[Extract from correspondence with a specialist in ancient astronomy, on the question of why it is we are so disengaged with the concerns of the ancient world.]
[....]
Thanks for your substantial mail, which I will work through
in order, for clarity.
The day of the equinox was quite spectacular, with the full
moon rising over the Pentland Hills to the south of Edinburgh. The weather has
been very unsettled in the past couple of weeks, so I was not expecting to see
anything.
[...]
...binding and loosing was important in Egypt also. In
fact it seems to have been an idea universal in ancient civilisations. Though
the basis of the idea is likely to have been the preserve of the educated, and
the personnel of the divine cults (mostly, but not always exactly the same
people). The core idea underlying binding and loosing is that our physical
existence is, however it might look to us, a subjective perception of reality.
And a subjective perception of reality is a subjective perception of Being
itself.
That is why it is so difficult for scholars to understand
what is going on. They see the practices and ‘beliefs’ which survive in the
literary and archaeological record, but they have no frame in which to
understand these things. They do not expect to find anything subtle and
sophisticated, because they (they think) are dealing with forms of primitive
stupidity, no matter how refined the cultural remains might appear to be.
The figure I gave for the number of offering tables recently
turns out to be well out of date. The archaeological exploration of ancient
Akhetaten (Tell El Amarna) continues, and the current figure is more than 790 offering tables. That is a
staggering number.
You can term the perception of the cosmos which largely
eludes modern scholars ‘a shamanic world view’. It is a world view which is
extremely old. There were always people around who could see and think beyond
the here and now. But the term ‘shaman’ is relatively modern, and fills a gap
in the arsenal of modern anthropology. But supplying a name for a phenomenon
does not explain what is behind the shamanic practices, and the associated
patterns of understanding.
Once the inextricable link between the physical world and
the reality beyond became part of the ancient mindset (probably from an
immemorial time), it becomes obvious that what happens in Heaven has an effect
on Earth, and vice versa. This explains a lot about Buddhist thought, which
I’ve spent some time studying over the years. Recently I wrote an article on
the possible influence of Buddhism on the philosophy of David Hume. The article
explores the logic involved in Theravara Buddhism in some detail.
Theravara Buddhism isn’t a close analogue with
with Mesopotamian and Egyptian thought, but it arises from a similar perception
of what Reality itself is. The article also discusses ideas prevalent in the
European Enlightenment (mainly in the context of Diderot’s Encylopedia, which
explain much about negative attitudes to ancient thought in the eighteenth
century).
The
Enlightenment of David Hume.
How was the ancient perception of the nature of the cosmos lost,
and why? That’s two very large questions! Asking about the consequences of that
loss is another big question. You know lots of stuff about that already, I
know. But a discursive triangulation on this question between us, is likely to
be useful for us both. This may take some time.
I’ve been writing about that loss for a long time, since it
became obvious early on that it was necessary to understand the trajectory, the
context, and the mechanics of the loss (in some detail), if we were to be able
to (properly) understand what was actually lost.
As far as the savants of the European Enlightenment were
concerned, the entire history of the human race before the eighteenth century
was a morass of irrational thought – mythology, folklore, magic, legions of superstitious
beliefs, a general credulity in the human race, and in earlier times, murderous
ritual. They thought they could get clear of all of that by the rigorous
application of common sense. That was the basis of Diderot’s Encyclopedia. So, the enoblement of
common sense is one of the factors in the loss of the ancient world view.
It is hard to entirely blame the savants, given the limited
information that they had. To them the past seemed to be a grim and dark place.
They understood that even the crafts were wrapped around in superstition. But the
crafts remained important for the wellbeing of the human race. So the crafts
were described in the Encyclopedia,
but shorn of anything which wasn’t entirely practical.
The savants often did not read and know ancient literature.
So they did not know much that was worth knowing. That’s one of the problems
with common sense: if the solution is common sense, that is already in your
head. Reading is irrelevant.
Common sense of course, when you are dealing with something
which is transcendent of human experience and understanding, is entirely
inappropriate. Common sense dictated that the transcendent did not exist, and
served no purpose in understanding our world.
The loss of understanding has been going on for a very long
time, and was already under way in the 2nd Millennium BCE. This
island is dotted with stone circles as you know, but the ancient Britons
stopped building them around the 14th century BCE. So something,
some conception was lost, which removed the motive for building them.
