the part about the limited number system is something i haven’t seen in a while . I remember authors going through all sorts of mental gymnastics to try to avoid calling them retarded -like in Alex’s adventures in numberland
Yes it’s pretty clear that part of it is that they are retarded, but I doubt they’re more retarded than Aboriginals or for that matter any of the other Amazonian tribals and yet abos seem to understand quantity
I'm following Jean Gebser's model of magical, mythical, and mental consciousness, where metaphysics (quantitative or logical analysis of God) really only takes place in the third stage. When I read about the ancient Hebrews saying that God was a burning bush, or a pillar of fire, or the Muslim conception that God has physical hands, or even the Christian/Vedic idea that God takes on a body, this is very different from the Pythagorean concept of God as "source of the limit and unlimited."
It's possible that in the Dravidian pre-Indo-European Upanishadic tradition, there was this kind of metaphysics, but we don't have any direct evidence of it in writing. You could try to infer that in 2000 BC they were able consider divine forces as being consubstantial with certain abstractions like "death itself" or "life itself."
It's possible that metaphysics did arise at the dawn of civilization, 10k BC, or even earlier. Maybe Neanderthals had metaphysics. It's impossible to prove that they didn't. But I think when you read certain sections of the Tanakh or the Theogony, Iliad, and Odyssey, it is clear that divinity is not limited to metaphysical conceptions, but that the divine was "supernatural." That is, naturalistic, but more so.
Like Thor is described as picking up mountains and throwing them at giants. This isn't metaphysics, this is just storytelling to make kids impressed around the fire.
There could be multiple layers of religion, where the priests at the top have some metaphysics, but they don't bother disseminating it to the illiterate masses. There's a case to be made that metaphysics and writing develop in mutually dependent way.
For most people today, science plays the role of the Gods. Scientists are a council of shamans, and they can get together and do anything. They could turn you into a pig, or kill you, or make you live forever. How do you know? You're not a scientist. The scientists look in their big books and they use this magic thing called numbers to predict the future and make magic.
If you look at the accounts of anthropologists in 19th century Russia, they believed that an Orthodox priest could bless a jar of pickles with a dead rat in it and make the "bad spirit" go away, so the pickles would be safe to eat. They understood that dead rats would make you sick, but they also thought, "well, he's a priest, so he could make it safe to eat." Their conception of God was literally "big priest in the sky." It wasn't much more complicated than that.
I would argue, psychologically, the magical conception of divinity is the default perception of 99% of humans throughout every stage of history. And maybe metaphysics precedes writing, and Neanderthals had it. To the extent that people are now literate, metaphysics is much more accessible, although I'm not sure that's a good thing. Even if metaphysics is true and helpful, a distorted or "half-truth" version might drive people crazy.
There are so many half-Nietzscheans who have never read him, but they have picked up on a few filtered-down points, and are now convinced that "morality isn't real, so I can smoke weed if I want to." This isn't really the fault of the person, but the fault of a society which doesn't police morality or metaphysics in a strict way. People cannot possible help but misinterpret and mess things up.
The point about intelligence is interesting. Spatial intelligence is probably decreasing over time, which is also something we have a hard time getting AI to do. Engineers are high in spatial intelligence. If everyone was slightly more spatially intelligent, the cost of basic mechanic goods, like cars, would be much cheaper, because everyone would have basic mechanical skills. I wonder if this would result in any break-through advancements at the highest level. It's hard to even know what these functions are at the highest level.
I can sort of understand verbal intelligence as "retain symbol, manipulate symbol." Mathematical intelligence is also technically a symbolic manipulation, but devoid of any qualitative texture. Language has these very hardcore instinctual pre-sets, to the point where certain brain injuries affect vocabulary, while others affect grammar. Math seems to be accessing the same infrastructure but without the aid of the pre-set instincts. So babies can talk much more quickly than they can do math. If there is a non-verbal child who can do math, they are probably severely autistic (male brained?).
But what even is spatial intelligence? It's not symbolic, but some kind of mapping. Being in a space. It does seem to me that people with high verbal intelligence ascribe mystical or emotional significance to words, like they cry when they read a nice poem. It then seems that people with high spatial intelligence would have a greater emotional sensitivity to spaces and forms, like something that is beautiful. Are we losing our sensitivity to the material world?
A counter-argument would be that when you take hunter-gatherers and put them in a city they do not become elite architects or fashion designers something.
