Magic or Magia? Plato's Sophist II

I remember analysing the structure of Plato’s The Sophist in 1994, but over time, I forgot about the argument it contains, or even that I’d made one. I batch-scanned a lot of paper documents in 2003, and the analysis of The Sophist was one of those. But I didn’t read it again until recently.

The original document is squibbish, was written quickly, and was never properly completed or edited. But, knowing what I now know, I’d found the essential arguments for the ancient priestly understanding of reality, all collected together in one literary work, without being entirely aware of the implications of that. It is a little eerie to read this document now, since it looks far beyond what I was sure of at the time.

What Plato is doing in The Sophist is what he did in many other dialogues (not all), which was to include reminders to those who had been trained in theological doctrine what was important, and to wrap this information up with more or less irrelevant speculation for the merely curious and uninitiated.

The discussion of the four outlooks on the nature of reality which feature in The Sophist represent discussions which took place in the ancient equivalent of the seminary (it is odd that we don’t have information about the existence of these institutions in ancient Greece, unless the Academy was exactly that). The importance of the discussion is that it establishes that the Real is essentially and necessarily paradoxical. There is the idea of the One, and there is the experience of the many.  If there is only the One, there is no life, movement or thought. If the many are real, then it is difficult to understand how there can be something like the One, which retains its nature, and abides.

Not everyone who participated in these discussions would have become a priest, because not everyone would have settled for position b), which, to some casts of mind, would have seemed to be deeply unsatisfactory. But acceptance of position b) is the one the priestly establishments were looking for in their candidates.

Why position b)? It is suggested in the course of the dialogue that it has to be accepted, in order to account for both our intellectual understanding of the nature of reality, and our experience of the world of movement and change.

That however is not a philosophical argument. Something is being glossed over at this point, and we have to look outside The Sophist to understand that. The answer to this problem is Plato’s concept of The Good, articulated by Socrates in The Timaeus.

Socrates said that:

The ultimate reality, whether it be termed the form of the Good or given another necessarily inadequate name does not reside in space - in fact the notion that things have a place is described as "a kind of bastard reasoning":

we dimly dream and affirm that it is somehow necessary that all that exists should exist in some spot and occupying some place, and that which is neither on earth nor anywhere in the Heaven is nothing.

          In the Phaedrus Socrates speaks of the region above heaven,

“never worthily sung by any earthly poet". It is, however, as I shall tell; for I must dare to speak the truth... the colourless, formless, and intangible truly existing essence, with which all true knowledge is concerned, holds this region and is visible only to the mind...

Which means that Socrates is referring to the concept of the plenum: the reality we experience a partial representation, a slice, of what is contained in the totality of what is possible. If the plenum itself is possible, then the experience of change and motion is also possible. But as a perception.

The point of position b) is that it recognises the paradoxical nature of reality, and that what is represented to us is a subjective representation of Being itself. There is only Being, and the experience of physical and secular existence is a partial view of what is contained in the plenum. We see what we see, but it is not reality itself. It is what we can see and understand.

Is this a purely Greek understanding? I think it isn’t. Pythagoras (according to the Neoplatonists) spent around twenty years in Egypt imbibing their doctrines, as well as having  discussions with priesthoods in the Levant and Mesopotamia, while in the service of Cyrus. Some of that went into Plato’s work, according to the Neoplatonists, though there is also strong evidence (which I’ve discussed) that ideas familiar to Plato were already present in archaic Greece.

The blog page which points to the paper (‘Magic or Magia? Plato’s Sophist’) is at: http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2019/06/magic-or-magia-platos-sophist.html The link to the file is at the foot of the page.  The article has its own DOI.

Thomas Yaeger, June 3, 2019.

The Destruction of Ancient Astronomy

There is a tide in the affairs of men./Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;/
Omitted, all the voyage of their life/Is bound in shallows and in miseries./
On such a full sea are we now afloat,/And we must take the current when it serves,/
Or lose our ventures./ (Brutus to Cassius, in Julius Caesar Act 4, scene 3, 218–224)

Of course that didn’t work out well in the end, since they chose to fight Octavian at Philippi, and lost. The point is however that everything has a tendency to follow an arc through time, and it is very difficult to preserve an insight or a way of thinking over an extended period. Or an empire. Or anything at all.  And sometimes the tide is in favour of your opponents.

We can look at what happened as a disaster of sorts. But it is also something of a miracle that so much survives, in some shape or form. The astronomy was still intact in the civilizations of South America when the Spanish arrived, followed by the missionaries, and there is still information circulating in the populations, as the writer and anthropologist William Sullivan found out (The Secret of the Incas). Despite the efforts of the Spanish priests to root it out. 

