The Origins of Transcendentalism in Ancient Religion (forthcoming)

This title has been superseded by 'The Death of Pan'. There is a new page for the expanded work (follow the link).

This is a short book about a very large subject – the transcendentalism which is present in ancient religions, located to the west of India. 

Normally it is assumed that there is very little in the way of transcendentalist thought associated with these ancient religions, and that the evidence we are looking at is mainly built out of concrete imagery, fanciful myth, poetry, irrational associations, all of which are in the service of religion and the state. In other words, religion serves a series of social and ideological functions, and it is to those functions that we should look for the explanation of the cultural remains, rather than the minds of the ancients themselves.

Is this actually so? Or are we the victims of an enlightenment agenda which sought to remake the history of religion and religious thought in terms of a profound irrationality?

That is one of the arguments of this book – that we have been sold short by enlightenment presumptions and certainties, and that what we think we know and understand about ancient religion is so far from its real basis that, for the most part, it is nearly impossible for modern scholars to make intelligible sense of it.

This book is short, not because the questions it addresses are simple, and have easy answers. It is short because I have written four other books before this one, and, to a significant extent, it references argument and discussion which can be found in those books. It was not possible to write a short and credible introduction to an understanding of the transcendentalism which can be found in ancient religions, without first covering an enormous amount of ground.

Scholars must decide for themselves if the argument of this book is soundly based.  The problem for scholars  is that they live and work within what Michel Foucault called an ‘episteme’. This is a model of reality dependent on many presumptions. Not only does the episteme shape discussion, it controls what can actually be discussed, or even be seen by those within it.

Preface
On Ancient Religion
Parallels and Discontinuity between Contemporary and Ancient Religions
The definition of Transcendentalism in Religion

The Origin of the Transcendentalist Perspective 

The Nature of Reality 

Contradiction and Paradox 

Transcendence and Immanence 

Detecting the Presence of Transcendentalist Thought 

The Future of our Understanding of the Past 

Notes

*Update, May 22, 2020:

Sometimes a book changes during the process of research and writing. The writer of anything is in a dialogue with both his materials and his thoughts. That is what has happened with this book. It will contain the discussions outlined above, but it will be significantly different, since it will also discuss a famous essay from late antiquity, which illuminates the underlying argument of the book, and shows that there was a consciousness present in the second century C.E., that ways of thinking about the Divine were changing, and that the older modes of thought were about to be largely lost.

The author of this essay understood that the patterns of thought of the ancient world would no longer be accessible to those who came afterwards. Rational discussion of these patterns of thought would disappear, and would be replaced by an entirely ersatz mode of discussion, and shape almost everything which could be thought or said afterwards. With almost none of it making any kind of sense.

The title of the book will be different, reflecting the changes to the book's contents. There will be a new page for this shortly. TY

Thomas Yaeger, March 25, 2018. Revised, October 12, 2018, June 11, 2019, November 9, 2019, and May 22, 2020.