This article, and this extraordinary blog in general, point to the exact problem of our “modern” times, which is the estrangement from the vision, or the need, of “reality itself”. Instead, the basic vision of the “separation from reality” prevails, whereby there cannot be “completeness”, “fullness”, or “plenum”. Thus, modern science is trapped in the dilemma of “observer” + “reality”, whereas modern philosophy has renounced [ ...] the “thing in itself”, while stressing the inevitability of “doubt”, or “hypothesis”. This is, in my view, the definite contrast between “ancients” and “moderns”. And for this very same reason, it makes the “ancients” more actual, and needed, than ever. Perhaps it is time, now, to re-gain the “ancient” need of “plenum”, of “universal unity and wholeness”. It would be, of course, a “present” vision, which therefore has to be produced.
(This blog has dispelled my doubts on the internet being a space too “shallow” for “deep thought”. Thank you.)
"The God Enki and the Ocean of Everywhen" is at:
https://thestrangecontinent.com/2017/08/03/the-god-enki-and-the-ocean-of-everywhen/
DM from D***** T****, July 29,2019
Hi, and thank you for your interest in my work. 'The Sacred History of Being' is not available via Amazon, because I don't like their terms and conditions (those may change). But the book is available from many other outlets (Itunes, Barnes & Noble, Inktera, etc., and now from Walmart). My books can be read independently, but you may get more out of the later ones by starting with SHB, since it maps the territory. Best, Thomas.
12:22 PM July 29, 2019
Tweet from @Indpunch, May 1, 2019
IndPunch Retweeted10h
Thomas Yaeger @Rotorvator17h
Kind of you to say so. The book was difficult to write, owing to the range of evidence which had to be covered. But there is plenty of evidence out there to support the case I make. Which led me also to discuss why it is that some important questions don't get much attention.
IndPunch @indpunch
Replying to @Rotorvator
Thomas Yaeger is delving deep in history and coming up with amazing discoveries
July 31, 2018
Review of The Sacred History of Being at Google Books:
This is an unusual book. It argues that abstract thought was around long before the Greeks, and the supreme abstraction, the concept of Being, was a key element in ancient religion. The author (Thomas Yaeger) examines ancient texts which support this argument, mostly focusing on ancient Assyria and ancient Israel, and shows parallels with Greek thought, particularly in Plato's dialogues. It also argues that the idea of knowledge in antiquity was closely associated with the idea of Being, and that establishing a connection with Being was understood to offer the possibility of acquiring divine knowledge.
The author also argues that Mesopotamian polytheism owes much of its nature and ritual practice to this body of ideas around Being, and divine knowledge. Mesopotamian rituals for the installation of divine statues (some of which survive in whole or in part), are discussed in detail, which reveal the importance of Being and knowledge to the logic of these rituals.
The book is a fascinating read. It is properly referenced, and Yaeger writes clearly throughout. There is a substantial discussion of the modern ontological argument in part one, which you might want to skip, at least on the first reading. The reason it is present is because it shows that a number of assumptions are built into modern discussion of religion, and these assumptions were not made in antiquity. This makes it difficult for modern scholars to properly understand the basis of ancient religions, both in Mesopotamia, and in Greece. So far only available in eBook format.
June 3, 2018. A review of The Sacred History of Being at OCLC's 'WorldCat':
(This blog has dispelled my doubts on the internet being a space too “shallow” for “deep thought”. Thank you.)
December 15, 2019
DouDou Thiam @WilliamDoudou
Worth reading ! @hadyba_ C'est Fascinant... besoin de le relire ( et pas que 2 fois ) ..mais fascinant. ...la partie sur les rapports entre les concepts de division..de pouvoir ...de justice... twitter.com/Rotorvator/sta…
DouDou Thiam @WilliamDoudou
Worth reading ! @hadyba_ C'est Fascinant... besoin de le relire ( et pas que 2 fois ) ..mais fascinant. ...la partie sur les rapports entre les concepts de division..de pouvoir ...de justice... twitter.com/Rotorvator/sta…
Thomas Yaeger @Rotorvator
Many thanks! This chapter is the engine of the whole book (SHB). It is a tough read, but it illustrates that there is a technical substrate of meaning beneath the surface of ancient thought about the Divine. Knowledge of the existence of that substrate changes everything. -TY
October 11, 2019
Christopher Josiffe was kind enough to post this tweet on the 10th of October:
Christopher Josiffe @ChrisJosiffe
I know it’s not Friday and therefore not #FF day, but may I commend Thomas Yaeger’s account? Deep #prehistory, (pre)history of ideas, #archaeology. Well worth a follow. @Rotorvator
He was responding to this tweet, sent out a little earlier:
Thomas Yaeger @Rotorvator · Oct 10
Pythagoreanism, the Divine, and the Nature of Eternity https://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2019/09/pythagoras-and-transcendentalism.html?spref=tw
#Pythagoras #Pythagoreanism #Divinity #Eternity #Religion #Transcendentalism #Mathematics #Geometry #Commensuration #Surds #Plato
11:03 AM · Oct 10, 2019·
Thomas Yaeger
@Rotorvator
·
Replying to
@ChrisJosiffe
Thank you!
August 5, 2019.
My work The Sacred History of Being is cited in an article by the writer Ben Thomas - "The God Enki and the Ocean of Everywhen" - on his website 'The Strange Continent'' (published August 3, 2017). This is a fascinating article which is well worth checking out - the link to the full article is at the foot of this post. We've been corresponding occasionally over the past few years, mostly about Mesopotamia and Mesopotamian modes of thought. The argument of The Sacred History of Being is complex and sometimes abstruse, and it is always a joy to find it has been understood.
