Tautology is a statement which is true by its own definition, and is therefore fundamentally uninformative. Logical tautologies use circular reasoning within an argument or statement. In linguistics, a tautology is a redundancy due to superfluous qualification.
Logical tautologies
A logical tautology is a statement that is true regardless of the truth values of its parts. For example, the statement "All crows are either black, or they are not black," is a tautology, because it is true no matter what color crows are. As a humorous example, tautology is famously defined as "that which is tautological". (That definition is, of course, tautological.) In a more realistic example, if a biologist were to define "fit" in the phrase "survival of the fittest" as "more likely to survive", that definition would be a tautology.
Controversy
What is or isn't a logical tautology can be a matter of bitterly-contested controversy. Consider the below use of the example "helpful assistance." If this was a key term in the systematic thinking of some philosopher, a critic might think it a devastating objection to point out its tautological character. Yet the philosopher might reply, "it plainly isn't a tautology, because unhelpful assistance also exists -- most of us have been the victims of enough bad luck to receive it now and again!"
Less hypothetically, the question whether "God is good" is a tautology or a substantive assertion about God is a contentious issue among theologians, and the question whether such statements as "only the free market can find the true value of a commodity" are tautological or substantive have been much debated in social philosophy.
Linguistic tautologies
A linguistic tautology is often a fault of style. It was defined by Fowler as "saying the same thing twice". For example, "three-part trilogy" is tautologous because a trilogy, by definition, has three parts. "Significant milestone" and "significant landmark" are also, if less obviously, tautologous, because milestones and landmarks are again significant by definition (could one imagine an "insignificant landmark"?).
Tautologies sometimes occur when multiple languages are used together, such as "The La Brea Tar Pits" (the the tar tar pits), "Sierra Nevada Mountains" (snowy mountains mountains), "Manos: The Hands of Fate" (hands: the hands of fate), or "Shiba Inu dog" (small dog dog). They often appear in conjunction with acronyms or abbreviations, when the original meaning fades through familiarity with the acronym itself; for example, consider "ATM machine", "PIN number", "HTML language", "VIN number", or "LCD display". (See RAS syndrome.) Other examples of linguistic tautologies include "in this day and age", "helpful assistance", and "new innovation".
A linguistic tautology may be intended to amplify or emphasize a certain aspect of the thing being discussed: for example, a gift is by definition free of charge, but one might talk about a "free gift" if the fact that no money was paid is of particular importance. A tautology could also be used if a non-tautologous expression might not be taken at face value: for example, a business might offer its customers a "free gift", to distinguish itself from other businesses that claim to offer "gifts" but only give them in conjunction with a purchase. Similarly, a tautology could be used if the non-tautologous expression might be ambiguous or might not be understood: although PIN stands for "Personal Identification Number", one might refer to a "PIN number" if the intended audience is unfamiliar with the acronym, or to avoid confusion with the word pin. For these reasons, although tautologies are technically unnecessary, and may be considered incorrect, they are nonetheless common in some contexts.
POSTSCRIPT
The subject of human evolution including the evolution of language is dominated by taxonomers. Paleontology and linguistics give us an anatomy for evolution, but they cannot put Humpty-Dumpty together again anymore than a neuroanatomist can explain brain function. Linguistics lays the groundwork, it tells us that the leg bone is connected to the knee bone, but it is poorly equipped to understand the role of rhythm and melody in language that is the basis for speech. It takes an entirely different way of looking at the world. Two recent reviews have looked at the role of music in human evolution. Ian Cross at Cambridge concludes "At the very least it may have contributed to the emergence of one of our most distinguishing features, or cognitive flexibility; at most,it may have been the single most important factor enabling the capacities of representational rediscription to evolve. It may be that music is the most important thing that we humans ever did." No less an eminence than Charles Darwin supposed that the language-using ape descended from a singing age, but this is considered one of his unfortunate idea sand is ignored by Darwinists. The tired old 19th-century dogma of Darwinism is so simplistic in its intellectual framework that it struggles to understand the role of the most rudimentary level of behavior in evolution. The elegant and sophisticated behavior involved with the evolution of human language is well beyond its competence. Furthermore, a singing ape is not what the prosaic academic institution or the educated public in general wants to find: a spear-chucking,yodeling ape attended by a scantily clad Jane, perhaps, but not a singing ape. We have shown that the primordial descendants of the originators of human language are still with us in the Ituri Forest and that they are very musical indeed.
Alexander Marshack at Harvard has made an important survey of Paleolithic Art and has deciphered some of its symbolism. He has revealed the use of calendar bones. His work underlines the central issue at work in human evolution, but this turns out to be an issue that the academy, in the service of the Judeo-Christian tradition, has sought to avoid for a few thousand years. This tradition human birthing is an automatic organic process of little interest. We have demonstrated that the function of the calendar was to be able to delay conception so that birthing would occur in the most favorable season. We have demonstrated that birthing is the central issue for human survival in the north. Marshack's work also shows intelligence in humans too much, too soon for conventional understanding. The intelligence at work in Paleolithic Europe was fully capable of effecting the earliest stages of high agricultural civilization, but only when the occasion would demand it. The slow dumb progress of human evolution conceived of by 19thcentury English science was built upon the thesis of Uniform: all biological evolution can be explained entirely by the benign processes of meteorology that we have observed in our own little age of reason. Having eliminated major meteor or comet impacts with the stroke of a pen Uniformatarianism avoided the hectic story of social jury rigs in response to the outrageous slings and arrows of violent climate change. The principle of Uniformatarian geology was completely discredited by the end of the 20th century, yet it is still grand fathered in for the last million years or so, the period during which our species appeared. Archeology, history, linguistics, theology, and mythology all dutifully continue to follow the principle of Uniformatarianism. The secularized public, having removed itself from any hope of religious salvation, does not care to know anything that might suggest that we have been thrown out of the Garden of Eden. The secularized public would rather use human destruction of the supposed Garden of Eden as the basis for an ethical posture.
Paleolithic culture existed with local variations from Iberia to Siberia. The thought that any fundamental issues of human survival reflected in aba sic set of language symbols could continue to exist in modern language as shadows of forgotten ancestors is well beyond the imagination of the modern academic institution. The conventional view of human culture and intellectual possibility from such an early period can be deduced by the response to the symbol collection that has been uncovered at Tartaria near Cluj in Rumania. This discovery has been belittled in the name of convention by M. S. F. Hood as, "an uncomprehending imitation of more civilized people's written records."The fact of the matter is that these symbols have been dated to the first half of the 6th millennium B.C. This is considerably older than the oldest Sumerian or Egyptian symbols. New discoveries of this magnitude disrupt academic tradition and have an increasingly difficult time entering the mainstream. This is, in part, due to the necessity to break down the universe into microscopically small domains. The highest reward goes to successful specialist. Broad overviews are left to fate, to the marketplace,and to writers who can artfully blend the exponentially increasing database into an interesting story. This nurtures traditions of interpretation rather problem solving: intellectual tribalism. Joseph Greenberg at Stanford is an exception to this rule. Although he is a taxonomer in the classical sense his conception of a Eurasiatic super family embraces language cultures from Iberia to Siberia and down into North America. By intruding on the countless tribal domains he is the recipient of the righteous outrage by the various language specialists involved. With the exception of his tribe of disciples he works alone. To the skeleton collected by linguistics, in the spirit of Greenberg we have added flesh and blood from ancient traditions recorded or still practiced from around the world.
In 1953 Hugh A. Moran, and Oxford Rhodes scholar, privately published book showing the precursor of the modern phonetic alphabets was the collation of the ancient, Eurasiatic, ten-month, circumpolar calendar with the twelve-month zodiac of the Sumerian calendar, a basic symbol set of 22 ikons. This principle traveled as far a field as Chinese culture. Although the Chinese never developed a phonetic alphabet Moran showed that they did use the principle of collated lunar and solar ikons augmented by six to name the 28 days of the lunar month. We have added Moran's work Germanic Futhark whose rune set clearly has a basic set of 22 ikons marked as stemming from the Bronze Age. This is consonant with the recent overview of European, Bronze-Age dates by Cambridge scholar Colin Renfrew which revises European megalithic culture dates making them contemporaneous with Sumerian and Egyptian culture rather than a cheap imitation of them. It is conventional,however, for linguists to give Futhark a date no older than 200 B.C. and to assume that it is an imitation of Greek and Latin. For a culture that derives its philosophical and religious principles, not to mention its O.E.D. linguistic roots, from the beginning of the Iron Age, the principle of The Light of Civilization out of the Near East is still too attractive. Individuals may propose, but the social institution disposes.
The wide dispersal of Eurasian tradition requires a knowledge of the culture of the traveling people rather than the knowledge of the great fixed civilizations that leave most of of the refuse labored over by archeologists. As a model for this sort of culture we may look to the marine people. For most of human history travel by water has been safer than travel over land. To understand human culture we must look to its circulatory system. It is at the miter between ocean and land were the erosion of type into a homogeneous universal is most pronounced. Shore birds the world round are strikingly similar whereas as soon as we leave the mud and the sand to move inland we find more tribal specialization,more inbreeding, and more local preference. In the modern port cities around the Mediterranean today there exists a human lingua franca consisting of ground down or pidginized French, Spanish, Greek, and Arabic. This is not the language whereby nations discuss whether to go to war or to cease from going to war. This is not the language that the people prefer to speak in their homes, schools, places of business, or in church. This is the language of the docks and the decks. Shore birds too speak in a language of calls that they all understand. The northern Mediterranean contribution to the lingua is more fragmented reflecting its geography of islands, peninsulas, and mountain ranges. Arabic represents the southern Mediterranean contribution to the lingua and is its only none Indo-European language.
The earliest instances of writing for both Sumerian and Egyptian culture are concerned with trade. These were symbolic communications of public nature. Also traveling with the traders along the arteries of circulation were song men, magicians, prophets, seers, and wise men of all descriptions. Oannès the fish man was the language using civilizer of the Sumarians. In India it was Matsyendra (Aryan), while he was trapped inthe belly of a gigantic fish, who overheard a conversation between `Sivaand Parvati (Dravidian). This was how he acquired the secrete doctrine ofJhanayoga. These fish people traveled by sea where they could. Theytraveled by river and where there was no river they traveled by land fromoasis to oasis following the stars like mariners. Victor Mair at the University of Pennsylvania has elucidated Bronze-Age, Occidentalinfluences on China in the magus or Wu tradition by way of the Silk Trail. Egyptians attributed language to Taautos who, it is told, invented the firstwritten characters. Taautos was the father of tautology or imitation, whothe Greeks called Thoth and the Egyptians called Djehuti. Taautos came from Byblos. Byblos shows a continuous cultural tradition going back asfar as 8,000 B.C. It is a port of call where the circulatory system ofMediterranean culture has left a deep imprint. Taautos played his tune to the chief deity of Byblos who was a moon-goddess Ba alat. Taautos who is cognate with Thoth and equivalent to Dionysus, or Njörth the snakepriest was, at times, the consort to the moon-goddess. The snake priest was also represented by the the ikon of a pillar, a wand, a caduceus, or apenis fetish that represented a message from the gods. This ikon would itself become a god being Hermes or Mercury. The Greeks equated Thothwith the widely-traveled Hermes. According to Egyptian tradition Osiris traveled the world with Thoth. Under the protective umbrella of Hinduculture we see a tattered remnant of this ancient tradition in the itinerant snake charmer playing his nasal punji for the fascinated tourist. The snake charmer is Osiris, the snake is Thoth. The nature of this knowledge was secret which is to say that it was difficult to learn,required initiation, and was of value only if not publicly available.
