Before the Ontological Argument (Writing to Alvin Plantinga)

Date: Thu, 05 Mar 2020 23:44:33 +0000
To: Alvin Plantinga 
From: Thomas Yaeger 
Subject: Before the Ontological Argument

Dear Professor Plantinga,

Things have moved along a great deal since I last wrote to you. You might like to read the following article, which argues that the idea of the One, and its transcendent nature, was known in the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age in Britain. Which, if this argument is correct, means we are talking about more than five thousand years ago, and long before Anselm and Aquinas attempted to make rational sense of religion.

There are many parallels in the mathematics which are evident in the Neolithic monuments with ideas which we can identify in later times - in particular in the case of ancient Greece. Such as the ideas of totality, the important role of integral numbers in connecting us with what is Divine, and the centrality of mathematical and geometric commensurability.  Greek conceptions about these is a development of the earlier ideas, as close study shows.

The underlying perception in the British Neolithic was that the physical reality in which we live is not Reality itself, which is demonstrated by the various puzzles (the aporia) which physical reality contains. This view also emerges from Plato, since he argues (through Socrates) that Reality itself exists in no time or space. Time and space are representations of a transcendent reality, and not truly real in themselves.

I'm arguing that a rational basis for belief in the Divine is a contradiction in terms. I know how important this is to you, so my apologies. The ancient arguments however make the modern idea of belief irrelevant to any conjecture about the Divine. If there is a transcendent reality which we might term as the Divine, it is necessarily real, since it is what lies behind all human experience, despite having its reality nowhere in time and space.

As I suggested before, the ancient conception was that Reality and the Divine were coterminous - or otherwise, two ways of speaking about the same thing.

One of the implications of the idea that reality itself is One, and cannot change, but stands behind physical reality, is that Reality and physical reality are essentially the same (I've argued this in detail in my books). Though they are represented differently to the human understanding. Physical reality contains a number of incommensurable values, whereas Reality contains values which are commensurable, and often related to what is incommensurable in physical reality. If they are in fact one and the same reality, but with a double nature, reconciling the differences between these worlds might have been a matter of some importance to religious establishments in the ancient world. Which is what I argue (in this article) the priests responsible for the design and building of megalithic structures were doing. The mathematics bear this out.

This offers important clues to the actual origin and significance of human religion, despite some of the nonsense which has been written on this subject.

The article is at:

'The Mathematical Origins of the Megalithic Yard'.

http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-mathematical-origins-of-megalithic.html

....

 Best wishes,

Thomas Yaeger

Echoes of Eternity

 Much of the cultural production of the ancient world, east and west, was based on the idea of reflecting aspects of the divine in human life and thought. Many social structures and institutions were based on this approach. The model for these things was was astronomy and the heavens, and the heavens were conceived of as a moving image of eternity, and eternity was understood to be coterminous with the Divine. Since it moved, it contained life and thought, and repaid the attention of man. We still live, work and think inside what is a scarcely changed neolithic temple, which is the sky.

 The final word count is around 56 thousand words. Two of the chapters - 'The Greek Ontological Model in the 1st Millennium B.C.E', and 'Patterns of thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain', are quite large pieces of work (6k and 10k words respectively). The introduction and a chapter each from the three parts of the book are available via the list below.


The chapter list:

Introduction: The Interpretation of Ancient History

Part One. 6

Camera Obscura: Marx, Aristotle & Ptolemy. 7

Synoikismos and the Origins of the Polis. 12

Kingship in Ancient Assyria. 20

Proskynesis, and the Deification of Alexander. 25

Part Two. 34

The Greek Ontological Model in the 1st Millennium B.C.E. 35

Post-Enlightenment Plato, and That Which Cannot Move. 47

Greece and the cultural Impact of the Assyrian Empire. 57

The Threshold in Ancient Assyria. 68

Symmetry and Asymmetry in the Iconography of the Ancient Near East. 75

Part Three. 80

The Keys of the Kingdom: Binding and Loosing in Heaven and Earth. 81

Being and Eternity in the Neolithic. 87

Patterns of thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain. 93
The Mathematical Origins of the Megalithic Yard

What We Have Lost, and How the Ancient Concept of the Cosmos Died

Marx and Historicism.. 129

Publication date, June 30, 2020.