I've quoted the passages most relevant to The Sacred History of Being. Ben wrote:
Many thanks! This chapter is the engine of the whole book (SHB). It is a tough read, but it illustrates that there is a technical substrate of meaning beneath the surface of ancient thought about the Divine. Knowledge of the existence of that substrate changes everything. -TY
October 11, 2019
Christopher Josiffe was kind enough to post this tweet on the 10th of October:
Christopher Josiffe @ChrisJosiffe
I know it’s not Friday and therefore not #FF day, but may I commend Thomas Yaeger’s account? Deep #prehistory, (pre)history of ideas, #archaeology. Well worth a follow. @Rotorvator
He was responding to this tweet, sent out a little earlier:
Thomas Yaeger @Rotorvator · Oct 10
Pythagoreanism, the Divine, and the Nature of Eternity https://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2019/09/pythagoras-and-transcendentalism.html?spref=tw
#Pythagoras #Pythagoreanism #Divinity #Eternity #Religion #Transcendentalism #Mathematics #Geometry #Commensuration #Surds #Plato
11:03 AM · Oct 10, 2019·
Thomas Yaeger
@Rotorvator
·
Replying to
@ChrisJosiffe
Thank you!
August 5, 2019.
My work The Sacred History of Being is cited in an article by the writer Ben Thomas - "The God Enki and the Ocean of Everywhen" - on his website 'The Strange Continent'' (published August 3, 2017). This is a fascinating article which is well worth checking out - the link to the full article is at the foot of this post. We've been corresponding occasionally over the past few years, mostly about Mesopotamia and Mesopotamian modes of thought. The argument of The Sacred History of Being is complex and sometimes abstruse, and it is always a joy to find it has been understood.
I've quoted the passages most relevant to The Sacred History of Being. Ben wrote:
...The upwelling of cool, sweet, fresh water seems to have spoken of something deeper to these people: a limitless potentiality; a permission to play with the world and reinterpret it; to import new realities from the world of Mind.
Because it’s clear – as the philosopher Thomas Yaeger’s book The Sacred History of Being explains in depth – that certain ancient Mesopotamians understood the concepts of Being, Becoming, Matter and Mind every bit as clearly as the Greek philosophers did.
But where the Greeks defined and explored these concepts explicitly, in writing and debate, the Mesopotamians explored them experientially, through symbol and ritual: The Ceremony of the Tree. The Opening of the Mouth of a God. (When Mesopotamian texts say, “This is how to make a god,” Yaeger argues, they mean it literally!) The intercessory deities who hold cups overflowing with endless streams of fresh water.
The Sumerians consciously recognized that they stood on a great threshold – and across thousands of years, they perfected the techniques of stepping back and forth across it; carrying material facts one way, and new inventions the other.
And what lived on the other side of that doorway? The god Enki – lord of intelligence and knowledge, keeper of the arts and crafts; also called Nudimmud, “the Shaper,” who “opens the doors of understanding” (emphasis mine) and teaches humans how to construct canals, plan temples, write letters and compose music.
From his hidden “House in the Waters,” Enki monitors the flow of all information in the world, and guards new ideas until they’re ready to be born. He’s not exactly a trickster, but he’s definitely playful, and he inspires playfulness.
Still more crucially, Enki is the custodian of the mé – an untranslatable (plural) Sumerian word, which the great Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer explained as the “fundamental, unalterable, comprehensive assortment of powers and duties, norms and standards, rules and regulations, relating to… civilized life.”
The Sumerians have left us lists of more than 100 mé, including “kingship,” “truth,” “law,” “sexual intercourse,” “weapons,” “scribeship,” “sacred prostitution,” “leatherwork,” “judgment,” and “the troubled heart.”
As Kriwaczek says, the mé “show how self-consciously aware the ancient Mesopotamians were of the difference between civilization and other ways of living… that they expressed it with an entirely new cognitive concept, for which we have no equivalent.
As Yaeger explains in his Sacred History, the mé are far more than just abstract concepts. In the poem known as Inanna and Enki, the goddess Inanna gets Enki drunk, steals the mé, and loads them onto her “boat of heaven.” Braving seven attacks by sea monsters, Inanna manages to transport the mé to the cities of Eridu and Uruk, where the people unload them amidst great jubilation and feasting.
This would be a very strange way to talk about the mé if they were simply abstractions. But a clue is offered by the fact that the Sumerians treated many seemingly abstract concepts in similar ways.
Ceremonies for “opening the mouth of a god” refer to “putting on the melammu,” the divine splendor, as if it were a sort of cloak. Kingship, too, is often described as something that “descended from Heaven,” and can be “carried” from one city to another.
In light of all this, it seems very likely that – just as the term mé is untranslatable into our frame of reality – our discrete categories of “symbol,” “referent,” “abstract” and “concrete” would have been equally baffling to a Sumerian.
This framing is so different from ours that it can be difficult to comprehend: a scepter does not symbolize kingship; it is kingship. The statue does not symbolize Enki; once its “mouth is opened,” the statue is Enki – even as the god Enki is not limited by this one statue, and dwells in the eternal ocean.
To ask whether the Sumerians thought of the mé as abstractions or physical objects is to pose a wrong question. The mé sat at the border between reality and Mind – and once the Sumerians had stumbled on that doorway, they took great pains to keep it open, and to facilitate passage across it.
