Echoes of Eternity

 Much of the cultural production of the ancient world, east and west, was based on the idea of reflecting aspects of the divine in human life and thought. Many social structures and institutions were based on this approach. The model for these things was was astronomy and the heavens, and the heavens were conceived of as a moving image of eternity, and eternity was understood to be coterminous with the Divine. Since it moved, it contained life and thought, and repaid the attention of man. We still live, work and think inside what is a scarcely changed neolithic temple, which is the sky.

 The final word count is around 56 thousand words. Two of the chapters - 'The Greek Ontological Model in the 1st Millennium B.C.E', and 'Patterns of thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain', are quite large pieces of work (6k and 10k words respectively). The introduction and a chapter each from the three parts of the book are available via the list below.


The chapter list:

Introduction: The Interpretation of Ancient History

Part One. 6

Camera Obscura: Marx, Aristotle & Ptolemy. 7

Synoikismos and the Origins of the Polis. 12

Kingship in Ancient Assyria. 20

Proskynesis, and the Deification of Alexander. 25

Part Two. 34

The Greek Ontological Model in the 1st Millennium B.C.E. 35

Post-Enlightenment Plato, and That Which Cannot Move. 47

Greece and the cultural Impact of the Assyrian Empire. 57

The Threshold in Ancient Assyria. 68

Symmetry and Asymmetry in the Iconography of the Ancient Near East. 75

Part Three. 80

The Keys of the Kingdom: Binding and Loosing in Heaven and Earth. 81

Being and Eternity in the Neolithic. 87

Patterns of thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain. 93
The Mathematical Origins of the Megalithic Yard

What We Have Lost, and How the Ancient Concept of the Cosmos Died

Marx and Historicism.. 129

Publication date, June 30, 2020.

TY, May 5, 2019. Details updated May 27,  July 5, and September 6 and 17, October 1,  November 26,   December 12, 2019, May 5 2020, and June 14 2020.. Updated October 10.

Pharaoh Akhenaten, the Aten, and the History of Ideas (I)

[An extract from recent correspondence with a specialist in ancient astronomy. Akhenaten's reign is not often considered to have been one concerned with a technical understanding of astronomy (though through his veneration of the Divine Aten, his interest in the sky is clear). There are interesting reasons for this neglect]

January 24, 2019

[...]

I’ll respond to your mail in order. First the Egyptian paper.

I had the opportunity to look at pharaoh Akhenaten in some depth at university. His reign was covered in the general course on Egyptian history, largely from the point of view that most scholarly writing on Akhenaten doesn’t fit very well with the evidence. I liked this aspect of the teaching of ancient history in London: a highly critical approach to what could actually be known, which sometimes isn’t very much. Other things I disliked, but I’ll get on to that later.

The title of the upcoming paper is ‘The Horizon of the Aten’ – the Aten being the sun disk, which is most associated with Akhenaten, though not exclusively. Most writing on Akhenaten suggests that his religious reforms were actually innovations, which the priesthoods – particularly the priests of the cult of Amun, probably the most important divine cult in Egypt in the 14th cent B.C.E – regarded as heretical.

At the least, the religious changes instituted by Akhenaten, threatened the power of the cult. It does not follow however, that such changes represented innovation and heresy, whatever the priests of Amun said.

After a little digging last year, I came across a piece of information, never mentioned in college, and which did not appear in any of the books on the reading list. It surfaced first in a book published relatively recently. It is evidence which appears in contemporary texts. It wasn’t deemed worthy of a mention in any of the many studies of the 18th dynasty, because it didn’t appear to make any significant sense in that context.

