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THE BIRTH OF THE WORLD , OF THE GODS AND OF MEN...
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Message 1.Â
Posted by chefone (U14431437) on Sunday, 22nd May 2011
Hi Boffins....
I am engaged in research on a book i am going to write with the above title...It's issue is still some distance away and i would like to ask your opinions on two very interesting stories....
One about the Teutons and another about Assyro-Babylonian Mythology....
Does Archaeological evidence give Authority to these tales... or does that evidence , [That which has been found with-in the "dust and stone"] make these storys an historical impossibility....?
Storey One......
"From the beginning of the 3rd millenium civilisation exsisted on the lower banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates , created by two neighbouring peoples...The Akkadians and the Sumerians . The land of Sumer was situated around the upper end of the Persian Gulf , which in those days [argumentively] probabley extended much further inland than it does today ...The towns of Eridu to the South and Nippur to the North marked it's most exreme limits. [other towns would have been Lagash , Umma , Erich , Larsa , and Ur.]
The Sumerians had come from central Asia [or the Siberian steppes] The land of Akkad , which lay immediately to the North of Sumer , was peopled by "Semites" who had come from northern Syria. ..
The question of which of these two peoples was the older is a matter of dispute [as is the part attributable to each in the development of civilisation]
As to the respective "contributions" of the two races to religion [which is all that concerns us here] it is probabley most accurate to regard Aassyro-Babylonian religion as not primarily a Semitic religion but as one resulting from the Semitisation of an originally Sumerian [or to employ a more general term , Asian basis.....
How ever that may be , there was indubitabley a reciprocal penetration between the religions of Sumer and Akkad. Each city "venerated" its own divinities , but each also welcomed those of neighbouring cities..Conquerors , moreover , would impose thier own Gods on regions subdued. In time , these "New" gods would become identified with the indigenous gods and , if not actually assimilated , form affliliations and relationships with them. It is this intermixture of the Akkadian and Sumerian pantheons , completed by the contributions of later "Epochs" , which constitutes Assyro-babylonian mythology....."
Many thanks.....Link to this forum: THE BIRTH OF THE WORLD , OF THE GODS AND OF MEN...
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Message 2
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Sunday, 22nd May 2011
Chefone
Not my field.. But I suppose that you are familiar with the work of Henri Frankfort nb.
"Before Philosophy. The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man. An essay on speculative thought in the Ancient Near East"
by H. and H.A. Friankfort.. John. A. Wilson and Thorkild Jacobsen
CassLink to this forum: THE BIRTH OF THE WORLD , OF THE GODS AND OF MEN...
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Message 3
Posted by chefone (U14431437) on Monday, 23rd May 2011
Morning cass....
Thanks for your helpful reply....
This book i am writting is a very tricky deal indeed. Infact i never actually knew that i was going to write it untill recently.
Its subject matter concerns events from another time and another place and in 99% of the time it will have suppositions un-varifiable by sources or recorded history.
My research has taken me to a place where , i have to assume , mortal folk are not allowed to tread and thus thier understanding of thier situation is both blind and manipulatable ... and i am searching for a metaphor that i can use which will allow mortal folk to better understand thier situation and the responsibilities that have been kept from them in relation to thier [ possibly] cosmic origins..
It seems to me cass that the folk who have had the finger of controll upon the heart beat of our human consciousness for millenium now have been playing a very dirty game...Thier controll of the media , television , and primary institutions has been absolute and complete owing to thier adept effieciency in the dark arts of manipulative psychograpths and because of this , they are able to keep human consciousness mis-led and confused..
They have , as all victors do i suppose , re-written almost everything that is true and principled about history and have systematically wiped whole nations and cultures from the maps of time and of history....
It is a very tricky book to write.....
At the moment my notes are concentrated and could probably be understood from many different perspectives but now i have got to a point where thier evidence forces me to admit that "other " unworldly energies are at work here , and i am leaning towards the idea that these other unworldly energies are extraterrestrial or potentially inter-dimensional in thier origins ....This theology is now starting to nudge me towards the thesis of cosmic balance and the right of appeal......
