This article was first published in the Newsletter of the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica in December 2015. In October 2019 the website went down, and hasn't come back up. So I'm posting the full text of the article here in the meantime. It covers both the subject of The Sacred History of Being, and also something of how the book came to be written. In 2018 the article was published as a chapter in Man and the Divine.
TY, October 30, 2019.
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“Enki’s beloved
Eridug, E-engura whose inside is full of abundance! Abzu, life of the Land,
beloved of Enki! Temple built on the edge, befitting the artful divine powers!”
From: ‘Enki’s journey to Nibru.’ (Black,
Cunningham, Robson, Zόlyomi, The Literature of Ancient Sumer, 2004,
p. 330)
The Sacred History of Being (2015) is
about philosophy and its origin in the context of ancient cultic life. As such
it argues that philosophy as a discipline is very old, as Plato himself said in
the Protagoras, and that it was not invented by the Greeks.
In my twenties, I was struck by the strong
interest the ancients had in the idea of limit – in art, architecture,
philosophy, and ritual. This interest did not much seem to engage modern
scholarly attention, with a couple of notable exceptions. Initially I had no
idea at all what the significance of the idea of limit might be, and no idea
where pursuing it would take me. Or that it would lead to a book it would take
me four years to write, and which would reshape my understanding of human
intellectual history in the process.
There is a standard form of image
from the earliest years of civilization, which consists of two opposed figures,
standing on either side of an object. The object can be a tree, an altar, a
table heaped with produce, lotus blossoms, animal foreparts, loaves, and so on.
The opposed figures can be human, animal, god or genie. This kind of image can
be found throughout the archaeological record of the Ancient Near East, and in
Egypt.
Questions arise from the ubiquity of this image, which appears in the context of those who had great power in the world, and also in funerary contexts, particularly in Egypt. It appears prominently in royal contexts in Assyria and in Babylonia. The image can be traced back as least as far as the settlement at Çatal höyük, now in modern Turkey, dating to some eight or nine thousand years before the present.
What does this image mean? It is nowhere explained, but
clearly had some kind of explanation at some time, even if its transmission in
later centuries was enabled simply by its status as a traditional iconographic
element. Why is it so prominently displayed, so persistent throughout time, and
apparently not discussed in the cultures in which it appears?
Some details of esoteric lore were written down in the
Ancient Near East – the colophons of the relevant tablets make it clear that
the contents were for the initiated only. The ritual procedures for the
installation of divine statues in Assyria and Babylonia survive, together with
some incantations which were part of the ritual. These tell us about the
ritual, and the elements involved in the ritual – the thigh of a ram, best
beer, mashatu-meal, and sacralised reeds, plus information about which stellar
constellations and planets a statue was to be pointed at as part of the
installation; and about the selection of craftsman’s tools which were disposed
of as part of the ritual (enclosed in the ram’s thigh, and deposited into the
river), in order to remove their responsibility for making divine images (not a
thing for mortals to undertake).
But we find no discussion of the rationale of the
installation ritual. Or discussion of the rationale of any other ritual which
they documented. This suggests that there were levels in the esoteric life of
Assyria and Babylonia: that the ritual details were important to record to
ensure consistency in the performance of the ritual, but the meaning of the
details, and the underlying rationale for the ceremony were transmitted orally,
and never committed to writing.
The image with the opposed figures standing around a ritual
object is clearly an image whose meaning and function was too important to
record in a temple or palace document. In which case it might appear that we
can never know what it signified, and why it was so important.
But, it is not so. Assyriologists have explored this image
as it appears in the Mesopotamian context, and have made some headway in understanding
the scope of its significance. They have established that, in terms of the
iconography, the Sacred Tree may stand in for the King. In other words, the two
ideas were understood to represent the same thing. The contemporary
understanding of the nature of the role of king in Assyria was that he was the
Regent of the god Ashur on Earth, and therefore the king represented an
emulation and image of the Divine on Earth.
But why a tree? The tree can stand in for the king, because
of two further ideas which are connected in the definition of what the king is.
The contemporary scholarly definition of the Divine in
Assyria, framed it as the source of all excellences and perfections, and all
knowledge.*1 Hence the importance of excellences and perfections of the life of
the king, as we find recorded in the Annals of Ashurbanipal in the late 7th
century B.C.E. (found in the ruins of his palace at Nineveh at the end of the
nineteenth century). As Ashur’s representative on Earth he excels in military
skills, in throwing the javelin, in horse riding, in the use of weapons; in
divining the will of the gods through divination by oil, and other arcane
skills; also in scribal excellence and mathematics – he is able to read the
‘obscure and difficult to master’ texts written in Sumerian ‘from before the
flood’. And so on.
The excellence and perfection of the king’s skills were
understood to place him in proximity to the god Ashur. He is thus at the limit
of what a mortal may do and be; as Ashur is at the limit or zenith of Reality
itself. Ashur is Reality itself. That the Tree may stand in
for the king suggests that it was understood also as an esoteric and symbolic
representation of the idea of limit, taken to the nth degree, and also of
Reality itself.
Much of the discussion found in Plato concerns the nature of
what he calls ‘The Good’. The Good is in a sense the Crown of Creation, and it
is the target of human attention because of that status. He refers to the Good
rather than ‘God’ because he is talking about the ultimate abstraction, which
has commerce with other abstractions – as he says, ‘things pass into one
another’. The Good is perfect, complete, whole, and the ultimate source of
justice, good order, beauty, wisdom, and all the other abstract concepts which
have some form of existence in the temporal world. He is careful to say
(through the words of Socrates) that this ultimate Reality, the Form of Forms,
has ‘no shape, size or colour’. In its nature it wholly transcends physical
reality.
