Do We Know Why We Know? - Part 6

I do wonder, after reading Cormac McCarthy’s “The Kekule Problem,” whether language has indeed enabled these ancient stories to be drawn out of our unconscious in ways to help us understand who we are, where we came from and what we’ve tried to do to ensure our survival as a species. I ended Part 5 with the Mesopotamian story of Marduk.

In this part, Part 6, I will go through the Egyptian story of Osiris, Isis and Horus but there are a few other things I’d like to include before I get there.

I’ve written briefly in past parts of Do We Know Why We Know about the Nephilim, Anakim and Rephaim. In the article that started this series—A Changing Frame-Of-Reference—I wrote, “And why is there no mention of the pyramids in the Bible? The giant Nephilim people are included.” I also included all three in Part 4 when I wrote, “the soil beneath the earth’s surface,” or how Sheol from (Psalm 6:5) is defined. The Sheol known as the abode of the Rephaim or the dead, the people described as being greater-than-average height and stature as found in Genesis 14:5 and Deuteronomy 2:11 to name two of several instances where the giants are mentioned in the OT. The Rephaim are also referred to as “shades”, “spirits”, or “dead,” while other names of these giants from this ancient text include the Nephilim and the Anakim. Goliath, the giant that David slew, was a Rephaim.

That these giants mentioned in numerous places throughout the OT piqued my curiosity, when the pyramids are not mentioned at all. Why is that? What were the authors’ intentions or the hermeneutics behind including the Nephilim, the Rephaim or the Anakim? We may never know. But recently I discovered that in another book not included in The Bible was The Book of Enoch that includes writing about the Nephilim at length.

What I find interesting here is the apparent association of Enoch, who is mentioned several times in The Bible, to Thoth (the Egyptian god of wisdom and writing) and part of Osiris story I will soon talk about. Enoch is also associated with the Greek god Hermes—messenger of the gods. Together the three represent the figure Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes the Thrice Great). Poking my head a little ways down Lewis Carroll’s rabbit hole from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, I had written about Giordano Bruno who was executed for his ideas around an helio-centric galaxy in Part 3 of Do We Know Why We Know, who was one that thought Hermes Trismegistus was a pagan prophet who foresaw the coming of Christianity. There were several other Christian writers including Augustine who predicted the same thing in their writings.

I’m still in the rabbit hole. Hermes Trismegistus seems may be associated with Atlantis but more of that will have to come in my next update. But some more on Enoch from Genesis 5:24, “Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.” Enoch was one of only two people God took to heaven without them dying. The other was Elijah 2 Kings 2, “Now when the Lord was about to take Elijah up to heaven by a whirlwind, Elijah and Elisha were on their way from Gilgal.”

I will investigate further The Book of Enoch in coming articles but do you know why God took Enoch and Elijah to heaven without them dying? Some believe they are the two people mentioned in Revelations 11:3 that will witness end times, “And I will grant authority to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth.” Leave it to say there’s more to come.

But it’s time to get on with the story of Osiris, Isis and Horace.

Osiris was an old king who had established the Egyptian state when he was young. He was great hero but had become archaic and stubbornly blind. Though he represented the embodiment of Egyptian custom and tradition, which is what the “pyramid” had come to represent, he no longer saw the world as he should, given his position. Osiris, being old and unseeing of what he should, represents culture, as culture seems to be an essence that is old and deliberately blind; culture always seems to be this way. It’s a construct of what came from those who are now dead, the dead who have stopped living and are out of date. Being dead they can’t update themselves, and the living inhabit their corpse like in the Marduk story where the gods inhabited their father Apsu’s corpse, the story I describe in my last article Do We Know Why We Know Osiris is old and not seeing what he should and stubbornly won’t look where he knows he should.

Osiris doesn’t have the energy or the spirit to deal with his brother Seth, who is a scoundrel, a precursor to the western idea of Satan. Osiris knows this but underestimates his brother’s malevolence and strength. Seth wants to be the ruler and take over the kingdom.

