Krasylov, 1997. Metaecology-02. Chapter 1. PREMONITIONS. Saloroids. Fundamentals

Introduction. Definitions. Problems. The dust of titanium.

V.A. Krasilov. Metaecology. Moscow: Paleontological Institute of the RAS, 1997. 208 p. Part 2. Chapter 1. PREMONITIONS. Solarids. Foundation.

Heracles. Chapter 2. DOUBLES.

Chapter 1. PREMONITIONS The problems raised in this book are as old as the world, rather, as human thought—an essential clarification, since our world is over four billion years old, while human thought is about forty thousand years old. It is not surprising that thought cannot encompass the world—different scales of time. If one is to be amazed, it is at how early the fundamental questions were posed and how accurate the premonitions of their answers turned out to be. Nevertheless, this is also explainable. Children ask universal questions until they are drowned out by the “sweet and vulgar melody of life” that pursued Thomas Mann. Humanity’s childhood, in the breadth and volume of its thinking, far exceeds later epochs (maturity, or have we not yet reached it?). In the past it was believed that wisdom was concentrated in an even more distant past. This had its own logic: the deeper one goes into time, the closer one gets to the still‑unclouded source of spiritual experience. Not much remains of it for us—mainly what is recorded in genetic memory, access to which is limited by later layers. Throughout history attempts have been made to reach genetic memory by shutting down reason, relying on revelation, or, conversely, mobilizing the full analytical power of the intellect. Each of these methods has its merits and drawbacks. Since spiritual culture is older than material culture, we have no direct material evidence of the early stages of spiritual development. Zoroaster, the creator of the model of the cosmic struggle of good and evil that for millennia gave meaning to human existence, lived, according to ancient chronology, five centuries before the Trojan War, i.e., roughly in the 17th century BC. Like Prometheus, he was probably the last of the Titans of the age of mastering fire and word, together granting an irresistible magical power. Echoes of these most ancient ideas are heard in the Pythagorean teaching about Hestia—the “world hearth” around which the planets revolve. Heraclitus spoke of the eternal fire, of the Logos‑creator, and of the struggle that moves the world (contemporaries called Heraclitus “dark”: he can be understood only with the aid of an almost forgotten past and a barely discernible future). The Titans on whose shoulders modern culture rests—Buddha, Moses, Confucius, Plato—saw their task as replacing the irrational creative force of the magical Logos with reason and substituting the cosmic struggle with another eternal engine—love. Jesus of Nazareth embodied the idea of love in an ethical system, making it the cornerstone of a new philosophy of life. It is said that the philosophy of the new age is interesting mainly as an expanded commentary on Heraclitus, Plato, Jesus. Nevertheless, it diligently refined the analytical tool needed for further progress. After all, world history was seen as a certain path, and an individual life—as its brief repetition. But will there be progress? What awaits us in the twenty‑first century, besides the sweet and vulgar melody of life?

