Krasylov, 1997. Metaecology-05.Compound. Chapter 3. TRANSMUTATION. World as will. Dissolution

Creation. Soul. Conflict.

V.A. Krasilov. Metaecology. M.: Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997. 208 p. Part 5.

Connection. Chapter 3. CROSSING. World as Will. Dissolution.

Crossroads. Supertask.

The creation of Twinship is not for enmity, but for mutual aid and complementarity. Gilgamesh suffered from a sense of inferiority and tyrannized his people until the gods gave him a "partner," Enkidu. The biblical God offered Adam a mate from all living creatures, but "no suitable helper was found for man." Since living this way is impossible, God completed his creation with a wife from the same material – flesh of my flesh. The word "helper" indicates that the wife was conceived as a twin (a twin of a twin); the function of a sexual partner emerged later. In any case, since all biblical patriarchs had concubines, the sexual aspect did not dominate in relationships with wives. The words spoken during the Christian wedding ceremony indicate that husband and wife were seen as "helpers" who complement each other. This rite absorbed the richness of metaphysical ideas associated with twins. It incorporated the relationship between the earth and the sky that fertilizes it, spirit and matter, Logos and Chaos, man and nature, body and soul, life and death. My two hands are the moon's western sickle! My fingers are tamarisk, the bones of celestial gods! The whole world is my repetition, repeated in you. And echoes in the Bible: The rounding of your hips is like necklaces, the work of the hands of a skilled artist; Your belly is a round bowl, in which fragrant wine never runs out; Your womb is a heap of wheat, set about with lilies; Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle; Your eyes are pools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bath-rabbim; Your nose is like the tower of Lebanon, which faces toward Damascus; Your head crowns you like Carmel... These sometimes questionable compliments with overly precise toponymy characterize the bride as the embodiment of the surrounding world, which, in turn, embodies the "second self" of the royal groom, in whom the same traits are repeated. Poets still describe their beloved in similar terms, resorting to ancient symbolism (as I. Brodsky said, "in the darkness, your features with your whole body, like a mad mirror, repeating"). The God of Abraham is called the bridegroom in "Exodus" and the prophecy of Isaiah. Jesus, as the bridegroom, enters the festive Jerusalem on a young donkey. Winter has passed, the rain has stopped. The fig trees have budded, and the grapevines, in bloom, give off their fragrance. But who is the bride waiting by the city walls? Who is she who shines like the dawn, beautiful as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as an army with banners? It is not difficult to recognize her: after all, the wedding rite is essentially little different from the funeral rite. It is the beginning of a journey that one of the lovers inevitably embarks on, leaving the other to an endless search-pursuit. Ninlil searches for her Enlil underground, meanwhile submitting to the gatekeepers and ferrymen. Sulamith searches in the night, stumbling upon rough doorkeepers who strip her of her clothes. The difficult and trial-filled path of Psyche in search of Eros. Io, transformed into a cow, crosses three continents, following the prophecy of the chained Prometheus. Orpheus descends into the kingdom of Hades for his Eurydice, appeasing Cerberus and Charon with his song. Knight Orlando falls into madness, pursuing Angelica. His path is repeated by the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance. Romeo and Hamlet bury their brides, following them. The fictional Dante, Novalis, Edgar Allan Poe, Dante Rossetti turn their lives into a symbolic pursuit of a beloved who left too soon. Life separates, death unites. As a Shakespearean hero said: "I will kill to love afterwards." Thus, God created the world to repeat and complement himself, thereby ridding himself of an inferiority complex. Therefore, a banal love story includes doubling (or, as an option, creating a twin, which perhaps more accurately reflects the relationship between lovers), a journey, pursuit, rescue, and reunion. The wedding ceremony as the final act of this story symbolizes resurrection. After all, death was never perceived as the end of life. What does the resurrection of Christ mean, for example? His soul did not die. Only one of the twins died. He seems to betray his other half with her intercessor – death. ("I did not know," says Romeo, "that bodiless death was so greedy for love.") But their union is not lasting. The surviving twin, by the force of his attraction, can break the loving embrace of death and reclaim his half. This is resurrection. Jacob, reborn