one book leads to another

In my life, one book leads to another. Occasionally I might stroll through a bookstore and pick up a book that happens to catch my fancy, or find a book through some other more or less serendipitous means (I recently got the Maus comics after seeing their author-artist, Art Spiegelman, interviewed on TV), but that is increasingly unusual.

More often I acquire books as part of following a line of thought or investigation. Take Systems of Survival by Jane Jacobs, a book that I recently took down from my shelf to read again. I first bought and read it in March 1997 (I inscribe the purchase date inside each book). The book, written (unusually for Jacobs) in the form of a Socratic dialogue between modern characters in New York, is, as its subtitle says, A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics.

I was led back to it as part of my investigation into good and evil. What's good and what's bad--and why? What exactly is evil?

In the ancient world there were natural evils--that is, natural events that were regarded as evil, such as famines or floods. To me these are more what I would call misfortunes or disasters. Painful and unwanted, yes--but not evil in the same sense as the deliberate and unjust infliction of harm by one person on another. The cruel treatment of the helpless and innocent seems especially evil. Where does it come from? Why does it happen?

Following the thread of this line of thinking back, I recall reading in John Keegan's A History of Warfare that the phenomenon of the mounted warrior arose in the steppes of Central Eurasia sometime around 3000 BC. These people were nomadic pastoralists who gained most of their living from herding and hunting animals. To round up and slaughter defenseless animals requires a certain hardening of the heart, and Keegan observes that the techniques of wrangling herds were exactly the same techniques used by these nomadic warriors in combat: driving and encircling foot soldiers, and then slaughtering them. The feeling of superiority that the mounted warrior felt over his livestock was transferred to his similarly unmounted enemies. They were weak, passive creatures to be controlled and killed for his benefit.

Then I recalled reading in Mary Boyce's book Zoroastrians that it's possible that Zarathustra, the great Indo-Iranian prophet of (possibly) 1500 BC, received his revelation of the cosmic warfare of good and evil in response to his experience of these same mounted (or in his period, chariot-driving) warriors, who mercilessly pillaged peaceful farmers on the steppes.

Another input: in Vintage: The Story of Wine, by Hugh Johnson, I read that the ancient practice of dining while reclining on couches--the eating style of the nobility throughout the Mediterranean world--was acquired from the nomadic tribes of the steppes and deserts. It struck me that the mounted warrior, that creature of the steppes of Central Eurasia, who eventually morphed into the medieval knight, was the basis of what we call the aristocracy or the ruling class. By virtue of their mental toughness and superior prowess, they have the ability and the right to rule over those who are not of their class. Farmers produce wealth, warriors take it.

These thoughts led me to reading up on the steppe cultures of Central Eurasia, but then I also remembered Jane Jacobs's book on morality. She discovered that there are two different and mutually exclusive moral "syndromes" in the public world: one which she called the Commercial Moral Syndrome, which governs the affairs of people in industry and trade; and one called the Guardian Moral Syndrome, which governs the affairs of those in government, politics, and the military.

These two syndromes are mutually dependent in a functioning, thriving society, but what is "good" in one part of the system is "bad" in the other part. Jacobs lists 15 "precepts" that make up each of the syndromes, and the first precept of the Commercial Syndrome is "Shun force". The first precept of the Guardian Syndrome is "Shun trading". Merchants trade, and it's wrong for them to engage in the coercion of force; guardians (that is, police, soldiers, etc.) use force to achieve their aims, and it's wrong for them to engage in trade. When a merchant uses force, or a cop sells things, you have wrongs such as extortion and corruption.

This is the merest outline. My point is that one book leads to another for me, a flow, like one neuron lighting up the next in a train of thought in the brain.

no gum-chewing

The spoken word has power. The written word has, perhaps, even more. In many ways I find this to be an unfathomable mystery.

It's as though humanity reached as eagerly for writing as a child does for speech. I recently saw a wonderful documentary about how infants learn. Of all the sounds that the developing baby hears in the womb--and it hears plenty--the most audible to it is its mother's voice. At birth we're already very familiar with our mother's voice: its pitch, rhythms, and other qualities.

Experiments show too that at birth the brain is a general-language machine, in the sense that a newborn infant can distinguish between sounds in just about any language. A one-month-old baby of English-speaking parents can clearly distinguish between two different sounds in, say, Hindi, that its parents cannot tell apart. Among adults, only Hindi-speakers can hear the difference in sound. The baby, immersed in the language of its household, loses this universal sound-distinguishing ability soon, by about six months, as I recall. Now habituated to its mother tongue, it too can no longer tell the foreign sounds apart.

Babies work ceaselessly to speak, as they do to walk. As extremely social animals we thirst to communicate. The baby's survival depends in part on its ability to communicate its needs, and babies get very frustrated at the barrier they experience in getting their message across. The acquisition of language has the strongest possible motivation behind it.

Language, as a skill, comes under the heading of technology, and it may be our oldest one. The technology called writing is much more recent, dating to maybe 4000 BC or so. But that too was reached for eagerly by cultures who felt the need for it. And now it would surely be the worst sign of disaster for a culture to slide from literacy to illiteracy: the social equivalent of Alzheimer's disease.

In this culture we're inundated with words and we take writing for granted. There seems to be too much of it: marketing "messages", political campaigning, the disposable chatter of text-messaging. If television is, as Steve Allen put it, "chewing-gum for the eyes", then almost all writing today is chewing-gum for the mind.

Almost all. For man does not live by chewing-gum alone, and it was not as chewing-gum that writing was originally created and valued. In the first place, someone must have had something important enough to say that he wanted to record it, so it would not be forgotten--or altered.

Writing reflects the cast of thought behind it. It is an expression of the values and intentions of its creator. All writing is intended to influence others--this blog is so intended. The question is always, influence people how? in what direction? to do what?

Lying next to my keyboard is the latest statement from my phone-service provider, Rogers. Across the top are emblazoned the words, "Welcome to Rogers"--a typical example of automated and meaningless commercial "friendliness". A more honest headline would be: "We rely on your money for our profits, but in most ways you are a nuisance to us, especially if any of our employees has to pay any individual attention to you. Then you become a cost center. Please don't do that." (Indeed, if they put that message on there, I would gain respect for them--something I have very little of right now.)

Those of us who make an art of writing have a special duty not to be false. The deluge of chewing-gum writing is characterized by its manipulativeness, hypocrisy, and frivolity. Writing as art should be none of these things. But most of all it should be truthful: telling it like it is (or was!).

I don't even like real chewing-gum.

musings on a dark, rainy fall morning

Back to the task. Kimmie returns to work today. The mornings are dark a long time now after 5:30, when our alarm goes off. I hear the distant jingling of our front-door chimes buffeted in the predawn autumn wind.

My project, my story, is morphing out from under me. As I learn more, throw open more doors to the vaults of the deep past, my world enlarges and changes the journey of my heroes. Not fundamentally--I'm in far too deep to make a radical story-change now. But it's more like discovering things that were already here: connections, meanings, possibilities. I feel I have the opportunity to replace certain arbitrary elements, which I'm never very happy about, with elements that reflect the growing meaning of my story. In this way a controlling idea very gradually emerges, like a shipwreck being floated gingerly from the bottom of the ocean.

My reading about the cults of the Roman Empire--the exotic religions brought into it by its foreign traders and captives--is throwing tremendous new light on the way I see that world. I sometimes wonder (and worry) about the fact that I'm coming across this information so late in my journey, but in general I trust the timing of the arrival of information. This trust seems to be borne out time and again by the coincidental arrival of complementary information from different sources. I read about the Egyptian religion of Isis, which became widespread in the Roman world, in a book devoted to her cult, only to open a chapter of Toynbee's A Study of History to find him discussing Isis and Osiris (he conjectures that this brother-sister, husband-wife, mother-son duo represents a transformation of the more ancient cult of Ishtar and Tammuz in Sumer). These simultaneous linkages between widely different sources happen a lot for me, and tend to confirm the path I'm on, and the way I'm traveling it. It's like just-in-time delivery of manufacturing parts, except the parts here are ideas or pieces of knowledge.

