Cosmotheism, Totality, and the Transcendental (Complete)

[This text originally appeared on my blog in four parts, as: 'Philosophical Thought in Greece and Babylonia' I-IV, during the winter of 2018-9. The parts are now stitched together. A fifth part has been added (December 2019), which brings  the essay to a conclusion]  

There were many more subjects dealt with in my first book (The Sacred History of Being) than the chapter listing suggested. It was designed to be worth reading, but it isn’t constructed as a through narrative. It can be read like that, but the structure is actually fugal: echoes of the same ideas come up throughout the text in different guises.

One of these ideas is the significance of what is ’whole’ in ancient thought, and the role it seems to have played in the development of ancient religion (the connection between physical and transcendent reality, a matter of great importance to the ancients, was understood to be made possible through the nature of wholes and totalities). Another is the idea that the nature of reality can only be one, otherwise the integrity of reality would be fatally compromised. A third idea which plays a part in this fugue is the irrational nature of the ur-reality. We see this fundamental irrationality expressed in physical reality through the irrational nature of mathematical constants. The closer we look at the building blocks of physical reality – geometry, mathematics and physics – The more we understand that these actually point back to an ur-reality which is deeply irrational. However large parts of physical reality can be described and modelled in terms of geometry and mathematics. A fourth question is discussed – if reality is necessarily one, otherwise the fundamental nature and integrity of that reality is rendered impossible, how is it that the universe in which we live is full of multiplicities and things which are different from each other? How can this be if reality is one?

The fourth question is closely allied to one of the most profound questions which can be asked, which is ‘how is it that there is something rather than nothing?’ This question was asked in antiquity, as it is still sometimes asked. But the answer to that question received a more intelligent response in antiquity than it does now. We know about its importance not so much from direct references, but from the fact that that ancient writers become very coy when discussing matters of creation, and often do not give satisfactory answers. Most historians simply assume that this is a reticence surrounding the particular doctrine of particular cults, and that the phenomenon does not point to a way of thinking about the generation of the physical world which is rooted in philosophical questions about what reality is. Instead they dismiss the importance of reasoning in connection with the creation of the physical world as having nothing to do with universals, because (‘as any fule know’) that kind of abstract thought was absent from the human race until the advent of the Greeks.

One of the ways to test this assumption is to assume, for the purposes of argument, that the opposite might be true: that bodies of thought before the Greeks are actually built on abstract and universal propositions derived in the course of philosophical inquiry. And mostly on a basis of logical thought. The results which emerge from this approach are often quite startling: a great deal of thought from before the time of the Greeks starts to make sense. And strong parallels emerge (another one of the themes of The Sacred History of Being) in the Babylonian liturgy of the New Year Festival (the Enuma Elish), between early Greek and Babylonian/Assyrian thought.

Another thing which historians of ancient thought do is to assume the simplest interpretation of the details of ancient religion is likely to be the correct one. So, the gods have a variety of origins – deified individuals, local totemic deities, and the personification of the powers of the natural world. Storm gods and Sun gods are a gift for this kind of interpretation. But again, the assumption can be tested by assuming the opposite: that there is some kind of philosophical basis to ancient gods within particular cultural groupings. The parallels across several cultural groups in the ancient world are often striking. Close examination of the rituals for installing gods (where we have them) are particularly revealing. Are these rituals designed to install gods on the earth, or in some transcendental realm, such as Heaven itself? Very few specialists deal with these materials, because the answer to that question is quite clearly the latter.  Yes, there is a carefully crafted image of the god on earth, in his temple, but it was understood by the Mesopotamians to be a particular image of the god on earth, who has his essential reality in Heaven.

 So what is going on here? The difficulty is compounded by the fact that the craftsmen undertaking the work are granted a temporary divinity, without which they could not create a god. And afterwards, their divine status is removed through another part of the ritual, and they make public denial of their involvement in the creation of the god. Historians (with one or two exceptions) have no idea of what the basis of such a notion of granting temporary divinity might be. And so these rituals are generally passed over in any discussion of Babylonian and Assyrian civilization, in favour of the more conventional view that the gods are personifications of natural powers, and so on.

Nothing is explained by avoiding the uncomfortable nature of the evidence. Addressing the evidence is the only way to understand what is involved. There are several clues, such as the description of Marduk as the totality of the gods, in the Enuma Elish (in the section known as ‘The Fifty Names of Marduk’). Each of the descriptions of the fifty gods is a humanly crafted definition of what they represent, and their importance for the good order of the world. As the totality of the fifty, Marduk is the head of the pantheon of gods. He represents the whole of Mesopotamian divinity.

Is Marduk therefore reality itself? The answer is both yes and no. The Enuma Elish contains descriptions of two creations – the second rational, the first irrational. And Marduk is not present during this first creation. The first creation is described as a hail of composite creatures, with the bodies of animals and the heads of men. It is destroyed because it is irrational. Marduk then creates good order in the world so that man may live, stretching out the surface of the earth and creating the places of refuge (implying that he was responsible for the creation of ordered space and the physical dimensions as we know them).

So, as in other ancient descriptions of creation, there is a stage in the process which is difficult to fathom, and which participated in irrationality, and in chaos.

The Greeks were cautious in their discussions of the arche, at least in public, probably for this very reason. They sometimes passed over this stage altogether in silence, in their divine genealogies. But this evasion tells us that their conception of reality was that reality was a plenum, and that it was not, in itself, good. A well ordered world emerged from that initial state of reality, through the presence and action of the gods. In Mesopotamia, the gods had the power to secure the good order of the world through the ‘fixing of the destinies’. The Greeks had a similar concept, in the three fates.

The Sacred History of Being contains an extract from a discussion of the complexity of our understanding of the One by the Platonist Thomas Taylor, who was a contemporary of Shelley and William Blake. Taylor's text outlines the difficulty which surrounded the discussion of this subject in antiquity. After quoting the text, I wrote that Taylor’s comments show:

…how far Platonic argument about Being and the One can be pushed, and also [shows] how far Plato understood the limitations of argument about Being, and knowledge itself. This is a thousand miles beyond the level of sophistication of discussion of the nature of reality by Anselm and by Descartes. In practice their discussions of the subject lack clarity, and actually never proceed beyond ideas and notions associated with Being. So the ideas of 'Greatness' and 'Perfection', which figure in Plato's dialogues as attributes of Being, are the core of their arguments, and the limits of their conception of the Divine.

Another reason for including this text is that it shows just how dangerous this doctrine is, and that its dangerousness was fully understood in antiquity. If an ultimate ineffability is wrapped around the idea of Being, and it cannot be fathomed or known, it is easy for the 'idiotical ears' to assume that their religion is a pious fraud based on a doctrine which has at its core no divinity at all. 

