Heidegger and Being: (Writing to @SemprePhi)

Hi. I read some of Heidegger’s Being and Time when I was around twenty, not realising that it was only the first third of a much larger projected volume. His essentially existential approach to gaining a theoretical grasp of ‘Being’ left me cold. This is because even then I didn’t think there was an existential approach possible, since, by definition ‘Being’ by itself is beyond actual existence.

Or at least by my definition, which was fuelled (at the time) by the sort of thing Plato said about it, and some of the statements by the presocratics. We might imagine that it exists, as all things must do, somewhere in space and in time. This Plato said was an illegitimate way of thinking about ‘the one true thing’. By its nature it cannot have its reality and nature in space and time.

Heidegger is aware of this of course, but nevertheless deflects from the consideration of Being as Being (the presocratics Aristotle described as the first philosophers to consider the question of Being qua Being). He looks leftwards again and again at existential and phenomenological approaches to questions of Being.

In the end, he argues, in a manner similar to Sartre later on when talking about meaning (in Existentialism & Humanism, which is the slightly inaccurate title his book is given in Britain), that existential experience, however imprecise and however poor it is as a process,  is the way in which to gain an understanding of what is difficult to apprehend.

In short, for me, Heidegger is not actually talking about Being at all, but the Being of living beings, and occasionally looking upwards at more abstracted and transcendent conceptions of what Being itself might be, though it is an unattainable concept.

Heidegger was a pupil of Edmund Husserl, who has been a major influence on me, also, though it a different way. Many of my essays on subjects start off from one place, and end up in another. Occasionally I follow the line of an established author or authors, and as the essay goes on, I start to deconstruct the elements which hold their argument together. After that, I may entirely reverse the premises of their argument, and go off in another direction. I was doing this before I had my close encounter with Husserl, but learning to see all information as elements which might be capable of being read and constructed in entirely different ways, and breaking down conventional narratives into their components, was a key part of my intellectual development.

I also had the advantage of having read widely in philosophy and ancient literature before I began formal study of the ancient world. So there was much more going on in my head than a direct interaction with texts as themselves. There were always other possible contexts, and other ways of understanding what their actual concerns might have been (this widened to an interest in iconography and ritual texts – no one treats the latter seriously (in their own terms), outside of a purely anthropological interest. Wittgenstein thought this was a foolish approach by the anthropologists).

One of the first things which set me on my current path was noticing (as I’ve mentioned elsewhere), that some equivalent technical terms in ancient Egypt were used in the same way as Aristotle did. But the Egyptian evidence was nearly a thousand years older (the concept of ‘completion’ for example). So it occurred to me that both the established history of philosophy (i.e., invented by the Greeks in the 5^th century BCE), and that the idea that philosophy was the successor to religious thought (considered scarcely rational), might be components in a false narrative. So I started to move the building blocks of the conventional narratives around, to see if they made more sense when looked at from a different point of view.

I’ve mentioned Aristotle referring to the presocratics as the first philosophers to consider Being as Being, meaning in all the abstracted glory of the concept (Aristotle made an important distinction between the actual and the potential infinite, and the latter is still the basis of most mathematical work on the infinite. Why? It is hard to do mathematics and geometry with the actual infinite. The modern assumption is that nobody before the Greeks ever conceived of a direct engagement with the infinite (or with Being).

Yet the prosocratic concern with Being qua Being is in the wrong place. If it was in the right place, it would follow on from the kind of discussion we get from Plato and Aristotle, when contemplating various intellectual puzzles (the aporia). Yet there it is at the beginning of the Greek philosophical tradition. It is in fragments only, many of which were used by Aristotle in his Metaphysics. Could it be that these fragments were the product of a sophisticated discussion of philosophical questions in the Eleatic school and elsewhere, much earlier, and that such discussion has just dropped out of the record? Or perhaps was never committed to writing at all?

I know the answer to that question now, which is that the Greeks did indeed get their philosophical ideas from elsewhere, which is not to say that they did not do philosophy themselves before this (I’m in the process of writing up the evidence and case for the Greek close encounter with Ancient Assyria in the seventh century BCE.)

I’ve been reading an extensive paper on Heidegger, and his uncompleted project of Being and Time. The latter half of the proposed book was actually looking to a deconstruction (or even destruction) of the history (and modern understanding) of philosophy. That was a big surprise, since it is essentially what my overarching project is about. For me, it is largely a necessary task because the Enlightenment placing of the first sophisticated discussion of philosophical questions in Greece between the seventh to the fourth centuries BCE entirely obscures the relevance of philosophy to the history and development of religion, both in the ancient Near East, and in ancient Greece. That false narrative needs to be fixed.

I’ve beaten over a thousand words in about an hour, so I will break off here. If you are interested the essay (actually seminar notes) on Heidegger’s Being and Time is at: https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/campuspress.yale.edu/dist/8/1250/files/2016/01/Heidegger-Being-and-Time-1qtvjcq.pdf . By Karsten Harries, from 2014.

I’ll write about Parmenides and Heidegger’s discussion of Plato’s Sophist later.

Hope you have had a great start to the year!



Best, Thomas

Wearable Fictions, Phenomenology, and the Grammar of Human Thought

'Fish Magic' (Paul Klee, 1925)

Some notes on The Shrine in the Sea, which eventually became The Sacred History of Being, written while waiting for a delayed flight to Bristol from Edinburgh, 3rd March 03 (four hour delay in total). Not everything which is scribbled during an airport delay is perfectly coherent by itself, so I've introduced some qualifications and expansions in square brackets, where necessary. There is more scope for writing about Robert Graves' White Goddess, but that is for another time.

I’m now approaching this [project] as something like a grammar of human intelligence. This is because I backed away (around two or three years ago) from starting from where I started – which was from a study of ancient philosophy. [It is hard to establish parallels using materials which appear to have no exemplars in other cultures. Which is one of the reasons this comparative and anthropological work has, so far at least, not been undertaken with any degree of seriousness].  Instead I decided to approach the question of how people used to think in antiquity on the basis of a phenomenological study. As if I didn’t know any of the things I already knew about the ancient world – both historical and prehistoric. [I.e., there are many obvious parallels between the culture phenomena of Greece, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levantine civilizations, but these are, as yet, largely un-anchored in an underlying substrate of what might be sophisticated patterns of thought.] 

This way of tackling the problem has turned out to be very successful. Unfortunately I’ve written very little down about this, beyond a couple of lists of phenomena which repay closer study because they illustrate the characteristic grammar of the human intelligence [if the scholar looks hard enough]. Essentially these lists form the backbone of the study – it was and is my intention to use these lists as the basis of the books structure.[There was a series of lists entitled 'Topics', added to over time. One of these has been posted - Topics 5. The point was not to assume that all of the post-Enlightenment constructs which we use to interpret the ancient world, and which are less than three hundred years old, are correct. I know what I have been taught, and know what the assumptions are. But I chose to proceed as if these constructs were invisible, for the purposes of separating the actual evidence from what might be convenient presumptions,  including ideological and political judgements]. 

I backed away from the original approach for a number of reasons – partly because it was a very technical approach – but mainly because I didn’t think that attempting to infer common ways of thought on the basis of philosophical writings was a good idea, despite the fact that there are lots of clues in ancient texts to support such inferences. Better I thought to establish a good case on the basis of all available evidence for patterns of thought in antiquity outside philosophical texts, and then show how these texts build on these patterns, since, to some extent at least, this is likely to be what actually happened. The technical apparatus then becomes the principal corroboration of the thesis, rather than the point of entry into the argument.

In effect I’ve established [a process for dealing with] the case[s] twice, from different points of view, which represents some kind of check on the use of the evidence to support the hypothesis. This is as important to me in developing this case as it is in making the case to a more casually interested reader. I’m not interested in creating a weak and scarcely wearable fiction. I want a more coherent armature for the evidence that we currently have, which does less violence to that evidence.

In many ways the book is no longer about ancient history, though that remains the place where I started, and the home of the question I wished to solve.

It is now (as a book) a phenomenological study of human culture, and more particularly of its various levels of articulation. Essentially it is about establishing a coherence and continuity in human cultural production. Not by cutting down the evidence to fit, but by looking for the levels which make this cultural production hang together.

