Richard Bulliet - History of the World to 1500 CE (Session 6) - The Mediterranean and Middle East

all right on Tuesday I at the end of the class got on the subject of divination which is a subcategory of a larger subject which is whether one believes in an unseen world or in beings that exists in in a non perceivable fashion when I have asked students in my CC or lit hum courses about this the first thing they say was does that include ghosts because you can see it goes sometimes but in general most students at Columbia don't appear to believe in beings in an unseen world you can't think about the ancient world with that in mind you have to go on a consumption that everyone in the period that we're talking about in these early chapters that everyone believed that there was an unseen world that there were beings they could not perceive or could perceive only in extraordinary circumstances if you believed there was an unseen world you could populate it with with beings who could be would look like anything you want since you couldn't see them so whether they were centaurs or werewolves or ell beings like that or whether they're angels or Jim or demons it doesn't a whole lot of difference because conceptually they shared the quality that you could see them but you could then categorize them and say that this body of unseen beings is malevolent this group is benevolent and here's another big group who really couldn't care less about people they just hang out the issue for people was can you you know if you believe there are these unseen beings and you ascribe to them capacities to act can you get them to help you can you prevent them from screwing you up can you force them to do something or if they're doing things just on their own can you identify and predict what they're doing and there's a whole array of spiritual technologies and I think technology is the right term to use here of spiritual technologies to achieve these sorts of goals to sacrifice I've mentioned is one where you initially believed that by carrying out a certain ritual you will cause something to happen you know the gods or the spirits or something of this sort when you read about Agamemnon sacrifice of his daughter in the earliest part of the Iliad you're dealing with the idea that this sacrifice will atone for a sin that Agawam Agamemnon has committed and as a result the wind will blow and the fleet will be able to to reach Troy so you can have a notion that by sacrificing you can cause something happen then you can have the notion that you can discover what is going to happen by contacting the unseen world divination is a technology to achieve that where you do something whether it is applying a red-hot bronze poker to a turtle shell causing it to crack or whether you observe the flight of birds or whether you analyze the entrails of sheep these are all forms of divining and all have a common purpose now the idea of that science and technology are linked is not a purely early modern idea in other words if these are technologies was there a science related to it and the answer is is yes and this was a science that was predicated upon observation of nature and it's the science of the relationship between the macrocosm and the microcosm where you maintain that things that happen at a certain speed and in a certain repli'd repeating pattern at the macro level particularly the movements of heavenly bodies that these are models or alternatively that these are causing parallel activities to take place at the micro level the notion of of scaling you know cause and effect is a very very appealing one the the single most important idea in that has to do with this sort of thing for modern times is is Newton's law of gravity here you have something that applies to heavenly bodies at the most that the largest possible aggregation and it applies to you know the Apple falling off the tree and it's the same formula Newton who of course was a an alchemist and the man who believed very strongly in in the secrets of nature that could be uncovered Newton really achieved the goal of the ancient and saying is there something that we can observed in the heavens that applies to us on the ground it is surprising that people religion did not take to Newton more readily because he was doing what what people had wanted at a later point Darwin does something similar he says that there is something that takes place at the level of entire families or taxon of of animal and vegetable life and it takes place at the level of of inheritance from one to another and of course once Mendel's laws of genetics are added to it and even more when DNA is added to it you end up with the notion that that evolution as interpreted today with the insights from DNA analysis that evolution goes from the the largest aggregates of of living organisms down to the smallest so while we have a tendency to to debunk the the absorption of ancient thinkers in the macrocosm thinking that it has something to do with a microcosm we have to recognize that we do the same thing and that's some of the most important ideas that we have are precisely things that link the macrocosm and microcosm and alternatively some of the ideas we have the hardest time with for example that there are six dimensions beyond number four that are wrapped up in entities that are so small they cannot be perceived that doesn't seem very likely even though it's mathematically required by the people who who derive these theories because it doesn't scale up it's simply something that happens at the subatomic level and we cannot perceive it all we can do is model it mathematically and affirm on that basis that it exists so there's a particular appeal to the notion of the macrocosm and microcosm the abundant evidence around the world that from say the 3rd millennium BC onward if not earlier you had people who were aware of the regularities of the motion of heavenly bodies and particularly the regularities of of eclipses that they then manifest that awareness in building what are now thought of as earlier prehistoric observational devices Stonehenge being one of them that