What is Philosophy?

The word is made of two Greek components. The meaning of the first is obvious.  Sophos means ‘wise’ and was applied to those who had wisdom (’sophist’). It is comparable to the Latin ‘sapiens’, and both may owe their origins to the Egyptian ‘sp’, which has a range of meanings, including ‘to teach’.

We got both the word ‘philosophy’, and the practice of the discipline, via Pythagoras, who flourished in the sixth century. Plato spent much of his life criticising the philosophers who came after Pythagoras, known to us as the sophists, because they professed wisdom, but often had none. So apparently possessing a love for philosophy didn’t make you a philosopher. At least not in the eyes of Plato. The sophists may have come into being as a result of the success of Pythagoras. They often retooled ideas from the ancient near East, but with very little understanding.

Was there philosophy before Pythagoras? Of course, but the word had no currency. Who was practicing philosophy before the mid-sixth century BCE? Almost everybody. It is what priests used to do and is one of the things the ancient seminary was for (they also taught ritual observance, and administration). Philosophy is not the invention of Plato’s Academy. The Academy is modelled on teaching establishments around the Mediterranean, mostly associated with divine cult. Solomon’s Temple for example, was, among other things, a teaching establishment. The Pharisees and Saducees were the philosophically inclined who were associated with the Temple. They did not always agree on matters, but their role was to debate issues and to engage in rational conjecture.

   

Debate and questioning had always been a feature of civilisation, and we have records of some public debates from as far back as ancient Sumer (third millennium BCE). A close examination of the text corpora of Plato and Aristotle shows that the most consistent feature of their work is a concern with puzzles and paradoxes (the aporia). We have no texts by Pythagoras, but we have an extensive body of writing about his life and ideas stretching from Plato (fourth century BCE) all the way to the late Neoplatonists Porphyry and Iamblichus (third century CE). The same basic pattern of thinking appears in all of these philosophers, which is that the world cannot be known or understood purely in terms of sensory experience. This is because the world is full of puzzles, paradoxes, illusions and falsehoods. The genuine philosopher has to rise above these stumbling blocks in order to have wisdom. Real wisdom is therefore transcendental in nature. And everything is necessarily open to conjecture.

This is one of the principal themes of Plato’s Republic, and many of his remarks in his other works are essentially footnotes to his argument that wisdom is obtained by rising through a sequence of images (aka the ‘Forms’ - the illusory and the false) to the transcendent realm of ‘The Good’ in which all things meet and agree. The Good has no existence in time and space, and no properties to speak of, except that it contains all knowledge which is to be had (the Babylonians had the same idea, and called it the Abzu, or the abyss). The philosopher may then descend from ‘The Good’ via the Forms, and bring back knowledge of the transcendent reality to man. And the solution to many puzzling things.

Of course when Plato talks of ‘The Good’, he is talking of the Divine. But if  he had indicated that he meant God, he would have suffered the same fate as Socrates. He does clearly indicate however, at one overlooked passage in the Sophist, that he is talking of divine things.

Where did Pythagoras get his idea for a school of philosophy, and where did his philosophical ideas come from? Abydenus (a pupil of Aristotle, who appears to have been able to read and translate Akkadian documents written in cuneiform script) is the earliest writer to mention that Pythagoras spent several years as a soldier in the service of the Persian king Cyrus, and travelled with him on his campaigns around the Near East. And that wherever he went, he made a point of visiting establishments devoted to the gods. And asked questions. We know he was in Babylon at one point, and seems to have attended a public lecture there. He also visited religious establishments in Lebanon and upper Syria, in Arabia, and also Egypt (he didn’t get a very respectful response in Egypt, and was passed down the chain of divine establishments to the least important, before he received answers).

So much of Pythagorean doctrine, passed on to Plato, probably via the three books on Pythagorean ideas offered for sale by Philolaus, had its origin in establishments devoted to the gods. Pythagoras was the head of a religious cult as well as a philosopher, which is an important detail which is often ignored. We separate out religion and philosophy, because they are so different from each other now. But this was not the case in the middle of the 1^st millennium BCE, and not the case for the two millennia before that.

This is why it is important to understand the nature of ancient civilizations, since it is nearly impossible now for us to understand what philosophy once was, and what it was understood to be for. It is also nearly impossible for us to understand the nature of religion in the past, since we habitually and uncritically regard it as essentially the same as it is now, just with different personnel, different regalia,  and a plethora of bizarre ritual practices, many of them murderous.

Philosophy is about asking questions, and conjecture about how reality makes sense beyond purely physical descriptions of the world, and beyond mathematical and geometric understandings which don’t actually address the question of what the world is, and how it works. Reality is transcendental. It cannot be understood without addressing its transcendental nature.

Among the fundamental questions which lie at the heart of ancient philosophy are: ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ And: ‘Is reality itself one, or many? If it is one, how is there a multiplicity of things in the world?’ Another question, which is addressed, but not answered by Plato: ‘If this world is not reality itself, is it a copy? And if it is a copy, is reality now two, and therefore not itself?’ The whole agenda of ancient philosophy is addressed by the following question: ‘If this world is not reality itself (and clearly it is not), what is it that we experience, and why?’

Thomas Yaeger, December 30, 2018.

Books by Thomas Yaeger at Bargain Prices in the Smashwords Summer/Winter Sale!

10th Annual Smashwords 2018 Summer/Winter Sale!

July 1, 2018 - July 31, 2018

All three of my books sold through Smashwords will be heavily discounted during the month of July, so this is a chance to pick up a bargain! The catalog for the sale goes live at one minute past midnight on July 1 Pacific time, and expires 11:59pm on July 31. Clicking on the image of each book's cover below will take you through to the Smashwords page for it. Clicking on the title will taken you to a blog page giving further details.

During the sale period the price at Smashwords is the discounted price. Prices at Itunes, Barnes & Noble, Blio, etc. are not discounted.


The Sacred History of Being (2015), is available during the sale period at 75% off the full Smashwords price!

