by John David Ebert

The Myth

The great myth of Western civilization, then, is not, as Oswald Spengler insisted, that of Faust; neither is it, as the American mythologist Joseph Campbell once suggested, Prometheus, or even the Grail quester of Arthurian legend; it is not even Lewis Mumford’s ‘myth of the machine’; it is none of these. Rather, the great myth of Western civilization—and it has been the great myth since the days of Minoan Crete—is that of the Wonder Child’s struggle against the Elders.

Its first great literary manifestation was, of course, the Iliad, whose protagonist, the twenty-something Achilles, has been suggested by some scholars to  have been a late innovation added to the mythos of the Trojan War by Homer himself.[1] His magical powers of invulnerability give Achilles more of the feel of a folk hero than any traditional hero of a literary epic, and the fact that he is absent from most of the book’s action implies that he was never necessary to whatever its original structure may have been. Also, he is too young to have been one of Helen’s suitors, for the Greeks at the time the epic opens have already been fighting in Troy for ten years. The other heroes—Diomedes, Odysseus, Agamemnon—had all pledged themselves to the rescue of Helen if ever she were abducted; Achilles alone among these heroes is too young ever to have made such a pledge. In short, he may have been an innovation of Homer’s to an already traditional epic of war and battle.

Which is important because the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon is certainly not over a girl; it is, rather, the conflict of youth against age; of reverence for the cult of the Wonder Child with miraculous abilities who will, from henceforth, become the central fetish of Greek religiosity from the grave statues of its beautiful young Kouros boys to Alexander the Great himself, the youngest world conqueror in history. There are no old men depicted in Greek art until the Hellenistic Age, and this is not an accident, since the Greek reverence for youth was tantamount to an orientation toward innovation, novelty and all things new that would characterize Classical civilization from Homer on down to the Romans.

In the Medieval period, European art was haunted by the persistent reiteration of the Wonder Child in the form of the Infant Christ and his Virgin Mother at the expense of representations of Yahweh, the old man and the Old God of the bygone age of the Jews, who appears less and less often in this art as it evolves through the centuries. The child represents the future; the old man, the past. And along with an orientation toward the future comes a willingness to experiment and try new things that has been characteristic of the Western attitude toward technology to the present day.

Indeed, in the climactic battle scenes of Return of the Jedi, Luke Skywalker’s fight against Darth Vader and the Emperor—crippled, deformed old men both—is not just about Freedom vs. Tyranny, or democracy against totalitarianism, but more specifically, it is an echo of the Wonder Child’s struggle against the ways and traditions of the Elders that was first announced in the Iliad and has been characteristic of the Western mentality ever since.

And it also happens to be the central myth of Apple Computer.

The Commercial

On January 22, 1984, Apple debuted its commercial for the new Macintosh computer on television, a commercial directed by Ridley Scott, who had just then completed Alien and Blade Runner. The commercial, one of the most famous ever made, begins by showing a single-file line of drab, shaven-headed men marching through a glass tunnel on their way to a meeting with Big Brother who appears before them, as in Orwell’s novel, on a gigantic television screen. A woman dressed in a white T-shirt imprinted with a schematic Macintosh computer and wearing red shorts runs, carrying a sledgehammer, while in pursuit behind her is a group of helmeted police, face shields drawn for combat mode. The woman runs down the center aisle of the meeting room where she hurls the sledgehammer at the giant video screen with its talking head spouting ideology, which then explodes into white phosphorescence as the words appear onscreen voiced by a narrator: “On January 24 Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll understand why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’”[2]

Steve Jobs, who co-founded Apple Computer with Steven Wozniak, was a kind of anti-executive executive who refused to hire anybody who showed up for an interview wearing a suit and tie, since he himself never wore one, and often did not even wear deodorant. He and Wozniak created the first affordable personal computer with the Apple II in 1977, and by the end of that year, they had also introduced the first floppy disk drive. They were millionaires by the age of 25.

Jobs identified IBM, Apple’s primary rival, with the dragon to be slain. In ancient myth, dragons were often killed by thunderbolts hurled at them in the form of hammers, swords, spears, etc. and in this light it becomes clear that the role of the woman in Ridley Scott’s commercial is that of a dragon slayer hurling a thunderbolt at the staid old establishment of IBM, a conservative East Coast corporation with its roots in the Cold War. Big Brother, in the Mac commercial, is IBM, which Jobs made clear in the keynote speech that he gave near the end of 1983 when he first unveiled the commercial to a live audience.[3]

The hammer that the woman-as-dragonslayer hurls, furthermore, is a signifier for the Macintosh computer itself, Apple’s response to the IBM PC which IBM had put out in 1981, a computer based largely upon the technology of the Apple II. If Apple lost the computer wars then, according to Jobs, a Dark Age would settle over the industry. In his own words:

’If, for some reason we make some big mistake and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter sort of a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years. Once IBM gains control of a market sector, they always stop innovation. They prevent innovations from happening.

If you look at the mainframe marketplace, there’s been virtually zero innovation since IBM got dominant control of that marketplace fifteen years ago. The IBM PC fundamentally brought no new technology to the industry at all. It was just a repackaging and slight extension of Apple II technology, and now they want it all.

Apple is providing the alternative.’[4]

And that alternative was, of course, the Macintosh computer, the sword drawn from the stone of the Wonder Child’s worskshop which, once forged, would become the means for the Old Man’s undoing.

The Subtle Body of the Text

The first Macintosh computer, known as the 128k, introduced a revolutionary new idea: that of the so-called graphical user interface, in which images became simulacra of things. This was inspired by the visit of Jobs and some other Apple personnel to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1979, where they first saw a demonstration of graphical user interface software. As Young and Simon, Jobs’ biographers, describe it:

What Apple saw that day was a display on which the user made selections, not by typing out cryptic commands, but by moving a pointer to designate the desired onscreen object. And individual windows for different documents. And onscreen menus. Today, this is the standard way that most people interact with computers, but then it was extraordinary. Up until that time, computers were controlled by typed commands, and the screens generally displayed nothing but letters and numbers. Here was a graphical user interface (GUI, as it would later become known) unlike anything ever seen on a computer screen before, and better yet, it was working.[5]

The computer’s ‘pointer,’ furthermore, was called a ‘mouse,’ a technology which had been invented by Douglas Englebart at Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s. This was all revolutionary new stuff, but Xerox turned out not to be interested in their own technological innovations. However, Apple was, and so they implemented it with the introduction of their Lisa computer in 1983, which was too expensive for the average user but became affordable with the Macintosh in 1984.

The Macintosh is a machine for the transformation of physical objects into light. The graphical interface overlaid upon the computer screen—hitherto a black screen with commands typed in green characters—a secondary stratum of images of coded flows of information: physical objects such as desktops, manila folders, paintbrushes, file drawers, pens, pencils and typewriters were all encoded in the form of “icons.”

Thus, with the creation of desktop publishing—invented with the Mac—one could now see a virtual image of a page of text, together with all its graphics, exactly as it would appear before being printed out in physical form. In other words, a subtle form of the document or text began now to precede and displace the visualized idea of the text held in the mind’s eye before it was created as a piece of physical matter.

The Macintosh, then, has a dematerializing effect upon the physical world, an effect not all that different from the magical child’s abilities in ancient myth to transform physical things into luminous visions. When, for instance, the boy child Krishna—a true Wonder Child, indeed–lifts up Mount Govardana with one hand in order to shield the cows and the gopis from the rain, the mountain is no longer a physical object at all, but a visionary image from the realm of myth and dream.

Luminous Technology

The evolution of the Macintosh taken as a whole, from the 128k in 1984 to the iPad in 2010, is a tale of the gradual victory of forms of suksma technology over sthula technology, a gradual and inevitable absorption of the physical by the luminous. It is a tale of the transformation and dissolution of the very idea of the computer into something more akin to a piece of electronic stained glass.

If the evolution of Western art from the Medieval period to the nineteenth century is a tale of the unfolding of the physical and the concrete at the expense of the realm of the subtle and the visionary, then the evolution of the computer via the Macintosh is a narrative that reverses the physical back into the world of the subtle, of the realm of ghostly visions and phantom forms.

The One Non-Negotiable Element of the Personal Computer

The personal computer, as it was invented by Apple in 1981 with the Apple II, was basically a crossing of the typewriter with the television.[6] The phantom realm of the CRT screen, that is to say, was crossed with the linear rows of type arranged on the typewriter (a miniaturized printing press which enabled everyman to be his own printer) in such a way as to begin to dematerialize typed words themselves, which were no longer inscribed upon a sheet of actual paper, but now existed virtually in the form of pixilated bytes on a computer monitor. The words, that is to say, began to attain a new status of virtuality: they might exist, but unless they were printed out, they might also just as easily disappear like thoughts in the mind withdrawing into some secret reservoir of consciousness never to be heard from again.

With the advent of the Macintosh computer in 1984—preceded by the Lisa in 1983, the first to actually feature GUI–the idea was that one could now begin to manipulate images with a mouse and a typewriter’s keyboard the way one had previously, with a typewriter, manipulated typed words on a page. Images could be typed, moved, fused, dissolved, etc., exactly like thoughts in consciousness.

To draw once again from Indian philosophy: consciousness is known there as citta, mind-stuff, which has the spontaneous capacity of moving around in the mind and taking on the shapes of whatever the senses perceive in the outer world. A liquid crystal display does almost the same thing as it takes on the forms of the electrical impulses that pour through it as data. The Macintosh computer, then, comes very close to the technological replication of consciousness—or at least, the consciously controlled thought forms of waking consciousness—closer than any other technology hitherto.

As the evolution of the Mac unfolded throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, the computer monitor tended to remain as a separate unit from the hard drive and the keyboard and mouse. The Macintosh was basically a four piece unit.

But when Steve Jobs rejoined Apple in 1997 (after having been forced to leave in the mid 1980s), and created the iMac, the monitor and the CPU were fused together into one unit, while both the keyboard and the mouse still remained separate. The iMac was the first computer to be specifically designed for Internet usage, coming equipped with an internal modem and the first USB port. The floppy disk drive, which Apple had invented, was now gone, replaced by a CD drive.

Over time, it becomes evident that the essential component of the computer, the one piece that is non-negotiable, is the screen (together, of course, with its CPU). It is to the computer what Goethe’s idea of the Leaf was to the archetypal plant: the central informing Idea of which all the other parts are but extensions and transformations.

This is finally proven once and for all with the introduction of the iPad in 2010, in which the computer is stripped down to the screen and everything else is subordinated to it, including the keyboard, which is now transformed into light in the form of a digital simulacrum of the keyboard. Thus, the keyboard, the main element which had survived from the computer’s descent from the typewriter, is finally dissolved and etherealized to become an internal organ of the computer itself. All that remains of the hybrid of typewriter and television is a flat, luminous screen that glows with the internal self-radiance of a piece of stained glass.

Thus, with the iPad, the destiny of the computer is revealed, as the transformation and etherealization of all its component parts into organs made out of light.

A Brief History of Invisible Worlds

The Macintosh computer, then, opens up a window into a luminous, non-physical world. And what, then, is the nature of the world that it reveals?

To answer that, we must look back at some earlier windows to alternate realities opened up by ancient cultures. Let us start with the Paleolithic: according to David Lewis-Williams in his book The Mind in the Cave, the walls of the painted caves were not conceived of merely as solid surfaces upon which painted animals cavorted like primitive graffiti, but rather as windows opening onto another reality altogether, a world of phantom animal spirits that the painter, using his paints as a medium, was able to break open the rock in order to see, a world of ancestral beings and eternal forms upon which the physical world had modeled itself since the beginning of Time.[7]

Upon the walls of Egyptian tombs, likewise, the painted images opened up a world of magical spells and eternal beings, a world that could be manipulated by the dead person’s ka only if he knew the proper utterances that would unlock its various gates and thresholds and move him past their demon guardians into an eternal Afterlife.

In the world opened up by Greek statuary, a realm of eternal Acts of Men in Motion was visualized, a realm of Platonic essences and archetypes upon which all men in the accidental world were to model their actions. The key to this world lay in the mastery of philosophical concepts—not magical spells—which, once known, would gain one entrance into the eternal Academy of Great Men and their Deeds.

For the Christians, as Gilles Deleuze has pointed out, Essence began to be identified for the first time with the accidental by way of the myth of the avatar of God, the Being who came down into this world.[8] The forms of Byzantine art, then, are concerned more with the earthly, with transitory men like Justinian and the incarnated Christ than with Eternal Forms. This paved the way for the Western preoccupation with the accidental and the ephemeral at the expense of substance and essence.

On the analogy with the metaphysics of these other parallel realities, then, we might say that the world opened up by the luminous window of the Macintosh gives us access to the current Western episteme, which is a realm of coded flows of information and data caught in a flux of perpetual change. You can’t step into the same Information river twice in this society, for the subtle realm structured by its software and its Ideas is one that is always subject to revision, in accordance with its dominance by the myth of the Wonder Child who has no reverence for the teachings of his former masters, but wishes only to shape the world in accordance with his own mind.

When you are using a Macintosh, you have entered inside the mind of Steve Jobs, a realm composed of subtle images and graphics not structured around the power of the Word—Jobs was a college dropout—but around the Image as all-encompassing signifier which has swallowed up the Word, just as his iPad swallowed up the keyboard and turned it into an icon.

Digital Hub

On January 9, 2001 Steve Jobs gave a keynote speech at the Macworld Expo, in which he articulated his vision of the personal computer as the center of a “Digital Hub,” in which, far from becoming obsolete, the personal computer was destined to become the nucleus of the digital revolution in which all other digital gadgets could be jacked in like so many drones subordinated to the Queen Bee.[9] The vision Jobs was articulating, then, was an image of the subtle, luminous reality configured by his Macintosh swallowing, absorbing, digesting and engulfing all other gadgets and physical components, just as the Mac via the iPad would gobble up all the components of the computer and transform them into organs of light.

With the introduction of the iTunes application at this same Macworld Expo, followed by the iPod in October of that year, the CD as a physical object was effectively eliminated and dissolved, transformed, that is, into an object made out of light. With a single stroke, the iPod rendered the portable CD player obsolete. Now one no longer had to carry around one’s favorite CDs in order to listen to music. You could, as Jobs pointed out, keep them all, your entire library, in your pocket, inside of a gadget the size of a deck of cards.

With the introduction of the iTunes Music Store in April of 2003, furthermore, which Jobs conceived as the first legal rival to illegal music download sites like Napster and Kazaa, and for which he received the blessing of the entire music industry, he further dematerialized the industry by eliminating, not just the CD, but the music store itself as a physical entity. It was not long after this—in 2006, to be exact–that Tower Records closed down. “Between 2003 and 2006,” as Andrew Keen writes, “800 independent music stores closed their doors for good.”[10] Music stores are now a thing of the past, for they have been translated and transformed by the Wonder Child’s wizardry into components made out of light and shadow located not in any real physical three dimensional space, but in the subtle realm of the Internet.

And where is the Internet?

Nowhere and everywhere.

Just like the astral plane.

Subtle Matter in Cyberspace

The mythology of Apple Computer, then, is that of the myth of the Wonder Child who befuddles and mystifies the Elders with his magic tricks, just like the Christ child when his parents found him lecturing to an astonished audience of Pharisees in the Temple. The metaphysics, furthermore, is one of the transformation of three dimensional objects located in physical space into the self-radiant images of subtle matter in cyberspace. Light on gradually gives way to light through.

Consider the iPhone, introduced by Jobs at the Macworld Expo in 2007: this is the first phone to eliminate the keyboard by virtualizing it with touch pad technology. Not only that, but with the iPhone, the cell phone itself is dematerialized and absorbed into the Macintosh computer, for every iPhone is essentially an avatar of a Macintosh computer made small enough to fit into one’s pocket. There is very little that a Macintosh computer can do that an iPhone can’t. The iPhone absorbs the cell phone, takes it inside the virtual reality of the Macintosh, and then extends it out into physical space as an avatar of itself, thus rendering all other cell phones effectively obsolete. At once, the other phone companies begin copying it by introducing their own versions of touch pad phones. (Google’s Android is its primary competitor).

Thus, it is the goal of Apple Computer to absorb and transform all physical electronic objects and turn them into extensions of Mac computers precisely by eliminating their physical components and etherealizing them into phantoms made of so much light and shadow.

What we are witnessing before our very eyes, then, is a technological drama played out upon the capitalist proscenium, of the victory of suksma technologies over sthula technologies, of the transformation and destructuring of the entire physical world-space created by capitalism during the Newtonian Age into a Manichean economy dominated by technologies of Light.

By the time all of this is over, you can expect to witness not just the disappearance of things like CD players and DVD players, or even record and book stores, but of the entire mercantile world of capitalism configured by stores located in three dimensional space altogether.

The victory of suksma technologies means the inevitable virtualization of capitalism taken as a whole.

The retail store is becoming a fossil soon to be buried deep in the archaeological strata of archaic forms of capitalism. Future Walter Benjamins engaged in Arcades-type projects will write books with titles like: The Origins and Extinction of the Retail Store or The Rise and Fall of the Shopping Mall.

Mark my words.

–Excerpted from The New Media Invasion by John David Ebert (McFarland Books, 2011)

http://www.amazon.com/New-Media-Invasion-Digital-Technologies/dp/0786465603/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317859925&sr=8-1

[1] Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles (NY: Viking, 2009), 95-96.

[2] Ridley Scott’s Macintosh commercial can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNy-7jv0XSc

[3] Jobs’ keynote 1983 speech in which he first unveiled Scott’s commercial and slammed IBM in the process can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSiQA6KKyJo

[4] Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon, iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Show Business (Wiley, 2005), 81.

[5] Ibid., 61.

[6] The first personal computer was actually the Altair 8800, introduced in 1975 by MITS. The difference was that Apple’s was the first personal computer that came preassembled and was not marketed primarily to hobbyists.

[7] David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004)

[8] Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (London and New York: Continuum, 2005), 87.

[9] Jobs’ “Digital Hub” keynote speech from January, 2001 can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9046oXrm7f8&p=ABCB88A18BFCEE5B&playnext=1&index=18

[10] Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, (NY: Doubleday / Currency, 2007), 100.

by John David Ebert

When Worlds Close Down

Every culture opens a window onto a particular world horizon that is accessed via one or another form of media. Normally, the process of articulation and unfolding of a cosmos is two-fold, that of annunciation and transmission: annunciation, that is, of a vision to one sort of prophet, while another one, receiving the vision, then creates the necessary medium for transmitting it on a mass scale. Thus, Abraham, living in the Mesopotamian city of Ur, hears the voice of an obscure and hitherto unknown god that tells him to leave the land of his birth and migrate to another land, Canaan, which this god will make known to him. Generations later, after enduring the collective traumas of Egyptian servitude, the vision descends to Moses, who invents the medium of the alphabet and brings it down from the top of the mountain as the new means for communicating the Hebraic vision of a non-visual deity who makes his will known via a non-pictographic script.

Later, reiterating the structural dynamics of the same process, an illiterate carpenter will venture into the desert in quest of a new vision bestowed upon him by a descending dove – the ancient signifier of the love goddess Aphrodite – in which the dove’s revised meaning will now stand for a religion of an-erotic brotherly love. A generation or two more and a man named Saul, hit by a vision on his way to Damascus, will change the signifier of his name to Paul and then invent the new literary medium of the Christian epistle as a means for conveying this desert vision to the other members of the worldly City of God.

The vision, then, comes first – whether that vision is of an acoustic or imagistic nature – while the medium for transmitting it is then invented subsequently. Note that the morphology of the process of world-formation implies that a literate mentality is absolutely unnecessary for receiving world-shaping Visions that become foundational for entire civilizations. Literacy only becomes necessary, along the lines of the Shannon-Weaver model of communication, for sending that Vision along the constraints of one or another cultural channel to a receiving audience.

When, however, worlds close down and visions become extinct, so too, their corresponding media disappear. Thus, Egyptian hieroglyphs vanish at the end of the fourth century when the vision that had animated Egyptian civilization for three thousand years had crumbled and fallen into desuetude. The cuneiform tablet, likewise, had by then already disappeared (end of the first century) along with the Mesopotamian way of life that Abraham was already paying farewell to in about 1800 BC.

Likewise, when the literate world configured in the fifteenth century by the advent of the printing press – a world structured by individuality, nationalism and abstract, three-dimensional space – begins to disappear somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century in a haze of violent, earth-shaking battles and academic disputes in which their corresponding metanarratives are taken apart, dismantled and deconstructed – then it is only a matter of time before the media which made that world possible, which had fed and sustained it for centuries with printed books, magazines, newspapers and bookstores, also begin to vanish.

Which brings us to the edges of history, where we, today, currently find ourselves gazing off into the abyss of a new media extinction event in which absolutely all the media which have built and shaped a literate Gutenbergian cosmos for five centuries are, within the space of about a decade, ceasing to exist.

Extinction Event

What made this ecosystem possible in the first place was a society equipped with printed reading matter and the corresponding mercantile economy of booksellers, shopowners and vendors which came into being in order to purvey those texts in the form of identical copies of mass-reproduced objects to a European public whose vision had been honed to a keen edge by the recent invention of lenses. Spinoza, lest we forget, made his living as a lens grinder, and the achievements of natural philosophers like Roger Bacon, Galileo and Descartes were made possible, to a very large degree, by their fascination with the properties of optical devices.  This was a culture, in other words, that was thoroughly fascinated by the dynamics of vision, and everything that it produced, from printed books to depth-perspectival oil paintings, were manifestations of this fascination.

The new digital world that is coming to replace this optical horizon of Western civilization, on the contrary, is one based upon the revelation of the integrated circuit: a world of hidden, non-visible electromagnetic fields of force. This invisible cosmos of photons and electrons traveling at the speed of light – think of the old iconic RKO tower beaming its zig-zags to all quarters of the compass – now cocoons the entire planet in a sort of invisible macrosphere composed of ghosts, phantoms and etheric information searching for antennae like Shannon’s proverbial receiver waiting to catch and rearrange the data into an observable, yet phantasmic, reality of pulsing signals given form as recognizable images.

This is a new cosmos altogether, one that is moving too fast for the media of old Europe, with its linear first-one-thing-then-another logic to keep up with. And since it can’t keep up, that world, together with all its media of communication, is dissolving into the slag heap of melted visions and worn out cosmologies along with all of history’s other discarded world horizons.

The sum total of these vanishing media, however, is currently amounting to something of an extinction event analogous to all those other great geo-ecological extinctions which scientists and environmentalists have mapped out for us. But whereas those events – there were five of them, the most recent being the one that killed off all the dinosaurs approximately 65 million years ago – took place offstage, as it were, in a distant temporal horizon that is inaccessible to our contemporary mode of experience, the current media extinction event is happening right in front of our eyes.

One morning, for instance, I woke up to do a Google search only to find out that record stores had disappeared while I wasn’t looking. Indeed, I read that Tower Records had closed the doors of its last store in December of 2006, just a few years after Apple’s release of its iPod and iTunes Music Store in 2001. Tower Records, gone? But how could this be?

And that’s not all: bookstores may soon follow, for they have been closing their doors steadily since the advent of Amazon.com in 1995, and now, with the release of the third generation Kindle in August of 2010, the book itself as a physical entity may soon go the way of CDs, records and tape cassettes. Borders Books, moreover, is in serious financial trouble, and Barnes and Noble is doing nowhere near the kind of business that it once used to. DVDs, too, may not last much longer, as Netflix’s streaming of movies on their website begins to catch on, and the movie studios themselves introduce Video on Demand services which will make movies available over the Internet within a mere 45 days of their theatrical release.

Newspapers, furthermore, which came into being during the early part of the seventeenth century, and magazines, which originated about a century after that, are folding up at an alarming rate. Newspapers that have either filed for bankruptcy or will be transferring to exclusively online versions include The Philadelphia Daily News, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Miami Herald, The Detroit News, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Chicago Sun Times, The New York Daily News, The Fort Worth Star Telegram and The Cleveland Plain Dealer.

The Tribune Company, furthermore, which owns both The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune filed for bankruptcy in December of 2008. Not long ago, The Christian Science Monitor shifted from a daily to a weekly paper, while The Washington Post – the very paper that uncovered the Watergate hotel break-ins back in 1972 – announced in 2009 that three of its regional bureaus in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles would close.

The list of magazines that have folded up in the past decade is cause for similar alarm: Mirabella, Mademoiselle, Lingua franca, The Partisan Review, Book Magazine, Circus Magazine, Premiere Magazine, Life, House and Garden, PC Magazine, Playgirl, Vibe, McCall’s, Teen Magazine, Country Home, Gourmet Magazine, and many other, more obscure titles.

The actual physical world space of capitalism, too, seems to be breaking apart and destructuring, for retail stores are collapsing all around us like singularities into the dead space of economic penury: in June of 2008, FedEx announced that they were removing “Kinko’s” from their store signs, having already purchased the company in 2004; in February of 2010, meanwhile, Hollywood Video filed for bankruptcy and has now vanished along with Kinko’s. KB Toys, Linens ‘n Things, the Sharper Image and Steve & Barry’s have all folded up for good. Blockbuster intends to close some 20% of its stores, while Starbucks has plans to shut down 600 or so of its stores, and Circuit City has closed its doors (its rival, Best Buy, meanwhile, is reporting loss of market share for the first time ever as of 2010). Sears, too, is in dire straits, with a ten percent loss of its revenue since 2005, when it made a desperate merge with Kmart. Sales at J.C. Penney’s have declined by six percent, and other stores like Macy’s, the Gap, Zales Jewelers, Foot Locker, Dillard’s and Whole Foods are all cutting back and closing stores. Shopping malls themselves, furthermore, are in a state of decrepitude, and are becoming an increasing economic, as well as visual, blight all across the American landscape.

Not since the end of the fourth century AD, when the Christian Emperor Theodosius outlawed paganism, has there been any comparable Media Extinction Event. In 384, Theodosius banned the ancient practice of haruspicy (the examination, that is, of the entrails of animals for omens, which had been practiced since the early days of the Sumerians); pagan feast days were declared work days in 389; a few years later, in 391, the Serapeum, a temple annex of the great library of Alexandria, was sacked and burned under his orders, resulting in the loss of countless manuscripts; in the same year, moreover, Theodosius issued a new decree outlawing blood sacrifice and insisting upon the closure of all pagan temples; also in 391, the eternal fire in the Temple of Vesta in the Roman Forum was extinguished and the Vestal Virgins disbanded; the last Olympic Games  took place in 393. The fourth century was, furthermore, the final century in which Egyptian hieroglyphics were written.

Subsequent centuries have featured assaults on books and learning (as for example, when the Arabs finished off the Alexandrian library in the seventh century), book burnings and barbarian invasions, but nothing on the scale of what happened in the fourth century, in which pagan media of all kinds were forcibly extinguished. What is happening today is, of course, not taking place at the point of the sword, but as part of the internal exigencies of capitalism. Nevertheless, the scale of the two events is just about commensurate.

