The Secret History of the World: Part 2 (Chapters 8-11)
I'm continuing to plod along through this work. It's striking me as a slightly more readable, and far less reliable version of Manly P. Hall's The Secret Teachings of All Ages. At times I find it fascinating and others completely infuriating because it's blazingly clear that whatever research he did to go into this book was only half-baked. As if he found something and just started riffing on it, connecting it to other things just because there were vague structural correlations. Mystic, beware of false cognates! Anyway, here's a few more thoughts on the book. There will have to be at least another three entries as I go through, so, sorry if this is boring anyone.
Solidification of Matter
Again, I'm not sold on young earth creation stories. I think it's total bullshit. That said, the Sphinx of Giza being a symbol of the four elements, from four zodiac signs. Yeah, I'm down with that.
Oh for the Days of Atlantis
Yeah, I'm not sold on Atlantis either. But there is something in his description of how these flood myths tie into each other. The fact that there are a number of "flood world" myths, means something. Perhaps it's just a story handed down from generations of people who lived eons ago and remember a time when the world flooded from the Ice Ages. If so, that story would be amazingly persistent. But early cultures being advanced enough to build monuments like the Sphinx of Giza or Stonehenge are something we tend to be baffled by. Then again, we've seen reconstructionists who have rolled megalithic stones with logs and I myself have pulled a multi-ton stone with a crew of people in this exact same fashion. It's not so hard to believe that ancient engineers could have come up with such a thing.
Mithras is not Ahuramazda
Chapter 10 was the most frustrating thing that I've read in this book so far. The first major thing that I called WRONG on was the claim that we understand about the cult built by Zarathustra because of our knowledge of the mystery cult of Mithras. First off, we don't know a hell of a lot about the Mithras cult, because it was a mystery religion. Like all mystery religions they don't talk about their practices. We know that temples were underground, and that they all had very similar altar spaces with this uniform iconography of Mithras slaying the bull. Beyond that it's all kind of speculative. What archaeologists and historians have agreed on however is that it did NOT originate with Zarathustra. Historians have been in agreement about that for 40 years now. The second major thing that he completely glosses over was that we know about the cult of Zarathustra from it's contemporary descendant: Zoroastrianism. The Zoroastrian religion, though limited by Iranian law, has maintained its existence for thousands of years of Pesian history. The fact that he would give a paltry few lines, while devoting pages to the Mithras cult is beyond me.
The Missing Inanna
This was what made me almost throw the book across the room. On page 192 in my paperback edition there is a block quote section that is unidentified. The preceding paragraph begins "The following account has been compiled from fragments of ancient tablets, dating perhaps as far back as the third millennium BC, excavated in Iraq in the late nineteenth century:" and then it goes on as follows...
The first gate he passed her out of, and he restored to her the covering cloack of her body.
The second gate he passed her out of and he restored to her the bracelets of her hands and feet.
The third gate he passed her out of, and he restored to her the binding girdle of her waist.
The fourth gate he passed her out of and he restored to her the ornaments of her breast.
The fifth gate he passed her out of and he restored to her the necklace of her neck.
The sixth gate he passed her out of and he restored to her the earrings of her ears.
The seventh gate he passed her out of and he restored to her the great crown of her head.
And then he begins talking about how everyone knows this story as Sleeping Beauty. I slammed the book shut, because that was just so utterly, utterly wrong. NO. This is not the story of Sleeping Beauty. This is the ascent of the Goddess Inanna from the underworld. In the mythology of ancient Sumer the fertility Goddess Inanna descends into the underworld to retrieve the lost spirit of her husband Dumuzi. Along the way she must pass through 7 gates, and at each gate she was stripped of her trappings of office as a Goddess. When she appears before her sister Ereshkigal she is naked and vulnerable. There she is beaten unto death and her corpse hung on a hook in the halls of the dead. The Gods saw this and decided to dispatch emissaries to the underworld to bargain with Ereshkigal for the corpse of Inanna. These emissaries find Ereshkigal in some kind of distress. So they tell her they will help her, if they can have Inanna's corpse. Ereshkigal agrees and the emissaries feed Inanna the food and water of life and they all leave the underworld. At each gate she reclaims her symbols of office and arises Goddess again.
The descent of Inanna is a fertility myth, much like the rape of Persephone. Inanna, a grain and sexual fertility Goddess is responsible for the flourishing of crops. Her time in the underworld, is the time when life on earth goes dead and dormant. It is the cycle of life and death and rebirth told over and over again.
This is not Sleeping Beauty. If the brothers Grimm knew of the myth of Inanna, which I could pretty much guarantee you they didn't, Sleeping Beauty would be far more interesting than it is.
The Chinese Lucifer
Seriously, what the hell is this guy talking about? Rudolf Steiner talking about Lucifer incarnating in some Chinese tribal encampment in the third millenium BC? Even China doesn't have histories that go back that far. The Xia dynasty of China is only vaguely recognized as being around at the time that they're talking about here. But according to this book Lucifer is the one who gave us the proverb. The whole time I was reading this I couldn't shake the what the fuck, is he saying that Confucius was Lucifer? No, that's thousands of years off. But who knows really, because time doesn't really matter in this book. Whatever, he was the "first person to think about life on earth in an entirely rational way." Really?
I'm not even going to go into how stupid it is that he thinks that the step pyramid of Djoser was the first permanent construction in Egypt. I mean, really.
The Bicameral Mind
Where I started to come back into the book was when he started to talk about consciousness. He pulls in the work of Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and talks about how the history he's trying to express all comes down to the ability of humans to recognize the self from the other. That the belief in the Gods was an internally generated experience. But he then turns it on its head and says "no, it's real" again. The voices of the Gods are not some delusion of the mind, they are real experiences with real Gods. It's like Latro in the Mist was a non-fiction piece. I'm busting out my copy of Jaynes tonight to do a little light reading opposite this book.
The First Trick in History
This was another wonderful gem of ridiculousness: ...the date of the siege of Troy is also the date of the first trick in history. (p. 224)
If we're talking about mythopoetic history, since we are, then let me throw a few other tricksters into the mix.
- Prometheus stealing the fire and the burnt offering swap.
- Raven stealing the sun.
- How Anansi got all the stories.
- Loki killing Baldur
- Hephaestus rigging a bed with an ultra-fine net to capture Aphrodite and Ares having an affair.
- Hermes stealing Helios's cattle
The other day my partner told me that two of our mutual friends, who both hate Glee, were sitting around and watching Glee. When asked why, their response was, "How else can I hate it properly?"
Yeah, that's how I'm feeling.