DS: Hello, I'm David Suzuki. Our perceptions of where human beings fit in the natural scheme of things have varied enormously in time and place and are best seen in the mythologies of different cultures, including our own.

DS: We see the world through scientific eyes, seeking a particular understanding of nature. And by applying our scientific knowledge, we try to control nature. Our worldview has taken us far. But it's not the only way to reach for control or for understanding.

DS: Some try to exert an influence through prayer, or the ritual reenactment of mythical tales.

DS: This is a way of seeing that involves symbols, dramatization.

DS: All myths provide ways of looking at the world. They all were invented by the only species on Earth that makes up it's versions of reality.

DS: Mythologies preserves the insights gained over generations of wondering about life and death, about origins and destiny. Myths also preserve in imaginative form, stories about day to day conduct that provide a framework for social harmony, as well as survival. Of course, mythologies and ways of life do change over time. But for 99%, of humankind's existence, we've lived together in family groups of hunters and gatherers. Here at the edge of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, are the last remnants of that way of life. Perhaps in the stories of the San people, we can learn something about ourselves, something about our basic humanity that we tend to forget in our rapidly changing modern world.

DS: Traditions have given the San both a wealth of practical details about living in the desert, and a poetic understanding of their place in the world they know.

DS: Their myths speak of an intermingling of the natural world and the world of spirits of the lives of animals and people.

DS: This story, chronicles that time when animals and people were the same and lived together.

DS: That was when the handsome Kori Bustard was married to the beautiful Python Lady, but then entered the villain, the Trickster Jackal.

DS: She kidnapped Python Lady and in disguise, trying to take her place. But Jackal's eating habits gave her away.

DS: Many mythologies have a Trickster figure, a symbol of how unpredictable nature can be. In this story, the other characters have their revenge. They made up a bed with poison arrows hidden in it, when Jackal was tempted to lie down for sleep soon became death.

DS: Once mistrust and suspicion had entered the world, the original closeness between people and animals disappeared, and ever since they've gone their separate ways.

DS: Until recently, the ways followed by the San hadn't changed for centuries, nature was their storehouse. Even in the desert, they found everything they needed through knowledge built up over the generations

DS: One commodity in limited supply here, especially in the dry season is water. But now, three days march from the nearest well, experience yields enough to drink. It's all a question of knowing where to look for the collected remnants of the rainy season.

DS: Traditionally, the men have done the hunting with an ingenious use of available materials for effective weapons, and with skillful tracking.

DS: Their's was always a world of completeness, and unity. They lived in a landscape peopled with animal spirits, gods,, and the spirits of tribal ancestors. No one owned the land. Everything was shared equally, including food. Women added much to the larger gathering the fruits of desert plants, and they nurtured the next generation extending ancient tribal lines through time.

DS: Now, a long history of stability is coming to an end, something is happening to the San, and they have no myths to help them deal with the changes they're facing.

DS: Cattle are being grazed over traditional San hunting grounds, watering at their wells. Lured by new lifestyles, the San are setting up permanent camps around the wells.

DS: Where once all animals were wild, the sun now see the products of domestication, what they call animals that don't run away, and where land used to be open to anyone's use, where possessions were once kept to a minimum. The people are now trying to acquire property.

DS: And with men making all the decisions about what to own, women can't make much contribution to the family economy. Old equalities are slipping away.

DS: Meat no longer comes from the hunt.

DS: Every so often, an animal is butchered and the meat divided up. But the very idea of ownership is confusing. And instead of equal sharing, there are often arguments.

DS: With their water sources taken over by livestock, their natural storehouse being over grazed and their values turned upside down, the San are being precipitated into change.

DS: It's a change that most of humankind went through slowly. Starting about 10,000 years ago. The domestication of animals brought an end to a long history of hunting and gathering. With agriculture, societies and myths began to change.

DS: The Nile was one of the great rivers that nurtured early civilization. Like its counterparts in the Middle East. It's flooding fertilize the land, its fish, help feed a growing concentration of people and its waterways linked settlements with corridors of transport.

DS: The Egyptian myth also reflected the new social organization. It took central power and wealth to oversee the building of these massive monuments.

DS: This is the Indus River in what's now Paksitan. It was the site of the earliest civilization outside Asia and Egypt.

