An Appetite for Knowledge

I have argued elsewhere that ideas of Being, of the nature of reality, and the divine, were once approached  in terms of conjectures about the reality (or otherwise) of the one and the many. These conjectures 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 is real, 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.

The anthropologist and classicist 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 about the nature of Being  remained entirely undiscussed by Frazer.  But then he argued that questions concerning Being were entirely barren, since nothing could be predicated of Being.*1

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 articulate 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 the practice of philosophy was of a great age – perhaps contemporary with the arrival of peoples from Egypt, who settled in the Peloponnese, and also in Crete. He also presented Solon in discussion with Egyptian priests in the pages of the Timaeus, who found the Greeks to be very young, and not conversant with knowledge ‘hoary with age’.  

Aristotle 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 B.C.E.*2  Plato references details of this doctrine, without connecting it explicitly to Pythagoras.*3 Aspects of that doctrine can be found elsewhere in the pages of Herodotus (concerning Solon),*4  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. *5

The former Priest of Bel at Babylon, Berossus, moved to Athens, and wrote about Babylonian history and philosophy, describing their system of knowledge as based on the idea of an initial plenum (which is a philosophical concept) using the image of a sage emerging daily from beneath the sea (symbolising primal fulness and abundance), granting knowledge to man about the sciences, agriculture, and the practical arts. *6 He also gave information about the Babylonian New Year festival (Enuma Elish), the liturgy for which contained accounts of two creations: the first irrational, and the second one, rational, and which was given its rational character by the chief of the Babylonian gods.*7  Berossus' book was the Babyloniaka, unfortunately now lost. But the christian writer Eusebius had access to it as late as the early fourth century C.E, and quoted a number of passages from it which survive in his writings. Recovered Mesopotamian texts, including tablets containing the Enuma Elish liturgy, generally confirm the accuracy of Berossus. 

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. The culture of the modern west rests on this idea.Why in Greece? The idea of the ‘Greek genius’ won’t cut the mustard any more, at least by itself, but I have heard the phrase uttered 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 *8 But as Bernal pointed out in the first volume of his Black Athena, the critical revision begun in the enlightenment was wholesale, and created an alternative representation of the origins of European civilisation.

That was the agenda. To reinterpret the past, and in terms of a rational and enlightened understanding of the world. Hence, the philosophe Denis Diderot wrote not just about ideas and philosophy in his Encyclopédie, 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 Encyclopédie. 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.

I wrote in the article ‘Logical Modality in Classical Athens’ that 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 modern academic 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  talks about this other logical modality several times, 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.*9

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 up to the middle of the first millennium B.C.E, and beyond.  The doctrine underpins the understanding of the divine as something which can be both transcendent, and immanent, and thus be present in existence. *10 *11 It also points to a rather strange conclusion about the nature of the reality in which we live and think.*12

It might be imagined therefore that this doctrine would be the subject of a great deal of scholarship. In fact there is very little on the subject. The dialogues in which the doctrine appears have been written about endlessly over the last two centuries, but, though Plato’s discussion is noted, the fact that his discussion is based on an alternate 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 often presented by Plato – as mathematical and geometrical metaphors for how things might possess some form of congruence with each other.

I've argued elsewhere that there is, in general, very little appetite for attempting to understand Plato in his own terms.*13  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 records as being demolished in his Parmenides and in the Sophist. When Plato discusses the soul (in the Timaeus), it turns out that it is something which has the property of being connected with the Form of the Good, and so he argues that 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 by looking to the one true thing.*14 

Deriving all knowledge from the Form of the Good is also seen as a bafflingly impenetrable notion to the modern mind, since Plato 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 lifeless 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 frame. It is their minds, and the categories of their own understanding which create the problem, not the obscurity of Plato’s ideas.

