Summer has passed. The autumn equinox is upon us, and the goddess Persephone senses that her time in the Land of the Living is once again coming to an end. A swelling chorus of pleas, that only she can hear, is a persistent reminder of her obligation to return to the Dark World. Her responsibilities as Queen of the Netherworld are also pulling her, drawing her in. The fatal pomegranate seed is on her lips, and deep in her heart she knows there’s no turning back.
However far more is at play in this pivotal moment than just the normal autumnal rhythm of plenty turning to privation. A long and flourishing cycle of matriarchy, of which she and her mother Demeter have been divine patronesses, has also run its course. The old goddess-centered, at-one manner of being human in-the-world is in full retreat; and a structurally different, distinctly ‘Western’ form of human consciousness is just beginning to emerge.
And why is this happening? Because now it’s patriarchy’s turn…
“The light shifts and ripples. The crash of thunder rips through the world. A screaming wind tears at her hair and stings her eyes. Before her, a chasm appears where the sun had been only moments before, and Persephone cries out in horror even as she leaps into the void. For a moment that seems like eternity she forgets who she is, where she is, and why. Then darkness…silence…warmth. The spirits of the dead surround her. They speak without voices. They sing without sound. They cry and laugh as she presents her gifts from the realm of the living. And they welcome her with gifts of their own.” (Irene A. Faivre, “Persephone Remembers,” Parabola, Summer 1996.)
THE SECOND GREAT MUTATION OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS
If some day you were to visit the Isles of Scilly, 28 miles southwest of Britain’s Cornish peninsula, you just might find yourself walking an ancient dirt road that unexpectedly leads you straight into the azure waters of the North Atlantic Drift. “Strange,” you think as you turn to retrace your steps. But what if instead you were to hire a boat, and follow the trajectory of this poor drowned road? Soon you would arrive at the shore of another island; and there you would see your lonely little road re-emerging from the sea as if this were a perfectly natural thing for it to do.
Then what if curiosity got the better of you, and you chartered a helicopter to have an eagle’s-eye view of the entire archipelago? From such a high, wide vantage it’s easy to spot the road you were walking, and to see it disappearing and then reappearing. Only now you see that it does this more than once, while at the same time intersecting other roads that do exactly the same. The result is a spider-web of roadways knitting together some 55 of these seemingly-disconnected and separate isles.
Then suddenly you get it. The Scillies are really just leftovers, hilltops of what was once a single contiguous land mass that at some point in its long history of human habitation (ca. 450 CE, to be exact) surrendered its essential oneness to the rising waters of a once-friendly sea.
A few days later you’re sitting in the departure lounge of a London airport, watching passengers and crew members come and go. You cannot help but notice how totally absorbed most are in their private little worlds of earbud and cell phone. It strikes you how easy it is these days to mistake device-mediated connectivity for true relationship. “We’re just like the Scillies now,” you think to yourself. “Still deeply interconnected; but to all appearances not.”
Saddened by this realization, and with that haunting image of the archipelago’s fundamental unity still etched in your memory, you wonder: “Has it always been like this? Is it simply human nature to be so insular? Or is something else going on here — something we don’t really understand? And what about the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden and all those other old, old stories that seem to come from a time when humans were as fundamentally networked with nature and each other as the pre-diluvian Scillies?”
Now I fully realize that these musings may strike you as fantasy pure and simple. But what if due to some decisive change, equivalent in its consequences to a sudden sea-level rise, humankind’s deeply rooted embrace of common identity was totally effaced? The At-one-ment, that had commenced with the 1st Great Mutation of consciousness — the one that made us fully human — gradually and imperceptibly faded away, leaving the human experiment stranded on today’s global archipelago of 8+ billion individual ‘isles’ of awareness.
And what exactly was this change? It was a 2nd Great Mutation driven by the emergence of the ‘Western’ form of consciousness: the ‘subject/object split. The split is a perceptual and cognitive divide between an experiencing ‘subjective’ awareness (you), and an experienced ‘objective’ reality (everyone and everything that’s not you). If you’ve been educated in the Western manner, as most of us today have, then I can say for certain that you’ve learned to experience yourself and the world in this particular manner. And wouldn’t it seem quite natural that a polarizing paradigm of consciousness would eventually produce increasingly polarized societies, and eventually a polarized world?
Permaculture teaches that nature’s most interesting and fruitful interactions happen on the edge where different environments meet. Where, for example, sea encounters land; or a plain curls up against a rise of mountains. So let’s see if we can find a cultural analogue, some ’edge’ where the waning psychology of the At-one-ment and the waxing psychology of the split are meeting head-on in a manner that reveals the agent responsible for this epochal shift. Somewhere perhaps on a remote periphery of the expanding Greek Empire…
CROWNED WITH THE STARS
It’s 331 BCE, 727 years before the patriarchal rape of Eleusis. In Part 1 of this essay, you and I imagined we were witnesses to this epochal violation and the demise of the At-one-ment it portended. Now in Part 2 we’ve come to a humble little seaport on the southern shore of the Mediterranean to search for the origins of the ultimate cause of the At-one-ment’s demise: the invention and dissemination of the subject/object split.
However our first order of business here is to witness Alexander the Great. As you and I watch, the never-modest Emperor, who has just recently added Egypt to his burgeoning Greek Empire, is re-christening this ancient port of Rhakotis ‘Alexandria’ in his own honor. Then he orders his military commander Cleomenes to begin construction of the paramount center of culture and learning he envisions it becoming. Finally, in his moment of supreme triumph, he leads his army north, never to return until 323 BCE when his then-regent Ptolemy I will take possession of the 32 year-old’s lifeless corpse and lay it to final rest in this his namesake city.