TY, May 5, 2019. Details updated May 27,  July 5, and September 6 and 17, October 1,  November 26,   December 12, 2019, May 5 2020, and June 14 2020.. Updated October 10.

Bringing the Divine to Earth. Writing to the Poet Leona Esther Medlin

I wrote to Leona Esther Medlin on the 26th of January 2018, and headed the letter, 'After the Bronze Age Wreck'. The letter is an update on where I was with my research. The original (rather squibish) article 'The Bronze Age Wreck' was shared only with one archaeologist in May 2013, since it depended very much on an understanding of the arguments in 'The Sacred History of Being'. That book was not published for another two and a half years. 

***

The focus of The Sacred History of Being is the presence of the idea of Being in cultures around the Mediterranean from the eighteenth century BCE onwards. Particularly in Mesopotamia. The date was chosen because it marks the earliest appearance in the archaeology of a standard symbol for divine Being in Mesopotamia.

It was obvious from Egyptian iconography (and from elsewhere) that the idea of Being is much older. I chose not to go back before this date however, for the purposes of argument. Or to go anywhere near Egyptian stuff, for obvious reasons.

I found in 2013 that it might be possible to identify the (functional) presence of the idea of Being in the Neolithic and early Bronze Age in Britain. How? There is no writing. Just lots of big stones in lines and circles. But as Alexander Thom’s surveys from the 1930s onwards showed, the circles betray a profound interest in various Pythagorean triangles, and in whole numbers (the circles are not strictly circular, and the circumferences are expressed in whole numbers). This is a form of writing, just writing in terms of number and geometry.

There are several ways of talking about Being, and one of the terms often used in antiquity to reference Being was ‘totality’. I wrote about this way of thinking extensively in The Sacred History of Being (hereinafter SHB). It was a major part of Pythagorean doctrine, and also in Mesopotamian thought. Plato discusses the idea, and in fact his whole argument about ascending to the Good and returning depends on the significance it was supposed to have.

I also wrote extensively in SHB about the installation of divine statues in Mesopotamia, and the connection between the idea of totality and divine Being. The installation process lasted three days, during which time the statues were pointed at the heavens, which was regarded as an image of eternity or totality. The rite was a rite d’aggregation. The statue did not embody the divine without the performance of this ritual: the statue need to participate in totality to be divine.

After seeing the documentary ‘Cracking the Stone Age Code’ in early 2013, it occurred to me that the mathematical and geometrical aspects of stone circles may have served the same sort of function as divine statues in Mesopotamia and elsewhere. The hypothesis was that in their construction the circles embodied aspects of divine Being on earth, and they therefore established a bridge between earth and eternity. 

In just a few days in May 2013 I wrote an extensive essay arguing this case. It had the title ‘The Bronze Age Wreck’. I called it that because the body of ideas which lay behind the building of the megalithic circles was lost to us, apart from a few clues. It seems also to have been lost to those living in the British Bronze Age itself, since the building of the circles more or less ceased around 1400 BCE (I’ve not written about that, but I think I know what happened. For another time).

The essay depended very much on a reading of SHB, so it wasn’t much use to circulate it. What I’m writing now is based on that essay, but readers are not required to have read SHB first.

In November 2016 I wrote another essay, called: ‘Stone Circles, Phenomenology, and the Neolithic Mind’. It discussed the archaeological evidence, Plato’s arguments about the heavens as an image of divine Being, and Mesopotamian ritual for the installation of gods, both in heaven and on earth. The essay was published on my website, and it received significant attention. It resulted in a commission in November 2017 to write about these ideas for the journal Time and Mind.

This article of 10.5 thousand words was written and delivered in four weeks, and it has the title ‘Patterns of thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain.’ It was quite different from the first, largely as the result of a conversation with the philosopher Adrian Moore across the year, which moved from ideas of Being in antiquity to Greek discussion and understanding of irrational numbers. This discussion prompted a general review of Pythagorean mathematics, and the sources. In the end, the new article suggested that there was a connection between mathematical and geometrical puzzles and paradoxes, and the idea of a transcendent reality (divine Being) standing behind appearance. The article also argued that Pythagoras travelled widely, borrowing much of what later became known as Pythagoreanism from priestly establishments in Babylonia, Egypt, Phoenicia, and other places. What he was doing involved looking for a universal substructure of number, mathematics and geometry which pointed to the nature of Being.