The primal chaos at the heart of Being of course makes perfect sense within a model of the world in which the difference between the subjective and objective is ultimately an illusion. We participate in Being, and in creation. Reality is what we make of it. Without such an understanding of this model of reality, the description of Being and reality served and discussed in the ancient temple school could only mean to 'the idiotical ears' that the priesthood held that there is no god.

[TY, December 21, 2018]

The conventional wisdom, at least since the European enlightenment in the eighteenth century C.E., is that the phenomenon of monotheism is an idea which emerged from a preceding general inclination to polytheism among the human race. It is also conventional wisdom that we know of no instance of a monotheistic religion before the instances which are regularly cited to support this narrative. This emergence is short on evidence, and the evidence we have is less than clear in terms of context and implications, but is nevertheless a key assumption for historians of thought, and for theologians. It is assumed that the appearance of monotheism represents a negative and critical reaction to aspects of polytheism, and marks a great leap forward in human thought.

The evidence comes entirely from religious contexts, but this does not seem to matter. It is a great leap forward whether or not you are religiously minded, a professional theologian, a historian of cultural ideas, or even an outright atheist, because it marks the arrival of the ability to think in abstract rather than concrete terms. After this, it was possible for human beings to think in terms of universals rather than in assemblages of essentially unconnected particulars. It does not matter how the change is dressed: the human race was emancipated from an irrational concern for personification of natural forces, and the other ways in which a religious pantheon, or a sequence of genealogies, might have been built.

The two instances which are taken to show the emergence of monotheistic patterns of thought are:

 1):  the Hebrew insistence that Yahweh stands alone, and that ‘there is no other god beside me’. This insistence dates – in textual terms - back to the middle of the 1^st millennium B.C.E., since we know, largely from internal evidence,  that the text of the Old Testament was heavily redacted in the fifth century B.C.E., and reflects the views of what appears to be the victorious ‘Yahweh only’ faction in a long-running theological and political struggle concerning the nature of the Hebrew religion.

And:

2): The religious revolution which is supposed to have been wrought by the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten in the 14^th century B.C.E., in which the plethora of divinities and the religious cults attached to them were replaced with the worship of the god ‘Aten’ alone.

I wrote extensively about Hebrew monotheism in the chapter ‘The Idea of Being in Israel’, in The Sacred History of Being (2015), and the influence of Mesopotamian ideas of divinity (principally Babylonian) on Hebrew thought. There are many clear references to Babylonian concepts in the Old Testament, often in the form of parodies. The Hebrews certainly encountered Babylonian religious thought and practice during their exile in Babylon. The extent to which this was a significant influence on their thought and practice before the period of exile is hard to determine however, since there is very little evidence to illustrate the nature of Hebrew religious thought before that time, both in terms of datable textual references, and archaeological remains. We do not know whether polytheism was a Hebrew practice in the first half of the 1^st millennium BCE, because there is no unequivocal evidence remaining for that period.  Other individuated Hebrew gods are unknown to us in the textual and archaeological records, though there are references in Hebrew texts to the worship of both foreign and Canaanite gods (Baal being one of the most conspicuous). Yahweh is however sometimes referred to as ‘El’, and occasionally with the plural form ‘Elohim’. Which might be taken to imply a multiplicity of gods.

There is a great deal of evidence however which shows that argument about the nature of the divine took place, and some of that may have been prompted by the importation of foreign deities and foreign cult practices. These arguments, and their potential implications for the nature of Hebrew thought about the divine, were also discussed in ‘The Idea of Being in Israel’.

This argument about the nature of the divine is rarely read by scholars in terms of a philosophical debate. There is no connected discussion available to us relating to these conjectural debates, if that is what they were, and scholars are disinclined to address the detail which does exist in terms of a philosophical understanding of the divine.

As for Akhenaten’s religious revolution, some biblical scholars have argued (over many years) that Moses brought monotheism to the Levant at the time of the Exodus from Egypt, and that there is a lineal connection (of some sort) between the supposed monotheism of Akhenaten, and the Hebrew conception of Yahweh. We are told in the Pentateuch that Yahweh is the one true god, but, as already mentioned, these are texts which were redacted in the middle of the 1^st millennium B.C.E. These texts reflect the interests and beliefs of the victors – the ‘Yahweh only’ group.  The truth may be quite different. Since we have no reliable evidence for Hebrew conceptions of the divine in the first half of the 1^st millennium, what can be said of their conceptions of the divine in the second half of the second millennium B.C.E.?

In any case, are we clear about the difference between monotheism and polytheism? To adherents of the idea that the passage from polytheism to monotheism represents a cultural evolution, the answer is obvious: monotheism is a move away from local and tribal gods, and a move towards a grander and more abstract conception of the divine. However imperfectly understood. This eventually led to the development of articulate discussion of the philosophical nature of the divine among the Greeks.

But this narrative is entirely based on the two examples discussed above, and our understanding of what was going on in both cases is very thin. It is possible to impose the narrative of a cultural evolution on these examples, and this is what is done. But there is no conclusive evidence that this narrative represents the actual cultural dynamics at play in the second and first millennia  B.C.E. 

I’ve already shown in my essay ‘Polytheism, Monotheism, and The Cult of the Aten’ *1 that Akhenaten did not set out to obliterate the cults of the traditional gods of Egypt, and that there is no evidence that Akhenaten’s worship of the Aten attracted early hostility from the traditional cults. This does not mean that there was no tension between the new cult and the other priestly establishments. We do know that in the end, both Akhenaten’s supporters, and the priests of Amun, were enthusiastically hacking out references to their respective divinities from the monuments. But we have very little unambiguous information about how this situation came to pass.

In fact there is another narrative available concerning Akhenaten’s religion of the Aten which has not so far received much attention. Why is this? The existing narrative supports the simple idea of the development of monotheism as a form of reaction to what had become unacceptable aspects of polytheistic belief.  This narrative has a great hold on scholars, even if not all the available evidence provides clear support for it. The other narrative about Akhenaten’s religious revolution suggests something quite different – that the worship of the Aten was not just a newly minted preoccupation of Akhenaten, and to lesser extent his father, but that his revolution was an attempt to restore a very old body of thought in Egypt.*2

If that is the case, then the modern narrative we have constructed, on the basis of a very partial understanding of the evidence, will necessarily collapse. For one thing, monotheism will have been shown to be very old, and indeed be an Egyptian way of thinking about reality which stretches back to the earliest dynasties. For another, the idea of a cultural evolution from polytheism to monotheism will no longer be tenable, if monotheism is an idea which is thousands of years old. And in addition, if monotheism has an extensive history in Egypt, alongside an equally extensive history of polytheism, we would need to ask, ‘how could this be?’

1 Polytheism, Monotheism, and The Cult of the Aten

2 Discussed in 'The Horizon of the Aten' (forthcoming). 

[TY, December 26, 2018.]