In reading history, every stable society is threatened by this stubborn blindness and malice. Every bureaucracy becomes stagnate and lethargic. History has shown this in the rise and fall of empires like the Roman and Ottoman but also in the business world with fortune 500 companies of limited life spans (i.e. Digital Equipment, Compaq). Mention DEC (Digital Equipment Corp) or Compaq to anyone under 30 years of age and they don’t know who you’re talking about. I wrote a paper on what makes a company sustainable years ago in holding what made them successful in the first place (as a start up) being quite opposite to what keeps them going in a sustainable way (systems and procedures).

Osiris ignores Seth. Seth waits in the wings for Osiris to one day make a mistake or show his weakness. When he does, Seth is ready and pounces. He kills Osiris and then cuts him up into pieces that he spreads across the entire Egyptian state. The Egyptians regarded their provinces as pieces of Osiris’s body. Now Osiris is a god and can’t actually die that represents the inherent spirit of structure that can’t be destroyed either; there’s always structure, as the new one replaces the old one. The structure may be different but it’s still structure and always returns. Structure can be hurt and broken into pieces like Osiris; things fall apart because they get old and are under minded by something else. It seems to be what the Egyptians were trying to figure out. Not unlike their predecessors in Mesopotamia with Marduk. The pieces of Osiris are spread over Egypt so he can’t get himself back together; things fall apart and can’t be brought back together.

But the spirit of Osiris lives in the pieces. Order is demolished and chaos emerges in Isis. Isis is Queen of the Underworld. She is chaos. She’s also Osiris’s wife. Osiris and Isis (order and chaos) are together like Apsu and Tiamat from the Mesopotamian story in my last article. The order of Osiris collapses and up comes chaos: Isis—searching. She’s looking for order; chaos cries out for order. Isis goes all around Egypt that’s in a state of chaos, trying to put Osiris, her husband, back together. She finds Osiris’s phallus and uses it to make herself pregnant. The pieces of Osiris are still alive and unite with chaos to produce something new—a new order. That’s the story of the dissolution of structure into chaos and its resurrection, or coming back to life. Isis is pregnant and goes back down into the underworld to give birth to Horus on the advice of Thoth, god of wisdom, as he knows that Seth will try to kill her child. Horus is the son of the great mother and the great father.

A quick side note on Thoth, who I mentioned earlier, being connected with Enoch in Hermes Trismegistus, who is also said to be an engineer from the destroyed Atlantis.

Horus is known as the Egyptian eye and a messianic figure. Much of the mythology that described Horus parallels the Christ story from the Judeans coming out of Egypt and Christians emerging from the Jewish community. There’s influence of Mesopotamian and Egyptian thinking apparent in the development of later ideas on organizing society. Paintings of Isis with Horus on her lap seem similar in content and form to Mary holding infant Christ. The Holy Mother of God and the hero described as a metaphor by Joseph Campbell. This is not only a Christian motif but goes much deeper. “It’s a human motif,” as Jordan Peterson describes.

Isis gives birth to Horus and Horus grows up outside the kingdom in the underworld. He sees what differentiates him from his father Osiris, and like Marduk from my last article, he can see, see like a falcon and is symbolized as such. Birds of prey have better sight than humans.

Horus comes back to fight Seth. A significant difference between Horus and Osiris is that Horus doesn’t underestimate Seth malevolence and knows what he is up against. Horus battles Seth to get the kingdom back. While Horus and Seth are fighting, Seth tears out one of Horus’s eyes. Horus’s eye is torn out but still he defeats Seth banishing him to the nether regions of the kingdom. Horus can’t kill him because, like structure, the malevolent destructive force that threatens structure never dies. It’s always there and can only be removed temporarily.

Horus is king. King god. With his removed eye, one might think he’d pop it back in his head and take his place in the upper most position amongst the pantheon of the gods. But that isn’t what Horus does. He goes back to the underworld where Osiris’s metaphysical existence lies. Horus hands Osiris his eye giving Osiris sight. Osiris regenerates himself only with vision. Horus and Osiris now linked together return to the world to rule jointly. The Egyptians came to believe that the pharaoh, who had an immortal spirit, was the embodiment of the conjunction of Horus and Osiris and gave the pharaoh sovereignty. The Egyptians, like the Mesopotamians I wrote about last time, were trying to puzzle out who should lead civilization. Who should be pharaoh and what does the pharaoh have to be in order for things to work and order to be restored? The pharaoh has to be awake to evil and chaos while embodying Egyptian tradition to place him at the highest pinnacle of society’s structure.