It takes less than two centuries for Alexander’s dream to become reality. In the words of the historian M. M. Mangasarian: “Under the Ptolemies, a line of Greek kings, Alexandria soon sprang into eminence, and accumulating culture and wealth, became the most powerful metropolis of the Orient.” The animating soul of this cultural marvel is an educational institution known as the Mouseion: the ‘Temple of the Muses’. And the beating heart of the Mouseion is the magnificent library this city will become most famous for. A major pilgrimage terminus for scholars and students from every corner of the civilized world, the Mouseion is also the destination of choice for a whole new generation of young Egyptian astrologers.
Awareness of a relationship between celestial phenomena and terrestrial experience is a legacy of the old at-one form of consciousness. I’m going to call this ‘astrological awareness’, even though it’s fundamentally different from modern astrology, which is essentially a hybrid of the original awareness processed through the patterns of perception and cognition native to the subject/object split. In other words: living astrological awareness is to the At-one-ment as modern astrology — the astrology of the book — is to the subject/object split.
A 17th-century British poet named Thomas Traherne captured the spirit of the original awareness beautifully when he wrote: “You never enjoy the world aright, till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars.” The roots of such an awareness reach very deep into the human past. A bas-relief of a goddess figure from the Upper Paleolithic holding a simple lunar calendar — the Venus of Laussel — suggests that humans have been cultivating this sensibility for possibly as long as 25,000 years. If a single generation spans some 25 years, then 25,000 years divided by 25 means that the tradition our young Egyptians are heir to has been being handed down for somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 generations.
This would make its origins roughly contemporaneous with those of shamanism; and suggests that the divinatory practices stemming from astrological awareness were most likely the result of a co-evolutionary symbiosis with shamanism. Shamans garner knowledge through a corporeal participation in rather than an intellectual observation of. In other words: the original at-one awareness was embodied, shamanist, animal and animist, of no-mind, imaginative, ritualized, and communally-expressed rather than individually-practiced.
Here then is a distilled formula for the old-consciousness tradition our Egyptian student astrologers have been deeply entrained by when they knock on the Mouseion’s imposing door: star-mapping wonder + shamanist at-one-ment = astrological awareness.
So as we proceed now with our search for the root cause of the subject/object split, please keep in mind this distinction between traditional astrological awareness and present-day astrology. Because the story of how the former morphs into the latter is exactly the kind of ‘edge’ we were hoping to find, where an old and a new form of consciousness are pushing up against each other like buckling tectonic plates.
METAMORPHOSIS
In actuality it’s more like 75% astrological awareness, plus 25% Babylonian mathematics and astrological lore made available to them by Egypt’s involuntary inclusion in the Persian Empire, that our students are bringing with them. Nonetheless, once they’ve completed their prestigious Greek-style educations and are actually plying their time-honored trade, something quite unexpected occurs.
After 1,000 generations of contiguous development, during which the Egyptian practice of astrology remained qualitatively constant, over the course of perhaps a dozen generations it undergoes an unprecedented shift. The revolutionaries responsible for this take the empirical, highly-ritualized practice their elders bequeathed them, and turn it into something quite un-Egyptian but unmistakably Greek. The result is the highly-systematized, rationally-ordered cosmology we know today as ‘Hellenistic’ astrology — the prototype for all ensuing systems of Western astrological practice right up to the present day.
Whether they realize this impressive feat entirely on their own, or learn their new practice from Greek or Greek-trained astrologers as the scholar Robert Schmidt believed they did, isn’t a question you and I need answered. What we want to know is: why would such a change even happen? Was it simply that the Greeks had a better idea?
Possibly; but a recalcitrant conservatism was the shadow side of the At-one-ment; and a tradition that’s thousands of years old can sometimes be quite unresponsive to better ideas. The Arab Neoplatonist Iamblichus (245-325 CE) advances a more plausible explanation in his commentary On The Mysteries. "The men who translated the Egyptian wisdom into Greek,” he writes, “were all trained in Athenian philosophy.”
Now Athenian philosophy was one of the inaugural inventions of the subject/object split, NOT the agent responsible for it. So even if Schmidt is correct that the actual founder of Western astrology was a student of Plato and an older contemporary of Aristotle named Eudoxus of Cnidus (c.390-c.337 BCE), doesn’t it seem a bit too coincidental that philosophy too had made its debut in just as sudden and unprecedented a manner only three centuries prior? And that it too established itself as a viable institution through the efforts of just a few generations?
Bottom line: if philosophy wasn’t the progenitor of the split, but it’s debut achievement, then it cannot have been the agent that transformed the tradition of astrological awareness into Western astrology. Something we have yet to identify must have been responsible for the invention of both Western philosophy and Western astrology.
So with this in mind, let’s return to Alexandria, but at a slightly later date: the beginning of the 1st century BCE. We need to see what else is in play in the education being offered at the Mouseion that might help us identify the true cause of the split. And if it wasn’t philosophy itself then, to the best of my knowledge, there’s only one other significant factor that Greek philosophy, Greek natural philosophy (i.e., science), and Hellenistic astrology all share in common.
Here’s a little teaser. When Alexander leads his patriarchal occupation force into Egypt unopposed, the most consequential weapon in his imperial arsenal isn’t his state-of-the-art fleet of war chariots.
HOW WORDS BECOME WORLDS
In order to read and understand the Athenian philosophers, our Egyptian students must first become fluent in the Greek language. So Hellenistic Koine, as it’s referred to at the time, is the one common factor shared by Greek philosophy, Greek natural philosophy, and Greek astrology. Could Koine then be the agent responsible for engendering the split?
It may seem self-evident that perception and thought are one thing, and that the language we use to articulate and communicate both is something else entirely. Philosophers of language call this the ‘Picture Theory’; and it’s been around now since at least the 4th century CE and the writings of Augustine of Hippo (St. Augustine). If the Picture Theory is correct, and language is simply a re-presentational vehicle, then becoming fluent in Koine should have little or no effect on our students’ astrological perceptions. And yet it seems that it does.