Formerly argued by classical scholars to have been first discussed by the ancient Greeks in the middle of the first millennium B.C.E., the articulate concept of Being can now be traced as far back as the middle of the second millennium, and the state of Assyria. 

The Greeks themselves had several stories about the origins of philosophy, a discipline which essentially deals with abstractions, including that it originated elsewhere, but that is not the received narrative. The consequence of this, is that all historians of ideas, when constructing their accounts of the intellectual development of man before the arrival of Parmenides and Plato, have had to negotiate the Greek invention of philosophy, and the corollary, that articulate discussion of the abstract concept 'Being' didn’t happen before this.

This can now be shown to be a faulty understanding, resulting in many absurdities. The Old Testament has examples where God declares his identity with Being itself (‘I am that I am’, better translated into English as ‘I am that which is,’ and ‘I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God', for example), but these are not regarded by scholars as evidence of a sophisticated discourse around the idea of Being. Instead these statements indicate inchoate ‘notions’ about the nature of god, rather than anything more profound. The statement in Malachi, however, that 'I do not change', is an explicitly philosophical understanding of the nature of God.

Published by the Anshar Press.  

Reader responses to The Sacred History of Being are documented by the Rolling Thunder page.

J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being (2016) Is available during the sale period at a 50% discount from Smashwords.

When he was only twenty-four years old, James Frazer won a Cambridge fellowship with an essay on the development of Plato's theory of the Forms or Ideas (eidos). In this essay he argued that there was no overarching theory of Being in Plato's mind before he embarked on the writing of his dialogues, and that consequently differences in approach and discussion apparent in his work are the result of the development of his thought. He also argued that the very idea of Being is a barren notion, in that nothing can be predicated of Being. As a result Plato made a mistake, effectively conflating an epistemology with an ontology. 

Though the essay was written in 1879, it was not published until 1930, after much of his later work was done. Frazer became famous for his monumental study The Golden Bough, which explored a vast range of ancient and primitive myth and ritual. Here too he found intellectual processes founded in error. What was Frazer's intention in re-interpreting Plato against what Plato himself said, and his wholesale restructuring of ancient thought by reducing much of it to a pattern of error?

In sixteen sections, with prefaratory material and a conclusion. Over 23 thousand words, a preface, select bibliography, and extensive notes. Published Spring 2016 by the Anshar Press.  

A couple of related blog posts explore J.G. Frazer's discussion of Plato, and the implications for the writing of The Golden Bough. The two articles are synthesised together in a third article: Frazer and the Association of Ideas.

Understanding Ancient Thought (2017), is available during the sale period at 75% off the full Smashwords price!

Understanding Ancient Thought is the third in a series of books which examines how we assess evidence from antiquity, and frame models to make sense of that evidence.  

The book consists of eighteen essays, which cover a number of subject areas which are in thrall to what Foucault described as an ‘episteme’. In other words, the way the subject areas are understood within the academy is in terms of what our cultural models, language and assumptions will allow us to understand. The actual evidence may suggest an alternative view, but it is not possible to see it, or to think it. At least until the paradigmatic frame shifts to another ‘episteme’.  

The main thrust of the book is that two hundred years of modern scholarship concerning the past has, for the most part, assembled a fictive and tendentious version of the ancient world. 51 thousand words. Published by the Anshar Press, 

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Thomas Yaegers next book, Man and the Divine: New light on Man's Ancient Engagement with God and the History of Thought, is expected to be available in August, at full price, shortly after the Smashwords sale concludes. Published by the Anshar Press. ISBN 9780463665473. It is now available to pre-order at Smashwords https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/872542. Publication date August 12, 2018.

Many of the essays deal with the question of esoteric knowledge in antiquity, often from slightly different angles. Essays include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Origins of Transcendentalism in Ancient Religion (forthcoming, 2020)

This is a short book about a very large subject – the transcendentalism which is present in ancient religions, located to the west of India. 

Normally it is assumed that there is very little in the way of transcendentalist thought associated with these ancient religions, and that the evidence we are looking at is mainly built out of concrete imagery, fanciful myth, poetry, irrational associations, all of which are in the service of religion and the state. In other words, religion serves a series of social and ideological functions, and it is to those functions that we should look for the explanation of the cultural remains, rather than the minds of the ancients themselves.

Is this actually so? Or are we the victims of an enlightenment agenda which sought to remake the history of religion and religious thought in terms of a mockery of reason?

That is one of the arguments of this book – that we have been sold short by enlightenment presumptions and certainties, and that what we think we know and understand about ancient religion is so far from its real basis that, for the most part, it is nearly impossible for modern scholars to make intelligible sense of it.

This book is short, not because the questions it addresses are simple, and have easy answers. It is short because I have written four other books before this one, and, to a significant extent, it references argument and discussion which can be found in those books. It was not possible to write a short and credible introduction to an understanding of the transcendentalism which can be found in ancient religions, without first covering an enormous amount of ground.

Scholars must decide for themselves if the argument of this book is soundly based.  The problem for scholars  is that they live and work within what Michel Foucault called an ‘episteme’. This is a model of reality dependent on many presumptions. Not only does the episteme shape discussion, it controls what can actually be discussed, or even be seen by those within it. Most scholars would have difficulty in recognising the epistemic limitations of their disciplines if the suggestion was put to them that such limitations exist. But if you can accept the broad thrust of the case this book is making, you are already halfway out of the scholarly episteme.

Preface
On Ancient Religion
Parallels and Discontinuity between Contemporary and Ancient Religions
The definition of Transcendentalism in Religion

The Origin of the Transcendentalist Perspective 

The Nature of Reality 

Contradiction and Paradox 

Transcendence and Immanence 

Detecting the Presence of Transcendentalist Thought 

The Future of our Understanding of the Past 

Notes

Thomas Yaeger, March 25, 2018.

The Making and Renewal of the Gods in Ancient Assyria

A key chapter from The Sacred History of Being, published in November 2015. This chapter will be quite perplexing for readers who imagine that the important aspects of ancient religious practice, its preoccupations and purposes, are essentially the same as those which we are accustomed to in the later Abrahamic religions. Modern religion in fact bears very little relation to ancient religion, except in terms of some generalised concepts and vestigial remains. 