One of the principal reasons we cannot easily understand Plato is down to the loss of an understanding of that alternative logical modality. That understanding needs to be restored, along with 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 and Magic: Approaches and Theories, which is a survey of modern anthropological thought. *15 The author is Graham Cunningham, a specialist in the ancient Near East and the relevant languages. Anthropology is a relatively young discipline, though crowded with many points of view. *16 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  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 presumptions in the discipline of anthropology, which have not yet been rooted out. Anthropology as a formal subject 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 can be called into the light of day if you scratch the modern anthropologist in the course of discussion. The fact is that a dangerous 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’).*17

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. *18 

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 bring to the party, 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 brought the same thing to the party, as would some of the early Gnostic writers. The Platonists of the Italian and English Renaissances also 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 much of human culture in terms of a fundamental conceptual error about the way reality works, and with a complete disregard for the way the human mind was once understood to engage with that reality.

It is assumed by the moderns (in the west, at least) that philosophy is a cultural phenomenon which, in historical terms, follows on from religious thought, and does not precede it. We are sure of this because we are sure we know what religion is, and what philosophy is. We think that religion enshrines a form of knowledge about the world and the universe which is less than rational, and that the devotees of religion are often credulous. Religious thought is often transfixed by the numinous and the invisible, and its responses to these things are unfathomable to the rational mind. We also think religion, to a great extent, developed in response to the ideological needs of social groups, sometimes in conflict with other social groups, which can give very distinctive structures to the myths and rituals which become part of the bedrock of the public show of these religions.We believe this (admittedly oversimplified) picture to be a correct interpretation of what religion is. Modern religion differs from ancient religion only in details.

Whereas philosophy is about a critical and rational understanding of the world and how it presents itself to us. Religion is cast as an un-philosophical and irrational understanding of that reality. The development of philosophy represents progress.

These notions are subject to nuance of course, but this is the core of the enlightenment idea of what these things are.

We assume that religion, as it presents itself to us in the form of the relatively young Abrahamic religions, is not fundamentally different in nature to other religions, either elsewhere now, or in the distant past. We make such an assumption, because there is nothing in our understanding of other religions which suggests to us, at least not with any clarity, that any other process is active in the creation and operation of religion. The dynamics are the same, and the functions are the same.

Graham Cunningham’s postscript makes it clear that religion is generally understood by anthropologists to be a relic of an earlier time where rational thought was absent. Certainly in terms of what we would recognise. Somehow religion is still with us, because large parts of the human race believe in the importance and efficacy of belief in the divine: that belief in the reality of the divine is something which is essential to the religious life, and the religious understanding of reality. *19

Yet this is not what ancient writers tell us. They tell a different story, as I’ve suggested, and one which is not represented by any current anthropological approach. That different story is that religion in the ancient world was not about belief, but concerned both knowledge and conjecture about the nature of the divine; and about the nature of reality itself.*20

I prefer to write about ancient religion in terms of divine cult. I distinguish the two for clarity - religion is often understood in the modern world in terms of sociological and ideological functions. And indeed religion has these functions: it often provides social cohesion, ideology, and useful rules of social behaviour. But to attempt to explain the core of divine cult in such terms is presumptive. If the core of a divine cult involves rational conjecture about the nature of reality itself, we will not easily find this out, even if the evidence is screaming this at us. In antiquity the ritual practice of divine cult was often a private affair, rather than a public one, which implies an important division between the performative function of ritual, and the outward show. Ritual and observance were the important things. The public show might echo the thought behind the cult in some respects, and offer clues to its significance and nature, but it is not the cult itself. *21

The association of knowledge with the core divine cult (and, consequently, a confirmation of the  connection of the cult with the divine itself), gave the rituals of ancient religion (both private and public) their efficacy, and patterned their meaning. But this did not involve belief.  Belief is something which is not supported by credible argument, or is a step beyond the limits of an rational argument.  That is not what was involved in ancient discussion of questions concerning the divine. Can you have knowledge without rational modes of thought? And what did the ancient writers mean by knowledge of the divine, and by equating knowledge with the divine? Clearly, it is not possible to have actual knowledge of something without rational modes of thought. But what rational thought is, is another one of those things which we are quite clear about in modern times, even if the evidence points to a different conclusion, and exists in teeming quantities.