Of course this means that the book is a 21st century stab at the “key to all mysteries” [in that it proceeds on the basis that there is the possibility that there is a coherence in the body of ancient thought, expressed in art, literature, poetry, liturgy and ritual, which we have missed. With the intention of establishing whether or not a coherence of that sort exists, or once existed in some form.] On that account alone the thesis of the argument will be dismissed by those for whom synthetic arguments are not possible. Where they are found they are ipso facto false (itself a synthetic proposition, which doesn’t seem to be an objection to those who hold such an opinion). However I don’t see that a coherence in the cultural production of the human mind is a priori not to be found, and I do not find it to be very scientific (if that is to be valued) to presume that it cannot be found because it is [simply assumed that it is] not there to be found. 

If anything, the case which the book will make is that there is a coherent synthetic argument which binds all the inconsistencies of human cultural production. [As well as arguments which render consistency in interpretation. In other words, we need to understand why things are apparently inconsistent, as much as those which appear to be consistent to us. That throws back the problem of interpretation on to the sometimes problematic nature of the paradigms, constructs, and mental processes of scholars from the Enlightenment onwards]. 

The key to the mysteries is not an intellectually satisfying single core of human genius, but, that none of it adds up to that – the key is that human cultural production is deeply contingent and consistent with nothing save its own context [both intellectually and in terms of expression], except when the phenomenon is examined for the signs of an underlying grammar – which may or may not be part of a body of intellectual ideas.

Is this structuralism? Certainly it is a form of structuralist analysis, but it isn’t the structuralism of Levi-Strauss – it is not connected with the architecture of human narrative, but rather all human constructs, in space and in time. And it certainly isn’t an attempt to bind together cultural production on the basis of similar content; rather the opposite – to find out how quite dissimilar things participate in the same underlying grammar of human understanding [I was thinking of Plato's discussion of the' Same and the Different' at this point, since it follows from Plato's ontology, as well as the ontologies of other cultures around the Mediterranean, that, if the experienced world actually resides in a place which is neither located in space or in time, the ontological model which is being employed is that of reality as a plenum].

I would not wish to give this kind of philosophical analysis a name of that kind. The argument is both analytic and synthetic, in that way that good historians proceed. Questions are asked, and data is ordered. And questions are then asked of the ordered data. That isn’t structuralism (at least not to me). 

[Those familiar with  the work of Husserl may recognise the process of bracketing in my description of the attempt to analyse evidence and data outside the paradigms which we normally use to understand the past]. It is the act of creating wearable fiction, as the poet Alastair Reid suggested recently, at a public lecture in the Playfair Library, in the University of Edinburgh. Or at least, more wearable fiction than those we are currently forced to wear. [Alastair Reid was a friend and associate of Robert Graves. I was particularly interested in what he had to say, because I once worked as a research assistant for the Robert Graves Trust in Oxford, and spent much time before and after that trying to come to grips with Graves' White Goddess, which is not an easy text. I wrote an analysis of the White Goddess Sigil (in 1999) which appears on the cover of the book. The sigil can be understood in terms of various parts of the text, and in terms of information which can be found in his Greek Myths]. 

A principal way in which this study differs from a modern historical approach is that it does not build on the assumption that economic forces dictate cultural production. Or even that economic forces shape men’s thoughts. Rather economic forces are seen as a level of constraint, defining a space in which cultural production is possible. The difference is that whereas historians tend to see economics as a cultural driver, I see them as a brake, principally on the human imagination. Once, as a student studying the career of the Gracchi, I expressed the view that I could not work out what was in the mind of the surviving Gracchi brother. The eminent historian in charge of the tutorial suggested ‘does it matter?’ Well yes it does, unless you think that what is in someone’s mind is of no account, and that the inner life of the mind is no more than a reflection of the economic pressures bearing down on the owner of that mind.

Which is not to say that the economic landscape is of no little account – just that it acts as both a facilitator and a brake on human action. What causes human action is more interesting than that, as we shall see. Understanding the phenomenology of human history and culture without taking account of the mind, and perhaps more particularly the human will, seems to me to be a very strange approach. An approach so strange in fact, that it may be possible to explain it only by reference to the same grammar of human thought which some historians purport not to need to know anything about.

Philosophical Thought in the Neolithic (and why we cannot see it)

While responding to a mail from the managing editor of a scholarly magazine,  who I'd pointed in the direction of a couple of articles on my blog, I found myself condensing my project into the compass of just four paragraphs. This covers both what I am doing, and why. I reproduce them here:

Years ago I read Adolf Erman's collection of Egyptian Literature in English translation. One text in particular made me sit up, since it involved the use of concepts I associated with classical Greece. The text was Akhenaten's 'Hymn to the Aten'. Akhenaten lived some nine hundred years before Plato and Aristotle, yet he seemed to be comfortable with concepts which are supposed to have been first discussed among the Greeks. I looked for other 'anticipations', and found them.

That propelled me to study in London (in 1989). By that time I'd started to look at antiquity quite differently from the way I'd been taught by classicists. Instead of seeing classical Greece (and the work of the later philosophers all the way up to the closure of the philosophical schools in 529 CE) as the beginnings of sophisticated thought about abstract concepts, I began to treat major components of classical thought as the possible end point of a way of thinking, which might conceivably stretch back into the neolithic. The notion of excellence is one of those components, which as we now know was a concern for the megalith builders.

That's the basic hypothesis. The idea of Greece as the birthplace of philosophy is a modern construct. Plato himself said it was a very old discipline, but classicists don't bother to discuss what he had to say about that when they are writing about the history of philosophy. The evidence from around the eastern Mediterranean however, bears out what Plato said.

My focus so far has been mainly on Mesopotamia, and back to the 14th century BCE, because it is the area where I have the most expertise. It is now pretty clear however that the hypothesis that the presence of abstract ideas stretches back into the Neolithic is sound, and that this insight can deliver great riches. If only we can escape our enlightenment presumptions about the intellectual poverty of our distant ancestors.

Best regards,

Thomas Yaeger

The two articles the managing editor was pointed at were: Stone Circles, Phenomenology, and the Neolithic Mind, and: Frazer and the Association of Ideas, 

I introduced the first article as looking at the context and function of Stone Circles, particularly when looked at as structures which may have served a similar function to divine statues in both Greece and Mesopotamia. In Mesopotamia, during the installation of divine statues, the three day ritual necessarily involved pointing them at defined areas of the sky, because the heavens were understood to represent an image of the Divine - of Being and Reality itself. 

The second article I described as a review of J. G. Frazer's approach to the meaning of evidence from the ancient world. He was trained in Classics, and knew the works of Plato virtually backwards and his concern with the idea of Being, but chose to write his account of ancient thought entirely without reference to the idea of Being in antiquity. He suggested that since nothing could be predicated of Being, it was an entirely barren concept. So Frazer's voluminous output is really a species of fiction, replacing sophisticated thought about the nature of reality with the argument that ancient human thought was, more or less entirely, built on intellectual error.

Intentionality, Conjecture, and what is Holy

[This is one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

This was originally a suppressed chapter (to use the jargon) from The Sacred History of Being (2015). I removed it, together with some other chapters along the way, in order to focus the argument of the book more tightly. It looks at the role of intentionality in establishing commerce with the Divine, and the essentially phenomenological nature of how the Divine is both made and known by us. It draws parallels between the creation of gods in antiquity, and the setting up of saints in Heaven. Both represent instantiations of what is Holy.

***

It is unclear that the realm of the divine has reality. It is real, and at the same time it is not.  The only argument for the world of existence is that it is a poor copy of the divine world. And the divine world is uncertain. So how ‘real’ is the world of existence? What is the way out of this dilemma?

The answer is intentionality. The objective world is subject to change, as is the understanding of men. We cannot know the full properties of God, because, among other things, God is transcendent of human understanding. How can mortal man then understand the properties and nature of the divine, and how can the gods have a genuine involvement in the world? The answer arrived at, it would seem, is that the human understanding does not need to encompass the actual nature of the divine in order to have commerce with it. 