If my "building blocks" are arriving just in time, that must mean I'm assembling things at the right pace--painfully slow though that seems to me. (I find it embarrassing to be asked about the progress of my work, since its progress is almost imperceptible, even to me. Pluto seems to orbit the Sun faster.)

Even in Chalmers Johnson's latest book, Nemesis, about the disintegration of the American republic, I have a very good short summary of the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, which also dovetails with my other research, even though I'm reading it to learn more about current events and not for my project. The parallels between Rome and the U.S. are striking, and give me a feeling of relevance in what I'm doing.

Supposedly Harry Truman said that the only news is the history you don't know. I'm sure that's true. History is made generally by the ignorant and purblind, those who believe they're acting in an original way but who are in fact merely duplicating the actions of others taken long before, most often with disastrous results. It's a truism to say that history repeats itself, and it never actually does, quite. But the hallmark of intelligence is the ability to see a pattern where the less intelligent see only chaos.

Mind you, that's also the hallmark of paranoia.

One of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, I think it was Live and Let Die, had as an epigraph this little saying:

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

According to Toynbee, since the beginning of civilization societies have evolved according to one overarching pattern: growth; stagnation into a "time of troubles"; the rise of a pacifying "universal state"; and a final rupture and disintegration due to the combined agitation of a disenfranchised "internal proletariat" and a hostile and opportunistic "external proletariat" of barbarians beyond the civilization's frontier. Although I have not yet finished reading his Study of History, Toynbee so far reckons that our own civilization (which he calls Western Christendom) entered its "time of troubles" in the 16th century with the bitter and fratricidal European Wars of Religion. Since the 20th century was even more disastrous and bloodthirsty, it seems safe to say we're not out of the time of troubles yet. Indeed, they have to get so bad, in Toynbee's view, that people are generally relieved to acquiesce in living under the aegis of a universal state, like Rome under the Empire.

We don't seem to be there yet, which means that things are set to get continually worse. The U.S. administrations since World War 2 have set their sights on becoming the next universal state. But their chances of success are, in my opinion, poor. I expect this century to be worse than the 20th century in terms of human suffering, and that much of it will be linked to catastrophic environmental change. If Toynbee's historical cycle is still functioning after we go through that wringer, it's anyone's guess who might be strong and coherent enough to provide a peaceful universal state for the survivors to recuperate in.

Whew, this morning's even darker than I thought.

credit history

In my inventory yesterday of the research books I read the previous day, I left out one: A History of Interest Rates by Sidney Homer.

I think I forgot it because I have been reading (and typing) it down here at the PC, instead of in the living-room as part of my daily reading period. I got my hardback copy of Homer's classic last February through Abebooks; it is marked (discreetly) with the stamps of a former owner, the Ambassador College Library in Pasadena, California.

I first learned about this book in 1994, when it was referenced by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg in their hefty jeremiad The Great Reckoning, a bold set of forecasts based on their theory of history. This theory was centered around the concept they called megapolitics: that the ultimate driver of historical change is and always has been the technology of weapons. In the last analysis, those who make things happen have always been those who held the greatest ability to project violence. In the view of these authors, the history of civilization has been essentially the story of how governments have controlled the freelance violence of individuals and small groups by being able to overpower them. But a continuing trend, from the beginning of history, has been the "democratization" of violence: the development of ever more powerful weapons that placed ever more violent power in the hands of individuals. We have gone from spears to muskets to handguns to machine guns to high-yield explosives to "tactical" nuclear weapons. In the long run, in their view, the question is whether governments, including legitimate, accountable ones, can hold the balance of power against violent individuals and splinter-groups.

The authors acknowledge that these thoughts are not cheerful. However, when you boil away all the ideology and talk, you arrive, basically, at Hobbes's "state of nature": what we now call the law of the jungle, or, in more sanitized Darwinian terms, survival of the fittest. Hobbes saw the rule of law as what separates us from that miserable condition in which men's lives are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". But Davidson and Rees-Mogg are saying that the rule of law itself is only as good as the weapons that back it up. If the police are less well armed than the miscreants they are trying to control, then the state is lost just as surely as if its army is outmanned and outgunned by an invading force. The final backstop of the rule of law is violence.

I found their book fascinating, and in fact have read it twice. It even formed a key inspiration for another TV project that Warren and I created in the 1990s, a drama about a degenerated society in the near future (a project which has not got off the pad). For the record, I'm a nonviolent person myself, and believe firmly in the principle of negotiation rather than violence in achieving results. No matter how long it takes, agreement is a much more powerful force, as well as more humane, than simply imposing your will through violence. At the same time, we all know what happens when we operate by an "honor system" that has no one policing it. Even in a monastery, frictions and grievances arise.

The authors of The Great Reckoning were investors and investment advisers, and the book was addressed mainly to fellow capitalists. How do you make a buck in Hobbes's state of nature? One of their favorite authorities was Sidney Homer, and his monograph on the history of interest rates. When I first saw the title, A History of Interest Rates, I laughed. It sounds like a satire of dullness--a text that might be carried around by an ultra-nerdy sitcom character. Because I have long been interested in finance and capitalism, I actually felt some nerdish attraction for the book--although not enough to actually seek it out and buy it.

However, now that my own story of the ancient world is developing more of a financial component, I felt I had to get it. I've still read only the first 60 pages or so, but I find that it is even more interesting than I'd hoped. As Homer, a bond trader and partner of Salomon Brothers in New York, observes, interest rates are like a fever chart of society: peace, calm, and stability are reflected in low interest rates; and disorder, uncertainty, and fear are reflected in high interest rates.

Homer also observes that every major legal code, at least of the ancient world, from that of Hammurabi on, was brought in largely to regulate credit. From ancient times, Jews (and other compact societies) were forbidden to lend to each other at interest; loans were expected to be interest-free. Only loans to strangers or outsiders could bear interest. Eventually such rules created large financial and social problems, which were addressed in various ways.

The very word credit is related to words like credo and credible, relating to belief. To extend credit is to have faith. Faith in someone, faith in the future. Faith is the basis of religion.

My intuition tells me that this is an important theme, both for my story and for all of us.

looking for answers

Back to the routine of work. The B.C. Day long weekend is over, and also Kimmie's extra day off yesterday, giving us a mini-vacation in this glorious time of summer. Again, the city became deserted on the long weekend, making it all the more pleasant to remain here.

Yesterday the weather turned to overcast and cool drizzle, and we had a visit from Warren, my scriptwriting collaborator. He is en route with his family to Hong Kong, where his wife has been posted for two or three years with the British bank HSBC. It's been two years since I last saw him, and it may be two or three before I see him again. Thus does globalization reach into our mundane lives.

Since my travels are now in the mind, I'm happy to stay in one place. I've been reading in Hellenistic Religions: An Introduction by Luther H. Martin that the Hellenistic period--which is the period of my story--was a time of wandering. People traveled and drifted. A powerful new goddess, widely worshipped, with temples in many cities, was Fortune--whom we now know as Lady Luck. People saw their lives as buffeted by the unpredictable winds of luck. Like us, they saw themselves as sandwiched between chance and necessity: driven by mechanical forces beyond their control, and also subject to continual random rolls of the dice. Even the gods were seen as subject to the same forces.

