The Esoteric Conception of Divinity in the Ancient World (full text)

This article was first published in the Newsletter of the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica in December 2015. In October 2019 the website went down, and hasn't come back up. So I'm posting the full text of the article here in the meantime. It covers both the subject of The Sacred History of Being, and also something of how the book came to be written. In 2018 the article was published as a chapter in Man and the Divine.

TY, October 30, 2019.


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 “Enki’s beloved Eridug, E-engura whose inside is full of abundance! Abzu, life of the Land, beloved of Enki! Temple built on the edge, befitting the artful divine powers!”

From: ‘Enki’s journey to Nibru.’  (Black, Cunningham, Robson, Zόlyomi, The Literature of Ancient Sumer, 2004, p. 330)

The Sacred History of Being (2015) is about philosophy and its origin in the context of ancient cultic life. As such it argues that philosophy as a discipline is very old, as Plato himself said in the Protagoras, and that it was not invented by the Greeks.

In my twenties, I was struck by the strong interest the ancients had in the idea of limit – in art, architecture, philosophy, and ritual. This interest did not much seem to engage modern scholarly attention, with a couple of notable exceptions. Initially I had no idea at all what the significance of the idea of limit might be, and no idea where pursuing it would take me. Or that it would lead to a book it would take me four years to write, and which would reshape my understanding of human intellectual history in the process.

There is a standard form of image from the earliest years of civilization, which consists of two opposed figures, standing on either side of an object. The object can be a tree, an altar, a table heaped with produce, lotus blossoms, animal foreparts, loaves, and so on. The opposed figures can be human, animal, god or genie. This kind of image can be found throughout the archaeological record of the Ancient Near East, and in Egypt.

Questions arise from the ubiquity of this image, which appears in the context of those who had great power in the world, and also in funerary contexts, particularly in Egypt. It appears prominently in royal contexts in Assyria and in Babylonia. The image can be traced back as least as far as the settlement at Çatal höyük, now in modern Turkey, dating to some eight or nine thousand years before the present.

What does this image mean? It is nowhere explained, but clearly had some kind of explanation at some time, even if its transmission in later centuries was enabled simply by its status as a traditional iconographic element. Why is it so prominently displayed, so persistent throughout time, and apparently not discussed in the cultures in which it appears?

Some details of esoteric lore were written down in the Ancient Near East – the colophons of the relevant tablets make it clear that the contents were for the initiated only. The ritual procedures for the installation of divine statues in Assyria and Babylonia survive, together with some incantations which were part of the ritual. These tell us about the ritual, and the elements involved in the ritual – the thigh of a ram, best beer, mashatu-meal, and sacralised reeds, plus information about which stellar constellations and planets a statue was to be pointed at as part of the installation; and about the selection of craftsman’s tools which were disposed of as part of the ritual (enclosed in the ram’s thigh, and deposited into the river), in order to remove their responsibility for making divine images (not a thing for mortals to undertake).

But we find no discussion of the rationale of the installation ritual. Or discussion of the rationale of any other ritual which they documented. This suggests that there were levels in the esoteric life of Assyria and Babylonia: that the ritual details were important to record to ensure consistency in the performance of the ritual, but the meaning of the details, and the underlying rationale for the ceremony were transmitted orally, and never committed to writing.

The image with the opposed figures standing around a ritual object is clearly an image whose meaning and function was too important to record in a temple or palace document. In which case it might appear that we can never know what it signified, and why it was so important.

But, it is not so. Assyriologists have explored this image as it appears in the Mesopotamian context, and have made some headway in understanding the scope of its significance. They have established that, in terms of the iconography, the Sacred Tree may stand in for the King. In other words, the two ideas were understood to represent the same thing. The contemporary understanding of the nature of the role of king in Assyria was that he was the Regent of the god Ashur on Earth, and therefore the king represented an emulation and image of the Divine on Earth.

But why a tree? The tree can stand in for the king, because of two further ideas which are connected in the definition of what the king is.

The contemporary scholarly definition of the Divine in Assyria, framed it as the source of all excellences and perfections, and all knowledge.*1 Hence the importance of excellences and perfections of the life of the king, as we find recorded in the Annals of Ashurbanipal in the late 7th century B.C.E. (found in the ruins of his palace at Nineveh at the end of the nineteenth century). As Ashur’s representative on Earth he excels in military skills, in throwing the javelin, in horse riding, in the use of weapons; in divining the will of the gods through divination by oil, and other arcane skills; also in scribal excellence and mathematics – he is able to read the ‘obscure and difficult to master’ texts written in Sumerian ‘from before the flood’. And so on.

The excellence and perfection of the king’s skills were understood to place him in proximity to the god Ashur. He is thus at the limit of what a mortal may do and be; as Ashur is at the limit or zenith of Reality itself. Ashur is Reality itself. That the Tree may stand in for the king suggests that it was understood also as an esoteric and symbolic representation of the idea of limit, taken to the nth degree, and also of Reality itself.