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 1. Frazer wrote this in his prize essay of 1879 on the 'Growth and Development of Plato's Ideal Theory'. Published finally in 1930. I'd found this essay after noticing that there were odd features in the structure of The Golden Bough. I wrote about this in J. G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being (2016), and also in the more compact essay 'Frazer and the Association of Ideas', published in Understanding Ancient Thought (2017).
2. In his 'Life of Pythagoras' Porphyry tells us that Pythagoras travelled extensively around the Near East and Egypt in the service of Cyrus. Discussed in 'Pythagoreanism, the Divine, and the Nature of Eternity'.
 3. In the Timaeus. Discussed in 'The Platonic Theory of Being' (full text with notes). Originally published in The Sacred History of Being (2015).
4. Discussed in 'Solon in the Court of Croesus' (extract). The full text is a chapter in The Sacred History of Being (2015).
5. Discussed in 'Working Wonders: Hephaestus and the Armour of Achilles'. A retitled chapter from The Sacred History of Being (2015), originally titled  'Being in Homer'.
 6. Discussed in 'Oannes and the Instruction of Mankind', which is one of the appendices to The Sacred History of Being (2015).
7 Discussed in 'The Babylonian Creation': an extract from the chapter 'Creation' in The Sacred History of Being (2015).
 8. Modern scholars are well aware of this. Ancient historians arranged information, but also questioned it. The Assyrians seemed to have a similar attitude to their materials - the chronicles associated with Ashurbanipal's reign exist in more than one version, with events recorded in a different order.
 9. Discussed in 'Logical Modality in Classical Athens' which is a chapter in Understanding Ancient Thought (2017).
10. Consequently this ought to be a matter of interest to Christian theologians, owing to the importance of the idea of the incarnation of the divine in the Gospels. For centuries the incarnation has been presented as a mystery (to both believers and theologians), without any kind of theoretical basis. But the theoretical basis is present in ancient literature, in various places. It even surfaces in a text in the Nag Hammadi documents.
 11. The logical basis of the incarnation is discussed in 'The Keys of the Kingdom: Binding and Loosing in Heaven and Earth', a chapter from Echoes of Eternity (2020).
12. Discussed in 'The Transcendental understanding of Reality', and in 'The Greek Ontological Model in the 1st Millennium B.C.E.'  from Echoes of Eternity (2020).
13.  'The Sweet Song of Swans'. The full text of this chapter, which concerns (among other things) the modern creation of the Greeks as the originators of philosophy, was published in the The Sacred History of Being (2015).
 14. In the chapter 'Plato's Theory of Vision', from The Sacred History of Being (2015). This extract concerns the discussion of the cosmos as “a perceptible God made in the image of the Intelligible.”
 15. Cunningham, Graham, Religion & Magic: Approaches & Theories, Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
 16. That there are so many conflicting views might suggest that perhaps few, or even none of the approaches are correct, but are simply the product of the failure to grasp the sophistication of ancient thought.

17. Discussed in 'Running Folklore to the Death', an extract from section 13 of J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being (2016).
18. I've discussed Eriksen and Nielsens' A History of Anthropology (2001) in the chapter 'Before Anthropology', which book illustrates that modern anthropology is sometimes about how things ought to be, rather than a profound engagement with the evidence. They do however give a useful account of what came before Hegel. Published in Man and the Divine (2018).
 19  We tend to inject our presumptions about the past onto the evidence, as if common sense is a servicable tool in understanding it. It takes more than that. Discussed in 'Beyond the Religious Impulse'. Published as a chapter in Understanding Ancient Thought (2017). See also 'Distinguishing Belief and Faith', in Man and the Divine (2018).
20 A close look at Assyrian divination reports makes it clear that there was nothing mystical or vague about Assyrian queries about the future. The queries to the Sungod (Shamash) were expected to provide accurate information in response. This is because the diviners and scholars formulating the questions understood the universe to be rooted in a plenum. In which case,  all things which might be, already exist in the plenum. The diviners were therefore asking the Sungod for information which was available to the god. Twenty divinatory queries are available on the page 'Who will Appear before the City?' The concept of the plenum and its connection with the Mesopotamian story of the creation is discussed in the chapter: 'The Idea of the Plenum in Babylon'; further discussion of  the concept can be found in  'Pleroma, Cosmos, and Physical Existence', both from Understanding Ancient Thought (2017).