Take the zodiac, for example — that band of constellations that circles the Earth and serves as a backdrop for the movements of the Sun, Moon, and planets. In traditional Egyptian astrology, the signs of the zodiac have a very organic, phase-like relationship — similar to the way the changing seasons of the year blend seamlessly one into another. However our Mouseion graduates are treating the signs in a more discontinuous, disjointed manner as if they were individual beads on a necklace. So could Koine be doing something more than just re-presenting their perceptions?
On this very question, 21st-century linguistics is a house divided. The dominant paradigm today is Linguistic Universalism, which in tandem with Usage-Based theories comprises the modern Science of Linguistics. Both are great examples of what the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once termed: “the craving for generality.” In other words: both approaches are primarily interested in what language acquisition and usage have in common across all cultures.
In the Universalist view, our brains have a genetically-determined capacity for language. Specific tongues may differ structurally and semantically; but such differences have a minimal effect on the way a person perceives and thinks. Sounds like a modern redux of the Picture Theory to me. So once again, if this characterization of language is correct, then Hellenistic Koine couldn’t possibly be a determining factor in creating a new understanding of astrology, much less be the root progenitor of a whole new form of human consciousness.
The opposing view is known as Linguistic Relativism. In sharp contrast to the generalized Science of Linguistics, Relativists are primarily interested in what makes each language, or family of languages, unique. In their view, language does leave an identifiable set of ‘fingerprints’ on perception and cognition. Vocabulary plays a role in this; but the factor mainly responsible is the language’s grammar or syntax — from the Latin syntaxis, meaning: ‘an arrangement’. So think of vocabulary as the players in a game called ’describing the world’, and grammar — how a language assembles its vocabulary into meaningful patterns — as the rules of that game.
Perception and cognition are the functional ‘spear-bearers’ of human consciousness. So if the syntax of a language does filter its speakers’ perception and structures their cognition, then it’s also helping to construct the architecture of their consciousness by encouraging the members of that community to share a common ‘world-view’. A Relativist, for instance, might argue that we in the US call the first 8 years of a child’s formal schooling ‘grammar school’ because this is when learning the rules of Americanized English initiates (or indoctrinates, depending on your point-of-view) the child into the common world-view of the American people.
Relativists believe that a language’s syntax accomplishes this, first: by lending its structural properties to the way a speaker unconsciously perceives and organizes the information that comprises her or his world. As another philosopher with a Relativist take on language, Martin Heidegger, once put it: "If we go to a spring, or if we go through a forest, we already go through the word spring, through the word forest, and this occurs even if we do not pronounce these words and do not think from a linguistic viewpoint.”
And second: by lending those same structural properties to the speaker’s cognition, where they effectively become the logic of the speaker’s thinking. Taken together they result in a subtle, but deeply abiding, entrainment process that takes place far below the threshold of the speaker’s conscious awareness. “A French politician once wrote that it is a peculiarity of the French language that in it words occur in the order in which one thinks them.” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations)
Despite a century of persistent Universalist attack, Relativism refuses to go away. In fact it’s currently undergoing a significant revival. Support is coming mainly from three overlapping groups. First are indigenous linguists who speak and study languages outside the mainstream Indo-European family. Second are cultural anthropologists who accept that the capacity for language is inherent, but argue that language itself is a man-made construct. And third are adherents of a relatively new branch of science called: Psycholinguistics. Research in this area done by Susan Ervin-Tripp, for example, found that bilinguals experience different mindsets when they move between languages, to the degree that they feel like different people when speaking one or the other.
Relativist or Universalist, the origins of language remain obscure. Current estimates are that it has been developing for a minimum of 100,000, and possibly closer to 500,000, years. In addition, some neuroscientists now maintain that language learning doesn’t take place in dedicated brain systems as some linguists still assume, but in multiple-purpose systems. For example: when we learn to read and write we preempt and transform certain visual structures of the brain because our genomes don't contain any instructions for reading or writing-specific brain circuits.
These same neuroscientists also believe that some of these multi-purpose systems may have even pre-existed humans. This is important for Relativists because it opens the way for a wider, more inclusive understanding of language — one that incorporates, but isn’t limited to, human expression and the structured use of symbols. In other words: any means of codifying and transmitting experience — sound, text, gesture, ritual, art, movement, etc. — is by this definition linguistic; and any creature, human or otherwise, that’s attempting to share experience in any of these ways is doing so linguistically.
Even though languages are going extinct almost as fast as plants and animals, as of 2003 there were still 6809 distinct tongues in the global language pool. Each of these tongues is a member of a linguistic ‘family’; and depending on how one keeps count, we currently have somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 different families. What constitutes a family is that all its members have evolved from a common parent (or ‘proto’) language. Because of this common evolutionary source, family members display a formal resemblance because they share a common structural framework. Greek is a member of the Indo-European Family; and Egyptian belongs to the Afro-Asiatic Family.
In the end, Relativists treat languages exactly as you might treat plants in your vegetable garden. Each has its own unique ‘texture’, and its own individual ‘flavor’. So let’s do a little ‘taste test’, and see if the syntax of Greek, or that of Egyptian, could possibly be predisposing speakers to develop a world-view compatible with the psychology of the subject/object split.
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO EGYPTIAN
Word order is of paramount importance in the Afro-Asiatic Family of languages —which includes Egyptian. The syntax of this 4700 year-old language mandates what linguists call a verb-subject-object (VSO) structural arrangement. Placing the verb in first position indicates that the action is being emphasized, rather than the doer of the action (the subject). The juxtaposition of subject and object encourages an egalitarian, reciprocal relationship between the two.
This is very different from a language like English (Indo-European Family) which mandates a subject-verb-object (SVO) word order. Giving the subject first position denotes that the doer of the action is the primary element in the equation; and that there’s no reciprocity between subject and object. The ‘doer’ is purposefully directing energy towards someone or something. Thus in English, a sentence such as ”The man salutes the sun,” would in Egyptian be: “Saluting man/sun.” Here the salutation is being emphasized; and both man and sun are understood to be in a non-hierarchical, two-way energy exchange — as one might expect in an at-one culture.