after crossing the river under the name of Israel, met his brother Esau, and his brother embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him, and they wept. Pygmalion brought Galatea to life, and the Dioscuri found a way not to part even after the death of one of them. These are paradigmatic triumphs of love as a force of attraction, as a medium that resolves the conflicts of twins. Chapter 3. THE CROSSING The metaphysical ideas mentioned in Chapter 2 were and remain common to all of humanity. Without diminishing the importance of mutual influences, it can be assumed that this common basis determined the parallelism of metaphysical development in different parts of the world. Natural and social conditions, of course, left their mark. In the mountains, humans become accustomed to more defined and clear forms than in the air of river valleys saturated with swamp vapors. The inhabitants of Mesopotamia, settling in the Judean mountains, transformed the vague ancestral symbols into the history of their tribe and succeeded so well that the "realism" of the Bible misleads even researchers experienced in comparative mythology. H. Frankfort, for example, argues that "the Old Testament is strangely poor in mythology of the type we encounter in Egypt and Mesopotamia" ("Before Philosophy"). Strangely, the Egyptian duality of the main Old Testament characters, down to God himself (who in the first and second chapters of "Genesis" creates the world and man twice – the first time by word, the second by manual labor), or the practical identity of the stories of the Babylonian Ninlil, who pursues her beloved in the underworld and is subjected to violence by the gatekeepers on the way, and of the Shulamite from the Song of Songs of Solomon, from whom the beloved suddenly "went away" and now "feeds among the lilies" (the asphodel meadow, a pasture overgrown with lilies – a symbol of the afterlife in ancient times), and she searches for him and is attacked by guards, has gone unnoticed. J. Frazer, in his book "Folklore in the Old Testament," finds many echoes of older beliefs in the Bible. In particular, he interprets Jacob's struggle with the mysterious Him as a clash of the hero with a river god. However, this interpretation seems naive in light of the general paradigm of the soul's journey, all elements of which – the conflict of twins, the departure of one of them, service to atone for guilt, crossing the river, which always symbolizes death, a second birth under another name, and the reunion of twins – are recounted in the story of Jacob-Israel with amazing simplicity. Behind the conciseness of the biblical narrative lie metaphysical abysses. This is the attractive power of the great book. In the metaphysical content of the New Testament, along with the repetition of paradigmatic plots of journeys, death, and resurrection (reunion of twins, return of the prodigal son), there are evident totemic, Hellenistic, and Eastern motifs, woven in the spirit of ancient syncretism. John baptizes with water and warns that he who comes after him, i.e., Jesus, will baptize with fire, referring to the two stages of purification – by water and by fire – introduced by Zoroaster, whose teachings he might have learned from the Essenes (it is said: and a shoot will come up from the root of Jesse; Isaiah, II, 2). Jesus calls – in the spirit of Eastern passivity – to abandon worries about daily bread and prefers contemplative Mary to bustling Martha. In connection with the paramita – crossing to the other shore, where demons entered the pigs, water miracles (echoes of the cult of the Palestinian god Dagon), the choice of a donkey for the entry into Jerusalem, etc. – let us recall that Jesus' homeland, Galilee, was pagan shortly before his birth. Militant early Christianity saw in the similarity of pagan rites to Christian ones a demonic mockery of the sacred. More far-sighted theologians, however, recognized the universal meaning of Christian symbolism. The teachings of Christ, transferred to the Greek soil, absorbed elements of Platonism and Cynicism – schools that stem from the same root (Socrates) and for a long time occupied opposing positions, but in the Hellenistic period noticeably converged. At the other end of the world, in ancient China, Platonism and Cynicism find their parallels in Confucianism and Taoism. It is striking how short a distance Jesus' earthly journey covered and how long a path Confucius, and half a century later, Plato, traveled in vain searches for the ideal of morality and state structure. Both Cynic criticism of Platonism and Taoist criticism of Confucianism were based on the idea of natural man, closeness to nature, continuous spiritual development-formation (the Way, Tao). The ideas of the Cynics found their reflection in the teachings of Francis of Assisi, religious romanticism, and