Much of the discussion found in Plato concerns the nature of what he calls ‘The Good’. The Good is in a sense the Crown of Creation, and it is the target of human attention because of that status. He refers to the Good rather than ‘God’ because he is talking about the ultimate abstraction, which has commerce with other abstractions – as he says, ‘things pass into one another’. The Good is perfect, complete, whole, and the ultimate source of justice, good order, beauty, wisdom, and all the other abstract concepts which have some form of existence in the temporal world. He is careful to say (through the words of Socrates) that this ultimate Reality, the Form of Forms, has ‘no shape, size or colour’. In its nature it wholly transcends physical reality.

Plato’s Republic tells of the craft of passing from the contemplation of one Form to another, entirely intellectually, and without distraction, with the intention of eventually arriving at the contemplation of The Good. The man returning from this journey comes back with knowledge beyond the scope of any wisdom to be found on the Earth.

The Platonic discussion of the Forms is treated by modern scholars as a species of literary fiction. Meaning it has no detectable connections with cultural activity in Greece, or in any other part of the civilised world in the two millennia before the Common Era. But Plato is very clear that it is important to look to the ‘One Thing’, the ur-Reality which underpins the world of the here and now. So he is talking of a conception of God, which gives rise to all other things which may be understood by the mortal mind, though the ultimate abstract conception of Reality may lie forever beyond human understanding.

How old is this conception of the Divine? If the Divine is understood to have its reality at the limit of physical and perceptible reality, and to be the most abstract of abstractions, historians of philosophy would say this notion was first discussed in Classical Greece. If on the other hand, the iconography of the two opposed figures, facing a ritually significant object between them, represents the most abstract conception of limit, beyond any physical instance, then this conception of the Divine is thousands of years older than the middle years of the 1st millennium B.C.E.

The Assyriologist Simo Parpola has shown that there is a connection between the Kabbalah and the Assyrian Sacred Tree. Each of the Mesopotamian gods was associated with a divine number, and sometimes they were referenced in documents by their number alone. He was able to reconstruct the Assyrian version of the Kabbalistic tree, populating the sefirotic nodes (understood in the Middle Ages as divine powers and qualities), with the key Mesopotamian divinities, their properties and numbers.

The Kabbalah enshrines a philosophical notion of transcendent divinity in the concept of the ‘en sof’. It has been assumed by modern scholars that this is an imported idea, perhaps borrowed from Gnosticism in the early centuries of the Common Era. If in fact the idea of the ‘en sof’ was in the Assyrian version of the Sacred Tree, then we understand something new and profound about Hebrew ideas of divinity from the middle of the 1st millennium B.C.E. onwards.  The relationship between the Assyrian and Jewish Sacred Trees which Parpola has been able to show, by itself pushes a philosophical conception of the Divine back to at least the 14th century B.C.E., which is when the representation of the Assyrian Tree first appears.

This philosophical equation of the idea of limit with what is transcendent is an important factor in ancient religious ritual. In Mesopotamia the ritual installation of divine statues took place in locations with clear boundaries, including riverbanks and quays, and a key part of the ritual involved a temple threshold, as the surviving texts tell us. These boundaries were understood to have proximity to the primal reality, the Abzu, house of Ea/Enki, in the sweet waters at the bottom of the sea. Reeds used in the ceremony were spoken of has having their roots in the Abzu. The association of limit with ritual performance tells us something about the logic of the installation: the rites serve to make the images one with the company of gods in Heaven. The statue becomes itself Divine by its exposure to repeated representations of Divinity in the course of what was described in Mesopotamia as the ‘most sacred and secret of rituals’.

A great age for a philosophically conceived notion of Divinity, coequal with Reality itself, makes it possible to make much sense of many otherwise obscure texts and inscriptions which have been excavated over the past two centuries.  The determination of classicists over two centuries (since the European Enlightenment) to downgrade and deny the connections between Greek civilization and other civilizations around the Mediterranean and the Near East, both in classical times, and in the 2nd millennium B.C.E., has made it very difficult to make sense of both Greek philosophy, and the intellectual life of the other cultures of the ancient world. The Greeks accorded the Egyptians the status of philosophers, and Plato represents Solon having conversations with Egyptian priests in the Timaeus, who had knowledge ‘hoary with age’.  But archaeological excavation in Mesopotamia and elsewhere, and the recovery of thousands of texts, made possible the idea of writing something like The Sacred History of Being.

The structure of the book is relatively simple. There are three main parts. The first begins with reflections on philosophy, both ancient and modern. This goes some way to explain how I came to pursue this project. The second half of the first part discusses the ontological argument, which has its origins in the early modern period, which has come to be the principal way in which the reality of Divinity is discussed. We have made it very difficult to understand ancient theological ideas by promoting the ontological argument to its current status.

The second part explores Plato’s writing, and the strikingly different way in which Divinity was discussed. It also explores wider Greek thought, and earlier instances of the kind of understanding of Reality found in Plato.

The third part examines ideas common to Greece, Israel and Mesopotamia, plus the significance of the Assyrian Sacred Tree for the scholars of the Assyrian royal court, and the significance of the Jewish Kabbalah, which descends from parallel Mesopotamian ideas. Two of the chapters in part three work through the Mis Pî tablets from Nineveh and Babylon, which describe the ritual for the installation of images of the gods, and discuss the significance of the ritual.