This is an exceptionally important point, since, beyond legitimizing commerce with the divine despite the definition of God as beyond human understanding, it also provides the intellectual basis for the creation of multiple gods. Essentially therefore the idea of isolating the properties of God, insofar as they can be understood, was understood to be a way of accessing the nature of these properties, and therefore to allow operations to take place, establishing a commerce between the divine and the world of change.

Intentionality explains why the ancients created a multiplicity of gods. If the divine itself cannot by definition be completely defined and understood, at least certain properties and attributes can be understood. These can therefore be defined and named as ways of accessing the divine. This does not at all conflict with the idea that the reality of the divine is in question. Instead this view argues that there is in fact a subjective component in the reality of the divine, at least insofar as it is possible for us to have commerce with it. That is to say, some aspects of the divine are accessible to the human mind. We cannot prove that it is real or that it exists in any sense, but despite this uncertainty, there are certain properties of the divine which are indisputable. Proof of the whole nature of the divine is unimportant, since this cannot, by the definition of the divine, be demonstrated.. We might then say that all connection with the divine therefore is an act of faith rather than certainty. The nature and power of the divine can be understood, defined, invoked and accessed by man.

Viewed in this way, we can see that each of the gods we encounter in ancient accounts represents a slice through the nature of divinity, so that one god has a special interest in one thing as opposed to another, a special set of characteristics or attributes, which more directly can be understood than an abstract and indefinable numinous concept of divinity. However the underlying numinous concept, in fact the objective numinous reality itself, requires to be real and present as the ground of being behind the multiplicity of gods. 

This explains the phenomenon of henotheism, found in ancient polytheism. Pharaoh, for example, as the incarnation of the the divine on earth, could ‘appear’ as himself, or could appear in any appropriate form of the divine. When smiting his enemies for example, he might appear as ‘Montu, in his great form.’ He might be depicted on a temple wall as Montu, rather than in the form of the king. It might also be the case that a divine pronouncement might involve the speaker moving successively from the voice and vocabulary associated with one god, to the mode of speech associated with another god, as appropriate. This has been found in Assyrian records, where someone recorded in a state of divine possession, speaks successively as the voice of different gods.

Considered in this way, the divine world is filled with a variety of gods. Some of these have been defined, and subsequently invoked. Other aspects of the underlying divine reality have not been defined or invoked, and remain as possibilities. In the world of existence, the divinities which have been defined were given representation in the form of images and statuary.

None of this should be taken to imply that polytheism initially arose from such a complex and philosophically subtle theory as this. We have much information about the growth of local pantheons in the near east, and the way in which local gods were absorbed into state pantheons, given increased importance over time, or diminished in importance, according to requirements. They would be given family relationships which they did not possess when they first arrived, and gain attributes and characteristics which they did not have when they were first born in the smaller urban centres. 

We cannot easily know to what extent there was an intellectual model behind the creation of polytheistic belief and worship from its first appearance in the archaeological and textual record. It is likely that much of what has been written about ancient polytheism from an anthropological perspective is probably correct, and valuable to our understanding. It is just that the account is incomplete from this limited perspective, and anthropologists have hardly ever seriously considered the possibility that some intellectual ideas might underpin the phenomenon as well.  

Those notionally equipped to explore this territory, the specialists in ancient philosophy and perhaps theologians, have had many reasons to stay out of this territory. For them, the possibility of the ancient presence of a sophisticated intellectual model, based on logical argument, is not something which can be easily entertained. This is something which belongs to the Greeks. Though the Greeks were polytheists, their polytheism antedates the beginnings of philosophy in the historical record, and therefore polytheism has no bearing on philosophy, or vice versa. Many writers on both Greek religion and philosophy have found this arrangement to be conveniently tidy and a boon to scholarship. But it is not the case.

Shortly before I began this work, Pope Benedict visited the UK in connection with the Beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman. When I read the details of the process of Beatification (essentially of making saints), I was struck by the resemblance between the idea of this in the Catholic Church, and the idea of setting up gods in antiquity (which will be explored in more detail later on).  The idea is that someone has to request (in ancient parlance this would be to ‘invoke’) the assistance of a person, now deceased, who showed especial virtues in life, and has to receive a response to this request which amounts to a miracle.

This is worth unpicking in detail, in order to understand the logic which is involved. It is not clear why someone would invoke someone less than the divine itself, if the divine is on offer, unless the virtues of a lesser being seem more appropriate. In other words, the prospective saint offers what looks like a channel which is more likely to be successful than the supplicant making a direct appeal to a God who is both difficult to define, and to know. 

The Catholic Church itself promotes the idea of sainthood, and unambiguously points at likely candidates. Newman has been one of those for quite sometime. Two miracles are required for the final elevation to sainthood. Why miracles? Because miracles are defined as things which cannot be accounted for in terms of earthly understanding. These may (in the extreme) be things which defy our understanding of physics, but ordinarily are occurrences such as unexpected remission from terminal illness, which ‘defies’ orthodox medical science. This was indeed the case for the supplicant who invoked the assistance of John Henry Newman.

The argument therefore runs as follows: Newman has special status in Heaven because an appeal for his assistance was answered. Because the assistance defied earthly understanding and expectation, the result was a miracle which otherwise could not have occurred. Therefore his status in Heaven is proved*[1]. Thus it is that the Catholic Church sets up saints on earth, and also in Heaven.

The Catholic Church is not based on polytheistic belief.  So it is rather surprising to find that it supports the idea that divine intervention can occur via the saints, rather than directly through the divine father, or his incarnation on earth.

The only significant difference between the Vatican’s idea of saints and the ancients idea of gods is that all of the saints are supposed to have lived human lives before being elevated to a divine status in Heaven. The ancients did not subject themselves to such an unreasonable constraint, and created gods who had never lived, and who could never have endured existence in the world. They could do this because they understood a formal and technical mechanics underpinning connection between the earthly world of existence, and divinity. The mechanics are still available to us in the records.   

It might be in order here to recap a little on the nature of the intellectual model of reality which underpins polytheistic belief, as we find it reflected in Greek texts, particularly those by Plato.

The most perfect entity it is possible for man to conceive is God. God is reality itself. The world of existence as understood by man is imperfect, and consists of imperfect representations of reality. The world of appearance as understood by man is subject to change and corruption, whereas the world of divine reality as conceived by man is eternal.

God is real. Existence is full of representations, more or less false, more or less true. Reality and existence are opposed. Man can apprehend that this is the case.

Since existence is suspended from reality, as a poor image of it, it is subject to change. Since man is an existent creature, man’s perception of reality is also subject to change. Both the nature of things which are existent, and man’s perception of these changeable things, are perpetually in flux.

Man cannot have full understanding of the nature of the divine, since, by definition, the divine transcends the world of sensible reality, and existence. It is in essence transcendental, and to the fullest extent.

However there are a number of ways in which the world of existence can access the divine reality. Several characteristic features of the divine remain in the sensible world, and retain their divine natures.  The connection does depend absolutely on the idea that the divine is complete, is total in its nature, is the ultimate limit of reality, and is the final end.  These things have analogues in the world of existence, and so there is a route of commerce open between the world of the divine and the world of existence.

Man has connection with the world of the divine through things and properties which are present in the world of existence which participate in the nature of the divine. These things include: completion, totality, the limit, the end, the perfection of a thing, a nature, a property, or an act, and so on. It also includes infinitive and superlative action, and also its extreme opposite, inaction. Greatness too, which we found to be an insufficient concept in the medieval version of an ontological argument concerning the divine, is also something which may open the way to the divine. The ancients also included ‘fame’ as one of the properties which connect man with the divine. We can explore the wide range of concepts and properties which can connect us with the divine along the way.  We shall find that justice, beauty, magnanimity, ethical and moral perfection, and honour, are also included in this list.

It is not necessary for us to have a complete understanding of the divine in order to access aspects of that higher reality. In fact a focus on particular characteristics, a ‘bracketing’ of the most relevant aspects of the divine, increases the efficacy of the commerce with the divine. Thus the intentionality of the supplicant is a factor in the opening of contact with the divine. There are other ideas associated with the strengthening of the connection with the divine which we shall explore. These include reduplication, the striking together of images and concepts, the collection or heaping up of things, especially where these result in reduplication of properties; the act of drawing near to the divine, or to the image of the divine, and so on. The deliberate opposition of ideas and images is also relevant to the business of establishing a commerce with the divine. For connection with the divine represents an alteration of state.