existentialism, just as Taoism became one of the sources of Zen Buddhism. When an existentialist writes: "The principles of the only rational freedom become here the divine detachment of a condemned man, before whom one fine morning the prison doors will open, an incredible indifference to everything except the pure flame of life, death, and absurdity," – is he not repeating the words of a Zen master, cited by the Japanese researcher D. Suzuki: While you live, be a dead man, be a dead man to the end – and live as you wish, and everything will be fine. The World as Will In the period when instinctive actions gradually moved to a conscious level, humans actively sought – and sometimes found – the purpose of various things around them. A seemingly unremarkable flint shard lay around, but the master already saw an arrowhead in it; it only remained to sharpen it, as if to bring out the hidden purpose (just as Rodin believed he was only freeing the figure from the block of marble). The first generalization of consciousness was likely that all things are useful for something; one only needs to reveal their purpose, which is their meaning as a manifestation of their essence. Humans mastered essences through signs – images and words. The oldest works of art (e.g., female figures with three bulges – abdomen and breasts), like the oldest names, concerned not visibility, but essence. To give (to know) a name meant to master the essence (the Creator offered Adam to give names to all creatures – as if to take possession of nature). But many things held their essence firmly within themselves. To penetrate the mystery of their names, to master them, was possible only through an act of will, a special state of consciousness achieved through magical procedures. Magic was a contest of human will and the will of things, the outcome of which was influenced by the wills of other people, things, and gods. The world of the magical era was, as it seemed to Schopenhauer many millennia later, a clash of wills. Language, art, and philosophy appeared in the magical stage of spiritual evolution. This is a debatable assertion, but I will try to justify it. Of course, animals also constantly make sounds that partly express their inner state, partly signal danger or something external. But the Word, which creates, heals, and kills, is not directly related to these noises. The Word is the sonic form of magical symbols, just as drawing is their graphic form, and dance is their plastic form. Evidence of this is the exquisite metaphorical language of the Icelanders from ancient sagas or the indigenous people from the Amazon, who have not yet joined modern civilization. Only at more developed stages did the division of functions occur between purely informational communication with its poor imagery and the rhythmic language of poetry, which retained much in common, in form and purpose, with magical incantations. The gesture of the orator, the drawing with chalk on the board accompanying a scientific report – what is this, if not a legacy of magical action, in which the volitional influence of the word was reinforced by the volitional influence of image and dance? I am, of course, aware of theories that develop completely opposite views. Darwin believed that language appeared in the process of labor interaction and received enthusiastic support from Marxists. To modern people, this hypothesis may seem plausible, but the fact is that ancient people, at the stage when language appeared, did not yet do anything that required constant communication. The need to obtain information from each other was minimal: knowledge in their world was common. Based on the experience of modern people, it is assumed that drawings, especially animal drawings, were made to show future hunters what they would have to deal with, and also to practice throwing darts. And only later did people notice that a drawing could serve as decoration or even express some feelings. But this is the theory of a person who has not only never thrown darts but also has not expressed their feelings through painting. In the same vein, the origin of dance would have to be explained by the need to warm up the legs. There is every reason to believe that fire, a primal cause as powerful as the Logos, was used for magical purposes and guarded as a symbol of tribal will long before it found application in heating homes and cooking food (which originates from the ritual burning and consumption of sacrifices offered to fire). All these ideas belong to the same category, and they are consistent with the fact that the word came first. The pragmatic arose as a superstructure over the spiritual, not vice versa. Dissolution Even a Homeric hero could casually remark: "Some god showed us the way" (everything turned out well). Some nameless god was merely the embodiment of a friendly or hostile will, which could