Thomas Yaeger's Blog: Belief

I guess that you are asking if there is a significant history of the idea of man as the image of God before Christianity, and the doctrine of the incarnation? Yes there is, and it is a very old idea. In Egypt, the Pharaoh was understood to be the Divine on earth – he could be understood to reflect many aspects of divinity – for example, when represented as the destroyer of Egypt’s enemies, he was depicted in the form of the God Montu, wielding a club. But he could be any of the other gods in the divine pantheon, according to circumstance.

In Mesopotamia they had the same essential notion, that the king represented the perfect man, and was ‘the very image of the God’ (I quoted from some Assyrian letters which illustrate that this was the contemporary understanding – see 'Standing in the Place of Ea'). There are a number of parodies of this idea which appear in the Old Testament, as a consequence of the Hebrew exposure to Mesopotamian ideas while in exile in Babylon. I wrote about this in ‘The Idea of Being in Israel’.

This isn’t a way of thinking which was necessarily drawn from the east, though there are clear parallels. The Romans developed an imperial cult around their emperors from the end of the Republic onwards. Effectively the emperors were worshipped either as semi-divine, or as actually divine (sometimes hard to tell the difference). They could be elevated to divine status after death, even if no-one was sure of their actual status while alive.

[Quotation from 'Knowledge and Belief in Israel']

As discussed elsewhere in The Sacred History of Being, in Greece and Mesopotamia divine images functioned as a part of a complex system, a chain of images of Being, to enable intellectual access to the most difficult of all images which might be apprehended by man or god: the one true thing, which is the nature of reality itself, and the source of all knowledge.

Over time, the polytheistic show was entirely removed in Israel. The monotheism which emerged in Israel was necessarily no longer about access to knowledge of the divine and its apprehension - a mental discipline - but about belief.

Replying to @Rotorvator

Excellent. Do you unpack the last sentence somewhere? The idea that belief was merely mental assent is unfortunately common.

Replying to Johannes Richter @jgmrichter

I’ve talked about this a lot, and in various places. I distinguish between belief (doxa, or opinion) and faith (pistis). Belief serves societal and political functions. Faith is not so much about what is believed, but is about the necessity that the due observances are conducted. In early Judaism for example, the scope for observance was gradually narrowed, to the point where only the priests in the temple in Jerusalem could perform ritual. Everybody else had to make do with a simple altar of earth. This was about political and social power. I talk about this in ‘The Idea of Being in Israel’, and there is a separate article on the blog called ‘Distinguishing Belief and Faith’.

If religion is about the acquisition of knowledge of divine things, but is subsequently transformed into a social and political construction which enforces what you are to believe, then that religion has ceased to serve its proper function. It has fallen away from both the importance of regular observance, and the very idea that such observance opens a connection with the divine, and reinforces the connection between man and the Divine.

Replying to @Rotorvator

PS where do you discuss it? [the ontological argument]

Replying to Johannes Richter @jgmrichter

…. I spent fifty pages discussing the progress of the ontological argument [in The Sacred History of Being]. I think it is a dead thing now. Though in the way of things, it may take a hundred years for this critical demolition to be taken on board.

Replying to @Rotorvator

That's the weakness of arguments; they shuffle bits of information around as if it changes something. I was just curious whether you know the book (by David Bentley Hart) since it comprehensively tries to stake down the conceptual space the (classical) idea of God occupies.

Replying to Johannes Richter @jgmrichter

I’m particularly interested in the contrast between conceptions of the Divine in antiquity, and conceptions from the middle ages onwards. They are quite different, and a lot of ideas have simply disappeared from later argument. I know what you mean when you refer to the classical idea of God, but I would refer to that ‘classical’ idea as ‘the standard ontological argument’. It is less than a thousand years old. Since I study classical philosophers from fifteen hundred years earlier than that, to refer to such an idea of God as ‘classical’ would just court confusion and misunderstanding.

Of course we don’t have clear formal argument about the Divine from the Classical or the Mesopotamian worlds. But close study of what they wrote does make it possible to figure out what they understood by the Divine. The ancient conception is far more subtle and sophisticated than the standard ontological argument. The modern world prefers a simpler idea of God.

The whole idea of constructing a form of argument which provides a rational basis for religious belief (which is how Alvin Plantinga views its function), is self-contradictory, and an absurdity.

Replying to @Rotorvator

Thanks. DBH gives an overview of scholastic theology and includes perspectives from quite a few other traditions. Tough reading but we'll worth the time.

Replying to Johannes Richter @jgmrichter

Thanks for the pointer to DBH's book.

***

Sunday, 10 June 2018

Man and the Divine

This is my second collection of essays on philosophy and ancient history. Like my first collection, Understanding Ancient Thought, it expands further on the arguments of The Sacred History of Being, which appeared in November 2015. Most of the 21 chapters have appeared in draft form on my web site, and one first appeared on the web site of the Bibliographica Philosophica Hermetica, run by the Ritman Library in Amsterdam (‘The Esoteric Conception of Divinity in the Ancient World’). Man and the Divine replaces The Frankish Tower, which was slated to be my next book Man and the Divine was published on August 12, 2018.