The best film on aboriginal religion is Ten Canoes. Free on youtube:
I would argue that metaphysics arises among the priestly class by the mythical period, and myths are symbols of metaphysical truths. This is very evident in Egyptian religion, with many gods being hypostases of metaphysical principles, and Ma’at/Isfet being pretty clearly representative of the actuality/potentiality or form/hyle divide. Isfet for this reason is not even a god, because gods are hypostases of formal principles or objects, and Isfet is the lack thereof. The Theogony (both Hesiodic and Orphic) is similarly lining a metaphysical belief system with myths. Zeus, through his consumption of Metis-Phanes, embodies the generative while Nyx or Ananke or Gaia perhaps even Hera is the receptive.
Not all myths are symbolic of metaphysics because some exist to teach lessons or just to be good stories, but many are. Thor’s battle against the Jotunn is supposed to represent the act of demiurgy as is Odin and bros. dissection of Ymir. Evidence of all this being the case is that pagan religions were not anal about the consistency of their myths, they recognized these myths as all being true in spite of contradictions because they reflected the same happening from different angles. Also worth noting that the presocratics tended to either claim association with or become associated with the religious sages of other races. Like claims that t Pythagoras learned among the Druids or Magi or Chaldeans or Brahmins (Gymnosophists)
Myth can be unconsciously metaphysical. Everything is metaphysical by its nature, but a child can imagine or reproduce a myth without metaphysical knowledge. Mythologies evolved by an unconscious process, and metaphysical science only later uncovered this process. Hence Plato wanted to set the myths straight.
By the time of Pythagoras the consciousness of metaphysics was in full swing. I would be comfortable tracing this back to 2000 BC with the Upanishads. I'm also referencing the timeline of the Bicameral Mind Theory of Julian Jaynes.
Protestantism was an attempt to promote a popular understanding of a metaphysical view of God, which up until that point was only held by a minority. They wanted to dispense with all the iconography and symbolism, much of which was preserved from paganism. The progression is:
1. God is dude and he just rapes as he pleases; (magical paganism)
2. Actually no, God is good and he rapes specifically only when it is right and just (mythic paganism)
3a. well, actually, no, rape is against the law, and God is lawful, so he wouldn't do that unless there was a really good special exception (metaphysical paganism)
3b. there's only one God, but he's a pillar of fire, and all the other Gods agree that he's the only God (magical henotheism)
4. Well no, it looks like God broke the rules, but he actually didn't because reasons (mythic monotheism)
5. Actually, no, if the text says that, the text is corrupt, and we need to be Deists who believe in the morality of Christ but not this superstitious miracle stuff (metaphysical monotheism)
6. Actually no, it's not necessary to believe in God in order to believe in the moral law of Christ (moral agnosticism)
7. Actually, a belief in God is the cause behind all violations of moral law. A truly morally person MUST be an atheist, because God is just a dude and he rapes as he pleases. (moral atheism)
8. I am so morally good that I would rather suffer eternally than ever break the moral law and admit that God could do evil things. If God is evil, let him punish me! Hail Satan! (moral anti-theism/satanism/Fedora tipping intensifies)
The problem with this progression is that it always filters down in a perverted way, so you have popular interpretations which end up looping back to the ur-paganism stage, eternally. I would argue that gooning is quite literally a pagan ritual that probably occurred frequently throughout history. Those big fat Venus Figurines were probably subject to many a bukkake.
The Upanishads were definitely not as old as 2000 BC, and by the way were not “Dravidian”… Did a Dravidian tell you this?
I know of the Bicameral theory, in fact I was planning on making a post on it for the longest time, but scrapped it. I am a little bit bicameral myself, there have been times where I recall myself referring to the “I” as a “we”. But it was probably more of a difference in outlook rather than an actual experience of audio hallucination. Today it’s usually experienced in solitude and life threatening survival situations iirc.
I would say Thomism is the most metaphysical Christianity ever gets. Lutheranism sort of rejects this approach.
It is precisely the fact that myths can be reproduced by people who don’t know the deeper meaning of them, that makes myth a good vessel for truth in the unstable world of the past. It is true that they could reflect a sort of collective unconscious that people only later became individually conscious of, it would be hard to tell. And it’s hard to demonstrate whether or not people could tell before 2000 BC because of lack of records. I would assume wise men were numbered enough to know amongst themselves, though, which is what the post is moreso about. Plato wants the myths to be reformed to some extent but this was common before him as well. Pindar did the same. But others say that Plato is being shortsighted and doesn’t see beneath the layers in the seemingly unwholesome myths. Proclus insists that the religious elite knew the true meaning of the myths
What's your take on Dravidians? The standard 19th century idea? My take is that Dravidians migrated from the pre-Aryan Iranian Plateau somewhere between 10kbc and 4kBC, before the Indo-Europeans arrived.
