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

[Extract from correspondence with a specialist in ancient astronomy, on the question of why it is we are so disengaged with the concerns of the ancient world.] 

[....]

Thanks for your substantial mail, which I will work through in order, for clarity.

The day of the equinox was quite spectacular, with the full moon rising over the Pentland Hills to the south of Edinburgh. The weather has been very unsettled in the past couple of weeks, so I was not expecting to see anything.

[...]

...binding and loosing was important in Egypt also. In fact it seems to have been an idea universal in ancient civilisations. Though the basis of the idea is likely to have been the preserve of the educated, and the personnel of the divine cults (mostly, but not always exactly the same people). The core idea underlying binding and loosing is that our physical existence is, however it might look to us, a subjective perception of reality. And a subjective perception of reality is a subjective perception of Being itself.

That is why it is so difficult for scholars to understand what is going on. They see the practices and ‘beliefs’ which survive in the literary and archaeological record, but they have no frame in which to understand these things. They do not expect to find anything subtle and sophisticated, because they (they think) are dealing with forms of primitive stupidity, no matter how refined the cultural remains might appear to be.

The figure I gave for the number of offering tables recently turns out to be well out of date. The archaeological exploration of ancient Akhetaten (Tell El Amarna) continues, and the current figure is more than 790 offering tables. That is a staggering number.

You can term the perception of the cosmos which largely eludes modern scholars ‘a shamanic world view’. It is a world view which is extremely old. There were always people around who could see and think beyond the here and now. But the term ‘shaman’ is relatively modern, and fills a gap in the arsenal of modern anthropology. But supplying a name for a phenomenon does not explain what is behind the shamanic practices, and the associated patterns of understanding.

Once the inextricable link between the physical world and the reality beyond became part of the ancient mindset (probably from an immemorial time), it becomes obvious that what happens in Heaven has an effect on Earth, and vice versa. This explains a lot about Buddhist thought, which I’ve spent some time studying over the years. Recently I wrote an article on the possible influence of Buddhism on the philosophy of David Hume. The article explores the logic involved in Theravara Buddhism in some detail.  Theravara Buddhism isn’t a close analogue with with Mesopotamian and Egyptian thought, but it arises from a similar perception of what Reality itself is. The article also discusses ideas prevalent in the European Enlightenment (mainly in the context of Diderot’s Encylopedia, which explain much about negative attitudes to ancient thought in the eighteenth century). The Enlightenment of David Hume.

How was the ancient perception of the nature of the cosmos lost, and why? That’s two very large questions! Asking about the consequences of that loss is another big question. You know lots of stuff about that already, I know. But a discursive triangulation on this question between us, is likely to be useful for us both. This may take some time.

I’ve been writing about that loss for a long time, since it became obvious early on that it was necessary to understand the trajectory, the context, and the mechanics of the loss (in some detail), if we were to be able to (properly) understand what was actually lost.

As far as the savants of the European Enlightenment were concerned, the entire history of the human race before the eighteenth century was a morass of irrational thought – mythology, folklore, magic, legions of superstitious beliefs, a general credulity in the human race, and in earlier times, murderous ritual. They thought they could get clear of all of that by the rigorous application of common sense. That was the basis of Diderot’s Encyclopedia. So, the enoblement of common sense is one of the factors in the loss of the ancient world view.

It is hard to entirely blame the savants, given the limited information that they had. To them the past seemed to be a grim and dark place. They understood that even the crafts were wrapped around in superstition. But the crafts remained important for the wellbeing of the human race. So the crafts were described in the Encyclopedia, but shorn of anything which wasn’t entirely practical.

The savants often did not read and know ancient literature. So they did not know much that was worth knowing. That’s one of the problems with common sense: if the solution is common sense, that is already in your head. Reading is irrelevant. 

Common sense of course, when you are dealing with something which is transcendent of human experience and understanding, is entirely inappropriate. Common sense dictated that the transcendent did not exist, and served no purpose in understanding our world.

The loss of understanding has been going on for a very long time, and was already under way in the 2^nd Millennium BCE. This island is dotted with stone circles as you know, but the ancient Britons stopped building them around the 14^th century BCE. So something, some conception was lost, which removed the motive for building them.