I knew none of this, of course, as I sat in my apartment paging through images of Mesopotamian archaeology. I only knew that I’d stumbled on some primordial wellspring of originality; a mystery I wanted not so much to solve as to experience for myself.
.....
The great historian Thorkild Jacobsen describes the god Enki as “the numinous inner will-to-form in the Deep.” This is not the dead god of a vanished civilization – this is the Ocean where “2+2=4” and “the steam engine” and “scribeship” and “the troubled heart” have always lived, along with all things unimagined and yet to be.
To bring new things across the doorway, we must re-learn the trick of standing on its threshold.Bravo Ben!
"The God Enki and the Ocean of Everywhen" is at:
https://thestrangecontinent.com/2017/08/03/the-god-enki-and-the-ocean-of-everywhen/
DM from D***** T****, July 29,2019
Many thanks to you - I am "binge reading" your blog | and my next mission is to buy & read your first book when back in London in few days (fyi can not find it on amazon). Regards D***** T****
7:41 AM
7:41 AM
Hi, and thank you for your interest in my work. 'The Sacred History of Being' is not available via Amazon, because I don't like their terms and conditions (those may change). But the book is available from many other outlets (Itunes, Barnes & Noble, Inktera, etc., and now from Walmart). My books can be read independently, but you may get more out of the later ones by starting with SHB, since it maps the territory. Best, Thomas.
12:22 PM July 29, 2019
Tweet from @Indpunch, May 1, 2019
IndPunch Retweeted10hThomas Yaeger @Rotorvator17h
Kind of you to say so. The book was difficult to write, owing to the range of evidence which had to be covered. But there is plenty of evidence out there to support the case I make. Which led me also to discuss why it is that some important questions don't get much attention.
IndPunch @indpunch
Replying to @Rotorvator
Thomas Yaeger is delving deep in history and coming up with amazing discoveries
July 31, 2018
I received a comment from reader Joel in Ga [7th July] on the blogpost 'The Ontological Argument in Descartes', which is an extract from the chapter in The Sacred History of Being with the same title. He said:
Interesting. Could we combine Descartes'; argument with Berkeley somehow? When I look outside my window, I necessarily see, or more precisely, conceive the idea of a tree. When I turn my thoughts to God, I necessarily conceive of a perfect or maximally great Being. I can no more prove that my idea of a tree corresponds to an objectively-existing tree than I can that my idea of a perfect God corresponds to an objectively-existing perfect God, but in both cases there is a kind of automatically given idea. Very interested in your thoughts. Thanks!
I replied that:
The ontological argument is false. Just being able to conceive of a maximally great being (to use Plantinga's phrase) does not make it exist. Part of the problem is the contrast between 'real' and ' existent' in philosophy. Being real does not necessarily imply actual existence. I included a chapter on Berkeley in The Sacred History of Being to show that there were other ways to discuss the reality of divinity, other than the idea that the divine had to be objectively real (which is what existence implies). Like Berkeley, I distrust the notion that there is an objective reality outside our minds (though it is a persuasive illusion).
on The Ontological Argument in Descartes
Thomas Yaeger on 7/7/18
June 29, 2018.
Review of The Sacred History of Being at Google Books:
This is an unusual book. It argues that abstract thought was around long before the Greeks, and the supreme abstraction, the concept of Being, was a key element in ancient religion. The author (Thomas Yaeger) examines ancient texts which support this argument, mostly focusing on ancient Assyria and ancient Israel, and shows parallels with Greek thought, particularly in Plato's dialogues. It also argues that the idea of knowledge in antiquity was closely associated with the idea of Being, and that establishing a connection with Being was understood to offer the possibility of acquiring divine knowledge.
The author also argues that Mesopotamian polytheism owes much of its nature and ritual practice to this body of ideas around Being, and divine knowledge. Mesopotamian rituals for the installation of divine statues (some of which survive in whole or in part), are discussed in detail, which reveal the importance of Being and knowledge to the logic of these rituals.
The book is a fascinating read. It is properly referenced, and Yaeger writes clearly throughout. There is a substantial discussion of the modern ontological argument in part one, which you might want to skip, at least on the first reading. The reason it is present is because it shows that a number of assumptions are built into modern discussion of religion, and these assumptions were not made in antiquity. This makes it difficult for modern scholars to properly understand the basis of ancient religions, both in Mesopotamia, and in Greece. So far only available in eBook format.
June 3, 2018. A review of The Sacred History of Being at OCLC's 'WorldCat':
The Sacred History of Being.
by Yaeger, Thomas
eBook : Document
Seeing through Noise
by VenusPeter
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.
***
April 22, 2018
***
I've taken to including the phrase 'Greece is not the 'birthplace' of Western Civilization' in some tweets, in response to the occasional public assertion that Greece is the birthplace of Western Civilization. Hence the response below:
Keith R. Amery @amery_1 21h
Wasn't this covered decades ago by "Black Athena"?
Thomas Yaeger @Rotorvator
A radical text: The Sacred History of Being (published 2015). Greece is not the 'birthplace' of Western Civilization. http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/p/the-sacred-history-of-being-as-its.html?spref=tw #Philosophy #History #Religion #Cult #Assyria #Greece #Mesopotamia #Anthropology pic.twitter.com/nVohrpe9Be
Thomas Yaeger @Rotorvator 19h
Replying to @amery_1
Bernal argued that Egypt was a better candidate, and that the deprecation of Egyptian thought was a construct of the Enlightenment. But he wasn't equipped to dig systematically for evidence of philosophical thought in ancient Egypt and in Mesopotamia. That's the difference.