Why did the Christians take against astronomy and astronomical lore? There are two ways in which to look at this question. 

The sky, imagined as a moving image of god, or eternity, is one, and what it is. This seems to have been a deeply rooted idea from time immemorial, and it surfaces in the writing of Plato, and in the later Platonists. The oneness of the image is perhaps the main reason for its identification as an image of god. Another is that it was understood to be forever beyond our reach. But in addition, it contains other images, some of which were identified and described as gods. Not all of them were anthropomorphic deities, but by virtue of their presence in the heavens, all of them had a kind of divine status.

So, the heaven represents what is one and divine, and at the same time contains a plethora of gods. For the Christians, and not just the early ones, that must have been a disturbing thing to contemplate.

Polytheism is one of the most difficult things for human beings (in the modern west) to deal with, both within academia, and in the population at large. Historians and theologians argue that polytheism arose before monotheism, and that it represents an earlier and more barbarous form of religion. And yet, the idea that they both have their reality somewhere in a moving image of God is there in the sky above us.

Scholars will argue that polytheism shows that early man was not thinking of the divine in terms of a single overarching abstraction, which could be imagined to be responsible for the creation, for existence, for generation, etc. And yet, if the myths concerning the gods who belong to a polytheistic pantheon are explored, we find evidence of abstract thought, ideas of creation, the generation and ordering of earthly reality, etc. Instead, it will be argued that the polytheistic gods are representations of things which were important in human society, and which needed to be placated. Therefore they can be interpreted as personifications of natural forces (the existence of storm gods is usually regarded as a clincher), or representations of tribal gods or totems, later integrated into a pantheon which reflects the society built up from earlier and looser groupings.

None of that is impossible, and in many cases, that might be the best explanation. But it is a lazy way to look at intellectual and social history, when there is in existence clear evidence that monotheistic and polytheistic patterns of thought once both belonged to the same model of reality.

One of the most ancient of questions is ‘why are there many, if there is one?’ Thousands of years of theological and philosophical thought were shaped by that question. Considering that the one (or Being itself) is the only truly real thing, does not force us to deny the existence of multiplicity. But it does create a problem, in that it is not easy to find the explanation for multiplicity. One of the ancient arguments was that since only the one was truly real, the world of physical reality was an illusion – a set of subjective perceptions of Being which stand between us and an understanding of Being itself. 

This multiplicity also can be interpreted as the product of the divine’s understanding of itself. In which case, we are part of the working out of what the divine is. Mythology and polytheistic conceptions can be understood as the articulation of that working out.

The point here is that the idea of many gods is deeply disturbing to many human beings, and not just for doctrinal reasons. It is disturbing because there is a deep seated, rarely formulated, and mostly unconscious conception in us that reality (however that is understood) must be itself, and itself alone. The corollary of that is that multiplicity enshrines falsehood and error. Add to that the general view that we are getting smarter over time (the myth of progress, which J.B. Bury wrote about in the twenties) and that we left error behind when (in the west at least) we embraced monotheism instead of polytheism (the concept of the trinity notwithstanding).

This body of ideas spills out into political and social notions (not always in a bad way – many socio-political creations in antiquity owed their origin to discussions of the nature of the divine, and its manifestation in physical reality. The unification of the poleis in Attica is a case in point – the administrative, political and liturgical functions of the state were expressly modelled on the natural divisions of the year).

The political and theological development of the Hebrew kingdoms in the first half of the 1^st millennium B.C.E. is mostly unknown to us, since the texts were redacted in the 5^th century B.C.E., and reflect the views of the winners of the hegemonic struggle. But we can tell from the later history the general outline of the trajectory of change. Early on there seems to have been a considerable amount of freedom of religious worship in the Hebrew kingdoms (these were also modelled on the natural divisions of the year) until they came into severe conflict with Assyria. After that political and religious power became ever more concentrated in Jerusalem. One god, one power, one place of religious observance, one source of the law, etc.

Christianity, gifted to us partly as the consequence of a similar concentration of power in ancient Rome (another story), took over the idea of a single omniscient god, who was also able to become flesh and blood and walk on the earth (and on water too, which image reflects Babylonian iconography). All the other gods became, in the end, falsehoods, demons, devils, and in the pages of Tertullian, a species of fornication, which he reckoned to be the principal nature of sin, which embraced all others.