I read a chapter of your writing about the esoteric recently, which was essentially sound. But it isn’t the case that esoteric knowledge in the ancient world was not deliberately kept as a secret. The various priesthoods and sages might have wished that every living person should know what it is, but because esoteric knowledge is often puzzling and counterintuitive in nature, it is easy for what it is to be misunderstood, and then reconstituted as something else. Knowledge which is misunderstood is worse than no knowledge at all. 

I think that is the general pattern of the loss of understanding. Some insight into the nature of reality itself is achieved by an individual, and that insight is taught. An entire culture is developed on the bedrock of that insight. Then it is taught badly, or taught to those who cannot understand what they are being told. The insight becomes something other than what it actually is, and then serves some other cultural or social function. Once a culture is on that slope, it is hard to put the slide into reverse.

I can give some examples here, plus pointers to articles in which I’ve discussed the disconnects between ancient and modern understanding.

First, the ontological argument, which constitutes a huge obstacle to an understanding of ancient thought about the divine. The principal problem with the modern ontological argument is that, for the past seven or eight centuries or so, the argument has been formulated on the basis of the notion that the property of ‘existence’ indicates that something is real. Which is why the argument attempts to provide credible grounds for saying that God exists, and is therefore real. Which is tantamount to a denial of transcendent reality, or the transcendent nature of god. There are other issues with the argument.

I discussed both Anselm’s and Descartes’ versions in The Sacred History of Being, and an extract from the article on Descartes is at: The Ontological Argument In Descartes.  

How did the Christian church, and the philosophers, make this mistake? Probably because they were afraid of the unbounded, the limitless, and the concept of infinity. They wanted an omniscient and perfect entity as their god, but not one that was necessarily beyond human fathoming, and wrapped around in puzzles and paradoxes. They were making God in their own image, rather than the other way around.

I’ve written about the history of the idea of infinity in mathematics, religion and philosophy, via a critical review of Adrian W Moore’s BBC radio series on the subject, broadcast in 2016. My review identifies what is missing from Moore’s tendentious argument.  A long read, but worth the time, I think. It shows just how much pain and intellectual difficulty the idea of the infinite can cause the human mind: ‘Evading the Infinite’

They still had the notion that God lay somewhere behind the physical world, but that notion was not a very sophisticated one. They didn’t need a sophisticated version of God any more, since the main function of religion in the West, from sometime before the fall of Rome, was to support temporal power. 

Divines in the early modern period ended up splitting into two major factions. The Theists saw the world as the creation of God, and that God could be petitioned by Man. Though they had by this time lost all understanding of the mechanism which might make this connection possible. The other major faction was the Deists, who conceived that God had created the world, but that God was the prime mover, and once the world and the cosmos was set in motion, he did not interfere. This view took hold particularly after Descartes and Newton, and the regularity of the motions of the heavenly bodies was then taken to be evidence of the existence of God (this view became known as uniformitarianism, meaning that the forces which were in play in the past, are the same ones which are at play now. The implication is that everything can be calculated).

Much of this is down to early modern misreadings of Aristotle from the 12^th century CE onwards, and his notion of ‘substance’ (ousia). When is Aristotle talking about matter, or about Being, and/or Reality itself? In the Middle Ages they weren’t very sure. The earlier Arian controversy in the 4^th century CE also revolved around substance (is God one or Triune? They decided that God was Triune – ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost’ - but the component parts ‘were of the same substance.’ (homousia) What that common substance actually was, was never established in Christian doctrine (and the trinitarian view of God is still not accepted by all Christians). The triadic nature of the divine in Christianity is something which has its origins in Egyptian religion. It’s a feature of Christian theology because the ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost’ are mentioned in the Old Testament. Just without the political fudge of the homousia, which is the legacy of the Council of Nicaea, held in 325 CE.