Because the VSO arrangement prioritizes the action, the Egyptologist Rene Schwaller de Lubicz chose the word ‘functional’ — which he defines as “action in itself” — to characterize the nature of traditional Egyptian language usage. Doesn’t this in its own way echo Vico’s insistence, discussed in Part 1, that the First People were “passionate poets” rather than “wise philosophers?” In Nature Word, Schwaller de Lubicz tries to give his readers a taste of functional consciousness. “Be restless with the dog that barks in the night,” he writes. “Labor with the parsimonious ant; gather honey with the bee; expand in space with the ripening fruit.”
If an emphasis on action and mutual reciprocity is built into the architecture of the Egyptian language, then we would expect to see it’s structural properties being mirrored in the Egyptian world-view — and we definitely do. So when referring to the relationship between the human realm and the Divine, for example, traditional Egyptians treated each as horizontally equal to and inter-dependent with the other, rather than hierarchically-ranked.
What does present a problem though to anyone trying to understand the traditional Egyptian world-view is that speakers of the original language no longer exist. But we’re fortunate that other languages born of the At-one-ment still are being spoken, and that these languages can definitely give us insight into Egyptian. For example: the Ojibwe writer Louise Erdrich describes her ancestral Native American tongue — Ojibwemowin (Algonquian family) — in a manner evocative of traditional Egyptian. Like Egyptian, the Ojibwe language is verb-dominant. Verbs make up a full two-thirds of its vocabulary; and each verb can have as many as 6,000 distinct forms. Little surprise then that Ojibwe, in Erdrich’s own choice of words, is: “all action.”
Verb-dominant languages are process-oriented renderings; and as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead famously wrote: “The process is the reality.” Thus the dynamic, action-oriented quality of a verb-dominant language — whether it be by word-order or percentage — can also help explain why the First People, including the Egyptians, made sense of their world through story-telling and myth. You and I have a tendency to consider objectively-biased modes of thought, such as philosophy and science, superior to subjective modes. But in the end, isn’t a story just a different way of organizing one’s experience? What if, for some reason, the ‘different’ way is better?
“In Blackfoot (Algonquian family)...what we refer to as ‘dog’ is probably the word eemidaugh. And eemidaugh is simply trying to express some kind of an awareness, some kind of a being on the move. In other words, that dog could change. It’s always, forever, changing. So there is no finality about it. There’s always the door left open that it could be something else. Consequently, the notion of change, transformation, is part of the everyday thinking process: things will change, things will transform.” (Leroy Little Bear, quoted in Proceedings of the Year 1999: The Language of Spirituality Conference, Albuquerque NM, brackets mine.)
One very characteristic feature common to all languages rooted in the pre-historic At-one-ment — including Egyptian, Ojibwe, and Blackfoot — and that today’s languages completely lack, is that the act of speaking is treated as a spiritual practice. Each Ojibwe word, for instance, has its own inherent spirit; and learners are expected to honor and engage these spirits with gifts of tobacco and food as an integral part of mastering the language…
“When people learn the language, they’re on a path. They don’t know it at first, but the more of the language they learn, the more of the Ojibwe world-view they take in, and the more they begin to treat the world with the respect and kindness of the old Ojibwe. Learning the language is a way of becoming Ojibwe. It sneaks up on you though.” (“Dream Catcher: Questions and Answers with Louise Erdrich”, Lion’s Roar (formerly Shambala), Nov 2008.)
It’s likely that speaking was a spiritual practice for the at-one, First People of Egypt as well. Based on what I’ve presented here, I think it safe to conclude that there’s no evidence whatsoever of a subject/object split in the world-view of Afro-Asiatic Egyptian.
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GREEK
“The gifts of the dead are those of knowledge and mystery and paradox. In this world of darkness, their eyes see patterns of incredible beauty, yet the patterns have neither color nor shape. Their ears hear rich, complex music, yet the music has neither pitch nor duration. Here, every thought, every perception has endless variations. Persephone is fascinated, and she begins to remember….” (Irene A. Faivre, “Persephone Remembers,” Parabola, Summer 1996.)
Unlike traditional Egyptian, Hellenistic Koine (Indo-European family) has no fixed word order. So we’ll have to consider other grammatical elements if we want to catch a glimpse of its particular world-view. In most Indo-European languages, for instance, the definite article is very important. Placing ‘a’, ‘an’, or ‘the’ before an adjective or verb transforms it into a noun. For example: ‘a’ + ‘to hunt’ = ‘a hunter’. Linguists call this resultant noun: a substantive.
Substantives describe specific pulses of information, and help make it possible to perceptually disentangle them from the seamless streaming of experience. Repetitive use of a substantive encourages the perception that this transient pulse is a stable, independent entity (i.e., ‘a thing’). This stabilizing tendency has been a constant source of consternation for philosophers of language. As Ludwig Wittgenstein writes: “We are up against one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment; we try to find a substance for a substantive.”
So if the definite article and substantives have played a significant role in crafting the Greek world-view, we would expect to see that reflected in the Greek psyche and in different aspects of Greek culture. And once again, we do. For example: the philologist Bruno Snell makes the point that substantives encourage the sense of clearly-defined, enduring presence that was of great importance to the Greek philosophers; and then definitively states that: "We could scarcely imagine the existence of Greek philosophy if there had been no definite article.”
Another apropos feature is that Koine verbs have a grammatical attribute called ‘aspect’, which allows a speaker to classify the developmental phases of an action very precisely. The ‘perfect’ aspect is used for actions that are perfected or complete (i.e., bounded). The ‘aorist’ denotes an action that is one, or in some manner a unity (once again, though in a slightly different way, bounded). Such stasis-inducing precision, however, has existential consequences. As Snell points out, the Greek natural philosophers (i.e., prototype scientists) were neither able to formulate a clear concept of motion, nor propose any viable laws of motion.