[By coincidence the article 'Shar Kishati and the Cult of Eternity' was scheduled to follow shortly afterwards, and Keith Amery kindly retweeted it. It illustrates how different SHB is from Martin Bernal's Black Athena, in approach and in content. Though a thorough reading of Bernal's book was one of the reasons I went off to study the ancient world.]
Keith R. Amery @amery_1 21h
Shar Kishati and the Cult of Eternity
Thomas Yaeger @Rotorvator
'Shar Kishati' and The Cult of Eternity #Mesopotamia #Philosophy #Abstraction #Cult http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/shar-kishati-and-cult-of-eternity.html?spref=tw pic.twitter.com/DSNS1ex5Kj
Thomas Yaeger @Rotorvator
Replying to @amery_1
You've noticed this article, which gives some idea of my approach.
10:03pm · 21 Apr 2018
***
There is a lot of discussion in The Sacred History of Being of the deification of inanimate statues in the ancient world. This discussion covers both the intellectual model within which the deification made sense, and two contemporary descriptions of the ritual by which the statues were made divine. The issue of deification and de-deification of statues came up on Twitter in connection with an episode of 'Civilisations' presented by Mary Beard, 'The Eye of Faith'. I responded to the Egyptologist Margaret Maitland first:
***
Robert Nagle wrote the following in his blogpost on interesting offerings from Smashwords at reduced prices, during 'Read an eBook' week 2018 (March 4-10):
[The] Sacred History of Being by Thomas Yaeger. This book of ancient scholarship by a scholar of ancient languages intrigued me so much that I ended up buying the ebook at 75% off. The book argues that philosophy and the conception of the divine, the nature of reality and being came about well before the Greek philosophers; Yaeger examines historical evidence from cultures predating the Greeks to establish this thesis.
Another fascinating and slightly more accessible book, Understanding Ancient Thought tries to get inside the mind of ancient humans from different cultures in Greece, Mesopotamia, Assyria, Mexico and Asia. You can view the Table of Contents for this book on Yaeger’s blog.
by Yaeger, Thomas
eBook : Document
Seeing through Noise
by VenusPeter
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.
***
April 22, 2018
***
I've taken to including the phrase 'Greece is not the 'birthplace' of Western Civilization' in some tweets, in response to the occasional public assertion that Greece is the birthplace of Western Civilization. Hence the response below:
Keith R. Amery @amery_1 21h
Wasn't this covered decades ago by "Black Athena"?
Thomas Yaeger @Rotorvator
A radical text: The Sacred History of Being (published 2015). Greece is not the 'birthplace' of Western Civilization. http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/p/the-sacred-history-of-being-as-its.html?spref=tw #Philosophy #History #Religion #Cult #Assyria #Greece #Mesopotamia #Anthropology pic.twitter.com/nVohrpe9Be
Thomas Yaeger @Rotorvator 19h
Replying to @amery_1
Bernal argued that Egypt was a better candidate, and that the deprecation of Egyptian thought was a construct of the Enlightenment. But he wasn't equipped to dig systematically for evidence of philosophical thought in ancient Egypt and in Mesopotamia. That's the difference.
[By coincidence the article 'Shar Kishati and the Cult of Eternity' was scheduled to follow shortly afterwards, and Keith Amery kindly retweeted it. It illustrates how different SHB is from Martin Bernal's Black Athena, in approach and in content. Though a thorough reading of Bernal's book was one of the reasons I went off to study the ancient world.]
Keith R. Amery @amery_1 21h
Shar Kishati and the Cult of Eternity
Thomas Yaeger @Rotorvator
'Shar Kishati' and The Cult of Eternity #Mesopotamia #Philosophy #Abstraction #Cult http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/shar-kishati-and-cult-of-eternity.html?spref=tw pic.twitter.com/DSNS1ex5Kj
Thomas Yaeger @Rotorvator
Replying to @amery_1
You've noticed this article, which gives some idea of my approach.
10:03pm · 21 Apr 2018
***
There is a lot of discussion in The Sacred History of Being of the deification of inanimate statues in the ancient world. This discussion covers both the intellectual model within which the deification made sense, and two contemporary descriptions of the ritual by which the statues were made divine. The issue of deification and de-deification of statues came up on Twitter in connection with an episode of 'Civilisations' presented by Mary Beard, 'The Eye of Faith'. I responded to the Egyptologist Margaret Maitland first:
Interesting exploration of the controversy of religious
imagery on #Civilisations by @wmarybeard: art dangerously entangled with the divine. In
ancient Egypt, superseded statuary had to be ritually disposed, a remarkable
example being 20,000+ statues buried under Karnak temple
'art dangerously
entangled with the divine'. A bit tendentious perhaps? the Egyptians would not
have seen it like that.
Replying to @Rotorvator
It was a subject of discussion in the tv programme #Civilisations.
I agree that it was probably not generally seen as an issue in ancient Egypt,
an exception being what do you do with a divine statue when you stop treating
it as divine?
The regular
process of the installation and de-installation of gods (not merely 'images' of
the divine) suggests something which we are no longer comfortable in taking on
board, I've not seen the relevant episode of Civilisations yet. I'll catch up
with it this afternoon.
@wmarybeard The Civilisations episode was miles
better than any of the episodes from the Kenneth Clark series. But sound? Why
should the inanimate nature of a divine statue imply that it is a mere image of
the divine, and not the divine itself? That's a modern assumption.