Many of the essays deal with the question of esoteric knowledge in antiquity, often from slightly different angles. ‘The Death of Socrates’ is one of those, a solicited response to one of a series of dramatized readings of famous speeches from history, staged by the Almeida Theatre in London in 2017. This reading was performed by Sir Derek Jacobi. ‘Distinguishing Belief and Faith’ began as a meditation on some text by Alan Watts, but which expanded into a chapter about who believed what, and why, in ancient Mesopotamia. ‘Polytheism, Monotheism, and the Cult of the Aten’, explores Akhenaten’s religious innovations in the Egypt of the 14^th century B.C.E. These are still difficult to understand, but we are getting closer.

Modern scholarship generally steers away from the idea that there may be an esoteric level to the nature of reality, but approaches questions surrounding esotericism in terms of a division between those who argue that there is such an esoteric level of reality, and those who maintain that just because they can think of such a thing and give it names and descriptions, does not mean that there is genuine esoteric knowledge. The first group are sometimes described as ‘Essentialists’, and the second, as ‘Nominalists’. I dealt with this way of thinking in my book J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being. Frazer simply denied the idea that it was possible to say anything meaningful at all about a transcendent reality (Being), and consequently argued that Plato’s work was built on a fundamental error, through the conversion of an epistemology into an ontology.

Some of the essays discuss something of the background to the writing of The Sacred History of Being. It was important to produce a concise and focussed argument, and many interesting discussions had to be put to one side in order to achieve that. The Sacred History of Being represents the core argument. What I have written elsewhere is best understood in terms of a sequence of extended footnotes to that book.

The final essay, ’Stone Circles, Phenomenology, and the Neolithic Mind’, is necessarily more speculative than the others, and deals with the British Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, when the building of megalithic structures was at its height. It makes comparisons with Greek and Mesopotamian notions of the importance of the sky in ancient religious thought.

Approximately 57,000 words. Available in ePub format. ISBN 9780463665473.

Each of the 21 chapters is summarised below:

The Enlightenment of David Hume. Though Hume's empirical approach was not wholly successful, some of his intuitions expanded our collective understanding of how we perceive reality – for example, his insight that we have no actual knowledge of the process of causation at all, and only a customary expectation of causal process, was a powerful one. We can describe causal processes, we can differentiate the nature of different causal processes, and we can formulate rules in connection with them, but we cannot know how causality itself operates, or even be sure that a perceived causal relation, often observed before, will obey the implicit rule the next time it is under scrutiny by us. However, it is no longer clear that Hume was exploring his mental processes and understanding entirely within the framework of western secular thought. This chapter is based on intriguing research by Alison Gopnik.

The Death of Socrates. It is a puzzle that, in the midst of a thoroughly polytheistic culture in Athens, with its plethora of gods, its many cults and priesthoods in the service of those gods, that both Socrates and Plato could speak of ‘god’ in the singular. Our difficulty here is the result of a modern understanding of the significance of polytheism, which sees the phenomenon as the inevitable precursor to monotheistic belief, which excludes other gods from consideration, or credibility. For modern scholars, polytheistic belief in ancient Greece was something which developed, higgeldy-piggeldy, out of a plethora of local and tribal deities, much embellished with myths about their lives and actions, which served important social functions, but which had no universal meaning, and were not rooted in a model of reality which embraced consideration of what the nature of reality itself might be.

The Irrationality of Atheism, Atheists do not deny the existence of the world, its laws and properties: they just argue that the concept of God is not required to accept the world, and to have an understanding of it. But this leaves them at a loss to explain how the world came to be, and why it should have come into existence.

Richard Dawkins and Deism. Modern atheism is actually dependent for its nature on the ontological argument, and the terms in which it is framed. Meaning that eight hundred years of argument about the nature and existence of God underpins the point of view of those who regard themselves as atheists. Dawkins makes a distinction in ‘The God Delusion’ between theism and deism. Theism is a pattern of belief which enshrines the idea that the Divine is responsive to man, and his rituals of worship and prayer. It is a pattern of belief dependent on the idea that God can act in the world. By contrast, deism contemplates the idea that a creator God has existence, and necessarily created the world, but that he is not active in the physical world beyond that. This essay argues that Dawkins is in fact a modern deist rather than an atheist.

Contra Plantinga. Alvin Plantinga was kind enough to accept a copy of The Sacred History of Being. I sent two supplementary emails which outlined the implications of its criticism of the traditional ontological argument, whose function is to support a rational basis for belief, which are reproduced here.

Distinguishing Belief and Faith. Modern scholarship has a track record of making easy assumptions about the continuity of religious ideas and patterns of practice, and the accompanying social compacts. At the time the Assyrian palaces, temples and cities were being dug from the sand and soil in northern Mesopotamia, it was assumed that the relationship between the royal and temple establishments could be understood in terms of a modern division between church and state. This notion turned out to hold very little water on close analysis. It is also the case that belief is not a conspicuous feature of ancient religions.