Until fairly recently European scholars had hoped that Hebrew was thelanguage that had supplied Europe with its alphabet, Latin being theinterlocutor. As late as the 8th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica,1853, "we must ascribe it {Latin}, with the Rabbins, who are prepared withauthenticated copies of the characters they used, and of those of Seth,Enoch, and Noah, to the first man." This followed from the religioustradition that Hebrew religion was the primitive forerunner of Christianity,and that the directed arrow of historical progress has resulted in theChristian-Democratic civilization that is us. Although this has been impossible to sustain in its childlike simplicity the academy still carriesthe classical Greek and Latin contempt for Northern European traditionsand assumes that European alphabets are a derivation whole cloth out ofLatin. It is conventional today to derive the Sinai, Canaan, Phoenician,Greek, and Brahmi phonetic alphabets from Egyptian hieroglyphs as theywere around 1700 B.C. It was thanks to the Phoenicians, who borrowedfrom everyone, that there existed something like a koine in the EasternMediterranean. Egypt was first designated as home of the alphabet bythe French Egyptologist Emmanual de Rougé in 1859. This was confirmed and cemented for English culture by Isaac Taylor in amonumental two volume work, The Alphabet, 1885. This was the most daring departure from tradition in the linguistic department in moderntimes. It was part of that adolescent outrage against the Church, the Ageof Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Napoleon, and thesecularization of the French academy. The general thesis is this. Around 1700 B.C. West Semitic-speaking people of the Sinai became workers orslaves under the sway of Egyptian rule. The Egyptian hieroglyphicsymbols these Semitic speakers saw made an impression on them, andencouraged the adoption of a limited number of hieroglyphics to writedown sounds in their language. Because phonetic Egyptian hieroglyphsonly recorded the consonants, and not the vowels, the Sinaitic script alsoadopted this convention. On the other hand, unlike hieroglyphs whichhad multi-consonant signs, the Sinaitic script only used single consonantletters. An ox head was the Egyptian hieroglyph the Proto-Canaanitesadopted to represent the sound as in aleph meaning 'ox', although theProto-Canaanites did not adopt the sound of the hieroglyphic since thephonetic architecture of Egyptian was quite different. The ox sign inEgyptian represented a [k] sound.
This theory easily deconstructs itself on its own merits. The absence of separate vowel symbols is a reflection of the syllabic alphabets thatdominated the Near East since the beginning of the Iron Age. Each character represented a syllable rather than a single sound. Syllabicmetaphor had been one of the most ancient generators of new language.Oral language elaborated and alliterated itself poetically by gender (yin,yang), tense (sing, sang,sung), and lexicon (mari, mater, magh, magus).The Chinese got many centuries more life out of their logographiclanguage by converting word symbols into phonetics that were eitherclosed syllables or open syllables that no longer had a graphic meaning.When the Akkadians took over Sumerian civilization the adoption of ascript created for the spoken language by a language so dissimilarbrought about a mismatch between spoken and written Akkadian. The proportion of cuneiform signs used for arbitrary phonetic syllablesincreased quickly. Writing changed from chiefly a logographic system toa largely syllabic system with a trend towards consistent spelling. By 1,000 B.C. an Assyrian scribe could manage fairly well with just 120graphemes. Most of the surviving Phoenician inscriptions come fromByblos. Byblos script contained 100 different characters which suggeststhey represented a syllabary. Marking for the vowel came very late sothere is nothing special about the fact that both Egyptian and WestSemitic didnít use vowel symbols. The use of symbols to indicate vowelswas a Northern Mediterranean convention.
The supposed equivalency of the Egyptian ox sign with West Semitic iscompletely disingenuous. The ox symbol is found at least 2,000 yearsearlier from the Occident to the Orient in connection with ox-driven civilizations. It would have been hard to find and educated person inEurasian culture who didn't recognize the ox symbol and its meaning. In fact, the Egyptian symbol shows a cartoon-like bovine profile withouthorns. This makes it quite unique. All other ox symbols, including theWest Semitic ikon, show horns. The unique Egyptian symbol doubtlessreflects an antiquity and sympathy with the feminine that was peculiar toEgyptian culture. The conventional theory freely admits that there was nophonetic correlation between Egyptian and West Semitic. The order of the West Semitic symbols shows a greater correlation with the order ofthe symbols of the Chinese lunar month than with Egyptian. This suggests a very old common influence from Sumerian as suggested byMoran. Alpha in first position associates the tradition with the old BronzeAge and the sign of Taurus at the beginning of the year. The earliest abecedary (a list of the letters in an alphabet in the some kind of order) inthe order that we see closely replicated in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin hasbeen found at Ugarit that used a reduced set of 30 symbols. Ugarit was aport city broadly multicultural and pantheistic, and it was just 60 milesnorth of Byblos. Its earliest levels of occupancy are dated around 6,000 B.C. Ugarit was influenced by the Ubiad period of Sumerian culture, byAryan Hittite culture, and, of course, Phoenician culture. Egyptian writtenlanguage was extremely complicated. It was the sort of thing that highcivilizations love to confabulate to demonstrate their god given geniusand their wealth of labor. The reduction of the name of the symbol to itsinitial sound - A, B, and so forth - called the acrophonic principle inlinguistics, is a familiar process in language seen today in the formationof acronyms. The mantra - Alpha, Beta, and so forth - is a commonrhythmic mnemonic used by oral cultures, especially traveling oralcultures. In summary, if there were any West Semitic scribes trained inEgyptian, the simple one-consonant alphabet they are supposed to haveinvented reflected not an inspiration from the Egyptians, who they hated,but a negative reaction against it and everything it stood for. The onlycorrelation between West Semitic and Egyptian is an extremely negativecorrelation.
Flinders Petrie took on the chimaera of the Phoenicio-Hieroglyphic theorywhen he uncovered symbol collections that predated the Egyptian hieraticsymbols or even the hieroglyphs. He summed up his thesis in thefollowing statement:
The point of view here presented is not that of a systematic alphabet,invented by some single tribe or individual in a developed civilization. On the contrary it appears that a wide body of signs had been graduallybrought into use in primitive times for various purposes. These were interchanged by trade, and spread from land to land, until the less knownand less useful signs were ousted by those in more general acceptance.Lastly a couple of dozen signs triumphed; these became commonproperty to a group of trading communities, while the local survivals ofother forms were gradually extinguished in isolated seclusion.
He was criticized by Kurt Sethe in an article entitled Des Ursprung desAlphabets, in 1916. The brunt of the argument was that Petrie had beencareless and had bought forgeries from those rascals in Thebes, and hewent on to say, curiously, "they are simple signs which have nothing todo with writing, such as stars, forks, crosses with lines through them,and the like, which are still used in similar ways even today." For academics to be arguing that Egypt invented and modeled thefundamental aspects of phonetic-alphabet literacy is like trying to arguethat the Ford Motor Company invented the automobile. High civilizationis the place where languages go to be refined, to bloom, and then to die.When great civilizations collapse and stop nourishing their intellectualcaste their language dies too. Culturally-specific, religious languagessuch as Egyptian, Brahmi, and Hebrew were not the source of inspirationfor other languages or scripts. They were not inclusive languages, theywere exclusive. But the Phoenicio-Hieroglyphic Theory has becomeanother one of those 19th-century axioms of science that must beobeyed. We will get much closer to the creative process that producedthe phonetic alphabet and common literacy by examining the flowering ofGreek culture.
European culture was completely destroyed by the Atlantean Flood. The collapse of the Bronze-Age cultures of Greece and Asia Minor led to anabrupt decline in civilization to which the archeological record bearsalmost universal witness. The Greek peninsula was so devastated that itlost its first literate language with the Deluge of Deucalion. The apocalypse brought on by Typhon caused the old gods flee in terror toEgypt. Many areas went back to a stone age existence even whilecarrying the memory of high civilization. All of nature became peopled with a horde of hybrid monsters, little rustic gods, family demons, andimps whose traces are discernible at the very foundations of modernbeliefs. Religion becomes visceral: profoundly necessary and allpowerful. The Dorians, fleeing from the social disorder of the Indo-European diaspora and from the deepening cold of the north, occupyGreece under the banner of Zeus and Hera. The Dorian peoples wereBalkan, Danubian Bronze-Age peoples. This Eastern European area hadbeen the meeting place of three cultural traditions and the nexus for thebirth of Proto-Indo-European 4,000 years earlier. This was the area surrounding Lepinski Vir on the Danube where the horse-riding steppepeople called the Kurgans (possibly speaking Proto-Turkish) would meetwith small farmers from Anatolia (speaking Proto-Semitic) working theirway up the Greek peninsula in the home of the descendants of the Ice-Age Gravettian people (speaking the original European language). This was the home of the symbol collection of Tartaria. The Dorian descendants of this racial mixture were being lead by a violent lightning-god. Zeus was descended from the Titans (antediluvian, Golden-Agepeoples) whose chief god had been Cronus. Zeus was the son of Cronus. The warriors of Zeus raped and pillaged their way through the survivingindigenous Achaeans, Aeolians, and Ionians. As Yahweh would lead the Hebrews into Canaan, Zeus would lead the Dorians into Greece.
The self-righteous, unreflective roles that Zeus and Yahweh played hadalready been unwittingly prepared for them by the Queen of Heaven inthe Bronze Age. They had been sexual consorts, these oaken gods ofthunder and lightning, who were sacrificed as magnificent sexual objectsin the rut of high solstice in the Golden Age. They were not magi, orsongmen, or Druids; they were not poets, nor were they hermeticallyinclined. In our age of relative quiet as far as meteors, comets, floods,and volcanic activity are concerned both Zeus and Yahweh appear to usas out of control adolescents on a monstrous scale. The modern intellectual naturally migrates to the black comic tone of the revisionaryhistory of Olympus and once that posture is adopted it is very difficult toshake it with something as mundane as evidence, the evidence that Zeusand Yahweh were nothing less than an eye for an eye. They were thehyper-masculine response to the emasculation of Bronze-Age culture bythe impact of Typhon. W. K. C. Guthrie, the expert on Greek culture, canassume virtually without argument that a line between myth and reason,the Heroic Age and the Classical Age, is to be drawn between Homer andHesiod. For Guthrie and the modern academy nature is a constant andthe fall of human nature into the hell of violence, ignorance, anddepravity is without reason. Harold Bloom in The Book of J attempts tomake the case that a woman wrote the oldest J material of the Torah because the characterization of women such as Sarai and Rachel is so strong and mature, the characterization of the men so adolescent.
Limited as he proudly claims to be, limited to the traditional canon ofJudeo-Christian tradition he cannot see that Yahweh represents apostdiluvian masculine norm that will be faithfully carried down to theage of literacy. Even when reaction to the norm of the early Iron Agewould begin to appear around 600 B.C. - Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu,Jeremiah, and Pythagorus - those avatars of more civil, more evolvedbehavior were either ignored or killed in their own time. In addition to the fact that Bloom is incapable of translating Yahweh and the Hebrewmale persona back into their formative environment, he is equallyincapable of seeing that in those earliest stages of the patriarchal religionthe female presence was still formidable as it obviously was also in Greektradition. Had Bloom not limited himself to the Judeo-Christian canon,could he have extrapolated back to Bronze-Age culture and forward tothe last stage of Jewish patriarchal evolution in Islam he might havenoticed that Hebrew women have had a greater face and a broader role inthe public culture of Yahweh than women in either Christian or especiallyIslamic culture down to the modern era. The women, therefore, weresimply portrayed as they were. Bloom, of course, is only voicing aprejudice that is wide spread to his class.