The Internet vs. The Printing Press

If an extinction event is characterized by a vast reduction of species biodiversity in favor of fewer of them, then I think it is possible to theorize that ever since about the year 1995, when the National Science Foundation released control of the Internet to the private sector, we have been living through an analogous phenomenon on the plane of media and culture. A single colossal entity, the Internet, together with a handful of electronic gadgets which swarm around it like a cloud of flies, is emerging from the devastated mediascape as a powerful force of centralized communications. Almost every digital gadget in existence is compatible with the Internet in some way, including the personal computer itself, without which, we should remind ourselves, the Internet would not even have been possible.

I think it is important, though, not to see this, as is commonplace in most contemporary discussions of the social effects of the Internet, as analogous to what happened with the rise of the printing press in the middle of the fifteenth century. There are some important reasons for this.

The printing press, for one thing, emerged out of world circumstances which were entirely favorable to it, for its nature as an ocular medium was already consistent with the optically based aptitudes of the society that gave birth to it. It simply brought this specular gaze, which was already being honed by painters and Scholastic philosophers, to a fine focus.

The Internet, on the other hand, is not an ocular medium, but a digital one, and as such, it is inherently incompatible with the Gutenbergian nature of the print-based society into which it crashed like a bolt from the blue. Its advent is sudden and discontinuous, whereas that of the printing press had been more gradual and evolutionary.

Elizabeth Eisenstein, in her magisterial two-volume study, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change,[1] made the argument, back in the 1970s, that the effects of typography were not so much evolutionary as revolutionary and that its effects were rather more sudden than her media studies peers had then assumed. But it should be pointed out that the word “sudden” is a relative thing: her idea of the “suddenness” of the printing press involved it exerting its effects over the course of about a century and a half. The damage wrought by the Internet to our media landscape, on the other hand, has taken place in about the same space of time as the proscriptions of Theodosius in the fourth century, namely, over the course of a mere fifteen years. This is neither evolutionary nor revolutionary, but catastrophic.

Indeed, the disturbing and transformative effects of the printing press are undeniable, as Eisenstein describes them: from approximately 1450 – 1600, the advent of typography favored a shift away from scriptoria and professional (“lay”) stenographers to printers, which created new jobs for typesetters and compositors while putting scribes completely out of work. It also forced the Renaissance bookdealer, who had previously made his living selling illuminated manuscripts as works of art, to close the doors of his shop for good. Illuminators themselves found work for a time applying the same old techniques to the new medium, for the first printed books, ”incunabula” as they are called, were virtually indistinguishable for a time from illuminated manuscripts.

The printing press also created intellectual property laws and the concept of “fame” as we know it, for it eroded the anonymity of oral sayings by fixing one’s name in place on the title page, thus permanently associating the individual with a particular text that had sprung from his own brain like Athena from the head of Zeus. The unleashing of hordes of new texts, meanwhile, created the conditions for the possibility of the encyclopedically learned scholar, like Erasmus or Montaigne, thus transforming the mythic figure of Saint Jerome into a quotidian reality. The individual was no longer part of a vast social machine but rather cut loose from the Medieval collectivity by the linear framing processes of printing, as though saints were now being removed from niches where they had been buried in the walls of Gothic cathedrals and taking on their own lives as articulate men capable of explaining the symbolic subtleties of the Gothic edifice to a vast new reading public.

Thus, the overall impression that is conveyed by the details of this media revolution is one of linear continuity with the optically embedded structures in the mentality of the pre-printing press Western episteme. The sense of order and organization that is associated with typography – indexes, Arabic numerals, title pages and citations – is consistent with the already extant tendency toward linearity and ocularly inspired thinking that is evident in the Medieval scholastic mentality. Thus, if any culture was going to produce mechanized printing, it would surely have come forth out of the implicitly ordered and organized mentality of the Scholastic universe that had already dedicated itself to carefully detailing, arranging and tracking Classical texts preserved from the ruins of antiquity.

With the Internet, on the other hand, what is most strikingly evident is its discontinuity with the surrounding culture out of which it emerged, a culture that had built itself around printed media for five centuries prior to its advent. The Internet actually reverses and disrupts all of these structures: on the ironically named website Project Gutenberg, for instance, texts are simply dumped in and stripped of all their sensuous elements, fonts, typefaces, and indeed all haptic sense of texture have been removed from the books, and consequently, one is presented with a collection of unreadably bland documents that no one would ever want to spend much time bothering about. Blogs, meanwhile, are sloppy, informal and disorganized, and are rarely, if ever, proofread for grammatical and spelling errors with which they are normally saturated. Even on professionally designed websites, moreover, images are routinely misaligned, out of place or just plain incorrect. On Amazon.com, for instance, it is not uncommon to encounter book covers matched with the wrong captions, and so forth.

Many of these Internet sites, furthermore—as Andrew Keen points out in The Cult of the Amateur–are in reality low budget operations with little in the way of ad revenue to finance them and so cannot afford to pay good journalists and writers to create worthwhile articles and essays. As a result, there is a vast decrease not only in the quantity of kinds of available media, but also in the quality of the information that is offered as a monolithic substitute. We are being forced, in other words, to trade off a diversity of media sources – magazines, newspapers, etc. – for only one kind of media: digital. The disappearance of diversity, especially of media, is never a good thing, for in this case, it amounts to a massive cultural impoverishment. As a result of the elimination of choices, we are increasingly forced to rely more and more on the Internet in order to get access to our media, our news and our information, articles, essays, reviews, etc., which is only one means of purveying such media, and arguably, not even the best.

So the Internet is a force of disruption and discontinuity in the evolution of the Western mediascape and is in no way analogous to the revolution in printing inaugurated by typography in the fifteenth century. It is rather the incarnation of a new kind of mentality altogether, one in which technology, learning and information occur at the speed of light via digitization. It is a mentality that is at its best when its concern is with images, pattern recognition and icons; at its worst when it attempts to take over and mimic the functions of the Gutenbergian landscape that it is in process of dismantling.

Thus, the printing press builds up, favoring structurally organized hierarchies of knowledge, whereas the Internet tears down, favoring nomadologies of one sort or another (along with their attendant antipathy to knowledge apparatuses: historically, nomads are illiterate). To borrow from the language of the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, then, we can say that the Internet is a nomadological technology while the printing press is a technology of state apparatuses.

The Internet and Radio

There is another medium, however, that serves as a much better analogy to the Internet, and that is radio.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the telegraph had given birth to two further media: the telephone, in which the disembodied human voice was transmitted across vast distances through wires; and the wireless telegraph, in which the atmosphere was stained with Morse code signals which saturated it in all directions simultaneously. The wireless, in turn, gave rise, about the year 1920, to radio, in which the heavens crackled with human voices and music coded into the ether like a technologized version of the ancient elemental spirits which were once thought to flit about amongst clouds, fields and trees intermittently.

Radio, you might say, added an ear to the ocular world of Gutenberg that had been missing since the days of the fifteenth century when oral traditions began to drop out and give way to printed works. The Medieval jongleur and the court storyteller – basically involved in staging Medieval radioplays – were obsolesced by the Renaissance man of the printed book whose written stories, plays and novels began to favor the eye at the expense of the ear. Radio brought back the Medieval storyteller and transplanted him into the middle of the suburbs, where the denizens of the average living room became his new audience.

But radio was a very different kind of medium from anything that had gone before it because it was the first medium to offer its content “free” to the public. The initial problem that it raised, correspondingly – and it was a problem that would later be raised again by the Internet – was how the new medium would pay for itself.

The inceptual imagination of radio was that it would be a sort of ennobling medium that would bring the arts and culture to the living rooms of suburbia (just as Starbucks later brought espresso from the cafes of Vienna to the sidewalks of Main Street). There was great reluctance, consequently, to freight the new medium with advertising, since in those days the living room was thought to be a place where the crass vulgarities of the marketplace did not belong. President Hoover’s comment that it was “’inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, for education, and for vital commercial purposes, to be drowned in advertising chatter’”[2] now seems almost comical in its naivete. Various solutions were suggested: a private tax, perhaps, or else wealthy endowments from some Andrew Carnegie type of philanthropist?

Eventually, the aura of advertising that began to glow around the names of various programs, like the Everready Hour or performers like the Vicks Vaporub Quartette, began to provide the answer.[3] Within just a few years, the previous resistance to advertising had vanished, and the medium was so completely hi-jacked by advertisers that they actually began to dictate the content of shows, writing them and selling them as package deals to the networks. Eventually, radio became the one medium to draw its entire source of revenue from advertisers, and this solved, once and for all, the problem of how to pay for the new medium.

Another issue that radio raised was that of intellectual property rights, just as the Internet has done in our own day. The answer to the question, should royalties be paid for the right to use and broadcast music over the air? may be obvious to us, but back in the 1920s, it wasn’t obvious at all. In 1922, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) demanded royalties for music played on the air, reminding one of the various suits filed by the Authors Guild and a convocation of publishers against Google in 2005 for the right to scan books electronically. Back in the 1920s, however, broadcasters pointed out that copyright holders were being greedy, since it was thought that by playing their music on the air, they were already getting free advertising. But, of course, we know very well how the copyright issue turned out.

Now the link between media and economic landscapes is not usually thought much about, but radio, too, had devastating effects on the economy of the 1920s just as the Internet has had in our own time, for as Paul Starr has pointed out, “radio in the 1920s, like the Internet three-quarters of a century later, plunged record (as well as sheet music) sales into a deep downturn,” for rather than pay for the records, people preferred to listen to the music broadcast over the air for free.[4] The record companies managed to solve this particular problem by putting out the recordings of such hitherto overlooked music as jazz, which wasn’t then being played on the radio—since it was considered “disreputable”—and thus served to create the jazz explosion of the 1920s.

There are of course important differences between the two media that should not be overlooked: the fact, for instance, that whereas the Internet is not owned by anyone, radio fell very quickly into the private ownership of just a few large networks. The damage inflicted by radio on other media, furthermore, has come nowhere near that which has been wrought by the Internet, for though radio was as different from printed media as the Internet is–coming down, as it were, from heaven to earth–it was not a medium that sought to replace and imitate those other media like some ersatz invasion of the body snatchers, but rather supplemented them with the invention of new literary genres like the radio play.

Radio, though, not only caused a downturn in the sales of records, it also siphoned off advertising revenue from newspapers and magazines – just as the Internet has done today – and may therefore have contributed to shifting the economy into that turbulent flow which we call the Great Depression. Perhaps not coincidentally, the advent of the Internet, too, was followed about a decade later by another Great Depression (although it has not yet been called this) and so it may be that we need to be more attentive to the politically and economically destabilizing effects of these new media on the respective societies into which they were born.

Destabilizations

The great media essayist Neil Postman, in his writings, used to point out that the one thing we almost always forget to ask in our excitement over the possibilities unveiled by new technologies is what way of life will be undone by this or that new gadget. This is a question which I think needs to be asked today more than ever. For every new technology invented, new vectors of turbulence are introduced into a society, and those vectors can sometimes result in explosive bifurcations which can be surprisingly destructive of existing socio-political configurations.

The role of television in the destabilization of the Soviet Union, for instance, which Gorbachev had, for the first time in Russian history, allowed to broadcast Politburo meetings live in the late 1980s, has yet to be studied, but the effects of Twitter during the 2009, presidential elections in Iran, very obviously catalyzed the transformation of the crowd into a plasma that nearly overwhelmed Ahmedinajad’s regime. Then there is Xerox’s invention of the copy machine, which came into widespread use in the late 1960s, and which enabled Daniel Ellsberg to photocopy the Pentagon Papers and hand them over to the New York Times, which published them in 1971, revealing a whole series of lies and cover-ups on the part of the US government which set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the conclusion of the war a few years later.

It was Harold Innis, the cofounder of the American media studies tradition, who first remarked in his Empire and Communications that the rise of radio as a new medium in the 1920s may have contributed to destabilizing the economy and thus indirectly bringing on the Great Depression.[5] In his other great media studies book, The Bias of Communication, Innis even suggests, rather cryptically, that the invention of the telegraph in the 1840s may have played a role in the outbreak of the Civil War: “As in England the telegraph destroyed the monopoly of political centres and contributed, in destroying political power, to the outbreak of the Civil War.”[6] There does, then, appear to exist an interesting pattern of economic depressions and wars occurring in the wake of volcanic periods of technological upheaval: the depression of 1837 – 43, for example, followed immediately upon a major public works project of building railroads, canals and urban roads.

The problem is that while healthy economies are able to integrate the turbulences caused by new technologies, economies that have already been weakened for one reason or another – by, say, old age or dwindling resources — may not be able to withstand the impacts of new innovations, especially if there are a lot of them occurring within a short space of time, as was the case in the 1920s. As a result, the proliferation of new gadgets creates structural instabilities in the economy which gradually accumulate and then, if conditions are right, brings about a catastrophic bifurcation in which the economic system collapses. As the system then restructures itself, it must take the new technologies into account, favoring certain of them, while excluding others. Thus, the evolution of economies and technologies are involved in an intimate feedback loop of structural coupling in which changes made in one sphere (i.e. technology) create changes in the other sphere (the economy) which then feed back into the original sphere and change it to suit the needs of the new situation.

As the philosopher Bernard Stiegler puts it in his book Technics and Time:

The transformations of the technical system regularly bring in their wake upheavals of the social system, which can completely destabilize it when ‘the new technical system leads to the substitution of a dominant activity for an out-dated activity of a totally different nature’ . . .The relation between the technical and social systems is thus treated as a problem of consumption, in which the economic system is the third component: the development of consumerism, accompanying constant innovation, aims at a greater flexibility in consumer attitudes, which adapt and must adapt ever more quickly, at a pace obviously not without effect on the specifically cultural sphere. The twentieth century thereby appears properly and massively uprooting—and this will always provide the theme, in terms of alienation and decline, of the great discourses on technics.[7]

It therefore seems not implausible to me to suggest that we are caught in a period of turbulence similar to the one which took place in the 1920s—and before that, the 1830s–in which the new medium of radio – together with all sorts of new domestic gadgets such as the electric oven, the dishwasher, the refrigerator, etc. – exerted so many stresses on an already weakened economy that it brought about the total collapse of that economy.

The current crisis, admittedly, is a many body problem which involves multiple layers of interfolding causes—subprime loans and credit default swaps are only the surface layer, in my opinion—but surely the massive proliferation of gadgets during the years from 1995 to 2008—i.e. the Internet, digital cameras, video games, handheld devices, etc.—has played a major role in the present collapse, since it has forced us into a survival mode in which we have to adapt very rapidly in a very short space of time to tremendous economic, political and technological changes. As P.W. Singer remarks:

. . .we experienced more technologic change in the 1990s than in the entire ninety years beforehand. To think about it another way, technology in 2000 was roughly one thousand times more advanced, more complex, and more integral to our day-to-day lives than the technology of 1900 was to our great-grandparents. More important, where they had decades and then years to digest each new invention, ours come in ever bigger bundles, in ever smaller periods of time.[8]

Just to take one example: as I was in the midst of revising this book, I came across an article in The Atlantic Monthly’s online journal in which the writer described how he thinks the iPod will become obsolete soon as the result of new cloud computing music websites like Grooveshark, rdio.com, or emusic.com. The writer points out how he no longer has any need for the iPod, since he uses his smartphone to download all the songs he wants, after paying his website a mere $36.00 annual fee for unlimited song downloads. What does he need an iPod for, or even the iTunes Music Store, in light of such a development?[9]

This is a pace of change that is absolutely breathtaking and it is nearly impossible to keep up with its demands. Indeed, by the time this book is published, much of it will have been rendered obsolete by new gadgets that have come along in the meantime.

The effects of such a rate of change upon the human psyche as well as the organization of society is nothing short of catastrophic, which is precisely why we periodically require catastrophes and breakdowns in order to give ourselves time to readjust and catch up with it. To quote Marshall McLuhan: “Most people take a long while to adjust to quite simple changes. And when invited to readjust their entire lives every few years to very vast changes, people tend to fall apart.”[10]

Thus, the world that we have come to know—especially the one those of us who have reached middle age grew up in—is now collapsing all around us. We have entered a cultural and social pralaya, from which, I have no doubt, the world that emerges will bear only faint resemblance to the one inside of which we were encased up until the late 1990s. As different, say, as the 1950s were from the 1930s, two decades straddling either side of the catastrophes of the Great Depression and the Second World War, respectively.

The present book, then, is a report from the battlefield, as it were, meant to chronicle what it is like to live through such a shift, and how our perceptions and actions are being forced to change so drastically in order to adapt to the world that the new media are currently unmaking all around us.

–Excerpted from The New Media Invasion, which can be ordered from Amazon at:   http://www.amazon.com/New-Media-Invasion-Digital-Technologies/dp/0786465603/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1316314973&sr=8-1

[1] Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

[2] Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 338.

[3] Ibid., 355.

[4] Ibid., 339.

[5] Harold Innis, Empire and Communications (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 162.

[6] Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 59.

[7] Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1, The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998), 32.

[8] P.W. Singer, Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21^st Century (NY: Penguin, 2009), 101.

[9] Derek Thompson, “The iPod is Dead to Me,” found online here: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/10/the-ipod-is-dead-to-me/65148/

[10] This quote comes from McLuhan’s interview with Edwin Newman, which can be found on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9Eq3sDgl9o

by John David Ebert

Myth as Psychology

Historically, the conflict between myth and science, according to Joseph Campbell, involved a discrediting of visionary cosmology in favor of one based upon “fact.” In his essay “The Symbol Without Meaning,” Campbell described how science gradually disentangled itself from the mythological projections of the medieval imagination through the discoveries of men like Columbus and Copernicus, which amounted to the “drawing of a distinct dividing line between the world of dream consciousness and that of waking.” As a result, “mythological cosmologies. . .do not correspond to the world of gross facts but are functions of dream and vision,” which means, for Campbell, that myths are projections of the human psyche onto the canvas of the universe. Their validity, consequently, is restricted to the psyche, and all myths are to be regarded as metaphors symbolic of, on the one hand, the mysteries of Being, and on the other, transformations of human consciousness.

Suppose, however, we discard Campbell’s insistence that myths have been cosmologically disqualified by science, and actually read them, instead, in terms of scientific narratives. Is it possible that we may find visions of cosmological knowledge once stored by archaic societies but now rediscovered by modern science?

Micromyths

In the Brihadharanyaka Upanishad, we find the myth of the Great Self whose cosmic loneliness is so immense that it splits into two beings, the first man and the first woman. The woman changes herself into a cow, the man transforms into a bull, and together they produce all the cattle. Then she turns into a mare, he into a stallion, and so on. Finally, the man has a revelation when he realizes that all the phenomena of the world have come forth from himself. “Verily,” he concludes, “I am all this that I have poured forth!”

The Hindu image of the cosmos as the body of a single living Being is a vision sprung from the depths of thousands of years of yogic practice, going back, perhaps, as far as Harappa and Mohenjo Daro. Indeed, the entire civilization, in contrast with the West, has been inward turned all along, as a comparison of the eye-motifs of Hindu sculpture with those of the Greeks reveals, for the eyes of the gods and heroes of Indian art are usually closed, whereas those of the West are wide open. I would like to suggest that this particular creation myth — and there are, of course, thousands of them in Hindu sacred literature — may be rooted in a visionary transformation of cellular mitosis that came to some rishi while in trance. Mitosis is the process whereby living forms grow, as one cell splits into two, two into four and so on. This organic movement from center to periphery, and from less form to more, would then be a deep structure shared by the Hindu creation myth with Western scientific knowledge.

In his book The Body of Myth, physicist J. Nigro Sansonese develops his thesis that all “myth describes a systematic exploration of the human body by the privileged members of archaic cultures.” Myths, according to Sansonese, are encoded descriptions of physiological processes envisioned by yogis and shamans in trance states. He describes, for example, how the myth of Perseus slaying the Kraken by showing it the head of Medusa and turning it to stone is actually a description of the stopping of the heart along the vagus nerve that connects it to the visual centers at the back of the brain. The monster with all its tentacles is the vagus nerve itself, while the head of the Medusa with its snakes is “a description of the brain and its twelve cranial nerves.” And the entire story, then, describes how the yogi stops the beating of his own heart while in samadhi.

If Sansonese’s theory is correct, then a deep structure shared by the Hindu creation myth with the process of cellular mitosis might in fact exist. If it is possible that visualizations of interior physiological processes can manifest to yogis in trance states, then it is certainly worth considering that the Hindu creation myth is, on one level anyway, a visualization of a somatic process.

The same goes for shamanic trance states, as Jeremy Narby describes in his elegant book The Cosmic Serpent. Narby is an ethnobotanist who wondered whether it could be true, as Amazonian tribesmen claimed, that their extensive botanical knowledge originated in trance states induced by ayahausca, a psychoactive infusion derived from an Amazonian vine. The more he thought about the structural isomorphism shared by the double helix of DNA with the images of snakes and ladders universal to shamanism, the more he began to suspect that the serpents and geometrical patterns of shamanic iconography might actually be proprioceptions of DNA and intracellular activity. In the book, Narby details a series of paintings inspired by ayahausca visions that he showed to a friend conversant with molecular biology. His friend identified the geometric patterns as unravelled DNA, chromosomes during specific phases of mitosis, triple helix collagen structures and so on. In other words, Narby discerned the deep structures shared by shamanic trance visions with scientific knowledge of the soma. Thus, perhaps, Western civilization has arrived at knowledge by way of technological extensions of sensory organs that tribal peoples have long ago arrived at through proprioceptions during meditation and trance.

There  exists,  as  a  final  example,  a  tradition  in  Christian  mysticism  of  visionary  states  in  which  angels  descend  to  human  beings in  order  to  inspire  them  with  the  spirit,  as  in  the  Annunciation,  in  which  the  angel  Gabriel  descends to  announce  to  Mary  that  she  is  to  become  Theotokos,  “God-bearer.”  In  most  illustrations  of  this  myth  during  the  Middle  Ages,  Gabriel’s  descent  is  accompanied  by  a  miniature  dove –signifier  of  the  Holy  Spirit — and  the  power  of  the  Word,  the  Logos  itself,  is  rendered  visible entering into  Mary’s  ear.  Thus,  Mary   is  impregnated  by  the  power  of  the  Word ,  and  her  response  is,  “My  soul  doth  magnify  the  Lord.”

But  now  consider  the  isomorphism  of  this  with  the  image  of  a  virus  landing  on  a  cell  wall.  The  virus  attaches  itself  and  then  squirts  into  the  cell  its  own  DNA — or  RNA — which  then  overtakes  the  cell’s  normal  replicating  functions  and  forces  it  to  copy  this  new  program,  whereupon  it  then  spits  out  hordes  of  viruses  which  burst  through  the  cell  and  move  on.  I  am  reminded  here  of  a  miniaturized  version  of  the  Annunciation  from  an  illuminated  manuscript  by  Fra  Angelico  which  depicts  a  giant,  gleaming  initial  “R,”  in  which  the  Virgin  Mary  sits  below  the  leg  of  the  R,  while  Gabriel  hovers  just  outside  it.  Immediately  above  her,  in  the  R’s  rounded  oval,  God  the  Father  sits,  gazing  down,  while  from  his  fingertips  the  luminous  gold  sheen  of  the  Logos  extends,  with  the  dove  at  its  tip,  puncturing  through  the  arch  of  the  “R” as  though  it  were  a  cellular  membrane  separating  Mary — who  sits  below  like  a  blue  nucleus — from  God  and  the  angel  Gabriel.

The  image  of  a  virus  landing  on  a  cell  wall  and  squirting  its  DNA  into  the  nucleus  is isomorphic  with  Fra Angelico’s  illustration – although this may be a mere accident of the syntactical grammar shared by such images — but  it is important to point out that  the  metaphysical  and  spiritual  implications  of  the  myth  are  in no way  reduced  to  a  biological  function.  Whereas  a  Jungian  reading,  for  example,  would  elucidate  precisely  those  dimensions through  a  cross  cultural  comparison  of  the  Virgin  Birth  with,  say,  the  impregnation  of  the  Buddha’s  mother  by  a  tiny  white  elephant — or  the  myth  of  the  birth  of  the  monkey  king  Hanuman  from  the  semen  of  Shiva  poured  by  sages  into  the  ear  of  Hanuman’s  mother,  Anjani — the  point  of  this exercise  is  rather  to  develop  new  organs  of  perception  with  which  to  view  ancient  myths  in  a  way  that  sidesteps  the  dogma  of  a  Jungian  approach.

It is important to point out that the metaphysical and spiritual implications of myth are in no way reduced to a biological function by these examples. If Narby and Sansonese are right, then the realization of these mythic images as micromyths of cellular processes should induce us to study myths in a new way, for it will be seen that science does not render myth obsolete, and that the tribal wisdom of indigenous societies whose scientific systems are rooted in myth can be taken seriously, rather than disparaged.

Macromyths

One of the primary functions of mythology — what Campbell used to call its “cosmological function” — is to project a world pictures onto the universe that is consistent with the knowledge of the time. The Christian cosmographer Cosmas, for example, in the sixth century imagined that the universe was a sort of gigantic chest in which the sun and moon revolved around a single enormous mountain that stood up like a monolith from out of a flat earth surrounded by water. Of course the Greeks had long since deduced the rotundity of the earth, and had even drawn up rough draft sketches of the theory of evolution and the heliocentric hypothesis, both of which were discarded, just as the primordial Christians discarded the world image of the Greeks since, in both cases, the images clashed with the respective spiritual dispositions of each culture.

Today we turn to science for our knowledge of what the universe looks like, and when we turn to examine certain scientific narratives of the origins of things with an eye for the deep structures that these narratives might have in common with ancient myths, we find surprising parallels. An example is the current scientific story of the creation of the universe. The idea of what has come to be known as the Big Bang was first put forth by a Catholic priest, the Abbe Georges Lemaitre, who in 1927 suggested that the universe might have arisen from a sort of “primal atom” of matter and energy. The idea of the emergence of the universe from a cosmic egg is, however, a mythological one as well, found all over the world. Here is another creation myth from the Upanishads:

In the beginning, this world was nonbeing. This nonbeing became being. It developed. It turned into an egg. It lay there for a year. It burst asunder. One part of the eggshell was of silver, the other part was of gold.

The silver part is the earth, the golden part is the sky…

This is from a Tibetan creation myth:

From the essence of the five primordial elements a great egg came forth…Eighteen eggs came forth from the yolk of that great egg. The egg in the middle of the eighteen eggs, a conch egg, separated from the others. From this conch egg, limbs grew, and then the five senses, all perfect, and it became a boy of such extraordinary beauty that he seemed the fulfillment of every wish…

And an Orphic creation myth from ancient Greece:

…black-winged Night, a goddess of whom even Zeus stands in awe, was courted by the Wind and laid a silver egg in the womb of Darkness; and…Eros, whom some call Phanes, was hatched from this egg and set the universe in motion.

Thus Lemaitre, when describing his theory of the origin of the universe from a cosmic egg, may have been subconsciously evoking a mythological image. Then there is the deep structure shared by ancient creation myths with current narratives of the origins of life on this planet. On the first page of his book The Fifth Miracle: the Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life, physicist Paul Davies describes two contrasting theories regarding the origins of the first microbes. The old idea of cells  emerging on the surface of the ocean in the presence of sunlight (and lightning), he insists, is made obsolete by new evidence, for “it now appears that the first terrestrial organisms lived deep underground, entombed within geothermally heated rocks in pressure cooker conditions. Only later did they migrate to the surface.” Several pages further on, he says that “our eldest ancestors did not crawl out of the slime so much as ascend from the sulfurous underworld.”