In a different arena, August C. Mahr comments on the “curious static air” of the Greek theatre — the performance being more like a portrait than say a film. The drama unfolds in this specific place at this precise time. According to Mahr, the Greek theatre evolved from the Mysteries of Dionysus, whose indispensable prerequisite was yet again: “the bounded locale.” And in a lecture some years ago, Greek scholar Robert Schmidt described Koine as having a “discreet, quantum-like quality” — yet another variation of bounded; and exactly the quality we saw illustrated by our Koine-fluent astrologers’ bead-like segmenting of the more continuum-like Egyptian zodiac.
The question that needs to be asked here, however, is: are all the above features of Koine enough proof to claim that the syntax of the Indo-European family of languages, of which Koine is a member, was the agent that engendered the subject/object split? Whereas ancient Egyptian clearly had no tendency whatsoever to foster the split, it seems that Koine does. But a ‘tendency’ isn’t necessarily a ‘cause’.
If we consider the evolution of word order in the developmental history of Greek syntax, there is evidence of gradual movement away from total freedom, and towards an increasingly subject/verb/object (SVO) arrangement in a very specific part of its syntax: the construction of clauses (a group of words that function as part of a sentence, but include their own subject and verb). Why would this ever happen?
Add to all this the fact that a bias towards an SVO word order in total sentence structure has increasingly become a feature of both modern Greek and other members of the Indo-European family. In Old English (9th and 10th centuries CE), for example, word order was completely free. But in Modern English, an SVO order is a structural mandate. All these trends suggest to me that something besides grammar is driving both the evolution of the Greek and English languages and the emergence of the subject/object split.
So was Koine then the root cause of the split? Probably not. However once the split was in play, its objectifying psychology, substantiating tendency, and the split would have been a marriage made in heaven. So if neither Greek philosophy nor the Greek language were responsible for engendering the subject/object split, what was?
A LITTLE BIT OF BACKSTORY
My first hunch that there was something missing in the human story that I was being told, both within and without the confines of my schooling, came when I was a 22-year old undergraduate. I was sitting in a very tedious class on the ‘Pre-Socratic’ philosophers, watching my instructor twist himself into knots trying to make rational sense of their wildly irrational ideas. I had not yet come to understand that these long-forgotten luminaries were straddling two disparate worlds. They clearly had one foot solidly planted in the rapidly emerging new world of reasoned philosophy; but the other was still deep in the old world of indigenous Greek shamanism.
For my classmates, it was simply a boring lecture. It was for me as well; but it was also my inaugural lesson in the history of consciousness. For starters, it gave me my first glimpse of an earlier kind of human — one who appeared to experience herself or himself and what it meant to be human in-the-world much differently than I. I certainly didn’t understand it at the time, but is also was a perfect example of the incongruences and misunderstandings that were a consequence of the historical shift from the At-one-ment to the subject/object split.
Still, with my limited understanding, I realized that the missing piece of the human story was consciousness. I thought it strange that everything else in the phenomenal world had a developmental history. And yet on the rare occasion that my teachers even mentioned consciousness, they appeared to presume that the form of consciousness they and their students were in-habiting was the only element in the equation that remained qualitatively constant. What was important to them was the perceptual and cognitive content of consciousness, not its functional form.
Eventually I came to realize that the question I was really asking was: is the structural configuration of human consciousness essentially hard-wired; or has it changed over time — and if it has, why? It occurred to me that if an earlier form had once existed, then I should be able to find some surviving ‘remnant’ of it, and through it get a least a little ‘taste’ of the earlier form. At the time I was reading Carl Jung’s Collected Works; and I was struck by the fact that he kept referring to astrology in a favorable way. I knew that astrology had been around a lot longer than philosophy. So I decided to find out if this ancient ‘language of the stars’ might possibly have a thing or two to teach me about the history of consciousness.
With all this was rattling around in my brain, I was preparing to begin a Master’s program in philosophy with the intention of pursuing a teaching career. A few short weeks into the program I went to the chairman of the department and told him that I had made a big mistake and was dropping out. When asked why, I confessed that my real interest wasn’t in philosophy per se, but in the history of consciousness and the place of philosophy in that history. I shared with him what I knew about the strained relationship between the early Greek philosophers and the 2000-year old Eleusinian Mysteries. I wanted to know why all that tension existed; and lamented that there didn’t appear to be room in the accepted universe of philosophical discourse for exploring such an unconventional topic.
To my utter surprise, his response was: “Well, here’s an idea. Almost no one writes a Master’s thesis any more; but it’s still a viable option. There are some philosophy courses I cannot exempt you from; but otherwise you have my permission to take any course in the university you can talk your way into that will help you research your topic. And if two years from now you write up what you’ve learned, and your thesis committee approves it, you’ll get your degree. And if not, then no degree. How does that sound?”
Needless to say I jumped at the opportunity; and the next two years turned out to be some of the most interesting of my life. Not sure how to proceed and with little guidance, since in 1971 there wasn’t a whole lot of available information on either Eleusis or the history of consciousness, I simply trusted my intuition and followed the clues as they appeared. Nonetheless, I was like a horse grazing in a lush green meadow. At the end of the two years I had answered my question. Something the philosophers themselves were doing, that they weren’t even aware of, had planted the seeds of a radical change in the form of human consciousness; and the conflict between the old and new forms was the source of all the tension.
When the time arrived, I wrote my thesis. It was effectively an earlier version of the 3-part essay you’re now reading. My department chair immediately approved it. A second committee member let me know what he thought of it by tearing up his copy right in front of me. And a third refused to even vote.
Six months passed, and I was still at the mercy of a deadlocked committee. The words of an earlier mentor preyed on me relentlessly. When I told him that I was off to graduate school, his advice was: “Don’t get too creative.” When I asked what he meant, his reply was: “You’ll find out.” Then one day the committee member who had refused to vote quite unexpectedly summoned me to his office.