DS: Extensive ruins show a city of 40,000 power center of a culture called Harappan.

DS: This is Mohenjo Daro, one of the cities that flourished as part of the Indus Valley Civilization over 4000 years ago. It's one of the earliest settlements that developed along the great river deltas here and in the Middle East. Before cities like this, small bands of hunter gatherers had to be mobile in order to locate wild game and plants. Agriculture and the domestication of animals made permanent settlements like this possible and signaled a profound transition. In villages, people began to specialize as masons, farmers, laborers, leaders, different groups became stratified. With power concentrated at the top and extending over ever larger populations and territories. A hierarchy of men and Gods gradually replaced the diffuse spirit world of nomadic hunters and priests, who were the interpreters of divinity became the most visible shapers of society.

DS: Here outside the city of Madurai in Southern India, a Hindu festival reflects much the same pageantry and priestly influence that once helped build Mohenjo Daro.

DS: This is the golden horse of Lord Aligarh one of the manifestations of Vishnu, a god associated with goodness and with the source of the Ganges. Each year devout Hindus reenact a journey Aligarh is believed to have taken making his purifying image visible to all who had eyes to see.

DS: The festival is held at the height of the dry season. The divine figure must be kept refreshed. Appeasing the gods is one way of trying to influence individual destinies.

DS: Here, time is seen as cyclical and every lifetime has an opportunity to recapture a golden age of the past

DS: Like this song, the Hindus have their storytellers with myths about who peopled the past and how life them was lived.

DS: This is the story of a family's struggle to possess what was rightfully theirs.

DS: It's an epic tale of the earlier days of agriculture and of the strife between landowners and hunters.

DS: Like so many myths, this one harks back to a time when the lives of gods and people were closer, just as the San tell of the former closeness between animals and humans. But Hindu mythology contains one important element that's absent from the traditional world of the San. Hierarchy; everything is ordered, according to rank.

DS: Part of the epic tales of the killing of a wild boar that was destroying the family crops. In Hindu myth, animals may represent the wild disorder that runs counter to the serenity of the gods.

DS: The Hindu world is highly structured, Gods are ranked and so are heroes, figures who are partly mortal, partly divine. Human society itself is ordered according to caste.

DS: Even household goods are given a particular rank. Pots important, as vessels they are seen as symbols of the body containing the soul.

DS: The cow is sacred in Hindu mythology, so cattle effigies are good luck charms. Here local tradition carries the symbolism further. In this system, the image of the cow and the color white signifies the top of human society, the priesthood.  The tiger stands for the warrior class whose color is red.

DS: Green, as seen in the feathers of the peacock, represents the farmer, and for the lowest class, the labor, the black of the Cobra.

DS: One more way of ordering the world and giving all things a place.

DS: Madurai is a Hindu religious center. One of its most imposing buildings is its temple, where the mortal world merges with the immortal, where the gods with the help of human artisans make themselves visible to the human eye.

DS: In this Temple City of Madurai in Southern India, we see the likely descendants of a civilization that flourished over 4000 years ago. In the statues and carvings, we recognize much that is found in the excavations at Mohenjo Daro. But these are more than just ancient relics of the past. They're also a vibrant part of this culture today. And in Madurai, man is not a superior being set apart from nature. Here tradition sees all existence as interconnected. The gods, people, animals, the trees, even rocks. Hindu philosophy is directed inward, it attempts to achieve an inner perfection, which resonates in harmony with the rest of the cosmos.

DS: At a shrine within the main temple, people come to worship the planets, not to analyze or understand them, but to pray to them.

DS: Hindu belief sees every individual as an extension of the universe. Reaching inwards to the center of being means also reaching outwards, towards unity with the whole cosmos.

DS: The petals of the lotus symbolize outward extension with the deity at the center, the center extending out into the cosmos, just as the temple is seen as an extension of the body.

DS: A Hindu poet, centuries ago, consoled himself with a thought, the rich will make temples to the gods, but what shall I, a poor man do?

DS: My legs are pillars, my body, a shrine, my head, a cupula of gold. "Listen O Lord of the Meeting Rivers. Things standing shall fall, but the moving shall ever remain."

DS: Monuments to being may not last, but living cycles go on forever.