Shortly after this paper was completed in December 2017, I wrote a post for my website which discussed the two papers on stone circles and Pythagoreanism from 2016 and 2017. It is titled: ‘Thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain’. It contains the abstract for the paper intended for the journal, and thirteen section headings, but no actual quotations from the body of the text.

Earlier in 2017 I was asked for a copy of a paper – ‘The Esoteric Conception of Divinity in the Ancient World’, published in the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica Newsletter in December 2015. The inquirer was Nico Bader, who runs the Pythagoras Foundation in Amsterdam. I wrote to him sometime after forwarding the paper, suggesting that he might be interested in looking at the two posts on the web concerning stone circles and their significance. He found this line of research to be interesting. Yesterday he offered to summarise the argument in these posts for the Pythagoras Foundation’s Newsletter (number 23), which will be published in March. The newsletter (it is a bit more than that) is read by everyone who is seriously interested in Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism. If Time and Mind publishes ‘Patterns of Thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain’ in their upcoming issue, both will items will appear in March.

January 26, 2018.

***

Stone Circles, Phenomenology, and the Neolithic Mind: http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/stone-circles-phenomenology-and.html

Thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain (now retitled 'Being and Eternity in the Neolithic'): http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/patterns-of-thought-in-late-neolithic.html

‘Cracking the Stone Age Code’ (the original BBC Chronicle documentary, broadcast in October 1970, which I didn’t see until early 2013. Worth 50 minutes of your time on a wet Sunday: http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/chronicle/8604.shtml

The most recent Pythagoras Foundation Newsletter: https://www.academia.edu/31783263/PYTHAGORAS_FOUNDATION_NEWSLETTER_22_2017.pdf

[The article 'Patterns of Thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain' was rejected  by the editorial board of the journal 'Time and Mind'. It is available here. All about what a pre-pythagorean pythagoreanism might have meant in the context of the British Neolithic. Nico Bader, on the other hand, did follow through with publishing his summaries of my posts. At: https://www.academia.edu/36071620/PYTHAGORAS_FOUNDATION_NEWSLETTER_23_2018.pdf]

[Updated May 13, 2020]

The Time Bomb Under Archaeology

Text from the Spectator archive, November 14, 1970. The programme was broadcast on October 31, 1970 (the Spectator came out once a fortnight). An edited excerpt from their review of TV programming. It is coming up for fifty years since the programme was broadcast, and the 'time-bomb under archaeology' may be about to explode. There is new information.

Magnus Magnusson wrote and narrated an excellent programme about even older good old days, four thousand years ago, when some of the natives of these islands were 'prehistoric Einsteins.' Chronicle: Cracking The Stone Age Code' (BBC 2) was about Professor Alexander Thom's study of megalithic mathematics and astronomy. Now seventy-six, Professor Thom, a retired engineer, has spent the past thirty years studying ancient stone circles. His measurements have demonstrated to his satisfaction that Stone Age man was no barbaric simpleton but erected stones in patterns founded on Pythagorean geometry two thousand years before Pythagoras.
Professor Thom discovered that stone circles all over Britain used a standard megalithic unit of measurement, precisely 2.72 feet in length. Using the crudest instruments, the Stone Age astronomer-priests were able to predict accurately various astronomical events, such as lunar eclipses.

Mr Magnusson suggested that Professor Thom's findings have put 'a time- bomb under archaeology.' Archaeological sceptics were given opportunities to voice their disagreement on the programme, but Thom appeared to be entirely undisturbed by expressions of dissent. Chronicle enterprisingly sent him to Carnac, a megalithic site in Brittany. His findings there fitted his British observations and demonstrated, as Mr Magnusson said, that 'there was an intellectual common market four thousand years ago.' Perhaps Malcolm Muggeridge is right,... when he says that our civilisation is in decline.

The original programme is available from the BBC Archive, and is an extraordinary time capsule from the time in which it was made. There was no consensus about the implications of Thom's work, or even that his suggestions about the basis on which the monuments were laid out were reliably rooted in Thom's phenomenological and statistical analysis.