Solarids The most ancient gods personified the forces of nature. At the same time they were, in a sense, parts of a single body. T. Jakobsen (in G. Frankfort et al., “On the Eve of Philosophy”) cites the following Babylonian text: Enlil—my head, my visage—noon! Uraš the incomparable—my spirit‑guardian, who directs my way! My neck—necklace of the goddess Ninlil! My two hands—western crescent of the moon! My fingers—tamarrisk, bones of the heavenly gods! They will not allow sorcery in my body! The gods Lugaledinna and Latarak—my chest and knees! Mukhra—my tirelessly running legs. In the Egyptian “Book of the Dead” the gods embodying various elements are presented as parts of the body of Atum, who protectively stretches his arms over all that exists. The outstretched Atum gave rise to the image of the “celestial man,” which appears in Christian mysticism, whose sign is the cross (the Old‑Testament divine spirit also hovered over the abyss—though the outstretched arms are not mentioned, how else could it hover?). The trace of Atum survived in the myths of various peoples about a man who ascended to the sky, like Orion (in the form of a constellation reminiscent of a cross). Since Atum, as Atum‑Ra, was identified with the Sun (Ra), which changes its duration in the sky over the year and daily descends into the sea to be reborn in the morning light, the “celestial man” also had to travel along the solar path. The winter solstice falls in the twenties of December. Accordingly, characters identified with the “celestial man” were born—or set out to wander—on those dates or immediately thereafter. Their mother was embodied by the constellation at the beginning of the path, dedicated to the great mother‑goddesses Ninhursag, Isis or Aphrodite, often depicted with a baby in her arms. Already in Greek mythology this infant was a symbol of love. The divine wanderer Dionysus was born twice—first from the mortal Semele and then (as a posthumous birth) from Zeus’s thigh. In his earthly wanderings he endured many trials. Among his assailants was the cruel Thracian king Lycurgus, from whom the young god had to escape into the sea. He descended into the gloomy realm of Hades to rescue Semele. All his enemies, naturally, were punished, and his worshippers were rewarded, ascending with him to the heavens. Among the latter was Icarus’s daughter Ergona, immortalized as the constellation Virgo, from which the solar path originates. From the myth of the Sun’s son Phaethon we learn that the solar path was by no means a leisurely stroll. Here the celestial man faced heavy trials in the form of monstrous animals. Not everyone could cope with them. The burning Phaethon fell to earth and his body was washed by the waters of the sacred river Eridanus. Even more dangerous was the subterranean segment of the path after crossing a sacred river—whether the Ganges, the Styx, the Eridanus or the Jordan—once assigned to “sons” (Enlil, Heracles) as atonement for sin, recalling the sacrifice of children. Hence the motif of the stern father, whose echoes still sound in the Gospel (“Why have you forsaken me?”) and in countless stories of lost, abandoned, persecuted, unrecognized fathers and again found children. Later the underworld became a mandatory destination. The story of Gilgamesh allows us to grasp the true purpose of the journey. He went to the afterlife in search of an ancestor (the sole survivor of the flood) to learn from him the secret of immortality—not only for himself but for all people. His quest ended in failure: on the return journey, after the crossing, a serpent ate the tree of life. The return of the dead was the task of the journeys of Orpheus, Heracles (for Alcestis), Theseus and perhaps Lot (if the flaming, ash‑covered Sodom is taken as a Old‑Testament analogue of hell). Aeneas descended to his dead father to, with his help, glimpse the future. Odysseus pursued a more modest goal—to find the way home to his father in Ithaca, but this is merely a more earthly variant of the same myth. The combination of all these symbols yields birth from a virgin in late December, immersion in water, wandering in the desert among beasts and demonic visions, multiple crossings from one bank to another, disciples equal in number to the signs of the Zodiac, resurrection of the dead, a duel with death in the name of salvation, and return to the celestial father (descent into hell is absent from canonical Gospels, but appears in the account of Nicodemus). Allusions to the great journey repeatedly appear in biblical parables. Thus, the prophet Jonah “ran from the face of the Lord” and, caught in a storm on the way to Pharisee, was—at his own request—cast into the sea by the sailors to redeem his salvation by his own death. He was swallowed by a whale, but the metaphorical nature of this event (clearly rooted in some primeval sacrifice) is immediately revealed in Jonah’s speeches: … From the bowels of Sheol I cried out—and You heard my voice. You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the sea… To the foundation of the mountains I descended, the earth sealed me forever, but You, my Lord, will bring my soul out of hell. The Parable of the Prodigal Son is a demythologized paraphrase of the same story, whereas the Eternal Liquid symbolizes a one‑way road—an endless wander without return and, consequently, without purpose or meaning, contrary to the order of things and as unnatural as Sisyphus’s labor. Voltaire’s Candide, exiled from his native lands, passes through the Prussian military hell, endures innumerable calamities and finally reunites with his (also heavily battered) beloved to “till his garden.” In the same heroic century Pastor Lawrence Stern embarked on a “sentimental journey” through France and Italy. He failed to notice that a war was raging and barely glanced at Notre‑Dame, his attention being drawn by a girl with a green satin purse. This was the first journey of a small man with his diminished Epicureanism, perceived by contemporaries as a collection of minutiae. Virginia Woolf, however, insightfully saw in Stern’s Impressionism a prototype of a new art that made a sharp turn from the eternal to the momentary. But was not a similar turn made by those who made Enlil the carpenter’s son? Western literature of the new age shows how deep the roots of the mystical journey have spread. Its great wanderers walked the well‑trodden path. The constantly recurring motif of loss of reason (fits of madness afflicted Gilgamesh, Heracles, the blinded friend thrown from a cliff, the influential biblical prophet Isaiah, who for three years walked naked and barefoot by divine will, Orlando, also shedding his clothes in sexual frenzy, Don Quixote, Hamlet—upon the appearance of a father’s ghost—and many other “sons”) may stem from the ancient notion (found in the “Book of the Dead,” the “Odyssey”) that the souls of the dead are deprived of intellect. Romantics breathed new life into the waning theme of the solar wander. All its signs are found in the unfinished novel by Novalis, “Frederick of Offterdingen,” whose hero descends into an underground cavern (though for Novalis, as a geologist, infernal associations are replaced by mineralogical ones), where he discovers the history of his lineage in a mysterious book. He continues his journey purposefully—in search of his father. Late Romantics often enacted this plot in reality. Lord Byron in his youth resembled a father, the “Mad Jack,” a libertine with incestuous tendencies; in his mature years—a grandfather, “Jack Bad Weather,” a captain always caught in storms; and at the end of his life—a misanthropic brother, the “Corrupt Lord,” from whom he inherited his title. By turning the events of the mystical journey into facts of his biography (including the death of a friend in stormy seas, epileptic seizures, and a sacrificial death for freedom), Byron prefixed his “Corsair” songs with epigraphs from Dante’s “Inferno.” His younger contemporary Charles Darwin, as a youthful Romantic, set out on a circumnavigation that led him, however, not to a father but to the grandfather Erasmus, the first English evolutionist. I will return to this journey later. It is not immediately clear why, to this day, the story of a capital dandy who rejected the love of a provincial girl only to later fall for her and be rejected in turn still attracts us. Yet recall that this dandy of high society was driven into the steppe villages by the summons of an elder relative he never met alive; that the promise of brotherly love he gave to the beloved girl instead of sexual love has a highly revered prototype; that his senseless murder of a friend is a tribute to an ancient tradition descending from Heracles (Onegin and Lensky were “ice and flame,” i.e., mirror doubles. Their conflict was resolved according to the traditional scheme: one double sent the other on an after‑life journey. His place, however, remained vacant only briefly. The ideal beloved, mastering the hero’s spiritual world through the works he had read and paying attention to the “sharp nail marks” associated with similar marks—the personal sign of a primitive man on cave walls—becomes his double and traverses the ascending part of the path, rising from meaningless idleness in the remote villages to self‑sacrificial life in higher spheres). The epigones of Romanticism reproduced the travel novel without pondering its hidden meaning. The children of Captain Grant wander and endure hardships in search of a father (the fact that the goal is to save the father rather than themselves is an allowable genre‑specific transposition). Regardless of the author’s intent, the appeal of such plots is explained by their genetic link to the mystical journeys of “sons,” an inseparable spiritual bond between generations. The most vivid literary phenomena of the new age are paraphrases of solar journeys in the works of Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, Pasternak, Platonov, Márquez (Dvanov, breaking out of Chevengur’s hell, descended from the saddle into water in search of the road once taken by his father out of curiosity about death. The path of another solarid, Colonel Aurelio Buendía, began with a visit to a traveling circus brought by his father, passed through a thirty‑two‑war inferno he himself unleashed and lost, a thwarted death, the madness of power, a near‑fatal betrayal of a Friend, and concluded—with the arrival of the traveling circus—under an old chestnut tree where his father’s ghost had waited for years). These examples illustrate the extraordinary durability of ancient metaphysics. At its core lies the identification of the individual with the Universe, protecting against sorcery and ensuring immortality. The image of the guardian with cross‑shaped outstretched arms flying over the abyss evokes a feeling of protection, belonging, and participation in everything that occurs in nature. If the metaphysical system collapses, a new one forms from its fragments, acquiring a striking (and not always desirable) resemblance to its predecessor. The spiritual heir of the holder of the new word, who embodied the latter in the historical realities of a particular chosen country, descended from privileged strata of society to the very bottom, endured the humiliation of exile, banishment, betrayal and accepted a martyr’s death to become more alive than all the living. The faithful disciple—here Joseph, not Peter—became the stone on which the indestructible brotherhood of peoples, walking the bequeathed path, was erected, etc. It is easy to notice many matching details down to the strict regulation of sexual relations. The similarity of successive, as well as parallel, simultaneous metaphysical systems is determined by the stability of basic spiritual needs, which pass unchanged from one generation to the next, just as basic material needs related to nutrition and reproduction do. Pragmatic life experience is directed toward the external world, immersing its phenomena in consciousness as certain explanations; metaphysics turns inward, opening the phenomena of spirit to an outward exit as events. Ever‑living, metaphysics also follows the solar path, sometimes sinking into the abyss, sometimes soaring upward. At the bottom, the creation of spirit learns to eat, drink, associate with thieves, tax collectors, prostitutes. Metaphysics intervenes in nutrition and reproduction, imposing fasting and recommending abstinence. At the same time, under the influence of pragmatic experience, metaphysical ideas become encrusted with syllogisms, proofs, facts, increasingly sophisticatedly and wholly subordinating consciousness. The history of Western civilization can be presented as an alternation of metaphysical and pragmatic periods. Metaphysical ideas dominated the Hellenistic world, which was succeeded by Latin pragmatism that yielded to the triumphant metaphysics of the Middle Ages. After the Renaissance, pragmatism marched victoriously through the ashes of the Huguenot and other equally sacred wars, and now it rides the crest of the wave.