We live in a similar period, with similar ideas. Our term globalization would have been familiar to Alexander the Great, and indeed this was his aim: to unite the (known) world under a single benign government, united by the universal adoption of what he regarded as the world's best culture--the Greek.

Our scientific ideas are also, again, the same. We imagine the world to be driven on the one hand by mechanical, deterministic forces (classical physics), and on the other to be the product of purely and ultimately random events (quantum physics, evolutionary theory). While our laws and societies and personal lives are built around the notion of choice, freedom, and individual responsibility, we have no scientific way of accounting for such ideas. We see ourselves as mechanical, random machines that are also, paradoxically, free and goal-oriented.

This dog's breakfast of beliefs would also have been familiar to the denizens of the Hellenistic world. It was an individualistic society, as ours is, in which people felt increasingly alienated and estranged from the centers of life. The questions were rising in the human soul: what to value, and why?

These questions are still with us, of course. The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl said that life does not provide us with answers; life asks the questions, and we provide the answers. It doesn't make finding them any easier, but I suppose it changes the direction of the search. We can wander the earth, but we need to look within.

sick souls

I've recently been reading again from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, a book developed from a series of talks he gave at the Gifford lectures on natural religion in Edinburgh in 1901-02.

The first three lectures lead in with a general discussion of his topic--looking at religion primarily from a psychological point of view. Lectures 4 and 5 are together called "The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness", and deal with optimistic religious experiences, using as his main example the "mind-cure" school of religion that seemed to be all the rage at the time he was speaking. This held that one can quite abruptly change one's life for the better by having faith in the guidance and help of a higher power, visualizing health and happiness, and refusing to dwell on or even acknowledge pain, illness, or depression in one's life. As James demonstrates, this approach had proved itself to be widely effective and powerful--indeed could not have become so popular if it had not.

But in lectures 6 and 7 he moves on to "The Sick Soul"--the opposite outlook, which does not deny pain and sin, but looks these right in the face, acknowledging them to be a permanent feature of the human and even cosmic landscape. I'm still working my way through lecture 6, but already have been exposed to some powerful remarks that remind me very much of some of my Buddhist studies, which likewise emphasize the futility and impossibility of finding lasting happiness in life, so long as one relies on clinging to impermanent things.

As James says,

Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world: in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure.

In illustration of this, he quotes Goethe in 1824:

I will say nothing against the course of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.

Whew. Or this, from Robert Louis Stevenson:

There is indeed one element in human destiny, that not blindness itself can controvert. Whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted.

Sobering words. They seem to suit my mood at the moment. Reading as much history right now as I am, especially sweeping views of the whole of human history (I've just finished Michael Cook's A Brief History of the Human Race), it's hard not to see it as a march of folly, the gradual acquisition of more powerful means to achieving the same dismal ends.

The British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, writing in the 1930s, saw militarism as one of the main features of a decadent and moribund society, a kind of social disease that would prevent the arising of a decent human civilization for as long as it persists. Well, we live in a world that is vastly more militarized than it ever has been, with more killing power distributed into more hands.

Being the biggest and best-armed is no help. Toynbee points to the legend of David and Goliath as the example of how supreme power breeds complacency, and brings about its own destruction through means it feels no motivation to foresee. Even when a heavily armed power toils to stay up to date, upgrading its military systems, as the ancient empire of Assyria did, it eventually reaps the whirlwind of militarism.

Assyria dominated the Middle East from about 1000 to 650 BC, but its oppressive strength bred tremendous resentment in its neighbors, and eventually all the conquered rose against it and destroyed it. When the Greek general Xenophon led his 10,000 mercenaries back from Persia toward the Black Sea in the 5th century BC, he passed Nineveh, the ancient fortified capital of Assyria. He and his men were amazed to find such a vast and heavily built city utterly vacant. Xenophon was unable to discover the truth about who had built the city, or when. The very name of Assyria had been forgotten.

the darkening age

Jeepers, still coming up dry as I sit down here to write a post. Maybe it is time to go back to jotting down ideas for blog-posts as they come to me during the day; for they do come to me. Sometime after I publish each post I usually have the thought, "Oh yeah, that's what I've been wanting to write about!"

Well, today I'm quite underslept (late to bed, early wakeup) and I don't feel up to much in terms of anything to say. I've dutifully typed some notes into the PC, from Arnold J. Toynbee's A Study of History (volume 1 of the abridged version) and from The Golden Bough (also an abridged version--where did people ever find the time to read 12-volume works?).

I'm finding Toynbee's writing a bit pompous, but also powerful, bold, and provocative--in other words, very good. I love his field of inquiry: how civilizations arise, flourish, and decline. He's plowing ground similar to that covered by Oswald Spengler in his The Decline of the West, the book that so inspired the young Joseph Campbell. I got that out of the library a couple of years ago, but found it quite heavy going. I would need to get my own copy that I could highlight at will (I'm a destroyer of books--ruining them for others while making them more useful and valuable for myself).

Toynbee has identified 21 civilizations (or "civilizing societies") that have existed since humanity first took up agriculture. The one in which I'm sitting and writing right now he dubbed Western Christendom. By his reckoning, every civilization evolves along the same broad lines, prospering for awhile under the impetus of an initial creative and spiritual energy, gradually settling into a universal state run by a dominant minority. Along with the dominant minority grows a church, a religion within the universal state, and a proletariat of people excluded from the dominant minority. Eventually, as the state ossifies into a more or less oppressive structure, it cracks and is overthrown by forces within and without. In general, the church that grew within the shelter of the universal state becomes the spiritual germ of another civilization, as the Christian Church became the germ of Western (and also Eastern) Christendom after the demise of the Roman Empire. In the meantime there is an interregnum or "heroic age" in which barbarians contend for the scraps of empire--what in our history we refer to as the Dark Ages.

Fascinating. I can't help but wonder: what is the "church" of our society now? The notion of "Christendom" has become weak and anachronistic, even though there are still many Christians in our society. But in Canada, as in Europe, the churches are filled--well, partly filled--mainly with old people; their congregations are dying off. The U.S. is more aggressively "Christian", but the society itself is violent and uncivil, with "Christianity" apparently doing little but attempting to put the brakes on certain aspects of science, such as evolutionary biology and biotechnology.

Western society is certainly aging. Who would deny that we're moving closer to senescence in our aggressive, materialistic culture, in which fewer and fewer people vote, and which is gradually coming to be steered by unpopular people who, as Toynbee puts it, rule rather than lead. There is disaffection within and also resentment without--ingredients leading toward the dissolution of the society and the lapse into a new "heroic age" of barbarism and warlords. Right now, it's not easy to pick which spiritual tradition or idea might form the nucleus of a new society, something creative to arise from the corpse of our own.

The Great Chain of Being

Rain drips outside, somewhere in the dark beyond my closed office blinds. I've been keying notes from Neil Forsyth's The Old Enemy over my morning coffee.

Ideas, ideas. Another book I'm enjoying right now is The Great Chain of Being by Arthur O. Lovejoy, an examination of the influence of the ancient idea of God's "fullness", first developed by Plato. According to Lovejoy, in this published series of lectures he delivered at Harvard University in 1933, this idea of a perfect God (for Plato, the idea of "the Good") necessitated its expression in creativity, a kind of overflowing of its goodness in the creation of forms--other, lesser ideas to begin with, but then, because of the inexhaustible superabundance of the all-Good, myriad other forms as well. This idea was developed by subsequent Platonists, especially by the 3rd-century AD philosopher Plotinus, who formed the idea into a systematic theory of emanation--the generation of ideas and forms from the central Good, or God, to fill the universe with everything.