Hence the antipathy to astronomy, and the gods from cultures who foolishly embraced a multiplicity of them. Despite the fact that, the Christian scriptures, as well as the Hebrew ones, are full of astronomical and mythological imagery, and characters who were once understood to have their essential reality in the sky. 

Pharaoh Akhenaten, the Aten, and the History of Ideas (II)

[Mail sent to a specialist in ancient astronomy on February 15, 2019. It is a response to a mail of the 28th January, 2019.]

[...]

I was a bit coy about Akhenaten - there are still things turning up. And some things need more thought. However, the 400 sacrificial tables at Akhenaten’s new city foundation at Akhetaten (the ‘horizon of the Aten’) isn’t new information, but often it is a detail which isn’t mentioned in discussions.

Unlike most Egyptian temple complexes, the temple is open to the sky. As you are probably aware, Akhenaten, at least towards the end, was in conflict with various priesthoods, possibly because his new religious dispensation made himself and his family the sole conduit to the bounty of the gods. Hence the hacking out of references to Amun by his followers, and the hacking out of representations of Akhenaten and the Aten by those whose hegemony was being threatened.

I think Akhenaten or his officials did a calculation about the number of sacrifices performed daily throughout Egypt across all the major priesthoods, and set out to perform the same number of daily sacrifices at Akhetaten. It could not be said therefore, that insufficient sacrifices were being made. This of course is a hypothesis, and is not so far supported by any texts. But to have so many sacrificial tables in one temple means that they served a real rather than a purely symbolic function.

I agree with everything you said about Hamlet’s Mill. And you are correct that academics have ways of disguising what they don’t know, or aren’t sure about, and there is plenty of that in the book. Having an academic career can often be like walking a tightrope over a bed of burning coals, if you are trying to open up uncharted territory. Most academics deliberately avoid risking their reputations with speculative work, and do more boring stuff instead. We should be grateful to Santillana and von Dechend for staying the course and producing a pioneering work, even if the result is difficult and a sometimes frustrating read.

Sometimes of course they know something, but can’t say it, because the insight is something beyond what can be supported by academic evidence, or is beyond what colleagues can accept as credible explanation. This happens more often than you might think. My most important Assyriological contact wrote a whole paper (72 pages) on a body of ideas shared by the scholars in the royal court in the 1st and 2nd millennia BCE, without overt mention of the most important implication of his discussion [...]. I wrote and told him what that implication was. He agreed in his reply, but is still coy about discussing the matter with his peers. It is not always possible for an academic scholar to say what he thinks in public. Sometimes reading academic papers is a bit like reading code.

The H A Rey book is probably as important as you say, but I have not yet read it. I will let you know when I have. It can be hard to know the forms of the constellations in the distant (and not so distant) past. Re-interpreting the shapes according to the details found in the related myths is probably the only way.

When I mentioned the image of an Egyptian god discussed at a lecture in Cambridge (after which I was nearly run down by Stephen Hawking – I had no idea his wheelchair could make around 15 miles per hour), I wasn’t referring to the question of whether an image of a god is a representation of it, or the god itself. What was strange about the image was that the statue was a representation of a representation of the divine, since it was mounted on a sled. I have no idea what significance that image was meant to have, but its existence is a mark of the sophistication of the Egyptian mind,
which saw the physical world in terms of representations (and sometimes representations of representations).

I take your point about the images of the divine in the constellations being representations of things which have a different (and transcendental) kind of existence – without physical form as we understand it. You refer to this as ‘the invisible realm’, which is fine. I generally refer to this realm as ‘the plenum’. I think we both mean the same thing, but we can discuss that as we go.

Representation is a serious business as you point out, and even now, in various places. I used to have difficulty with the humanist tradition in western scholarship, which encouraged the idea that if you wanted to have some of the qualities of Cicero (for example), then you should read the entirety of his extant work, and regularly. And learn to write text in his style. I never liked this at all, since my attitude was that you should read, interpret and understand an author. But I now understand this approach as stemming from the idea that to represent something is to be that something – to some degree at least.

I’ve taken on board your pointers to blog posts, and how to search for some of them. I’m now reading your stuff on a regular basis. And thanks for the chart, and clarification of the role of Ophiuchus. I’m sure you are right. I was struck by the coincidence of the image turning up when it did, and being such a great example.