Logic, Sophistry, and the Esoteric in Ancient Education. Both Plato and Aristotle's writings contain arguments which either don't make clear logical sense within themselves, or in the context of the rest of the work. Sometimes the clues to the meaning of arguments are present elsewhere in the canons of both Plato and Aristotle, and some of them clearly involve an esoteric level of understanding. The whole body of their outputs need to be taken on board in order to grasp the meaning of individual works. This is usually not done with the works of Aristotle: his Historia Animalium is read by biologists and specialists in animal taxonomies, but usually they read little else of his work.

Beyond Mathematics and Geometry. The process of separating ourselves from an interpretation of the world in terms of simple apprehension is driven initially by the practical necessities of our existence. But this process does not need to stop there. Intelligence consists in being able to adjust the categories of our understanding so that we do not mistake one thing for another. It is a mental development which might have no end. This is essentially how Kant understood human intellectual development, which he framed (in his Prolegomena) in terms of a general theory of a priori concepts, not based on empirical sense data, or even a mathematical or geometric understanding of anything in the world.

Evading the Infinite: A Review of A.W. Moore’s ‘History of the Infinite’. This chapter is a critical response to Adrian W. Moore's radio series 'The History of the Infinite', broadcast in the autumn of 2016, and his book 'The Infinite', published in the early 90s. His treatment of the subject hardly references Plato at all. Adding Plato to the discussion changes the way in which the argument should be framed. The actual infinite is the principal source of ancient ideas concerning the divine, not Aristotle's potential infinite, so Moore's argument concerning our knowledge of God is forced to take refuge in the quasi-mystical Calvinistic idea of a 'sensus divinitatis'. His argument also makes it impossible to understand Kant's treatment of religion.

The Esoteric Conception of Divinity in the Ancient World. 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 reframe my understanding of human intellectual history in the process.

Unwritten Doctrine, Ancient Silence. It is often assumed by students of antiquity that there is no special importance to be attached to remarks that certain items of information are to be kept secret and not imparted to the unworthy, and to the ordinary mortal. This assumption is based on the presumption that there was, and is not, anything about which it is impossible to speak of, before those not used to dealing with information about religion and the divine. This is a curiosity of modern times, in that the ignorance of theology among the moderns makes it impossible for them to credit the importance of theology in antiquity - both to those who understood its subtleties and and those who didn’t.

Ancient Conjectures, and Fictive Intellectual History. Plato argues that we should always look to the ‘one true thing’. J.G. Frazer also argued that questions concerning Being (‘the one true thing’) were entirely barren, since nothing could be predicated of Being. This of course is a spectacular instance of intellectual blindness, by which the richness of the intellectual matrix of ancient Greek thought was spirited into nothingness. In antiquity, nods were made toward the notion that the discipline of philosophy might not have been first developed in Greece, including (tellingly) at the beginning of Diogenes Laertius' Lives of the Philosophers. Plato after all argued against the idea that philosophy was invented by the Greeks in the Protagoras, saying that it was of a great age – perhaps contemporary with the arrival of peoples from Egypt, who settled in the Peloponnese, and also in Crete.

What is Sacred, and what is Profane? Each of the divine names of Marduk, the head of the Mesopotamian pantheon, has a description, and each of the lesser gods can be understood as abstractions of aspects of the rational creation. They represent excellences in the world. Marduk represents the sum total of these. This is the clue to understanding much of the ancient understanding of what the divine is. Each described excellence resembles reality itself in terms of its properties. The excellence may serve social functions, as does a skill or specialism, but it should be performed for its own sake. The performance of these excellences recalls the perfection and completeness of the plenum, and reinforces the presence of the divine in the world.

Intentionality, Conjecture, and What is Holy. Intentionality explains why the ancients created a multiplicity of gods. If the divine itself cannot by definition be completely defined and understood, at least certain properties and attributes can be understood. These can therefore be defined and named as ways of accessing the divine. This does not at all conflict with the idea that the reality of the divine is in question. Instead this view argues that there is in fact a subjective component in the reality of the divine, at least insofar as it is possible for us to have commerce with it.

Excellence and the Knowledge of Divine Things. Plutarch opens his life of Alexander with a cheerful complaint about the sheer extent of the materials available to him to write on Alexander. So the details which are in his essay are there because he regarded them as important in showing Alexander’s character, his disposition, and the content of his mind. On the basis of his sources he says that it is thought that Alexander was taught by Aristotle not only his doctrines of Morals and Politics, but also those more abstruse mysteries which are only communicated orally and are kept concealed from the vulgar: for after he had invaded Asia, hearing that Aristotle had published some treatises on these subjects, he wrote him a letter in which he defended the practice of keeping these speculations secret.