As far as the ancient Mesopotamian religious elite was concerned, it was within their power to both create divine images, and to set them up in Heaven. Strange? It is to us. But we don't make this conception unimportant by refusing to address what the evidence tells us. This chapter gives an indication of the extensiveness and detail in the evidence which has emerged from the ground over the past 150 years or so. 

The evidence for this strikingly different understanding of the nature of reality is largely ignored (currently), except by specialists in a relatively narrow field. It is hard to understand, and without an understanding of ancient philosophical ideas about the world, virtually impenetrable to modern scholarship. I've given some reasons in the chapter why this is so. 

This is just one of the puzzling areas of Mesopotamian civilization. There is elsewhere on this site a collection of divination texts, with the title 'Who will Appear Before the City?'. Equally strange, they concern conversation with Shamash the Sun god, about what will happen in the future. 

Thomas Yaeger, February 20, 2018. 

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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!" 

 'Enki's journey to Nibru.'  [i]

I have argued that the practice of philosophy in Greece is rooted in the context of religious ritual, and that philosophy as practised and discussed by Plato had as a principal purpose the exposing of a paradoxical quality in reality, in that reality has a two-fold nature (containing the limited, existing in time; and the unlimited, which participates in eternity), and that the world of experience is in effect an illusion within the ur-reality. As a consequence, the world as it presents itself is a series of images of Being, which point to its ineffable and invisible nature. Plato also spoke of the heavens as a moving image of eternity, patterned after the nature of Being, the 'most fair' image of divinity after which to pattern the world and everything contained within it. He also intimated that what applied to the reality of the Forms also applied to the 'revered and holy' images of the gods. This is possible because of the two-fold nature of reality. Things can be made holy, and holiness can be withdrawn.

So Plato was not talking entirely abstractly about Ideas and the Forms. They can have both concrete form on earth as well as a presence in Heaven. This suggests that in Ancient Greece, there was ritual practice associated with the making of divine statues, built on the precepts of the transcendent theology of the divine cults. Unfortunately, none of the rituals which might have existed have survived from the Greek cultural context.

The presence of a theory of Being in ancient Assyria has been demonstrated to be likely, on the basis of the clear similarity between the structures of the Jewish Kabbalah and the Assyrian Sacred Tree. The following chapters seek in addition to establish relationships between what Plato had to say about the creation of the world and its patterning, and ritual practice concerning the making of gods in Assyria. We have good detail for the latter. If the Assyrians understood the concept of Being as the root of reality itself, then the relationship of the forms of things to a wholly abstract concept of Being in Assyria should show parallels with the discussion in Plato.

The reconstruction of the Mis Pî ritual and its associated incantations mainly comes from the Neo-Assyrian or Neo/Late Babylonian periods. So that is from the 8th to 5th century B.C.E, although there are some fragments from Uruk dating to the 2nd century.  [ii]  These tablets come from Nineveh, Assur, Babylon, Sippar, Nippur, Kalhu (Nimrud), and a small number of other, more widely spread locations. The majority come from Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh, and so date from the 7th century B.C.E. Their colophons confirm that they were the property of the library. Some of the texts from Nineveh are copies of texts originating elsewhere, but the tablets do not often give the sources. Full details of the existing texts are given in The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia, SAALT1, 2001, p27 - 29.

The following text concerning the preparation for the renewal of divine images, dates from the latter days of the reign of Esarhaddon (680-669 B.C.E.), and describes the process of the renewal of the cult images from the initial consultation of the oracles, to the final installation of the images.  [iii]

When in heaven and on earth signs favourable for the renewal of the (statue of) the gods occurred,  [iv]  then I, Esarhaddon, king of the universe, king of the Land of Assur,  the apple of Assur’s eye, the beloved of the great gods, with the great intelligence and vast understanding,  which the great Nudimmud, the wise man of the gods, bestowed on me,  with the wisdom which Assur and Marduk entrusted to me when they made me aware of the renewal of (the statue of) the great gods,  with lifting of hands, prayers, and supplication, (I) prayed to the divinities Assur, king of the Gods, and to the great Lord Marduk.

The following passage concerning the right to make gods we have already encountered. I repeat it here, within its original context:

 “Whose right is it, O great gods, to create gods and goddesses in a place where man dare not trespass? This task of refurbishing (the statues), which you have constantly been allotting to me (by oracle), is difficult! Is it the right of deaf and blind human beings who are ignorant of themselves and remain in ignorance throughout their lives? The making of (images of) the gods and goddesses is your right, it is in your hands; so I beseech you, create (the gods), and in your exalted holy of holies may what you yourselves have in your heart be brought about in accordance with your unalterable word”. 

Again, as is common in the translation of texts which seem to make little sense without minor emendation, this translation inserts words apparently required in English to render the meaning clear. Thus the line which says “…the renewal of the (statue of) the gods occurred” actually ought to be rendered “….the renewal of the gods occurred,” in order not merely to be strictly faithful to the original text, but in fact to enable us to understand what the text is actually saying. Likewise with the sentence “the making of (images of) the gods and goddesses is your right,” the rendering ought to be simply: ”the making of the gods and goddesses is your right.” We are dealing with a pattern of belief which employs images towards the worship of its divinities, and understands these images as actualisable representations of that which cannot be represented as an image, since that image transcends all of the categories of our understanding. The gods can have existence in this physical world precisely because of this transcendent nature.

Such existence defies common-sense, but it does not defy the logic of idolatry. Just as for some modern worshippers there is no necessary contradiction between a divinity who is transcendent in nature and yet immanent, in antiquity there was no necessary contradiction between a transcendent god and his incarnation in a cult image. The idea – by its elusive nature - was always subject to criticism, and latterly ridicule, both within and beyond the cultural grouping which supported such a notion, but it made sense within the implex of ideas around the role of the cult image.