   

Reliance on Aristotle as a guide always was an error of judgement among scholars. He sometimes argues something other than what he actually thinks (he wrote a book on rhetoric, the Sophistical Refutations), and clearly sometimes actively intended to mislead his students. A case in point is his Nicomachean Ethics, the argument of which proposes that the Gods, by their nature are wholly contemplative, and cannot engage in the world.  Which is an odd and essentially heretical kind of argument to make in the late 4^th Century BCE. The book is a series of lecture notes, probably by different hands (there is an obvious duplication in the text in Book 8). We know that Aristotle held different classes in the morning, and in the afternoon. In the morning he taught exoteric knowledge, in the afternoon he taught esoteric knowledge. The notes on ethics must come from his exoteric teaching, since the argument arrives at, what was at the time, a nonsensical conclusion.

Why would Aristotle do this? The point of spending time building a painstaking argument that leads to a nonsensical conclusion is to find out who the intelligent students are in your class: the intelligent ones are those who pick at the inconsistencies and absurdities of your argument. Those are the ones who you allow to move on to study esoteric thought. Something like this procedure is still used by tribal elders in Africa: you ask a question about the gods, and they give you what sounds like a plausible reply. But it isn’t the real one. The student will only get the real reply once he has shown he is no fool. And that takes a lot more questions on the subject.

Aristotle’s greatest and most dangerous legacy to us also comes ultimately from his exoteric teachings, and is a main cause of our intellectual exile from antiquity. These are his Laws of thought. These Laws became the basis of formal logic as we understand it in the modern world, and they are also the basis of much theological argumentation from the middle ages onwards. Aristotle did not write a treatise on the laws of thought – the various component parts are mentioned and described in his Metaphysics. Put in the most simple way, The first is the Law of Identity (a thing is itself, and not something else), the second is the Law of Non-Contradiction (a thing cannot be one thing and another thing at the same time); the third is the Law of the Excluded Middle (a thing cannot be halfway between what it is and something else).

You can see that the laws revolve around the idea of identity. But it is a purely secular conception of identity, not at all applicable to something which is transcendent.  If you accept the universality of these laws, you cannot discuss the transcendent in any meaningful sense, even if you have academic tenure in a theological seminary. And it is entirely impossible to understand anything useful about ancient religion and ritual, except in purely phenomenological terms.

I have pointed out however that an alternative logical modality has come down to us in the pages of Plato (in the Timaeus), and it is this one which illuminates ancient religion and philosophy. The Neoplatonist writers referenced it. The account of this modality in Plato is rarely discussed by specialists, in terms of what it is and what it means, though it is often read, since Plato’s Timaeus is a text often set for students. Detail available in: Logical Modality in Classical Athens. You might find it interesting then to read The Greek Ontological Model in the 1st Millennium B.C.E.

Though the idea of Being was discussed in classical Greece, by Parmenides and Plato, as well as the Presocratics, the idea was not much discussed in late antiquity, except by the Neoplatonists from the third century CE onwards (Proclus, Iamblichus, Porphyry, Olympiodorus and Plotinus, and some others). But very few outside of their circles were paying attention at the time. Their moment came as late as the Italian Renaissance. And then they were lost sight of once again after the Newtonian revolution.

So the ideas of the Divine as coterminous with Reality itself, and that Reality itself was entirely transcendent in nature, dropped out of philosophical discourse within the Church. It was not picked up again by philosophers in the early modern period. Hence the endless and vacuous discussions about whether or not God could be said to have the property of existence.

With the advent of the European Enlightenment, the history of human thought began to be written about again in detail, for the first time since Diogenes Laertius wrote his Lives of the Philosophers. But the rewriting was done on the basis of certain presumptions. It was axiomatic that abstract ideas,  such as Being,  were difficult things to discuss, and it was agreed that the Greeks had been the first to do this, during the middle of the first millennium BCE. Why was this decided? The evidence for the Greeks was unquestionably in the surviving texts. Whereas it was decided that there was no evidence that other cultures had ever risen to such levels of discussion.

At the time, it could be argued, it would have been difficult to have come to any other conclusion. Several ancient writers however, had suggested that philosophy was an immensely old discipline, including Plato and Clement of Alexandria. Clement even gave a list of the cultures who practised the discipline. Both Diogenes Laertius and Aristotle suggested that it might have had an origin elsewhere. Aristotle suggested that it required a relatively leisured professional class to emerge, by which he probably had the Egyptians in mind. Isocrates (a rival to Plato, and actively opposed to Plato’s outlook) mentioned the Egyptians in connection with philosophy four times. These statements were (and still are) dismissed.