Egypt in the Shadows. Since the European enlightenment, the influence of Egypt on the development of abstract and philosophical thought has been deprecated. Yet, as Martin Bernal showed in the third volume of Black Athena, many Greek words have plausible etymologies from Egyptian. It is also the case that several of the concepts used by Aristotle in his philosophical writing were known to Egyptians nine hundred years before his time, such as the idea of completion (it is connected with the idea of birth in Akhenaten’s Hymn to the Aten, which dates to the fourteenth century BCE). There is also abundant evidence for the existence of philosophical thought among the Hebrews in the books of the Old Testament. Yahweh is described as ‘the first and last, and beside me there is no God’. His name (minus the vowels) is a variant of the verb ‘to be’, which suggests that his isolation is due to the fact that he was understood to be Being itself.

Polytheism, Monotheism, and the Cult of the Aten. The Aten is first mentioned (to our knowledge) in the Story of Sinuhe, which dates at least as far back as the twelfth dynasty, where the dead king is described as uniting with with the sun-disk in the heavens. Akhenaten’s iconography never shows the god in anthropomorphic form – instead the Aten is always shown as the sun disk with rays of light extending from it, with hands at the end of each ray. The Sun god was considered to be neither male nor female, but both simultaneously, an idea which was reflected in the depiction of Akhenaten in sculpture and reliefs. His full title however was ‘The Ra-Horus who rejoices in the horizon, in his/her Name of the Light which is seen in the sun disk’. We find this full rendering of the Aten’s name on the stelae placed around Akhetaten, which was Akhenaten’s newly founded capital. Sometimes the full name was shortened to Ra-Horus-Aten, or just ‘Aten’. Since two of the names of Akhenaten’s god refer to the sun (Ra being an older name for the sun god), it seems that some kind of intellectual synthesis of older ideas had taken place.

Cultural Continuity in the Ancient World, and Bernal’s Black Athena. Martin Bernal’s intention was to take ancient Greece out of its exalted orbit above all other civilizations, and root it in what he assumed to have been a cultural continuum around the Mediterranean sea from at least the mid-2nd millennium B.C.E up until the classical period of Greece in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C.E. Bernal pointed to the evidence within the texts of the 1st millennium which suggested cultural continuities with ancient Egypt – all dismissed by the classicists in favour of evidence in texts which could be interpreted as suggesting the opposite. Bernal’s attempts to establish cultural continuity with the civilizations around the Mediterranean were hampered by the fact that myths are not simply encodings of historical and political change, and that the exchange of words between linguistic groups is, by itself, weak evidence for cultural continuity. He was correct to guess at the existence of the cultural continuity, I think, but ill-equipped to establish such a thing. To do this requires moving things around – particularly re-anchoring the relationship of Greek philosophy to patterns of religious belief and cult practice; and the establishing of the relationship between Greek patterns of religious belief and cult practice to parallel ideas and behaviour in the Near East and in Egypt.

The Tangled Thread: Universals in History. The liturgies and the description of ancient rituals have been published and translated, and their signifcance and meaning have been discussed by scholars. But they make difficult reading for the reason that they involve a different set of preconceptions from those understood by Mesopotamian scholars. It is hard to break through to an understanding of what was understood to be going on. The Mesopotamians employed ideas which they considered to be universally valid, such as all wisdom being present in the Abzu, and that the acquisition of knowledge depended on some kind of ritual engagement with Ea and the Abzu. And that the good order of the world depended on man's relation to the world of the divine. Since the European Enlightenment however, we have adopted another set of universal notions, which do not depend at all on the reality of the divine and the gods. In fact it pushes such notions into the shadowlands of unreason. So there is little inclination among scholars who specialise in Mesopotamia to spend time trying to makes sense of things which they regard as intrinsically unreasonable.

The Age of the Lord Buddha. Scholars acquiesce in the convention that an articulate and technical understanding of the idea of Being was first broached by the Greeks in the middle of the 1st Millennium BCE. It follows therefore that all references to the divine in the ancient near east before that date are not articulate and technical references, but notional and inchoate. The consequence must be that we can learn nothing useful about ancient intellectual processes and concerns from these notions, since they are beliefs entirely unsupported by rational argument. This would come as a surprise to many ancient cultures, if they were still around. The date of the Buddha's floruit for western scholars is much closer to our own time than it is for scholars in the east. We place him around the 5th century BCE, since there is clearly an interest in universals in the texts. The Puranas provide a chronology of the Magadha rulers from the supposed time of the Mahabharata war, and Buddha is supposed to have become enlightened during the reign of Bimbisara, the 5th Shishunaga ruler, who, according to this chronology, ruled between 1852-1814 BCE. His birth date may have been 1887 BCE. Chinese scholarship has long maintained that Buddhism came to China from India around 1200-1100BCE.

Stone Circles, Phenomenology, and the Neolithic Mind. The evidence from the megaliths makes the importance of the sky very clear: in Britain and around the megalithic world, the sky was seen as a representation of divinity, of Being. As an image of the divine, it was an image of totality itself. The megalithic observatory, or temple, according to this hypothesis, was a device to embody aspects of divinity, of Being, actually in its structure, in the same way in which the gods in Mesopotamia might be invited to occupy their representations on earth.

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Page updated July 13 &16, and December 16, 2018.

Thursday, 21 September 2017

Writing to Alvin Plantinga

[This is one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. There it appears as 'Contra Plantinga'. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

I wrote to Alvin Plantinga on Sunday, 2nd of July 2017, concerning the ontological argument, which he has done so much to promote.