21. Discussed in 'Shar Kishati and the Cult of Eternity', published in Understanding Ancient Thought (2017).

Draft version, October 29, 2019. Final version, All Hallows Eve, 2019. Updated 11 January 2020. TY. 

Today's favourite posts on the blog (August 28, 2016)

Marx and Historicism 22 Apr 2015	12
The Babylonian Mis Pi Ritual 25 Nov 2015	12
Locke, Newton, and the Rejection of Reality 3 Jun 2015	11
Creation 25 Nov 2015	10
Divination in Antiquity 3 May 2015	10
The Irrationality of Atheism 1 Aug 2016	9
The Idea of the Plenum in Babylon 11 Mar 2016, 3 comments	8
Sameness and Difference in Plato 14 Jun 2016	7
Language and Abstraction in Egypt and Greece 23 Apr 2015, 2 comments	6
A Saussurian Approach to Babylonian Epistemology 21 May 2016	6

A Saussurian Approach to Babylonian Epistemology

'Philosophy Before the Greeks: The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia' - Marc Van De Mieroop. Princeton University Press, October 2015. 

Marc Van De Mieroop’s book is an exploration of how the Babylonians understood and processed their reality in the 1^st and 2^nd millennia BCE, long before the Greeks developed the apparatus of logical thought which we now associate with philosophy in the 5^th century BCE.  Van De Mieroop chooses to call the Babylonian understanding of reality, which he describes in detail, ‘philosophy’. However what he is describing is, as he describes it, so far removed from what is understood in the west as philosophy, that it may be perplexing for the reader looking for the wider context of the development of the discipline in antiquity. It does not take Greek philosophy as its starting point, which might have seemed to be the obvious starting point. Instead, it proceeds with a phenomenological analysis of a variety of scribal processes, found in legal, omen and literary texts. The subtitle of the book is ‘The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia’, so it will seem to someone picking up the book that we must be in cultural and intellectual territory familiar to us. We are not.

The book is divided into five parts and nine chapters. The first part is called ‘An Essay in Babylonian Epistemology’ and has one chapter, ‘At the Time of Creation’. This draws on the Enuma Elish (when on high), which is the liturgy of the Babylonian New Year Festival. Using this document, Van De Mieroop establishes his starting point, and the approach to the subject which he is going to take. Which is to argue that for the Babylonian scholar the text (and the process by which texts were created) was primary.

Part II, ‘The Order of Things’ (Les Mots et les Choses) has two chapters – the first gives a short history of the importance of the word lists in Babylonia; the second (chapter 3) is called ‘Constructing Reality’.

Part III ‘The Writing of the Gods’ has two chapters: ‘Omen Lists in Babylonian Culture’, and the second: ‘The Structure of Knowledge of the Universe’. This part of the book explores the idea that the Babylonians treated omens not just as divinations of the mind of the gods, but as encounters with a species of divine writing, which scribes and diviners could read and understand. This is a valuable part of the book, which ties together both the processes involved in scribal understanding of omens, and their understanding of the significance of the texts they produced in response to the omens.

Part IV is titled ‘The Word of the Law’, and the first of its two chapters look at the ancient law codes from the perspective of his argument. This chapter does illustrate clearly that the same kind of processes found underlying the construction of the literary and omen texts, also lie beneath the construction of the legal texts. The seventh chapter is ‘The Philosopher King’. It might be imagined that this chapter might contain some kind of comparison with Plato’s notion of the importance of knowledge to the Philosopher King, and how that knowledge might be acquired. Plato’s concept of the Philosopher King is mentioned briefly, but only to dismiss the idea that Plato was in the same cultural territory as the Babylonians, since Plato deprecated writing.

Part V, ‘A Babylonian Epistemology’ also has two chapters. The first gives an account of his understanding of Babylonian epistemology over historical time, from the middle of the 2^nd millennium BCE onwards, until the cuneiform script ceased to be used or understood in the early years of the common era. The final chapter is titled: ‘The Conceptual Autonomy of Babylonian Epistemology’ and sums up Van De Mieroop’s argument that, for the Babylonians the text, and more importantly, the cuneiform script, was primary, and that processes by which the texts were created, whether literary, legal, ominous, or lexical lists, did not derive their importance from reference to things outside the texts and the script. The Babylonian construction of reality existed within the texts, and was generated by the process of writing.

