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.

Ancient Conjectures, and Fictive Intellectual History

The following text concerns the question of whether or not there was a philosophical basis for the development of religious concepts in antiquity, informing ritual, liturgy, divination, sacrifice, and the worship of images; and therefore, as a consequence, philosophy was not the exclusive possession of the Greeks in the 1st millennium B.C.E. 

This argument of course turns the received view of the historical relationship between religion and philosophy upside down: we like to think that the development of philosophy was a practical response to religion as it became an outworn and irrational phenomenon, which preceded a more scientific approach to phenomena and nature. If such a sequence is in fact falsely inferred, and undermined by the evidence, then we have some rethinking to do.

The text references both my book The Sacred History of Being (2015), and the contents of Understanding Ancient Thought (2017). It is one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. 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]

Thomas Yaeger, April 28, 2017 

What has been argued in part one of the book (The Sacred History of Being) is that ideas of Being, of the nature of reality, and the divine, were once understood in terms of conjecture about the reality (or otherwise) of the one and the many. These follow on from the initial question, which is: why is there something rather than nothing? Plato’s argument, following on from propositions made by Parmenides, who declared that we should look only to the one, and that only the one truly exists, is the most sophisticated of all discussions in antiquity concerning why there should be something rather than nothing.

Plato argues that we should always look to the ‘one true thing’. This is different from saying only the one exists, or only the one is truly real.

J.G. Frazer was very dismissive of Greek questions concerning the one and the many, saying that they constituted ‘popular questions of the day’. The argument of Parmenides remained entirely undiscussed.  But then he argued that questions concerning Being 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. We like to see Plato’s discussion of Being as the surfacing of a human capacity to grapple with abstract ideas, and the marker of our emancipation from irrational ideas about the world and the gods. For Frazer, Plato was as guilty of intellectual error as any of his contemporaries, as well as his predecessors.

In late Hellenistic times, there seems to have been a very poor grasp of the context of the development of philosophy around the Mediterranean. 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 this was so 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 in also Crete. 

He also presented Solon in discussion with Egyptian priests in the pages of the Timaeus, who found the Greeks very young, and not conversant with knowledge ‘hoary with age’.  Aristotle (in his Metaphysics) presented the common sense view that philosophy was first developed in a place where there was a leisured class, with the time and resources to think about philosophical questions. He may have had Egypt in mind, since Egypt had professionalised priesthoods. 

Later philosophers such as Porphyry suggested that key parts of Pythagorean doctrine came west to Greece from Babylon, in the late sixth century (Plato references details of this doctrine, without connecting it explicitly to Pythagoras). We have also seen that aspects of that doctrine can be found elsewhere in Herodotus (concerning Solon), and also in Homer’s Iliad (Book 18), where a number of key details associated with the doctrine are run together in close order, without being explained. 

The former Priest of Bel at Babylon, Berossus, moved to Athens, probably during the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus in Egypt, and wrote about Babylonian history and philosophy, describing their system of knowledge as based on an initial plenum, using the image of a sage emerging daily from the sea, granting knowledge to man about the sciences, agriculture, and the practical arts.

Not much of this was of use to the Enlightenment agenda, which preferred to look at the development of philosophy in Greece as the first beginnings of a rational understanding of the world. And so the information was deprecated and ignored. The phrase ‘I doubt that’ is a dangerous one in the classics community. It is a way of saying ‘this is not the consensus view of scholars and the profession’. Usually no discussion follows, since the opinion is usually an opinion of the worth (or otherwise) of evidence. Scholars weigh evidence, and they do so (they are convinced) with better tools than were available to ancient scholars. The judgement is fitted to modern requirements. So, as a result, it is clear that it is unlikely that Solon visited Egypt, and that Pythagoras visited Babylon. Tread carefully, or your credibility as a scholar may be in doubt.

Thus, the scholarly consensus is that philosophy is an autochthonous development. Why in Greece? The ‘Greek Genius’ won’t cut the mustard any more, at least by itself, but I have heard it said by people who should know better. But during the high days of the Enlightenment, and the beginnings of what became the fully-fledged discipline of Classics, that is what the scholars wanted. Something pure and out of the orbit of other cultures, which, by definition, had no philosophy or anything which would measure up to something like rational thought.