The southern Indian type which we call "Dravidian" because they preserved the language is actually a mixture of Dravidian and a basal Austronesian population. The reason why northern Indians are lighter skinned is due primarily to greater Dravidian admixture and less Austronesian admixture, not primarily due to Aryan admixture.
Aryans contributed their haplogroup through patrilineal succession of priests and princes, but haplogroup is distinct from allele frequencies and phenotypes. There are sub-saharans with R1a, but that has little bearing on phenotype.
I agree that Catholic priests were more metaphysical than average Lutherans, but my point is that Lutherans were trying to force metaphysics on peasants in a way that Catholics did not.
I think Plato is correct. I also believe Zeus was a real person, like Nero or Critias, and his reign began when he killed his father and took all the neighboring priestesses of Greece as war brides. He was a Khan-level figure. I don't think his characteristics are metaphorical. You can project metaphysics onto those qualities, but Plato rejected that and said it's best to start over. My view on Zeus is derived from the religious anthropology of James Frazier and Jean Gebser.
It's possible that humans discovered metaphysics in 40k BC, but this was forgotten and rediscovered multiple times. It's possible that the Black Sea Civilization, destroyed by flood in 5600 BC, had metaphysics, but this was lost, then rediscovered by the Egyptians and Sumerians in 4000 BC; but then they forgot what the symbols meant and just kept repeating the symbols; and then rediscovered around 800 BC.
Maybe it is possible that Ur-Zeus was metaphysical, but the Ur-Zeus was then syncretized with a real king. Supposedly there is a large tomb in Crete with the inscription ZEUS. This is made more likely if we consider that the Egyptians considered the Pharaoh to be an incarnation of a God, so if a Pharaoh was really important, his biographical details might be retroactively added to the archetype of the God.
Yes, I completely agree that Dravidians were descended from Neolithic Iran types and was largely replaced in its original form. The Brahui are the only remnant of this. I think I discuss this in my India post. However, the Aryans did contribute a good chunk of autosomal DNA to some Indian groups. Both IE and Dravidian DNA probably contribute to lighter skin. I think Balochs are the most Iran-Neo rich population today.. Brahmins are probably around 20% Aryan (by which I mean the Andronovo culture which already had EEF admixture, not pure Yamnaya).
Yes, I’ve heard of the tomb of Zeus as well. It wasn’t just Plato, a lot of wise men of Greece denied the legitimacy of the tomb and considered Cretans in general kind of an odd bunch. Even Epimenides, the great sage of Crete, vehemently denied that it contained Zeus. And yet, there does seem to be a strong connection between Zeus and the Doric invaders. Ur-Zeus was probably like Jupiter, who initially was very abstract and maybe more like Tengri or Shangdi than you might imagine. He gradually became more personified in art and literature and some of this may have been because mortal men were considered to have been Zeus. It’s not so much that Zeus was inspired by them so much as posthumously they were considered to have been the god walking among men or perhaps even had their souls United with the deity. This happened in Rome with Romulus and Quirinus, and with Aeneas and Jupiter Indiges. This is the goal of Pagans, to achieve this sort of apotheosis. However, it is certain that Ur-Zeus was not a human as he is cognate with a bunch of other IE gods whose names all mean something like “daylight-sky [father]”
I agree that there is a God called Zdeyus Piter, or whatever the original PIE is, who was very abstract and shamanistic. In the way that you could point to a river, and say, "this river is a living God," they pointed to the sky and said it was a God, and ascribed characteristics to it. When I say that Zeus was a real person, I mean the specific Greek stories attributed to Zeus, in which he kills his father and goes around wearing (transforming) animal clothing and having sex with many women. It's possible that this was even some kind of Yamnaya tradition, where in order to become a chieftain, you would have to kill your father and steal a bunch of women from neighboring tribes while wearing the skins of various animals. The wife stealing behavior is very prominent in the Mahabharata.
I tend to think that the human behavior precedes the archetype, so there was actually a guy who did many of the things ascribed to Zeus, probably even married his sister like the Pharaohs did, and then people wrote about him for a long time afterward. I think the character of Odin is also based on a real person. I think we underestimate how exceptional ancient kings could be in their behavior and how this behavior became the basis of later myths. This behavior was then applied to Zeus, so there was a syncretism between the historical Greek King, the shamanistic Daylight Father, and then afterwards people started adding metaphysical Pythagorean interpretations. You might argue the opposite, that first came the metaphysicians, then the shamans with their animism, then finally the Kings started to call themselves Gods and acted as Nero did.