Van De Mieroop therefore is not seeking to establish the philosophical nature of Babylonian thought by means of a comparison of Babylon literary, legal and divination texts and their contents, with similar documents from Greece, where these exist. In fact he does not engage in significant comparison with the intellectual output of Greece at all. ‘Philosophy before the Greeks’ is therefore a title which means, in the context of this study, something quite different to what it seems to mean. 

It is also the case that he does not attempt to define what philosophy is directly within the Babylonian context, but instead explores the concept through numerous examples, revealing a number of structuralist procedures employed by the scribes, and allows the logic and the consistency of scribal activity to emerge from these examples. We learn a lot about these processes, including instances where the processes contradict both human experience, and physical possibility. His conclusion from these is that they show that whatever meaning the resulting texts had was considered to reside in the texts, and so physical reality and possibility was not seen by Babylonian scholars as a legitimate constraint on the construction of these texts. 

***

"Philosophy before the Greeks is a sophisticated, erudite, strikingly original, well-argued, and richly documented study that will stand alone in ancient Mesopotamian studies." - Benjamin Foster, Yale University. That is a barbed accolade.

The first chapter of the book is available from Princeton University Press, at:

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s10616.pdf

[See also my first short post about this book, in December 2015, at:

http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/van-de-mieroop-m-philosophy-before.html]

The Idea of Knowledge in the Ancient World

Ten articles on the idea of knowledge as it was understood in the ancient world, as they were tweeted:

Nick Zacharewicz @NickSCZach (Jan 9, 2017)

"A great source if you're wondering how ancient peoples thought."

Divination in Antiquity (and the sense it made) #Telos #Divination #Sacrifce #immanence https://t.co/leDJpoajDl pic.twitter.com/uTdNItBrGP

To know about important things in the ancient world it was understood you needed to have insight into the mind of God. The process of gaining that insight involved the technique of divination, and the paying of due honour in the form of sacrifice.

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'Whose right is it to make Gods?' The Idea of Being in Israel #Assyria #Israel #gods #images #idolatry #divinity https://t.co/WYnVhopYbt pic.twitter.com/1exc8TUhG7

How can man make gods, and know the will of the gods? This was a live question in the middle of the 1st millennium BCE, and it is still a problematic notion. It is a main focus of my book The Sacred History of Being, and this is a chapter from it.

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The Fifty Names of Marduk https://t.co/KOJyRtPEOv #An #Babylon #EnumaElish #Marduk #Mesopotamia #NewYearFestival pic.twitter.com/VQJsvB7jha 

How the gods were characterised in the New Year Festival liturgy in Babylon. The pantheon reflects knowledge of the Divine. A chapter extract from The Sacred History of Being.

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A Metaphysic beneath Theology? 'The Divine and the Limit' https://t.co/ofHvuTuQD6 #Janus #liminality pic.twitter.com/ba7T3miLvL

The Divine and its aspects does not have to be represented in the form of images, but can be represented in terms of abstract ideas (the end, the limit, the completed, etc).

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The Esoteric Conception of Divinity in the Ancient World https://t.co/zA6vAWRTEX

 #Assyria #Limit #Reality pic.twitter.com/WKGMVKDvbZ

How knowledge of the Divine was understood and represented in ancient Assyria (this extract points to the whole article which appeared in the Ritman Library Newsletter for December 2015. The article is freely available).

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Understanding Ancient Religion: Cultural Parallels, and False Narratives https://t.co/w2fVnj1S9t #Hindu #Rome #Janus #Religio #Temple

Is ancient religion in general about knowledge and observance, rather than belief? If the history of the meaning of the term 'religio' is explored, our modern understanding of it falls apart.