I agree if you
look at classical sculpture the distinction between deity and statue of deity
can be very hard to draw. Christianity and other world religions tend to debate
the boundary fiercely
Replying to @eloquentpeasant
@Rotorvator
It's not that the statue was seen as divine in itself so
much as a repository for the divine and consequently as something
"infected" with it. In this way the cache is analogous to a genizah
The genizah
analogy is apt: what is commissioned needs to be decommissioned at some point.
The idea however that divine statues were not seen as divine in themselves but
rather as repositories for the divine, is a modern fudge.
March 25, 2018.
March 25, 2018.
***
Robert Nagle wrote the following in his blogpost on interesting offerings from Smashwords at reduced prices, during 'Read an eBook' week 2018 (March 4-10):
[The] Sacred History of Being by Thomas Yaeger. This book of ancient scholarship by a scholar of ancient languages intrigued me so much that I ended up buying the ebook at 75% off. The book argues that philosophy and the conception of the divine, the nature of reality and being came about well before the Greek philosophers; Yaeger examines historical evidence from cultures predating the Greeks to establish this thesis.
Another fascinating and slightly more accessible book, Understanding Ancient Thought tries to get inside the mind of ancient humans from different cultures in Greece, Mesopotamia, Assyria, Mexico and Asia. You can view the Table of Contents for this book on Yaeger’s blog.
[http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/p/first-look-at-my-new-book-which-should.html]
Thanks Robert! At: http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogrammer/2018/03/2018-overlooked-ebook-gems-for-1-or-less-on-smashwords-ebook-week-march-4-10/
(scroll down to Social Science and History).
TY, March 10, 20I8
October 4, 2017 at 8:26 am Absolutely enlightening work. I would like to read your book when I finally get the leisure time to do so. I am a full time student at the University of Albany and have shared many of the same interests as you do. I would also like to get in contact with you to get at your understanding of things that I have thought about often. I often feel weighed down at university and sometimes even hindered by the conventions employed by professors especially regarding history and the history of ideas. Overwhelmed at the moment with thoughts that what I am doing is an egregious waste. I hope it is not, regardless I digress… as I said before. Absolutely enlightening and illuminating work.
***
A comment from Joel in ga on a key theme of The Sacred History of Being:
joel in ga 28 December 2017 at 23:13
"Intellectual imposture"--nice phrase. Now I'll probably be looking for opportunities to use it :)
"This suggests the uncritical acceptance of space and time as something which exists apart from the Divine, and which is perhaps a fatal objection to the ontological argument." -- This is a fascinating point. Realism as opposed to idealism seems to be the default position of most apologists for theism. ....
Thomas Yaeger 29 December 2017 at 13:12
Thanks for your comment. I didn't invent the phrase - I borrowed it from Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, who wrote a book on postmodern academic writing, with the title 'Intellectual Impostures'. A great book, which by a strange coincidence was excellently reviewed by Richard Dawkins (published in Nature, in 1998) as 'Postmodernism Disrobed'. http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/dawkins.html
Thanks Robert! At: http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogrammer/2018/03/2018-overlooked-ebook-gems-for-1-or-less-on-smashwords-ebook-week-march-4-10/
(scroll down to Social Science and History).
TY, March 10, 20I8
***
A response to an article, 'The Esoteric Conception of Divinity in the Ancient World', published in the Ritman Library Newsletter in December 2015. The article discussed The Sacred History of Being. I didn't spot the response until January 26, 2018.
Mark A. Lajeunesse says:
A response to an article, 'The Esoteric Conception of Divinity in the Ancient World', published in the Ritman Library Newsletter in December 2015. The article discussed The Sacred History of Being. I didn't spot the response until January 26, 2018.
Mark A. Lajeunesse says:
October 4, 2017 at 8:26 am Absolutely enlightening work. I would like to read your book when I finally get the leisure time to do so. I am a full time student at the University of Albany and have shared many of the same interests as you do. I would also like to get in contact with you to get at your understanding of things that I have thought about often. I often feel weighed down at university and sometimes even hindered by the conventions employed by professors especially regarding history and the history of ideas. Overwhelmed at the moment with thoughts that what I am doing is an egregious waste. I hope it is not, regardless I digress… as I said before. Absolutely enlightening and illuminating work.
***
A comment from Joel in ga on a key theme of The Sacred History of Being:
joel in ga 28 December 2017 at 23:13
"Intellectual imposture"--nice phrase. Now I'll probably be looking for opportunities to use it :)
"This suggests the uncritical acceptance of space and time as something which exists apart from the Divine, and which is perhaps a fatal objection to the ontological argument." -- This is a fascinating point. Realism as opposed to idealism seems to be the default position of most apologists for theism. ....
Thomas Yaeger 29 December 2017 at 13:12
Thanks for your comment. I didn't invent the phrase - I borrowed it from Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, who wrote a book on postmodern academic writing, with the title 'Intellectual Impostures'. A great book, which by a strange coincidence was excellently reviewed by Richard Dawkins (published in Nature, in 1998) as 'Postmodernism Disrobed'. http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/dawkins.html
***
One of the articles I linked in a tweet on the 22nd of December 2017 was:
3:47pm · 22 Dec 2017
***
An exchange in November 2017 with someone tweeting as 'BPBowne'. Borden Parker Bowne was an important American philosopher, born in 1847, died 1910, who taught philosophy for more than thirty years. He described his work as 'Kantianised Berkeleyism'. Much of his most interesting work was in the area of metaphysics.
The tweeter regularly posted quotations by Bowne, and I responded to one of these. I've put the exchanges into chronological order.
