VenusPeter's review of 'The Sacred History of Being'

A review of The Sacred History of Being at WorldCat:
The Sacred History of Being.
by Yaeger, Thomas
eBook : Document

Sometimes scholars do not see what is before their eyes, or they see what they are trained to see. The Sacred History of Being begins with an account of the author becoming aware - over many years - of the limitations of modern scholarship concerning the ancient past. There are so many unexamined assumptions in the relevant disciplines which make it nearly impossible to make sense of some of the evidence. The assumptions are a form of noise, which is hard to see through, and the understanding of most scholars is circumscribed by the din of that noise.

This is a book which discusses both the ancient past, and the modern post-Enlightenment world. The modern world comes off badly in comparison, since we now generally frame questions in terms which produce answers which make sense to us. What an ancient priest made of a question, for example, is often of no concern to us. We aren't dealing with rational thought in antiquity.

Yaeger's book is a sustained assault on this idea. It attempts to show that, long before the Greeks, the Mesopotamians explicitly understood themselves to be rational beings living in a rational universe. Their account of the creation of the world in which we live makes that very clear. That world is framed in their creation story as a descent into generated matter from an undifferentiated plenum. As a consequence, the Mesopotamians saw a connection between the plenum and knowledge far beyond human understanding. Yaeger argues that one of the functions of religion in Mesopotamia was to make connections possible between the transcendent world of the plenum (Being itself) and the secular world, and for man to gain access to knowledge of divine things.

Sound familiar? This is very similar to what Plato was discussing in the Republic in connection with the ascent of the philosopher to 'the Good' via the forms, and a return to the sensible world with beneficial knowledge. Yaeger does not rest on this simple comparison however, and digs deep into Mesopotamian ritual for the creation of divine images. The result of close study of these rare texts shows how thoroughly the parallels run between Greek and Mesopotamian thought. The Mesopotamian texts however date from a period before the rise of classical Greece...

The fifth century enlightenment in Greece therefore begins to look like a form of noise - a difficulty largely created during the European Enlightenment.

There are many good things about this book, not least of which is the quality of the writing and discussion. Once you have read the book, it is hard to look at the ancient world in the same way as we used to do. Much that looked like the result of a primitive stupidity (the practice of divination, sacrifice, etc), can now be approached in a different way, which presumes so much less about the nature of the ancient evidence.

Is the History of Human Thought Upside Down? Writing to an Egyptologist.

I wrote to this particular Egyptologist because I found that Daniel Richard McBride, the author of 'The Egyptian Foundations of Gnosis', had been a postgraduate student of his. McBride's work is truly extraordinary, and approaches the nature of Neoplatonic philosophy in a way no-one ever has before. Or at least since the Neoplatonists themselves, who, in late antiquity, understood ancient religion in both Egypt and Assyria as the product of philosophical thought. Iamblichus, author of the
The Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians, was the most explicit exponent of this idea. 

Is this a viable understanding of the evidence? It is. And McBride's work associates ideas in Neoplatonic thought with the various Egyptian priestly colleges and their views on the divine. It is an extraordinary achievement, which (so far), has not been taken on board or even discussed, by any tenured scholars of the ancient world in the West (to my knowledge at least).

Daniel McBride used to have a website, from which it was possible to download his thesis. That disappeared a long time ago. It is still possible to find his thesis online (there is a link to the PDF file on my site), but he himself seems to have disappeared. I continue to wish to make contact with him to discuss his work and its implications. 

The Egyptologist did not reply. 

TY, June 26, 2019.

To:******@*****.edu

November 3, 2016 

Subject: Is the history of human thought upside down?

Dear ****,

Weve not met, but we may have trod something of the same path, or similar paths over the past twenty plus years.

I published a book a year ago about the idea that our intellectual history, for one reason and another, is actually upside down (The Sacred History of Being). And that the earliest history of the human race can only be understood if we understand that there was a very sophisticated level of abstract thought at the beginnings of civilisation.

My background is a heavy engagement with philosophy, both ancient and modern, from age fifteen onwards (I am now sixty years old). I was also interested in art, religion, history, and some other subjects. Eventually, in the early eighties, I noticed that there were concepts present in texts from the second millennium B.C.E. (principally in Akhenaten's 'Hymn to the Sun') which were embedded also in the philosophical writings of the Greeks from nearly a thousand years later. I understood that they shouldn't be there, if there was no sophisticated philosophical thought present in the second millennium. Iconography was also particularly revealing.

I decided in the end to major in ancient history at university (as a mature student of thirty or so), rather than philosophy, though I did some of that too. I wanted to know if I was barking up the wrong tree (I didn't think I was).

So I spent three years studying Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and also Assyria, in great detail at UCL and SOAS in London (1989-92). Finding abundant evidence for the heretical idea that the human race had a profound capacity for abstract thought from the earliest times. And I became increasingly perplexed at the fact that scholars could not see what was before their eyes, or understand what the evidence actually meant.

Sometime before moving to London (I lived in Edinburgh in the eighties) I had read On the Mysteries by Iamblichus. So I was aware that the Neoplatonists had the idea that there was a common intellectual system underpinning both Assyrian and Egyptian theology. Which, by itself, suggested that there was an immense level of abstraction involved, stretching back thousands of years. And that I might, just possibly, be on the right track.