you know that's the indication of that the notion of a macrocosm was there at a very very early point and there's no reason to think of that that the idea doesn't go back a good deal farther it's the connection with a microcosm of course that's the that is the puzzle do the motions of the heavenly bodies represent or mirror or predict things that are happened or are going to happen in your own personal life and out of this theory you come up with the idea of the horoscope where if you can identify the positions of heavenly bodies the time you were born or at certain crucial points you can predict what will happen in your in your lifetime I've already mentioned as somewhat later point and more arcane one which is numerology where numbers are seen as indicators because you can have numbers that are on a macro scale for example the number of celestial spheres and numbers that are on a micro scale such as you know which day of the week is sacred something of that sort but numerology develops temps develop somewhat later than other types of of divination the divination is pretty much ubiquitous as mentioned before than every society that where we have the evidence sufficient evidence seems to have some sort of divination but if you take sacrifice witches everywhere where you're in a sense coercing the unseen world in a to do something or to stop doing something if the unseen world is you know beating you with a stick you know the sacrifice is a way to get it to stop so that's one technology divination is another technology but there's a third that has to do with inspiration inspiration is literally having a spirit inside you and you can say well that's only etymology but the fact the matter is that for the period that we are dealing with in this chapter and the next chapter two or three inspiration literally means having a spirit inside you and being informed by or guided by that spirit at a you know at one level this is a matter of certain individuals who who can prophesy because of of an inspiration for the Greeks the Oracle at Delphi was so important that you had rulers and states that would base their policies on what the Oracle said or what they thought the Oracle said since the Oracle was service specialists in ambiguity but you could also have inspiration at another level it was widely believed that what happened in dreams was not a a product of you know what you ate or the problems you had with your toilet training or something of that sort but rather it came about because the spirits appeared in your dreams if spirits appear in your dreams are they telling you something well the the practice of interpreting dreams or divination by dreams is known as Oni romancey and it was an extremely widespread practice what we know about it is mostly at the most important political level so the ability of Joseph to interpret dreams in the Bible or the interpretation by who Daniel of the the dream of Belshazzar the interpretation of dreams shows up in these special literary cases but interpretation of dreams is also something that occurs with almost everybody at least among those people who remember their dreams all those so I surprisingly many people don't remember their dreams I suspect that most people in this room who remember their dreams try and interpret them I certainly do I have extremely vivid dreams great whole you know badass movie scenarios of dreams and you know and then afterwards I try and figure out what it is and if I wake up in the middle of the night I think gee I'd like to see this now move on to this and can pretty much go back and resume the dream and get the story going in another direction and I'm very lucky in fact I have I just I just couldn't do it I've extremely detailed dreams and and in fact I've recently come a conclusion that when I die what I'm going to miss most is dreaming because as you get older and sicker who wants really to continue the real world but my hope is that the dreams will remain cool and that that will be worth missing anyway that's no point how these thoughts mortality it was because I'm retiring at the end of this year but the interpretation of dreams is almost unavoidable when it's your dream you can't help to think about it and so you have different theories about it that arise one of the more interesting ones is that in books on dream interpretation written in the Muslim tradition one of the fixed rules is that Satan can take any form in a dream except the form of the Prophet Muhammad so if Muhammad appears to you in a dream it is Muhammad if your brother-in-law appears that's probably Satan but that's very important because throughout the Muslim you know religious tradition interpretation of dreams plays an important role but it played an important role for everybody the Greeks believed in the the real existence of spirits and dreams pretty much everybody did because it was simply a corollary of the broader belief in an unseen world now in a more specific fashion after all the dream is hard to to conjure forth just because you want it it happens or it doesn't happen but you can't control it very much however the the non dreaming corollary of it was that during your waking moments you might be informed by a being from the spirit world happiness in ancient Greek Oh was the word diamond AR o diamond AR l is good and diamond is a spirit a lot of tension with this word diamond because it's also the word demon so that diamond can be good or diamond can be bad or demon can be bad and you have to look into the tradition you're studying to see how it's meant but for for the Greeks happiness meant at its most primitive level being informed or guided by a good spirit the good spirit Oh even though you don't necessarily specify it as being an angel or something else but it has your interest at heart it is benevolent it wishes the good for you the the Greeks also had a standard I talking about more about the Greeks here then about the Assyrians or the Israelites because we know about this a little bit more for the Greeks Lodge because there's a very good book called the Greeks and the irrational isn't anyway I can't