6 Possibilities, with Nero=N, A=Animism, Metaphysics=M:
NAM
NMA
MAN
MNA
AMN
ANM
It's also possible that there were various waves or parallel developments. As shamanism developed, kings arose, they did crazy things, this was integrated into the storytelling tradition, people emulated the stories in a feedback loop... I tend to see the first Shaman as a Zeus-like figure, because to be the first Shaman ever would be quite crazy. That is why I prefer NAM. Or maybe an alternating loop of NANANA until finally metaphysics is developed.
But I suppose if you believe that metaphysics can be arrived at without writing, and you could believe that shamanistic rituals were developed merely to symbolically communicate already explicitly, consciously understood metaphysical ideas, then MAN sounds best to you.
I would refute your claim, but if you and I spoke, you would quickly find my genteel nature is just a veneer, and I think you would be reminded of folks you probably don't like very much. For me, there is no debate. I stand with King Zeus. There is no other tree to garner fruit from.
I think Injuns are more susceptible to believing Hollywood portrayals of themselves than they realize. This blend of nature worship shamanistic-monotheism seems too much like a movie cliche that they all seem to have bought in on.
My inference is that all tribes in the Americas prior to Christian influence had belief systems more similar to the Piraha, which is belief in terrible spirits that would attack and rape/kill you. And their belief in that is just a reflection of how life went about around them, senseless wanton violence for untold generations perpetrated against each other. They behaved that way, and naturally the spirits they believed in reflected the nature of their adherents. The Aztecs were in the early stages of moving out of this animist system of chaotic nonsensical violence to a religion of metaphysics where things had to make sense logically and be justified in a moral sense too. So, they may have tortured thousands of people to death... but only cause the freakin' Sun God is gonna die if we don't mang.... you wouldn't get it white boy!
This entire analysis is moot because it ignores the shared cross-cultural processes through which metaphysics arose. It wasn't "smart cave man think world is fire" out of nowhere.
The trend is something like this: Animism (reflexive understanding of everything in the world as personified and engaging in Mind) yields to Goddess Worship (understanding there is something materially UNDERNEATH the world that causes a proliferation of shapes) which leads to Ancestor Worship (delineating a specific proliferation of 'shapes'/people of culture) to worship of an Absent God (understanding there are causes beyond the visible/material) to Metaphysics, which is largely an attempt to place a God above God. Metaphysics is the apotheosis of monotheism.
Not sure how this makes my analysis “moot”. In fact, I touch on this subject more than once in my post. Unless you think Metaphysics has always been a pan-national process, and cultures have never done it themselves, which I see no reason to believe. If anything, it seems much more likely that most of it wasn’t cross cultural and it’s just that people tend to come to the same conclusions on these topics. Goddess Worship also might be a meme and ancestor veneration certainly predates it
The Assyrians seemed brutal in the more traditional sense of being brutal as a means to an end, unless there is stuff I’m missing. At worst they were like the Comanche. The Aztecs literally bloodlet themselves regularly as a sort of daily libation, they were obsessed with the blood sacrifices
my favorite thing about the assyrians is how they moved whole populations around their empire, its so random. Which is ironic considering that since 2003 there are probably as many Assyrians in america as there are in iraq
Assyrians werent a very large ethnic group back then and even then they were a small minority in their empire. But if there’s one thing i hold in suspicion is that modern day assyrians have always been calling themselves assyrian and not syriac/chaldean
I suspect modern Assyrians are just a general group of Christian Aramaic speakers who were United as an outgroup under Islamic rule. Aramaic was used as a lingua franca in that entire region and Assyria became a general term for Mesopotamia under the Sassanids.
the part about the limited number system is something i haven’t seen in a while . I remember authors going through all sorts of mental gymnastics to try to avoid calling them retarded -like in Alex’s adventures in numberland
Yes it’s pretty clear that part of it is that they are retarded, but I doubt they’re more retarded than Aboriginals or for that matter any of the other Amazonian tribals and yet abos seem to understand quantity
I'm following Jean Gebser's model of magical, mythical, and mental consciousness, where metaphysics (quantitative or logical analysis of God) really only takes place in the third stage. When I read about the ancient Hebrews saying that God was a burning bush, or a pillar of fire, or the Muslim conception that God has physical hands, or even the Christian/Vedic idea that God takes on a body, this is very different from the Pythagorean concept of God as "source of the limit and unlimited."