The passage referring to Esarhaddon as: ‘the beloved of the great gods, with the great intelligence and vast understanding, which the great Nudimmud, the wise man of the gods, bestowed on me, with the wisdom which Aššur and Marduk entrusted to me when they made me aware of the renewal of (the statue of) the great gods,’ yokes together the idea of knowledge with kingship, and also with divinity, since the gods Aššur and Marduk made him aware of the need for the renewal of the great gods. He has the ‘great intelligence and vast understanding’ of ‘the great Nudimmud’, who  is in fact the god Ea, often identified with Enki the trickster god, but also the god of craftsmen. ‘Nu.dim.mud’ is one of Ea’s epithets, meaning ‘fashioner of images’.

We have already discussed the interesting equation between knowledge and ‘vast understanding’ and its contrast with the non-royal, non-divine ignorance which is the common lot of mankind within this model - the “deaf and blind human beings who are ignorant of themselves and remain in ignorance throughout their lives…”, and also Esarhaddon’s allusion to one of the theological questions of the day, by asking ‘Whose right is it, O great gods, to create gods and goddesses in a place where man dare not trespass?” Clearly however this is Esarhaddon’s task, and no-one else’s. It is a royal task, communicated to Esarhaddon by divine command, and not easy to perform: “This task of refurbishing (the statues), which you have constantly been allotting to me (by oracle), is difficult!”

The text continues with details of the means by which the gods are to be renewed.  Esarhaddon says:

Endow the skilled craftsmen whom you ordered to complete this task with as high an understanding as Ea, their creator.  Teach them skills by your exalted word; make all their handiwork succeed through the craft of Ninshiku.

Ninshiku is yet another name for Ea, a late form from post-Kassite times, though based on the Sumerian Nin-ši-ku.  [v]  Esarhaddon is asking that the workmen be endowed with all the qualities of understanding and skill associated with Ea, the god of the craftsmen (i.e., the god also known as Nudimmud). This is tantamount to the request that the craftsmen have at least a temporary divinity for the duration of the renewal of the gods. The craftsmen have the excellence of the craftsman god only for a limited period, and for a precise purpose. They are therefore in a sense demiourgoi, like Plato’s craftsman in the Timaeus, able to fashion an image after the nature of the divine, while not being wholly or permanently divine themselves. Except that in this case, the gods themselves (aspects of the transcendent divinity) are being created.

Esarhaddon’s text continues with details of the means of oracular transmission of the gods wishes to the king:

I arranged diviners in groups in order to obtain a reliable oracular pronouncement about entering the bīt mummi. I performed divination (in order to determine whether the renewal should be done) in Aššur, Babylon (or) Nineveh. To determine the experts who should do the work and their initiation, I decided that each group should decide for itself separately; and still all the extispicies were in perfect agreement; they gave me a reliable, positive answer.

In other words, the oracular inquiries made by several groups of diviners produced answers which arrived together at the same time and agreed about the same issue.

Esarhaddon tells us that the oracular answers ordered him to enter the Bit Mummi in Aššur,

The capital, city, the dwelling of Aššur, Father of the gods; they indicated to me the names of the artisans (fit) for completing the work. By authority of a reassuring and favourable oracle, the diviners ordered me to do this work as follows:  “do it quickly, pay attention, and be careful; do not let up, do not direct your attention elsewhere”.  I trusted their positive and unchangeable oracle; I placed full reliance (on it).

It would seem from this text that there were at least two sets of oracular responses involved – those which ordered Esarhaddon to enter the Bit Mummi in connection with the renewal of the gods, and a second grouping of responses which were given within the precincts of the Bit Mummi, which named the artisans who were to undertake the work, and therefore those who were to be given a temporary divinity for the purpose of renewing the gods. Esarhaddon’s will is not to be focused on any other activity than this renewal.

In a favourable month, on a propitious day in the month of Shabatti, the favourite month of Enlil, I entered the bit mummi, the place where refurbishing was done, which the gods had chosen.

Among the epithets of Enlil (Sumerian ‘Ellil’) is ‘king of the foreign lands’, and the center of his cult was the temple E-kur, the ‘mountain house’, at Nippur. One of the images associated with Enlil is ‘merchant’ which suggests association with transactions.  [vi]  Arranging the work for the month of Shabatti, Enlil’s favourite month, would therefore be seen as propitious for work so definitively connected with the otherness of the gods in heaven.

I brought carpenters, goldsmiths, metalworkers, stone-cutters, “skilled artisans knowledgeable in the mysteries” into the temple which Shamash and Adad had indicated through divination. I installed the craftsmen there.

The work by the artisans is to be done in a place of both mystery and knowledge. We might infer from the choice of this place by the gods Shamash and Adad that the place in which the renewal is to happen is not fixed.  [vii]  The choice of the Bit Mummi is therefore likely to have a special significance for this occasion of renewal. The craft of making cult images, of the manufacture of the gods, is a religious mystery, knowledge of which is granted only to a limited group, who are installed in the chosen temple.

Red gold, mined in the mountains, which no one had as yet worked for artistic purposes, countless precious stones, not yet cut…., native to the mountains and upon which Ea had generously bestowed his splendour so that they might be fit for the lordly deities, I prepared in abundance for the shrines of the great gods, my lords, and for the bejewelling of their divinity, I gave (all these costly materials) into the pure hands (of the craftsmen).

Emphasis is laid on the fact that the materials which are to be used for the renewal of the gods have not yet been worked for such purposes – in other words they have not already served as materials for another form. They are as gifted by the gods – ‘upon which Ea had generously bestowed his splendour’, and therefore suitable for the work of the renewal. The Red gold, mined in the mountains (kur – a place of otherness), has not been worked, and ‘precious stones, not yet cut’, for the ornamentation of the divine images, Esarhaddon ‘gave…. Into the pure hands’.