According to Lovejoy, this idea has been tremendously influential throughout subsequent history, down at least until the 18th century, and no doubt is still shaping our thinking, subtly, today. For the idea came to be framed as the Great Chain of Being: the notion that there is a hierarchy or ladder of creation, leading from the lowest, least sentient things (rocks) up to the very highest (God, the Infinite Good), with every possible gradation in between. Humans are midway on this great Chain, the highest of material beings or the lowest of the spiritual beings, depending on how you look at it. For the Chain made angels necessary, representing the links of the Chain above us, leading on up to God. An unknown author of the 5th century AD, writing under the name of St. Paul's student Dionysius the Areopagite, set down the hierarchy of angels (nine different orders, from ordinary angels up to the seraphim who attended the throne of God). Since leading medieval theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas, accepted the pseudo-Dionysius as an authority, his hierarchy has more or less stuck ever since.

Lovejoy points out that there are inherent contradictions in this idea of the Chain of Being, contradictions that have caused great tension in thinkers and people generally since the formation of the idea. For, on the one hand, the spontaneous urge of every being in the Chain is to seek to move higher, to approach more closely to the all-good Creator who is the source of all happiness. Yet, on the other, every created thing and being is a handmade expression, so to speak, of that Creator's superabundant goodness, worthy of His attention, and therefore, you might suppose, intrinsically excellent in its own right, and certainly not to be despised. In a nutshell: the very notion of a Chain of Being suggests a hierarchy of higher quality to lower, while at the same time every link in the Chain is a divine creation and therefore, presumably, all equally valuable.

The contradictions in this idea have put Western humanity under great stress for a couple of thousand years now. For on the one hand, we are enjoined to seek higher things, to purify and spiritualize ourselves so that we may unite with God, shunning the mere matter of His creation; while on the other we experience a natural joy and attraction for the world at our own level, our senses and our own physicality, all of which are God-given and therefore divine. So what's the right thing to do?

Well, I haven't finished the book. And I don't expect Lovejoy to come down on one side of the debate or the other. But I find my mind magnetized by this type of inquiry. As Lovejoy points out in his introduction, this is not philosophy in the strict sense, for his study is more wide-ranging than mere philosophical analysis. Following the evolution of an idea means looking into diverse fields, such as the arts, sciences, and politics, to see how the idea shapes people's attitudes and actions, often unconsciously. He likens the study to chemistry: the historian of ideas looks at complex "substances" and dissolves them to discover the elements of which they're made. Cool!

I may finally have found an academic discipline that I could pursue more or less wholeheartedly.

This is just a taste. There's much more to say about ideas, their history, and my own relationship with them. But that will be for future posts.

the magic world

Two days ago, in search of some basic information on the phenomenon of taboos, I pulled out my thick copy of J. G. Frazer's The Golden Bough and searched through it. He defines taboo as "negative magic"--"Do not do this, lest so and so should happen." I was digging into the ancient institution of ritual purity, which appears to be an extension of the still more ancient notion of taboo.

Frazer's book, originally published in 12 volumes in 1922, is a famous landmark in the study of comparative religion and mythology. I of course have only an abridged edition in one teensy-weensy paperback volume of 972 pages, a very well-made Macmillan paperback with a cover illustration by Peter Goodfellow that I've always liked: a young man, in classical drapery, seen from behind, sits on a white unicorn that lies on a rock, gripping its horn and surveying a fantastic landscape that has strong affinities with Bosch--little naked figures, bearded satyrs, mermaids, all in and around a magic lake surround by rocky bluffs.

I got the book so long ago that it was before I started inscribing the date on the inside along with my name, which I started doing in 1979. But I remember exactly when I got it: in the late summer of 1978. My mother got it for me to take with me on what was intended to be a year-long world trip with my friend Tim (it lasted six months and we only got as far as Italy--no complaints!). She hadn't read the book, but had heard that it was supposed to be a widely acknowledged authority on mythology. I hadn't heard of it, but I packed it with me, along with the white Bible that Tim and I had agreed we would read through as part of our traveling education.

I picked up other books to read on the trip as we went along, but I did start The Golden Bough and kept up with it as a kind of background read, finding it strangely compelling, even though it was mainly, even in such severely abridged form, a long mass of examples of magical beliefs, superstitions, and rituals from primitive cultures around the world, ca. 1900. It was fascinating in many ways--an eye-opener. I felt I was peering into a dreamlike world, which was also the world in which the great majority of humanity has always lived--a world alien to my own upbringing in the comfortable, materialistic suburb of North Vancouver. It seems that most people's lives, for almost all of human history, have been governed mainly by magical thinking.

I didn't finish the book--in fact, I still haven't. But it did form an important thread in that trip. Indeed, the farthest point of our journey was actually Nemi--the lake south of Rome on whose shore the ancient grove of Diana was, where the succession of her priesthood, the so-called Kings of the Wood, aroused the curiosity of Frazer and prompted him to write the book that would turn out to be his entire career. The King of the Wood guarded the sacred oak to which he was also, apparently, married. At any time of day or night he might be attacked and forced into mortal combat. If his attacker vanquished him and killed him, then the attacker became the next King of the Wood, and must stand guard the rest of his life until his own unknown successor eventually killed him. This priesthood was ancient even in Imperial Rome, its origins shrouded in legend.

I remember when Tim and I stopped at the roadside overlooking Nemi, still a beautiful little lake nestled in the Alban hills. In the deep rural quiet we ate our salami, bread, and cheese in our red Westfalia van, looking down at the dark-green trees standing in the very spot where the King of the Wood once guarded his tree-goddess-wife. I felt strange stirrings of both connection to and distance from that ancient practice and the passionate beliefs that underlay it.

The world is mysterious. Our presence in it and our actions in it are also mysterious. Everything we do can be looked at as a straightforward, literal action; but somehow the echoes of our deeds reverberate through a strange chasm of unconscious purpose and meaning, ensuring that nothing is ever quite what it seems.

inspiration

Something else I've been meaning to talk about: inspiration.

I'm thinking here not of artistic inspiration, particularly, but of inspiration in general, as defined thus in Webster's:

1 a: a divine influence or action on a person believed to qualify him or her to receive and communicate sacred revelation; b: the action or power of moving the intellect or emotions

What we call artistic inspiration, of course, is a stepped-down version of this divine influence.

I got thinking about it while reading the book Zoroastrians by Mary Boyce. Early in the book she sketches the revelation of the ancient Iranian prophet (around 1500 BC) whom the Greeks called Zoroaster, contrasting his teaching with the previously existing beliefs of the Indo-Iranians who at that time still lived on the steppes east of the Caspian Sea--before the migrations that would split this group into the peoples we now call Indians and Iranians. As I read, I found myself becoming inspired by Zoroaster's message.

The Indo-Iranians had many gods. They were a pastoral people whose nomadic lifestyle allowed only a simple, mobile cult. They regarded the elements of earth, water, and fire as sacred, and their rituals included simple representations of these things. Also sacred to them was what they termed asha--the natural order of the world. Asha manifested itself in human society mainly as justice and as truth in speech, something the Indo-Iranians took very seriously. Being true to one's word was especially important in two actions: in making an oath, and in making an agreement with another person. The god who oversaw oaths was Varuna; the god who oversaw contracts was Mithra. Whoever violated an oath or a contract could expect punishment from the god in question.

As the Bronze Age unfolded, the invention of the war chariot revolutionized warfare in much the same way that gasoline-powered vehicles revolutionized it in the 20th century, by making it mobile. A single war chariot could wreak havoc on a large contingent of foot soldiers at that time. The charioteer, dashing, bold, powerful, and wealthy, became a new icon--the prototype of the knight and cavalryman, or even our modern race-car driver. The Indo-Iranians tamed horses on the steppes, and had access to rich deposits of copper and tin that enabled them to make weapons. A new caste of mercenaries and brigands was born.