remember the author's name right now I'll get somebody to look that up but it gives all the details about this sort of thing a poet for the Greeks was regarded as being inspired by a diamond and the the ability to to create poetry was related to what this diamond did within you for the ancient Semites that you had the same thing we know more about it for the for Arabia Arabia before Islam actually probably going back a very long way in Arabia there was a category of unseen being called the Jim this is what he's extremely peculiar Arabic words that has the plural is jam which is just unspeakably unfair because it's not like any other plural but the Jim were unseen the spirits that lived in the desert that were neither intrinsically malevolent nor intrinsically benevolent they were just there and they had you know they did their own thing the Jim had a a world to themselves but if a jinn decided to do so he or she I suppose could enter into a human and become a source of inspiration and the word in Arabic is Majnoon it's a it means literally ginned possessed by a gym now in modern Arabic that is the word for crazy a crazy person has a spirit in them that is causing some sort of dementia but in in ancient times someone who is Majnoon could be described in other ways so that Majnoon becomes the the great paradigmatic lover a male lover Majnoon is crazy mad in love and it's one of the few articulations in the ancient world of the idea of being crazy mad in love which we think of primarily as a television theme but it also was used for poets just as the Greeks believed that a poet was inspired by a diamond or in a more literal literal sense by a category of a diamond known as the muses because the muses are simply named diamonds you know they'll speak o muses that sort of thing so in Arabic in ancient Arabia a someone who is a poet was thought it was being possessed by a by a Jim as being Majnoon this was was not trivial if you if you learn Arabic and you look into pre-islamic Arabic poetry I would say the poetry that goes back in time long before the Prophet Muhammad you'll find that the definition of a poem is that it is in a certain meter and there are what 15 of these meters and none of them are easy to perceive none of this Dada Dada Dada or Dada Dada da Dada Dada if Japan came in thick draw even lamb and zili you know there's a meter but just try and extract something from it because it's that it's not an intuitive meter so if you lived in a community and suddenly someone in your community can do this you said why is why is Abid able to do this and the rest of us can't because because there he has a gin in him and we should be proud of the fact that someone from our community has this indwelling spirit so the poet became the the most important person in the in the community because the poet could do this now we have gotten away from the notion of oral poetry very much and therefore the idea that someone can just spontaneously do this was let us say as of 1980 clearly something nobody believed in then rap came along and it turned out some people can do it and not your roommate and you wish you'd stop trying because it's just awful unbearable but but there's some guy or some woman who can who can do it and we don't say that they're possessed by a by a diamond or a gym but we don't call them crazy either because they make much too much money we just say it's kind of a gift but you know the thing about a gift is that it implies a giver and we are totally agnostic on the question of giver where does that gift come from whereas in ancient times when you believed in an unseen world you had no trouble identifying the giver the giver was something from from the unseen world now there's another category that has to do with prophets people who are are not poets they're not dream interpreters but they have a website but they are able to convince the people around them that they have had a revelation or a vision that comes from the unseen world and in the case of monotheism comes from the high end of the unseen world but prophecy does not have to be associated with a single with a single God and indeed there are traditions particularly in China where the notion of communicating with the spirits that guide the world focuses on the spirits of the ancestors not on a god or a pantheon but simply on the ruler or the head of the clan being able to be in touch with the ancestors so but but this is a notion of inspiration now inspiration is the least technological of these of these things the technology with poetry or something like that has to do with the the way it's manifested you a specific thing that the unseen being teaches the technology of sacrifice is is fairly self-evident you take plant or animal matter and you you know kill it or display it or drip it or whatever on an altar and that is the sacrificial act to leave its company buy a lot of chanting if it's divination by crack tortoise shells or by flight of birds or by sheet slivers it's very clearly a technology but but inspiration that's that's tougher to to see as a technology you can if you isolate it to certain very certain institutionalized beings like Oracle's or Sybil's who live in certain places and who sniff glue or whatever it was that caused the Delphic Oracle people say was methane or some other you know who loose inventory gas leaking out of the rocks under Delphi but the thing is the symbols and Oracle's were specific beings that lived in in specific places and had a kind of technology but the notion of a prophecy at large where you could simply experience this notion of the divine this becomes related tradition particularly associated although not really properly so with the biblical tradition as it extends into Christianity as extends into Islam but you have lots of other inspiration traditions the closest you get to a technology of inspiration is probably with meditation where you say if you meditate whether you do it as a Buddhist or do it as a Hindu or do it as a Christian or whatever that you can induce through the technology of meditation a state of receptiveness in which you could have