We can never know exactly when the idea of Being, or, as we may characterise it, the most abstract possible conception of the nature of reality, first entered human consciousness. It may have been an idea which was conjectured as long ago as the Palaeolithic period, or as late as the early Neolithic. 

However, for those who accept the western convention that the abstract conception of Being as the foundation of reality itself was first broached by the Greeks in the middle of the 1^st millennium BCE., the very idea of its earlier presence in human consciousness is an absurdity. The Western convention explains very little, is not supported by the available evidence, but it serves the purpose of closing off from our consideration even the possibility of a much longer history of the idea of Being. And for the gigantic, sprawling edifices of Western philosophy and religion, this is, for the most part, a comfort.

Yet the evidence for a much earlier presence of the idea of Being in civilization is far from invisible, except to those for whom (prima facie) the idea of an earlier existence for the concept can have no reality. Historians are disabled in their critical understanding of antiquity by the fact that the contemporary episteme – the intellectual frame in which ideas can be thought and discussed - excludes the possibility that the idea of Being is truly ancient.

It was suggested in the late 19^th century that the idea of Being was of no importance, since it was not possible to say anything about the nature of Being with any certainty: it was beyond having anything predicated of it. That alone made it possible for scholars to ignore the question of Being, whatever role it might have had in ancient cultures. The modern west had reached the point where ancient ideas made so little sense in terms of a modern understanding, that the idea of Being was simply passed by.

In antiquity the conception of Being was understood to be coterminous with reality itself. Hence the suggestion in the Babylonian ‘Enuma Elish’ that the dimensions of physical reality were stretched out of this primal and transcendent reality. In such terms, it is impossible to dismiss Being as an idea which does not need to be addressed. However, the idea of a reality beyond physical and sensory reality was effectively dismissed in the 19^th century. What we could see, measure and weigh was the only reality we could engage with. What might lie beyond the scalar and vector values was not something which could be rationally addressed. In fact the conception of a transcendent reality disappeared altogether from the range of things which might be known and understood, at least in terms of real knowledge. If divines and mystics still wanted to talk about these things, they were free to do so. But their discussions were treated as so many varieties of nonsense, and were not worthy of consideration.

In antiquity, the infinite, or Being itself, was not seen as inaccessible. That is clear from the texts we have. But it does not mean that connection with the Infinite and Being was regarded as unproblematic. The difficulty was the result of a collision between the logic of the immanence of the divine, and earthly logic. According to the latter, it is impossible for the divine to intersect with physical reality, since something cannot be other than it is. At least according to Aristotelian logic. Plato can not be interpreted the same way.

As we cannot know the origins of monotheism, we cannot know the origins of polytheism. We have to accept that. It is too far in the past. And indeed, there may have been no single origin for polytheism; no identiable path by which the human mind and human experience shaped man’s encounter with a plurality of gods. Generally we imagine how polytheism came to be: as the result of political and social struggles in antiquity, with the creation of pantheons of gods, whose existence mirrors in large part, earthly experience of powers, exalted into entities who have their existences somewhere quite remote from human experience. They are in some way in notional control of all aspects of ancient life, and are often deeply unfathomable in both  their natures and in their behaviour. Therefore they give rise to a sense of awe and sometimes terror in the human mind.

This way of looking at the origins of polytheism assumes that there is no transcendental aspect to polytheism, and that polytheism is a phenomenon which precedes both the first discussions of the idea of Being, and the idea that there is a transcendental reality which was understood to stand behind the world of appearance.

These two propositions stand behind the modern interpretation of the meaning and function of the gods in antiquity, and both propositions were occasionally entertained in antiquity itself, particularly from Hellenistic times onwards. We assume that this way of seeing and understanding the gods, which is our modern understanding, was as correct then as it is now, even if other ideas were current about the gods, and how the human race might engage with them, as though they were truly real. For the anthropologist and classicist James Frazer, the idea of discussing Being, now as well as in antiquity, is nonsensical. It is an abstraction about which it is not possible to say anything. For Frazer, Being is an unattainable abstraction, and for all practical purposes, it does not profit us to discuss it in any way.

And yet… Frazer himself noted that the idea of Being was clearly regarded as a proper subject for discussion by some of the earliest Greek philosophers – Anaximander, Hesiod, Heraclitus, and Pythagoras, for example, as well as for later figures, such as Parmenides and Plato. If the discussion of Being is a corollary of the emancipation of the human mind from irrational patterns of thought, normally imagined to be a major landmark in Greek civilization, the fact that there is a continuity of discussion around the idea of Being long before the development of the Athenian intellectual hegemony - via Plato’s Academy, and Aristotle’s Lyceum – is something which requires an explanation.

  

There is no such explanation available to be considered as long as we persist in the presumption that there is no conception of the ultimate abstraction of Being before the 5^th century BCE, which even the Greek evidence contradicts. Greek genius? I cannot write that without a sense of irony. It is an explanation which explains nothing, but draws attention to the fact that either we have nothing useful to say about the intellectual achievement of the Greeks, or that we choose to remain within our modern episteme.

We also need to escape the notion that the intellectual achievement of the Greeks owed nothing to contact with other cultures – again a view based on the presumption that there was no concept of the ultimate abstraction of Being anywhere else before the Greeks. Isocrates credited the Egyptians with the discipline of philosophy. Aristotle indirectly referenced the Egyptians by suggesting that philosophy may have begun with a professional class with time to think, by which he clearly had in mind the Egyptian priesthoods. And we know something of the cultural contacts (both intellectual and commercial) that the Greeks had with Egypt. Solon visited Egypt and talked with the priests. Pythagoras did the same, and also spent time in Babylon. The historian Herodotus wrote extensively (if often inaccurately) about Egypt, and went so far as to claim that the names of some of the Greek gods came from Egyptian sources.

We also know now of the cultural impact of the empire of Assyria on Greece, partly through the close proximity of Ionia with the kingdom of Lydia, a client state of the Assyrians, and through the direct capture of Athens by the Assyrian king Sennacherib, some time around 700 BCE. There was a temple to Assyrian gods built in Athens, according to the Greek writer Abydenus, and so there would have been Assyrian temple personnel present for a significant period of time, during which there was the possibility of a significant exchange of ideas. We have long known that many notions of the presocratic philosophers echo similar Mesopotamian ideas. 

[TY, January 10, 2019]

How can we have polytheistic and monotheistic ideas apparently existing side by side, within the same cultural contexts? This seems to have been the case in ancient Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, and perhaps also in ancient Greece. Plato often referred to ‘ho theos’ (God), rather than ‘the gods’, yet the cultural context was polytheistic. This is a mystery if we are yoked to the idea of a cultural transition from polytheism to monotheism within historical time.  That the evidence from these cultures, does not, on the face of things, provide support for this idea, suggests strongly that this modern and simplistic model of ancient cultural development is deficient in explanatory power, and is more than likely plain false.