DS: This is the temple of Minakshi, a river goddess, sister to Lord Aligarh, whose journey on a golden horse brings a yearly celebration

DS: There is a sacred symbol in the rituals followed in Madgurai, the image of a fish it to recalls the importance of the river to the origins of this culture, a culture based on the belief that the universe is an eternal closed system. Nothing is created or destroyed, but only rearranged. Struggles between opposites in the universe bring temporary and repeated changes in an endless cycle, just as the river has it cycles of low and high water.

DS: A yearly festival centers on the river goddess Minnachi, meaning fisheye, she who keeps watch over the soul, as the carp does over her eggs, a vigilant goddess and at times of violent one.

DS: Every year, part of the festival reenact a mighty battle. Minnachi on the rampage against the lords of the universe. She is symbolized here by her word chariot, and by the young girl chosen this year to represent her.

DS: The passive serenity of the Divine is symbolized by the figure of the god Shiva.

DS: Minnachi, on the other hand, is an embodiment of the raw animal energy of the earthly in order to achieve the harmony, that is a major Hindu goal, both the serenity and the energy must be retained, but join in perfect balance.

DS: Legend has it that Minnachi's warlike restlessness would persist until she met the being who had become her husband. And that was Lord Shiva.

DS: Now, for the first time in her life Minnachi's true feminine nature emerges. And the new equilibrium is achieved in the marriage of Minnachi and Shiva in the vital blending of earthly energy and serenity of the spirit.

DS: The festival will reach its climax in a mammoth celebration of the divine and harmonious marriage.

DS: Already the wedding gifts are being paraded by the splendid richness of the ritual gifts from Shiva to his bride, as well as the offerings from their assembled well wishers.

DS: The next morning, the feeling of Carnival reaches its peak.

DS: For the people who've been streaming in from the surrounding villages and countryside, this is the moment of tremendous anticipation. And that last, the wedding procession begins.

DS: To be in contact with one of the ropes pulling the bridegroom's chariot is to become one with the most powerful God in the Hindu pantheon, Shiva. At this time of year, he emerges from the sanctity and seclusion of the temple, and moves among the people in a huge, fantastic contraption, attend temple on wheels.

DS: Now with the power of the Gods and the power of belief, differences in caste disappear. For the moment, everyone is equal. Everyone joins in the exaltation of union with the Divine.

DS: The whole festival underlines the basic Hindu philosophy, the belief in a world of shifting hierarchies as the divine, the human and the animal interact to bring about greater or lesser degrees of balance and harmony.

DS: The history of civilization has seen a cavalcade of cultures, each with its own framework of belief, most with a number of gods and goddesses.

DS: But another worldview was to appear, not from the banks of any river, but out of the desert. The profits from this dark and barren landscape saw a remote God dwelling beyond the stars, a single god, who was not of the Earth, but above it, banishing all earthly deities and spirits, a God who created all things. It was an idea that would come to dominate our Western world.

DS: In a sense, it was the sea that would add a further dimension to human belief. For it was the sea that carried early Greek traders around the civilized world. They brought back not only new products, but new ideas. The old idea was that supernatural forces were at work in human destiny, and in nature.

DS: But there was a spirit of independence among the seafaring people on the Greek islands. Hearing so many different notions. They began asking questions about the world and addressed their questions, not to the gods, but to nature itself.

DS: This is the birthplace of Pythagoras, the island of Samos. Those mountains behind me are along the Turkish coast in Asia Minor. This was once a busy part for trade from the entire civilized world. And it was here, about 2500 years ago, that occurred one of those periods in history that exerted a profound effect on the course of human affairs. A handful of exceptional individuals, the first great philosophers, began to look at the world around them in a new and radically different way.

DS: You might say, science began with numbers, with mathematics, and the idea that nature could be measured, quantified, and for a practical seafaring culture of traders and fishermen, that idea made sense. The Greeks were reaching for a new and different understanding of the world.

DS: One Greek thinker intuitively suggested that all matter was constructed of simple particles, another suggested we could trace our ancestry back to fish.

DS: The ideas themselves were less important than the worldview they reflected, that behind the changing face of nature, there were simple and intelligible principles, operating on a logical basis, and not on the whim of the gods.