1. Thomas Yaeger @Rotorvator
Replying to @BPBowne
A surprising quotation, which would put Parker Bowne in territory similar to Locke's association of ideas. A Platonist would say that forms and ideas in the world relate to those in transcendent reality, and we understand them because our souls participate in that reality.
2. 18 Nov 17, 5:27pm
Borden Parker Bowne @BPBowne
Thanks for your reply. Bowne seemed to be in the line of philosophical succession from Locke to Berkeley to the German theistic idealist Lotze. In Philosophy of Theism, the earlier version of Bowne's Theism, Bowne recalls how Locke observed that the universe consists of a system of relations. Bowne elaborated in Theism on how relations are the work of the mind. Plato's view as you have described it seems rather compatible with Bowne's. Like Berkeley, Bowne would attribute to the Divine Mind ideas transcending human ideas and would explain that we understand them because the laws of intelligence are the same for the Divine mind as for the human mind. In Theism, Bowne frames an epistemological argument for theism from the fact that the external world is thought-shaped.
3. 19 Nov 17, 5:35pm
Thomas Yaeger @Rotorvator
And thanks for yours too, which clarifies what was a bit puzzling. The difference between Locke and Berkeley is that Locke, though talking about a universe consisting of a system of relations, was not talking about a system of relations within Divine mind. J. G. Frazer adopted Locke's ideas wholesale, but refused to write about the concept of Being, since he said 'nothing can be predicated of Being'. Which, for a cultural historian, is a pretty extraordinary thing to say.
Best, Thomas
4. 23 Nov 17, 12:41am
Borden Parker Bowne @BPBowne
Excellent blog post on Berkeley. Well crafted summary giving a sense of the power of his view.
5. Thomas Yaeger @Rotorvator
Many thanks! It's actually a full chapter from my book 'The Sacred History of Being', published in November 2015. It is part of an extensive attack on the validity of the ontological argument, which doesn't resemble argument about the nature and reality of the Divine in antiquity. The OA makes it nearly impossible for us to understand ancient religion, and the book is an attempted corrective. Berkeley's argument was quite close to the kind of discussion which took place in antiquity - I included this chapter to show that there were other ways to discuss Divine questions.
***
From Ben Thomas (@writingben), August 18, 2017.
Hi Thomas,
[.....] my historical novel "The Cradle and the Sword," set in ancient Mesopotamia -- and, I might add, significantly influenced by "The Sacred History of Being" -- went on sale on Amazon today. [......] Thank you, again, for providing such stimulating material for discussion, and for inspiration in my own (fictional) work. --Ben
Ben's book is at: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0692922636/ref=cm_cr_ryp_prd_ttl_sol_0
I replied:
Ben, hi. Congratulations on a very professional looking job. I look forward to reading it. Thanks for the heads-up.
My third book, 'Understandng Ancient Thought' will be available in ePub format on August 21. It expands on some of the discussion in SHB, but it can be read separately. Details at:
http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/nineteen-meditations.html
Good luck with your book!
Best, Thomas
***
From Simo Parpola, April 14, 2017.
Many thanks for sending me your book, The Sacred History of Being. I read it with great interest and appreciation. It is well written and planned, the result of many years of serious thinking and research, and I really hope that it will attain its goal and help shake the outdated paradigm of the Greek origin of philosophy that continues to be maintained in academic circles. I'm sure that much of the Mesopotamian evidence that you present is totally new to your readers and should induce them to revise their views.
I liked your discussion of the "subjective element in the identification of quality evidence that makes good science so hard to do" (pp. 66-67) and the "unwillingness to go beyond what can be commonly understood" (p. 79), and I learned a great deal about philosophy in general as well in reading the book.
...
Best wishes and warm regards,
Simo
I replied, April 15, 2017:
Dear Simo,
I' am so pleased that you found my book to the point. And well written (that took a lot of time, and was intentional).
....
Best wishes, Thomas
***
Finally, Ben also mentioned the book on www.medium.com (September 27), in response to a user question:
Comment From 'Texelar' (Paul Boudreau) on the list of questions relating to The Sacred History of Being, October 16 2015, shortly before publication of the book:
One of the articles I linked in a tweet on the 22nd of December 2017 was:
The Irrationality of Atheism #God #Religion #Theology #Plato #Monotheism #Belief #Atheism #Philosophy #Divinity shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2016/08/atheis…
I received a response from Bernard Lamborelle, who has been reading The Sacred History of Being:
Replying to @Rotorvator
Indeed. Tell me who your "God" is and I will
tell you what I think of it...
Replying to @blambore
The hook is misleading. If you read the article, I will
respond.
Replying to @Rotorvator
I did read the article and agree. My comment was more
along the lines that we should always start by defining what we mean by
"God" before we can communicate efficiently on the topic...
Replying to @blambore
I see. Many of my articles take as their point of
departure the text of 'The Sacred History of Being' (2015), which is an
extensive discussion of what God is, the origins of the concept, and the
weaknesses of human argument concerning what is Divine.
Replying to @Rotorvator
I'm still reading your book... and I very much enjoy the
intelligent, well informed discussion on the notion of "God" and [...] being. I often regret that too many "atheism vs theism" debates
amount to little more then a pissing contest between egos...
An exchange in November 2017 with someone tweeting as 'BPBowne'. Borden Parker Bowne was an important American philosopher, born in 1847, died 1910, who taught philosophy for more than thirty years. He described his work as 'Kantianised Berkeleyism'. Much of his most interesting work was in the area of metaphysics.
