Bringing the Divine to Earth. Writing to the Poet Leona Esther Medlin

I wrote to Leona Esther Medlin on the 26th of January 2018, and headed the letter, 'After the Bronze Age Wreck'. The letter is an update on where I was with my research. The original (rather squibish) article 'The Bronze Age Wreck' was shared only with one archaeologist in May 2013, since it depended very much on an understanding of the arguments in 'The Sacred History of Being'. That book was not published for another two and a half years. 

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The focus of The Sacred History of Being is the presence of the idea of Being in cultures around the Mediterranean from the eighteenth century BCE onwards. Particularly in Mesopotamia. The date was chosen because it marks the earliest appearance in the archaeology of a standard symbol for divine Being in Mesopotamia.

It was obvious from Egyptian iconography (and from elsewhere) that the idea of Being is much older. I chose not to go back before this date however, for the purposes of argument. Or to go anywhere near Egyptian stuff, for obvious reasons.

I found in 2013 that it might be possible to identify the (functional) presence of the idea of Being in the Neolithic and early Bronze Age in Britain. How? There is no writing. Just lots of big stones in lines and circles. But as Alexander Thom’s surveys from the 1930s onwards showed, the circles betray a profound interest in various Pythagorean triangles, and in whole numbers (the circles are not strictly circular, and the circumferences are expressed in whole numbers). This is a form of writing, just writing in terms of number and geometry.

There are several ways of talking about Being, and one of the terms often used in antiquity to reference Being was ‘totality’. I wrote about this way of thinking extensively in The Sacred History of Being (hereinafter SHB). It was a major part of Pythagorean doctrine, and also in Mesopotamian thought. Plato discusses the idea, and in fact his whole argument about ascending to the Good and returning depends on the significance it was supposed to have.

I also wrote extensively in SHB about the installation of divine statues in Mesopotamia, and the connection between the idea of totality and divine Being. The installation process lasted three days, during which time the statues were pointed at the heavens, which was regarded as an image of eternity or totality. The rite was a rite d’aggregation. The statue did not embody the divine without the performance of this ritual: the statue need to participate in totality to be divine.

After seeing the documentary ‘Cracking the Stone Age Code’ in early 2013, it occurred to me that the mathematical and geometrical aspects of stone circles may have served the same sort of function as divine statues in Mesopotamia and elsewhere. The hypothesis was that in their construction the circles embodied aspects of divine Being on earth, and they therefore established a bridge between earth and eternity. 

In just a few days in May 2013 I wrote an extensive essay arguing this case. It had the title ‘The Bronze Age Wreck’. I called it that because the body of ideas which lay behind the building of the megalithic circles was lost to us, apart from a few clues. It seems also to have been lost to those living in the British Bronze Age itself, since the building of the circles more or less ceased around 1400 BCE (I’ve not written about that, but I think I know what happened. For another time).

The essay depended very much on a reading of SHB, so it wasn’t much use to circulate it. What I’m writing now is based on that essay, but readers are not required to have read SHB first.

In November 2016 I wrote another essay, called: ‘Stone Circles, Phenomenology, and the Neolithic Mind’. It discussed the archaeological evidence, Plato’s arguments about the heavens as an image of divine Being, and Mesopotamian ritual for the installation of gods, both in heaven and on earth. The essay was published on my website, and it received significant attention. It resulted in a commission in November 2017 to write about these ideas for the journal Time and Mind.

This article of 10.5 thousand words was written and delivered in four weeks, and it has the title ‘Patterns of thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain.’ It was quite different from the first, largely as the result of a conversation with the philosopher Adrian Moore across the year, which moved from ideas of Being in antiquity to Greek discussion and understanding of irrational numbers. This discussion prompted a general review of Pythagorean mathematics, and the sources. In the end, the new article suggested that there was a connection between mathematical and geometrical puzzles and paradoxes, and the idea of a transcendent reality (divine Being) standing behind appearance. The article also argued that Pythagoras travelled widely, borrowing much of what later became known as Pythagoreanism from priestly establishments in Babylonia, Egypt, Phoenicia, and other places. What he was doing involved looking for a universal substructure of number, mathematics and geometry which pointed to the nature of Being.

Shortly after this paper was completed in December 2017, I wrote a post for my website which discussed the two papers on stone circles and Pythagoreanism from 2016 and 2017. It is titled: ‘Thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain’. It contains the abstract for the paper intended for the journal, and thirteen section headings, but no actual quotations from the body of the text.

Earlier in 2017 I was asked for a copy of a paper – ‘The Esoteric Conception of Divinity in the Ancient World’, published in the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica Newsletter in December 2015. The inquirer was Nico Bader, who runs the Pythagoras Foundation in Amsterdam. I wrote to him sometime after forwarding the paper, suggesting that he might be interested in looking at the two posts on the web concerning stone circles and their significance. He found this line of research to be interesting. Yesterday he offered to summarise the argument in these posts for the Pythagoras Foundation’s Newsletter (number 23), which will be published in March. The newsletter (it is a bit more than that) is read by everyone who is seriously interested in Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism. If Time and Mind publishes ‘Patterns of Thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain’ in their upcoming issue, both will items will appear in March.

January 26, 2018.

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Stone Circles, Phenomenology, and the Neolithic Mind: http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/stone-circles-phenomenology-and.html

Thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain (now retitled 'Being and Eternity in the Neolithic'): http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/patterns-of-thought-in-late-neolithic.html

‘Cracking the Stone Age Code’ (the original BBC Chronicle documentary, broadcast in October 1970, which I didn’t see until early 2013. Worth 50 minutes of your time on a wet Sunday: http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/chronicle/8604.shtml

The most recent Pythagoras Foundation Newsletter: https://www.academia.edu/31783263/PYTHAGORAS_FOUNDATION_NEWSLETTER_22_2017.pdf

[The article 'Patterns of Thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain' was rejected  by the editorial board of the journal 'Time and Mind'. It is available here. All about what a pre-pythagorean pythagoreanism might have meant in the context of the British Neolithic. Nico Bader, on the other hand, did follow through with publishing his summaries of my posts. At: https://www.academia.edu/36071620/PYTHAGORAS_FOUNDATION_NEWSLETTER_23_2018.pdf]

[Updated May 13, 2020]