The Wider Scope of Ancient Mathematics (letter to an American Scholar)

 

Avebury Circle, photographed in 2001

Dear....., 

Hi. I became aware of your short book [.......................]  relatively recently. I wish I’d known it earlier.

I have a strong interest in the idea and function of the concept of limit in antiquity. My main object of study at UCL was ancient  Assyria (mostly the text corpus). Like the Greeks, they had a strong interest in the idea of limit, which is illustrated on the walls of their buildings, and is also represented in their images of the sacred tree. Limit also serves an important function in setting up their gods in heaven (I’ve written about both Assyrian and Babylonian rituals for this).

This tells us something of the actual basis of Mesopotamian religion, which has an origin which is quite different from what we imagine. 

Essentially ancient religions are transcendentalist in nature. In other words, they have their origins in a focus on abstract conceptions (limit, infinity, infinite series,completion, totality, etc). Which makes a nonsense of the idea that the Greeks were the first to grapple with sophisticated abstract thought. Clement of Alexandria created a list of civilizations which practised philosophy, and added the Greeks as the* last* to adopt the practice of philosophy.

Since you might be interested in the wider scope of ancient mathematics, I am writing to you to point you at a couple of articles which illustrate that these concerns were a feature of building projects in Neolithic Britain also. The Horus numbers are there, as the basis of establishing Euler’s number via a geometric construction. Euler’s number being the final result of a convergent infinite series.

Did they get their mathematics from Egypt, or did they develop them themselves? I have no idea. Why Euler’s number? It’s a mathematical stand-in for the extreme limit, which is infinity.


‘At Reality’s Edge’

https://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2020/12/at-realitys-edge.html?spref=tw%20%20# (Short article)

‘The Mathematical Origins of the Megalithic Yard’

http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-mathematical-origins-of-megalithic.html (Long  article)

Best regards,

 

Thomas Yaeger

At Reality's Edge

 

[Some notes I made while I was writing up The Mathematical Origins of the Megalithic Yard in early 2020. The notes conclude with some observations of the importance of the idea of limit in Mesopotamia, and its connection with the Assyrian Sacred Tree, and their notion of kingship.  I could have finished up with a short discussion of Egyptian interest in the idea of limit, particularly since we know (from the Rhind Papyrus) that they used the same method of calculation of Euler's number as in ancient Britain. That discussion with follow later.]

***

It has been twenty two days since I started to write up the article ‘The Mathematical Origins of the Megalithic Yard’ (mid February 2020). In this article, I suggested that those who designed the. circles came to the idea of the megalithic yard of 2.72 feet as the consequence of an interest in infinite series, and particularly those which approach a limit. The most important of these limits is the one which is known as Euler’s number, which, when rounded up from 2.7218… is 2.72.

This limit was first noticed in relatively modern times in the context of the calculation of compound interest, but the number, and the process by which it is arrived at, can be found in many other contexts.

Effectively, the number (when worked out to thousands of places), is the number as it would be found at infinity. So it can stand as an indicator of ultimate limit and of infinity. It is associated with the idea of ‘one’, as I’ve discussed in the article, and also as an irrational equivalent of one, which is a rational whole number.

An irrational counterpart to ‘one’, in a proto-pythagorean community, would have been easy to understand as belonging to a world beyond this one – i.e., a transcendent reality which is more perfect than this world, which is full of irrationality and measures which are incommensurable. The number may have been understood as being irrational to us because it is being represented in our finite world, and not irrational.

It also stood for the edge of our reality, and therefore would have signified the possibility of a joining between the transcendent reality, and our world of physical reality. Finding ways in which the worlds could be joined, and the incommensurate made commensurate, seems to have been a major preoccupation in the Neolithic, as it was also to philosophers and mathematicians in Greece during the second half of the first millennium BCE.

After I finished the article, I wondered how difficult it is to construct a series which will arrive at Euler’s number, how it might have been done, and how long it would take to come to the result.

A little research showed that there were many ways to construct suitable series of numbers, and a geometric calculation could produce a reasonable approximation reasonably quickly, without enormous calculations.  

 We don’t know for certain what base was used for calculations in the British Neolithic, but they were certainly aware of base 10, since they used powers of ten in their construction (ie, instead of a 3,4,5 triangle, they would sometimes use 30,40, 50 as their measures, knowing that the sides would be similarly commensurate after squaring). If they were using the English foot as their basic measure, it is likely they were counting to base 12 (ie, in duodecimal). But the construction of a series only requires whole numbers, arranged as fractions.

1 + 1/100000)^100000 = 2.7182682371923

100,000 is a lot of iterations, so it is unlikely that the determination was done in this way. The process will result in Euler’s number with any consistently generated series.

It can be done geometrically, which is much more practical, and is probably the technique which was used in the Neolithic. Using a sequence such as:

1/2  +  1/4  +  1//8  +  1/16  + ... = 1

Those who generated such a geometrical figure did so knowing that the series converged on a limit from observing the initial results. What they wanted was to find out a reasonably accurate value for the limit itself. The square could therefore be of any size (read as the value ‘one’), and might well have been created in a large field, with the fractions indicated by small stones.

I’ve written elsewhere about the importance given to limits and boundaries in ancient Assyria and Babylonia, particularly in connection with sites connected with the gods, and the rituals for the installation of the gods in Heaven. Sometimes aspects of the design of the Assyrian Sacred Tree were unwrapped, and represented on pavings as lotuses, alternately open and closed. Which is a way of indicating at these edge points that both possibilities are open, and even perhaps that opposing states are commensurate with each other in infinity.