First he chastised me, and told me that he didn’t know what I thought I was doing but it sure wasn’t philosophy. He concluded by suggesting that my thesis was an affront to the tradition, because all I did was tell a story rather than defend or argue a specific thesis. In a way he was correct, in that I had told a story. But in the telling I thought I’d argued my ‘thesis’ very well: the Mysteries were an artifact of an earlier form of consciousness; philosophy was the creation of our current form; and now that form too is rapidly receding in the rear-view mirror and taking philosophy with it. Philosophical training will always have pedagogical value; but it’s no longer, as it once was, the growing edge of thought.
Needless to say, my judge and jury wasn’t impressed. So I respectfully nodded, and turned to leave. As I reached the door, he blurted out: “OK, OK! I’ll give you a ‘yes’ vote if you promise me you won’t try to get a PHD at this university.” Shocked by his sudden reversal, my first thought was that without a doctorate my plans for a career in academic philosophy were toast. Eventually I would come to understand that I was actually being saved from myself. In light of my own thesis, thinking I could be an effective professor of philosophy clearly wasn’t very realistic.
Over the next five decades, and throughout two non-academic careers, I continued to put the puzzle-pieces of a new human story together. Owen Barfield gave me a basic outline for the history of consciousness, and a rudimentary understanding of the unified psychology of the First People — what he dubbed: “the Original Participation.” And I chanced upon a sparse, but truly brilliant, exposition of the subject/object split scattered throughout the lesser-known writings of the philosopher Martin Heidegger.
The most important question of all, however, remained unanswered. What determines the form of human consciousness? Why did the original configuration, the At-one-ment, fade away; and our current configuration, the subject/object split, take over? What could possibly have caused such an epochal shift? Then one serendipitous day a friend introduced me to the work of Leonard Shlain.
THE EGYPTIAN PARTNERSHIP: GOD’S WORDS
Leonard Shlain was a laparoscopic surgeon turned author, lecturer, and historian of consciousness. He’s perhaps best known for his iconoclastic book: The Alphabet Versus The Goddess. My first exposure to him, however, came through a truly informative, image-rich lecture of the same name that he gave at Pepperdine University not too long before he died in 2009. I highly recommend you view it.
Shlain begins his lecture at that pivotal moment in Greek history when they were methodically re-dedicating their traditional goddess shrines to gods. He wonders why they’re doing this; and then answers his own question in one pithy sentence. “The only event in history powerful enough to change the sex of God from female to male was the invention of the alphabet.”
This remarkable observation has two important ramifications. First: Shlain posits a relationship between the fluctuating periods of matriarchal and patriarchal priority that we’ve been discussing in this essay and specific patterns of brain function. In his view, periods of matriarchal dominance = right hemispheric emphasis; and patriarchal periods = left hemispheric emphasis. If this correlation is correct, and because the linear one letter or word at-a-time nature of the alphabet tends to engage the left-hemisphere, alphabetic literacy would naturally create the conditions that support and sustain a more patriarchal mind-set — in this case, specifically, the subject/object split.
It turns out that the Greeks were the first culture in the world to fully alphabetize their native language. So building on Shlain’s insight, when Alexander the Great delivers Hellenistic Koine to North Africa on the point of his spear in the 4th century BCE, he’s bringing so much more than just an innovative new technology. First: he’s giving the patriarchal revolution its ‘weapon of choice’, even though no one at the time — including Alexander — had any clear understanding of what was really transpiring.
And second: Shlain’s physiology-grounded insights into the psychology of alphabetic literacy is a definite answer to my long-standing question of what determines the form of human consciousness. His work, in concert with that of the communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, strongly suggests that neurological function isn’t the primary determination of form as many philosophers and scientists today still assume.
RATHER IT’S THE SUSTAINED PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN NEUROLOGICAL FUNCTION AND THE SPECIFIC CHARACTERISTICS OF THE INFORMATION ENVIRONMENT ENGENDERED BY A CULTURE’S DOMINANT TECHNOLOGY OF MASS COMMUNICATIONS. So let’s take a closer look at Egypt’s and Greece’s histories of pre-alphabetic and post-alphabetic literacy. Let’s see if Leonard Shlain’s postulates actually align with these histories.
The First People everywhere partnered their fully-operational brains with vocalized language. This transformational partnership morphed the Animal At-one-ment into the human. Like any language close to its parental origins, vocalized Egyptian mirrors and reinforces the unified psychology of the At-one-ment. Speaking takes place face-to-face, or within audible range. Then early in the 4th millennium BCE, the at-one Egyptian brain begins to partner with written communication.
Egypt’s earliest native script is called Hieroglyphics. Believed to be a gift of the god Thoth, its 5000+ symbolic pictographs are known as: “God's words.” To master this technology, a student has to memorize and be able to reproduce all 5000; and only 1-2% of the population are motivated, or have the time, to do this. As a consequence, Hieroglyphics never really becomes a true medium of mass communication.
In stark contrast to simple one-dimensional signs (such as the letters of the alphabet), pictographic symbols are complex and multi-dimensional. Like miniature poems, they point beyond themselves to some larger reality; and by so doing activate the all-at-once, synthesizing capacity of the brain’s right hemisphere. In other words: pictographic literacy = right hemisphere = matriarchy = the At-one-ment.
A more accessible evolution of Hieroglyphics appears sometime around 3000 BCE. Essentially a sign/symbol hybrid, Hieratic script is a cursive rendering of Hieroglyphics in which the people, animals, and objects being depicted are no longer as easily recognizable, but can be more easily reproduced. Hieratic is a big step towards a true technology of mass communication; and a transitional stage between right-brain activating and left-brain activating linguistic mediums.
Then by 700 BCE, an even more distilled version known as Demotic script, which consists exclusively of 400 conventional signs (so fully left-brain activating), is in popular usage. Demotic (from the Greek demos: ‘the people’) is still somewhat complicated, as only a limited number of these 400 signs represent actual sounds — the rest being 'ideograms', which are symbols indicating ideas rather than sounds.