This in a way is similar to the battle of the gods through the centuries with the expectation that the highest possible moral virtue would emerge as a consequence of that competition. That’s the eye on the top of the pyramid that hasn’t yet been part of my pyramid discussion. What’s at the top of the pyramid isn’t the same as what the rest of the pyramid is made of. The pyramid is a representation of structure. Something rises to the top of the pyramid—the eye in this case. The Egyptians figured out what puts something at the top of the pyramid is attention, paying attention. Keep your eyes open; keep watch, which is not the same as thinking. The thing about human beings is that we can see, better than any other mammal. The capacity to see is what we use in the world. More than fifty percent of the human brain’s cortex—the largest part and the ultimate control of—is organized around vision. The brain of most animals is organized around smell. We stand up right and can see a long distance. The human ability to see is what saves us and what saves human communities and that’s what the stories like Marduk and Osiris seem to be trying to tell us.

Why didn’t storytellers just say so? They likely didn’t know how. It’s taken a long time—forever—to figure out. We’re still trying to understand it.

This extends back to the first article I wrote for Do We Know Why We Know and the Cormac McCarthy essay, “The Kekule Problem.” McCarthy describes that our unconscious has been whirling around and developing for two million years or longer and language infected us with the primary purpose to help us understand our unconscious, for less than a hundred thousand years. That is virtually all but an instant in time when we know our universe is 13.8 billion years old; earth is 4.5 billion years old and life on earth is 3.5 billion years old. However long our unconscious has been developing 13.8 billion years or 3.5 billion years the development of language is a mere, smidgen of an instant of that time; we’re still in the beginning of the beginning stages.

I’m still finding out lots. For me, it’s an interesting journey. I hope next to look deeper into Enoch with the potential of learning more on the Greek story of Gaia and Uranus. Maybe some more even on Atlantis. We’ll see.

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More will come in my next post.

Get yourself a copy of The Actor, The Drive In and The Musician and find out what many readers have already discovered. You can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn or visit my website at www.douglasgardham.com.

Do We Know Why We Know? - Part 5

I ended my last part of the Do We Know Why We Know series alluding to the Osiris and Marduk stories being part of this next article. I was also relieved that my computer woes were behind me and I hadn’t lost any of my work. I won’t be labor the point any more and get right into things. As it turns out there’s too much to include both Osiris and Marduk in a single writing especially after what I discovered.

I’ve chosen Marduk as I recently learned that Bel, who’s mentioned in the Old Testament, is Marduk, the patron god of Babylon. Bel is included in several places in the Old Testament including Jeremiah 51:44, “And I will punish Bel in Babylon, and take out of his mouth what he swallowed”, as well as Jeremiah 50:2 and Isaiah 46:1. Through this search I also learned that there are three additions to The Book of Daniel with more on Bel but are considered deuterocanonical and not considered part of The Bible by Protestant dominations. They were rejected in the 16^thcentury by the Protestant movement because those sections of Daniel were not in Jewish Bibles. There is an extension to Chapter 3 and two additional Chapters, 13 and 14. Chapter 14 is entitled Bel and the Dragon that seems appropriate until you read the text. Tiamat, in the Marduk story, is recognized as a dragon who fights Marduk for control of the world hence my thinking Bel (Marduk) and the Dragon (Tiamat). But in the Daniel story, it is Daniel who destroys both Bel and the dragon. The Daniel chapter is more about Bel the idol than the Marduk story. There’s more here but that’s for another time. The actual Marduk story will come later in this article.

Let me try and set the stage for the Marduk story is relaying to us.