And to reiterate a key point, none of this proves the reality of God. It merely establishes a range of correspondences between a concept of God and a hypothetical Being who might or might not have reality. Instead, the entire intellectual system underpinning polytheism, at least in its later stages, was rooted in the paradoxical and transcendent notion of the divine, which necessarily defied human comprehension. So, there was no proof available, but within this world view, ‘proof’ conclusive to the human understanding would have demolished the entire edifice.

---

[1] It is proved by the fact that it could not ordinarily have happened. This is a tacit admission that what is real, what is possible, at the level of divine reality, may be entirely contrary to what we understand as possible in the world of existence. 

Stone Circles, Phenomenology, and the Neolithic Mind

Some notes on the cultural context of Stone Circles, and the function of observations made with them.

[This is one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

How could we ever understand the function of these objects, in the absence of any contemporary account? Archaeology and scholarship have been applied to the problem of these mysterious objects, but we are apparently still none the wiser. When it was first noticed that these objects were in some way astronomically aligned, that was a step forward, but in fact the observation did not advance us much in understanding the function of the monuments. They mark rising and setting points, and other extreme positions, and so there is the possibility of a calendrical function.

It is hard however to imagine that keeping tabs on the seasons was a principal function of these objects. You don’t need to observe the heavens in any detail in order to know it is time to sow, and time to harvest. If you want to know the length of the year, this can be established with simple observation. After that you could tell that you were in midwinter or at midsummer, at least until the precession of the equinoxes and the imperfection of the quarter day at the end of the year gradually moved things out of kilter. And so leap years would be invented to keep the seasons roughly where they should be, and intercalary days and months would be introduced where necessary over longer periods of time. All this has been done elsewhere, and through time, in the context of relatively basic observations.

The work of Alexander Thom, who surveyed the megalithic monuments in Britain over a period of more than 40 years, from the 1930s onwards, confirmed to those of us with eyes to see, that indeed the circles have a serious astronomical function. He also confirmed that the circles, with their observational platforms and their distant farsights, often on hills and mountains many miles away, have in many cases, a fearful precision about them, whether these farsights mark the rising and declination of the principal stars, the rising and setting of the sun at different points in the year, the solstices and the equinoxes, and the peculiar movements of the moon at various points during the 19 year metonic cycle.

The main objection of the archaeological community to the acceptance of this view of the circles as sophisticated tools for the observation of the heavens and its movements is two-fold. The first is that there is nothing (beyond what these objects seem to show) which suggests to us that the megalith builders and their contemporary culture was concerned at all with precision. The second is that, even if the circles can be shown to mark certain astronomically precise points, we have no clue at all about why the megalith builders would want to do this. We have no understanding of the function and purpose of such observations, and so we can say virtually nothing about either the purpose of the monuments, or about the culture which gave rise to them. In other words we are no further forward in our understanding.

This two-fold objection is sound, at least from the archaeologists point of view. We have no contemporary description of anything at all from the time and culture of the megalith builders. We have no understanding of their intentions, and no understanding of the function of the circles, and it is unlikely that archaeological interpretation by itself will reveal these things to us. It seems to be gone altogether, and all we are left with is insupportable speculation. Perhaps it would be best to draw a veil over this apparently anomalous aspect of the past, since we can have no understanding of it.

Yet we do know that other cultures had a concern with precision, and with precise measure. Egypt is well known to have had such a concern, at least during some parts of its history, as the orientation of its temples show. Precision is a feature of Mesopotamian civilization, as exemplified in Babylonian mathematics; and Hebrew literature also contains precise descriptions of objects. Ancient Greece likewise understood precision (akribeia), exemplified in the design of the Parthenon.

What does this concern with precision mean? We can start from what we know, and throw off what we only think we know about the Neolithic mind. One of these presumptions is that intelligence and intellectual sophistication is relatively new, and that consequently these things are not to be found in the Neolithic period. If we presume instead that it is present, and in fact it is not, we will know our mistake soon enough. If we presume that intellectual sophistication is not present, and in fact it is, we will be left with the intractable puzzle we are attempting to solve.

I have argued elsewhere that, for both Greece and Assyria, the heavens, and what the heavens represented, were of particular importance for cult practice. Plato is clear that the heavens represent an image of divine Being, also spoken of as the ‘Living Animal’, created out of the materials of other gods, by the demiourgos (the ‘Living Animal’ is created by the Demiourgos rather than by God directly, so that there should be not too much of the divine present in the world). He is also quite explicit that the body of the ‘Living Animal’ was created with precision.

In which case astronomy is important for the understanding of divine Being. An infamously unintelligible passage in Plato’s Timaeus talks about the perception of images being possible only because the soul already contains exemplars of these. If the heavens represent an image of divine Being, then all other images are poor imitations, and we should direct our attention principally to the heavens. The soul represents the heavens most closely, and in antiquity was notionally the part of us which is most connected to the divine. It is the soul which recognizes divine knowledge when it is presented to it.

In ancient Assyria, part of the ritual for creating an image of a god (thereby conferring divinity on the object) involves the image being exposed to the sight of the heavens. As a god, it needs to have perception of Being, of which it is an aspect. We have this ritual from the reign of Esarhaddon (7^th century BCE), who was the predecessor of Ashurbanipal, one of the last Assyrian kings, and the owner of the famous palace library, much of which is now located in the British Museum.

In the Republic, Plato argues that the philosopher should ascend to the idea of the Good, which is another way of referencing the idea of transcendent Being, by a series of connected images, without specifying what those images might be. These images, as imperfect representations of Being, are subject to change. Matters are complicated by the fact that the things which are imaged are also subject to change. Thus both subjective impression and objective reality are subject to change and uncertainty.

In his dialogues, Plato shows that most arguments about the nature of the ultimate reality fail – particularly in his dialogue most concerned with Being, the Sophist. Here the participants in the dialogue agree to accept that a communion between man and the divine must be granted to exist, even if it cannot be argued certainly to be the case. The necessity of this communion is vital to religion, otherwise it is not possible for man to connect with the divine, and therefore he would be powerless in the world in which he finds himself.

A key characteristic of ancient religion was that it entertained conjecture regarding knowledge of the gods. Plato refers to this in his discussion of the divided line in The Republic. We cannot know Being itself directly. We cannot know the lesser gods directly either, but we can understand some of the characteristics of these gods, though full knowledge is necessarily beyond our understanding. We can approach some limited understanding of Being via the images and descriptions of the lesser gods however, which is one reason why they were deemed to have some kind of reality.

This limited set of characteristics and properties emerges from thorough and precise discussion of the nature of ontology (Being), as the focus of human conjecture. This is quite clear in both Plato and also in what we know of the teachings of Pythagoras. The paradox of knowledge is the consequence of the idea that all knowledge is present in the divine, and that we only have knowledge because we have a soul. In other words, we can have knowledge as the result of the divine having a presence in us already.

Since the divine is transcendent, there must be only a limited set of properties of the divine which can have exemplars in the world of appearance (the mundane earthly world). These properties cannot be things which have no meaning or permanent reality in the divine world. Thus one would not expect arbitrary sizes and colours, for example, or things which are changeable and impermanent. Since the reality of Being is at the extreme of our understanding, and is in itself necessarily an extreme, those who would look for things on earth which are exemplars of the divine would look for things which were in some way extreme, and which exist in conjunction with other things which participate in the divine extremity.

In both Greece and Assyria (I suggest), during the inauguration of divine statues, the statues, which are treated as markers of divinity on earth, representing and, in some instances, creating divinity through the will of the inaugurators, were pointed at the sky at a key point in the ritual. This is so that the statues could see (and know) Being, as represented by the heavenly bodies. In the ritual from Nineveh, the gaze of the statue is pointed at different parts of the sky and different parts of the horizon, in a precise sequence.

So we have an understanding of what was understood to be taking place in such a ritual, once we have a clear understanding of the model of reality in which the ritual served its function. There is evidence from Mesopotamia that this conceptual model was in existence at least as far back as the eighteenth century B.C.E.

It is possible that this model of reality, essentially established through logical argument, was very widely spread, and was not confined to the near East, and was in fact something like a standard view for those who had the time and the liberty to think about such matters.