inspiration it just doesn't happen to you but you could for Buddhism this is enlightenment so that the inspiration is the sudden you know sudden sense of enlightenment and mystics for in all sorts of traditions will have technologies of meditation or mortification of the flesh or something like that in order to to achieve a state in which inspiration could appear but you have a parallel notion that institution that inspiration can be random let's say in a Quaker meeting you sit around and wait for the Holy Spirit to descend upon someone but that's up to the Holy Spirit it isn't something that you come and you can coerce all right these are technologies and associated sciences that depend upon the presumption that there is an unseen an unseen world they have their analogues for modern times when people no longer think of an unseen world or more properly they think of an unseen world being the world of particle physicists whoo-hoo we trust to be reliable truth-telling witch doctors now there is a argument that is made that in the period from 800 to 200 BCE there is a shift in this in this way of looking of the world let me say it's long about BCE BCE is obviously BC in the older terminology it's configured as before Christ extra or something like that but that isn't really that's not getting very far if CEO first the Common Era BC evenings before the Common Era it is a usage that began primarily with Jewish scholars who really didn't like the idea that you know the year of the Lord or before Christ should be what determines the calendar they use in their books but it spread pretty widely through through the same tendencies toward world history and globalization that give rise to a course like this where lots of people who are not interested in the year of the Lord or the the birth of Jesus which we don't know anyway are more comfortable with BCE and and NCE for the Common Era so that's what I use in this course the the idea of there being a change that takes place usually identified as a change throughout the the cumin a a Greek word meaning the known world that is to say Middle East northern Africa Europe Asia but not sub-saharan Africa not the Western Hemisphere not Southeast Asia of the notion of this this change taking place in the Akuma nee between eight hundred and two hundred b.c.e was expressed initially by a German philosopher named Karl Yas Paris and he called that period the axial age because he said that is when the world pivots not when China pivots or Egypt pivots but when the world pivots around an axis and his primary observation was that it's in this period from 800 to 200 BCE that Buddha Confucius Buddha in India Confucius and louts of the semi-legendary founder of Taoism in China the major prophets in Israel Isaiah Jeremiah and so forth and Xaro Esther or Zarathustra and the Iranian tradition they all lived in this period now you you enter why it'll be an obvious to any historian well before Yas bears that these people lived roughly at the same time and in if you can call a six hundred year span the same time this is like saying we have an axial age that goes from you know you know four hundred to two thousand because a lot of people lived at the same time and oddly enough you now have some people say we are in a second axial age because we have Newton and we have Freud and we have it you think can you just do that can you just lump everybody together and say the world changes no you can't but that is what gossipers was proposing of course as you the farther back you look the more truncated time becomes but six centuries in a long period of time and we're even skeptical about some of the dates of people like Zahra Zoroaster or Zarathustra probably lived before 800 BCE you know certainly a strong Scalia debate that would push his dates back before that so why did yeah Spurs who as a philosopher is thought of as an existentialist why did why did this catch on so that today you have world historians who will talk about it but even more you'll have religious studies people who will expand on the nature of the axial age Karen Armstrong for example who's well known for her views on religious matters what was it that was so interesting about this did the world really change well their device looking at this you can say when did blended Yas Affairs have his idea when did when was the book published that had this idea because no other idea of Yas purrs really caught on his existentialist theology is kind of murky he had an influence on Heidegger but you know influencing Heidegger no longer impresses people very much since he was influenced by the Nazis as well but the osburgh's publishes this in 1949 you think Oh big time thinker from Germany publishes a book in 1949 why is anyone paying any attention to what a German says in 1949 when we've just got through world war two well of course it turns out that Yossef er is wrote a book just before this that he published in 1946 a book on the guilt of Germany in which he said the guilt of Germany is in certain certain categories that there's obviously a guilt for having a decision maker in the Nazi government or this that and the other thing but ultimately it is and is broadest level he says there is a moral guilt that is upon all Germans who chose to live through this Nazi era and not lose their lives trying to overthrow Hitler so here you had a German he had been a professor in Heidelberg of both psychology and philosophy he left his post in 1935 but did not leave Germany and he sat out the entire Nazi era with a record that was unbeaten with the Nazi regime and now at the end of the war he's saying we are all guilty well that that's kind of puts him makes him German number one from an American or allied standpoint you have a really important German thinker who is saying that there is a broad moral guilt and who is also saying here is the nature of the world and how the world has evolved his idea was picked up even though it's not a particular sunny idea and you think okay now we can perhaps understand apply apply oscar's was intellectually acceptable but what what about the idea well at the end