It is far from straightforward to disentangle the elements of this issue, so that we might come to a practical resolution as to what is actually going on.  It is however useful to discuss some of the issues which stand between us and an understanding.

One of these of course is our modern preconception of what it was possible to think before Jaspers ‘Axial Age’. The very concept of an axial age speaks of a desire to close off detailed study of thought before classical Greece.

Why would we want to close off the analysis of earlier patterns of thought? The answer is that we consider that such patterns are irretrievably irrational in nature, and offer no rational insights into patterns of thought in antiquity. They may be intelligible in terms of the language of mythology, and in terms of the logic of poetry, but their literature is essentially pre-rational, and so is best approached in terms of disordered, and even pathological thought.

Another is the idea that it is only with the capacity to engage in rational thought, is it possible to  contemplate abstractions such as ‘Being’ and the ‘Infinite’. Before the classical period, we conceive that man did not contemplate Being or the Infinite, at least in rational terms, whatever inchoate inklings they may have had.

One of the issues with the scholarship which addresses thought from time before the Greek contributions, is that it is generally assumed, rather than evidentially determined, that there is no transcendentalist aspect present in ancient religions. What is missing is not defined in the context of ancient thought however, because there is nothing to be defined. Transcendentalist patterns of thought belong to later - and western - intellectual traditions.

It does not however take much effort to show that this is a false assumption, and that the interpretation does not account for the range of evidence which is available. For example, the Assyrian god Ashur was understood in a number of ways, including simply as the local god of the city of Ashur – recognised as powerful because his city was powerful.  However Ashur was also defined as the totality of the other gods. In which case he could be understood in terms of a grand aggregation of the properties and attributes associated with the other Assyrian divinities. This idea has been entertained, in this simple form, also for Egyptian polytheism, using the term ‘cosmotheism’ to mark out this species of thought concerning the ‘pre-axial gods’. In other words, the definition of the supreme deity in the official pantheon of gods is a plain summation of everything associated with the divine pantheon.

This also is how Marduk appears to be presented in the Babylonian New Year Festival – Marduk is the principal god in the Babylonian pantheon, and a section of the liturgy of the festival assigns him fifty names. These names are the other gods: they are listed for recitation, and the main characteristics are described and their principal functions are defined. Together, these gods, their descriptions and their functions delineate all the proper characteristics of divine kingship. As the supreme god, Marduk is also the perfect model for kingship in the Babylonian state.

This is how the literary and ritual texts can be, and are, read by the majority of scholars interested in the subject of ancient divinity. The starting point is that there is no transcendentalist aspect to the ancient understanding of the divinities in the pantheons of Assyria, Babylonia, or Egypt. If there is something approximating to a transcendentalist conception of the supreme deity, we cannot fathom it – and in any case, it will not be a wholly rational conception which would stand up to scrutiny. The idea will necessarily be vague, inchoate and imprecise, and will have no significant range of function associated with it. Such a loosely defined transcendentalism will perhaps signify only an exaltation of the status of the god, in the same way that in ancient Greece, divine status could be accorded to human individuals, without it being understood that the individuals had actually become divine.

However, we should look closely at what is being described in texts relating to the divine. In the case of the Enuma Elish, each of the gods in the pantheon which are embraced in the nature of Marduk, king of the Gods, represents an excellence, whether in the construction of quays and harbours, the detection and restoration of lost gods, the making of divine images, of farming and cultivation, of cattle husbandry, etc. Each of these gods represents the good things which are necessary for the good order and prosperity of the Babylonian state. And they are the most excellent exemplars of these necessary things.

[Final part added, December 29, 2019]

Excellence in Mesopotamia was understood to be a virtue, just as it was in ancient Greece. We can see this clearly in the autobiographical remarks made by the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, when he recounts his training as crown prince, in preparation for becoming the successor to his father, Esarhaddon. He tells us of his skill as a spear thrower, and of his skill at oil divination. He tells us of his skill in mathematics, and that he is able to read the obscure cuneiform of tablets ‘from before the flood’.

By demonstrating his excellence at these things, Ashurbanipal showed that he merited the status accorded to him by his father Esarhaddon, who was the representative of the god Ashur on earth.

In a sense Ashurbanipal’s collection of excellences mirror’s Marduk’s embodiment of the lesser gods, as described in the liturgy of the Enuma Elish, all of whom are exemplars of things essential for the good conduct of the state and the upholding of the universe by the king.

It is possible to look at this kind of listing of embodiments of excellence purely as a description of what is desirable in both the gods and in earthly kings. That is the essence of the cosmotheist argument – the various excellences are descriptive, and provide a reminder once a year (in the case of the performance of the liturgy of the Enuma Elish) of what the necessary excellences are.

However we need to remember that liturgy and ritual in antiquity were understood to be performative, rather than simply descriptive. In other words the performance of ritual served a function  In the case of the Enuma Elish, performing the text was understood to contribute to the upholding of the good order of both the earthly world, and the state of the cosmos. Modern scholars of course do not believe such a thing, and have difficulty fathoming the ancient understanding of the efficacy of ritual.  But it is clear that in antiquity, for the courtly and scholarly classes at least, they held that ritual was performative and effective. We are told by the Greeks (and not just by Aristotle), that the pursuit of excellence is something which should be done for its own sake. Meaning that such a pursuit was understood to serve an important function.

We get clues about this when Plato talks about the harmony of the soul, and relates the idea to the good order of the polis, and the structure of the state. All of which is achieved through the pursuit of excellence, even at the level of craft activity. The soul and the society reflect each other, and each is, if things are in order, an assemblage of excellences. By extension, both reflect the good order of the cosmos, and the perfection of the gods.

This is not a cosmotheistic assemblage. Cosmotheism essentially argues that the idea of assemblage which a divine pantheon contains, is a fiction, since the assemblage does nothing in itself, but merely serves the purpose of creating a superficial sense of totality and completeness in the divine world.

In fact the function of the assemblage of the divine excellences embodied in both the gods, and in society, serves the function of binding the divine and human worlds together, and establishes a continuity between them. In addition to that, the assemblage of excellences opens the possibility of commerce between the human and divine worlds. 

This issue was of fundamental importance in both ancient Greece and in Mesopotamia. Plato focussed on the importance of a commerce between worlds in the Sophist, because otherwise all of the rituals and observances, the creation of images of the gods and their installation in Heaven, the sacrifices to them, and the divination of divine will, would be both completely meaningless, and impossible, if the two worlds lacked a connection, and a commonality. 

In the Sophist, in the presence of the Eleatic Stranger, Plato did not provide the detail of the argument for the connection between the worlds, but merely said that they must agree with each other that it must be so. But the detail of the argument can be found elsewhere in the Sophist, particularly when Plato is discussing the battle of the Gods and Giants . That section repays close study.

Philosophical Thought in Greece and Babylonia (I)

"…. yet dualism was able to reign for so long, thousands of years after those truths of the whole were irrefutably established"

.