The tweeter regularly posted quotations by Bowne, and I responded to one of these. I've put the exchanges into chronological order.
1. Thomas Yaeger @Rotorvator
Replying to @BPBowne
A surprising quotation, which would put Parker Bowne in territory similar to Locke's association of ideas. A Platonist would say that forms and ideas in the world relate to those in transcendent reality, and we understand them because our souls participate in that reality.
2. 18 Nov 17, 5:27pm
Borden Parker Bowne @BPBowne
Thanks for your reply. Bowne seemed to be in the line of philosophical succession from Locke to Berkeley to the German theistic idealist Lotze. In Philosophy of Theism, the earlier version of Bowne's Theism, Bowne recalls how Locke observed that the universe consists of a system of relations. Bowne elaborated in Theism on how relations are the work of the mind. Plato's view as you have described it seems rather compatible with Bowne's. Like Berkeley, Bowne would attribute to the Divine Mind ideas transcending human ideas and would explain that we understand them because the laws of intelligence are the same for the Divine mind as for the human mind. In Theism, Bowne frames an epistemological argument for theism from the fact that the external world is thought-shaped.
3. 19 Nov 17, 5:35pm
Thomas Yaeger @Rotorvator
And thanks for yours too, which clarifies what was a bit puzzling. The difference between Locke and Berkeley is that Locke, though talking about a universe consisting of a system of relations, was not talking about a system of relations within Divine mind. J. G. Frazer adopted Locke's ideas wholesale, but refused to write about the concept of Being, since he said 'nothing can be predicated of Being'. Which, for a cultural historian, is a pretty extraordinary thing to say.
Best, Thomas
4. 23 Nov 17, 12:41am
Borden Parker Bowne @BPBowne
Excellent blog post on Berkeley. Well crafted summary giving a sense of the power of his view.
5. Thomas Yaeger @Rotorvator
Many thanks! It's actually a full chapter from my book 'The Sacred History of Being', published in November 2015. It is part of an extensive attack on the validity of the ontological argument, which doesn't resemble argument about the nature and reality of the Divine in antiquity. The OA makes it nearly impossible for us to understand ancient religion, and the book is an attempted corrective. Berkeley's argument was quite close to the kind of discussion which took place in antiquity - I included this chapter to show that there were other ways to discuss Divine questions.
***
From Ben Thomas (@writingben), August 18, 2017.
Hi Thomas,
[.....] my historical novel "The Cradle and the Sword," set in ancient Mesopotamia -- and, I might add, significantly influenced by "The Sacred History of Being" -- went on sale on Amazon today. [......] Thank you, again, for providing such stimulating material for discussion, and for inspiration in my own (fictional) work. --Ben
Ben's book is at: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0692922636/ref=cm_cr_ryp_prd_ttl_sol_0
I replied:
Ben, hi. Congratulations on a very professional looking job. I look forward to reading it. Thanks for the heads-up.
My third book, 'Understandng Ancient Thought' will be available in ePub format on August 21. It expands on some of the discussion in SHB, but it can be read separately. Details at:
http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/nineteen-meditations.html
Good luck with your book!
Best, Thomas
***
From Simo Parpola, April 14, 2017.
Many thanks for sending me your book, The Sacred History of Being. I read it with great interest and appreciation. It is well written and planned, the result of many years of serious thinking and research, and I really hope that it will attain its goal and help shake the outdated paradigm of the Greek origin of philosophy that continues to be maintained in academic circles. I'm sure that much of the Mesopotamian evidence that you present is totally new to your readers and should induce them to revise their views.
I liked your discussion of the "subjective element in the identification of quality evidence that makes good science so hard to do" (pp. 66-67) and the "unwillingness to go beyond what can be commonly understood" (p. 79), and I learned a great deal about philosophy in general as well in reading the book.
...
Best wishes and warm regards,
Simo
I replied, April 15, 2017:
Dear Simo,
I' am so pleased that you found my book to the point. And well written (that took a lot of time, and was intentional).
....
Best wishes, Thomas
Tweet by Nick Zacharewicz @NickSCZach (January 2017):
"All about how history is built by inclusion and omission. Even written histories have to hang together like a good story."
***
I had an interesting conversation with Ben Thomas about the
book at the beginning of September. This is an edited version of the exchange, published with his permission.
Ben Thomas (@writingben) Sept 1 2016
I'm about halfway through your book, and I'm absolutely fascinated -- not only because you're casting light on some of the most neglected and dismissed aspects of pre-Classical thought, but because a lot of your assertions resonate deeply with some of my own conclusions. For example, I've done no formal research on Kaballah or Assyrian iconography -- but ... it occurred to me that the gods of the Mesopotamian pantheon fit perfectly into the sephirotic diagram. I even drew a series of doodles in which I inserted the cuneiform symbols for the gods in their corresponding places on the diagram.
[…] I say these things to point out that even with no formal background in this field, and without any exposure to your work or thought, was drawn toward the very same ideas you explore in your book, by my sheer love for the aesthetic and thematic textures of ancient Near Eastern thought. Finding those ideas in your book is an intensely thrilling experience for me.
I replied:
Many thanks for your initial reactions to my book. As you
will see later in the book the relationship between the Kabbalah and the
Mesopotamian pantheon is established pretty firmly. I wasn't the one to find it
- The Assyriologist Simo Parpola wrote a paper about it in 1993. We had a
discussion about that relationship between late 2004 and early 2006. It is interesting however to
discover that the possible relationship was suspected by others quite
independently.