‘Splendour’ here is indicated by ME.LAM/Melammu.  [viii]  Black and Green suggest that it connotes a ‘brilliant, visible glamour which is exuded by gods, heroes, sometimes by kings, and also by temples of great holiness and by gods’ symbols and emblems’.  They also suggest that ‘while it is in some ways a phenomenon of light, melam is at the same time terrifying and awe-inspiring’. Further:

Gods are sometimes said to ‘wear’ their melam like a garment or a crown, and like a garment or a crown, melam can be ‘taken off.’ If the god is killed, his melam disappears. While it is always a mark of the supernatural, melam carries no connotation of moral value: demons and terrifying giants can ‘wear’ it too.

[i] Black, Cunningham, Robson, Zόlyomi, The Literature of Ancient Sumer, 2004, p330


[ii] The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia, SAALT1, 2001, p27.


[iii] The Esarhaddon text comes from Borger’s Die Inschriften Asarhaddons, Königs von Assyrien. AfO Beiheft. 9. Graz. It is reproduced in translation in C.B.F. Walker and Michael B. Dick’s The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia, SAALT1, 2001 p25-27.


[iv] Note 79 on page 25 indicates that the astronomical sign meant here was the heliacal rising of Jupiter. The omen is discussed in detail in Borger 1956: 17-18. Note 79 also suggests a comparison with an omen declaration given to Ashurbanipal CT 35 pl.13-15, line 23 , which runs: ‘I commissioned you with the renewal of these (images of the) gods and of their temples (as before the words supplied by the translator in brackets should be ignored). The astronomical omen also had to be confirmed by a liver omen.


[v] C.B.F. Walker and Michael B. Dick’s The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia, SAALT1, 2001.p25, n84.


[vi] Black and Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, ‘Enlil’ p76.


[vii] Shamash and Adad were invoked in Babylonian extispicy rituals see Black and Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, 'Utu', p184 . It is possible that the instruction to use the Bit Mummi as the place for the renewal of the gods was received through divination by liver. Interestingly Plato’s account of the liver in the Timaeus describes the organ as reflecting the reason, which is a reflection of the reason of the heavens, exactly as it might have been regarded here (revealing the wishes of the gods Shamash and Adad). See also Black and Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, 'melam' and 'ni', p 130-1.


[viii] C.B.F. Walker and Michael B. Dick’s The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia, SAALT1, 2001.p26, n86. It can be understood in terms of a visible counterpart of the 'me' of the gods.

Reading Thomas Yaeger

Recently I removed a number of papers which were freely available on the website Academia.edu. I did this because the site has become less and less useful, as it transitions to something offering 'premium' services. I also took down the description and metadata for other papers, many of which are chapters in the books listed below.

I saved the descriptions of my first three books, however, and together with a description of the fourth (Man and the Divine) these form a concise overview of what I have written and published so far on historical and philosophical questions.

One thing I might suggest, is that J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being  should be read before the other two (if you are considering reading all of them). The argument is fairly technical, but shouldn't be off-putting to someone interested in philosophy. Though it was first published as an eBook in 2016, it was in fact written in London in 1993, the year after I finished my studies at UCL. It illustrates a  great deal about how and why I came to be interested in writing about the significance of the idea of Being in antiquity.


***


Commercially available books:

 The Sacred History of Being (2015) 

 The discipline of philosophy was not invented by the Greeks, but was in existence elsewhere, and as far back as the middle of the second millennium BCE. It has its origin in ancient divine cult. The detail of its presence can be traced in the civilizations around the ancient Near East, and particularly in Assyria and Babylonia. The Sacred History of Being collects the key evidence together, and examines the idea of the divine as a philosophical concept in Greece, Israel, and ancient Assyria. Published as an eBook by the Anshar Press,. Available from Barnes & Noble, Itunes, Kobo, Blio, Inktera, Smashwords, etc.

Published: Nov. 02, 2015. Available in ePub format. Words: 113,510. ISBN: 9781311760678
More information available at: https://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/p/the-sacred-history-of-being-as-its.html


 J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being (2016)

 When he was only twenty-four years old, James Frazer won a Cambridge fellowship with an essay on the development of Plato's theory of the Forms or Ideas (eidos). In this essay he argued that there was no overarching theory of Being in Plato's mind before he embarked on the writing of his dialogues, and that consequently differences in approach and discussion apparent in his work are the result of the development of his thought. He also argued that the very idea of Being is a barren notion, in that nothing can be predicated of Being. As a result Plato made a mistake, effectively conflating an epistemology with an ontology. Though the essay was written in 1879, it was not published until 1930, after much of his later work was done. Frazer became famous for his monumental study The Golden Bough, which explored a vast range of ancient and primitive myth and ritual. Here too he found intellectual processes founded in error. What was Frazer's intention in re-interpreting Plato against what Plato himself said, and his wholesale restructuring of ancient thought by reducing much of it to a pattern of error? Over 23 thousand words, a preface, select bibliography, and extensive notes. Published by the Anshar Press. Available from Barnes & Noble, Itunes, Kobo, Blio, Inktera, Smashwords, etc.

Published: April 04, 2016. Available in ePub format. Words: 22,930 ISBN: 9781310105470
More information available at: http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/p/j.html


 Understanding Ancient Thought (2017) 

 'Understanding Ancient Thought' is the third in a series of books which examines how we assess evidence from antiquity, and frame models to make sense of that evidence. The book consists of eighteen essays, which cover a number of subject areas which are in thrall to what Foucault described as an ‘episteme’. In other words, the way the subject areas are understood within the academy is in terms of what our cultural models, language and assumptions will allow us to understand. The actual evidence may suggest an alternative view, but it is not possible to see it, or to think it. At least until the paradigmatic frame shifts to another ‘episteme’ The main thrust of the book is that two hundred years of modern scholarship concerning the past has, for the most part, assembled a fictive and tendentious version of the ancient world. 51 thousand words. Published by the Anshar Press, August 20, 2017. Available via Smashwords, Itunes, Barnes and Noble, Blio, Kobo, etc.

Published: Aug. 20, 2017. Available in ePub format. Words: 51,070. ISBN: 9781370378012
More information available at: http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/nineteen-meditations.html


Man and the Divine (2018)

This is my second collection of essays on philosophy and ancient history. Like my first collection, Understanding Ancient Thought, it expands further on the arguments of The Sacred History of Being, which appeared in November 2015.  Man and the Divine was published on August 12, 2018. 