The evidence from the megaliths makes the importance of the sky very clear. The hypothetical argument to be tested here, is that also in Britain and around the megalithic world, the sky was seen as a representation of divinity, of Being. As an image of the divine, it was an image of totality itself.

The megalithic observatory, or temple, according to this hypothesis, was a device to embody aspects of divinity, of Being, actually in its structure, in the same way in which the gods in Mesopotamia might be invited to occupy their representations on earth.

What about this representation of divinity might qualify as capable of representation on earth? Not the motion of the planets in themselves, since they appeared to be subject to a degree of arbitrariness (with the exception of Venus). The most obvious candidates for the establishment of extreme rising and setting points were the Sun and the Moon – the most prominent aspect of the heavenly representation. The equinoxes would also be of interest, since these represent the points at which the Sun and Moon pass along the path of the ecliptic and cross the celestial equator.

The doctrine of totality is common to both Pythagoras and Plato, and also surfaces, much earlier, in Assyria, as far back as Shamshi Adad I, who reigned in the eighteenth century B.C.E. One of his titles was: ‘King of Totality’ (Shar Kishati). This doctrine makes it clear that many aspects of the world have something of a double nature: Plato argued for example that ‘greatness’ implied participation in ‘the great’. Likewise the divine reality is total, and participation in the divine reality implies the presence of a form of totality in whoever was regarding the heavenly representation of the divine. The sacred is, in some respects, always present in the secular. Both Pythagoras and Plato held that things only come to be by wholes through wholes.

We can now make a preliminary list of things which, if we assume an intellectual sophistication, born of a culture familiar with logical argument, would perhaps have been of particular interest to observers who were part of megalithic culture:

Extremity, Totality, Perfection, Completion, Invariance, Integral (whole) numbers, The incorruptible, Greatness, Rising, Setting, Beginning, Ending, Duration, Periodicity,  Points of transformation.

This list illustrates the sort of abstracted interest I propose the megalithic builders had in aspects of the world, which interest follows from the conceptual model of reality which I have described. All of these have exemplars on both the earth, and in the sky. These characteristics would, within this conceptual model, have been understood to provide points of contact, and a bridge to the divine.

A megalithic circle might therefore be conceived as a representation, in an abstracted form, of the perfection of the heavens, and of Being itself. It would demonstrate its perfection to those who had the understanding to see this for themselves, and would mark the extreme points of the movement of the heavenly bodies. It would be constructed only using integral values, derived where possible, proportionately, from the movement of the heavens in relation to the earth. It would be built out of the most incorruptible materials (most often stone), and where possible, the stone would remain unworked, as something which, in its natural state, already possessed commonality with divine Being. The stones would be large, since their largeness by itself represents unworldliness, and another commonality with Being. The arrangement of the stones would be the way in which this commonality would be reduplicated and intensified. Heavenly cycles would be embodied in the structure where possible, together with indications (in some cases) of their duration.

As we know from the studies made by Alexander Thom, the stone circles were built on the basis of various sizes of Pythagorean right-angled triangles, and laid out with ropes of precise length. The construction process was designed and executed in such a way that the circumference of the circles, whether truly circular, egg-shaped, or flattened, would always be an integral number of the units used. This interest in integral numbers seems to have been universal among the builders of the circles.  The connectivity the integral numbers opened to Being is the reason why this was important.

We are told by Julius Caesar (in his Gallic Wars), that the Druids, at the time of his arrival in Northern Europe, taught astronomy and mathematics, and held to a doctrine akin to Pythagoreanism. In fact this section of the text seems to belong to the Roman equivalent of the CIA factbook, so it is probably a fairly accurate assessment by those in Rome whose job it was to collect useful information about cultures around the known world, into which Rome was expanding.

There are strong parallels between the ideas of Plato and Pythagoras as has already been noted, and Plato is reputed to have made significant efforts to obtain texts from the Pythagoreans. Both regarded the world as the product of mind: both the transcendental realm of Being, and the world of appearance. So there is, at a conjectural level, a series of connections between the divine world and the world of appearance, which can be discovered. All other stories about the world are mere likelihood. Modern scholarship on Greek philosophy stops short of this understanding of Greek thought. Plato’s highest level of reality is never explored, and even the approach to it is left shrouded in mystery.

The presence of an articulate idea of Being explains aspects of Mesopotamian theology and ideas about creation, as well as illuminating aspects of Homer’s Iliad, which of course precedes both Plato and Pythagoras by several centuries. There are strong parallels between Greek and Mesopotamian ideas of Being, which I have explored elsewhere. Both cultures practice theurgy (though the term does not make an appearance until much later), and the theoretical basis for this is similar, in that the twofold aspect of creation makes it possible for workmen (under the direction of the king, who in himself embodies several aspects of divinity in his official position) to have their sacred aspect initialized, so that they can set up gods in heaven. They can do this because they have had divinity put upon them by the king who is directing operations, in conjunction with instructions from his diviners. This is possible because they already possess divinity and connection to the divine, though ‘they are blind and deaf’ to this understanding throughout their lives, as Esarhaddon tells us.

Thus, they, like everyone else, and the world, are representations and images of Being, and the divine reality.

What I suggest Plato is doing, during a period of intense cultural crisis in Greece, is transmitting in writing, in a scrambled and elliptical fashion, key aspects of a Bronze Age philosophy, which has its roots in the Neolithic in both Europe and the near East. The transcendental doctrine which is enshrined in his work is actually in plain sight to anyone who can follow his reasoning that all the merely likely stories are just that: no more than likely. The single argument which is not a mere likelihood, is counterintuitive, paradoxical, and beyond common sense. And it remains a matter of conjecture. This argument about the nature of the world used to be the apex of learning and knowledge. Reality is transcendental, and neither subjective or objective. Nothing lay beyond this fundamental understanding of the world.

If this argument is correct, then we can know what Neolithic man was up to, and in some detail. In short, for the intellectually sophisticated in the Neolithic period, the heavens represented, as for Plato much later, a moving image of eternity. To measure the parameters of this moving image of the divine was to know God, and to have knowledge of divine things.

What was once a complete and deafening silence is now filled with many voices. We can never know the words they used, but we can know what they talked about, since anyone who talks about Being, and the connections between Being and the world of appearance will talk about the same things, and come to the same sort of conclusions. Some of these arguments have a practical upshot in the creation of sacred sites. They would look for extreme points in the heavens, since the heavens comprise a representation of the divine. The extreme points of the motions of the heavenly bodies represent a connection between the extreme of Being, and the secular world.

The principal concern was the nature and reality of Being, and the nature of reality itself. All  philosophical instruction would have been designed to lead the neophyte, by dint of the repeated failure of argument to establish any solid and reliable conclusion within the confines of common sense, to the conclusion that the reality that we perceive is essentially transcendental in nature. And that the nature of the divine is a conjecture which must be held as just that, a conjecture. Anything less and it becomes an opinion, which isn’t real knowledge.

Many practices in the ancient world emanate from this perspective on reality. Sacrifice is one. The origin of the idea is that something which has been completed is connected with the divine, which is also complete. Even if the termination of life is artificial and precipitate. The idea is also reflected in the conversation between Solon and Croesus in Herodotus, where Solon, in response to Croesus, says ‘call no man happy until his end’. Divination by entrails also is based on the same idea, that by inspection of the entrails of an animal whose life has been ‘completed’ (even now we may say ‘totalled,’ to mean something utterly ended), something of the divine can be understood.

***

[The BBC Chronicle documentary from 1970 - 'Cracking the Stone Age Code', on the work of Alexander Thom, is available to watch (complete) by clicking on the image at the head of this article.] 

Thomas Yaeger, November 26, 2016

This article eventually gave rise to another article which focussed particularly on the pythagorean aspects of the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age. This new article uploaded on March 5, 2018,  'Patterns of Thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age in Britain' is perhaps the place you want to go next.


Thomas Yaeger, March 6, 2018

Questions and Answers

The Sacred History of Being addresses many questions. Some of these have been puzzles over the centuries. What follows is a list of fifty of these questions (some of which are framed as proposals for discussion), all of which are given some kind of answer in the course of the text. Other questions are discussed, including the strange description of the Great Year in relation to the life of man, in the famous conversation between Solon and Croesus, recounted by Herodotus.