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1 The Babylonian scholar Berossus, former priest of Bel, who wrote about Babylonian culture and religion after moving to Athens,  tells us of the encounter of the first legendary sages with an emissary of the Divine. The emissary granted them knowledge of the arts and crafts, of husbandry, and the apportioning of land.

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]

Philosophical Thought in Greece and Babylonia (II)

The conventional wisdom, at least since the European enlightenment in the eighteenth century C.E., is that the phenomenon of monotheism is an idea which emerged from a preceding general inclination to polytheism among the human race. It is also conventional wisdom that we know of no instance of a monotheistic religion before the instances which are regularly cited to support this narrative. This emergence is short on evidence, and the evidence we have is less than clear in terms of context and implications, but is nevertheless a key assumption for historians of thought, and for theologians. It is assumed that the appearance of monotheism represents a negative and critical reaction to aspects of polytheism, and marks a great leap forward in human thought.

The evidence comes entirely from religious contexts, but this does not seem to matter. It is a great leap forward whether or not you are religiously minded, a professional theologian, a historian of cultural ideas, or even an outright atheist, because it marks the arrival of the ability to think in abstract rather than concrete terms. After this, it was possible for human beings to think in terms of universals rather than in assemblages of essentially unconnected particulars. It does not matter how the change is dressed: the human race was emancipated from an irrational concern for personification of natural forces, and the other ways in which a religious pantheon, or a sequence of genealogies, might have been built.

The two instances which are taken to show the emergence of monotheistic patterns of thought are:

 1):  the Hebrew insistence that Yahweh stands alone, and that ‘there is no other god beside me’. This insistence dates – in textual terms - back to the middle of the 1^st millennium B.C.E., since we know, largely from internal evidence,  that the text of the Old Testament was heavily redacted in the fifth century B.C.E., and reflects the views of what appears to be the victorious ‘Yahweh only’ faction in a long-running theological and political struggle concerning the nature of the Hebrew religion.

And:

2): The religious revolution which is supposed to have been wrought by the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten in the 14^th century B.C.E., in which the plethora of divinities and the religious cults attached to them were replaced with the worship of the god ‘Aten’ alone.

I wrote extensively about Hebrew monotheism in the chapter ‘The Idea of Being in Israel’, in The Sacred History of Being (2015), and the influence of Mesopotamian ideas of divinity (principally Babylonian) on Hebrew thought. There are many clear references to Babylonian concepts in the Old Testament, often in the form of parodies. The Hebrews certainly encountered Babylonian religious thought and practice during their exile in Babylon. The extent to which this was a significant influence on their thought and practice before the period of exile is hard to determine however, since there is very little evidence to illustrate the nature of Hebrew religious thought before that time, both in terms of datable textual references, and archaeological remains. We do not know whether polytheism was a Hebrew practice in the first half of the 1^st millennium BCE, because there is no unequivocal evidence remaining for that period.  Other individuated Hebrew gods are unknown to us in the textual and archaeological records, though there are references in Hebrew texts to the worship of both foreign and Canaanite gods (Baal being one of the most conspicuous). Yahweh is however sometimes referred to as ‘El’, and occasionally with the plural form ‘Elohim’. Which might be taken to imply a multiplicity of gods.

There is a great deal of evidence however which shows that argument about the nature of the divine took place, and some of that may have been prompted by the importation of foreign deities and foreign cult practices. These arguments, and their potential implications for the nature of Hebrew thought about the divine, were also discussed in ‘The Idea of Being in Israel’.

This argument about the nature of the divine is rarely read by scholars in terms of a philosophical debate. There is no connected discussion available to us relating to these conjectural debates, if that is what they were, and scholars are disinclined to address the detail which does exist in terms of a philosophical understanding of the divine.

As for Akhenaten’s religious revolution, some biblical scholars have argued (over many years) that Moses brought monotheism to the Levant at the time of the Exodus from Egypt, and that there is a lineal connection (of some sort) between the supposed monotheism of Akhenaten, and the Hebrew conception of Yahweh. We are told in the Pentateuch that Yahweh is the one true god, but, as already mentioned, these are texts which were redacted in the middle of the 1^st millennium B.C.E. These texts reflect the interests and beliefs of the victors – the ‘Yahweh only’ group.  The truth may be quite different. Since we have no reliable evidence for Hebrew conceptions of the divine in the first half of the 1^st millennium, what can be said of their conceptions of the divine in the second half of the second millennium B.C.E.?

In any case, are we clear about the difference between monotheism and polytheism? To adherents of the idea that the passage from polytheism to monotheism represents a cultural evolution, the answer is obvious: monotheism is a move away from local and tribal gods, and a move towards a grander and more abstract conception of the divine. However imperfectly understood. This eventually led to the development of articulate discussion of the philosophical nature of the divine among the Greeks.