be overcome, just as Odysseus's magic potion overcame the effect of Circe's magic potion. Some god, in terms of will, is hardly stronger than the spirit of an ancestor or totem – these components of the magical system are interchangeable (Homer, a poet of a transitional era, tries to combine Odysseus's volitional superiority over Circe with an exaggerated admiration for her magical abilities: to anger the terrible goddess with beautiful braids is, at the very least, undesirable). The idea of a single universal will as the organizing principle of spiritual life is undoubtedly of later origin and could only arise in a developed social system that made humans feel the action of forces far exceeding anyone's individual will. Humanity as a species, one might say, became disillusioned with itself, with its volitional power, with the infinity of knowledge (each of us, repeating the history of the species on an individual level, experiences a similar disillusionment at an early stage of spiritual development). The universal will in the first stage was impersonal and indifferent, like fate, samsara, the Tao, to which even gods are subject. Later, they change places. The omnipotent, unknowable God, the sovereign dispenser of fate, arises as a limit beyond which human will and human knowledge cannot go. We are broadly familiar with the history of the main ecological systems. The history of the meta-ecological system is yet to be reconstructed from the fossils of spiritual life preserved for us. The following stages are tentatively outlined. 1. Pantelic – everything has a purpose, goal, meaning, essence. The first sign systems arise to express the latter. Human will knows no bounds. 2. Magical – the wills of people, things, totems, and gods enter into a struggle for dominance. The world appears as an arena of multilateral volitional influences, in the context of which spiritual essences receive rhetorical, graphic, and plastic embodiments – prototypes of art. 3. Fatalistic – humans become disillusioned with their volitional power; spiritual development moves out of the happy childhood stage (which will be remembered as the golden age) and undergoes a growth crisis. The worldview is tragic. Everything, as it turns out, is subject to an impersonal universal will. Even gods are no more than its instruments, and for humans, the only virtue is to know fate and prudently follow its intentions. 4. Theocratic – the universal will is identified with the demiurge. Humans delegate free will to the gods, finding support for spiritual life in the idea of service. The worldview is rather joyful than tragic. Aeschylus gives way to Aristophanes. Spiritual life is divided between the temple and the fairground. Later, pantheism was repeatedly revived in Renaissance and Enlightenment rationalism, fatalism in Spinozism and its derivatives, ancient magic in Baroque tragicism, romantic mysticism, and, in a farcical-guignol style, in fascism. Meanwhile, the Semito-Hamitic peoples who created the great civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt were entering the fourth stage, retaining more or less distinct memories of the previous three, fragments of which are deeply embedded in the new matrix of spiritual life. Gods gradually and with difficulty shed their zoomorphic features. The serpent was still an object of magical cult (and associated healing) in all Semitic countries, but increasingly appeared as an antagonist to supreme deities and heroes (Gilgamesh, Teshub, Yahweh). Sacred trees, like the biblical Tree of Knowledge, still retained magical properties beyond God's control. Abraham's God still made bilateral agreements with the patriarch's lineage, acting as a guarantor of successful reproduction (circumcision was given as collateral). The personal God did not exclude the existence of other gods, but increasingly demanded exclusive worship (ancient people generally did not think that rejected gods ceased to exist; they continued to be revered, but as demons). If Abraham and Jacob could argue with God, Moses was only deemed worthy to receive the divine tablets. But the apotheosis of Yahweh occurred during the reign of David, the founder of the Judean dynasty, who "danced with all his might before the Lord." When proud Michal, Saul's daughter, saw King David dancing and leaping, exposing himself before the eyes of the female slaves, she despised him, and David said: "I will play and dance before the Lord; and I will humble myself even more, and will be even more contemptible in my own eyes." As a reward, God favored David and even forgone the death of Uriah, who was treacherously set up. However, in the long run, unconditional capitulation to God proved fatal for his people. Not only Jews but also other Semito-Hamitic peoples, in their spiritual evolution, increasingly approached monotheism, uniting the entire host