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Mesopotamian Polytheism, and the cult of Monotheism: Knowledge and Belief in Israel  https://t.co/nQMHZ1BQAt #Israel #Mesopotamia #Politics

It is possible to read the emergence of monotheism in Israel as a prolonged theological and philosophical controversy, in which the nature of a deity without form, colour, and shape, similar in nature to ‘the one thing’ that we should look to, as referenced by Plato, is debated.

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Post-Enlightenment Plato, and That Which Cannot Move. #Plato #Gottingen #Reality #Philosophy #Universe #gods https://t.co/UUhCycddjX

How we have misunderstood the real history and function of philosophy, which had its origins in the 'cultus deorum', and which was based on the idea that man should strive for an understanding of the Divine. Post enlightenment philosophy is about an understanding of the world apart from knowledge of the Divine.  Which is why the ancient world is so hard for us to understand.

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How Egypt lost Philosophy - in 'The Sweet Song of Swans' https://t.co/LdXfVSRIgG #AncientEgypt #Gottingen #Philosophy #Enlightenment

Egypt used to be regarded as the home of philosophy and the knowledge of Divine things. Not any more. Extracted from the chapter 'The Sweet Song of Swans' in The Sacred History of Being, published in November 2015. 

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Logic, Sophistry and the Esoteric in Ancient Education #Aristotle #Plato #Logic #Sophistry #Esoteric #Philosophy https://t.co/htJH3jMn0z

Truth and fiction in the education of the young. Finding those who could think for themselves.

TY, May 5, 2016

Van De Mieroop, M.: Philosophy before the Greeks: The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia. (eBook and Hardcover)

How interesting that this book should show up almost at the same moment (within days!) as The Sacred History of Being! The argument isn't the same, and focuses on Babylonia. But both works see the development of philosophy by the Greeks as the result of the collapse of the 'Cosmopolitan System' in Mesopotamia in the 1st Millennium B. C. E.  The Sacred History of Being focusses on intellectual life in Assyria, Israel, and in Greece.



Van De Mieroop has cottoned on to the importance of the use of lists in Mesopotamia, which is one of the most important ways of entering the Babylonian scholarly mindset. The chapter list suggests he has not explored the idea of divinity in Mesopotamia in any depth.



Van De Mieroop, M.: Philosophy before the Greeks: The Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Babylonia. (eBook and Hardcover)

The cover blurb for the book says:

"There is a growing recognition that philosophy isn’t unique to the West, that it didn’t begin only with the classical Greeks, and that Greek philosophy was influenced by Near Eastern traditions. Yet even today there is a widespread assumption that what came before the Greeks was "before philosophy." In Philosophy before the Greeks, Marc Van De Mieroop, an acclaimed historian of the ancient Near East, presents a groundbreaking argument that, for three millennia before the Greeks, one Near Eastern people had a rich and sophisticated tradition of philosophy fully worthy of the name.

In the first century BC, the Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily praised the Babylonians for their devotion to philosophy. Showing the justice of Diodorus’s comment, this is the first book to argue that there were Babylonian philosophers and that they studied knowledge systematically using a coherent system of logic rooted in the practices of cuneiform script. Van De Mieroop uncovers Babylonian approaches to knowledge in three areas: the study of language, which in its analysis of the written word formed the basis of all logic; the art of divination, which interpreted communications between gods and humans; and the rules of law, which confirmed that royal justice was founded on truth.

The result is an innovative intellectual history of the ancient Near Eastern world during the many centuries in which Babylonian philosophers inspired scholars throughout the region—until the first millennium BC, when the breakdown of this cosmopolitan system enabled others, including the Greeks, to develop alternative methods of philosophical reasoning."

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[See also my analytical review of Van De Mieroop's book in the blogpost: 'A Saussurian Approach to Babylonian Epistemology', published May 21, 2015 at:

http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/a-saussurian-approach-to-babylonian.html]

Divination in Antiquity

Much sacred practice in the ancient world can be understood as attempts either to understand the mind of the divine (to ‘divine’ it), or to understand more fully the nature and state of the mundane world through access to the gods, or, to have a more intimate communion with the divine through through its presence, becoming one with it, or its actual immanence*[1]. Thus a considerable amount of effort went into establishing something akin to windows into the soul of the world.