Foundation Any developing system has a goal—a certain predictable state toward which it strives, obeying the general laws of development. Achievement of the goal—for example, the renewal of a species—is guaranteed by a genetic mechanism whose precision allows one to predict without error that a duckling, not a swan, will hatch from a duck egg (though there was a time when philosophers extended their distrust of teleology in nature to all of genetics, almost classifying it as an occult science). Naturally, a natural system does not contemplate its goals and cannot arbitrarily change them. But can the same not be said of humanity? The system sets a goal for its components, and while a human was part of the natural ecological system, there was no need to concern oneself with the meaning of existence. Anxiety, the feeling of life’s emptiness, and the need to define its meaning came with the separation from nature and the ensuing process of forming new systems that increasingly subordinated human physical existence. In this context, for the first time arose the need to understand not only the surrounding world but also the inner self, i.e., spiritual life. To sustain the latter, a meta‑ecological system was formed, developing autonomously, though analogous to the external system of the cosmos. Metaphysics arose on the basis of such analogy as a symbolic embodiment of the inner world. In this early period the foundation of the meta‑ecological system was laid. Its cornerstone was the image of the Sun, the cosmic hearth, as the substantive basis of the unity of the cosmos, which was complemented and partially replaced by the Logos, a related intellectual substance. The properties of this ionian substance—its continuity and discreteness—generated unifying and conflicting principles, notions of the unit and the infinitesimal, refracted in god and man, in the fine atoms of the soul and the dense atoms of the body. The cosmos acquired a Structure based on the harmony of numbers or the likeness of atoms. In this system a separation occurred between the external world of things and the internal world of essences.The new era has been tasked with rationalizing these ideas, translating primary metaphors called myths into the simplified language of secondary metaphors called philosophy. In the preceding and subsequent chapters I adopt the traditional interpretation of mythic narratives or propose my own when it seems more convincing. Comparative mythology provides the key to mythic symbolism, revealing a universal parallelism of myth‑making processes. Myths born in tropical jungles and on the tundra speak, in different languages, about the same thing—sometimes clearly, sometimes obscurely—and in this sense complement each other, helping to fill gaps and clear later accretions. Mythic parallelism testifies to the unity of humanity’s primary spiritual needs, reflected in the most ancient meta‑ecological systems.