One Dorian explanation for the dark age of culture was that the chief godof the Golden Age, Cronus, was afraid that one of his children wouldmurder him to avenge his castration of his father, Uranus. He therefore ate his children. Demeter outwitted him in the case of Zeus spiriting himaway to be raised in secret. Upon achieving manhood Zeus slit open theold man's belly and out came Hera, and her siblings Poseidon,Hephaestus, Pan, and Hades unharmed. This divine history helps toexplain how the Dorians, who had lost their cosmology in the course oftheir uprooting and immigration, would find a familiar version of it oncesettled on the Greek peninsula. Closely connected with Zeus was Hera.Hera was found upstream in the old homeland, the Black Forest orHercynia Silva that was at the headwaters of the Danube, as well as theRhone, and the Rhine rivers. She was cognate with the Anglo-Saxon Erce,and Nerthus of the Germanic coastal-dwelling Atlanteans, and she wasthe Earth Mother of the Greek peninsula. There was no getting away fromHera. Zeus is variously supposed to have been Hera's twin, he also rapesher on the occasion of the occupation of Greece, but she also becomeshis wife who is jealous of his many other affairs, affairs that he attemptsto keep secret. As vigorously masculine as Zeus may appear to be, he isnot the pure all-powerful patriarch. Demeter, Zeus's mother, is oftentreated with deference verging on fear by the great man. He would frequently send another god with a message to Demeter rather than haveto face her himself. The completion of the revolution in gender politicsinto the masculine will not be completed until two further stages of socialevolution occur: until Apollo, who would not be as successful with or interested in women, would take the wand of power; and until thecelibate avatar of Yahweh, Jesus the Christ, would come to replace Apollo.
It is from Doric culture that we get the Greek story of the Prometheaninvention of language. In this tradition language had been invented onthat mountain of languages El Brus in the Caucasus. This is the Slavonic tradition to the present day. El Brus was where Prometheus lay. This is the first voice of tradition to give credence to archeological evidence forEastern Black Sea influence upon Eastern Europe. Aristotle gives the firstGreek alphabet as thirteen consonants and five vowels, and the list ofletters corresponds exactly with Cronus's Beth-Luis-Nion alphabet,except that he gives Zeta for H-aspirate and Phi for F. The use of Zeta conforms with the Eastern European origin of the Dorians which was thesame general area that was the home of the Celts who would begin toreoccupy Western Europe about the same time the Dorians enteredGreece. In Western Europe the Celts would lose the sibilance in theirlanguage, become Kelts, and lose Zeta in their alphabet . This difference in the sonic architecture between Western Europe and Eastern Europe ismarked by the Satem-Centum border down to the present day. Z in the Western European lexicon is the home of foreign exotics. Zeus is Tiu in Germanic speech.
The Beth-Luis-Nion tree alphabet would have been a closely-guardedsacred language of runish ikons that served as a mnemonic linked to acalendar. The thirteen consonants represented the number of 28-day,lunar months in the year. This was a Bronze-Age improvement on theoldest Eurasian calendar of ten-paired months. The five vowels,however, represent the five, 72-day, paired-month seasons that go allthe way back to Paleolithic culture. On the other hand, the five vowelshad also come to represent the five days that were inserted during thewinter to make the 365-day year. The Paleolithic calendar did not mark the winter season and was not particularly concerned with the totalnumber of days in the year. This was a detail coming from the improvedBronze-Age calendar and a reflection of Stonehenge science. The Beth-Luis-Nion alphabet served the purposes of prophecy and was used tocast spells like any farmers almanac. Being from Eastern Europe theDorians had no more marine language or knowledge than their originswould suggest. In order to make that heroic marine adventure to the mountain of languages where Prometheus lay Jason and his Argonautshad to borrow marine knowledge from Athena, that is to say, fromindigenous sea-faring Greeks who had stayed home in the face of theDorian invasion. The Spartans who practiced conservative form of Dorianculture never took to the sea willingly.
The diaspora out of Greece caused by pressure from the Dorians wascalled Pelasgian for their pelagic flight from the homeland. Pelagosmeans 'sea' in Greek. Pelasgus was the original sea-faring man born outof the soil of Arcadia. Some of these Pelasgians ended up in the south ofItaly, some in Sicily, and some winged their way as far afield as inIreland. Among these Pelasgians were Athenian Ionians who occupiedAnatolian port cities directly across the Aegean Sea to the East. Here theyentered a vacuum caused by the destruction and dispersal of the Bronze-Age civilizations of Asia Minor. The prominent Ionian cities of the IonianLeague were Miletus, Ephesus, Smyrna, and Magnesia. The ancient or Pelasgic language still remained, however, in such remote fastnesses asArcadia and at well-defended Athens. The invention of the Ionian alphabet was attributed to Io who was a moon-goddess priestess. To her would be attributed the basic set of five vowels: A-E-I-O-U. These are the same vowels that are part of the Beth-Luis-Nion alphabet thereforepointing to an ancient, common Indo-European ancestry. Io was the Bronze-Age priestess to Hera located at Dodona that faces the IonianSea. The three colors of Io were white for the new moon, red for theharvest moon, and black for the moon when it waned representing theancient Trinity: Mari meaning 'young woman of marriageable qualities',Mater meaning 'mother', and Magh meaning 'to be able', 'power', andlater 'magician'. The animal ikon that symbolized Io was a three-colorheifer. Dodona was part of the black dove and oracular cults of Zeus thatwere also found at Ammon in the Libyan desert oasis of Djado and atThebes in Egypt. Io was the priestess to the Bronze-Age, Greek versionof the widespread religious conversion around the Mediterraneanwhereby the Queen of Heaven and the oak-tree god of old becametransformed into the sacred heifer and the bull or Taurus of the greatagricultural civilizations. Io was associated with Ba alat, meaning 'theLady of Byblos' and the Egyptian Hathor with a headdress of a diskbetween two horns; Ishtar, the goddess of love and spring; and Esther inthe Old Testament. These last all stem from the Proto-Indo-Europeanroot Aus meaning 'to shine', and 'east'. Ion is the Greek word for a reddish violet the cloaks the Grecian hills in the spring. The hiero gamosor sacred marriage between the divine bull and the divine heifer markedthe beginning of the planting season.
The Dorians, like the Hebrews, were rustics outside of the brilliant highcivilizations of the Bronze-Age. They were capable of greater flexibilityof movement and of quicker recovery after the Typhon impact. For both the Hebrews and the Dorians the finger of blame for being cast out ofParadise would be pointed at what seemed to them the effeminatecultures of old and more specifically at the curiosity of woman. Blaminghigh civilization for the ills of the world is the time-tested first principlefor those who are outside of the blessings of urban culture. This perception is personified for the purposes of divine history. In the case of Eve it is a matter of receiving the fruit from the tree of good and evilfrom the snake representing an impious act of curiosity. The snake, ofcourse, was Hermes and the tree of good and evil is religion's version ofthe tree of life sacred to matriarchal religion. By this construction thedeity is seen to have control over the scene by warning Adam againsteating of the fruit, so that it is the self-willed Eve that brings on thecurse. An equation such as this is necessary if religion is to avoid chaosin its cosmos. Adam is carried along with the curse, but is now suppliedwith a justification for assuming the dominant role. Two birds are killed with one stone. Pandora, the wife of the slow-witted Titian Epimetheus,is blamed by the Greeks for the havoc wreaked on the world. It was she that opened the box that had contained the ills of the world. In order not to appear to have given Pandora the box with Zeus-like powers, the storyis that Zeus gave the box in question to Epimetheus with instructions notto open it. Zeus knew that Epimetheus would comply, but that Pandorawould not, thereby allowing divine history to take its course and tocoincide with the outrageous chaos of a major comet impact.
Pandora means 'bearer of all gifts' as well as 'taker of all gifts.Commentators cite this as a paradox. It is not. Pandora is equivalent tothe 7th Futhark rune Ghebh (X) also meaning both 'gift' and 'debit'. It refers to the essential meaning of a ritual offering in the old matriarchalreligion in contrast to prayer in the new religion. The fundamental change in the individual's relationship to the divine with the new Iron-Age religions is reflected in a change in grammar. In Bronze-Agelanguage there were generally two voices, the active and the medio-passive. An active verb is one in which the subject is the agent of theverb, but is not affected by the action: 'He prayed to god.' When the subject of the verb is both the agent and the recipient the verb is in themedio-passive voice. Only Sanskrit retains the archaic medio-passivevoice in the word yajate, that is translated into English, 'He makes asacrifice for himself.' This no longer makes sense because in the newreligions the high priest intervenes between the petitioner and thedivinity. From the view of the patriarchs the rituals of the old religionhad failed to control the bad weather or, indeed, had even caused it. In an exact parallel with the story of Eve, Zeus sentences Pandora and all herdaughters to travail in childbirth for their curiosity. This kills three birds with one stone. The new god not only confirms his power and points thefinger of blame elsewhere, he will bring the fundamental issues of humansurvival attended to by the old culture under a taboo where they will becast under a pall of amnesia.
The collapse of civil life and the diaspora of peoples with the Iron Agetriggered a proliferation of gods and goddesses. Just as language families would fragment into dialects and then new languages throughisolation, deities would also ramify. Some of the sacred places that werea part of the general matrix of the old religion would, in isolation, createnew religions sui generis: new gods and goddesses often being the localpriests and priestesses elevated to higher realms. As we have seen with other migrating peoples, the Dorians and the Hebrews would have lostthe refinements of language in the area of syntax, grammar, andphonetics that they might have had before the long march, but theywould greatly increase their lexicon. They would have lost therefinements of cosmology, epistomology, and eschatology that a peopledevelop when they are settled, emphasizing family relationships instead.Once settled the Dorians and the Hebrews would have option to startfrom scratch, as far as that is humanly possible. Their newly fashionedcosmologies would eventually reflect a powerfully motivating postdiluvianperspective that none of the classical civilizations of the Mediterraneanarea could achieve with their piecemeal reconstructions and weakjustifications. Of course it would take some time to mold a practicalexpression of the great reform. Eventually the Dorian-Hebrew point ofview would achieve what would seem to be a David versus Goliath victoryover the surviving classical civilizations. David, of course, would notnotice that Goliath was well past his prime, and would certainly notremember Goliath's brilliant achievements as a younger man. This remains the dominant perspective of the modern age with the exceptionof a few specialists. The modern language cultures that look to Hebrewand Greek for their roots act as though they had no antecedents.
There were many similarities to point to in the early circumstances of theDorian and Hebrew cultures, but there is one profound difference. The Hebrews would comb through their genealogies to exclude divineimitations and foreign elements, would start with many gods and distilldown to one. Moloch the king who had to be propitiated with thesacrifice of a child, who may have been common to all Semites very early,is simply outlawed in Leviticus without being mentioned by name. On the ground this drive for ethnic purity is reflected when King Saul is chastisedfor not exterminating the Philistines that he had conquered root, stem,and leaf. The Dorians, on the other hand, would start with the pre potentdestroyer of Typhon, Zeus, and inclusively take over one foreign traditionafter another. Zeus was more lenient in his divine history and in hisapproach to other peoples, at least in retrospect. Where the Torah would largely be left with a litany of familial mayhem, Zeus would create anOlympic soap opera for all to see. On Olympus child sacrifice ishumiliated out of theological existence by a satyrical constructionwhereby Zeus is shocked to discover that Tantalus of the House of Atreushas offered up his son Pelops to him for dinner. Tantalus had been a close friend of Zeus and had attended parties given by the gods. Zeus reverses the offering and brings Pelops back alive by collecting all thelimbs and putting them back into the cauldron with the help of Hermes,Demeter, Rhea, and Pan, thereby rehabilitating several gods with oneblow. Demeter has to make a special contribution since she of all thegods had not noticed the indelicate offense and had taken a bite out ofPelops's shoulder. Demeter, apparently, was still stupefied by thememory of her daughter Persephone being dragged down into hell thatwas her sense of the cause of the withering of life that nearly killed offhumanity. The Hebrews would receive their religion from a single voiceby indoctrination and we are not privy to the ugly business religiousconversion in that tradition. The Greeks would take religion into theirown hands. The Frankenstein story of Tantalus is a beacon from theearliest stages of apostasy when it is discovered that a religion and acivilization is a fraud. In Greek culture we can see the culture of matrilineal Bronze-Age tradition being metamorphosed into cannibalism,incest, and castration: a blood-spattered carnival of revenge runningthrough Greek myth. These taboos have come steaming down to themodern era blocking any sympathetic investigation of their origins. In truth Bronze-Age cultures were as brilliant and humane in their saladdays, and as vicious, ignorant and deformed in their times of poverty anddespair as any modern exemplar. The taboos against this knowledgehave helped to preserve the Judeo-Christian-Scientific theory of history Progress.