DS: There was already a god in the Greek pantheon, who seemed to symbolize the new spirit of clarity, Apollo, the god of reason, whose temple was here at Delphi. But in this golden age, Greek culture balanced the claims of reason against the powers of chaos. For three months of the year, Apollo handed the temple over to Dionysius, god of the irrational, the instinctive.

DS: A traditional dance portrays an image of disorder, the confusion of the maze in Crete, where the Minotaur terrorize the people. The hero Theseus slew the monster and unwelcomed the dark mysteries of the labyrinth.

DS: This triumph of order and reason, symbolizes what happened in Greek culture, as the rational approach to nature became dominant and open the way for modern science.

DS: We all know that as the Earth revolves around the Sun, it spins and that causes day and night and the tilt of its axis produces the seasons. We speculate about an expanding universe, or the smallest particles that make up atoms. As a scientist, I take it for granted that theories about natural phenomena can be expressed in mathematical or abstract terms, that there are principles in nature that we can discover. But it wasn't always so obvious. It took a revolution in thinking to see things this way. In the Agora, below the Acropolis of ancient Athens, thinkers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle took up the ideas of the early Greek philosophers. They proposed that there are ideals in nature that are absolute and eternal, but can be discovered by objective rational thought. They left a tradition that was the foundation of all Western science.

DS: Within that tradition, there were as many new ideas as there were philosophers with one major disagreement. What was the true nature of reality?

DS: Plato argued that the most basic forms were those that existed only in abstract thought. To him, forms visible to the eye, were only extensions of eternal abstract patterns, what could be seen was temporary, subject to change.

DS: Plato took Pythagorian mathematics, and extended it to the structure of all creation. To him, the only justification for studying nature was to reveal reason at work in the universe.

DS: He contrasted the lasting reality of ideas, with the changeable, illusory perception of the senses.

DS: To Plato, we are like underwater creatures, seeing only the shifting patterns of light on the ocean floor. And from this evidence of the senses, trying to imagine the precise geometry of the ripples on the surface of the water. He wrote, if we are ever to know anything, absolutely, we must be free from the body, and behold the actual realities with the eye of the soul alone.

DS: Aristotle, on the other hand, held that Matter and Form were simply two aspects of the same reality, and that both must be considered in any attempt to grasp an understanding of nature. If anything, he favored the evidence of the senses over abstract arguments, and he became a dedicated student of living nature.

DS: He saw the whole spectrum of life as an ordered hierarchy, a ladder, climbing to the complex from the simple, with humankind, at the very top. After Aristotle, investigations into nature were pushed in every direction. But with the decline of civilization in the classical world, the spirit of inquiry faded away.

DS: Ultimately, Western thought was dominated by religious authority. The revealed truth was seen as the only accepted way of interpreting reality. Based on opposing themes of sin and salvation, a new order was perceived. As Augustine wrote, it is not necessary to probe into the nature of things. It is enough for the Christian to believe that the only cause of all created things, whether heavenly or earthly, whether visible or invisible, is the goodness of the Creator. The One True God.

DS: The church saw a Chain of Being extending down from the everlastingly pure order of the heavens to the transitory, the corruptible here on Earth and below, for the unrepentant, there was the pit of eternal damnation.

DS: The monastic orders served as the guardians of men souls. But it was also here in their secluded libraries that the knowledge of the ancient world was preserved. The light of Greek insight flickered and faltered for 1000 years, all through the dark ages, but it was never completely extinguished.

DS: It was a stagnant time. The universe of the Middle Ages was as walled in as any medieval town. It was a worldview, dominated by unbending church authority, impregnable to change, with everything in place in a static hierarchy descending from God. Just about the only body of thought opposing this rigid view, was a mixture of metallurgy, magic, and mysticism known as alchemy. It focused on change. Every physical transformation that could be brought about in the alchemist flask, properly interpreted, reflected some inner transformation of the soul.

DS: It was a search for perfection, as embodied in the one substance that resisted corruption, gold. This perfection was expressed as a marriage between the masculine, the Sun, and the feminine, Moon.

DS: The alchemists saw the dualities of human experience mirrored in the changing states of matter. And so, lifetimes were spent trying to bring all the opposites together in exquisite balance.