Sometimes history is built backwards. It isn’t just a matter of looking to the historical record and starting from that. History always has been in part about critical scrutiny of sources and judgements, even among the Greeks. But as Bernal pointed out in the first volume of his Black Athena, the critical revision was wholesale, with the purpose of creating a representation of the true origins of European civilisation as it entered the period of the Enlightenment.

That was the agenda. To reinterpret the past, and in terms of a rational and enlightened understanding of the world. Hence, Diderot wrote not just about ideas and philosophy in his Encyclopedia, but also about the arts and crafts. The latter may have been wrapped up with myth, folklore, and superstition, but they were still essential to the rational life of man, so these were also added to the Encyclopedia. Everything from the past which served some purpose, or which could be made to serve some purpose within the rational enlightenment model of reality, was critically examined, and reworked to fit what was intended to become a new understanding of man and his place in a new world of reason. A new understanding of how man might live.

As I point out in the chapter ‘Logical Modality in Classical Athens’ there are in fact two logical modalities present in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle is mostly (though not always) concerned with the modality which has come down to us as the basis of formal logic. Plato is clearly aware of this modality, but, though no scholar has dared to identify the other modality as logical, it is. It is simply that to us, it does not describe relationships which should be described as logical. Plato thought otherwise, and talks about this logical modality often, in the Republic and in the Timaeus. It is connected with the doctrine of wholes and totalities, and is the basis of explaining how things may participate in other things, which is not a pattern of ideas which fits with Aristotle’s general understanding of logic.

Why is this important? Simply put, it matters because it is the basis of the Greek understanding of how transcendent reality relates to secular and physical existence, which was a matter of great significance in the middle of the first millennium B.C.E.  The doctrine also underpins the understanding of both transcendent reality, and the idea of the immanence of the divine. It also points to a rather strange conclusion about the nature of the reality in which we live and think.

It might be imagined therefore that this would be the subject of a great deal of scholarship. In fact there is very little on the subject. The dialogues in question have been written about endlessly over the last two centuries, but, though Plato’s discussion is noted, the fact that it is a form of logical modality is not acknowledged, and the conclusions which might follow from treating it as such, do not follow, and are therefore not discussed. It is treated as it is presented – as mathematical and geometrical metaphors for how things might possess some form of congruence with each other.

As I wrote in the chapter ‘Sweet Song of Swans’, there is very little appetite for attempting to understand Plato in his own terms. When he talks about transcendent reality, this is treated as some sort of literary fiction, which has no necessary properties of its own. When Plato talks about the Forms, this also is treated as a species of literary fiction, which Plato himself demolished in his Parmenides and in the Sophist. Wnen Plato discusses the soul, it turns out that it is something which has the property of being connected with the Form of the Good, and so knowledge is acquired by the activation of that connection. We have forgotten what we knew (apparently) through the shock of physical birth, but it is possible for us to reacquire this knowledge.  Deriving all knowledge from the Form of the Good is also seen as a bafflingly impenetrable notion, since he talks about ascending purely in the mind from Form to Form, and then descending back to the world of physical reality, Form by Form, and says this is the only way to acquire genuine knowledge.

How can real knowledge be acquired in this way? Why should Plato argue like this?  How can any of this make sense to us?

It makes very little sense to us, because we have lost the original doctrinal context of his discussions, and we are not that interested in attempting to recover what we can of that context, even for the purposes of a better scholarly understanding of what he is talking about. So the study of Plato languishes in the seminar room, taught and discussed from generation to generation by people who have no clear idea of what Plato meant. Books and papers are published, which clear up a minor detail here, discuss another one there, but do not leave us much the wiser.

 We can understand the range of existing discussion about Plato in terms of what scholars do not or cannot understand about Plato, and their attempts to fit what they think they understand about his work into some kind of modern intellectual and critical frame. It is their minds, and the categories of their own understanding which are problematic, not the obscurity of Plato’s ideas.

Other than that, reading Plato at least serves to teach us something about how we used to think, and how we may think, even if we understand very little of what he is saying.

One of the principal reasons we cannot easily understand Plato is down to the loss of an understanding of that alternative logical modality. So a major concern of this book is to restore knowledge of it, and a basic comprehension of why it is important. Not just for our understanding of Plato himself, but also for our understanding of his cultural context; the context in which philosophy was understood to be of inestimable value; and also for an understanding of some very strange things about the ancient world, which are all the stranger because (it seems) they made sense in antiquity (sacrifice, divination, idolatry, prophecy, omens, oracles, etc.).