The article ‘The Horizon of the Aten’ is one I’m still brooding over, but my experience is that it is likely to be written over a couple of days when I least expect it. But you can ask questions in the meantime. It is a partner to the article ‘Polytheism, Monotheism, and the Cult of the Aten’. At: http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2018/04/polytheism-monotheism-and-cult-of-aten.html


Best regards,

Thomas

Topics 5: Before 'The Sacred History of Being'

Much of the text which follows is from a document ('Topics 5') produced on December 30^th, 2002. It is a list of topics connected with ancient religion which are what we might understand as a technical substratum to religious thought. By this I mean something which underpins a number of ideas which might be found elsewhere, and in some other form, in the textual remains, but which is based on physical analogies with the properties and attributes which were understood to have some connection with the Divine.

I will expand on the first three items on the list.

Things like the deliberate breaking of objects at a ritually significant moment, before being thrown into the water at Flag Fen (a site in England of great ritual importance in ancient times), might have depended on the association of water with the Divine. This was an association which was made in a number of cultures, including Mesopotamia, Phoenicia,  Persia, Egypt, in Israel, and in Greece. Why this association? There are so many reasons, including the fact that water has no form, no colour of its own, and is everywhere. It was conceived to surround the world, and to signify abundance and generation.

The pursuit of distinctive excellences in design around the Polynesian islands might have happened because of the notion that the Divine can be understood as that which is the most excellent of things, and that pursuing excellence in the design of ritual tattoo designs was therefore an attempt to emulate one of the qualities of the Divine.

The alternation of open and closed lotuses in both Egyptian and Assyrian designs, most often in the design of carpet edges and thresholds, is usually treated simply as a matter of artistic design. But if the concept of the Divine in Egypt and Assyria involved the idea that whatever the divine is, it is necessarily at the edge of physical reality – at the limit of what physical reality is, then we can understand the association between the threshold and the alternating design, as a representation of the Divine as something which necessarily embraces the possible states in which things can exist. In the case of the lotuses, they can be open or closed, and at the limit of physical reality, they are in both states. We know in the case of the ritual for the inauguration of divine statues in Assyria, the ritual made special use of thresholds during the process.

And so on.

I’d been pursuing this interest since 1991 or thereabouts. There is a first outline of what became The Sacred History of Being from early 2003, which was worked up into chapters and sections, which were to deal with a number of items in the list. 

The actual draft which I worked on up to 2005 retained a number of elements of the outline, but it became clear that it was an unworkable way to make the case I wanted to make, which was the idea that the conception of a singular divinity lay somewhere behind the multiplicity of gods in the ancient world. Too many cultures, and too much detail.  I needed to do it some other way. I decided that a detailed exploration of the technical substratum would wait, and that it would be easier to discuss if the conception of a singular divinity had already been explored.

Here is (an edited) version of the list -

-Flag Fen: pattern of distribution of ritual objects in the lake/bog (broken/intact).

-Geographic array of excellences pursued by Polynesian islands (tattooing, stone carving, etc).

-Decorative motifs in Near Eastern and Egyptian Art: the alternation of open and closed lotus flowers.

-Decorative motifs in Near Eastern Art: the corridor/infinite regression of doorways in altar design (see Mastaba).

-The Omphalos in Greece and Babylonia.

-The concept of the Boundary and the limit in antiquity (Greece, the Near East, and Egypt).

-The concepts of the mean and the extreme in Greece.

-The concept of completion in antiquity (Greece, Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Sumer, Persia).

-The concept of Kingship in Antiquity (Greece, Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Sumer).

-The zoo in Assyria.

-The concept of the Museum in Greek Egypt and Assyria.

-The concept of the Library in Greece, Greek Egypt, Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Sumer and Rome.

-The concept of fate in antiquity.

-The concept of ‘kairos’ or ‘right time’ in antiquity.

-The concepts of ‘the same’ and ‘the different’.

-The concepts of ‘the little more’ and ‘the little less’.

-The infinitely small and the infinitely great.

-The collection of augmentations and reduplications.

-Metaphor in antiquity.

-Metonymy in antiquity.

-Possession in antiquity (Assyria, Greece, Babylonia).

-The concept of sacred space in Greece, Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, and Sumer.

-The conception of the otherworld in Greece, Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Sumer, Rome (etc).

-The conception of ‘reality’ in Greece, Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Sumer, etc.

-The concept of virtue (excellence) among the Greeks (Athens and Sparta).

-The concept of  virtue (excellence) among the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Sumerians.

-Excellence and discipline in antiquity.

-The concept of ‘the other’ in antiquity.

-The listing of objects by their virtues (or accidental characteristics) (Sumer)

-Accidental property or virtue?

-The concept of transcendence and the transcendent in Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Greece and Sumer.

-The problem of transcendence in antiquity.

-Markers of the transcendent in antiquity.