A charioteer didn't want a life of herding sheep or cattle; he could take whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it. So began an era of systematic domination of humble pastoralists by aggressive warriors.

This was the era into which Zoroaster was born. Apparently he looked around him, saw violence and injustice, and one day, while fetching water in a river to perform a rite, had a vision of the supreme god Ahura Mazda ("Lord Wisdom"), who gave him a new understanding of the world and his mission in it.

Ahura Mazda, the lord of goodness and truth, upholder of asha in the universe, had an opponent, Angra Mainyu ("Hostile Spirit"), who like Ahura Mazda had always been, but who was bent on upsetting the order of the world. He was the source of injustice, lies, and evil in the world. Most of the other gods of the Indo-Iranian pantheon, including all those worshipped by the warrior caste, were on the side of Angra Mainyu, not Ahura Mazda. Zoroaster learned that the whole universe was a struggle between good and evil, between truth and falsehood, between justice and injustice, and the mission being given him was to educate his fellow people about this, and get them working on the side of Ahura Mazda--bringing good and order into the world.

To make a long story short, Zoroaster was indeed able to convince enough people of his message to launch a major world religion--the world's first revealed religion, and eventually the official religion of the mighty Persian empire, and a major influence on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. His teachings followed the migrations of the Indo-Iranians into what we now call India and Iran; Zoroastrianism was one of the influences on the northern Mahayana Buddhism of India just before and after the time of Christ.

Zoroaster preached goodness and truth. And he stressed that each individual human, man and woman, young and old, mighty and humble, matters in the cosmic struggle against evil. Every word, deed, and thought that we have counts. At every moment of our lives it makes a difference, to the universe as a whole, what we think, say, and do. We need to decide whose team we're on, and then play our part to the fullest.

When I read this I was inspired. I no difficulty seeing why Zoroaster could find followers with this message. It was a categorical summons to what was highest and best in people, presented in a myth, a story, they could believe. I was reminded of how I have been inspired, again and again, by the teachings of Buddhism, for much the same reason: it was, is, a summons to what is highest and best in us, to apply ourselves to our lives with attention and diligence--to do the right thing.

I venture to suppose that inspiration is the most powerful force in the human psyche and in the shaping of world events. And I can see why Zoroaster taught that Ahura Mazda, Lord Wisdom, must and would eventually win this cosmic struggle--it was inevitable. Angra Mainyu would be finally and permanently defeated, because while greed and power-lust can motivate people, they can never inspire them. Somehow Zoroaster was tapping into this difference in motivating forces in the human psyche, which must in turn of course be related to reality, the structure of the universe after all. His message was meaningful, fulfilling, and optimistic. If everyone must live by some set of beliefs, why not these?

The wind of inspiration blew through me. I recalled the times--many times, I'm glad to say--I've felt in my life that there are good, important, worthwhile things for us--all of us--to do in the world.

Ideally, artistic inspiration can be part of that.

what's your story?

This morning: rain. I've just opened the office blinds (the hexagonal acetate rod that controls the blinds still swings from the action). Across the wet greenery of the garden I see activity in the neighbors' window: the woman packing or unpacking something. There is a faint, slow percussion of raindrops hitting wood and plastic. Two floors up from me Kimmie is still getting ready for work.

Where are my thoughts these days. Well, on other than a purely personal front, I'm noticing how ideas are all around us. An idea, once formed, seems to remain part of the permanent stock of human culture, at least as long as there are records of the past. Whether a particular idea is regarded as true seems to be determined by the temper of the times. I was just reading, for instance, about how the Phoenicians circumnavigated Africa in the 7th century BC, and noted how the sun, in the course of their journey, came to rise and set in the north instead of the south--early evidence for the sphericity of the Earth, a theory which was to be developed by Greek philosophers soon after. When I was a child I was taught that it was Christopher Columbus who "proved" that the Earth was round in 1492, while in fact this had been proved at least 1,800 years earlier. "Spherical Earth" and "flat Earth" are two ideas, and they're no doubt held by different people to this day.

But the spherical Earth seems to be a matter of fact. What about other, more value-charged ideas? Those are perhaps the more interesting. Does God exist? What is the nature of consciousness? Why is there a universe? It seems the mere posing of such questions sparks ideas--suggestions, possibilities, guesses. Each of us chooses certain ones and decides to believe in these--to hold them as true.

A book I'm reading right now, by Neil Forsyth, The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth, contains an interesting, and for me, new, way of defining myth: "the stories we believe". When I read this I found it simple yet powerful and provocative. I hadn't thought about it in just that way before. It contains two elements: A myth is a story, and more particularly, a story we believe.

Think about it. What stories do you believe?

We have our own stories: the story of our life. The stories of particular events within it. We have stories that we believe about other people in our lives--stories they may or may not agree with.

Those might be called "personal myths". Then there are wider, more generally accepted stories. Some of these are termed scientific theories, such as the theory of evolution: the story of how humanity came to be from animal precursors. If you believe that story, then it's your myth--part of your mythology. We have the story of how the universe originated with the Big Bang and developed through impersonal forces into the vast, complex, and life-supporting thing it is today. If you believe that story, then it is part of your mythology.

Most of what we believe is on the basis of authority: we believe what we're told to believe. I've never measured the cosmic background radiation; experts tell me that the universe is expanding and must have originated in a Big Bang, so I believe it. People tell me there's a country called Venezuela; I've never been there, but I believe that.

Much depends, then, on whom we regard as authorities. Do I regard The Bible as an authority? If so, why do I? It will because someone else told me to. That person is an authority.

Of course, we can accept or reject an authority. I'm thinking that often the changing of an authority in our lives, switching from rejecting to accepting, or accepting to rejecting, is an epochal event: life-changing, empowering. Our beliefs then change, and with them our mythology.

So I'm asking myself: what stories do I believe? And maybe even more importantly: why do I believe them? I think somewhere around here one gets close to the beating heart of one's character.

ideas: keep 'em coming

A steady cold rain falls through the gray air. Kimmie phoned to say she wanted to beg off our power-walk for this afternoon--fine, suits me! We'll take a break, and I have a chance to get down here and write a blog-post.

I'm an idea guy. I like ideas. This has to do with my Aquarian nature, for Aquarius is the "idea" sign. More and more I'm seeing my mission in life as boiling things down to their basic idea-content, and working with that, studying it, understanding it.

I understand Gregory Chaitin perfectly when he says in the preface to his Meta Math!:

I'm not really interested in complicated ideas, I'm only interested in fundamental ideas.

He's a mathematician--a great one--but more than that he's a philosopher. Here's another quote, from chapter 2:

I think that the history of ideas is the best way to learn mathematics. The best way to learn a new idea is to see its history, to see why someone was forced to go through the painful and wonderful process of giving birth to a new idea!

Yes! Giving birth to a new idea. Why is this so important?

Everything that could be called an advance or an improvement in human life or society is the product of an idea. The word itself comes from the Greek idein "to see". Someone sees something new in the mind--has a new conception, and with that new conception novelty enters the life of humanity.

Novelty. Newness. Freshness. New ideas tend to arise under pressure, when they're needed. All technological innovation depends on them. Without new ideas, we would all still be digging roots out of the ground with a piece of antler and eating them raw. We'd be huddled in the cold and wet below a rock overhang, hoping not to die. Hoping--not doing something about it.

It's easy to take ideas for granted. I was just keying notes yesterday from an excellent book I read last year, The Long Summer by Brian Fagan. In it he mentions a crucial invention from the Ice Age, about 18,000 years ago: the needle-drawn thread. This invention enabled people to make fitted clothes, which were much warmer than what had been available until then. This in turn allowed people to live in colder climates, exploiting the game of the tundra in a way that others without that technology, such as the Neanderthals, could not.