Now as anyone familiar with Native American myth knows, the common narrative for the origins of life involved the myth of emergence from the underworld. It is particularly widespread amongst the tribes of the Southewest– for example, among the Hopi, whose famous kivas are miniaturizations of this underworld. In a Navaho myth, the first people are in danger of being drowned by a flood, and as the waters rise, they all the other animals climb onto a gigantic reed that grows up to the world ceiling, from whence the First Man digs his way through to this, the upper world, in which we are presently dwelling.

On the same page, Davies suggests an exactly opposed theory for the origins of life, and, along with it, invokes an equally opposite mythological cosmogony when he says that life may have been brought to the earth from the heavens by meteorites from Mars that may have crashed into its Hadean oceans. The deep structure here is isomorphic with the creation myth of the Sky Father, one example of which is found on the first page of the Book of Genesis, in which Yahweh infuses the watery abyss with the Spirit. That image, in turn, was embedded in an older Mesopotamian cosmology that associated the heavens with the realm of the gods and the earth with clay that required an external agency from above to give it form.

In her book Narratives of Human Evolution, bioanthropologist Misia Landau examines a series of accounts of hominization from Darwin to Leakey and discovers that they all share in common the hidden narrative pattern of the hero myth. Using Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale as a stencil, she makes visible within these so-called “objective” narratives the presence of the hero myth as described in folk tales. According to Propp, the formula is of a humble hero who departs on a journey, receives magical aid from a donor figure, survives a series of tests and trials and arrives at some sort of an apotheosis. Landau shows how, in scientific narratives of human evolution, the hero is the nonhuman primate who departs from his arboreal habitat with the aid of natural selection and who is tried and tested by competition from other animals, harsh climate and predation, but eventually arrives at an apotheosis in the achievement of the upright posture of humanity.

Upon examining scientific narratives of three key points in the quest for the origins of things — of the cosmos, of life upon the earth, and of the emergence of the human from the animal — we discover structural isomorphisms with the ancient myths of the cosmic egg, emergence from the underworld, creation from the heavens and the hero myth. Apparently, scientists are mythologizing a lot more often than they realize when telling their accounts of the origin and evolution of things.

It is probable that we will never know precisely what “happened” at these key points in the evolution of the cosmos, because they involve knowledge of something that transcends the capacity of the human intellect ever to grasp. For whenever we pose such questions as “Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?” we are postulating eternal questions that can be answered only in terms of the complex semiotics of myth. When the human mind goes in search of origins, it strains its limits and begins to crack, while myth comes rushing along to fill in the gap. Perhaps Immanuel Kant was right: we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only through the human mind’s mythological schemata, for between ourselves and “reality” the screen of myth always structures our perceptions.

This essay was originally published in Parabola magazine in the Fall 2008 issue.

Or, The Victory of the Astral Plane Over the Human Ego

An Essay by John David Ebert

The Tyranny of the Ancestral Dead

In Mesoamerica, the realms of the dead and the living were never truly separated. In fact, of all the civilizations in world history, the Mesoamericans are the one society in which no such separation was ever even attempted. Indeed, there is a continuity from the early village traditions of the so-called Archaic period (8000 – 2000 BC), in which the dead were buried under the floors of the houses, right on into the Formative, Classic and Post-Classic periods, in which this practice continues into Aztec times, as Manuel Aguilar-Moreno comments:

Archaeologist Michael Smith points out that the placement of burials in and around the home provides insight into Aztec attitudes toward death. The dead were still considered part of the family, and they took their place within the household. It is likely that families conducted rituals or made offerings to their deceased members, much as modern Mesoamerican peoples do in the Day of the Dead ceremonies of early November.[1]

As a result, Mesoamerica remained one of the most conservative societies on earth, perhaps the most conservative society ever. We have the word of Ignacio Bernal:

Perhaps this is why we find a curious contradiction between great progress in some aspects and none in others. I refer principally to technology, which almost stood still in contrast with remarkable developments in art, writing and the calendric system.[2]

And, as Susan Toby Evans, in her magnificent study of Ancient Mexico & Central America remarks: “…in AD 1520 the tool repertoire was still basically the same ‘Neolithic’ assemblage that had emerged by the end of the Formative.”[3]

Thus, ‘technological evolution’ in Mesoamerica is an oxymoron. This is a society which remained at about the level of a late Neolithic village, technologically speaking, until the coming of the Spaniards. No wheeled vehicles, no use of metal until very late in its development, no plow, no draft animals, nothing, in short, fancy at all.

For the dead were everywhere, all the time, watching. As Linda Schele and David Freidel write:

Public monuments erected by the Maya king during the Classic period emphasize not only his role as shaman, but also his role as family patriarch. A large percentage of the texts on stelae focus on his genealogy as the source of his legitimacy. Not only were statements of his parentage regularly included in his name phrase, but pictorial records of all sorts show the parents of the king observing the actions of their offspring, even after these parents had died.[4]

For the dead, apparently, do not like change.

The Olmecs

One of the ways in which this becomes evident is by comparing the function of the Mesoamerican temple with the pyramids of the Egyptians and the ziggurats of the Mesopotamians. All three types of building are homologous structures within their respective societies, but whereas in Egypt the pyramids and mastaba tombs were located out in separate necropolises far away from the cities, the temple tombs inside of which dead Mesoamerican kings were buried were actually located in the downtown civic centers of their cities, in the same locations, roughly speaking, where we would expect to find the ziggurats and temples of the Mesopotamians, although the Mesopotamians never buried their dead inside such temples. The Mesopotamians, it is true, as the case of the Royal Tombs of Ur shows us, did bury their dead sometimes within city limits, but by contrast with the Mesoamericans, the tombs of the Sumerian dead were rather inconspicuous and unassuming structures located in a peripheral relationship to the city itself. In Mesoamerica, the temple tomb is the nucleus around which the entire city is built, just as the ziggurat or temple tower was the nucleus of the Mesopotamian city.

Mesoamerican cities, that is to say, were essentially necropolises inhabited by living people, just as in the ancient world of the Near Eastern Neolithic, where the living actually inhabited the realm of the dead. That is the key idea of the Mesoamerican city. It is, so to say, something of a throwback to the Neolithic in which the ancestors ruled the society.

Let’s take a look, then, at one of the earliest Mesoamerican cities as an illustration of this principle. The ceremonial center of La Venta was a great ritual and sacred center of the Olmecs, who are regarded generally as the founding members of Mesoamerican civilization. Their time in the sun spans the period from about 1600 BC to 400 BC, while the high period of La Venta dates from about 900 BC to 400 BC, although it is not the earliest Olmec site: that honor would go to San Lorenzo, located off the Coatzacoalcos River in Veracruz in a region that was not as swampy as La Venta in Tabasco.

San Lorenzo was apparently a civic ceremonial center – as was La Venta – the core of which occupied about 55 hectares and might have housed about 6,000 people, although the entire area surrounding San Lorenzo could have exceeded maybe 13,000 individuals. We don’t know that much about San Lorenzo, actually, since its archaeological remains have been poorly preserved, but we do know that the site was located on the top of an artificially engineered platform on a natural eminence rising 50 m (164 ft) above the surrounding landscape. There, the Olmecs cleared an area for courtyards and civic structures spanning 1,200 m by 600 m (3,937 ft by 1,969 ft).

It is at San Lorenzo that the earliest of the giant carved stone heads were found, dating from the so-called ‘San Lorenzo phase’ (1150 – 900 bc). Ten of these enigmatic heads, some as tall as 9 ft., carved from basalt and weighing many tons, were unearthed here.

Now, the site seems to have been attacked around 950 BC, at which time it was completely abandoned. This date happens to coincide nicely with the rise to prominence of La Venta, so it seems likely that there was some sort of rivalry between the two centers.

La Venta was built on a kind of island about 2 miles square that was surrounded on all sides by swamps. At its height, the site occupied about 200 hectares (or 494 acres).  It was laid out on a north-south axis[5], as was San Lorenzo and so also, it happens, were most other Olmec sites. Since the Milky Way during the month of August shifts to a north-south orientation across the sky, and since the Mayans regarded the present era as having begun on August 13, 3114 BC, it is possible that the Olmecs could have laid out their cities to conform with this axial alignment of the Milky Way in the month of August (which month, by the way, later became sacred to the Aztecs as the month of the dead).[6]

At La Venta, we find the earliest surviving Olmec tombs, which happen to have been royal tombs, five in number, and dating from sometime around 1000 BC. Due to the humid climate in this region of swamps and sluggish, muddy rivers, as well as the acidity of the soil, no bones have survived from these tombs, and they are the only known Olmec burials. These tombs were located at the north end of the site, just above the so-called “Great Pyramid,” while the rest of the site’s civic structures, which seem to have been mainly places for the gathering of crowds, were laid out to the south in a series of squarish and rectangular shaped mounds.

The Great Pyramid was built about the same time as the royal cemetery, and since it was never excavated, it is possible that it contains a royal tomb inside it. This was the prototype of the later Mesoamerican temple inside of which dead rulers were buried, so it would be no surprise if such a tomb was ever found within it. At the time of its construction, it was the largest pyramid anywhere in the New World, and its location in the city demarcates the northern area of the royal necropolis from the civic areas to the south.

The pyramid was over 30 m (100 ft) high, and contains 3.5 million cubic feet of earth fill. There was a protecting apron built up around the south, east and west sides of the structure, while on the south side was located a projecting earth ramp or staircase which opened to the forum below, toward what is known as Complex B. According to Richard Diehl, “six large stone slabs with carvings on one face (stelae) were firmly embedded in the apron floor at the foot of the Great Pyramid, while two multi-ton thrones rested on the south edge of the ramp. The stelae formed two sets of three, each forming a linear sculptural tableau that faced the plaza to the south.”[7]

Thus, we are to imagine the Olmec ruler descending the staircase of the Great Pyramid while performing a ritual, perhaps of autosacrifice, in which he would wear a white cotton robe while cutting himself with a stingray spine and perhaps spinning like a dervish to splatter his blood in all four directions of the compass. The crowd watching in awe below would have stood stupefied, perhaps, by his performance. Linda Schele imagines a similar scenario taking place at the early Mayan city of Cerros, c. 50 bc, where the earliest temple likewise faced south toward an open area where crowds would have gathered to watch the kingly spectacle.[8] (Forest of Kings, 111) I imagine something similar must have taken place at La Venta.

Thus, the ruler would have descended the staircase with the weight and authority of the ancestors buried in the northern part of the necropolis behind him, and the symbolic function of his descent might have been to inflect their ancient, eternal powers outward into the temporal area of the forum.

There are, as I have said, five tombs in the royal necropolis at La Venta, located on the other, northern side of the Great Pyramid, which archaeologists call ‘Complex A.’ They were closed off by a fence made out of rectangular standing basalt columns. Basalt was expensive for the Olmecs to use, since there was no stone in this particular region of Mesoamerica; the basalt had to be imported from the Tuxtla mountains far to the northwest.

On the north end of this fenced enclosure, then, there lay a large mound – possibly shaped like a sort of strawberry shortcake bun – which archaeologists call Structure A-2 and within which Tomb A was constructed. This tomb is rather unique in the Mesoamerican world, for it was built out of long, thin basalt columns.

12 such columns supported the sides, and there were 5 across in width, while the roof consisted of 9 columns supported by those on the sides, with an entrance enclosed by 5 more inclining columns rising from floor to ceiling as a sort of door. This type of basalt column architecture occurs in only one other place in Mesoamerica, and that is at San Lorenzo. It was never continued, because it was too costly, according to Ignacio Bernal.[9] Inside the tomb, there was found a few bone splinters and some teeth of two juveniles. Each cluster contained sets of exquisitely carved jadeite objects that included four standing figurines, a seated female figurine wearing a tiny obsidian mirror on her chest, two ear ornaments, a clamshell pendant, beads and a bloodletter in the form of a stingray spine. The burials had been placed on the floor and covered with red cinnabar.[10]

In tomb B, located a few meters to the south of Tomb A, there was found a stone sarcophagus shaped like an Olmec dragon inside of which was found a standing human figurine carved from serpentine, a jadeite bloodletter and two large jadeite ear spools.

Tomb E, which lay between Tombs A and B, was covered by a layer of horizontal basalt columns coated with red cinnabar (normally used by the Chinese in their burials) and clay. Inside this one was found 108 jadeite celts and some other ornaments.

Finally, Tombs C and D lay under Mound A-3. Tomb C was constructed of sandstone slabs covered with red clay. Inside was a layer of cinnabar where the corpse had once lain, while the furnishings had included three pottery vessels, an incised obsidian prismatic blade core, fragments of rock crystal and a collection of greenstone objects, which included 37 serpentine and jadeite celts, 2 decorated jadeite earspools and pendants, a large jadeite tubular bead, a jadeite perforator, 2 jadeite turtle carapace pendants, a serpentine figurine and 110 jadeite spangles. Tomb D, meanwhile, seems to have contained a child burial.[11]

This, then, is the collection of royal ancestors from which the ruling king seems to have derived his authority.

One more little detail is worth mentioning: further to the north of this complex, there was found three colossal Olmec heads arranged in a loose line, all facing out toward to the north. Another such, by itself, was found just to the south of the Great Pyramid, near the staircase. Thus, the heads seem to demarcate the entirety of Complex A together with the Great Pyramid as an enclosed sacred precinct protected by the ancestral dead.

For it seems likely that the colossal Olmec heads were ancestor figures, like the giant moai of Easter Island. The headgear worn by each, furthermore, suggest the type of headgear worn by Mesoamerican ballplayers, at the end of which game the loser was sacrificed, usually by decapitation. It is possible that the heads were portraits of dead rulers, as most archaeologists assume, but I think it more likely that the presence of the headgear and the fact that the portraits are confined only to the head suggests that they are meant to be representations of primordial ballplayers, the first such ballplayers, perhaps, like the Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh.

Thus, with the Olmec site of La Venta, we are presented with the blueprint and prototype for all later Mesoamerican cities: such cities tend to be laid out on north-south axes and they are, furthermore, always equipped with central pyramids inside of which dead kings are buried; most such cities, in addition, revolve around the central institution of ritual kingship, in which the king calls forth the ancestors through a rite of drawing blood, sometimes his own, sometimes those of human sacrifices.

The dead, at this site, as in all other Mesoamerican cities, are revered ancestors whose will must be called upon for blessings on all occasions, and they are, therefore, incorporated into the very idea of the Mesoamerican city. The entire city takes shape around them, and everything unfolds in accordance with their wishes, just as in ancient Mesopotamia, the cities had unfolded from the temple complexes which housed the gods of the city whose goodwill was necessary to keep the city functioning smoothly. In Mesoamerica, it is not the gods, but the revered dead, whose will must be anxiously invoked in order to keep catastrophes at bay. And this central mythic idea held Mesoamerican civilization together for nearly three thousand years, from San Lorenzo to Aztec Tenochtitlan.

The Signature Image

The comparison, so often used by scholars when speaking of technology, of Mesoamerican society with the Near Eastern Neolithic, is apt in more ways than one, for the case of Mesoamerican culture represents an almost complete tyranny of the realm of the dead over the living to a degree of thoroughness not seen in the history of civilization since the days of creepy Neolithic sites like Catalhoyuk or Nevali Cori. Just as we took note, while studying those village cultures, that human existence had seemed to have been actually submerged into the underworld, so that the walls of the living spaces routinely depicted imagery more appropriate to mortuary art (as at Catalhoyuk), so too, it seems to have been the case in Mesoamerica that the entirety of the civilization was actually swallowed up into the underworld itself – which the Mayans termed “Xibalba,” meaning “place of fright” – often depicted, indeed, in Mesoamerican art, as a monster with gaping jaws.

There is a motif in Mesoamerican iconography that is found obsessively reiterated from the Olmecs to the Aztecs in which a human being is shown peering out from the gullet of the open jaws of a beast, as in the case of the above pictured Aztec eagle warrior. The particular beast can vary: sometimes it is an eagle, sometimes a jaguar or a caiman or even some fantastic creature, but the obsessive repetition of the image indicates that it is the signature image of Mesoamerican civilization as a whole.

This image indicates that in Mesoamerican culture, the human soul has been swallowed up by the great beast Xibalba, or else by the astral spirits which populate Xibalba, which amounts to the same thing. In Mesoamerican civilization, then, the astral plane has been allowed to overtake the society completely.

The astral plane is the realm of ghosts, spirits, monsters and demons. It is often visualized in picture form as the underworld of a particular society. To be swallowed up by such beings is tantamount to the erosion and disintegration of the human personality, which is then hijacked by otherworldly entities.

The result?

An unending, and apparently unquenchable, thirst on the part of the dead and the realm of the gods, for the blood of the living.

The Myth of Blood

The symbolism of wearing such headdresses and costumes is meant to illustrate the fact that the hierophant or ruler has identified with, or in actual fact, has become the god he is depicting. The prevalence of such imagery in Mesoamerica is a vestigial survival from the bedrock cult of shamanism upon which the entirety of the Native American world was originally based and which confers upon it its rich orientation toward the display of masks. Mesoamerican society is the great civilization of the mask. No other can rival it for the ubiquity and magnificence of its masks and headdresses and costumes. And whereas the Greeks, by contrast, confined the wearing of masks to the performance of plays, the Mesoamericans wore masks or headdresses for every occasion whatsoever. Nowhere, in other words, did there exist a space in which a human being was allowed to be just a human being. He was always playing the role of a god, animal or spirit in whatever public role he undertook, be it ruler, noble, priest or even merchant. All wore masks of one sort or another, or else mask equivalents in the form of tattoos, ear spools, jade nose plugs, lip bones, face paint, etc. Everyone in Mesoamerican society pretended to be a spirit being at all times.

The mask depersonalizes. It flattens the human being out into a two-dimensional icon that no longer exists in a temporal flow, but rather dwells in an eternal latticework beyond spacetime, like Plato’s Forms. The human personality, with all its three-dimensional complexities, tics, idiosyncrasies, complexes and so forth, is submerged and stereotyped with the intrusion of the god, via the mask, like a stamp seal impressing its image onto fine red clay.

The macroscale result of an entire civilization’s complete depersonalization of its members through the almost continuous wearing of masks is the creation of a society in which the gods and spirits, not human beings, are always making the decisions. For when the human personality is eclipsed by the god, it is the god, and not the person playing the role of the god, who speaks. And the god is always hungry for blood.

Hence, the near total erosion of the human personality through identification with the god leads to the need for constant bloodletting, and it is, of course, well known that blood was the fuel upon which Mesoamerican civilization depended for its functioning.

Nothing, in Mesoamerican society, could take place without the letting of blood. The gods and the ancestors would not heed your summons if you did not cut yourself and offer blood, so kings and nobles are always depicted in Mesoamerican art as cutting themselves in order to draw blood, since it is blood that attracts the spirits.

The great carved relief from the city of Yaxchilan which shows the noblewoman Lady Xoc drawing a rope studded with thorns through her tongue is archetypal here:

The results of her bloodletting are depicted in another wall relief which shows her cowering on the ground before the apparition of a Vision Serpent which towers over her, its jaws open to emit an ancestral being who is thrusting down at Lady Xoc with his spear. This being is Yat-Balam, the ancestral founder of the city’s dynasty.

As Linda Schele and David Freidel explain:

“During the Classic period, the heart of Maya life was the ritual of bloodletting. Giving the gift of blood from the body was an act of piety used in all of their rituals, from the births of children to the burial of the dead. This act could be as simple as an offering of a few drops of one’s blood, or as extreme as the mutilation of the different parts of the body to generate large flows of this precious fluid. Blood could be drawn from any part of the body, but the most sacred sources were the tongue for males and females, and the penis for males. Representations of the act carved on stelae depict participants drawing finger-thick ropes through the wounds to guide the flow of blood down onto paper. Men with perforated genitals would whirl in a kind of dervish dance that drew the blood out onto long paper and cloth streamers tied to their wounded members. The aim of these great cathartic rituals was the vision quest, the opening of a portal into the Otherworld through which gods and the ancestors could be enticed so that the being of this world could commune with them. The Maya thought of this process as giving ‘birth’ to the god or ancestor, enabling it to take physical form in this plane of existence. The vision quest was the central act of the Maya world.”[15]

Now whenever we are perplexed by a society’s bizarre behavior, all we need to do is find out the myth that programs for that behavior and it suddenly makes sense, since myth is the DNA of civilization. The rationale for this particular aspect of Mesoamerican behavior can be found preserved in an Aztec myth that tells of the creation of the first human beings. At the beginning of the present age, the Age of the Fifth Sun, the creator god Quetzalcoatl descended down into Mictlan (the Aztec equivalent of Mayan Xibalba) where he tricked the god of the dead, Mictlantecuhtli, into allowing him to make off with the bones of the human beings who had perished at the end of an earlier age, that of the Fourth Sun. Quetzalcoatl emerged from the underworld and gave the bones to a woman named Cihuacoatl, who ground them up into a kind of flour and made dough out of it. But in order to make the forms cut from this dough come to life, Quetzalcoatl and the other gods all pierced their penises and dripped blood onto the dough in order to make it live.[16]

Thus, blood must be offered back to the gods because they gave their own blood in the beginning in order to create human beings. The myth and its attendant behavior illustrates the existence of a sort of covenant between humans and the gods.

The demand for blood is made by the gods, and in Mesoamerica, it seems, no real objection – except in one case, which we’ll get to momentarily – was ever made on behalf of its population. The entire society willingly acquiesced in this myth and performed accordingly, giving to the gods the blood which they demanded.

In other words, the Mesoamericans never developed much in the way of an immune system to protect them from psychological rape by the gods. And this is evident, furthermore, by the fact that Mesoamerica is the one civilization, in fact, which had no myths of monster slaying, dragon killers or even animal tamers.

No Dragon Slayers?

As I have articulated the idea in a previous book, Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons, myths of the slaying of monsters and dragons are tantamount to a society’s development of a psychological immune system. Such myths are both healthy and necessary, since they protect the developing ego against the corrosive forces of demons and spirits from the astral plane which would otherwise overwhelm and drown it.

Mesoamerica, however, developed no such myths and consequently had no defense against the astral beings which tend to seize possession of the human personality and use it as a vehicle for satisfying their own wishes. Nowhere – in the iconography on the walls of their temples, in the Mayan royal stelae, on their pots and pottery and cups, in their carvings or paintings –  do we find images of heroes killing monsters.

For the dragon, in Mesoamerica, is the Vision Serpent and, as illustrated by the relief carving of Lady Xoc, the Vision Serpent is never resisted, since it is the means by way of which the ancestral dead are enabled to communicate with the living. The Vision Serpent, in Mayan art, brings the summoned ancestor with it inside its belly.

Monsters, dragons, serpents and mythical birds carry the dead to the heavens or to the underworld or else they bring ancestors up to the realm of the living. There is no myth of killing them, for they are essentially shamanic spirit helpers which convey souls between worlds. To kill them would be tantamount to cutting off the means of communication with the otherworlds.

The problem, though, is that, lacking any such myths displaying the growth of the ego and its psychological immune system, the mind simply acquiesces without question to the will of the spirits, which end up tyrannizing over the society with their endless demands for blood.

Now, the only exception to this is the myth of the Hero Twins in the Quiche Mayan epic known as the Popol Vuh. In the opening chapters of that epic, the Hero Twins are depicted as monster slayers who shoot a blowgun at the Celestial Macaw at the top of the World Tree and then kill his two imperious sons, Zipacna, the earth monster and his brother, Earthquake. But I wish to point out that in this sole example of the killing of monsters in Mesoamerican myth, the images are illustrative of astronomical phenomena: when the Twins shoot their blowgun at Seven Macaw and he falls, the story is a code for the disappearance of the Big Dipper over the horizon at a certain time of year, for Seven Macaw was the Big Dipper and the world tree upon which he sits is the Pole Star.[18] His son Zipacna, furthermore, is the giant caiman that forms the roots of the world tree and the bumps of whose back represents the world’s mountains. Killing him and his brother is meant to rid the world of earthquakes and also possibly to prevent the pole star from precessing.

These are the only images in all of Mayan mythology of heroes slaying monsters, but the fact that they are allegorical of astronomical processes lends them a certain inevitability which tends to undercut the heroism of the Twins’ deeds.

But the story of the Popol Vuh leads us to our next point: the Mesoamericans did put up some struggle against astral forces in at least one case: the fight against Death and the Lords of Xibalba.

The Ball Game

The ball court is ubiquitous throughout Mesoamerica. As far as I know, there is not a single city that did not have one. (Even La Venta, right at the beginning of the civilization, seems to have had one or two). This tells us that, at a superficial level, at least, the Mesoamericans loved sports.

But then they did not play sports the way we moderns play them, for purposes of mere entertainment. The ball game was played to the death and the sacrifice of the losers was its inevitable outcome.

The game, furthermore, was a symbolic struggle of the forces of Light against those of Darkness and Death. The ball courts were usually I-shaped and the game was played with two to four players along a central narrow depression wedged in between two sloping artificial hills. The V-shaped furrow thus created very much resembles the cleft in the earth through which the Mayan Maize God is depicted as having emerged from the ground bearing maize plants. It is likely, then, that the design of the court was meant to replicate this V-shaped furrow, for the court is the world beneath the earth: Xibalba, in other words. Thus, with the layout of the court, it is as though someone had taken a wedge and split the earth open so that we could peer down inside it in order to witness the ball game that was being played in Xibalba, where human souls struggled against the Lords of Death for rebirth in the heavenly realm above.

The ball court, then, was the arena, the one arena, in which was depicted the attempt to rescue the fallen human soul from its captivity within the belly of the great beast, Xibalba. This is why it occurs everywhere, since it was meant as a corrective to the otherwise ubiquitous swallowing up of the human soul by astral beings. All media, as Marshall McLuhan never tired of pointing out, are unconscious attempts to correct disturbances in sensory ratios inflicted by the advent of new media. The ball court was the antidote to the image of the swallowed man peering out of the mouth of the beast.

The structure of the Popol Vuh will help to clarify what I mean here, since the Popol Vuh is essentially structured around the myth of the ball game. The fact that it is the one great epic to survive the holocaust of Mesoamerican literature is not accidental, either, for it is the central myth of Mesoamerican civilization, and its existence explains the obsessive prevalence of the ball court.

The story, in briefest outline, goes like this: Before the Hero Twins were born, there existed an earlier pair of twins, their father 7 Hunahpu and his brother 1 Hunahpu. The two were ballplayers who spent most of their time playing the game. Their playing, however, grew so noisy that the Lords of Xibalba, irritated by the commotion on their ceiling, sent messenger owls to summon the twins to the underworld to play ball with the Lords of the Dead (which is, of course, a euphemism for death itself. When one dies, one is summoned to go play the ball game).

The brothers accepted the challenge and descended into the underworld (at the point, I might add, where the Milky Way crosses the ecliptic at Scorpio, the very same entrance to the underworld in the Gilgamesh Epic). There they played ball with the Lords and were promptly defeated. The two were then killed and their bodies buried under the court, except that the head of 7 Hunahpu was decapitated and placed on a calabash tree.

