003 Maps of Meaning: 3 Becoming Like Gods (TVO)

Now one of the things that people are very much confused by in the modern world is what archaic people meant by gods, and that’s because whatever the deities were that had the motive force that archaic people attributed to the gods seemed to have disappeared in modern culture. Now the Jungian hypothesis is that’s because they turned into psychological traits fundamentally, or motivational forces. So what the archaic societies would describe as gods, we would describe as motivational forces.

For example, Venus is a goddess, the goddess of love, and we would associate her power with love and sex fundamentally. The reason that that’s a reasonable association from the archaic standpoint is because the motive quality that makes up what Venus represents is transpersonal, which means it’s not limited to one person and it’s immortal in that the motive force that characterizes sexual affiliation exists whether or not a single individual exists. So it’s transpersonal, has the force of a personality because, if you fall in love, you’re motivated by a certain set of standards and perspectives, right?

If you’re gripped by beauty, say, or if you’re gripped by lust, that imposes a particular view of the world on you and impels your actions—sometimes despite your will. That would be equivalent, from the archaic perspective, to possession. It’s clearly the case that archaic societies who are engaged in warfare, for example, would conduct rituals to ensure that the warriors that made up their societies were, in fact, possessed by the correct god, so it might be Mars, for example, the Roman God of War.

So that on the battlefield they exhibited the proper characteristics of somebody who was in battle—rage, you can think, rage. Possession by the God of War would be equivalent to this possession by a state of rage. Now, it’s not quite that simple; it isn’t only that archaic people externalized motive forces and gave them the status of deities. What they did was more complex than that, and I think you can understand that a little bit better if you start to give some thought to the modern behavioral notion of the stimulus.

Now the stimulus is a very, very weird concept because the behaviorists who were interested in taking apart what was inside the brain would attribute motive force to the stimulus, right? They’d say, if you present an animal with a stimulus, he will therefore act, and that meant that the behaviors were making the presupposition that the motive power resided in some manner in the stimulus. Well, and why, why would they think like that?

Well, it’s an archaic mode of thought in a sense. You can imagine a child saying, “One of my friends today made me really angry,” right? Which means that the child is essentially conflating his or her own internal emotional state with the proximal stimulus that gave rise to that state. You see complex associations like that taking place with regards to the apprehension of beauty, say, because beauty is a very, very complex and difficult to localize phenomenon. If you’re very attracted to someone, are you attracted by them?

Well, in a sense, of course, you are, because there they are, but in another sense you’re not at all because what’s happening is that you’re engaged as much in the attraction as anything that’s motivating you from the outside world. I think that partly accounts for your sense of foolishness, especially if the person that you’re attracted to doesn’t return your attraction. I mean, you know that from your perceptual perspective you’re attracted and dominated by the object, but by the same token, you know entirely that, as easy as it is to presume it’s them and their fault, say, pretty much it all has to do with you.

So in the modern world where we’ve been able to separate out the object and the motive force of the object, the deities have sort of moved inside of us and become psychological forces. But you can understand if you think about it in this manner that things weren’t so clear prior to the dawn of the empirical age. That gives you a little bit of background with regards to what the notion of deity meant to archaic societies who still utilized those notions as explanatory terms.

Okay, so we know that if you’re caught up in one of these little world games, that you may be motivated by something very, very fundamental, right? A tendency that transcends you—the tendency to propagate yourself, say, Freud’s fundamental motivational level, sexual affiliation, or the tendency to maintain yourself. Those you could say are the fundamental gods of existence, the fundamental driving forces, and it’s there—it's the interaction of those two forces over great periods of time that produce the great diversity of life and human life that we see before us.

Each of those fundamental, most fundamental of gods has their differentiated minions, so to speak, so that while engaged in the meta goal of self-preservation, you act out plots of hunger and plots of thirst, and you move from cold to hot, or from hot to cold depending on your particular surroundings. With regards to self-propagation, you’re attracted to people or are repelled by them for reasons that are frequently absolutely beyond your comprehension, by the way.