One of the most valued books in my library is Religion & Magic: Approaches and Theories. The author is Graham Cunningham, who is a specialist in the ancient Near East. Anthropology is a relatively young discipline, though crowded with many points of view. Cunningham’s book covers the whole range of these, at least in terms of summarising the views of those who first suggested those theoretical approaches. He divides the approaches into several sections, which are 1. German pioneers, 2 Early Intellectualist approaches, 3 Emotionalist approaches, 4 Phenomenological Approaches, 5 Structural Functional Approaches, 6 Symbolic Approaches, 7 Recent Intellectualist Approaches, 8 Structural approaches, 9, Cognitive Approaches, 10, and finally Feminist Approaches.

All of these approaches were developed and used without any meaningful distinction being made between ancient cultural phenomena and cultural phenomena of modern times. I write carefully here, since there are unpleasant assumptions in the discipline of anthropology, which have not yet been rooted out entirely. Anthropology was founded in the early nineteenth century, and the presumptions of the time are necessarily locked into the work of the pioneers. Many of these presumptions are still implicit, and can be called into the light of day if you scratch the modern anthropologist in the course of discussion. The fact is that an unfounded equation was early made between the cultures of antiquity and the world of the primitive and the savage in the modern world (which the Classicist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson referred to as ‘running folklore to the death’).

So Cunningham’s book covers two centuries of thought about culture, civilization, religion, magic and ritual. All premised on the assumptions, understanding and categories of knowledge of those living and working in those two centuries. Nothing about those matters is covered from earlier centuries. It is as if the study of human culture, human thought, and the nature of man himself, began only in Hegel’s study, and nothing of worth came before Hegel.

I could digress here, and lay out what came before in detail, but that is for another time. I will allow myself to say that Plato had something else to add to the pot, which is not covered in Cunningham’s survey; the Neoplatonists (who thought of themselves as Platonists, but we will not let them be what they are) would have had added the same thing to the pot, as would some of the early Gnostic writers.

 The Platonists of the Italian and English Renaissances understood what Plato was writing about, at least for the most part, and would be shocked that, not only do we not understand Plato, but that we have chosen to explain human culture in terms of a fundamental stupidity about the way reality works, and with a complete disregard for the way the human mind was once understood to engage with that reality.

In short, religion is seen by all anthropologists and sociologists  in negative terms (at least professionally – what they choose to believe in private is a separate matter), as something baleful and poisonous to human culture and human thought, except to the extent that religious belief provides social cohesion, ideology, and rules of social behaviour.....

Oannes and the Instruction of Mankind

 

The Babylonian writer Berossus (possibly a Greek form of the name Bēl-uşur), took up residence in Athens, after having been a priest of Bel in Babylon in the late 4^th century/early 3^rd century B.C.E. He wrote a three volume work, Babyloniaka, unfortunately now lost, which was a study on the culture and history of Babylonia. Alexander Polyhistor made an abridgement of this work in the first century B.C.E., also lost. However this abridgement was available to the christian writer Eusebius (4^th century C.E), and also Josephus in the first century C.E. The passages which they quoted from Polyhistor and a few other authors survive. As Black and Green write, “Akkadian mythological and historical texts found in modern excavations have largely confirmed the authenticity of the tradition represented by Berossus.”  [1]  This includes the tradition of the Seven Sages, preserved in the account by Berossus (in his first book) of the eight creatures, beginning with Oannes and concuding with Odakon, which emerged from the sea bringing to man the civilising arts, including agriculture. His second book covered the history of Babylonia from the ‘ten kings before the flood’, through the Flood itself.

The Babylonian tradition is indeed that seven apkallu or sages lived before the flood. Their names are given in Neo-Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian ritual texts, as well as the seven cities from which they are supposed to come, though there are differing traditions within Mesopotamia about the sages and their origins which are difficult to reconcile.

Apollodorus has preserved a fragment of Berossus, which tells us that the first of the Chaldean Kings was Alorus of Babylon, followed by Alaparus and also Amelon who came from Pantibiblon, followed by Ammenon the Chaldean. In the reign of Ammenon, the sage Oannes appeared from the sea.  [2]  Polyhistor gives us detail drawn from Berossus about this appearance, after Berossus describes the Babylon of those times as: a great resort of people of various nations, who inhabited Chaldaea, and lived without rule and order like the beast of the field’:

In the first year there made its appearance, from a part of the Erythraean sea which bordered upon Babylonia, an animal endowed with reason, who was called Oannes. (According to the account of Apollodorus) the whole body of the animal was like that of a fish; and had under a fish’s head another head, and also feet below, similar to those of a man, subjoined to the fish’s tail. His voice too, and language, was articulate and human; and a representation of him is preserved even to this day.