It's possible that in the Dravidian pre-Indo-European Upanishadic tradition, there was this kind of metaphysics, but we don't have any direct evidence of it in writing. You could try to infer that in 2000 BC they were able consider divine forces as being consubstantial with certain abstractions like "death itself" or "life itself."
It's possible that metaphysics did arise at the dawn of civilization, 10k BC, or even earlier. Maybe Neanderthals had metaphysics. It's impossible to prove that they didn't. But I think when you read certain sections of the Tanakh or the Theogony, Iliad, and Odyssey, it is clear that divinity is not limited to metaphysical conceptions, but that the divine was "supernatural." That is, naturalistic, but more so.
Like Thor is described as picking up mountains and throwing them at giants. This isn't metaphysics, this is just storytelling to make kids impressed around the fire.
There could be multiple layers of religion, where the priests at the top have some metaphysics, but they don't bother disseminating it to the illiterate masses. There's a case to be made that metaphysics and writing develop in mutually dependent way.
For most people today, science plays the role of the Gods. Scientists are a council of shamans, and they can get together and do anything. They could turn you into a pig, or kill you, or make you live forever. How do you know? You're not a scientist. The scientists look in their big books and they use this magic thing called numbers to predict the future and make magic.
If you look at the accounts of anthropologists in 19th century Russia, they believed that an Orthodox priest could bless a jar of pickles with a dead rat in it and make the "bad spirit" go away, so the pickles would be safe to eat. They understood that dead rats would make you sick, but they also thought, "well, he's a priest, so he could make it safe to eat." Their conception of God was literally "big priest in the sky." It wasn't much more complicated than that.
I would argue, psychologically, the magical conception of divinity is the default perception of 99% of humans throughout every stage of history. And maybe metaphysics precedes writing, and Neanderthals had it. To the extent that people are now literate, metaphysics is much more accessible, although I'm not sure that's a good thing. Even if metaphysics is true and helpful, a distorted or "half-truth" version might drive people crazy.
There are so many half-Nietzscheans who have never read him, but they have picked up on a few filtered-down points, and are now convinced that "morality isn't real, so I can smoke weed if I want to." This isn't really the fault of the person, but the fault of a society which doesn't police morality or metaphysics in a strict way. People cannot possible help but misinterpret and mess things up.
The point about intelligence is interesting. Spatial intelligence is probably decreasing over time, which is also something we have a hard time getting AI to do. Engineers are high in spatial intelligence. If everyone was slightly more spatially intelligent, the cost of basic mechanic goods, like cars, would be much cheaper, because everyone would have basic mechanical skills. I wonder if this would result in any break-through advancements at the highest level. It's hard to even know what these functions are at the highest level.
I can sort of understand verbal intelligence as "retain symbol, manipulate symbol." Mathematical intelligence is also technically a symbolic manipulation, but devoid of any qualitative texture. Language has these very hardcore instinctual pre-sets, to the point where certain brain injuries affect vocabulary, while others affect grammar. Math seems to be accessing the same infrastructure but without the aid of the pre-set instincts. So babies can talk much more quickly than they can do math. If there is a non-verbal child who can do math, they are probably severely autistic (male brained?).
But what even is spatial intelligence? It's not symbolic, but some kind of mapping. Being in a space. It does seem to me that people with high verbal intelligence ascribe mystical or emotional significance to words, like they cry when they read a nice poem. It then seems that people with high spatial intelligence would have a greater emotional sensitivity to spaces and forms, like something that is beautiful. Are we losing our sensitivity to the material world?
A counter-argument would be that when you take hunter-gatherers and put them in a city they do not become elite architects or fashion designers something.
The best film on aboriginal religion is Ten Canoes. Free on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AMmHrFdyBw
I would argue that metaphysics arises among the priestly class by the mythical period, and myths are symbols of metaphysical truths. This is very evident in Egyptian religion, with many gods being hypostases of metaphysical principles, and Ma’at/Isfet being pretty clearly representative of the actuality/potentiality or form/hyle divide. Isfet for this reason is not even a god, because gods are hypostases of formal principles or objects, and Isfet is the lack thereof. The Theogony (both Hesiodic and Orphic) is similarly lining a metaphysical belief system with myths. Zeus, through his consumption of Metis-Phanes, embodies the generative while Nyx or Ananke or Gaia perhaps even Hera is the receptive.