So I just found out this week, and this is absolutely staggering, I think, that if you run an experiment on a group of women and you track their menstrual cycle, and then you give them t-shirts that men have worn to smell, that women who are ovulating like the smell of symmetrical men better than asymmetrical men. That’s partly because symmetrical men are probably more healthy, but this is a good example of how the motive forces that configure your world are dependent on instinctual forces that are not only beyond your consciousness but they’re beyond even, at the moment, any of our explicit explanations.

So another finding that’s very similar that I came across recently: it turns out that mice will not mate with mice that have RH blood factors that are likely to produce unfit offspring. The more closely genetically related the RH factors, the more likely there is to be a catastrophe with regards to offspring, and the mice seem to detect the RH factor by smell. This was recently run by with women, and it is also the case that women prefer men whose RH factors are at an optimal distance from them in terms of smell.

This is some example of how these unbelievably archaic systems—because like the olfactory systems are unbelievably archaic—produce alterations in world view at a level that’s massively below consciousness. So underneath your cortical shell, which is tonically inhibiting all your emotional and motivational systems, lie all these motivational and emotional systems. They have branches that grow up into the cortex, and they have the capacity to control your behavior completely and voluntarily.

So, for example, if you’re gripped by fear, if you’re gripped by fear, it’s very, very difficult to overcome that voluntarily. At least initially, you won’t be able to, which is to say that when the chips are down, the underlying motivational and emotional systems have control. Okay. So then, what happens from that perspective? What happens when you encounter something you don’t understand?

I think the best way to explain it is something like generalized disinhibition, which is that all your underlying motivational and emotional systems are more or less disinhibited simultaneously. The reason for that is because you want to be maximally prepared to do whatever the hell is necessary to do when you are somewhere that you don’t understand, and because you don’t know what that thing is going to be, all your systems go on.

When psychologists talk about stress, which is an abysmal word, right? It means everything and nothing. When psychologists talk about stress, what they mean is generalized disinhibition of emotion and motivation. Then you come to the case of ancient Egypt. One of the things Eliade points out, which I think is really interesting, I mean really phenomenal, the story I’m going to tell you right now was essentially revealed in Egyptian culture at the dawn of the culture rather than developing over the course of the culture.

So the Egyptians had a revelation, right, immediately that the most fundamental of gods was the one who created as a consequence of his tongue and his speech—very much akin to the Sumerian idea with regards to Marduk and also to later Judeo-Christian ideas. So here’s the story. There are four players in this drama, OK? There’s Osiris, his wife Isis, Horace their son, and Seth. And Seth is Osiris’ evil brother, OK?

Now Osiris was a remarkable guy. He was the founder of the Egyptian state from the mythological perspective, so kind of like Romulus and Remus for Rome, a myth, or like George Washington for the U.S., right? A mythologized figure who represented all of the Pharaohs and people, for that matter, who’d actually constructed the Egyptian state. Osiris, father of Egypt, so to speak. But Osiris is kind of old and a little archaic and maybe a little bit senile and even possibly a little bit naïve in that you know even no matter how great you were in your youth, as time goes on, you lose contact with environmental transformations and the old rules that you lived by are not necessarily applicable to the present.

Some of those things that you ignore become paramount in importance. It turns out that Osiris has an evil brother, Seth, and Seth eventually turns into Satan as mythology develops through the centuries. Seth is a nasty guy, right? I mean what he wants more than anything is undeserved dominion over the Egyptian state. Now Osiris, because he’s not paying attention and because he isn’t sufficiently cognizant anymore of the power of evil, more or less ignores his evil brother, who in turn chops him into pieces and then distributes his pieces all over the Egyptian state.

Now you might say: why didn’t he just kill him, right? I mean you’d think chopping him up would kill him, but he’s a god; you can’t just kill them. The reason in mythology, and you see this in movies as well, where the villain never quite dies or the hero never quite dies, is because even if you eliminate individual embodiments of what those figures represent, new embodiments manifest themselves virtually immediately.