-The pure and the impure (are priests pure or impure?)

-The problem of the priest.

-Hair and Nails (extremities).

-The concept of the foreign.

-The living and the dead (differences and similarities)

-Do statues live?

-The lives of statues.

-Movement and the inanimate

-Eternity (and the millions of years)

Gk ‘zoon’ (Hdt).

-Mastaba tomb to multiple mastaba tomb (pyramid) (augmentation and reduplication)

-The conception of the Divine in Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Sumer and Greece.

-Can a man become a god while alive?

-Can a man become a god at all?

-Divine honours in Greece and Persia.

-The Cult of the Great Gods

- Augmentation and reduplication (the emphatic in antiquity).

-The pursuit of the Great.

-Airs, waters and places before Plato and Aristotle (direction and geography in the ancient world).

-Loosing and Binding (Greece and Israel).

-High Places (Britain, Greece, Israel, Canaan).

-The temple as the Gods house.

-Filling the temple with gravel (Sumer) – completion.

-The puzzle of the palace and the temple.

-The King and the High Priest.

-The Shamanic aspects of King and Priest.

-The concept of the Soul in Greece and Egypt.

-The Pythia (old woman) wearing young woman’s clothes.

-Reduplication of social structures in Roman society (consuls and tribunes, praetors and aediles).

-‘Consular Tribunes’

-The fabrication of Roman history (the 1^st cent. Filter)

-The Roman Arena – mythological guises for murder.

-Wrestling by grave a means of passage to the next world (Greece, Rome).

-Ancestor worship (the past as the other in antiquity – Rome and Polynesia).

-Hebrew emulation of Babylonian and Assyrian religious forms and narrative.

-Hebrew inversions of Babylonian and Assyrian religious forms (abandonment of the image).

-Cultures without professional priestly classes (Assyria, Greece).

-Is Greece influenced by Egypt?

-Self-creation of Sparta and its military virtues.

-The evidence for early Sparta.

-The false door in Egypt

-proximity and touching (Egypt, Greece, Assyria, Babylonia, Sumer).

-The idea of symbol in antiquity.

-The concept of the telos

-The idea of the telos in antiquity before Socrates

-‘Going before’.

-The joint in antiquity (China, Greece, etc).

-The concept of identity in antiquity.

-The concept of similarity in antiquity.

-The concept of discrete states (law of the excluded middle).

-The wall (limit, boundary as proximity of the other).

-The text addressed to the gods.

- Addressing the gods in general.

-theology and history as emulation

-theology and history as dissimulation

-The Iiad and the Odyssey as Achaean documents.

-The Iliad and Odyssey in terms of art and artifice.

-The parallel lives of Greeks and Gods in the Iliad.

-The ordering of a theology by a poet (Homer).

-Theological assimilation (Greece, Assyria, Egypt, Babylonia).

-The conception of the Good.

-The concept of the One.

-Concept of the Many.

-Concept of the cairn.

-The Tibetan prayer wheel.

-The contents of the Egyptian altar (bread, lotuses, etc).

-The ground of reality (ousia) and its properties

-The Golden Section (Golden Mean) as the abstraction.

- Alternative views of polytheism

- The numinous in antiquity.

- Rites of passage.

-Rites of communication.

-Varro’s analysis of the possible types of religious belief.

-Varro’s concept of ‘superstitio’.

-Religious theatre and Incarnation in antiquity.

-The Chinese Warriors (Terracotta Army).

-The Parmenidean Hypothesis.

-The damnation of the Parmenidean hypothesis (by Parmenides) in Plato’s account.

-The Democritean account of reality an alternative to the Parmenidean, or a subset?

Thomas Yaeger, March 30, 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. 

***

"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.

Being and Representation in Greece and Assyria

This is a discussion of the argument and significance of The Sacred History of Being, published in November 2015. The essential argument of the book is that, in both Greece and Assyria, knowledge was conceived to exist in Being itself, and as a consequence, all true knowledge was knowledge of the Divine. The cultural apparatus of both states can be understood to have been built on that conception. 

***

The argument of The Sacred History of Being is complex and necessarily discursive, since its purpose is to uncover an ancient implex of ideas which was almost always discursively expressed, whether in the course of argument, in the formation of myth, liturgy, or ritual, and was, for the most part, conjured in terms of images. The argument however has a clear focus, which is the consistent reference point of these images - that which does not change - and secondarily the body of ideas which grew up around this notion of a reality which is beyond all merely human understanding.