It has already been identified that the Sacred Tree represents a form of limit, and consequently of the nature of divinity which has its true existence in a world beyond the constraints of finitude.  The design of the alternating lotuses also was used to separate the registers of images adjoining the collosal Lamassu statues which guarded the entrances of royal palaces. There was an image of the sacred tree, with two winged genies behind Assurbanipal’s throne, which seems to indicate that the king was understood to embody the transcendent reality which lies behind the world of the here and now.[the identification of the king with the divine reality appears in various royal letters] He is the perfect man, and the very image of God

[March 8, 2020]

 

[ Minor text corrections, Jan 1, 2021]

The Prisoners in the Cave

 @SemprePhi drew my attention to the following book review on the 23^rd November:

Phillip Sidney Horky, Plato and Pythagoreanism 2013. Reviewed by Simon Trépanier bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2014/2014-05-1… #brynmawr #philosophy

I responded in four short posts, which I’ve now augmented with further discussion.

@SemprePhi Hi. Thanks for the pointer to Horky's book and the review. Where to start! You cannot rely on Aristotle for accurate information about the Pythagoreans. Huffman has been occupying academic space for thirty years, and won't cross the boundaries. 1/

Note the whole argument is based on the idea that philosophy in Greece is an autocthonous development. Not invented elsewhere. I've shown that Pythagoras derived many of his ideas from Mesopotamia. And that these influences are reflected in Plato. They just don't want to see. 2/

Or they fear to step outside the accepted paradigm for fear of committing heresy, and having to pay for their sin. There is much information about what Pythagoras brought back from the east in Greek writing. But scholars don't know what it is, and why [it] is important. 3/

In order to stay within the acceptable paradigm, or 'episteme', they don't read the full range of sources which are available. Consequently it is difficult to make sense of the sources that they do read. If you read the full range of sources, it is an eye-opener. 4/

Philosophers and Historians are nervous about crossing the boundaries of their subjects, not just because of the risk to their reputations. They are happiest when sense can be made of what they are looking at. That sense isn’t always the sense that things made in antiquity. Modern scholars make fictions, and sit upon the pile they have made.

The philosopher Adrian Moore wrote a history of the infinite in 1990, and presented a series on BBC radio in 2016 on the same subject. Both discuss the problems and issues around the human response to the idea of the infinite. However Moore’s idea of the history of man’s relationship is strangely structured. Writing about the broadcast series I pointed out that:

We  get many clues about the Greek understanding of the infinite and the unlimited from a number of Plato’s dialogues, including The Timaeus, The Sophist, The Republic, The Theaetetus, The Laws, and The Parmenides. In skipping Plato, the first reference to Parmenides and his notion of the universe as simply one and one alone, is as an introduction in the first episode to his pupil Zeno of Elea, and his response to paradox. There is no discussion of Plato’s demolition of Parmenides arguments, no discussion of the Platonic forms, no discussion of the relationship of the forms to the form of the Good, which is another way of talking about what is infinite, and no discussion of what amounts to a different logical modality in the pages of Plato (where he discusses things passing into one another by means of their similitude), which is a way of understanding the relationship of finite things to the infinite.  

What Moore has constructed is a Catholic perspective on the idea of the infinite, since it is viewed from the perspective of Thomas Aquinas and Bishop Anselm. What made sense to those scholars, makes sense to Moore. Plato was largely unavailable to any scholars  of that period (with the exception of some sections of the Timaeus). But to write now about the infinite as if the writings of Plato are unknown to us, or of no importance to our understanding of the human response to the infinite, is difficult to fathom. I summarised part of this first episode of the series as follows:

Essentially Aristotle’s rapprochement, which Moore characterises as an attempt to make the concept of the infinite more palatable to the Greeks, involved dividing the idea of the infinite into two. As already mentioned, one of these was the potential infinite, and the second was the actual infinite. As outlined in the first episode, Zeno’s paradoxes depended on the idea of an infinite divisibility, which seemed to make the idea of any kind of movement impossible, since that would require a universe of infinite complexity. Zeno therefore regarded all forms of movement as illusion. Since in order to travel a certain distance, you would have to travel half the distance to your destination, and then half of the distance remaining, and then half of that, and half of what still remained, and so on. Which would result in an infinite number of steps. Which would be impossible. 

Aristotle’s response was that though the various stages of the journey could be understood in such a way, the stages were not marked, and did not have to be considered in making a journey. The idea of limit is however a crucial point. What Aristotle was saying is that there are two ways of looking at the idea of what a limit is.  Essentially there is limitation which is defined by what a thing is, and there is limitation which is not. In the first case the limit of a thing cannot be transcended without the nature of that thing turning into something else.

The essence of this argument is that there are forms of limit which can be ignored. One of which is the actual infinite: instead we should deal with the potential infinite. The actual infinite, by its nature, is always there. But we cannot deal with it. The potential infinite we can work with, since it is not always there, and spread infinitely through reality. So we can count numbers without ever arriving at infinity, or ever being in danger of arriving there. Moore mentioned that this conception of infinity more or less became an orthodoxy after Aristotle, though not everyone accepted that his argument against actual infinity was solid. Which is something of an understatement. Aristotle’s distinction between the potential infinite and the actual infinite is between what is, in practical terms, something we can treat as finite, and what is actually infinite. 

 

Moore has defined himself as an Aristotelian finitist, meaning that, since (he argues), man cannot deal with the actual infinite, only the potential infinite can make any sense to us. And so, much ancient discussion is swept away, as of very little interest or importance. This is why we cannot easily understand much of the intellectual world of antiquity. Instead we choose to write unflattering fictions about it.