Maybe, in the big picture, it doesn't matter. Maybe it would make no objective difference if humans, like other social animals, simply lived and died in a changeless cycle of nature, eating, procreating, dying.

But I don't feel that way. I feel that humanity has a special relationship with novelty, an ability to conceive and create new things: new tools, new institutions. The universe permits this ceaseless creativity, indeed in its richness seems to encourage it, invite it. And personally, I'm all for it.

fighting over ancient bones

Another rather underslept night for me. The rain has dissolved away the snow, and the rhododendron and the aucuba both obviously enjoy the above-freezing temperatures, having both hung shriveled and limp when the air was below freezing. It's a drab, wet, cold day.

I'm still on the case, keying research notes in the morning over coffee--something to look forward to, for me; something to get me out of bed. Right now I'm keying from a library copy of The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity by James D. Tabor.

I'm still in chapter 1 of that, but his introduction was very good, describing his own personal connection with ancient history and how he became involved with it, and also an exciting real-life-mystery account of events surrounding the discovery and subsequent cloak-and-dagger intrigue of two ancient tombs in the Jerusalem area. One of these, the so-called Talpiot tomb, contained a number of ossuaries (stone boxes for housing the bones of a corpse, a practice prevalent around Jerusalem for about 100 years, including the lifetime of Jesus) inscribed with names that all bore connections with the family of Jesus: Mary, Joseph, and yes, even a "Jesus son of Joseph". In all there were 10 ossuaries in the tomb, and one of them has gone missing--no one knows where, or what was on it. The original excavator of the tomb is dead, and an apartment building was erected over the site (this in fact was why it was discovered in the first place).

Fascinating stuff. Tabor himself so far is proving to be a good narrator: he comes across as passionate and excited, but also open-minded and undogmatic. He seems refreshingly free of the edge of bitterness that seems to cling to so many in the field of biblical archaeology. People are suspicious to the point of paranoia that their colleagues are trying to prop up pet theories. Recall the recriminations around the discovery of the "James" ossuary in 2000--inscribed "James son of Joseph brother of Jesus". Experts aligned on either side of the debate as to its genuineness--that is, whether its inscription really was from the 1st century AD, as the ossuary itself undoubtedly was. The question is still not really resolved, and the reasons appear to be politics, religious beliefs, and personal relationships rather than science.

As Tabor observes, the last thing the Israeli authorities want is the discovery of the bones of Jesus anywhere in Israel. From their point of view, there's no real upside to such a discovery. Hmm...another possible motivating factor in the mysterious appearances and disappearances of these important artifacts.

of weddings and kings

Kimmie races against time to finish Jen's wedding cake.

I have spent most of the day down here in my office, working on notes toward The Mission. I find myself digging around topics that I worked on early in the project, when I first returned home from Gampo Abbey in 2002 and spent my days pleasantly in the sunlit living-room, my left leg in a cast. One such problem is the genealogy of Jesus.

The genealogies in the books of Matthew and Luke conflict, and these in turn conflict with the king-list given in 1 Chronicles. How I worked on that back then! I came up with my own solution to the problem, but I had forgotten my thought-process, so I was trying today to reconstruct it, as well as get more of my notes in typewritten form on the PC, rather than lying in handwritten form in the old (and fat) blue project-binder.

I'm strengthening my knowledge of kingship in general by reading one of my recent online used-book purchases: Kingship and the Gods by Henri Frankfort, published in 1948. In this he examines the institution of kingship as it was practiced in ancient Egypt and in ancient Mesopotamia (the two approaches were apparently quite different). The hardback I got, a reprint from 1969, is in excellent condition. I'm on page 58, having moved this book into the rotation of my reading period each afternoon (other books currently in that rotation: Pragmatism by William James; The Prize by Daniel Yergin; and The Earth System by Kump, Kasting, & Crane).

As I understand it so far, Frankfort's thesis is that the kings of those most ancient civilizations were the connectors between the gods and their societies, with the king serving a different function in each civilization--as an actual incarnation of the all-powerful god Horus in Egypt; and as the human intermediary between the gods and the people in Mesopotamia.

Once again, I found today that I could apply myself more consistently, for a longer time, to my project, now that I'm on a kind of "vacation"--the routine of regular life has been interrupted with Kimmie off work. If only I could relax enough to immerse myself in my own work while going through the regular "work" days. There is some blockage about that: fear of boredom, I think, is part of it.

Tomorrow is Jen's wedding. The cake must be finished tonight--and it will be. Kimmie has coated the three large stages of the cake in white fondant, and is attaching swags of icing around the top of each stage. These swags will drip icicles, and gum-paste vines of ivy will somehow be worked around the whole thing. The crest ornament will feature an arrangement of gum-paste calla lilies, roses, and carnations. The flowers, already made, all look as though they were picked from the garden. It will be magnificent.

Now: on to tea. I may not be able to write, but at least I can read. I'm validating all those other writers' lives.

mythology and waking up

A semi-wakeful night, with plenty of dark thoughts. Plus, a major windstorm swept in by around 3:00, creating thunderous sounds outside (when I pulled out my earplugs), and making the building shudder.

In the morning I keyed more notes from Oriental Mythology by Joseph Campbell. I'm in chapter 4, "Ancient India". Campbell is developing the streams of mythology that led to the distinctive civilization of India. He has identified four streams:

1. the diffusion of Bronze Age civilization from the nuclear Near East (Mesopotamia), with its society based on the hieratic city-state, goddess-worship, professional priests with knowledge of the calendar, and the periodic ritual killing of kings;

2. the overthrow of this culture by the horse-mounted Aryans, patriarchal warriors who worshipped willful, capricious gods--the culture now known as Vedic;

3. the resurgence of some of the Bronze Age mythology, but farther east, down the Ganges River, and the rise of the Brahmin as a class of being superior even to the gods, insomuch as the Brahmins, through their ritual knowledge, were able to compel the favor of the gods; and finally

4. the arising, by 700 BC or so, of "forest sages", hermits who meditated in the jungle to cut through the chain of suffering of earthly life--men who used the ancient practice of yoga (which existed in India even before the time of the Bronze Age infusion) to awaken from the sleep of life. The greatest of these would be known as the Buddha (563-483 BC).

From these four great creative centers the great mythological complex of India was born, giving rise to the spiritual civilization that we know today.

When I was younger I resisted studying the history of religions or philosophies. I was looking for truth, and I didn't want to think that truth was something contingent, the result of a rough-and-tumble series of accidents. If something is true, it's true, isn't it? It doesn't matter what came before, or how it was discovered. 2 + 2 = 4, no matter who says it, or where, or when.

Now I feel different. I'm able to share Campbell's excitement in tracing the origins and history of ideas--the ideas that have given form to whole cultures and civilizations. I'm willing to acknowledge that truth in the absolute, pristine sense that I was looking to find does not exist--not in the relative, conceptual world in which I was looking, anyway. (In my Buddhist training, I came to be acquainted with the idea of the "two truths", that is, relative and absolute.)

For me, the Buddhist teachings have been decisive in my spiritual education, which means my education into the meaning and purpose of my life, my education into adulthood. When I was at Gampo Abbey in 2002 I learned a little about the philosophical matrix in India from which Buddhism was born. I was surprised to learn that many of the doctrines I had been taught did not originate with the Buddha, but were simply incorporated by him from the surrounding culture in teachings of his own--things such as the concepts of samsara, nirvana, karma, and the meditative states called dhyanas. Even his first core teaching of the Four Noble Truths were not original, but a repackaging of existing teachings, using a standard medical structure: diagnosing an illness, identifying its cause, naming its cure, and prescribing a treatment regime to get there.