Egypt’s information environment, however, is completely transformed by the arrival of Grecian Koine in the 4th century BCE. Not only is Koine as totally left-brain as Demotic; but with a mere 24 conventional signs, it’s 200 times simpler than either Hieroglyphic or Hieratic scripts, and 17 times simpler than Demotic. The Egyptians find this simplicity irresistible; and within only a generation or two, Greek becomes the language of choice for the educated classes. At roughly the same time however, a fourth mode of written language called Coptic appears, which is a blend of Greek and Demotic.
As you might expect, Hieratic was a VSO (verb-subject-object) language with the action being emphasized and the Archaic At-one-ment being continuously reinforced. Coptic, however, rapidly evolves into an SVO (subject-verb-object) arrangement. No one is exactly sure why this shift occurs. Since this trend was already evident in late Hieratic (900-700 B.C.E.), it cannot be exclusively due to the introduction of Greek — although that probably accelerated the change. However Greek, if you recall, has no set word order; or, if anything, tends to be verb-final (SOV).
Whatever the reason for the shift, in the subject-verb-object syntax of Coptic the actor is now being emphasized, rather than the action. It also means that the action is no longer reciprocal; and because the exchange is now exclusively one-way, the at-one experience is no longer being reinforced. From the long-vista perspective of a history of consciousness, an increasing emphasis on the subject suggests that a stronger sense of individuality and personhood is beginning to emerge. Clearly the consciousness of the Egyptian people is undergoing a very significant paradigm shift. The At-one-ment is fading; and the future belongs to the subject/object split.
THE GREEK PARTNERSHIP: TAKING THINGS LITERALLY
So how do we know that the sustained exercise of alphabetic literacy skills is a primary cause of the subject/object split, and not just another correlation — like the development of philosophy or the syntax of Koine were? Well, let’s see what happens to Greek culture in the wake of the alphabet’s arrival.
As with the Egyptians, the alphabet isn’t the Greeks’ first experience with written communication. Their original medium, known today as Linear A, emerges around 2500 BCE, and is comprised of nearly 600 hundred signs and symbols (once again, a left-brain/right-brain hybrid). A slightly less complicated Linear B (trending left-brain) follows around 1450 BCE. However, both are upstaged in 800 BCE when Phoenician traders deliver the Semitic alphabet to the Athenian seaport of Piraeus. Alphabetized Koine (entirely left brain) is 25 times simpler than either Linear A or B.
Just 50 years after the alphabet is first introduced — which given the speed at which life was moving at the time is actually just the blink of an eye — the various strands of oral tradition woven into the Iliad are being successfully transcribed. The result is Greece’s first, and the world’s second, alphabetically-rendered book (the first being the Old Testament).
Then in just another century and a half an alphabetically-literate Thales of Miletus (624-546 BCE) is presenting his students with objectively reasoned accounts of natural phenomena rather than the traditional mythological explanations. And by helping to pioneer the subject/object split, Thales becomes the West’s first true philosopher.
Socrates (469-399 BCE) is a temporary throwback. He deeply distrusts the written word believing it will undermine his students’ ability to internalize his oral instruction. He believes that written communication distracts students from the discussion-centered ‘Socratic’ method of arriving at the truth through face-to-face dialogue. And yet ironically he thrives in the new literate environment, and gets the majority of his students directly from it.
Socrates’ student Plato (427-347 BCE) embraces the new technology. At the same time, however, he shares his teacher’s wariness of what he called: “the tyranny of the written word.” That’s why Plato’s Dialogues read more like passages from the oral tradition he and his contemporaries are rapidly abandoning, rather than the purely technical philosophy that with his student Aristotle will soon become the accepted norm.
Angry at his teacher Socrates’ politically-expedient execution, Plato rejects democracy. In the authoritarian alternative he proposes in the Republic, philosopher-kings run the show, while poets aren’t welcomed. And why not? Because, as the epitome of At-one-ment oral tradition, Greek poetry is always recited aloud and in a communal setting. The warm, passionate, emotionally-charged atmosphere engendered by the poets’ words is the nemesis of the cool, rational, examined life of the philosopher.
Still, even budding philosophers have to learn how to read aloud to determine where breaks need to occur. Reading silently to oneself won’t even become possible until European monks invent punctuation in the 7th century CE.
Plato’s adoption of the written word, and his deliberate exclusion of poets from his visionary state, illustrates the power of alphabetic literacy to induce the sensory reorganization the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter alluded to in Part 1: the shift from the balanced, “harmonically-orchestrated” senses of the First People to the vision-dominant, “synchronized” senses of the subject/object split.
Here’s Carpenter’s brief, to-the-point description of the same reorganization process pioneered by the Greek philosophers as it develops in a child being initiated into the perceptual and cognitive world of the subject/object split…
“A child learns to separate the senses when he learns, in class, to read silently. His legs twist, he bites his tongue, but by an enormous tour de force, he learns to fragment his senses, to turn on one at a time and keep the others in neutral. And so he is indoctrinated into the literate world….” (Edmund Carpenter, They Became What They Beheld, 1970, emphasis mine.)
Keep in mind that I’m making an historical argument here, not a scientific. So from the historical point-of-view, here’s the formula for the development of the subject/object split: a language environment with a split-friendly syntax + alphabetic literacy + synchronization of the senses to the visual channel = subject/object split.
This formula may still be incomplete. Nonetheless we should be able to detect an unconscious shift towards synchronization in the Greek philosophers’ observations regarding the human senses. So it shouldn’t be a surprise to find the acknowledged paragon of Greek philosophy, Aristotle (384-322 BCE), writing in the very first sentence of his Metaphysics: “Of all the senses, trust only the sense of sight.”
GONE GIRL RETURNS
“In the world of the living, the solstice passes. The storms lessen. The bears and squirrels stir in their sleep. And, suspended in her timeless void, Persephone begins to feel the stirring in her own blood. The voices of life’s children are calling. Their voices are like the buzzing and chittering of troublesome insects. Persephone hears their first, faint cries, and she is filled with dread and sorrow. ‘They call to me. They call to me,’ she whispers as she floats in the void.” (Irene A. Faivre, “Persephone Remembers,” Parabola, Summer 1996.)