One of the things mythology is quite clear about is that you never win a final battle with evil. It’s a permanent property of the world. So anyways, Seth hacks up Osiris and spreads him all over the land. Osiris ends up living a kind of shadowy and nebulous ghost-like existence down in the underworld and Seth becomes the ruler of the state—a nasty story.

Alright, but Osiris has Isis as a wife. Now Isis had a huge cult. She was a powerful goddess, goddess of the underworld—a kind of combination of Kali and Diana, so to speak, capable of tremendous destructive power but also the source of all good things—something very much like Tiamat. Now Isis got wind of her husband’s disintegration, so to speak, and she went searching around Egypt till she found his phallus. With it, she makes herself pregnant.

OK, so what does that mean exactly? It means something like this: the collapse of any great order brings with it new potential, and I think this is something that capitalism has way over forms of government like communism. Capitalism has mechanisms in place to allow large structures that are no longer meeting their function to collapse. But frequently, when they collapse, it’s not like they disintegrate into dust, right? They disintegrate into sub-components, so to speak, many of which then come to terms with the fact that the order has collapsed and build something new.

So you can’t get rid of culture so easily. You can hack it up into bits, you can disembody it, so to speak, you can spread it all over the state, you can introduce chaos into it, but that’s something that has the potential of new birth, like the phoenix rising from the ashes. So anyways, Isis, who’s the matrix, who’s Tiamat, gets Osiris’ phallus, which is the container of the germ of culture, right? The phenomenon that’s capable of the seminal idea, and she makes herself pregnant and she gives birth to Horace, who’s the long-lost son of the rightful king—right, a very typical mythological motif.

OK, so Horace is alienated from the kingdom, which is another very common mythological motif; you know, like how King Arthur, for example, is raised by commoners. The same story pops up in the story for Christ, for example, because Christ has heavenly parents but then he also has kind of ordinary parents, and it’s a very common motif.

Anyways, so Horace grows up outside of the classical structure of the Egyptian state, which is tilted terribly towards evil because Seth has dominated, because Osiris was too blind to his evil brother to take appropriate defensive actions, and he grows to maturity. Then he decides, like all rightful sons of the long-lost king, to reclaim his heritage. So he goes back to Egypt, right, and he has this vicious battle with Seth, and in the process, Seth tears out one of his eyes.

Well, fine, that’s an indication of just exactly how devastating a battle with the forces of evil, so to speak, precisely are. They represent a critical threat to the integrity of consciousness, right? That’s why he loses an eye. Well, luckily enough, Horace has got his act together, and he does defeat Seth and banishes him, and he gets the eye back. You think: OK, great, pop the eye back in, become emperor—everything’s fine.

Now let’s backtrack a little bit and think about this politically. The Egyptians had this really weird idea. They had the idea that the living pharaoh was the living pharaoh and the dead pharaoh at the same time. It makes no sense rationally, but it makes a lot of sense from a narrative perspective because what they were saying is something like this: look, you got to think that when you become king, or when you become president, or when you take on a role of that absolute magnitude, that then you’re partly you, but you’re also partly this role, and there’s really no way out of that, right?

And the role is composed of the unbelievable weight of the cultural tradition that you’re representing. You can say: well, that’s true for being king or for being president, but it’s also true if you become a doctor or a lawyer, any sort of specialized occupation. It’s partly you because you’re embodying the role, but it’s partly the role too. So the pharaoh is the live pharaoh and the dead pharaoh because the dead pharaoh represents culture, right? The king is dead, long live the king.

OK, but paralleling that idea was the idea that the pharaoh was not only the dead pharaoh and the live pharaoh at the same time but that he was Osiris and Horace at the same time. But then you think in the story, Horace has taken over Seth, he’s got his eye back, he can be king. But he isn’t king yet, and this is where the Egyptians really get their act together, and I think, of the two stories that I’m telling you, this is the one that has the most significance, I think, for modern people because we’re so likely to sidestep our obligation to our culture, whatever that happens to be.