***

 I’m not sure how much of my work you have read. It isn’t obligatory for anyone to read any of it at all. However there were many more subjects dealt with in my first book (The Sacred History of Being) than the chapter listing suggested. It was designed to be worth reading, but it isn’t constructed as a through narrative. It can be read like that, but the structure is actually fugal: echoes of the same ideas come up throughout the text in different guises.

One of these ideas is the significance of what is ’whole’ in ancient thought, and the role it seems to have played in the development of ancient religion (the connection between physical and transcendent reality, a matter of great importance to the ancients, was understood to be made possible through the nature of wholes and totalities). Another is the idea that the nature of reality can only be one, otherwise the integrity of reality would be fatally compromised. A third idea which plays a part in this fugue is the irrational nature of the ur-reality. We see this fundamental irrationality expressed in physical reality through the irrational nature of mathematical constants. The closer we look at the building blocks of physical reality – geometry, mathematics and physics – The more we understand that these actually point back to an ur-reality which is deeply irrational. However large parts of physical reality can be described and modelled in terms of geometry and mathematics. A fourth question is discussed – if reality is necessarily one, otherwise the fundamental nature and integrity of that reality is rendered impossible, how is it that the universe in which we live is full of multiplicities and things which are different from each other? How can this be if reality is one?

The fourth question is closely allied to one of the most profound questions which can be asked, which is ‘how is it that there is something rather than nothing?’ This question was asked in antiquity, as it is still sometimes asked. But the answer to that question received a more intelligent response in antiquity than it does now. We know about its importance not so much from direct references, but from the fact that that ancient writers become very coy when discussing matters of creation, and often do not give satisfactory answers. Most historians simply assume that this is a reticence surrounding the particular doctrine of particular cults, and that the phenomenon does not point to a way of thinking about the generation of the physical world which is rooted in philosophical questions about what reality is. Instead they dismiss the importance of reasoning in connection with the creation of the physical world as having nothing to do with universals, because (‘as any fule know’) that kind of abstract thought was absent from the human race until the advent of the Greeks.

One of the ways to test this assumption is to assume, for the purposes of argument, that the opposite might be true: that bodies of thought before the Greeks are actually built on abstract and universal propositions derived in the course of philosophical inquiry. And mostly on a basis of logical thought. The results which emerge from this approach are often quite startling: a great deal of thought from before the time of the Greeks starts to make sense. And strong parallels emerge (another one of the themes of The Sacred History of Being) in the Babylonian liturgy of the New Year Festival (the Enuma Elish), between early Greek and Babylonian/Assyrian thought.

Another thing which historians of ancient thought do is to assume the simplest interpretation of the details of ancient religion is likely to be the correct one. So, the gods have a variety of origins – deified individuals, local totemic deities, and the personification of the powers of the natural world. Storm gods and Sun gods are a gift for this kind of interpretation. But again, the assumption can be tested by assuming the opposite: that there is some kind of philosophical basis to ancient gods within particular cultural groupings. The parallels across several cultural groups in the ancient world are often striking. Close examination of the rituals for installing gods (where we have them) are particularly revealing. Are these rituals designed to install gods on the earth, or in some transcendental realm, such as Heaven itself? Very few specialists deal with these materials, because the answer to that question is quite clearly the latter.  Yes, there is a carefully crafted image of the god on earth, in his temple, but it was understood by the Mesopotamians to be a particular image of the god on earth, who has his essential reality in Heaven.

 So what is going on here? The difficulty is compounded by the fact that the craftsmen undertaking the work are granted a temporary divinity, without which they could not create a god. And afterwards, their divine status is removed through another part of the ritual, and they make public denial of their involvement in the creation of the god. Historians (with one or two exceptions) have no idea of what the basis of such a notion of granting temporary divinity might be. And so these rituals are generally passed over in any discussion of Babylonian and Assyrian civilization, in favour of the more conventional view that the gods are personifications of natural powers, and so on.

Nothing is explained by avoiding the uncomfortable nature of the evidence. Addressing the evidence is the only way to understand what is involved. There are several clues, such as the description of Marduk as the totality of the gods, in the Enuma Elish (in the section known as ‘The Fifty Names of Marduk’). Each of the descriptions of the fifty gods is a humanly crafted definition of what they represent, and their importance for the good order of the world. As the totality of the fifty, Marduk is the head of the pantheon of gods. He represents the whole of Mesopotamian divinity.

Is Marduk therefore reality itself? The answer is both yes and no. The Enuma Elish contains descriptions of two creations – the second rational, the first irrational. And Marduk is not present during this first creation. The first creation is described as a hail of composite creatures, with the bodies of animals and the heads of men. It is destroyed because it is irrational. Marduk then creates good order in the world so that man may live, stretching out the surface of the earth and creating the places of refuge (implying that he was responsible for the creation of ordered space and the physical dimensions as we know them).

So, as in other ancient descriptions of creation, there is a stage in the process which is difficult to fathom, and which participated in irrationality, and in chaos.

The Greeks were cautious in their discussions of the arche, at least in public, probably for this very reason. They sometimes passed over this stage altogether in silence, in their divine genealogies. But this evasion tells us that their conception of reality was that reality was a plenum, and that it was not, in itself, good. A well ordered world emerged from that initial state of reality, through the presence and action of the gods. In Mesopotamia, the gods had the power to secure the good order of the world through the ‘fixing of the destinies’. The Greeks had a similar concept, in the three fates.

The Sacred History of Being contains an extract from a discussion of the complexity of our understanding of the One by the Platonist Thomas Taylor, who was a contemporary of Shelley and William Blake. Taylor's text outlines the difficulty which surrounded the discussion of this subject in antiquity. After quoting the text, I wrote that Taylor’s comments show:

…how far Platonic argument about Being and the One can be pushed, and also [shows] how far Plato understood the limitations of argument about Being, and knowledge itself.

This is a thousand miles beyond the level of sophistication of discussion of the nature of reality by Anselm and by Descartes. In practice their discussions of the subject lack clarity, and actually never proceed beyond ideas and notions associated with Being. So the ideas of 'Greatness' and 'Perfection', which figure in Plato's dialogues as attributes of Being, are the core of their arguments, and the limits of their conception of the Divine.

Another reason for including this text is that it shows just how dangerous this doctrine is, and that its dangerousness was fully understood in antiquity. If an ultimate ineffability is wrapped around the idea of Being, and it cannot be fathomed or known, it is easy for the 'idiotical ears' to assume that their religion is a pious fraud based on a doctrine which has at its core no divinity at all. 

The primal chaos at the heart of Being of course makes perfect sense within a model of the world in which the difference between the subjective and objective is ultimately an illusion. We participate in Being, and in creation. Reality is what we make of it. Without such an understanding of this model of reality, the description of Being and reality served and discussed in the ancient temple school could only mean to 'the idiotical ears' that the priesthood held that there is no god.