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

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

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

The final essay, ’Stone Circles, Phenomenology, and the Neolithic Mind’, is necessarily more speculative than the others, and deals with the British Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, when the building of megalithic structures was at its height. It makes comparisons with Greek and Mesopotamian notions of the importance of the sky in ancient religious thought. Published by the Anshar Press. Available from Barnes & Noble, Itunes, Kobo, Blio, Inktera, Smashwords, etc.

Approximately 57,000 words. Available in ePub format. ISBN 9780463665473.
More information available at: http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/p/man-and-divine-2018.html


The Origins of Transcendentalism in Ancient Religion (forthcoming, 2019)

Transcendentalism is present in a number of ancient religions, located to the west of India. 

It is assumed by scholars however, that there is very little in the way of transcendentalist thought associated with these ancient religions, and that the evidence we are looking at is mainly built out of concrete imagery, fanciful myth, poetry, irrational associations, all of which are in the service of religion and the state. In other words, religion serves a series of social and ideological functions, and it is to those functions that we should look for the explanation of the cultural remains, rather than the minds of the ancients themselves.

One of the arguments of this book is that we have been sold short by enlightenment presumptions and certainties, and that what we think we know and understand about ancient religion is so far from its real basis that, for the most part, it is nearly impossible for modern scholars to make intelligible sense of it. The cultural supremacy of ancient Greece in modern western thought depends on other civilisations not having an engagement with abstraction and the idea of Being before the middle of the 1st millennium B.C.E. 

This book is relatively short, not because the questions it addresses are simple, and have easy answers. It is short because I have written four other books before this one, and, to a significant extent, it references argument and discussion which can be found in those books. It was not possible to write a short and credible introduction to an understanding of the transcendentalism which can be found in ancient religions, without first covering an enormous amount of ground.

More details will follow in due course.  

***

The short bio at Academia.edu:

I'm an independent researcher and a specialist in scholarly communications, who studied the Ancient Near East and the Neo-Assyrian Empire at University College London. I'm particularly interested in the History of Ideas in the context of the ancient world, and in the importance of religion and art in understanding ancient cultures.

 My four ebooks are commercially available from Itunes, Barnes & Noble, Kobo Books, Blio, Smashwords, Inktera, etc. They are also available to read (on request) in each of the legal deposit libraries in the UK and Ireland. The Sacred History of Being is mostly available free to libraries around the globe, depending on the distributor the libraries use. Libraries respond to requests from users: if copies are free, they have little reason not to acquire one.

My blog at http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com contains essays related to my books, discussions with readers, book chapters and chapter extracts, an RSS feed, and other discussion on philosophical, archaeological and historical subjects. I'm active on Twitter.


TY, February 17 2018; updated September 02, 2018.

'The Sacred History of Being' is free to download in November!

This offer is now closed. Thanks to everybody who participated!

The Sacred History of Being will be available free from Smashwords during the month of November 2017, to mark the second anniversary of its publication in 2015. Use the coupon available on the Smashwords page for the book. The coupon is available for use from the 25th of October.

Coupon Code: TT95F

:

"All about how history is built by inclusion and omission. Even written histories have to hang together like a good story." - Nick Zacharewicz @NickSCZach

The Subject 

The Sacred History of Being has as its radical thesis that a philosophical knowledge of divine things was at the heart of ancient religion, both in Greece and the ancient Near East. And that the source of all knowledge was understood to be Being itself. 

 Formerly argued by classical scholars to have been first discussed by the ancient Greeks in the middle of the first millennium B.C.E., the articulate concept of Being can now be traced as far back as the middle of the second millennium, and the state of Assyria.

The Greeks themselves had several stories about the origins of philosophy, a discipline which essentially deals with abstractions, including that it originated elsewhere, but that is not the received narrative. The consequence of this, is that all historians of ideas, when constructing their accounts of the intellectual development of man before the arrival of Parmenides and Plato, have had to negotiate the Greek invention of philosophy, and the corollary, that articulate discussion of the abstract concept 'Being' didn’t happen before this. 

The Old Testament has examples where God declares his identity with Being itself (‘I am that I am’, better translated into English as ‘I am that which is,’ and ‘I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God', for example), but these are not regarded by scholars as evidence of a sophisticated discourse around the idea of Being. Instead these statements indicate inchoate notions and beliefs about the nature of god, rather than anything more profound. The statement in Malachi, however, that 'I do not change', is an explicitly philosophical understanding of the nature of God. 

This is the full chapter list for the edition of The Sacred History of Being, published on November 2, 2015. 


Preface.

Part One.

A Sense of the Past.
How old is Philosophy?
The Arrival of the Idea of Being.
The West and the Other.
The Golem.
Change and what is Permanent.
The Ontological Argument.
The Ontological Argument in Anselm.
The Ontological Argument in Descartes.
The Nature of Reality in Berkeley.
Hume and Kant on Reality.
The End of the Ontological Argument.

Part Two.

The Sweet Song of Swans.
The Academy.
The Platonic Theory of Being.
Plato’s Theory of Vision.
The Paradox of Knowledge.
Eleven attributes of Being.
Pythagoras and Totality.
Solon in the court of Croesus.
The Complexion of the Dead.
Being in Homer.

Part Three.

Ocean and the Limit of Existence.
Creation.
The Fifty names of Marduk.
The Idea of Being in Israel.
Understanding Creation as a Sacred Tree.
Being, Kabbalah, and the Assyrian Sacred Tree.
The Making and the Renewal of the Gods.
The Ritual sequence and its purpose.
The Nineveh ritual.
The Babylonian ritual.
Finding the Name of the Sacred Tree.
Postscript.

Appendices.