I imagine ... that you would be interested to see alternative arguments for the reality of the divine, were these to exist.

And they do exist. I spent many years assembling the arguments for the understanding of the divine in the ancient world. These are quite different arguments from those offered from St. Anselm onwards.

You are under no obligation at all to read my book, but it may be worth a look, if only to dismiss the arguments as threadbare, or even completely baseless. And in short order.

If you are interested in reading the book, I will send it to you either as an ebook or a pdf, according to your choice. You are under no obligation at all to respond, if you accept the book.

I didn't get a response from that, so I wrote again on 18th of July, 2017

The ontological argument has obviously been important and highly influential over the past thousand years. But I argue that, in any of its instances, it is not sound, and does not resemble argument about the divine in the ancient world. I've written about this issue in detail in The Sacred History of Being, which was published in 2015.

I think we have come to the end of a road with the ontological argument, which has profoundly influenced the history of philosophy, theology, and the development of anthropology. Ancient discussion of the divine was based on logical argument about the nature of a transcendent reality, which gave rise to space and time, rather than the more constrained question of whether or not God exists in a pre-existing and unexplained frame. Mesopotamia provides the intellectual background for the development of public philosophy in Greece. I will send you my book by email if you are interested in reading an alternative view.

Professor Plantinga was kind enough to accept the offer of a copy of my book, and a PDF was sent by email the next day.

I followed up on the exchange on the 19th of September:

Some useful things can be taken away from the arguments in The Sacred History of Being. First of all, if the Divine and Reality are not artificially separated from each other (they are usually coterminous in eastern thought), then atheism is unreasonable and almost unthinkable. This separation is a characteristic of western philosophy, after the closure of the schools. Plato does not argue like this. Neither do the Neoplatonists.

The importance of belief is less important when the Divine and Reality itself are not understood to be separate. In ancient religion (if we insist on referring to the phenomenon with that term, rather than using Cicero's more appropriate phrase 'cultus deorum'), belief was mostly beside the point, being subordinate to observance, if you understood the basis of what was being discussed. Belief is a phenomenon which assumes importance when a population does not know the traditional arguments concerning what is Divine, and the speculative and conjectural conclusions which might be drawn from those arguments.

This was the case by the time Anselm put together his version of the ontological argument. Faith is slightly different, since it isn't the same as blind belief, but signifies an understanding of why certain arguments are made, and an acceptance of the scope of what they suggest. The possibility of conjecture and discussion remains.

How does Plato argue about the nature of the Divine? He understood the Divine to be beyond physical space, and the dimension of time. Without shape and colour, or any other characteristic which could be easily understood by the human mind. However, and paradoxically, the Divine was capable of participation in the world, because some aspects of the Divine have exemplars on earth. Such as totality, greatness, perfection, completeness, etc. The nature of the Divine emerges from a number of philosophical questions, such as: if the Divine is one, how is the many possible? If the Divine is one and beyond change, but God needs to make a copy of it in which movement is possible, has the integrity of the nature of the ur-reality been fatally compromised? If the one thing which we should all look to is, by definition, one and unchanging (see the self-description of God in the 3rd book of Malachi, where God says: 'I do not change'), how is participation in the world of movement and change possible?

And so on. Frazer wrote these arguments off as 'popular questions of the day', with no more significance than that. A rational basis for belief, is I think, a contradiction in terms. If it is rational, then belief is unecessary. A key conclusion of The Sacred History of Being, is that the basis of ancient religion was the acquisition of knowledge of the Divine, and as a corollary, the acquisition of knowledge itself, since it was understood to be already present in the Divine (an idea most clearly expressed in Mesopotamian literature and liturgy).

We lost almost all of that in the west, except in rhetorical and literary terms. But the evidence from antiquity does not support either the necessity of belief in religion, or the necessity of God possessing the property of existence within an unexplained and inexplicable pre-existence of space and time, The evidence from antiquity *does* support the reality of God, and the importance of the reality of the Divine in every aspect of human existence.

Of course if the Greeks did invent philosophical argument and sound logic, and no-one else around the Mediterranean and the ancient Near East was able to think about the Divine in such terms as far back as the middle of 2nd Millennium B.C.E., when they were building their accounts of the nature of reality, then this argument would be impossible to support. I would suggest instead, that the argument be reversed, as it can be, however much the classicists and the historians of philosophy would object to the loss of Greek intellectual primacy which would result.

Best regards,

Thomas Yaeger

Monday, 17 October 2016

'Shar Kishati' and The Cult of Eternity

This is part of a chapter from the draft of The Sacred History of Being which was under way in 2004. The chapter did not make it through to the final version which was published in November 2015, though I did write about the same things in the published version, in slightly different terms. I had moved on considerably in those eleven years.