We began this 3-part essay by exploring the common dream of The Mother Demeter and her alter-ego daughter, The Maiden Persephone. And I suggested that this strange little tale was one way the pre-historic matriarchy tried to preserve the memory of their deposition by a rising patriarchy.
There was one highly effective method the Greek patriarchs employed to take control of society. They restricted women’s access to Greece’s traditional forms of literacy. This was already a well-established practice when the alphabet arrived in Greece in 800 BCE. But once the practice of reading and writing alphabetically had become a viable communications option, it was obviously the males who were in first position to perfect the perceptual and cognitive revolution it engendered: the emergence of the subject/object split. And so by the close of the 4th century BCE, mastery of the split was well on its way to becoming the patriarchal coup’s ‘weapon of choice’.
Then over the course of the next 2300 years (i.e., some 100 or so generations), and even as women across the West did begin to share in cultivating literate skills, the concomitant psychology of the split gradually became synonymous with the nature of consciousness itself. In other words: once the patriarchal split had been around long enough, everyone practiced in it came to assume that its inherent biases were the very nature of reality, rather than the deeply conditioned habits they actually were.
Southern white slave owners in the US, for example, used a split-riddled Christianity to justify not only their suppression of blacks, but of women as well. “God,” they argued, “had made Black Americans for enslavement and women for marriage, and society must recognize those facts.” (Heather Cox-Richardson Letters From An American, Substack.com, 02/22/2024).
“A character in an 1836 novel written by a Virginia gentleman explained to a younger man that God had given everyone a place in society. Women and Black people were at the bottom, ‘subordinate’ to white men by design. ‘All women live by marriage,’ he said. ‘It is their only duty.’ Trying to make them equal was a cruelty. ‘For my part,’ the older man said, ‘I am well pleased with the established order of the universe. I see…subordination everywhere. And when I find the subordinate content…and recognizing his place…as that to which he properly belongs, I am content to leave him there.’”
I also conjectured at the outset that the tale of The Maiden & Her Mother might contain an augury for a future humanity. So as we come to the conclusion of Part 2, and hopefully with a better understanding of the origin, history, and dynamics of the subject/object split, let’s assume that you, I, and all our contemporaries are the future humanity the augury was intended for, and see if we can decode the dream’s prophetic message.
So what follows now, in closing, is my preferred interpretation…
As Greece’s divine patronesses of the matriarchy, Demeter and Persephone are epitomes of the feminine archetype. The Mother represents the feminine in what was then its traditional expression; and The Maiden is the future feminine. If you remember, both suffer the traumatic victimization of rape — Demeter by her brother Zeus, and Persephone by her uncle Hades. I see this as a portent that the emerging patriarchal manner of being human-in-the-world — the defining psychology of which is the subject/object split — will not only in time eradicate the at-one matriarchal manner, but will continue its transgression of the female essence well into the future.
All this is due to transpire as an epochal shift from a matriarchal to a patriarchal world-order plays itself out across the Western world. This is the West’s fate because Queen Persephone can no longer care for the Land of the Living due to her self-imposed obligation to attend to the Land of the Dead. And as a consequence the Goddess will forget the Living, and the Living will eventually forget her.
In her absence, humans will fall more and more under the unconscious spell the split, and the personal traumas inflicted by the split’s divisive psychology will begin to reach well beyond the human sphere. In time, an increasingly disconnected, patriarchal social order will come to think nothing of traumatizing and defiling the Goddess’ corporeal presence: the once-blessed Earth. The full consequences of this ongoing transpersonal rape are only beginning to reveal themselves. How can they possibly prove beneficial?
And so here we are now in the year 2025: right where the dream predicted we would one day be. What used to be science fiction has become scientific fact. We’re in the throes of a 6th Great Extinction, which we ourselves are primarily responsible for, and with a species being lost now every 20 minutes — and why do we seem to think that humans are somehow exempt? CO2 levels are the highest they’ve been in the last 800,000 years. We’ve destroyed 66% of our forests, and depleted 97% of our arable soils. Based on a consensus reached in 2022 at COP 27, the number of years left before climate change reaches an irreversibly catastrophic point is today in the relatively minuscule neighborhood of 5. That’s 2030 folks.
So wake up sleepers! And remember: the dream is cyclical. A day will come when the Goddess will hear our pleas for her return; and she will once again begin to remember those of us in the Land of the Living. Now whether you take this literally, or see it as a mythic metaphor for humanity learning to overcome the psychology of the split, either way it will be closing time for our current 5000-year cycle of patriarchy.
The problem with cycles, however, is that they just keep cycling. And why do they do this? Because they are unconscious mechanistic processes. How many times do you think humanity has swung back and forth between matriarchy and patriarchy in the past? No one really knows. How many times will we continue to do this before we finally get it? There is a way to intentionally stop all this, to get off the wheel and out of our unconscious proclivity for eternal recurrence. We’ll explore this path in detail in Part 3.
But for now, keep in mind that new worlds spring up from the detrital decay of old worlds. When an astroid struck the Earth 66 million years ago, and abruptly ended the dinosaur cycle by driving them extinct, the better-adapted mammals — the future of life on this planet — were already zooming around under the reptiles’ stumbling, bewildered feet. Just so, as the subject/object split’s agonizing festival of the deathbed continues to play itself out, and as many around you and dear to you opt to remain with the world they know, the world the split has fashioned, the future human is already here.
The world this post-split human will fashion from the leftovers of climate-trashed consumer culture will no longer be either patriarchal or matriarchal. But it will, of necessity, be both respectfully masculine and profoundly feminine. I sincerely hope that you will find your way, and gift your children the necessary understanding and skills, to be part of this new world that’s now working its way slowly down the birth canal…
“On a quiet day,” writes Arundhati Roy, “I can hear her breathing.”