A very tricky book indeed.....
Right now , i am only interested in the similarity of creation mythology between the many cultures that were known to exsist with-in the time span of our commonly recorded history and my research is finding a patten of similarity of names and common occurances among many different races and cultures and i will write them down for my reader to wonder about and maybe force him/her to conclude that "some other thing" interfers with human thought and destiny...
Anyway cass this is the sort of book i will write , [not looking to get it published , but who knows....2012 and all that....]
Thanks for the links...Link to this forum: THE BIRTH OF THE WORLD , OF THE GODS AND OF MEN...
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Message 4
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Monday, 23rd May 2011
chefone
Good luck.. There are many themes that you have mentioned that I have tackled in "English Peace"..using historical material notably:
(a) The Section on "Book Culture".. we were all brought up to see the crucial importance of printing and the mass circulation of books. But this made it possible to divorce thinkers and split them off into lonely isolation- so that the ideas that they disseminate are in fact sterile. I believe that this has been crucial in my evolution as an historian because I have deliberately left dreaming spires to spent my working life in the flood tide of the present.. The mass media and these PC have continued on the same principle of linking people merely in virtual reality. Having worked at getting to know thousands of pupils and parents over a 37 year career I know that it is not an instant process... And I noted an entry on the Ö÷²¥´óÐã News site saying "If you want to change the world get up from your screens"
(b) The Section "Of Monsters and Myths" which explores that Romantic/Gothic Horror Age that justified change , either that of violent revolution or of a gradual evolution and the idea of a life and death struggle for the survival of the fittest. So much material that was produced as propaganda in that age has been treated by historians as documentary evidence to prove the Hell that modern politics and the Big State has rescued us all from- though not big enough for Socialists and Communists, who one thought might have believed in Societies and Communities.
(c) The Section "The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory" which more or less re-writes the materialistic Marxist (London Library bound) view of the history of Civilization to assert that wealth has never been a true end but a by-product of positive and healthy human ingenuity, invention and the harnessing of potential enregies for the "commonweal".
(d) The "The Real and the Apparent" which examined the way that the eye and the appearance of things became an obsessive factor in Western thought at the Renaissance, and has continued to be so in popular culture which still- in effect- believes in atomic building blocks and a Newtonian mechanical reality, though Einsteinian Physics has exploded those myths. The reality is the dynamism and spirit of what we call life.
But- as someone condemned also to use books- after your first post I looked at a book that I have on my unread shelf that looks as if it might be a useful source of ideas for you. It is called "Through Ancient Eyes. Seeing Hidden Dimensions, Exploring Art and Soul Connections" its author Neil Hague is a professional illustrator, artist and college lecturer, and his book is a very personal study of what he sees as threads going right back into the earliest efforts of man to make apparent the hidden realities that lay obsured to the mundane eye.
But to come back to your post it has been the work of Book Culture to project backwards throughout history and prehistory the "mind world order" that it created.. And this, and the need to free ourselves from the control that has been achieved especially by that Middle Class that basis its claim to power of the basis of its ownership of intellectual capital, is an important theme of my latest "book" "History For Our Own Times"..
CassLink to this forum: THE BIRTH OF THE WORLD , OF THE GODS AND OF MEN...
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Message 5
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Monday, 23rd May 2011
Chefone
PS
As for "forces at work" I believe that what President Obama referred to as "the best of England" has been an important factor in the history of the last 1500 years or so as I summed up in this song lyric that I posted on another thread yesterday..
THE MAKING OF AN ENGLISH PEACE
1. Long ago and far away, in an age without a time
Burdened bands of folk made tracks across a northern clime.
A tide of change was running high , the order could not hold
Many would be swept away in the rush for Roman gold.
But the promised land, as wise womenfolk could see
Was a place where all could stand and work in security.
And men who bore the traces of a legionary style
Told tales of green spaces in Britannia’s Isle
2. Warrior bands and chiefs set off to test the Saxon Shore
To prove themselves as fighting men and to find out more.
They saw the wetland wilderness of the Isis and her brood
And heavy clay-based forest belts , where the Green Man roamed so rude.