Trying to separate out key aspects of Greek and Mesopotamian models of Reality, as I did here, was something of a methodological conceit, and the discussion of the hypothetical core of the ancient understanding of Reality as something which might be separated from everything else, doesn't mean that such a hypothetical core existed apart from the rest of the religious and theological implex of ideas which constituted Greek and Mesopotamian religion. The point of the exercise was to explore what was actually essential to that implex of ideas, and to get a better understanding of why it was important to the functioning of the ritual universe in both Greece and Mesopotamia.

So this text should be understood as a snapshot of how I was approaching the ancient data, and the different points of view I was exploring, as part of the study in 2004.

Essentially what I called in this text the 'Cult of Eternity' revolves around the 'Doctrine of Totalities', which is mentioned in connection with Pythagoras, is described by Plato, mentioned by the Neoplatonists, and is also referenced in a Nag Hammadi text. We know the doctrine was known in Babylon, and it is possible that Pythagoras learned of it while he was there. It is in fact a logical modality, though currently it is not recognised as such. It can be argued that this logical modality underpins the entire intellectual edifice of Mesopotamian thought, and much of the philosophical thought in ancient Greece, from Pythagoras onwards.

I have taken the liberty of re-Englishing some of the text, but the argument is as it was.

Thomas Yaeger, October 17, 2016

Defining the Cult

Why characterise the beliefs of some elite groups in Greece and
Mesopotamia as cultic, rather than considering them simply as elite groups
functioning within the social and institutional structures of these cultures?

The reason for this is quite simple: the belief system of these elite groups is at variance
with aspects of the more broadly based belief system of the culture in which the cult is
embedded. The cult in question enshrines a pattern of belief which is shared by a small
and influential group; it has great meaning for that group, and it informs
almost every aspect of their lives. It has all the characteristics of
individuated cults – liturgy, ritual, festival, sacred objects and images, etc. It
also has a secret at its core, which is often a feature of individuated cult*1.

It is not strictly a secret society however – or at least we have no reason to
believe that it functioned entirely in secret. This does not mean that it functioned in
public – rather that it functioned as an elite club, occasionally admitting new members,
according to merit. Thus, it would be possible for individuals outside the group to
know something of its existence, and perhaps to know individuals who belonged to the
group, as well as perhaps knowing the time and place of ritual, etc. But these individuals
would not know any significant detail of the cult, either in terms of practice or belief.*2
It is a secret society however in terms of it having secret aims and beliefs, and a
restricted membership.

Its function was religious. The detail of what was involved and the belief
system which underpinned this activity is the focus of this study.
In essence what we have uncovered is a way of thinking of some
importance in history. It underpins the historical development of many
ancient religions, even if it is not itself older than these religions, or is not
native to the region in which the religions grew up.

It needs a name, if we are not always to be returning to the details of its nature
and influence in order to indicate its involvement. I have decided to call this
phenomenon the ‘Cult of Eternity’, since it is clear that emulation of the nature
of eternity is the principal goal of this school of thought: the source of the cult is
the understanding of the importance of invariance above all else, and the members
of the cult are focussed on eternity. Eternity is a concept which all important
religions - of which we have knowledge - have.

We are not talking here about an organisation with physical and intellectual
continuity across both time and the geography of the ancient world when
we talk about the ‘Cult of Eternity’: what we are talking about is a way of
thinking which might have been transmitted by contact between elite groups
over large geographical distances, but which, alternatively, might as easily
come to exist at a certain place and time whether or not such actual contact
has occurred. If it can arise as a notion spontaneously in the mind of one
man, then it has arrived within the culture in question.*3

If it subsequently informs the theological and religious structures of that culture,
then that form of cultic belief is of importance to the understanding of that culture,
and its dynamics.

It must be understood as a cult in the sense that it involves a shared set of beliefs,
understandings, and practices belonging to a small group within ancient cultures.*4
The true nature of these cultic beliefs were not understood – and perhaps not even
suspected outside of members of the royal court, and some parts of the priesthood.

Notwithstanding the fact that we can often trace the ideas of the cult in the
art and literature and language of a culture, where elements associated with
the cult have shaped the outward form of the institutional religion, the
nature of the core ideas of the cult, then as now, make it very unlikely that
any but a small group of people with control of the political and religious
hegemony could hold these beliefs.

The Pattern of Belief

What is the essential nature of this cultic belief? It can be stated quite
simply, though its difficult passage through history has been as a
consequence of the fact that its essential nature it is so easy to miss, and to
lose, without any sense that something important has been lost.

It is lost when the understanding that the doctrine enshrines images which
are understood as recollections of the ur reality, turns into the notion that the
images themselves, whether in ritual or narrative or poetic form, represent
the matter of the cult, rather than pointers and paths to the real goal of the
cult.

In essence the central belief of the cult is that reality itself is utterly
transcendent of all the characteristics and properties of earthly existence.
The divine, as a consequence of this understanding, is understood as
entirely beyond our human ability to grasp, except in terms of a crude
inversion of the categories normally employed in our understanding. This
idea of reality is conveyed and referred to by means of a number of images
– these may be actual images, through descriptions of images, through
ritual, through narrative, and through mythic and poetic constructs.

