Darkness Visible
The transition from matriarchy to patriarchy was not the only transformation that took place in the darkness. There was an alteration in the very way in which people think: a change from primitive materialism to Ionian consciousness. There was the abandonment of the practice of human sacrifice.
Ionian consciousness is the cognitive structure of our own contemporary academic culture, and we are indebted to the Ionian Greeks for it. When Thales of Miletus (c.624—c.546) wrote, “All things are from water and all things are resolved into water,” a new understanding of the world had its inception. Miletus is in Ionia, so I call this way of thinking “Ionian consciousness”. In his statement Thales was the first person we know of to make a distinction between appearance and reality, between what subjectively appears to us in perception and what objectively appertains in the “real” and “external world”. It is this distinction that lays the basis for modern natural science, for it conceives of the world as existing independently of the conscious mind that perceives it—a world that may “run” mechanically according to unchanging laws of nature that operate on events in objective time. Mind and matter are thus separated in Ionian consciousness. Ionian consciousness also introduces for the first time the concept of infinity. These two ideas—objective reality and infinity—make mathematics as we know it possible, and the appearance of geometry and number theory follow hard upon the heels of the Ionian revolution, as does the atomic theory of Democritus, another Ionian thinker.
The system of Olympian religion such as we find in Homer is of a pantheon of major gods dominated by a powerful king-god Zeus; there are also myriads of other deities or older powers, such as Rhea, Mother of the Gods, and her offspring, the Titans. All these deities indulge in behaviours that are very human-like—the male gods rape women, and all of them have love affairs, commit adultery, fight bloody wars, get wounded in battle and experience the gamut of human emotions: love, anger, jealousy, envy. In Ionian consciousness, all of this becomes morally unjustifiable. A single famous quotation from the work of an Ionian thinker, Xenophanes of Colophon (c.570—c.475), sums up the whole devastating critique: “Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods all the things which among men are shameful and blameworthy—theft and adultery and mutual deception.” Where there is only large and larger, there is no contradiction in the notion of a plurality of gods, but where there is infinity, only one god may occupy the supreme position, and “He” must be above all human passions. Monotheism is born, and patriarchy rationalised.
Ironically, Thales also expresses the dominant idea of the earlier stage of cognition, primitive materialism, when he writes, “Everything is full of gods.” Thales introduced the new Ionian form of consciousness, but this emerged from the older one. In Primitive materialism there is no distinction between appearance (perception) and reality, and there is no concept of infinity. There is a tendency to think of time as cyclical, of events as a repetition of an eternal oscillation, like day following night, and night following day. Ancient Egyptians thought of their king as Horus while alive, and as Osiris once dead, notwithstanding the contradiction that Osiris is the father of Horus and both are married to their sister-mother, Isis; all Pharaohs are different, all yet one and the same.
The science of primitive materialism is magic. Everything is full of gods, but some things are fuller of gods than others; hence, there are sacred places and sacred objects where the gods are particularly present. The whole science of magic is laid bare in the sacred texts of the Egyptians, in the Book of the Dead. Or, for example, consider this extract from the Memphite Theology of Creation, a document originating from c.2500: “… [Ptah] is in every mouth of all gods, all men, [all] cattle, all creeping things, and (everything) that lives…” This asserts that there is a single divine presence that is found in lesser or greater degree in all things—all things are living. This system of spiritual presence is also law-like, so that man as magus can control nature—he does so through the rites of invocation, through ritual sacrifice, and, when writing is present, through inscriptions. The word has power to transform nature. To the ancient there is one-world of fused matter and spirit, of god manifest in all things, without distinction between animate and inanimate; we could also call this “material vitalism”. The Egyptian magus believed that a statue made of clay could, by operation of the magic formulas inscribed upon the tomb walls, come alive within the tomb. Man is clay made animate by the divine spirit, which is also a breath, a physical thing.
Primitive materialism is also a system of primitive dualism in which the “soul” is a detachable physical part of the body—a breath primarily. In primitive materialism, there is no death of the soul. When a warrior is slain in battle, the spirit departs the body and goes somewhere else—it may inhabit the tomb, descend to the underworld, depart to a blessed isle, or ascend to the halls of the ancestors. The primitive had limited fear of death, because he did not conceptualise it as we do. Ionian cognition first made it possible to conceive of death as the utter annihilation of the person; it also made possible the idea that at death body and soul separate: the body to break apart in physical corruption to re-join inorganic material, and the soul to depart to the afterlife—be it Hades, Hell, the Isle of the Blessed, or Heaven.
We fail to take into our accounts the observation that ancient men and women did not think in the same way we do. Nowadays, no general would delay the fighting of a battle (or at least would admit to delaying one) because the sacrificial victim’s liver was found to be the wrong-way round. But in the ancient world, this was standard practice. We cannot understand their polity without taking this difference of cognition into account. Furthermore, the transition from primitive materialism to Ionian consciousness was not a once-and-for-all break with the past: as if, once Thales had spoken, all were immediately enlightened. We can only understand Greek history against the background of a slow developmental change in cognition, where even at the time of Socrates and Plato, the bulk of humanity still conceived of the world through the earlier concepts. During the bitter Peloponnesian War fought between Athens and Sparta (431—404), consultation with oracles was an essential preliminary to any action, and, under pressure of war and plague, many atrocities and atavisms were committed—these are the expression of older solutions to problems presenting themselves during times of great stress, for the main solution to any practical problem within primitive materialism is sacrifice.