of gods in a system of kinship around a supreme patriarchal god. At higher levels of integration, secondary gods became parts of the body of the one God (among the Egyptians) or his aspects (among the Chaldeans). The Aryan tribes, who invaded from the north, were likely at the magical and fatalistic stages. Magical rituals were associated with fire worship and ancestor cult. The Vedas interpret paradise as the "world of the fathers." The ancient Scandinavians imagined it as Valhalla, the castle of the twice-killed – hanged and speared – Odin, where those who died in battle went, meaning it was not so much about ancestors in general as about the ancestors of the slain (in these warlike tribes, perhaps there were no others). On Semitic soil, the cult of the slain produced unexpected sprouts. Perhaps not without the influence of the Aryans, the patriotic attitude was established in Zhou China as the main dominant of spiritual life. The abode of ancestors was considered heaven, which also served as a symbol of universal will-fate. The life path, the Tao, aimed at achieving harmony between earth and sky. Aryan fatalism did not always reach such philosophical heights, fluctuating between karma, the influence of perfect or imaginary deeds on the future, and the senseless actions of blind spinners. Gods could cast lots on scales, but were powerless to change anything. In the Vedas, the "Iliad," and the "Edda," the attitude towards the gods is approximately the same – cautiously condescending, like towards beings whose power far exceeds their common sense. Spiritually, the Aryans were freer than the Semites, who advanced further along the path of theocracy. This may be the reason for their military successes. At the same time, the conquerors adopted the spiritual culture of the conquered peoples so quickly that it is quite difficult to judge their original beliefs. The tribe that destroyed the Anatolian state of Hatti not only began to call themselves Hittites but also adopted the Hatti totem, the lion, unknown to the Aryans, as a symbol of royal power. The Achaemenid Persian kings also sat on a lion throne brought from Babylon. Moreover, they took a decisive step towards monotheism, adopting Zoroaster's teachings and forcing the fire-worshipping Magi to serve Ahura Mazda, whose symbol, in a spirit of compromise, became fire. (The Creator Ahura Mazda, also known as the evil spirit Angra Mainyu, corresponds to the Vedic Asura-Varuna and the fire god Agni. The latter name is found in Scandinavian epic, and the Germanic Woden and Roman Vulcan are likely lexical variants of Varuna; the duality of these Aryan gods, combining life-giving and destructive principles, is also characteristic of the Semitic Yahweh, who acts as a destroyer in the episodes with Sodom and Gomorrah, the flood, and the Egyptian plagues). Schematically, the spiritual life of people in the 8th-6th centuries BC was a mixture of Semitic theocracy, Aryan fatalism, and Chinese (also possibly Aryan in origin) patristics. From this mixture grew worldviews that were strangely similar to each other at different ends of the earth. In the statements of Empedocles about the combinatorics of the elements of a fallen whole or Pythagoras about the transmigration of souls, one can see the "influence of the East," Vedic roots, although it is more likely to speak of general Aryan roots. However, at the level of generalizations of Buddha, Mahavira, Lao Tzu, and Plato, ethnic roots are lost, and we first see inhabitants of the Universe (although many teachers of humanity came from provincial towns like Kapilavastu in the foothills of the Himalayas, Gufu in Shandong, or Galilean Nazareth). The central idea for them was the perfection, self-sufficiency of the cosmos as a whole, into which disharmony was introduced by the very act of dividing substances, and then by the tragic separation of self-aware beings, whose short existence as fragments of the world soul was filled with suffering. Good, therefore, lies in suppressing the ego, erasing its boundaries, dissolving it into the general. This is nirvana, the destruction of illusory barriers erected by ourselves. This is the recognition of the commonality of all beings – accidental combinations of immutable monads – from which ahimsa – non-harming of living beings – inevitably follows. This is our path, the stream flowing into the universal Way, the Tao, a powerful current in which past and future, heaven and earth, life and death, happiness and suffering, good and evil are indistinguishable. This is the harmony of the Cosmos, through the contemplation of which the harmony of the human soul is formed.

Creation. Soul. Conflict.

V.A. Krasilov. Metaecology. M.: Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997. 208 p. Part 5.

Connection. Chapter 3. Crossing. The World as Will. Dissolution.

Crossroads. Supertask.