I read a chapter of your writing about the esoteric
recently, which was essentially sound. But it isn’t the case that esoteric
knowledge in the ancient world was not deliberately kept as a secret. The
various priesthoods and sages might have wished that every living person should
know what it is, but because esoteric knowledge is often puzzling and counterintuitive
in nature, it is easy for what it is to be misunderstood, and then
reconstituted as something else. Knowledge which is misunderstood is worse than
no knowledge at all.
I think that is the general pattern of the loss of
understanding. Some insight into the nature of reality itself is achieved by an
individual, and that insight is taught. An entire culture is developed on the
bedrock of that insight. Then it is taught badly, or taught to those who cannot
understand what they are being told. The insight becomes something other than
what it actually is, and then serves some other cultural or social function.
Once a culture is on that slope, it is hard to put the slide into reverse.
I can give some examples here, plus pointers to articles in
which I’ve discussed the disconnects between ancient and modern understanding.
First, the ontological argument, which constitutes a huge
obstacle to an understanding of ancient thought about the divine. The principal
problem with the modern ontological argument is that, for the past seven or
eight centuries or so, the argument has been formulated on the basis of the notion
that the property of ‘existence’ indicates that something is real. Which is why
the argument attempts to provide credible grounds for saying that God exists,
and is therefore real. Which is tantamount to a denial of transcendent reality,
or the transcendent nature of god. There are other issues with the argument.
How did the Christian church, and the philosophers, make
this mistake? Probably because they were afraid of the unbounded, the
limitless, and the concept of infinity. They wanted an omniscient and perfect
entity as their god, but not one that was necessarily beyond human fathoming,
and wrapped around in puzzles and paradoxes. They were making God in their own image, rather than the
other way around.
I’ve written about the history of the idea of infinity in
mathematics, religion and philosophy, via a critical review of Adrian W Moore’s
BBC radio series on the subject, broadcast in 2016. My review identifies what
is missing from Moore’s tendentious argument.
A long read, but worth the time, I think. It shows just how much pain
and intellectual difficulty the idea of the infinite can cause the human mind:
‘Evading
the Infinite’
They still had the notion that God lay somewhere behind the
physical world, but that notion was not a very sophisticated one. They didn’t
need a sophisticated version of God any more, since the main function of
religion in the West, from sometime before the fall of Rome, was to support temporal power.
Divines in the early modern period ended up splitting into
two major factions. The Theists saw the world as the creation of God, and that
God could be petitioned by Man. Though they had by this time lost all
understanding of the mechanism which might make this connection possible. The
other major faction was the Deists, who conceived that God had created the
world, but that God was the prime mover, and once the world and the cosmos was
set in motion, he did not interfere. This view took hold particularly after
Descartes and Newton, and the regularity of the motions of the heavenly bodies
was then taken to be evidence of the existence of God (this view became known
as uniformitarianism, meaning that the forces which were in play in the past,
are the same ones which are at play now. The implication is that everything can
be calculated).
Much of this is down to early modern misreadings of
Aristotle from the 12th century CE onwards, and his notion of ‘substance’
(ousia). When is Aristotle talking
about matter, or about Being, and/or Reality itself? In the Middle Ages they
weren’t very sure. The earlier Arian controversy in the 4th century
CE also revolved around substance (is God one or Triune? They decided that God
was Triune – ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost’ - but the component parts ‘were of
the same substance.’ (homousia) What
that common substance actually was, was never established in Christian doctrine
(and the trinitarian view of God is still not accepted by all Christians). The
triadic nature of the divine in Christianity is something which has its origins
in Egyptian religion. It’s a feature of Christian theology because the ‘Father,
Son and Holy Ghost’ are mentioned in the Old Testament. Just without the political
fudge of the homousia, which is the
legacy of the Council of Nicaea, held in 325 CE.
Reliance on Aristotle as a guide always was an error of
judgement among scholars. He sometimes argues something other than what he
actually thinks (he wrote a book on rhetoric, the Sophistical Refutations), and clearly sometimes actively intended
to mislead his students. A case in point is his Nicomachean Ethics, the argument of which proposes that the Gods,
by their nature are wholly contemplative, and cannot engage in the world. Which is an odd and essentially heretical kind
of argument to make in the late 4th Century BCE. The book is a
series of lecture notes, probably by different hands (there is an obvious
duplication in the text in Book 8). We know that Aristotle held different
classes in the morning, and in the afternoon. In the morning he taught exoteric
knowledge, in the afternoon he taught esoteric knowledge. The notes on ethics
must come from his exoteric teaching, since the argument arrives at, what was
at the time, a nonsensical conclusion.