TY, December 21, 2018.

Reviewer Notes for 'The Sacred History of Being' (2015)

Notes on Part One:

The Preface gives an outline overview of the book and its parts, and something of the context. One way to look at the book and its subject is as an extension of A.O. Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being, which examined the idea of Plenitude from the Classical Greeks onwards. SHB provides an extra nine hundred years to the history of the idea of Being, taking it back into the 14^th century B.C.E.

The first chapter explains something of the authors background, and how he came to approach the past from the point of view of the history of the idea of Being, and came to study ancient languages and history in London.

Historians of philosophy treat the 5^th century B.C.E. as the proper start of sophisticated philosophical thought, as we now understand it, with figures such as Parmenides, Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle as the principal figures. It comes as shock to find Plato recounting the immense age of philosophy in his dialogue The Protagoras. This is the subject of ‘How Old is Philosophy?’, and ‘The Arrival of the Idea of Being’

‘The West and the Other’ explores the way western modes of thought are inverted from those in the east.  ‘The Golem’ is about how it is possible for things present in bodies of evidence to remain invisible. When the SHB project began, I expected it to be difficult to find supporting evidence. In fact it is present in vast quantities both in ancient texts and in the archaeology. But two centuries of scholarship have glided past this evidence, as if it is not there.

‘Change and what is Permanent’ looks at some of the ideas which are present, but which are not much studied. These are abstractions, which are normally associated with the philosophical explosion of the 5^th century B.C.E. in Greece, but are major components in thought from earlier periods. The human capacity to deal in abstractions is, as a corollary of the notion of cultural progress, assumed to have developed first in Greece. This a poor frame in which to try to understand ancient thought.

The discussion which occupies the rest of Part One of SHB concerns the Ontological Argument, which has been the mainstay of the understanding of the nature and reality of God in the west, since Anselm. The point of this extended discussion of this argument is to show that it isn’t really about the nature of the divine at all, but about the properties and attributes of the divine. In other words, it is loosely argued, and assumes that the frame of time, space and the underlying reality of the world (whatever that might be), is something which exists apart from the nature of God.

This isn’t how divinity was understood or discussed in the ancient world. To argue in this way puts an insuperable barrier between ourselves and the possibility of an understanding of the divine in antiquity, and makes it impossible for us to understand the relationship between religion and philosophy.

The chapters are:

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.

Notes on Part Two:

Part two explores ancient Greek ideas about the Divine, and the arguments which were used. It looks in detail at argumentation which appears in Plato’s work, and also at ideas which are reputed to have been part of the doctrines of Pythagoras.

‘The Sweet Song of Swans’ examines the nature and history of the scholarship around the work of Plato, which is contained mainly within the period of the past two centuries. The Platonic corpus is problematic. It appears to be inconsistent. Plato was still writing at 80 years of age, and so it seems possible that Plato changed his views over time, and this is reflected in half a lifetime of writing. On the other hand, there is no evidence that Plato’s Academy was a research institution, and so there is no reason to assume that his views changed during that half a lifetime. Those modern scholars who take this view have a problem however, since they have been unable to dig out the consistent doctrine (hoary with age) underpinning the weaving discourse of the dialogues.

The late neoPlatonic philosopher Olympiodorus gives us some clues as to the reasons for the form of Plato’s discourse. Further clues come from close analysis of some parts of Plato’s dialogues, particularly in the Timaeus and the Sophist.

Plato often refers to looking to the ‘one true thing’. That ’one true thing' is Being itself, which he characterises as ‘The Good’. It never changes, it is entirely itself, and it is the goal of the philosopher to rise through the forms to the form of the good, and to return again, with knowledge of beneficial things.

J.G. Frazer once said that nothing useful could be said of the idea of Being. This was flying in the face of the whole of antiquity, whose civilizations articulated many aspects of the nature of Being as part of their understanding of the world. ‘Eleven attributes of Being’ discusses these, and why they had such importance in antiquity.

‘Pythagoras on Totality’ concerns a doctrine which was understood both in Mesopotamia and in ancient Greece. The idea can be traced back to the middle of the second millennium in Mesopotamia. Pythagoras is said to have learned of it in a lecture at Babylon after its fall to the Persians. Plato knew of it, and mentions the doctrine in his Timaeus. Once again, it is the idea of the ‘all’ being the location of all knowledge. It is the principal goal of the philosopher to access the totality of all reality. The distinction we customarily imagine to exist between philosophers and priests in antiquity, more or less breaks down at this point.

‘Solon in the court of Croesus’ is a re-examination of one of the most famous stories from antiquity, as told by Herodotus. There are details in the story which do not make sense without some analysis. In fact he is telling us about the importance of completion in understanding whether something is good or bad. He also connects the life of man with the cosmos using an unusual selection of numbers.
 

If we look closely at Homer’s Iliad (Book Eighteen in particular), we can see ideas in the text which are later reflected in Plato’s writing, which suggests strongly that Plato was writing about a body of ideas which was present in the late Bronze Age (discussed in the chapter 'Being in Homer').

The chapters are:

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.

Notes on Part Three:

Ideas about water and ocean are held in common around the Mediterranean in the first and second millennia B.C.E. These ideas are associated with creation and the generation of life. They are also associated with the idea of abundance, which features in the Babylonian creation myth, performed each year by the King and the priests. The liturgy tells us about the intellectual frame of their world, as they understood it.  The physical world is a place of refuge, created by the gods to ensure the well-being of human life. The King is the earthly embodiment of the King of the gods, Marduk, whose character is described in detail. Each of his qualities enables him to maintain the good order of the world. Which tells us important things about how the gods were understood.

Israel suffered from the Assyrian addiction to war and cultural depredation. The Hebrews also spent some time in exile in Babylon, which gave them an insight into Mesopotamian thought about the Divine. Or was that insight garbled by the Hebrews, because they were engaged in a political and military struggle with their neighbours? ‘The Idea of Being in Israel’ considers this question.

The close connection between Hebrew and Assyrian thought was demonstrated by Simo Parpola in the early nineteen-nineties,  who showed that the Jewish Kabbalah is a close analogue of the Assyrian sacred tree. The Assyrian sacred tree is never described in detail in texts, though it is ubiquitous in Assyrian iconography. However if the principal Assyrian gods are placed within the structure of the Kabbalistic tree, with their associated god numbers, the fit is perfect. Formerly the Kabbalistic tree was understood to have been devised sometime in the early middle ages, possibly drawing on gnostic thought. If it is as old as the Assyrian sacred tree, then the history of intellectual thought as we have it is wrong.

The final part of the book concerns the installation of statues of the gods in both Assyria and Babylon. The revelation of close examination of the texts is that they are not talking about installing images of the gods, but the gods themselves. The rituals are described in detail, which gives an extraordinary insight into the minds of the scholars in the royal courts of Assyria and Babylon, and suggests we need to alter our perceptions of how divinity and the gods were understood in the first and second millennia B.C.E.