We know that this idea was pursued in Greece, in particular by Plato, who was 'always looking to the one thing.' This 'one thing' has been very difficult for students of Plato to disinter, since it seemed to be hedged about with logical difficulties which, not least, cast considerable doubt on the possibility of there ever being something which could be referred to as the 'one thing.'

This difficulty isn't simply the result of the coy and often allusive way in which Plato discusses the relationship between the world of change and the world of unchanging reality. It also has something to do with us, and the weight of cultural baggage which we bring to bear on certain questions. We read Plato with many assumptions.

It is also the case that we do not read Plato (or any Greek philosophical writer for that matter) in cultural context. The Platonic canon is about philosophy, and philosophy is currently treated, almost universally, as a subject which can be abstracted from its original context without any significant damage to its meaning or worth. What that original cultural context is, is difficult to determine.

I have attempted to turn this assumption on its head. The Platonic canon belongs very precisely in its cultural context, and we do damage to our capacity to understand both Plato, and the culture to which the canon belongs, by breaking these connections without any grasp of what is lost.

The culture of Greece in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C.E is generally interpreted by classicists in terms of something which happened in isolation from other cultures around the Mediterranean, because it is assumed that the culture of Greece is, in essence, an autocthonous development. The loss this creates for our understanding of all of the cultures of the first millennium B.C.E - including Greece itself - is colossal. Greek intellectual life is relatively well documented when compared with other cultures around the Mediterranean; but rather than using one to illuminate the other, the classicist and philosophical communities assume that they are so far apart, no meaningful comparisons can be made. 

 I have attempted to stand this assumption on its head too, by comparison with aspects of the culture of the Neo-Assyrian empire. Some key details of Greek thought and religious life, which are entirely missing from the record, are documented in Assyria (and in Babylonia) in the mid-1st millennium B.C.E. In writing about the Forms, Plato is, as a key passage indicates to us, also writing about divine statuary and their cultic function. The Forms, as discussed in the canon, reflect a hierarchy which leads to the contemplation of the 'one thing.' This one thing Plato referred to as 'The Good'. This is the ground of Being, or reality itself. All of the Forms participate in some way in Being, and represent aspects of it. Being is conceived by Plato to be the home of real knowledge, and this knowledge can be accessed via the hierarchy of Forms, contemplated in the mind. The Forms represent perfect or ideal approximations to the perfection of Being itself, and provide the access route.

Assyria too possessed the ultimate abstract idea of Being also, some considerable time before Plato wrote about the idea. We know this because of the close relationship which has been established between the structure of the Kabbalah and the Assyrian sacred tree, which is represented many times in royal palaces and on seals. The Assyrians regarded the pursuit of knowledge as an essential component of kingship, which we know about from several sources, including a personal account of the scribal training of Ashurbanipal. The wider training of the king involved the pursuit of excellence in various skills. The king was understood to represent divine Being on earth.

'Looking to one thing' was also essential to the Assyrians, since they too conceived that knowledge resided in transcendent Being, which, they called by many different names. One of the principle images of Being is the undersea Abzu, the home of Ea, the god of wisdom. This is the place where generation is made possible, and where the destinies are determined. Assyrian rituals for inaugurating divine statues invoke the beginning of creation in the Abzu, and feature a long series of images which repeatedly point toward this idea of Being. And in order for a statue to become a living being in heaven, it must be (and is) granted the wide knowledge of Ea himself.

Plato's account of the creation involves the use of an image of Being as a pattern for the generation of the world. This image of Being was used by the Demiourgos to pattern the heavens, with its constellations and moving planets. It is therefore striking that the making of a divine statue in Assyria involves a ritual which exposes the statue to the heavens in order that it may have knowledge of the divine. The parallel Babylonian ritual goes into more detail about the aspects of the heavens which impart divine knowledge to the new god.

In both Assyria and Greece generation is associated with the sea. In both cases the sea is understood as an image of the limit of reality - Okeanos, the encircling ocean in the case of Greece, and the upper and lower sea, in the case of Assyria. It is the limit which is significant, and which gives rise to the image of it. Plato has much to say about the transcendent realm of The Good, in which Forms can have no location, size, shape or colour. The limit appears as the site of generation in Assyrian ritual in the form of the riverbank, which was regarded as the gateway to the Abzu and its threshold. Similarly therefore, in Assyria, generation is understood to emerge from a place which has no location, size, shape or colour. The pure reeds of the riverbank are stated to have their roots in the Abzu.