There isn't much about my use of methodology in the course of SHB. It would have been a tedious way of starting the book, and instead I chose to write about the development of my understanding of certain problematic questions during my formative years, and some of my reading, as a way to introduce the main subjects I wanted to deal with. But there is a methodology present. The text is the result of the application of a Husserlian approach to the study of ancient history. This approach has been refined over the years, and is capable of producing rich results, as I think SHB shows. I intend to write more about this methodology at some other time.

Here is the list.

1. Is Plato writing literary fiction when he talks about the Forms? 

2. The history of philosophy is old, and was understood in the 2nd millennium B.C.E.

3. Are there philosophical ideas in Homer?

4. How did scholars schooled in philosophy not notice philosophical procedures in texts from the Ancient Near East in the 2nd millennium B.C.E.?

5. What was Homer joining together? Literature and poetry in the Late Bronze Age.

6. The undiscovered philosophical underpinnings of the liturgy of the New Year Festival in Babylon (Enuma Elish).

7. How is it that statues of the gods are themselves divine in the ancient world?

8. How can you make gods, and why?

9. The significance of the Undefined Dyad in ancient thought.

10. When is polytheism actually polytheism, and when is it monotheism?

11. Why is the Ontological Argument such a disaster for our understanding of ancient philosophy concerning the gods?

12. Why was philosophy demoted from its original status by German scholarship?

13. Can the nature of Reality be accommodated by an Aristotelian logical model?

14. How and why did Egypt lose its reputation for philosophy?

15. What is the meaning and purpose of the Assyrian Sacred Tree?

16. When scholars blink: Not seeing what there is to be seen.

17. What aspect of philosophy did Pythagoras learn at Babylon?

18. How the kings of ancient Assyria could be gods.

19. Philosophical analysis before Plato.

20. The most secret and sacred of rituals: the setting up of gods in Heaven.

21. How old is Jewish mysticism, and what is its origin?

22. What aspects of the Divine have existence on Earth?

23. Why is the home of the Mesopotamian god Ea at the bottom of the sea?

24. Why Assyrian kings on campaign wished to touch the ‘Upper and Lower Seas.’

25. Why ancient cultic life is not best understood as religion.

26. Is the origin of the world always with us?

27. What did the European Enlightenment leave behind?

28. How man was instructed by the first sages in the art and science of civilization, and what the story means.

29. How much fiction is there in our rational understanding of the past?

30. The myth of Progress, and the power of Abstraction.

31. What theory of reality is present and cultivated from the 2nd millennium B.C.E., and can be found in the Nag Hammadi codices?

32. Why the Assyrian Court valued scholarship and excellence.

33. What is the True light of the gods?

34. How old is Abstract Thought?

35. Ancient Cult practice and the pursuit of Knowledge.

36. The necessity of knowing the mind of God, and how it is known.

37.  What is the Doctrine of Wholes and Totalities?

38.  Is Reality One or Many?

39. How 'God' is different from the gods.  

40.  What is the nature of Reality?

41. The properties and attributes of the Divine.

42.  What is the complexion of the Dead?

43. Why are rivers divine in Mesopotamia?

44.  What is the significance of Ocean?

45. Can holiness be conferred and taken away?

46. Why does Marduk carry a woven basket?

47. The meaning of the Mesopotamian interest in lists.

48. What is the Paradox of Knowledge?

49. What is the Sweet Song of Swans?

50. What is esoteric knowledge?


Thomas Yaeger, 22 September 2015

Cultural Parallels, and False Narratives

Brilliantly written ! Convincing & well argued. A must read for all students of History https://t.co/cz2TgjlVbu

— Beena Raza (@razabeena) November 20, 2015

I treat much of our intellectual and cultural baggage as contingent, meaning that it can and should be questioned. It isn't necessarily real, or grounded, and it may be as mythical as the main subject in question. So it is necessary to look at that too, because it may be part of a supporting narrative, without which the main subject may have a quite different meaning.

For example, when looking at ancient societies such as Greece and Assyria, we talk about their culture in terms which make sense to us. So for example we may talk of Greek Religion, and be entirely unaware that the concept is problematic. It is problematic because the Greeks did not have 'religion'. The term acquired its current usage through the writings of St. Augustine, around the time of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. To talk of Greek cultic life in terms of 'religion' is therefore to be using a problematic notion which took form around nine centuries after the high point of Greek civilization.

Gilbert Murray wrote a famous work called 'The Four Stages of Greek Religion'. Some time later, and after much further thought, the book was revised with an extra chapter, and titled 'The Five Stages of Greek Religion'. So not only is the entire analysis based on a subjective and conceptual retrojection of a much later idea, the meaning of the evidence has been divided in two different ways according to what was in Murray's mind at different times in his scholarly career.

What Murray was trying to do was to put his concept of ancient Greek religion into a framework of historical and intellectual development, and to provide a narrative for its progress. That's what historians did with their materials in 1925, and a glance at modern histories of human cultural and intellectual development will show that not much has changed. There are pitfalls that have swallowed the reputations and reliability of earlier historians, and modern historians cautiously avoid these. But they are playing essentially the same game. It can be argued that it is hard to avoid constructing such narratives when dealing with the evidence. It is indeed difficult to avoid this. But the difficulty involved in dealing with the evidence and its context is not an excuse for superficial and largely subjective analysis.

It can also be argued by historians that 'we know what we mean' when terms such as religion are used in the analysis of earlier contexts. They may well know what they mean, in terms of how the word might be used in the context of modern European culture and modern history. The assumption is made that using it to analyse what is understood to be a parallel cultural phenomenon in the ancient world is therefore legitimate, and not hazardous.

Are we dealing with 'parallel cultural phenomena'? We understand what we already know, and this knowledge allows us to identify cultural parallels in other contexts and times, and therefore to explore the phenomena we are looking at in a rational way.

But sometimes there was no word for what we understand as the cultural phenomenon of religion in antiquity, and therefore there was, sometimes no understanding then, of what we think we understand now. It follows that, either the understanding of what we call 'religion' in the ancient past was significantly different from our own, or the terminology we use in our own culture is actually unnecessary.

So, if we did not use the term 'religion' to discuss 'religious' phenomena in our own world and time, such as the abrahamic religions, or Buddhism, Taoism, and Hindu patterns of understanding, what would or could we understand of these phenomena?

We could say quite a lot in fact. But it would start to paint for us a different picture of our world.

What we would be missing would be a formal term which we use to indicate that a significant cultural grouping is bound together or unified by a doctrine, a text, liturgy, a cult of worship of the divine, an organised understanding of the world, an affiliation to a body of belief, a shared faith in another world, an eschatology, an organised priesthood, and so on.

The term 'religio', can be traced back to the mid-first century B.C.E., in the writings of Cicero. There is no universally accepted definition of what it means, or even its derivation. St Augustine defined it differently, on the basis of an interpretation by Lactantius. Augustine's is the most commonly agreed derivation, from the Latin 'religare', which means 'to bind together'.

There is a Wikipedia page on the word 'religio' which is rather good (not by me!), and reveals just how much weight we put on the modern derivations from this word. I'm going to quote from it a lot. It begins with this passage.

The Latin term religiō, origin of the modern lexeme religion (via Old French/Middle Latin[2]) is of ultimately obscure etymology. It is recorded beginning in the 1st century BC, i.e. in Classical Latin at the beginning of the Roman Empire, notably by Cicero, in the sense of "scrupulous or strict observance of the traditional cultus".

On the etymology, the article continues:

The classical explanation of the word, traced to Cicero himself, derives it from re- (again) + lego in the sense of "choose", "go over again" or "consider carefully". Modern scholars such as Tom Harpur and Joseph Campbell favor the derivation from ligo "bind, connect", probably from a prefixed re-ligare, i.e. re- (again) + ligare or "to reconnect," which was made prominent by St. Augustine, following the interpretation of Lactantius.[3][4]

The problem with these etymologies, regardless of whether one favours lego or ligo, is that the now-familiar prefix re- "again" is not attested prior to its occurrence in religio and is itself in need of an etymological explanation. For this reason, it has been suggested that this productive prefix originates in the very word religio, where it arose by dissimilation of an earlier reduplicated *le-ligare, thence as it were *le-ligio.