Since then a resurvey of 300 of the monuments by Clive Ruggles, using a highly unorthodox and inconsistent methodology, has removed the need for archaeologists to engage with the implications of Thom's original study of the monuments. *1 This is because many of the things which Thom drew attention to are now understood by the archaeological community to be the product of a 'selection bias'. As the archaeologist Euan MacKie (who appears in the programme) has pointed out however, Ruggles resurvey was conducted in such a way that it could not possibly verify some of Thom's findings, such as the deliberate orientation of the monuments on foresights in the landscape, even if those findings were correct.

Thom was an engineer, mathematician, and an excellent surveyor. He detected some key components to the construction of the monuments, such as a near obsessive interest in whole numbers, and what appeared to be the use of pythagorean triangles in the laying out of the structures. Those aspects of the circles and ellipses he did not over-interpret, because he had nothing to go on. He reported on what he could see, and how the structures might have been laid out given those clear interests of the original designers of the monuments.

Being an engineer, and a mathematician, there were other things he must have noticed during his surveys, but for which he could offer no sensible explanation. And at the time this documentary was made, nobody else could have either. The phenomenological and statistical analysis of the monuments remains however as a remarkable body of work. There is more information in those surveys than meets the eye.

The interpretative frame has moved forward in the meantime. We know much more about the nature and origins of Pythagorean thought than we did - it is possible, for example, to understand Pythagoreanism as a way of thinking which is rooted in the consideration of natural puzzles. Such an interest necessarily has a bearing on the human response to such puzzles, which can be a religious response (and was, in the case of the later Pythagoreans). Many constants in nature are mathematically irrational, such as pi and phi, etc, which makes them a phenomenon of interest to those disposed to philosophical inquiry. These are staples of Greek philosophy. Such an interest also offers an explanation of how a Pythagorean way of thinking could have arisen so long before the advent of the Pythagorean sect we know from much more recent times.

***


1. Ruggles describes his resurveying work in a chapter in Records in Stone. His 'methodology', might have seemed to him to make sense at the time, but now it looks like what it is: an attempt to unsee a large body of unpalatable evidence for which the discipline of archaeology was entirely unprepared. It was about protecting an academic and cultural narrative, which then, as now, was firmly entrenched. [Records in Stone: Papers in Memory of Alexander Thom, edited by C.L.N. Ruggles, CUP, 1988]

[Readers of this article might be interested in reading Patterns of Thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain, which explores the pre-Pythagorean Pythagoreanism which Thom said was suggested by the evidence. Much of Pythagorean thought was evidently derived from Pythagoras's travels around the ancient Near East, which are documented, and elements of Pythagoreanism might have been a staple ingredient of religious thought from the Neolithic onwards].

Being and Eternity in the Neolithic

For the past three weeks or so I've been writing a paper on aspects of mind during the late Neolithic and the early Bronze Age in Britain, during the period when most of the megalithic circles were built. I wrote a paper in 2016 (Stone Circles, Phenomenology, and the Neolithic Mind) which explored the possibility that we might have enough information from the structures to infer thought and motive of their builders. 

In that article I wrote: 

The main objection of the archaeological community to the acceptance of this view of the circles as sophisticated tools for the observation of the heavens and its movements is two-fold. The first is that there is nothing (beyond what these objects seem to show) which suggests to us that the megalith builders and their contemporary culture was concerned at all with precision. The second is that, even if the circles can be shown to mark certain astronomically precise points, we have no clue at all about why the megalith builders would want to do this. We have no understanding of the function and purpose of such observations, and so we can say virtually nothing about either the purpose of the monuments, or about the culture which gave rise to them. In other words we are no further forward in our understanding.

This two-fold objection is sound, at least from the archaeologists point of view. We have no contemporary description of anything at all from the time and culture of the megalith builders. We have no understanding of their intentions, and no understanding of the function of the circles, and it is unlikely that archaeological interpretation by itself will reveal these things to us. It seems to be gone altogether, and all we are left with is insupportable speculation. Perhaps it would be best to draw a veil over this apparently anomalous aspect of the past, since we can have no understanding of it.

