///Here is Part II of Five Myths of Zoroaster. Part I can be found here. Thanks for reading.\\\
ב.
The Birth of Mythos: Akhenaten, Homer, Brahma, Zarathustra, Socrates, and Monotheism
Culture is a lab-culture dropped in a swamp... What is born in this Silurian marsh? God rises from the primordial ooze…life seems to be ruled by limiters: crop yield, rainfall, drought, fires, storms, megafauna migration patterns, plagues. Things happen for apparently inexplicable reasons, yet from behind our eyes they seem directed and personal. So come the gods, in the wind at sea, licking in the fire in the forests. Gods are explanation for circumstance and contingency, and perhaps more importantly, divinity provides us with something to do about things which otherwise seem beyond our control.
Religion gets to work through the successful mobilization of Erotic 'lures,' the success of competing narratives which account for contingency. As Michael Thomas writes, thinking with Whitehead, “The concepts [...] that appeal to individuals do so through their resonance with present experience, or by forcing a reevaluation of the present perspective[...]. In turn, our perception of reality changes, causing us to feel differently[...].”[1] There is a feeling, which seems to be endemic to the human condition, from which deification, spirituality, and religiosity arise. Plotinus refers to it as something inarticulable, which can’t ever be put adequately into words. It’s a sense of unity, a feeling that there’s something beyond oneself, beyond flat nominal observations and facticity (“there is a tree, there is a rock, here is the sidewalk”)—some transcendent connectivity, some sublime interactivity, some coalescence of phenomena which becomes larger than its parts, something fundamental to the structure of what’s happening, to experience, that one struggles to articulate, that one ultimately makes into God.
Something beyond the bare movements of atoms, something else, some hidden truth. There is a moment in which you feel the process of immanent happening unfolding with you deep in its current, something which you can’t quite catch up with, to which you are not mere witness but in which you are an indivisible if infinitesimal part. Vibrating along the strumming of the process, there is no point with which to catch up—you are simply borne along in its evolvement. And in moments, flashes, of revelation you can see God moving in the world, there is something about this intangible which becomes blindingly clear, beyond reason or articulation. And this feeling of oneness that you’re granted, that you access, in these brief blazing instants leaves you feeling fundamentally changed, and “in turn, [y]our perception of reality changes, causing [you] to feel differently and to see more or fewer relations as a result.”[2] As Thomas notes, A.N. Whitehead speaks of the order of nature as having an Eros, “the urge towards the realization of ideal perfection.”[3] Thomas writes,
The Eros constitutes the initial feeling of wholeness or togetherness in experience that aims at the continuation of order, but with greater intensity (the involvement of more relations). This Eros is the ground of feelings from which concepts abstract and have their own emotional quality or tone. The structural resonance between ideas has an emotional resonance in the order of things. Eros explains the pull towards perfection and systematic wholeness. There is a fullness of relations between existing things that is felt in the emotional texture of our experience. “God” and other ultimate principles are a manifestation of the desire to capture this wholeness and make it a central feature of our experience. Thus […] the ontological idea of God along with our other grand metaphysical presuppositions, should be seen as an attempt to seduce us into a shared experience for mutual satisfaction.[4]
There is something Erotic, therefore, in our experience of what might be termed the Divine, something which draws us to that experience in which we share in Plotinus' struggle to articulate that which hits so brightly in these moments of clarity which escape articulation, which, thinking with Plato, might be called momentary fusions with the Absolute. We feel, fully, deeply, the “fullness of relations between existing things that is felt in the emotional texture of our experience”[5] in these moments of revelation, wherein something appears to be “revealed” to us. Afterwards, we are left in the position of reckoning with this experience, of reconciling it somehow to the world and our experience of it. We struggle to find explanation, struggle to express it, struggle to make something of it. Religion is the attempt to do so, and its success is due in part to its ability to Erotically lure its converts and adherents, its ability to speak to and connect with this fundamental feeling of interactivity which exists within our experience. This is the origin of the religious instinct—here is Crake’s “God gene.”[6]