For me, it was like a bolt from the blue. It made sense of half a dozen other pieces of information rattling around in my head, almost simultaneously. Akhenaten now looked like the adherent of one of the oldest cults in ancient Egypt. This ‘new’ information, made sense of what he understood himself to be doing (it is hard to understand any ruler who builds a temple with 400 sacrificial tables, as he did). A reformer, but not an innovator or heretic at all. The evidence ties his reforms, and the concept of the Horizon of the Aten, with the equinoxes and the precession. A reform which was intended to restore a pattern of thought which was contemporaneous with the earliest of Egyptian dynasties. Several features of the Giza plateau would not otherwise be present. They set things up so they could not possibly have missed the precession.

The new paper connects texts, architecture and cultic evidence to make the case.

Thanks for the information about the King Den tablet, which I had not seen before. I think you may be right about the astronomical aspect to the image. One of the problems in studying ancient history, particularly in the ancient Near East, is that real events are often presented in terms of mythical images, since what happens on earth echoes what is in the sky. The sky is the more real. So sometimes it is difficult to tell whether an image represents a myth, or whether it represents a physical event dressed up in mythical imagery.

A similar issue of what is being represented occurs with images of the gods – when are representations of the gods just that, and when are they the gods themselves? I remember attending a lecture in Cambridge more than twenty years ago where the speaker spent twenty minutes talking about this question, and why the Egyptians would create a statue of a god standing on a sled (they did), which indicated that it was a representation of a statue of the god, and not a representation of the god itself.

I first read Hamlet’s Mill sometime around 1978, which is a long time ago now. I accept the argument, but the book is in many ways poorly constructed, though there is a mass of useful information in there. The fugal aspect of the structure was not likely to be appreciated in academia, and the text is very dense, so I think they did not give a lot of thought to who was going to read it (sometimes writing a book for yourself is the only way). I have read academic books which are much more difficult to read, but which have credibility among academics – I’m thinking particularly of Lynn Thorndikes’ eight volume ‘A history of magic and experimental science’. No points for style or clarity.

I’m not a mathematician, but I’m comfortable with numbers. I worked out pretty early on that the rate of precessional movement means that the intersection of the celestial equator and the ecliptic moves a degree in about 70 years. That is about two diameters of the moon as seen from the Earth. How blind do you have to be in order not to see that? Especially if those observing the sky belong to long-established professional priesthoods, with a background in astronomical observation and lore, and in possession of a temple library?

Why was Hamlet’s Mill shunned by academics? Because as far as the scholarly consensus goes, the argument of the book is faulty in conception, as well as execution. The book was not simply ahead of its time, but it argued outside the paradigmatic frame in which scholars were willing to consider evidence. That’s an important thing in academia: the field in which scholars operate has to have its limits defined. They study and write within a frame in which it is possible to make a case for this or that. It is a mistake to think that academics engage with what the whole range of evidence might have to tell us. It is not about understanding, but about developing an understanding of the subject under study.

This is not altogether a bad thing. Sometimes it is necessary to narrow a focus of interest in order to understand what is being considered. I’ve often engaged in this kind of process myself. It becomes problematic where the artificially constricted parameters ossify into the definition of an academic discipline or sub-discipline. When people talk about the value of interdisciplinary research, they actually mean that the nature of much contemporary research is too narrow to keep students supplied with interesting or useful Ph.D proposals…

Which is why I am working outside academia, and self-publishing my work.

Yes there is a reluctance to see the prevailing paradigm as untenable. But you are right that established paradigms are always difficult to overturn, just because they are established, and a lot of scholars have an investment in preserving the status quo. Is there another agenda? Yes there is. In fact, there are several. For the moment I’ll just pick out a couple of them here (we’ll get through all of them in the course of our conversation I’m sure!).

1} Not everybody who writes about human intellectual history has a practical grasp of astronomy. Or philosophy. Or theology. And sometimes their heads are filled with nonsense ideas, many of which first saw the light of day as late as the European Enlightenment. One of these nonsense ideas is that our distant ancestors were subject to a primitive stupidity, for which the Germans have an appropriately ugly word: ‘Urdummheit’. It is the myth of progress over time. If that notion is firmly
planted in a scholar’s head, then it is clearly straining the bounds of possibility to credit ancient peoples with any kind of understanding of precession. It is just common sense that they wouldn’t notice such a thing. Primitive stupidity is a scholarly presumption which is powerful enough to override the need to engage with facts and observation. There is less of this presumption in academia than there used to be, but it is still there, and not always hiding in the corners.