In the process of restoring civilization and to establish his role as thehead primate, Zeus not only releases his own ethnic tradition from itsintestinal bondage, but he begins begetting Olympians outside of histradition. Zeus beget Hermes on the daughter of Atlas, Maia. That is to say he raped her. Maia, stemming from Magh meaning 'old tradition' inthis usage, bore Hermes in a cave on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia. Arcadia was where a remnant of the indigenous antediluvian Greek culture hadsurvived that was not overrun by the Dorians in their initial thrust. The revival of Hermes is an episode in divine history pertaining to thediscovery by the followers of Zeus of the ancient influence of Semiticculture on the Greek peninsula. The earliest attested Greek scripts comefrom 800 B.C. by which time there were already several variations. These are assumed to be of Semitic origin. Following the principle that the ageof the alphabet is as old as the oldest letter Martin Bernal cites 1750 B.C.as the outside date for the earliest Semitic influence. Of course we now know that the indigenous culture of the Greek peninsula includedinfluences from Asia Minor that go back to the settlement of smallfarming communities beginning around 6,600 B.C. It was not known byZeus that Hermes was the ikon of Njörth of Western European origin,Njörth's penis if you will, and, of course, it was not known that Dionysus,soon to be imported as an independent theological entity, was the Semitic metathesis of Njörth. Pan, the goat-legged, pipe-playing rustic,was a local version of the traveling songman. As far as some Greeks were concerned, Hermes picked up his pipe from Pan without attribution. We can add that Pan picked up his pipe or ngetal from the Bronze-AgeNjörth without attribution. In fact, they all borrowed from one anotherwithout attribution. The traveling songman may have been given a localname, but he was of no particular ethnicity.
The Dorians may have condemned Pandora for curiosity, but they weresoon rummaging around all of the indigenous traditions for effectivebirthing knowledge. Birthing is the archetypal human trial between arock and a hard place and it is best solved by a local tradition with longexperience. The Dorian invasion of Greece was particularly baroqueexhibition of the process of an invading culture overlaying an indigenousculture. Dorians seem not to have been an all male hord if the relationship between Zeus and Demeter and Hera, or if Spartan cultureare any indication. Being the purest representative of Dorian culture toexist down into historical time we find Spartan woman showing the mostface of any in Greece. This is not what we generally find when a all-malehord is doing the invading, but the females would have been uprootedfrom what was the basis of woman's knowledge and power, theknowledge of the immediate locality and how it provides. Dorian woman would have had to defer to local woman in terms of such things as thekitchen garden and birthing practices. One of the ikons of Hera was the Cuckoo bird that lays its eggs in another's nest. The situation, therefore,was appreciated at the time, but no modern commentator seems tounderstand any of this. At first the relationship between the Dorians andnative culture was stormy. Artemis was a birth-goddess native to Ioniantradition. In an early story Artemis was raped by Zeus even though shehad attempted to escape by transforming herself into a bear and bydaubing her face white. Artemis was, originally, the ruler of the stars.She lost the stars to Zeus. Artemis probably comes from airo and themismeaning 'the lofty water'. This reminds us of Arundhati in Hindu tradition who as laksa, the daughter of the waters, still resides in a smallstar in Ursa Major after being displaced by the Seven Sages. The reference to water, in turn, reminds us of the 21st Germanic rune, Laguz,meaning 'water' that is related to blood, to washing, change, andadjustment; and is related to the moon, night, and sleeping, and itreminds us of the birthplace of Proto-Indo-European, Lepinski Vir on theDanube. Artemis was a title or epithet to Diana of the sacred beech. Theantipathy in Greek culture between the Dorians and Ionians would bemended, at least from the Dorian perspective, during the Heroic Age ascommemorated by the twinning of Artemis and Apollo.
In divine history Zeus beget Apollo and Artemis on Leto. Leto was a daughter of the Titan's Coeus (intelligence) and Phoebe (moon). Leto was known in Egypt and Palestine as Lat. Lat was a birth-goddess of the datepalm and the olive who was conveyed back to Greece by a propitioussouth wind. Artemis in this story was born on the island of Ortygia closeto Delos. Ortygia, the quail, was an ikon for Artemis. MiraculouslyArtemis, a birth-goddess, is actually able to help her mother across thenarrow straits to Delos where she assists in the birthing of her own twinApollo. This seems to indicate that Artemis and Apollo were perceived tobe of different ages as well as different ethnic traditions. The Dorians and some Ionians claimed Apollo as an ancestor. Hecataeus clearlyidentifies Apollo as British. He seems to have been a Hyperborean priestof great renown. We are more familiar with Atlantean influence in the Western Mediterranean. Delos appears to have been a center for anAtlantean cult that extended south-eastward to Nabataea and Palestine,north-westward to Britain, as well as Athens in the Bronze Age. In one story, the birth of Apollo occurred on the north side of Mount Cynthus onthe island of Delos, between an olive tree and a palm tree. The island of Delos is about half way between Athens and Miletus in the Aegean Sea. It is as far to the north of Thera as Crete is to the south, but since severalislands stand between Delos and Thera it may have avoided the majorimpact of the tsunami that occurred when Thera blew up that sodevastated Crete. In some stories Eileithyia is involved in the birth ofApollo, but Eileithyia, meaning 'she who comes to aid women in childbed',was an epithet to Artemis just as Artemis was another of the thousandand one epithets to Diana, the huntress and birth-goddess, which stemsfrom the Proto-Indo-European root that means 'shining', Bha, that is equivalent to the Sanskrit root Bhâ meaning 'splendor', and the Latin faxmeaning 'fiery meteor', and along another line of derivation what was'spoken' by the deity.
Dorian culture may have had to refer to other traditions for birthingknowledge for obvious reasons, but this was hardly an issue solely formigrating peoples. Delos is the location of another poignant birthingstory given to us by Herodotus that is an interesting bridge betweendivine history and legend. Two damsels named Hyperoché and Laodicébrought the first offerings to Delos from the Hyperboreans in the north.They were accompanied by five men to keep them from all harms way.They came to acknowledge and give thanks to the Delian birth-goddessfor their quick labors. Birthing knowledge was local, but the tradition forits importance was universal. The offering given for their gift into theritual fires on the altar to Diana was a thigh bone. This is cognate withProto-Indo-European roots Dhe(i) and Teu(h). Dhe(i) goes to the Latinfemina meaning 'woman', to fetus relating to pregnancy, childbearing,and offspring, and to femora meaning 'femur', the thighbone. Teu(h) goes to the Germanic meaning 'to swell', 'to be swollen', from this comesthe English word thumb 'the swollen finger' and the word thigh, 'theswollen part of the leg', this in turn was cognate with the third Germanicrune Thurisaz meaning ëthe giant or swollen part of the leg or groin'.The golden thigh was the ikon that Pythagorus showed to the Scythiansavant Abaris, along with a description of his distant HyperboreanTemple (Stonehenge?) as proof that he was an initiate of that ancienttradition; this was the thigh that was taboo to eat all around theMediterranean being the part given as a sacrifice to the gods; this was thethigh in the northern sky on the Denderah planisphere and in the templeof Edfu in Egypt; this was the thigh in the Sumerian word URU-SILA-IMmeaning 'city of the thigh of the sky', being what we call the Big Dipper,or Ursa major; and, finally, this was the thigh was cognate with the oldEnglish 'thorn' letter and the claviform symbol in the bear chamber at Tucd'Audoubert in Old Ice-Age France. Hyperoché and Laodicé must haveliked it in Delos since they never returned home. All subsequentofferings were wrapped in wheat straw and were passed from hand tohand, city to city according to Herodotus. Here we have a rare glimpse ofa path and a method communication that will never be found byarcheology, would be overlooked by history, and is a subject matter thatis enjoined to all in the age of the patriarchs. The crossed thigh bonesunder a skull is the mark for poison in the modern era.
Unlike the Hebrews, whose ancestor Adam received the word directlyfrom the mouth of the Lord, the Dorian originator of language,Prometheus, was a trickster who stole fire from Zeus for which he was tobe eternally punished. Unlike the Hebrews who had been thrown out of Paradise, but who looked forward to a land that their Lord had showedthem, the earliest Dorian view of the future from Homer and Hesiod wassimply that life was in decay. From Hesiod's Works and Days came thememory of the bitterly-lamented, vanished age of Cronus when men"lived as if they were gods, their hearts free from all sorrow, and withouthard work or pain." Unlike the Hebrews who gave over personal freedominto a contract of faith with their one god who was omnipotent, neverdeceived and could do no wrong, the Dorians played the opposite theme.The earliest Dorian view of the manís relationship with the deities fromHomer in the Odyssey is that men are responsible for their ownmisfortunes despite their tendency to to blame the gods and goddesses.Although both Hesiod's Theogony and Hebrew tradition owe a great dealto the Babylonian and Near Eastern creation myths, the Doric and Ioniantraditions would come to emphasize I in personality and eventually givephilosophy to the world; the Hebrew tradition, as well as the Semitictradition in general, would emphasize Thou in personality and wouldeventually give psychology to the world. In the present day a bilingualIsraeli mother will find that her Israeli instructional frame of reference with her child will emphasize how his or her behavior effects her (thesocial perspective); her English instructional frame of reference willemphasize what is incumbent upon him or her to do (the personalperspective).
The oral tradition of Homer does a good job in preserving the tone of lifethat followed the impact of Typhon. A story by Homer was like amigration of birds passing over darkening the sky for hours, day andnight, for days on end. To be remembered properly these tales had to betold without a break. Homer represented an oral tradition of epic storytelling that went back the earliest dark beginnings of the Iron Age, and itcontinues down to the present day in the epic poetry of Serbo-Croatculture where it is finally at its fag end. Oral tradition does not allow the performer great latitude. Each subsequent generation conforms itself tothe previous in order to learn the great stories at all. Homer, a blind manwho dwelled in rocky Chios, was not of his age. Hesiod, of the same ageas Homer but still using oral epic-poetry style, is more detached. ForHesiod the gods are no longer striding the earth as men. With Hesiod we are half the way to the opposite pole from Homer, the allegorical world ofPlato's windy Cave of Illusions where anything may be said, or nothing atall. The Torah or Old Testament, like Homer, is unadulterated heroicviolence. People live in the midst of the blood and gore of life withoutreflection. The early Iron-Age character of Yahweh continued to ring truewell into the age of literacy because literate Hebrew is so arcane. With its absence of vowels, spaces between words, and punctuation Hebrew wasfunctionally a secret language, a high priestly language, an exclusivelanguage. The act of transferring literacy to the next generation requiredan oral tradition sitting at the elbow of the student to assure that the textcould be read at all, and, of course, to assure that the tone of the greatstory was maintained. Semitic culture in general still looks back to theoral tradition of the Bedouin for advice and correction in languagematters in distinct contrast to Indo-European language tradition. With the user-friendly literacy of the Greeks the oral guru will be left behind tobe replaced by the classless language instructor. In Indo-Europeanculture speakers are hectored into complying with correct languagestandards by those who represent high-level education and the upperclass. Rustic language is viewed with contempt. In Greek mythologyaspects of life that had long disappeared by the age of literacy, such asthe magnitude of the violence and the human response to it, acquire asavagely ironic and disbelieving cast. Untainted high tragedy flows fromthe pen only when the actors are human, in real time, although stilldealing with the consequences of the past. The tragedy of the House ofAtreus in Greek literate tradition is comparable to the familial tragedy ofthe House of David in Hebrew tradition.