The fishtailed images found upon the slabs of Assyrian Palaces and on cylinder seals are representations of this first sage, preserved even until our own much later day. The appearance of Oannes in ritual contexts with the King or the Sacred Tree, or both together, tells us that the earliest days of mankind are being recalled, and that an element of re-enactment or revitalisation is being invoked in these images.

Polyhistor’s account of Berossus’ first book continues:

This Being in the day-time used to converse with men; but took no food at that season; and he gave them an insight into letters and sciences, and every kind of art. He taught them to construct houses, to found temples, to compile laws and explained to them the principles of geometrical knowledge. He made them distinguish the seeds of the earth, and shewed them how to collect fruits; in short, he instructed them in every thing which could tend to soften manners and humanize mankind. From that time, so universal were his instructions, nothing material has been added by way of material improvement. When the sun set it was the custom of this Being to plunge again into the sea, and abide all night in the deep; for he was amphibious.

Creatures which were amphibious were of interest in antiquity because they could inhabit more than one world, as Oannes does here. Not only can he live and breathe under water, and converse with man in the daytime, but he is equipped with what is clearly divine knowledge – the knowledge of writing and of various sciences and arts, house-building, the founding of temples (and implicitly the worship of the gods), law, geometry, botany. The order of the sciences and arts is interesting here, in that house-building comes before the founding of temples, and knowledge of the law comes after the knowledge of the founding of temples. This reflects a conflation of a likely sequence – men will have built houses before they embarked on temples and the development of law and geometry – with a theoretical sequence of the founding of temples and the worship of the gods, the knowledge of whom will have given rise to the knowledge of law and its importance, and the application of the idea of law to the measuring and demarcation of space using the techniques of geometry. The development of botanical knowledge, and the division of the parts of nature, represents the application of the idea of demarcation to the world of plants, as the precursor to agriculture.

The softening of manners is not the thing of principal importance here, but something which is absolutely necessary – it is impossible to have an organised population, subject to reason and the law, able to build houses and temples, and most importantly worship the gods, if they are not free of the daily struggle for survival, in which they are not distinguished in any significant way from the beasts of the field.

The instructions which came from Oannes are described as ‘so universal’, that nothing of any significance ‘has been added by way of material improvement’. These instructions are clearly divine and the product of divine knowledge, and came from the gods by way of the Sage Oannes, who rests in the sea. Recalled here is the shrine of the god Ea/Enki, the ‘broad-eared’ one of wide learning, which is at the bottom of the Apsu, among the sweet waters. The image of the obverse of our world is doubled by associating the return of Oannes to the deep at sunset, where the sun leaves our world in darkness. The human race is illuminated only when Oannes is on land, and conversing with us. It is also of some significance that the point is made that Oannes does not eat ‘at that season’, but receives his sustenance at some other time – implicitly while he is below the waters of the deep, in the place of Ea/Enki, in the Abyss, where all good things which may be had have their ultimate origin.

Polyhistor’s account also tells us that ‘Oannes wrote concerning the generation of mankind; of their different ways of life, and of their civil polity’. Berossus gives the purport of what he said:

There was a time in which there was nothing but darkness and an abyss of waters, wherein resided most hideous beings, which were produced of a two-fold principle. Men appeared with two wings, some with four and with two faces. They had one body but two heads; the one of a man, the other of a woman. They were likewise in their several organs both male and female. Other human figures were to be seen with the legs and horns of goats. Some had horses’ feet; others had the limbs of a horse behind, but before were fashioned like men, resembling hippocentaurs. Bulls likewise bred there with the heads of men; and dogs with fourfold bodies, and the tails of fishes. Also horses with the heads of dogs: men too and other animals, with the heads and bodies of horses and the tails of fishes. In short, there were creatures with the limbs of every species of animals.