So instead of popping this eye back in his head, which is the first thing you’d think he does, he decides he’s going to go back to the underworld, where Osiris is living in this ghost-like and dead manner since he’s been chopped up by Seth. He goes down into the underworld, which is no piece of cake, and he finds Osiris there in this kind of half-dead state, and he gives him his eye. That enlightens Osiris, right? It gives him vision, and so then he takes Osiris back to Egypt arm in arm, so to speak.

It’s the conjunction of Osiris and Horace that constitutes the basis for Egyptian sovereignty, and that is bloody brilliant, right? Because the Egyptians figured out that Horace is Marduk, for all intents and purposes, right? He’s this avenging hero. In the Egyptian story, he fights political corruption rather than chaos, but you can understand that those are two flipsides of the hero archetype. They are. The hero archetype has two basic elements. One is the confrontation of the terrible aspect of nature, chaos in its most brutal form, and the other is the confrontation with the archaic aspect of culture.

In some ways, those aren’t distinguishable because if culture isn’t archaic, chaos never makes itself present. Which is to say you can’t separate out political degradation from environmental degradation, say; it’s the same idea. So anyways, Horace has this great idea. He needs his father, right? I told you about the same motif emerging in Pinocchio. We already looked at that, right? Pinocchio doesn’t become genuine until he risks his life saving his father, alright? So the same thing is happening in this particular situation.

So that’s pretty cool. Then you get the situation where the Egyptians characterize sovereignty as the capability to overcome evil in the political domain, combined with—and that’s a youthful capability, right—combined with the wisdom of the past, alright? Then you look at that from a political perspective and you find out already that the Egyptians viewed the pharaoh as the live pharaoh and the dead pharaoh simultaneously.

But then you find out something else that’s interesting, and it gives you some real insight into just exactly how bloody powerful these ideas were. So you think: what did the Egyptians do with their spare time? And then you think: well, they built the pyramids, right? I mean, that was no trivial undertaking. It was sort of the 5000 B.C. equivalent of flying to Mars. I mean, the pyramids are pretty impressive now, but they were a hell of a lot more impressive in their original form because they were in the middle of an immense complex.

The pyramids were dedicated to the immortality of the pharaoh, and the pharaoh was possessed by a spirit called Ka, and Ka was his immortal spirit, and it was the union of Horace and Osiris, OK? So Egyptian society was dedicated to deifying the immortal spirit of the pharaoh, the union of Horace and Osiris. This identification with this union gave the pharaoh a phenomenon the Egyptians called Maat. Maat was like truth or good order. You could think about it as conscience in a sense; if the pharaoh was utilizing the union of Horace and Osiris, then he would have an intuitive ability to decide what the appropriate course of order was.

So the Egyptians would say, for example, when the pharaoh came into the court, they’d say: the sun has risen, by that they meant the power that reigned over the dominion of the night had arrived. They conceptualized Maat as the capacity to put order in the place of chaos, essentially, formally. They assimilated the union of Horace and Osiris with the capability of putting order in the face of chaos. They regarded that as immortal and spent all of the excess resources of their society glorifying that idea.

You think: you don’t produce something like the pyramids without really being possessed by an idea, right? This is no trivial undertaking; it’s going over a period of several hundred, if not several thousand, years. That takes an awful lot of work. So this idea of the immortality of the union of Horace and Osiris and its association with sovereignty was an absolutely potent idea for the Egyptians. It gave their whole culture motive force.

OK, so the Egyptians thought: the pharaoh is immortal and that’s the reason why, and we more or less partake in his immortality by being his subjects. So that was a pretty good deal. But then Eliade points out something very interesting, and this is called the democratization of Osiris. What you found was that initially, there were certain symbolic presentations representing the immortality of the pharaoh that could only be used by the pharaoh.