I talk more in this post: https://sectionalismnotes.substack.com/p/chaoskampf-as-the-perennial-tradition
Not all myths are symbolic of metaphysics because some exist to teach lessons or just to be good stories, but many are. Thor’s battle against the Jotunn is supposed to represent the act of demiurgy as is Odin and bros. dissection of Ymir. Evidence of all this being the case is that pagan religions were not anal about the consistency of their myths, they recognized these myths as all being true in spite of contradictions because they reflected the same happening from different angles. Also worth noting that the presocratics tended to either claim association with or become associated with the religious sages of other races. Like claims that t Pythagoras learned among the Druids or Magi or Chaldeans or Brahmins (Gymnosophists)
Myth can be unconsciously metaphysical. Everything is metaphysical by its nature, but a child can imagine or reproduce a myth without metaphysical knowledge. Mythologies evolved by an unconscious process, and metaphysical science only later uncovered this process. Hence Plato wanted to set the myths straight.
By the time of Pythagoras the consciousness of metaphysics was in full swing. I would be comfortable tracing this back to 2000 BC with the Upanishads. I'm also referencing the timeline of the Bicameral Mind Theory of Julian Jaynes.
Protestantism was an attempt to promote a popular understanding of a metaphysical view of God, which up until that point was only held by a minority. They wanted to dispense with all the iconography and symbolism, much of which was preserved from paganism. The progression is:
1. God is dude and he just rapes as he pleases; (magical paganism)
2. Actually no, God is good and he rapes specifically only when it is right and just (mythic paganism)
3a. well, actually, no, rape is against the law, and God is lawful, so he wouldn't do that unless there was a really good special exception (metaphysical paganism)
3b. there's only one God, but he's a pillar of fire, and all the other Gods agree that he's the only God (magical henotheism)
4. Well no, it looks like God broke the rules, but he actually didn't because reasons (mythic monotheism)
5. Actually, no, if the text says that, the text is corrupt, and we need to be Deists who believe in the morality of Christ but not this superstitious miracle stuff (metaphysical monotheism)
6. Actually no, it's not necessary to believe in God in order to believe in the moral law of Christ (moral agnosticism)
7. Actually, a belief in God is the cause behind all violations of moral law. A truly morally person MUST be an atheist, because God is just a dude and he rapes as he pleases. (moral atheism)
8. I am so morally good that I would rather suffer eternally than ever break the moral law and admit that God could do evil things. If God is evil, let him punish me! Hail Satan! (moral anti-theism/satanism/Fedora tipping intensifies)
The problem with this progression is that it always filters down in a perverted way, so you have popular interpretations which end up looping back to the ur-paganism stage, eternally. I would argue that gooning is quite literally a pagan ritual that probably occurred frequently throughout history. Those big fat Venus Figurines were probably subject to many a bukkake.
The Upanishads were definitely not as old as 2000 BC, and by the way were not “Dravidian”… Did a Dravidian tell you this?
I know of the Bicameral theory, in fact I was planning on making a post on it for the longest time, but scrapped it. I am a little bit bicameral myself, there have been times where I recall myself referring to the “I” as a “we”. But it was probably more of a difference in outlook rather than an actual experience of audio hallucination. Today it’s usually experienced in solitude and life threatening survival situations iirc.
I would say Thomism is the most metaphysical Christianity ever gets. Lutheranism sort of rejects this approach.
It is precisely the fact that myths can be reproduced by people who don’t know the deeper meaning of them, that makes myth a good vessel for truth in the unstable world of the past. It is true that they could reflect a sort of collective unconscious that people only later became individually conscious of, it would be hard to tell. And it’s hard to demonstrate whether or not people could tell before 2000 BC because of lack of records. I would assume wise men were numbered enough to know amongst themselves, though, which is what the post is moreso about. Plato wants the myths to be reformed to some extent but this was common before him as well. Pindar did the same. But others say that Plato is being shortsighted and doesn’t see beneath the layers in the seemingly unwholesome myths. Proclus insists that the religious elite knew the true meaning of the myths
What's your take on Dravidians? The standard 19th century idea? My take is that Dravidians migrated from the pre-Aryan Iranian Plateau somewhere between 10kbc and 4kBC, before the Indo-Europeans arrived.
The southern Indian type which we call "Dravidian" because they preserved the language is actually a mixture of Dravidian and a basal Austronesian population. The reason why northern Indians are lighter skinned is due primarily to greater Dravidian admixture and less Austronesian admixture, not primarily due to Aryan admixture.
