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/

Symmetry and Asymmetry in the Iconography of the Ancient Near East

Symmetry and Asymmetry

I first noticed a regularity (and accompanying irregularities) in images from the ANE a long time ago, and mentioned the phenomenon in 'The Sacred History of Being'. I described a number of images in detail because at the time I had no money to have the images copied (in the early eighties).  This extra labour turned out to have consequences. In compiling these descriptions I noticed that, where images possessed a symmetry, the same images often (but not always) contained some kind of breakage of the symmetry. It is easy to write this sort of detail off as carelessness on the part of the maker, but that attitude to what we are seeing just excuses us from trying to figure out the significance.

This kind of imagery is a legacy from the Neolithic. I've seen the same sort of pattern in iconography from Catal Hoyuk. So it seems to reflect a way of thinking which has had a long history. This does not mean that it is a continuous history as something which was always understood. But that this kind of image keeps turning up, means we should try to fathom what is going on with symmetrical images broken by asymmetries. At least before we decide the details of the images are unimportant.

I studied the ANE in London (89-92), not just because I was interested in ancient civilizations. My principal interest is the history of ideas (as my twitter feed illustrates). By the time I got there I'd come to the conclusion that the idea that philosophical thought was a creation of the Greeks, was in fact a scholarly construct. Much of my work since has focussed on demolishing this construct. The construct serves the function of removing the need for close attention to the details of rational thought before the middle of the first millennium B.C.E., because we know it isn't there: the Greeks were the first.



The Plenum

The idea that there is nothing worth discussing is obviously a major problem. Another major problem is that, in the west at least, an important concept has dropped out of our ways of thinking. This idea is the plenum. It is important for us to understand it because it was important in antiquity. If we discuss civilizations in the ANE without the knowledge that this was so, we are just studying  representations of the civilisations, convenient to our own way of thinking, rather than what is there to be understood.

What is the plenum? It is the idea that the physical reality in which we live is not reality itself. Reality itself is a primal fulness, beyond physical existence. The world of physical existence is therefore a kind of selective representation of what is possible, beyond space and time. The primal fulness has no physical existence, but it gives rise - in some way we do not understand - to the existent world. It is the other place. It is eternity. And it was a key idea in Mesopotamian civilization.



The Plenum in Mesopotamia

This idea underpins Mesopotamian religion, and the role of the King. The idea that reality itself lies beneath the world in which we have our existence is the reason why there are two creations in the Enuma Elish - the first an irrational one, before Marduk imposed order. This is why the first created beings are an irrational jumble of possible forms. All of the forms are present (at least in potential) in the plenum, but not everything which is possible is either desirable, or rational. So there is a second and rational creation, in which Marduk establishes order. That rational order is also described in the Enuma Elish,  in the form of his fifty names, and the description of his attributes.

This same idea of the plenum is the root of the Mesopotamian idea that destinies can be fixed. All possible destinies already have a reality in the plenum. But the gods, and their representatives on earth, have the power to fix the destinies, because of their close contact with the entity which contains the possible destinies. The plenum is most often referenced in terms of the Abzu. It is at the bottom of the sea, because the sea (as discussed in The Sacred History of Being) is an image of the primal fulness of the plenum - it appears limitless, it has no form, no shape, no colour.

The Abzu is also the place where all knowledge is to be had, and Ea/Enki is the lord of the Abzu. The earthly king strives to embody the attributes of Ea/Enki, and to be as wise as he is.

The plenum in Mesopotamia is also sometimes referenced as totality. That is what it is. Not the totality of the physical world, which is merely an earthly representation of it, but the totality of everything that is real. Hence Shamshi Adad I using the epithet 'King of Totality' (Shar Kishati) as part of the description of himself. According to Neoplatonist sources (more than one) a doctrine of totalities was taught in Babylon, and was supposedly brought back to Europe by Pythagoras. The doctrine is referenced (indirectly) by Plato.

