A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

logical enough, since it now seems well established that birds migrate with the aid of the earth’s
magnetic field. Experiments conducted at Manchester University by Dr Robin Baker showed that
human beings are also sensitive to earth magnetism; blindfolded students were driven long
distances - as much as forty miles - by a circuitous route, and then asked to point in the direction of
‘home’; sixty-nine per cent were accurate within an arc of 45 degrees, almost a third of them within
10 degrees.
It is easy enough to see that the ability to find water and to ‘point’ in the direction of home must
have been essential for our ancestors for millions of years, and that this explains why their
descendants still possess these abilities. This, in turn, suggests answers to certain questions raised
by Marshack’s analyses. He argues convincingly that the series of ‘snakey’ dots on a piece of bone
are a code indicating the times of the rising of the moon. But why should our ancestors have been
interested in what time it rose? They did their hunting by day, not by night. And if their aim was
simply to work out when herds of reindeer or bison would begin their annual migration, then small
vertical notches - such as are found on other pieces of bone - would serve just as well for a ‘tally’.
We know that the moon has a powerful influence on the earth’s magnetic field - just as on the tides;
it is probably this magnetic influence that causes disturbances in mental patients at the time of the
full moon (and which leads us to speak of ‘lunacy’). Researches carried out by Dr Leonard Ravitz
of the Virginia Department of Health showed that there is a difference in electrical potential
between the head and chest, and that in mental patients there are far greater fluctuations in this
difference than in normal people; the greatest fluctuations occur at the times of the new and full
moon. A Japanese doctor, Maki Takata, showed in the 1940s that the rate at which blood curdles -
the ‘flocculation index’ - is affected by sunspot activity. Experiments on the electrical field of trees
- carried out by Harold Saxton Burr and F. S. C. Northrop in the 1930s - showed that this was also
affected by sunspots. But the most significant deduction from their experiments was that living
matter is somehow held together, shaped, by electrical fields, just as iron filings are held together
and shaped by a magnet. This is the reason why if half a sea urchin’s egg is killed with a hot
needle, the remaining half develops into a perfect but half-sized embryo (an experiment performed
early in this century by Hans Driesch); each half contains a complete electrical ‘blueprint’ of the
whole. But the astonishing thing is that the electric field should have a shape, like the jelly-mould
that turns a blancmange into a miniature castle. (It is this same mould that allows certain creatures
to re-grow lost limbs.) It is as if the force of life controlled matter by means of electric fields.
So there is nothing surprising in the discovery that animals are sensitive to the earth’s magnetic
field; it would be astonishing if they were not. And since this field is altered by the movements of
our neighbours in space - the planets as well as the sun and moon - it would also be surprising if
our remote ancestors did not feel instinctively the connection between the earth beneath his feet and
the heavens above his head. The sensitivity to underground water - and its electrical fields - must
have been developed by our ancestors millions of years ago, perhaps in the great droughts of the
Pliocene.
All of which suggests that there was no need for ancient man to ‘ask questions’ about the forces of
nature; he felt them around him, as a fish can feel every change in the pressure of the water through
nerves in its sides. The result must have been a curious sense of unity with the earth and heavens
that homo sapiens lost a long time ago. Ancient man’s religion was not an attempt to ‘explain’ the
universe; it was a natural response to its forces, like the response of the skin to sunlight.