And they sent back word that their folks should come by boat
Bringing beasts to restock every herd and all that they could float.
And deep within the greenery new settlements were built
Adapted to a scenery of timber, rush and silt.
3. How many generations worked there are no words to tell
For their tales are all of heroes who ventured into Hell.
But the ‘tons’ and’ hams’ and ‘vills’ they built had great fertility
For those able to labour hard as one community.
So they tamed and drained , with water-meadow , dyke and weir
And they pulled up clumps of forest stumps to leave open fields so clear
And in their halls they spoke of common law and commonweal
And their common lands and a common peace in which open wounds could heal.
4. And when the tide of violence rose in a mighty flood
Drug-eyed , mounted dragon men swooped for gold and blood.
In common cause subject and King made the Viking cease
And accept a future Danelaw would be defined by English peace
And successive English Kings , like Harold , Bill and such
Had to learn that the great men of war still must keep the common touch.
And so the realm grew stronger as the centuries unfurled
To match the threat of foreign ‘greats’ who sought to rule the World.
5. A thousand years of History is not a fairy tale
And the Angles were no angels even as Roman slaves for sale.
But life is lived in the present tense with the tools we have at hand
And many-a hope for the modern World was ‘made in England’.
And if this is to be the Age of the Common Man
There are things that that everyone needs to understand.
Freedom and security they are not granted, owned or leased.
It takes time and toil from everyone to make an English Peace.
***
Some of the more historical ideas involved in what made the English story special I put on a thread "The Roots of the Modern World" a couple or years ago. That took the story up to about 1763. Since that time the simple and healthy English rootstock has been used to graft on a Middle Class culture that- as is the case with the grafting of fruit trees- consciously and deliberately diverted the energy of the rootstock into the stock that did not have enough energy of its own to fruit and flower adequately. So we have created a world where- in place of "time and toil" being required from everyone, we have unemployment, underemployment and incapacity, while people like fascinating argue that the whole purpose of Civilization has been to make human life easier.. as opposed to more fulifilled.
CassLink to this forum: THE BIRTH OF THE WORLD , OF THE GODS AND OF MEN...
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Message 6
Posted by chefone (U14431437) on Tuesday, 24th May 2011
Cass....
Thank you very much and i must say what a beautifully crafted prose.....Give me a bit of time to assimulate your words and i will get back [if you dont mind,] a little later...
Brilliant...!
Chef....Link to this forum: THE BIRTH OF THE WORLD , OF THE GODS AND OF MEN...
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Message 7
Posted by chefone (U14431437) on Tuesday, 24th May 2011
Story two......
At the dawn of time , say the old bards and poets of Iceland , there was niether sand nor Icy waves. The earth did not exsist , nor the skys which today covers it. Nowhere did grass grow. Only a yawning abyss strecthed through space...But long before the sea was created ,Niflheim , a world of clouds and shadows , formed in the regions to the North of the abyss . In the midst of niflhiem surged the fountin Hvergelmir , from which spread the glacial waters of 12 rivers. To the south lay the land of fire , Muspellshiem. From here poured rivers whose waters contained a bitter poison which little by little set and become solid..On contact with the ice coning from the North this first deposit became covered with thick coatings of hoar- frost which partly filled up the abyss..But warm air blowing from the South began to make the ice melt ; and from the tepid drops which thus formed was born a giant in human form , "mir"....The first of all living beings......
Three or four centuries before christ the teutons were established in the south of the scandinavian homeland in the islands of the Baltic sea and on the great plain of North Germany between the rhine and the Vistula...They often fought each other but all spoke the same language , had a communitie of culture , and very probably shared the same religious beliefs..........
Some of these beliefs were inherited from thier Indo-European ancesters....[Aryans] The Teutons however , had lived so long seperated from other Indo-European people that in the end they had devised thier own original religion........The teutons were divided into three great groups ; Those of the east , or Goths , who , left this region towards the end of the 2nd century AD , and imigrated in great numbers towards the black sea......