Joseph Campbell wrote, “Mythology … is psychology misread as biography, history, and cosmology.” I haven’t used the word “mythology” in any of the Do We Know Why We Know articles but in the last one I wrote that these “stories may be an explanation on what happened without the availability of writing or language as we know them” and were “filtered by or construed in our unconscious until language further found its way into us.” I’m including this here to keep in mind not only the literality but the interpretation and translation of these stories from ancient times in what they’re saying. There are clues about us but if language infected us as Cormac McCarthy suggested in his essay “The Kekule Problem” to explain our unconscious, which I wrote about in the first Do We Know Why We Know, we are still in the very early stages of understanding what has been constructed in our unconscious in the two million years of its existence, with language seemingly as useful as chopsticks would be to build a house; simply put language may be the tool for the job of deciphering our unconscious but it’s a long way from ideal. But I suppose it’s a start.

In the last article, I briefly mentioned the city of Troy, from Homer’s epic poem The Iliad, that most thought was a story of fiction, until it was discovered at Hisarlik, Turkey in 1870. I mentioned Atlantis as well that hasn’t yet been uncovered but how the Plato story of the legendary, mythical city, from his dialogues of Timaeus and Critias, sank into the ocean in 9,600 B.C. and how this date aligns exactly with the date of the dramatic rise of sea level that is now recognized as the end of the Younger Dryas period 11,600 years ago. The advanced, ancient civilization of Atlantis is somewhere; we just haven’t found it yet or we don’t recognize it for what it is.

What I also think is extremely difficult to understand about knowing what we know, is the conception of what life was like or will be like in the past or the future respectively. I’ll illustrate in a moment. That the time was millennia ago makes it all the more difficult to understand what we knew and were at that time. Like the adage, “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” We only discover parts from the past that we use to decipher the whole.

This is one of the reasons I’ve landed on the Mesopotamian story of Marduk to start with, potentially being the first metastory that some seem to think may be the beginning of our conception of the fundamental structure of reality. The Mesopotamians, like other civilizations, appeared to be trying to get it right in how to organize society to create a sustainable civilization.

When we read the stories, it’s difficult not to put our spin of how we see the world today versus how the people of the time would have seen, heard or even understood things. Think of this today, in youth trying to imagine the world with what’s been developed for our every day lives in the last thirty years. In our home 1990, we didn’t have the Internet and didn’t know anyone that did. I don’t know that I even really knew what it was. We had VHS tapes, CDs, cassettes and albums. Then, it was nearly unimaginable to think we’d soon have more songs than we could listen to in a lifetime contained in a small device we could hold in our hand or put in our pocket. Never mind imagining what we have today in a smart phone that allows us to access the Internet, phone or text anyone anywhere in the world, buy things, take high quality photos and videos, watch almost any movie we want to or listen to any song that has ever been recorded in history that’s affordable to the vast majority of us. We can listen to any and as many songs as we want to at a cost per month that’s less than what one CD would cost in 1990. How does a person who’s twenty today even picture 1990? And that’s only thirty years ago. The Marduk story is eight thousand years old! It’s hardly inconceivable.

Let me continue my pause on the Marduk story a little longer.

I mentioned in Part 4 of Do We Know Why We Know that the pyramids are not mentioned at all in The Bible. It seems strange when in Exodus, great lengths are taken to describe the relatively “simple” construction of the tabernacle where the Ark Of The Covenant was contained. The pyramids were there according to the historic timeline. The powerful King Khufu built the Great Pyramid of Giza in 2,540 B.C. According to Josephus, who I’ve not mentioned yet but wrote about biblical times in his epic The Antiquities of the Jews, includes the word “pyramids” once in Book II, “they set them also to build pyramids.” Interesting here when the word “pyramids” is used, most, I think, would immediately figure the Great Pyramids of Giza.

So if the pyramids were there and only significant enough to warrant one mention between the two epic accounts of the times—The Bible and The Antiquities of the Jews—then maybe it’s not a pyramid thing at all but a people thing. Were the Judeans and Hebrews who wrote The Bible even in Egypt then? Maybe the Judeans and Hebrews didn’t want to include them.