Why would Aristotle do this? The point of spending time
building a painstaking argument that leads to a nonsensical conclusion is to
find out who the intelligent students are in your class: the intelligent ones
are those who pick at the inconsistencies and absurdities of your argument.
Those are the ones who you allow to move on to study esoteric thought.
Something like this procedure is still used by tribal elders in Africa: you ask
a question about the gods, and they give you what sounds like a plausible
reply. But it isn’t the real one. The student will only get the real reply once
he has shown he is no fool. And that takes a lot more questions on the subject.
Aristotle’s greatest and most dangerous legacy to us also
comes ultimately from his exoteric teachings, and is a main cause of our
intellectual exile from antiquity. These are his Laws of thought. These Laws
became the basis of formal logic as we understand it in the modern world, and
they are also the basis of much theological argumentation from the middle ages
onwards. Aristotle did not write a treatise on the laws of thought – the
various component parts are mentioned and described in his Metaphysics. Put in the most simple way, The first is the Law of
Identity (a thing is itself, and not something else), the second is the Law of
Non-Contradiction (a thing cannot be one thing and another thing at the same
time); the third is the Law of the Excluded Middle (a thing cannot be halfway
between what it is and something else).
You can see that the laws revolve around the idea of
identity. But it is a purely secular
conception of identity, not at all applicable to something which is
transcendent. If you accept the
universality of these laws, you cannot discuss the transcendent in any
meaningful sense, even if you have academic tenure in a theological seminary.
And it is entirely impossible to understand anything useful about ancient
religion and ritual, except in purely phenomenological terms.
I have pointed out however that an alternative logical
modality has come down to us in the pages of Plato (in the
Timaeus), and it is this one which illuminates ancient religion and
philosophy. The Neoplatonist writers referenced it. The account of this
modality in Plato is rarely discussed by specialists, in terms of what it is
and what it means, though it is often read, since Plato’s
Timaeus is a text often set for students. Detail available in:
Logical
Modality in Classical Athens. You might find it interesting then to read
The
Greek Ontological Model in the 1st Millennium B.C.E.
Though the idea of Being was discussed in classical Greece,
by Parmenides and Plato, as well as the Presocratics, the idea was not much
discussed in late antiquity, except by the Neoplatonists from the third century
CE onwards (Proclus, Iamblichus, Porphyry, Olympiodorus and Plotinus, and some
others). But very few outside of their circles were paying attention at the
time. Their moment came as late as the Italian Renaissance. And then they were
lost sight of once again after the Newtonian revolution.
So the ideas of the Divine as coterminous with Reality
itself, and that Reality itself was entirely transcendent in nature, dropped
out of philosophical discourse within the Church. It was not picked up again by
philosophers in the early modern period. Hence the endless and vacuous
discussions about whether or not God could be said to have the property of
existence.
With the advent of the European Enlightenment, the history
of human thought began to be written about again in detail, for the first time
since Diogenes Laertius wrote his Lives
of the Philosophers. But the rewriting was done on the basis of certain
presumptions. It was axiomatic that abstract ideas, such as Being, were difficult things to discuss, and it was
agreed that the Greeks had been the first to do this, during the middle of the
first millennium BCE. Why was this decided? The evidence for the Greeks was
unquestionably in the surviving texts. Whereas it was decided that there was no
evidence that other cultures had ever risen to such levels of discussion.
At the time, it could be argued, it would have been
difficult to have come to any other conclusion. Several ancient writers
however, had suggested that philosophy was an immensely old discipline,
including Plato and Clement of Alexandria. Clement even gave a list of the
cultures who practised the discipline. Both Diogenes Laertius and Aristotle
suggested that it might have had an origin elsewhere. Aristotle suggested that
it required a relatively leisured professional class to emerge, by which he
probably had the Egyptians in mind. Isocrates (a rival to Plato, and actively
opposed to Plato’s outlook) mentioned the Egyptians in connection with
philosophy four times. These statements were (and still are) dismissed.
The European Enlightenment marks the point where the
Egyptians ancient reputation as philosophers was systematically downgraded by
German scholars (documented in detail in Martin Bernal’s Black Athena). In the end it was agreed that the Egyptians dealt in
terms of concrete ideas (whatever that means), and consequently were not
capable of abstract thought, and were not capable of contemplating ideas of a
wholly transcendent level of reality. Even now, Egyptologists refer to ancient
Egyptians as ‘pragmatic’ (as opposed to philosophical) in the way they thought
about their religion and rituals.