I said that we cannot rely on Aristotle for accurate information on the Pythagoreans. This is not because I regard him as a poor scholar. Both Plato and Aristotle taught in the Academy in Athens. They were both dealing with a body of traditional doctrine (there are many passages where a comparison shows this – their discussion of the importance of the liver, for example). But they had quite different ways of discussing doctrine. Plato gives the reader real information about the subject, but hedges it about with other arguments, and sometimes talks in terms of images and myth (the account of the prisoners in the cave, in the Republic, for example). So his work makes sense to those who already know the doctrine, and intrigues those who don’t. Aristotle on the other hand, seems to have had the job of sifting through students to find those who might have the intelligence to  be able to grasp the essence of the doctrine (when properly instructed). He did this sometimes by constructing complex sophistical arguments which actually contradicted doctrine, and sometimes even rational sense.

Two examples: The first is Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, originally a series of lectures, ends up concluding the gods cannot act in the world, but only contemplate. Imagine the response to that argument in the ancient world! Why did Aristotle argue like this? He was looking for students who could provide critical rational responses to the argument, and who could  see that it did not make any sense in a reality which was (at the time) populated by divinities expected to play a constructive role in the world. The second example is Aristotle’s comments on logical modality (mostly in the Metaphysics), which I’ve discussed elsewhere (in ‘Logical Modality in Classical Athens’). This also contradicts traditional doctrine which underpinned the human relationship with the divine. And not just in Greece. Plato discusses the logical modality which enables contact and engagement with the divine, and other authors do too. We ignore all of this information concerning doctrine, because we prefer the unfathomable shadows on the wall.

However, despite the occasional tricksiness of Aristotle, he tells us something important, which, if we are familiar with relevant texts by other authors, we can figure out. I quote again from my critical review of Adrian Moore’s broadcast History of the Infinite, concerning the arguments of Zeno:.

The idea of limit is however a crucial point. What Aristotle was saying is that there are two ways of looking at the idea of what a limit is.  Essentially there is limitation which is defined by what a thing is, and there is limitation which is not. In the first case the limit of a thing cannot be transcended without the nature of that thing turning into something else.

Aristotle’s discussion references the doctrinal view which is also discussed by Plato. Which is that there is an important connection between the idea of limit and the infinite. The infinite is just another way of specifying what is unlimited, and beyond the physical world. Paradoxically, it is the actual limit of what is, and what can be. This does not represent a retreat from commerce with the actual infinite, but actually tells us how that commerce was supposed to work.

However the physical and finite world is also full of limits. These sometimes function as boundaries, and serve to close off access. Some limits you can choose to pass beyond, and there are others which you cannot pass. And in some cases, because of the nature of the limit, it is the nature of the limit itself which allows commerce with the ultimate limit of everything, which is where the Gods were once understood to have their existence.

This is the most important thing to understand about antiquity, both east and west. For Moore, the actual infinite is simply something which defies our understanding. In antiquity, the actual infinite was something of vital importance, and which we could have commerce with through its earthlly analogues (totalities, completions, limits. etc). Aristotle, in talking about Zeno’s paradox, is referencing the key doctrinal point, which is that reality has a double nature. And that we have (if we are properly informed), a choice about how we respond to that double nature.

In modern times, we no longer have this choice, since the doctrine concerning actual infinity has been mostly lost, and in fact entirely lost to those who function in the modern successors of Plato’s Academy. We are stuck in a world that imagines it must deal with everything in terms of calculable finitudes. Effectively we are, to quote the Mesopotamian king Esarhaddon, “blind and deaf ” for the whole of our lives.

It was not always so.

Transcendental Reality in the Ancient World (Writing to Marie aux Bois)

Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2020 16:24:58 
To: Marie aux Bois
From Thomas Yaeger

Marie,

Re: the paper on the mathematics of the megalithic yard - there's been a lot of movement since I wrote it in the middle of February, and I will write several other articles on the back of it. One of the objections to the argument will be that arriving at Euler's number would have been impossibly complicated for them to do (quite apart from the general case I'm making as to the sense it made for them to want do this). But it isn't true that this is complicated to do, particularly if you work it out geometrically, and use the right kind of exponentiating series (i.e., ones which arrive at the limit of the series in the shortest number of steps). I've already drafted this one.

The argument of the article is fine I think, but at various points it trades on what I know, and what I've written about elsewhere. So I'm going to write another article which brings the relevant information together.

I can make a list of the most significant things in the article:

1. It brings together concepts which were present in Greek civilization and philosophy, as well as in Mesopotamia. So the same ideas are going on in their heads, even if on the face of things the cultures are quite different. For the neolithic case, they are writing in terms of number and geometry.

2 If this argument is sound, it pushes the development of sophisticated mathematical and geometric thought back to the middle to late 4th millennium (3500 -3200 BCE).

3. The argument shows that, on the basis of the mathematics and geometry in the stone circles, that the builders had the same general concept of the existence of a transcendent level of reality which we know for certain the Greeks had. Indeed, historians of ideas pick the Greeks as the originators of the idea of a transcendent level of reality, and behave as if all the other religions in the world did not, before this time.

4 This transcendent level of reality was in fact infinity itself. They came to this conclusion in the Neolithic on the same basis as the Greeks did much later. Which is that the version of reality we inhabit isn't reality at all, but a poor copy of it (I echo Plato's words here). This was established on purely logical grounds, and on the basis of puzzling things about the physical universe (why is there something rather than nothing? If reality itself is necessarily one, otherwise it breaches its nature, how is it possible that there is multiplicity?)