The European Enlightenment marks the point where the Egyptians ancient reputation as philosophers was systematically downgraded by German scholars (documented in detail in Martin Bernal’s Black Athena). In the end it was agreed that the Egyptians dealt in terms of concrete ideas (whatever that means), and consequently were not capable of abstract thought, and were not capable of contemplating ideas of a wholly transcendent level of reality. Even now, Egyptologists refer to ancient Egyptians as ‘pragmatic’ (as opposed to philosophical) in the way they thought about their religion and rituals.

All this was done in order to preserve the Enlightenment fiction of a stupendous achievement of the Greeks in the middle of the 1^st Millennium BCE, by isolating and downgrading contemporary cultures which might have influenced their development.

Over the past 170 years, an enormous amount of evidence has come out of the ground, and quite a lot of it suggests (to those who are awake at least) that philosophy, transcendental thought, and a sophisticated concept of Being was at the root of a number of cultures around the Mediterranean and the Near East. However Egyptologists (in particular) just ignore this evidence as irrelevant to their profession. Most classicists do too, but with some of them, the dam is starting to break.

That’s the short answer to your question…. There is much more, however, which I will skip for the moment. Where are we going on this long trajectory? I had an exchange of mails with a friend in San Francisco in 2015, where we discussed this question.  I took out personal stuff from the exchange, anonymised her, and turned it into an article which is on my website. I will point you at that.  Locke, Newton, and the Rejection of Reality.

I entirely agree with you that the materialistic paradigm necessarily results in the denial of the possible non-locality of consciousness. If you think that thought and consciousness itself are the products of biological processes in the brain, the idea that consciousness is not localised in the human head just sounds like so much nonsense.  The non-locality of consciousness has been a subject for a few philosophers over the years, but is not discussed in terms of the paradigm which we clearly have in common. P. F. Strawson was one, Wittgenstein was another (Strawson was influenced by Wittgenstein’s thought). Among philosophers it is generally referenced as the ‘no-ownership’ model of consciousness. Usually the argument is along the lines of: “we are constricted to think as we are about identity, perception, experience, physicality, location, etc., by the limitations of (apparently) being physical entities in space and time. Which may not actually be the case”. Not much fun to read, but at least they understand that a materialist interpretation of human existence is problematic.

I also agree that there is a lot of evidence which suggests that consciousness is not localised in the brain, or associated with matter at all. Consciousness may interact with matter, and have some kind of interface with the material world, but that is not the same as being a phenomenon which is entirely localisable. There is a two-way traffic, as you said earlier in your mail.

For me I understand this to be possible because things which are apparently in different places, are actually together in one place, which I reference as the plenum. Which is a place which is not localisable. It is also the key idea we have lost, which makes it impossible to understand both reality itself, and the representations of it, in which we live.

The implication of the concept of reality being a plenum (as it was understood in antiquity) is that both God and gods are necessarily real. This is the consequence of the way they were defined. Each of them has an excellence special to them. That excellence is what makes them real. The plenum is itself real because it is complete and perfect in itself [...]. This fundamental idea is what underpins Greek and Assyrian conceptions of the importance of excellence in thought and activity. It is also why excellence in craft skills was venerated in antiquity. Excellence is what connects everything with everything else. It is why the perfect  execution and observance of a ritual or ceremony was regarded as the most important thing to achieve. This pattern of ideas served as a model among the Greeks for the human soul, and to the organization of society, discussed at: Justice and the Harmony of the Soul. Excellence was also what gave access to the divine: Excellence and the Knowledge of Divine Things.

So I accept that consciousness can be understood as a bridge between ourselves as we are in the form of finite representations, and what we are in that place (which is paradoxically no place) which is filled with the complete and the perfect.  And I agree with you that an important aspect of ritual is about facilitating traffic between the worlds. As you suggest, the traffic is a bit constricted now, since many fewer people have any conception of this purpose…. However, it is necessary for ritual to be performed, and observance to be made, but not essential for the process to be fully understood for it to have an effect. There are still people performing rituals and observances.

