φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ
In both the Mesopotamian and Egyptian cosmogonies, the primordial state of the world is chaotic and that chaos must be overcome. In both the Enuma Elish and the Egyptian creation myth the primordial state of the world is that of formless watery chaos. For the Mesopotamians it is the internal embrace of Apsu (fresh water/culture/masculinity/order)…
Our early ancestors, after the end of the last ice age roughly 14,000 BC, had a very important question to answer viz., how are we going to survive? In a world with very little structure the primary concern was that of nature. Nature, like fire, has two sides — the benevolent and the malevolent. There…
Today, in the final entry of our week discussing the Mesopotamian creation myth and in our first Pop Culture post, I want to start somewhere a little unusual — the ideological split that drove a wedge between Freud and Jung. Modern people don’t like the take Freud all too seriously and I think it is…
In this week’s installment of Analogismoi we discussed the postmodern, neomarxist concept of power as an overarching meta-narrative. Behind the question of whether or not power is the meta-narrative and the oppressor-oppressed dynamic is the ultimate arbiter of truth is the question of what we mean when we say truth. The most difficult thing…
Karl Marx, in his book Das Kapital (1867), attempts to make the claim that history is a story of power struggles. He sees this primarily thorugh the lens of class conflict and economic control. In the future we will return to this short sighted, dangerous and, frankly, moronic understanding of the world…what is important for…
In this week’s Main Project post we ran thought the Babylonian creation myth as it appears in the Enuma Elish. Today, in the first of several posts which will deal with that story in more detail, I want to talk about the primordial goddess, the dragon of chaos, the god of the salt water —…
Editors note: I struggled for some time trying to figure out how to go about this post. The material is so incredibly rich that attempting to mine the entirety of its value in a single post is just not feasible and would do overall harm to the coherence of the project. What we are going…
In this week’s Main Project post we are going to be talking about the Babylonian creation myth found in the Enuma Elis. After thinking about it for quite a bit I decided to put forward a rather straight telling of the story. I plan, over the course of the week, to flesh out the philosophical…
In today’s More Unfashionable Observations I want to take a moment to discuss how it is that all perception, including scientific reasoning, is done with an implicit morality. Earlier we touched on the play circuit in mammals and how it regulates fair play in rats as was discovered by Jaak Pankseep. For the rat, playing…
“Only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the hoard…the treasure hard to attain” Carl Jung Symbols of Transformation 1912 For a Swiss psychologist Carl Jung dedicated quite a bit of effort on the discussion and analysis of dragons. In his books Symbols of Transformation 1912, Psychology and…