2) Historians in academia generally work within a paradigm which owes its character to the writings of Karl Marx, as mediated through the writings of Max Weber and other sociologists. This way of looking at things got its foothold in Britain through the London School of Economics in the early years of the twentieth century. What it means is that society is studied in material and economic terms. Ideas are deprecated as fundamentally irrelevant to the forces which have shaped history and human cultural development. This appreciation of the forces which underpin our society is assumed to be universally true, and so is equally applicable to the study of ancient societies. If ancient scholars did not know this to be the case, it was because they were victims of what Marx and Engels called ‘false consciousness’. In other words, history was to be explained in terms of power and propaganda, and ideological struggle between competing groups. All my teachers at university shared this point of view, to some extent at least, but some did allow that it might be too narrow a perspective.

From this point of view, if you are talking about priestly ideas, which you are if you are talking about ancient astronomy, you are talking about a subject which is irrelevant to our understanding of antiquity. The real history of humanity is to be teased out of a knowledge of priestly power and the propaganda developed to support that power. Religious ideas and iconography serve that priestly power, and are to be interpreted in such terms. So the detail of a concern with astronomy, and a knowledge of precession, is, for some historians, beside the point.

I describe myself as a historian of ideas. It is a scholarly discipline, working outside the Marxist-inspired model, which came into existence in the mid 1930s, specifically to deal with the materials and questions other historians were ignoring. The book which kicked-started the discipline was authored by Arthur Lovejoy. It was called ‘The Great Chain of Being’. It considered the concept of ‘plenitude’ from the Greeks up to the European Renaissance. My first book can be understood as an extension of the argument into more remote times.

Best, Thomas

Marx and Historicism

In the early twentieth century the discipline of history effectively became subordinate to sociology. This was not a wholly negative development, since it expanded the scope of the subject, and introduced tools and discipline. But it also introduced a narrowness of perspective via an overarching model - essentially a teleological one - which makes it very nearly impossible to discuss many aspects of history. The overarching model is the historicist perspective which places material and economic forces at the interpretative core of historical understanding.


Though few historians are Marxists now, the ultimate source of the current focus of historians remains the Marxist analytical perspective, even if the model is hardly ever referred to or discussed.

Marx used a model of the world which offered the possibility of a new interpretation of the of it and its workings. This model was not created in Marx’s mind out of nothing. He was heavily influenced by the writings of the philosopher Hegel, who created a vast, abstract and scarcely intelligible world system which, as a byproduct, gave a new way in which to understand the nature of history. For Hegel, history was about the realization of the absolute. The absolute would be achieved through dialectical opposition between powers, cultures and interests, resulting in a final resolution, which would effectively result in the end of history.


The system erected by Marx borrowed this structure, and turned it on its head (as he
acknowledged). No longer was the system focused on the realization of the absolute. The absolute was replaced with an ideological target - a world in which the conflict between classes and interests would inevitably result in the resolution of its internal contradictions. It became a political system, aimed at changing things. The Hegelian dialectical process now functioned as a principal aspect of Marx’s theory, and political and social classes formed the opposing forces within the system. The end point of the process was framed in terms of what was politically desirable – the means of production would pass out of the hands of the owners of capital and become the common property of labour. Class struggle would end forever, shortly after the dictatorship of the proletariat was established.


It is easy to see how the discipline of sociology came into being as a consequence of the enthusiasm for this doctrine in the late nineteenth century. The most damaging aspect of this development however is that the Marxist analytical framework was assumed to be appropriate as an analytic tool for all societies, over all time. It was treated as universally applicable. This was because the hidden mainsprings of human society had been laid bare by Marx – class, economics, and material forces.