Divination falls into two principal categories: by omen, and by oracle. The former is less formal, and the insight may be unsolicited. Oracular divination is a formal process. Again the basic principle of both approaches is that reality lies beyond the world of appearance, and is the place where the gods reside,  their representations on earth notwithstanding. Here also is real knowledge and understanding, perfect in all respects. Gaining access to this realm, even for a short time and in a limited way, would enable real wisdom to be had here on earth*[2].

One of the characteristics of conceiving the world in teleological terms, with an ultimate reality at its apex, is that all facts in the mundane world have value – nothing is devoid of meaning. Meanings may be trivial and of little importance, but everything is conceivably significant, if only the meaning can be deduced and put into its proper context.*[3]

Thus, we find a whole range of beliefs and practices surrounding the idea that the intent and purpose of the divine can be found in the world of everyday reality. The cleidon (literally ‘the key') was a Greek idea, that meaning might be heard in words spoken by a passerby, with no connection and no interest in the preoccupations of the person who overhears. The scattering of bones (using objects belonging to the dead) might reveal in the patterns in which they fall something of the intentions of the divine. Divination or augury by birds might also reveal important things about the world and its masters, and their intentions. These things might also foretell the future.

In Rome this interest in mundane things which might have some bearing on the mind of the gods or the future led the priests to maintain whitened boards, maintained in a public place, which contained notable information, some of which has been transmitted to us by the historian Livy. This might include information such as monstrous births, strange behaviour by fauna, grain prices, notices of earthquakes and floods, and so on. In Babylonia records were kept of commodity prices, also for divinatory purposes.

Almost anything could be conceived as a way to understand the intentions of the divine. Ultimately the motions and relations of the planets and stars became part of this matrix of divinatory practice. We have records from Assyria which make it clear that the king, as representative of Ashur, king of the gods, who embraced the other gods, was concerned to express in the royal court, forms of behaviour consistent with the aspects of planetary behaviour.*[4]. The Assyrians also divined using the shadow of the earth on the moon. Each of the quarters of the moon held a geographic significance for the Assyrians, so that the way the shadow moved across the moon (not always the same, due to the inclination of the orbit of the moon to the plane of the ecliptic, plus the effect of various nutational movements) defined the meaning for the state of Assyria.*[5]

If we examine the Oracle of Delphi and the way it functioned, we can see that it fits within the same teleological model of the world. The questioner entered the oracle and was confronted by the Pythia, the priestess who delivered the responses, and an interpreter. The Pythia was seated on a tripod which sat above a rift in the earth from which gases emanated naturally. These were credited with being intoxicating, and an aid to the trance state in which the Pythia delivered her responses to questions. Trance by definition means that the individual is not acting in a normal way. The understanding of the questioner would be that the trancebound Pythia in some way possessed by the gods, who spoke through her.

The speech of the Pythia was wholly unintelligible to the inquirer, as might be expected by one who is conducting the speech of the gods.*[6] Hence the need for the interpreter. The questions were in fact submitted to the oracle in advance, so there was time to prepare an intelligent and suitably ambiguous response to the inquiry. But the form of the engagement between the inquirer and the diviner was a connection with the gods. The interpreter divined the meaning of the Pythia, who divined the meaning of the gods.*[7]

Again the same model underpins oracular divination as other forms of divination: it is possible for us to have contact and communication with the gods because there is something in us, for the majority of men and women mostly latent and not within our consciousness, which makes this communication possible. This is a consequence of the fact that we can have properties in common with the ground of Being, the home of the divine, such as perfection, completion, excellence, virtue, and so on. One would expect that the Pythia might be represented as in some way near at hand to the world of pure Being, through one of its metaphors. And indeed this is the case. The Pythia was always old, but was dressed in the clothes of a young girl. In Egyptian terms this would be understood as indicating her relationship to the horizon of existence, with its double doors of birth and death*[8].