One of the key concepts of this cult is the distinction between the secular
and the eternal. Most of the desirable (and as Robert Graves might say,
‘nostalgic’) characteristics of reality are imaged in the idea of the eternal. It
does not move, does not participate, but simply is itself. The moving image
of eternity, which we have seen is of central importance in the Greek
version of the doctrine of the cult, is the one which does participate in
generation, which does move. Significantly, it is itself described as an
image, since it, along with all the elements of secularity within the moving
image, is an approximation, a metaphor to the all but indescribable and
unreachable.

The second aspect of this pattern of belief in a completely transcendent ur
reality, is that there are certain areas of earthly reality which are closely
connected with the ur reality. These areas are the limits or boundaries of
things. A characteristic of a limit or a boundary is that it is the place where
something passes into something else. In this place, the utter limit of
something is no longer what it is, but is the place between what that thing
was (whatever it was) and the thing which is beyond. In other words, the
boundary or limit is a no-man’s-land in terms of categorical understanding.
In consequence, it resembles very strongly the nature of the divine.

Why this Pattern?

Why do these properties of both the ur reality and of boundaries and limits
have such importance for those involved in the cult? Because the ur reality
is the place of generation, the place of the ur decisions – the principal
separations and divisions of eternity, the place of ultimate completion – the
ur of all and everything. Like the soil of the original home of a tribe, packed
into its ritual altar, its ‘first earth’, eternity is the place and condition of
resort when change, joining, sundering, enhancement, and judgement are
required. The devotee of the cult can, by means of its rituals and discipline,
both travel there, and bring eternity to the here and now.

The tribe need not have a theory of being to know the importance of ‘first earth’,
and it is not necessary for there to be a theory of being behind the existence and
importance of the practice. However it is clear that the concept of an ur
reality has abstracted to the nth degree many of the simpler notions which
occur to man, and brought them together, as Solon suggested to Croesus, ‘to
arrive at the proper time and agree’.*5 Where we find many clues to the
existence of this abstracted and rarified vision of the other in one or several
cultures, we cannot ignore these clues without damaging our capacity to
understand the cultural processes at work.

One of the problems which historians face in studying the ancient world is
the problem of studying patterns of belief which, are full of the practice of things
which have become reprehensible or meaningless - magic, witchcraft, divination
and sacrifice. To the modern scholar, these are credulous beliefs, without
foundation in anything which makes sense to the rational mind, and so the
historian is expected to have no sympathy wth the patterns of thought involved -
beyond that necessary to explore the social and cultural dynamics of these beliefs
in the material under examination. It is of course perfectly possible to write an excellent
study of a belief system without the writer sharing that belief system, but, for the
sake of professional credibility, it is important that objectivity – the ‘not sharing’ in
the belief system under study – is visible and public. Hence there is a tendency for
historians to avoid as far as possible discussion of beliefs and the intellectual undertow
of ancient practice, and where they find it necessary to engage with it, they usually
describe rather than analyse.

The difficulty of a historian is therefore very great, if we attempt to bring in
from the cold the common practice of the ancient world, and its intellectual
origins within a pattern of cultic belief and ritual. If it is more like what we understand
than we (formerly) understood, and belongs to the known tradition of understanding
the world in terms of the relationship between being and the world of becoming,
then a danger emerges that the work involved might seem like a rehabilitation rather
than an objective study.*6

Who would be safe? The objectivity of a discipline can mean that the object of
study is preferred lying dead on the dissecting table, rather than as something whose
whole nature requires study as a living thing: the object is studied as an ‘it’ rather than as
a ‘thou’. Where its dynamics are explored, these are often framed within modern
models of the forces at work in social structures, since these are the product of rational
discussion over many decades, and give us the tools and approaches to understand social
dynamics.

But is this really adequate as an approach? The cultures of the ancient world once lived,
and it is important to look at them as living things, driven by by their own will and
concerns. Looking at these cultures as supported and vivified by the powerhouse of a
theory of Being allows us to understand what it is that shapes them, and to understand
the connections between that powerhouse and more distributed and diffuse practices and
phenomena.*7

The cult itself is sustained by the inner logic of its belief system. Based on the
understanding of the importance of the concept of the eternal, it shares
serveral features with the religion in which it functions as the intellectual
core, supplying access to the functional aspects of the ur reality. Serving in
this way, it has a technical language, and technical logic. Much of this, particularly in
the fine detail, is lost to us within Mesopotamian culture, and we must also use non-textual
evidence as part of the recovery technique. But sometimes it peeps out at us, utterly
inexplicable within the now traditional modes of interpretation which are applied to
near eastern civilisations.

One example of this is the Akkadian phrase ‘Shar Kishati’, which was applied to Assyrian
Kings in the 1st Millennium B.C.E. The phrase literally means: ‘King of
Totality’. This makes very poor sense outside of the context of a cultic model
for the importance of the king – the phrase does not specify the nature or context of
the totality – whether it is to be understood as a totality of nations, of peoples, or even of
the world.