One of the daughters of the underworld lords named Blood Moon happened to wander by and approached the head, fascinated by it. When she got close enough, the head spit on her and she became pregnant with twins. Fearful for her life, she fled to the upperworld, where she took up residence with the mother of 1 and 7 Hunahpu, who was slow to warm to her.

In time, Blood Moon gave birth to the twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who grew up to become ball players like their father and uncle. Once again, the lords of Xibalba were disturbed by the noise and summoned the boys to the underworld for a game. This time, however, things went better for the twins: they passed a series of ordeals imposed upon them in a sequence of “houses.”

The first station was that of the Dark House, in which they were given a torch and cigars that they were required to return in the morning good as new. But instead of burning the torch, they substituted the brightly colored tail of the macaw, which looked like fire to the sentries. And instead of smoking the cigars, they put fireflies on the tips so that it looked like they were lit.

The next test was the Razor House in which knives were supposed to cut them, but they told the knives to go and cut animal flesh instead, and the knives thought this was a better idea.

The third test was the Cold House, which they passed by shutting the cold out.

Then came the Jaguar House: when the jaguars approached to eat them, the boys simply gave them animal bones to gnaw on.

Then came a house of fire, which didn’t burn them as it was supposed to.

And finally, the Bat House, which was full of screeching bats, but they hid from the bats by climbing inside of their blowguns. At one point, though, Hunahpu got curious and stuck his head out and one of the bats swooped down and chopped it off. The following day, the Lords of Xibalba decided to use it as the ball.[20]

Xbalanque,  however, made a fake head out of a carved squash (like carving a pumpkin on Halloween) and put it on his brother’s neck. During the game, they managed to switch the heads back with the help of a rabbit and Hunahpu was restored to normal again.

Next, the boys summoned a couple of wise men and told them that they were about to die and that when they died the two wise men should advise the Lords to grind up their bones and sprinkle them into the river. The wise men agreed.

The boys then constructed a stone oven and threw themselves inside, while the Lords watched, delighted. When the boys were dead, they ground up the bones just as the wise men had advised and sprinkled them into the river. In the river, however, the boys were reborn as catfish (for in Mesoamerica, bones are like seeds from which the dead can be regenerated). Then they got out of the river and transformed themselves into a couple of traveling performers who could do magic tricks: for instance, they sacrificed people and then resurrected them again. The Lords were delighted. Then Xbalanque killed Hunahpu and brought him back to life.

The Lords begged them to do the same thing to them, and the twins obliged and killed them, but they didn’t bring them back to life. And that is how they triumphed over Xibalba.

Then they located their father’s head and put the pieces of his body back together and he was reborn in an apotheosis as the Maize God. Then the two boys ascended into the sky as the sun and the moon.

Thus, the story shows how the human soul (i.e. 7 Hunahpu’s severed head which winds up in the calabash tree) falls down into the belly of the underworld and becomes trapped there (this is equivalent to the image of the human face peering out from the depths of the animal’s gullet). The boys then descend down into the underworld where they defeat the powers of death and retrieve the fallen human soul (7 Hunahpu’s head) and return it back to the world of the light (7 Hunahpu’s rebirth as the Maize God).

So the story is an illustration of the central myth of the ball court, in which the human soul battles against the powers of the astral plane for deliverance into the afterlife. And moreover it is the only such example of a myth illustrating any kind of resistance at all to the powers of the astral realm in Mesoamerica.

The equivalent image, by the way, in modern Western civilization is the vision of the human soul fallen into the machine. In the opening scene of the movie A.I., for instance, we see a woman seated in a chair while a scientist is giving a speech about the creation of artificial life. The woman seems real until the scientist tells her to open her mouth, whereupon he touches a button inside of it which causes the woman’s face to split open and reveal the cool black chromium face of a robot underneath. In the Transformers movies, likewise, the car that opens up to reveal an anthropomorphic being inside of it is an exact equivalent of the animal that opens its mouth to reveal the swallowed human soul in Mesoamerica.

So in our civilization, we too have a problem with the fate of the human soul, only in our case the soul has fallen and become entrapped inside the machine, for the machine is the central problem which our troubled psyches must learn to adapt to, just as the spirits of the astral plane formed the main problem of relationship for the Mesoamerican mind.

Fatal tableau

I would like to conclude by describing a scene from a 16^th century document known as the Lienzo de Tlaxcala. The scene depicts the Spaniards being attacked by the Aztecs inside the palace stronghold at the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan. The Spaniards are shown trapped inside the palace riding on their horses and brandishing their long pikes against the Aztec warriors who surround them. We notice the cannon depicted in one corner firing its blast beneath the image of the Virgin Mary and an icon of the Crucified Christ.[27]

What I would like you to notice about this picture is how it depicts, albeit unintentionally, the contrasting relationships which the two peoples had to the animal world: the Spaniards ride on horseback; the Aztec warriors are on foot, wearing jaguar heads with open mouths through which their own heads peer out.

Note the difference: in the one case, the human being is depicted as hierarchically above the animal, riding on top of it; in the other, the animal has emerged victorious over the human, completely engulfing him.

In a way, this image says it all.

For the essence of the conflict between the Spaniards and the Aztecs was that here were the two civilizations confronting each other in history which were exactly opposed to each other in every conceivable manner, but most especially as regards the position of the astral plane within each of the two cultures. In the case of the Aztecs, we have the paradigmatic civilization in which a complete and total victory of the astral plane over the temporal world of human society had taken place; in the other, that of the Spaniards, we have the great exemplar of the one civilization in history that had gone, psychologically speaking, to the other extreme in totally expelling the astral plane from its purview. Western Christian civilization is the one civilization in history that declared total war against the astral plane, scouring and extirpating every demon, devil and witch that it could find. This process began with the coming of Christ, who was the first to declare war against the astral plane, but it was brought to completion by Western Europe, which spent the entire course of its unfolding chasing the devils away until, by the sixteenth century, it had attained a thorough separation of the realm of the living from that of the dead.

Indeed, Western Europe separated these two worlds, the realms of the living and the dead, as far as it was ever possible to separate them, and in doing so, created one of the most unstable societies in world history. Western Europe is the great exemplar of a society that bases its entire rationale upon change and novelty, and it was only able to do this by carefully and laboriously disentangling itself from the realm of the supernatural, of taboos and superstitions, which normally act as a sort of governor to keep change in ancient societies going at a slow and humanly manageable pace.

With the complete elimination of the astral plane from the field of its discursive formations, however, the West has created the most unstable society in history. Nothing can be relied upon to stay ‘true’ for more than a day or two at most, as the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman has written:

The ongoing effort to understand the world—this world, here and now, apparently familiar yet sparing us no surprises, denying today what it yesterday suggested was true, while giving little assurance that what we hold true at sunset today won’t be refuted tomorrow at dawn—is indeed a struggle…Life appears to be moving too fast for most of us to follow its twists and turns, let alone anticipate them. Planning a course of action and sticking to the plan is an endeavor fraught with risks, whereas long-term planning seems downright dangerous. Life trajectories feel as if they are sliced into episodes; any connections between the episodes, not to mention the causal, determining connections, are discernible (if at all) only in retrospect.[28]

This is the world we Westerners have built by declaring war upon the astral plane together with its entire realm of taboos which exist to prevent a society from becoming exactly what ours has become: a guessing game in which no one has any idea what is going to be considered “true” tomorrow and consequently can make no long term plans of any sort.

Mesoamerica, on the other hand, took things to the opposite extreme and paid for its complete submersion into all things astral by denying human freedom and building a gigantic industry out of human sacrifice. The modern West, though, has gone the other way and eliminated the religious world altogether.

The results, in both cases, have been equally disastrous.

[2] Ignacio Bernal, The Olmec World, Doris Heyden, trans., 1969 Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973, p. 5.

[3] Susan Toby Evans, Ancient Mexico & Central America: Archaeology and Culture History, London: Thames & Hudson, 2008, p. 104.

[4] Linda Schele and David Freidel, A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya, NY: Quill, William Morrow, 1990, pp. 86-87.

[5] As are most Chinese cities.

[6] Ibid., Evans, p. 175.

[7] Richard Diehl, The Olmecs, London: Thames & Hudson, 2004, p. 65.

[8] Ibid., Schele, p. 111.

[9] Ibid., Bernal, p. 38.

[10] Ibid., Diehl, p. 70-71.

[11] Diehl, ibid., pp. 70-72.

[12] Roberta H. Markman and Peter T. Markman, The Flayed God: The Mythology of Mesoamerica, San Francisco: HarperSanfrancisco, 1992, p. 192.

[13] Ibid., Evans, p. 345 for illustration.

[14] See Mary Miller and Karl Taube, The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, London: Thames & Hudson, 1993, p. 83 for illustration of an eagle warrior.

[15] Ibid., Schele and Freidel, p. 89.

[16] Ibid., Markman and Markman, p. 77.

[17] Ibid., Markman and Markman, p. 76.

[18] Dennis Tedlock, The Popol Vuh, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1996, p. 238.

[19] David Carrasco, Religions of Mesoamerica, SF: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990, p. 35.

[20] In the vision of the Mesoamerican cosmos, the earth is thought to exist as a flat rectangle or square surrounded by an ocean. There are thirteen levels of the cosmos extending up above the earth, while below it, in the underworld, there are nine. Each of these levels, in Aztec cosmology, furthermore, has a name indicative of the qualities which the human soul is thought to experience at that level: the Place of Water Passage, for example, lies immediately beneath the earth; the next level down is the Place Where the Hills Clash Together; this is followed by the Place of the Obsidian Mountain; the Place of the Obsidian Wind; then the Place Where Banners Are Flourished; then the level Where Someone is Shot by Arrows followed by Where People’s Hearts are Eaten and the bottommost level, the Place of the Dead, Where the Streets are on the Left. (Markman, 157) The names of these underworlds do recall the names of the houses in which the Hero Twins of the Popol Vuh were tested: the Dark House, for instance, recalls the Place of the Obsidian Mountain; while the Razor House suggests the level Where Someone is Shot by Arrows and so forth.

[21] Carrasco, ibid., p. 60.

[22] Markman and Markman, ibid., pp. 141-142.

[23] Carrasco, ibid. p. 61.

[24] Markman and Markman, ibid., p. 354.

[25] Markman and Markman, ibid., p. 372.

[26] Aguilar-Moreno, ibid., p. 167.

[27] Richard F. Townsend, The Aztecs, London: Thames & Hudson, 2000, p. 38.

[28] Zygmunt Bauman, Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008, p. 1-2.

Fragment of a Preface for a Discarded Manuscript

by John David Ebert

Bedouins

The desert gave birth to civilization.

Mesopotamia and Egypt both came into being in hot, dry desert climates alive with palm fronds, braying donkeys and the squeaking of shadufs drawing up water from wells. Camels, Bedouins, veils and dust: mud brick buildings, red granite cliffs, turquoise skies and crescent-shaped boats going up and down rivers and waterways. Canals splayed across the land like dendrites in a primitive nervous system shooting strips of water across muddy fields to nourish thin and spindly shafts of grain. Heat, flies and dusty pink horizons. Groves of date palms and tamarisk trees the only shelter from a burning disc in the heavens that settles at dusk to a glowing coal where the sky meets the earth.

Such is the world from out of which High Civilization emerged: mathematics and writing, astronomy and sculpture, monumental architecture and cylinder seals, gods and theogonies. A world of mental striations as topologically convoluted as a farmer’s network of fields interlaced by canals and ditches. A world of cracked plaster walls and crumbling roofs; of frayed reedwork boats and threadbare linen clothing; of cows, sheep and goats.

This is the world of the first great cities. But, take note: it is also the world that gave birth to the three great monotheisms, founded by Moses, Jesus and Mohammed: all religions favored by the desert, and all inimical—utterly—to life in cities. The three monotheisms bear the hatred of cities within them like striations in woodgrain: the Bedouin’s antipathy to life in cities, for they were all born, these gods—this God—out in the red granite cliffs beneath sagging palm fronds where lizards dart across rocks. As the French theoretician Regis Debray put it: “The city closes man in on himself; the desert opens him up to the Other. The polytheist prefers the vegetal, embellishments and valleys; his despiser prefers the mineral, abrupt canyons, limestone cliffs limned with geological phantasmagoria.”[1]

The desert is the home of monotheism, as Ernst Renan once put it.

And monotheism is a type of religiosity that is inherently, and structurally, opposed to life in cities, for it is a religion of nomads and camel drivers; of goat-herders and men living in tents, like the prehistoric Jacob wandering with his sons across the desertscapes of Palestine. The 10^th Commandment, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house,” may actually be an injunction to the nomad to keep his eyes on the grainy, shimmering horizons and the arcing wave-shaped, wind-blown dunes and away from the cities of the plain, nestled and secure within the mental wombs of their ancient protective gods.

And, just as in chaos theory, in which large effects ultimately result from very small initial conditions, so the monotheistic shepherd’s antipathy to cities will later become the general incommensurability of the Abrahamic worldview with science. The Scientific Civilization, also built by the West, is a civilization that comes out of life in cities, that is to say, the Medieval world of walled cities, towns and hamlets whose capitalistic metabolism nourished the very conditions out of which the scientific mentality could grow and thrive; the Monotheistic Society, though, is a world rooted in the horizontal life of nomads, goats, donkeys, camels and tents. Hence, in the Book of Genesis, Cain (whose name means “smith”) is cursed from the very beginning: nothing good, this text says, can come from technology or the worldview that leads to life in cities. Cain’s son Enoch is the builder of the world’s very first city, and his descendant Tubal-cain becomes the world’s first master of metallurgy. It is thus no coincidence that the Bible portrays Cain as the one who introduces murder into the world, for the Abrahamic vision thereby equates technology with cities, corruption and death. The city builder who, unlike the nomad, is locked into place and is therefore constrained to move vertically, can only ever give birth to his Towers of Babel, those impious and hubristic ladders to the heavens which confer on the city builder his heaven-storming arrogance.

Cain is the farmer; Abel the shepherd. But the excess produce of the farmer will require huge silos and storage buildings within which to store the grain, and soon, this will lead to the necessity for protective enclosures such as walls, armies and temples. One of the very first cities, in fact, the Samarran site of Tell es Sawwan (circa. 6000 BC), was nothing more than a collection of seven large storage silos for grain which, in later levels of the site, gave birth to a walled compound, one of the world’s first walled settlements, in fact. Gilgamesh was later regarded as a builder of walls, but the animal man Enkidu, on the other hand, climbs his way up from the deserts to the inside of the protective womb of Uruk itself: he was precisely the sort of dusty fellow that Gilgamesh had built his walls to keep out. However, Gilgamesh’s partnership with this proto-Martu was prophetic of the future of Near Eastern religion, which would unfold, not from the life of the city dweller, as in the days of the ancients, but from the dwellers in tents who had, from time immemorial, circled the cities as roving satellites. Gilgamesh was, in a sense, the lord of civilization’s past (hence, the true significance of his role as keeper of the dead, for the dead are merely bits of fossilized Past); while the future belonged to the Enkidus who claimed the world of cliffs and valleys, steppes and plains as their home.

The world’s most ancient deity of writing, the Sumerian goddess Nisaba, also happened to be the goddess of grain, for writing was originally invented in Sumer as a means of keeping track of economic flows going in and out of the temples: grain to this god and its priesthood; barley for that man and his fieldwork, etc. Thus, writing, like the first walls, and the farmer’s act of reaping and threshing and storing his grain, is part of the new womb-world of enclosures that the first cities brought into being.

But it is precisely such enclosures that the monotheistic shepherd blows apart: the Tower of Babel must be stopped by introducing foreign languages to break down its lines of communication so that it can no longer be built; the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah must be flattened by divine wrath for their incubation of bizarre and polymorphic forms of sexuality; the earliest cities themselves wrecked by a gigantic Flood, which washes them away like so much ruined silt and debris from the river’s ebb tide.

The monotheistic nomad, and his invisible God, wants nothing of enclosures, which recall too much of the womb and the Great Mother. He wants only open, endless vistas shimmering from one muddy horizon to the next; wants only the freedom to move about unconstrained and wander from one desert spring to the next; wishes only to follow the ancient desert trails of his Bedouin forebears who have tracked the endless, featureless wastes of the desert scrub before him.

For our blackboard, then, another formula: Bondage vs. Freedom; arborescence vs. mobility; submission to a king vs. the shattering visions of the Prophets.

Dark Age

The main event that separates the mentalities of Gilgamesh and Akhenaten from those of the Abrahamic founders is the Dark Age of the 12^th Century BC that descended upon the Eastern Mediterranean. It was at this time that the Hittite Empire collapsed; the Mycenaean civilization was destroyed; towns and villages all along the Palestinian littoral sacked and burned; and the invasions of the Sea Peoples, which flooded Egypt first in 1225 BC, and then in a second wave around 1184 BC in the time of Ramses III. Populations and peoples were on the move everywhere: the Trojan War had recently taken place, and very possibly, the Exodus occurred at about this time also. Peoples and tribes were in motion, undergoing a massive Volkerwanderung. A major drought, too, had settled in, perhaps one of the causative factors of this dark age.

As Julian Jaynes wrote in his Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, the cumulative effect of this disaster was to weaken the influence of the gods upon the human mind, for it threw the very concept of authority, in both heaven and on earth, into question.  As Jaynes points out, Mesopotamia seems to have reverted to the magical consciousness structure as a fallback in this age of the silence of the gods, for at this time in the Near East, there is an explosion of interest in divination, omens, astrology and other magical practices as part of a desperate search to confer meaning upon catastrophe.

This sweeping and clearing of the old gods from the stage of world history, however, resulted in the creation of a new mentality of subjective individualized consciousness amongst both the Hebrews and the Greeks, for the breakdown of what Jaynes termed the bicameral mind corresponds to the period of the advent of what the Swiss philosopher Jean Gebser called the “mental consciousness structure,” or what Rudolf Steiner called “the intellectual soul.” The old age in which the actions of men were almost entirely determined by the commands of their gods was over, and already with the Odyssey, we begin to see the horizons of a new kind of self-motivated human consciousness that is beginning to shape itself in despite of the wishes of the gods. As the civilization of ancient Greece evolves, the voices of the gods become ever more and more distant and the human ego, together with its rationalistic thought processes, begins to step forward and command center stage.

In the Near East, this development is manifested by the Hebrew invention of the one, true, invisible God. The swarming chaos of polytheism is gradually, as Hebrew consciousness evolves, diminished as consciousness becomes centered in the axial relationship between the subjective human individual and his God. The voices of the many gods are gradually drowned out over the centuries as the one god, an invisible one, emerges to command dominance.

With the three transformations represented by Moses, Jesus and Mohammed, this god undergoes a process of evolution and metamorphosis. Nietzsche, in his Zarathustra, wrote of the three metamorphoses of the Spirit as the transformation from the camel, to the dragon, to the child, but in the case of the three monotheisms, the transformations proceed from the donkey to the lamb to the camel.

Events

But, in reality, we are dealing with three separate events of world history, events of the kind described by Alain Badiou in his book Being and Event. Here is how he describes his event theory in his book Ethics:

Let us say that a subject, which goes beyond the animal (although the animal remains its sole foundation). . . needs something to have happened, something that cannot be reduced to its ordinary inscription in ‘what there is.’ Let us call this supplement an event, and let us distinguish multiple-being, where it is not a matter of truth (but only of opinions), from the event, which compels us to decide a new way of being. Such events are well and truly attested: the French Revolution of 1792, the meeting of Heloise and Abelard, Galileo’s creation of physics, Haydn’s invention of the classical musical style…

From which ‘decision,’ then, stems the process of a truth? From the decision to relate henceforth to the situation from the perspective of its evental supplement. Let us call this a fidelity. To be faithful to an event is to move within the situation that this event has supplemented, by thinking (although all thought is a practice, a putting to the test) the situation ‘according to’ the event. And this, of course—since the event was excluded by all the regular laws of the situation—compels the subject to invent a new way of being and acting in the situation.[2]

Thus, Badiou introduces the idea that new chains of causes and effects are set into motion by certain specific human beings who maintain fidelity to an event, which irrupts as a singularity within the banalities of the status quo of a social situation. Through what Badiou calls an “interpretative intervention,” an event is named and designated as “belonging to the situation,” and through fidelity to this event, truth is brought into being as a universal singularity along with the very idea of a human subject. The event of culture subjevitates us, according to Badiou, demarcating the human subject from other ordinary human beings.

The Christ-event, for example, unfolds, according to Badiou, in the following manner: his death and crucifixion are interpreted by the apostles as not just any ordinary death of a man, but rather, as the death of God (hence, interpretative intervention); the evental site of this event is Palestine, and its metastructure is the Roman imperium which forms the “state of the situation” within which the event takes place. Through fidelity to this event, the human being becomes a Christian subject and the death of God become man a universal Truth.[3]

Human cultural history is thus made up of ruptures and discontinuities in which the incommensurability of a singular event with the status quo of a situation acts as a means of moving history forward, but not, in Badiou’s cosmos, with any sort of direction, for history is meaningless and based upon mere chance, in his view. No spiritual forces intervene: only human fidelities to cultural events that make them “true” and therefore world-transforming.

In the case of the three great monotheisms, we are faced with three such ruptures in the banal flow of Western religious history: what I would call the Sinai Event, the Christ Event and the Event of the Cave. It is through fidelity to the Event which occurred at the top of Mount Sinai—and also at its foot, when Yahweh first announced His presence in history through the burning bush that spoke to Moses and told him to go back to Egypt—in which Moses brought down the Decalogue and along with it, the entire body of rules, laws and proscriptions that formed the functioning body of the Hebraic religion. It is through fidelity to this unique Event, this historical singularity that ruptures history irrevocably in half, that the contemporary Jew subjectivates himself as a Jewish subject of his religion.

Likewise, a similar fidelity to the Event of Christ’s crucifixion—and especially, the witnessing of his resurrection—transforms the modern Christian into a Christian subject, i.e. the member of a world-shaping religion.

And it is through fidelity to the Event of the Cave, in which Gabriel descended to dictate the Koran to Mohammed, that the modern Muslim constitutes himself as a subject. That one event created the First Cause of a new chain of causes that has effectuated a transformation of world history ever since, and the modern Muslim constitutes himself through his fidelity to that one, single, originating Event.

Badiou’s philosophy, though, is designed to emphasize the subject who is faithful to the event rather than the initial creator who set the event in motion in the first place. He rather uncomfortably terms such creators “intervenors” as a means, perhaps, of evading the old idea that history is created by the Great Man. However, the problem is that an interpretative intervenor comes after the fact of an event that has already long since transpired—just as the dream precedes its befuddled analysis–for the intervenor only brackets and sets aside the event as culturally signficant. He does not initiate it. Badiou, wishing to avoid the cult of the Great Man, quietly steps around the event as origin and focuses upon the faithful who make the event into a historical reality by deciding upon its status of “belonging to the situation.”

But without the visionary imaginations of Moses, Christ and Mohammed, there would, of course, be no religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. These religions began somewhere, and they did not begin in the minds of the faithful who indeed made them a historical reality, but rather in the creative imaginations of three desert dwellers who, like Gilgamesh and Akhenaten, were completely dissatisfied with the “state of the situation” of their times.

It is from their imaginations that entire worlds have come into being, whole civilizations that have been built, brick by brick, on the groundplans laid out by their visionary fever dreams. While I have no wish to regress back to the nineteenth century Great Man theory of culture, it is nonetheless important to locate the origins of these religions somewhere, and that somewhere happens to lie in the creative imagination of the desert dwelling nomad who was still embedded inside a cosmos made out of gods, demons and jinn which could still speak and converse with him.

It is the world-making potentialities of these visions that I am interested in investigating here, for each one drew up a new metastructure, a new macrosphere within which the human being was, from henceforth, to constitute himself as a subjectivity. Not a member of a particular city any longer, but a being contained inside the mind of a God, whose mental space would come to replace the physical world space defined by the mudbrick and stone of his earlier walled cities.

Indeed, these new walls were made out of subtler stuff than mud and stone. They were now to be made out of ideas. Thus, the new world space inside which the human being is to be contained is a mindspace, and it is this mental wombsphere which comes to replace the physical city state as macrosphere. That is the innovation of the Three Great Monotheisms.

Thus, the human being becomes an embryo that now lives and dwells and is fed and nourished inside the mind of a God. Where he lives no longer matters.

[1] Regis Debray, God: an Itinerary (London: Verso Books, 2004), 39.

[2] Alain Badiou, Ethics: an Essay on the Understanding of Evil (London: Verso Books, 2001), 41-42.

[3] Alain Badiou, Being and Event (London: Continuum Books, 2007), 212-13.

Spheres I: Bubbles by Peter Sloterdijk

Reviewed by John David Ebert

The first volume of Peter Sloterdijk’s theoretical opus Spheres is now available in English translation from Semiotexte and is due out shortly. This volume, entitled Bubbles, investigates those types of social spheres which Sloterdijk terms “microspheres,” which have to do with personal, one-to-one human relationships, especially of the amniotic kind. The second volume, Globes, articulates his idea of “macrospheres,” or the cosmological containers inside which humanity has been situated until about the 15th century, while the final volume, Foams, articulates the fate of spheres in the Modern world, in which each individual inhabits his or her own sphere, all of which rub up against one another to create a kind of social “foam.”

The reader familiar with esoteric traditions will at once recognize that the first volume updates the old microcosmic idea of the personal destiny and fate of the human soul, while the second volume is a recasting of what the Neoplatonists once termed the anima mundi or World Soul. The third volume, however, is entirely non-traditional, since the idea of each individual occupying his own sphere is rather unique to Western Modernity, a society that specializes, one might say, in generating lonely individuals.

Bubbles explores, then, this idea of the microsphere, that is to say, one on one human relationships. Sloterdijk makes the rather startling assertion that we are actually never alone psychologically. Even in the womb, the existence of a Levinasian Other was actually the placenta, according to Sloterdijk, and the absence of the placenta leaves a kind of etheric scar on the human psyche such that it is like Orpheus always yearning for his lost Eurydice. The ancient myth of the double — in Egypt, the ka, or in Rome, the genius — is an attempt to account for this missing piece of the human psyche. This is a startling, and very fresh idea, to say the least.

Another microsphere is the personal relationship between the mother and the embryo in the womb, especially forming what Sloterdijk calls a sonosphere, in which the embryo can, indeed, hear sounds going on outside the womb. There are relationships formed by lovers, another kind of microsphere; and twins, especially mythical twins like Christ and Judas, who form interfacial dyads.

The book opens with a sustained meditation on Yahweh’s creation of Adam as a clay vessel into which Yahweh breathes life. We are, according to Sloterdijk, always part of a breathed commune, for the gods are forever pictured in ancient myth breathing life into humans, who are therefore always conceived as dyadic: man plus God. But then, in our relationships with the Other, we are always, in one way or another, breathed upon, and are therefore constantly in an intimate microspheric interinvolvement with someone else. Sloterdijk calls this the “Breathed Commune.”