But this narrative is entirely based on the two examples discussed above, and our understanding of what was going on in both cases is very thin. It is possible to impose the narrative of a cultural evolution on these examples, and this is what is done. But there is no conclusive evidence that this narrative represents the actual cultural dynamics at play in the second and first millennia  B.C.E. 

I’ve already shown in my essay ‘Polytheism, Monotheism, and The Cult of the Aten’ *1 that Akhenaten did not set out to obliterate the cults of the traditional gods of Egypt, and that there is no evidence that Akhenaten’s worship of the Aten attracted early hostility from the traditional cults. This does not mean that there was no tension between the new cult and the other priestly establishments. We do know that in the end, both Akhenaten’s supporters, and the priests of Amun, were enthusiastically hacking out references to their respective divinities from the monuments. But we have very little unambiguous information about how this situation came to pass.

In fact there is another narrative available concerning Akhenaten’s religion of the Aten which has not so far received much attention. Why is this? The existing narrative supports the simple idea of the development of monotheism as a form of reaction to what had become unacceptable aspects of polytheistic belief.  This narrative has a great hold on scholars, even if not all the available evidence provides clear support for it. The other narrative about Akhenaten’s religious revolution suggests something quite different – that the worship of the Aten was not just a newly minted preoccupation of Akhenaten, and to lesser extent his father, but that his revolution was an attempt to restore a very old body of thought in Egypt.*2

If that is the case, then the modern narrative we have constructed, on the basis of a very partial understanding of the evidence, will necessarily collapse. For one thing, monotheism will have been shown to be very old, and indeed be an Egyptian way of thinking about reality which stretches back to the earliest dynasties. For another, the idea of a cultural evolution from polytheism to monotheism will no longer be tenable, if monotheism is an idea which is thousands of years old. And in addition, if monotheism has an extensive history in Egypt, alongside an equally extensive history of polytheism, we would need to ask, ‘how could this be?’

1 Polytheism, Monotheism, and The Cult of the Aten

2 Discussed in 'The Horizon of the Aten' (forthcoming). 

['Philosophical Thought in Greece and Babylonia (III)' will follow shortly]. 

Thomas Yaeger, December 26, 2018.

Philosophical Thought in Greece and Babylonia (I)

"…. yet dualism was able to reign for so long, thousands of years after those truths of the whole were irrefutably established"

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 I’m not sure how much of my work you have read. It isn’t obligatory for anyone to read any of it at all. However there were many more subjects dealt with in my first book (The Sacred History of Being) than the chapter listing suggested. It was designed to be worth reading, but it isn’t constructed as a through narrative. It can be read like that, but the structure is actually fugal: echoes of the same ideas come up throughout the text in different guises.

One of these ideas is the significance of what is ’whole’ in ancient thought, and the role it seems to have played in the development of ancient religion (the connection between physical and transcendent reality, a matter of great importance to the ancients, was understood to be made possible through the nature of wholes and totalities). Another is the idea that the nature of reality can only be one, otherwise the integrity of reality would be fatally compromised. A third idea which plays a part in this fugue is the irrational nature of the ur-reality. We see this fundamental irrationality expressed in physical reality through the irrational nature of mathematical constants. The closer we look at the building blocks of physical reality – geometry, mathematics and physics – The more we understand that these actually point back to an ur-reality which is deeply irrational. However large parts of physical reality can be described and modelled in terms of geometry and mathematics. A fourth question is discussed – if reality is necessarily one, otherwise the fundamental nature and integrity of that reality is rendered impossible, how is it that the universe in which we live is full of multiplicities and things which are different from each other? How can this be if reality is one?

The fourth question is closely allied to one of the most profound questions which can be asked, which is ‘how is it that there is something rather than nothing?’ This question was asked in antiquity, as it is still sometimes asked. But the answer to that question received a more intelligent response in antiquity than it does now. We know about its importance not so much from direct references, but from the fact that that ancient writers become very coy when discussing matters of creation, and often do not give satisfactory answers. Most historians simply assume that this is a reticence surrounding the particular doctrine of particular cults, and that the phenomenon does not point to a way of thinking about the generation of the physical world which is rooted in philosophical questions about what reality is. Instead they dismiss the importance of reasoning in connection with the creation of the physical world as having nothing to do with universals, because (‘as any fule know’) that kind of abstract thought was absent from the human race until the advent of the Greeks.

One of the ways to test this assumption is to assume, for the purposes of argument, that the opposite might be true: that bodies of thought before the Greeks are actually built on abstract and universal propositions derived in the course of philosophical inquiry. And mostly on a basis of logical thought. The results which emerge from this approach are often quite startling: a great deal of thought from before the time of the Greeks starts to make sense. And strong parallels emerge (another one of the themes of The Sacred History of Being) in the Babylonian liturgy of the New Year Festival (the Enuma Elish), between early Greek and Babylonian/Assyrian thought.