Within the context of a cult which has the pursuit of eternity at its core, the epithet
makes perfect sense: totality is one of the ways in which eternity may be
spoken of, since the eternal is the undivided and undifferentiated ur reality,
before the creation, the moving image of the same. The phrase ‘King of the
Four Quarters’ similarly does not refer (except where made explicit) to
earthly power and hegemony. The ‘four quarters’ refer to a division of the
ur reality or totality made by the cult, in which the properties of kingship
are defined in terms of different images of his transcendence over the
world.

These images are connected with the bull, the ram, the eagle, and
man. Other combinations of images are possible, and found, but these
four are the principle ones. Very often aspects of these animals are brought
together in images of the King and of the sages, so that the leg of the king is
overmuscled to invoke the strength of the bull; his cloak is feathered in
order to invoke the power and clarity of vision of the eagle*8, and he wears
a torque around his arm whose ends are marked with ram’s heads, a
favoured animal for the purposes of enquiry by divination. The human part
of the quartet represents intelligence and the rational part of the soul.

That this totality of the four quarters is something to which limits and
borders are closely associated is clear from the fact that the quartet of
images is often combined in the sacred winged bulls, found situated within
the limits of palaces and temples, marking the gateway between the
precincts of the palace or temple, and the outside secular world of movement
and change.

Notes -

1 We are familiar with the existence and importance of the indivuated Greek cults,
which eventually assumed an enormous importance in the later Roman Empire.
Herodotus sometimes mentions these cults, but makes offhand references to the
nature of the rites performed in thse ceromonies, saying ‘those who have experienced
them will know what I mean’. The details were secret from the uninitiated. We do not know
about the details of the cult of the Great Gods, the Kabiroi at Samothrace, on account of
this reticence on the part of Herodotus. As for Mesopotamian cults, we know that the whole
religious edifice functioned more or less as an assemblage of individuated cults. Those in
the lower levels ofsociety were simply not admitted to cult buildings at all, far less being
admitted to worship or to participate in ritual. So far however, it has not been considered as a possibility that the whole thing was held together by a cult which might be restricted to an
even smaller group, initiated into a cult whose ideas reflect a different kind of
intellectual picture of the world

2 Of course there are exceptions to this rule. The journalist Richard Carlile gained access to
Masonic ceremonies and documents in the early years of the 19th century, and wrote
extensively about this cult. Though he was pilloried for his efforts at the time, it was not
long before his ‘Manual of Masonry’ was being used in preference to official texts by the
members of the craft – indeed, one of the two copies I own has clearly been marked by
someone learning the rites of the craft.

3 The question of the routes by which the ideas of the cult have moved around is
nevertheless interesting, and in some instances it is possible to point at likely nodes
of contact and exchange. However this question is beyond the scope of this book.

4 I have defined the belief in the importance and efficacy of eternity as a cult for two
principal reasons. The first is that this belief is clearly necessarily confined to a small
group or network of individuals, for the simple reason that the nature of some of the
beliefs belonging to the cult would be anathema to the wider population. Talking of a
divine nature which has none of the properties of earthly existence could easily be
misunderstood as atheism. The second reason for defining this pattern of belief as cultic is
that, during the first millennium B.C. E., the belief system was more often than not
accompanied by cult ritual.

5 Those who invite for example the pre-eminent anthropologist of the ancient
world, Walter Burkhert, as keynote speaker to a conference on the subject, are perhaps
unconsciously exhibiting similar behaviour to tribal elders who place ‘first earth’ at the
core of their cultic life.

6 We are familiar with the Platonic tradition, which, through a number of twists and
turns, is more or less continuous as a body of ideas in the west during the past two
and a quarter millennia. It isn’t a tradition which is continuously active, in that it is not always worked within, and sometimes it has lain fallow. However we can trace a continuous tradition
based on the original Platonic corpus all the way from classical Greece to modern times.
And sometimes this tradition has actively shaped institutions and patterns of belief.

Examples of the powerful influence of this tradition include the neo-Platonist writings, the
take-up of Platonic ideas within the court and intellectual life of the Italian Renaissance,
and its particularly fertile influence in the English Renaissance of the late sixteenth
century. What is being suggested here is that a similar pattern of tradition existed in the
ancient world before Plato, and that the Platonic writings, rather than instituting something
entirely new, refashion an existing tradition of arcane cultic ideas, passed on largely
through oral means, within small and select groups within institutions which offer a
conducive and receptive environment for these ideas. Plato therefore is one highly important
node in the tradition, particularly because he is deliberately trying to pass on a body of ideas being threatened by a wholly secular view of the world.

7 If it is faulty to approach ancient societies which are replete with magical practice as
supported by a theory of being which informs much of the detail of its belief and practice,
then we will find out our error soon enough: we will find no evidence to support the claim
which is not inexplicable by other means. Some of the key pieces of evidence in this book
have no explanation in terms of existing interpretative schema: they are not treated as
evidentially significant, even when they clearly absorbed much of the ancient economy, as
well as the time and intellectual focus of the elite of the society in question.

8 Most probably the feathered cloak also is intended to conjure the idea of the king
functioning in another world, as the eagle can exist on land, but has its true existence
in the air