The book ends, symmetrically, with a meditation on Mary’s giving birth to Christ, as an image of the mother-child dyad that brings the reader up to the edge of the Renaissance, when the major spheric disintegration took place once Copernicus et. al. started to question the notion of being encased inside whirling cosmic macrospheres. When those spheres were shattered, all hell, did indeed, break loose, and humanity was set on the path toward Nietzsche’s annunciation of the death of God as a disguised cry that the human being now, for the first time ever, faced a gigantic cosmos alone and unprotected by any metaphysical immune system. Hence, the anxieties of the 20th century, its chaos of wars and its profusion of sages, each of whom desperately attempts to offer a pharmaceutical balm to soothe the anxiety of being-in-the-world, as Heidegger put it.

Sloterdijk, indeed, picks up from where Heidegger left off, for it was Heidegger’s primary task to situate the lonely philosophical Ego into a specific and very concrete world, where he is always already engaged in doing something, thus putting an end to the subject-object dichotomy that had haunted philosophy since Descartes. Sloterdijk picks up the tradition of embedding the individual in a context by saying that not only is the human already in the world doing something, but he is specifically inside a container of some sort that functions as an extension of the mother womb. He or she is always involved with someone — even when no one appears to be present — inside an invisible environment of one ontological sort or another. Ontology, then, is applied immunology.

If it is the task of the artist, as both Heidegger and McLuhan pointed out, to make invisible environments perceptible through art, Sloterdijk, as a theoretician, is performing something very similar, for he  is drawing our attention to the invisible worlds that very often surround us without our even noticing them, including missing human Others.

Bubbles is a brilliant work from a thinker whose main engagement has been to build bridges between postmodern thought and the kinds of Modernist macronarratives that had been typical of the German mentality prior to World War II. Sloterdijk, unlike most of the French theoreticians, is not comfortable tossing the history of great German metaphysics aside in favor of deconstructing them and thus neutralizing their authoritarian validity. He wants to retain what was great in that tradition — namely, its penchant for metaphysics — in an age that no longer gives metaphysical thought much validity (at least, not in the academic world). Consequently, metaphysics has suffered the fate of being tossed into the murky and intellectually irresponsible bargain bin of the New Age, where such ideas are treated with rampant anti-intellectualism and scorn for cultivated and reasoned discourse generally. New Agers can neither write well, nor think clearly, but Sloterdijk stands, for the thoughtful person who remains hesitant, in spite of the dazzling profusion and brilliance of French po-mo thought, to just discard such ideas without further ado. After all, the entire history of human civilization was built out of metaphysical ideas. Surely, they must have had some validity to them?

Admittedly, the danger of adhering to them — Nazi mysticism is a classic case — can lead to annihilation wars when they are taken dogmatically or connected to political contexts. However, kept safely out of the arena of politics, metaphysics is surely food for the soul, capable of enlivening and expanding its horizons without necessarily dimming the mind’s intellectual capacities.

In sum: for those readers who like esoteric ideas and are simultaneously interested in postmodern thinking, Sloterdijk is your man. Habermas, predictably, has accused him of regressing to murky German metaphysics, but I don’t think that is the case: rather, Sloterdijk enters the arena of murky ideas with a very clear and sober intellect polished by his thorough immersion in French postmodern theory, so that it is an entirely different experience from reading Spengler, say, or Wagner’s intellectually torturous essays. Postmodern thinking sharpens the intellect and enables it to discern valuable metaphysical ideas from useless ones due to its inherent skepticism. In fact, anyone with a sober head who is interested in metaphysics should soak themselves in postmodern theory first; then go back, once one’s mental immune system has been built up, to retrieve from the midden heap what looks like it might still be usable.

I think the idea of micro and macrospheres is still a good and useful tool for illuminating cultural problems and I am glad that someone like Sloterdijk has taken the necessary time and trouble to guide us through them from an altogether new, and very valuable, vantage point.

I look forward to the second volume.

By John David Ebert

1. The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler (1918-1924): A little known and rarely discussed fact is that Heidegger, in his early lectures, read Spengler and was clearly both concerned and worried about the implications of his ideas. Spengler also seems to have been instrumental in the creation of Heidegger’s idea of Dasein, since he, too, uses the word, but in a different, more vitalistic-Romantic way.  In Spengler, Dasein, or Being, is opposed to Wachsein, or Waking Being, as instinct is opposed to intellect. World civilizations are unfoldings of Dasein, or Being, by supra-rational entelechies that function like cultural monads which unfold their life cycles deterministically from within. Though history appears to be a mess, Spengler saw that it was ordered by these 8 great civilizations, each of which irrefutably underwent a process of form-evolution that involved the birth of a particular Dasein, its growth and attainment of cultural maturity through a mastery of the arts, followed by a subsequent loss of such ability and decline into historical senescence and cultural irrelevance.  The most sobering part of Spengler’s theory, every part of which seems to be daily confirmed by one or another new headline, is that we in the West have passed the moment of our Greek-like mastery of art and culture and have entered a Roman-like period of militarism and empire with its attendant lack of competence in the arts. The shifting from metaphysical concerns in philosophy to economic-pragmatic concerns is symptomatic.

2. Being and Time by Martin Heidegger (1927): It’s become a bit of a cliche to cite this book, but there’s no getting around it: Heidegger almost single-handedly altered the entire thoughtscape of the subsequent unfolding of 20th century thought and this is his best, or at least, his most famous work. It is impossibly difficult to read for a first-timer, who is better advised to begin, as I did, by reading Heidegger’s early lectures, especially The History of the Concept of Time which is basically a dress rehearsal for the book. Heidegger in this book takes the subject-object dichotomy that has marred the history of philosophy since Descartes by pointing out that the cogito is tantamount to a dehistoricizing of the “I,” that is, a removal of the subject to some “objective” and non-existent thought sphere in which he floats like a discarnate entity, deworlded and shorn of cultural context. Those cultural contexts were originally termed by Heidegger in his early lectures Daseins, but he later somewhat changed the concept to cover the idea of human-existence-in-the-world-as such as opposed to other types of mentalities. He eliminated the subject-object dicothomy by embedding the “I” in a specific life world in which he is always already doing things and is engaged in goal-oriented tasks. He is “thrown” into a certain historical circumstance, and anxiety about death characterizes him all the way.

3. Technics and Civilization by Lewis Mumford (1934) For the pre-WWII American contribution to the noosphere, I think we have to single out Lewis Mumford, a nowadays little read American cultural genius who was one of the first to fathom the implications of the technological hi-jacking of the planet by industrial civilization. His book on technology comes just after Spengler’s short but dense Man and Technics, which was one of the first great works of theory to fathom the coming failure of industrial civilization to interface with the biosphere, a failure that is becoming more and more apparent to us today. Mumford’s book is larger, however, and more carefully thought out. He divides the technological history of the West into three epochs: the Eotechnic, which is the age beginning with the advent of the mechanical clock by Gothic monks in the thirteenth century and extending down to about the eighteenth, whereupon, with the Paleotechnic, the motive forces of wind, water and wood which had guided the Eotechnic gave way to coal and steam as the motive powers and also the industrial poisoning of the biosphere with carbon outgassing. With the Neotechnic that begins with the advent in the late nineteenth century of technologies based upon the manipulation of electricity, mechanics gives way to electrodynamics and the birth of a new technical horizon. Mumford was very pessimistic about contemporary civilization: indeed, he had read Spengler and had a sober assessment of its inevitable destiny of collapse and disintegration. Also, like Spengler, Mumford detested Modern Art and modernity in general, but no one was ever as eloquent about the problems and cultural issues raised by technology as he. He is, indeed, one of the few American philosophers which European thinkers have bothered to read and cite, for his influence on Deleuze and Guattari, and to some extent, Baudrillard, was definite.

4. The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin (1935ish): Though this book was technically not published until 1982 in German, Benjamin worked on it through the entire decade of the 1930s up until his death in 1940. It is a bizarre book, one of the strangest ever written: it is a mammoth tome composed of scattered thoughts and reflections about the emergence of the lineaments of popular culture in nineteenth century Paris. It is, in many ways, the first media studies book; Benjamin was one of the first to take popular culture seriously as a subject for intellectual discourse. The book is itself arranged like an arcade: hallway after hallway of aphorisms, quotes and reflections of the dreamlike nature of capitalism and its strange new world of bread and circuses. Few people nowadays have the attention span to read through it, but it is a sort of ramshackle masterpiece with aphorisms on pop culture that already look ahead to those of McLuhan.

5. The Ever-Present Origin by Jean Gebser (1949): Gebser, like Heidegger, was influenced by his reading of Spengler, but his response was totally different. Whereas Heidegger proceeded with the End of Metaphysics, Jean Gebser built a new theory of the evolution of human consciousness constructed out of a sequence of structures of thought, mainly inspired by the Hindu analysis of consciousness in the Upanishads as a cycle that moves daily from dreamless sleep, to dreaming sleep to waking consciousness. Thus, in Gebser, the ancient Magical Consciousness Structure of oral and pre-literate tribal societies, with its unitary conception of the world, and its frank belief in the reality of the paranormal, corresponds to dreamless sleep; the Mythical Consciousness Structure that emerges with writing and High Civilization, with dreaming consciousness; and the Mental Consciousness Structure that begins with the Greeks, with Waking Consciousness. Gebser adds to these the Integral Consciousness Structure that he saw coming into being in the late nineteenth century: in fact, precisely where Spengler saw a decline of culture in the nineteenth century, Gebser saw the advent of a new consciousness structure, one that took up and relativized all the earlier structures. From Gebser’s point of view, Spengler’s book is really about the decline and disintegration of the Mental (a.k.a. Perspectival) Consciousness Structure; Spengler missed the significance of the Integral structure that is the organizing force behind the entire Modernist development in the arts and the sciences which transcends, but includes all the others.

6. History of Madness by Michel Foucault (1961): This is my favorite work by Foucault (the unabridged edition, that is), a long rambling excursion into the evolution of the idea of madness in Western civilization. Foucault shows how there is no such thing as “madness” per se; only culturally created ideas of sanity vs. insanity, depending upon the particular cultural episteme of the time. The lepers of the Medieval Age disappear and give way to the drifting Ship of Fools, real ships containing madmen that were sent floating off from European town to town during the time of the Renaissance. In these days, the mad were regarded as possessors of a higher wisdom: the Fool in King Lear contains all the great insights into what is going on, and the title of Erasmus’ book In Praise of Folly says it all. But with the advent of rationalism in the seventeenth century, the Great Confinement took place, and institutions of confinement began springing up all over Europe, institutions in which the insane, the indigent, the crippled and the criminal were all thrown in together as the socially undesirable. Foucault is interested in analyzing how those in power determine who belongs to a social configuration and who is excluded and why. It is essential reading.

7. Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan (1964): For post war American theoreticians, there is no comparison to McLuhan. His insights were so fundamental that they helped change the course of French po-mo philosophy: Baudrillard would not be Baudrillard without his reading of McLuhan, and the same goes for thinkers like Paul Virilio, Deleuze and others. In this book, McLuhan, having read and absorbed Mumford, theorized for the first time in intellectual history not so much about technology as such, but specifically about media of communication, due largely to his reading of the books of Harold Innis, technically the first to theorize that media of communication are shaping forces in the thought-scapes of civilizations. McLuhan, however, though technically an academic like Innis, was in spirit no academic at all, but a visionary thinker, a sort of prose poet: reading him is an experience closer to reading Nietzsche or Schopenhauer than it is to literary criticism, which is what McLuhan started out doing. But under the influence of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, McLuhan’s word wizardy kicked in, and his aphoristic style of presenting incredibly complex insights in just a few words is second only to Nietzsche. People, in fact, still get McLuhan wrong and think that the phrase “the medium is the message” is just window dressing: they’re wrong. The medium is everything, and determines the content of what flows through it. There is no such thing, for instance, as intelligent, reasoned discourse on television, despite the wonderful attempts of people like Dick Cavett and Bill Moyers to make intellect work through light speed technologies. The attention span is too short, however, to keep the viewer watching, and so complex thoughts must be boiled down to sound bites–as McLuhan, in fact, had a genius for doing, which is why he played so well on TV talk shows–in order to make them work at all. The Internet, too, McLuhan would have pointed out, is absolutely antithetical to the intellect and is currently the sole and single force responsible for destroying the entire mediascape of the Gutenberg Galaxy more thoroughly than television ever could have done.

8. A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1980): Slavoj Zizek insists throughout his writing that Deleuze’s collaborations with Guattari are actually his weaker books, but I beg to differ: all of them are fantastic. This book, in particular, is a dazzling work of postmodern genius, filled with a landslide of concepts and great ideas. If philosophy, as Deleuze says, is all about the creation of new concepts, then this book is a work of philosophy par excellence: the Body Without Organs is here, fully worked out; the famous treatise on Nomadology also; the idea of rhizomatic structures of thought and culture as opposed to those of the arborescent, or hierarchical type; the author as a subject of enunciation, or mouthpiece of a collectivity rather than as creator; the intersection of art, music, science and philosophy. The book’s worldview is quite compatible with the self-organizing systems of chaos theory, a great deal of which was worked out in France with Rene Thom and others, and D&G were clearly familiar with their ideas. The elimination of chapters and chronology in favor of “plateaus,” in which tension fields of ideas ramify and explode in all directions, is brilliant. This is a work of genius: my favorite work of postmodern philosophy, in fact, and a testament against the cliche that postmodern thought is bereft of fresh ideas. On the contrary, as Deleuze and Guattari reveal, it is the only source of new ones.

9. Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard (1981): This book is as small and concisely written as D&G’s is epic and mammoth in scale and scope. But the prose is dazzling, and it is really the first work to pick up from where McLuhan left off and to point out that our contemporary postmodern culture is, like Seinfeld, a show about nothing. Behind the sensory overload of the viral profusion of images all around us, we are really trying to conceal and cover up the fact that we no longer believe in anything and that behind all these images, there is nothing, nothing at all. Images, in other words, especially electronic ones, have actually replaced the ontological status once occupied by the ideas of metaphysical realities underlying this one. Instead, hyperreality is the New Beyond, and it is a Beyond that is utterly meaningless, beyond the mere repetition and profusion of its own images. We are engaged, according to Baudrillard, in a vast attempt to replace reality with a gigantic simulacrum: a soundstage of phenomenal reality in which, for the first time, noumena have ceased to exist and are no longer postulated behind, beyond or within it. The telos of postmodernity is to produce images virally; and the primary struggle is against a form of Evil which Baudrillard simply defines as that which resists the smooth functioning of any system whatsoever. Cancer and AIDS resists the smooth functioning of the immune system; terrorism attempts to disrupt the flow of globalization; and so forth. Nobody writes with the kind of smooth, espresso-style prose of Baudrillard, with the concision of writing and brilliance of metaphor and image that is his forte.

10. Being and Event by Alain Badiou (1988): This is the central theoretical vision in Badiou’s oeuvre and it makes for forbiddingly technical reading, especially to the mathematical outsider, as I am. However, the core of the idea is astonishingly simple: Events create subjects. In response to Deleuze and Foucault’s annihilation of the human subject, Badiou attempts to restore him to a position of centrality by claiming that a human subject — as opposed to the mere animal human — is created when that subject becomes faithful to a Truth Event. Such events are not just any happenings, but moments of cultural singularities at the inception of a religion, say, or a new art movement or a major development in mathematics. Thus, there is the Christ Event; the Cantor event of set theory; the Haydn event of the invention of the classical style in music; the historical event of the French Revolution, etc. These events enter into banal situations as unmapped novelties, or singularities, which are then taken into account, much as are anomalies in Thomas Kuhn’s ‘revolutionary science,’ as belonging to the ’situation.’ The world, according to Badiou, is a series of situations, mostly banal, that are ruptured and broken by the sudden discontinuities configured by events. It is the maintaining of fidelity to such an event that creates the human being as a subject, especially when such events — and these events can be personal, too, such as a love affair — are tested and questioned and the individual’s fidelity is shaken by such tests. It is up to the individual, however, to maintain the reality of these truth events by remaining unshakeably faithful to them. The reader is advised to start with Badiou’s book Ethics, which gives a non-mathematical version of his event theory, before attempting his magnum opus.

11. Paul Virilio’s Oeuvre: The reason I have not listed any single book by Virilio is that he has not written any masterpieces, for each of his books are short and direct analyses of cultural phenomena. Rather, it is his entire body of work taken as a whole — somewhat like Baudrillard in this sense — that constitutes a magnum opus, especially his books of the 1990s. Virilio is one of the few French po-mo theoreticians to be uninterested in Marxism, for he is of a Christian background, and his writings constitute a sustained and profound meditation, like McLuhan’s and Mumford’s, of the damaging effects on culture of human technological development. Virilio, for instance, sees the engulfing of the world by electronic technologies of real time, in which everything happens now on a global scale, to be anathema to the old-fashioned idea of things happening in deferred time, in which a mental horizon exists in which thinking has time to process events and reflect upon them eloquently in the writing of books. Now, today, there is no longer time to process events: they simply happen with catastrophic speed. Virilio invented the science of what he calls ‘dromology,’ or the study of speed and its effects on civilization. The faster a society moves, the greater the likelihood that catastrophes will occur. Hence, Virilio’s fascination with accidents and catastrophes which led him to the formulation of the theory of the inevitable Integral Accident: one day, he says, as a result of globalization, the world will suffer the first planetary-scale accident which will involve a catastrophe affecting all its systems simultaneously. That hasn’t happened yet, but one can sense that Virilio is probably right here and that it is only a matter of time before this global integral accident takes place. Virilio’s work should be studied by anyone with an interest in the problems raised by contemporary technologies.

12. Spheres by Peter Sloterdijk (1998): This is really a trilogy, of which the first book, Bubbles, came out in 1998. It is a massive and in some respects, old-fashioned attempt to work out a gigantic theory of what Sloterdijk calls “macrospheres,” or cultural containers as extensions of the immune system. Metaphysics, as Sloterdijk says, is rooted in immunology: cultures which suffer a rupture of their spheres, as ours did in the seventeenth century when the crystalline spheres of the ancients were shattered with Copernicus, Kepler, et. al., spiral into anxiety, breakdown and worry. It is no accident, as he says, that Western civilization, one of the first societies to operate without a containing macrosphere, proceeded to create a global industrial technology that created a new gaseous greenhouse as a spherical replacement, a greenhouse that is currently threatening life on the entire planet. In some respects, Sloterdijk’s work is an attempt to bridge the gap between the German pre-WWII macronarrative a la Spengler and Heidegger and French post-modern philosophy, which was based almost entirely on an attempt to deny the validity of such all-encompassing narratives. Sloterdijk is a master of both spheres of discourse, and his work is a sustained attempt to bridge old-fashioned culture morphological concerns with current French theoretical ones.

A Question of Values

by Morris Berman

Reviewed by John David Ebert

You know that something fundamental and utterly irreversible has befallen the American publishing industry when Morris Berman, the author of The Twilight of American Culture and Dark Ages America, both published by a major house (W.W. Norton), is unable to find a publisher for his new book. As he remarks: “No American publisher was even mildly interested” since “clearly, a book like this is not going to make anybody rich.” Berman therefore decided to self-publish it on Amazon’s new self-publisher called Createspace.

Is this a reflection of the quality of the book, perhaps the reader is wondering? Maybe Berman’s writing has slipped a little bit in his old age? Maybe he’s just not as insightful as he used to be? And the answer is, no, the book is very similar in tone, style and quality of writing to his two previous books, both of which were fantastic. It is simply that the publishing industry, in the past decade, has changed completely, having become yet another victim of the predatory drive of Late Capitalism to make money and nothing but money.

Oswald Spengler, the German philosopher who wrote The Decline of the West, once summed America up in a single sentence, a sentence which, at the time I read it, about twenty years ago, I thought seemed a little harsh: “America: Dollar trappers; no past, no future.” Nowadays, as with everything else Spengler wrote, that assessment seems to have been prophetically accurate.

In the first sentence of his new book, Berman points out that in 2006, after careful deliberation, he decided to move to Mexico, for he had become disgusted by how utterly callous and uncompassionate American society had become. When, for instance, he needed an operation in 2009, one Mexican family showed up at the hospital in full force, some of them even offering to spend the night with him in case he needed anything. In the United States, on the other hand, he points out that he could have died alone in his condominium and nobody would even have noticed until someone showed up to collect the past due mortgage. Nothing matters, in other words, in American society but the dollar bill, and the dollar bill means everything.

Berman’s book is packed with such insights. In an essay on “How to Get Out of Iraq,” he points out how he was invited to a symposium in Washington, D.C., held by a think tank called the Independent Institute, in which he sat in an audience full of bored people who were barely listening to the speakers and kept answering their cell phone calls, text messaging each other and generally inhabiting their own private space. But he says that this very American attitude of “to hell with everybody else, my private life comes first” is the very same attitude that landed us in Iraq in the first place: we come first, we’re number one in the world, and if we don’t like your regime we feel we have the moral right to depose it, no matter what the cost to your country. We come first; to hell with everybody else.

In another essay, Berman points out, while inside a hospital, he saw a man collapse on the floor of the men’s room and immediately went to go get help. The police officer who was seated as he approached merely told him “I don’t work here” and when he went to the front desk to ask for help the attendant told him he would have to ask the Security guy “over there” and that she would call the Fire Department. When he asks the Security guard for help, however, the man walks ahead of him toward the bathroom, but Berman is shocked to see him keep on walking past it, without a word.

These small, apparently insignificant actions are a microcosm for a mentality of “I can’t be bothered” writ large. The slowness of the response to the survivors of Hurricane Katrina is simply a macro-scale version of the same carelessness for the man who had collapsed on the floor of the bathroom, and when Berman points out that some of the looters of a New Orleans Wal-mart were actually police officers, we are not the least bit surprised. In America, it is more important to get your own DVD players first, while others who are starving and suffering can wait. Those are the kinds of values we cherish.

America is a “me first” society that fosters an attitude of competition and one-upsmanship at the expense of others. The statistics which Berman points out are also unsurprising: it has, for instance, one of the highest percentages of single occupant dwellings in the world; the highest overall crime rate; the largest military budget (by far) and the largest number of shopping malls anywhere. Clearly, it is a place where helping others or concern for the welfare of others are not values which the typical American prides himself on.

Berman points out how the typical American social gathering is full of subtle boasts, witty put-downs of others and a kind of self-absorbed narcissism. Living in Mexico, by contrast, Berman notices how an effort is normally made in gatherings to include the outsider and make him feel part of the group. In America, as I can attest from personal experience, a social gathering is felt to be a success only if someone is made to feel an outsider.

So, it is no surprise that Berman could not find a publisher for this book. It is a question of values, and as far as regard for the intellect goes, America just doesn’t cut it. Fifty years ago, a Lewis Mumford or a Jane Jacobs, neither of whom held higher degrees, could still make a living as a public intellectual in America. I know from my own personal experience, however, that those days are simply over. Being an intellectual just doesn’t cut it anymore in this society: if you can’t sell books, it’s assumed somehow that you are not “with it” and that your insights, therefore, are not worthwhile. It is a typical American trait to confuse skill and ability with financial success. In fact, most successful people in America are complete morons, so it is apparent that not much in the way of intellect is required to “make it” in this society. All you need to do is demonstrate the mentality of an alpha male gorilla: pound your chest, yell at some people, demean egos and damage the self-esteem of others, and you’re in. Consider yourself a “success.” That you may not know that the earth is five or six billion years old or that the stars manufacture elements or that oxygen was a by-product of photosynthesis invented by bacteria two billion or so years ago, is all beside the point. The point is: how much money will it make me? If it doesn’t make anyone rich, no one wants anything to do with it, no matter what the idea is. It is no wonder, as Michael Moore points out, that all our best and smartest college graduates are going straight to Wall Street, where they can get rich, not by inventing anything important or making innovative contributions to society, but simply by moving money around. Big deal.

My conservative grandparents were proud, in their day — the day of the Marshall Plan, the GI Bill, of employee loyalty to companies that rewarded them with lifetime pensions — they were proud to be Americans. Nowadays, we laugh at the 1950s, regarding them as a time of conformity and social oppression of women and non-whites, but by contrast with the situation we’re in now, the 1950s look like a Golden Age in which America was on top of the world because it was a society full of exuberant optimism in which skill and achievement were still rewarded with social success. It seemed, in those days, that we could do anything: hell, we even went to the moon. Let’s see your society top that.

Now, where are we? As Berman remarks: “What, after all, can be the fate or future of a country in which people on crutches constitute an annoying distraction; in which the hospital staff response to a man collapsing on the floor is, ‘It’s not my problem’; and in which the police join looters in their looting while all around them people are dying by the thousands?”

Undoubtedly, the publishers and agents approached by Berman for this book, simply shrugged their shoulders and said: “I don’t sense a commercial pulse here.”

I don’t either, actually, but what I do sense is that America, as a society, has basically disqualified itself as a social ideal. This is ironic in that much of the mentality that went into founding America was based on creating a kind of utopian society as an escape from the religious persecutions and wars of Old Europe. America began as a social experiment, an attempt to create an ideal society in which what social class you were from, or what country you were from or which religion you practiced were, for the first time in history, irrelevant. This idealism, however, is now long since a thing of the past, for the only thing that counts now in American society is how much money you make. And the average American, confused and disoriented by all these rivers of commerce, thinks that if you can’t make money, then you are not one of the members of the kingdom of God. There is no place in the heaven of capitalism for the preterite poor.

But, that a rich man has about as much chance of getting into heaven as a camel has of being drawn through the eye of a needle is a Christian truth that has apparently been forgotten by shameless, rapacious Americans who constitute 5 percent of the world’s population and yet are consuming 25 percent of its resources.

The Greek columns pictured on the cover of Berman’s book are interesting, for they are a subtle reminder of the kind of democratic ideal society invented by the Greeks which American society is ultimately derived from and yet…I can’t but help think that those same Greeks, confronted by the spectacle of American society today, would have found us an embarrassment–as Spengler did. The Romans, on the other hand, I think would have recognized a kindred spirit, for the brutality and coldness of their society, the same society in which slaves and animals were killed for amusement and fun in their gladiatorial arenas, has become proverbial.

In the future, I suspect that people will remember America and American values in the same way in which we nowadays recall the Romans with a shudder. We are glad those days are gone. What a hell on earth it was to live in ancient Rome.

But, alas, that’s for the future: for those misfortunate enough to call America “home” nowadays, all I can say is:

Welcome to Hell.

How Gilgamesh Became a God

An Essay by John David Ebert

Lord of the Dead

The earliest version of the Gilgamesh Epic dates to the Old Babylonian period of about 1800 BC. In ancient Egypt, this was a period of cultural disintegration: the time of the collapse of the 12th Dynasty and the end of the Middle Kingdom (the last of the pyramids had recently been completed under Amenemhat III, who built two of them at Hawara and Dahshur); in Mesopotamia, on the other hand, it was a time of great expansion, the rise of the Babylonian Empire of Hammurabi the Great.