The Greeks identify literacy with Cadmus. The beginning of thispostdiluvian influence would have been during Greek Heroic Age, alsocalled the Dark Age, as early as 1200 B.C. Historians identify the tribe ofCadmus as Semitic. They are identified first on the plains of northernSyria. Their contact with urban culture likely occurred at Ugarit on thecoast. Ugarit was north of Bilblos. It was the sarcophagus of KingAhiram of Byblos that bore the earliest known Phoenician alphabeticinscription. It is at Ugarit where the earliest abecedary in the order thatwe see closely replicated in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin has been found.During the age of the Jewish Patriarchs the eponymous tribe representedby the name of Cadmus moved from Syria to Karia in western Anatoliaunder pressure from Aryan and Semitic invaders from inland. The portcity of Karia, Miletus, was originally founded by Karians and perhapsCretans. A last wave of Semitic influence, a sort of afterbirth, came after900 B.C. This marks the end of a Semitic influence upon Greece that thestory of Cadmus collates into a single event.
The legend of Cadmus begins with Europa. The legend has it thatEuropa, who was the daughter of the Phoenician king of Sidon, Agenor,while picking flowers by the seashore at Tyre was dazzled by Zeus in theguise of a white bull. While she sat astride him he plunged into the deepwater and carried her off to Crete where he ravished her as an eagle.This is one of those reductions in divine history where time and space areremoved in the interest of telling a good story. The love affair between Europa and Zeus as a white bull marks the conversion of the old oak-treereligion to the high Bronze-Age religion whose totem was the bull,especially the white bull. This was the mark of high civilizationthroughout the Mediterranean area in the Bronze Age. The drowning anddisappearance of Europa astride Zeus as a bull is a general reference tothe destruction of that Bronze-Age culture in the Mediterranean by theimpact of Typhon, especially in low lying areas exposed to the sea.Agenor dispersed his five sons, including Cadmus, to find her and torevive the old commercial relations. After the shambles of Typhoneverything was changed. The Atlantean presence had almost completelywithered away and Phoenicians would occupy the old Atlantean tradingcenters in the Western Mediterranean. Although the sons of the king ofSidon would never find Europa, she would eventually be recognized inCrete. In the legend Europa was ravished by Zeus in Crete, but as theeagle the symbol of the lightning-god, not as a bull. This is a reference to the marauding and pillaging Dorians under the aegis of Zeus who hadinvaded and occupied the devastated Cretan culture. Europa was creditedwith the birthing of king Minos, who was a Greek king. Minos is a Greek name. We don't even know what the original Minoans called themselves.It was Minos who gave the old Cretan queen, Pasiphaë, so much trouble.It was Pasiphaë gave birth to the Minotaur, a monster with a bull's head and a human body who could only be appeased with that most preciousgift, human life.
We should pause here to consider the question of names. Just as we don't know what the original Cretans called themselves, we only knowwhat the Greeks called them, we don't know what Europeans calledthemselves or what Phoenicians called themselves if anything. The history of the Phoenicians is somewhat difficult to trace since our namefor them was not the name they used for themselves. Since each citystate had its own particular galaxy of gods and goddesses and followedperiods of strength and decline independently it is clear that theypracticed a non-centralized culture. Phoenica may simply have stemmedfrom the Greek word for the southern tree of life, the Date Palm. The Greeks were probably summing up the gaggle of various SouthernMediterranean city states as the palm-tree people in the same way thatthey summed up all northern Europeans as barbarians. According toRobert Graves Europa means 'broad-face', or 'full moon' (eur-ope) or,with poetic license, it means 'good for willows', or 'well-watered' (eu-rope). Whatever the case the legend of Cadmus seems to be the firstusage of the name. Perhaps Europa was used by Phoenicians to refer toNorthern Mediterraneans including Atlanteans who had once dominatedthe Western Mediterranean and to Ionians who now dominated the North Eastern Mediterranean marine trade. The Phoenicians probably didn'tmake careful distinctions between the various Northern Mediterranean peoples anymore than the Greeks distinguished between the variousPhoenician city states. King Agenor himself was the offspring of Libyaand Poseidon which gives him both European and African heritage.
The islands of the Aegean Sea had been Greek during the Bronze Age asthey are today, including Chios and Samos that lie within sight of theAnatolian coast. It was pressure from the Dorians that caused the Ioniansto migrate from Athens to occupy the Anatolian coastal cities. Ephesuswas the original capitol of the Ionian League. Ephesus was mainlyagricultural and showed greater influence from inland, from Lybians andeven Hittites. It was here that Artemis acquired an Anatolian persona andphysiognomy. The cult center to Artemis was located at Ephesus.Herodotos tells us that the Ionians of Miletus "did not bring their wiveswith them to their settlements, but married Karian women whose parentsthey had put to death. For this slaughter these women made a customand bound themselves on oath (which they handed down to theirdaughters) never to sit at meat with their husbands nor address them byname." This would reverberate with tragic consequences for centuries. A diglossal language environment separated by gender is clearly indicatedhere. Remembering the fascinating portrait of gender diglossia given byTheodora Kroeber of the Yana people in Northern California, men are always brought up by their mothers and learn their mother's languagefirst. In the case of the men of Miletus this would have been the Semitic language of their Karian mothers. This also recalls the Cretan custom of keeping the boy in darkness, that is to say in the women's quarters, untilpuberty. This would have been a consequence of the Dorian invasion ofCrete that was accomplished by an all-male hord. With their initiation into manhood the men of Miletus would have learned Ionian. In contrast to Ephesus, Miletus was easier to defend from Anatolian influence, butwith a good harbor they engaged in the marine trade. They wereinfluenced by the Phoenician league. Therefore, the men of Miletuscommunicated in the linga franca of the Mediterranean as well as Ionian.According to Greek tradition it was Palamedes who introduced elevenconsonants to Greek under the influence of Hermes who had associated the sounds to characters. It was in the Hermetic tradition that the Sumerian, calendar cycle was reduced to a mantra. In Hermetic tradition languages differ, but mankind is one; and speech likewise is one. It is translated from tongue to tongue, but it is the same in Egypt, Persia, andGreece. Speech was an image of mind; and mind was an image of God.Hermes was not specifically connected with any particular tribe ornational ethnicity. The Palamedian, Ionian dialect rendered with Hermeticsymbols was the Milesian men's language. Women would not formallylearn the language of the men. The men could always speak to thewomen in their own language in private and this relationship wouldalways be rather uncomfortable. The language of the market place oragora and the temple would be the men's literate language. Women would disappear from public view in this culture.
It is the conventional wisdom of the modern educated Indo-European toformulate all interpretations of this Heroic or archaic period from theperspective of the later Classical Age of Ancient Greece, that short periodof four or five generations from around 500 to 300 B.C. From this perspective Ionian culture was fatalistic, autocratic, and uncreative, in aword, oriental: very much the way modern Western Europeans viewEastern Europe. We are disabused of this prejudice by Hesiod. Hesiod recites a story from the archaic period, to which he belonged, that givesus a view of a Dorian savant from the perspective of the Ionians: "Therecame to Colophon {in Ionia} an old man and divine singer, a servant ofthe Muses and of far-shooting Apollo. In his dear hands he held a sweet-toned lyre. He knew many things but knew all badly. The godshad taught him neither to dig nor to plough, nor any other skill; he failedin every craft." A revision of the conventional view of Ionian culture bythe classicist C. J. Emlyn-Jones sums up the situation: "Theories whichembraced the origins of man and life, the idea of 'nature' and thetradition of rational inquiry all had their origins in 6th-century Ionia."Xenophanes proposed that the gods had not revealed to mortals all things from the beginning, but in time they find out better by seeking.Curiosity is given license here. Ionian cosmology introduced to Athens byAnaxagoras brought him under prosecution for impiety, in particular forteaching about meteorological phenomena. The Greeks called Pythagorus 'The Father of Philosophy'. He was an Ionian from Samos. It is entirely within the context of Ionian culture that we can see the shiftfrom the highly-wrought effects of declamation, oracle, and epigram withemphasis on rhythm, phonetic patterns, and antithetical structure in thework of Herakleitos to the simple and flowing prose of Hekataios. This change seems actually to have preceded the use of linear phoneticlanguage, but it would be confirmed and augmented by the new form ofliteracy. Ionia was the father of Classical Greek culture.
It was Prince Cadmus sought Europa in Greece. Bronze-Age Athens hadcertainly been a commercial partner of the Phoenician league includingthe Sidonians. Whether Cadmus went overland or he sailed directly toMiletus doesn't matter much. Perhaps he went by boat while the familyand stock went overland. The point is Cadmus came to Greece by way ofIonian Miletus. Cadmus failed to find Europa in Greece. What Cadmus found in Athens was a scrambled culture of old Greeks with new Greeks. Consulting the oracle he was instructed to follow a cow until it droppedof fatigue. The exhausted cow collapsed near a spring at a place calledThebes. Cadmus defeated a Python (the local oracle) scattering its teethin the fields out of which came soldiers. This is a wonderful hyperbolefor the conditions for agriculture in Greece. Whereas cattle culture was the basis for high civilization around the Mediterranean and could befound in Greece it would never achieve the same grand results in Hellas.The primary agricultural symbols associated with Greece were and are theolive tree, sheep, and goats. These reflect its generally rocky, infertilesoils that have never been able to support rich cultures, even in theBronze Age, of the sort found along the Tigris, the Euphrates, or the NileRivers, or in the heartland of Europe. Where relatively rich bottom landsdid exist in Greece strong city states did appear. Sparta was situated insuch a place, a lovely, sheltered valley on the bank of the Eurotas River.Sparta survived as an agricultural state by a strict, military upper classover an enslaved laboring class. According to Herodotus Cadmus cameinto Greece from Ionian culture in Asia minor to the territory of Búotia inthe company of the Gephyræans who were Phoenicians. They appear tohave been inserted as a ruling class over the native Búotians. However,the Búotians rose up and expelled the Cadmeans who then took refuge inAthens.
At first the Greeks wrote from right to left that was the Semitic habit ofold, but they also wrote from left to right each letter being a mirrorimage. Their native inclination was to write in alternation of direction, called boustrophedon meaning 'ox turning'. This was a very early Indo-European tradition. Etruscan, although not originally an Indo-Europeanlanguage, was writ this way. Hittite was writ this way. The Germanic runes were writ boustrophedon. This style goes all the way back to Ice-Age notation that proceeded along one edge of a bone to the oppositeend, then to turn around and come back along the opposite edge; or thenotation might follow a serpentine pattern on the face of a bone if spacepermitted. The topography of the pattern itself contained information.This is a perfectly adequate way of rendering a handful of basic principlesof life, or the ten months of the year, or a compilation of the two in aportable form for the mobile intellectual. In putting Alpha in the firstposition in their alphabet the Greeks would honor the Phoenician ikonAleph meaning 'ox', but also a much older Bronze-Age tradition goesback to the Sumerian zodiacal calendar. Hesiod, a peasant farmer inearly 7th century B.C. Búotia, the land of the sacred ox, composed hisepic verses while guiding his 'starry plow' and his ox boustrophedon.Composing in the oral, epic-poetry style of Homer his work would almostimmediately be passed on to the new tradition of literacy so we believewe hear the voice of an individual rather than the voice of a tradition for the first time.