DS: For every alchemist, there was a tantalizing image, the forces of corruption vanquished, and the Perfected Human Soul victorious. But eventually, the Mystic Quest was abandoned. And with the rebirth of the scientific mathematical view, even the power of revealed truth was challenged. 

DS: Kepler redefined natural law, Copernicus with the planets in motion, not around the Earth, but around the sun. And by watching the swaying of a cathedral lamp and Pisa, Galileo embarked on his monumental studies on motion, he developed the grand concept of a vast homogeneous universe. Whatever the local differences might be, everywhere there was the same matter and the same laws of motion. 

DS: Paradoxically, a spirit of mysticism was to underlie some of the thinking of the man who finally tied together all these scientific views. The ultimate expression of the mathematical universe was formulated by one of the giants in the history of science, Sir Isaac Newton, a practitioner of the mystic arts of alchemy, but also a genius with numbers. Here in the seclusion of Cambridge, he took what had been discovered and proposed by those who preceded him, and drew it all into a comprehensive picture of something orderly, measurable, understandable.

DS: Newton compiled most of his important work at Trinity College in Cambridge. This is the college library, where many of his personal letters and books are still kept.

DS: One of the towering figures in modern science, yet he's also been called the last of the magicians. He straddled two powerful ways of knowing the universe. He searched the accumulated body of knowledge called alchemy, to see whether it provided to any insights into the structure of matter. But he also applied mathematics in a new science of physics, which soon pushed alchemy aside. He wasn't quite ready to abandon the old yet he himself provided a new way to perceive nature.

DS: Newton invented the science of optics. He analized light, and formulated the lows by which white light can be broken up into a spectrum of colors. The mathematics of the rainbow.

DS: By applying mathematics, he saw a universe that was predictable and controllable, a mighty machine, set in motion by God, but whose laws could be understood by the human intellect.

DS: He expressed in precise numerical terms, the forces that bind the earth and the planets to the sun, the same forces that control the swing of the pendulum.

DS: Newtonian physics, a new order, a new means of control. It's a view of the world that has overwritten millennia of believing that the aim of humankind was integration with the gods through prayer through worship.

DS: Such belief succeeded even older mythologies that contended directly with the powerful forces of nature, and preserved in their storytelling the skills and attitudes vital to survival.

DS: The clockwork universe, a different mythology, a new symbol.

DS: It's given us the tools to achieve tremendous power over the physical world. But by its very success, it has unleashed a monster with a momentum of its own a modern Minotaur in a labyrinth of our own creating.

DS: Perhaps the new mythology has gone so far. It's distorted our vision, dazzled us with our growing abilities to recreate the world.

DS: The Newtonian view deeply affects our lives today, and dominates our thinking. It takes the clockwork universe that Newton saw and analyzes it, pulls it apart, measures it piece by piece, and describes each separate part in numerical terms. With the help of technology, it tries to put the parts back together, so the machine will do what we want. But however much Newtonian science has accomplished, it's still just one in a long series of perceptions of what the world is like. In that sense, it's our most recent myth, it's just one more way of trying to precieve reality.

DS: Laser light provides one of the most precise measuring devices we have today, the modern outcome of Newton's study of the spectrum.

DS: Lasers create holograms, three dimensional images that seem to hover in space. But they can also be used to probe chemical reactions between molecules and to measure precisely the orbit of the moon.

DS: Measurement is the basis of our manmade world of the synthetic version of nature.

DS: Our satellites orbit other planets, following trajectories according to Newton's laws of gravity, as they work to extend even further our reach, our knowledge.

DS: It's an irony that the whole technological complex that isolates us from the rest of nature, at the same time, lifts us high enough to see the whole sweep of our planet.

DS: Perhaps the revelations of science can be viewed in the light of much older beliefs to give us new insights new myologies that will reconnect us to the living planet that gave us birth.

DS: So far in this series, we've seen how biological evolution produced the human species, and how cultural evolution then gave rise to so many different worldviews, different ways of perceiving reality. Next week, we'll explore further the perceptions that have made science and technology, the dominant features of our culture, the belief that all of nature can be measured, controlled, and ultimately mastered.

DS: For us, the ultimate conquest of nature began with the wedding of science and Christianity. We see all of nature as having been set in place exclusively for our benefit. Next week, subdue the Earth.