The postscript summarises how we might now understand the concept of Being, and the meaning of the representation of the gods, in both ancient Mesopotamia, and in ancient Greece.

The chapters are:

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.

Notes on the Appendices:

It is a strange fact that neither of the two premier universities in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, managed to get the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and the neoPlatonists into English translation before a private individual did, at the cusp of the two centuries. The work was done by a scholar of great gifts, Thomas Taylor, supported by a private benefactor. He chose to undertake the translation of Plato and Aristotle, and the neoPlatonists, because he did not recognise the notional division between them which has taken root in western academia since the Enlightenment. Post-Enlightenment scholars like to understand Plato outside of a theological context, which doesn’t at all square with the focus of his writing. Plato would have been utterly dismayed to be read in this way, but the neoPlatonists are clearly talking theology, and so they need to be kept apart for the purposes of an academic and untheological understanding of Plato. I’ve included a mildly redacted piece by Thomas Taylor, which explains why Plato’s discussion of the one and the ineffable is a theological matter of some importance.

The appendix on the story of the first sage in Babylonia is included to amplify what we know of the Babylonian understanding of how knowledge is acquired. It is acquired from Being itself, represented by the ocean and the ocean depths, because Being is the all, and all knowledge is necessarily already there. So a conversation with eternity, which is what the all is, is the principle source of knowledge of good and beneficial things.

The extract from the annals of the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal on the exercise of kingship shows the importance attached to the idea of excellence in ancient Assyria, and that a concern with excellence was not an invention of the Greeks. Ashurbanipal lived in the seventh century B.C.E. Before now this significant passage had not been retranslated since the late nineteenth century. The Assyriologist Simo Parpola was kind enough to provide a new translation for me in 2005.

The appendices are:

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



Thomas Yaeger, April 10, 2018. Chapters added, September 2018.

Babylon the Great (fourteen articles)

I've written much about Babylon and Mesopotamia over the years, and some of the essays appear on my blog, either as extracts or as full text. I thought it would be useful to pull most of these together for convenience in a single post. Collected here are fourteen articles, which amounts to a small book of material, even if some of the articles are just extracts. All of the full text can be found either in The Sacred History of Being, or Understanding Ancient Thought.

I've been using Babylonian and Assyrian cultures as a contrast with ancient Greek civilisation, and many cultural continuities can be detected, though classicists and historians still discuss Greece largely in autocthonous terms, as if the Greeks are entirely self-made, and therefore no meaningful comparisons between Greece and Mesopotamia are possible. This inability to see what is in front of them, and their unwillingness to read about Mesopotamian parallels, won't continue forever, because it is ridiculous. But a ridiculous state of affairs can continue for a very long time, particularly in academia, and particularly when a discipline is more of a worshipful church than a place of discovery and exploration. 

TY, September 20, 2017. 


The Fifty Names of Marduk  #An #Babylon #EnumaElish #Marduk #Mesopotamia #NewYearFestival  

An extract from 'The Fifty Names of Marduk', a chapter in The Sacred History of Being, published November 2, 2015, which explores the significance of Marduk, head of the Mesopotamian divine pantheon, on the basis of his description in the Babylonian New Year Festival liturgy.

....The relevant passage of the Enuma Elish begins by announcing ‘Let us proclaim his fifty names…. He whose ways are glorious, whose deeds are likewise.' The first name is of course Marduk. His first description identifies him as An, the Sumerian king of the gods, and describes An as his father, who ‘called him from his birth…’. This refers to the fact that Marduk was not present in the first chaotic creation, before reason and order was imposed. 

Shar Kishati, and the Cult of Eternity #Mesopotamia #Philosophy #Abstraction #Cult  

This is a discussion of the hypothetical core of the ancient understanding of Reality as something which might be separated from everything else (in a Husserlian sense), though it does not mean that such a hypothetical core was separable from the rest of the religious and theological implex of ideas which constituted Greek and Mesopotamian religion. The point of the exercise was to explore what was actually essential to that implex of ideas, and to get a better understanding of why it was important to the functioning of the ritual universe, in both Greece and Mesopotamia.

'Creation' (extract)   #Abyss #Belus #Berossus #Chaos #Creation #Heidel #Timaeus 

From The Sacred History of Being, which explores the Babylonian account of the Creation of the World. In both Babylonia and Assyria, plenitude could be represented by the waters of ocean. Before ordered generation arose from these waters, there was a primal chaos, which Mesopotamian scholars understood in terms of undifferentiated possibility. The Babylonian priest Berossus, who lived and wrote in Greek most probably during the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus, describes this primal chaos in terms which emphasise that it is a plenitude. 

The Babylonian Mis Pi Ritual #Babylon #Divinity #Installation #MisPi #Palm #Quay #Ritual #Rivers #Statues #Tamarisk 

An extract from 'The Babylonian Mis Pi Ritual', a chapter from The Sacred History of Being, It is a critical analysis of one of the most fascinating aspects of Babylonian culture - the inauguration of divine statues, and their endowment with divine powers.

'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;''

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'.... 

Oannes and the Instruction of Mankind #Berossus #Telos #Origins #Civilisation #Apkallu   

The Babylonian writer Berossus (possibly a Greek form of the name Bēl-uşur), took up residence in Athens, after having been a priest of Bel in Babylon in the late 4th century/early 3rd century B.C.E. He wrote a three volume work, Babyloniaka, unfortunately now lost, which was a study on the culture and history of Babylonia. Alexander Polyhistor made an abridgement of this work in the first century B.C.E., also lost. However this abridgement was available to the christian writer Eusebius (4th century C.E), and also Josephus in the first century C.E. The passages which they quoted from Polyhistor and a few other authors survive. As Black and Green write, “Akkadian mythological and historical texts found in modern excavations have largely confirmed the authenticity of the tradition represented by Berossus.” [1] This includes the tradition of the Seven Sages, preserved in the account by Berossus (in his first book) of the eight creatures, beginning with Oannes and concuding with Odakon, which emerged from the sea bringing to man the civilising arts, including agriculture. His second book covered the history of Babylonia from the ‘ten kings before the flood’, through the Flood itself. 

Standing in the Place of Ea: The Adapa Discipline and Kingship in the Neo-Assyrian Empire.  #Ashurbanipal #Assyria

This extensive article (10k words) explores the role of the King in ancient Assyria, as the vizier of the god Assur. He was trained in the Adapa discipline, which is related to the myth of Adapa. He was required to be skilled in crafts, spear-throwing, scholarship, mathematics, divination, etc., and to excel other men, as chosen for the role by Assur. Thus he would emulate the knowledge and power of Ea, the divine sage whose home was the Abzu, the abyss at the root of creation.