5. And how is it that there are irrational numbers? Again, historians of ideas argue that before the Greeks, and the Pythagoreans in particular, people had no knowledge or understanding of irrational numbers, and when the Pythagoreans discovered their existence, they tried to keep this secret. In fact *the entire basis of Pythagorean thought, both in Greece, and the protoPythagorean megalithic culture was based on the existence and significance of irrational numbers.* I've talked around this issue both in SHB, and in "Understanding Ancient Thought", firstly by discussion of how ancient people conceived that commerce between the Gods and Man was possible, and by discussion of the logical modality that Plato discusses in the "Timaeus", which is based on irrationals.

6. The esoteric core of ancient religion was often kept secret. We know this for sure about the Pythagoreans, the Spartans, the Athenians, and also the ancient Romans. Plus the Assyrians and Babylonians. Modern historians assume that a transcendentalism isn't involved, but rather a doctrine which serves societal and political functions. But what if the esoteric core is too difficult and too dangerous to  convey outside a tight circle of those who understand?

7. Plato discusses how the disagreements about the nature of reality in antiquity might be resolved, in more than one place in "The Sophist". The position  which must be accepted (he says) is that *Reality is both One and Many at the same time*. In other words, the esoteric core of religion, based on the consideration of natural puzzles and the reality of irrational numbers, is that transcendent reality is necessarily paradoxical in nature.

8. Hence the common representation of the transcendent reality as *the inversion of ours* (look up 'Seahenge'). It is the same as this one, but it has different properties. In that transcendent reality, all things are commensurate.

9. Finally, this argument offers the possibility of proving that  transcendental thought did exist at the close of the 4th millennium around a number of cultures. If transcendental thought about the nature of reality was expressed mathematically and geometrically, and  necessarily involved irrational numbers, we should be able to find such references to transcendentalism in many of the architectural and engineering achievements of the ancient world. These have been noticed already in a number of structures, long before I started pursuing this question, but (for example) the golden section, clearly present in a number of Egyptian structures, is written off as a coincidence, or as consequence of the way the structure was laid out in practical terms, and that the builders had no knowledge of  its presence, and did not think the proportion had any significance in itself.

We know the measures the Egyptians used. Scope I think for a nifty little computer programme to number crunch all of these, to look for the presence of Euler's number, and other irrationals.

Best, Thomas

The paper 'The Mathematical Origins of the Meglalithic Yard' is at: https://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-mathematical-origins-of-megalithic.html

Books by Thomas Yaeger

The Sacred History of Being (2015).

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

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

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

Published by the Anshar Press.  

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

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

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

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

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

Understanding Ancient Thought (2017).

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

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

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

***

Man and the Divine.  Published by the Anshar Press. ISBN 9780463665473. Available at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/872542. Published in August 2018.

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

The Esoteric Conception of Divinity in the Ancient World (full text)

This article was first published in the Newsletter of the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica in December 2015. In October 2019 the website went down, and hasn't come back up. So I'm posting the full text of the article here in the meantime. It covers both the subject of The Sacred History of Being, and also something of how the book came to be written. In 2018 the article was published as a chapter in Man and the Divine.

TY, October 30, 2019.


***

 “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!”

From: ‘Enki’s journey to Nibru.’  (Black, Cunningham, Robson, Zόlyomi, The Literature of Ancient Sumer, 2004, p. 330)

The Sacred History of Being (2015) is about philosophy and its origin in the context of ancient cultic life. As such it argues that philosophy as a discipline is very old, as Plato himself said in the Protagoras, and that it was not invented by the Greeks.

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 reshape my understanding of human intellectual history in the process.

There is a standard form of image from the earliest years of civilization, which consists of two opposed figures, standing on either side of an object. The object can be a tree, an altar, a table heaped with produce, lotus blossoms, animal foreparts, loaves, and so on. The opposed figures can be human, animal, god or genie. This kind of image can be found throughout the archaeological record of the Ancient Near East, and in Egypt.

Questions arise from the ubiquity of this image, which appears in the context of those who had great power in the world, and also in funerary contexts, particularly in Egypt. It appears prominently in royal contexts in Assyria and in Babylonia. The image can be traced back as least as far as the settlement at Çatal höyük, now in modern Turkey, dating to some eight or nine thousand years before the present.

What does this image mean? It is nowhere explained, but clearly had some kind of explanation at some time, even if its transmission in later centuries was enabled simply by its status as a traditional iconographic element. Why is it so prominently displayed, so persistent throughout time, and apparently not discussed in the cultures in which it appears?

Some details of esoteric lore were written down in the Ancient Near East – the colophons of the relevant tablets make it clear that the contents were for the initiated only. The ritual procedures for the installation of divine statues in Assyria and Babylonia survive, together with some incantations which were part of the ritual. These tell us about the ritual, and the elements involved in the ritual – the thigh of a ram, best beer, mashatu-meal, and sacralised reeds, plus information about which stellar constellations and planets a statue was to be pointed at as part of the installation; and about the selection of craftsman’s tools which were disposed of as part of the ritual (enclosed in the ram’s thigh, and deposited into the river), in order to remove their responsibility for making divine images (not a thing for mortals to undertake).

But we find no discussion of the rationale of the installation ritual. Or discussion of the rationale of any other ritual which they documented. This suggests that there were levels in the esoteric life of Assyria and Babylonia: that the ritual details were important to record to ensure consistency in the performance of the ritual, but the meaning of the details, and the underlying rationale for the ceremony were transmitted orally, and never committed to writing.

The image with the opposed figures standing around a ritual object is clearly an image whose meaning and function was too important to record in a temple or palace document. In which case it might appear that we can never know what it signified, and why it was so important.