Here Berossus describes the properties of the Abyss. It is unilluminated and full of waters which contain beings whose characteristics and properties are not defined by any of the rules which apply on the earth – men have the feet of horses, some have wings, some have two heads, male and female. Bulls have the heads of men, horses have the heads of dogs, etc. These are not ‘seeds of the earth’, but of a realm in which the demarcations and separations in the animal kingdom of the earth are collapsed together and mixed to an infinite degree. In some ways the situation can be paralleled with the disorder in the life of man before the appearance of Oannes from the waters of the sea: the fact that this description follows on immediately from that account suggests this quite strongly. And as the beasts of the field were the precursors of a humanized mankind, so the Abyss is the precursor of another creation, in which order is given to the ‘seeds of the earth’. Berossus says that these creatures, plus ‘fishes, reptiles, serpents, with other wonderful animals…..assumed each other’s shape and countenance’  my emphasis . This is an image of a dynamic chaos, in which everything is intermingled; all possibility is here, and nothing is absolutely separate from anything else.

This is the abyss from which Oannes emerged. And emerging from this, he instructed mankind. This implies some kind of connection between the state of the abyss and the knowledge of the sciences and the arts, and of the nature and worship of the gods. Berossus concludes this passage by saying that ‘Of all these were preserved delineations in the temple of Belus at Babylon’, so there was obviously some constructive point to the contemplation of these composite animals, and the condition and properties of the abyss. Unfortunately this temple was taken to pieces by Alexander during his brief stay in the city, so we cannot look at these images in particular.  [3]  We should not forget that Oannes is himself a composite creature, with the head of a fish and the head of a man, the body and tail of a fish, and the feet of a man – the body and head of a fish mark him as an inhabitant of the sea and the abyss, which is a reflection of his access to the knowledge of the sciences and the arts. He has the voice of a man, and so can communicate with the inhabitants of the earth.

Why should the abyss be accounted the source of knowledge about the sciences and the arts? If the abyss is an approximation, another image of the telos, of the final nature of reality in which all things are contained, and from which all things unfold (even if through the mediation of a copy, a moving image of eternity), then it is all too obvious why the sciences and arts should be associated with the abyss. Ultimately everything which the human race wishes to know and to understand is already present in potential form in the primary reality. Access to it is the question, not whether or not it exists.

This is one of the principal reasons why the teleological perspective on the world has held such a fascination for the powerful and the educated throughout history. The concept of the telos suggests that all things are possible, and that all knowledge is accessible to man, through ritual, through contemplation, and through study. It also suggests that knowledge and understanding can be formalised (a concept with which we are now estranged), so that it is possible to determine the will of the divine, and to arrange the world according to a divine order.

It is also worth pointing out that not only is this understanding that human knowledge is the result of communion with the divine through repeated and enhanced access to the cause of causes, the telos, but the account of the gift of the sciences and the arts which Berossus gives is itself an image which, through the act of its contemplation, amplifies access to the telos.

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[1]   ‘Berossus,’ in Black, Jeremy, and Green, Anthony - Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, British Museum Press, 1992. The text of Berossus can be found collected together in I. P. Cory’s Ancient Fragments, 2^nd edition, 1832.

[2] The passage is lexically interesting: Berossus says that in the time of Ammemnon… ‘appeared the Musarus Oannes the Annedotus from the Erythaean sea.’ ‘Musarus’ and ‘Annedotus’ do not appear to be Greek words.

[3] It was Alexander’s intention to rebuild it, but he died before the rebuilding began.

The Babylonian Creation

This is an extract from the chapter 'Creation' in The Sacred History of Being, published November 2, 2015. The discussion of the Babylonian idea of the Creation in this chapter emphasises that there are several philosophical concepts present in the story we are told. Almost all scholars of Mesopotamian civilisation however, accept the conventional narrative which states that philosophical thought was the creation of the Greeks in the middle of the 1st Millennium B.C.E, and so the presence of philosophical concepts in texts from a much earlier time, and in another place (as here) is not noticed, and is not discussed. Instead of clear and cogent thought, scholars believe that the authors of the Babylonian creation were dealing with loose notions about the cosmos and the world. This is false. The later writings of the Greeks echo earlier ideas from Mesopotamia, and often very closely, as The Sacred History of Being uncovers. 