Thomas Taylor on the Ineffable principle.
Oannes and the Instruction of Mankind.
Ashurbanipal on the exercise of Kingship.
Select Bibliography.
Abbreviations

Available Full Chapters

The first five chapters of the book, plus the preface, are available to read in full, by following the links below. A further chapter from part one, which discusses George Berkeley's understanding of the Nature of Reality, and two chapters from part three, 'Ocean and the Limit of Existence', and  'The Idea of Being in Israel', are also available to read in full. Plus one of the appendices, which discusses the Babylonian account of the first sages, and man's acquisition of knowledge. 

Preface

Part One

A sense of the past
How old is Philosophy?
The Arrival of the idea of Being
The West and the Other
The Golem
Change and what is permanent
Recurring Questions
The Ontological Argument
The Ontological Argument in Anselm
The Ontological Argument in Descartes
The Nature of Reality in Berkeley
Hume and Kant on Reality

....

Part Three

Ocean and the Limit of Existence
The Idea of Being in Israel

....

 Appendices

Oannes and the Instruction of Mankind

The eBook is in ePub format, which can be read on Macs, iPads, iPhones, etc, and most other tablets, irrespective of the operating operating system they use. If you have an Amazon Kindle, the ePub formatting of the book can be converted easily to the MOBI format, which the Kindle uses, with the excellent eBook management software Calibre, which can be downloaded free. 

The book can be read on a PC, laptop or notebook computer, in ePub or any other eBook format, using the Adobe Digital Editions software, which is also available free, in both Mac and PC formats. Supports conversion to many formats, including PDF. 

The principal distributor of The Sacred History of Being is Smashwords. The book can be downloaded from Smashwords directly, after a signup which takes just a minute or so. After purchase (free, with the coupon TT95F), the book goes into a library space associated with your signup, and it can be downloaded on to your device from there. Just follow the link.

The book has a five star review at Goodreads. 

Thomas Yaeger, October 25, 3017.

The Sacred History of Being

(New Cover, issued March 12 2017. The image links to the book page at Smashwords)

Nick Zacharewicz @NickSCZach

"All about how history is built by inclusion and omission. Even written histories have to hang together like a good story."

The Subject 

The Sacred History of Being has as its radical thesis that knowledge rather than belief was at the heart of ancient religion, both in Greece and the ancient Near East. And that the source of all knowledge was understood to be Being itself. 

 Formerly argued by classical scholars to have been first discussed by the ancient Greeks in the middle of the first millennium B.C.E., the articulate concept of Being can now be traced as far back as the middle of the second millennium, and the state of Assyria.

The Greeks themselves had several stories about the origins of philosophy, a discipline which essentially deals with abstractions, including that it originated elsewhere, but that is not the received narrative. The consequence of this, is that all historians of ideas, when constructing their accounts of the intellectual development of man before the arrival of Parmenides and Plato, have had to negotiate the Greek invention of philosophy, and the corollary, that articulate discussion of the abstract concept 'Being' didn’t happen before this. 

This can now be shown to be a faulty understanding, resulting in many absurdities. The Old Testament has examples where God declares his identity with Being itself (‘I am that I am’, better translated into English as ‘I am that which is,’ and ‘I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God', for example), but these are not regarded by scholars as evidence of a sophisticated discourse around the idea of Being. Instead these statements indicate inchoate ‘notions’ about the nature of god, rather than anything more profound. The statement in Malachi, however, that 'I do not change', is an explicitly philosophical understanding of the nature of God. 

The Sacred History of Being unpicks this log-jam in the history of ideas, largely the legacy of classical scholarship from the late eighteenth century onward.

Around late November 2016, 'The Sacred History of Being' entered the bestseller lists at Smashwords, in the categories of Philosophy and History. 

Chapter List for The Sacred History of Being

This is the full chapter list for the edition of The Sacred History of Being, published on November 2, 2015. 


Preface.

Part One.

A Sense of the Past.
How old is Philosophy?
The Arrival of the Idea of Being.
The West and the Other.
The Golem.
Change and what is Permanent.
The Ontological Argument.
The Ontological Argument in Anselm.
The Ontological Argument in Descartes.
The Nature of Reality in Berkeley.
Hume and Kant on Reality.
The End of the Ontological Argument.

Part Two.

The Sweet Song of Swans.
The Academy.
The Platonic Theory of Being.
Plato’s Theory of Vision.
The Paradox of Knowledge.
Eleven attributes of Being.
Pythagoras and Totality.
Solon in the court of Croesus.
The Complexion of the Dead.
Being in Homer.

Part Three.

Ocean and the Limit of Existence.
Creation.
The Fifty names of Marduk.
The Idea of Being in Israel.
Understanding Creation as a Sacred Tree.
Being, Kabbalah, and the Assyrian Sacred Tree.
The Making and the Renewal of the Gods.
The Ritual sequence and its purpose.
The Nineveh ritual.
The Babylonian ritual.
Finding the Name of the Sacred Tree.
Postscript.

Appendices.

Thomas Taylor on the Ineffable principle.
Oannes and the Instruction of Mankind.
Ashurbanipal on the exercise of Kingship.
Select Bibliography.
Abbreviations

Available Full Chapters

The first five chapters of the book, plus the preface, are available to read in full, by following the links below. A further chapter from part one, which discusses George Berkeley's understanding of the Nature of Reality, and two chapters from part three, 'Ocean and the Limit of Existence', and  'The Idea of Being in Israel', are also available to read in full. Plus one of the appendices, which discusses the Babylonian account of the first sages, and man's acquisition of knowledge. 

Preface

Part One

A sense of the past
How old is Philosophy?
The Arrival of the idea of Being
The West and the Other
The Golem
Change and what is permanent
Recurring Questions
The Ontological Argument
The Ontological Argument in Anselm
The Ontological Argument in Descartes
The Nature of Reality in Berkeley
Hume and Kant on Reality

....

Part Three

Ocean and the Limit of Existence
The Idea of Being in Israel

....

 Appendices

Oannes and the Instruction of Mankind

Questions addressed by The Sacred History of Being

The Sacred History of Being addresses many questions. Some of these have been puzzles over the centuries. What follows is a list of fifty of these questions, all of which are given some kind of answer in the course of the text. 

