At the very Edge: Marking Transition and Transformation in Antiquity

One of the principal themes of my work is the importance accorded to the idea and the function of limit in ancient thought. Discussion of the idea of limit (and the unlimited) can be found in early Greek philosophy, and limit is a key idea in both Mesopotamian and Roman civilization. However currently it is not a major focus of interest for scholars, and so its importance is scarcely understood. 

Here are pointers to seven texts which discuss the significance of the idea of limit in antiquity. 

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'The Threshold in Ancient Assyria'. http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-threshold-in-ancient-assyria.html?spref=tw The chapter is based on pioneering research by the scholar Pauline Albenda.

[From The Origins of Transcendentalism in Ancient Religion (forthcoming)]

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 'The Divine and the Limit' http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-divine-and-limit.html?spref=tw …  explores the prominence of Janus in the ritual life of the Romans. In the songs of the Salii (‘jumpers’ or dancers) he was called the good creator, and the god of gods; he is elsewhere named the oldest of the gods and the beginning of all things. The king, and in later times the rex sacrōrum, sacrificed to him. At every sacrifice he was remembered first; in every prayer he was the first invoked, being mentioned even before Jupiter. He is especially associated with the idea of limit, which is a preoccupation of a number of ancient cultures.

[From Understanding Ancient Thought (2017)]

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Being, Kabbalah, and the Assyrian Sacred Tree http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/being-kabbalah-and-assyrian-sacred-tree.html  The Assyrian Sacred Tree appears to be associated with the ideas of divine being and also with the idea of limit. The explanation for such an association is that the Mesopotamians conceived divinity to be at the limit of that which is. The parallels between the Kabbalah and the Assyrian Sacred Tree were uncovered by the Assyriologist Simo Parpola in the 1990s. This was achieved using the god numbers which the Mesopotamians used to reference their gods. 

[an extract from The Sacred History of Being (2015)]

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'Ocean and the Limit of Existence' http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2017/03/ocean-and-limit-of-existence.html?spref=tw There are similar ideas associated with Ocean in Europe and in the Ancient Near East. These parallels, and the concepts which underpin them, are explored in this chapter. 

[a full chapter from The Sacred History of Being (2015)]

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'Remarks on the Telos (and other lost ideas)' https://t.co/FBciqYgSWk  We recognise only one cause in the modern world, which is the efficient cause. This is concerned with work, energy and power. In antiquity Aristotle described four causes, which are discussed here. Did Aristotle conjure these by himself, or were these concepts understood across the civilised world for centuries before Classical Greece?

[From the chapter: 'Aristotle’s Four Causes' in: Understanding Ancient Thought (2017)]

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'The Esoteric Conception of Divinity in the Ancient World' http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-esoteric-conception-of-divinity-in.html  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.

[Some extracts from the essay: 'The Esoteric Conception of Divinity in the Ancient World', in Man and the Divine (2018)] 

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'The Making and Renewal of the Gods in Ancient Assyria.' https://t.co/6CMNzMiGw2 We have good information about the installation and refurbishment of the gods in Assyrian temples from Esarhaddon, who ruled Assyria before his son Ashurbanipal. Such operations were agreed (via diviners present in the workshop of the gods) with the relevant divinities beforehand (principally Shamash, the sun god), and the omens were cross-checked for accuracy. The full strangeness of what we now know renders a lot of previous anthropological interpretation horribly out of date.

[a full chapter from The Sacred History of Being (2015)]

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'Installing the Gods in Heaven: the Babylonian Mis Pi Ritual' http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-babylonian-mis-pi-ritual.html?spref=tw … This extract contains analysis and commentary on one of the surviving descriptions of the ritual found in Ashurbanipal's library during excavations. Boundaries and limits serve an important function at key moments of the three day ritual. 

[An extract from the chapter 'The Babylonian Mis Pi Ritual', from The Sacred History of Being (2015)]

TY, August 30, 2018

The Living Animal: Aspects of the Function of Statuary among the Ancient Greeks

This is a scan of a research proposal which was completed on the 19th of December 1994, while I was living and working in Oxford. I have been on this path a long time. This was one of two proposals submitted, to different institutions. Neither of the proposals were funded, which isn't really surprising. If this case could be made successfully, it would up-end the history of philosophy, and place its origins in a cultic context. Which is the core argument of the book I published in 2015. 

It is interesting to look at this proposal now, and to see that I confined the parameters of the research (at least within the proposal) to Greece. But I had by this time seen and studied the Mesopotamian rituals for the installation of divine statues. The information contained in those documents, together with  the philosophical discussion in Plato's Sophist mentioned in the proposal, allowed me to infer that Plato knew the logic and ritual for the installation of a divine statue in Greece, and that his writing about the Forms had as much to do with divine images, as it did with a purely abstract argument about how an individual might approach 'The Good'. 

Of course there is no dispute that the Greeks had statues of the gods, and that they gave their observances and respect to the divinity of these images, within their various cults (I choose my words carefully here). However no ritual for the installation of divine statues survives from ancient Greece, The eminent scholar Walter Burkert has gone so far as to declare that the absence of these rituals in the record indicates to us that there were no such rituals for the installation of divine statues in Greece. That's quite a claim, since if an elaborate three day ritual was considered necessary for such an installation in Mesopotamia, and there was no parallel elaborate ritual for the creation of divine images in Greece, that would make the Greeks seem cavalier about the matter. The Greeks were rarely cavalier about their gods. 