So, we find we are reading both backwards, and also forwards, into our own time, when we try to discover something like the original sense of the word. We can't easily understand the word at this immense distance, when the word was scarcely understood (it would appear) in Republican Rome.

As I've indicated in my post The Divine and the Limit, there was a body of ideas in Rome which associated properties and attributes of things in the physical world with the Divine. These were often reduplicated in the same place, as if by doing this the connection with the Divine would be reinforced. The Wikipedia article on 'religio' observes that:

Within the system of what we would now call "Roman religion (in the modern sense of the word), the term religio originally meant an obligation to the gods, something expected by them from human beings or a matter of particular care or concern as related to the gods,[5]"reverence for God or the gods, careful pondering of divine things, piety".[6]

In this sense, religio might be translated better as "religious scruple" than with the English word "religion".[7] One definition of religion offered by Cicero is cultus deorum, "the proper performance of rites in veneration of the gods."[8]

That shows some good understanding. The scholar Simon Price understood very well that it was the matter of observance which was the most important thing in Roman religion, not what people believed. The idea of belief is a retrojection into a foreign context, and is something which we assume was always present in connection with religion.

Religio among the Romans was not based on "faith", but on knowledge, including and especially correct practice.[9] Religio (plural religiones) was the pious practice of Rome's traditional cults, and was a cornerstone of the mos maiorum,[10] the traditional social norms that regulated public, private, and military life. To the Romans, their success was self-evidently due to their practice of proper, respectful religio, which gave the gods what was owed them and which was rewarded with social harmony, peace and prosperity.

Again, a good understanding. It is observance of the gods and their rites, and knowledge of their properties and attributes which serve the functions of the cult. Belief or faith serves no function.

So in important ways, modern understanding of the idea of religion is a real hindrance to an understanding of the concept in its original context: we ought to be talking in terms of cult observance.

Of course modern religions have cultic aspects to them, and involve cult practices which are of great
importance. But imagine trying to explain something like the Church of England or the Roman Catholic Church in terms of their performance of cult action.

We are misled about ancient religion by our presumption of an understanding of our own, and this misunderstanding of ancient religion magnifies our difficulty in maintaining that they are parallel cultural phenomena. 

One of the ways in which we might understand something of the nature of ancient religions is to look at one which was around in antiquity, and which is still around. Hinduism has been around for a very long time, and its numerous sects and schools reflect something of the cultic organisation in both Greece and Rome.

The role of temples in Indian civilisation was explained by the Paramacharya of Kanchi Kamakoti Pitham, Sri Chandrasekharendra Saraswati Swamigal, in an interview in 1959. I'm quoting from an excellent article in the magazine India Facts, 'Temples and the State in India: A Historical Overview', written by M D Srinivas, and published on the 9th of September 2015. Sri Chandrasekharendra Saraswati Swamigal tells us that:

Our temples are not organised as places for meditation, nor for congregational worship. The purpose of a temple is different. We enjoy the goods of life, such as house, food clothing, ornaments, music, dance, etc. We pay a tribute in the form of taxes to the King – now the Government – for making it possible for us to enjoy them by giving us their protection. The King Protector is provided with a palace and other paraphernalia of royalty.

Even as we render homage to the kings for the enjoyment of these things, we are bound to tender our gratitude to God who has primarily given us the good things of life. We offer a part of these good things as a token of our gratitude to Him in the temple. We first offer to Him all that he has given to us, in the shape of food, clothing, jewels, music, flowers, lights, incense, and so on with the grateful consciousness that they are His gifts to us; and we receive them back from Him as His prasada.

The temple is the place where these offerings are made on behalf of the collective community where it is situated. Even if people do not go to the temple, it is enough that these offerings are made to God on behalf of the community. The duty of the people at the place is to see that these offerings are made in a proper manner. There have been people who would not take a day’s meal till the temple bell announced that the offering to God of food for the day had been made. Then only do they take their meal as God’s prasada.

He is also quoted as saying:

No other religion is known to have lasted so long. When I think of our religion I am reminded of our temples. They are not kept as clean as the churches or mosques…. Our sanctuaries are different because they are built of granite. Their foundations laid thousands of years ago still remain sturdy. … These temples still stand as great monuments to our civilization in spite of our neglect of them and our indifference. It is not easy to pull them down. Perhaps it is more difficult to demolish these edifices than it must have been to build them. Our religion, to repeat, is like these temples. It is being supported by something that we do not seem to know, something that is not present in other faiths… This something is varnashrama dharma.

He is referring to the Hindu model of the world, and specifically the duties performed according to the system of four varnas (social divisions) and four ashrams (stages in life).This system is imagined to be a natural part of the world.

M D Srinivas reminds us that,

From ancient times, the classical texts of India have enjoined that one should not stay in a place which is not sanctified by the presence of a deity.

Arthur Koestler, who was the original interviewer of Sri Chandrasekharendra Saraswati Swamigal, published it in his The Lotus and the Robot, in 1960, (p.54-63). We get some crucial further details from this important interview. Koestler brought up the issue of “din and noise in Indian temples.” Koestler wanted to know whether this was the “reason why Indians with a meditative disposition had to resort to the solitude of the mountains or bury themselves in lonely caves.”

The Paramacharya begins his answer by saying, “The case is just the reverse. Because solitude and a secluded spot have been prescribed from the oldest times, for contemplation, the temples do not have to serve that purpose.” 

Now that is a good cultural parallel for ancient Greek and Roman religion. Faith is mentioned, but not belief (I've distinguished between these two things elsewhere on this web site). The reason it isn't mentioned is because belief serves no function. Sri Chandrasekharendra Saraswati Swamigal tells us exactly what the temples are for, and they are places of observance of the rites proper to the gods, properly conducted, and that the buildings are the houses and palaces of the deities. The offerings are in response to the idea that all good things came from God. Note that he refers to God in the singular, and not as a plurality. God is accessed through the properties and attributes of the plurality of gods, and the rites and observances which are appropriate to them.

If the offerings are a symbolic return of good things to the God who gave them, then it is the case that the ritual activity in the Hindu religion is a deliberate recollection of the original creation and ordering of the universe. The activity and the meaning of the temples, the worship of statues of the Hindu divinities, and the temple system, are understood to function as a recreation of conditions close to the inception of the the world, when all good things were granted to the human race. By performing these rites and observances, the reality of the world and its proper order is upheld.

This is strikingly like patterns of thought which are found in ancient Sumer, Assyria and Babylonia. In the latter two cases the recollection of the conditions of the original creation is a key part of the installation of the gods in the temples, and can be seen to lie beneath the performance of the liturgy of the New Year Festival in Babylon (one of the chapters in the Sacred History of Being concerns aspects of this liturgy, the Enuma Elish). The important things which relate to the creation are collected together, and serve to establish the relationship with the Divine. By virtue of their collection together in the context of the temple, the Divine is brought closer, and into the physical world.

This pattern of ideas also applies to the cultic life of Greece and Rome, though it is not expressed in the same way as in India; and in the case of Rome, we have lost the reasons for some of its peculiarities (the role of Janus for instance, who seems sometimes to be the most important of the Roman gods).

But we are closer to understanding the problematic aspects of Roman religion, and the original meaning of the term 'religio', than we might think.

As already discussed, historians proceed by establishing parallels between cultural phenomena where they can, and build an understanding of a thing which might be quite different in detail from what is already understood. If what is known is actually understood. If it isn't understood, then confusion and misunderstanding will follow. That is what has happened with the understanding of 'religio' as anciently conceived.

Not understanding the concepts behind religious practice and observance, scholars fell back on what was, to them, the most likely meaning of the term. They assumed, as we have seen, that the meaning of the term could be understood in terms of 'religare', which means something like 'to bind again'. Despite the history of the Latin language making this understanding very unlikely, since the prefix 're-' is not attested in early writings as meaning 'to repeat'. So religare is, both in terms of definition and etymology, a poor candidate for aiding our understanding of 'religio'.