The precise nature of the cultural relationship between the cult of knowledge in Greece and in Assyria, is currently unclear, apart from the obvious parallels. It will take time and effort to clarify this. But we do know that another important philosophical idea was held in common both in Greece and in Mesopotamia, and we know the nature of the doctrine which emerges from it.  This is the doctrine of wholes or totalities, which we are told was acquired by Pythagoras while he was in Babylon. This doctrine concerns how ideas and forms can participate in one another. It seems like a small thing, outside its proper context. But the doctrine has huge importance in understanding ancient philosophical theology, and indeed in knowing that it existed at all. Anything which is whole, or total in some respect, was understood to participate in wholeness or totality itself. Being was understood in both cultures as a form of totality. In fact in both cultures, it was understood as the entirely transcendent form of totality.

Plato employs this doctrine in his account of the creation, and it is the means by which it is possible for one thing to pass into another, as he tells us. So the creation of wholes and totalities is of key importance. The Forms are wholes, and point to the totality at the root of reality.

It is possible to understand the consequence of the presence of this idea in Mesopotamia, because it is possible, with some teasing out, to understand the consequence of its presence in Greece. Which is that if the ground of Being is transcendent totality, then all other things which possess totality are in some way connected with it, and can be understood as representations of it. This is part of the logical basis for the creation of divine statues. But only part.

The transcendent totality is a plenitude, but it is ungenerated, and so it has no size. It contains the potential for all creation. It is one alone, because otherwise it would be other than it is. And yet Plato speaks of God creating a copy of Being, after which the world was patterned. If a copy of Being was created, then Being would be divided, not whole, and not what it is. It would have been subject to change, which is contrary to its very definition. And yet if it does not exist in the world of change, then it can do nothing. Movement and thought would be impossible. This would be a disastrous state of affairs for any cult which placed knowledge at the heart of Being.

Plato's argumentation about Being is unlike any other from Anselm onwards, in that he identifies Being with the nature of reality itself. Anselm and Descartes speak of supposed properties and attributes of the divine, but since they are attempting proof of the reality of God (framed in terms of some kind of existence), rather than proof of the realness of reality, there is an implicit and unaddressed separation between the divine and the nature of reality in their arguments. There is no sense in either case that the divine is absolutely dependent on the nature of reality.

Plato does not tell us how the paradox of one Being, who is necessarily two for the generation of the world of movement and change, and therefore not real Being, is resolved, nor does he resolve for us the question of whether or not the unchanging divine can be present in the world of movement and change.  What he does do is to proceed with the discussions, on the basis that it is necessarily so, that, somehow, the generated world is patterned after a representation of Being;  and that it must be the case that the divine can, somehow,  be present in the world of movement and change.

If we turn over in our minds the idea that the world is patterned after Being, without its essential nature being compromised, which is totality, alone and undivided, there is only one possible rational logical solution: that the world of movement and change is not, in reality, separated out from the nature of Being. What we see are aspects of Being itself, represented to us in various ways which are available to our capacity to perceive.

Language here does not serve us well, but essentially the logical conclusion must be that, if the essential nature of Being is to retain its integral nature, the world of movement and change is illusory. It has no reality apart from Being. Indeed, there is no such thing as existence 'apart' from Being: Being and the generated world are in some way coterminous.  The world we see and live in is a perception, no more and no less, contained entirely within unchanging Being, and composed of elements and aspects of Being. It is a perceptible world, rather than real; an immensely complex illusion generated within a reality which has no location, extension, shape or colour.

The consequence of this - and this is the crux of the matter - is that though Being retains its essential unchanging nature, and remains always purely is what it is, the generated world must have a double nature. That is, the world of generation is finite, and contains finite things, but it also necessarily contains things which are infinite. These things which relate to the infinite are the completions and perfections, and the other things which participate in the ground of Being. As finitudes, as conceivable images, they belong in the generated world as representations of the divine reality. Considered as representations of Being, they represent what we can understand of the divine, but they must necessarily also be Being itself, and be able to pass in and out of Being. Though we necessarily perceive these images as representations, unless we have profound knowledge of the divine.

It turns out therefore that we can add Plato to the list of ancient philosophers who were addressing reality as a paradoxical phenomenon. That changes quite a lot. It changes our understanding of the Greek mind, and our understanding of Greek culture.

We get some idea of the logic of divine images, their creation and worship, from this perception of reality and the world we live in as a paradoxical matrix. Things necessarily exist in two potential states. Secular and divine. Finite and infinite. Changeable and unchangeable. Sacred and Profane. These two states exist at the same time. It is a matter of understanding, which allows us to know that what belongs to the secular world, is also divine; that what is finite is also infinite; that what is subject to change also belongs to the realm of the unchanging; and that we can find elements of the sacred in the profane.  And, since the world of change is an illusion, so too are living and generated beings.