   

I read somewhere (in what I’ve read of your work so far), that myth is often about travelling to that other place, either by ascending to Heaven, or descending to an underworld (actually the same place, the plenum, just dressed differently). I agree. [...] The creation of a myth, and the telling of it, can be understood as performative also, particularly if rituals are associated with it: it is ritual made visible. Placing myths in the sky, to descend into the earth, and to rise from it once again, as part of a regular cycle, like a rotating Tibetan prayer wheel, is performative and served the same function.  

Best, Thomas

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

Where are my books going? What is the point I’m trying to make by writing them?

There is something very important about the way the cosmos was understood in antiquity, which has been lost almost entirely. But not actually entirely, as I have found out in conversation with readers since my first book was published in November 2015. Some readers seem to grasp the ancient understanding almost intuitively, without having to know how it can be approached at a technical level.  Others arrive at the knowledge as the result of logical argument. It is also possible to approach the knowledge on the basis of the study of ancient literature, liturgy, philosophy, and iconography.

My own way into the ancient understanding began perhaps with discovering the statement Matthew 16: 19 concerning the ‘Keys of the Kingdom’, which is a phrase used only once in the Bible.

 “ whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven”

I first read this when I was about fifteen, and at school, and wondered at what it could possibly mean. It remained a mystery to me for some time – it would have been an entirely fruitless business to bring it up in our religious instruction class. The full passage extends from Matthew 16, verse 13-20, which I quote here:

13 When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?”
14 They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
15 “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”
16 Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
17 Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven.
18 And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.
19 I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
20 Then he ordered his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.

This passage concerns the knowledge that the Son of Man is in  fact God incarnate. Jesus asks questions of his disciples about their understanding of who he is, and they reply with different interpretations. All except Simon Peter answered by suggesting he is one of the prophets. Simon Peter on the other hand, identifies him directly as the Messiah, and declares that he is the Son of the living God.

Jesus declares that Simon Peter is blessed, on account of this identification, "for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood” (i.e., by anything or any experience with roots and nature in the physical and secular world), “but by my Father in heaven”. He then proceeds to proclaim this idea as the rock on which “I will build my church”. There is a pun here of course on Simon Peter’s name – Petros - which means ‘rock’. But the meaning of the passage is that the Church (ekklesia) is to be built on the idea that whatever is bound on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever is loosed on earth will be loosed in heaven. This power constitutes the Keys of the Kingdom (of God).

Peter here represents a personification of the Church, but it is the Church itself which is important, and whose nature is being defined. Jesus is saying is that there is an essential identity between Heaven and Earth, and between the Father (in Heaven) and the Son (on Earth). However difficult a concept this may be to grasp, since it seems to defy logic. Simon Peter does grasp this, and he is made blessed and holy by this understanding.

As I said, this remained a passage which was hard to fathom for many years, despite the fact that it came to serve an important function for the Catholic church, in that the Church knows Saint Peter as the first Bishop of Rome, and claims that the power of the 'keys of the kingdom of God' is therefore invested in their Church. But its meaning is so much more interesting than that.

It is in fact a passage which parodies the Mesopotamian understanding of the relationship between gods in heaven, and incarnations of the gods on earth. I’ve written extensively about this in The Sacred History of Being. Babylonian priests could set up gods in heaven, and on earth, and they had a complex ritual process (lasting three days) which allowed them to do this. Close study of the texts associated with this process tell us a great deal about the logic which underpins it, and indeed the priests have the power to both create and to decommission gods both in heaven and on earth.

The king in Babylonia, as the living representative of Bel/Marduk on Earth, had the power to confer a temporary divinity upon the workmen making or refurbishing the divine images, which power could then be removed when they had finished their work. Part of the ceremony involved the ritual parody of their hands being cut off with a knife of tamarisk wood, symbolising the removal of their capacity to make gods. Which was their ability to join together divinity in heaven, and divinity on Earth, and to bind and loose in two worlds.

The holiness code in Leviticus confirms this interpretation that there is, for some reason which is hardly ever spelled out, an essential identity between heaven and Earth

“I am the Lord your God. If I am Holy, then you must be Holy”. (Leviticus 19.2).