Ionian consciousness is the cognitive structure of our own contemporary academic culture, and we are indebted to the Ionian Greeks for it. When Thales of Miletus (c.624—c.546) wrote, “All things are from water and all things are resolved into water,” a new understanding of the world had its inception. Miletus is in Ionia, so I call this way of thinking “Ionian consciousness”. In his statement Thales was the first person we know of to make a distinction between appearance and reality, between what subjectively appears to us in perception and what objectively appertains in the “real” and “external world”. It is this distinction that lays the basis for modern natural science, for it conceives of the world as existing independently of the conscious mind that perceives it—a world that may “run” mechanically according to unchanging laws of nature that operate on events in objective time. Mind and matter are thus separated in Ionian consciousness. Ionian consciousness also introduces for the first time the concept of infinity. These two ideas—objective reality and infinity—make mathematics as we know it possible, and the appearance of geometry and number theory follow hard upon the heels of the Ionian revolution, as does the atomic theory of Democritus, another Ionian thinker.
The system of Olympian religion such as we find in Homer is of a pantheon of major gods dominated by a powerful king-god Zeus; there are also myriads of other deities or older powers, such as Rhea, Mother of the Gods, and her offspring, the Titans. All these deities indulge in behaviours that are very human-like—the male gods rape women, and all of them have love affairs, commit adultery, fight bloody wars, get wounded in battle and experience the gamut of human emotions: love, anger, jealousy, envy. In Ionian consciousness, all of this becomes morally unjustifiable. A single famous quotation from the work of an Ionian thinker, Xenophanes of Colophon (c.570—c.475), sums up the whole devastating critique: “Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods all the things which among men are shameful and blameworthy—theft and adultery and mutual deception.” Where there is only large and larger, there is no contradiction in the notion of a plurality of gods, but where there is infinity, only one god may occupy the supreme position, and “He” must be above all human passions. Monotheism is born, and patriarchy rationalised.
Ironically, Thales also expresses the dominant idea of the earlier stage of cognition, primitive materialism, when he writes, “Everything is full of gods.” Thales introduced the new Ionian form of consciousness, but this emerged from the older one. In Primitive materialism there is no distinction between appearance (perception) and reality, and there is no concept of infinity. There is a tendency to think of time as cyclical, of events as a repetition of an eternal oscillation, like day following night, and night following day. Ancient Egyptians thought of their king as Horus while alive, and as Osiris once dead, notwithstanding the contradiction that Osiris is the father of Horus and both are married to their sister-mother, Isis; all Pharaohs are different, all yet one and the same.
The science of primitive materialism is magic. Everything is full of gods, but some things are fuller of gods than others; hence, there are sacred places and sacred objects where the gods are particularly present. The whole science of magic is laid bare in the sacred texts of the Egyptians, in the Book of the Dead. Or, for example, consider this extract from the Memphite Theology of Creation, a document originating from c.2500: “… [Ptah] is in every mouth of all gods, all men, [all] cattle, all creeping things, and (everything) that lives…” This asserts that there is a single divine presence that is found in lesser or greater degree in all things—all things are living. This system of spiritual presence is also law-like, so that man as magus can control nature—he does so through the rites of invocation, through ritual sacrifice, and, when writing is present, through inscriptions. The word has power to transform nature. To the ancient there is one-world of fused matter and spirit, of god manifest in all things, without distinction between animate and inanimate; we could also call this “material vitalism”. The Egyptian magus believed that a statue made of clay could, by operation of the magic formulas inscribed upon the tomb walls, come alive within the tomb. Man is clay made animate by the divine spirit, which is also a breath, a physical thing.
Primitive materialism is also a system of primitive dualism in which the “soul” is a detachable physical part of the body—a breath primarily. In primitive materialism, there is no death of the soul. When a warrior is slain in battle, the spirit departs the body and goes somewhere else—it may inhabit the tomb, descend to the underworld, depart to a blessed isle, or ascend to the halls of the ancestors. The primitive had limited fear of death, because he did not conceptualise it as we do. Ionian cognition first made it possible to conceive of death as the utter annihilation of the person; it also made possible the idea that at death body and soul separate: the body to break apart in physical corruption to re-join inorganic material, and the soul to depart to the afterlife—be it Hades, Hell, the Isle of the Blessed, or Heaven.
We fail to take into our accounts the observation that ancient men and women did not think in the same way we do. Nowadays, no general would delay the fighting of a battle (or at least would admit to delaying one) because the sacrificial victim’s liver was found to be the wrong-way round. But in the ancient world, this was standard practice. We cannot understand their polity without taking this difference of cognition into account. Furthermore, the transition from primitive materialism to Ionian consciousness was not a once-and-for-all break with the past: as if, once Thales had spoken, all were immediately enlightened. We can only understand Greek history against the background of a slow developmental change in cognition, where even at the time of Socrates and Plato, the bulk of humanity still conceived of the world through the earlier concepts. During the bitter Peloponnesian War fought between Athens and Sparta (431—404), consultation with oracles was an essential preliminary to any action, and, under pressure of war and plague, many atrocities and atavisms were committed—these are the expression of older solutions to problems presenting themselves during times of great stress, for the main solution to any practical problem within primitive materialism is sacrifice.
Naked Dancers
Tomb of Kamilari, near Phaistos, c.1500.
The religious context is indicated by the horns of consecration.
Tomb of Kamilari, near Phaistos, c.1500.
The religious context is indicated by the horns of consecration.