of World War two particularly in the United States although perhaps more broadly the idea became current that the world could be understood in its totality now before them there had been very few American thinkers who had tried something like this you had had Oswald Spengler and Germany who divided the world into civilizations Arnold Toynbee in Britain who divided the world into civilizations those people who tried to look at the world in its entirety deconstructed it into into pieces but now here you have Karly Oscars who's saying the difference between China and Judaism and India and Greece really is not that important because they're all doing the same thing at the same time it has been it appears that Yass pers was very strongly influenced by the German sociologist Max Weber who had written books on ancient China ancient India ancient Judaism and on the relationship between Protestantism and Catholicism along with numerous other influential works that were less specific by culture and so what yaws pers is doing is saying well you don't have to divide things up you can look at the world as a whole now what I'm saying is that in the aftermath of World War two the notion of looking at the world as a whole was very attractive in the United States and indeed it is what gives rise to the notion of area studies the notion of a broad approach to the entire development of the world so an approach that we generally call modernization theory people who who were part of the successful conquest of the fascist regimes of the world some of them not all of them but some of them seem to have felt that they had a vision of the whole thing that arose from the sort of uplifting experience that they had had in America there was a strong view that in the future the world's problems would be solved by Americans we still have that you know now we use a phrase policemen of the world we didn't use the phrase then but but the idea that the United States would could solve the world's problem problems had a corollary in the academic intellectual arena which said let us try to understand the world as a whole rather than bit by bit and it was very one of the means it's a very specifically American thing is that the European traditions that comes out of intellectually where traditions that were skewed by colonialism so that a French person wouldn't think so much let's think of the world as a whole let's think about you know France and Indochina and Algeria West Africa and a Brit would think about let's think about India and blah blah blah you would you didn't see the world as a whole because for the previous hundred two hundred and fifty years Europe had been busy dividing the world up and taking possession of it piece by piece the Americans either didn't have the wit to do this or got left out or tried and failed or we want to interpret the history of American Pro to imperialism going back to time William McKinley and to some would be earlier but now the Americans were saying the empires are not the defining part of the world we should think of the world as a whole and we should think of how does the world evolve as a whole the the works that came out of this ranged from highly influential particularly in the area of modernization theory so that a book by Walt Whitman Rostow called the stages of economic growth was probably the single book that was most most highly touted and most read of when I was undergraduate in the 60s the late 50s now you were a little bit later must been graduate school because it explained how the whole world was going to to develop in the same direction taking an economist approach when I was an undergraduate I devoted a whole semester to inventing a board game about the development of the entire world that was so complex that it was played once we only got through two years and then everyone said well you know screw this and that that was the end of my semesters work but but it was a temptation how does the world work as a whole people had different theories they were not all economy economists ik Manfred Halpern at Princeton felt that he had discovered the seven relationships that governed all human interaction everywhere in the world for all time and that every society could be could be described fully by by the icons that he associated with each of these relationships so they say okay well that society gets a smiley face and Anchor they you know in an arrow or something like that and that describes a society of he or maybe two arrows interaction according each other I think Halperin was certifiably nuts but and nobody really paid any attention to his theory but the temptation was there for grand theorization and yah Spurs came along and wrote a book that that really fit into this the mood of the times that said the world is a hole and the world changes as a whole even if you cannot pin down the the interactions between the parts of the world that are changing they're they're changing in the same direction of course you could go back to Hegel and say this is simply another version of his notion of world historical feeling except that Hegel believed that it was episodic and happened in some areas not others whereas the new idea was that the world as a whole could change so people were attracting the notion of an axial age still are in some cases and it might not be a bad idea I think it's it is worth exploring whether there was some sort of broad change if there was could you characterize it and I don't know whether how broadly it would be but if there was the only thing I that I can think of that might fit is the decline of sacrifice the decline of divining and the rise of inspiration or inspiration / meditation / you know cutting off your testicles and living a celibate life in honor of God whatever but the old views of the unseen world that were related to technology and to the the scientific or the scientistic link between the technology of the unseen world in the day to day and the notion of a macrocosm that encompassed the entire world those tendencies seemed to recede so that sacrifice becomes more and more pro-forma without people really