Divination in all parts of the ancient world included that by the investigation of animal entrails. The usual animals for this included sheep, pigs, goats, and sometimes birds. The reasons for the use of these animals in particular are likely due to interesting and suggestive phenomena and properties of their viscera. There has been little interest shown in this level of detail in the practice of divination shown by modern scholars.*[9] To my knowledge I know of only one modern experimental re-examination of the practice. This was conducted by Robert Temple as part of the research for his book ‘Conversations with Eternity', and it is discussed again in his later book ‘Netherworld’. He is conscious that this is strange territory:

‘What was at the bottom of this strange practice? At a casual glance it seems total madness. Were the ancients out of their minds? Who would want to plunge his hands into the steaming innards of a freshly killed animal, pull out some of its organs and study them with intense scrutiny? And more important, what possible connection could this disgusting activity be supposed to have with predicting the future? Was fate to be read in such a bloody place?

There is probably no better way to appreciate the chasm separating the ancient from the modern mind than by exploring this subject.’

Temple thinks there are perfectly sensible answers to be found however, and he is right. He is not looking to frame these answers within the technical language explored in The Sacred History of Being however, though he does argue for the ancient consensus view that aspects of the viscera reflect the world of the divine, in particular the Liver.  He quotes Morris Jastrow to this effect (from his essay 'On the Liver as the Seat of the Soul'):

‘The life or soul, as the seat of life, in the sacrificial animal, is, therefore, the divine element in the animal, and the god in accepting the animal, which is involved in the act of bringing it as an offering to the god, identifies himself with the animal – becomes, as it were, one with it.  The life in the animal is a reflection of his own life, and since the fate of men rests with the gods, if one can succeed in entering into the mind of a god, and thus ascertain what he purposes to do, the key for the solution of the problem as to what the future has in store will have been found. The liver being the center of vitality – the seat of the mind, therefore as well as the emotions – it becomes in the case of the sacrificial animal, either directly identical with the mind of the god who accepts the animal, or, at all events, a mirror in which the god’s mind is reflected; or to use another figure, a watch regulated to be in sympathetic and perfect accord with a second watch. If, therefore, one can read the liver of the sacrificial animal, one enters, as it were, into the workshop of the divine will.’

[Netherworld: Discovering the Oracle of the Dead. 2002. ch 6: Divination by Entrails, p193.]

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[1] Hence the remark by Jesus that ‘the Kingdom of Heaven is within you’.

[2] Socrates argued that we already know many of the things that we think we don’t know, and his educational practice was tailored to show this. I would argue that Socrates reveals by this that he believed that all men have latent access to the divine condition, in that we are all connected with the transcendent reality which is the place of ideal knowledge. The divine is potentially immanent within us. 

[3] I first became acutely aware of the importance of this equation between fact and value in the teleologically-framed universe in class with one of my teachers of philosophy, Len Pinski, with whom I studied Plato’s Republic and the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle in 1988.

[4] This information can be found in Simo Parpola’s doctoral thesis from 1971 Letters from Assyrian Scholars (LAS), and concerns the planet Mars.

[5] Also discussed in Parpola’s LAS. Divination by the shadow of the earth on the face of the moon is also discussed in Michael Roaf’s Cultural Atlas of Assyria.

[6] It is likely to have been gibberish, but we are familiar with glossolalia or ‘speaking in tongues’ in the modern world, among evangelical Christian groups. The human brain has a facility for scrambling known language into something strange and foreign. This would have been the requirement here.

[7] In a similar manner to Moses and Aaron. Moses was in communication with Yahweh, but required an interpreter to translate his utterances into intelligible Hebrew.

[8] The Hebrew god spoke of himself as the ‘First and Last’, which is a poetic way of expressing the idea that the god embraces all things. Yahweh is at the limit of what is. The horizon for us represents the limit of what we can see, though we know that what we can see is not all there is. As a poetic metaphor however, it is perfect. The horizon marks the point where this world turns into something else, which has no dimension and transcends our own. It is interesting to speculate how the nature of the earth (being a sphere), conspires to validate this idea in the case of someone watching a ship reach the horizon, at which point it diminishes and appears to descend into it.

[9] The explanation for this is obvious: to us sacrifice is an irrational practice, which can have no meaning except in terms of how the conduct of sacrifice appeared and functioned within its social and anthropological context. Thus the detail is of very little interest, and nothing of importance will be discovered by looking closely at the phenomena.