Gilgaemsh had been an actual king who had ruled early in the First Dynasty of the city of Uruk sometime around the year 2700 BC, a city located just to the north of Ur, and one of the most ancient in the world. Indeed, writing was invented in this city sometime around 3500 BC, and a cycle of legends even attributed its invention to Gilgamesh’s grandfather, a man named Enmerkar, a man who was directly descended from the sun god Utu, for Enmerkar’s father was Meskiaggasher, whose father, in turn, was Utu. Thus, Gilgamesh, the son of Enmerkar’s son Lugalbanda, was directly descended from a dynasty of solar kings in the city of Uruk whose patron gods of old had been Inanna — the goddess of the planet Venus — and An, the god of the pole star.

We don’t know much about the real Gilgamesh — in the Sumerian language, his name was ‘Bilgames’ — but he lived at about the same time as the royalty of the First Dynasty of nearby Ur were being buried in their famous Royal Tombs unearthed by Sir Leonard Woolley. Indeed, in a Sumerian tale known as “The Death of Bilgames,” he too is shown being buried in a lavish tomb adorned with rare treasures, a tomb that, according to the poem, was located beneath the river Euphrates, which had to be dammed and moved aside for the purpose.

In this same story, it is told that the gods decided to award Bilgames a special role in the underworld, for not only was he descended from a goddess — his mother was the cow goddess Lady Ninsun — but he had performed a series of amazing adventures that had left an impression upon the gods, as they explain to him:

In the assembly, the place of [the gods'] ceremonial,

[the lord] Bilgames [having] drawn [nigh,]

they said to him, the lord [Bilgames, on his account:]

‘Your matter — having traveled each and every road,

having fetched that unique cedar down from its mountain,

having smitten Huwawa in his forest,

having set up monuments for future days,

having founded temples of the gods,

you reached Ziusudra in his abode!

The rites of Sumer, forgotten since the distant days of old,

the rituals and customs — it was you brought them down to the land. (Andrew George, 1999, p. 198)

As a result of his mighty adventures, and especially the one concerning his quest for immortality that took him to the abode of the original Sumerian flood hero Ziusudra, the gods awarded him the role of the judge of the dead in the underworld. In other words, they made him a god, as the poem says:

Bilgames, in the form of his ghost, dead in the underworld,

shall be the governor of the Netherworld, chief of the shades!

He will pass judgement, he will render verdicts,

what he says will be as weighty as the word of Ningishzida and Dumuzi.

(George, 199)

Gilgamesh became, then, a sort of Babylonian Osiris, for within about a century of his death, he was already being worshipped as a god of the dead. By about 2400 BC, at the city of Girsu, funerary offerings were being made to dead rulers at a locality called ‘The Riverbank of Gilgamesh.’ And when, in the Sumerian poem known as “The Death of Ur-Nammu,” that ruler is described as journeying to the Netherworld, Gilgamesh is there listed as one of its rulers whom Ur-Nammu must bribe with gifts in order to incur a good judgment and a fine place for himself in the real estate of the Underworld. He was, apparently, not a minor deity, either, for a god list from the Sumerian Third Dynasty of Ur (2112 – 2004 BC) lists him in the company of some major deities.

So, Gilgamesh was the god of the underworld, a god who joined the ranks of such underworld deities as Ereshkigal, Nergal, Dumuzi and Ningishzida. The fifth month of the Babylonian Calendar, moreover, the month of Abu, was sacred to him, for it was the month in which shades, ghosts and spirits of the dead were honored. At the end of this month, there was a Babylonian All Souls’ Night when the spirits of the dead were considered especially prone to return to the land of the living. The gates of hell were briefly open as ghosts came and went. “It was by his [i.e. Gilgamesh's] leave that the deceased ancestors could participate in the offerings made to them,” remarks Andrew George.

Gilgamesh, moreover, was the only mortal in the history of Mesopotamian religion ever to have been elevated to the status of a major god of the Babylonian pantheon. He was unique in this respect, just as unique as Ziusudra, the Sumerian Noah — in the Epic he is called Uta-napishti — who was the only mortal ever to have been awarded the status of immortality by the gods, which was precisely the reason why, in the Epic, Gilgamesh sought him out. Uta-napishti was never worshipped as a god, however, and in the Epic, Gilgamesh’s encounter with him is portrayed as a disappointment, for Gilgamesh fails to pass the test which the Flood hero imposes upon him of staying awake for seven nights straight. Then, when, at his wife’s behest, Uta-napishti relents and tells him where he can find a plant that will confer upon him fresh youth, Gilgamesh goes to the place where it is located, dives down to the bottom of the ocean and retrieves it, only to have it eaten by a snake while he is occupied elsewhere, bathing in a well, thus costing him his chance at immortality.

In disappointment, and heavy with a keen sense of his own failure, Gilgamesh returns to the city of Uruk condemned, apparently, to live the life of a mere mortal, as we all are. But the moral which Near Eastern scholars have drawn from the story, namely, that all mortal men are doomed to die and the quest for immortality bound to fail, seems, upon reflection, not to square with the traditions concerning Gilgamesh in which, at the end of his life, he was awarded with a kind of immortality after all: that namely, of the status of a god of the underworld. Indeed, this was a commonly known fact about him, and to append the earlier Sumerian tale of “The Death of Bilgames” to the end of the epic was apparently thought by its Old Babylonian author to be completely unnecessary since everyone knew very well what ultimately became of him.

He was the one man in Mesopotamian history who did win through to immortality, albeit at the end of his life. The tale would appear, then, to be an aetiological one, in which the task which the original author of the Old Babylonian Epic set himself was to explain exactly how and why Gilgamesh became a god of the underworld, and therefore to describe the process by way of which the human being attains to the status of immortality, not as has been traditionally thought, to explain why all men are doomed to die.

As the teachers and prophets of the world’s Axial religions well knew, the human being is not doomed to die, after all, for there is a path — first sketched out by Gilgamesh — by way of which he, too, can attain to the status of immortality by means of yoga, gnosis, nirvana, etc.

For our nature, as the prophets of the Axial religions taught us, and as the author of the Old Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic seems to have been well aware, is twofold: we are both mortal and divine. Our mortality, bounded by the limits of biological ageing, is obvious; what is not so obvious, and so difficult to find out that it requires an arduous quest of the nature and scale as that first described in the Gilgamesh Epic, is our immortal nature, that divine Pearl of Great Price that lies sunken deep beneath the threshold of consciousness, where it is hidden, but which, captured by the metaphors of diving, seeking and digging up — precisely what Gilgamesh does at the end of the Epic when he is digging for the Plant of Eternal Youth — can be found only by following one or another of the various paths taught by the prophets of self-salvation: Buddha, Mani, Christ, Lao-tzu and so forth.

Thus, Gilgamesh is indeed the Opener of the Way, as tradition ascribes him, for his restlessness and dissatisfaction with the official state religion of the city of Uruk should be understood as prophetic of the coming of the religions of self-salvation taught by the great Axial Age prophets, all of whom, without exception, rejected the official religions sanctioned by the state apparatuses of their various cities of cultural origin.

The pharaoh Akhenaten rejected the official priesthood of Thebes, the religion of Amun; Christ rejected the official religion sanctioned by the priests of the Temple in Jerusalem; Mohammad rejected the polytheism of Mecca; and even Moses rejected the religion of the Egyptian state apparatus. The point which I will be making, then, about the founding of the great Western monotheisms, is that they were all religions erected out of a profound dissatisfaction with the reigning religions of the cities of their time. They are attempts to meet, and address, spiritual needs that were not being met by the official priesthoods of their day.

Thus, the peculiar restlessness, anger and zealotry that characterizes the great Western monotheisms are first clearly foreshadowed in the Gilgamesh Epic, for he is, so far as I know, the first character in religious history to disengage from the protective macrosphere of his own city and set off on a quest into the Cosmos at large in order to find answers to the problem posed by his own mortality, answers not met by the official state religion of his native city.

The Western tradition, then, is one characterized by Rage in precisely the sense in which Peter Sloterdijk, in his Rage and Time, characterizes the “wrath of Achilles” as essentially thymotic in nature. Gilgamesh’s destructive rejection of the religion of Ishtar, which brings down the rage of the goddess upon him and his city and results in the death of his friend Enkidu, is countered by Gilgamesh’s utter rejection of the very city over which he had been king, and his determined — and very wrathful — quest through the Cosmos for some kind of religious satisfaction. Indeed, he is portrayed as so angry that the characters whom he encounters in the latter part of the Epic, such as the barmaid Siduri and the boatman Urshanabi, are frightened by his approach. Siduri cowers on the roof of her tavern in fear as she spies him coming, and Urshanabi must defend himself with an axe as Gilgamesh assaults and destroys his crew of stone slaves who row his boat for him.

From Gilgamesh to 9/11, then, it is Rage which has been the signature characteristic of Western religion, has indeed, given it its peculiar destructive zealotry, and so it is with Gilgamesh rather than with Achilles that we will begin.

The Babylonian Star Map

Our Two-Fold Origin

So, to restate the problem: the human being has a two-fold origin. He is both mortal and immortal. He is an immortal being wearing the clothing of a mortal body doomed to die.

Thus, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, from this point of view, personify both aspects of our nature. Enkidu, the hairy one, is mortal: in the Epic, it is his birth and his death that we witness. Gilgamesh is the immortal aspect of our nature: as the Epic opens, he is already in existence, and when it closes, he is still very much alive.  When the Epic begins, the author points out that he is “two thirds divine, one third mortal,” for his mother was the goddess Ninsun, while his father was the human mortal Lugalbanda. In the Epic, Enkidu is the hairy wild man who is made by the gods out of clay — exactly as they made the first human beings — and placed out in the countryside, where he frolics with the wild herds of gazelle. His story recapitulates the evolution of humanity from a state of Nature to a state of Culture. His mode, therefore, is that of temporality, of the flow and evolution of beings caught in the meshwork of Time.

The two heroes, furthermore, were equated with the Babylonian constellation of the Gemini, known as the Great Twins, whose names were Lugalirra and Meslamtaea. A Late Babylonian cultic text says: “Lugalirra is Sin, the first born son of Enlil. Meslamtaea is Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh is Nergal, who dwells in the Netherworld.” (George, 130) Now, Sin was the Babylonian god of the moon, and Enkidu, as we have seen, was identified with the temporal rhythms of birth, cultural evolution and death. Of the two, he is the lunar power; Gilgamesh was directly descended from the sun, the immortal power.

Thus, Enkidu is the mortal, animal aspect of our nature; Gilgamesh, the immortal. The logic of the narrative then, in which Enkidu dies, demands that Gilgamesh eventually go on to attain immortality, as we know that he does, since he eventually becomes the Lord of the Dead. The semiotics of the narrative tell us, then, that this is not a story in which Gilgamesh’s failure becomes illustrative of  the fate of all mortal men to die, for Gilgamesh, in fact, is the first human being to break the barrier separating men from the realm of the gods. Prior to his advent, Mesopotamian cosmology had kept a clear and careful separation between the realm of the gods — located in the heavens above — and the realm of human beings doomed to die upon the earth below.

It is worth pausing a moment here to review some of the details of Mesopotamian cosmology: the earth, Ki, was separated in primal times from the god of the heavens, An. The earth was visualized as a flat disc surrounded by a ring of ocean, and composed of three levels: the ground itself; the Abzu located directly beneath the ground and thought to be the source of all of its freshwaters; and beneath that, the Netherworld — known variously as ershetu, Irkalla, Arallu, kur, Ganzir, etc. The Netherworld could be accessed by means of a staircase located in the West leading down to the realm ruled over by the goddess Ereshkigal, the mistress of the Great Below and sister of Inanna, the goddess of the planet Venus and mistress of the Great Above. The heavens, too, were regarded as having three levels: the uppermost was known as the Heaven of Anu, the god of the pole star; the next one down was the Middle Heavens, associated with a group of gods known as the Igigi; and finally, the lower heavens, made out of jasper and upon which were inscribed the various constellations. (Wayne Horowitz, 12-14)

The planets were referred to as bibbu, meaning ‘wild sheep,’ and they were thought to emerge from out of the constellation of the Sheepfold, located on the eastern horizon. It had three gateways corresponding to the Three Paths described in the Mul-Apin tablets and known as the Ways of Anu (i.e. the celestial equator); Enlil (the northern celestial hemisphere); and Ea (the southern celestial hemisphere). The planets were all identified with gods: Enlil and Ea with Jupiter and Mercury, respectively; Nergal, another god of the dead and husband of Ereshkigal, with Mars; Enlil’s father Ninurta with Saturn; and Sin with the moon and Utu with the Sun (Babylonian Shamash). All were immortal beings.

The heavens, in this cosmology — and as they would remain until the days of Isaac Newton — were identified with Eternity, the realm of eternal cycles of inevitable — and astrologically predictable — returns. The earthly realm was the realm of temporality, of corruption and generation, of ebb and flow, birth and death. The two realms were forever separated: humans were mortal, gods were immortal.

Until Gilgamesh, that is, broke the barrier between them. And he did this by traveling along the path of the sun god Shamash, i.e. the ecliptic, the road along which the planets travel through the zodiac. Gilgamesh was the first mortal privileged to take “the path of the Sun God,” as the text says.

The story of the Gilgamesh Epic, then, as created by the still unknown author of the Old Babylonian Epic, was a tale of the journey of a warrior hero through the twelve signs of the zodiac, a realm forbidden human beings ever to enter.

The Journey to the Cedar Forest

The earliest version of the epic dates, as we have said, from about the 18th century BC, but earlier stories about Gilgamesh, written in Sumerian, are much older. These stories are episodic, however, and were never linked together to tell a single coherent narrative. Most of them appear to date from the Third Dynasty of Ur (2112 – 2004 BC), a dynasty whose rulers had a particular liking for Gilgamesh, and who seem to have regarded him as their patron deity. The five or six extant Sumerian tales of Gilgamesh ultimately date back to this period, and include “Bilgames and the Netherworld,” “Bilgames and the Bull of Heaven,” “Bilgames and the King of Akka,” “Bilgames and the Cedar Forest,” and “The Death of Bilgames.”

But it was the mysterious Babylonian author of the 18th century BC who first put these stories together to create what scholars call the Old Babylonian Version of the Epic, which survives, however, only in fragments, and is mostly incomplete. The version of the Epic upon which we have come to rely, therefore, and which is much more complete, is known as the Standard Babylonian Version, which differs only in its details from the Old Babylonian Version. The structure of the story is recognizably the same in both versions. The SBV was edited by one Sin-leqi-unnini (a man who happened to be a professional exorcist) and dates from somewhere around 1200 – 1000 BC.

The genius, however, of the Old Babylonian author of the epic was his idea that the Sumerian episodes could be unified by casting them in the form of a complete journey through the twelve signs of the zodiac. We have already seen that Gilgamesh and Enkidu themselves represent the Babylonian constellation of the Great Twins, or Gemini.

When Gilgamesh and Enkidu first meet, they fight each other in a doorway — the Babylonian Gemini were guardians of the entrance to the Netherworld that is located between Taurus and Gemini at the point where the Milky Way crosses the ecliptic. Neither is able to get the upper hand, so they agree to become friends. And the first thing they do is plan an adventure that will immortalize their names: they will become the first heroes to journey to the legendary Cedar Forest of Lebanon, where they will kill its guardian and cut down the great central cedar tree whose branches reach up to the heavens.

In the original Sumerian prototype of this episode, known as “Bilgames and Huwawa,” the reason given for this expedition is that Bilgames is troubled by death and he wants to make a name for himself so that something will be left behind him when he is gone. As he tells the sun god Utu: “I raised my head on the rampart / my gaze fell on a corpse drifting  down the river, afloat on the water: / I too shall become like that, just so shall I be!” Then he resolves, “Since no man can escape life’s end, / I will enter the mountain and set up my name.” (George, 151)

Of course, the problem of death becomes, in the Old Babylonian version, the motivation that sets Gilgamesh off on his quest to find Uta-napishti, the Flood survivor. But what the Sumerian text reveals to us is that the essence of the myth has been motivated all along by an attempt to find a solution to the problem represented by death. Gilgamesh is the man troubled by death par excellence, just as the Buddha will later be.

When, in the Epic, he and Enkidu set forth on their journey north along the west bank of the Euphrates, they travel to the Cedar Mountain, which is identified with Lebanon. There, they find the guardian of the forest, a monstrous ogre named Humbaba, and do battle with him. When they kill him, an interesting thing happens: the Cedar Mountain splits in two, as an earthquake rips it in half to become two mountains, the Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon, down the middle of which stretches the Beqaa Valley. Thus, Gilgamesh and Enkidu are portrayed in the epic as essentially creating what will later become the Biblical landscape of Palestine.

After disposing of Humbaba, they proceed to cut down the great cedar tree, which crashes to the ground. Then they begin a logging campaign, in which Enkidu ties up bundles of cedar logs like sheaves of barley, and straps them to rafts to be sent back down the Euphrates to Uruk. This image casts Enkidu in the role of the constellation which the Mesopotamians called the Hired Man, identified with our Aries. The Hired Man was hired in the springtime to help bring in the wheat harvest in bundles of sheaves, but the author, in the spirit of a Paul Bunyanesque exaggeration, magnifies the sheaves as bundles of cedar logs, for Gilgamesh and Enkidu are, of course, to be thought of as larger than life heroes.

(This constellation is visible on the Mesopotamian star map above as a ram. Interestingly, we notice that just to the left of the Ram is a constellation known as The Old Man, which corresponds to Perseus, and we note that he is carrying a severed head. This head corresponds to that of Medusa in the Greek myth, but in the Gilgamesh Epic, it seems to be a reference to the fact that Gilgamesh severs the head of Humbaba so that he can take it with him to the throne of Enlil at the city of Nippur. Humbaba, too, has the Medusa-like ability to freeze his victims in place, as he does to both Gilgamesh and Enkidu during their battle. Thus, this puts Humbaba in the role of an ancestral ghost of the underworld who must be ritually purged and sent back to the underworld during the rites of spring. This corresponds to the ancient springtime festival of the Greeks known as the Anthesteria, when the spirits of the dead would run loose and would have to be chased back to the underworld as the New Year began).

The Bull of Heaven

Once they have returned to Uruk, Gilgamesh, one fine warm spring afternoon, happens to be cleaning himself and his weapons in the river when he is approached by the goddess Ishtar, who is attracted to his rough-hewn masculinity and the fame which his deed has brought him. “Come,” she says, “be you my bridegroom! / Grant me your fruits, O grant me! / Be you my husband and I your wife!” (George, 48)

But Gilgamesh wants nothing to do with her. He replies, scathingly: “[Who is there] would take you in marriage?” (ibid., 49) Then he proceeds to recount a litany of her lovers, all of whom have met misfortunate ends as the result of erotic entanglements with her. The woman that he rejects here is most likely not Ishtar herself, but the main priestess of her cult, which happened to be the central religion of Uruk. It was, moreover, famously decadent as a religion of whores, transvestites, sexual inverts, eunuchs and other such colorful figures who would have been repugnant to an old-fashioned warrior like Gilgamesh. Servitude to the Great Mother, whose later incarnation in the religion of Cybele, famously demanded the sacrifice of its priest’s genitals in an act of sacred castration, is of no interest to Gilgamesh, and so Ishtar withdraws to heaven to consult with her father, the sky god An. She demands that he turn over to her the yoke of the Bull of Heaven — a figure which few scholars have trouble recognizing as the sign of Taurus — which he does, and  she unleashes it upon the hapless city of Uruk, where it drinks up all the water in the canals, eats up the date palms and crashes into its walls.

Gilgamesh and Enkidu, however, in the performance of the world’s first bull ring, make short work of the bull, killing it and carving it up into pieces that are distributed to the city’s poor, while Ishtar receives only one of its haunches. Gilgamesh saves the horns for himself and hangs them in his bedroom as a cult offering to his father Lugalbanda.

Thus, the episode of Taurus.

The Death and Burial of Enkidu

In the next episode, which is recounted on Tablet VII of the Standard Version of the epic, the gods hold counsel and decide that for their crimes — i.e. the slaying of the Bull of Heaven and Humbaba — one of the two warriors must die, and of course, this turns out to be Enkidu. The episode itself thus corresponds to the sign of Gemini, in which, as in Greek mythology, Castor is mortal while Pollux is immortal, for one of the two is fated to die. Enkidu does not die a hero’s death, but a slow, horrible wasting disease that confines him to his bed, while he recounts terrifying dreams in a delirium to Gilgamesh.

Enkidu then dies, and Tablet VIII recounts his elaborate funeral. The author of the epic has here borrowed imagery from Bilgames’s funeral in the Sumerian poem of “The Death of Bilgames,” which has now been transferred to Enkidu, for the role which Gilgamesh had refused to play — that, namely, of the dying and reviving spouse of Ishtar, i.e. Tammuz (Sumerian Dumuzi) — now redounds to his companion Enkidu, who must play the role in his stead. Indeed, all of nature is depicted as mourning for Enkidu in exactly the manner in which, during the month of Tammuz — the fourth month of the Babylonian calendar (June – July) — festival mourning rites for the dead god Dumuzi had been instituted in Mesopotamia since the founding days of civilization. Summer is the death season in Mesopotamia rather than winter, since the heat is unbearable and kills off all the vegetation. The rivers are at their lowest ebb — this had been personified by the Bull of Heaven drinking up all the water — and Dumuzi is mourned for having gone to the underworld in order to replace his bride Inanna. According to the Sumerian myth, the condition for her resurrection from the dead had been that she be replaced by someone else. Since Dumuzi had failed to display proper mourning rites for her death, gallu demons were sent to fetch him and carry him to the Netherworld so that Inanna could return to the Great Above. (Dumuzi was the constellation of Orion, known as The True Shepherd).

The month of Tammuz is the month of the astrological sign of Cancer, which the Babylonians termed “Nangar,” the Carpenter, on the basis of an apparent analogy between the serrated claws of the crab and the saw of a carpenter. Enkidu, as a matter of fact, had been a very handy carpenter, indeed, for immediately after the two had slain Humbaba, he had proceeded to construct a special door for the Enlil temple at Nippur.

Now, at this point along the ecliptic there appears what is known as the northern entrance to the Underworld, for the Milky Way intersects the ecliptic like a giant arch across the sky, at two points: between Taurus and Gemini, and between Scorpio and Sagittarius. Enkidu’s death appears to represent the entry into the underworld via this northern entrance, just as Gilgamesh will later enter through the southern entrance between Scorpio and Sagittarius.

Exodus and Wandering

In the next episode, Gilgamesh, severely depressed by his friend’s sad fate, and terrified by the thought of his own mortality which it portends, decides to undertake a sort of mini-Exodus from the city of Uruk and to travel off into the wilderness in quest of the one man in existence who might actually know something about immortality: this is the Flood hero, Uta-napishti who, as tradition ascribes, had been placed by the gods in the land of Dilmun, located, according to the epic, “at the mouth of the rivers.” Since the Tigris and the Euphrates dump out into the Persian Gulf, this must refer to the tradition which identifies Dilmun with the island of Bahrein (in the earlier tradition of the story of Ziusudra, Dilmun lay somewhere to the east, probably on an island located out beyond the world-encircling ocean). But in the Standard Version of the epic, the implication is clearly to the tradition which identifies Dilmun with Bahrein, and so that is where, on the literal geographical plane of the story, Gilgamesh now heads.

Gilgamesh, at this point, is in the traditional role of the World Savior who, aware of the problem of death and human suffering, now decides to set out in order to find the cure, just as the Buddha, after his vision of the sick man, the old man and the corpse, decides then to leave the city of Kapilavasatu behind and journey out into the wilderness in order to find the cure for death and suffering on his own. He ends up founding a world religion; Gilgamesh, however, is not sophisticated enough to know that that is what the situation requires. He knows only that his mind is fraught with suffering and so he seeks a legendary sage whom he thinks might be able to help find a way to attain immortality in a literal way.

His dissatisfaction with the official state religion of Uruk has led him to conclude that he must find another way, out beyond the protective macrosphere of the confining walls of the city of Uruk which he himself had built. He must go on a vision quest in which he will come into contact with cosmic powers directly, unmediated by any priesthood and located beyond the protective walls of the boundary of civilization. This is the first occurrence in the history of religion of the kind of stirrings that will later lead to the founding of the religions of self-salvation inaugurated in India by the sage Yajnavalkya, who, about the ninth century BC, will reject the official state religion of the Brahmins and institute the practice of yoga instead; or, in Palestine, of the kind of discontent that will lead Jesus out into the surrounding deserts of Judaea, where he will come under the influence of another great sage, John the Baptist, a former Essene, who will introduce him to the mysteries of the messianic tradition; or in China, it is the same disaffection for the official state religion of Confucianism that will lead Lao-tzu to head off into the wilderness and found Taoism.

Gilgamesh is the prototype for all of these religious movements, although he is lacking in the kinds of mental subtleties that would have enabled him to found an Axial religion on his own. He is a warrior, and he sets off with a warrior’s thymos, or directed rage, which he first vents on a pair of lions who have been stalking him along the river. This, of course, corresponds to the sign of Leo: Gilgamesh cuts off the skin of the lion and wraps it around himself, thus reverting to the level of a Paleolithic hunter. But the lion is also a solar symbol, and on the story’s astronomical plane, he is traveling along the path of the sun god Shamash, that is to say, the ecliptic.

Now, the text is fragmentary at this point and a cluster of lines is missing, lines that would likely have supplied us with our analogue for Virgo. We don’t know what the episode would have been, although it is known that Ishtar was, in some traditions associated with this sign. The lions with which she is associated as her primary vahana, for instance, may refer to  her in the role of Virgo beside Leo. Furthermore, the month that follows Abu — the fifth month of the Babylonian calendar, and the one sacred to Gilgamesh and corresponding to Leo — was known as Ululu, which was the month sacred to Ishtar.

At any rate, Gilgamesh now approaches the Mashu mountains, a pair of mountains between which the sun rises daily (and which resembles the Egyptian hieroglyph akhet, which shows a pair of mounds from between which the sun rises and which served as the model for the pylons of their temples at Thebes).

Egyptian symbol for "akhet"

This is the southern entrance to the underworld that occurs between Scorpio and Sagittarius. Thus, just as Enkidu’s shade descended into the underworld via the  northern entrance, so Gilgamesh goes, while still alive, through the southern entrance, that is to say, to the realm of the southern constellations associated with the latter half of the year.

Now, the two Scorpion people, a man and a woman, that are guarding the gate here actually represent only the claws of Scorpio, a very large constellation which was later separated by the Greeks into the scales of Libra and the Scorpion figure. So the Scorpion people actually correspond only to the sign of Libra. They recognize the divine nature of Gilgamesh, so they let him pass.

He then journeys down through a tunnel to an underworld full of gardens of jewels and precious gems. He travels through the twelve hours of the night — which no student of Egyptian mythology will have trouble recognizing here as corresponding to the Amduat — which is a miniature version of the sun’s annual journey through the twelve signs of the year.

Then, after traveling for a time — on the story’s literal plane, he is making his way south down the bank of the Euphrates, past gardens of date palms and women carrying clay pots on their heads and tiny brown villages with flat roofs, where he is coming now to the soggy realm of the marsh dwellers who live to this day in this same area — and soon the mudbrick tavern of the innkeeper known as Siduri comes into view.