really believing in it divining gradually loses its its credibility you might still have people who who who talk about the the flight of birds or omens of one sort or another and indeed we down to this day people who will sometimes think of omens which is a type of of divinatory thinking but by and large divining sub-field moves to the to the margins and sacrifice move to the margins or becomes bureaucratized and an inspiration and and whether sudden and involuntary or whether induced by meditation or some other technique becomes more important Oh to some degree this is you could say this is a decline of science because you don't have a very clear scientistic theory to undergird inspiration inspiration simply occurs or you hope it occurs or something of that sort so I think you do have a transition away from a scientistic universe that was not real science but have you know was thought of by people as being real science toward a much more fluid one and this coincides with political changes that tend to move away from the Association of individual groups whether cities or tribes or regional groups of villages something association with a single with a particular God that is the guardian of the group two more generalized notions of what sort of being in the unseen world is involved so one direction is a direction toward prophecy and toward inspiration and for European history this culminates really in in early Christianity where the writings of st. Paul make it clear that Christians were supposed to be visited by the Holy Spirit and being visited by the Holy Spirit would enable them to handle snakes without being bitten would enable them to speak in tongues or to understand the language of people who spoke in tongues then and so forth and so on and it would enable people to heal disease and to perform miracles miracles become more numerous as a conceptual category in the scientistic era where you have the notion of a macrocosm and microcosm miracles don't fit all that well but when you move into something that is more dependent upon prophecy and an inspiration the sign of your inspiration might be the capacity to perform miracles certainly you know any inspired person worth his salt in the late ancient world could perform miracles and did before miracles according to the books written about them at the time you simply ascribed miracles and of course down the present day if you're going to be canonized you have to be able to perform miracles or at least your corpse has to be able to perform miracles so that's one direction and as I say it's a it's a non-scientist ik one another direction that I mention is the numerological where you preserve a certain scientistic element but you become increasingly arcane in terms of the inability of most people to to follow numerology numerological calculations so it's not wildly important but another one that arises that is more important is the rise of the notion of fate or chance now you go back to the ancient the early ancient world a very little indication of people thinking in terms of chance events now fate was a little bit different because you could say there is a certain timeline that is laid out and that at your posts the fate who cuts the timeline and brings about your death at the end of it you know as soon as you are born that timeline is established and fate will bring it to an end at a given point and that fit pretty well with the macrocosm microcosm idea and everyone had a certain trajectory and they might try to identify that trajectory through the use of horoscopes or some other idibon Ettore means and you have the notion that you cannot escape your fate although people will try to escape their fate so forth and so on but chance with something else with the Greeks called a TK fortune chance was based on the idea of randomness that something's going to happen to somebody it might as well happen to me or if it's bad the module happened to to Nathan it's hot you know not me whatever you just don't have very much in the in the period that yah spares fans would identify as pre Axial Age that relates to fortune and you have a lot later on you know fortune could lead you to to take risks because it might work we're not up to Roman history yet but Julius Caesar when he crossed the Rubicon to invade Italy from Gaul is said by futhark to have said in Greek the die is cast meaning the dice has been thrown and what that meant was that he was taking a chance and now the chance has been taken and Caesar was famous in his in the books about him for being the first one into every battle you know you're gonna have a sea battle you got off the ships to invade the shore Julius was there first even though he was the commander because he said why you take a chance and then one day he got unlucky and everybody killed him but you know the idea of chance was you know gradually became more widespread and it was terribly destructive of the notion of the unseen world because chance appeared to be non-directed fate was directed chance seemed to be non directed now I'm not sure whether this is enough to identify an axial age or not it may be that once you go back and look at the specifics of Gaspar's approach and say is there something that that is similar in the in the teachings of Isaiah or Jeremiah to the teachings of the Buddha to the teachings of Confucius and lotsa and first thing I don't see what that would be but I'm a shallow technologist so I don't have to see spiritual things but I think that that there does appear to be some sort of dying out or at least loss of credibility for the unseen world and the scientistic macrocosm microcosm interpretation of it and in a sense the person who most most reflects this dying out or diminishment of influence yep I mean you could talk about Greek philosophers you know Plato and Aristotle and so forth of the six people who read their books but but I'm talking about a more popular level there was a Greek a Greek philosopher named you himuro's who lived in the fourth century BC or third I don't remember exactly and he you know think of this enjoy when you when you reflect on Hesiod and