If one regards a myth as a presentation of some, even partially or wholly fictitious, events, it is easy to detect deviations from elementary logic. It is as if myth‑making follows its own special logic. However, the logical structure of a myth manifests not in everyday meaning but in the metaphorical significance of the described events. In the course of spiritual evolution, metaphors underwent certain changes (for example, the personification of a generic essence lost its zoomorphic traits and acquired anthropomorphic ones; the soul’s path no longer ran across a starry sky but across a stony earth). Accordingly, adjustments were made to their narrative formulation (Europe’s spouse became not a bull but Zeus in the form of a bull; the constellation Virgo was obscured by the carpenter’s virgin wife), gradually losing any plausibility. This, apparently, is the secret of mythopoetic logic, which, as many claim—and especially Y.E. Holosovker in *Logic of the Myth*—has nothing to do with formal logic. In other words, there are different modes of representation, but no different logics. The basis of logic consists of cause‑and‑effect relationships that inevitably arise in any system as a result of its elements influencing one another. Since there can be no world without influences (such a world we simply cannot judge whether it exists, because existence manifests only through influence), there is likewise no world without causal logic. Essentially, logic is the sole commonality of all conceivable worlds, the main element that links physical systems with meta‑ecological ones. Myths convincingly refute the notion that spiritual life derives from the material. We see the richness and complexity of meta‑ecological systems in the poverty and simplicity of ecological ones, and vice versa. The cosmism of ancient humans had no support in material conditions or the needs of their existence. Humans needed the cosmos to order the cycles of the soul long before the need for calendars and navigational instruments arose, which later caused them to forget the cosmos. A person could contemplate the essential while not being convinced that the essential lies beyond the competence of human reason. Introduction. Definitions. Problems. The Dust of Titanium. V.A. Krasylov. *Meta‑ecology*. M.: Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997. 208 p. Part 2. Chapter 1. PREMONITIONS. Solyroids. Foundation. Heraclitus. Chapter 2. DOUBLES.