Now it was Hertha von Dechend who, in her book Hamlet’s Mill, identified Siduri as the constellation of the Scorpion goddess known as Isshara (pronounced “Ish-khara”)(von Dechend, 295). Her tavern located at the edge of the entrance to the underworld is found scattered universally throughout mythology: in Egypt, she is Selket, the scorpion goddess; in Nicaragua, she is the many-breasted scorpion goddess who provides nourishment to the souls of the newborn dead, just as Siduri the barmaid provides them with such decoctions as pulque, soma, peyote, psilocybin, ginseng, etc. In Catholic mythography, she is Saint Gertrude, who provides the souls on their first night of death with room and board.

I would also add to von Dechend’s analysis one further clue, which is that the Akkadian name for barmaid which is used to refer to Siduri is sabitu, an apparent homophone for sebittu, or the Seven Great Ones of whom it was said that Isshara was their mother, for they were the Pleiades located directly across the sky from her above the bull’s back.

When Siduri sees Gilgamesh coming, she is terrified and draws the bolt across her door and hides up on the roof, where she watches him approach. She says to herself, “For sure this man is a slayer of wild bulls: / whence did he make straight for my gate?” (George, 679) The constellation known as Pabilsag was the Babylonian name for Sagittarius, which was also pictured as a centaur and was known as a dangerous huntsman. Indeed, there is an interesting Sumerian tale known as “Pabilsag’s Journey to Nibru,” in which Pabilsag is there referred to as a “wild bull.” As he travels by himself along the road, moreover, he soon encounters a house in which a lonely maid named Ninisina accosts him and begs him to marry her.

“And as the warrior Pabilsag set off in Enlil’s direction, as he set off, now he turned in front of that house in Isin. And then my lady in Isin came out…at the spacious house, the house of Isin, she…her hair, then she…the hair in curls…(Her) face…She addressed Pabilsag joyfully: ‘Good-looking…the house of Isin! Warrior Pabilsag…born to Nintud. You who are traveling from Larag to…that house in Isin, say to your father, ‘May she be my spouse!’ Say further to Enlil…’with me.’ Fix your sights on it, fix your sights on it, and may you be its lord.’ The house of Isin…May you, Pabilsag, be its lord, and may I be its lady!” (Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature)

Now it would appear that this scene formed the author’s model for the encounter of the wandering Gilgamesh with the lone barmaid Siduri at the edge of the ocean, for it is structurally the same, with the exception that its erotic semiotics are reversed, for Siduri is here clearly terrified by Gilgamesh’s rough appearance. This episode, then, casts Gilgamesh himself in the role of Pabilsag, the centaur of Sagittarius.

Gilgamesh at this point looks like something out of a Mad Max movie, but his confession to her of his life story eases her apprehension somewhat. After finishing, he says brusquely, “Now, ale-wife, what is the road to Uta-napishti? / What is its landmark? Give it to me! / Do give me its landmark! / If it may done, I will cross the ocean! / if it may not be done, I will roam the wild!” (George, 683)

She tells him that crossing the world ocean has never been done by anyone before, that it is a feat normally exclusive to the sun god Shamash. But she admits that there might be a way: he should go to find Urshanabi, Uta-napishti’s boatman, who happens to be in a nearby forest cutting down trees with his stone men. Possibly, he will agree to take Gilgamesh across the Waters of Death (i.e. the Milky Way).

At once, Gilgamesh sets off in a rage:

When he heard this,

he took up (his) axe in his hand,

he drew forth the dirk [from] his [belt,]

he crept up and rushed down on [them.]

Like an arrow he fell among them,

(his) shout booming through the midst of the forest. (George, 685)

Urshanabi, startled, rushes at him to defend himself with an axe, but Gilgamesh knocks him aside and then proceeds to smash the Stone Ones who are already attempting to make off with the boat. Urshanabi, beaten, listens as Gilagmesh tells him his story, the same story he had recounted to Siduri. Urshanabi then calmly explains to him that he has just destroyed the Stone Ones who had provided his boat with its primary means of crossing the Waters of Death and that if Gilgamesh wants to get across he has to go into the forest and cut down 300 punting poles, each one of which can only be dipped into the water once before it is useless and must be discarded. Urshanabi and Gilgamesh together make the crossing, and when they run out of punting poles, Gilgamesh takes Urshanabi’s shirt and rips it in two to make the world’s first sail out of it.

Urshanabi appears to represent the Babylonian constellation known as the Cargo Boat (visible on the Star Map above), which occurs on the ecliptic at about this point. He is Uta-napishti’s official boatman and servant, and corresponds to the archetypal ferryman of the dead who runs souls up and down the Milky Way (in Greek myth, the River Styx; in Babylonian, the river Hubur).

On the story’s literal plane, Urshanabi is taking him down the Persian Gulf to the island of Bahrein.

The Pearl

The island of Bahrein seems to have been a special place in Mesopotamian cartography. It was the one place in the Persian Gulf at which there were to be found a number of freshwater springs both on and around the island, some of them beneath the surrounding salt waters. There was also some sort of baptismal cult practiced there, for a number of what appear to be sacred wells dedicated to the god Inzak, the son of Enki, have been found all over the island. And it also seems to have been a desirable place to be buried, for thousands of tombs, of all different kinds, have been found in great numbers across the island. Indeed, it may have been thought that being buried on Dilmun was desirable precisely because of its proximity to the life-revivifying waters of the Abzu, the underground source of all the world’s freshwaters, just as in Medieval Christian cartography, it was thought that the four rivers of Eden fell from the top of Mount Purgatory at the bottom of the earth and became thereby the source of all the world’s waters. If Mount Purgatory had been a real place, people would have wanted to be buried there, too.

In any event, it seems an appropriate place for the gods to have stationed Uta-napishti, the survivor of the Great Flood, as perhaps the ministering priest of its baptismal cult. Uta-napishti is referred to in the texts as ‘the Living One,’ and so it is no surprise when we learn that the constellation of Aquarius, the water bearer, was known as ‘the Great One,’ for Uta-napishti seems to have been its iconic equivalent.

He is unnerved to see Gilgamesh approaching together with Urshanabi, but upon arrival Gilgamesh recounts his tale, the same autobiography he had unfolded to both Siduri and Urshanabi. Gilgamesh then asks him, “How was it you attended the gods’ assembly, and found life?” (George, 703)

We can imagine Gilgamesh and Uta-napishti seated on the floor inside the cool interior of one of the island’s barasti huts, fashioned of woven palm fronds with a floor made out of crushed seashells as the Living One then proceeds to recount to Gilgamesh the story of how he survived the Great Flood. “I will disclose to you, Gilgamesh, a secret matter,” he says, “and I will tell you a mystery of the gods.” (George, 703) Uta-napishti then explains to him how the god Ea (whose name was also Enki) warned him of the coming flood that the gods were about to unleash by whispering to him through the wall of his reed hut at the city of Shuruppak. Now it so happens that one of Ea’s attributes was the goat-fish, and as a matter of fact, he later became the constellation of Capricorn.

Presently, he instructs Uta-napishti to build an ark in the shape of a cube, “her breadth and length should be the same,” he says, which is, of course, a non-sensical design for a boat until we realize that the ark isn’t meant to be a boat at all, but rather a reference to the constellation of the Pegasus Square, located between the two Pisces fish, and which was referred to as ‘1 Iku,’ the ideal measurement for a field. The city of Babylon itself was laid out in this rectangular fashion, with the Tigris and Euphrates rivers thought to correspond to the two cords of the Pisces fishes. The illustration below shows the square located in between the two fishes:

The flood is unleashed and Uta-napishti, together with his family, survives it. The ark is washed ashore atop Mount Nimush, and Uta-napishti then lets a dove fly forth to look for new land. When the dove returns, he sends out a swallow (see image above), and when it returns, he sends forth a raven. Now in Babylonian astronomy, one of the two Pisces fishes actually was not a fish at all, but a swallow. And the other fish was sometimes depicted as a mermaid goddess named Annunitum, who appears in the story in her guise as the birth goddess Belet-ili, who mourns the gods’ destruction of the human race and then commemorates it with a necklace made out of lapis lazuli flies, a necklace that may serve as the prototype for the Biblical rainbow which God provides as a sign that he will never again wipe out the human race. On the Babylonian ecliptic, by the way, it is interesting to note that there is also a nearby constellation known as the Rainbow.

The gods then decide to make Uta-napishti and his wife immortal and to place them “at the mouth of the rivers.” The Living One, pausing at the conclusion of his tale, then asks Gilgamesh how he thinks he would ever get the gods to convene in assembly over him — which is, of course, exactly what they will do at his death — and imposes upon Gilgamesh the shamanic task of trying to remain awake for seven nights in a row. Gilgamesh is a warrior, not a shaman, and so he is unable to accomplish this feat and Uta-napishti is about to dismiss him as unworthy of his time, when his wife prevails upon him to make sure that Gilgamesh is not sent back empty-handed. So he tells the warrior where to find a plant of eternal youth and Gilgamesh goes diving for it somewhere off the coast of the island. He ties a rope to his foot, dives down, finds the plant and brings it back up to the boat. While he is otherwise occupied, however, a snake comes along and eats it.

My suspicion, however, is that the plant is actually not a plant at all: Wayne Horowitz, in his Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography, suggests that it might actually be a coral reef; (Horowitz, 105) however, I suspect that it may have been a pearl. The way in which Gilgamesh dives for the plant is exactly the way that pearl divers off the shores of Bahrein dive for pearls to this day, tying a rope to one foot. Not only that, but Geoffrey Bibby, in his book Looking For Dilmun, reveals to the reader that during his digs on the island, he found ancient clay pots with snake skeletons curled up inside them, into the mouth of which had been placed a single pearl. One of the pearl’s mythological attributes is to confer eternal rejuvenation upon its owner, just as the snake sheds its skin perenially.

If it is a pearl, then the image of Gilgamesh diving down to retrieve it and bring it up into the daylight is a direct visionary analogue for the main image of the Axial religions and their technology of self-salvation: in yoga, one “dives” down into one’s consciousness to find the pearl of the jiva or the purusha as it is variously called, which is the indestructible — and immortal — core of one’s very own being. It is the jiva which transmigrates from one lifetime to the next, putting on and taking off bodies like sets of clothing. Karma infects it like dirt, and must be cleansed through purifications of various sorts that will allow the jiva to shine through once again with perfect clarity.

So, in a way, Uta-napishti has given Gilgamesh a mythic analogue for the task of finding and bringing up into consciousness his own true immortal Self. But Gilgamesh is not quite bright enough to understand the point, and so it eludes him, just like the snake, and he returns with Urshanabi to the city of Uruk, his quest an apparent failure.

But Uta-napishti must have had other conversations with Gilgamesh which have gone unrecorded, for as the Prologue of the epic that was specifically appended to it by the scribe Sin-leqi-uninni states, Gilgamesh “restored the cult centers that the Deluge destroyed, / and established the proper rites for the human race.” (George, 541) He did not, then, simply return to Uruk empty-handed, but rather with specific instructions for demolishing and then reforming the city’s decadent cults in accordance with ancient practices revealed to him by Uta-napishti, the only man in existence who would have knowledge of how they were originally performed in the days before the Flood came and wiped them out. The text doesn’t give us any details as to the nature of these reforms, but given that we have seen Gilgamesh’s disgust with what he must obviously have regarded as the corrupt and decadent practices of the city’s official religion, it is apparent that upon his return, he instituted some sort of sweeping reform of its temples, perhaps chasing out Ishtar’s retinue of debaucheries.

Thus, reading between the lines of the text, it becomes evident that Gilgamesh instituted some type of Truth Event analogous to the one performed by the pharaoh Akhenaten, who would later see himself as the great conservator of Egyptian culture forms, whose primary task it was to restore the ancient cults of Re-Harakhty that had been forgotten and covered over by the decadent Amun priesthood.

Gilgamesh did not then return to Uruk empty-handed at all, but with new cultic knowledge of special rites gained during his conversations with the ancient sage Uta-napishti. He completely reformed the temples using this new knowledge as a basis, a knowledge perhaps informed with astronomical details gained by his initiatory journey through the circle of the zodiac, just as Roman soldiers would later be initiated into the mysteries of the zodiac in the religion of Mithraism.

And so his quest, contrary to popular opinion, was no failure: for as the Sumerian poem of “The Death of Bilgames” tells us, the gods did indeed, at the end of his life, convene in that very assembly which Uta-napishti was so sceptical of them ever doing for another human mortal again, where they gathered in the Great Below to award him, for all his labors, the status of judge of the dead in the Babylonian Netherworld.

Thus, the Gilgamesh Epic tells us, in careful detail, the exact process by way of which a human being was transformed into a god in ancient Babylonia.

Moses, The Exodus and The Hebrew War Machine

An Essay by John David Ebert

I. Theological Embryogenesis 

Hegel seems to have been right: history moves dialectically, with each age serving as a counter-argument to the one before it. If Akhenaten had eliminated the sun’s nocturnal journey through the underworld, then the life of Moses restores it, for the characteristics of his biography have all the markings of a journey through the underworld: not only does he travel from West to East in imitation of the sun’s course through the world beneath the earth, but he also battles monsters and adversaries which turn up in the narratives disguised as Pharaoh (who functions in the role of the Apopis serpent) and the giants of Anak which the Hebrews encounter once they reach Canaan. The imagery of the parched red deserts which the Egyptians so dreaded that they identified them with the underworld turn up, too, in the narrative as the complaining Hebrews always running short of water and blaming Moses for leading them out into the deserts of the Sinai to die. The same image of waterless sands turns up in the Fourth Hour of the Book of the Netherworld which the Egyptians of the New Kingdom painted on the walls of the tombs of their pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings. 

Moses, furthermore, is said to have learned his wisdom from his studies in the Egyptian city of On, or Heliopolis which, we have learned, was also an important city in the pedagogical training of Akhenaten, for it was the city whose patron was the ancient god Re-Harakhty, the sun god who traversed the sky in his barge from one horizon to the next. Thus, both Moses and Akhenaten seem to have graduated from their theological studies from the same city, while the two men split the course of the sun’s 24 hour journey in half, the rebel pharaoh taking on its 12 hour daytime half, while the founder of Hebraic monotheism took with him the nocturnal half of its journey through the world below. In both cases, what emerged were two different monotheisms, one identified with the sun as its primary image and icon, the other with an invisible, and very transcendent, god whose being consists precisely in his very absence from the phenomena of the physical world.

The two religions, furthermore, may not have been more than a century or so apart if we follow the currently favored academic date for the Exodus taking place during the time of Ramses II, who ruled for most of the 13th century BC. If we imagine the Exodus to have occurred circa 1250 BC, in about the middle of his reign — since the stele of his son Merneptah dating from 1207 BC mentions “Israel” for the first time in Egyptian chirographic history — and since we know that Akhenaten’s reign terminated sometime around 1340 BC or so, this would give us about a century between the two religions.

It is likely, though, as scholars such as T.J. Meek once pointed out, that the actual Exodus concerned only a very small portion of the Hebrew people, perhaps only one or two tribes, such as the Levites — the only tribe, incidentally, with Egyptian names — and Judah. The Amarna Letters from the time of Akhenaten reveal the so-called “Habiru” running around the north of Palestine taking over its cities from about 1400 BC on. The city of Shechem, moreover, was taken at this time, and seems to have become the capital of a confederacy of tribes that formed the northern nation of Israel. Joshua’s name turns up in these letters, too, as “Yahuya,” so he may have led the northern conquest and may not have known Moses at all, who appears to have led the settling of the south and eventually what later became the kingdom of Judah.

If we were to follow the date for the Exodus given in the Bible (1 Kings 6:1), however, which tells us that 480 years elapsed between the building of Solomon’s Temple around 960 BC and the occurrence of the Exodus, this would put the event somewhere around 1447 BC, which is far too early, in my opinion, since this would place it long before the monotheistic Truth Event of the pharaoh Akhenaten. There are, however, simply too many structural similarities between the two religions for them to be wholly unrelated Truth Events: the monotheistic Idea itself; the ban on images; the intolerance of other deities; the lack of interest in the afterlife; the proscription of magic and divination, etc.

We don’t need to go so far as to say, with Freud, that Moses was a priest in the court of Akhenaten: we need merely take note of Nicholas Reeves’ comment that the cult of the Aten still continued to be practiced in Egypt long after the demolition of Akhenaten’s city, clear down to the time of the pharaoh Sethos I — the father of Ramses II — and beyond; long enough, in other words, for some kind of an influence to radiate throughout Egypt, perhaps eventually finding its way to the mind of a man of priestly ambitions living in the city of Helipolis in the middle of the 13th century, a Hebrew man with an Egyptian name looking for a better life somewhere in another land that would be less hostile to his Semitic inheritance.

The influence, then, could only have run from Akhenaten to Moses, not the other way, for in those days, the haughty and arrogant Egyptians copied from no one, let alone a people whom they would have regarded as culturally inferior such as the Habiru living in their midst. (Indeed, we have an inscription from the time of Ramses II stating that the Habiru were involved in building one of his many giant construction projects). It was the Egyptians who were the great cultural innovators of the time, the Mother Civilization, in other words. The rest of the ancient Near East, in those days, copied them, so to put the Exodus Event prior to Akhenaten’s creation of monotheism does not seem to me a likely scenario. 

Moses was a theological student at Heliopolis, and there is no doubt that the Amarna heresy would have become known to him by one means or another. The invention of Hebraic monotheism was simply his transformation of the religion of Amarna.

And so, history moves dialectically, for the advent of Mosaic monotheism seems very much to represent an acknowledgement of, and counter-response to, the monotheistic innovation of the pharaoh Akhenaten. As in the case of all great creators — Isaac Newton, for instance, who stood on the shoulders of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo — Moses acknowledges Akhenaten’s great theological revolution, and then uses it as the basis for a complete transformation of the Hebraic cognitive mental space, a transformation so thorough that it would require the leaving behind of Egypt altogether, just as Akhenaten’s new religion required his own mini-Exodus from the city of Thebes to build a new city within which to house his new religion.

The Hebraic Truth Event that signifies a historical rupture — a complete singularity, in fact, in religious history — from all that had gone before it, requires a decisive severance from the Egyptian state apparatus. A three-dimensional mental horizon opened out in the mind of Moses, and it was a landscape that would require a new city with a new map, for its strictures were incompatible with a continued existence inside the body of Mother Egypt. This new theological topography was so extensive, so thoroughly conceived and arranged in the cognitive eye of Moses, that he knew it would ultimately require an entirely new civilization within which to house its new insights.

And so Egypt must be left behind, the very Egypt inside of whose protective walls the young Moses had grown up. The Bible says that Moses fled from Egypt as the result of his murder of an Egyptian that he saw beating one of his own people, but the biography of Moses penned by Josephus leaves this out of account and instead, Josephus has him fleeing Egypt as the result of a dawning paranoia that pharaoh might suspect him of kingly ambitions.

In reality, Moses fled from Egypt because he was so startled by the audacity of his own Vision, a Vision that was too large to be compatible with a further existence inside the Egyptian macrosphere. A new macrosphere — this is Peter Sloterdijk’s term for the all-containing world-womb within which a people comes to exist, comes, that is, into being-in-the-world in a certain way, as Heidegger would put it — was emerging like the embryo of a god taking shape within the skull of Moses, and he needed time and space to plan it out and shape it into a new historical mode of Existenz. 

So he fled to the deserts of Midian (perhaps located just east of the Gulf of Aqaba) where he lived for forty years as a shepherd caretaking his new father-in-law Jethro’s sheep, but all the while the vision of a new mode of being was taking shape inside the microsphere of his head. Akhenaten, he knew, had attempted to build a monotheistic society within a world surrounded and soaked in ancient polytheism. What was required was a new field altogether, a field where such ancient cults could not squash out the new religion before it could get a foothold on new ground. He needed a new land…

The idea languished. Perhaps he even forgot about it: in Midian the endless desert horizons of hot days alternating with cool nights unfolded and spooled past. He was a shepherd now. He would, apparently, always be a shepherd.

And then something happened: another Truth Event.

II. The Hebrew Avatar

 One day, Moses is out with his sheep near Mount Horeb (the older name for Sinai) and he sees a burning bush. Then he hears a voice calling to him from out of the bush, a voice that insists he must return to Egypt and put the idea into action: he must go down into the underworld of Egypt and ‘draw forth’ the Israelites. Then he must act as midwife to an entire people, giving birth to them in a New Land with a new macrosphere inside which they will exist. He asks the voice of the god speaking to him from out of the bush what he will tell the Israelites when they ask him the name of his god, and the god tells him, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”

Moses, in other words, wants to know the name of this new god, because in those days, names were everything. It is a bit like the Egyptian story of the goddess Isis who manages to trick the sun god Re into telling her his name after he has been bitten by a snake, and she promises to give him the anti-venom only if he will reveal his name, which he does. Hence, the epithet of Isis: “The Lady of a Thousand Names.”

The subject of names, at this point, is worth dwelling on, for there is the problem of Moses’ name: it is an Egyptian name, but only half of one. The word ‘moses’ means ‘child of’ or ‘born of,’ and usually occurs in conjunction with the name of a god, such as ‘Thuthmosis,’ meaning ‘child of the god Thoth,’ or ‘Ramesses,’ i.e. ‘Ra-moses,’ or ‘born of the god Ra.’ The suffix was especially common in the Egyptian New Kingdom, and so it is interesting that the name of Moses is missing whatever Egyptian god’s name would have formed its prefix. Thus, we have x-Moses: a man who is the child of an unknown god.

When the god whom he will later serve gives him his name as “I am Who I am,” (Ehyeh asher ehyeh) it appears, once again, to be a bit of a mystery, as though the god were being cagey about Moses knowing his real name. The name does begin and end, however, with a word in which the syllables of YHWH (i.e. the letters yod, hay, va’a, hay) are inverted, as though it were code for ‘Yahweh.’ (The Hebrew verb hayah means ‘to be.’) Yahweh, then, is the god who IS. He is, in other words, the reason for the existence of everything that IS.

According to the Book of Exodus, when pharaoh’s daughter rescues the infant Moses from the basket on the river, she gives him the Hebrew name ‘Moshe’ from a folk etymology of Hebrew mashah, meaning ‘to draw out.’ Since we can scarcely consider the likelihood that pharaoh’s daughter knew Hebrew well enough to give him such a name, we must assume that it really is an Egyptian, not a Hebrew, name. And yet, the Hebrew name, with its connotation of ‘drawing forth’ from the water, is precisely what Yahweh, at the episode of the burning bush, is telling Moses to do: go and ‘draw forth’ the Hebrews from the waters of the Egyptian underworld. The Egyptian name ‘Moses,’ with its connotations of ‘giving birth,’ is actually not all that far away from the Hebrew word mashah, since it is precisely an act of giving birth that Moses will perform, by descending into the darkness of Egypt and ‘drawing forth’ the captured Hebrew peoples from bondage.

Thus, the semiotics of his mission are similar to those of Neoplatonism and Manicheanism: the Hebrews have fallen into the captivity of darkness just as the light particles in the religion of Mani have fallen and been captured by the material world. It is the task of the Manichean holy man to redeem these trapped light particles, just as in the Manichean cosmogony the Holy Spirit is sent down to rescue the Anthropos from his fall into materiality. The Anthropos had descended into the underworld wearing an armor made out of light, and the demons of darkness had torn it off and swallowed it, trapping him in their world of darkness and sensuality. The Holy Spirit reaches down and pulls him back up into the realm of Light.

Moses is given the mission by Yahweh of doing the exact same thing for the Hebrews as a people. As a traditional solar hero, he will descend into the underworld and redeem the captured light particles which the Hebrews represent, pulling them out of their state of bondage and setting them free in the Promised Land.

Yahweh IS; Moses DOES.

Thus, there is a hidden avataric relationship between the two, an idea, of course, that is anathema to traditional Hebrew thought, but which, nonetheless is suggested by the semiotics of the narrative.

In Hindu mythology, the god Vishnu sends forth avatars of himself in order to rescue trapped beings: when the goddess Earth is kidnapped by the elephant demon, Vishnu descends as the boar avatar down into the waters of a primordial ocean to dig her up from its depths and restore her to the surface where she can function once again as a sort of Pangaea that gives birth to all life; in the form of his fish avatar, Vishnu descends into the waters in order to save humanity, in the form of Manu — the Hindu Noah — from the flood that will otherwise wipe out all human beings; in the form of Rama, he descends into the world to rescue Sita from her capture by the demon Ravana, and so forth.

Moses, then, is the avatar of Yahweh sent down into the abyssal realm of Egypt to rescue the Hebrews from their fall into captivity.

III. The Man With no Face

Moses, however, is a hero, not a god.

But he is a certain very special type of hero, one who is not just himself, hero x, but a hero who functions as a kind of floating signifier, as Jesus Christ, in fact, will later do. Moses, in other words, is a man who puts on and takes off the masks of other deities. If monotheism is to succeed as a religion — a fact later realized by the architects of early Christianity — then it must do so by absorbing the powers of all the other gods.

Take the serpent staff, for instance, which Yahweh, at the episode of the burning bush, tells Moses he will wield before the Egyptians as a sign of his power. Moses throws his shepherd’s staff to the ground and it becomes a serpent. When he picks it up again, it is a staff once more.

When he tries this trick out on the Egyptians in pharaoh’s court, however, the Egyptians are unimpressed: they know the trick well and are able to duplicate it with their staffs, too. But what they don’t realize is that the god of the serpent staff, known in Mesopotamia as Ningishzida, a god of the underworld, is being absorbed into the spiritual metabolism of Moses thereby. Later, in Greek myth, the serpent staff will become sacred to Asclepius, the god of healing. (Note that Moses is in the role of the serpent god of healing when he sets up the bronze serpent in the desert in order to heal the snakebites from the plague of fiery serpents that Yahweh has sent to punish the intransigence of the Israelites).

Ningishzida with serpents sprouting from his shoulders

When the 10 Plagues begin, Moses takes off the mask of Ningishzida and puts on the mask of Nergal (also known as Erra), the Mesopotamian god of plagues and destruction. The litany of plagues that are visited upon the Egyptians remind one of the catalogue of devastations visited upon Babylon by the god Erra in the Mesopotamian text known as “Erra and Ishum,” written down in the 8th century BC: “I shall finish off the land and count it as ruins,” Erra says, then continues:

I shall devastate cities and make of them a wilderness.

I shall destroy mountains and fell their cattle.

I shall stir up oceans and destroy their produce.

I shall dig out reed-thickets and graves and I shall burn them like Gerra.

I shall fell people and [I shall leave no] life,

I shall not keep a single one back!

I shall not leave out any of the cattle of Shakkan nor any wild beasts [whatsoever].

From city to city I shall seize the one who governs.

In Mesopotamian imagery, whenever a person fell sick it was imagined that he had been ’seized’ physically by the god Nergal and hung upside down in the underworld. Moses, then, is in the process of ’seizing’ pharaoh and hanging him upside down as he blights the land of Egypt with locusts, lice, frogs, darkness, etc.

Later, Moses will put on other masks, such as the mask of Baal when he fights pharaoh at the Red Sea, or the mask of Thoth when he invents the alphabet. When he comes down from the mountain of Sinai after his second confrontation with Yahweh, his face shines with a divine radiance that is too much for the Israelites to bear to look upon, so he is forced, from that moment on, to wear a veil over his face for the rest of his days. He only takes off the veil when he goes in to commune with Yahweh. When dealing with him, the Israelites must have thought him a spooky and frightening man. This imagery, significantly, is omitted from all the later Moses biographies from Josephus to Cecil B. DeMille, and it is a little known detail to anyone who has not read the Exodus narratives.

