual infrastructure and the economy of Sumer. This outsized cultural footprint was then transferred to the Akkadian and Babylonian civilizations that followed Sumer in Mesopotamia. Furthermore, extensive linkages of cheese and spirituality spread northwards from Mesopotamia to the Hittite civilization of Anatolia and westwards to the Canaanite peoples of the Levant, and ultimately was culturally transferred to Greek civilization, Roman civilization and beyond.

Milk, cheese and butter also left a lasting footprint in eastern spirituality as dairying and dairy product technology diffused eastwards in response to the 6200 BC climate event. As noted in an earlier Great Dispersal post, dairying and cheesemaking spread eastwards along the northern fringes of the Eurasian steppe through cultural assimilation at the forest-steppe interface until the 5th millennium BC, when climatic stresses progressively forced sedentary mixed agricultural communities to rely more heavily on their cattle grazing out on the steppe grasslands. Ultimately, this gave rise to new cultures organized around mobile pastoralism, made possible through the domestication of the horse. During this transformative period of the late 5th millennium BC a new language, the ancestor of the Indo-European languages, developed among mobile pastoralists located on the steppe situated between the Lower Volga River to the north and the Caucasus Mountains to the south. These pastoralists, known as the Yamnaya culture, ultimately dispersed across Europe and much of Asia on horseback, bringing with them a new linguistic infusion that gave rise to over 400 Indo European languages that today are spoken by around 40% of the world’s population.

The unprecedented mobility of horseback riding, which enabled mass migrations to radiate out from the steppe in every direction, not only left an indelible linguistic fingerprint across much of Asia and most of Europe today but also a genetic fingerprint that is still detectable. In other words, the record of these vast migrations of steppe pastoralist is not only evident in the languages spoken in Europe and Asia today but also etched into the very DNA of most Europeans and many Asians.

Now, returning to the linkage of cheese and spirituality, the mass migrations of steppe Yamnaya people’s also infused into Europe and vast tracts of Asia a cultural/spiritual heritage that was strongly centered around the cow, milk, and yogurt, cheese and butter making. This is clearly reflective in the proto-Indo-European mother tongue of the Yamnaya culture and the mythology preserved in that language. The cow was sacred and a key figure in the steppe creation story; dairy products were revered and worthy of sacrifice to the steppe deities, whereas agricultural crops were not considered worthy. They believed that nature is animated by spirits, and that dairy products were sacred because they served as a connection to nature and spirit world. Spiritual taboos were built into the culture to conserve the bovine breeding stock even if it meant that the family had to endure hunger for a period, such was the was sacred esteem held by the Yamnaya for the cow.

The relationship between the steppe communities and their dairy livestock can be thought of as the latest chapter in perhaps one of the greatest and most enduring love affairs in the archaeological-anthropological record. By the time migrating steppe peoples poured into Europe towards the end of the 4th millennium BC, Europe had long since been infused with a strong bond between cheese and spirituality, carried by the Anatolian refugees who had settled across Europe following the 6200 BC climatic event. Now, in the late 4th and 3rd millennium BC, Europe received a new infusion of spiritual connections involving dairying and cheesemaking, which arguably reinforced the existing spiritual appreciation already embedded in European culture, ultimately enabling broad linkages to persist to this day, as evidenced by the ongoing deep love affair of Europeans with their traditional artisanal cheesemakers. Arguably, this spiritual dimension, coupled with the environmentally diverse and cheesemaking-friendly landscape of Europe helped set the stage for Europe to become the epicenter of imaginative cheesemaking innovation during antiquity and the medieval centuries to follow, which are framed out in the book "Cheese and Culture".