Then the teutons of the North , who occupied the scandinavian countries; And finally the West Germans , ancesters of the present Germans and the Anglo Saxons , who were first confined to North Germany and little by little spread towards the rhine and the Danube where they were soon to clash with the Romans....
chefLink to this forum: THE BIRTH OF THE WORLD , OF THE GODS AND OF MEN...
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Message 8
Posted by chefone (U14431437) on Tuesday, 24th May 2011
Cass...I hope you are enjoying the Tale.....
May i have another poem and i will put it in my book ....
Meanwhile certain tribes prepared to cross the sea and establish themselves in Great Britain.......On thier contact with the Romans great numbers of Goths converted to christianity...The only examples of thier language that survived that ruthless conversion are translations of the bible and sacred texts....
For the German tribes of the west , [the ancesters of the germans and anglo Saxons , documentary sources of information are rare....The romans converted thier gods into thier own gods ...For instance , Donar the thunder god became Jupiter...
The roman War machine had began it's systematic elimination of teutonic civilisation......
Ymir , was the father of all the giants . Once while he was asleep it happened that he become completely bathed in sweat ; Under his left arm were then born a man and a woman , both giants like him . At the same time the ice containing , continuing to melt gave forth a cow , Audumia , the wet nurse of the giants....
Ymir quenched his thirst at her udders from which flowed four streams of milk. The cow herself licked the blocks of ice and was nourished by the salt which they contained......
chef.........Link to this forum: THE BIRTH OF THE WORLD , OF THE GODS AND OF MEN...
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Message 9
Posted by chefone (U14431437) on Tuesday, 24th May 2011
Cass , i would love to have a read of your book...There is stuff that i could maybe add overall point of view...?
Chef.....Link to this forum: THE BIRTH OF THE WORLD , OF THE GODS AND OF MEN...
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Message 10
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Saturday, 18th June 2011
Chefone
Just back from a few week away.. I am glad that you appreciated that lyric.. But while away I fell back into book culture.. In France I am ploughing my way through an old c1915 outline of Medieval European History and have just about got to the end of the Dark Ages and the reign of Charlemagne.. It really does throw into question your "birth of the world" version that does seem to be rather Eurocentric. While it is seems from archaelogy that Northern European regions have had small and relatively isolated populations for a long time, and that the racially-based nationalism of this old history book with the Greco-Roman world taken over by waves of immigrant tribes calls for drastic revision, the evidence does seem compelling that the thrust of history did come from elsewhere.
My other reading involved two volumes by Han Suyin that I had not previously read, and I would recommend her five volume "China. Autobiography/History" to anyone interested in understanding the way that world history during the 20th appeared to someone with a Belgian mother and a Chinese father. Perhaps more immediately relevant to your project was her novel "The Mountain is Young" written c1958 , which was based upon a trip that she made to attend the coronation of the King of Nepal. Woven into the novel- which I found to be very typical of the Fifties- and the Cold War- there is quite a lot of insight into the very ancient ideas of the Himalayan region- Tibet as well as Nepal.
I have written about the importance of some of the anciently rooted parts of the human story in a piece called "The Future is Chinese" if you are interested in a link.
And while on this theme of the continuities with the longer human story, I might mention "The Autobiography of a Yogi" by Paramahansa Yoganadanda (1946) which was written because Yoganandanda was told by his personal Guru to make it his task to bring the wisdom of the Orient to the West. By this time the great age of Theosophical Society and its great protege Krishnamurti was over, but Mary Lutyens has produced many interesting works about a period when there was rather more intellectual courage that in these modern times.
CassLink to this forum: THE BIRTH OF THE WORLD , OF THE GODS AND OF MEN...
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Message 11
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Saturday, 18th June 2011
THE FUTURE IS CHINESE
I chose Chinese history as a topic of educational interest back in my PGCE year in 1966-7, and I still maintain that a history that has endured for c5000 years has almost certainly more to teach "us" about surviving the next 1000 years than a Western industrial model that really has only become fully-fledged for at at best 150 years. The Chinese were prepared to give the UK a 150 year lease on Hong Kong because in Chinese terms the time span was of little significance.
CassLink to this forum: THE BIRTH OF THE WORLD , OF THE GODS AND OF MEN...
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