Another thing which historians of ancient thought do is to assume the simplest interpretation of the details of ancient religion is likely to be the correct one. So, the gods have a variety of origins – deified individuals, local totemic deities, and the personification of the powers of the natural world. Storm gods and Sun gods are a gift for this kind of interpretation. But again, the assumption can be tested by assuming the opposite: that there is some kind of philosophical basis to ancient gods within particular cultural groupings. The parallels across several cultural groups in the ancient world are often striking. Close examination of the rituals for installing gods (where we have them) are particularly revealing. Are these rituals designed to install gods on the earth, or in some transcendental realm, such as Heaven itself? Very few specialists deal with these materials, because the answer to that question is quite clearly the latter.  Yes, there is a carefully crafted image of the god on earth, in his temple, but it was understood by the Mesopotamians to be a particular image of the god on earth, who has his essential reality in Heaven.

 So what is going on here? The difficulty is compounded by the fact that the craftsmen undertaking the work are granted a temporary divinity, without which they could not create a god. And afterwards, their divine status is removed through another part of the ritual, and they make public denial of their involvement in the creation of the god. Historians (with one or two exceptions) have no idea of what the basis of such a notion of granting temporary divinity might be. And so these rituals are generally passed over in any discussion of Babylonian and Assyrian civilization, in favour of the more conventional view that the gods are personifications of natural powers, and so on.

Nothing is explained by avoiding the uncomfortable nature of the evidence. Addressing the evidence is the only way to understand what is involved. There are several clues, such as the description of Marduk as the totality of the gods, in the Enuma Elish (in the section known as ‘The Fifty Names of Marduk’). Each of the descriptions of the fifty gods is a humanly crafted definition of what they represent, and their importance for the good order of the world. As the totality of the fifty, Marduk is the head of the pantheon of gods. He represents the whole of Mesopotamian divinity.

Is Marduk therefore reality itself? The answer is both yes and no. The Enuma Elish contains descriptions of two creations – the second rational, the first irrational. And Marduk is not present during this first creation. The first creation is described as a hail of composite creatures, with the bodies of animals and the heads of men. It is destroyed because it is irrational. Marduk then creates good order in the world so that man may live, stretching out the surface of the earth and creating the places of refuge (implying that he was responsible for the creation of ordered space and the physical dimensions as we know them).

So, as in other ancient descriptions of creation, there is a stage in the process which is difficult to fathom, and which participated in irrationality, and in chaos.

The Greeks were cautious in their discussions of the arche, at least in public, probably for this very reason. They sometimes passed over this stage altogether in silence, in their divine genealogies. But this evasion tells us that their conception of reality was that reality was a plenum, and that it was not, in itself, good. A well ordered world emerged from that initial state of reality, through the presence and action of the gods. In Mesopotamia, the gods had the power to secure the good order of the world through the ‘fixing of the destinies’. The Greeks had a similar concept, in the three fates.

The Sacred History of Being contains an extract from a discussion of the complexity of our understanding of the One by the Platonist Thomas Taylor, who was a contemporary of Shelley and William Blake. Taylor's text outlines the difficulty which surrounded the discussion of this subject in antiquity. After quoting the text, I wrote that Taylor’s comments show:

…how far Platonic argument about Being and the One can be pushed, and also [shows] how far Plato understood the limitations of argument about Being, and knowledge itself.

This is a thousand miles beyond the level of sophistication of discussion of the nature of reality by Anselm and by Descartes. In practice their discussions of the subject lack clarity, and actually never proceed beyond ideas and notions associated with Being. So the ideas of 'Greatness' and 'Perfection', which figure in Plato's dialogues as attributes of Being, are the core of their arguments, and the limits of their conception of the Divine.

Another reason for including this text is that it shows just how dangerous this doctrine is, and that its dangerousness was fully understood in antiquity. If an ultimate ineffability is wrapped around the idea of Being, and it cannot be fathomed or known, it is easy for the 'idiotical ears' to assume that their religion is a pious fraud based on a doctrine which has at its core no divinity at all. 

The primal chaos at the heart of Being of course makes perfect sense within a model of the world in which the difference between the subjective and objective is ultimately an illusion. We participate in Being, and in creation. Reality is what we make of it. Without such an understanding of this model of reality, the description of Being and reality served and discussed in the ancient temple school could only mean to 'the idiotical ears' that the priesthood held that there is no god.

TY, December 21, 2018.

Transcendental Thought in Ancient Assyria

Transcendental thought in Assyria? The conventional view is that there is no transcendental or rational thought worthy of the name before the rise of Greek philosophy. That is the settled view of western scholars. A new anthology of transcendentalist thought *1, compiled by David LaRocca, published in February 2017, begins only with the writings of the Greeks, and without a trace of embarrassment about having nothing to say about earlier times.   

This view, which is dependent on the notion of intellectual and cultural progress, has been growing ever firmer since the European Enlightenment. The philosopher Karl Jaspers saw the Greeks in terms of a transition from one way of thinking, mostly alien to us, to another, which is the root of the way we understand our reality now. He termed the middle of the 1st millennium B.C.E. as 'the axial age'. His 'axial age' marks the transition from what is essentially irrational thinking, to rational thought. 