Eastward migrating steppe pastoralists also left a profound legacy of cheese and spirituality in Asia, as evident in the material and cultural record. For example, we now know that dried cheese played a specific role in the funeral rites of the nomadic Steppe pastoralists because one of the migratory spurs taken by pastoralists from the Russian Altai region on the border of Mongolia near the end of the third Millenium BC brought them to the Tarim Basin in the Xinjiang region of far northwestern China. The winters in the Tarim Basin are very dry and very cold, and summers are very dry and very hot, and it turns out that this environmental combination exerts a remarkable preservative effect on human remains. Indeed, several cemeteries dating from the second Millennium BC were recently discovered that contain dried, amazingly well preserved, corpses that have come to known as the “cheese mummies” because of the placement of dried cheese with the bodies of the deceased.

For example, a “cheese mummy” woman who was clad in a beautiful felt hat and exquisite clothing, wore a neckless that contained pieces of dried acid-coagulated cheese, which has been called “kefir cheese” because it contained DNA from the signature microbiome of the mildly alcoholic fermented milk beverage, kefir. Most likely, the kefir microorganisms were present in the acid coagulated cheese as contaminants from the parallel production of kefir, which along with the alcoholic beverage koumiss from mare’s milk, was revered by steppe cultures, understandably so given the absence of wine and beer making out on the steppe. Other “cheese mummy” corpses had woven pouches fastened to their belts which contain dried cheese. Why dried cheese? Presumably because it was seen as essential preparation for the journey that takes place after death, the same motivation that inspired the Egyptians to provision aristocratic Egyptian tombs with cheese mentioned earlier. Provisioning of the deceased with cheese was perhaps part of the sacred duty of the living, to make sure that the deceased was well prepared for what was to come.

Steppe pastoralists also journeyed southwards through Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, ultimately bringing their dairy-dependent way of life and their language, genetics and spiritual beliefs to northern India, where they settled in Ganges River Valley around 1500 BC. These steppe peoples, the Arya, composed a collection of written religious Scriptures, the Hindu Vedas, which remain foundational to Hindu culture and spirituality. The Vedic Scriptures, along with the Vedic commentaries known as the Upanishads, held tightly to the steppe reverence for the cow and the sacred status of dairy foods, thus transferring to ancient India a cultural and spiritual legacy that continues to this day.

The Vedic scriptures and Upanishads contain numerous references to milk, clarified butteroil or Ghee, and curds or fresh cheese, which highlight their defining roles as offerings to the gods in various religious observances. The Upanishads also have much to say about the relationship between the purity of food and the purity of thought, and moral purity. Food purity laws in Hindu India (like those of Judaism and Islam) have strong moral implications for day-to-day life. Cheese (acid coagulated and acid-heat coagulated types) and ghee/butteroil remain sacred items in India that are still used in numerous religious celebrations, especially those related to birth, marriage and fertility, and death.

Around 500 BC a new religious sage, the Buddha Gautama, arose in India who attracted a dedicated following. The Buddha assimilated the Hindu reverence for milk and milk products, including Hindu notions of their purity as a food and their importance in certain religious rites. The Buddha also viewed milk as having medicinal properties. After the Buddha’s death, his disciples became the vehicle for the spread of Buddhist beliefs and monastic practices far and wide.

In the far east, Buddhist monks brought their teachings to Tibet, China and southeast Asia, then to the Korean peninsula, and from there to Japan. In all of these regions except for Tibet (where pastoralist from the Mongolian steppe had migrated during the late 3rd millennium BC, bringing dairying and cheesemaking with them), the milk and milk products revered by Buddhist monastics were alien to well-established local food cultures, and dairy products were firmly resisted in terms of their incorporation into the local cuisine.

Nevertheless, wherever Buddhist monks settled and established monasteries, they brought with them a “dairy infrastructure”, a capacity to produce the dairy products that are required for religious rites and food purity and medicinal needs. Therefore, the bottom line is that milk, butteroil and fresh cheese curds, played a much larger role in the spiritual practices and spiritual development of the Far East than is generally recognized today, even though most far eastern cultures did not assimilate dairy products into their daily diet and cuisine.