I found myself focusing on ancient Assyria while I was in London. I had already noticed the continuities between Greek and Egyptian ideas, but if Iamblichus was right, I should find the same intellectual system underpinning their theology, and the structure of their divine pantheon. I thought of that as a check on the idea that a high level of abstraction was present in both cultures.

I was not at all disappointed. And there were also direct connections between Greek and Mesopotamian thought. None of which made any sense to the historians.

[.......]

And then, in 1997 (I think), I discovered the thesis of Daniel Richard McBride, on The Egyptian Foundations of Gnosis. That had a huge impact on me.

So, if philosophy could draw on Egyptian theology, then Egyptian theology necessarily was essentially based on a series of philosophical arguments. Otherwise none of it would have made sense to the Neoplatonists.

I could go in several directions from here, but some of them might be conversations for the future. So I will confine myself to the suggestion that the Egyptians were philosophical, and concerned with abstractions, and everything around these abstractions, and that, given the antiquity of Egyptian religion, these ideas are of immense antiquity.

I have tried to contact Daniel McBride. He had a website at one point, now gone. He is referenced often, but he seems to be impossible to contact. As the supervisor of his thesis, it occurred to me that what he was writing about was something which interested you.

I know how tight Egyptology is, not least in avoiding any conflict with the classicist view that the Greeks invented philosophy. You are a working and eminent Egyptologist - I have no intention of making problems for you [....]. But I would be interested to know if we are sharing the same heresy.

My website is at: http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/



Best regards,

Thomas Yaeger

Plato and Cosmic Mind

I was digging through my archives today, to find a draft paper I wrote some years ago. I found along the way this draft letter, intended for the attention of book publishers. I wrote this on the 10th of June 2012, when the completion of The Sacred History of Being was some way off (the end of 2014). However, this text does describe the final version of the book pretty well, and points to a significant issue in the modern interpretation of what Plato was saying. 

***

To: [as appropriate]

Dear [as appropriate]

For the past two hundred years or so, works exploring the earlier history of ideas in Europe and the Near east, have been happy to settle on a consensus. This consensus is that the articulate discussion of the idea of Being began with the Greeks – particularly in the writings of Plato. There are earlier references to Being, in the Bible and elsewhere, but these references are deemed not to be the product of the kind of intellectual clarity which Plato and the Academy brought to discussion of the subject. This earlier notion of Being is treated as the focus of belief and of worship, rather than as an articulate concept.

While this allows the Greeks to retain their status as the originators of philosophy, and the religions which grew up in the Near east to retain faith as their (modern) focus, the foundation of this distinction is false.

Recent study of the pattern of religious practice in ancient Rome, and also in Assyria and Babylonia, shows that beyond a certain point, religion no longer resembles what we in the modern world understand to be religious. The work of the late historian Simon Price has shown that observance and ritual was of key importance in Roman religion, whereas belief in the gods was not. Similarly in Mesopotamia, belief in the gods was not a requirement in society, but the observance of ritual was important. Further, it is a commonplace among specialists in Mesopotamian civilization that the gods and their respective temples were often referenced in documents by numbers rather than by name.

The principal importance of observance and ritual in these and other cultures does not mean that there is no intellectual model standing behind observance and ritual. But it is not a model which depends on the existence of belief.

The importance of observance and ritual in the ancient world can be shown to follow from an articulate understanding of the idea of Being. An understanding which treats Being as a conjecture rather than any kind of certain knowledge.

My book is a study of the idea of Being, which extends the history of the idea into the middle of the second millennium BC, and shows that the articulate understanding of the concept was present in Mesopotamia as far back as the 14^th century BC.

The book discusses those aspects of Being which underpin observation and ritual. It identifies key texts in both pre-classical Greece and Mesopotamia which illustrate this concern with the aspects of Being. It also pursues the parallel between the restricted properties of Being which are the focus of the medieval Kabbalah and the sets of properties which were deemed to be appropriate to describe the head of the Babylonian pantheon.

The final part of the book explores the significance of the Assyrian Sacred Tree, and is an extended discussion of a 1993 paper by the Assyriologist Simo Parpola. This paper opened up the possibility that the sacred tree stood for the articulate concept of Being, and that the articulation of the idea was identical in most respects with the model of Being represented by the Kabbalah. The symbol of the tree is well known, and it can be traced in palace reliefs to the 14^th century BC, thus establishing an upper date for the concept of Being.

The book also reviews the views of Plato, who supplies us with some very old discussion about the nature of reality. There is a long-standing problem for scholars with Plato, in that he could not provide a logical argument for the reality of commerce between the world of Being, and the world of appearance. At least not in terms of likely explanation. But then he was clear that in speaking of the divine, that was not possible. At the upper end of the divided line (in the Republic), only conjecture is possible. So the discussion of the apparent world as a copy of the divine world is no more than a likely story. The real argument for the reality of commerce is not directly discussed. 