Why do kings and genies hold a basket or pail, particularly in the vicinity of the Assyrian Sacred Tree? The banduddu is another symbol of the plenum - of all that is possible. One of the representations of the banduddu in the British Museum shows doves at each side. They are there because that primal reality, beyond space and time, requires to be laid out in a rational order, if life is to be possible. The doves symbolise the laying out of the fabric of the world and its dimensions, stretched out of the transcendent reality in which there is no space and time.

So the banduddu represents the all of reality itself, out of which the physical world is created. The other object is the mysterious pine cone. It represents (I think) an opposite to the banduddu, which is multiplicity. There is no multiplicity in the plenum. It is what it is. It does not move and it does not think. But the rationally created world is full of multiplicity and difference. The primal fulness is held in one hand, and the multiplicity of creation is held in the other. The king (or other divine power) is between the two extremes - between reality itself, and its physical representation. He has the power to shape the created world - to fix the destinies, and to create good order on earth. 

The king (or another divine power) is represented twice around the tree. The image is symmetrical. But the symmetry of the image is superficial, since it is broken by simple details. One being is shown bringing the pine cone close to the tree; on the other side of the tree, the opposing being is making contact with the tree. What is being represented here is the power of decision which both the king and divine beings possess. Which is the power of rational creation, and the establishment of good order in the physical world.

What is being represented is two separate states. The first represents the potency of the king, where it is the king being represented; the second represents the actualisation of the power which he has. So the image represents both the power of kingship, and the function of the king. Which is why there was such a representation behind the throne in Ashurbanipal's palace.

This implies that the king has a connection with reality itself. The tree is another image of that reality (reduplication of themes is a major part of ancient iconography). We can tell a lot about what it means on the basis of the way it is used in other contexts. Elements of the tree (alternating lotus buds, open and closed, etc.) can be used in pavements and porches, or used to mark the boundary between wall reliefs. So it represents a form of limit. The king accesses that limit, and because he has access to it, he has divine power. The limit is the plenum, because it is at the edge of physical reality. What is at the edge of physical reality is coterminous with divine reality.

"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, Z lyomi, The Literature of Ancient Sumer, 2004, p330

This is why sacrifices used to take place mainly at sunrise and sunset, because at that moment representations of the divine crossed from one reality to another (crossing the horizon between earth and heaven). It was the most propitious time for connecting the earth with the world of the divine.

The installation of divine images in Babylon and Assyria involved limits also - part of the ritual took place in a garden next to a river bank, where the long reeds were conceived to reach all the way down to the Abzu itself. And the rivers were themselves divine (DINGIR.ID), because water was an image of the divine reality.

The first sage,  Oannes, emerges from the sea to impart knowledge to mankind, for the same reason.


Transcendentalism in Mesopotamia

All of this makes sense only if Mesopotamian religion (or more accurately, Mesopotamian divine cult), was transcendentalist in nature. Meaning that the Mesopotamians (or at least some among the scholars, the 'priestly' class, and certain privileged members of the artisan class) understood there to be at least two levels of reality, one of them transcendent of physical reality, which gave rise to the world of physical existence. And that is what is described in their rituals and liturgies. Once the idea is grasped of the initial plenum, which forever lies behind the physical world, much of the rest of Mesopotamian literature makes sense, or at least offers clues to what is going on. Without a grasp of that idea, we have no clue.

A classicist would be likely to object to the above on the grounds that a transcendentalist nature to Mesopotamian religion would imply a contemporary grasp of philosophical concepts, and the ability to frame complex arguments about abstract questions and the nature of reality. But the Greeks invented all of that in the middle of the 1^st millennium B.C.E., so it is obviously wrong. They would follow up by saying that transcendentalist thought around the world does not predate the Greeks either. A history of transcendentalist thought has to start with the Greeks.

So we are back with the fiction. Transcendental thought is however the lynchpin of religious thought and practice in the ancient Near East. The denial of the presence of transcendental thought in the ANE has very little to do with the evidence which we have, and much more to do with the way the evidence is approached by us.