The issue of truth is very important to me and always has been. That makes me a philosopher. There are always people who know more than oneself, which means that in some sense they stand as authorities over one. I think of an image from the novella called The Goshawk by T. H. White (I haven't read it--my brother-in-law Mike read it and told me about it). Evidently, in order to tame a hawk, the would-be master has to stay awake longer than the bird. That's the only way. It can take a couple of days, but when the hawk finally falls asleep in your presence, it knows it's been beaten; it has submitted to your mercy.

In a similar way, those who know more than we do have been "more awake" in those fields where their knowledge is superior, and we are naturally inclined to submit. This is normal, natural, and good--but only up to a point. There comes a point when one must go by one's own lights, regardless of authority, and of course take all the attendant risks. Otherwise, one never attains true adulthood. One remains a member of the herd, obedient to leaders who may take you only to slaughter.

our mythological heritage

Rolled out of bed just after 7:00 this morning, while it was yet dark. Kimmie is on her long vacation from work, spending all of December at home. (People often ask her, when they hear she's on a five-week vacation, "Are you going anywhere?" Her answer: "Yes: home." For her, being away from work is the vacation--and I agree. Of course, I'm always at home.)

Unsure of exactly what I'm doing or where I'm going at the moment, I've been keying notes, over my morning coffees, from Campbell's Primitive Mythology, the first in his four-part series The Masks of God. I picked up this Penguin Arkana copy new in 2001, not having acquired a copy of my own after reading the one that belonged to my roommate Keith in 1981. (I'm noticing lots of 20-year skips in my life right now. Example: for our power-walk in the quasi-drizzle today, I put on the blue polyester work pants that I bought in 1986 when Kimmie and I traveled to Europe. The good news: I can still get them on. The bad news: they almost cut me in half. "It's my punishment," I explained to Kimmie, "for becoming a fat slob.")

I am always energized and inspired by reading Joseph Campbell. This morning I was keying from chapter 10, "Mythological Thresholds of the Neolithic". This is a survey of the major shifts in mythological ideas and practice that occurred over the neolithic period, from about 7500 BC to 2500 BC. (Chapter 9 summarized the paleolithic, from 600,000 BC to 7500 BC.) It's fascinating, because Campbell, who was not an archaeologist, allowed himself more imaginative and deductive scope than what archaeologists usually seem to allow themselves. Also, he was bringing to bear a wider range of comparative knowledge than what most specialists can lay claim to. The result is a profound look into the mindset of ancient humanity--people who were not different from ourselves, except in their level of knowledge of abstract things, and the tools in their toolkit.

I was excited to read the material in chapter 9 about the paleolithic, the era of hunting and gathering. The paucity of evidence from that time might suggest that not much could be surmised about the lives and beliefs of the people and proto-people who lived then. But consider this extract about the cave as a mythological place:

Apparently the cave, as literal fact, evoked, in the way of a sign stimulus, the latent energies of that other cave, the unfathomed human heart, and what poured forth was the first creation of a temple in the history of the world. A shrine is a little place for magic, or for converse with a divinity. A temple is the projection into earthly space of a house of myth; these paleolithic temple-caves were the first realizations of this kind, the first manifestations of the fact that there is a readiness in man’s heart for the supernormal image, and in his mind and hand the capacity to create it. Here nature supplied the catalyst, a literal, actual presentation of the void. And when the sense of time and space was gone, the visionary journey of the seer began.

What is most exciting about Campbell, to me, is his vision of myth as a fount of profundity. To him, myth is not a primitive type of religious thinking; rather, religion--including all the most elaborate and developed faiths--are simply one branch of myth. Myth has always been the vehicle of our deepest thoughts, our keenest yearnings, and our strongest emotions. They represent our efforts to be adequate to the mystery of existence.

So, yes: a pleasure on a vacation morning to key highlights from one of his texts.

Did you know that the story of Eve and the snake in Eden is a variant of a universally distributed ancient tale about the maiden and the serpent? Learning these things changes my view of our mythological heritage.

outside the box

It's warmer: now 3°C. The snow is wet and heavy (I still went out to do some shoveling, since it snowed again overnight, and it will not be gone by tonight when it freezes again). There is a mild, pearly luminosity to the sky, making the winter scene benign and beautiful.

Again this morning I keyed notes from Uriel's Machine. I made it all the way to page 413, where the highlights stop because that's where I left off reading the book last year (the text, including appendixes, runs 530 pages). The material is very interesting, but I'm unsure of Lomas and Knight's authority. They make bold speculative connections between diverse types of evidence, and go to great trouble to develop original evidence of their own for the core parts of the book--notably constructing their own version of Uriel's calendar "machine".

I typed skeptically the passage I'd highlighted in which they state their belief that Julius Caesar's new solar calendar was developed from a calendar of the Druids, with whom he had studied astronomy and calendars while in Gaul. While Caesar is supposed to have authored a book on astronomy based on Druidic lore, his new Julian calendar was essentially identical to the solar calendar already in use in Egypt, and the creation of his calendar is credited to the Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes. Of course, there's undoubtedly more to the whole thing than meets the (modern) eye.

Overall, I like Lomas and Knight because of their boldness, their willingness to think outside the box (indeed, they don't spend too much time in the box). They launch their book on a biblical patriarch's supposed relationship with megalithic astronomy by discussing the impact of comets and planetoids on the Earth--in particular, they discuss two impacts for which there is apparently good scientific evidence: one in 7640 BC, and another in 3150 BC. The first of these was particularly catastrophic, with a comet breaking into seven pieces that hit the Earth in various oceans, according to geologists Edith and Alexander Tollmann. The 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean gives an idea of how powerful giant waves can be, and what devastation they can wreak. The tsunamis released by an event like the one theorized for 7640 BC would have been much bigger, and multiple--criss-crossing each other, crushing and drowning everything within many miles of any shore.

Lomas and Knight speculate that these events may well be the basis of the Flood legends--their universality being accounted for by the fact that the floods were universal on Earth.

All of that may be. It's intriguing to consider. On the other hand, I find efforts to account for myths by various literal facts and phenomena unsatisfying. The deepest truths concern things that we can't see with our eyes. The literal level of events is like the crust of the Earth itself: a veneer of diverse, wonderful phenomena lying over a much vaster unseen realm that is the real prime mover of events.

casualties

The fall rains are here: water falling out of a wet but still faintly glowing sky, pasting big rusty maple-leaves to sidewalks and streets.

It's been a solitary day. The phone has rung twice: each time it was the dead sound of a telemarketer's automatic dialing system waiting to connect, and I hung up before the salespeople clicked on.

Down here in my dim office, in the pale splash of light given off by my tiny metal desklamp, I typed in little bursts in my Notes document for chapter 25. I'm feeling stuck, and this creates a sense of futility and anxiety, since it seems no more productive than standing by a high wall, waiting for a way over to present itself.

Looking for ways to break the logjam (new metaphor--sorry), I went to the dictionary to look up words. I typed the definitions into a Word document I have for Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition: credit and grace. Rome was in turmoil just before Caesar's return from the civil war in the East. The big issue was the cancellation of debts--a law pushed forward by the aggressive and heavily indebted patrician-turned-plebeian Dolabella. People weren't sure whether Caesar would ever return, or whether he would be killed first, and so the issue of who was running the show was up in the air. Nominally it was Mark Antony, the so-called Master of the Horse appointed by Caesar to run the city in his absence, but Antony was preoccupied with carousing and transferring the property of Pompeians into the hands of himself and his cronies. Meanwhile, armed gangs roamed the streets, fighting each other and terrorizing other citizens.