However it emerges from an analysis of the development of the modern ontological argument, which, by the time it is being discussed by Berkeley and Kant, results in the conclusion objective reality is an illusion (something Plato was insistent about). Berkeley’s solution to the question of the persistence of appearance beyond our perception, is that appearance is perceived by cosmic mind. Our perceptions are part of the perception of the cosmic mind.

The suggestion is made that this is the solution to the question of commerce with the divine (the transcendental) left unresolved by Plato. There is no copy of the divine world. All appearance represents slices through the nature of divinity. About which stories can be told.

The commerce with the divine world is achieved through those things which are common to the divine world and the world of appearance. These are (what we might call) transcendental intersubjectivities, which have already been identified as the property sets of Being, which are in common in both worlds.

***

The classicist Lewis Campbell made much the same suggestion in a footnote to his translation of Plato's Sophist in the 1860s. He was right. It appears however that, around 150 years later, many classicists would still rather not know what Plato was talking about. 

Magic or Magia? Plato's Sophist II

I remember analysing the structure of Plato’s The Sophist in 1994, but over time, I forgot about the argument it contains, or even that I’d made one. I batch-scanned a lot of paper documents in 2003, and the analysis of The Sophist was one of those. But I didn’t read it again until recently.

The original document is squibbish, was written quickly, and was never properly completed or edited. But, knowing what I now know, I’d found the essential arguments for the ancient priestly understanding of reality, all collected together in one literary work, without being entirely aware of the implications of that. It is a little eerie to read this document now, since it looks far beyond what I was sure of at the time.

What Plato is doing in The Sophist is what he did in many other dialogues (not all), which was to include reminders to those who had been trained in theological doctrine what was important, and to wrap this information up with more or less irrelevant speculation for the merely curious and uninitiated.

The discussion of the four outlooks on the nature of reality which feature in The Sophist represent discussions which took place in the ancient equivalent of the seminary (it is odd that we don’t have information about the existence of these institutions in ancient Greece, unless the Academy was exactly that). The importance of the discussion is that it establishes that the Real is essentially and necessarily paradoxical. There is the idea of the One, and there is the experience of the many.  If there is only the One, there is no life, movement or thought. If the many are real, then it is difficult to understand how there can be something like the One, which retains its nature, and abides.

Not everyone who participated in these discussions would have become a priest, because not everyone would have settled for position b), which, to some casts of mind, would have seemed to be deeply unsatisfactory. But acceptance of position b) is the one the priestly establishments were looking for in their candidates.

Why position b)? It is suggested in the course of the dialogue that it has to be accepted, in order to account for both our intellectual understanding of the nature of reality, and our experience of the world of movement and change.

That however is not a philosophical argument. Something is being glossed over at this point, and we have to look outside The Sophist to understand that. The answer to this problem is Plato’s concept of The Good, articulated by Socrates in The Timaeus.

Socrates said that:

The ultimate reality, whether it be termed the form of the Good or given another necessarily inadequate name does not reside in space - in fact the notion that things have a place is described as "a kind of bastard reasoning":

we dimly dream and affirm that it is somehow necessary that all that exists should exist in some spot and occupying some place, and that which is neither on earth nor anywhere in the Heaven is nothing.

          In the Phaedrus Socrates speaks of the region above heaven,

“never worthily sung by any earthly poet". It is, however, as I shall tell; for I must dare to speak the truth... the colourless, formless, and intangible truly existing essence, with which all true knowledge is concerned, holds this region and is visible only to the mind...

Which means that Socrates is referring to the concept of the plenum: the reality we experience a partial representation, a slice, of what is contained in the totality of what is possible. If the plenum itself is possible, then the experience of change and motion is also possible. But as a perception.

The point of position b) is that it recognises the paradoxical nature of reality, and that what is represented to us is a subjective representation of Being itself. There is only Being, and the experience of physical and secular existence is a partial view of what is contained in the plenum. We see what we see, but it is not reality itself. It is what we can see and understand.

Is this a purely Greek understanding? I think it isn’t. Pythagoras (according to the Neoplatonists) spent around twenty years in Egypt imbibing their doctrines, as well as having  discussions with priesthoods in the Levant and Mesopotamia, while in the service of Cyrus. Some of that went into Plato’s work, according to the Neoplatonists, though there is also strong evidence (which I’ve discussed) that ideas familiar to Plato were already present in archaic Greece.

The blog page which points to the paper (‘Magic or Magia? Plato’s Sophist’) is at: http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2019/06/magic-or-magia-platos-sophist.html The link to the file is at the foot of the page.  The article has its own DOI.

Thomas Yaeger, June 3, 2019.

Magic or Magia? Plato's Sophist I

A discussion of the arguments in Plato's Sophist concerning the nature of what is real, and of the implications of the apparent conclusion that the One, as well as being unchanging, is also subject to change.

This is a short paper dating from October 1994, with a new expository introduction (May 2019), suggesting the importance of its argument for our understanding of the context of the dialogue and the various propositions which appear in the course of the dialogue. The article also contains an overview of the sections of the dialogue.


The paper is available in PDF format from the Zenodo Open Access Repository at CERN. Downloadable without the need for a signup.


Yaeger, Thomas. (2019, June 2). Magic or Magia? Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3237026