But the veil is a sort of a mask, too, and it is a clue to the essentially undefined nature of the visage of Moses. He is personality x, a hero unique in all the world’s sacred literature as the Man With No Face. Consequently, he is a man of many faces, a hero who defines himself at any one particular moment in the narrative by whatever god of the ancient Near East he happens to be impersonating.  

IV. Birth

Once the 10 Plagues have run their course, Moses disengages the Hebrew people from the Egyptian state apparatus — the state is always an apparatus of capture, according to Deleuze and Guattari — and begins to head out with them beyond the boundaries of Egyptian society. Later, he will transform them into a nomadic war machine, but at this point, they are still a formless amorphous mass, like a blastula.

When we come to the episode of the Red Sea — which is apparently a mistranslation of ‘Reed Sea’ — we may say that the Hebrews have arrived at the membranous boundary of the Egyptian mother body. The water has burst and the embryo is ready to come forth. The walls of the birth canal part; the Hebrews come through; and then the waters fall upon pharaoh and his army, wiping them out.

The episode has the feel about it of the Hebrews actually emerging from the sea, as though the image were a recapitulation of the evolutionary story of the migration of lobe-finned lungfish to the sand, where they begin laying eggs beyond the reach of the water, eggs which then hatch into an entirely new organism, an amphibial creature known as Acanthostega, a full blown land-dwelling, air-breathing creature. Spiritually speaking, however, this evolutionary image is a direct analogue of the state of the Hebrews as a people at this point in the narrative, for they are mere spiritual newborns with a long and arduous test on the land ahead of them.

The emergence from the Red Sea is also a threshold crossing of another sort, for it marks the final emergence of the Hebrews from the protective womb of Egyptian civilization itself. It is a moment that is directly analogous to Dante’s exile from the walled city of Medieval Florence, when he is cast out into the wilderness of the forests between Florence and Siena. His frightening sojourn in the woods, where he encounters monsters like the lion, the leopard and the wolf, and then his subsequent descent downward on a vertical plane into a spiraling abyss of concentric circles is directly analogous to the sojourn of the Hebrews across a horizontal netherworld through the wilderness of Sinai, where they will encounter monsters such as giants, huge armies of Amalekites and other such desert predators.

But there is yet another level to the image, which Jonathan Kirsch points out in his biography of Moses, for some scholars believe that the story of Moses and Yahweh’s victory over the Egyptians at the Red Sea is a deliberate echo of the Canaanite myth of the battle of the god Baal against the sea dragon Yam. The use of the rod by Moses to part the waters thus becomes an echo of the club used by Baal to hurl against Yam. This mythic substratum would therefore cast pharaoh in the role of the dragon and Moses, wearing the mask of Baal, as the dragon-slayer who brings order out of chaos. The myth also conveniently underscores our analogy to the narrative of evolution, which is a narrative in which reptilian elements throughout evolutionary history are gradually defeated and overthrown by mammalian ones: the womb is victorious over the egg; the limbic ring over the reptilian brain stem; three bones in the ear and one in the jaw as a reversal of the reptilian single ear bone with three in the jaw, etc.

Baal hurling his thunderbolt at Yam

Thus, the Canaanite story tells of the victory of a more highly evolved being — Baal, the son of El — over a more primitive, less evolved dragon monster named Yam, just as the Hebrews see themselves at this point as a more highly evolved spiritual organism triumphing over the mere animal gods of the Egyptians.

And since the god Baal was identified by the Egyptians with their god Seth, we also have an image that echoes Seth’s slaying of the Apopis serpent in the Books of the Netherworld, which depict the nocturnal journey of the sun through the world beneath the earth. Thus, the story of Moses retrieves and restructures the Egyptian night sea journey of the sun beneath the earth, and by reversing that story’s semiotics, in which pharaoh is now identified with the chaos monster, and the Hebrews with the forces that defeat him, the myth is appropriated by the Hebrews and completely overturned to the detriment of the Egyptians. Pharaoh is the great beast which, like the Apopis serpent that appears to block the passage of Re’s barque, attempts to stop the passage of the Hebrews and must be overcome by them.

V. The War Machine

After a period of wandering in the desert and feasting upon manna and quail, the Hebrews come upon the Amalekites and soon discover themselves born as a people united by the concept of Holy War. This is the first battle of the Hebrews with another people after their escape from pharaoh at the Red Sea, and it is an episode that brings into being the very concept of the Holy War.

Moses tells Joshua, whom we meet here for the first time, to go down with an army and fight the Amalekites while he and his brother Aaron and an elder named Hur will watch the battle from the cliffs up above. Whenever Moses raises his staff, the Hebrews will prevail; when he lowers it, the Amalekites will prevail. The name of the place is Rephidim, which means “support,” and evidently refers to the fact that when Moses — who is about 80 years old at this point — becomes too tired to raise his arms, Aaron stands on one side of him while Hur stands on the other and they support the raising of his arms.

This little clue also informs us that he was raising both arms into the air, thus making the shape of the Hebrew letter of the alphabet called heh, or the letter “E” turned onto its back which was, originally, the image of a man with arms upraised into the air in prayer to his god.

The letter "E" is in the top row, third from left

According to Marc-Alain Ouaknin, the letter heh means “Breath, cry, prayer, interjection: hey! With the letter heh we gain acces to the first breath with which a human being can begin his existence, with a rhythm and power that are constantly renewed.” (Mysteries of the Alphabet, 163)

The Hebrews, in other words, with the battle of the Amalekites at Rephidim, are constructing themselves as a nomadic war machine: they are drawing their first breath as a newborn embryonic war machine that has detached itself from a pre-existent state apparatus and is now moving horizontally across the flat space of the desert, defending this space. If the state, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is an apparatus of capture that functions by internalizing things to itself, then the nomadic war machine exteriorizes itself completely. It is a social formation without a state.

But it must defend the smooth space of its habitat against the striated spaces signified by cities. Cities are merely striations in the smooth plane of nomadic space, and they must be flattened out accordingly. The nomadic Hebrews, coming into being as a war machine for the first time, transform this universal goal of the nomad into the very specific goal that is central to all three Abrahamic religions: the Holy War, the divinely sanctioned battle against an enemy who is “not holy” precisely because he is completely Other, and is therefore in the way of the construction of holy space. He who interferes with the physical construction of the topography of sacred space, in this tradition, whether it is configured as the smooth space of the desert or the striated space of the city, is to be eliminated as the Enemy.

The Holy War is a unique structural characteristic of the monotheistic mentality, since all other gods function merely as noise in this sacred space. It is only after he has built the city of Akhetaten that Akhenaten declares a Holy War on all the other gods and priesthoods of Egypt, because the divinely sanctified space of Amarna must not be transgressed by other gods. Likewise, with the Hebrews wandering through Sinai: they are attempting to create a holy space that is sanctified by one god; other gods mean other tribes and so both must be eliminated. Other ethnicities can no more be tolerated than other gods.

Monotheism lends itself very well to ethnic cleansing. 

VI. The Birth of the Alphabet

And so we come to the Sinai Event.

Moses has returned full circle from his starting point in Midian. He is reuinted with his wife and two sons, and reports about his trip to his father-in-law Jethro. Then, after taking care of all earthly business, he ascends Mount Sinai. This mountain serves as a sort of local geological ziggurat for a poor nomadic society that cannot afford to build a cosmic mountain in stone or even mud-brick. It is the Hebrew analogue to the Egyptian pyramid — which, in the New Kingdom was substituted by the Theban Mountain in the Valley of the Kings — and the Mesopotamian ziggurat, the axial meeting point between the powers of Heaven and Earth. Moses ascends to meet with his god and when, forty days and forty nights later, he comes down, he is in possession of the Decalogue.

Now, as I see it, there are two aspects to this Decalogue: what it says, and the medium used to communicate those words. Both are revolutionary.

The medium that Moses would have used to compose the Decalogue would have most likely been the alphabet, a medium which he is no doubt being imagined to have originated here (with the help of Yahweh, of course). Though it nowhere says in the Bible that Moses invented the alphabet, the circumstances of his bringing down the very first Hebrew text from the mountain implies as much.

Myths are compressed images and narratives that store cultural memory; they are the way in which entire civilizations remember its past, and like all memories, they can be a bit fuzzy. But also like individual memories, they can store a surprising amount of information if you look at them closely enough.

The myth of Moses’ ascent up Mount Sinai is, I suspect, not only a “memory” of the production of what might be the oldest document in Hebrew literature, i.e. the Decalogue, but simultaneously stores a memory of the creation of the Hebrew alphabet.

It used to be thought that the alphabet was created by the Phoenicians somewhere around 1500 BC, but it now seems more likely that it was indeed the creation of Old Hebrew-speaking Canaanites in the Sinai peninsula located in an area not too far away from Mount Sinai — if, that is, Sinai is correctly identified as Mount Catherine in the southern part of the peninsula, although this seems unlikely, since the Greek Christians who operate the world’s oldest Christian monastery on that mountain most likely concocted the notion to lend them credibility.

At a mountain in the south-eastern part of Sinai known as Serabit el-Khedim, the Egyptians had set up a turquoise mining operation that ran there for centuries. They employed a large number of Canaanite workers in this mine, workers who, sometime around 1800 BC seem to have invented the earliest alphabet in the form of some thirty or so inscriptions that have been found on the rocks at this site. These are the earliest dated alphabetic inscriptions in the world, and they are a direct transformation of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Take the Egyptian hieroglyph for the word “snake,” for instance: there are two such hieroglyphs, one showing a horned viper and the other a cobra, as follows: 

The Canaanite workers, who may have been illiterate, according to Oliver Goldwasser, borrowed the N-shaped picture of the cobra and used it as the N-sound for their word for “snake,” which was “nahash.” This became the letter “N,” (Hebrew nun) which now stood not for an entire word, but for a sound only. A similar process occurred with all the other 22 signs of this proto-Sinaitic alphabet, as it is called. 

Located at the site of the Serabit el-Khedim mountain, moreover, was a large temple to the cow goddess Hathor, the patroness of turquoise, which looked like this:

This structure was the only known temple ever built by the Egyptians outside the bounds of their country and it functioned clear down to the end of the New Kingdom, for a total of about 800 years (it was built under the pharaoh Sesostris II around 1953 BC). Hathor is referred to in these Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions as “Baalat,” meaning that the Canaanites equated her with the mistress of the god Baal, a god who was normally pictured standing atop a bull.

That the first letter of the alphabet, the letter “A” (Hebrew aleph) originally meant “bull” and is actually an upside down bull’s head should give us pause in light of the existence of the Hathor temple at the site. And not only that, but we cannot fail to recall that when Moses came down from the mountain bearing the tablets of the law in his hands, he was confronted with the Hebrews worshipping a golden bull, a fact which enraged him. (That the image was a later interpolation by the Judean priesthood condemning the erecting of bull shrines at the cities of Dan and Bethel by the northern king Jeroboam notwithstanding).

Though Moses seems to have lived perhaps in the 13th century BC, many centuries after the alphabet Event, we should nonetheless keep in mind that the image of the golden bull, the mountain and the setting of the narrative in the Sinai desert — as well as the tablets being the primal Hebrew document — should alert us to the possibility that the myth of Moses’ ascent up Sinai might – and I say only “might” — contain a trace memory of the invention of the alphabet in the Sinai peninsula by Canaanite workers in the 18th century BC.

Moses, in that case, would have donned the scribal mask of the Egyptian god Thoth, the ibis-headed lord of writing:

Thoth with his scribal kit

VII. What the Decalogue Says

 The text of the Decalogue, as Jonathan Kirsch convincingly points out, may be the only text in the Bible to have been authentically authored by Moses himself. The Ten Commandments, he suggests, were probably understood very differently from the way we moderns understand them, but in a way that is quite consistent with the cognitive horizons of a nomadic tribal society.

Consider the last of the Commandments: “Thou shalt not covet they neighbor’s house.” From the point of view of nomads, this most likely would have meant for the tent-dwelling nomad to keep his mind off of coveting life in the cities, which are not a nomad’s business. “Thou shalt not steal” probably referred not to theft in general, but specifically not to kidnap people or steal their slaves. “Thou shalt not kill” would have referred not to avoiding killing altogether, but specifically to eschewing tribal blood vendettas. “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain” may have meant to ban the attempt to use the name YHWH in magical spells against one’s enemies.

All the other laws, taboos and proscriptions that are listed exhaustively in page after page of Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, refer mainly to the circumstances of settled farmer folk. Taxes and tithes, for example, are specified in shekels when coinage had not yet been invented in the time of Moses. And laws like, “For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield; but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, that the poor of your people may eat” (Exod. 23:10-11) are obviously the concerns of farmers, not wandering nomads.

But the Commandments of the Decalogue differ from these other laws in that they can all plausibly be situated within the concerns of a wandering tribal community and therefore it is very possible that the Decalogue is exactly what the Pentateuch says it is: the proto-text of the Hebrew people.

Else, why build an Ark within which to house it?

VIII. The Hebrew Creation of the Guilty Conscience 

Moses, then, is a hero of depths rather than surfaces. His cosmology is the exact inverse of the world view of Akhenaten, a man whose project it is possible that Moses studied with some scrutiny.

This is why, when Moses comes down from his second encounter with Yahweh atop the mountain, and his face is permanently disfigured by that encounter, he has to wear a veil for the rest of his days. The face is a surface, and it is precisely surfaces, in this tradition, which are effaced in favor of depths. No graven images, either, for the tradition of making exterior gods is traded off for a graven memory. The god is to exist now within the private interior space of the mind. 

Part of the revelation of Sinai, then, is that it is the memory and not the physical body itself which will serve henceforth as the new locus of the socius. The cosmos of laws and taboos and proscriptions, of which there are hundreds in the Mosaic revelation, is a cosmos that is not to be inscribed, as in tribal societies — and the Hebrews, lest we forget, began this way, as a series of tribes colliding one with another — upon the body, but upon the memory, via the instrument of writing in the new medium of the alphabet that Moses “invented” for this purpose. It is the alphabet that will make possible the memorization of these laws that will be inscribed upon the memory, for the breaking of the laws, Moses demonstrates repeatedly, will be punishable by death.

It is an internal world of memory and conscience, in other words, that Moses is bringing into being here. The alphabetic script and the Mosaic Laws which are communicated by means of it serve to inscribe the memory in a new and incredibly complex way: henceforth, the memory will be expanded via writing in such a way that a new ethical cognitive space is brought into being internally within the devout human subject. The memory of the Israelite will become so overcoded with laws and rules of conduct that conscience will sting him no matter what he does or where he goes. If he picks up sticks on the Sabbath, he will be stoned to death; if he steals, he will be maimed; if he practices divination, he will be executed, etc.

This is partially the reason, then, for the dark punishing aspects of Moses as a personality, for the severity of his punishments is part of the key to burning these laws into the memory like etheric tattoos. For instance, when he sees that the Hebrews have reverted to the religion of the golden bull, he smashes the tablets of the law and then orders that all who had taken part in such worship are to be killed. This amounts to some three thousand Israelites, who are thus the first internal victims of the zealotry of monotheism, which now punishes the worship of other gods with death.

Later, when the Hebrew men have been seduced by Moabite women, Moses orders the men to be publicly executed by hanging (Num. 25:5). He then has all the Midianites put to death for helping to seduce the men of Israel, and when the Israelite soldiers return to the camp with a line of women and children they have taken as prisoners of war, Moses tells them to kill all the male children and all those women who have given birth to them, leaving only the virgins, whom he then turns over to his soldiers. And when it comes time to suppressing the insurrection of Korah and his 250 followers, Yahweh causes the ground to open up and swallow them all, and those who are not killed in the earthquake are then burnt to ashes by a fireball which he sends upon them.

Moses, then, is the archetype of the Punisher, who carries out the will of his new god, a dark, violent god, against all those who oppose him and his Law.

IX. The Mandate of Yahweh 

But the severities of Moses and his new god are a necessary means of opening up the internal abysses of the Hebrew psyche, and of creating a mental space of guilt and conscience, a space with walls where line upon line of taboos have been inscribed. The Mosaic revelation, in contrast to that of Akhenaten, is an entirely internal one that shapes and creates a private space of mental anguish in which the Hebrew system of overcoding stings the individual at every step.

The only practice of bodily inscription that is held over from the tribal world is that of circumcision, an invention of the Egyptians, and an atavism within this new interior mental space of the Hebrew Vision. Circumcision denotes tribal membership, but it is only a leftover from another macrosphere, the Egyptian one, for it is the memory that is inscribed now, not the body.

This, then, is the real reason for the ban against graven images: they are pure surfaces, and all surfaces in this tradition must be effaced and internalized. The god is to exist now only within the mind: he is to be imagined in the private inner space of one’s mind, not exteriorized in a carven image.

Thus, the alphabet is more abstract than hieroglyphics because the words have to be imagined in the private interior of the mind. The things the words refer to are no longer to be pictured before one, but imagined inside this new interior space that Mosaic revelation announces. The point of an invisible god is the same as that of a pictureless writing: it is not the world out there that counts anymore, but the world in here. 

Thus, this shift from the sensory soul to the intellectual soul as Rudolf Steiner would describe it, makes possible a new complexity to the relationship of man to his god: now the god, too, must be held accountable for his actions, which must be explained to the human worshipper and justified. The god cannot simply do as he pleases, with the human subject left behind wondering what hit him. There is an agreement, a covenant governing the relationship. The covenant is repeatedly broken, not just by human beings, but also by the One God which governs them. But reasons must be given for the actions of this god: if he sends the Assyrians to wipe out Israel, it is because the Israelites have reverted back to the northern cult of the bull god.

Catastrophes are no longer explained by a simple, and inscrutable, withdrawal of the Mandate of Heaven, as in Chinese or Sumerian theology in which, if a catastrophe befalls your city, it is explained as the god taking a sudden dislike to you and simply withdrawing its favors. There is a certain arbitrariness to these traditions.

But in the new private ethical mental space of the Mosaic revelation, the god must be held accountable for his actions, and they must make sense. If misfortune happens, it is due to the disturbance of the relationship between the Israelite and Yahweh. There is nothing arbitrary about it.

Thus, human suffering is accounted for in this tradition in a way that is completely overlooked in the monotheism of Akhenaten. If the people fail to keep the covenant, they will be punished. If the individual transgresses the Law, he will be punished.

If, in the Egyptian tradition, you act in accordance with Maat – a cosmic, impersonal notion of Truth — then you will be rewarded with good fortune. If you don’t, then misfortune will befall you. But Maat is completely impersonal. You can’t make deals with it. And it can’t be changed.

In the Hebrew tradition, all sorts of deals and bargains can be worked out with Yahweh, who is the sole source and author of Events. What happens in the phenomenal world of “nature” is neither impersonal, nor predetermined, but a function of the whims and moods of this deity.

That is the Mosaic revelation.

X. Conquest: Two Vectors 

At this point, the Hebrews have constructed the Ark of the Covenant within which to house the Decalogue, for the instructions for making it were brought down by Moses from Sinai, along with the instructions for building the tent or tabernacle inside which the Ark is to be housed. I find it interesting that this tent is laid out on an East-West axis, with its opening facing to the East, exactly as though Yahweh were some sort of sun god. But then this is the way temples were laid out in Egypt and so the practice is perhaps an authentic carry-over from the sojourn of the Levites there.

Thus, we are to imagine the Hebrew encampment: the Ark is inside the tent; the tent is in the center of camp, where it is surrounded by a circle of tents of the twelve tribes, with donkeys and perhaps camels parked out on the periphery. A defensive arrangement, in other words, for the Hebrews are now becoming a streamlined war machine that is preparing for its new mission: the conquest of Canaan, a mission given to Moses at the top of Sinai and which he now gives to the Hebrews.

As they approach Canaan, Moses tells them that they must volunteer one man from each of the twelve tribes to be sent on ahead as spies in the land of Canaan. When the spies return, they report that the Canaanites are actually a race of giants, the “sons of Anak,” and that the Hebrews are merely the size of grasshoppers in proportion to them. They are terrified, but Moses orders them to launch the first assault upon Canaan, apparently from the south.

This first attack is a total debacle, for the Amalekites and the Canaanites swoop down on them from the north and defeat them, utterly.

Now, at this point, we must mention that there are actually conflicting vectors for the assault upon Canaan given in the Pentateuch. In these early passages, Moses and the Israelites are approaching the land, probably the Negeb, from the south. Later, it says they will go to the east, around Edom and up through the land of Moab, where the Israelites will consort with the women and Moses will punish them for it. The Moses narrative will end with the Israelites perched on the eastern bank of the  Jordan River, ready, with Joshua, to invade and destroy the ancient city of Jericho.

However, as T.J. Meek once, long ago, pointed out, Moses could not have known Joshua, who is mentioned in the Amarna Letters from the time of Akhenaten as one of the leaders of the earlier assault on the uplands of Ephraim during the 14th century. Meek reminds us that the authors of these texts are mostly Judeans, for the Israelites were wiped out by the Assyrians and so, along with them, the northern point of view has been lost.

So the editors of the post-exilic period have put Joshua and Moses together into the same timeframe with Joshua subordinate to Moses and his directions. But in fact, the Books of Joshua and Judges preserve, in certain passage (such as Judges 1:1-21) the tradition of a conquest of Canaan from the south rather than the east, led by Judah and Simeon, members of the southern tribes, who conquer the cities of Debir and Hebron located in the far south. This is followed by the conquest of Hormah, Gaza, Ashkelon and Bethel, a movement that sweeps generally from south to north.

Thus, according to Meek, we have the following scenario for the conquest of Canaan: beginning around 1400 BC, the conquest of multiple towns and villages by the Habiru led by Joshua (“Yashuya”) coming in from the east across the Jordan, who end by forming a confederacy centered on the city of Shechem, which long remained the capital of the north, and given the name of “Israel” by the time of the Merneptah stele in 1207.

A second invasion of the Hebrews of the Exodus coming in from Egypt across the Sinai somewhere in the middle of the 13th century, led by Moses and emerging up through the Negeb from the south, eventually settling the land that would come to be known as Judah.

Thus, two traditions, two lands, two peoples: Israel, whose ultimate ancestor Abraham, had originated in Ur of Mesopotamia — the city of the moon god Sin — and who migrated north to Haran and then south to Palestine (a pattern which generally fits the geographical spread of references to the Habiru since about 1850 BC); and Judah, whose founder was Moses, having originated in the city of the sun god Re-Harakhty of Heliopolis, coming across the wastes of the Sinai desert.

Thus also, two different names for a god who was originally two different gods: El, the Canaanite father of Baal who becomes “Elohim” (“gods” plural, that is); and Yahweh, perhaps an Arabic-derived Midianite storm god. (The Midianites are thought by some to have been Arabs and Yahweh may stem from the Arabic root hwy meaning ‘to blow.’) It was at this point in our narrative that Moses may have been introduced to the god Yahweh by his father-in-law Jethro, who may already have been the priest of this god. Moses would then have substituted Yahweh for Akhenaten’s sun disc, and then abruptly realized that with this substitution the Hebrews could be fished out of Egypt using the bait of a Semitic, rather than an Egyptian god. This is the real meaning of the episode at the Burning Bush.

Originally, though, as Meek points out, each of the Hebrew tribes may have had its own totem god, for the names of many of the tribal founders are those of Canaanite gods: Asher may be the masculine form of Asherah, the Hebrew consort of Yahweh; Dan and Gad are both the names of Canaanite divinities; Leah means “wild cow” and Rachel means “ewe”; Issachar is ish’ sakar, Sakar being the name of a god, etc. The god Yahweh, then, was apparently the main god of the tribe of Judah, and he became the national god during the time of the United Monarchy from about the period of David, who was a Judean.

So we have a monotheistic tradition that was originally perhaps thoroughly polytheistic and which was eventually whittled down to two gods who were, in turn, finally spliced together into one god over many centuries of priestly writers and redactors.

XI. Pious Fraud

But according to the Bible, meanwhile, the Hebrews have marched and fought their way east and then north and now remain perched near Mount Pisgah, ready for the assault upon Jericho. Yahweh tells Moses to elect Joshua as his successor, which he does. His brother Aaron has died and been replaced by Eleazar, his son. His sister Miriam is long since gone. He is 120 years old now — a mythical age, no doubt — and ready to be gathered unto his people, as the phrase goes.

But first, according to the Pentateuch, anyway, he delivers a long speech to the Israelites composed of a fresh — and rather overwhelming — batch of new laws that is essentially the substance of the Book of Deuteronomy. Now this book, in its entirety, dates from the 7th century BC, during the time of King Josiah, after the northern kingdom of Israel has fallen to the Assyrians in 722 BC, and so represents an entirely Judean point of view. And one of its most important arguments — which its author has gone back and retroactively placed into the mouth of Moses, the great founding father of Judah, as a way of sanctioning its authenticity — is that Yahweh now should no longer be worshipped in any place other than the Temple in Jerusalem, which is  now the only valid place of worship. He is no longer to be worshipped under that tree or atop yonder hill, and most certainly not in the temples erected for him and adorned with golden bulls at shrines set up by King Jeroboam in Israel at Dan and Bethel. By the time of the reforms of King Josiah, which represent a sudden outburst of desperate zealous persecution of all other forms of Canaanite worship — i.e. the Baal cults, the Asherim, etc. — Yahwistic monotheism has narrowed to the point of only tolerating the worship of this god at one location upon the surface of the earth, and that location is to be found in Jerusalem. Thus, the words spoken by Moses in the Book of Deuteronomy as he is making ready for death were never words spoken by him at all, but represent a much more severe point of view from the later 7th century BC.

Suffice it to say, however, that after giving his speech, Moses climbs to the top of Mount Pisgah for his final view of the world.

XII. The Final Glimpse

Yahweh has forbidden him entrance into the Promised Land. Back at Kadesh-barnea, Moses had struck the rock of a cliff face with his staff in order to make water flow for the thirsty Hebrews, when Yahweh had told him only to “speak words” to the rock. Apparently, this inattention to detail was tantamount to giving preference to magic over prayer, for the traditions of magic, divination and sorcery are in process of being left behind as the Hebrews migrate to the Promised Land. They are, in the new religion designed by Moses himself, expressly forbidden.

Moses is allowed only a glimpse of the Promised Land, from the top of Mount Pisgah. He stands, an aging old man leaning on his staff, the wind rumpling his robe, as he gazes out over the Land.

His mission is accomplished. He has played midwife to the birth of an entire people, a people who are ready to shape history in accordance with a new set of religious ideas and practices. A people with, already, a difficult past and, at this point, an unimaginably difficult future.

They do not yet have a history. Only a geography.

Soon, the war machine will have fallen and become captured once again by a state apparatus, in this case, the city of Jerusalem, which David will capture from the Jebusites.

Moses dies quietly on some late afternoon beneath a terebinth tree, perhaps. He is buried in an unmarked grave, so that his bones cannot be turned into relics and worshipped.