Religion is further mobilized by the reconciliation of revelation and the subsequent codification and spread of that standardized and narrativized reconciliation. Its success relies on the strength of its Erotic lure, its ability to instantiate and mythologize “the pull towards perfection and systematic wholeness,” in its ability to “lure” feeling into sensing the world in a certain way, “causing us to feel differently and to see more or fewer relations as a result.”[7] Religion arises in the form of narrative, as we begin to assign and assemble meaning to the inexplicable, and it successfully coheres where those narratives, for whatever reason, possess broad libidinal appeal. In Egypt, god arose as a deification of a fundamental productive or generative force. According to Charles Finch’s introduction to the opus of Gerald Massey, Massey claims that “early humans realized no connection between sex [...] and reproduction, hence there was no notion of fatherhood. [...T]he bursting forth of new life in toto presented itself as a [...] transcendent mystery. It made the female [...] the paradigm of the first [...] images of deity. In the first advent, God was feminine.”[8][9] And this divinity was not clad in human guise, but rather in the guise of the hippopotamus, the crocodile, the lioness, and the sycamore tree.[10] In Kemet, agriculture, social law, early crafts, and the other attributes which distinguished man from not-man, first developed under the system of the matriarch, “with the mother[11] supreme as procreator, nourisher, and preserver.”[12] Under the ancient Egyptian’s understanding of production and procreation, maternity and the figure of the Mother[13] reigned as the embodiment of generative force. And, crucially, as Finch notes, “The strangest and most peculiar beliefs and customs are never merely products of the imagination; they reflect a typological reality that governed the world that the early humans made.”[14] In other words, beliefs arise from further beliefs arrived at by peculiar perception and attendant habituation, and do not spring mysteriously into the mind from nowhere. In Kemet, as elsewhere, this immanent, playful, and associative religiosity arises first, a predecessor to the eschatological figures of later ‘revealed’ religion. As Finch explains, “The Great Mother[15] was the primal type and from her [...] emanated other [...] Powers. [She] was not worshipped out of fear and ignorance [...] but as a means of linking with and benefiting from the Powers inherent in nature. [...N]ature encompassed both the seen and unseen planes” (italics my own).[16] The symbols of this mode of religiosity are associative, intuitive: the hippopotamus embodies the pregnant female and therefore is thought of as an avatar of the Great Mother,[17] for example. For the Mythic human there is no personified God, immaterial and supreme, but rather an interpretive mode which latches meaning onto one’s physical surroundings, imbibing it all with a deeper significance. And what is the Erotic lure, the attraction, of such a mode of religiosity, of consciousness? Its imbibing of experience with meaning and significance, and its opening the door for the sanctification of repeated stylized acts as themselves interactive with divinity itself—its lure is composed of its enriching of life with purpose, meaning, and satisfaction.
Thus, and as we see clearly in the italicized above, religion also arises ritualistically, from a libidinal demand to do something about the existence of the Divine. Early on, this takes the form of the repetition of stylized rituals which are meant to ingratiate one into the favor of the gods, seen as a way to prevent disaster and encourage plenty. The question answered by the early religious ritual was how to integrate human actions into the Eros, into the binding divinity of the phenomenal world. A powerful example is found through a critical study of the origin of the Vedic verses in early Hinduism: the Vedas are a compilation of improvised verses composed by poets in the service of Brahmic elites, used to invoke deities during sacrifices. They were not testimony or narratives of revelation, but “displays of poetic talent meant to attract deities to sacrifice through their aesthetic and lyrical content.”[18]
Only later was their status as canonized scripture cemented. Likewise, the rituals and ceremonies of the pre-Christian Greek and Roman mystery cults were typically performed in order to improve one’s standing with some god or other, or improve one’s lot in the afterlife.[19] Early religion inaugurates a cultural mythic consciousness principally characterized by a materiality to divinity, wherein the gods are not abstractions but actually-material deities which walk upon the earth and affect it directly—Zeus tests your virtue by appearing really before you as a traveler in need of shelter at your door; the Great Mother drinks at the water-hole in the “guise”[20] of the hippopotamus. Early religious conceptualization imbibes the empty materiality, the dreary facticity, of existence with meaning, soaks it with immanent divine significance, and helps to make life itself rich, fecund, and worth living. Mythic consciousness is an unmitigated play of imagination and material, an immanent symbolism which coheres groups around shared ritual and belief.