The upshot of the article was not as negative. I argued that:

[in] both Greece and Assyria, the heavens, and what the heavens represented, were of particular importance for cult practice. Plato is clear that the heavens represent an image of divine Being, also spoken of as the ‘Living Animal’, created out of the materials of other gods, by the demiourgos (the ‘Living Animal’ is created by the Demiourgos rather than by God directly, so that there should be not too much of the divine present in the world). He is also quite explicit that the body of the ‘Living Animal’ was created with precision.

In which case astronomy is important for the understanding of divine Being. An infamously unintelligible passage in Plato’s Timaeus talks about the perception of images being possible only because the soul already contains exemplars of these. If the heavens represent an image of divine Being, then all other images are poor imitations, and we should direct our attention principally to the heavens. The soul represents the heavens most closely, and in antiquity was notionally the part of us which is most connected to the divine. It is the soul which recognizes divine knowledge when it is presented to it.

We already know the importance of the soul in Britain in the late 1st millennium BCE, from several sources, including Julius Caesar.  It may be that these ideas were similarly tied together in Britain, and perhaps at a much earlier period. I explored a Mesopotamian parallel:

In ancient Assyria, part of the ritual for creating an image of a god (thereby conferring divinity on the object) involves the image being exposed to the sight of the heavens. As a god, it needs to have perception of Being, of which it is an aspect. We have this ritual from the reign of Esarhaddon (7th century BCE), who was the predecessor of Ashurbanipal, one of the last Assyrian kings, and the owner of the famous palace library, much of which is now located in the British Museum.

So the point is the establishment of contact - even an identity with - what is divine. It is possible to see this concern with connecting Heaven and Earth as a parallel to what Plato describes more abstractly in his Republic. I wrote:

...Plato argues that the philosopher should ascend to the idea of the Good, which is another way of referencing the idea of transcendent Being, by a series of connected images, without specifying what those images might be. These images, as imperfect representations of Being, are subject to change. Matters are complicated by the fact that the things which are imaged are also subject to change. Thus both subjective impression and objective reality are subject to change and uncertainty.

So the process is problematic, and complex. To some extent it is a matter of conjecture, as well as knowledge.

A key characteristic of ancient religion was that it entertained conjecture regarding knowledge of the gods. Plato refers to this in his discussion of the divided line in The Republic. We cannot know Being itself directly. We cannot know the lesser gods directly either, but we can understand some of the characteristics of these gods, though full knowledge is necessarily beyond our understanding. We can approach some limited understanding of Being via the images and descriptions of the lesser gods however, which is one reason why they were deemed to have some kind of reality.

In which case knowledge of divine things is a journey through the problematic and sometimes paradoxical aspects of reality as it presents itself to us. You need a priesthood for dealing with that. They were dealing with ontological questions, and did the best they could within the limitations of human knowledge.

This limited set of characteristics and properties emerges from thorough and precise discussion of the nature of ontology (Being), as the focus of human conjecture. This is quite clear in both Plato and also in what we know of the teachings of Pythagoras. The paradox of knowledge is the consequence of the idea that all knowledge is present in the divine, and that we only have knowledge because we have a soul. In other words, we can have knowledge as the result of the divine having a presence in us already.

I suggested that Plato, rather than exploring a pattern of ideas created in the Academy in Athens, was in fact transmitting and refurbishing some

...key aspects of a Bronze Age philosophy, which has its roots in the Neolithic in both Europe and the near East. The transcendental doctrine which is enshrined in his work is actually in plain sight to anyone who can follow his reasoning that all the merely likely stories are just that: no more than likely. The single argument which is not a mere likelihood, is counterintuitive, paradoxical, and beyond common sense. And it remains a matter of conjecture. This argument about the nature of the world used to be the apex of learning and knowledge. Reality is transcendental, and neither subjective or objective. Nothing lay beyond this fundamental understanding of the world.

If this argument is correct, then we can know what Neolithic man was up to, and in some detail. In short, for the intellectually sophisticated in the Neolithic period, the heavens represented, as for Plato much later, a moving image of eternity. To measure the parameters of this moving image of the divine was to know God, and to have knowledge of divine things.