But, it is not so. Assyriologists have explored this image as it appears in the Mesopotamian context, and have made some headway in understanding the scope of its significance. They have established that, in terms of the iconography, the Sacred Tree may stand in for the King. In other words, the two ideas were understood to represent the same thing. The contemporary understanding of the nature of the role of king in Assyria was that he was the Regent of the god Ashur on Earth, and therefore the king represented an emulation and image of the Divine on Earth.

But why a tree? The tree can stand in for the king, because of two further ideas which are connected in the definition of what the king is.

The contemporary scholarly definition of the Divine in Assyria, framed it as the source of all excellences and perfections, and all knowledge.*1 Hence the importance of excellences and perfections of the life of the king, as we find recorded in the Annals of Ashurbanipal in the late 7th century B.C.E. (found in the ruins of his palace at Nineveh at the end of the nineteenth century). As Ashur’s representative on Earth he excels in military skills, in throwing the javelin, in horse riding, in the use of weapons; in divining the will of the gods through divination by oil, and other arcane skills; also in scribal excellence and mathematics – he is able to read the ‘obscure and difficult to master’ texts written in Sumerian ‘from before the flood’. And so on.

The excellence and perfection of the king’s skills were understood to place him in proximity to the god Ashur. He is thus at the limit of what a mortal may do and be; as Ashur is at the limit or zenith of Reality itself. Ashur is Reality itself. That the Tree may stand in for the king suggests that it was understood also as an esoteric and symbolic representation of the idea of limit, taken to the nth degree, and also of Reality itself.

Much of the discussion found in Plato concerns the nature of what he calls ‘The Good’. The Good is in a sense the Crown of Creation, and it is the target of human attention because of that status. He refers to the Good rather than ‘God’ because he is talking about the ultimate abstraction, which has commerce with other abstractions – as he says, ‘things pass into one another’. The Good is perfect, complete, whole, and the ultimate source of justice, good order, beauty, wisdom, and all the other abstract concepts which have some form of existence in the temporal world. He is careful to say (through the words of Socrates) that this ultimate Reality, the Form of Forms, has ‘no shape, size or colour’. In its nature it wholly transcends physical reality.

Plato’s Republic tells of the craft of passing from the contemplation of one Form to another, entirely intellectually, and without distraction, with the intention of eventually arriving at the contemplation of The Good. The man returning from this journey comes back with knowledge beyond the scope of any wisdom to be found on the Earth.

The Platonic discussion of the Forms is treated by modern scholars as a species of literary fiction. Meaning it has no detectable connections with cultural activity in Greece, or in any other part of the civilised world in the two millennia before the Common Era. But Plato is very clear that it is important to look to the ‘One Thing’, the ur-Reality which underpins the world of the here and now. So he is talking of a conception of God, which gives rise to all other things which may be understood by the mortal mind, though the ultimate abstract conception of Reality may lie forever beyond human understanding.

How old is this conception of the Divine? If the Divine is understood to have its reality at the limit of physical and perceptible reality, and to be the most abstract of abstractions, historians of philosophy would say this notion was first discussed in Classical Greece. If on the other hand, the iconography of the two opposed figures, facing a ritually significant object between them, represents the most abstract conception of limit, beyond any physical instance, then this conception of the Divine is thousands of years older than the middle years of the 1st millennium B.C.E.

The Assyriologist Simo Parpola has shown that there is a connection between the Kabbalah and the Assyrian Sacred Tree. Each of the Mesopotamian gods was associated with a divine number, and sometimes they were referenced in documents by their number alone. He was able to reconstruct the Assyrian version of the Kabbalistic tree, populating the sefirotic nodes (understood in the Middle Ages as divine powers and qualities), with the key Mesopotamian divinities, their properties and numbers.

The Kabbalah enshrines a philosophical notion of transcendent divinity in the concept of the ‘en sof’. It has been assumed by modern scholars that this is an imported idea, perhaps borrowed from Gnosticism in the early centuries of the Common Era. If in fact the idea of the ‘en sof’ was in the Assyrian version of the Sacred Tree, then we understand something new and profound about Hebrew ideas of divinity from the middle of the 1st millennium B.C.E. onwards.  The relationship between the Assyrian and Jewish Sacred Trees which Parpola has been able to show, by itself pushes a philosophical conception of the Divine back to at least the 14th century B.C.E., which is when the representation of the Assyrian Tree first appears.

This philosophical equation of the idea of limit with what is transcendent is an important factor in ancient religious ritual. In Mesopotamia the ritual installation of divine statues took place in locations with clear boundaries, including riverbanks and quays, and a key part of the ritual involved a temple threshold, as the surviving texts tell us. These boundaries were understood to have proximity to the primal reality, the Abzu, house of Ea/Enki, in the sweet waters at the bottom of the sea. Reeds used in the ceremony were spoken of has having their roots in the Abzu. The association of limit with ritual performance tells us something about the logic of the installation: the rites serve to make the images one with the company of gods in Heaven. The statue becomes itself Divine by its exposure to repeated representations of Divinity in the course of what was described in Mesopotamia as the ‘most sacred and secret of rituals’.

A great age for a philosophically conceived notion of Divinity, coequal with Reality itself, makes it possible to make much sense of many otherwise obscure texts and inscriptions which have been excavated over the past two centuries.  The determination of classicists over two centuries (since the European Enlightenment) to downgrade and deny the connections between Greek civilization and other civilizations around the Mediterranean and the Near East, both in classical times, and in the 2nd millennium B.C.E., has made it very difficult to make sense of both Greek philosophy, and the intellectual life of the other cultures of the ancient world. The Greeks accorded the Egyptians the status of philosophers, and Plato represents Solon having conversations with Egyptian priests in the Timaeus, who had knowledge ‘hoary with age’.  But archaeological excavation in Mesopotamia and elsewhere, and the recovery of thousands of texts, made possible the idea of writing something like The Sacred History of Being.