So now this period has a name. And because it has a name, it serves a function. That function is, in practice, to close off detailed consideration of what went before it, since it is not worth looking at as part of the history of of rational thought. Before the axial age, there was no rational thought. People lived and died in a miasma of irrational ideas, in a world peopled with gods and demons, and who had strange ideas concerning causality and meaning.

In practice ancient Assyria (and the whole Mesopotamian oikumene) is largely studied in terms of the things we think we know and understand, such as power, propaganda, and ideology. These things we assume to be universals in history, applicable to ancient societies, as much as to our own. We treat power, propaganda and ideology as the only intelligible rational drivers in the culture of Assyria. Assyria therefore is held prisoner within the presumptions of a historical and sociological school of scholarship which is a little more than a century and a half old. Very little effort is made to enter into the intellectual world of ancient Assyria, and  that intellectual world is treated (more or less) as an irrelevance to our understanding. 

The new exhibition, 'I am Ashurbanipal: king of the world, king of Assyria', it appears, does not challenge the scholarly approach to ancient Assyria which was developed during the twentieth century, and which persists today. That is not what the exhibition is for. It celebrates the British Museum and its extensive Assyrian collections, put together since the beginning of the excavations in the near East, halfway through the nineteenth century. It is also a way of cementing the established view of ancient Assyria in the public imagination. It is, to a significant extent, an exercise in propaganda.The British Museum is guarding the status quo. 

To look at Assyria in any other way is essentially an act of cultural subversion. Nevertheless, the established view is untenable. It has been untenable for years. 

Sometimes academic disciplines get stuck in a particular place, or become trapped in a set of approaches which once seemed to make sense, but no longer serve to advance the discipline. Assyriology is unfortunately in that position today. This is despite the work of a small number of scholars who have published on the transcendentalism which can be detected in the religion, art and literature of ancient Assyria. 

Assyriology is a discipline which is very dependent on a number of other subjects (Classics, Anthropology, Sociology, and Philosophy in particular). It does not stand on its own. An Assyriologist does not need to ask a classicist or a philosopher whether the Greeks pioneered philosophy and abstract thought in the middle of the 1st Millennium B.C.E., since he already knows their answer, and defers to it. As a result, a serious challenge to the validity of the concept of an 'axial age' is unlikely to start in Assyriological circles.

For a period of a hundred and fifty years, the Assyrian Empire is the best documented ancient civilization available for study, as the Ashurbanipal exhibition shows. If we are ever going to gain a real insight into the nature and sophistication of ancient thought in the Near East, that insight will emerge from the close study of all aspects of ancient Assyria, and not just those aspects of their culture which can be used to support modern theories about how the human story unfolded. 

Here is a selection of fourteen articles (mostly book chapters and chapter extracts) which explore an alternative Assyria to the the one promoted by the Assyriological profession, and by the current exhibition. A few of these articles draw on Babylonian records, which also illuminate Assyria thought and culture. Those who have studied Mesopotamia in any depth know that Assyria and Babylonia belonged to a Mesopotamian cultural oikumene.There were many significant differences, but also many similarities, right down to their respective gods, and languages (mutually intelligible dialects of Akkadian, as well as common use of Sumerian).  

1. 'Greece and the cultural Impact of the Assyrian Empire' (full article) 

Keywords: Assyria, Greece, Cyrus, Pythagoras, Sennacherib, Babylon

It has been argued for some considerable time that there was a significant Assyrian impact on the culture of Greece, and the development of philosophy.*2 Simo Parpola published a paper in 2004 *3 (buried in a Festschrift), which argued that Assyria influenced Ionia, on the western coast of what is now Turkey, through its interactions with the kingdom of Lydia. This argument was made on the basis of Assyrian administrative documents. At about the same time, with no knowledge of Parpola's paper, I compiled the following document, largely on the basis of Greek accounts, mostly buried and unregarded in the writings of Eusebius. Our papers arrived at broadly the same conclusion, but the Greek references to Assyria are the more startling in their implications for the cultural history of Greece and the beginnings of western philosophy.*4

2. 'The Threshold in Ancient Assyria' (full article) 

Keywords: Assyria, Threshold, Border, Liminal, Carpets, Cones, Garlands, Sacred Tree 

Pauline Albenda studied (in detail) the threshold designs in Assyrian places from a phenomenological point of view, and published her important account in 1978 in the Journal of the Ancient Near East.*5 I reviewed her work in the following article, but from the point of view of the ritual and cultic significance of the threshold and the associated designs in Assyria. The designs are associated with the Assyrian sacred tree, which is itself associated with the idea of an ultimate limit. *6

3. 'The Idea of Being in Israel' (full article)

Keywords: Bible, Philosophy, Religion, Theology, Israel, Assyria 

Close examination of passages in the Old Testament show an intimate understanding of Mesopotamian ideas of divinity, and a great deal of borrowing of these ideas. Divinity was associated with the concept of the limit. The passages also show that these descriptions of divinity have a philosophical aspect. In the book of Malachi for example, God is made to say 'I do not change', which is an explicitly philosophical conception of what the divine is. YHWH also declares his identity with Being: ‘I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God.' This article draws heavily on a discussion published by Michael Dick and Christopher Walker.  *7

4. 'The Making and Renewal of the Gods in Ancient Assyria' (full article)

Keywords: Making Gods, Assyria, Mesopotamia, Divine Images, Sumer, Shamash, Esarhaddon, Ashurbanipal, Plato, Astronomy 

There are some extraordinary documents present in the library of Ashurbanipal, which give us great detail about the ideas lying behind the creation of gods, and their refurbishment. To do their work, the craftsmen are allotted a temporary divinity themselves, which was removed once the work is done. How and why was this conceived to be possible? Temporary divinity was possible only if ritual action was conceived to establish connection with transcendent divinity itself *8. . 