A Saussurian Approach to Babylonian Epistemology
#Cuneiform #Structuralism #Philosophy 

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

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

'The Idea of Being in Israel'. #image #religion #philosophy #theology #aniconism #Tertullian 

A sample chapter (in draft) from the Sacred History of Being:This chapter looks at the body of Mesopotamian ideas about the gods and the divine through the extensive commentary on these ideas present in the books of the Old Testament.... The chapter also explores how Old Testament ideas about images were understood by the christian writer Tertullian, in the early second century of the common era.

….within the hierarchy of Mesopotamian ritual, the lengthy performance of washing the mouth of the temple statue is the most solemn, most sacred and most secret of rituals. This conclusion is reached from consideration of the special circumstances of the performance of the mis pi, the investment of time and resources, and the goal of the ritual. This ritual calls upon all the knowledge and spiritual know-how of the ritual specialists to transfer the deity from the spiritual world to the physical world. It requires the most expertise in ritual matters and accomplishes the epitome of ritual possibilities actualising the presence of the god in the temple.

The introductory remarks on the cult Image are prefaced with a quotation from James Preston, which is worth repeating here:

Through the study of icons and their construction we are able to perceive some of the most vital impulses underlying religious experience. Sacred images are products of the human imagination – they are constructed according to systematic rules, and then they are infused with sacrality and kept “alive” by highly controlled behaviours intended to retain the “spirit in matter”. An analysis of this process of constructing sacred images, and the corollary process of the destruction, reveals to us something paradoxical and intriguing about human religion. 

The Idea of the Plenum in Babylon  #Babylon #AncientHistory #Plenum #Creation    

This article argues that the description of Marduk in the Babylonian New Year Festival liturgy (The Enuma Elish) and the fact that the described creation was two-fold (it began before Marduk appeared, and was subsequently destroyed), indicates that their creation was understood to emerge from a plenum, in which all things potentially exist. This is an abstract conception which is not supposed to be present in Mesopotamia in the early 1st millennium B.C.E.

Who Will Appear Before the City? (Divination in Sargonid Assyria)
#Assyria #Divination #SunGod #Haruspicy 

Twenty divinatory texts from Ancient Assyria, assembled for the purposes of a commentary on the logic and purposes of ancient divination, and the parallels with the installation of divine images in Mesopotamia. All of these texts are drawn from The State Archives of Assyria, vol 4 (Queries to the Sun God), by Ivan Starr.

The texts, where we have them near complete, are generally in two parts. The first specifies the query, with a precision that some readers may find startling. The inquirers wanted clarity in the responses, not a vague intimation of the future. The second describes the reading of the condition of the liver, entrails and whatever other organs were inspected by the haruspex (diviner), but rarely gives an interpretation of the reading. This absence of interpretation of the inspection changes around the time of the reign of Ashurbanipal, as does the standard text in which the inquiries were couched.

The commentary for 'Who Will Appear Before the City' is in preparation, and is likely to appear in 2019.

What is Sacred, and what is Profane?  #Holy #Divine #Finitude #Infinity #Creation #God #Gods #EnumaElish #Religion 

Ancient accounts of the creation of the physical world however suggest that the created world was in chaos at its beginning. What does this mean? It means that, by whatever means the plenum gives rise to the physical world and its realities, by itself it cannot give rise to a rational creation. Its creations are not defined by anything approaching reason.

Ancient cosmogonies reflect this. The Enuma Elish from Mesopotamia has two distinct levels of divine beings. The first group is present during the initial creation, and the second group is responsible for the second and rational creation. The first group of gods are not gods after the pattern of the second group. The king of heaven does not have a name in Mesopotamia, or rather his name is his description (Anshar). It is two words joined together – ‘heaven’ and ‘king’. In the Mesopotamian context both heaven and the king were understood as representations or images reality itself – representing some of the properties of the plenum.

In a sense therefore, the initial gods are simply gods which must be latent in the nature of reality itself, whether or not there is a rational creation underway. There must be a heaven, and there must be a king of it, if there is to be anything else. And somehow the first creation has to be destroyed, if there is to be a rational creation. The gods who are present during the first creation are there to serve the purpose of making it possible for there to be a rational creation.

Being, Kabbalah, and the Assyrian Sacred Tree #Assyria #Kabbalah #Abstraction #Mesopotamia 

Ann extract from the chapter 'Being, Kabbalah, and the Assyrian Sacred Tree' in The Sacred History of Being.

Stylised trees were part of the iconography of religion in ancient Mesopotamia, as far back as the fourth millennium. The symbol, as it interests us here, dates from around the middle of the second millennium B.C.E. At about that time there is a new development of the symbol of the tree. The Late Assyrian form of the Tree appeared during the reign of Tukulti-Ninurta I, of the thirteenth century B.C.E. The rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the first millennium spread the symbol throughout the Near East, and it survived until the end of the millennium. This form of the tree is the one most familiar to students of Assyriology and those who have visited the Assyrian galleries in the British Museum, with its garland of cones, pomegranates, or palmates surrounding either the crown of the tree, or its trunk. The importance of this symbol is made clear by the fact that it appears on royal garments, jewelry, official seals, as well as the royal wall paintings and sculptures found in the royal palaces. Indeed in the famous throne-room of Ashurnasirpal II (now in the British Museum), it is the central motif, standing directly behind the throne.

Parpola argues that the Tree symbol in Assyria had a dual function in Assyrian Imperial art. As well as symbolizing the divine world order which the Assyrian king maintained, it could also relate to the king, resulting in his portrayal as the Perfect Man. This would account for the prominence of the Tree as an imperial symbol, providing legitimation for the rule of Assyria, and justification of the king as absolute ruler. 

Concerning Cult Images (Porphyry)  #Cult #Religion #Philosophy #Images #Interpretation #Thought #TheGods #Porphyry 

Some informative texts from antiquity (such as this one) survive in part as quotations by other writers. In this case the original author was Porphyry, and it was quoted in an extensive work (the Preparation for the Gospel) by the industrious christian apologist Eusebius in the 4th century C.E. As I've shown elsewhere, Porphyry knew about the doctrine of wholes and totalities also understood by Pythagoras and Plato and others, and so he was well informed, and so gives an insight into the real significance of the practice of idolatry in the ancient world.

Eusebius' purpose in quoting the text was to show that much of the nature of earlier religion was a mere foreshadowing of the Christian revelation. By contrast, my purpose in including the text as an appendix was to show that there was still much known of the nature of 1st millennium idolatry up until the closure of the philosophical schools in 529 C.E., and that their knowledge pointed to quite a different understanding of polytheism than the one we commonly associate with the history of Israel and its religious struggles, and the later Christian objections to the 'abomination' of polytheism.

Being and Representation in Greece and Assyria #Forms #Idolatry #Philosophy   

This is a discussion of the argument and significance of The Sacred History of Being. 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.