This list of questions developed slowly over the decade between the first draft of the book in 2003-4, and the final version which was published in 2015, after four years of writing. Other questions are discussed, including the meaning of the strange discussion of the Great Year in relation to the life of man, in the famous conversation between Solon and Croesus, recounted by Herodotus.

Here is the list.

 1. Is Plato writing literary fiction when he talks about the Forms? 2. Philosophical concepts and terms can be found in texts belonging to the 2^nd millennium B.C.E. in both Mesopotamia and Egypt - is philosophy that old?  3. Can we identify philosophical ideas in Homer? 4. How and why did scholars schooled in philosophy not notice philosophical elements in Ancient Near Eastern texts from the 2nd millennium B.C.E.? 5. What was Homer joining together? Philosophical ideas in literature and poetry in the Late Bronze Age. 

6. Can philosophical underpinnings be identified in the liturgy of the New Year Festival in Babylon (The ‘Enuma Elish’)? 7. How is it the case that statues of the gods were considered themselves to be divine in the ancient world? 8. How was it understood to be possible to make gods, and why?  9. What was the significance of the Undefined Dyad in ancient thought? 10. When is polytheism actually polytheism, and when is it monotheism?

11. Why is the Ontological Argument such a disaster for our understanding of ancient philosophical ideas concerning the gods? 12. Why was philosophy in Egypt demoted from its original status by German scholarship? 13. How and why did Egypt lose its reputation? 14. Can the nature of Reality be accommodated by an Aristotelian logical model? 15. When scholars blink: Not seeing what there is to be seen. 

16. What aspect of philosophy did Pythagoras learn at Babylon? 17. How were the kings of ancient Assyria able to take on divinity? 18. How are we to understand what was called ‘The most secret and sacred of rituals’: the setting up of gods in Heaven? 19. What is the meaning and purpose of the Assyrian Sacred Tree?  20. What aspects of the Divine have existence on Earth?

21. Why is the home of the Mesopotamian god Ea at the bottom of the sea?  22. Why did Assyrian kings on campaign wish to touch the ‘Upper and Lower Seas’?  23. What is the meaning of the Mesopotamian story of man being instructed by the first sages in the art and science of civilization? 24. Why did the Assyrian Court value scholarship and excellence? 25. What theory of reality is present and cultivated from the 2nd millennium B.C.E., and can be found not only in the writings of Plato, but also in the Nag Hammadi codices? 

26. Why are rivers divine in Mesopotamia? 27. What is the symbolic significance of Ocean in both Greece and Assyria? 28. Can holiness be conferred and taken away? 29. Why does Marduk carry a woven basket (the banduddu)? 30. What is the meaning of the Mesopotamian interest in making lists?

31. What was the nature of philosophical analysis before Plato? 32. How old is Jewish mysticism, and what is its origin? 33.  Is ancient cultic life not best understood in terms of modern notions of religion? 34. Is the origin of the world always with us? 35. What did the European Enlightenment leave behind? 

36. How much fiction is there in our rational understanding of the past? 37. How old is abstract thought? 38. Has the myth of progress damaged our capacity to understand the history of the human mind, and the role and power of abstract thought in antiquity? 39. What is the relationship between ancient cult practice and the pursuit of knowledge? 40. Why was it considered necessary to know the mind of God, and how was it known?

41. What is the Doctrine of Wholes and Totalities? 42. What was the significance of the question whether Reality is One or Many? 43. How was the idea of a supreme 'God' understood to be different from the other gods? 44. What was understood to be the fundamental nature of Reality? 45. How were the properties and attributes of the Divine understood? 

46. What did Solon understand by the phrase: ‘the complexion of the Dead’? 47. What is Plato’s Paradox of Knowledge, and what does it tell us about his model of reality? 48. What is meant by the phrase:  ‘the Sweet Song of Swans’, which Olympiodorus used to describe Plato’s writing? 49.What is esoteric knowledge, and why is it esoteric? 50. What is the ‘True light of the gods’?

Thomas Yaeger, November 13, 2016

Buying The Sacred History of Being

I've been asked many times about the options for purchasing the book, so I've decided to digest my responses into one blogpost. The text contains active links to the relevant pages. This is all you need to know, in just a few paragraphs. 

Currently the book is available for sale in eBook format from a number of large retailers, including Itunes (click the link on the left which allows you to see the book in your Itunes application), Barnes & Noble, Blio (search on Thomas Yaeger), Kobo (preview available), Inktera, and other retailers around the world. So, if you are already signed up to an account with one of those (and half the planet seems to be signed up with Itunes), you can buy the book in exactly the same way as any other book. 

The book is not available from Amazon. Their current terms and conditions are why I chose to exclude Amazon from distribution of the book. Their terms and conditions may change, however.

The eBook is in ePub format, which can be read on Macs, iPads, iPhones, etc, and most other tablets, irrespective of the operating operating system they use. If you have an Amazon Kindle, the ePub formatting of the book can be converted easily to the MOBI format, which the Kindle uses, with the excellent eBook management software Calibre, which can be downloaded free. 

The book can be read on a PC, laptop or notebook computer, in ePub or any other eBook format, using the Adobe Digital Editions software, which is also available free, in both Mac and PC formats. Supports conversion to many formats, including PDF. 

The principal distributor of The Sacred History of Being is Smashwords. The book can be downloaded from Smashwords directly, after a signup which takes just a minute or so. The book can be paid for using a credit or debit card, or with Paypal, if you have an account with them. After purchase, the book goes into a library space associated with your signup, and it can be downloaded on to your device from there. Just follow the link.

The book has a five star review at Goodreads. 

Interested in a review of the reasons why this book cannot possibly exist? I wrote about these (rather facetiously) while putting together an early draft of the book. The review is in the form of a publisher's memo. 

Thomas Yaeger, July 24, July 29, July 30, September 6, October 30-31, November 13,  December 31 2016, January 5, 2017, February 13, 2017, March 12 2017, July 1, and August 12,  2017. A copy of the static page, October 21, 3017.