Plato’s Republic tells of the craft of
passing from the contemplation of one Form to another, entirely intellectually,
and without distraction, with the intention of eventually arriving at the
contemplation of The Good. The man returning from this journey comes back with
knowledge beyond the scope of any wisdom to be found on the Earth.
The Platonic discussion of the Forms is treated by modern
scholars as a species of literary fiction. Meaning it has no detectable
connections with cultural activity in Greece, or in any other part of the
civilised world in the two millennia before the Common Era. But Plato is very
clear that it is important to look to the ‘One Thing’, the ur-Reality which
underpins the world of the here and now. So he is talking of a conception of
God, which gives rise to all other things which may be understood by the mortal
mind, though the ultimate abstract conception of Reality may lie forever beyond
human understanding.
How old is this conception of the Divine? If the Divine is
understood to have its reality at the limit of physical and perceptible
reality, and to be the most abstract of abstractions, historians of philosophy
would say this notion was first discussed in Classical Greece. If on the other
hand, the iconography of the two opposed figures, facing a ritually significant
object between them, represents the most abstract conception of limit, beyond
any physical instance, then this conception of the Divine is thousands
of years older than the middle years of the 1st millennium B.C.E.
The Assyriologist Simo Parpola has shown that there is a
connection between the Kabbalah and the Assyrian Sacred Tree. Each of the
Mesopotamian gods was associated with a divine number, and sometimes they were
referenced in documents by their number alone. He was able to reconstruct the
Assyrian version of the Kabbalistic tree, populating the sefirotic nodes
(understood in the Middle Ages as divine powers and qualities), with the key
Mesopotamian divinities, their properties and numbers.
The Kabbalah enshrines a philosophical notion of
transcendent divinity in the concept of the ‘en sof’. It has been assumed by
modern scholars that this is an imported idea, perhaps borrowed from Gnosticism
in the early centuries of the Common Era. If in fact the idea of the ‘en sof’ was
in the Assyrian version of the Sacred Tree, then we understand something new
and profound about Hebrew ideas of divinity from the middle of the 1st
millennium B.C.E. onwards. The relationship between the Assyrian and
Jewish Sacred Trees which Parpola has been able to show, by itself pushes
a philosophical conception of the Divine back to at least the 14th century
B.C.E., which is when the representation of the Assyrian Tree first appears.
This philosophical equation of the idea of limit with what
is transcendent is an important factor in ancient religious ritual. In
Mesopotamia the ritual installation of divine statues took place in locations
with clear boundaries, including riverbanks and quays, and a key part of the
ritual involved a temple threshold, as the surviving texts tell us. These
boundaries were understood to have proximity to the primal reality, the Abzu,
house of Ea/Enki, in the sweet waters at the bottom of the sea. Reeds used in
the ceremony were spoken of has having their roots in the Abzu. The association
of limit with ritual performance tells us something about the logic of the
installation: the rites serve to make the images one with the company of gods
in Heaven. The statue becomes itself Divine by its exposure to repeated
representations of Divinity in the course of what was described in Mesopotamia
as the ‘most sacred and secret of rituals’.
A great age for a philosophically conceived notion of
Divinity, coequal with Reality itself, makes it possible to make much sense of
many otherwise obscure texts and inscriptions which have been excavated over
the past two centuries. The determination of classicists over two
centuries (since the European Enlightenment) to downgrade and deny the
connections between Greek civilization and other civilizations around the
Mediterranean and the Near East, both in classical times, and in the 2nd
millennium B.C.E., has made it very difficult to make sense of both Greek
philosophy, and the intellectual life of the other cultures of the ancient
world. The Greeks accorded the Egyptians the status of philosophers, and Plato
represents Solon having conversations with Egyptian priests in the Timaeus,
who had knowledge ‘hoary with age’. But archaeological excavation in
Mesopotamia and elsewhere, and the recovery of thousands of texts, made
possible the idea of writing something like The Sacred History of
Being.
The structure of the book is relatively simple. There are
three main parts. The first begins with reflections on philosophy, both ancient
and modern. This goes some way to explain how I came to pursue this project.
The second half of the first part discusses the ontological argument, which has
its origins in the early modern period, which has come to be the principal way
in which the reality of Divinity is discussed. We have made it very difficult
to understand ancient theological ideas by promoting the ontological argument
to its current status.
The second part explores Plato’s writing, and the strikingly
different way in which Divinity was discussed. It also explores wider Greek
thought, and earlier instances of the kind of understanding of Reality found in
Plato.
The third part examines ideas common to Greece, Israel and
Mesopotamia, plus the significance of the Assyrian Sacred Tree for the scholars
of the Assyrian royal court, and the significance of the Jewish Kabbalah, which
descends from parallel Mesopotamian ideas. Two of the chapters in part three
work through the Mis Pî tablets from Nineveh and Babylon, which describe the
ritual for the installation of images of the gods, and discuss the significance
of the ritual.
1 The
Babylonian scholar Berossus, former priest of Bel, who wrote about Babylonian
culture and religion after moving to Athens, tells us of the encounter of the first
legendary sages with an emissary of the Divine. The emissary granted them
knowledge of the arts and crafts, of husbandry, and the apportioning of land.