5. 'Installing the Gods in Heaven: the Babylonian Mis Pi Ritual' 
(extract from article) 

Keywords: Babylon, Divinity, Installation,  Mis Pi, Palm, Quay, Ritual, Rivers, Statues, 
Tamarisk 

And we have the ritual. The ritual for the installation of the Gods in Heaven survives in more than one copy. One of the best is Babylonian, but it reflects Assyrian thought and practice also. The idea of men being able to create gods runs counter to what we think we understand about ancient cult. But it is quite clear that they had reasons for thinking that they had the power to create gods.*9 

6. 'Who Will Appear Before the City? (Divination in Sargonid Assyria)' 

Keywords: Assyria, Divination, SunGod, Haruspicy 

The sages of the kings of Assyria conceived that it was possible to divine the mind of the gods, and therefore to know about the future. They thought this because they conceived of reality (that is, a reality which transcends physical reality) as something which already contained all things which were possible, though not already revealed to the mind of man. The information could be accessed if a commonality was established between the inquirer and the god (in this case Shamash, the Sun god). That commonality could be established by completing the life of a sacrificial animal, and examining its entrails, which were understood to reflect divine knowledge at the point of the completion of its life. This is a compilation of twenty such enquiries about the future, presented here without commentary. The texts are taken from The State Archives of Assyria, vol. 4..*10

7. 'Standing in the Place of Ea: The Adapa Discipline and Kingship in the Neo-Assyrian Empire' (full article)

Keywords: Ashurbanipal, Assyria, Adapa, Mesopotamia, Mythology, Enki, Abzu, Kingship, Neo-Assyrian Empire, Sargonids

An overview of the role of the king in the Assyrian Court and State, and an analysis of the Adapa myth in Ashurbanipal's education. The King is responsible for upholding not just the state, but the universe itself.*11

8. 'Shar Kishati' and The Cult of Eternity' (full article) 

 Keywords: Mesopotamia, Philosophy, Abstraction, Cult  

What is the intellectual core idea which energised the Assyrian state? It is the idea of eternity, of reality itself, which stands behind physical reality. The king's role is to connect both worlds, through his excellence in this world. It is essentially the same concept which allowed the divine (coterminous with reality itself) to be questioned about the future in 'Who Will Appear Before the City?' *12

9. 'Being, Kabbalah, and the Assyrian Sacred Tree' (extract from article) 

Keywords: Assyria, Kabbalah, Perfection, Sacred Tree, Abstraction, Mesopotamia 

The Jewish Kabbalah has been understood by historians to be a body of ideas and practices which were developed from the early middle Ages onwards, and which perhaps owe something to the influence of Gnosticism. There is the concept of an absolute without limit in Kabbalism (the 'En Sof'), which is not a problem if Kabbalism was developed in the middle Ages. However, there is a striking resemblance to the Assyrian Sacred Tree, if the Mesopotamian God numbers are inserted into the structure. If this identification is accurate, then the 'En Sof' may have been a living concept as far back as the middle of the 2nd Millennium B.C.E. *13

10. 'The Fifty Names of Marduk' (extract from article)  

Keywords: An, Babylon, Enuma Elish, Marduk, Mesopotamia, New Year,Festival

The idea of an axial age in the middle of the 1st millennium B.C.E. divides historical, cultural and archaeological time into two epochs: the first is (for us) an epoch which is deeply irrational in nature. Rationality only emerges after the rise of philosophy among the Greeks. This is a deeply problematic notion, because the Assyrians and Babylonians defined themselves as rational beings. The idea is quite clearly expressed in the section of the Babylonian New Year festival, where the supreme god (Marduk in Babylon) is described as the totality of the characteristics of the other gods, who provide for good order in the world. These gods came into existence at Marduk's call, and replaced the disorder of the first and irrational creation.*14 

11. 'The Concept of the Plenum in Babylon' (full article) 

Keywords: Babylon, Ancient History, Plenum, Creation

The concept of a transcendent and unlimited reality containing all possibility, standing behind the creation, and all generation and manifestation in the physical world, was an absolutely key idea to both the Assyrians and the Babylonians. The following article discusses the two creations which form part of the New Year Festival liturgy, and how the double nature of the creation points to to the presence of such a conception (an undifferentiated 'plenum' containing all possible things as potencies).*15
   

12 'Being and Representation in Greece and Assyria' (full article)  