The structure of the book is relatively simple. There are three main parts. The first begins with reflections on philosophy, both ancient and modern. This goes some way to explain how I came to pursue this project. The second half of the first part discusses the ontological argument, which has its origins in the early modern period, which has come to be the principal way in which the reality of Divinity is discussed. We have made it very difficult to understand ancient theological ideas by promoting the ontological argument to its current status.

The second part explores Plato’s writing, and the strikingly different way in which Divinity was discussed. It also explores wider Greek thought, and earlier instances of the kind of understanding of Reality found in Plato.

The third part examines ideas common to Greece, Israel and Mesopotamia, plus the significance of the Assyrian Sacred Tree for the scholars of the Assyrian royal court, and the significance of the Jewish Kabbalah, which descends from parallel Mesopotamian ideas. Two of the chapters in part three work through the Mis Pî tablets from Nineveh and Babylon, which describe the ritual for the installation of images of the gods, and discuss the significance of the ritual.

---

1 The Babylonian scholar Berossus, former priest of Bel, who wrote about Babylonian culture and religion after moving to Athens,  tells us of the encounter of the first legendary sages with an emissary of the Divine. The emissary granted them knowledge of the arts and crafts, of husbandry, and the apportioning of land.

Wearable Fictions, Phenomenology, and the Grammar of Human Thought

'Fish Magic' (Paul Klee, 1925)

Some notes on The Shrine in the Sea, which eventually became The Sacred History of Being, written while waiting for a delayed flight to Bristol from Edinburgh, 3rd March 03 (four hour delay in total). Not everything which is scribbled during an airport delay is perfectly coherent by itself, so I've introduced some qualifications and expansions in square brackets, where necessary. There is more scope for writing about Robert Graves' White Goddess, but that is for another time.

I’m now approaching this [project] as something like a grammar of human intelligence. This is because I backed away (around two or three years ago) from starting from where I started – which was from a study of ancient philosophy. [It is hard to establish parallels using materials which appear to have no exemplars in other cultures. Which is one of the reasons this comparative and anthropological work has, so far at least, not been undertaken with any degree of seriousness].  Instead I decided to approach the question of how people used to think in antiquity on the basis of a phenomenological study. As if I didn’t know any of the things I already knew about the ancient world – both historical and prehistoric. [I.e., there are many obvious parallels between the culture phenomena of Greece, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levantine civilizations, but these are, as yet, largely un-anchored in an underlying substrate of what might be sophisticated patterns of thought.] 

This way of tackling the problem has turned out to be very successful. Unfortunately I’ve written very little down about this, beyond a couple of lists of phenomena which repay closer study because they illustrate the characteristic grammar of the human intelligence [if the scholar looks hard enough]. Essentially these lists form the backbone of the study – it was and is my intention to use these lists as the basis of the books structure.[There was a series of lists entitled 'Topics', added to over time. One of these has been posted - Topics 5. The point was not to assume that all of the post-Enlightenment constructs which we use to interpret the ancient world, and which are less than three hundred years old, are correct. I know what I have been taught, and know what the assumptions are. But I chose to proceed as if these constructs were invisible, for the purposes of separating the actual evidence from what might be convenient presumptions,  including ideological and political judgements]. 

I backed away from the original approach for a number of reasons – partly because it was a very technical approach – but mainly because I didn’t think that attempting to infer common ways of thought on the basis of philosophical writings was a good idea, despite the fact that there are lots of clues in ancient texts to support such inferences. Better I thought to establish a good case on the basis of all available evidence for patterns of thought in antiquity outside philosophical texts, and then show how these texts build on these patterns, since, to some extent at least, this is likely to be what actually happened. The technical apparatus then becomes the principal corroboration of the thesis, rather than the point of entry into the argument.

In effect I’ve established [a process for dealing with] the case[s] twice, from different points of view, which represents some kind of check on the use of the evidence to support the hypothesis. This is as important to me in developing this case as it is in making the case to a more casually interested reader. I’m not interested in creating a weak and scarcely wearable fiction. I want a more coherent armature for the evidence that we currently have, which does less violence to that evidence.

In many ways the book is no longer about ancient history, though that remains the place where I started, and the home of the question I wished to solve.

It is now (as a book) a phenomenological study of human culture, and more particularly of its various levels of articulation. Essentially it is about establishing a coherence and continuity in human cultural production. Not by cutting down the evidence to fit, but by looking for the levels which make this cultural production hang together.

Of course this means that the book is a 21st century stab at the “key to all mysteries” [in that it proceeds on the basis that there is the possibility that there is a coherence in the body of ancient thought, expressed in art, literature, poetry, liturgy and ritual, which we have missed. With the intention of establishing whether or not a coherence of that sort exists, or once existed in some form.] On that account alone the thesis of the argument will be dismissed by those for whom synthetic arguments are not possible. Where they are found they are ipso facto false (itself a synthetic proposition, which doesn’t seem to be an objection to those who hold such an opinion). However I don’t see that a coherence in the cultural production of the human mind is a priori not to be found, and I do not find it to be very scientific (if that is to be valued) to presume that it cannot be found because it is [simply assumed that it is] not there to be found. 

If anything, the case which the book will make is that there is a coherent synthetic argument which binds all the inconsistencies of human cultural production. [As well as arguments which render consistency in interpretation. In other words, we need to understand why things are apparently inconsistent, as much as those which appear to be consistent to us. That throws back the problem of interpretation on to the sometimes problematic nature of the paradigms, constructs, and mental processes of scholars from the Enlightenment onwards]. 