For both the Hebrews and the Dorians there was a close association between the new phonetic-alphabet literacy and the law. A code of law did not arise in the Sumerian tradition until after well after the Semitic Akkadians took over, in the reign of Sulgi over 2,000 years after itsbeginning. No code of law is associated with the Old or Middle Egyptiandynasties. It would not be until the Late Period under Darius I that Egyptian mores would be codified into laws. No code of law is associated with legendary or classical Chinese culture. The bloody game of musicalchairs involving the migrations of peoples and the long memory ofvengeance made the consequences of social disorder the all engrossingchallenge facing humanity for many centuries after the beginning of theIron Age especially for the migrant Dorians and Hebrews. The Hebrews began with a code of laws in the name of Moses and used literacy toconfirm it. Literacy came rather late to the Dorian Greek world comparedto the Near East. However, G. S. Kirk points out that Greek culture hadmany of the characteristics of a literate culture from a very early periodwithout actually being one. In many city-states there were office holderswhose duties consisted of being recorders of events or decisions insacred or secular matters called remembrancers. Here was an individual whose mind was trained to remember the linear cause and effect formulation that is the basis for law codes. In Sparta the role of theremembrancer was preserved and the writing down of law was forbade.Literacy in general was considered a waste of time. Boys learned the Iliadby oral transmission; they learned the songs of war and religion. The Spartans would leave little in the way of culture. In Athens literacy wasallowed to occur, or could not be controlled, with a result that is wellknown. Literate language was conscripted to the needs of an oral cultureattempting to keep things straight, not the other way round. Literacy didnot shape the mind that invented it, literacy was the mind that inventedit. A similar environment surrounded the introduction of public literacyand the use of the printing press in Western Europe nearly two thousandyears later. The predisposing circumstances were the Little Ice Age thattriggered a collapse of social order. Public education combined with the translation of the Bible into the vernacular was intended to restore ethical rigor to a flailing culture. Fundamentally, this is all a further extension ofthe schooling of mentality that led to the original use of symbols and thecalendar in Paleolithic caves: strings of thought modulated through variedphonetic pulses, marked by visual ikons, that gave great extension andorder to memory and allowed humans to live in Ice-Age Europe. This was the basis for Bhear tongue and Eurasiatic culture from Iberia to Siberia; itwould underwrite the expansion of husbandry and agriculture in theBronze Age; in Classical Greek culture it would write the story of the earlyIron Age.
In a certain sense the Hebrews and the Spartans followed a similar pathof conservatism. It was the injunction against depiction of the deity inHebrew tradition that helped preserve the primitive character of Yahwehin combination with the arcane nature of the Hebrew written language.When ideals are visualized they tend go out of fashion and change isinimical to ethics. Hebrew tradition was not only without art it waswithout science. Solomon had to borrow not only science but craft fromHiram King of Tyre to build the first temple. Israelites were seduced byGreek arts and sciences first when Alexander conquered the Near East,but this influence was severely suppressed after the fall of the secondtemple. The Jews were then reintroduced to the Greek culture within the Southern-Mediterranean culture of Islam, and they would be partiallyresponsible for revival of learning in the North. There would be a longand largely fruitless tradition of attempting to seduce a science out of theHebrew alphabet alone, but the failure to do so would set the stage for anintense affair with Greek art and science within the context of Northern-Mediterranean Christian culture.
The priests of Apollo would add two vowels to Io's sacred five, long O andshort E, so that his sacred lyre would now have a vowel for each of itsseven strings. This seven-stringed lyre or zither was brought into Greeceabout 676 B.C. by Terpander of Lesbos. In primitive European traditionthe sacred lyre had five strings, the calendar five seasons, the week fivedays. The sacred number seven, as well as the linguistic root for itsname, goes back through Hermes to the Sumerian solar calendar and its seven-day week. The symbol for seven comes from Sumerian-Akkadianand is a Big-Dipper symbol. Uranus and Coronus had been the EuropeanBronze-Age Titans of the 7th day and the 7th month who were offered upto the most ancient goddess of all. In the new alphabet the EasternEuropean Z (Zeta), as in Zeus, was given the sacred number 7 in the orderof the Greek alphabet until Digamma (F) dropped out of usage and itdropped into sixth position. Until that happened Zeus would swing lowin the sweet chariot of the ancient bear-goddess, Ursa Major, as wouldArthur in Britain, Thor in Scandinavia, and the Emperor in China.
The linguistic equivalent to 7 as a Dipper image was the Greek G. As we recall that early human consciousness was polar, radiating out from thepoint of view of speaker. This polar consciousness had its astralcounterpart in the pole star with its circum-polar constellations wheelingaround it, the most notable being Ursa Major. Experience begins tomodify this perspective especially when people began to live inrectangular houses, the long houses with the twin king posts connectedby a cross beam. Linearity is further augmented by the rectilinear formatof regular right to left literacy. Before that happened no distinction wasmade between the astral symbol in its various orientations. In Old Futhark, symbols or runstaef meaning 'secret letter' were carved ontobuoh-stab meaning 'beech-staff', from the tree sacred of Diana. There were no symbols that would have required a rectilinear frame of referenceto distinguish one from another without confusion, such as b-d, or p-q,or G-L. It is rectilinear formality allows them to be used as differentsymbols. Dialect and then language make them sound different: theTower of Babel. Each literate tradition would determine what was normal yet the different traditions would be curiously related. The Etruscan [l]sound is given a letter that looks like a J. In Old Futhark the [l] soundedrune looks like a J upside down and backwards. The Futhark Laguz,meaning 'water' is the original Big Dipper. In Etruscan, L words includelauchum meaning 'king', les meaning 'offer sacrifice', leu meaning 'lion',lucair meaning 'to rule', and luth meaning 'sacred place'. Hugh Moranassociates the Hebrew lamed with malmed meaning 'an oxgoad', and theChinese tale of Niu Lang the herdsman who visits the weaver woman onlyon the evening of the seventh of the seventh moon. This was the June-July month of the sacred wedding or hiero gamos of ancient Eurasianprovenance going back to Paleolithic, moon-bone calendars. The Chinese character Jên that looks like a tipped over L has the sameconstellation of ancient meanings as such gamma words as Gaia, genesis,gamete, and gynecology. Not only that but they both go through agender inversion of meaning to kin, kind, king, and mankind. J as in Jah or Jahweh, and L as in El or Al are the epithets to the Iron-Age deity whorides in the astral chariot of the old bear-goddess. Modern linguistsbelieve that the Greek alphabet never had any logographic origin, and although the Hebrew phonetic alphabet continues to show its originallogographic meanings this is only paid attention to in the Cabalictradition. As an examination of any modern linguistic text book willquickly reveal so much of human intellectual tradition has been declaredout of bounds to the linguist that this is hardly surprising.
According the Brian D. Joseph Mycenaean Greek or common Greek hadthe consonantal hard J [dj]. Therefore Io was originally Jo, just asOedipus's mother was Jocasta. In the more civilized world of Classical culture the evocative mood of Jah was reduced to an Iota in Greek. In Israelite culture the evocative became a Yod. In Greek culture the loss of the evocative mood came as a result of secularization following a brutalreligious war. In Hebrew culture the loss of the evocative mood came as a result of fear of profanity, fear of exposing the sacred name to publichearing. The Romans were first enamored of Etruscan culture so the illiterate Oscan-Italian dialect of Banzi Djowei went to Loui. Later theybecame so enthralled by pagan Greek culture that they adopted it lung,tongue, nose and all, and Djowei went to Iupiter. This, in turn, wasfollowed by Judeo-Christian Greek influence that would persecute thepagan and eschew public evocation entirely. The Romans would influence Western European language through a literate, Latin upperclass. The rustic English would continue to use their own hard J, but itwould not reveal itself until the Religious Civil War in the 17th centurywhen common usage would enter the literate language. As we come to modern times the fortunes of Southeastern Europe are so reversedcompared to the fortunes of Northwestern Europe that the north is nowreturning the favor to the south. The hard J is now being used in Greeceonce again to pronounce gamma words before i, and e. They can nowpronounce the word jeep. Jah, however, is still beyond the pale.
The commercial method of Cadmean literacy enabled scribes to quicklycopy verbatim and it enabled the small city-state to compete with thelabor-intensive, pottery or lapidary methods of the great ant-hillcivilizations. In contrast to oral tradition Walter J. Ong states, "that anentirely oral language which has a term for speech in general, or for arhythmic unit of a song, or for an utterance, or for a theme, may have noready term for a 'word' as an isolated item, a 'bit' of speech." The small number of arbitrary symbols recombined to mimic the phonetic outline ofspeech underwrote the future of a huge expansion of the lexicon, andlevels of specification and detail unheard of. The Greeks formalized the use of vowels to separate the consonants, which is to say, they convertedmnemosynes into mnemonics. This was clearly an extension of Indo-European tradition, not Sumerian-Semitic tradition and definitely notEgyptian tradition. Spaces were used to isolate one word from anotherbreaking down the runon quality of Hebrew literacy. These two innovations combined with the fact that the ordering of the ikons wasborrowed from commercial parlance, allowed the language to becomewidely used. The Athenian Greeks would achieve a very high level ofliteracy and it gave them the polish of high civilization far above theiractual physical resources. A commingling of Dorian, Pelasgian, Ionian,and Phoenician culture was conducted in the cosmopolitan vessel ofAthena. Athenians gave up their Pelasgian language, according toHerodotus, when they "passed into the Hellenic body." The modern Greek language stems from the Attic dialect of Greek. In the Indo-European family of languages Greek is given a place of its own outside ofSlavonic, Germanic, and Celtic reflecting its broader Mediterraneaninfluences.
The social crisis that set the stage for the Classical Age of AncientGreece was perfectly mundane, it was a situation that we can completelyunderstand. The early system of landed gentry evolved into city statescommanded by tyrants as the population grew. The pressure on thelandholders to keep up with the cost of farming coupled with the badyear or two caused defaults and more and more land shifted to the creditholders and the labor of farming increasingly fell to those who hadalready been enslaved as well as those who fell into slavery throughdefault. Sparta sustained its enslavement of indigenous Achaeans andIonians, called helots, by making of itself a permanent military caste thatregularly warred upon its none Dorian citizens. City states also quarreledwith one another over the marginal lands the lay between them. The first formal declaration of law and order came out of this state of social turmoil. In 621 B.C. the Athenian tyrant Draco had a code of laws writtenout. Reflecting the circumstances it was Draconian. Soon enough theseverity of the laws provoked a compensatory social reaction when Solontook over and canceled the laws that had plunged the landholders intodebt and freed those who had been enslaved. He also gave citizens ofAthens the right to vote joining the upper class into a cooperativeoligopoly. This did not last long. Civil war broke out. Order was returned by Peisistratos who wrote laws defending the poor from therich. Peisistratos seems to have been the first to have the Homeric tales rendered into writing. He encouraged the arts and gave Athens a brilliantperiod. Solon, nevertheless, is the one who is remembered fondly by theintellectual tradition of Western Europe, not Peisistratos. Democracy, aswell as correct language usage, tends to seen as coming from the topdown in the intellectual tradition of the West.
Depiction of the gods in statuary and painting at the beginning of theClassical Age of Ancient Greece showed flat, static images indimensionless space. Even movement is a state, and it is not understoodhow the hare will ever catch up to the tortoise. Herakleitos begins to undermine the very foundation of religion that needs static immortality ofprinciple. Rather than applaud justice over injustice he proposed thattension, as in the hidden workings of the bow or the lyre, ensured thecontinued existence of the universe. Everything, he is thought to haveasserted, is in constant motion through tension. Suddenly in art there isan unparalleled lightness of movement and we see musculature. Prior to Aeschylus drama was limited to one actor and a chorus. The single actorrepresented the elevation of the old oral epic story teller to the high stagewith a text for the audience now converted to a chorus. Giving thechorus a preordained voice allowed the dramatist to remind the audienceof times past or distant places, and even to focus the response of theaudience. Nevertheless, the presentation was largely a static recitation.Aeschylus added a second voice to create dialog and a sense of I andThou in a secular setting. Aeschylus was born in 525 B.C. in Eleusis justwest of Athens, home of the Elusinian Mysteries in honor of Demeter.Eleusis stems from the Proto-Indo-European root Alès meaning 'ameeting place to which people traveled'. It was a place that peopletraveled for the Dionysian festival of the harvest and the eternal mysteryof rebirth and immortality, the mystery of selflessness. Aeschylus beganto erode this perspective by changing grammar. No definite article was used by Homer or Hesiod, but Aeschylus speaks of the thought. Here was a particular thought among the swarm of thoughts. In a dynamicallychanging culture it was becoming increasingly necessary to separate thefather from the son. The potential to isolate individual personalityenhanced the chilling sense of drama with intimations of mortality.