Keywords: Forms, Idolatry, Philosophy

Several of the foregoing articles are chapters in the book The Sacred History of Being (2015), which discusses a shared (or borrowed) substratum of ideas, both in Greece, and in Assyria. This article reviews some of the major parallels, and the implications of such a shared cultural substrate.*16 


13.'Oannes and the Instruction of Mankind' (full article) 

Keywords: Berossus, Telos, Origins, Civilization, Apkallu

The nature of the Mesopotamian understanding of reality is reinforced by the story of the first sage, who instructed mankind in knowledge of cultivation, and knowledge of seeds and plants. We have the account from the Babylonian writer Berossus, who describes an amphibious creature (capable of living in two worlds) with the head of a fish, which emerged from the sea and imparted his knowledge in the daytime, before returning to the deep at night. The symbolism of this is clear: water is one of a number of images which can symbolise the plenum, in that it is formless, without colour, and which exists in abundance. Living in the sea, Oannes has access to the knowledge which the plenum holds. *17

14. 'Ocean and the Limit of Existence' (full article) 

Keywords: Generation, Abundance, Myth, Creation

The symbolism of water and ocean is a feature of poetry and literature around the Mediterranean and the Near East. It is widely associated with ideas of creation, generation, and abundance.*18

Notes:

*1 The Bloomsbury Anthology of Transcendental Thought, edited by David LaRocca, Bloomsbury, 2017.
*2 Parpola, S., 1993c “The Assyrian Tree of Life: Tracing the Origins of Jewish Monotheism and Greek Philosophy”: Journal of Near Eastern Studies 52, 161-208. See also: Parpola, S., 2000a “Monotheism in Ancient Assyria,” in Barbara Nevling Porter, ed., One God or Many? Concepts of Divinity in the Ancient World (Transactions of the Casco Bay Assyriological Institute 1, Casco Bay), 165-209. 
*3 Parpola, S., 2003b “Assyria’s Expansion in the 8th and 7th Centuries BCE and Its Long-Term Repercussions in the West,” in W. G. Dever and S. Gitin, eds., Symbiosis, Symbolism and the Power of the Past: Canaan, Ancient Israel and their Neighbors from the Late Bronze Age through Roman Palestine. Proceedings of the Centennial Symposium, W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research and the American Schools of Oriental Research, Jerusalem, May 29-May 31, 2000 (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns), 99-111.
*4 Yaeger, T., 'Greece and the Cultural Impact of the Assyrian Empire', in The Origins of Transcendentalist Thought in Ancient Religion, Anshar Press, 2019.  
*5 Albenda, P., ‘Assyrian Carpets in Stone’, in JANES [the Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society of Columbia University], vol 10, 1978
*6 Yaeger, T. 'The Threshold in Ancient Assyria' in The Origins of Transcendentalist Thought in Ancient Religion, Anshar Press, 2019.
*7 Yaeger, T., 'The Idea of Being in Israel' in The Sacred History of Being, Anshar Press, 2015. The rituals for the installation of gods are discussed in two books: 
Dick, M, Born in Heaven, Made on Earth: The Making of the Cult Image in the Ancient Near East,  Eisenbrauns, (Winona Lake, Indiana), 1999, and 
Walker, C, and Dick, M., The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Mesopotamian Mis Pi Ritual, State Archives of Assyria Literary Texts vol. 1, The Neo Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2001. 
*8 Yaeger, T., 'The Making and Renewal of the Gods in Ancient Assyria' in The Sacred History of Being, Anshar Press, 2015
*9 Yaeger, T.,'The Babylonian Mis Pi Ritual' in The Sacred History of Being, Anshar Press, 2015
* 10 Starr, Ivan, Queries to the Sungod: Divination and Politics in Sargonid Assyria, SAA (State Archives of Assyria) vol 4, Helsinki University Press, 1990. Ritual life reveals a great deal about the minds of the royal court, and many of the rituals survive and are collected together in Parpola's Assyrian Royal Rituals and Cultic Texts, SAA vol 20, The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2017
*11 Yaeger, T., 'Standing in the Place of Ea: The Adapa Discipline and Kingship in the Neo-Assyrian Empire', in Understanding Ancient Thought, Anshar Press, 2017,
*12 Yaeger, T., ''Shar Kishati' and The Cult of Eternity', in Understanding Ancient Thought, Anshar Press, 2017,
*13 Yaeger, T., 'Being, Kabbalah, and the Assyrian Sacred Tree', in The Sacred History of Being, Anshar Press, 2015
*14 Yaeger, T.,  'The Fifty Names of Marduk', in The Sacred History of Being, Anshar Press, 2015
*15 Yaeger, T., 'The Concept of the Plenum in Babylon' in Understanding Ancient Thought, Anshar Press, 2017, 
*16 Yaeger, T., 'Being and Representation in Greece and Assyria', in The Sacred History of Being, Anshar Press, 2015
*17 Yaeger, T., 'Oannes and the Instruction of Mankind', in The Sacred History of Being, Anshar Press, 2015
*18 Yaeger, T.,'Ocean and the Limit of Existence', in The Sacred History of Being, Anshar Press, 2015

Thomas Yaeger, November 11, 2018