There is little about this proposal which I would change after twenty-two years. It was on the money, in suggesting that the origin of philosophy was in cult practice, and the logic which underpinned it (which seems very strange to us). This is utterly anathema to classical scholars, who prefer a fictional and largely secular origin for its beginnings. 

Thomas Yaeger, December 5, 2016

The Babylonian Mis Pi Ritual

[This is an extract from The Babylonian Mis Pi Ritual, a chapter from The Sacred History of Being, published November 2, 2015]

....Then the offering-arrangements are dismantled.  The hand of the god is taken, and they process to the garden.

The new god is seated in the orchard, in the midst of the reed-standards on a reed-mat placed on a linen cloth. His eyes are turned toward sunrise.

You go to the river and throw mashatu-meal into the river;

You libate mihhu beer. You lift up your hand; and you recite three times each in front of the river the incantation, 'Apsu-temple, where fates are determined,' (and) the incantation 'Quay of the Apsu, pure quay;'

The operator is instructed to draw water (for) seven holy-water-basins, and to place the water in the chapel of Kusu. Into the basin of Mouth-Washing is thrown an interesting selection of items: tamarisk, mastakal, date palm 'heart', seven palm shoots, salalu-reed, apparu-reed, sweet-reed, sulphur, salt, cedar, cypress, juniper, 'horned alkali', sikillu-plant, tree-resin, lodestone, zalaqu-stone, mussaru-stone, carnelian,  [i]  lapis-lazuli, pappardilu-stone, pappardildilu-stone, silver, gold, tin, iron, oil, salve-oil,  perfumed (?)  oil, cedar oil, syrup (and) ghee.

Mention of  the 'Apsu-temple, where fates are determined,' and 'Quay of the Apsu, pure Quay,' represents a poetic reduplication of a single idea, which is the idea that both of them point to the ground of Being, of totality, where fate and destiny can be determined, since all knowledge is present in the Apsu, and that proximity to the Apsu is to be had at the river bank, since all  rivers in Mesopotamia were accorded divine status, and therefore prefixed with the Sumerian determinative sign 'Dingir'.  Tamarisk and date-palm-heart have already been discussed in terms of images pointing toward the Apsu. Juniper has been used in purification rituals in a number of cultures. The palm shoots fairly obviously represent coming forth and generation. 'horned alkali' is a vegetable ash, which clearly represents the final end for something which once had existence. Tree-resin is something which is often found exuding from pines, and can be used for purification purposes, lodestone may indicate stones which fall from the sky, and so were once part of the image of being which the night sky represents. Lapis-lazuli is the colour of the sky, and was a much sought after mineral in antiquity for that reason. It was often used in circumstances where a reference to the sky was required. Gold and Silver reference the Sun and the Moon who are gods, who belong to the image of Being. And gold possesses incorruptibility, which may be the reason why Shamash is also the god of justice (there is no justice where there is corruption).  Iron is far from incorruptible, but it has a special excellence of its own, in that it was the hardest metal available in the first millennium B.C.E, and could be worked into useful forms by the smiths, who had something of the divine fire about them.

After a line which is hard to understand, but concerns arrangement, the operator is instructed to fill a trough of tamarisk wood with the waters of the holy-water-basins. Into this trough carnelian, lapis-lazuli, silver beads, gold beads, juniper and halsu-oil, and then to set the holy water-basins on the brick of Dingirmah. The holy-water-basins are set up, and the Mouth-Washing is performed again. The offering-arrangement is dismantled.

At line 25 the instruction is to set up nine offering arrangements for Anu, Enlil, Ea, Sin, Shamash, Adad, Marduk, Gula (and) Ishtar, the stars  ...  toward the north. The incantation, 'Tamarisk, pure wood,' is recited, and the Mouth-washing is performed again.

Now we get some interesting astronomical detail in connection with the ritual.

You set up towards the south nine offering arrangements for Ninmah, Kusu, Ningirim, Ninkurral, Ninagal,

Kusibanda, Ninildu, Ninzadim and that god.

The Mouth washing is repeated here, and after each of the following, until line 36.

You set up 2 offering arrangements for Jupiter and Venus.

You set up 2 offering arrangements for the Moon and Saturn.

You set up 3 offering arrangements for Mercury, Sirius (and) Mars.

You set up 6 offering arrangements for the Scales (Libra) (which is) the star of Shamash, the Plough (Triangulum/Andromeda), 'SU.PA' (Boӧtes), the Wagon (Ursa Major), Erua (Coma Berenices), the She Goat (Lyra).

You set up 4 offering arrangements for the Field (Pegasus/Andromeda), the Swallow (Pisces), Anunitum (Pisces) (and) the Furrow (Virgo).

You set up 4 offering arrangements for the Fish (?), the Giant (Aquarius), Eridu (and) the Scorpion.

 [End of extract]

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[i] Carnelian was used in both Mesopotamia and Greece for seals, because clay did not stick to it. Symbolically the carnelian represents one half of the undefined dyad, and the clay represents what Plato referred to as the ‘receptacle’, capable of receiving images, and participating in Being. Each is the reverse of the other.