The first Judeans in Egypt came with the First Persian Empire founded by Cyrus the Great in 550 B.C. Apparently Cyrus credited Marduk with the inspiration to allow the Jewish community to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple of Yahweh. There’s much more detail on this but according to the Old Testament (2 Kings 25:22-26) many Judeans took refuge in Egypt with the destruction of Jerusalem and Judah that took place in 597 B.C. after the assassination of Gedaliah, who Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar had appointed governor of Judah.

Additionally, the term Hebrew is first seen in The Bible in Genesis 14:13 of the Old Testament, “Then one who had escaped came and told Abram the Hebrew.” Archeology has related Hebrews to the name of the seminomadic Habiru people found in Egyptian inscriptions of the 13^th and 12^th centuries B.C. as having settled in Egypt. This fits close with Moses leading the liberation of the people of Israel out of Egypt in the 13^th century—the time of Exodus.

With these dates neither the Judeans nor the Hebrews were around for the building of the Great Pyramids.

Then I wondered maybe the pyramids the Hebrews or Judeans worked on from Josephus’s works were the much smaller, man-made brick pyramids that have not fared well over time. But when I looked, even these last pyramids were built in Egypt around 1,700 B.C. If the Judeans didn’t begin to come into Egypt until 597 B.C. and the Hebrews until the 13^thcentury we have a 1,100-year to 500-year gap respectively between when Judeans and the Hebrews were first in Egypt and the construction the man-made brick pyramids. So from Josephus’s writing, maybe the Hebrews or Judeans were repairing the brick-constructed pyramids but they weren’t building them. The pyramids are not likely mentioned in The Bible because the Hebrews and Judeans didn’t build them or want them included.

Now before I leave the pyramids and why I’m even writing about them here, is the construction of the Great Pyramid, the first pyramid built in Egypt, was remarkable. The design, precision, ingenuity and craftsmanship of the Great pyramids are what make them the only Seventh Wonder of the World that’s still in existence and leaves experts to question how the Egyptians even built them. But as incredible a feat as the construction of the first great pyramids were in 2,500 B.C. as building them continued until 1,700 B.C., their construction grew steadily less impressive. Man-made brick replaced the quarried limestone block construction in the later pyramids and the impressive precise construction grew consistently shabbier. Some say this is attributable to the pharaohs’ decline in power and dwindling financial resources. No one seems to know for sure.

Why am I spending so much time on pyramids when I said I was going to talk about Marduk and one of the earliest civilizations to exist?

Well because there seems a connection between the pyramids and the Mesopotamian culture and the story of Marduk. The Mesopotamian existential view of the world had the earth as a disk and the space above it, a dome (I couldn’t help but think of Jim Carrey in The Truman Show when I learned this). Surrounding the disk was seawater and below the earth was fresh water; the disk floated on freshwater. They extended this (potentially from what I wrote earlier about language and our unconscious) to the water, recognizing it as deities: Tiamat (the god of the seawater) and Apsu (the god of the watery deep beneath the earth or fresh water). More on water is coming in a future article; oh, what we don’t know.

I wrote in A Changing Frame-Of-Reference about the pyramids being representative of the spherical earth or a hemisphere and how the height divided by the perimeter is equal to 2Pi. If the Mesopotamia idea of the world was a dome on a disk, which is a hemisphere, the pyramid seems a likely representation of the dome concept of the world. Were pyramids being considered prior to the Egyptians?

Why did I really choose the Marduk story to start? Mesopotamia appears to be the first existence of human society that dates back to 6,000 B.C. Why I mention this is because of what I wrote in Part 4. My three areas of focus for the Do We Know Why We Know series seem to be centred on: the space above us (the universe or everything outside of us), the space below us (the ground we stand on), and, the space inside us (our unconscious and language). The Mesopotamian story is the first to capture these. The space below us is Apsu, the god of fresh water beneath the disk of the earth. The space above the earth and around it is the dome and Tiamat, the goddess of seawater around the disk. Even now, in searching for who we are and where we came from and why we know what we know 8,000 years later, we’ve penetrated the seawater to its greatest depth at the Challenger Deep. There’s a huge focus on the dome and what lies “out there” in space with space agencies around the world like NASA and Spacex but very little (other than the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia) on what lies inside earth and what we stand on beyond what’s just below the surface as are most archeology sites.