If they had possessed a better understanding of the concepts and reasons underpinning Cicero's 'cultus deorum' in the ancient world, (which in a sense is to beg the question) they would have spotted a similar Latin word, which retained something of the original meaning of 'religio'. That word is 'religere', which means 'to collect, or gather together'.


Thomas Yaeger,19-21 September 2015

Beyond the Religious Impulse

Millions of words have been written on the subject of human religion, and its origin, in the past two centuries or so. These words have been written in an intellectual and cultural landscape, in the western world at least, that has a very clearly defined structure. This means that each new writer on the subject of religion has had to negotiate these, while framing arguments which add to the sum of human knowledge, and which make sense of the data which is available to us.

The discipline of archaeology has given us a treasure trove of data which we did not have even a century ago, so that it is possible for us to analyse the past to a level of detail which can be quite revealing. Many of the things understood and believed by scholars in the nineteenth century have lost all value, except in terms of waymarkers in the development of a rational response to the evidence for the past.

The archaeologist James Mellaart, who was brilliant, but who did not entirely have the confidence of other scholars for one reason and another, once said in a lecture that ‘the important bit of evidence is always missing’. Meaning that there is no reason at all why the simple act of digging should provide materials which answer the questions you want to ask.

It is also true that the important bit of evidence is sometimes present, but often isn’t recognised, because the scholar is asking the wrong questions, and possibly asking questions within the wrong analytical paradigm. So there is in fact a very large quantity of material available to scholars which can tell us much about the intellectual life of the ancient world, but because of the contemporary intellectual and cultural landscape, with its fixed and defined structure developed over many years, it simply cannot be seen for what it is.

The most common explanation for the human insistence on the reality of the divine, and its long existence, stretching as it does, back (at least) into the Palaeolithic, if rock art is any guide, is that it is an intuitive and natural response to the nature of the reality which presents itself to man. That is undoubtedly part of the explanation, but it has an enormous weakness, in that there is nothing about this response which offers an explanation of any of the complexity of human religious observance and understanding. Of that we have only a phenomenological understanding; we can describe the phenomena represented to us in the evidence of texts and ritual objects, burial sites, temples, etc, and we can infer certain things about the ancient perception of reality, and of the nature of the divine, on the basis of these, usually within a comparative framework.

Analysis of a phenomenon within a comparative framework is always hazardous, because it is necessary to determine what is comparable. It may be the case that apparent parallels are simply phenomenal coincidences, without any deeper common meaning, and so the comparison is misleading. The comparative choices, and the nature of the decisions made in connection with them, have bedevilled comparative study of ancient patterns of thought concerning the divine since modern comparative study began. I remember the archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson’s confidence in interpreting the monument of Stonehenge as a place of the dead early in the first decade of this new century. He interpreted the routes to the monument, by water and land, as a processional route from some formerly existing and similar monuments made of wood (Durrington Walls and Woodhenge), and read from the whole array that the processional route symbolised passing from life to death.

This easy interpretation even sounds as though it belongs to the late nineteenth century, in its approach and assumptions. Why was he so confident of his interpretation? The answer is that he had met someone from Madagascar, where they have stone structures too, who told him that stone monuments are places of the dead.

So many questions could be asked! Why should practice and meaning in Madagascar be comparable with practice and meaning in Stonehenge? How does the Madagascan know about the meaning of stone monuments in Madagascar – is it still a current practice, and therefore it is possible to ask people what it means? If it is a current practice, why should it be the case that it reflects an earlier understanding of what it might have meant to build these things some four thousand years ago? If it isn’t a current practice, then what basis is there at all for conjuring an interpretation from the stones which is then used to interpret the meaning of Stonehenge?

Underneath this interpretation is the unpleasant notion that the strangeness of the ancient world arises from an essentially irrational view of reality, which we do not share because we are rational creatures (in this case a post-processual academic archaeologist of some standing). If we want to gain an insight into irrational phenomena, we need to find someone to ask who might still be in touch, in some way, with an understanding of that irrationality.

***

Scholars are looking for a simple set of solutions to the question of the origin of the religious impulse, because we imagine it must be simple. It is after all a universal phenomenon which has existed almost from time immemorial. But it isn’t the case that the set of solutions needs to be simple. It does however need to have been intelligible to the group which first mooted the idea of the divine, as does the idea of connection between man and the divine. Not everyone needs to understand the actual detail of how god was first understood by man, and the nature of the basis of the idea that man can have some kind of connection with the divine. What is necessary is the existence of such ideas. Human beings will do the rest.

So much of modern life depends on things we don’t understand in any real sense – technology, as Arthur C. Clarke once pointed out, if sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic. But we are able to live our lives on the basis of the knowledge of the functionality of our technology. The function of computers, phones, cameras and televisions is deliberately made simple, otherwise we would not know how to use them, or perhaps even understand how they might be of use to us. When I was a child of about six or seven, I was taught how to count in binary, and also taught how to draw flow diagrams. This was because at the time (the early sixties), this was the sort of knowledge it was imagined would be necessary for people to be able to use computers in the future. Which turned out to be wrong. I’ve had occasion to use this knowledge (rarely), only because I’ve worked professionally in the development of information technology. Very few people outside this relatively narrow group of techno-priests have any idea at all of the practical workings of the technologies they use.

What we identify as the religious impulse is what is phenomenally observed by us, both in the present, and also in the archaeological and literary record, where it takes some very strange forms. This evidence does not give us clear explanation of why our ancestors conceived of both the idea of the divine, and the idea that some sort of human-divine commerce could take place. In the absence of such a clear explanation, we follow the line of least resistance, and assume that the explanation lies in the credulity of the human mind, and that therefore what lies beneath the phenomena we observe is essentially irrational. On this basis, it is hard for scholars to see the history of religions as anything other than an interminable procession of human foolishness through time.

Yet there are many people for whom the human response to the divine is still more important to them than anything else that civilisation has made. They do not know why things are as they imagine them to be, but at some level, the notion of the divine makes profound sense. They need to live their lives in relation to the  observance of the reality of God.

***

 Much of The Sacred History of Being is an exploration of a hypothesized noumenal core of rational ideas about the nature of the divine, which also provides explanation for the idea that the divine and the world of time and space are in some way interwoven. This hypothesized noumenal core, and its nature, I inferred from surviving discussion which took place in antiquity, and close examination of the detail of ancient liturgy, ritual, and art. Some of the evidence is not obscure, and has been in circulation for a very long time, including materials which appear in the Old and New Testaments. It simply isn't seen for what it is. Other evidence comes from Mesopotamian texts, particularly from ancient Assyria.

Rational argument provides a basis for both the nature and reality of the divine, and also for the existence of connexion between the divine and the secular world. We have this discussion first from the middle of the 1st millennium BCE. In the place where the argument is made most explicitly, the conclusion to the discussion is not given. This is to be expected, since it represents an esoteric core of understanding of reality, and therefore a matter of great importance to any group who had religious doctrine built upon it. The nature of the conclusion is profoundly counter-intuitive, which is another reason why only the reasoning was given, and not the conclusion. But it can be figured out.

This counter-intuitive conclusion implies some extraordinary things about the nature of reality in general, and about the nature of material existence. The most striking thing is how closely the implications of this conclusion mirror known models of reality which have been in circulation in various parts of the world since the 2nd millennium BCE.

It is possible to extrapolate from the implications of this argument some things which would have become a focus of special interest to any priestly group who followed the logic of this kind of argument about the nature of reality. The Sacred History of Being discusses both the nature of the divine which emerges as a consequence of this argument, and its implications for the relationship between the divine and the world, plus the mechanics of the kind of interaction which can be predicted to take place. In addition it is possible to specify particular aspects of the world of existence which have the most powerful resonance with the divine world. Some of these were already known on the basis of the observance of these phenomena by ancient societies, but it wasn’t clear why they were accorded such importance.

Now it is possible to focus also on similar resonances, which might not already have been noticed. So the hypothesis has turned into a (so far tentative) reconstruction of a view of the world which was in existence around the Mediterranean and in the ancient near east in the 1st millennium at least, and most likely also in the 2nd millennium. This model is capable of making predictions about what may be found in the evidence, and can also be falsified on the basis of whether or not it is supported by the evidence.



Thomas Yaeger, 14th May 2015 (edited 15th May).