As Egyptian culture continued to develop, the symbolic representations of immortality started to be adopted by the aristocracy. Now what did that mean? It meant that this process that the Egyptians had conceptualized as integral to the order of the state was no longer solely embodied in the hands of the pharaoh; it had started to drift down the power hierarchy into the aristocracy.

Well then you think: what happens after that? By the end of Egyptian society, the aristocrats were characterized by an identity with the union of Horace and Osiris, right? Sovereignty had started to spread itself out. And you think: what starts to happen with the Greeks, right? The Greeks attribute sovereignty to every male Greek. Barbarians, no. Women, no. But at least all males, right? You get a beginning of a democratic notion there.

The Jews developed ideas that, if not derived from Egypt, were at least similar in structure to Egyptian ideas, say: not the aristocracy, not the pharaoh, but every individual has the capacity of establishing a direct relationship with the transcendent deity, right? Then you have a Christian revolution that follows that where the idea that sovereignty inheres in the individual is distributed to everyone, right? Everyone—male, female, criminal, non-criminal, murderer, rapist, taxman, you name it, sovereignty inheres within them.

It’s on that soil that our whole democratic culture emerges—these unbelievably archaic ideas, first acted out, right? First embodied in ritual, first dramatized, then only told as stories, developing more and more coherence over stretches of time of thousands of years, not hundreds of years but thousands of years, becoming more coherent, becoming more pointed, becoming more relevant with regards to their embodiment, then starting to become understood explicitly and distributed to the entire society.

It’s on that ground that our world rests, not on the ground of rationality, as established in say Europe in 1500. What we have is much more profound and solid and deep than any mere rational construction. It’s a form of government, an equilibrated state, so to speak, that’s a consequence of an emergent, if not evolutionary, at least social evolutionary process.

I would say that it stems much farther back than that because you can imagine something like this. Look, if this ideal personality that should be sovereign is represented by the optimal combination of creativity and traditionalism, say, if that’s the optimal combination, and if we’re prepared to regard that as optimal—if that’s what you perceive when you perceive someone that you respect and admire—then you could say that success in our social hierarchies is predicated on the degree to which you actually embody that combination.

You see an interaction between individual success and the social construction that would be an interaction that extends over centuries or even thousands of centuries so that as these ideas become more and more developed, we become more and more adapted to embodying them as a consequence of evolutionary pressure. So it’s not just cultural; it’s also biological.

Our political presuppositions rest on a cultural basis that is unbelievably archaic, resting in turn on something even lower than that. I think examples of that are those that I’ve provided you with already. We know, for example, that chimps who have to live in a dominance hierarchy are very aggressive, especially the males, but they’re also very cooperative.

The males who are aggressive spend a substantial amount of time repairing social boundaries in the aftermath of an aggressive incident because they’re just as concerned with keeping the bloody hierarchy intact as they are in climbing it. They have to be. We know that even wolves won’t kill a subordinate wolf once they’ve defeated it. They allow the subordinate wolf to maintain its own existence, right?

They have this notion, this procedural notion that even those entities that appear insignificant may, in some manner that’s beyond speech, still contribute to the integrity of the whole. That’s an idea that’s very much similar to our notion that sovereignty inheres in the individual, right? We’ve taken it further. No matter what you do, even if you’re in clear violation of the law, your rights remain intact because no matter how outcast you are and how apparently beyond redemption, your existence may still contribute something to the integrity of the whole.

As far as I’m concerned, that doesn’t appear to be a metaphorical idea. If you dismiss it, you cannot dismiss it without simultaneously dismissing the ground on which our states rest. And so then you have to ask yourself: are you willing to do that? If the answer is no, well then you have to start to question what it is that you actually believe because if you buy the doctrine of natural rights, which you do, you act it out, then all of this follows in its wake, or it rests on sand.

And it bloody well better not rest on sand.