The Oresteia is Aeschylusís trilogy based upon the curse on the House ofTantalus. Tantalus, we recall, had offered his son Pelops to the gods.Zeus, shocked by this abomination, kills Tantalus and he is condemnedto stand in a pool of water up to his neck under the bough of a tree inHades unable to eat or drink. The sons of Pelops, Atreus and Thyestes,play out the next twist in the fate of this accursed house. Thyestesseduces his brother's wife and takes the throne of Argos. In revengeAtreus pretends to offer a feast of reconciliation, but offers up theslaughtered sons of Thyestes instead. Here is a cruel reverberation on the theme of Tantalus's theological abomination now reduced to act ofrevenge over the issue of primogeniture. Primogeniture has become acentral problem for patrialineal inheritance especially for royal houses.Thyestes returns the curse by fathering a child upon his own daughter,Pelopia; this is Aegisthus whose life's task is to avenge the murder of hisbrothers. The House of Atreus has not been rehabilitated by thereconstruction of Pelops by the gods as we see, its descendants are leftto twist in the wind of irreconcilable consequences. The House of Atreus will provide the actors for Aeschylus's drama; the gods will watch inamazement. Aeschylus takes the story for Agamemnon directly from oral tradition of the Heroic Age. Menelaus and Agamemnon are sons ofAtreus. The wives of these, Helen and Clytaemnestra, are the strong-willed women of the old style, unlike Odysseus's faithful and demurePenelope. Menelaus and Agamemnon are the leaders of the Greeks in theTrojan War. Agamemnon sacrifices his own daughter Iphigeneia at thestart of the war in a desperate attempt to appease Artemis who appearsto be holding up the Greek army with ill winds at Aulis. Artemis was on the side of the Trojans. In the first chapter of the trilogy Aeschylus setsthe scene with the skilled hand of the dramatist. Artemis, the goddess ofold, is sympathetically portrayed. From the chorus we are returned back across space and time to the royal seer of the armies trapped at Aulis,anxious that the curse of the house of Atreus not shatter the giant armorforged to strangle Troy, hopeful that the sacrifice of Iphigeneia will turnthe winds and release the brooding eagle-kings who are on the brink ofself destruction:
I see Artemis bristle in pity
yes, the flying hounds of the Father
slaughter for armies...their own victim...a woman
trembling young, all born to die - She loathes the eagles' feast!
Artemis, lovely Artemis, so kind
to the ravening lion's tender, helpless cubs,
the suckling young of beasts that stalk the wilds
bring this sign for all its fortune,
all its brutal torment home to birth!
Because of the killing of her daughter by Agamemnon Clytaemnestra hasbecome the mistress of Aegisthus while he is at Troy. Clytaemnestra willkill Agamemnon upon his return. As the drama moves through theTrilogy and from divine history to history the appeals to a distant Zeus inthe early drama would turn into the manifested son of god, Apollo, by theend. In the denouement it would be the decorous and reasonable Apollowho would offer the only solution. And everyone in the audience will beonly to glad to embrace it.
The Ionian city states in Anatolia were attacked and captured in the early500s by an expanding Persian Empire that would also conqueror and rule Egypt from 525 to 332 B.C. The Ionians revolted in 499 B.C., but therevolt was crushed and Darius I sent an army to punish Athens forhelping the rebels. Although outnumbered Athens defeated the Persiansat the battle of Marathon 490 B.C. Once again the Persians attackedGreece in 480 under Xerxes. Once again they were defeated in a famoussea battle at Salamis. Herodotus wrote a history of the rise of Persianpower and its expeditions into Sythia north of the Black Sea, well as thetwo attacks upon the Greek peninsula. Herodotus thought that the godsused such cycles of warfare to punish human pride. Although the Greekswere united by the Persian attacks, especially the Spartans and theAthenians, the Golden Age that followed allowed that piebald flock ofGreek city states to return to their endless squabble.
Dionysus was the last of the four gods begot by Zeus out of wedlock whobecame Olympians. The first three were Hermes, Artemis, and Apollo.Dionysus would replaced Artemis as the consort to Apollo in the ClassicalAge of Ancient Greece. Dionysus had come with the female side of theMilesian Cadmeans whose males had brought a phonetic alphabet andcommon language. The birth of Dionysus, as reported by Apollodorus,was by Semele the daughter of King Cadmus of Thebes. Dionysus wasthe sacred king of summer that the goddess ritually killed with athunderbolt in the seventh month from the winter solstice, whom herpriestesses then tore apart and devoured. In this blood-spatteredceremony we see that the extremes created by the impact of Typhon hadalso seduced even the oldest religion down the dark path of profoundpropitiation. Hera hated Dionysus on first sight and ordered Zeus to slaySemele with a thunderbolt. This he did. Hermes saved her six-month fetus and in a tongue-in-cheek inversion of tradition sewed him upinside Zeusís sacred thigh or Thurisaz for three months longer. In due course Dionysus is delivered as the twice-born, or as in Orphic hymn thethrice born, or as John Barleycorn or Osiris the eternally reborn. Robert Graves supposes the destruction of Semele and the taking of Dionysusunder Zeus's own wing, as it were, recorded the action of the increasinglycivilized Hellions of Búotia who ended the ancient Ionian practice of thesacred king, Dionysus, who was ritually sacrificed to, variously, Dione, theoak-goddess; Io and Demeter, corn-goddesses; and Persephone, thedeath-goddess. In any case, Dionysus was now reborn from the divinesirloin thereby establishing a paternal sir line. This is part of a generaltheme where Zeus and Yahweh have to demonstrate control over creation and fertility if they were going to be the replacement for the Earth Motherand her projected astral image in Ursa Major. Whereas the Greeks would use Zeus's groin in the case of Dionysus, the prudish Hebrews would usea rib rather than an arm or a leg to create Eve. The most curious triumphof masculine birthing, however, would be Zeus's metaphysical birth ofAthena. Zeus, we are told by Hesiod, had consumed his first wife long ago, Metis. Metis was a Titian and the goddess of wisdom. Athena was to be born out of Zeus's head representing the final stage of theapotheosis of Zeus. Zeus may not have been particularly intelligent, butwith the skills he did possess it wasn't necessary. Apollo on the otherhand, the son of Zeus, was the god of music, poetry, philosophy,astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and science. Apollo was clearly theadopted son of Zeus. The transition from Zeus to Apollo wasaccomplished without castration, or cannibalism, or any particularceremony at all for that matter.
Apollo marks a reversal in the trend toward divine specialization in Greektheocracy. Apollo suggests a monotheistic urge and a yearning for aunion of Greek culture. Apollo would gain his knowledge of the phoneticalphabet from Hermes as well as his musical skill on the harp and thepipes. The association between music and language is very comfortableat this time. It is only in modern times that the disciplines of languageand music have been separated and no longer communicate. A demonstration of power over fertility was required of Apollo, like hisfather. The theme of birthing knowledge would be resurrected for newattribution in the reign of Apollo in connection with his romance with aCentaurian Lapith woman. The Centaurs were aboriginal Greeks who stillpracticed the old matriarchal religion. They were generally portrayed ashalf human, half horse. In anger over Coronis's infidelity while carryinghis child, matriarchs being rather less concerned about their childreníspatron might be, Apollo had his sister Artemis kill Coronis. As Coronis lay on the funeral pyre Apollo had Hermes cut the still living child fromCoronis's womb. This boy child was Asclepius. He would now requirethe intervention of Chiron, the hand, who was also a Centaur. Chiron raised Asclepius, presumably the son of Coronis and Apollo, teaching himthe arts of medicine and the chase. Here is the tradition of Diana again,but with an all-male cast. The woman of this story is reduced to thesmallest most organic role possible. Asclepius is revered as the founderof medicine in Greek tradition. After Chiron died Zeus set him among thestars as the Centaur or so the story goes. With the elevation of Chiron the days of primary religion are over. From this time on down to the present day no individual would be powerful enough to name theconstellations: not Apollo, nor any Saint, or Pope, or Emperor, andcertainly no President.
The accomplished Apollo would replace the powerful Zeus. The attractive, colorful daytime world of the sun-god would blind the mindseye to the greater universe. Memories of the early Iron Age were reducedto a simple metaphor. Apollo would bring the muses down from theirhome on Mount Helicon to Delphi and tame their wild frenzy. Ever after he would preach moderation: 'Know thyself' and 'Nothing in excess'.
Artemis would be reduced to a hag selling fetid nostrums in themarketplace. In the denouement of the Oresteian trilogy Aeschylus, inThe Eumenides, cuts the cycle of revenge attributed to ancient matrilinealculture with this speech by Apollo:
The woman you call mother of the child
is not the parent, just a nurse to the seed,
the new-sown seed that grows and swells inside her.
The man is the source of life - the one who mounts.
She, like a stranger for a stranger, keeps
the shoot alive unless god hurts the roots.
I give you proof that all I say is true.
The father can father forth without a mother.
Here she stands, our living witness, Look-
Here is the truth, I tell you - see how right I am.
(pointing to Athena)
This would be the understanding of conception down to the 20th centuryof the modern era when it was discovered that biology could no longermake progress without realizing the female half of the seed. This was so embarrassing that it would never be commemorated as an event in theHistory of Science. It was simply assumed to be the case by GregorMendel. Darwinism, however, with no laboratory experiments to get inthe way, still echoes the Apollonian thesis in its essence.
The particular crisis that would bring about the collapse of the ClassicalAge of Ancient Greece was perfectly mundane and all too familiar. The dynamic tension which had long existed between Sparta and Athensexploded into the Peloponnesian War that dragged on from 431 to 404
B.C. Sparta dominated on land, Athens on the sea. Although Spartawould win it was a Pyrrhic victory. They would basically destroy eachother. Out of this came a Civil War in multicultural Athenian societythrough the period 411 to 386 B.C. It was during this period thatSocrates would be required to drink the hemlock cup for asking pointedquestions. The terminal phase of Classical Greek culture was just as productive as its righteous youth. Aristophanes would give us highcomedy. Aristophanes' most popular plays included Clouds, whichsatirized Socrates; Birds, a fantasy about a city in the sky; and Lysistrata,a partly farcical play in which the women of Greece force their husbandsto stop warring against each other. With Aristophanes the audience is nolonger looked down upon from the heavens, it looks down on the ant liketribulations of humanity. From this period would also come skepticism.Pyrrho of Elis was the founder of Skepticism (361 to 270 B.C.). Pyrrhotraveled widely and learned many different philosophic viewpoints, eachone claiming to be the truth. Because not all viewpoints could be right,Pyrrho decided to suspend judgment about truth. Custom and convention, he felt, were the only guides to what is just or unjust; evenour senses tell us only how things appear. By this we seem to be back towhere we started from, but there is no going back.
Out of this period also came the material upon which Euripides wrote TheBacchae, and Sophocles would write the Theban trilogy Oedipus Rex,Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone. The crux of all these stories was the terrible fate that lay in store for those following the maternal line orpracticing matriarchal religion. The savage caricatures of matriarchalreligion are here reduced to ordinary human but inverted family values:the son kills the father and sleeps with the mother. Oedipus is cursedsimply by being born into a tradition that had come into bad odour, butwe also recognize Oedipus's conscious connection with that tradition: hisinjured foot that was the mark of the shaman and his ability to solve thehermetic riddle of the Sphinx. In Anglo-Saxon tradition we recall thatGwain, the shaman to Queen Guinevere, falls short of the Grail quest bythe stain of having merely experienced sexual emotion for his sister-in-law in the trial of the Green Knight. In Hebrew tradition the Torah is chock full of the similar trials created by the redefinition of family values.One of the most dramatic is the story of Absolom who starts byprotesting the rape of his sister Tamar (palm tree) by one of his halfbrothers. This is ignored by his father King David. Absolom becomes the leader of a rebel faction. Absolom ends up slaughtered while entangledin the branches of an oak tree becoming the archetype of the renegadeson who does not obey his father. Dionysus was the tragic divine behindthe story line of Oedipus. More than any other god Dionysus gave life tothe Greek Classical Age, and the wine. Yet Dionysus would becomeidentified with a second accursed house in Greek tragedy, the Cadmeanline of Thebes. It was the masculine voice of literacy from the Cadmeanline from Miletus that would leave us the intimate Apollonian perspectiveof the female side of the Cadmean line and of the demonic leader of the dance, Dionysus.