Formerly I've contrasted reality itself with the world of existence, which is, according to this way of looking at things, not truly real. It is sometimes useful to look at this contrast the other way round, in which the transcendently real world is the only one which has existence. This makes it possible to characterise the world of space and time as one which does not have real existence, only the appearance of existence to us.

However real things and people seem to be in space and time, they come to be and pass away, and do not abide. We think it has real existence of a kind because it has a form of consistency about it, in that physical laws exist and operate in it, and mathematics and geometry apply. This makes it possible to understand it in terms of a form of reality which has the property of objective existence, which is not dependent on mind. Mind observes it, according to this view, but it has existence apart from mind. 

Which brings us to the concept of necessity (anangke), which is key to the understanding of the natural world and the cosmos in Greece. Things which come to be and pass away are subject to it, as well as the objects which move in the heavens. Necessity refers to that force which determines how things behave which are not subject to the operation of the human will. So plants come forth and bloom, human beings are subject to divinely determined fate and destiny, and the planets move inexorably along their paths in the sky. The world of generation is characterised by the presence of necessity: it is a mark of things which have been generated, as opposed to those things which are aspects of unchanging Being.  But this property of the finite is necessarily determined by the infinite, as things which are finite are generated by it. They are patterned accordingly.

Greece shares with Assyria the notion that fate is all powerful, and that the destinies of both men and gods have been decreed at the moment of creation. In both cases however, fate and destiny are decreed by the transcendent divine, for the reason that the world of movement and change is an illusion contained within unchanging Being itself. It necessarily contains within it the start and the finish of all things which may take place in the secular view of reality. And Being determines these, according to its nature.

Maintaining this view of the division between the real world and the world of illusion, it follows that only the properties and attributes of Being are truly real, and truly existent. So, Being itself is real and existent, and its representations are also real, owing to their possession of its properties and attributes (by virtue of the fact that they are wholes and totalities, etc.). According to this view, things which have come to be are patterned after Being itself, and the Forms, which have divine properties as representations of Being.

In assembling lists of things which are pure, which have a common property, or a genealogy of the gods with their properties laid out as epithets which define their perfections and responsibilities, ancient scholars were also listing those things which they understood to be real and to have real existence, and which pointed to the place of creation. By contrast the world of generation contains mainly approximations to those truly real and existent things. These approximations to what is real however can be made perfect by skill, application and the pursuit of divine knowledge, and perfection and divine status can also be accorded to things and individuals by those who already have this knowledge.

By a short extension of this idea, it follows that those beings who live in the generated world have their true existence somewhere else. They are born into existence according to their destiny, and leave at the appointed time. Looked at from this point of view, death can be understood as a return to the place where the essential nature of the individual has its reality.

None of the foregoing implies belief of any sort. All of it may be teased out of the argument Plato makes about the nature of reality. This outlook is best understood as a doctrinal view, based on logical and philosophical discussion. It would have been subject to questions from neophytes and other philosophers; and would have been occasionally refreshed by interaction with those who understood similar doctrines from other places and cultures.

The normative view of religion in Israel for the first half of the first millennium B.C.E is that there was present a form of monotheistic culture and belief, engaged in a struggle with polytheistic ideas within Israel, and with Israel's neighbours in Mesopotamia. In fact we know almost nothing of religion in Israel in that period: there is no solid evidence which can give us reliable information. According to the redacted documents in the Old Testament, dating from the middle years of the  first millennium, it is clear that there was a protracted political struggle taking place for hearts and minds at some point, but most of the objections to polytheism seem to relate to experience of Mesopotamian religious cult and their ideas concerning the gods. Much of this valuable information may therefore post-date the Babylonian exile. 'Thou shall have no other gods before me' might be understood as a purely Israelite sentiment. However, 'I am that which is,' and 'I do not change,' (Malachi) references a philosophical notion of the divine, which we can now see is present in the context of the Mesopotamian divine pantheon.

Parts two and three of The Sacred History of Being were written first, with the umbrella title of 'Being and Representation in Greece and Assyria.' I came to realise in the course of writing that it was important to make it clear that later discussions of the divine in the early modern period were addressing a much more limited set of concepts of the nature of the divine, though these also represented an important subset of discussion of the nature of Being in Greece and Assyria. This early modern discussion represents a significant obstacle in understanding ideas about the divine in the ancient world.

Thomas Yaeger, 9^th April 2015.