All this was done in order to preserve the Enlightenment
fiction of a stupendous achievement of the Greeks in the middle of the 1st
Millennium BCE, by isolating and downgrading contemporary cultures which might
have influenced their development.
Over the past 170 years, an enormous amount of evidence has
come out of the ground, and quite a lot of it suggests (to those who are awake
at least) that philosophy, transcendental thought, and a sophisticated concept
of Being was at the root of a number of cultures around the Mediterranean and
the Near East. However Egyptologists (in particular) just ignore this evidence
as irrelevant to their profession. Most classicists do too, but with some of
them, the dam is starting to break.
That’s the short answer to your question…. There is much
more, however, which I will skip for the moment. Where are we going on this
long trajectory? I had an exchange of mails with a friend in San Francisco in
2015, where we discussed this question.
I took out personal stuff from the exchange, anonymised her, and turned
it into an article which is on my website. I will point you at that.
Locke,
Newton, and the Rejection of Reality.
I entirely agree with you that the materialistic paradigm
necessarily results in the denial of the possible non-locality of
consciousness. If you think that thought and consciousness itself are the
products of biological processes in the brain, the idea that consciousness is
not localised in the human head just sounds like so much nonsense. The non-locality of consciousness has been a
subject for a few philosophers over the years, but is not discussed in terms of
the paradigm which we clearly have in common. P. F. Strawson was one,
Wittgenstein was another (Strawson was influenced by Wittgenstein’s thought).
Among philosophers it is generally referenced as the ‘no-ownership’ model of
consciousness. Usually the argument is along the lines of: “we are constricted
to think as we are about identity, perception, experience, physicality,
location, etc., by the limitations of (apparently) being physical entities in
space and time. Which may not actually be the case”. Not much fun to read, but
at least they understand that a materialist interpretation of human existence
is problematic.
I also agree that there is a lot of evidence which suggests
that consciousness is not localised in the brain, or associated with matter at
all. Consciousness may interact with matter, and have some kind of interface
with the material world, but that is not the same as being a phenomenon which
is entirely localisable. There is a two-way traffic, as you said earlier in
your mail.
For me I understand this to be possible because things which
are apparently in different places, are actually together in one place, which I
reference as the plenum. Which is a place which is not localisable. It is also the key idea we have lost,
which makes it impossible to understand both reality itself, and the
representations of it, in which we live.
The implication of the concept of reality being a plenum (as
it was understood in antiquity) is that both God and gods are necessarily real.
This is the consequence of the way they were defined. Each of them has an
excellence special to them. That excellence is what makes them real. The plenum
is itself real because it is complete and perfect in itself [...].
This fundamental idea is what underpins Greek and Assyrian conceptions
of the importance of excellence in thought and activity. It is also why
excellence in craft skills was venerated in antiquity. Excellence is what
connects everything with everything else. It is why the perfect
execution and observance of a ritual or
ceremony was regarded as the most important thing to achieve. This pattern of
ideas served as a model among the Greeks for the human soul, and to the
organization of society, discussed at:
Justice
and the Harmony of the Soul. Excellence was also what gave access to the
divine:
Excellence
and the Knowledge of Divine Things.
So I accept that consciousness can be understood as a bridge
between ourselves as we are in the form of finite representations, and what we
are in that place (which is paradoxically no place) which is filled with the
complete and the perfect. And I agree
with you that an important aspect of ritual is about facilitating traffic between
the worlds. As you suggest, the traffic is a bit constricted now, since many
fewer people have any conception of this purpose…. However, it is necessary for
ritual to be performed, and observance to be made, but not essential for the
process to be fully understood for it to have an effect. There are still people
performing rituals and observances.
I read somewhere (in what I’ve read of your work so far),
that myth is often about travelling to that other place, either by ascending to
Heaven, or descending to an underworld (actually the same place, the plenum,
just dressed differently). I agree. [...] The creation of
a myth, and the telling of it, can be understood as performative also,
particularly if rituals are associated with it: it is ritual made visible.
Placing myths in the sky, to descend into the earth, and to rise from it once
again, as part of a regular cycle, like a rotating Tibetan prayer wheel, is
performative and served the same function.
Best, Thomas
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