Aryans contributed their haplogroup through patrilineal succession of priests and princes, but haplogroup is distinct from allele frequencies and phenotypes. There are sub-saharans with R1a, but that has little bearing on phenotype.
Dravidian admixture accounts for the clinal distinction between north and south. Dravidian languages are not native to India; Austronesian languages are. China was originally inhabited by Austronesians: https://deepleft.substack.com/p/ancient-pale-invaders-replaced-chinas
I agree that Catholic priests were more metaphysical than average Lutherans, but my point is that Lutherans were trying to force metaphysics on peasants in a way that Catholics did not.
I think Plato is correct. I also believe Zeus was a real person, like Nero or Critias, and his reign began when he killed his father and took all the neighboring priestesses of Greece as war brides. He was a Khan-level figure. I don't think his characteristics are metaphorical. You can project metaphysics onto those qualities, but Plato rejected that and said it's best to start over. My view on Zeus is derived from the religious anthropology of James Frazier and Jean Gebser.
It's possible that humans discovered metaphysics in 40k BC, but this was forgotten and rediscovered multiple times. It's possible that the Black Sea Civilization, destroyed by flood in 5600 BC, had metaphysics, but this was lost, then rediscovered by the Egyptians and Sumerians in 4000 BC; but then they forgot what the symbols meant and just kept repeating the symbols; and then rediscovered around 800 BC.
Maybe it is possible that Ur-Zeus was metaphysical, but the Ur-Zeus was then syncretized with a real king. Supposedly there is a large tomb in Crete with the inscription ZEUS. This is made more likely if we consider that the Egyptians considered the Pharaoh to be an incarnation of a God, so if a Pharaoh was really important, his biographical details might be retroactively added to the archetype of the God.
Yes, I completely agree that Dravidians were descended from Neolithic Iran types and was largely replaced in its original form. The Brahui are the only remnant of this. I think I discuss this in my India post. However, the Aryans did contribute a good chunk of autosomal DNA to some Indian groups. Both IE and Dravidian DNA probably contribute to lighter skin. I think Balochs are the most Iran-Neo rich population today.. Brahmins are probably around 20% Aryan (by which I mean the Andronovo culture which already had EEF admixture, not pure Yamnaya).
Yes, I’ve heard of the tomb of Zeus as well. It wasn’t just Plato, a lot of wise men of Greece denied the legitimacy of the tomb and considered Cretans in general kind of an odd bunch. Even Epimenides, the great sage of Crete, vehemently denied that it contained Zeus. And yet, there does seem to be a strong connection between Zeus and the Doric invaders. Ur-Zeus was probably like Jupiter, who initially was very abstract and maybe more like Tengri or Shangdi than you might imagine. He gradually became more personified in art and literature and some of this may have been because mortal men were considered to have been Zeus. It’s not so much that Zeus was inspired by them so much as posthumously they were considered to have been the god walking among men or perhaps even had their souls United with the deity. This happened in Rome with Romulus and Quirinus, and with Aeneas and Jupiter Indiges. This is the goal of Pagans, to achieve this sort of apotheosis. However, it is certain that Ur-Zeus was not a human as he is cognate with a bunch of other IE gods whose names all mean something like “daylight-sky [father]”
The Khalsa being made the 11th Guru with Guru Sahib himself taking initiation into it would be apotheosis.
Will reply to Deepleft seperately
I agree that there is a God called Zdeyus Piter, or whatever the original PIE is, who was very abstract and shamanistic. In the way that you could point to a river, and say, "this river is a living God," they pointed to the sky and said it was a God, and ascribed characteristics to it. When I say that Zeus was a real person, I mean the specific Greek stories attributed to Zeus, in which he kills his father and goes around wearing (transforming) animal clothing and having sex with many women. It's possible that this was even some kind of Yamnaya tradition, where in order to become a chieftain, you would have to kill your father and steal a bunch of women from neighboring tribes while wearing the skins of various animals. The wife stealing behavior is very prominent in the Mahabharata.
I tend to think that the human behavior precedes the archetype, so there was actually a guy who did many of the things ascribed to Zeus, probably even married his sister like the Pharaohs did, and then people wrote about him for a long time afterward. I think the character of Odin is also based on a real person. I think we underestimate how exceptional ancient kings could be in their behavior and how this behavior became the basis of later myths. This behavior was then applied to Zeus, so there was a syncretism between the historical Greek King, the shamanistic Daylight Father, and then afterwards people started adding metaphysical Pythagorean interpretations. You might argue the opposite, that first came the metaphysicians, then the shamans with their animism, then finally the Kings started to call themselves Gods and acted as Nero did.