Sep 1
The important point is that the sefirotic diagram features
a transcendent absolute. No problem if the origin of the Kabbalah is in the
medieval period. If it can be traced back to the 14th cent BCE however, then
the history of philosophy needs a rewrite.
Sep 1
However I will not spoil the experience of the book for you,
if I can avoid it. That it argues that the history of philosophy needs some
revision is in the advertisement for SHB.
Ben replied the following day:
Just finished the book, and left a very positive review on Goodreads. I really do think it deserves more attention than it seems to be getting, and I hope it will as more people read it. As I said in my earlier message, your thesis helps a lot of disparate elements -- symbols, artistic choices, odd passages of text, similar traditions -- fall into place in a very logical way. Regarding the mes, do you think they were strictly abstract attributes, or is it possible that they were instantiated in physical objects at some point in the tradition? For example, in the story of Inanna and Enki, it's clear not only that Enki stores the mes in a particular place in the E-Abzu, but that Inanna is able to display them to the people of Uruk. I wonder if there was an older Sumerian tradition of "making mes" in some physical sense.
Sep 2
I replied:
Many thanks for your comments, and for the positive review,
which hits the mark. I'm impressed that you got through it so fast! As regards
the Mes, there are abstractions, and
images of abstractions. So they could be instantiated in physical objects, just
as the gods could be instantiated in statues. It was also possible for the melammu of the gods to be put on, and
taken off. So properties and attributes can be moved around. There is evidence
for example that properties and attributes have passed from one god to another
in the liturgy of the Babylonian New Year Festival, possibly in response to
political changes. The understanding of the Mes
in Sumer was essentially the same as later on (the term is Sumerian), but I
chose not to go there for the purposes of this book
.
Sep 2
Ben replied:
That makes a lot of sense about the mes.... It's clear that the ancient Mesopotamians didn't draw the lines between the physical and the abstract in the same ways we do -- and as you point out in the book, anyone with divine status could step across those boundaries. [....]
The following review was left by Ben Thomas at the Goodreads
page for The Sacred History of Being,
and he gave the book five stars.
The ancient Greeks didn't invent philosophy. They themselves acknowledged the intellectual debts they owed to older Egyptian and Babylonian thinkers. Yaeger's thesis in this book is that we actually have abundant evidence of the nature of ancient Mesopotamian philosophy - not in the form of written texts, but through artistic symbols and literary metaphors. Through these allusions, a picture of a rich Mesopotamian intellectual tradition emerges: a tradition that may be the common ancestor of many esoteric doctrines found throughout the ancient Mediterranean.
Finally, Ben also mentioned the book on www.medium.com (September 27), in response to a user question:
One of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read .... recently is The Sacred History of Being by Thomas Yaeger, which is available in ebook format. This book makes (what’s in my view) a very strong argument that the ancient Greeks didn’t invent philosophy at all, but were drawing on deeply rooted, well-developed Eastern traditions that were widely known throughout the world at that time. This thesis is a very controversial one — not “historical canon” by any means— but in any case, the book provides an excellent introduction to the history of ideas in ancient Asia.***
Comment From 'Texelar' (Paul Boudreau) on the list of questions relating to The Sacred History of Being, October 16 2015, shortly before publication of the book:
Interesting stuff! They are all questions worth asking. My personal interests end temporally where the Greeks took up the banner of higher thought. I make my case here:
http://www.awhico.com/blog/egyptianpyramidmysticism.
There is so much evidence for cultural elevation before the time of the Greeks that it is a wonder we have the modern concepts of "progress". You capture it with your Question #30.
I replied:
Texelar, hi. Thanks for your comments, and for the links to your blog pages.
The intellectual world before the Greeks of the middle of the 1st millennium BCE *was* very sophisticated. But it and the moderns for the most part speak different conceptual languages, with different assumptions and understandings. So it is possible for the moderns to fail completely to recognise what they are looking at.
One of the functions of SHB is to explore and explain some of the sophistication and the complexity of ideas in the ancient world (and not just in Greece). Another is to show intellectual continuities between Greece and other cultures; and also the continuities which exist between the 2nd millennium BCE and the 1st.
Certain technical details of ancient civilisations, their art, their poetry, their architecture, their rituals, etc., illustrate how they understood the nature of reality, once you understand something of the armature of ideas they employed to understand their world. SHB is very much focussed on these technical details, which have been described before, but not much subjected to interpretation.
We have the modern concept of progress because we choose to look at the past from the point of view of the present. It's where we are, after all. Hard to bear the idea that we represent a shadow of what once was.
Best, Thomas.
Texelar, hi. Thanks for your comments, and for the links to your blog pages.
The intellectual world before the Greeks of the middle of the 1st millennium BCE *was* very sophisticated. But it and the moderns for the most part speak different conceptual languages, with different assumptions and understandings. So it is possible for the moderns to fail completely to recognise what they are looking at.
One of the functions of SHB is to explore and explain some of the sophistication and the complexity of ideas in the ancient world (and not just in Greece). Another is to show intellectual continuities between Greece and other cultures; and also the continuities which exist between the 2nd millennium BCE and the 1st.
Certain technical details of ancient civilisations, their art, their poetry, their architecture, their rituals, etc., illustrate how they understood the nature of reality, once you understand something of the armature of ideas they employed to understand their world. SHB is very much focussed on these technical details, which have been described before, but not much subjected to interpretation.
We have the modern concept of progress because we choose to look at the past from the point of view of the present. It's where we are, after all. Hard to bear the idea that we represent a shadow of what once was.
Best, Thomas.
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