The key to the mysteries is not an intellectually satisfying single core of human genius, but, that none of it adds up to that – the key is that human cultural production is deeply contingent and consistent with nothing save its own context [both intellectually and in terms of expression], except when the phenomenon is examined for the signs of an underlying grammar – which may or may not be part of a body of intellectual ideas.

Is this structuralism? Certainly it is a form of structuralist analysis, but it isn’t the structuralism of Levi-Strauss – it is not connected with the architecture of human narrative, but rather all human constructs, in space and in time. And it certainly isn’t an attempt to bind together cultural production on the basis of similar content; rather the opposite – to find out how quite dissimilar things participate in the same underlying grammar of human understanding [I was thinking of Plato's discussion of the' Same and the Different' at this point, since it follows from Plato's ontology, as well as the ontologies of other cultures around the Mediterranean, that, if the experienced world actually resides in a place which is neither located in space or in time, the ontological model which is being employed is that of reality as a plenum].

I would not wish to give this kind of philosophical analysis a name of that kind. The argument is both analytic and synthetic, in that way that good historians proceed. Questions are asked, and data is ordered. And questions are then asked of the ordered data. That isn’t structuralism (at least not to me). 

[Those familiar with  the work of Husserl may recognise the process of bracketing in my description of the attempt to analyse evidence and data outside the paradigms which we normally use to understand the past]. It is the act of creating wearable fiction, as the poet Alastair Reid suggested recently, at a public lecture in the Playfair Library, in the University of Edinburgh. Or at least, more wearable fiction than those we are currently forced to wear. [Alastair Reid was a friend and associate of Robert Graves. I was particularly interested in what he had to say, because I once worked as a research assistant for the Robert Graves Trust in Oxford, and spent much time before and after that trying to come to grips with Graves' White Goddess, which is not an easy text. I wrote an analysis of the White Goddess Sigil (in 1999) which appears on the cover of the book. The sigil can be understood in terms of various parts of the text, and in terms of information which can be found in his Greek Myths]. 

A principal way in which this study differs from a modern historical approach is that it does not build on the assumption that economic forces dictate cultural production. Or even that economic forces shape men’s thoughts. Rather economic forces are seen as a level of constraint, defining a space in which cultural production is possible. The difference is that whereas historians tend to see economics as a cultural driver, I see them as a brake, principally on the human imagination. Once, as a student studying the career of the Gracchi, I expressed the view that I could not work out what was in the mind of the surviving Gracchi brother. The eminent historian in charge of the tutorial suggested ‘does it matter?’ Well yes it does, unless you think that what is in someone’s mind is of no account, and that the inner life of the mind is no more than a reflection of the economic pressures bearing down on the owner of that mind.

Which is not to say that the economic landscape is of no little account – just that it acts as both a facilitator and a brake on human action. What causes human action is more interesting than that, as we shall see. Understanding the phenomenology of human history and culture without taking account of the mind, and perhaps more particularly the human will, seems to me to be a very strange approach. An approach so strange in fact, that it may be possible to explain it only by reference to the same grammar of human thought which some historians purport not to need to know anything about.

Abstraction and the Instantiation of Divine things in Mesopotamia

My work The Sacred History of Being is cited in an article by the writer Ben Thomas - "The God Enki and the Ocean of Everywhen" - on his website 'The Strange Continent'' (published August 3, 2017). This is a fascinating article which is well worth checking out - the link to the full article is at the foot of this post. We've been corresponding occasionally over the past few years, mostly about Mesopotamia and Mesopotamian modes of thought. The argument of The Sacred History of Being is complex and sometimes abstruse, and it is always a joy to find it has been understood.

I've quoted the passages most relevant to The Sacred History of Being. Ben wrote:

...The upwelling of cool, sweet, fresh water seems to have spoken of something deeper to these people: a limitless potentiality; a permission to play with the world and reinterpret it; to import new realities from the world of Mind. 

Because it’s clear – as the philosopher Thomas Yaeger’s book The Sacred History of Being explains in depth – that certain ancient Mesopotamians understood the concepts of Being, Becoming, Matter and Mind every bit as clearly as the Greek philosophers did. 

But where the Greeks defined and explored these concepts explicitly, in writing and debate, the Mesopotamians explored them experientially, through symbol and ritual: The Ceremony of the Tree. The Opening of the Mouth of a God. (When Mesopotamian texts say, “This is how to make a god,” Yaeger argues, they mean it literally!) The intercessory deities who hold cups overflowing with endless streams of fresh water. 

The Sumerians consciously recognized that they stood on a great threshold – and across thousands of years, they perfected the techniques of stepping back and forth across it; carrying material facts one way, and new inventions the other. 

And what lived on the other side of that doorway? The god Enki – lord of intelligence and knowledge, keeper of the arts and crafts; also called Nudimmud, “the Shaper,” who “opens the doors of understanding” (emphasis mine) and teaches humans how to construct canals, plan temples, write letters and compose music. 

From his hidden “House in the Waters,” Enki monitors the flow of all information in the world, and guards new ideas until they’re ready to be born. He’s not exactly a trickster, but he’s definitely playful, and he inspires playfulness.  

Still more crucially, Enki is the custodian of the mé – an untranslatable (plural) Sumerian word, which the great Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer explained as the “fundamental, unalterable, comprehensive assortment of powers and duties, norms and standards, rules and regulations, relating to… civilized life.” 

The Sumerians have left us lists of more than 100 mé, including “kingship,” “truth,” “law,” “sexual intercourse,” “weapons,” “scribeship,” “sacred prostitution,” “leatherwork,” “judgment,” and “the troubled heart.” 