6 Possibilities, with Nero=N, A=Animism, Metaphysics=M:
NAM
NMA
MAN
MNA
AMN
ANM
It's also possible that there were various waves or parallel developments. As shamanism developed, kings arose, they did crazy things, this was integrated into the storytelling tradition, people emulated the stories in a feedback loop... I tend to see the first Shaman as a Zeus-like figure, because to be the first Shaman ever would be quite crazy. That is why I prefer NAM. Or maybe an alternating loop of NANANA until finally metaphysics is developed.
But I suppose if you believe that metaphysics can be arrived at without writing, and you could believe that shamanistic rituals were developed merely to symbolically communicate already explicitly, consciously understood metaphysical ideas, then MAN sounds best to you.
Zeus can't have been a human king.
I would refute your claim, but if you and I spoke, you would quickly find my genteel nature is just a veneer, and I think you would be reminded of folks you probably don't like very much. For me, there is no debate. I stand with King Zeus. There is no other tree to garner fruit from.
The Guru gives me weapons and tells me to kill Muslims (non-Aryans).
ਅਕਾਲ
I think Injuns are more susceptible to believing Hollywood portrayals of themselves than they realize. This blend of nature worship shamanistic-monotheism seems too much like a movie cliche that they all seem to have bought in on.
My inference is that all tribes in the Americas prior to Christian influence had belief systems more similar to the Piraha, which is belief in terrible spirits that would attack and rape/kill you. And their belief in that is just a reflection of how life went about around them, senseless wanton violence for untold generations perpetrated against each other. They behaved that way, and naturally the spirits they believed in reflected the nature of their adherents. The Aztecs were in the early stages of moving out of this animist system of chaotic nonsensical violence to a religion of metaphysics where things had to make sense logically and be justified in a moral sense too. So, they may have tortured thousands of people to death... but only cause the freakin' Sun God is gonna die if we don't mang.... you wouldn't get it white boy!
https://genesoftheancients.wordpress.com/2024/09/19/genetic-differences-in-the-potential-for-intelligence-iq-across-modern-populations/
Scroll down and it compares 100 to 85 IQ for various marks like 115, 130, 145 etc.
Religion comes with fire as a way to organize groups beyond the Dunbar limit.
Rather, than focus on religious beliefs IMO praxis is a better indicator.
Saluting a flag is a form of "religion" or cultic behavior - as is hand shaking etc.
This entire analysis is moot because it ignores the shared cross-cultural processes through which metaphysics arose. It wasn't "smart cave man think world is fire" out of nowhere.
The trend is something like this: Animism (reflexive understanding of everything in the world as personified and engaging in Mind) yields to Goddess Worship (understanding there is something materially UNDERNEATH the world that causes a proliferation of shapes) which leads to Ancestor Worship (delineating a specific proliferation of 'shapes'/people of culture) to worship of an Absent God (understanding there are causes beyond the visible/material) to Metaphysics, which is largely an attempt to place a God above God. Metaphysics is the apotheosis of monotheism.
Not sure how this makes my analysis “moot”. In fact, I touch on this subject more than once in my post. Unless you think Metaphysics has always been a pan-national process, and cultures have never done it themselves, which I see no reason to believe. If anything, it seems much more likely that most of it wasn’t cross cultural and it’s just that people tend to come to the same conclusions on these topics. Goddess Worship also might be a meme and ancestor veneration certainly predates it
The Assyrians seemed brutal in the more traditional sense of being brutal as a means to an end, unless there is stuff I’m missing. At worst they were like the Comanche. The Aztecs literally bloodlet themselves regularly as a sort of daily libation, they were obsessed with the blood sacrifices
my favorite thing about the assyrians is how they moved whole populations around their empire, its so random. Which is ironic considering that since 2003 there are probably as many Assyrians in america as there are in iraq
It’s still a viable strategy today but everyone thinks it’s impossible
Syrians are on the whole mostly descended from Assyrians and other Levantine/West Mesopotamian Semitic peoples who were converted to Islam.
Assyrians werent a very large ethnic group back then and even then they were a small minority in their empire. But if there’s one thing i hold in suspicion is that modern day assyrians have always been calling themselves assyrian and not syriac/chaldean
I suspect modern Assyrians are just a general group of Christian Aramaic speakers who were United as an outgroup under Islamic rule. Aramaic was used as a lingua franca in that entire region and Assyria became a general term for Mesopotamia under the Sassanids.