Only later, and slowly, does this begin to change: the religiosity of associative immanence gives way to a religiosity of abstraction, direct revelation, and (often masculine) divine supremacy. Associative play and individual divine connectivity gives way as the conception of man turns from a creature among creatures borne along in the noumenal flux, toward the conception of man as subject, as the ultimate phenomenal perceiver. Tribal politics gives way to imperial politics as domination, disenchantment, and the secularization of the state inaugurate the new epoch. And here we see the beginnings of man, both gendered and universal, becoming the divine figure himself.[21][22]
In Egypt in the court of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, the Cult of Aten took hold of the kingdom and saw the destruction of all false gods and their temples. A new religion is born which de-subjectifies divinity, first abstracting it wholly into to singular god of Aten, then abandoning even that form for the radiance of Aten itself, immanent, divine, singular, and everywhere. The first monotheism seen on earth was perhaps closer to a positive detheism, a focus on the immanent and unifying power of divinity rather than on a powerful figure in-itself, worthy of worship and devotion. As the mechanic state carved careful thrones for their gods which granted brutal Pharoahs divine rule, the associative play of imagination which lies at the evolutionary root of this polytheism fades as divinity became bureaucratized. The radicality of Akhenaten’s rule was this dethroning of divinity, returning it to the blessed dirt and river, reinvigorating breath and rock and stone with sacredness. Akhenaten’s religious reinvigoration was itself driven by his own theophany, by a moment of brink-pushed madness in his middle youth. In the fifth year of his reign, Amenhotep IV, as he was known then, experienced what, at some point or another, we all experience: a brief, blinding moment of fusion with the absolute. The cynicism of the priestly class was as poison in his temples—like Zarathustra he cried, “Bad air! Bad air! That something deformed comes near me; that I should have to smell the entrails of a deformed soul!”[23] In all the bureaucratic subdivisions did this rancor burn, and so he cut out their hearts: he wrecked their pantheon, and reconsolidated divinity around the immanent outpouring of energetic connectivity, symbolized for him in the Aten, the Sun Disc.
For twelve years the Cult of Aten was ascendent, false gods and their temples torn down, with Akhenaten and Neferneferuaten Nefertiti on the throne, until his death and the desecration of his tomb. His sickly son, Tutankhaten, took back the name Tutankhamen and swiftly reinstated both the pantheon and the aristocratic bureaucracy. Akhenaten’s cult was outlawed, and his cultists rooted out. The Aten fell from grace, and the old god Amen sat once more at the helm of the Egyptian pantheon. Yet Akhenaten’s immortality exceeds forever the cheap fame bought by his son’s sarcophagus sitting even now in the British Museum. Akhenaten died, but his religion survived in a splinter group, which fled north after Akhenaten’s death and the collapse of the religion, to Palestine.[24][25]
In Persia, Zoroaster, Zarathustra Spitama, spoke of one God, who was (to put it crudely) lord of the gods, which themselves were immanent inundations of the One, avatars of a fundamental divinity (much like the Hindu gods, described by Matthew Duperon as “windows into divinity”).[26]
The teachings of Zarathustra spread west from Persia while the Cult of the Sun God rose north from Egypt: they met in Canaan, or Palestine, and the Yahweh god (among a diverse pantheon varying from tribe to tribe, Yahweh’s kingship among the gods was universal) was elevated to singularity in a move which united some dozen disparate tribes. For Massey, “There is evidence enough to prove the [Hebrew mythological] types are Egyptian and the people who brought them out of Egypt must have been [...] Egyptian in race, of a religion that was Egyptian of the earliest and oldest kind.”[27]
The Book of Exodus is simply the dramatization of this flight, the cultists themselves transformed into Hebrews in the court of King Solomon during the revision of the Pentateuch. The Cult of Aten, “represented the ancient Mother-and-Son religious system dating back to pre-dynastic times.”[28] Therefore here we see the genesis of classical monotheism: from Zarathustra’s king god Ahura Mazda which is the One of which the minor gods are inundations, and from Akhenaten’s Rē-Herakhteē, the god who lives in the immanence of the Aten’s rays who for Akhenaten (and his successors who fled the institutional reinstantiation of the pantheon) was the only God, and these synthesized in the figure of the Judean Yahweh Nameless One do we see the beginnings of the conception of a singular, supreme Lord and Creator of All, the Emaner of All That Is.