The House of Atreus in the Heroic period and the House of Cadmus in theClassical period are central to Greek culture and, like Prometheus in thefirst place, they would be sacrificed because of it. This is fate. This is the Yin-Yang or Hermetic view of history. This is the snake that eats its own tail. The raw material for such an interpretation can be found in theTorah, but Hebrew tradition avoids it by ruthlessly editing its vision downto the one true god and a single line of inheritance along which theblessing passes. Saint Augustine extended this monopoly for theChristian Church. Hermetic or Gnostic teachings would be suppressed.Iron-Age religion would give a literal definition of ethics in a way that theolder religions never did and never could. The European intellectualswho were inspired by Hermetic philosophy in the 17th century werepersecuted out of the academy by the Church. The epistomology of theChristian Church would determine the basic method of determining truthand falsity in the court of law, and it would define the grounds ofknowledge for science with reference to its limits and validity -empiricism. At the end of the 19th century Sigmund Freud, a secularizedJew, would uncover dark secrets in some of his psychologically-disturbed, female patients. Initially he thought that he had discovered achilling mental imbalance resulting from an overdone patriarchalrevolution with its kept women: fathers abusing daughters. This discovery was absolutely unacceptable in fin-de-siècle Vienna.Rummaging around in the only ancestral tradition that secularizedChristian society would recognize as its own, he would discoverSophocles. In the Theban trilogy Freud thought that he had discoveredthe solution to the mystery of the European mind. In reality the femininevoice, although silent in literate Classical Greece, was still a powerfulsocial influence: mothers abusing sons. In reality Freud was right in thefirst place. Nevertheless, he would unconsciously project his ownexperience with a strong and meddlesome Jewish mother onto the mindsof his female patients as the Oedipal Complex and discover theunconscious in a way that the intellectual culture could accept it. The unconscious had come to bear a heavy load for the monotheistic cultures.
Any holy aura that the phonetic language has acquired in the modern ageis a secondary phenomena. Cadmus was awarded the beautiful daughterof Ares and Aphrodite for his contribution. Harmony was given inrecognition for the practical applications of the new language, its legaland dramatic functions, but Cadmus was never elevated to MountOlympus. His commercial language was beneath the purview of Zeus. A secular Greek attitude toward the new language was captured in Plato'sPhaedrus. In it Plato revises the myth of Thoth. In a humorous send upThoth, the oily trickster, approaches Thamus the king of Thebes in orderto sell his diverse inventions. When they come to the question of thealphabet Thamus says: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not alwaysthe best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the usersof them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from apaternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them aquality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will createforgetfulness in the learner's souls, because they will not use theirmemories; they will trust to the external written characters and notremember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is anaid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples nottruth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of manythings and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscientand will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, havingthe show of wisdom without the reality.
The new culture ruefully commented upon by Plato began to dissolve theold oral communities that were bound to their particular minor variationson the main theme with little scope for individual freedom. In the final analysis Plato excluded the poets of old from his ideal republic. These he found formulaic, clichéd, and outmoded in the new chirographicallystyled noetic world. Since speakers were no longer learning set phraseswith carefully worked out rhythms and relationships, the new literacyrequired the evolution of more formal definition and categorization in therelationship between the elements of speech. The creative potential ofthoughts assembled from scratch by ink on paper or stylus on waxnaturally led to a much greater burden upon the sorcererís apprentice tocommunication - grammar. The most rudimentary function of grammarwas to establish the relationship between subject and predicate. To whom or not to whom, that was the question. The first formal presentation of grammar in any European language would have to waituntil 1492 and Elio Antonia de Negrija, but a fundamental principle ofliteral intellection would be delineated by Aristotle. In MetaphysicsAristotle proposed the law of the excluded middle: "There can be nointermediate between contradictories; any given predicate must be eitheraffirmed or denied of one subject." As Sir David Ross points outamusingly this is an argument ad hominem. With the law of the excluded middle the continuum of the perceived universe would besystematically broken down and arbitrarily given identity, and thenvariety, and then species, and then order, and then a kingdom. The arbitrary definitions of language would feed these basic assumptions intomachinery of epistomology in order for it to do its business. The Bible and the Dictionary would become dependent one upon the other likeSiamese twins and eventually both Religion and Science would becontrolled by grammatical pedants pulling hairs over split infinitives andsubatomic participles. The law of the excluded middle would eventually become the basis for an algorithm of grammar itself. And Aristotle, thepedant and instructor to the young Alexander, would be resurrected frompagan hell by St. Thomas Aquinas and become THE Greek intellectualhero of the modern academy. The musical soul of Homo sapiens couldnot be suppressed for too long. The new literacy would discover its ownnatural versification and rhyming schemes. As with any other toolphonetic literacy would be a method for both creativity and discovery, aswell as a vehicle for oppression and amnesia.
Greece sacrificed the private mystery of religion in order to achievemulticultural accommodation. The transparency of the process causedphilosophy to arise out of religion. But all that we have been speaking ofup to now has been entirely in reference to the upper class. Golden-Ageof Greek culture, as we receive it, was pure upper class. When we speakof occasions where democratic governance was practiced, it refers toabout 20% of the population, the male, landowning citizens. With one exception, it is only through archeology that we find out about the lowerclasses and their religion. To understand a broader perspective of Greekculture and what Greek culture would become we turn to a uniqueachievement in the history of drama. This is Philoctetes by Sophocles inwhich we see the appearance of a commoner, Philoctetes, in a centralrole. In this brief dramatic moment we will see, by implication, theeternal fear of all upper classes stemming from their total dependencyupon that great beast, the people, or the demos. The issue here for Sophocles was to model within the structure of the drama a functionalreligion that would be relevant to a commoner. Philosophy is rarely up tothe task of exorcising the terrors of nature, or reconciling one to thecruelty of fate, particularly as shown in death, or making amends for thesufferings and privations that the communal life of culture has imposedon the individual, especially for those who must work for a living .
The Greek demigod and savior of common humanity was Heracles. The name of Heracles was associated with all the various Indo-Europeanspeaking tribes in their great diaspora after the impact of Typhon.Heracles was popular throughout the Mediterranean. The Dorians were Heraclides. Zeus, it is told, beget Heracles upon Hera during a period ofdarkness when the sun failed to shine with the connivance of Hermes. Heracles performed his miracles of hard work and monster bashing, andwas one of the Argonauts on the trip to the mountain of languages.Philoctetes, the story goes, had been given Heracles's famous bow by thegreat hero himself from his very funeral pyre. He and his father had been passing by just at that moment. When Heracles was elevated to the stars the feminine infix was dropped and he became Hercules. In the play bySophocles Philoctetes, still armed with Hercules's bow, is the lynch pinthat is necessary for the aristocrats to realize their goals at Troy. They needed his bow. The play begins during the Trojan War when things arenot going well for the Greeks. In a dialog between Odysseus andNeoptolemus we discover that Odysseus, following the will of the Greekpeople, had marooned Philoctetes with his terrible bow, his injured andfestering foot, and his interminable lamentations on the island ofLemnos. Philoctetes had suffered a terrible, unhealing, snake bite whilemaking ritual at the altar of old time religion. It is his fate to be left alone on the island of the Amazons, Lemnos, cursing the heroes of the Houseof Atreus, Agamemnon and Menelaus, as well as Odysseus. The chorus attempts to move the audience to sympathy for Philoctetes by rhetoricallyinquiring, why should this man suffer such a horrible fate? This was not Ixion, a Centaur, who courted fate by attempting to seduce Hera and waspunished by Zeus for his abomination. This was simply a common mandoing his duty. Hercules, in the voice of the chorus leader, encouragesPhiloctetes to have faith in him:
Human beings suffer, They torture one another They get hurt and get hard. No poem or play or song Can fully right a wrong Inflicted and endured. History says, Don't hope On this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme. If there's fire on the mountain Or lightning and storm And a god speaks from the sky That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
With this play Sophocles introduces the third person. With this the complete range of the personal pronoun system is realized with itsdramatic possibilities. The primary personal pronoun in Greek is ai! as in'Oh!, I discover'. Once the excitement of self discovery passes the stateis labeled, eyo as in 'ego'. And, of course, thou completed the triad. And these are the pronouns that Freud would find imprinted on the Europeanpsyche and would call Id, Ego, and Superego. It is through the voice ofHercules that Philoctetes is turned from his primary need for revenge andconvinced that by giving up his isolated definition of self for a moresocial perception he will gain access to god. It is a circular argument. It requires an act of belief. This is the future for Greek culture. This is the future of the Apollonian axiom to 'Know thyself': not know by thy self,but know of thy self in the context of a social tradition whose medium isthe linguistic message. This is a recapitulation of early Dorian history,reduced to an analogy for social class, and replayed as a developmentalmetaphor. The role of Hercules as soter to common folk in Sophocles'sPhiloctetes reveals the skeleton that would be fleshed after the defeat of the autonomous, quarreling Greek city states first by the Macedoniansand then by the Romans. Under the ox goad of Roman rule Paul's churchwould mediate the evolution of the ego out of the I (id) to the Thou(superego). To believe in is to gain freedom from, freedom from thatultimate punishment, isolation from the social group. Modern Biblical scholars ignore this play and these circumstances at the birth ofChristianity. The Church traditionally stays out of the birthing chamberrelying on virgin birth and divine male seed to cleave itself from its paganantecedents. Only language itself reveals the ancient tradition of theEuropean Trinity.
We will end with another reference from Plato. Plato's Timeaus is basically a dramatic presentation of Solon's notes on his trip to Sais in theEgyptian delta. Sais was a cult center to Neith a pre dynastic goddessand great mother who was represented by a bow and crossed arrows.Neith was depicted wearing the red crown of Lower Egypt, she istherefore connected to Mediterranean culture rather than African culture. She was a goddess of the hunt and of wisdom. She was reputed to be themother of Isis, Osiris, and Horus. Neith is equivalent to Athena, not theAthena that pops out of Zeus's head, but the original goddess ofwisdom. The purpose of Solon's visit was to question such of their priests as were most versed in ancient lore. Solon begins by attemptingto give the Greek tradition of ancient history. A priest responds:
O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children, and there isnot an old man among you. In mind you are all young; there is no oldopinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any sciencewhich is hoary with age. And I will tell you why. There have been, andwill be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes;the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water,and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes. And from this calamity the Nile, who is our never-failing savior, delivers and preservesus, and whatever happened either in your country or in ours, or in anyother region of which we are informed - if there were any actions nobleor great or in any other way remarkable, they have all been written downby us of old, and are preserved in our temples. Whereas just when youand other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the otherrequisites of civilized life, after the usual interval, the stream fromheaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only those ofyou who are destitute of letters and education; and so you have to beginagain like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times,either among us or among yourselves. As for those genealogies of yourswhich you just now recounted to us, Solon, they are no better than thetales of children.
This reference is cited about as often by Modern Science as Philoctetes ismentioned by the Christian Church. Never. The two institutions are uncomfortably bound together in a hermetic relationship of mutualdelusion. In order to maintain their hopeful delusion of youth and vigorthey must ignore the tradition of human experience. Understanding canonly come from the outside. Language is the single most importanthuman invention. As a subject it is fragmented and abused. It is at the bottom of the academic social hierarchy. Only rhetoric is valued. Only when language becomes the central interest and dominant concern of the academy will the culture find a human tradition compared to some localtribal or national dialect of it.