the where the gods come from you humorous said the gods are originated as humans they are simply men who lived at one time and did certain things and and then people talked about them and exaggerated the things they did the longer they talked about them the more the exaggeration until finally they came to be regarded as as gods my wife told me about a famous intellectual in India who had died you know not so many years ago and she asked a friend is he still remembered and revered and the friend said yes they're drawing pictures of him now with four arms because he's now you know on his way to being God well you lemurs said you had all these people who were once kings or Chiefs and people told stories about them and the stories got exaggerated and so then they they said well these these were gods and that's a very very believable theory because when we look at stories of saints and certain other sort of larger-than-life people we see the accumulation of stories over time where they become grander and grander and able to do miracles and so forth but for you humorous and the people who followed his views the purpose was to to sort of kick the props out from under the notion of the unseen world being populated by gods oh the gods were not it happens to the unseen world they were just you know one-time kings and so you don't have to pay much attention to them the corollary to this developed that if you were a king and there was a theory that a great king could become after the passage of so many centuries a god then why don't you just cut out the middleman and declare yourself a god you're going to be a god eventually you might as well enjoy it while you're alive instead of waiting five hundred years before people declare your God so what you have at the end of the ancient world that is say Oh beginning around the fourth century BC well within the BCE well within the period of the axial age is that you have rulers who who declare themselves to be gods sometimes by saying that they're descendants of gods and having a genealogical argument but sometimes just flat-out saying they're their gods and demanding that people worship them know I am a god therefore let us build a temple to me and all of you go to the temple and sacrifice and pray to me because I'm a god now this is very close of course to modern politics in America it's not quite institutionalized in the same way but it's a it's a symptom of the not of the disappearance of belief in the unseen world but of its channeling into other you know into specific areas and away from other areas so the god channel begins to close down the divining channel begins to close down the inspiration channel opens up more the chance or random chance side opens up more all these have to do with the common human denominator of of dealing with innate spiritual urges that humans have in some cases it has to do with trying to take the spiritual away from the specialists from the tech from the technologically gifted and bring it down to the level of the of everyday so that you too can can do it no as mentions in the book you have in China where wet oracle bones where the king the Michonne period would would divine by asking a question will it rain tomorrow many of these were many the ones we know were specifically about weather so will it rain tomorrow then he'd apply a hot poker to the turtle shell and it would crack and it would be there a yes or a no crack and then on many of these there was a notation made of the bone as to whether it rained the next day so they could keep records since it wasn't aia scientistic inspiration they keep records as to whether this king was pretty good at the lining or whether he was sort of no maybe he should be traded to another team or something like that but the oracle bones only last for a couple of hundred years and what replaces them euro stocks the yarrow is a plant it has stalks the stalks are lightweight you can take the arrow plant and strip it of its leaves and now you have Garrow stalks and you can divide your handful of yarrow stalks into piles in a certain fashion and once you've done a certain number of divisions according to a certain technology a certain pattern you will end up with a with 1212 trigrams in a matrix and you can then look up the meaning of them in the in the Book of Changes 3ej well the arrow stocks don't require an emperor anybody can divine in this fashion so here's a case where it is the technology changes and allows the the contact with the unseen world to become localized down to the level of the individual person seeking knowledge about the future and you don't depend upon the king so there there are a number of different trends that that develop but it certainly is arguable that by the time you get to 200 BC or thereabouts you're in a rather different spiritual world everywhere in the old the old world now say the Eurasian Okuma neigh now this has not involved any discussion of Greek philosophy if you were teaching this as Western Civ you would say there were changes and let's talk about Plato and Aristotle because this is the road that you follow teleologically to get to where we are now in the story of Western Civ but one of the virtues of Yas first notion of an axial age is that while he puts Plato and Aristotle in there he doesn't give them such a important position that they become the whole the story so next week I'll talk about Iran and Greece and I have asked you to read an article I wrote and a couple of excerpts from a terrible book that I don't recommend that anybody read by a UCLA historian named Hagman and what's interesting in it in a sense is that it's the absolute opposite of the tendency after world war ii to see the whole world Magda and others like him now are trying to see the world divided into permanently antagonistic groups primarily the west and Islam so we'll get that next week

Channel: Columbia University

Views: 40,716

Rating: 4.6585364 out of 5

Keywords: education, columbia university, history, bulliet, world history

Id: zakZj8CUiBM

Length: 75min 4sec (4504 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 23 2010