As Kriwaczek says, the mé “show how self-consciously aware the ancient Mesopotamians were of the difference between civilization and other ways of living… that they expressed it with an entirely new cognitive concept, for which we have no equivalent.  

As Yaeger explains in his Sacred History, the mé are far more than just abstract concepts. In the poem known as Inanna and Enki, the goddess Inanna gets Enki drunk, steals the mé, and loads them onto her “boat of heaven.” Braving seven attacks by sea monsters, Inanna manages to transport the mé to the cities of Eridu and Uruk, where the people unload them amidst great jubilation and feasting. 

This would be a very strange way to talk about the mé if they were simply abstractions. But a clue is offered by the fact that the Sumerians treated many seemingly abstract concepts in similar ways. 

Ceremonies for “opening the mouth of a god” refer to “putting on the melammu,” the divine splendor, as if it were a sort of cloak. Kingship, too, is often described as something that “descended from Heaven,” and can be “carried” from one city to another. 

In light of all this, it seems very likely that – just as the term mé is untranslatable into our frame of reality – our discrete categories of “symbol,” “referent,” “abstract” and “concrete” would have been equally baffling to a Sumerian.  

This framing is so different from ours that it can be difficult to comprehend: a scepter does not symbolize kingship; it is kingship. The statue does not symbolize Enki; once its “mouth is opened,” the statue is Enki – even as the god Enki is not limited by this one statue, and dwells in the eternal ocean.

To ask whether the Sumerians thought of the mé as abstractions or physical objects is to pose a wrong question. The mé sat at the border between reality and Mind – and once the Sumerians had stumbled on that doorway, they took great pains to keep it open, and to facilitate passage across it. 

I knew none of this, of course, as I sat in my apartment paging through images of Mesopotamian archaeology. I only knew that I’d stumbled on some primordial wellspring of originality; a mystery I wanted not so much to solve as to experience for myself. 

.....

The great historian Thorkild Jacobsen describes the god Enki as “the numinous inner will-to-form in the Deep.” This is not the dead god of a vanished civilization – this is the Ocean where “2+2=4” and “the steam engine” and “scribeship” and “the troubled heart” have always lived, along with all things unimagined and yet to be.

To bring new things across the doorway, we must re-learn the trick of standing on its threshold.

Bravo Ben!

"The God Enki and the Ocean of Everywhen" is at:

https://thestrangecontinent.com/2017/08/03/the-god-enki-and-the-ocean-of-everywhen/

25 per cent discount on books by Thomas Yaeger during July 2019. At Smashwords only.

11th Annual Smashwords 2019 Summer/Winter Sale!

July 1, 2019 - July 31, 2019

Thanks for your participation! This offer is now closed. 

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

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


The Sacred History of Being (2015), is available during the sale period at 25% off the full Smashwords price.

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

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

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

Published by the Anshar Press.  

J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being (2016) Is available during the sale period at a 25% discount from Smashwords.

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

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

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

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

Understanding Ancient Thought (2017), is available during the sale period at 25% off the full Smashwords price.

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

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

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

*** 

Thomas Yaegers latest book, Man and the Divine: New light on Man's Ancient Engagement with God and the History of Thought, is also discounted by 25% during the Smashwords Summer/Winter sale. Published by the Anshar Press. ISBN 9780463665473. It is now available at Smashwords https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/872542. Published in August 2018.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VenusPeter's review of 'The Sacred History of Being'

A review of The Sacred History of Being at WorldCat:
The Sacred History of Being.
by Yaeger, Thomas
eBook : Document

Sometimes scholars do not see what is before their eyes, or they see what they are trained to see. The Sacred History of Being begins with an account of the author becoming aware - over many years - of the limitations of modern scholarship concerning the ancient past. There are so many unexamined assumptions in the relevant disciplines which make it nearly impossible to make sense of some of the evidence. The assumptions are a form of noise, which is hard to see through, and the understanding of most scholars is circumscribed by the din of that noise.

This is a book which discusses both the ancient past, and the modern post-Enlightenment world. The modern world comes off badly in comparison, since we now generally frame questions in terms which produce answers which make sense to us. What an ancient priest made of a question, for example, is often of no concern to us. We aren't dealing with rational thought in antiquity.

Yaeger's book is a sustained assault on this idea. It attempts to show that, long before the Greeks, the Mesopotamians explicitly understood themselves to be rational beings living in a rational universe. Their account of the creation of the world in which we live makes that very clear. That world is framed in their creation story as a descent into generated matter from an undifferentiated plenum. As a consequence, the Mesopotamians saw a connection between the plenum and knowledge far beyond human understanding. Yaeger argues that one of the functions of religion in Mesopotamia was to make connections possible between the transcendent world of the plenum (Being itself) and the secular world, and for man to gain access to knowledge of divine things.

Sound familiar? This is very similar to what Plato was discussing in the Republic in connection with the ascent of the philosopher to 'the Good' via the forms, and a return to the sensible world with beneficial knowledge. Yaeger does not rest on this simple comparison however, and digs deep into Mesopotamian ritual for the creation of divine images. The result of close study of these rare texts shows how thoroughly the parallels run between Greek and Mesopotamian thought. The Mesopotamian texts however date from a period before the rise of classical Greece...

The fifth century enlightenment in Greece therefore begins to look like a form of noise - a difficulty largely created during the European Enlightenment.

There are many good things about this book, not least of which is the quality of the writing and discussion. Once you have read the book, it is hard to look at the ancient world in the same way as we used to do. Much that looked like the result of a primitive stupidity (the practice of divination, sacrifice, etc), can now be approached in a different way, which presumes so much less about the nature of the ancient evidence.