In all three of these practices (Egyptian, Persian, Palestinian Hebraic), God still had materiality, sacrifices were made, rituals performed—yes, He was undepictable, a supreme ruler, and all-powerful, but He still held vestigial materiality granted by His ritualistic origins. Then a robed and hideous sophist wanders south and east from Athens and returns with an idea, supplemented by an idea of his predecessor Xenophanes: “One god, greatest among gods and humans, like mortals neither in form nor in thought.”[29] A singular god who is
synonymous with transcendental, unattainable truth and real reality absolutely distinct from materiality or appearance, who lives in and is constituted by a field of non-existent and absolute Forms, geometric angels in the court of high heaven. In the court of King Solomon the Hebrew scriptures are edited, written and rewritten, and God transcends from local supreme deity to Lord of All, Melekh Ha’Olam (Ha’Olam [העולם], “the world,” derived from helem [הלם], “hidden, concealed”—extraterrestrial, immaterial]). Western rationalism and formalism along with Abrahamic monotheism find their fetal incarnations in this Paleoarchean Babylon. Now God is become Truth, a singular stability, controlling, redemptive, total, unattainable. Something Beyond, Outside, to which to direct prayer, sacrifice, and eternal deference and devotion. We arrive at a singular god, solitary, supreme, and absolutely immaterial. Yet, our arrival is traceable, trackable, the result of a contingent coalescence of the culture-machine’s functioning over land and time: in the marsh of immanent and contingent culture, God rises from the primordial ooze.
Over the whole of the earth religiosity arises as humans grasp for meaning, and the meaning they find binds them in ritual and practice, becoming one of the primary foundations of culture.
[1] Thomas, Michael, Resisting the Habit of Tlön: Whitehead, Borges, and the Fictional Nature of Concepts, (PDF, 2018), 5. [2] Ibid., 5 [3] Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas (New York, Free Press, 1967), pg. 275 [4] Thomas, 5. [5] Ibid., 13 [6] Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake, (New York, Anchor Books, 2003). [7] Thomas, 5 [8] Finch, Charles S, Nile Genesis: An Introduction to the Opus of Gerald Massey, (Tring Local History Museum, 2006), 9. [9] In general, though he is certainly no quack, and though many of his claims find root in meaningfully substantial evidence, Massey is not considered to be a particularly rigorous practitioner of either archaeology or anthropology, and is often considered to be among a variety of scholars of questionable scientific and historical integrity who stretch Egyptological linguistic and cultural connections in order to support theses of only speculative legitimacy. However, for our purposes herein his empirical exactitude has little bearing on our rhetorical claims or theoretical illustrations and narrativizations. [10] Ibid., 10 [11] Mother—not from the Sanskrit “Matar,” but rather the Egyptian “Mut,” the Emaner, the mouth, the chamber, and “AR,” the child, the thing made. Mut-AR is the therefore the speaker, the generator, the holding-place for the child. [12] Ibid., 10 [13] Mother—not from the Egyptian “Mut,” but rather the German “Mutter,” the procreator, the condition for the possibility of speech acts. [14] Ibid., 10-11 [15] Mother—not from the German “Mutter,” but from the Dutch “Modder,” the “filth, dregs,” which are the wreckage of the afterbirth which is the physiological announcement of birth and actualization. [16] Ibid., 11 [17] Mother—not from the Dutch “Modder” but from the Greek “Meter,” as found in “Demeter,” the goddess of harvest and fertility, the sacred emaner of life and the overseer of death. [18] @Sturgeons_Law, www.twitter.com/Sturgeons_Law/status/1172463665531895809 [19] Post-Structuralist Tent Revival, Mystery Cults! With TJ Wellman: Part 1 (Soundcloud, 2019). [20] See “Becoming-Jaguar” on the k-jax blog, or the therein cited work Aztec Philosophy by James Maffie, for an exploration of conception of immanence in symbolism which divests from the idea of symbolic representation as a separation between the Real and the presentation in favor of a conception of performative aesthetic production, a performance which is a “becoming-” rather than a “representing.” [21] This movement is typified by the liberal, secular subject inaugurated by the thinkers of the European enlightenment, notably John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jaques Rosseau, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, etc. [22] Thanks to Michael Thomas for his critical contribution regarding this historical spiritual movement. [23] Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morality, Trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998), 24 [24] For further exploration of the Kemenite origins of Judaism, see Moses & Monotheism by Sigmund Freud. [25] I am indebted here to Lewis Gordon, who spoke about this topic during a visiting lecture and inspired for me this line of inquiry. [26] Duperon, Matthew. Lectures in Introduction to East Asian Religions at Susquehanna University, Fall 2017. [27] Finch, 13. Quoting Massey (Massey, G., A Book of the Beginnings, (Williams and Norgate, 1881), Vol. II, 363) [28] Ibid., 14 [29] Osborne, Catherine, Presocratic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford University Press), 62.
Comments