Thomas Yaeger, February 22, 2018

In Babylonia and Assyria, plenitude could be represented by the waters of ocean. Before ordered generation arose from these waters, there was a primal chaos, which Mesopotamian scholars understood in terms of undifferentiated possibility. The Babylonian priest Berossus, who lived and wrote in Greek most probably during the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus, describes this primal chaos in terms which emphasise that it is a plenitude (this passage was preserved by Alexander Polyhistor):

There was a time in which there was nothing but darkness and an abyss of waters, wherein resided most hideous beings, which were produced of a two-fold principle. Men appeared with two wings, some with four wings, and two faces. They had one body, but two heads the one of a man, the other of a woman. They were likewise, in their several organs, both male and female. Other human figures were to be seen with the legs and horns of goats. Some had horses' feet; others had the limbs of a horse behind, but before were fashioned like men, resembling hippocentaurs. Bulls, likewise, bred there with the heads of men; and dogs, with fourfold bodies, and the tails of fishes. Also horses, with the heads of dogs: men, too, and other animals, with the heads and bodies of horses and the tails of fishes. In short, there were creatures with the limbs of every species of animals. Add to these fishes, reptiles, serpents, with other wonderful animals, which assumed each other's shape and countenance. Of all these were preserved delineations in the temple of Belus at Babylon.

The person, who was supposed to have presided over them, was a woman named Omoroca; which in the Chaldee language is Thalatth; which in Greek is interpreted Thalassa, the sea: but, according to the most true computation, it is equivalent to Selene, the moon. All things being in this situation, Belus came, and cut the woman asunder: and, out of one half of her, he formed the earth, and of the other half the heavens; and at the same time he destroyed the animals in the abyss. All this (he says) was an allegorical description of nature. For the whole universe consisting of moisture, and animals being continually generated therein; the deity (Belus), above-mentioned, cut off his own head; upon which the other gods mixed the blood, as it gushed out, with the earth; and from thence men were formed. On this account it is that men are rational, and partake of divine knowledge. This Belus, whom men call Dis, (or Pluto,) divided the darkness, and separated the heavens from the earth, and reduced the universe to order. But the animals so recently created, not being able to bear the prevalence of light, died.

Alexander Heidel points out that thalatth in the foregoing passage, “... is obviously a scribal error.”  [i]  He says that the form thamte corresponds to the Babylonian tamtu, denoting the sea, the ocean, or Tiamat, which is the personification of the primordial sea or ocean. Heidel notes that Omoroka is a title of Tiamat  [ii]  –   Heidel also observes that the emended form of Omoroka in the Greek text is Omorka, which has the same numerical value (by gematria) as ‘Selene’ (the moon).  [iii]

Belus upon this, seeing a vast space quite uninhabited, though by nature very fruitful, ordered one of the gods to take off his head; and when it was taken off, they were to mix the blood with the soil of the earth, and from thence to form other men and animals, which should be capable of bearing the light. Belus also formed the stars, and the sun and the moon, together with the five planets.

It is interesting to compare again Plato’s account of the creation of the universe:

When He (Theos) took over all that was visible, seeing that it was not in a state of rest but in a state of discordant and disorderly motion, He brought it into order out of disorder, deeming that the former state is in all ways better than the latter. For Him who is most good it neither was nor is permissible to perform any action save what is fair. As He reflected, therefore, He perceived that of such creatures as are by nature visible, none that is irrational will be fairer, comparing wholes with wholes, than the rational; and further, that reason cannot possibly belong to any apart from Soul. So because of this reflection He constructed reason within soul and soul within body as He fashioned the All, that so the work He was executing might be of its nature most fair and most good.  [iv]

These accounts are essentially consonant, in that they relate an initial state of discord in creation, as we read already in the text of Berossus:

... there were creatures with the limbs of every species of animals. Add to these fishes, reptiles, serpents, with other wonderful animals, which assumed each other's shape and countenance.

These were not to be tolerated as part of the creation, though they were implicit in the ground of Being. They do not make sense in terms of a rational creation. Note the sentence: “add to these fishes, reptiles, serpents, with other wonderful animals, which assumed each other's shape and countenance.” in the Babylonian account (my emphasis). This makes it clear that these animals are the product of a plenitude, a totality, in which all possible combinations are, at the least, potential and latent. But they are to be destroyed in favour of a rational creation. This might be taken to imply that they possess the same degree of reality as the rational creatures which are to succeed them. Though they can have no practical existence.  By contrast the creation of men is due to the intervention of a god, who thereby made men rational. Berossus further connects this rationality with the ability to understand the workings of the divine....

[End of extract]

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[i] Heidel, A. The Babylonian Genesis, p77, footnote 85

[ii] Op cit. footnote 84, p 77.

[iii] Op cit. footnote 86, p77.

[iv] Plato, Timaeus, 30a–b.