I’ll throw in here from my last article that I’ve started reading Jules Verne’s 1864 novel Journey To The Center Of The Earth. I wonder what I’ll find?

Okay, the Marduk story. Mesopotamia became the amalgamation of middle-eastern tribes over many years. The gods of all these tribes warred in an abstract space out of which the metastory of Marduk emerged. Could this be our unconscious?

Apsu and Tiamat are inseparable and often depicted as two serpents entwined together like the double helix of DNA. How did the Mesopotamians know about the building blocks of life? Was it from our unconscious? From Apsu and Tiamat’s combined waters are created a family of unruly gods that Apsu decides he needs to deal with. The gods become upset and choose their resourceful god Ea to save them. Ea casts a spell to make Apsu sleep and then slays him (Apsu represents structure and culture). Tiamat is enraged at the killing of her husband and promises revenge (she represents chaos and nature). The gods are afraid of Tiamat’s reaction to what they’ve done. They know her power and hide, by inhabiting Apsu’s corpse. Tiamat creates an army of dragons and monsters to destroy the gods and takes Kingu her son, the demon of demons, as her consort and establishes him as leader of her army of monsters. Tiamat gives Kingu the Tablet of Destinies that give the bearer great powers and he wears as a breastplate. Ea and his wife Damkina create Marduk who is destined to become king of the gods. Tiamat wants to destroy Marduk and make Kingu the all-powerful one. But Marduk with arrow and net goes after Tiamat and destroys her by filling her up with a wind and killing her with an arrow that splits her in half. He uses each half of her to create the Earth and the heavens that he contains in his net. Marduk kills Kingu and captures the Tablet of Destinies to become the all-powerful. Marduk is all seeing with eyes all around his head and has the magic of speech. Marduk mixes Kingu’s blood with clay from the earth and molds the first human beings entrenching them with the element of evil. He makes human beings to serve the gods. Marduk becomes head of the Babylonian pantheon by the middle of the second millennium B.C.

Again from McCarthy’s “Kekule Problem” of language infecting us with the ability to explain our unconscious; we being the only mammal of five thousand that has language while all the others seem to do fine without it (think of how your cat rules the house). The evil element in human beings from this Mesopotamian story makes us different than all other beings as well. We’re the only creatures capable of deception and malevolence. We see this in the Adam and Eve story, Genesis 3:6-7, “she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” When they knew they were naked, they knew the difference between good and evil and that they could do evil. Was language part of the evil package? Marduk brought the magic of speech to the table. Certainly seems part of allowing us to understand it.

Why is this so important? It appears to be the beginning of our (human beings) conception of the fundamental structure of reality. In this story, the Mesopotamians appear to be doing their best to get it right. They’re looking at how to best organize society. When structure and culture fall, nature and chaos take over until the next order takes control. Their Marduk story illustrates how Marduk got organized against the emergence of chaos and how he mastered it. The gods declare a top dog that has eyes and speech and goes out voluntarily to encapsulate chaos cutting it to pieces to make the world. Isn’t that who should be top dog? That’s the heavenly domain. Now think of the story of David. Transferring the myth existentially to the Emperor of Mesopotamia then becomes the manifestation of Marduk on earth, the sovereign being, and all seeing, all knowing and able with speech. Why should they be king? They pay attention. They speak properly. They keep chaos at bay. They make ingenious things happen as a consequence. Was this what the Mesopotamians were trying to work out? What should be sovereign and why? That Marduk is the mapping for a new society seems implicit in his confrontation with the absolute unknown.

In my next article, I’ll write about Osiris and Isis and the Egyptian story. Then maybe Gaia and Uranus and the Greek story and more on the Judeao-Christian story as I make my way through The Bible. This seems like the beginning of the foundations of what western civilization is predicated upon leading to the sovereignty of the nation and of the individual. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

And is language drawing all of this from our unconscious?

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Again, more is coming in my next posted article.

I hope you’ll get yourself a copy of The Actor, The Drive In and The Musician and take them for a ride. You can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn or visit my website at www.douglasgardham.com.