Marx himself thought it was universally applicable – and as a result it has necessarily gifted to us the notion of ‘false consciousness’, which is what individuals and classes have when they do not understand the real forces at work in their lives. The real forces are as described by Marx's analysis. False consciousness is a necessary catch-all category for a doctrine which supersedes all other analytical approaches.


One of the positive aspects of the sociological approach in the early twentieth-century was
the deprecation of attempts to understand history in terms of great individuals, and it is true that many things are better understood in terms of the broader forces at work in society. Greek history in the 5th century BCE is better understood in terms of the threat from Persia than it is through, say, an attempt to understand the mind of Pericles. This should not however preclude the worth of attempting to understand Pericles point of view, or the point of view of any other individual who is part of the historical frame.


But the Marxist point of view does preclude this, or at least discourages attention to detail. In connection with the political activity of the Gracchi in Republican Rome, and their participation in social struggle, I expressed to a tutor that I could not understand what was in the mind of Tiberius Gracchus. The response from the tutor was “does it matter?” I was completely floored by this at the time, but I came to understand that this view follows naturally from the idea that decisions are made in response to material and economic forces, and that if you establish those, then you understand what is going on. Years later I found that the tutor was drawing on a remark by Friedrich Engels.


There are many aspects of antiquity which are difficult to understand using this
sociological-historicist approach. The importance of philosophy, sculpture, poetry, and religion for the ancient world is unquestioned, but these things are treated by historians as artefacts illustrating the ideology of civilizations, economies and powers, rather than as ways into understanding how these entities understood themselves. In other words, their main function for historians is to support the analysis determined by the interpretative model. The roles of religion and divine worship in particular are interpreted in either anthropological or sociological terms, and, given that the sociological model is an atheistic model, sometimes even as a form of pathology. In other words, there is very little about religion and ritual which needs to be understood in detail, since these things are irrational in nature, and not subject to rational analysis. Most ancient thought can be classed as false consciousness. As a consequence, philosophy and religion are sundered, even where they are known to have co-existed (Greece), even within individual figures (Plato). Scholars  prefer to interpret religion in terms of sacred space and demarcation, rather than in terms of what the ancients themselves said about it.


The telos is, in its own way, a key part of Marx's world view. Both Hegel and Marx's philosophy are teleological in nature. That is to say that everything within their systems is framed in terms of an end point. Teleology arrives in the work of Marx and Hegel mainly through study by Hegel of the writings of Proclus, who was the last head of the Academy in Athens, some nine hundred years after its foundation by Plato. Proclus has much to tell us about the relationship between philosophy and religion: he practised theurgy, and believed that was possible for man to achieve significant results through the power of the trained human will. Hegel’s system is built to a considerable extent on an interpretation of Proclus’ model of the world (minus the theurgy).


The telos in Proclus is a vital feature of his universe. In that universe, the telos has properties which are required for the proper functioning of that universe. It enables motion and change, which would be impossible without its properties. It also enabled the creation. The telos, in its original form, was the keystone of an intellectual and rational model of the universe, which existed until at least the closure of the philosophical schools in the early centuries of our common era, and the final passing of the pagan world. By contrast, by the time we get to Marx, the telos is merely a political desirable. It has no properties which enable anything else, and Marx is careless about its nature (we have no significant detail from Marx about the nature of the classless society). We have in Marx's work the vague shape of something which once existed, and had an important role in patterns of meaning;   and which was discussed with some intellectual rigour and clarity. The telos of Marx is an empty thing: a twisted parody of the original concept, existing only to justify a political agenda.


There is a fantastic irony here, in that the current sociological-historicist approach to understanding history is based on a Marxist inversion of the teleological model of Hegel, so that it recognises material and and social forces and not mind or thought, and that the Hegelian teleology has its roots in the thought of Proclus, who recognised mind and thought, but did not recognise the importance of the material world.