This represents a radical departure in our understanding of the development and the history of human thought. We know that the heavens were important in the neolithic and the early Bronze Age in Britain, and if that importance stemmed from an understanding that the heavens represented a moving image of eternity, then the people who built the megalithic circles had a concept of Being, and of a reality which transcended most human experience. Such an idea is the most abstract of all. It transcends all images of what is real. It implies a culture built on responses to questions about the nature of reality, and many conjectures about what can be known.

The Pythagoreanism which the surveyor of many of the megalithic sites in Britain, Alexander Thom, detected in his findings, was very basic in nature, and based on statistical analysis of his data, and the geometrical construction which could be found in the monuments. Which means the observance of the importance of the Pythagorean right angled triangle, and the concern with whole numbers.  Both of these were of importance to the later Pythagoreans, as we know. A further clue was the statements by a number of ancient authors to the effect that the religious belief of the Britons in the late 1st millennium BCE was akin to Pythagoreanism.

But there is very little detail about what Pythagoreanism in Britain might have entailed, if the identification is correct. This is rather surprising, since we have a great deal of information about Pythagoras and Pythagorean doctrine available to us from sources other than Julius Caesar, and the authors whose opinions have survived as a result of being quoted by Eusebius (though often inconsistent, and sometimes quite obscure in meaning). We have a biography of Pythagoras from both the neoplatonist Iamblichus, and also from Porphyry. We also have an extensive and rather good account from the author of the Lives of the Philosophers, Diogenes Laertius. Plus we have the works of Plato, who is constantly referencing the doctrines of the Pythagoreans.

So this new paper looks at the material we have concerning Pythagoras, in order to know a fuller range of what Pythagoreanism implied in the late sixth century BCE, both in Italy and in Greece. As it turns out, certain key ideas in Pythagoreanism arise as the logical consequence of the kind of discussions which they entertained, mainly concerning number, mathematics and geometry. And these key ideas shape their ideas about religion, divinity, the nature of reality, of Being, and of Eternity.

The paper concludes with the suggestion that, if  key religious ideas emerge in the Pythagoreanism of the 1st millennium BCE, in the course of logical argument concerning number, mathematics and geometry, then we should entertain the notion that parallel discussions may have taken place in the late Neolithic and the early British Bronze Age, on account of their own evident concern with number, mathematics and geometry.

***

The title of the paper is: 

Patterns of thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain

Abstract: Pythagorean elements detected in megalith circles in ancient Britain have no easy explanation, and precede 1^st millennium Pythagoreanism by an extraordinary period of time. This paper explores the idea that there is a connection between some core Pythagorean mathematical and geometrical concerns, and ideas of divinity and eternity.  On the basis of a close examination of Pythagorean ideas in the 1^st millennium, for which we have extensive documentation, it is suggested that this connection is based on a series of logical inferences. It is therefore possible that similar conclusions were arrived at in the Late Neolithic.

Key words: Megalith, Pythagoras, Philosophy, Religion, Mathematics

Paper sections are:

1 The Longevity of Ideas

2 Pythagoreanism in 1^st Millennium Britain

3.The Principal Sources for Pythagoreanism

4 The Core of Pythagorean Doctrine 

5 Diogenes Laertius on Pythagoreanism

6 Pythagorean Thought in Italy

7 The Existence of Irrational Numbers

8 Religious Aspects of Pythagoreanism

9 The Pattern of Eternity

10  Pythagorean Syncretism

11. Transcendentalism in Late Neolithic and early Bronze Age Britain

12 Walking back the Insight into Ancient Mind

13 Pythagoreanism and the Deep

TY, December 10, 2017.

The paper was reviewed a short time ago, and rejected for publication in Time and Mind (for reasons I understand, but disagree with). Thanks to Paul Devereux, who thought it was worth the shot. Rather than waste a lot of time looking at the very few options available for publishing this kind of article in a scholarly journal, I've opted to make it available here, at: Patterns of Thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain.

TY, March 8, 2018.

I changed the name of this post to 'Thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain' on January 26 2018, in order to avoid confusion with the actual paper intended for journal publication. The title was changed again, to 'Being and Eternity in the Neolithic', on May 6 2019, while the foregoing text was being edited for inclusion in Mirrors of the Divine, along with 'Patterns of Thought in Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain',

TY May 6, 2019.