Many in the modern world struggle with the idea of the incarnation of the divine on earth, and divinity made flesh. It was a struggle for many in antiquity also, hence the importance that faith (without understanding) came to have.  There are real answers out there to this question however, which illuminate much about ancient thought, religion, liturgy and literature, and they are worth spelling out.

Philosophical Thought in Greece and Babylonia (IV)

How can we have polytheistic and monotheistic ideas apparently existing side by side, within the same cultural contexts? This seems to have been the case in ancient Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, and perhaps also in ancient Greece. Plato often referred to ‘ho theos’ (God), rather than ‘the gods’, yet the cultural context was polytheistic. This is a mystery if we are yoked to the idea of a cultural transition from polytheism to monotheism within historical time.  That the evidence from these cultures, does not, on the face of things, provide support for this idea, suggests strongly that this modern and simplistic model of ancient cultural development is deficient in explanatory power, and is more than likely plain false.

It is far from straightforward to disentangle the elements of this issue, so that we might come to a practical resolution as to what is actually going on.  It is however useful to discuss some of the issues which stand between us and an understanding.

One of these of course is our modern preconception of what it was possible to think before Jaspers ‘Axial Age’. The very concept of an axial age speaks of a desire to close off detailed study of thought before classical Greece.

Why would we want to close off the analysis of earlier patterns of thought? The answer is that we consider that such patterns are irretrievably irrational in nature, and offer no rational insights into patterns of thought in antiquity. They may be intelligible in terms of the language of mythology, and in terms of the logic of poetry, but their literature is essentially pre-rational, and so is best approached in terms of disordered, and even pathological thought.

Another is the idea that it is only with the capacity to engage in rational thought, is it possible to  contemplate abstractions such as ‘Being’ and the ‘Infinite’. Before the classical period, we conceive that man did not contemplate Being or the Infinite, at least in rational terms, whatever inchoate inklings they may have had.

One of the issues with the scholarship which addresses thought from time before the Greek contributions, is that it is generally assumed, rather than evidentially determined, that there is no transcendentalist aspect present in ancient religions. What is missing is not defined in the context of ancient thought however, because there is nothing to be defined. Transcendentalist patterns of thought belong to later - and western - intellectual traditions.

It does not however take much effort to show that this is a false assumption, and that the interpretation does not account for the range of evidence which is available. For example, the Assyrian god Ashur was understood in a number of ways, including simply as the local god of the city of Ashur – recognised as powerful because his city was powerful.  However Ashur was also defined as the totality of the other gods. In which case he could be understood in terms of a grand aggregation of the properties and attributes associated with the other Assyrian divinities. This idea has been entertained, in this simple form, also for Egyptian polytheism, using the term ‘cosmotheism’ to mark out this species of thought concerning the ‘pre-axial gods’. In other words, the definition of the supreme deity in the official pantheon of gods is a plain summation of everything associated with the divine pantheon.

This also is how Marduk appears to be presented in the Babylonian New Year Festival – Marduk is the principal god in the Babylonian pantheon, and a section of the liturgy of the festival assigns him fifty names. These names are the other gods: they are listed for recitation, and the main characteristics are described and their principal functions are defined. Together, these gods, their descriptions and their functions delineate all the proper characteristics of divine kingship. As the supreme god, Marduk is also the perfect model for kingship in the Babylonian state.

This is how the literary and ritual texts can be, and are, read by the majority of scholars interested in the subject of ancient divinity. The starting point is that there is no transcendentalist aspect to the ancient understanding of the divinities in the pantheons of Assyria, Babylonia, or Egypt. If there is something approximating to a transcendentalist conception of the supreme deity, we cannot fathom it – and in any case, it will not be a wholly rational conception which would stand up to scrutiny. The idea will necessarily be vague, inchoate and imprecise, and will have no significant range of function associated with it. Such a loosely defined transcendentalism will perhaps signify only an exaltation of the status of the god, in the same way that in ancient Greece, divine status could be accorded to human individuals, without it being understood that the individuals had actually become divine.

[This sequence of essays will continue, as and when, throughout 2019]