The Nomadic Alternative – Page 135

of their golden ornaments and their habit of using gold foil as if it were wrapping paper, they concluded that the Amerindians must be the survivors of the Golden Race. When many of the tribes were found to be cannibals, this led to a speedy revulsion or attempts to condone the practice. Jean de Léry spent the year 1557 with the Tupinambas in Brazil, and found them naturally good, liberal, hospitable, affable, carefree. Montaigne interviewed three of their chiefs sent to Rouen for the inspection of the French King, pardoned their cannibalism as a minor sin, and also greatly admired them. The Tupinamba feasted on their prisoners fattened for the occasion and grilled. "The old women", de Léry wrote, "were more anxious to taste human flesh than the young, and pestered those who had prisoners to hurry up", adding that one didn't have to go as far as America to see things equally monstrous.

One fact remained. However admirable or abominable the Tupinamba may or may not have been, they were not the survivors of the Golden Race wandering harmlessly through the forest. They practised an elaborate tropical garden culture, lived in long houses that held up to three hundred people, and the chief who Montaigne questioned said he could only put three or four thousand men into the field at a time. Far from being simple savages the Tupinamba, like the Iroquois, were hardly savages at all.

The ancient mythographers were less inclined to confuse the issues. Hesiod's Works and Days provides a metaphorical model of the moral and social degeneration of man in relation to advances in his technology, and is a more sophisticated version of the process than the opening chapters of Genesis. His stages of human culture pass from the Ages of Gold to those of Silver, Bronze and Iron. The Bronze and Iron Ages are of course an archaeological reality which Hesiod knew from his own experience; but, though alluvial gold beads are among the earliest metal objects known, he conceives the Gold and Silver Ages symbolically. Arranged in the reverse order of the alchemist's scheme of metallic perfection the Ages represent a