Further details concerning transcendentalism in the ANE can be found by following the links in the article Babylon the Great. There is also an article describing detail of the Babylonian creation which suggests a transcendentalist outlook: The Idea of the Plenum in Babylon. The importance of the idea of limit in Assyria is discussed in: The Threshold in Ancient Assyria. Links to articles on the importance of limit in general can be found in: At the very Edge: Marking Transition and Transformation in Antiquity. The properties and atributes of  Mesopotamian kingship are discussed in The Fifty Names of Marduk.

A book, The Origins of Transcendentalism in Ancient Religion, was originally slated for publication in 2019, but will now appear either late in 2020, or early 2021.


TY, September 11, 2018, and January 9, 2020.

At the very Edge: Marking Transition and Transformation in Antiquity

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

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

***

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

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

***

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

[From Understanding Ancient Thought (2017)]

***

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

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

***

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

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

***

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

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

***

'The Esoteric Conception of Divinity in the Ancient World' http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-esoteric-conception-of-divinity-in.html  In my twenties, I was struck by the strong interest the ancients had in the idea of limit – in art, architecture, philosophy, and ritual. This interest did not much seem to engage modern scholarly attention, with a couple of notable exceptions. Initially I had no idea at all what the significance of the idea of limit might be, and no idea where pursuing it would take me. Or that it would lead to a book it would take me four years to write, and which would reframe my understanding of human intellectual history in the process.

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

***

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

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

***

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

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

TY, August 30, 2018

Topics 5: Before 'The Sacred History of Being'

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

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

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

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

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

And so on.

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

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

Here is (an edited) version of the list -

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

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

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

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

-The Omphalos in Greece and Babylonia.

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

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

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

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

-The zoo in Assyria.

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

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

-The concept of fate in antiquity.

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

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

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

-The infinitely small and the infinitely great.

-The collection of augmentations and reduplications.

-Metaphor in antiquity.

-Metonymy in antiquity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Excellence and discipline in antiquity.

-The concept of ‘the other’ in antiquity.

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

-Accidental property or virtue?

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

-The problem of transcendence in antiquity.

-Markers of the transcendent in antiquity.

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

-The problem of the priest.

-Hair and Nails (extremities).

-The concept of the foreign.

-The living and the dead (differences and similarities)

-Do statues live?

-The lives of statues.

-Movement and the inanimate

-Eternity (and the millions of years)

Gk ‘zoon’ (Hdt).

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

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

-Can a man become a god while alive?

-Can a man become a god at all?

-Divine honours in Greece and Persia.

-The Cult of the Great Gods

- Augmentation and reduplication (the emphatic in antiquity).

-The pursuit of the Great.

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

-Loosing and Binding (Greece and Israel).

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

-The temple as the Gods house.

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

-The puzzle of the palace and the temple.

-The King and the High Priest.

-The Shamanic aspects of King and Priest.

-The concept of the Soul in Greece and Egypt.

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

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

-‘Consular Tribunes’

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

-The Roman Arena – mythological guises for murder.

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

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

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

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

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

-Is Greece influenced by Egypt?

-Self-creation of Sparta and its military virtues.

-The evidence for early Sparta.

-The false door in Egypt

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

-The idea of symbol in antiquity.

-The concept of the telos

-The idea of the telos in antiquity before Socrates

-‘Going before’.

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

-The concept of identity in antiquity.

-The concept of similarity in antiquity.

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

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

-The text addressed to the gods.

- Addressing the gods in general.

-theology and history as emulation

-theology and history as dissimulation

-The Iiad and the Odyssey as Achaean documents.

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

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

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

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

-The conception of the Good.

-The concept of the One.

-Concept of the Many.

-Concept of the cairn.

-The Tibetan prayer wheel.

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

-The ground of reality (ousia) and its properties

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

- Alternative views of polytheism

- The numinous in antiquity.

- Rites of passage.

-Rites of communication.

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

-Varro’s concept of ‘superstitio’.

-Religious theatre and Incarnation in antiquity.

-The Chinese Warriors (Terracotta Army).

-The Parmenidean Hypothesis.

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

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

Thomas Yaeger, March 30, 2018.