The situation echoed with some reading I did in the morning on the conditions in Baghdad, which are (or were in spring this year) much grimmer than what we generally hear about on the news, which for me generally appears only as headlines of daily body-counts from bomb blasts and such. I think back to when I was growing up in the 1960s, during the Vietnam War. Every evening the news would come on TV, and Walter Cronkite would somberly report the day's (or maybe the week's) death-toll. Even by age 9 I could see that the death-tolls followed a strange pattern. U.S. casualties were always in the single digits; South Vietnamese in the tens; and Vietcong in the hundreds, sometimes over a thousand. How was it they always died in those same proportions? I wondered.

I didn't know then that the proportions were due to the very first casualty: truth.

when cultures collide

The day is warm, though not so summer-hot as it has been in the past week. Kimmie, in her blue tanktop and gray shorts, bends almost double out on the brick patio to weed and straighten her garden. Our yellow sprinkler sprays glittering streams of droplets into the greenery. Overhead the plywood floor creaks as Robin, recently risen (it's 12:20 p.m.), pads through my just-washed kitchen making herself breakfast. Later the two women will be traveling to Cloverdale to attend a bridal shower of Kimmie's great niece Lynn.

This morning, over coffee, I keyed notes from Galilee from Alexander the Great to Hadrian by Sean Freyne--the first historical-research text I have worked with in months--as well as The Origins and History of Consciousness and Wake Up to Your Life by Ken McLeod, an American Buddhist teacher. My investigation into the mystery of personal identity has brought me, inevitably, back to the Buddhist teachings that I more or less walked away from four years ago.

My copy of the HarperSanFancisco paperback I bought used from Ngodrup (an ordination name which is the Tibetan translation of the Sanskrit siddhi, meaning "spiritual accomplishments" or realization), a young fellow monk from Saskatchewan at Gampo Abbey. I felt conflicted about buying it from him, since it seems not quite right for any practitioner, but especially a monastic, to part with dharma books. However, after careful questioning, Ngodrup convinced me that he was clear that he wanted to sell the text, at least for the time being. I bought it for $20--money that he no doubt needed.

I already knew that I liked Ken McLeod as a dharma writer, since I had bought and read The Great Path of Awakening, his translation of a commentary on the Mahayana practice of lojong ("mind-training") by the 19th-century Tibetan master Jamgon Kongtrul the Great. McLeod's strength as a dharma teacher shows through in the extended notes at the end of the text, in which he offers pithy summaries of key points of Buddhist doctrine. I started reading Wake Up to Your Life while I was still there at the abbey, and, softened up by my months of living in an environment of meditation and study, I found it powerful and profound.

I was excited by his approach. McLeod had undertaken to write a Vajrayana Buddhist text (he was trained--much more extensively--in the same Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism that I was, under the direct supervision of Kalu Rinpoche) using almost no Sanskrit or Tibetan terms. He had translated them all, making no reference to the originals. Indeed, he had done more than this; he had thought through the basic principles taught in all Buddhist systems and come up with his own way of presenting this to a Western audience, as he describes himself (slightly compressed):

In the Kagyu tradition...I immersed myself, learning the Tibetan language, studying the texts, learning and practicing the rituals, and spending seven years in a training retreat. Though powerful, Tibetan Buddhist methods cannot easily be practiced in the classical manner in the context of contemporary American life. So I set about reexamining everything I had learned and practiced.

I came to understand the central role of attention in internal transformative work, and I saw how all aspects of Buddhist practice (and all forms of internal transformative work) can be described in terms of the operation of attention.

This translation of the teachings, without leaning on Sanskrit and Tibetan loan-words, is key, I think, to transmitting them to a new culture in a new time. Too often in translations of Buddhist texts we find statements to the effect that "there is no adequate English equivalent of the word prajna," and so on. While this may be true, it keeps the teachings alien; these terms--and there are many such--provide continual reminders to the student that the teachings come from elsewhere, some place where people's minds appear to work differently, insomuch as they have come up with different words to describe their workings.

We are now in a global melting-pot of ideas and traditions. I am most interested in this, because I believe this situation has an important antecedent in the Hellenistic period just after the conquests of Alexander the Great around 325 BC. Alexander's empire smashed down the bulkheads that divided civilizations, in particular the civilizations of West and East as exemplified by Greece and Persia. Largely as a matter of Alexander's personal policy (one that was not shared enthusiastically by his subordinates), the conquered Asians were not treated as mere subjects of their new Macedonian lords, but were respected for their traditions, institutions, and wisdom. West and East collided, commingled, and reacted with each other.

One of the effects of this, as pointed out by the great scholar of Gnosticism, Hans Jonas, in his The Gnostic Religion, was that ideas necessarily became stripped of their local, cultural content. For an idea to be picked up and regarded as powerful or true by someone from a completely different culture, it must have a universal content and appeal. When Greeks went to Asia, they found gods that reminded them of the gods back home, and felt that they were in fact the same gods being worshipped under different names. The gods became uprooted from their connections to particular locales and took on more universal attributes.

In the same way, today ideas are mixing all over the world. No idea will survive as a universal idea if its expression depends on a particular culture or nationality. Indeed, the world is already too small to accommodate religions based tribal gods claiming to be universal, such as Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. And Buddhism, in my view, will also never take wide hold in the West if it is seen as being culturally Asian. A sorting process is already happening: what is truly universal about Buddhism, and what is merely cultural? What is the true nature of a sentient being's mind, and what is merely an expression of Indian or Tibetan culture?

McLeod's book takes a big step in the direction of discovering the truly universal core of the Buddhist teachings: what speaks to my life, in my language, as well as to a Tibetan's life in his language.

Since my topic is identity, I can't ignore Buddhism, which has been intensively examining this question for the past 2,500 years. I know that the Buddha's answer is that the ego, the "I", does not exist. But I am still studying anyway. I need to find out for myself: what do I think?

slaves

The weather is hot and summery. I just got a little bump of excitement at finding a book, wrapped in cardboard and brown paper, lying on my porch: the mailman had left it there since it would not fit in the steel mailbox attached to the lattice below the porch rail. I knew what it would be: Slavery and Social Death by Orlando Patterson. I came across a reference to it in Us and Them by David Berreby, and got that familiar visceral tug that told me I wanted to read this book. Since I read with a highlighter, that means I had to buy this book. So I did, via Abebooks.com, as usual. The somber, black-covered trade paperback has a photographic negative image of one hand tugging a rope connected to two bound hands. The book was formerly the property of a John C. Hubbard, MD, of Orchard Park, New York.

Slavery of course is an ancient institution, and far from dead. There are no doubt millions of people living in slavery in the world today. Since I am writing about the ancient world, I want to familiarize myself with the forms of slavery practiced back then. But for some years now I have been interested in slavery in general, possibly a reflection of my being of the sign Aquarius, the most egalitarian of signs and the one most associated with emancipation.

I was struck by something I read in The History of Technology last year (at least, I think it was there): that slavery is essentially indistinguishable from the domestication of animals, it being simply the same process but applied to one's own species. Interestingly, animal domestication is much older than human society, since many animal species practice it. Some ants, for instance, farm aphids; and some species of ants domesticate other, different-species ants. These are technically forms of the zoological phenomenon known as symbiosis. As the author of this chapter of the history, F. E. Zeuner, points out, in very few instances of symbiosis do the participants benefit equally from the arrangement.

For many years Kimmie has believed that I was a slave in a previous life. Her evidence? Certain fears that I have, such as being near her when she's wielding a knife! But also a number of faint scars across my back that look like whip-welts, that I have no memory of receiving in this life.

So maybe my connection with slavery is even closer than I realize, and my interest in human emancipation is motivated from my own experience. But even apart from that, slavery is a powerful image and metaphor, for we are all slaves, are we not?